Wives and Daughters (71 page)

‘Oh, never mind! There are old complications with our affairs at Ashcombe. Money matters are at the root of it all. Horrid poverty—do let us talk of something else! Or, better still, let me go and finish my letter to Roger, or I shall be too late for the African mail!’

‘Is it not gone? Oh, I ought to have reminded you! It will be too late. Did you not see the notice at the post office that letters ought to be in London on the morning of the 10th instead of the evening? Oh, I am so sorry!’

‘So am I, but it can’t be helped. It is to be hoped it will be the greater treat when he does get it. I’ve a far greater weight on my heart, because your father seems so displeased with me. I was fond of him, and now he is making me quite a coward. You see, Molly,’ continued she, a little piteously, ‘I’ve never lived with people with such a high standard of conduct before; and I don’t quite know how to behave.’

‘You must learn,’ said Molly, tenderly. ‘You’ll find Roger quite as strict in his notions of right and wrong.’

‘Ah, but he’s in love with me!’ said Cynthia, with a pretty consciousness of her power. Molly turned away her head, and was silent; it was of no use combating the truth, and she tried rather not to feel it—not to feel, poor girl, that she too had a great weight on her heart, into the cause of which she shrank from examining. That whole winter long she had felt as if her sun was all shrouded over with grey mist, and could no longer shine brightly for her. She wakened up in the morning with a dull sense of something being wrong—the world was out of joint, and, if she were born to set it right, she did not know how to do it. Blind herself as she would, she could not help perceiving that her father was not satisfied with the wife he had chosen. For a long time Molly had been surprised at his apparent contentment; sometimes she had been unselfish enough to be glad that he was satisfied; but still more frequently nature would have its way, and she was almost irritated at what she considered his blindness. Something, however, had changed him now: something that had arisen at the time of Cynthia’s engagement; he had become nervously sensitive to his wife’s failings, and his whole manner had grown dry and sarcastic, not merely to her, but sometimes to Cynthia, and even—but this very rarely—to Molly herself. He was not a man to go into passions, or ebullitions of feeling: they would have relieved him, even while degrading him in his own eyes; but he became hard, and occasionally bitter, in his speeches and ways. Molly now learnt to long after the vanished blindness in which her father had passed the first year of his marriage; yet there were no outrageous infractions of domestic peace. Some people might say that Mr. Gibson ‘accepted the inevitable’; he told himself in more homely phrase ‘that it was no use crying over spilt milk’ and he, from principle, avoided all actual dissensions with his wife, preferring to cut short a discussion by a sarcasm, or by leaving the room. Moreover, Mrs. Gibson had a very tolerable temper of her own, and her cat-like nature purred and delighted in smooth ways, and pleasant quietness. She had no great facility for understanding sarcasm; it is true it disturbed her, but as she was not quick at deciphering any depth of meaning, and felt it to be unpleasant to think about it, she forgot it as soon as possible. Yet she saw she was often in some kind of disfavour with her husband, and it made her uneasy. She resembled Cynthia in this: she liked to be liked; and she wanted to regain the esteem which she did not perceive she had lost for ever. Molly sometimes took her stepmother’s part in secret; she felt as if she herself could never have borne her father’s hard speeches so patiently; they would have cut her to the heart, and she must either have demanded an explanation, and probed the sore to the bottom, or sat down despairing and miserable. Instead of which Mrs. Gibson, after her husband had left the room, on these occasions would say in a manner more bewildered than hurt—

‘I think dear papa seems a little put out to-day; we must see that he has a dinner that he likes when he comes home. I have often perceived that everything depends on making a man comfortable in his own house.’

And thus she went on, groping about to find the means of reinstating herself in his good graces—really trying, according to her lights, till Molly was often compelled to pity her in spite of herself, and although she saw that her stepmother was the cause of her father’s increased astringency of disposition. For indeed he had got into that kind of exaggerated susceptibility with regard to his wife’s faults which may be best typified by the state of bodily irritation that is produced by the constant recurrence of any particular noise: those who are brought within hearing of it are apt to be always on the watch for the repetition, if they are once made to notice it, and are in an irritable state of nerves.

