Heart and Cross

CHAPTER XI

“Johnnie, is there anything the matter. Why have you been sitting there?” cried I.

“Oh, no, there’s nothing the matter,” said Johnnie, in such a tone as a wild beast making a snap at one might have used if it had possessed the faculty of words. “I was there because I happened to be there before you came into the room, Mrs. Crofton; I beg your pardon! I don’t mean to be rude.”

“I think it is quite necessary you should say as much,” said I. “Your sisters and I have been talking here for some time, quite unaware of your presence. That is not becoming. No one ought to do such things, especially a young man of right feeling like yourself.”

“Oh, you think I have right feelings,” cried Johnnie, bitterly, “you think I am man enough to know what honor means? That is something, at least. I have been well brought up, haven’t I? Mrs. Crofton,” continued the unfortunate youth, “you were rather hard upon Maurice just now—I heard you, and he deserves it. If I were like Maurice, I should be ashamed to be as useless as he is. I’m not so useless now, in spite of everything; but you’ll be frank with me—why does Alice speak of keeping house with my mother and Johnnie? Why, when Kate, and even little Mary, are supposed to have homes of their own, and Maurice, of course, to be provided for—why is there to be a special establishment, all neutral colored and in the shade, for my mother, and Alice, and me?”

I sat gazing at the poor youth in the most profound confusion and amazement. What could I say to him? How, if he did not perceive it himself, could I explain the naturalness of poor Alice’s anticipations? I had not a word to say; his question took me entirely by surprise, and struck me dumb—it was unanswerable.

“You do not say anything,” said Johnnie, vehemently. “Why does Alice suppose she will have to take care of me all my life through? Why should I go to contribute that alternative of shade which makes the landscape picturesque?—picturesque!” exclaimed poor Johnnie, breathing out the words upon a long breath of wrath and indignation; “is that all I am good for? Do you suppose God has made me in a man’s form, with a man’s heart, only to add a subtle charm to another man’s happiness by the contrast of my misery? I believe in no such thing, Mrs. Crofton. Is that what Alice means?”

“I believe in no such thing either,” said I, relieved to be able to say something; “and you forget, Johnnie, that the same life which Alice assigned to you she chose for herself. She thought, I suppose, because your health is not strong, that you would choose to live at home—she thought”–

“Mrs. Crofton,” said Johnnie, “why don’t you say it out? she thought—but why say thought—she knew I was a cripple, and debarred from the joyous life of man; she thought that to such as me no heavenly help could come; it did not occur to her that perhaps there might be an angel in the spheres who would love me, succor me, give me a place among the happy—yes, even me! You think I speak like a fool,” continued the young man, the flush of his excitement brightening all his face, and the natural superlatives of youth, all the warmer and stronger for the physical infirmities which seemed to shut him out from their legitimate use, pouring to his lips, “and so I should have been, but for the divine chance that brought me here. Ah, Mrs. Crofton, you did not know what an Easter of the soul you were asking me to! I came only a boy, scarcely aware of the dreary colors in which life lay before me. Now I can look at these dreary colors only by way of Alice’s contrast—to make the reality more glorious—for I too shall have the home and the life of a man!”

He stopped, not because his words were exhausted, but because breath failed him—he stood before me, raising himself erect out of his habitual stoop of weakness, strengthened by the inspiring force of the great delusion, which gave color to his face and nerve to his hand. Looking at him so, his words did not seem such sad, bitter, heart-breaking folly as they were. Poor boy! poor Johnnie! how would he fall prostrate upon the cold, unconsolatory earth, when this spell was broken! I could have cried over him, as he stood there defying me; he had drunk that cup of Circe—but he did not know in his momentary intoxication that it was poison to him.

“My dear Johnnie,” said I, “I am very glad of anything that makes you happy—but there is surely no occasion to speak so strongly. Alice, I must remind you again, chose exactly the same life for herself that she supposed for you”–

“Alice has had her youth and her choice,” said Johnnie, with a calmer tone, and sinking, his first excitement over, into a chair; “but she does not think Maurice is likely to share that gray life of hers—Maurice, who, as you say yourself, is of no use in the world—nor Harry, whom they have all forgotten now he is in Australia, nor the children at home; only mamma when she is old, and Johnnie—well, it is of no use speaking. A man’s business is not to speak, but to work.”

