The Beth Book
TextCHAPTER LI
One warm morning when the apple-trees were out, Arthur Brock was sitting with Gresham Powell in the garden of the farm-house where they were lodging in the country, turning over a portfolio full of Powell's sketches, and Powell was looking at them over his shoulder, and discussing them with him. Arthur had just come upon a clever study of the head of a girl in a hat, and was looking hard at it.
"That's a study in starvation," Powell explained. "It's an interesting face, isn't it? She came into a hairdresser's one day when I was there, and sat down just in that attitude, and I sketched her on the spot. She was too far through at the moment to notice me. Look at her pretty hair particularly. You'll see why in the next sketch, which is the sequel."
Brock took up the next sketch hurriedly. It was the same girl in the same hat, but with her hair cut short.
"I asked the barber fellow about her when she'd gone," Gresham pursued. "He'd taken her into an inner room, and when she came out she was cropped like that. She told him she had come to her last shilling, and she had an invalid at home depending on her entirely, and she entreated him to give her all he could for her hair. I believe the chap did too," he seemed so moved by her suffering and gentleness. "What's the matter?"
Brock had risen abruptly with the sketches still in his hand. The colour had left his face, and he looked as pinched and ill as he had done during the early days of his convalescence.
"The matter!" he ejaculated. "I've just discovered what a blind fool I am, that's what's the matter; and I'll keep these two studies with your permission to remind me of the fact. Choose amongst mine any you like instead of them, old chap, but these you must let me have."
Without waiting for an answer, he took the sketches away with him into the house. When he returned a short time afterwards, he was dressed for a journey, and had a travelling bag in his hand.
"I'm going to town," he said, "to see the original of these sketches. I've run up an account with her I shall never be able to settle, but at all events I can acknowledge my debt, dolt that I am! I was that invalid. And I thought myself such a gentleman too! not counting my change and asking no questions, trusting her implicitly: that was my pose from the day you came and poisoned my mind. Before that I had neither trusted nor distrusted, but just taken things for granted as they came, beautifully. I was too self-satisfied even to suspect that she might be imposing her bounty upon me, starving herself that I might have all I required, and sending me off here finally with the last penny she had in the world. I told you I was wondering she did not answer my letters. I expect she hadn't the stamp. But you said it was out of sight out of mind, and she'd be trying it on with some one else in my absence. If I'd the strength, I'd thrash you, Gresham, for an evil-minded bounder."
"I'll carry your bag to the station, old chap," Gresham replied with contrition, "and take the thrashing at your earliest convenience."
Ethel Maud Mary was standing on the steps in the sunshine looking out when Arthur Brock arrived, just as she had stood to watch him depart, but in the interval a happy change had pleasantly transformed her. Her golden hair was brightly burnished again, her blue eyes sparkled, and her delicate skin had recovered its rose-leaf tinge. She wore a new frock, a new ring, a new watch and chain, and there was a new look in her face, one might say, as if the winter of care had passed out of her life with the snow and been forgotten in the spring sunshine of better prospects.
"O Mr. Brock!" she exclaimed; "you back! But none too well yet, judging by appearances."
"Where is Mrs. Maclure?" he demanded.
"I wish I knew!" Ethel Maud Mary rejoined, becoming important all at once. "She's gone for good, that's all I can tell you. O Mr. Brock! fancy her being tip-top all the time, and us not suspecting it, though I might have thought something when I saw the dresses she sold when you were ill, only I'd got the fashion papers in my mind, and didn't know but what she'd been paid in dresses! Come into the parlour; you look faint."
"You said she sold her dresses?"
"Yes; sit down, Mr. Brock. A glass of port wine is what you want, as she'd say herself if she was here; and you'll get it good too, for it's been sent for Ma. My! the things that have come! Look at me – all presents – everything she ever heard me say I'd like to have; and Gwendolen the same."
She got out the wine and the biscuits from a chiffonier as she chattered, and set them before him.
