Shirley (68 page)

that the tea-things were just brought into the schoolroom, and he was very thirsty, and he would be glad if you would leave your packing for the present and come and make a cup of tea for him and me.

You came; you would not talk at first, but soon you softened and grew cheerful. Mr. Moore began to

tell us about the Continent, the war, and Bonaparte—subjects we were both fond of listening to. After

tea he said we should neither of us leave him that evening; he would not let us stray out of his sight,

lest we should again get into mischief. We sat one on each side of him. We were so happy. I never passed so pleasant an evening. The next day he gave you, missy, a lecture of an hour, and wound it up

by marking you a piece to learn in Bossuet as a punishment-lesson—'Le Cheval Dompté.' You learned

it instead of packing up, Shirley. We heard no more of your running away. Mr. Moore used to tease

you on the subject for a year afterwards."

"She never said a lesson with greater spirit," subjoined Moore. "She then, for the first time, gave me the treat of hearing my native tongue spoken without accent by an English girl."

"She was as sweet as summer cherries for a month afterwards," struck in Henry: "a good hearty quarrel always left Shirley's temper better than it found it."

"You talk of me as if I were not present," observed Miss Keeldar, who had not yet lifted her face.

"Are you sure you
are
present?" asked Moore. "There have been moments since my arrival here when I have been tempted to inquire of the lady of Fieldhead if she knew what had become of my former pupil."

"She is here now."

"I see her, and humble enough; but I would neither advise Harry nor others to believe too implicitly in the humility which one moment can hide its blushing face like a modest little child, and the next lift it pale and lofty as a marble Juno."

"One man in times of old, it is said, imparted vitality to the statue he had chiselled; others may have the contrary gift of turning life to stone."

Moore paused on this observation before he replied to it. His look, at once struck and meditative,

said, "A strange phrase; what may it mean?" He turned it over in his mind, with thought deep and slow, as some German pondering metaphysics.

"You mean," he said at last, "that some men inspire repugnance, and so chill the kind heart."

"Ingenious!" responded Shirley. "If the interpretation pleases you, you are welcome to hold it valid.

I
don't care."

And with that she raised her head, lofty in look and statue-like in hue, as Louis had described it.

"Behold the metamorphosis!" he said; "scarce imagined ere it is realized: a lowly nymph develops to an inaccessible goddess. But Henry must not be disappointed of his recitation, and Olympia will deign to oblige him. Let us begin."

"I have forgotten the very first line."

"Which I have not.
My
memory, if a slow, is a retentive one. I acquire deliberately both knowledge and liking. The acquisition grows into my brain, and the sentiment into my breast; and it is not as the

rapid-springing produce which, having no root in itself, flourishes verdurous enough for a time, but

too soon falls withered away. Attention, Henry! Miss Keeldar consents to favour you. 'Voyez ce cheval

ardent et impétueux,' so it commences."

Miss Keeldar did consent to make the effort; but she soon stopped.

"Unless I heard the whole repeated I cannot continue it," she said.

"Yet it was quickly learned—'soon gained, soon gone,'" moralized the tutor. He recited the passage deliberately, accurately, with slow, impressive emphasis.

Shirley, by degrees, inclined her ear as he went on. Her face, before turned from him,
re
turned towards him. When he ceased, she took the word up as if from his lips; she took his very tone; she

seized his very accent; she delivered the periods as he had delivered them; she reproduced his manner, his pronunciation, his expression.

It was now her turn to petition.

"Recall 'Le Songe d'Athalie,'" she entreated, "and say it."

He said it for her. She took it from him; she found lively excitement in the pleasure of making his

language her own. She asked for further indulgence; all the old school pieces were revived, and with

them Shirley's old school days.

