He wrote to his cousin Helen asking if he might bring a friend with him. He did not think, he said, his host or hostess knew him, but Hester did: he was a young doctor, and his name was Christopher. He had met him amongst "Hester's friends," and was much taken with him. He would be a great acquisition to their party. He had been rather ailing for some time, and as there was much less sickness now, he had persuaded him to take a little relaxation.
Hester said for her part she would be most happy to see Mr. Christopher; she had the highest esteem for him; and therewith she told them something of his history. Mr. Raymount had known his grandfather a little in the way of business, and was the more interested in him.
I may mention here that Corney soon began to show a practical interest in the place—first in the look of it—its order and tidiness, and then in its yield, beginning to develop a faculty for looking after property. Next he took to measuring the land. Here the major could give him no end of help; and having thus found a point of common interest, they began to be drawn a little together, and to conceive a mild liking for each other's company. Corney saw by degrees that the major knew much more than he; and the major discovered that Corney had some brains.
Everything was now going on well at Yrndale—thanks to the stormy and sorrowful weather that had of late so troubled its spiritual atmosphere, and killed so many evil worms in its moral soil!
As soon as the distress caused by Corney's offences was soothed by reviving love for the youth and fresh hope in him, Hester informed her parents of the dissolution of her engagement to lord Gartley. The mother was troubled: it is the girl that suffers evil judgment in such a case, and she knew how the tongue of the world would wag. But those who despise the ways of the world need not fret that low minds attribute to them the things of which low minds are capable. The world and its judgments will pass: the poisonous tongue will one day become pure, and make ample apology for its evil speaking. The tongue is a fire, but there is a stronger fire than the tongue. Her father and the major cared little for this aspect of the matter, for they had both come to the conclusion that the public is only a sort of innocent, whose behaviour may be troublesome or pleasant, but whose opinion is worth considerably less than that of a wise hound, The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship. Neither did the father care much for lord Gartley, though he had liked him; the major, we know, both despised and detested him.
Hester herself was annoyed to find how soon the idea of his lordship came to be altogether a thing of her past, looking there in its natural place, a thing to trouble her no more. At his natural distance from her, she could not fail to see what a small creature her imagination, and the self that had mingled with her noblest feelings concerning him, had chosen as her companion and help in her schemes of good. But she was able to look on the whole blunder with calmness, and a thankfulness that kept growing as the sting of her fault lost its burning, lenified in the humility it brought.
There was nothing left her now, she said to herself, but the best of all—a maiden life devoted to the work of her master. She was not willing any more to run the risk of loosing her power to help the Lord's creatures, down trodden of devils, well-to-do people, and their own miserable weaknesses and vices. Even remaining constant to duty, she must, in continuous disappointment and the mockery of a false unity, have lost the health, and worse, the spirits necessary to wholesome contact and such work as she was fain to do. In constant opposition to her husband, spending the best part of her strength in resistance ere it could reach the place where it ought to be applied entire, with strife consciously destroying her love and keeping her in a hopeless unrest, how could any light have shone from her upon those whose darkness made her miserable! Now she would hold herself free! What a blessed thing it was to be her own mistress and the slave of the Lord, externally free! To be the slave of a husband was the worst of all slavery except self-slavery!
Nor was there in this her conclusion anything of chagrin, or pettish self-humiliation. St. Paul abstained from marriage that he might the better do the work given him by the Lord. For his perilous and laborious work it was better, he judged, that he should not be married. It was for the kingdom of heaven's sake.
Her spirits soon returned more buoyant than before. Her health was better. She found she had been suffering from an oppression she had refused to recognize—already in no small measure yoked, and right unequally. Only a few weeks passed, and, in the prime of health and that glorious thing feminine strength, she looked a yet grander woman than before. There was greater freedom in her carriage, and she seemed to have grown. The humility that comes with the discovery of error had made her yet more dignified: true dignity comes only of humility. Pride is the ruin of dignity, for it is a worshipping of self, and that involves a continuous sinking. Humility, the worship of the Ideal—that is, of the man Christ Jesus, is the only lifter-up of the head.
Everybody felt her more lovable than before. Her mother began to feel an enchantment of peace in her presence. Her father sought her company more than ever in his walks, and not only talked to her about Corney, but talked about his own wrong feelings towards him, and how he had been punished for them by what they wrought in him. He had begun, he told her, to learn many things he had supposed he knew he had only thought and written and talked about them! Father and daughter were therefore much to each other now. Even Corney perceived a change in her. For one thing, scarce a shadow of that "superiority" remained which used to irritate him so much, making him rebel against whatever she said. She became more and more Amy's ideal of womanhood, and by degrees she taught her husband to read more justly his beautiful sister. She pointed out to him how few would have tried to protect and deliver him as she had done; how few would have so generously taken herself, a poor uneducated girl, to a sister's heart. So altogether things were going well in the family: it was bidding fair to be a family forevermore.