“Don’t ring the bell, uncle; you will alarm my aunt.”
“Your poor dear aunt, what a niece has she!”
“Once I loved Socrates.”
“Pooh! no trifling, ma’am.”
“I admired Themistocles, Leonidas, Epaminondas.”
“Miss Keeldar — — “
“To pass over a few centuries, Washington was a plain man, but I liked him; but to speak of the actual present — — “
“Ah! the actual present.”
“To quit crude schoolgirl fancies, and come to realities.”
“Realities! That is the test to which you shall be brought, ma’am.”
“To avow before what altar I now kneel — to reveal the present idol of my soul — — “
“You will make haste about it, if you please. It is near luncheon time, and confess you shall.”
“Confess I must. My heart is full of the secret. It must be spoken. I only wish you were Mr. Helstone instead of Mr. Sympson; you would sympathize with me better.”
“Madam, it is a question of common sense and common prudence, not of sympathy and sentiment, and so on. Did you say it was Mr. Helstone?”
“Not precisely, but as near as may be; they are rather alike.”
“I will know the name; I will have particulars.”
“They positively are rather alike. Their very faces are not dissimilar — a pair of human falcons — and dry, direct, decided both. But my hero is the mightier of the two. His mind has the clearness of the deep sea, the patience of its rocks, the force of its billows.”
“Rant and fustian!”
“I dare say he can be harsh as a saw-edge and gruff as a hungry raven.”
“Miss Keeldar, does the person reside in Briarfield? Answer me that.”
“Uncle, I am going to tell you; his name is trembling on my tongue.”
“Speak, girl!”
“That was well said, uncle. ‘Speak, girl!’ It is quite tragic. England has howled savagely against this man, uncle, and she will one day roar exultingly over him. He has been unscared by the howl, and he will be unelated by the shout.”
“I said she was mad. She is.”
“This country will change and change again in her demeanour to him; he will never change in his duty to her. Come, cease to chafe, uncle, I’ll tell you his name.”
“You shall tell me, or — — “
“Listen! Arthur Wellesley, Lord Wellington.”
Mr. Sympson rose up furious. He bounced out of the room, but immediately bounced back again, shut the door, and resumed his seat.
“Ma’am, you shall tell me this. Will your principles permit you to marry a man without money — a man below you?”
“Never a man below me.”
(In a high voice.) “Will you, Miss Keeldar, marry a poor man?”
“What right have you, Mr. Sympson, to ask me?”
“I insist upon knowing.”
“You don’t go the way to know.”
“My family respectability shall not be compromised.”
“A good resolution; keep it.”
“Madam, it is you who shall keep it.”
“Impossible, sir, since I form no part of your family.”
“Do you disown us?”
“I disdain your dictatorship.”
“Whom will you marry, Miss Keeldar?”
“Not Mr. Sam Wynne, because I scorn him; not Sir Philip Nunnely, because I only esteem him.”
“Whom have you in your eye?”
“Four rejected candidates.”
“Such obstinacy could not be unless you were under improper influence.”
“What do you mean? There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil. Improper influence! What old woman’s cackle is that?”
“Are you a young lady?”
“I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.”
“Do you know” (leaning mysteriously forward, and speaking with ghastly solemnity) — “do you know the whole neighbourhood teems with rumours respecting you and a bankrupt tenant of yours, the foreigner Moore?”
“Does it?”
“It does. Your name is in every mouth.”
“It honours the lips it crosses, and I wish to the gods it may purify them.”
“Is it that person who has power to influence you?”
“Beyond any whose cause you have advocated.”
“Is it he you will marry?”
“He is handsome, and manly, and commanding.”
“You declare it to my face! The Flemish knave! the low trader!”
“He is talented, and venturous, and resolute. Prince is on his brow, and ruler in his bearing.”
“She glories in it! She conceals nothing! No shame, no fear!”
“When we speak the name of Moore, shame should be forgotten and fear discarded. The Moores know only honour and courage.”