“That is very true, certainly,” said I: “but tell me, will you—if it is not wrong to ask—what has made this great change in your ideas, all at once?”

“Ah, Mrs. Crofton, don’t you know?” cried Johnnie, blushing, a soft overpowering youthful blush, which would have done no discredit to Clara herself; and the poor, foolish boy looked at me with an appealing triumphant look, as if he at once entreated me to say, and defied me to deny that she was altogether an angel, and he the very happiest of boys or men.

“My dear boy,” said I, “don’t be angry with me. I’ve known you all your life, Johnnie. I don’t mean to say a word against Miss Reredos—but tell me, has there been any explanation between her and you?”

He hesitated a moment, blushing still.

“No,” he said, after a pause; “no—I have not been able to arrange my thoughts at all yet. I have thought of nothing but—but herself—and this unimaginable hope of happiness—and I am a man of honor, Mrs. Crofton. I will not speak to her till I know whether I have anything but love to offer—not because I am so base as to suppose that money could recommend a man to her, or so foolish as to think that I will ever have anything beyond income; but when I do speak, you understand, Mrs. Crofton, it is not for vague love-making, but to ask her to be my wife.”

He looked at me with his sudden air of manhood and independence, again somewhat defiant. Heaven help the poor boy! I heard myself groaning aloud in the extremity of my bewilderment and confusion; poor Johnnie, with his superb self-assumption!—he, a fortnight ago, the cheerfulest of boy invalids, the kindest of widow’s sons!—and she, five years older than he, at the lowest reckoning, an experienced young lady, with dreams of settlements and trousseaux occupying her mature mind! Alack, alack! what was to come of it? I sat silent, almost gaping with wonderment at the boy. At last I caught at the idea of asking him what his prospects or intentions were—though without an idea that he had any prospects, or knew in the least what he was talking about.

“You spoke of income, Johnnie—may I ask what you were thinking of?”

Johnnie blushed once more, though after a different fashion; he grew confidential and eager—like himself.

“I have told no one else,” he said, “but I will tell you, Mrs. Crofton, not only because you are our oldest friend, but because I have just told you something so much more important. I—I have written something—nobody knows!”

“Oh, you poor boy!” cried I, quite thankful to be able on less delicate ground to make an outcry over him; “don’t you think half the people in the country have written something?—and are you to make an income by that?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Johnnie, with dignity, “but it’s accepted, Mrs. Crofton—that makes all the difference. Half the country don’t have letters from the booksellers saying that it’s very good and they’ll publish it on the usual terms. I could show you the letter,” added my young author, blushing once more, and putting his hand to his breast-pocket—“I have it here.”

And there it was, accordingly, to my intense wonderment—and Johnnie’s hopes had, however small, an actual foundation. On the book about to be published on “the usual terms” the poor boy had built up his castle. Here he was to bring Miss Reredos to a fairy bower of love and literature—which, alas! I doubted would be very little to that young lady’s taste; but I dared not tell Johnnie so—poor, dreaming, foolish cripple-boy! Nothing afterwards, perhaps, would taste so sweet as that delusion, and though the natural idea that “it would be kindness to undeceive him” of course moved me strongly, I had not the boldness to try, knowing very well that it would do no good. He must undeceive himself, that was evident. Thank Heaven he was so young! When his eyes were opened he would be the bitterest and most miserable of misanthropes for a few months, and then, it was to be hoped, things would mend. I saw no other ending to Johnnie’s romance. But he went hobbling away from me with his stick and his stoop, as full of his momentary fallacious happiness, as if he had been the handsome young prince of the fairy tale, whom the love of Miss Reredos would charm back to his proper comeliness. Alas, poor Johnnie! If his Laura could have wrought that miracle I fear the spell was still impossible, for lack of the love—miraculous magic! the only talisman which even in a fairy tale can charm the lost beauty back.

CHAPTER XII

“Now, if I had the luck to hold a confidential talk with Maurice, I should have gone round the entire Harley family,” said I to myself the next morning, “and be in the secret of sundry imaginations which have not seen the light of day—but Maurice, fortunately, is not likely to make me nor any one else his confidante. I wonder if there is anything at all concerning him which it would be worth one’s while to be curious about?”

