CHAPTER VII.
THE FASHION OF THIS WORLD.
have said that from the first moment I had felt a singular attraction towards my new mistress. As the days went on, and I became better acquainted with the rare beauty and unselfishness of her nature, my respect and affection deepened. I soon grew to love Mrs. Morton as I have loved few people in this life.
My service became literally a service of love; it was with no sense of humiliation that I owned myself her servant; obedience to so gentle a rule was simply a delight. I anticipated her wishes before they were expressed, and an ever-deepening sense of the sacredness and dignity of my charge made me impervious to small slights and moved me to fresh efforts.
I was no longer tormented by my old feelings of uselessness and inefficiency. The despondent fears of my girlhood (and girlhood is often troubled by these unwholesome fancies), that there was no special work for me in the human vineyard, had ceased to trouble me. I was a bread winner, and my food tasted all the sweeter for that thought. I was preaching silently day by day my new crusade. Every morning I woke cheerfully to the simple routine of the day’s duties. Every night I lay down between my children’s cots with a satisfied conscience, and a mind at rest, while the soft breathings of the little creatures beside me seemed to lull me to sleep.
It was a strangely quiet life for a girl of two-and-twenty, but I soon grew used to it. When I felt dull I read; at other times I sang over my work, out of pure lightheartedness, and I could hear Joyce’s shrill little treble joining in from her distant corner.
“I wish I could sing like you, Merle,” Mrs. Morton once said to me, when she had interrupted our duet; “your voice is very sweet and true, and deserves to be cultivated. Since my baby’s death my voice has wholly left me.”
“It will come back with time and rest,” I returned, reassuringly, but she shook her head.
“Rest; that is a word I hardly know. When I was a girl I never knew life would be such a fatiguing thing. There are too many duties for the hours; one tries to fit them in properly, but when night comes the sense of failure haunts one’s dreams.”
“That is surely a symptom of overwork,” was my remark in answer to this.
“Perhaps you are right, but under the circumstances it cannot be helped. If only I could be more with my darlings, and enjoy their pretty ways; but at least it is a comfort to me to know they have so faithful a nurse in my absence.”
She was always making these little speeches to me; it was one of her gracious ways. She could be grateful to a servant for doing her duty. She was not one of those people who take everything as a matter of course, who treat their domestics and hirelings as though they were mere machines for the day’s work; on the contrary, she recognised their humanity; she would sympathise as tenderly with a sick footman or a kitchen-maid in trouble as she would with any of her richer neighbours. It was this large-mindedness and beneficence that made her household worship her. When I learnt more about her former life, I marvelled at her grand self-abnegation. I grew to understand that from the day of her marriage she had simply effaced herself for her husband’s sake; her tastes, her favourite pursuits, had all been resigned without a murmur that she might lead his life.
She had been a simple country girl when he married her; her bees, her horse, and her father’s dogs had been her great interests; to ride with her father over his farms had been her chief delight. She had often risen with the lark, and was budding her roses amid the dews.
When the young rising politician, Alick Morton, had first met her at a neighbouring squire’s house, her sweet bloom and unconscious beauty won him in spite of himself, and from the first hour of their meeting he vowed to himself that Violet Cheriton should be his wife.
No greater change had ever come to a woman. In spite of her great love, there must have been times when Violet Morton looked back on her innocent and happy girlhood with something like regret, if ever a true-hearted wife and mother permits herself to indulge in such a feeling.
Mr. Morton was a devoted husband, but he was an autocrat, and, in spite of many fine qualities, was not without that selfishness that leavens many a man’s nature. He wanted his wife to himself; his busy ambition aimed high; politics was the breath of his life; unlike other men in this, that he lived to work, instead of working to live.
These sort of natures know no fatigue; they are intolerant of difficulties; inaction means death to them. Mr. Morton was a committee man; he worked hard for his party. He was a philanthropist also, and took up warmly certain public charities. His name was becoming widely known; people spoke of him as a rising man, who would be useful to his generation. If he dragged his wife at his triumphal chariot wheel, no one blamed him; these sort of men need real helpmeets. In these cases the stronger nature rules: the weaker and most loving submits.