He had gone through some of the best passages of Racine and Corneille, and then had heard the echo of his own deep tones in the girl's voice, that modulated itself faithfully on his. "Le chêne et le Roseau," that most beautiful of La Fontaine's fables, had been recited, well recited, by the tutor, and the pupil had animatedly availed herself of the lesson. Perhaps a simultaneous feeling seized them now, that their enthusiasm had kindled to a glow, which the slight fuel of French poetry no longer sufficed to feed; perhaps they longed for a trunk of English oak to be thrown as a Yule log to the devouring flame. Moore observed, "And these are our best pieces! And we have nothing more dramatic, nervous, natural!"

And then he smiled and was silent. His whole nature seemed serenely alight. He stood on the hearth,

leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece, musing not unblissfully.

Twilight was closing on the diminished autumn day. The schoolroom windows—darkened with

creeping plants, from which no high October winds had as yet swept the sere foliage—admitted scarce a gleam of sky; but the fire gave light enough to talk by.

And now Louis Moore addressed his pupil in French, and she answered at first with laughing hesitation and in broken phrase. Moore encouraged while he corrected her. Henry joined in the lesson; the two scholars stood opposite the master, their arms round each other's waists. Tartar, who

long since had craved and obtained admission, sat sagely in the centre of the rug, staring at the blaze

which burst fitful from morsels of coal among the red cinders. The group were happy enough, but—

"Pleasures are like poppies spread;

You seize the flower—its bloom is shed."

The dull, rumbling sound of wheels was heard on the pavement in the yard.

"It is the carriage returned," said Shirley; "and dinner must be just ready, and I am not dressed."

A servant came in with Mr. Moore's candle and tea; for the tutor and his pupil usually dined at luncheon time.

"Mr. Sympson and the ladies are returned," she said, "and Sir Philip Nunnely is with them."

"How you did start, and how your hand trembled, Shirley!" said Henry, when the maid had closed the shutter and was gone. "But I know why—don't you, Mr. Moore? I know what papa intends. He is a

little ugly man, that Sir Philip. I wish he had not come. I wish sisters and all of them had stayed at De Walden Hall to dine.—Shirley should once more have made tea for you and me, Mr. Moore, and we

would have had a happy evening of it."

Moore was locking up his desk and putting away his St. Pierre. "That was
your
plan, was it, my boy?"

"Don't you approve it, sir?"

"I approve nothing utopian. Look Life in its iron face; stare Reality out of its brassy countenance.

Make the tea, Henry; I shall be back in a minute."

He left the room; so did Shirley, by another door.

28

Chapter

PHŒBE.

Shirley probably got on pleasantly with Sir Philip that evening, for the next morning she came down

in one of her best moods.

"Who will take a walk with me?" she asked, after breakfast. "Isabella and Gertrude, will you?"

So rare was such an invitation from Miss Keeldar to her female cousins that they hesitated before

they accepted it. Their mamma, however, signifying acquiescence in the project, they fetched their bonnets, and the trio set out.

It did not suit these three young persons to be thrown much together. Miss Keeldar liked the society

of few ladies; indeed, she had a cordial pleasure in that of none except Mrs. Pryor and Caroline Helstone. She was civil, kind, attentive even to her cousins; but still she usually had little to say to them. In the sunny mood of this particular morning, she contrived to entertain even the Misses Sympson. Without deviating from her wonted rule of discussing with them only ordinary themes, she

imparted to these themes an extraordinary interest; the sparkle of her spirit glanced along her phrases.

What made her so joyous? All the cause must have been in herself. The day was not bright. It was

dim—a pale, waning autumn day. The walks through the dun woods were damp; the atmosphere was

heavy, the sky overcast; and yet it seemed that in Shirley's heart lived all the light and azure of Italy, as all its fervour laughed in her gray English eye.

Some directions necessary to be given to her foreman, John, delayed her behind her cousins as they neared Fieldhead on their return. Perhaps an interval of twenty minutes elapsed between her separation from them and her re-entrance into the house. In the meantime she had spoken to John, and

then she had lingered in the lane at the gate. A summons to luncheon called her in. She excused herself

from the meal, and went upstairs.

