by George Eliot
useful life."
"You've such a way of wrapping up things in pretty words. You must speak
plainer."
"In plain words, then, I should like to settle you at Holly Mount. You would not
have to pay any more rent than where you are, and it would be twenty times
pleasanter for you than living up that passage where you see nothing but a brick
wall. And then, as it is not far from Paddiford, I think Mr Tryan might be
persuaded to lodge with you, instead of in that musty house, among dead cabbages
and smoky cottages. I know you would like to have him live with you, and you
would be such a mother to him."
"To be sure I should like it; it would be the finest thing in the world for me.
But there'll be furniture wanted. My little bit of furniture won't fill that
house."
"O, I can put some in out of this house; it is too full; and we can buy the
rest. They tell me I'm to have more money than I shall know what to do with."
"I'm almost afraid," said Mrs Pettifer, doubtfully, "Mr Tryan will hardly be
persuaded. He's been talked to so much about leaving that place; and he always
said he must stay there�he must be among the people, and there was no other
place for him in Paddiford. It cuts me to the heart to see him getting thinner
and thinner, and I've noticed him quite short o'breath sometimes. Mrs Linnet
will have it, Mrs Wagstaff half poisons him with bad cooking. I don't know about
that, but he can't have many comforts. I expect he'll break down all of a sudden
some day, and never be able to preach any more."
"Well, I shall try my skill with him by-and-by. I shall be very cunning, and say
nothing to him till all is ready. You and I and mother, when she comes home,
will set to work directly and get the house in order, and then we'll get you
snugly settled in it. I shall see Mr Pittman to-day, and I will tell him what I
mean to do. I shall say I wish to have you for a tenant. Everybody knows I'm
very fond of that naughty person, Mrs Pettifer; so it will seem the most natural
thing in the world. And then I shall by-and-by point out to Mr Tryan that he
will be doing you a service as well as himself by taking up his abode with you.
I think I can prevail upon him; for last night, when he was quite bent on coming
out into the night air, I persuaded him to give it up."
"Well, I only hope you may, my dear. I don't desire anything better than to do
something towards prolonging Mr Tryan's life, for I've sad fears about him."
"Don't speak of them�I can't bear to think of them. We will only think about
getting the house ready. We shall be as busy as bees. How we shall want mother's
clever fingers! I know the room up-stairs that will just do for Mr Tryan's
study. There shall be no seats in it except a very easy chair and a very easy
sofa, so that he shall be obliged to rest himself when he comes home."
CHAPTER XXVI.
That was the last terrible crisis of temptation Janet had to pass through. The
goodwill of her neighbours, the helpful sympathy of the friends who shared her
religious feelings, the occupations suggested to her by Mr Tryan, concurred,
with her strong spontaneous impulses towards works of love and mercy, to fill up
her days with quiet social intercourse and charitable exertion. Besides, her
constitution, naturally healthy and strong, was every week tending, with the
gathering force of habit, to recover its equipoise and set her free from those
physical solicitations which the smallest habitual vice always leaves behind it.
The prisoner feels where the iron has galled him, long after his fetters have
been loosed.
There were always neighbourly visits to be paid and received; and as the months
wore on, increasing familiarity with Janet's present self began to efface, even
from minds as rigid as Mrs Phipps's, the unpleasant impressions that had been
left by recent years. Janet was recovering the popularity which her beauty and
sweetness of nature had won for her when she was a girl; and popularity, as
every one knows, is the most complex and self-multiplying of echoes. Even
anti-Tryanite prejudice could not resist the fact that Janet Dempster was
changed woman�changed as the dusty, bruised, and sun-withered plant is changed
when the soft rains of heaven have fallen on it� and that this change was due to
Mr Tryan's influence. The last lingering sneers against the Evangelical curate
began to die out; and though much of the feeling that had prompted them remained
behind, there was an intimidating consciousness that the expression of such
feeling would not be effective�jokes of that sort had ceased to tickle the Milby
mind. Even Mr Budd and Mr Tomlinson, when they saw Mr Tryan passing pale and
worn along the street, had a secret sense that this man was somehow not that
very natural and comprehensible thing, a humbug; that, in fact, it was
impossible to explain him from the stomach and pocket point of view. Twist and
stretch their theory as they might, it would not fit Mr Tryan; and so, with that
remarkable resemblance as to mental processes which may frequently be observed
to exist between plain men and philosophers, they concluded that the less they
said about him the better.