“I say she is mad.”
“You have taunted me till my blood is up; you have worried me till I turn again.”
“That Moore is the brother of my son’s tutor. Would you let the usher call you sister?”
Bright and broad shone Shirley’s eye as she fixed it on her questioner now.
“No, no; not for a province of possession, not for a century of life.”
“You cannot separate the husband from his family.”
“What then?”
“Mr. Louis Moore’s sister you will be.”
“Mr. Sympson, I am sick at heart with all this weak trash; I will bear no more. Your thoughts are not my thoughts, your aims are not my aims, your gods are not my gods. We do not view things in the same light; we do not measure them by the same standard; we hardly speak in the same tongue. Let us part.”
“It is not,” she resumed, much excited — “it is not that I hate you; you are a good sort of man. Perhaps you mean well in your way. But we cannot suit; we are ever at variance. You annoy me with small meddling, with petty tyranny; you exasperate my temper, and make and keep me passionate. As to your small maxims, your narrow rules, your little prejudices, aversions, dogmas, bundle them off. Mr. Sympson, go, offer them a sacrifice to the deity you worship; I’ll none of them. I wash my hands of the lot. I walk by another creed, light, faith, and hope than you.”
“Another creed! I believe she is an infidel.”
“An infidel to your religion, an atheist to your god.”
“An — atheist!!!”
“Your god, sir, is the world. In my eyes you too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship; in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best — making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius, and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred — secret hatred; there is disgust — unspoken disgust; there is treachery — family treachery; there is vice — deep, deadly domestic vice. In his dominions children grow unloving between parents who have never loved; infants are nursed on deception from their very birth; they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies. Your god rules at the bridal of kings; look at your royal dynasties! Your deity is the deity of foreign aristocracies; analyze the blue blood of Spain! Your god is the Hymen of France; what is French domestic life? All that surrounds him hastens to decay; all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
“This language is terrible! My daughters and you must associate no longer, Miss Keeldar; there is danger in such companionship. Had I known you a little earlier — but, extraordinary as I thought you, I could not have believed — — “
“Now, sir, do you begin to be aware that it is useless to scheme for me; that in doing so you but sow the wind to reap the whirlwind? I sweep y
our cobweb projects from my path, that I may pass on unsullied. I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand — they only. Know this at last.”
Mr. Sympson was becoming a little bewildered.
“Never heard such language!” he muttered again and again; “never was so addressed in my life — never was so used!”
“You are quite confused, sir. You had better withdraw, or I will.”
He rose hastily. “We must leave this place; they must pack up at once.”
“Do not hurry my aunt and cousins; give them time.”
“No more intercourse; she’s not proper.”
He made his way to the door. He came back for his handkerchief. He dropped his snuff-box, leaving the contents scattered on the carpet; he stumbled out. Tartar lay outside across the mat; Mr. Sympson almost fell over him. In the climax of his exasperation he hurled an oath at the dog and a coarse epithet at his mistress.
“Poor Mr. Sympson! he is both feeble and vulgar,” said Shirley to herself. “My head aches, and I am tired,” she added; and leaning her head upon a cushion, she softly subsided from excitement to repose. One, entering the room a quarter of an hour afterwards, found her asleep. When Shirley had been agitated, she generally took this natural refreshment; it would come at her call.
The intruder paused in her unconscious presence, and said, “Miss Keeldar.”
Perhaps his voice harmonized with some dream into which she was passing. It did not startle, it hardly roused her. Without opening her eyes, she but turned her head a little, so that her cheek and profile, before hidden by her arm, became visible. She looked rosy, happy, half smiling, but her eyelashes were wet. She had wept in slumber; or perhaps, before dropping asleep, a few natural tears had fallen after she had heard that epithet. No man — no woman — is always strong, always able to bear up against the unjust opinion, the vilifying word. Calumny, even from the mouth of a fool, will sometimes cut into unguarded feelings. Shirley looked like a child that had been naughty and punished, but was now forgiven and at rest.
