Esther bites her lips, but has the sense to allow, with vast difficulty, this last observation to pass unquestioned.
"His horses have arrived already," continues Constance, placidly; "he has actually been unconscionable enough to send four of them: he is evidently going to test uncle's and your patience to the utmost by making a perfect visitation."
"Felton is such a good hunting country, that I wonder Mr. Gerard can bear to leave it now, just as the frost has broken up," remarks Esther, almost composedly; a dim, exquisite hope flashing up in her mind that he has heard of her being at Blessington, and is coming to ask her to forgive him – to forgive her, rather; to ask her to kiss and make friends.
The story-book ending, "Lived happy ever after," is running through her brain, when her reverie is broken, gently, but very effectually, as reveries are apt to be, by a simple speech of Miss Blessington's, spoken with a little smile:
"It is evident that Miss Craven has not heard our news, is not it, aunt?"
"What news?" inquires the girl, eagerly.
"Nothing of much interest to any one but ourselves, I suppose. It is only" (speaking with slow triumph, and narrowly watching the effect of her words) "that St. John and I have made up our minds to marry one another!"
The knife cuts as clean and clear as she could have wished; the divine happy rose-flush slips away suddenly out of the poor blank face opposite her; a grey ashy-white takes its place. She had thought that pain and pleasure were buried with Jack on the slope of Glan-yr-Afon's mountain graveyard; but that moment of raging agony undeceives her. For an instant the table and chairs seem dancing round; a humming buzz sounds dully in her ears; then the faintness passes; the table and chairs stand still again; the buzz ceases; and she is sitting on an old gilt chair: her arms still moving mechanically, with the outstretched wool upon them, while Constance goes winding, winding on – winding away hope and pleasure and joy; while the ball, growing larger under her hands, seems to have stolen its red colour from Esther's heart-blood.
"Our friends have really been very disagreeable to us about it," says Miss Blessington with a subdued laugh; "they tell us that it is the most uninteresting marriage they ever heard of, for that they had all foretold it, heaven knows how many centuries ago!"
"It is very seldom," replies Mrs. Blessington, shaking her head slowly to and fro, "that a young man shows the sense St. John Gerard has done in coming into his parents' views for him: in the present day they are mostly so headstrong and resolute to pick and choose for themselves, which generally ends in their selecting some worthless person utterly unsuited to their rank and fortune."
"How long have you been engaged?" asks Esther, presently, framing her words with as much difficulty as though they had been spoken in some little-known foreign tongue. Worse to her than the loss of St. John is the consciousness that that loss is written in despair's grey colours on her faded face, right under her rival's victorious eyes.
"How long? I really forget," answers Constance, with affected carelessness. "Oh, no! By-the-by, I recollect; it was almost immediately after you left Felton. I daresay" (with a smile) "that you were among the ranks of the prophets; lookers-on proverbially see most of the game."
"Indeed – no!" cries the girl, with a passionate disclaimer, the agony of loss made sharper by the humiliation of defeat. "Nothing ever struck me as more unlikely!"
"Indeed! And why, may I ask?"
The skein is finished; Esther lifts one hand to her face, and feels a slight relief in the partial shade.
"Why, pray?" with a slightly sharpened accent.
"Because – because," she answers, in confusion, "you had been brought up together from children; because Mr. Gerard's manner seemed so much more like a brother's than a – a – lover's."
The word so applied half chokes her.
"We dislike public demonstrations of affection, both of us," rejoins the other, coldly displeased; "we leave those to servants and savages."
A footman enters with tea in handleless red dragon cups, costly as age, brittleness, and ingenious ugliness can make them.
Esther leans back in her chair, idle, staring vacantly at the pane, blurred with big rain-drops.
After a pause, "You have not congratulated me, Miss Craven," Constance says, sipping her tea delicately; her madonna smile relaxing the severely correct lines of her Greek mouth.
Esther gives a great start. "I? Oh, I beg your pardon! I – I forgot; I – I – I congratulate you!"
"I was just going to write and tell you the news," says Constance, graciously – "I thought it might interest you, as you had been with us so lately, and seen the whole thing going on – when we heard of your brother's sudden death."