So that poor Molly had not passed a cheerful winter, independently of any private sorrows that she might have in her own heart. She did not look well, either: she was gradually falling into low health, rather than bad health. Her heart beat more feebly and slower, the vivifying stimulant of hope—even unacknowledged hope—was gone out of her life. It seemed as if there was not, and never could be in this world, any help for the dumb discordancy between her father and his wife. Day after day, month after month, year after year, would Molly have to sympathize with her father, and pity her stepmother, feeling acutely for both, and certainly more than Mrs. Gibson felt for herself Molly could not imagine how she had at one time wished for her father’s eyes to be opened, and how she could ever have fancied that, if they were, he would be able to change things in Mrs. Gibson’s character. It was all hopeless, and the only attempt at a remedy was to think about it as little as possible. Then Cynthia’s ways and manners about Roger gave Molly a great deal of uneasiness. She did not believe that Cynthia cared enough for him; at any rate, not with the sort of love that she herself would have bestowed, if she had been so happy—no, that was not it—if she had been in Cynthia’s place. She felt as if she would have gone to him both hands held out, full and brimming over with tenderness, and been grateful for every word of precious confidence bestowed on her. Yet Cynthia received his letters with a kind of carelessness, and read them with a strange indifference, while Molly sat at her feet, so to speak, looking up with eyes as wistful as a dog’s waiting for crumbs, and such chance beneficences.

She tried to be patient on these occasions, but at last she must ask—‘Where is he, Cynthia? What does he say?’ By this time Cynthia had put down the letter on the table by her, smiling a little from time to time, as she remembered the loving compliments it contained.

‘Where? Oh, I did not look exactly—somewhere in Abyssinia—Huon. I can’t read the word, and it doesn’t much signify, for it would give me no idea.’

‘Is he well?’ asked greedy Molly.

‘Yes, now. He has had a slight touch of fever, he says; but it’s all over now, and he hopes he is getting acclimatized.’

‘Of fever!—and who took care of him? he would want nursing—and so far from home. Oh, Cynthia!’

‘Oh, I don’t fancy he had any nursing, poor fellow. One doesn’t expect nursing, and hospitals, and doctors in Abyssinia;
^dg
but he had plenty of quinine with him, and I suppose that is the best specific. At any rate he says he is quite well now!’

Molly sat silent for a minute or two.

‘What is the date of the letter, Cynthia?’

‘I didn’t look. December the—December the 10th.’

‘That’s nearly two months ago,’ said Molly.

‘Yes; but I determined I would not worry myself with useless anxiety, when he went away. If anything did—go wrong, you know,’ said Cynthia, using a euphemism for death, as most people do (it is an ugly word to speak plain out in the midst of life), ‘it would be all over before I even heard of his illness, and I could be of no use to him—could I, Molly?’

‘No. I dare say it is all very true; only I should think the squire could not take it so easily.’

‘I always write him a little note when I hear from Roger, but I don’t think I’ll name this touch of fever—shall I, Molly?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Molly. ‘People say one ought, but I almost wish I hadn’t heard it. Please, does he say anything else that I may hear?’

‘Oh, lovers’ letters are so silly, and I think this is sillier than usual,’ said Cynthia, looking over her letter again. ‘Here’s a piece you may read, from that line to that,’ indicating two places. ‘I haven’t read it myself, for it looked dullish—all about Aristotle and Pliny
^dh
and I want to get this bonnet-cap made up before we go out to pay our calls.’

Molly took the letter, the thought crossing her mind that he had touched it, had had his hands upon it, in those far distant desert lands, where he might be lost to sight and to any human knowledge of his fate; even now her pretty brown fingers almost caressed the flimsy paper with their delicacy of touch as she read. She saw references made to books, which, with a little trouble, would be accessible to her here in Hollingford. Perhaps the details and the references would make the letter dull and dry to some people, but not to her, thanks to his former teaching and the interest he had excited in her for his pursuits. But, as he said in apology, what had he to write about in that savage land, but his love, and his researches, and travels? There was no society, no gaiety, no new books to write about, no gossip in Abyssinian wilds.