Among all Janet's neighbourly pleasures, there was nothing she liked better than
to take an early tea at the White House, and to stroll with Mr Jerome round the
old-fashioned garden and orchard. There was endless matter for talk between her
and the good old man, for Janet had that genuine delight in human fellowship
which gives an interest to all personal details that come warm from truthful
lips; and, besides, they had a common interest in good-natured plans for helping
their poorer neighbours. One great object of Mr Jerome's charities was, as he
often said, "to keep industrious men an' women off the parish. I'd rether give
ten shillin' an' help a man to stan' on his own legs, nor pay half-a-crown to
buy him a parish crutch; it's the ruination on him if he once goes to the
parish. I've see'd many a time, if you help a man wi'a present in a neeborly
way, it sweetens his blood� he thinks it kind on you; but the parish shillins
turn it sour�he niver thinks 'em enough." In illustration of this opinion Mr
Jerome had a large store of details about such persons as Jim Hardy, the
coal-carrier, "as lost his hoss," and Sally Butts, "as hed to sell her mangle,
though she was as decent a woman as need to be;" to the hearing of which details
Janet seriously inclined, and you would hardly desire to see a prettier picture
than the kind-faced white-haired old man telling these fragments of his simple
experience as he walked, with shoulders slightly bent, among the moss-roses and
espalier apple-trees, while Janet in her widow's cap, her dark eyes bright with
interest, went listening by his side, and little Lizzie, with her nankeen bonnet
hanging down her back, toddled on before them. Mrs Jerome usually declined these
lingering strolls, and often observed, "I niver see the like to Mr Jerome when
he's got Mrs Dempster to talk to; it sinnifies nothin' to him whether we've tea
at four or at five o'clock; he'd goo on till six, if you
'd let him alone�he's
like off his head." However, Mrs Jerome herself could not deny that Janet was a
very pretty-spoken woman: "She al'ys says, she niver gets sich pikelets as mine
nowhere; I know that very well�other folks buy 'em at shops�thick, unwholesome
things, you mut as well ate a sponge."
The sight of little Lizzie often stirred in Janet's mind a sense of the
childlessness which had made a fatal blank in her life. She had fleeting
thoughts that perhaps among her husband's distant relatives there might be some
children whom she could help to bring up, some little girl whom she might adopt;
and she promised herself one day or other to hunt out a second cousin of his�a
married woman of whom he had lost sight for many years.
But at present her hands and heart were too full for her to carry out that
scheme. To her great disappointment, her project of settling Mrs Pettifer at
Holly Mount had been delayed by the discovery that some repairs were necessary
in order to make the house habitable, and it was not till September had set in
that she had the satisfaction of seeing her old friend comfortably installed,
and the rooms destined for Mr Tryan looking pretty and cozy to her heart's
content. She had taken several of his chief friends into her confidence, and
they were warmly wishing success to her plan for inducing him to quit poor Mrs
Wagstaff's dingy house and dubious cookery. That he should consent to some such
change was becoming more and more a matter of anxiety to his hearers; for though
no more decided symptoms were yet observable in him than increasing emaciation,
a dry hacking cough, and an occasional shortness of breath, it was felt that the
fulfilment of Mr Pratt's prediction could not long be deferred, and that this
obstinate persistence in labour and self-disregard must soon be peremptorily cut
short by a total failure of strength. Any hopes that the influence of Mr Tryan's
father and sister would prevail on him to change his mode of life�that they
would perhaps come to live with him, or that his sister at least might come to
see him, and that the arguments which had failed from other lips might be more
persuasive from hers�were now quite dissipated. His father had lately had an
attack of paralysis, and could not spare his only daughter's tendance. On Mr
Tryan's return from a visit to his father, Miss Linnet was very anxious to know
whether his sister had not urged him to try change of air. From his answers she
gathered that Miss Tryan wished him to give up his curacy and travel, or at
least go to the south Devonshire coast.
