CHAPTER XXXIX.
_MR., MRS., AND MISS WYLDER_.
A new experience had come to Mrs. Wylder. Her passion over the death of
her son; her constant and prolonged contention with her husband; her
protest against him whom she called the Almighty; the public consequence
of the same; these, and the reaction from all these, had resulted in a
sudden sinking of the vital forces, so that she who had been like a
burning fiery furnace, was now like a heap of cooling ashes on a hearth,
with the daylight coming in. She had not only never known what illness
was, she did not even know what it was to feel unfit. Her consciousness
of health was so clear, so unmixed, so unencountered, that she had never
had a conception, a thought, a notion of what even that health was. Power
and strength had so constantly seemed part of her known self, that she
never thought of them: they were never far enough from her to be seen by
her; she did not suspect them as other than herself, or dream that they
could be disjoined from her. She could think only in the person of a
strong woman; she was aware only of the being of a strong woman. Even
after she had been some time helpless in bed, as often as she thought of
anything she would like to do, it was the act of trying to get up and do
it that made her aware afresh that she was no more the woman
corresponding to her consciousness of herself. For her consciousness had
never yet presented her as she really was, but always through the
conditional and non-essential, so that by accidents only was she
characterized to herself. Now she was too feeble even to care for the
loss of her strength; her weakness went too deep to be felt as an
oppression, for it met with no antagonism. Her inability to move was now
no prison, and her attendant was no slave with tardy feet, but an angel
of God.
For her Bab was now the mother's one delight. Her love for her lost twin
had been in great part favouritism, partisanship, defence, opposition;
her love for Barbara was all tenderness and no pride. In her self-lack
she clung to her--as lordly dame, who had taken her castle for part of
herself, and impregnable, but, its walls crumbling under the shot of the
enemy, found herself defenceless before her captors, might turn and clasp
her little maid, suppliant for protection. Good is it that we are not
what we seem to ourselves "in our hours of ease," for then we should
never seek the Father! The loss of all that the world counts _first
things_ is a thousandfold repaid in the mere waking to higher need. It
proves the presence of the divine in the lower good, that its loss is so
potent. A man may send his gaze over the clear heaven, and suspect no
God; when the stifling cloud comes down, folds itself about him, shuts
from him the expanse of the universe, he begins to long for a hand, a
sign, some shadow of presence. Mrs. Wylder had not got so far as this
yet, but she had sought refuge in love; and what is the love of child, or
mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being--which
is a being just because he shines through it. This was the one important
result of her illness, that, finding refuge in the love of her daughter,
she loved her daughter. The next point in her eternal growth would be to
love the God who made the child she loved, and whose love shone upon her
through the child. By nature she was a strong woman whom passion made
weak. It sucked at her will till first it hardened it to a more selfish
determination, then pulped it to a helpless obstinacy. The persistence
that goes with inclination has its force only from the weakness of pride
and the mean worship of self; it is the opposite of that free will which
is the reflex of the divine will, and the ministering servant-power to
all freedom, which resists and subdues the self of inclination, and is
obedient only to the self of duty. Where the temple of God has no
windows, earthquake must rend the roof, that the sunlight may enter.
Barbara's mother lay broken on her couch that the spirit of the daughter
might enter the soul of her mother--and with it the spirit of him who, in
the heart of her daughter, made her that which she was.
Her illness had lasted a month, when one day her husband, at Barbara's
prayer coming to see her, she feebly put out her hand asking for his, and
for a moment the divine child in the man opened its heavenly eyes. He
took the offered hand kindly, faltered a gentle-sounding commonplace or
two, and left her happier, with a strange little bird fluttering in his
own bosom. There are eggs of all the heavenly birds in our bosoms, and
the history of man is the incubation and hatching of these eggs.
She began to recover, but the recovery was a long one. As soon as she
thought her well enough, Barbara told her that Mr. Wingfold had been to
inquire after her almost every day, and asked whether she would not like
to see him. Mrs. Wylder was in a quiescent condition, non-combatant,
involving no real betterment, occasioned only by the absence of impulse.
