Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (278 page)

The active Harold had almost always something definite to propose by way of filling the time: if it were fine, she must walk out with him and see the grounds; and when the snow melted and it was no longer slippery, she must get on horseback and learn to ride. If they stayed indoors, she must learn to play at billiards, or she must go over the house and see the pictures he had hung anew, or the costumes he had brought from the East, or come into his study and look at the map of the estate, and hear what - if it had remained in his family - he had intended to do in every corner of it in order to make the most of its capabilities.

About a certain time in the morning Esther had learned to expect him. Let every woocr make himself strongly expected; he may succeed by dint of being absent, but hardly in the first instance. One morning Harold found her in the drawing-room, leaning against a consol table, and looking at the full-length portrait of a certain Lady Betty Transome, who had lived a century and a half before, and had the usual charm of ladies in Sir Peter Lely’s style.

‘Don’t move, pray,’ he said on entering; ‘you look as if you were standing for your own portrait.’

‘I take that as an insinuation,’ said Esther, laughing, and moving towards her seat on an ottoman near the fire, ‘for I notice almost all the portraits are in a conscious, affected attitude. That fair Lady Betty looks as if she had been drilled into that posture, and had not will enough of her own ever to move again unless she had a little push given to her.’

‘She brightens up that panel well with her long satin skirt,’ said Harold, as he followed Esther, ‘but alive I daresay she would have been less cheerful company.’

‘One would certainly think that she had just been unpacked from silver paper. Ah, how chivalrous you are!’ said Esther, as Harold, kneeling on one knee, held her silken netting-stirrup for hcr to put her foot through. She had often fancied pleasant scenes in which such homage was rendered to her, and the homage was not disagreeable now it was really come; but, strangely enough, a little darting sensation at that moment was accompanied by the vivid remembrance of some one who had never paid the least attention to her foot. There had been a slight blush, such as often came and went rapidly, and she was silent a moment. Harold naturally believed that it was he himself who was filling the field of vision He would have liked to place himself on the ottoman near Esther, and behave very much more like a lover; but he took a chair opposite to her at a circumspect distance. He dared not do otherwise. Along with Esther’s playful charm she conveyed an impression of personal pride and high spirit which warned Harold’s acuteness that in the delicacy of their present position he might easily make a false move and offend her. A woman was likely to be credulous about adoration, and to find no difficulty in referring it to her intrinsic attractions; but Esther was too dangerously quick and critical not to discern the least awkwardness that looked like offering her marriage as a convenient compromise for himself. Beforehand, he might have said that such characteristics as hers were not lovable in a woman; but, as it was, he found that the hope of pleasing her had a piquancy quite new to him.

‘I wonder,’ said Esther, breaking her silence in her usual light silvery tones - ‘I wonder whether the woman who looked in that way ever felt any troubles. I see there are two old ones upstairs in the billiard-room who have only got fat; the expression of their faces is just of the same sort.’

‘A woman ought never to have any trouble. There should always be a man to guard her from it.’ (Harold Transome was masculine and fallible; he had incautiously sat down this morning to pay his addresses by talk about nothing in particular; and, clever experienced man as he was, he fell into nonsense.)

‘But suppose the man himself got into trouble - you would wish her to mind about that. Or suppose,’ added Esther, suddenly looking up merrily at Harold, ‘the man himself was troublesome?’

‘O you must not strain probabilities in that way. The generality of men are perfect. Take me, for example.’

‘You are a perfect judge of sauces,’ said Esther, who had her triumphs in letting Harold know that she was capable of taking notes.

‘That is perfection number one. Pray go on.’

‘O, the catalogue is too long - I should be tired before I got to your magnificent ruby ring and your gloves always of the right colour.’

‘If you would let me tell you your perfections, I should not be tired.’

‘That is not complimentary; it means that the list is short.’

‘No; it means that the list is pleasant to dwell upon.’

‘Pray don’t begin,’ said Esther, with her pretty toss of the head; ‘it would be dangerous to our good understanding. The person I liked best in the world was one who did nothing but scold me and tell me of my faults.’

When Esther began to speak, she meant to do no more than make a remote unintelligible allusion, feeling, it must be owned, a naughty will to flirt and be saucy, and thwart Harold’s attempts to be felicitous in compliment. But she had no sooner uttered the words than they seemed to her like a confession. A deep flush spread itself over her face and neck, and the sense that she was blushing went on deepening her colour. Harold felt himself unpleasantly illuminated as to a possibility that had never yet occurred to him. His surprise made an uncomfortable pause, in which Esther had time to feel much vexation.

