‘What people? I don’t believe anybody cares where we live,’ said Rose with demure consciousness, walking along by his side with her eyes cast down, but a smile hovering about the corners of her mouth. Confession had been of use to her, and had relieved her soul, even though Mr. Loseby had no power to confer absolution.
‘Don’t we? Well, there’s Charley for one; he has never had a word to throw to a dog since you went away. Though a fellow may know it is no good, it’s always something to know that you’re there.’
‘What is no good?’ said Rose, with extreme innocence. And thus the two went back talking—of matters very important and amusing—through the coolness and sweetness and leisure of the little country street. Anne, who was seated in the bow-window of the sitting-room with her books and her papers, could not help breathing forth a little sigh as she looked out and saw them approaching, so young and so like each other. ‘What a pity!’ she said to herself. So far as she herself was concerned, it was far more than a pity; but even for Rose——.
‘What is a pity?’ said Mrs. Mountford: and she came and looked out over Anne’s shoulder, being a little concerned about her child’s absence. When she saw the pair advancing she flushed all over with annoyance and impatience. ‘Pity! it must be put a stop to,’ she cried; ‘Willie Ashley was always out of the question; a boy with next to nothing. But now it is not to be thought of for a moment. I rely upon you, if you have any regard for your sister, to put a stop to it, Anne!’
CHAPTER XXXV.
A SIMPLE WOMAN.
The Dower-house at Lilford was fixed upon shortly after by general consent. It was an old house, but showed its original fabric chiefly in the tall stacks of chimneys which guaranteed its hospitable hearths from smoke, and gave an architectural distinction to the pile of building, the walls of which were all matted in honeysuckles, roses, and every climbing plant that can be imagined, embroidering themselves upon the background of the ivy, which filled every crevice. And the pleasure of furnishing, upon which Mr. Loseby had been cunning enough to enlarge, as an inducement to the ladies to take possession of this old dwelling-place, proved as great and as delightful as he had represented it to be. It was a pleasure which none of the three had ever as yet experienced. Even Mrs. Mountford had never known the satisfaction, almost greater than that of dressing one’s self—the delight and amusement of dressing one’s house and making it beautiful. She had been taken as a bride to the same furniture which had answered for her predecessor; and though in the course of the last twenty years something had no doubt been renewed, there is no such gratification in a new carpet or curtains, which must be chosen either to suit the previous furniture, or of those homely tints which, according to the usual formula of the shops, ‘would look well with anything,’ as in the blessed task of renovating a whole room at once. They had everything to do here, new papers (bliss! for you may be sure Mrs. Mountford was too fashionable to consult anybody but Mr. Morris on this important subject), and a whole array of new old furniture. They did not transfer the things that had been left at Mount, which would have been, Mrs. Mountford felt, the right thing to do, but merely selected a few articles from the mass which nobody cared for. The result, they all flattered themselves, was fine. Not a trace of newness appeared in all the carefully decorated rooms. A simulated suspicion of dirt, a ghost of possible dust, was conjured up by the painter’s skill to make everything perfect—not in the way of a vulgar copy of that precious element which softens down the too perfect freshness, but, by a skilful touch of art, reversing the old principle of economy, and making ‘the new things look as weel’s the auld.’ This process, with all its delicate difficulties, did the Mountford family good in every way. To Anne it was the must salutary and health-giving discipline. It gave her scope for the exercise of all those secondary tastes and fancies, which keep the bigger and more primitive sentiments in balance. To be anxious about the harmony of the new curtains, or concerned about the carpet, is sometimes salvation in its way; and there were so many questions to decide—things for beauty and things for use—the character of every room, and the meaning of it, which are things that have to be studied nowadays before we come so far down as to consider the conveniences of it, what you are to sit upon, or lie upon, though these two are questions almost of life and death. Anne was plunged into the midst of all these questions. Besides her serious business in the management of the estate which Mr. Loseby had taken care should occupy her more and more, there were a hundred trivial play-anxieties always waiting for her, ready to fill up every crevice of thought. She had, indeed, no time to think. The heart which had been so deeply wounded, which had been compelled to give up its ideal and drop one by one the illusions it had cherished, seemed pushed into a corner by this flood of occupation. Anne’s mind, indeed, was in a condition of exhaustion, something similar to that which sometimes deadens the sensations of mourners after a death which in anticipation has seemed to involve the loss of all things. When all is over, and the tortures of imagination are no longer added to those of reality, a kind of calm steals over the wounded soul. The worst has happened; the blow has fallen. In this fact there is quiet at least involved, and now the sufferer has nothing to think of but how to bear his pain. The wild rallying of all his forces to meet a catastrophe to come is no longer necessary. It is over; and though the calm may be but ‘a calm despair,’ yet it is different from the anguish of looking forward. And in Anne’s case there was an additional relief. For a long time past she had been forcing upon herself a fictitious satisfaction. The first delight of her love, which she had described to Rose as the power of saying everything to her lover, pouring out her whole heart in the fullest confidence that everything would interest him and all be understood, had long ago begun to ebb away from her. As time went on, she had fallen upon the pitiful expedient of writing to Cosmo without sending her letters, thus beguiling herself by the separation of an ideal Cosmo, always the same, always true and tender, from the actual Cosmo whose attention often flagged, and who sometimes thought the things that occupied her trivial, and her way of regarding them foolish or high-flown. Yes, Cosmo too had come to think her high-flown: he had been impatient even of her fidelity to himself; and gradually it had come about that Anne’s communications with him were but carefully prepared abridgments of the genuine letters which were addressed to—someone whom she had lost, someone, she could not tell who, on whom her heart could repose, but who was not, so far as she knew, upon this unresponsive earth. All this strain, this dual life, was over now. No attempt to reconcile the one with the other was necessary. It was all over; the worst had happened; there was no painful scene to look forward to, no gradual loosening of a tie once so dear; but whatever was to happen had happened. How she might have felt the blank, had no such crowd of occupations come in to fill up her time and thoughts, is another question. But, as it was, Anne had no time to think of the blank. In the exhaustion of the revolution accomplished she was seized hold upon by all these crowding occupations, her thoughts forced into new channels, her every moment busy. No soul comes through such a crisis without much anguish and many struggles, but Anne had little time to indulge herself. She had to stand to her arms, as it were, night and day. She explained her position to Mr. Loseby, as has been said, and she informed her stepmother briefly of the change; but to no one else did she say a word.
