CHAPTER XVI.
Sophia was sitting with Mrs. Rexford on the sofa that stood with its back to the dining-room window. The frame of the sofa was not turned, but fashioned with saw and knife and plane; not glued, but nailed together. Yet it did not lack for comfort; it was built oblong, large, and low; it was cushioned with sacking filled with loose hay plentifully mixed with Indian grass that gave forth a sweet perfume, and the whole was covered with a large neat pinafore of such light washing stuff as women wear about their work on summer days. Sophia and her step-mother were darning stockings. The homesickness of the household was rapidly subsiding, and to-day these two were not uncomfortable or unhappy. The rest of the family, some to work, some to play, and some to run errands, had been dismissed into the large outside.
The big house was tranquil. The afternoon sun, which had got round to the kitchen window, blazed in there through a fringe of icicles that hung from the low eaves of the kitchen roof, and sent a long strip of bright prismatic rays across the floor and through the door on to the rag carpet under the dining-room table. Ever and anon, as the ladies sewed, the sound of sleigh-bells came to them, distant, then nearer, then near, with the trotting of horses' feet as they passed the house, then again more distant. The dining-room window faced the road, but one could not see through it without standing upright.
"Mamma," said Sophia, "it is quite clear we can never make an ordinary servant out of Eliza; but if we try to be companionable to her we may help her to learn what she needs to learn, and make her more willing to stay with us."
It was Mrs. Rexford's way never to approach a subject gradually in speech. If her mind went through the process ordinarily manifested in introductory remarks it slipped through it swiftly and silently, and her speech darted into the heart of the subject, or skipped about and hit it on all sides at once.
"Ah, but I told her again and again, Sophia, to say 'miss' to the girls. She either didn't hear, or she forgot, or she wouldn't understand. I think you're the only one she'll say 'miss' to. But we couldn't do without her. Mrs. Nash was telling me the other day that her girl had left in the middle of the washing, and the one they had before that for a year—a little French Romanist—stole all their handkerchiefs, and did not give them back till she made confession to her priest at Easter. It was very awkward, Sophia, to be without handkerchiefs all winter." The crescendo emphasis which Mrs. Rexford had put into her remarks found its fortissimo here. Then she added more mildly, "Though I got no character with Eliza I am convinced she will never pilfer."
Mrs. Rexford was putting her needle out and in with almost electric speed. Her mind was never quiet, but there was a healthy cheerfulness in her little quick movements that removed them from the region of weak nervousness. Yet Sophia knit her brow, and it was with an effort that she continued amicably:
"Certainly we should be more uncomfortable without her just now than she would be without us; but if she left us there's no saying where her ambition might lead her."
Mrs. Rexford bethought her that she must look at some apples that were baking in the kitchen oven, which she did, and was back in time to make a remark in exchange without causing any noticeable break in the conversation. She always gave remarks in exchange, seldom in reply.
"Scotchmen are faithful to their kinsfolk usually, aren't they, Sophia?"
"You think that the uncle she wrote to will answer. He may be dead, or may have moved away; the chances are ten to one that he will not get the letter. I think the girl is in our hands. We have come into a responsibility that we can't make light of."
"Good gracious, Sophia! it's only the hen with one chicken that's afraid to take another under her wing."
"I know you want to do your best for her—that's why I'm talking."
"Oh, I—it's you that takes half the burden of them all."
"Well, we want to do our best—"
"And you, my dear, could go back whenever you liked. You have not burned the bridges and boats behind you. There's one would be glad to see you back in the old country, and that lover of yours is a good man, Sophia."
A sudden flush swept over the young woman's face, as if the allusion offended her; but she took no other notice of what was said, and continued: "I don't suggest any radical alteration in our ways; I only thought that, if you had it in your mind to make a companion of her, the pains you take in teaching her might take a rather different form, and perhaps have a better result."
"I think our own girls grow more giddy every day," said Mrs. Rexford, exactly as if it were an answer. "If Blue and Red were separated they would both be more sensible."
The mother's mind had now wandered from thought of the alien she had taken, not because she had not given attention to the words of the daughter she thought so wise, but because, having considered them as long as she was accustomed to consider anything, she had decided to act upon them, and so could dismiss the subject with a good conscience.
