Shirley (54 page)

still swept the Continent. There was not the faintest sign of serene weather, no opening amid "the clouds of battle-dust and smoke," no fall of pure dews genial to the olive, no cessation of the red rain which nourishes the baleful and glorious laurel. Meantime, Ruin had her sappers and miners at work

under Moore's feet, and whether he rode or walked, whether he only crossed his counting-house hearth or galloped over sullen Rushedge, he was aware of a hollow echo, and felt the ground shake to

his tread.

While the summer thus passed with Moore, how did it lapse with Shirley and Caroline? Let us first

visit the heiress. How does she look? Like a love-lorn maiden, pale and pining for a neglectful swain?

Does she sit the day long bent over some sedentary task? Has she for ever a book in her hand, or sewing on her knee, and eyes only for that, and words for nothing, and thoughts unspoken?

By no means. Shirley is all right. If her wistful cast of physiognomy is not gone, no more is her

careless smile. She keeps her dark old manor-house light and bright with her cheery presence. The gallery and the low-ceiled chambers that open into it have learned lively echoes from her voice; the

dim entrance-hall, with its one window, has grown pleasantly accustomed to the frequent rustle of a

silk dress, as its wearer sweeps across from room to room, now carrying flowers to the barbarous

peach-bloom salon, now entering the dining-room to open its casements and let in the scent of mignonette and sweet-briar, anon bringing plants from the staircase window to place in the sun at the

open porch door.

She takes her sewing occasionally; but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for

above five minutes at a time. Her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs. Perhaps she goes to seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book or older china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment

indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a

particular view, whence Briarfield church and rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has

scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for

him. It is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own

eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the open kitchen door the court is visible, all sunny

and gay, and people with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea-fowls, and a bright variety of pure white, and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon plumed pigeons.

Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the door step scattering crumbs. Around her throng her eager, plump, happy feathered vassals John is about the stables, and John must be talked to, and her mare looked at. She is still petting and patting it when the cows come in to be milked. This is important; Shirley must stay and take a review of them all. There

are perhaps some little calves, some little new-yeaned lambs—it may be twins, whose mothers have

rejected them. Miss Keeldar must be introduced to them by John, must permit herself the treat of feeding them with her own hand, under the direction of her careful foreman. Meantime John moots

doubtful questions about the farming of certain "crofts," and "ings," and "holmes," and his mistress is necessitated to fetch her garden-hat—a gipsy straw—and accompany him, over stile and along

hedgerow, to hear the conclusion of the whole agricultural matter on the spot, and with the said

"crofts," "ings," and "holms" under her eye. Bright afternoon thus wears into soft evening, and she comes home to a late tea, and after tea she never sews.

After tea Shirley reads, and she is just about as tenacious of her book as she is lax of her needle.

Her study is the rug, her seat a footstool, or perhaps only the carpet at Mrs. Pryor's feet: there she always learned her lessons when a child, and old habits have a strong power over her. The tawny and

lionlike bulk of Tartar is ever stretched beside her, his negro muzzle laid on his fore paws—straight,

strong, and shapely as the limbs of an Alpine wolf. One hand of the mistress generally reposes on the

loving serf's rude head, because if she takes it away he groans and is discontented. Shirley's mind is

given to her book. She lifts not her eyes; she neither stirs nor speaks—unless, indeed, it be to return a brief respectful answer to Mrs. Pryor, who addresses deprecatory phrases to her now and then.

"My dear, you had better not have that great dog so near you; he is crushing the border of your dress."

"Oh, it is only muslin. I can put a clean one on to-morrow."

"My dear, I wish you could acquire the habit of sitting to a table when you read."

"I will try, ma'am, some time; but it is so comfortable to do as one has always been accustomed to

do."

"My dear, let me beg of you to put that book down. You are trying your eyes by the doubtful firelight."

"No, ma'am, not at all; my eyes are never tired."

At last, however, a pale light falls on the page from the window. She looks; the moon is up. She closes the volume, rises, and walks through the room. Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has

refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures.

The still parlour, the clean hearth, the window opening on the twilight sky, and showing its "sweet regent," new throned and glorious, suffice to make earth an Eden, life a poem, for Shirley. A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins, unmingled, untroubled, not to be reached or ravished

by human agency, because by no human agency bestowed—the pure gift of God to His creature, the

free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as

she wishes it. No, not as she wishes it; she has not time to wish. The swift glory spreads out, sweeping and kindling, and multiplies its splendours faster than Thought can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings. Shirley says nothing while the trance is upon her—she is quite

mute; but if Mrs. Pryor speaks to her now, she goes out quietly, and continues her walk upstairs in the

dim gallery.

