“Oh, Helen, Helen!” cried Lily, “I think Alick Duff must have been the cloud that has come over your life and turned its brightness to dark. If you had not always been thinking of him, you would have had another home and a brighter life. And even now—can I not see myself?—don’t you know very well there is a good man——”
“Oh,” cried Helen, rising up with sudden animation, almost pushing Lily’s kneeling figure from her, “go away from me with your good man! It is enough to make a person unjust, to make ye hate the name of good! How do you know whether they are good or no, one of them? Were they ever tempted like him? Had they ever the fire of hot thoughts in their head, or the struggle in their hearts? Was nature ever in them running free and wild like a great river, carrying the brigs and the dams away? or just a drumlie quiet stream, aye content in its banks, and asking no more? Oh, dinna speak to me of your good man! It’s blasphemy, it’s sacrilege, it’s the sin that will never be pardoned! There is but one man, be he good or bad, and one woman that is bound to do her best for him; and ill be her lot if she fails to do it, for it is not herself she will ruin,—that would matter little—the feckless creature, no worth her salt,—but him, too, but him, too!”
She sat down again after this little outburst and dried her eyes. Lily, who had risen hurriedly to her feet, too, startled and almost angry, stood irresolute, not knowing how to reply, when Helen put out to her a trembling hand. “You are not to be troubled about me,” she said; “you are not to be angry at what I say. It is a comfort to speak out my mind. Who can I speak to, Lily? Not to my father, who stands between me and my life; not to him, that rages at me as you have heard because I cannot arise and follow him, as I would do if I could, to the end of the world. Oh, Lily, it is good for the heart, when it is full like mine, to speak. It takes away a little of the burden. ‘I leant my back until an aik’—do you mind the old song? You are not an oak, you’re only a lily-plant, but, oh! the comfort to lean on you, Lily, just for a moment, just till I get my breath.”
“Say to me whatever you like, Helen; say any thing. I may not agree——”
“I am not asking you to agree—how should you agree, you that know nothing? Oh, Lily, my bonnie Lily,” cried Helen, suddenly looking in her face, “am I speaking blasphemy, too? You may know more than I think; there is that in your face that was not there six months ago.”
The color changed in Lily’s cheek, but she did not flinch. “If I know any thing,” she said, “it is not in your way, Helen. I am not the kind of woman that can change a man’s thoughts or his life. I am one that has no power. If I tried your way, I would fail. No one has changed a thought or a purpose in all my life for me. I am useless, useless. I have to do what other folk tell me, and wait other folk’s pleasure, and blow here and blow there like a straw in the wind. And I love it not, I love it not!” she cried. “It is as bad for me as for you.”
Helen thought she knew what the girl meant. She was here in durance, bound by her uncle’s hard will; prevented, too, from carrying out the choice of her heart. It had not yet dawned upon the elder woman that Lily’s experience had gone further than this. And it is possible that the gentle Helen, used all her life to an influence over others far stronger than seemed natural to her character, and believing fully and strongly in that power, could not have understood the higher trial of the far more vivacious and vigorous nature beside her, which flung itself in vain against the rock of another mind inaccessible to any power it possessed, and, clear-sighted and strong-willed, had yet to submit and do nothing but submit.