But such a condition gives opportunity for the good, the gentle, the
loving, to be felt, and so recognized. The sufferer resembles a child
that has not been tempted, whose trial is yet to come. With recovery,
fresh claim will be put in by the powers of good. This claim will be
resisted by old habit, resuming its force in the return of physical and
psychical health,--and then comes the tug of war. For no one can be
saved, as he who knows his master would be saved, without the will being
supreme in the matter, without the choosing to fulfill all righteousness,
to resist the wrong, to do the right. Wingfold never built much on
bed-repentance. The aphorism of the devil sick and the devil well, is
only too true. But he welcomed the fresh opportunity for a beginning. He
knew that pain and sickness do rub some dirt from the windows toward the
infinite, and that things of the old unknown world whence we came, do
sometimes look in at them, a moment now, and a moment then, waking new
old things that lie in every child born into the world. I seem to see the
great marshes where the souls go wandering about after the bog-fires; a
kiss blown from the walls of the city comes wavering down among them; it
flits hither and thither with the dead-lights; it finds a soul with a
spot on which it can alight; it settles there; and kisses it alive. God
is the God of patience, and waits and waits for the child who keeps him
waiting and will not open the door.
Wingfold went to see her, but took good care to press nothing upon her.
He let her give him the lead. She spoke of her weakness, and the parson
drew out her moan. She praised her Barbara, and the parson praised her
again in words that opened the mother's eyes to new beauties in her
daughter. She mentioned her weariness, and the parson spoke of the fields
and the soft wind and the yellow shine of the butter-cups in the grass.
Her heart was gently drawn to the man whose eyes were so keen, whose
voice was so mellow and strong, and whose words were so lovely sweet,
saying the things that were in her own heart, but would not come out.
One day he proposed to read something, and she consented. I will not say
what he read, for I would avoid waking controversy as to fitness. He
thought he knew what he was about. The good in a _true_ book, he would
say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its
wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a
book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader
for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. The general
sense of honour, he would say, has been stimulated not a little by the
story of the treachery of Jael. Nor was it any wonder he should succeed
in interesting Mrs. Wylder, for she had a strong brain as well as a big
heart. More than half her faults came of an indignant sense of wrong. She
had passionately loved her husband once, but he had soon ceased even the
show of returning her affection,
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
After a fierce struggle against the lessons life would have her taught, a
struggle continued to her fortieth year, she was now at length a pupil in
another school, where the schoolroom was her bed, the book of Quiet her
first study, her two attendants a clergyman and her own daughter, and her
one teacher, God himself. In that schoolroom, the world began to open to
her a little. Among men who could, without seeming to aim at it, make
another think, I have not met the equal of Wingfold. His mode was that of
the open-hearted apostle, who took men by guile. He called out the
thoughts lurking in their souls, and set them dealing with those
thoughts, not with him: they were slow to discover that he was a divine
musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts; they thought the
tunes came alive in their own air--as indeed they did, only another hand
woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare not a little of his own
feeling, but where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it
unchristian to hide it. Feeling by itself, however, that came and went
without correspondent action, he counted not only weak and mawkish, but
tending to the devilish.
Barbara was happy all day long. Life seemed about to blossom into a great
flower of scarlet and gold. She had learned from the parson that the
bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy and too anxious to
question him as to the cause of his going. Till her mother was well, it
was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell
her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her, and
what she had tried to do for him, and was certain he would one day
believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at
Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out,
and he did not choose to remain in a house the head of which, if lady
Ann's tale was true, had so bitterly wronged his mother. As soon as she
was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather! There was no
hurry! She would certainly see him again before long! And he would be
sure to write! It did not occur to her that a man in his position would
hardly venture to approach her again, without some renewed approach on
her part; and for a long time she was nowise uneasy.