If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she would take a pen at such moments, or at least while the recollection of such moments was yet fresh on her spirit. She would

seize, she would fix the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the story that

has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and thus possess what she was enabled to create.

But indolent she is, reckless she is, and most ignorant; for she does not know her dreams are rare, her

feelings peculiar. She does not know, has never known, and will die without knowing, the full value of

that spring whose bright fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.

Shirley takes life easily. Is not that fact written in her eye? In her good-tempered moments is it not

as full of lazy softness as in her brief fits of anger it is fulgent with quick-flashing fire? Her nature is in her eye. So long as she is calm, indolence, indulgence, humour, and tenderness possess that large

gray sphere; incense her, a red ray pierces the dew, it quickens instantly to flame.

Ere the month of July was past, Miss Keeldar would probably have started with Caroline on that northern tour they had planned; but just at that epoch an invasion befell Fieldhead. A genteel foraging

party besieged Shirley in her castle, and compelled her to surrender at discretion. An uncle, an aunt,

and two cousins from the south—a Mr., Mrs., and two Misses Sympson, of Sympson Grove, ——

shire—came down upon her in state. The laws of hospitality obliged her to give in, which she did with

a facility which somewhat surprised Caroline, who knew her to be prompt in action and fertile in expedient where a victory was to be gained for her will. Miss Helstone even asked her how it was she

submitted so readily. She answered, old feelings had their power; she had passed two years of her early youth at Sympson Grove.

"How did she like her relatives?"

She had nothing in common with them, she replied. Little Harry Sympson, indeed, the sole son of

the family, was very unlike his sisters, and of him she had formerly been fond; but he was not coming

to Yorkshire—at least not yet.

The next Sunday the Fieldhead pew in Briarfield Church appeared peopled with a prim, trim, fidgety, elderly gentleman, who shifted his spectacles, and changed his position every three minutes; a

patient, placid-looking elderly lady in brown satin; and two pattern young ladies, in pattern attire, with pattern deportment. Shirley had the air of a black swan or a white crow in the midst of this party, and

very forlorn was her aspect. Having brought her into respectable society, we will leave her there a while, and look after Miss Helstone.

Separated from Miss Keeldar for the present, as she could not seek her in the midst of her fine relatives, scared away from Fieldhead by the visiting commotion which the new arrivals occasioned

in the neighbourhood, Caroline was limited once more to the gray rectory, the solitary morning walk

in remote by-paths, the long, lonely afternoon sitting in a quiet parlour which the sun forsook at noon, or in the garden alcove where it shone bright, yet sad, on the ripening red currants trained over

the trellis, and on the fair monthly roses entwined between, and through them fell chequered on Caroline sitting in her white summer dress, still as a garden statue. There she read old books, taken

from her uncle's library. The Greek and Latin were of no use to her, and its collection of light literature was chiefly contained on a shelf which had belonged to her aunt Mary—some venerable Lady's Magazines, that had once performed a sea-voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm,

and whose pages were stained with salt water; some mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and

apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living; a few old English classics. From these faded flowers Caroline had in her childhood extracted the honey; they were tasteless to her now. By

way of change, and also of doing good, she would sew—make garments for the poor, according to

good Miss Ainley's direction. Sometimes, as she felt and saw her tears fall slowly on her work, she

would wonder how the excellent woman who had cut it out and arranged it for her managed to be so

equably serene in
her
solitude.

"I never find Miss Ainley oppressed with despondency or lost in grief," she thought; "yet her cottage is a still, dim little place, and she is without a bright hope or near friend in the world. I remember, though, she told me once she had tutored her thoughts to tend upwards to heaven. She allowed there was, and ever had been, little enjoyment in this world for her, and she looks, I suppose,

to the bliss of the world to come. So do nuns, with their close cell, their iron lamp, their robe strait as a shroud, their bed narrow as a coffin. She says often she has no fear of death—no dread of the grave;

no more, doubtless, had St. Simeon Stylites, lifted up terrible on his wild column in the wilderness; no more has the Hindu votary stretched on his couch of iron spikes. Both these having violated nature,

their natural likings and antipathies are reversed; they grow altogether morbid. I do fear death as yet, but I believe it is because I am young. Poor Miss Ainley would cling closer to life if life had more

charms for her. God surely did not create us and cause us to live with the sole end of wishing always

to die. I believe in my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it so long as we retain it.

Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest.

"Nobody," she went on—"nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do—

better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now. And when I speak thus I

have no impression that I displease God by my words; that I am either impious or impatient, irreligious or sacrilegious. My consolation is, indeed, that God hears many a groan, and

compassionates much grief which man stops his ears against, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I

say
impotent
, for I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn, this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy. Such reminder,

in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make

some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world; the demand disturbs the happy and rich—it disturbs parents. Look at the numerous families of girls in this