Esther rises abruptly, and walks to the window, with that painful hatred in her heart towards Miss Blessington that we feel towards those who lightly name our sacred dead to us.
"Was he your only brother, my dear?" inquires Mrs. Blessington, with languid interest.
"Yes."
"Dear – dear! Very sad – very sad! And what did he die of? Consumption?"
"No – diphtheria."
"Ah! A very fatal complaint, my dear, especially among children. I have always had a great horror of it. In my younger days it used to be called sore throat, but I suppose it killed just as many people then as it does now that it has got a fine long Latin name. I suppose your poor brother suffered a great deal – didn't he, love?"
No answer, except a stifled sob, a rush from the room, and the sound of flying feet upon the hall's stone floor.
There are some things past human endurance; and to hear Jack's parting agonies – agonies whose memory she herself dare as yet hardly contemplate in her heart's low depths – lightly discussed by a gossiping old woman, is one of those things.
CHAPTER XXXI
"Get me some fresh candles – long ones; longer than these – as long as you possibly can," Esther says that same evening, on going to bed, to the housemaid whom she finds putting coals on her fire.
"I think, 'm, that you will find these will last for to-night," the woman answers, looking at the very respectable dimensions of the unlit candles on Esther's queer old-fashioned toilet-table.
"No – no, they won't!" she answers, nervously; "it is better to be on the safe side."
"Would you like a night-light, miss?"
"Oh no, no! they make the corners of the room blacker than ever, and they cast such odd shadows. I'm so afraid of the dark," she ends, shuddering.
"I'm afraid you don't sleep well, 'm?"
"Not very. By-the-by" (with a sudden inspiration), "have you got anything that you could give me to make me sleep – any opiate of any kind?"
"I've got a little laudanum, ma'am, that Mrs. Franklin give me last week when I had a bad face."
"Fetch it me," she cries, eagerly; "that is, if you don't want it yourself. It is very foolish of me," she says, looking rather ashamed, "but I cannot sleep for fright."
The servant goes, and presently returns with a small dark blue bottle.
"About how much ought one to take, I wonder?" Esther says, holding it up between herself and the firelight.
"If you have never been used to take it before, I should think two or three drops would be hample, 'm; I hope, 'm" (with a little anxiety in her florid plebeian face), "as you'll be careful not to take a hoverdose, or you might chance never to wake up again: I knew a young person as took it by mistake for 'black dose' – it was the fault of the chemist's young man – and in an hour she was a corpse; they said as she had took enough to kill ten men."
"It is no wonder that she was a corpse, then," Miss Craven answers, with a slight smile. "I should not think" (scrutinising the little bottle inquisitively), "that there was enough here to kill one woman, let alone ten men. Yes, I'll be careful; thanks, very much. Good night!" (with her pretty courteous smile).
The housemaid being gone, Esther bolts the door – a weakly defensive measure against one class of assailants, the crape-masked burglars; though, as she is aware, utterly impotent against the other and worse class – the intangible, unkeep-outable revenants; the rustlers along the passage, the rattlers of the lock. She then seats herself at the dressing-table, flings down her arms among her brushes and combs, and sinks her head upon them, in closest proximity to the candles, whose little spires of flame the wind, thrusting its thin body in between window and frame, drives right against the tumbled plenty of her hair. In this attitude she remains a long time; forgetting even to search under the bed, up the chimney, behind the screen, or in the huge japanned chest, upon which a disconnected but interesting landscape of cocks, pagodas, and junks picks itself out, in tarnished yellow, from the dull black ground.
It is impossible for the most comprehensive mind or body to contain any two distinct, even though not necessarily opposite feelings, in their fullest force, at the same time. If one is famished with hunger, one cannot be consumed by thirst; if one is consumed by thirst, one cannot be famished with hunger. If one is in despair at being forgotten by one's lover, one is indifferent as to the onset of any number of ghosts and murderers; if one is paralyzed by fear of ghosts and murderers, one is tolerably indifferent as to one's lover's lapse of memory. For the first time since his death, Jack is not the leading thought in Esther's mind. Poor dead! How can they be so unreasonable as to expect to be anyone's leading thought? Even we noisy, voiceful, visible living are obliged to keep crying out, "I am here – remember me," in order not to sink into oblivion amongst our neighbours and kinsfolk.
