"As you will," he answers, deeply wounded. "If you take it as a great indignity to be offered a home with the oldest friends you have in the world, of course I can say no more; but oh, child! you are wrong—you are wrong!"
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
It is Sunday evening. Miss Craven has been to church for the first time since her bereavement, as people call it. She has displayed her crape in all its crisp funeral newness before the eyes of the Plas Berwyn congregation. Also, she has been made the subject of conversation, over their early dinner, between the imbecile rector and his vinegar-faced, bob-curled wife; the latter remarking how unfortunately unbecoming black was to poor Miss Craven—really impossible to tell where her bonnet ended and her hair began; and how lucky it was for her that people did not wear mourning for as long a time as they used—three months being ample nowadays, ample for a brother! Esther has sat in their pew for the first time alone: she has looked at Jack's prayer-book, at his vacant corner under the dusty cobwebbed window, with eyes dryly stoic; she has walked firmly after service down the church-path, past a grassless hillock, where he who was her brother lies, dumbly submitting to the one terrific, changeless law of decay—the law that not one of us can face, as applying to ourselves, without our brains reeling at the horror of it. Oh! thrifty, harsh Nature! that, without a pang of relenting, unmixes again those cunningest compounds that we call our bodies—making the freed elements that formed them pass into new forms of life—makes us, who erewhile walked upright, godlike, fronting the sun, communing with the high stars—makes us, I say, creep many-legged in the beetle, crawl blind in the worm!
It is evening now, and Esther sits, in her red armchair, beside the drawing-room fire, alone again. The wind comes banging every minute against the shuttered French window, as one that boisterously asks to be let in; the ivy leaves are dashed against the pane, as one that sighingly begs for admittance. Every now and then the young girl looks round timidly over her shoulder, in the chill expectation of seeing a death-pale spirit-face gazing at her from some corner of the room; every now and then she starts nervously, as a hot cinder drops from the grate, or as the small feet of some restless mouse make a hurry-skurrying noise behind the wainscot. As often as she can frame the smallest excuse, she rings the bell, in order to gather a little courage from the live human face, the live human voice, of the servant that answers it.
Around Plas Berwyn also the wind thunders—against Plas Berwyn windows also the ivy-leaves fling themselves plaintively; but there the resemblance ends. The steady light from the lamp outblazes the uncertain, fitful fire-gleams: at Plas Berwyn there are no ghost-faces of the lately dead to haunt the inmates of that cheerful room. They are all sitting round the table on straight-backed chairs—no lolling in armchairs, no stealing of furtive naps on the Sabbath—sitting rather primly, rather Puritanically, reading severely good books. To Bob's palate, the Hedley Vicarsian type of literature is as distasteful as to any other young man of sound head and good digestion, but he succumbs to it meekly, to please his mother; if Sunday came twice a week, I think he would be constrained to rebel. From the kitchen, the servants' voices sound faintly audible above the howling wind, singing psalms. The family are divided between prose and poetry. Miss Brandon is reading a sermon; her sister a hymn. Here it is:—
THE FIRM BANK.[1]
"I have a never-failing bank,
A more than golden store;
No earthly bank is half so rich,
How can I then be poor?
"'Tis when my stock is spent and gone,
And I without a groat,
I'm glad to hasten to my bank,
And beg a little note.
"Sometimes my banker, smiling, says,
'Why don't you oftener come?
And when you draw a little note,
Why not a larger sum?
"'Why live so niggardly and poor?—
Your bank contains a plenty?
Why come and take a one-pound note
When you might have a twenty?
"'Yea, twenty thousand, ten times told,
Is but a trifling sum
To what your Father hath laid up,
Secure in God his Son.'
"Since, then, my banker is so rich,
I have no cause to borrow:
I'll live upon my cash to-day,
And draw again to-morrow.
"I've been a thousand times before,
And never was rejected;
Sometimes my banker gives me more
Than asked for or expected.
"Sometimes I've felt a little proud,
I've managed things so clever:
But, ah! before the day was done
I've felt as poor as ever!
"Sometimes with blushes on my face
Just at the door I stand;
I know if Moses kept me back,
I surely must be damned.
"I know my bank will never break—
No! it can never fall!
The Firm—Three Persons in one God!
Jehovah—Lord of All!"
A charming mixture of the jocose and familiar, isn't it?
"Mother," says Bob, rather abruptly, looking up from a civil-spoken, pleasant little work, entitled "Thou Fool!" which he is perusing (it is generally an understood thing that conversation is not to be included among the Sabbath evening diversions at Plas Berwyn)—"Mother, do you know I don't think I shall try for extension, after all?"