"And why will you not do so?" Miss Linnet said; "you might come back to us well
and strong, and have many years of usefulness before you."
"No," he answered quietly, "I think people attach more importance to such
measures than is warranted. I don't see any good end that is to be served by
going to die at Nice, instead of dying amongst one's friends and one's work. I
cannot leave Milby�at least I will not leave it voluntarily."
But though he remained immovable on this point, he had been compelled to give up
his afternoon service on the Sunday, and to accept Mr Parry's offer of aid in
the evening service, as well as to curtail his weekday labours; and he had even
written to Mr Prendergast to request that he would appoint another curate to the
Paddiford district, on the understanding that the new curate should receive the
salary, but that Mr Tryan should co-operate with him as long as he was able. The
hopefulness which is an almost constant attendant on consumption, had not the
effect of deceiving him as to the nature of his malady, or of making him look
forward to ultimate recovery. He believed himself to be consumptive, and he had
not yet felt any desire to escape the early death which he had for some time
contemplated as probable. Even diseased hopes will take their direction from the
strong habitual bias of the mind, and to Mr Tryan death had for years seemed
nothing else than the laying down of a burthen, under which he sometimes felt
himself fainting. He was only sanguine about his powers of work: he flattered
himself that what he was unable to do one week he should be equal to the next,
and he would not admit that in desisting from any part of his labour he was
renouncing it permanently. He had lately delighted Mr Jerome by accepting his
longproffered loan of the "little chacenut hoss;" and he found so much benefit
from substituting constant riding exercise for walking, that he began to think
he should soon be able to resume some of the work he had dropped.
That was a happy afternoon for Janet, when, after exerting herself busily for a
week with her mother and Mrs Pettifer, she saw Holly Mount looking orderly and
comfortable from attic to cellar. It was an old red-brick house, with two gables
in front, and two clipped holly-trees flanking the garden gate; a simple,
homely-looking place, that quiet people might easily get fond of; and now it was
scoured and polished and carpeted and furnished so as to look really snug
within. When there was nothing more to be done, Janet delighted herself with
contemplating Mr Tryan's study, first sitting down in the easy-chair, and then
lying for a moment on the sofa, that she might have a keener sense of the repose
he would get from those well-stuffed articles of furniture, which she had gone
to Rotherby on purpose to choose.
"Now, mother," she said, when she had finished her survey, "you have done your
work as well as any fairy mother or god-mother that ever turned a pumpkin into a
coach and horses. You stay and have tea cozily with Mrs Pettifer while I go to
Mrs Linnet's. I want to tell Mary and Rebecca the good news, that I've got the
exciseman to promise that he will take Mrs Wagstaff's lodgings when Mr Tryan
leaves. They'll be so pleased to hear it, because they thought he would make her
poverty an objection to his leaving her."
"But, my dear child," said Mrs Raynor, whose face, always calm, was now a happy
one, "have a cup of tea with us first. You'll perhaps miss Mrs Linnet's
tea-time."
"No, I feel too excited to take tea yet. I'm like a child with a new baby-house.
Walking in the air will do me good.