“Miss Keeldar,” again said the voice. This time it woke her. She looked up, and saw at her side Louis Moore — not close at her side, but standing, with arrested step, two or three yards from her.
“O Mr. Moore!” she said. “I was afraid it was my uncle again: he and I have quarrelled.”
“Mr. Sympson should let you alone,” was the reply. “Can he not see that you are as yet far from strong?”
“I assure you he did not find me weak. I did not cry when he was here.”
“He is about to evacuate Fieldhead — so he says. He is now giving orders to his family. He has been in the schoolroom issuing commands in a manner which, I suppose, was a continuation of that with which he has harassed you.”
“Are you and Henry to go?”
“I believe, as far as Henry is concerned, that was the tenor of his scarcely intelligible directions; but he may change all to-morrow. He is just in that mood when you cannot depend on his consistency for two consecutive hours. I doubt whether he will leave you for weeks yet. To myself he addressed some words which will require a little attention and comment by-and-by, when I have time to bestow on them. At the moment he came in I was busied with a note I had got from Mr. Yorke — so fully busied that I cut short the interview with him somewhat abruptly. I left him raving. Here is the note. I wish you to see it. It refers to my brother Robert.” And he looked at Shirley.
“I shall be glad to hear news of him. Is he coming home?”
“He is come. He is in Yorkshire. Mr. Yorke went yesterday to Stilbro’ to meet him.”
“Mr. Moore, something is wrong — — “
“Did my voice tremble? He is now at Briarmains, and I am going to see him.”
“What has occurred?”
“If you turn so pale I shall be sorry I have spoken. It might have been worse. Robert is not dead, but much hurt.”
“O sir, it is you who are pale. Sit down near me.”
“Read the note. Let me open it.”
Miss Keeldar read the note. It briefly signified that last night Robert Moore had been shot at from behind the wall of Milldean plantation, at the foot of the Brow; that he was wounded severely, but it was hoped not fatally. Of the assassin, or assassins, nothing was known; they had escaped. “No doubt,” Mr. Yorke observed, “it was done in revenge. It was a pity ill-will had ever been raised; but that could not be helped now.”
“He is my only brother,” said Louis, as Shirley returned the note. “I cannot hear unmoved that ruffians have laid in wait for him, and shot him down, like some wild beast from behind a wall.”
“Be comforted; be hopeful. He will get better — I know he will.”
Shirley, solicitous to soothe, held her hand over Mr. Moore’s as it lay on the arm of the chair. She just touched it lightly, scarce palpably.
“Well, give me your hand,” he said. “It will be for the first time; it is in a moment of calamity. Give it me.”
Awaiting neither consent nor refusal, he took what he asked.
“I am going to Briarmains now,” he went on. “I want you to step over to the rectory and tell Caroline Helstone what has happened. Will you do this? She will hear it best from you.”
“Immediately,” said Shirley, with docile promptitude. “Ought I to say that there is no danger?”
“Say so.”
“You will come back soon, and let me know more?”
“I will either come or write.”
“Trust me for watching over Caroline. I will communicate with your sister too; but doubtless she is already with Robert?”
“Doubtless, or will be soon. Good-morning now.”
“You will bear up, come what may.”
“We shall see that.”
Shirley’s fingers were obliged to withdraw from the tutor’s. Louis was obliged to relinquish that hand folded, clasped, hidden in his own.
“I thought I should have had to support her,” he said, as he walked towards Briarmains, “and it is she who has made me strong. That look of pity, that gentle touch! No down was ever softer, no elixir more potent! It lay like a snowflake; it thrilled like lightning. A thousand times I have longed to possess that hand — to have it in mine. I have possessed it; for five minutes I held it. Her fingers and mine can never be strangers more. Having met once they must meet again.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SCHOOLBOY AND THE WOOD-NYMPH.