"Yes, she sold her dresses, and her rings, and her books, and every other blessed thing she possessed except what had belonged to an old aunt. She got them out too, one day, but cried so when it came to parting with them, I persuaded her to wait. I said something would turn up, I was sure. And something did, for you went away, and directly after – the next minute, so to speak, for you were scarcely out of sight – a lady stopped her carriage – a fine carriage and pair and coachman and footman all silver-mounted – and ran up the steps in a great way. She'd seen Mrs. Maclure go into the house, and she said she'd been hunting for her everywhere for months, and all her friends were in a way about her, not knowing what had happened to her. I took the lady up to the attic, and there was Mrs. Maclure lying on the floor looking like death, with her head up against the big chair where you used to sit. We thought she was dead at first, but the doctor came and brought her round. He said it was just exhaustion from fatigue and starvation."
Arthur Brock uttered an exclamation.
"You needn't reproach yourself, Mr. Brock," Ethel Maud Mary pursued sympathetically. "You weren't worse than the rest of us. I saw her every day, and never suspected she was denying herself everything, she was always so much the same – happy, you know, in her quiet way."
"Do you think she was happy?" he groaned.
"Yes, she was happy," Ethel Maud Mary said simply. "She's that disposition – contented, you know; and she was happy from the first; but she was happier still from the time she had you to care for. I'd read about ladies of that kind, Mr. Brock, but had not seen one before. It's being good does it, I suppose. Do you know she'd not have told a lie was it ever so, Mrs. Maclure wouldn't!"
"And she went away with that lady?" Arthur asked, after a pause.
"Yes, if you can call it going," Ethel Maud Mary replied; "for the lady didn't ask her leave, but just rolled her up in wraps, and had her carried down to the carriage and took her off. And that's all we know about her. She's written me a letter I'd like to show you, and sent me money, pretending she owed it, because I'd let her have her attic too cheap. She sent the presents afterwards, but no address. The lady came back once alone, and had the attic photographed, with everything arranged just as Mrs. Maclure used to have it. And she bought all the things in it that belonged to us, and had them and all Mrs. Maclure's own things taken away to keep, she said. She sat a long time in the attic, looking at it, just as if she was trying to imagine what living in it was like, and she kept dabbing her eyes with a little lace handkerchief, and then she got up and sighed and said, 'Poor Beth! poor Beth!' several times. She talked to me a lot about Mrs. Maclure. She seemed to know all about me, and treated me as if we'd been old friends. And she knew all about you too, and asked after you kindly. She said Mrs. Maclure was going to be a great woman – a great genius or something of that sort – and do a lot for the world; and she wanted to know if you'd ever suspected it. I told her I thought not. The two letters you wrote she took to give Mrs. Maclure, so she'd get them all right."
"And see the particular kind of fatuous ass I am set down clearly in my own handwriting!" he said to himself.
Then he rose. "I'll just go up and look at the attics," he said.
Ethel Maud Mary waited below, and waited long for him. When at last he came down, he shook hands with her, but without looking at her.
"I'm going to find that lady – Mrs. Maclure," he said, jamming his hat down on his head, "if I have to spend the rest of my life in the search."
CHAPTER LII
Beth, surrounded by friends, saw the spring come in that year at Ilverthorpe, and felt it the fairest spring she could remember. Blackbird and thrush sang in an ecstasy by day, and all night long the nightingales trilled in the happy dusk. She did not ask herself why it was there was a new note in nature that year, nor did she trouble herself about time or eternity. Her eternity was the exquisite monotony of tranquil days, her time-keepers the spring flowers, the apple-blossom and quince, daffodil, wallflower, lilac and laburnum, the perfumed calycanthus, forget-me-nots, pansies, hyacinths, lilies-of-the-valley in the woods, and early roses on a warm south wall; and over all the lark by day, and again at night the nightingale. In a life like hers, after a period of probation there comes an interval of this kind occasionally, a pause for rest and renewal of strength before active service begins again.
While she had been shut up with Arthur, seeing no papers and hearing no news, her book had come out and achieved a very respectable success, for the sort of thing it was; and she was pleased to hear it, but not elated. The subject had somehow lapsed from her mind, and the career of the book gave her no more personal pleasure than if it had been the work of a friend. Had it come out when it was first finished, she would have felt differently about it; but now she saw it as only one of the many things which had happened to her, and considered it more as the old consider the works of their youth, estimating them in proportion, as is the habit of age, and moderately rather than in excess. For the truth was that a great change had come over Beth during the last few months in respect to her writing; her enthusiasm had singularly cooled; it had ceased to be a pleasure, and become an effort to her to express herself in that way.
Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce had been looking out for Beth's book, and, while waiting for it to appear, he had, misled by his own suppositions, prepared an elaborate article upon the kind of thing he expected it to be. Nothing was wanting to complete the article but a summary of the story and quotations from it, for which he had left plenty of space. He condemned the book utterly from the point of view of art, and for the silly ignorance of life displayed in it, and the absurd caricatures which were supposed to be people; he ridiculed the writer for taking herself seriously (but without showing why exactly she should not take herself seriously if she chose); he pitied her for her disappointment when she should realise where in literature her place would be; and he ended with a bitter diatribe against the works of women generally, as being pretentious, amateur, without originality, and wanting in humour, like the wretched stuff it had been his painful duty to expose. Unfortunately for him, however, the book appeared anonymously, and immediately attracted attention enough to make him wish to discover it; and before he found out that Beth was the author, he had committed himself to a highly eulogistic article upon it in The Patriarch, which he took the precaution to sign, that the coming celebrity might know to whom gratitude was due, and in which he declared that there had arisen a new light of extraordinary promise on the literary horizon. The book, as it happened, was not a work of fiction at all.
Beth had heard nothing more from Dr. Maclure, and knew nothing about him, except that he must have lost his degrading appointment, the Acts having been rescinded. He had forwarded none of the letters her friends had addressed to her at Slane. The Kilroys had endeavoured to obtain her address from him, but he denied that he knew it. Unknown to her, Mr. Kilroy, Mr. Hamilton-Wells, and Sir George Galbraith had taken the best legal advice in the hope of getting her a divorce; but there was little chance of that, as the acute mental suffering her husband had caused her had merely injured her health and endangered her reason, which does not amount to cruelty in the estimation of the law. The matter was therefore allowed to drop, and Beth had not yet begun to think of the future, when one day she received a letter from Dan, couched in the most affectionate terms, entreating her to return to him.
"You must own that I had cause for provocation," he said, "but I confess that I was too hasty. It is natural, though, that a man should feel it if his wife gets herself into such a position, however innocently; and the more he has trusted, loved, and respected his wife, the more violent will the reaction be. I know, however, that I have had my own shortcomings since we were married, and therefore that I should make every allowance for you. So let us be friends, Beth, and begin all over again, as you once proposed. I am ready to leave Slane and settle wherever you like. Make your own conditions; anything that pleases you will please me."
This letter upset Beth very much. She would almost rather have had an action for divorce brought against her than have been asked to return to Daniel Maclure.
"Ought I to go back?" she asked, willing, with the fatuous persistency of women in like cases, to persevere if it were thought right that she should, although she knew pretty well that the sacrifice would be unavailing so far as he was concerned, and would only entail upon herself the common lot of women so mated – a ruined constitution and corroded mind.
"Why does he suddenly so particularly wish it?" was the question.
The obvious explanation was indirectly conveyed in a letter from her old lawyer. He had written to her in her London lodgings, first of all, but the letter was returned from the Dead Letter Office. Then he had written to Slane, but as he received no answer to that letter and it was not returned, he went in person to inquire about it. Dan declared that he knew nothing about the letter, or about Beth either, if she had left London; but he thought her intimate friends the Kilroys might know where she was. The old gentleman applied to the Kilroys, and having found Beth, wrote to inform her that her great-aunt Victoria Bench's investments had recovered at last, as he had always been pretty sure that they would, and she would accordingly, for the future, find herself in receipt of an income of seven or eight hundred pounds a year. Dan's sudden magnanimity was accounted for. Beth put his effusion and the lawyer's letter before her friends, and asked to be advised. They decided unanimously that, on the one hand, Dan was not a proper person for her to live with, that no decent woman could associate with a man of his mind, habits, and conversation without suffering injury in some sort; while, on the other, they pointed out that, although it would be nice, it would not be good for Dan to have the benefit of Beth's little income. While he was forced to work, he would have to conduct himself with a certain amount of propriety; but if Beth relieved him of the necessity, there would be nothing to restrain him.