‘You speak in the past tense,’ said Harold, at last; ‘yet I am rather envious of that person. I shall never be able to win your regard in the same way. Is it any one at Treby? Because in that case I can inquire about your faults.’

‘O you know I have always lived among grave people,’ said Esther, more able to recover herself now she was spoken to. ‘Before I came home to be with my father I was nothing but a school-girl first, and then a teacher in different stages of growth. People in those circumstances are not usually flattered. But there are varieties in fault-finding. At our Paris school the master I liked best was an old man who stormed at me terribly when I read Racine, but yet showed that he was proud of me.’

Esther was getting quite cool again. But Harold was not entirely satisfied; if there was any obstacle in his way, he wished to know exactly what it was.

‘That must have been a wretched life for you at Treby,’ he said, - ‘a person of your accomplishments.’

‘I used to be dreadfully discontented,’ said Esther, much occupied with mistakes she had made in her netting. ‘But I was becoming less so. I have had time to get rather wise, you know; I am two-and-twenty.’

‘Yes,’ said Harold, rising and walking a few paces backwards and forwards, ‘you are past your majority; you are empress of your own fortunes - and more besides.’

‘Dear me,’ said Esther, letting her work fall, and leaning back against the cushions; ‘I don’t think I know very well what to do with my empire.’

‘Well,’ said Harold, pausing in front of her, leaning one arm on the mantelpiece, and speaking very gravely, ‘I hope that in any case, since you appear to have no near relative who understands affairs, you will confide in me, and trust me with all your intentions as if I had no other personal concern in the matter than a regard for you. I hope you believe me capable of acting as the guardian of your interest, even where it turns out to be inevitably opposed to my own.’

‘I am sure you have given me reason to believe it,’ said Esther, with seriousness, putting out her hand to Harold. She had not been left in ignorance that he had had opportunities twice offered of stifling her claims.

Harold raised the hand to his lips, but dared not retain it more than an instant. Still the sweet reliance in Esther’s manner made an irresistible temptation to him. After standing still a moment or two, while she bent over her work, he glided to the ottoman and seated himself close by her, looking at her busy hands.

‘I see you have made mistakes in your work,’ he said, bending still nearer, for he saw that she was conscious yet not angry.

‘Nonsense I you know nothing about it,’ said Esther, laughing, and crushing up the soft silk under her palms. ‘Those blunders have a design in them.’

She looked round, and saw a handsome face very near her. Harold was looking, as he felt, thoroughly enamoured of this bright woman, who was not at all to his preconceived taste. Perhaps a touch of hypothetic jealousy now helped to heighten the effect. But he mastered all indiscretion, and only looked at her as he said -

‘I am wondering whether you have any deep wishes and secrets that I can’t guess.’

‘Pray don’t speak of my wishes,’ said Esther, quite overmastered by this new and apparently involuntary manifestation in Harold; ‘I could not possibly tell you one at this moment - I think I shall never find them out again. O yes she said, abruptly, struggling to relieve herself from the oppression of unintelligible feelings - ‘I do know one wish distinctly. I want to go and see my father. He writes me word that all is well with him, but still I want to see him.’ ‘You shall be driven there when you like.’

‘May I go now - I mean as soon as it is convenient?’ said Esther, rising.

‘I will give the order immediately, if you wish it,’ said Harold, understanding that the audience was broken u

CHAPTER 41

He rates me as a merchant does the wares

He will not purchase - ‘quality not high I -

‘Twill lose its colour opened to the sun,

Has no aroma, and, in fine, is naught -

I barter not for such commodities -

There is no ratio betwixt sand and gems.’

‘Tis wicked judgment ! for the soul can grovv,

As embryos, that live and move but blindly,

Burst from the dark, emerge regenerate,

And lead a life of vision and of choice.

ESTHER did not take the carriage into Malthouse Lane, but left it to wait for her outside the town; and when she entered the house she put her finger on her lip to Lyddy and ran lightly upstairs. She wished to surprise her father by this visit, and she succeeded. The little minister was just then almost surrounded by a wall of books, with merely his head peeping above them, being much embarrassed to find a substitute for tables and desks on which to arrange the volumes he kept open for reference. He was absorbed in mastering all those painstaking interpretations of the Book of Daniel, which are by this time well gone to the limbo of mistaken criticism; and Esther, as she opened the door softly, heard him rehearsing aloud a passage in which he declared, with some parenthetic provisoes, that he conceived not how a perverse ingenuity could blunt the edge of prophetic explicitness, or how an open mind could fail to see in the chronology of ‘the little horn’ the resplendent lamp of an inspired symbol searching out the germinal growth of an antichristian power.