‘There was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.’ Could any word express more impressively the pause of fate, the quiet of patience and deliberation over the great and terrible things to come. There was silence in the heaven of Anne’s being. She forbore to think, forbore to speak, even to herself. All was still within her. The firmament had closed in around her. Her world was lessened, so much cut off on every side, a small world now with no far-shining distances, no long gleams of celestial light, nothing but the little round about her, the circle of family details, the work of every day. Instead of the wide sky and the infinite air, to have your soul concentrated within a circle of Mr. Morris’s papers, however admirable they may be, makes a great difference in life. Sometimes she even triumphed over circumstances so far as to see the humorous side of her own fate, and to calculate with a smile half pathetic, all that her unreasonable fidelity had cost her. It had cost her her father’s approbation, her fortune, her place in life, and oh! strange turning of the tables! it had cost her at the same time the lover whom she had chosen, in high youthful absolutism and idealism, at the sacrifice of everything else. Was there ever a stranger contradiction, completion, of a transaction? He for whom she had given up all else, was lost to her because she had given everything for him. A woman might weep her heart out over such a fate, or she might smile as Anne smiled, pale, with a woful merriment, a tremulous pathetic scorn, an indignation half lost in that sentiment which made Othello cry out, ‘The pity of it! The pity of it!’ Oh, the pity of it! that such things should be; that a woman should give so much for so little—and a man return so little for so much. Sometimes, when she was by herself, this smile would come up unawares, a scarcely perceptible gleam upon her pale countenance. ‘What are you smiling at, Anne?’ her stepmother or Rose would ask her as she sat at work. ‘Was I smiling? I did not know—at nobody—I myself,’ she would say, quoting Desdemona this time. Or she would remind herself of a less dignified simile—of poor Dick Swiveller, shutting up one street after another, in which he had made purchases which he could not pay for. She had shut up a great many pleasant paths for herself. Her heart got sick of the usual innocent romance in which the hero is all nobleness and generosity, and the heroine all sweet dependence and faith. She grew sick of poetry and all her youthful fancies. Even places became hateful to her, became as paths shut up. To see the Beeches even from the road gave her a pang. Mount, where she had written volumes all full of her heart and inmost thoughts to Cosmo, pained her to go back to, though she had to do it occasionally. And she could not think of big London itself without a sinking of the heart. He was there. It was the scene of her disenchantment, her disappointment. All these were as so many slices cut off from her life. Rose’s estate, and the leases, and the tenants, and the patronage of Lilford parish, which belonged to it, and all its responsibilities, and the old women, with their tea and flannels, and the Dower-house with Mr. Morris’s papers—these circumvented and bound in her life.
But there was one person at least whose affectionate care of her gave Anne an amusement which now and then found expression in a flood of tears: though tears were a luxury which she did not permit herself. This was the Rector, who was always coming and going, and who would walk round Anne at the writing-table, where she spent so much of her time, with anxious looks and many little signs of perturbation. He did not say a great deal to her, but watched her through all the other conversations that would arise, making now and then a vague little remark, which was specially intended for her, as she was aware, and which would strike into her like an arrow, yet make her smile all the same. When there was talk of the second marriage of Lord Meadowlands’ brother, the clergyman, Mr. Ashley was strong in his defence. ‘No one can be more opposed than I am to inconstancies of all kinds; but when you have made a mistake the first time it is a wise thing and a right thing,’ said the good Rector, with a glance at Anne, ‘to take advantage of the release given you by Providence. Charles Meadows had made a great mistake at first—like many others.’ And then, when the conversation changed, and the Woodheads became the subject of discussion, even in the fulness of his approbation of ‘that excellent girl Fanny,’ Mr. Ashley found means to insinuate his constant burden of prophecy. ‘What I fear is that she will get a little narrow as the years go on. How can a woman help that who has no opening out in her life, who is always at the first chapter?’
‘Dear me, Rector,’ said Mrs. Mountford, ‘I did not know you were such an advocate of marriage.’
‘Yes, I am a great advocate of marriage: without it we all get narrow. We want new interests to carry on our life; we want to expand in our children, and widen out instead of closing in.’