Mrs. Morton was a submissive wife; early and late she toiled in her husband’s service; their house was a rallying point for his party. On certain occasions the great drawing-rooms were flung open to strangers; meetings were held on behalf of the charities in which Mr. Morton was interested; there were speeches made, in which he largely distinguished himself, while his wife hovered on the outskirts of the crowd and listened to him.
He kept no secretary, and his correspondence was immense. Mrs. Morton had a clear, characteristic handwriting, and could write rapidly to dictation, and many an hour was spent in her husband’s study.
This was at first no weariness to her—she loved to be beside him and share his labours. What wife begrudges time and work for her husband? But she soon found that other labours supervened that were less congenial to her.
Mr. Morton was overworked; the demands on his time were unceasing. Violet must visit the wards of his favourite hospitals, and help him in keeping the accounts. She must represent him in society, and keep up constant intercourse with the wives of the members of their party during the season. She worked harder even than he did. Her bloom faded under the withering influence of late hours and hot rooms. Night after night she bore, with sweet graciousness, the weary round of pleasures that palled on her. It was a martyrdom of human love, for, alas! in the hurry of this unsatisfactory life, the Divine voice had grown dim and far off to the weary ear of Violet Morton; the clanging metallic earth bells had deadened the heavenly harmonies.
Sometimes a sad, pathetic look would come into her eyes. Was she thinking, I wonder, of the slim, bright-eyed girl budding roses in the old-fashioned garden, while the brown bees hummed round her? Was the fragrance of the lilies—those tall, white lilies of which she so often spoke to me—blotting out the perfume of hothouse flowers, and the heavy scents of the crowded ball-room?
It was a matter of intense surprise to me that Mr. Morton seemed perfectly unconscious of this immense self-sacrifice. He could not be ignorant, surely, that a mother desires to be with her children, and that a woman’s tender frame is susceptible to fatigue. Selfish as he was, he loved her too well to impose such intolerable burthens on her strength, if he had only known them to be burthens. But her cheerfulness blinded him. How could he know she was overtasked, and often sad at heart, when she never complained, when she sealed her lips so generously?
If she had once said, “I am so tired, Alick; I cannot write for you,” he would at once have pressed her to rest; but men are so dense, as Aunt Agatha says. Their great minds overlook little details. They take in wide vistas of landscape, and never see the little nettles that are choking up the field path. Women would have noticed the nettles at once, and spied out the gap in the hedge beside.
I had not been many weeks in the house before I found Sunday was no day of rest to my employers, and yet they were better than many other worldly people. Mrs. Morton always went to church in the morning, and, unless he was too tired or busy, Mr. Morton went too. They were careful, too, that their servants should enjoy as far as possible the privilege of the day. The carriage was never used, so the horses and the coachman were able to rest. They dined an hour earlier, and invited only one or two intimate friends to join them, and there was always sacred music in the evening. But there was no more leisure for thought on that day than on any other. In the afternoon Mr. Morton wrote his letters and read his paper, and Mrs. Morton had her share of correspondence; the rest of the afternoon was given to callers, or Mrs. Morton accompanied her husband for a walk in the park. She was always very careful of her toilet on these occasions, and if it were Travers’s Sunday out, my services were in requisition. I had once offered to assist her, and I suppose I had given satisfaction. More than once Mr. Morton had found fault with some part of her dress, and she had gone back to her dressing-room with the utmost promptitude to change it.
“I have not satisfied my husband’s taste, Merle,” she would say, as cheerfully as possible; “will you help me to do better?” And she would stand before the glass with such a tired look on her lovely face, as I brought her a fresh mantle and bonnet.
I hate men to be over critical with their wives, but I suppose it is a greater compliment than not being able to see if they are wearing their best or common bonnet. I confess it must be trying to a woman when a man says—and how often he does say it?—“What a pretty gown that is, my dear. Have I seen it before?” when the aggravating creature must know that she wore it all last summer, and perhaps the previous summer too.
I found out that Mrs. Morton was ill-satisfied with the way they spent Sundays.
I remember one Sunday evening I was sitting in the twilight with Reggie on my lap and Joyce on her little stool beside me. I had been teaching her a new verse of her hymn, and she had learned to say it very prettily. We were both very busy over it, when the door opened, and Mrs. Morton came in.
Joyce jumped up and ran to her at once.
“I know it, mother—my Sunday hymn—it is such a pretty one.”