‘You will not like me to interrupt you, father?’ said Esther slyly.

‘Ah, my beloved child!’ he exclaimed, upsetting a pile of books, and thus unintentionally making a convenient breach in his wall, through which Esther could get up to him and kiss him. ‘Thy appearing is as a joy despaired of. I had thought of thee as the blinded think of the daylight - which indeed is a thing to rejoice in, like all other good, though we see it not nigh.’

‘Are you sure you have been as well and comfortable as you said you were in your letters?’ said Esther, seating herself close in front of her father, and laying her hand on his shoulder.

‘I wrote truly, my dear, according to my knowledge at the time. But to an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep. It seems now that all has been as usual, except my studies, which have gone somewhat curiously into prophetic history. But I fear you will rebuke me for my negligent apparel,’ said the little man, feeling in front of Esther’s brightness like a bat overtaken by the morning.

‘That is Lyddy’s fault, who sits crying over her want of Christian assurance instead of brushing your clothes and putting out your clean cravat. She is always saying her righteousness is filthy rags, and really I don’t think that is a very strong expression for it. I’m sure it is dusty clothes and furniture.’

‘Nay, my dear, your playfulness glances too severely on our faithful Lyddy. Doubtless I am myself deficient, in that I do not aid her infirm memory by admonition. But now tell me aught that you have left untold about yourself Your heart has gone out somewhat towards this family - the old man and the child, whom I had not reckoned of?’

‘Yes, father. It is more and more difficult to me to see how I can make up my mind to disturb these people at all.’

‘Something should doubtless be devised to lighten the loss and the change to the aged father and mother. I would have you in any case seek to temper a vicissitude, which is nevertheless a providential arrangement not to be wholly set aside.’

‘Do you think, father - do you feel assured that a case of inheritance like this of mine is a sort of providential arrangement that makes a command?’

‘I have so held it,’ said Mr Lyon, solemnly; ‘in all my meditations I have so held it. For you have to consider, my dear, that you have been led by a peculiar path, and into experience which is not ordinarily the lot of those who are seated in high places; and what I have hinted to you already in my letters on this head, I shall wish on a future opportunity to enter into more at large.’

Esther was uneasily silent. On this great question of her lot she saw doubts and difficulties, in which it seemed as if her father could not help her. There was no illumination for her in this theory of providential arrangement. She said suddenly (what she had not thought of at all suddenly) -

‘Have you been again to see Felix Holt, father? You have not mentioned him in your letters.’

‘I have been since I last wrote, my dear, and I took his mother with me, who, I fear, made the time heavy to him with her plaints. But afterwards I carried her away to the house of a brother minister of Loamford, and returned to Felix, and then we had much discourse.’

‘Did you tell him of everything that has happened - I mean about me - about the Transomes?’

‘Assuredly I told him, and he listened as one astonished. For he had much to hear, knowing nought of your birth, and that you had any other father than Rufus Lyon. ‘Tis a narrative I trust I shall not be called on to give to others; but I was not without satisfaction in unfolding the truth to this young man, who hath wrought himself into my affection strangely - I would fain hope for ends that will be a visible good in his less way-worn life, when mine shall be no longer.’

‘And you told him how the Transomes had come, and that I was staying at Transome Court?’

‘Yes, I told these things with some particularity, as is my wont concerning what hath imprinted itself on my mind.’ ‘What did Felix say?’

‘Truly, my dear, nothing desirable to recite,’ said Mr Lyon, rubbing his hand over his brow.

‘Dear father, he did say something, and you always remember what people say. Pray tell me; I want to know.’

‘It was a hasty remark, and rather escaped him than was consciously framed. He said, “Then she will marry Transome; that is what Transome means.” ‘

‘That was all?’ said Esther, turning rather pale, and biting her lip with the determination that the tears should not start.

‘Yes, we did not go further into that branch of the subject. I apprehend there is no warrant for his seeming prognostic, and I should not be without disquiet if I thought otherwise. For I confess that in your accession to this great position and property, I contemplate with hopeful satisfaction your remaming attached to that body of congregational Dissent, which, as I hold, hath retained most of pure and primitive discipline. Your education and peculiar history would thus be seen to have coincided with a long train of events in making this family property a means of honouring and illustrating a purer form of Christianity than that which hath unhappily obtained the pre-eminence in this land. I speak, my child, as you know, always in the hope that you will fully join our communion; and this dear wish of my heart - nay, this urgent prayer - would seem to be frustrated by your marriage with a man, of whom there is at least no visible indication that he would unite himself to our body.’