"Is not Shirley coming to luncheon?" asked Isabella. "She said she was hungry."

An hour after, as she did not quit her chamber, one of her cousins went to seek her there. She was

found sitting at the foot of the bed, her head resting on her hand; she looked quite pale, very thoughtful, almost sad.

"You are not ill?" was the question put.

"A little sick," replied Miss Keeldar.

Certainly she was not a little changed from what she had been two hours before.

This change, accounted for only by those three words, explained no otherwise; this change—

whencesoever springing, effected in a brief ten minutes—passed like no light summer cloud. She talked when she joined her friends at dinner, talked as usual. She remained with them during the evening. When again questioned respecting her health, she declared herself perfectly recovered. It had

been a mere passing faintness, a momentary sensation, not worth a thought; yet it was felt there was a

difference in Shirley.

The next day—the day, the week, the fortnight after—this new and peculiar shadow lingered on the

countenance, in the manner of Miss Keeldar. A strange quietude settled over her look, her movements,

her very voice. The alteration was not so marked as to court or permit frequent questioning, yet it
was
there, and it would not pass away. It hung over her like a cloud which no breeze could stir or disperse.

Soon it became evident that to notice this change was to annoy her. First she shrank from remark; and,

if persisted in, she, with her own peculiar
hauteur
, repelled it. "Was she ill?" The reply came with decision.

"I
am not
."

"Did anything weigh on her mind? Had anything happened to affect her spirits?"

She scornfully ridiculed the idea. "What did they mean by spirits? She had no spirits, black or white, blue or gray, to affect."

"Something must be the matter—she was so altered."

"She supposed she had a right to alter at her ease. She knew she was plainer. If it suited her to grow ugly, why need others fret themselves on the subject?"

"There must be a cause for the change. What was it?"

She peremptorily requested to be let alone.

Then she would make every effort to appear quite gay, and she seemed indignant at herself that she

could not perfectly succeed. Brief self-spurning epithets burst from her lips when alone. "Fool!

coward!" she would term herself. "Poltroon!" she would say, "if you must tremble, tremble in secret!

Quail where no eye sees you!"

"How dare you," she would ask herself—"how dare you show your weakness and betray your imbecile anxieties? Shake them off; rise above them. If you cannot do this, hide them."

And to hide them she did her best. She once more became resolutely lively in company. When weary of effort and forced to relax, she sought solitude—not the solitude of her chamber (she refused

to mope, shut up between four walls), but that wilder solitude which lies out of doors, and which she

could chase, mounted on Zoë, her mare. She took long rides of half a day. Her uncle disapproved, but

he dared not remonstrate. It was never pleasant to face Shirley's anger, even when she was healthy and

gay; but now that her face showed thin, and her large eye looked hollow, there was something in the

darkening of that face and kindling of that eye which touched as well as alarmed.

To all comparative strangers who, unconscious of the alterations in her spirits, commented on the

alteration in her looks, she had one reply,—

"I am perfectly well; I have not an ailment."

And health, indeed, she must have had, to be able to bear the exposure to the weather she now encountered. Wet or fair, calm or storm, she took her daily ride over Stilbro' Moor, Tartar keeping up

at her side, with his wolf-like gallop, long and untiring.

Twice, three times, the eyes of gossips—those eyes which are everywhere, in the closet and on the

hill-top—noticed that instead of turning on Rushedge, the top ridge of Stilbro' Moor, she rode forwards all the way to the town. Scouts were not wanting to mark her destination there. It was ascertained that she alighted at the door of one Mr. Pearson Hall, a solicitor, related to the vicar of Nunnely. This gentleman and his ancestors had been the agents of the Keeldar family for generations

back. Some people affirmed that Miss Keeldar was become involved in business speculations

connected with Hollow's Mill—that she had lost money, and was constrained to mortgage her land.

Others conjectured that she was going to be married, and that the settlements were preparing.

Mr. Moore and Henry Sympson were together in the schoolroom. The tutor was waiting for a