Briarmains being nearer than the Hollow, Mr. Yorke had conveyed his young comrade there. He had seen him laid in the best bed of the house, as carefully as if he had been one of his own sons. The sight of his blood, welling from the treacherously inflicted wound, made him indeed the son of the Yorkshire gentleman’s heart. The spectacle of the sudden event, of the tall, straight shape prostrated in its pride across the road, of the fine southern head laid low in the dust, of that youth in prime flung at once before him pallid, lifeless, helpless — this was the very combination of circumstances to win for the victim Mr. Yorke’s liveliest interest.
No other hand was there to raise — to aid, no other voice to question kindly, no other brain to concert measures; he had to do it all himself. This utter dependence of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he regarded him) on his benevolence secured that benevolence most effectually. Well did Mr. Yorke like to have power, and to use it. He had now between his hands power over a fellow-creature’s life. It suited him.
No less perfectly did it suit his saturnine better half. The incident was quite in her way and to her taste. Some women would have been terror-struck to see a gory man brought in over their threshold, and laid down in their hall in the “howe of the night.” There, you would suppose, was subject-matter for hysterics. No. Mrs. Yorke went into hysterics when Jessie would not leave the garden to come to her knitting, or when Martin proposed starting for Australia, with a view to realize freedom and escape the tyranny of Matthew; but an attempted murder near her door — a
half-murdered man in her best bed — set her straight, cheered her spirits, gave her cap the dash of a turban.
Mrs. Yorke was just the woman who, while rendering miserable the drudging life of a simple maid-servant, would nurse like a heroine a hospital full of plague patients. She almost loved Moore. Her tough heart almost yearned towards him when she found him committed to her charge — left in her arms, as dependent on her as her youngest-born in the cradle. Had she seen a domestic or one of her daughters give him a draught of water or smooth his pillow, she would have boxed the intruder’s ears. She chased Jessie and Rose from the upper realm of the house; she forbade the housemaids to set their foot in it.
Now, if the accident had happened at the rectory gates, and old Helstone had taken in the martyr, neither Yorke nor his wife would have pitied him. They would have adjudged him right served for his tyranny and meddling. As it was, he became, for the present, the apple of their eye.
Strange! Louis Moore was permitted to come — to sit down on the edge of the bed and lean over the pillow; to hold his brother’s hand, and press his pale forehead with his fraternal lips; and Mrs. Yorke bore it well. She suffered him to stay half the day there; she once suffered him to sit up all night in the chamber; she rose herself at five o’clock of a wet November morning, and with her own hands lit the kitchen fire, and made the brothers a breakfast, and served it to them herself. Majestically arrayed in a boundless flannel wrapper, a shawl, and her nightcap, she sat and watched them eat, as complacently as a hen beholds her chickens feed. Yet she gave the cook warning that day for venturing to make and carry up to Mr. Moore a basin of sago-gruel; and the housemaid lost her favour because, when Mr. Louis was departing, she brought him his surtout aired from the kitchen, and, like a “forward piece” as she was, helped him on with it, and accepted in return a smile, a “Thank you, my girl,” and a shilling. Two ladies called one day, pale and anxious, and begged earnestly, humbly, to be allowed to see Mr. Moore one instant. Mrs. Yorke hardened her heart, and sent them packing — not without opprobrium.
But how was it when Hortense Moore came? Not so bad as might have been expected. The whole family of the Moores really seemed to suit Mrs. Yorke so as no other family had ever suited her. Hortense and she possessed an exhaustless mutual theme of conversation in the corrupt propensities of servants. Their views of this class were similar; they watched them with the same suspicion, and judged them with the same severity. Hortense, too, from the very first showed no manner of jealousy of Mrs. Yorke’s attentions to Robert — she let her keep the post of nurse with little interference; and, for herself, found ceaseless occupation in fidgeting about the house, holding the kitchen under surveillance, reporting what passed there, and, in short, making herself generally useful. Visitors they both of them agreed in excluding sedulously from the sickroom. They held the young mill-owner captive, and hardly let the air breathe or the sun shine on him.
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 113