"Wilt thou remember me when I am gone,
Further each day from thy vision withdrawn —
Thou in the sunset, and I in the dawn?"
Pretty, tender, touching lines; but I think that the answer to them, if given truly, would hardly content the asker: "I will remember thee for a very little while; even till I see some one younger and prettier than thou wert, and then I will forget thee!"
Miss Craven starts up, after awhile, and begins to walk up and down, over the creaky, up-and-downy boards, and to speak vehemently and out loud to the rats, who, numerous and cheerful as usual, are scrabbling, pattering, squeaking under the floor, behind the wainscot, in the japan-chest. "At all events," she says, with a sort of savage satisfaction, "there is one comfort: he'll be miserable – he'll curse the day when he ties himself to that lump of blancmange. Blancmange! white meat! that exactly expresses her; she looks as if she would be good to eat – soft, luscious, ripe. Unfortunately, a man does not contemplate eating his wife!"
But even this little angry gleam of comfort has but a short life. Soon, too soon, it occurs to her that men do not look at a woman with women's eyes. Men, being three parts animal themselves, condone any offence to a woman the animal part of whom is perfect and beautiful. How else is it that beauty – mere blank beauty, although destitute of any accessory charms – can always command its price in the market, and that price a high one? In marrying Constance, St. John will have no disappointments to undergo, no discoveries to make. He has known her all her life; has seen her change from a handsome stupid child into a handsomer stupider girl, and bloom, lastly, into a handsomest, stupidest woman. Constance has no antecedents; she is a woman without a history. That also is in her favour. A man likes to write his name on a sheet of white paper better than on one upon which many other men have written theirs. Perfectly virtuous, perfectly healthy, perfectly beautiful, young, rich, not ill-tempered, not fast, not shrew-tongued – surely she is a prize worth any man's drawing. If, in addition to her long list of qualifications, she possessed also Desdemona's heart and Imogen's mind, it would be too hard upon the rest of womankind:
"Why should one woman have all goodly things?"
Want of sympathy with the companion of her life makes a woman embittered, reckless – sends her often trespassing on her neighbours' preserves, in the endeavour to find there that congeniality of spirit which is not to be met with in her own. Want of sympathy with the companion of his life sends a man oftener to his club; makes him much pleasanter to other women when he goes into society; makes him sulky and sleepy when he dines at home – that is all. Doubtless St. John will be indifferent to his bride at first; he will dislocate his jaw with yawning during their wedding-tour, but she will bear him children; "selon les us et coutumes Anglaises, elle aura beaucoup d'enfants;" he will like her for that. Year by year they will come here to Blessington, probably. Year by year she (Esther) will see the blossom of a fuller contentment on his wide brow, the quiet of a deeper rest in his restless eyes. And she herself will be here always, for one cannot throw away one's daily bread. Year by year they will find her with ever thinner hair, sharper shoulders, drabber cheeks; and he, looking upon her with the forgiveness of complete indifference, will say to himself, "She is bad, and she is ugly; I was well rid of her!" Than to be so forgiven, how much rather would she have been struck down dead by his hand, lifted in righteous anger and vengeance, on that moonlit September night, beside the glassy rush-brimmed mere at Felton! A sudden rage at her own fatuity fills her, when she looks back on that idiotic hope that had upsprung in her mind, that his object in coming to Blessington was to pardon her, and take her back to himself. Do men ever pardon a sin against themselves?
"......Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.
It is the only ill which can find place
Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour
Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost,
That it should spare the eldest flower of spring;
Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch
Even now a city stands, strong, fair and free,
Now stench and blackness yawns like death. Oh! plead
With famine and wind-walking pestilence,
Blind lightning, or the deep sea; not with man —
Cruel, cold formal man – righteous in words,
In deeds a Cain."
