A Charming Fellow, Volume II

by Frances Eleanor Trollope

All this pained and surprised Minnie. She understood at once how Castalia's ungracious manner was resented in the little town; and set down a great deal of the hostility which the widow had described to the score of the Honourable Mrs. Algernon's personal unpopularity.

Still there must be something seriously wrong at Ivy Lodge. Debt was a Slough of Despond into which such a one as Algernon Errington would easily put his foot, from sheer thoughtlessness and the habit of refusing himself no gratification within his reach. But he might not find it so easy to extricate himself. A word of warning might possibly do good. At least it could do no harm, beyond drawing forth some languid impertinence from Castalia. And Minnie would not for an instant weigh that chance against the hope of doing some good to her old friend Algy.

Besides, in truth, she had, as has been said, an undefined feeling of compassion for Castalia herself, which rendered her singularly forbearing towards the latter's manifestations of fretful jealousy or haughty dislike. In the first days of his return to Whitford Algernon had many a time shot one of his quick, questioning glances at Minnie, when his wife uttered some coolly insolent speech, directed at, rather than to, the rector's daughter. But instead of the keen sarcasm, or scornful irony, which he had expected, Minnie had, nine times out of ten, replied with a quiet matter-of-fact observation calculated to extinguish anything like a war of words. At first Algernon had attributed such forbearance on the part of the brilliant, high-spirited Minnie entirely to her strong regard for himself. But this flattering illusion did not last long. He soon perceived that Minnie regarded his wife with pity, and that she refrained from using the keen weapons of her wit against Castalia, much as a nurse might refrain from scolding or arguing with a sick child.

Now this discovery was not pleasant to Algernon. If any sympathy were to be expended on the inmates of Ivy Lodge, he was persuaded that much the larger share of it ought to be given to himself. If there were troubles; if there were mortifications; if there was disappointment—who suffered from them as he did? And by whom were they so unmerited? He was not far, sometimes, from resenting any show of compassion for Castalia as a direct injury to himself. After having sacrificed himself, by making a marriage so inadequate to his deserts, it was a little too much to hear his wife pitied for the contrast between her past and present position?

And yet, by a queer strain of inconsistency running through the warp and woof of his character, he would often boast of Castalia's aristocratic antecedents, and ask, with a smile and a shrug, how the deuce his wife could be expected to stand the petty privations and discomforts of Whitford, after having lived all her life in a sphere as remote from such things as the planet Saturn from the earth?

Minnie partly saw, partly guessed, these movements of Algernon's mind. But she judged him with leniency, and put a kind interpretation on his words and ways, whenever such an interpretation was possible. At all events, if a word in season could be useful to him, she would not refrain from speaking that word.

This young woman had latterly passed into regions of thought and feeling, from which much of her old life, with its old pains, and pleasures, and aims, seemed shrunken into insignificance. One solid good she was able to grasp and to enjoy; the satisfaction of serving her fellow-creatures. All else grew poor and paltry as the years rolled by.

Not that Minnie had attained to any saint-like heights of self-abnegation; not that she did not still "desire and admire" many sublunary things. But she had got a hurt that had stricken down her pride. She bore an ache in her heart for which "self-culture," and all the activities and aspirations of her bright intellect, afforded no balm.

But she did not grow sour and selfish in her grief. The example of the poor, unlettered Methodist preacher (whom in former days she would have thought the unlikeliest of human beings to teach her any profitable lesson) had roused the noblest part of her nature to emulation. David Powell had started from a lofty theory to a life of beautiful deeds. Minnie Bodkin, vaguely groping after a theory, had seized on practical benevolence as a means to climb to some higher ideal.

In morals, as in thought, the Deductive and Inductive stand, like the ladders of Jacob's dream, reaching from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and the angels of the Lord descend and ascend them continually.