Molly was not in strong health, and perhaps this made her a little fanciful; but certain it is that her thoughts by day and her dreams by night were haunted by the idea of Roger lying ill and untended in those savage lands. Her constant prayer, ‘O my Lord! give her the living child, and in no wise slay it,’
¹
came from a heart as true as that of the real mother in King Solomon’s judgment. ‘Let him live, let him live, even though I may never set eyes upon him again. Have pity upon his father! Grant that he may come home safe, and live happily with her whom he loves so tenderly—so tenderly, O God.’ And then she would burst into tears, and drop asleep at last, sobbing.

C
ynthia was always the same with Molly: kind, sweettempered, ready to help, professing a great deal of love for her, and probably feeling as much as she did for any one in the world. But Molly had reached to this superficial residence in her father’s house; and if she had been of a depth of affection and intimacy in the first few weeks of Cynthia’s nature prone to analyse the character of one whom she loved dearly, she might have perceived that, with all Cynthia’s apparent frankness, there were certain limits beyond which her confidence did not go; where her reserve began, and her real self was shrouded in mystery For instance, her relations with Mr. Preston were often very puzzling to Molly. She was sure that there had been a much greater intimacy between them formerly at Ashcombe, and that the remembrance of this was often very galling and irritating to Cynthia, who was evidently desirous of forgetting it as he was anxious to make her remember it. But why this intimacy had ceased, why Cynthia disliked him so extremely now, and many other unexplained circumstances connected with these two facts, were Cynthia’s secrets; and she effectually baffled all Molly’s innocent attempts during the first glow of her friendship for Cynthia, to learn the girlish antecedents of her companion’s life. Every now and then Molly came to a dead wall, beyond which she could not pass—at least with the delicate instruments which were all she chose to use. Perhaps Cynthia might have told all there was to tell to a more forcible curiosity, which knew how to improve every slip of the tongue and every fit of temper to its own gratification. But Molly’s was the interest of affection, not the coarser of knowing everything for a little excitement; and as soon as she saw that Cynthia did not wish to tell her anything about that period of her life, Molly left off referring to it. But if Cynthia had preserved a sweet tranquillity of manner and an unvarying kindness for Molly during the winter of which there is question, at present she was the only person to whom the beauty’s ways were unchanged. Mr. Gibson’s influence had been good for her as long as she saw that he liked her; she had tried to keep as high a place in his good opinion as she could, and had curbed many a little sarcasm against her mother, and many a twisting of the absolute truth when he was by. Now there was a constant uneasiness about her which made her more cowardly than before; and even her partisan, Molly, could not help being aware of the distinct equivocations she occasionally used when anything in Mr. Gibson’s words or behaviour pressed her too hard. Her repartees to her mother were less frequent than they had been, but there was often the unusual phenomenon of pettishness in her behaviour to her. These changes in humour and disposition, here described all at once, were in themselves a series of delicate alterations of relative conduct spread over many months—many winter months of long evenings and bad weather, which bring out discords of character, as a dash of cold water brings out the fading colours of an old fresco.

During much of this time Mr. Preston had been at Ashcombe; for Lord Cumnor had not been able to find an agent whom he liked to replace Mr. Preston; and while the inferior situation remained vacant Mr. Preston had undertaken to do the duties of both. Mrs. Goodenough had had a serious illness; and the little society at Hollingford did not care to meet while one of their habitual set was scarcely out of danger. So there had been very little visiting; and though Miss Browning said that the absence of the temptations of society was very agreeable to cultivated minds, after the dissipations of the previous autumn, when there were parties every week to welcome Mr. Preston, yet Miss Phoebe let out in confidence that she and her sister had fallen into the habit of going to bed at nine o‘clock, for they found cribbage night after night, from five o’clock till ten, rather too much of a good thing. To tell the truth, that winter, if peaceful, was monotonous in Hollingford; and the whole circle of gentility there was delighted to be stirred up in March by the intelligence that Mr. Kirkpatrick, the newly-made Q.C.,
^di
was coming on a visit of a couple of days to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Gibson. Mrs. Goodenough’s room was the very centre of gossip; gossip had been her daily bread through her life, gossip was meat and wine to her now.