The conversation ceased thus, as many conversations do, without apparent conclusion; for Sophia, vexed by her step-mother's flighty manner of speech, hid her mood in silence. Anything like discussion between these two always irritated Sophia, and then, conscious that she had in this fallen below her ideal, she chafed again at her own irritation. The evil from which she now suffered was of the stuff of which much of the pain of life is made—a flimsy stuff that vanishes before the investigation of reason more surely than the stuff of our evanescent joys. There was nothing that could be called incompatibility of temper between these two; no one saw more clearly than Sophia the generosity and courage of Mrs. Rexford's heart; no one else sympathised so deeply with her motherly cares, for no one else understood them half so well; and yet it might have been easier for Sophia Rexford to have lived in external peace with a covetous woman, able to appreciate and keep in steady view the relative importance of her ideas.
Meantime Mrs. Rexford went on talking. She was generally unconscious of the other's intellectual disdain. Pretty soon they heard bells and horses' feet that slackened at the gate. Sophia stood up to look.
There was a comfortable sleigh, albeit somewhat battered and dingy, turning in at the gate. A good-looking girl was driving it; a thin, pale lady sat at her side. Both were much enveloped in faded furs. Over the seats of the sleigh and over their knees were spread abundant robes of buffalo hide. The horse that drew the vehicle was an old farm-horse, and the hand that guided the reins appeared more skilful at driving than was necessary. The old reins and whip were held in a most stylish manner, and the fair driver made an innocent pretence of guiding her steed up the road to the back-yard with care. The animal the while, having once been shown the gate, trotted quietly, with head down, up the middle of the sleigh track, and stopped humbly where the track stopped, precisely as it would have done had there been no hand upon the rein.
Sophia, standing in the middle of the sitting-room, watched the visitors through the windows of that room and of the kitchen, with unwonted animation in her handsome face. The girl, who was now evidently coming with her mother to call upon them, had been named to her more than once by discriminating people as the most likely person in the neighbourhood to prove a friend and companion to herself, and Sophia, in her present situation, could not be at all indifferent to such a prospect. She had already observed them in church, wondering not a little at that scrupulous attention to ceremony which had made them ignore the existence of the newcomers till their acquaintance should have been made in due form.
"Mamma," said she, "this is Mrs. Bennett and her daughter."
"Something to do with an admiral, haven't they?" cried Mrs. Rexford.
It proved to be an unnecessary exertion of memory on Mrs. Rexford's part to recollect what she had heard of the relatives of her visitors, for not long after Mrs. Bennett had introduced herself and her daughter she brought her uncle, the admiral, into the conversation with considerable skill.
She was a delicate, narrow-minded woman, with no open vulgarity about her, but simply ignorant of the fact that bragging of one's distinguished relatives had fallen into disuse. Her daughter, was like her in manner, with the likeness imposed by having such a mother, but much more largely made in mind and body, pleasant-looking, healthy, high-browed. Sophia liked her appearance.
Mrs. Rexford, her mind ever upon some practical exigency, now remembered that she had also heard that the Bennetts managed their dairy excellently, and, having a large craving for help on all such subjects, she began to bewail her own ignorance, asking many and various questions; but, although she did not perceive it, it soon became apparent to her more observant daughter that the visitors, having come out to make a call of ceremony, preferred to talk on subjects more remote from their daily drudgery, on subjects which they apparently considered more elegant and becoming. Unable to check the flow of her mother's talk, Sophia could only draw her chair cosily near to Miss Bennett and strike into a separate conversation, hoping for, and expecting, mental refreshment.
"I suppose there are no good lending libraries in any of the towns near here," she began. "How do you get new books or magazines?"
Miss Bennett had a bright, cordial manner. She explained that she thought there was a circulating library in every town. When she was visiting in Quebec her friends had got a novel for her at two cents a day. And then she said Principal Trenholme bought a good many books, and he had once told her mother that he would lend them any they chose, but they had never had time to go and look over them. "It has," she added, "been such an advantage to Chellaston to have a gentleman so clever as he at the college."
"Has it?" said Sophia, willing to hear more. "Is he very clever?"
"Oh," cried the other, "from Oxford, you know;" and she said it in much the tone she might have said "from heaven."
"Is it long," asked Sophia, "since you have been in England?"
Miss Bennett said she had never been "home," but she longed, above all things, to go.
She had, it seemed, been born in Canada, and her parents had no possessions in the mother-country, and yet she always called it "home." This was evidently a tradition.
Sophia, who had come from England a little tired of the conditions there, and eager for a change, felt the pathetic sameness of the discontent wrought by surfeit and by famine.