So she set out. Holly Mount was about a mile from that outskirt of Paddiford
Common where Mrs Linnet's house stood nestled among its laburnums, lilacs, and
syringas. Janet's way thither lay for a little while along the high-road, and
then led her into a deep-rutted lane, which wound through a flat tract of meadow
and pasture, while in front lay smoky Paddiford, and away to the left the
mother-town of Milby. There was no line of silvery willows marking the course of
a stream� no group of Scotch firs with their trunks reddening in the level
sunbeams�nothing to break the flowerless monotony of grass and hedgerow but an
occasional oak or elm, and a few cows sprinkled here and there. A very
commonplace scene, indeed. But what scene was ever commonplace in the descending
sunlight, when colour has awakened from its noonday sleep, and the long shadows
awe us like a disclosed presence? Above all, what scene
is commonplace to the
eye that is filled with serene gladness, and brightens all things with its own
joy?
And Janet just now was very happy. As she walked along the rough lane with a
buoyant step, a half smile of innocent, kindly triumph played about her mouth.
She was delighting beforehand in the anticipated success of her persuasive
power, and for the time her painful anxiety about Mr Tryan's health was thrown
into abeyance. But she had not gone far along the lane before she heard the
sound of a horse advancing at a walking pace behind her. Without looking back,
she turned aside to make way for it between the ruts, and did not notice that
for a moment it had stopped and had then come on with a slightly quickened pace.
In less than a minute she heard a well-known voice say, "Mrs Dempster;" and,
turning, saw Mr Tryan close to her, holding his horse by the bridle. It seemed
very natural to her that he should be there. Her mind was so full of his
presence at that moment, that the actual sight of him was only like a more vivid
thought, and she behaved, as we are apt to do when feeling obliges us to be
genuine, with a total forgetfulness of polite forms. She only looked at him with
a slight deepening of the smile that was already on her face. He said gently,
"Take my arm;" and they walked on a little way in silence.
It was he who broke it. "You are going to Paddiford, I suppose?"
The question recalled Janet to the consciousness that this was an unexpected
opportunity for beginning her work of persuasion, and that she was stupidly
neglecting it.
"Yes," she said, "I was going to Mrs Linnet's. I knew Miss Linnet would like to
hear that our friend Mrs Pettifer is quite settled now in her new house. She is
as fond of Mrs Pettifer as I am�almost; I won't admit that any one loves her
quite as well, for no one else has such good reason as I have. But now the dear
woman wants a lodger, for you know she can't afford to live in so large a house
by herself. But I knew when I persuaded her to go there that she would be sure
to get one�she's such a comfortable creature to live with; and I didn't like her
to spend all the rest of her days up that dull passage, being at every one's
beck and call who wanted to make use of her."
"Yes," said Mr Tryan, "I quite understand your feeling; I don't wonder at your
strong regard for her."
"Well, but now I want her other friends to second me. There she is, with three
rooms to let, ready furnished, everything in order; and I know some one, who
thinks as well of her as I do, and who would be doing good all round�to every
one that knows him, as well as to Mrs Pettifer, if he would go to live with her.
He would leave some uncomfortable lodgings which another person is already
coveting and would take immediately; and he would go to breathe pure air at
Holly Mount, and gladden Mrs Pettifer's heart by letting her wait on him; and
comfort all his friends, who are quite miserable about him."
Mr Tryan saw it all in a moment�he saw that it had all been done for his sake.
He could not be sorry; he could not say no; he could not resist the sense that
life had a new sweetness for him, and that he should like it to be prolonged a
little �only a little, for the sake of feeling a stronger security about Janet.
When she had finished speaking, she looked at him with a doubtful, inquiring
glance. He was not looking at her; his eyes were cast downwards; but the
expression of his face encouraged her, and she said, in a halfplayful tone of
entreaty,�
"You will go and live with her? I know you will. You will come back with me now
and see the house."
He looked at her then, and smiled. There is an unspeakable blending of sadness
and sweetness in the smile of a face sharpened and paled by slow consumption.
That smile of Mr Tryan's pierced poor Janet's heart: she felt in it at once the
