Hester · Chapter 9 (1/2)

IX

Recollections

“If you will not think me an old croaker, ma’am, I would say that you retired from work too soon. That was always my opinion. I said it at the time, and I say it again. To give up before your time is flying in the face of Providence.”

“I know you are fond of a fine preacher, Mr. Rule,” said Catherine Vernon; “don’t you remember what the Scotch Chalmers said, that our lives were like the work of creation, and that the last ten years was the Sabbath⁠—for rest?”

“We are not under the Jewish dispensation,” said the old clerk, as if that settled the question.

Catherine laughed. She was seated near old Mrs. Morgan in the round window, her carriage waiting outside. Mr. Rule, who was a neighbour, having retired upon a handsome pension and occupying a handsome house, had come in to call upon the old couple, and these two, so long associated in labour and anxiety, had begun, as was natural, to talk on a subject which the others with difficulty followed⁠—the bank. Mrs. Morgan never did anything save sit contentedly in her chair with her hands clasped, but the captain sat by the table working away at one of his models of ships. He was very fond of making these small craft, which were admirably rigged and built like miniature men-of-war. This one was for Alick Vernon, the middle boy of Mrs. Reginald’s three. In the background, half hidden by the curtains and by the captain’s seat, Hester had taken refuge in a deep elbow-chair, and was reading. She did not want to hide herself, but she had no desire to be seen, and kept in the background of her own will. Catherine Vernon never took any special notice of her, and Hester was too proud either to show that she felt this, or to make any attempt to mend matters. She had risen up on her cousin’s entrance, and touched her hand coldly, then sank back into her former place, and whether anyone remembered that she was there at all she did not know.

“If one works till sixty, one does very well,” Miss Vernon said.

“You did not think that applicable to me, ma’am,” said the clerk. “You would not let me give up till I was near seventy.”

“For the sake of the bank⁠—for the sake of the young men. Where would they have been without a guide?”

“Ah!” said old Rule, shaking his head, “there is no guide like the chief. They might turn upon me, and laugh in my face, and tell me I am old-fashioned; but they could not say that to you.”

“Well, well! the young men fortunately have gone on very well, and have shown no need of a guide.”

To this there was no reply, but a little pause pregnant of meaning. The thrill of the significance in it roused Hester altogether from her book: she had not been reading much to begin with, and now all her faculties were awakened. She understood no reason for it, but she understood it. Not so Catherine, however, who took no notice, as so often happens to the person chiefly concerned.

“Thirty years is a long spell,” she said. “I was at it late and early, and did not do so badly, though I am only a woman.”

“Women⁠—when they do take to business⁠—are sometimes better then men,” said the clerk, with an accent almost of awe.

“That is natural,” said old Captain Morgan over his boat, without raising his head. “For why?⁠—it is not the common women, but those of the noble kind, that ever think of trying: so of course they go further and do better than the common men.”

“I don’t think that is a compliment,” said Catherine, “though it sounds a little like one. You have a turn for those sort of sayings, Uncle Morgan, which seem very sweet, but have a bitter wrapped up in them.”

“Nay, he never was bitter, Catherine,” said the old lady. “He knows what he is talking of. He means no harm to the common women⁠—for his wife is one of them.”

“We will not inquire too closely what he means,” said Catherine Vernon with a smile. “Anyhow it is very sweet to be able to retire while one has still command of all one’s faculties, and see the young ones come in. Of course one does not expect to live forever. We are all in the Sunday period of our lives, all of us here.”

“Not I,” said the old clerk, “with respect be it spoken: I have had my Sunday and am ready to begin again, if there should be any need of me.”

“Which there is not, thank God,” she said heartily. And again there ensued that little pause. Was it possible she did not observe it? No one echoed the sentiment, no one even murmured the little nothings with which a stillness, which has a meaning, is generally filled up by some benevolent bystander. What did it mean? Hester asked herself. But Catherine took no notice. All had gone so well with her. She was not afraid of evil tidings. Her affection for the young men, her relations and successors, was calm enough to secure her from the anxious prescience of love. She took her life and all that was connected with her, with that serene and boundless faith which is the privilege of the untried soul. Catherine would have resented beyond everything else the imputation that her life was without experience. She had gone through a great deal, she thought. The evening long ago, when she had been told that the credit of the Vernons was at stake, and had roused herself to redeem it, had been the highest crisis and turning-point of existence to her. What had happened since had been little in comparison. She had not known what anxiety meant in the deepest sense of the word, and what had happened before was so long over, that, though she recollected every incident of that early time, it was apart from all her afterlife, and never influenced her practical thoughts. She did not pay any attention to that pause which might have awakened her suspicions. There was no foundation in her for suspicion to build upon. She was so sure of all connected with her, and of herself, the first necessity of all.