This episode roused Beth from her tranquil apathy, and made her think of work once more. But first she had to settle somewhere and make a home for herself; and although she had ample means for all her requirements now, it was not an easy thing to find the special conditions on which she had set her heart. The first impulse of a woman of noble nature is to be consistent, to live up to all she professes to admire. As Beth grew older, to live for others became more and more her ideal of life; – not to live in the world, however, or to be of it, but to work for it.
"I must be quiet," she said to Angelica one day when they were discussing her future. "I am done for so far as work is concerned when I come into contact with crowds. I want to live things then; I don't want to think about them. Excitement makes me content to be, and careless about doing. My truest and best life is in myself, and I can only live it in circumstances of tranquil monotony. People talk so much about making the most of life, but their attempts are curiously bungling. What they call living is for the most part more pain than pleasure to them; for the truth is, that life should not be lived by men of mind, but contemplated; it is the spectator, not the actor, who enjoys and profits. The actor has his moment of applause, but all the rest is misery. People rush to great centres to obtain a knowledge of life, and do not succeed, for there they see nothing but broad effects. We find our knowledge of life in individuals, not in crowds. There is no more individuality in a crowd of people than there is in a flock of sheep. All I know of life, of its infinite diversity, I have learnt here and there from some one person or another, known intimately. A solitary experience, rightly considered in all its bearings, teaches us more than numbers of those incidents of which we see the surface only 'in the joy of eventful living;' and, if the truth were known, I expect it would be found that each one of us had obtained the most valuable part of our experience in such homely details of simple unaffected human nature as came under our observation in our native villages."
"Yes," Angelica answered thoughtfully, "the looker-on sees most of the game. But I don't think you allow enough for differences of temperament. You are thinking of the best conditions for creative work. You mustn't lose sight of all the active service that is going on."
"No; but it is in retirement that the best preparation is made for active service also. And I was thinking of active service more than of creative work just then. The truth is, I am in a state of being oppressed by the thought of my new book. I don't know what has come to me. I am all fretty about it. Writing has lost its charm. I doubt if I shall ever do well enough to make it worth while to write at all. And even if I could, I don't think mere literary success would satisfy me. I have tasted enough of that to know what it would be – a sordid triumph, a mere personal thing."
"Ideala does not think that it is necessarily as a literary woman that you will succeed," Angelica answered. "I thought it was because all the indications you have given of special capacity seem to me to lie in that direction. However, versatile people make mistakes sometimes. They don't always begin with the work they are best able to do; but there is no time lost, for one thing helps another – one thing is necessary to another, I should say, perhaps. Your writing may have helped to perfect you in some other form of expression."
"You cheer me!" Beth exclaimed. "But what form?" She reflected a little, and then she put the puzzle from her. "It will come to me, I dare say," she said, "if I shut the din of the world far from me, and sit with folded arms in contemplation, waiting for the moment and the match which shall fire me to the right pitch of enthusiasm. Nothing worth doing in art is done by calculation."
"I think you are right to keep out of the crowd," said Angelica. "You will get nothing but distraction from without. I should take one of the privileges of a great success to be the right to refuse all invitations that draw one into the social swim. Men and women of high purpose do not arrive in order to be crowded into stuffy drawing-rooms to be stared at."
"My idea of perfect bliss," Beth pursued, "when my work is done, and my friends are not with me, is to lie my length upon a cliff above the sea, listening to the many-murmurous, soothed by it into a sense of oneness with Nature, till I seem to be mixed with the elements, a part of sky and sea and shore, and akin to the wandering winds. This mood for my easy moments; but give me work for my live delight. I know nothing so altogether ecstatic as a good mood for work."
"What you call work is power of expression," said Angelica; "the power to express something in yourself, I fancy."
"Ye – yes," Beth answered, hesitating, as if the notion were new to her. "I believe you are right. What I call work is the effort to express myself."
Mr. Kilroy had come in while they were talking, and sat listening to the last part of the conversation.
"I have just the sort of 'neat little cot in a quiet spot, with a distant view of the rolling sea' that you yearn for, Beth," he said, smiling, when she paused, "and I have come to ask you and Angelica to drive over with me to see it."