“Is it, my darling? Then, suppose you let mother hear it.” And Joyce, folding her hands in her quaint, old-fashioned way, began very readily:
“I love to hear the story
Which angel voices tell,
How once the King of Glory
Came down on earth to dwell.
I am both weak and sinful,
But this I surely know,
The Lord came down to save me,
Because He loved me so.”
“Very pretty indeed, Joyce,” observed Mrs. Morton, rather absently, when the child had finished. But Joyce looked up in her face wistfully.
“Do you ever say hymns, mother dear?”
“I sing them in church, my pet.”
“But you never teached them to me, mother; they are all nurse’s hymns, the little one and the long one, and the little wee hymn I say with my prayers. Would you like to hear my little wee hymn, mother dear?”
“I will hear all you know, my darling.” But there were tears in the beautiful eyes as she listened.
“How nicely she says them! I am glad you teach her such pretty hymns, Merle,” as the child ran off to fetch Snap, who was whining for admittance. “Somehow it seems more like the Sunday of old times up here—so quiet, so peaceful. We must do as the world does, I suppose; but these secular, bustling Sundays are not to my taste.”
Her words jarred on me, and I replied rather too quickly, considering my position, “Are we obliged to follow a bad fashion? That is indeed going with the crowd to do evil.”
She looked up in some surprise. It must have been a new thing to the petted mistress of the household to hear herself so sharply rebuked.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” I exclaimed, penitently; “I had no right to say that; I forgot to whom I was speaking.”
“Do not distress yourself, Merle,” she returned, in her sweet way; “it is good for all of us to hear the truth sometimes. It was foolish of me to say that. I only mean that in our house it is very difficult not to follow the world’s custom.”
“Very difficult indeed,” I acquiesced; but she continued to look at me thoughtfully.
“Do not be afraid of saying what is in your mind; you may speak to me plainly, if you will. You are my children’s nurse, but I cannot forget that in many ways we are equals. You never intrude this fact on my notice, but it is none the less apparent. I know our Sundays are terribly secular,” as I continued silent; “sometimes I wish it were not so, for my children’s sake.”
“Not for your own sake, Mrs. Morton?”
A distressed look came over her face.
“I seem to have no time to wish for anything.”
“I could well believe that; but, Mrs. Morton, it seems to me as though we owe some duty to ourselves. If we neglect the highest part of ourselves we are committing a sort of mental suicide. How often has Aunt Agatha told me that!”
“How do you mean?” she asked, anxiously.
“We all need a quiet time for thought. It always seems to me that on Sunday one lays down one’s burthens for a time. It is such a rest to shut out the world for one day in the week, to forget the harass of one’s work, to take up higher duties, to lift one’s standard afresh, and prove one’s armour. It is just like abiding in the tents for shelter and rest in the heat of battle.”
I had forgotten the difference in our station, and was talking to my mistress just as though she were Aunt Agatha. Something seemed to compel me to speak; I felt a strange sort of trouble oppressing me, as though I saw a beautiful soul wandering out of the way. She seemed moved at my words, and it was several minutes before she spoke again.
“Your words recall the old Sundays at my own dear home,” she observed, presently. “Do you not love Sundays in the country, Merle? The very birds seem to sing more sweetly, and the stillness of which you speak seems in the very air. My Sundays were very different then. We lived near the church, and we could hear the chiming of the bells as we walked through the village. I taught in the Sunday-school; I recollect some of the children’s names now. Father always liked us to go to the evening service. I remember, too, we invariably sang Bishop Ken’s evening hymn. One evening a little robin found its way into the church. I remember Mr. Andrews, our vicar, was just reading that verse, ‘Yea, the sparrow has found her a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young,’ when we looked up and saw the little creature fluttering round the chancel. Oh, those sweet old Sundays!” And here she broke off and sighed.
I thought it best to say no more, and leave her to those tender memories. A word in season may do much, but I was young, and had no right to teach with authority. I suppose she understood my reticence, for she looked at me very kindly as she rose from her seat.
“It does me good to come up here, Merle; I always have a more rested feeling when I go down to my duties. If I did not feel that they were real duties that called me I should be very unhappy.”
She bade her children good-night, and left the nursery. What made me take up my Bible, I wonder, and read the following verse! “In this thing the Lord pardon Thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon Thy servant this thing.”
(To be continued.)