She sits down before her looking-glass, and stares desperately, with inner eyes, at the blank ruin of her life; with outer eyes at the ruin mirrored in her sunken, altered face, that the old looking-glass, blurred with rust stains, makes look more sunken and altered still. Involuntarily she lifts her thumb and forefinger, and lays them in the hollows of her cheek, as if seeking for the red carnations that used to flower so fairly there. She has noticed before the decay of her beauty – noticed it with apathy, as who should say, "Everything else is gone, why should not this go too?" But now she observes it with a sick pang, as at the parting with a friend; she would give ten years of her life to reach it back again. "It was only for my beauty he liked me," she says, still speaking aloud; "it was only for my beauty that anybody could like me; there is nothing else to like in me. I never was clever, or said witty things, or sang, or played: I was only pretty. Now that that is gone, everything is gone!"
As one shipwrecked, floating about on a plank among the weltering waves of some great plunging, grey-green sea, strains his eyes along the horizon to see some sail-speck, some misty palm-island, that looks as though it were hung midway in air; so she strains her mental eyes to catch sight of some friendly ship that may take her off from this rock of her despair. This world is full of pairs, but some oversight has left a good many odd ones also; Esther is an odd one. Her road has come to a blank wall, and there stopped. Is there no ladder that can overclimb this wall? – no gap in all the thickness of its brick-and-mortar? – no outlet?
She rises and stands by the fire; her eyes down-dropped on the blue-and-white Dutch tiles – on the hobs, and queer brass-inlaid dogs: involuntarily she raises them, and they rest upon the little laudanum-bottle on the chimneypiece. Quick as lightning, an answer to her thought-question seems flashed across her mind. There is a ladder that can overclimb any wall; there is a gap that can give egress through the stoutest masonries; there is an outlet from the deepest dungeon; and this ladder, this gap, this outlet, men call Death. Over the sea of her memory the housemaid's words float back: "I hope you'll be careful not to take an overdose, 'm, or you might chance never to wake again!" They had been spoken in careful warning; to her they seemed words of persuasive promise. Never to wake again! Never to say again in the evening, "Would God it were morning!" and in the morning, "Would God it were evening!"
To Esther, the great sting of death had always laid in his pain – in his gasping breath, twitched features, writhen unfleshed limbs; but this death that comes in sleep can be no bitterer than a mother that lifts her little slumbering child out of his small bed (he not knowing), and bears him away softly. The idea of self-slaughter, when first suggested, has always something terrific, especially to us, who from our birth have been taught to look upon it as a crime hardly second to murder; to us, to whom Cato's great heroism and Lucretia's chaste martyrdom seem as sins. Some vague idea that suicide is forbidden in the Scriptures runs through Esther's mind. She sits down at the table, and, drawing a Bible towards her, searches long among the partial, temporary, and local prohibitions and commands of the Books of the Law, and still longer among the universal, all-applying prohibitions and commands of Gospel and Epistle. Whether it be that she search ill, or that there is nought therein written on the subject she seeks, she knows not; only she finds nothing; and, closing the book, she leans her pale cheek on her closed white hand. Her brain feels strangely calm, and she even forgets the darkness of the night, musing on a deeper darkness.
What is this death, that we write in such great black letters? After all, what is it that we know about him, for or against? Is it fair to condemn him unheard, unknown? Why should we give him any embodiment? – why should we personify him at all? He is but an ending: what is there in the end of anything more terrifying than in its beginning, or its middle? Death is but the end of life, as birth is its beginning, and as some unnoticed moment in its course is its middle.
Why are the waters in which we set our feet at the last more coldly awful than those out of which we stepped at the first? Both – both, are they not portions of the great sea of Eternity that floweth ever round Time's little island? A clock is wound up for a certain number of hours; when that number of hours has elapsed, it stops. Our more complicated machinery is wound up to go for a certain number of years, months, days; when that number of years, months, and days is elapsed, we stop – that is all. What is this life, about the taking or keeping of which we make such a clamour, as if it were some great, costly, goodly thing?
"It is but a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep."
