I well believe that. One sometimes finds that combination of natural frankness, and exceeding reticence, when reticence is necessary.
The “mouse” had justified her name by being silent nearly all dinner-time, though it was not the silence of either sullenness or abstraction. But when she was afterwards accused of delighting in a secret, “running away with it, and hiding it in her hole, like a bit of cheese,” she looked up, and said, emphatically:—
“That is a mistake, Lisabel.”
“A fib, you mean. Augustus, do you know my sisters call me a dreadful story-teller,” smiling at him, as if she thought it the best joke in the world.
“I said, a mistake, and meant nothing more.”
“Do tell us, child, what you really meant, if it is possible to get it out of you,” observed the eldest sister; and the poor “mouse,” thus driven into a corner, looked round the table with those bright eyes of hers.
“Lisabel mistakes; I do not delight in secrets. I think people ought not to have any, but to be of one mind in a house.” (She studies her Bible, then, for the phrase came out as naturally as one quotes habitual phrases, scarcely conscious whence one has learned them). “Those who really care for one another, are much happier when they tell one another everything; there is nothing so dangerous as a secret. Better never have one, but, having it, if one ought to keep it at all, one ought to keep it to the death.”
She looked—quite accidentally, I do believe—but still she looked at me. Why is it, that this girl should be the instrument of giving me continual stabs of pain: yet there is a charm in them. They take away a little of the feeling of isolation—the contrast between the inside and outside of the sarcophagus. Many true words are spoken in jest! They dart, like a thread of light, even to “the body” within. Corruption has its laws. I marvel in what length of time might a sun-beam, penetrating there, find nothing worse than harmless dust?
But I will pass into ordinary life again. Common sense teaches a man in my circumstances that this is the best thing for him. What business has he to set himself up as a Simon Stylites on a solitary column of woe? as if misery constituted saintship? There is no arrogance like the hypocrisy of humility.
When Treherne had joined the ladies, Mr. Johnston and myself started some very interesting conversation, à propos of Mrs. Granton and her doings in the parish, when I found that he has the feeling, very rare among country gentlemen of his age and generation—an exceeding aversion for strong drinks. He discountenances Father Mathew and the pledge as popish, a crotchet not surprising in an old Tory, whose opinions, never wide, all run in one groove, as it were; but he advocates temperance, even to teetotalism.