If Esther had been less agitated, she would hardly have helped smiling at the picture her father’s words suggested of Harold Transome ‘joining the church’ in Malthouse Yard. But she was too seriously preoccupied with what Felix had said, which hurt her in a two-edged fashion that was highly significant. First, she was angry with him for daring to say positively whom she would marry; secondly, she was angry at the implication that there was from the

first a cool deliberate design in Harold Transome to marry her. Esther said to herself that she was quite capable of discerning Harold Transome’s disposition. and judging of his conduct. She felt sure he was generous and open. It did not lower him in her opinion that since circumstances had brought them together he evidently admired her - was in love with her - in short, desired to marry her; and she thought that she discerned the delicacy which hindered him from being more explicit. There is no point on which young women are more easily piqued than this of their sufficiency to judge the men who make love to them. And Esther’s generous nature delighted to believe in generosity. All these thoughts were making a tumult in her mind while her father was suggesting the radiance her lot might cast on the cause of congregational Dissent. She heard what he said, and remembered it afterwards, but she made no reply at present, and chose rather to start up in search of a brush - an action which would seem to her father quite a usual sequence with her. It served the purpose of diverting him from a lengthy subject.

‘Have you yet spoken with Mr Transome concerning Mistress Holt, my dear?’ he said, as Esther was moving about the room. ‘I hinted to him that you would best decide how assistance should be tendered to her.’

‘No, father, we have not approached the subject. Mr Transome may have forgotten it, and, for several reasons, I would rather not talk of this - of money matters to him at present. There is money due to me from the Lukyns and the Pendrells.’

‘They have paid it,’ said Mr Lyon, opening his desk. ‘I have it here ready to deliver to you.’

‘Keep it, father, and pay Mrs Holt’s rent with it, and do anything else that is wanted for her. We must consider everything temporary now,’ said Esther, enveloping her father in a towel, and beginning to brush his auburn fringe of hair, while he shut his eyes in preparation for this pleasant passivity. ‘Everything is uncertain - what may become of Felix - what may become of us all. O dear!’ she went on, changing suddenly to laughing merriment, ‘I am beginning to talk like Lyddy, I think.’

‘Truly,’ said Mr Lyon, smiling, ‘the uncertainty of things is a text rather too wide and obvious for fruitful application; and to discourse of it is, as one might say, to bottle up the air, and make a present of it to those who are already standing out of doors.’

‘Do you think,’ said Esther, in the course of their chat, ‘that the Treby people know at all about the reasons of my being at Transome Court?’

‘I have had no sign thereof; and indeed there is no one, as it appears, who could make the story public. The man Christian is away in London with Mr Debarry, parliament now beginning; and Mr Jermyn would doubtless respect the confidence of the Transomes. I have not seen him lately. I know nothing of his movements. And so far as my own speech is concerned, and my strict command to Lyddy, I have withheld the means of information even as to your having returned to Transome Court in the carriage, not wishing to give any occasion to solicitous questioning till time hath somewhat inured me. But it hath got abroad that you are there, and is the subject of conjectures, whereof, I imagine, the chief is, that you are gone as companion to Mistress Transome; for some of our friends have already hinted a rebuke to me that I should permit your taking a position so little likely to further your spiritual welfare.’

‘Now, father, I think I shall be obliged to run away from you, not to keep the carriage too long,’ said Esther, as she finished her reforms in the minister’s toilette. ‘You look beautiful now, and I must give Lyddy a little lecture before I go.’

‘Yes, my dear; I would not detain you, seeing that my duties demand me. But take with you this Treatise, which I have purposely selected. It concerns all the main questions between ourselves and the establishment - government, discipline, state-support. It is seasonable that you should give a nearer attention to these polemics, lest you be drawn aside by the fallacious association of a state church with elevated rank.’

Esther chose to take the volume submissively, rather than to adopt the ungraceful sincerity of saying that she was unable at present to give her mind to the original functions of a bishop, or the comparative merit of endowments and voluntaryism. But she did not run her eyes over the pages during her solitary drive to get a foretaste of the argument, for she was entirely occupied with Felix Holt’s prophecy that she would marry Harold Transome.