The Days of My Life: An Autobiography

by Mrs. Oliphant

I did not answer him—my girlish pride was on fire, and my cheeks burnt, but I could find nothing sufficiently annihilating to reply to Mr. Osborne.

We heard the noise of an opened door just then, and of a footstep in the passage which led to the garden. Mr. Osborne glanced hastily round him, and then bent forward to me.

“Hester, attend to me. You are very young, and have had a wild education; try, if you can think before you permit your father to decide on this. Do you mark me? I know this boy—he is a better boy than you are, and he has a fantastic fancy for you, as great as you could desire. Hester, here’s your father. I’ll keep your secret, and do you think of what I say.”

My father joined us immediately. If it surprised him to find me there, he took no notice of it, and I was glad to pick up my embroidery and hurry away. I was impressed with an uncomfortable necessity for thinking about it, from what Mr. Osborne had said, and I went to my own room to recollect myself. I could not deny either that I was a little excited and agitated about this new appearance of Edgar Southcote. It did not soften my heart to him, but it awoke my curiosity, and it made a step in my life. I said to myself with a beating heart—a heart disturbed with wonder, with anger, with surprise, and something like affright, that I was no longer a girl, but a woman now, standing upon the threshold of my life. I was sixteen. I thought I was rapidly maturing and growing old, for in this old house of ours, so quiet and withdrawn from common company, the days were peopled with fancies and imaginary scenes, and I did not know how very, very young and girlish were my secret conceptions of life and of the world.

Life! Here was my father, a man in whom I could see no blemish—what was his existence? Such as it was, he lived it in his library, among his books; talking with me now and then, and coming forth to take a long silent solitary walk, or a stroll in the garden in the evening, once or twice a week. Was this all? yes! and I said within myself in reverent explanation of it, that his life had been blighted and cast down by one wrong that always gnawed at his heart; he had married for love; but my mother had married him for pity. Was not this enough to account for the sombre shade in which he lived and walked? I said yes, yes! in eager youthful enthusiasm—yes, this was surely enough to decide for good or evil the whole tenor of a life.

And then there was Alice! Nothing in this house or about it, not even the sunshine, cheered my heart like the smile of Alice; yet she was not merry, and had little to be merry for. Alice was like one who had come out of a desert, leaving all her loves and treasures there behind her—she had lost everything, everything but her life—what had she to live for? I shuddered while I said so; for without Alice how dreary would my days be; and then I paused to recollect that on the borders of this grand and momentous existence, where my father had failed in his own enterprise for happiness, and in which Alice had lost all she loved, my own feet were standing now.

This was what I thought on the subject which Mr. Osborne recommended to my consideration; when I thought again of Edgar, it was with a renewed flush of anger and mortification. My cousin pitied me, who dreamed of inspiring some true knight with the loftiest ambitions, and rewarding him sufficiently with a smile. I was to be subjected to the humiliating proposals which Edgar Southcote’s “generous impulse” suggested to him! These were unfortunate words—how often they have clamored in my ear, and haunted me since then.

I did not go into the garden again that day; not even when it was twilight, and the dews were culling out the odors, and the murmur of hushed sounds and distant voices from the quiet town charmed the dim air into an enchanted calm. In my new-born consciousness, I walked up and down the dim close, at the other side of the house, where there were no windows overlooking the high walls and its glistening ivy. I would be no Proserpine among the flowers, to any foolish boy who dared spy upon my retirement from the college windows. Proserpine! if Mr. Osborne had known I heard him, he never would have called me by that name, nor supposed that any gownsman of Corpus could ever interest me! I had a great contempt for my next neighbors in my girlish loftiness and maturity. I could not have been more insulted than by such an insinuation as this.

And then I went to the drawing-room, and stationed myself at my usual place in the window; the long room was nearly dark, though the pale half-light streamed through it from window to window, and it was strange to look across the whole length of the room to the ivy leaves faintly quivering on the wall at the other side. My father and Mr. Osborne, who had dined with us, were walking in the garden, talking earnestly, and with some indignation I watched them, wondering if they still talked of me. Then there came out, one by one, these lights in the windows, some of them looking faint and steady like true students’ lamps, some suspiciously bright as though there was merry-making within. It pleased me to watch them, as window after window brightened on the night. I scorned the inmates; but I did not scorn these neighborly and kindly lights.

My father came in very soon, and Mr. Osborne called me to say good-night; I went down to him where he stood at the door, and he held my hand a moment, and looked into my face. “Now, Hester, good night—think of what I said,” he repeated. These words induced me to return very quickly upstairs, where my father had gone, following Alice with the lamp. When she had placed it on the table and left the room, I went to my father and stood beside him, till he lifted his eyes from the book. He looked at me with a kind loving look, as if he had pleasure in seeing me—a look not very usual to my father—and took my hand as he always used to do, when I stood at his knee, to ask anything of him as a child, and said, “Well, Hester?” I was full of excitement and resolution, and came to my subject at once, without remembering that I might be blamed for what I had to say first. “I was in the greenhouse, papa, when you were talking there with Mr. Osborne to-day,” I said, firmly—and then I paused with a sudden recollection that this was not quite consistent either with my father’s code of honor or my own.