The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler; and the very sight
of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound
reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women: could she not learn
from his mouth the rights of a thing, the instant she opened hers to ask
them? Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear
common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish the
insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as Wingfold
must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more useful, and
more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his wife, sent as
certainly as ever angel in the old time. The one fault she had in the
eyes of her husband was, that she was so indignant with affectation or
humbug of any sort, as hardly to give the better thing that might coexist
with it, the needful chance.
So long as evil comes to the front, it appears an interminable,
unconquerable thing. But all the time there may be a change, positive as
inexplicable, at the very door. How is it that a child begins to be good?
Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of alteration? As
undistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place; equally
perplexing to keenest investigation the part of the being in which the
renovation commences. Who shall analyze repentance, as a force, or as a
phenomenon! You cannot see it coming! Before you know, there it is, and
the man is no more what he was; his life is upon other lines! The wind
hath blown. We saw not whence it came, or whither it went, but the new
birth is there. It began in the spiritual infinitesimal, where all
beginnings are. The change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of her
war was to come.
Lady Ann had not once been to see her since first calling when she
arrived. Naturally she did not take to her. In the eyes of lady Ann, Mrs.
Wylder was insufferable--a vulgar, arrogant, fierce woman, purse-proud
and ignorant. But a keen moral eye would have perceived lady Ann vastly
inferior to Mrs. Wylder in everything right-womanly. Lady Ann was the
superior by the changeless dignity of her carriage, but her self-assured
pre-eminence was offensive, and her drawling deliberation far more
objectionable than Mrs. Wylder's abrupt movements, or the rough and ready
speech that accompanied her eager dart at the gist of a matter. Even the
look that would kill a man if it could, never roused such hate as sprang
to meet the icy stare of her passionless ladyship. Many a man with no
admiration of the florid, would have sought refuge in Mrs. Wylder's plump
face, vivid with an irritable humanity, from the moveless pallor of lady
Ann's delicately formed cheek, and the pinched thinness of her fine,
poverty-stricken nose. Oh those pinched nostrils, the very outcry of
inward meanness! will they ever open to the full tide of a surging
breath? What vital interweaving of gladness and grief will at length make
strong and brave and unselfish the heart that sent out those nostrils?
Less than a divine shame will never make it the heart of a fearless,
bountiful, redeeming woman.
Mrs. Wylder was nowise annoyed that lady Ann did not call a second time.
She did not care enough to mind, and preferred not seeing her. They had
in common as near nothing as humanity permitted. "Stuck-up kangaroo!" she
cried her.
"I'll lay you my best sapphire," she said to her daughter, in the hearing
of Wingfold, whose presence she had forgotten, "that for the last three
hundred years not a woman of her family has suckled her own young!"
Neither mother nor daughter had shown the least deference to lady Ann's
exalted position. The first movement of her dislike to Mrs. Wylder was
caused by her laughing and talking as unrestrainedly in her presence as
in that of the doctor's wife, who happened to be in the room when lady
Ann entered. But now that danger, not to say ruin, appeared in the
distance, she must, for the sake of her son, wronged by his father's
having married another woman before his mother, neglect no chance! Arthur
had been to Wylder Hall repeatedly, but Barbara had not seen him! She
must go herself, and pay some court to the young heiress! She was anxious
also to learn whether any chagrin was concerned in her continuous absence
from Mortgrange.
Barbara received her heartily, and they talked a little, lady Ann
imagining herself very pleasing: she rarely condescended to make herself
agreeable, and measured her success by her exertion. She found Barbara in
such good spirits that she pronounced her heartless--not to her son, or
to any but herself, who would not have come near her but for the money to
be got with her. She begged her, notwithstanding, for the sake of her
complexion, to leave her mother an hour or two now and then, and ride
over to Mortgrange. Incessant watching would injure her health, and
health was essential to beauty! Barbara protested that nothing ever hurt
her; that she was the only person she knew fit to be a nurse, because she
was never ill. When her ladyship, for once oblivious of her manners, grew
importunate, Barbara flatly refused.