The question was solved sooner than I thought. When everybody had left our pleasant breakfast-room but myself, and I, with my little basket of keys in my hand, was preparing to follow, Maurice, who had been lingering by the great window, startled me by asking for a few minutes’ conversation, “if I was quite at leisure.” I put down my basket with the utmost promptitude. Curiosity, if not courtesy, made me perfectly at leisure to hear anything he might have to say.

“I have undertaken a very foolish office,” said Maurice—“I have had the supreme conceit and presumption of supposing that I could perhaps plead with you, Mrs. Crofton, the cause of a friend.”

“I trust I shall feel sufficiently flattered,” said I, assuming the same tone. “And pray who is the friend who has the advantage of your support, Maurice? and what does he want of me?”

The young man colored and looked affronted—he was highly sensitive to ridicule, like all self-regarding men.

“Nay, pray don’t convince me so distinctly of my folly before I start,” he said; “the friend is a college friend of mine, who was so absurd as to marry before he had anything to live on; a very good fellow with—oh! don’t be afraid—perfectly sound views, I assure you, Mrs. Crofton, though he is acquainted with me.”

“I should think being acquainted with you very likely to help a sensible man to sound views,” said I, with some natural spite, thankful for the opportunity of sending a private arrow into him in passing; “and what does your friend want that I can help him in?”

“The Rector of Estcourt is an old man, and very ill,” said Maurice, after a pause of offence; “Owen, my friend, has a curacy in Simonborough. I told him I should venture—though of course aware I had not the slightest title to influence you—to name him to Mrs. Crofton, in case of anything happening.”

“Aware that you have not the slightest title to influence me—that means, does it not, Maurice?” said I, “that you rather think you have some claim upon that Rectory at Estcourt, and that you magnanimously resign it in favor of your friend? It was your father’s—it is your mother’s desire to see you in his place—you have thought of it vaguely all your life as a kind of inheritance, which you were at liberty to accept or withdraw from; now, to be sure, we are very, very old friends—is not that plainly, and without any superfluity of words, what you mean?”

Maurice made a still longer pause—he was seized with the restlessness common to men when they are rather hard tested in conversation. He got up unawares, picked up a book off the nearest table, as if he meant to answer me by means of that, and then returned to his chair. Then, after a little further struggle, he laughed, growing very red at the same time.

“You put the case strongly, but I will not say you are wrong,” he answered; “after all, I believe, if it must be put into words, that is about how the thing stands; but, of course, you know I am perfectly aware”–

“Exactly,” said I; “we both understand it, and it is not necessary to enter further into that part of the subject; but now, tell me, Maurice, supposing your rights of natural succession to be perfectly acknowledged, why is it that you substitute another person, and postpone your own settlement to his?”

“My dear Mrs. Crofton,” cried Maurice, restored to himself by the question, “what would not I give to be able to accept as mine that calm, religious life?—what would not I relinquish for a faith as entire and simple as my friend Owen’s? But that is my misfortune. I suppose my mind is not so wholesomely constituted as other people’s. I cannot believe so and so, just because I am told to believe it—I cannot shape my creed according to the received pattern. If I could, I should be but too happy; but que voulez-vous? a man cannot act against his convictions—against his nature.”

“Nay, I assure you I am a very calm spectator,” said I; “I would not have either one thing or another. I have not the least doubt that you will know better some day, and why should I concern myself about the matter?”

“Why, indeed?” echoed Maurice, faintly; but he was mortified; he expected a little honor, at the very least, as his natural due, if not a womanish attempt at proselytizing. The discomfiture of my adversary was balm to my eyes—I was, as may be perceived, in a perfectly unchristian state of mind.

“And how then about yourself?—what do you mean to do?” asked I; “you are getting towards the age when men begin to think of setting up houses and families for themselves. Do you mean to be a College Don all your life, Maurice? I fear that must be rather an unsatisfactory kind of existence; and one must take care, if that is the case, not to ask any young ladies again to meet you—some one might happen to be too captivating for your peace of mind—a Miss Reredos might outweigh a fellowship;—such things have been even with men of minds as original as your own.”

“Miss Reredos! ah, she amuses herself!” said Maurice, with a conscious smile.