"You mean Ilverthorpe Cottage," said Angelica, jumping up. "O Daddy! it's the very place. Two storeys, Beth, ivy, roses, jasmine, wisteria without; and within, space and comfort of every kind – and the sea in sight! Such a pretty garden, too, grass and trees and shrubs and flowers. And near enough for us all to see you as often as you wish. Beth, be excited too! I must bring my violin, I think, and play a triumphal march on the way."
Ilverthorpe Cottage was all and more than Angelica had said, and Beth did not hesitate to take it. It was Mr. Kilroy's property, and the rent was suspiciously low, but Beth supposed that that was because the house was out of the way. She and Angelica spent long happy days in getting it ready for occupation, choosing paper, paint, and furnishments. Mr. Kilroy saw to the stables, which he completed with a saddle-horse and a pony-carriage. There was a short cut across the fields, a lovely walk, from Ilverthorpe House to the Cottage, and when Angelica could not accompany her, Beth would stroll over alone to see how things were getting on, and wander about her little demesne, and love it. Outside her garden, in front of the house, the highroad ran, a sheltered highroad, with a raised footpath, bordered on either side with great trees, oak and elm, chestnut and beech, and a high hawthorn hedge just whitening into blossom. The field-path came out on this highroad, down which she had to walk a few hundred yards to her own gate. Day after day there was an old Irish labourer, a stonebreaker, by the wayside, kneeling on a sack beside a great heap of stones, who gave her a cheery good-morrow as she passed. Once she went across the road and spoke to him. He had the face of a saint at his devotions.
"You kneel there all day long," she said, "and as you kneel you pray, perhaps. Will you pray for me? Pray, pray that I may" – she was going to say succeed, but stopped – "that I may be good."
The man raised his calm eyes, and looked her in the face. "You are good, lady," he said simply.
"Yet pray," she entreated; "and pray too that all I do may be good, and of good effect."
"All you do is good, lady," he answered once more, in the same quiet tone of conviction.
"But I want all I do to be the best for the purpose that can be done."
She put some money in his hand and turned away, and as she went he watched her. She had touched him with her soft gloveless fingers in giving him the money, and when she had gone, he was conscious of the touch; it tingled through him, and he looked at the spot on which the impression remained, as if he expected it to be in some sort visible.
"Now Our Lady love you and the saints protect you, bless your sweet face," he muttered; "and may all you do be the best that can be done for every one. Amen."
A few months in her lovely little house sufficed to restore Beth's mind to its natural attitude – an attitude of deep devotion. She even began to work again, but rather with a view to making herself useful to her friends than to satisfy any ambition or craving of her own. Whatever she did, however, she approached in the spirit of the great musician who dressed himself in his best, and prayed as at a solemn service, when he shut himself up to compose. Beth had stepped away from the old forms by this time. She had escaped from the bondage of the letter that killeth into the realm of the spirit that giveth life. It is not faith in any particular fetish that makes a mind religious, but the quality of reverence. Churches Beth had come to look upon, not with distrust, but with indifference, as an ineffectual experiment of man's. She could find no evidence of a holier spirit or a more divine one in the church than in any other human institution for the propagation of instruction. The church has never been superior to the times, never as far advanced as the best men of the day, never a leader, but rather an opposer of progress, hindering when ideas were new, and only coming in to help when workers without had proved their discoveries, and it was evident that credit would be lost by refusing to recognise them. There is no cruelty the church has not practised, no sin it has not committed, no ignorance it has not displayed, no inconsistency it has not upheld, from teaching peace and countenancing war, to preaching poverty and piling up riches. True, there have been great saints in the church; but then there have been great saints out of it. Saintliness comes of conscientiously cultivating the divine in human nature; it is a seed that is sown and flourishes under the most diverse conditions.
