Heaven and Earth! he thought, as he had intended all along to think, were ever labours more jejune compelled upon a fresh and budding young life? Was ever yoke more galling laid upon yearling shoulders? To set a being so delicate at liberty, there can be no hammer and pick laid to the barrier; nay, it must be rather by enlarging from within. The butterfly lies so in a prison house, his iris wings close-folded to his sides. Break into the shell, you either crash the filmy thing, or usher it untimely into a chill world. No, no. Breathe tenderness, shed warmth about the lovely prisoner; it grows in grace and strength to free itself. Then be at hand to see the dawning of life, share in the contemplative ecstasy of a God, rejoice with Him in a fair work—behold it very good!
“What is exquisite here,” he told himself as he thought of Mary standing at her work, “is the bending to the yoke, and the resiliency, the strain for release which is irrepressible in so ardent and strong a nature. I remember the proud youths in the Panathenaic frieze, the noble maidens bearing baskets on their heads. Obedience, willingness, patience on the curb—can anything be more beautiful? You ride a perfect horse; he throbs under your hand. A touch will guide him, but brutality will make a mad thing of him. The gentle hand, the gentle hand! He who is privileged enough to have that in his gift, within his faculty, is surely blessed above his fellows!
“And does not that quality of beauty, indeed, depend upon the curb? Can it exist, as such, without it? No: the head cannot bow so meekly without the burden laid, the neck cannot spring until it has been bent. Ah, but the curb is wielded by the hand, and must never be in unwise or brutal employ. Here there is not brutality, but a stupidity beyond belief, something horrible to me, and deeply touching, that one so young, so highly graced, so little advantaged, should be drudging to prepare for others a lot no better than her own—drudging without aptitude, without reason, without hope to realize or ambition to gratify—desiring merely to live and grow and be happy! Horrible, most horrible. Surely so fair a spirit should be more thriftily expended! Transplant that sweet humour, that really beautiful submissiveness into a room more gracious, an atmosphere more appreciative, and how could it fail to thrive, to bear flower and fruit?”
Flower and fruit—ah, me! There leapt up in his heart an answering fire, and he cried to himself, “Hestia! The Hearth!”
VI
MISS MIDDLEHAM IS INVITED TO CONFIRM A VISION
The object of these sentimental and persistent excursions—circular tours, in fact, since, however far they wandered, whether to the Parthenon or to the shrouded Hestia of the Hearth, they always returned to their starting place—by no means filled the scene at Misperton Brand, which, when she crossed it at all, approved or disapproved according to taste and opportunity. Lady Cantacute had no doubt but she was a good little soul, and young Perivale would confidently wager her a girl with whom you could have fun. Her pupils adored her, Miss de Speyne had not yet realized her existence. Tristram Duplessis believed her waiting for him. The Rector had once called her a sun child, it appears; and that sounds like a compliment, but her good looks were denied. Yet “sun child” is apt, from a friendly tongue. Her colour was quick to come and go; no doubt she was burnt becomingly by the weather. She had—he might have said—a dewy freshness upon her, rather the appearance of having been newly kissed. No doubt, she had a figure, no doubt, the hot, full eyes of the South. Here her soul, if she had one, spoke to those who could hear. Excitement made her eyes to shine like large stars, apprehension opened them like a hare’s. Reproach made them loom upon you all black. If you interested her, they peered. They filled readily with tears, and could laugh like wavelets in the sun. But you can’t build a beauty upon eyes alone, and a beauty she had no claim to be. And yet she was well finished off—with small hands and feet, pointed fingers, small ears, quick nostrils, a smooth throat, running from dusk to ivory as the sun held or fainted in his chase. Then she had “pretty ways”—admitted—and there’s enough title for your sun child.
But the Rector, you see, liked her, while his wife disapproved of her fundamentally. Pretty ways, forsooth! “She’s a flirt, James, and I have no patience with Mr. Soames. The Eastward position is perfectly harmless, of course. Many clergymen adopt it—Lord Victor for one. But it was never done here, as you know very well, until Mr. Soames discovered that he could see the Sunday-school benches that way.”
The Rector shrugged with his eyebrows. “Scandalum magnatum, my dear, and dire nonsense at that. Soames is a good fellow with a conscience, and may say his creed in my church to whatever wall he finds helpful.”
Mrs. James retorted that a magnet was quite out of place in a church, and set him gently chuckling. That, as she knew, was final for the day; but she kept her eye steadily upon Miss Middleham, and had her small rewards. What was not discoverable could be guessed at by what was. She lighted by chance upon one crowning episode when, on a Sunday afternoon, she found her cousin Tristram declaiming Shelley’s Prometheus under the apple tree in the garden of Mary’s lodging—not to the apples and birds of the bough, but to the young person herself, snug in an easy chair, her Sunday pleats neatly disposed, no ankle showing, to speak of, but—and this did stamp a fatal air of domesticity upon the whole exhibition—but without a hat. This, if you come to think of it, means the worst kind of behaviour, a perverted mind. Shelley was an atheist, and his Prometheus was probably subversive of every kind of decency—but that is nothing beside the point of the hat, which might be missed by any man, but by no woman. For consider. If a little nursery governess were to be read to by the cousin of a person of good family—a young man who might be engaged to a peer’s daughter by a nod of the head—one might think little of it, had there been evidence of its being an event. But there had been none—far from that. Mrs. James knew her Misperton Brand very well; events there were hailed by young persons in their best hats. Here, nothing of the kind. On the contrary, there was an every-day air about it which showed that the girl was at home with Tristram, Tristram much at home with the girl. That Tristram should be at ease was nothing; it would have been ridiculous had he not been—a nursery governess! But was it not disastrous flippancy—to say no harsher thing—in Mary that she, too, could be at ease; hatless, in a rocking chair; not rocking herself—no, not that! but able to rock at any moment! The enormity was reported, and the Rector said that so long as young women wore their hats in his church he cared nothing what they did with them elsewhere. He threatened to chuckle, so no more could be said; but to Mrs. James, what had been dark surmise before was now garishly plain. The girl was——
But all this takes us far from the schoolroom where Miss Middleham was blamelessly expounding the Plantagenet Kings of England, or from the shady lime-tree walk where Mr. Germain was rhapsodizing upon yokes, submissiveness, and young necks resilient.