"Yet," said she, "it is a relief to the mind to feel that one lives in a country where no worthy person is starving, and where every one has a good chance in life if he will but avail himself of it. It seems to make me breathe more freely to know that in all this great country there is none of that necessary poverty that we have in big English towns."
Little answer was made to this, and Sophia went on to talk of what interested her in English politics; but found that of the politics, as well as of the social condition, of the country she adored, Miss Bennett was largely ignorant. Her interest in such matters appeared to sum itself up in a serene belief that Disraeli, then prominent, was the one prop of the English Constitution, and as adequate to his position as Atlas beneath the world. Now, Sophia cherished many a Radical opinion of her own, and she would have enjoyed discussion; but it would have been as difficult to aim a remark at the present front of her new acquaintance as it would be for a marksman to show his skill with a cloud of vapour as a target. Sophia tried Canadian politics, owning her ignorance and expressing her desire to understand what she had read in the newspapers since her arrival; but Miss Bennett was not sure that there was anything that "could exactly be called politics" in Canada, except that there was a Liberal party who "wanted to ruin the country by free trade."
Sophia ceased to take the initiative. She still endeavoured to respect the understanding of a girl of whom she had heard that when her father's fortunes were at a low ebb she had retrieved them by good management and personal industry—a girl, too, who through years of toil had preserved sprightliness and perfect gentility. What though this gentility was somewhat cramped by that undue importance given to trifles which is often the result of a remote life; it was still a very lovely thing, a jewel shining all the more purely for its iron setting of honest labour. Sophia fought with the scorn that was thrusting itself into her heart as she listened when Miss Bennett now talked in a charming way about the public characters and incidents which interested her.
"I wish for your sake, Miss Rexford," she said, "that some of the Royal family would come out again. The only time that there is any real advantage in being in a colony is when some of them come out; for here, you know, they take notice of every one."
"One would still be on the general level then," said Sophia, smiling.
"Well, I don't know. It makes one feel distinguished, you know, in spite of that. Now, when the Prince was out, he stopped here for a night, and we had a ball. It was simply delightful! He danced with us all—I mean with all who could claim to be ladies, and indeed with some who could not; but how could he discriminate? There was a man called Blake, who kept a butcher's shop here then—you may have noticed we haven't such a thing as a butcher's shop in the village now, Miss Rexford?"
"Indeed I have. It seems so odd."
"Blake had a handsome daughter; and when we had a ball for the Prince, didn't he buy her a fine dress, and take her to it! She really looked very handsome."
"I hope the Prince danced with her," laughed Sophia. Her good spirits were rising, in spite of herself, under the influence of the liveliness with which Miss Bennett's mind had darted, birdlike, into its own element.
"Yes, he did. Wasn't it good-natured of him! I believe his aide-de-camp told him who she was; but he was so gracious; he said she should not go away mortified. I never spoke to her myself; but I've no doubt she was unable to open her mouth without betraying her origin; but perhaps on that occasion she had the grace to keep silent, and she danced fairly well."
"Was her head turned by the honour?" asked Sophia, led by the other's tone to expect a sequel to the tale.
"Poor girl! The end was sadder than that. She caught a violent cold, from wearing a dress cut low when she wasn't accustomed to it, and she died in a week. When we heard of it I was glad that he had danced with her; but some were cruel enough to say that it served Blake right for his presumption. He was so broken-hearted he left the place. The dress she wore that night was a green silk, and he had her buried in it; and some one told the Prince, and he sent some flowers. Wasn't it sweet of him! They were buried with her too. It was quite romantic."
"More romantic to have such a swan-like death than to live on as a butcher's daughter," said Sophia, and sarcasm was only a small ingredient in the speech.
"We were quite grieved about it," said Miss Bennett, sincerely.
Sophia also felt sorry, but it was not her way to say so. She was more interested in remarking upon the singular method of getting butcher's meat then in vogue at Chellaston. A Frenchman, a butcher in a small way, drove from door to door with his stock, cutting and weighing his joints in an open box-sleigh. To see the frozen meat thus manipulated in the midst of the snow had struck Sophia as one of the most novel features of their present way of life. Miss Bennett, however, could hardly be expected to feel its picturesqueness. Her parents did not fancy this vendor's meat, and at present they usually killed their own. Her father, she said, had grown quite dexterous in the art.