“I will never forget,” said old Mr. Rule, after a pause, “that night, when I had to go and warn you that all was lost unless you would help. What a night it was! I recollect now the light on Wilton Street; the sunset shining in the Grange windows as I rushed through the shrubbery. You were a young lady then, Miss Vernon, and I could not tell whether you would do it or not. Mrs. John, poor thing, that I went to first, was never very wise⁠—”

Here a sudden fit of coughing on the part of the captain, and a stirring of Hester in the background, showed the old clerk his mistake.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Hester,” he cried, “I was just going to tell something of your mother that would please you. When I told her we wanted money, she ran to her desk and got out all she had. It was twenty pounds,” said the old clerk with a little laugh; “twenty pounds, when we wanted twice as many thousands! But what did that matter? Some people have laughed when I have told that story, and some have been nearer crying.”

He was an old man, and tears and laughter get mixed up at that age; he was nearly crying himself at the end.

Hester’s heart gave a bound of mingled pleasure and pain. Perhaps even she had never done justice to her simple-hearted mother. She sat bolt upright in her chair, listening with all her might. Catherine Vernon seemed to retire from the principal place she had hitherto held in the conversation, and Hester came forward in her stead. She looked at the old clerk steadily.

“You speak,” she said, “of ladies only. Where was my father?” holding Rule with her eye, so that he could not escape.

“Your father!” he faltered, his very lips quivering with surprise and consternation.

“I don’t know why we should bring up all these old stories tonight,” said Catherine, suddenly, “nor what led us to introduce the subject. Let bygones be bygones, Mr. Rule. We old fogeys have our little talks together, and tell over our old adventures to amuse ourselves for want of something better; but that is what the young ones never understand.”

“Do you wish me to go away, Cousin Catherine?” said Hester with her usual pale defiance, rising up with the book in her arms.

“Oh no, not I. It does not matter in the least whether you stay or go. I can remember, Uncle Morgan, when the same sort of thing I am now saying to Hester you used to say to me: and it does not seem so very long ago either. Now we are all old together, and not much difference between us,” she said with a little laugh. It still gave her a certain amusement to think that she was old like these old people, and yet it was true; for though sixty-five and eighty-five are very different, nobody can doubt that sixty-five is old. It was still strange, almost ludicrous, to Catherine, that it should be so.

“I am of all ages,” said the old captain, “for I can remember all. I’ll sail my boat with Alick tomorrow, and enjoy it like a small boy (it’s a capital little boat, and will sail, I can tell you, Catherine, if you took any interest in it), and then I shall walk on the Common with a young lady, and talk of poetry and love.”

“Fie, captain!” said his old wife; “but he does not mean all that nonsense, Hester.”

“If love is nonsense, and poetry, she and I will go to the stake for them,” said the captain. “We’ll take a longer walk tonight, my dear, to prove to that old woman how wrong she is.”

“I can’t wish you a pleasanter thing, captain⁠—and now I must be going,” said old Rule, inconsequently.

Catherine, who had been sitting thoughtful since the moment when she interfered, all unthanked and misunderstood, to save Hester, rose when the old clerk did, and went out before him, with her rich black silk gown sweeping and rustling. The presence of the elder people made her look blooming, and capable, and young. The old couple watched her from their window, as Rule, gratified and beaming, put her into the carriage.

“She looks young enough to do as much again,” said Captain Morgan, standing in the window with his gum-bottle in his hands, with which he was working.

“Oh, captain!” said his wife, “but where’s the money?” shaking her old head.

Hester behind peered out between these two aged heads, pale with interest, and antagonism, and attraction. She could never think of anyone else when Catherine was near, though all her instincts were in arms against her. The words that passed between the old people were as a foreign tongue to her. She had not the slightest perception what they meant.

Meantime Catherine spoke a warning word to her former prime minister, who had abdicated later than herself.

“You were very near giving that child a heartache,” she said. “Take care not to say anything before her. She need never know that her father deserted his post. The creature has a quick sense of honour, and it might wound her.”