CHAPTER XXIX
Alick Duff went away from the valley of the Rugas, calling on heaven and earth to witness that he would never be seen there more, and that from henceforward he was to be considered as an altogether shipwrecked and ruined man. “There is nobody that will contradict you there,” the minister said sternly, “and nothing but the grace of God, my man, for all you threep and swear to make my poor Eelen meeserable, that would ever have made any difference.” “And who will say,” cried Duff, “that it was not just her that would have been the grace o’ God?” The minister shook his head, yet was a little startled by the argument. As for Helen, she said little more to her strange lover. “It is no use speaking now. There is nothing more to say. I cannot leave my father.” Lily, to whom this story had come like a revelation in the midst of the quiet country life which seems, especially in Scotland, never to be ruffled by emotion, much less passion, and on whom it acted powerfully, restoring her mental balance and withdrawing at least a portion of her thoughts from herself, was a great deal at the Manse during this agitating period, which was all the more curious that nothing was ever said about it on the surface of the life which flowed on in an absolutely unbroken routine, as if there was no impassioned despairing man outside in the darkness waiting the moment to fling himself and his terrible needs and wishes at Helen’s feet, and no terrible question tearing her heart asunder. That it was there underneath all the time was plain enough to those who were in the secret. The minister had an anxious look, even when he laughed and told his stories; and Helen, though her serenity was extraordinary, grew pale and red with an unconscious listening for every sound which Lily divined. He might burst in at any moment and make a scene in the quiet Manse parlor, destroying all the pretence of composure with which they had covered their life, or, worse still, he might do something desperate—he might disappear in the river or end his existence with a shot, leaving an indelible shame on his memory, and upon those who belonged to him, and upon her who, as the country folk would say, “had driven him to it.” If she had married Alick Duff and gone away with him, there would have been an unanimous cry over her folly; but if in his despair he had cut the thread in any such conclusive way, Helen never would have been mentioned afterward but as the woman who drove poor Alick Duff to his death. There was a thrill of this possibility even in the air of the little town, where he was seen from time to time wandering about the precincts of the Manse, and where every-body knew him and his story. But the most exciting thing of all to Lily was to see the face and watch the ways of the excellent young minister, Mr. Blythe’s assistant and successor, who went and came through these troubled days, talking of the affairs of the parish, sedulously restraining himself that he might not appear to think of, or be conscious of, any thing else, but with a countenance which reflected Helen’s, which followed every change of hers, yet when her attention was attracted toward him, closed up in a moment, with the most extraordinary effort dismissing all meaning from his countenance. Lily became fascinated by Mr. Douglas, through whom she could read, as in a mirror, every thing that was happening. He said not a word on this subject, which, indeed, nobody spoke of, nor did he betray any consciousness of the other man’s presence, about which even the maid in the kitchen and the minister’s man, who never had been so assiduous in the discharge of his duties as now, were so perfectly informed; but yet she felt sure that something in him tingled to the neighborhood of his rival like an elastic chord. He would come in sometimes pale, with a stern look in his closely drawn mouth, and then Lily would feel sure that he had seen Alick Duff in the way, waiting till Helen should appear. And sometimes the lines of his countenance would relax, so that she felt sure he had heard good news and believed that haunting figure to have gone away; and then at a sound which was no sound outside, at the most trifling change in Helen’s face, the veil, the cloud, would shut again over his face.
The manner in which Lily attained the possibility of making these studies was that by the minister’s invitation, seconded, but not with very much warmth, by Helen, she had come to the Manse on a visit of a few days. Whatever prejudice Mr. Blythe had against her—and she was sure he had a prejudice, though she could not imagine any cause for it—had disappeared under the pressure of his own sore need. He himself was helpless either to watch over or to protect his daughter, and in despair he had thought of the other girl, herself caught in a tangle of the bitter web of life, and full of secret knowledge of its difficulties, who, though she was so much younger, had learned to some degree the lesson which Helen was so slow to learn. “She’s but a girl, but I’ll warrant she could give Eelen a fine lesson what it is to lippen to a man,” the minister said to himself. He had no high view of human nature, for his part. To lippen to a man seemed to him, though he had been in that respect severely virtuous himself, the last thing that a woman should do. For his own part he lippened to, that is, trusted, nobody very much, and thought he was wise in so doing. To have Lily there, seeing every thing with those young eyes, no doubt throwing her weight on the other side, allowing it at least to be seen that a man was not so easily turned round a woman’s little finger as poor Helen thought, would be something gained in the absence of all other help. Mr. Blythe had a tacit conviction that Lily’s influence would be on the opposite side, though his chief reason for thinking so was one that was fictitious.