"Really!" cried Sophia. This was an item of real interest, for it suggested to her for the first time the idea that a gentleman could slaughter an ox. She was not shocked; it was simply a new idea, which she would have liked to enlarge on; but good-breeding forbade, for Miss Bennett preferred to chat about the visit of the Prince, and she continued to do so in a manner so lively that Sophia found it no dull hearing.
"And, do you know," she cried, "what Bertha Nash did? The Nashes, you know, are of quite a common family, although, as Dr. Nash is everybody's doctor, of course we are all on good terms with them. Well, Bertha asked the Prince how his mother was!" She stopped.
"I suppose he knew whom she was talking about?"
"Oh, that was the worst of it—he couldn't help knowing," cried Miss Bennett. "I should have sunk through the floor with mortification if I had done such a thing. I should have expected to be arrested on the spot for high treason. Bertha says, you know, that she was so nervous at the thought of who her partner was that she didn't know what she was saying; but I scarcely think she knew really how to address him. One can never be thankful enough, I'm sure, for having been thoroughly well brought up."
She went on to explain what had been her own sensations when first accosted by this wonderful Prince, upon being led out by him, and so on. It all sounded like a new fairy tale; but afterwards, when she had gone, with cordial wishes, as she took leave, that another prince might come soon and dance with Sophia, the latter felt as if she had been reading a page of an old-fashioned history which took account only of kings and tournaments.
This visit was a distinct disappointment on the whole. Sophia had hoped more from it, and coming after weeks that had been trying, it had power to depress. It was late afternoon now, and the day was the last in the year. Sophia, going upstairs to get rid of the noise of the children, was arrested by the glow of the sunset, and, weary as she was, stood long by the diamond window that was set in the wooden wall of her room. It was cold. She wrapped a cloak about her. She did not at first look observantly at the glow and beauty outside. Her eyes wandered over the scene, the bright colour upon it rousing just enough interest to keep her standing there: her thoughts were within.
Sophia Rexford had set herself, like many a saint of olden and modern times, to crush within her all selfishness; and the result had been the result of all such effort when it is staunch and honest—to show that that against which she was warring was no mere mood or bad habit, to be overcome by directing the life on a nobler plan, but a living thing, with a vitality so strong that it seemed as if God Himself must have given it life. She stood now baffled, as she had often been before, by her invincible enemy. Where was the selfless temper of mind that was her ideal? Certainly not within her. She was too candid to suppose for a moment that the impatient scorn she felt for those with whom she had been talking approached in any way to that humility and love that are required of the Christian. She felt overwhelmed by surging waves of evil within. It was at the source the fountain ought to be sweet, and there ambition and desire for pleasure rose still triumphant; and the current of her will, set against them, seemed only to produce, not their abatement, but a whirlpool of discontent, which sucked into itself all natural pleasures, and cast out around its edge those dislikes and disdains which were becoming habitual in her intercourse with others. It was all wrong—she knew it. She leaned her head against the cold pane, and her eyes grew wet with tears.
There is no sorrow on earth so real as this; no other for which such bitter tears have been shed; no other which has so moved the heart of God with sympathy. Yet there came to Sophia just then a strange thought that her tears were unnecessary, that the salvation of the world was something better than this conflict, that the angels were looking upon her discouragement in pained surprise.
She had no understanding with which to take in this thought. As she looked at it, with her soul's eye dim, it passed away; and she, trying in vain to recall the light that it seemed to hold, wondered if it would come again.
Perhaps the tears had given relief to her brain; perhaps some Divine Presence had come near her, giving hope that she could not weigh or measure or call by name; at any rate, as she looked round again with fresh glance, the scene outside seemed fairer than it had yet appeared to her.
A long strip had been swept on the ice of the river by pleasure-loving hands. Down this burnished path young men and maidens were skating, and their way was paved with gold. There was soft tinting of this same light on the undulations of the pearly land beyond; blue shadows were in its woods, and reflected fire on many a window of the houses that clustered near and far. She knew that in each house that was a true Canadian home there was joyous preparations going on for the next day's fête. She wondered what it would be like to be at home in this country, to be one in its sports and festivities. She could not see from her attic window the land on this side of the river, but she heard the shouts of some boys who were spending their holiday at the college. They were at some game or other in a field near. Sophia liked to hear them.
Just then Mrs. Rexford came upstairs to consult her about something. She joined in the outlook for a few moments, and the sunset made her reflective.
"Well, my love," said she, "last year at this time we did not know we should be here to-day! Ah, Sophia, it is always a little doleful to see the Old Year go out; but here, where there are no bells in the churches, it will seem less solemn."