It is cowardly, disloyal, say they, for a soldier to desert the post at which he has been set. Ay, but the galley-slave, chained to an oar, if he can but break his chain and be gone, may flee away, and none blame him. A prisoner that is not on parole, what shall hinder him from escaping? If he can but burst his bars, and draw his strong bolts, may he not out and away into the free air? If, before our birth, in that unknown pre-existence of ours at which backward-reaching memory catches not, we, standing looking into life, had said, "Oh, Master, give me of this life! I know not what it is, but I would fain taste it; and if Thou givest it to me, I swear to Thee to keep and guard it carefully, as long as I may – ." But have we ever so asked for it? Has it not been thrust upon us, undesiring, unconsulted, as a gift that is neither of beauty nor of price? Who can chide us, if, laying it down meekly at the everlasting feet, we say, "Oh, Great Builder! take back that house in which, a reluctant tenant, Thou hast placed me. Resume Thy gift; it is a burden too heavy for me! Lay it, I pray Thee, on shoulders that mayhap may bear it stoutlier!"
She lifts the bottle, having uncorked it, to her lips and tastes. It has a deathly, sickly flavour, not enticing. Hesitating, she holds it in her hand, half-frightened, half-allured; while her heart beats loud and hard. "It is the key to all my doubts," she says within herself, looking steadfastly at it; "it is the answer to all my questions. If I do but drink this little draught, I shall have all knowledge; I shall never wonder again! I shall know where Jack is; I shall be with him! But shall I?" Ay, that's the rub! Even in this small world, to be alive at the same time with another person is not necessarily, or even probably, to be with him. Wide continents, high mountains, deep rivers often sever those that are closest of kin; and in the world of the dead, which, being so much more populous, must be so much the greater, is it not likely that still wider continents, higher mountains, deeper rivers, may part two that would fain be together? What if, before her time, she incur the abasement of death, the dishonour of corruption, and yet attain not the object for whose sake she is willing desperately to lay her comely head in the dust?
She changes her attitude, puts down the bottle, and again stoops her small flower-face on her bent fingers – her thoughts varying their channel a little: "If I go, I shall leave no gap behind me, any more than a teacupful of water taken out of a great pool leaves a gap behind. If it is disgraceful to go willingly out of the world, instead of being dragged unwillingly out of it, my disgrace is my own. I involve no one else in it; there is no one of my name left to be ashamed of me. I leave no work undone in the world. Hundreds of others can carry air-cushions, and read to a deaf old man far more patiently than I have done. My fifty pounds a year will go to put daily bread into some other poor woman's mouth, to whom it may perhaps taste sweeter than it has done to me." Her head sinks forward again on her outstretched arms… "It is awful to go out into the dark all by oneself," she thinks, with a pang of intense self-pity, as she feels the warm, gentle life throbbing in her round, tender limbs: "and I, that hate the dark so – , is it very wicked of me to think of this thing? People will say so, but I will not hear them. Where shall I be to-morrow at even?"
"You will be at Blessington, and feeling a good deal ashamed of your absurd paroxysm of cowardly despair," answers plain common sense, who, in the shape of an untold multitude of rats, begins rushing and gnawing, hundred-toothed, scampering hundred-footed behind the walls.
Esther lifts her foolish prone head, and listens. "Skurry – skurry!" go the rats; "Crack!" go the beams; "Thud!" goes some unexplained bulk, in the dining-room underneath! As the tide, at flood, creeps up and over the sands, so the child's old fear creeps up and over her new mad scheme of suicide. "Rustle – rustle!" come the ghostly dresses along the China gallery; "Click, rattle – rattle, click!" goes the door-lock. Down goes the laudanum bottle on the table, and Esther, springing to her feet, begins to unfasten, with fingers rendered nervous by extreme haste, her dress and the belt round her slim waist. "Crack – crack – crack!" goes something close to the bed-head; "Bang!" goes a distant door. There is no wind; what or who can have executed that bang? The fire, which has been burning hollow for some time, collapses, and falls in suddenly with a clear, loud noise. In one leap Miss Craven is in bed and beneath the sheltering bed-clothes.
All very well pensively to contemplate, in half-earnest, the conveying oneself out of a world that has been a most harsh step-mother to one, but by no means well to have one's graceful farewells to existence broken in upon by a nation tailed and whiskered – by the spirits of old reprobates in flowered dressing-gowns, and of ladies, who nightly carry their patched and powdered heads like parcels under their arms.
Good night, wicked woman! May the rats career all night over your small face, as a punishment for your great idiocy!