“She is not like his daughter,” said the clerk, “nor that poor lady’s either. She is one of the pure old Vernon stock.”

“Do you think so?” said Catherine, indifferently. “I rather dislike her than otherwise; but I would not do the child any harm.” And then the fat horses put themselves in motion, and she gave a smile and a bow to all her retainers and worshippers⁠—and the Miss Vernon-Ridgways drew away from Mrs. John’s window, where as usual they had been watching Catherine, as she, amid all these visible signs of her wealth and sovereignty, disappeared from their eyes.

“I suppose, Captain Morgan,” said Hester that evening, when she walked out with him as usual, “that Cousin Catherine was young once?”

It seemed an absurd question, but it was put with the utmost gravity; and Hester knew what she meant, as perhaps the reader will too.

“About your age, my dear,” the captain said, promptly, “and not at all unlike you.”

“Like me!”

“You think you are very different now, but there is not much more difference than that of years. She was the same kind of girl as you are⁠—masterful⁠—very sure that her own way was the right one⁠—obstinate as a mule in her mind, but not so difficult to move by the heart.”

“Am I all that?” said Hester, wondering; “not in some things, for I am never sure that I am right⁠—or anyone else⁠—except you, perhaps. No, it is the other way, quite the other way! I am very sure that I am wrong, and everyone else⁠—except you.”

“A large rule and a small exception,” said the old man; “but it is the same thing. Catherine was rich and had everything her own way. You are⁠—in the midst of a poor community where we can have nothing our own way. And at your age you can’t discriminate any more than she could at hers.”

“Then does it come to this, that money is everything?” asked the disciple with some bitterness, but without, as may be supposed, the slightest intention of accepting the master’s teaching on this point.

Captain Morgan made no reply. What he said was⁠—

“I should like to interest you in Catherine, my dear; all that happened, you know, before we came here, while we were busy with our own life, my wife and I; but I have put this and that together since. Catherine was, as people say, crossed in love, notwithstanding her wealth and all her qualities. So far as I can make out, the man preferred a woman that could not hold the candle to her; not so pretty, not so clever, altogether inferior. That must be rather a blow to a woman!”

“A blow! What sort of a woman would she be that cared for a man who did not care for her?”

This somewhat inarticulate sentiment Hester delivered with an indignant blush and flashing eyes.

“That is all very fine, my dear; but you are too clearheaded to be taken in by it,” said the captain. “A woman might not show it, perhaps. I have no reason to suppose that Catherine showed it. But you must remember that a woman is not a woman in the abstract, but Catherine or Hester as the case may be, and liable to everything that humanity is liable to; and she would be a poor creature indeed if she were incapable of falling in love generously, as a man is supposed to do.”

“I don’t know what you mean by generously!”

“Ah, but you do⁠—none better. Something however occurred after, much worse than his preference of another woman. The man turned out to be an unworthy man.”

Hester had been following every word with breathless interest. She grew quite pale, her lips dropped apart, her eyes blazed out of the whiteness of her face upon her old instructor. He went on without taking note of this change,

“I should think for my part that there cannot be any such blow as that. Don’t you remember we agreed it was the secret of all Hamlet’s tragedy? It is the tragedy of the world, my dear. I told the old woman we were going to talk of love and poetry. You see I was right.”

“But⁠—Catherine?”

Hester was, as became a girl, far too much interested in the individual case to be able to stray to the abstract, and in fact she had only assented to her mentor’s theory in respect to Hamlet, not having begun such investigations for herself.

“Ay, Catherine. Well, that is just what happened to her, my dear. The man first showed that he had no appreciation of herself, which we will allow must have wounded her; and then after, when that was all over, proved himself unworthy, dishonourable⁠—in short, what the young men call a cad.”

“Who was he?” asked Hester, in a low and awestricken tone.

Then Captain Morgan turned to look at her, apparently with some alarm; but his fears were quieted by her face. She had evidently no clue to who it was.

“I never knew the man,” he said quickly. “One has no wish to know anything about him. The interesting person is the woman in such a case. Here, Hester, you must be the teacher. Tell me, what would that discovery do to a girl, a daring, masterful spirit like you?”

“Oh, captain, I am not daring or masterful,” cried the girl clasping her hands; “don’t you know it is cruel to call me so⁠—I that can do nothing, that am only like a straw tossing on the water, carried the way I would not. If I were masterful, I would go away from here. I would do something for myself.”

“All that is no answer to my question,” the old captain said.