"You must pardon me, lady Ann," she said; "I cannot, and I will not leave
my mother."
Then lady Ann thought it might be wise to make a little more of the
mother to whom she seemed so devoted. She had imagined the daughter of
the coarse woman must feel toward her as she did, and suspected a coarser
grain in the daughter than she had supposed, because she was not
disgusted with her mother. She did not know that eyes of love see the
true being where other eyes see only its shadow; and shadows differ a
good deal from their bodies.
But meeting Mr. Wylder in the avenue as she returned, and stopping her
carriage to speak to him, lady Ann changed her mind, and resolved to
curry favour with the husband instead of the wife. For hitherto she had
scarcely seen Mr. Wylder, and knew about him only by unfavourable
hearsay; but she was charmed with him now, and drew from him a promise to
go and dine at Mortgrange.
Bab went singing back to her mother, who was never so ill that she did
not like to hear her voice. She could not always bear it in the room, but
outside she was never tired of it. So Bab went about the house singing
like a mavis. But she never passed a servant, male or female, without
ceasing her song to say a kind word; and her mother, who, now that she
had got on a little, lay listening with her keenest of ears, knew by the
checks and changes of Bab's song, something of what was going on in the
house. If one asked Bab what made her so happy, she would answer that she
had nothing to make her unhappy; and there was more philosophy in the
answer than may at first appear. For certainly the normal condition of
humanity is happiness, and the thing that should be enough to make us
happy, is simply the absence of anything to make us unhappy.
"Everything," she would answer another time, "is making me happy."
"I think I _am_ happiness," she said once.
How could she _naturally_ be other than happy, seeing she came of
happiness! "Il lieto fattore," says Dante; "whose happy-making sight,"
says Milton.
Mr. Wylder went and dined with sir Wilton and lady Ann. The latter did
her poor best to please him, and was successful. It had always been an
annoyance to Mr. Wylder that his wife was not a lady. In the bush he
did not feel it; but now he saw, as well as knew, wherein she was
inferior, and did not see wherein she excelled. It was the more
consolation to him that lady Ann praised his daughter, her beauty, her
manners, her wit--praised her for everything, in short, that she thought
hers, and for some things she thought were not hers. But she hinted that
it would be of the greatest benefit to Barbara to have the next season in
London. The girl had met nobody, and might, in her ignorance and
innocence, being such an eager, impetuous, warm-hearted creature, with
her powers of discrimination of course but little cultivated, make
unsuitable friendships that would lead to entanglement; while, well
chaperoned, she might become one of the first ladies in the county. She
took care to let her father know at the same time, or think he knew,
that, although her son would be only a baronet, he would be rich, for the
estates were in excellent condition and free of encumbrance; and hinted
that there was now a fine chance of enlarging the property, neighbouring
land being in the market at a low price.
Mr. Wylder had indeed hoped for a higher match, but lady Ann, being an
earl's daughter, had influence with him. The remaining twin was so
delicate that it was very doubtful if he would succeed: if he did not,
and land could be had between to connect the two properties of Mortgrange
and Wylder, the estate would be far the finest in the county; when, as
lady Ann hinted, means might be used to draw down the favour of
Providence in the form of a patent of nobility.
To lady Ann, London was the centre of love-making, and Arthur, she said
to herself, would show to better advantage there than in the country. The
place where she had herself been nearest to falling in love, was a
ball-room: the heat apparently had half thawed her.
Mr. Wylder thought lady Ann was right, and the best thing for Barbara
would be to go to London: lady Ann would present her at court, and she
would doubtless be the belle of the season. Her chance would be none the
worse of making a better match than with Arthur Lestrange.
It may seem odd that a like reflection did not occur to lady Ann: far
more eligible men than her son might well be drawn to such a bit of
sunshine as Barbara; but just what in Barbara was most attractive, lady
Ann was least capable of appreciating.