Beth thought much on religion in those quiet days, and read much, looking for spiritual sustenance among the garbage of mind with which man has overlaid it, and finding little to satisfy her, until one night, quite suddenly, as she sat holding her mind in the attitude of prayer, there came to her a wonderful flash of illumination. She had not been occupied with the point that became apparent. It entered her mind involuntarily, and was made clear to her without conscious effort on her part; but it was that which she sought, the truth that moves, makes evident, makes easy, props and stays, and is the instigator of religious action, the source of aspiration, the ground of hope – the which was all contained for Beth in the one old formula interpreted in a way that was new to her: The communion of saints (that inexplicable sympathy between soul and soul), the forgiveness of sins, (working out our own salvation in fear and trembling), the resurrection of the body (reincarnation), and the life everlasting (which is the crown or glory, the final goal).
"But God?" Beth questioned.
"God is love," she read in the book that lay open on the table before her.
Then she clasped her hands over the passage and laid her head on them, and for a long time she sat so, not thinking, but just repeating it to herself softly: "God is love," till all at once there was a blank in her consciousness; thought was suspended. When it returned, she looked up, and in herself were the words: "God is Love – no! Love is God!"
In the joy of the revelation, she arose, and, going to the window, flung it wide open. Far down the east the dawn was dimly burning; the faint sweet breath of it fanned her cheeks; her chest expanded with a great throb, and she exclaimed aloud: "I follow, follow —God– I know not where."
Beth had a task before her that day which she did not relish in the anticipation. She was going as a stopgap to speak at a large meeting to oblige Angelica. She had the credit of being able to speak, and she herself supposed that she could in a way, because of the success of her first attempt; but she did not consent to try again without much hesitation and many qualms, and she would certainly not have consented had not her friends been in a difficulty, with no one at hand to help them out of it but herself. But to be drawn from her hallowed seclusion into such a blaze of publicity, even for once, was not at all to her mind, and much of her wakefulness of the night before had been caused by her shrinking from the prospect.
Late that night after the meeting she returned to her cottage alone, cowering in a corner of the Kilroys' carriage. She was cowering from the recollection of a great crowd that rose with deafening shouts and seemed to be rushing at her – cowering, too, from the inevitable which she had been forced to recognise – her vocation – discovered by accident, and with dismay, for it was not what she would have chosen for herself in any way had it occurred to her that she had any choice in the matter. There were always moments when she would fain have led the life which knows no care beyond the cultivation of the arts, no service but devotion to them, no pleasure like the enjoyment of them, – a selfish life made up of impersonal delights, such as music, which is emotion made audible, painting, which is emotion made visible, and poetry, which is emotion made comprehensible; – and such a life could not have been anything but grateful to one like Beth, who had the capacity for so many interests of the kind. She was debarred from all that, however, by grace of nature. Beth could not have lived for herself had she tried. So that now, when the call had come, and the way in which she could best live for others was made plain to her, she had no thought but to pursue it.
The carriage put her down at her garden-gate, and she stood awhile in the moonlight, listening to it as it rolled away with patter of horses' hoofs and rattle of harness, listening intently as if the sound concerned her. Then she let herself in, and was hurrying up to her room, but stopped short on the stairs, cowering from the crowd that rose and cheered and cheered and seemed to be rushing at her.
Her bedroom had windows east, west, and south, so that she had sunrise and sunset and the sun all day. When she went in now, she found the lamps lighted and all the windows shut, and she went round and flung them open with an irritable gesture. Her nerves were overwrought; the slightest contrariety upset her. The sweet fresh country air streamed in and the tranquil moonlight. These alone would ordinarily have been enough to soothe her, but now she paid no heed to them. When she had opened the windows, she began to take off her things in feverish haste, pacing about the room restlessly the while, as if that helped her to be quicker. Everything she wore seemed too hot, too heavy, or too tight, and she flung hat and cloak and bodice down just where she took them off in her haste to get rid of them. Throwing her things about like that was an old trick of her childhood, and becoming conscious of what she was doing, she remembered it, and began to think of herself as she had been then, and so forget her troubled self as she was at that moment – fresh from the excitement and terror of an extraordinary achievement, a great success. For she had spoken that night as few have spoken – spoken to a hostile audience and fascinated them by the power of her personality, the mesmeric power which is part of the endowment of an orator, and had so moved them that they rose at last and cheered her for her eloquence, whether they held her opinions or not. Then there had come friendly handshakes and congratulations and encouragement; and one had said, "Beth is launched at last upon her true career."