“Yes, I think you are very well matched,” said I, calmly; “you will not do her much harm, nor she inflict a very deep wound on your heart, but it might have happened differently. People as wise as yourself, when their turn comes, are often the most foolish in these concerns.”

“Ah, you forget that I am past youth,” said Maurice; “you, Mrs. Crofton, have made a private agreement, I suppose, with the old enemy, but I have no such privilege—I have done with that sort of thing long ago. However, about Owen, if I may remind you, is there anything to say?”

“Somebody asked me for the living of Estcourt when your father lay dying; I was younger then, as you say—I was deeply horrified,” said I. “We must wait.”

“Ah, yes; but my father was a man in the prime of life, and this is an old man, whom even his own family cannot expect to live long,” said Maurice; “but, of course, if you do not like it, I have not another word to say.”

“Ah, Maurice,” said I, forgetting for a moment the personage who sat before me, and thinking of Dr. Harley’s death-bed, and the fatherless children there so helpless and dependent on other people’s judgment, “your father was a good man, but he had not the heart to live after he lost his fortune, and your mother is a good woman, but she had not the heart to bring you up poorly and bravely in your own home. They are my dear friends, and I dare speak of them even to you. Why did she send you to that idle uncle of yours, to be brought up in idleness?—you big, strong, indolent man! What is the good of you, though you are Fellow of Exeter? You might have been of some use in the world by this time if you had lived among your brothers and sisters, a widow’s son.”

Maurice started—rose up—made a surprised exclamation of my name—and then dropped into his chair again without saying anything. He did not answer me a word. The offence melted out of his face, but he kept his eyes down and did not look at me. I could not tell whether he was angry—I had been moved by my own feelings beyond, for the moment, thinking of his.

“Ask your friend to come and see you here,” I said, after an awkward little pause; “say, Mr. Crofton and I will be glad if he will dine with us before you go—perhaps, to-morrow, Maurice, and that will leave him time to get home on Saturday—and we will think about it, should the living of Estcourt fall vacant. Forgive me,” I continued, as I rose to go away, “I said more than I ought to have said.”

He took my hand and wrung it with an emphatic pressure; what he said I made out only with difficulty, I think it was, “No more than is true.”

And I left him with somewhat uncomfortable feelings. I had not the very least right to lecture this young man; quite the other way—for was not I a woman and an illiterate person, and he Fellow of his College? I confess I did not feel very self-complacent as I left the room. This third confidential interview, in which I had over-passed the prudent limits of friendliness, did not feel at all satisfactory. Nevertheless, I was glad to see that Maurice was magnanimous—that he was likely to forgive me—and that possibly there were elements of better things even in his regarding indolence. All which symptoms, though in a moral point of view highly gratifying, made me but feel the more strongly that I had gone beyond due limits, and exceeded the margin of truth-telling and disagreeableness which one is not allowed towards one’s guests, and in one’s own house.

CHAPTER XIII

It may be allowed to me to confess that I watched during the remainder of that day with a little natural, but extremely absurd curiosity to see “what effect” our conversation had upon Maurice Harley. After I had got over my own unpleasant sensations, I began to flatter myself, with natural vanity, that perhaps I might have “done him good.” I had an inkling that it was absurd, but that made very little difference, and I acknowledge that I felt quite a new spur and stimulus of interest in the young man. I listened to his chance observations during the day with an attention which I had never before bestowed upon them. For the moment, instead of simple impatience of his indolence, and virtuous, gentlemanly good-for-nothingness, I began to sympathize somewhat in the lamenting admiration of his friends that so much talent should be lost to the world. Altogether, in my capacity of hostess to Maurice, I was for that day a reformed and penitent person, full of compunction for my offence. I am obliged to confess, however, that there was no corresponding change upon my guest. Maurice demeaned himself that day exactly as he had done the day before—was as superior, and critical, and indifferent, as much above the common uses of life and motives of humanity as he had ever been. Still, my penitential feelings lasted out the day, and it was not till I perceived how entirely he was laying himself out to charm and captivate Miss Reredos and make up to her for the attentions she had paid him, that I detected myself in the simple-minded vanity of expecting to have “done him good.” The flirtation that evening was so evident, and Maurice threw himself so much more warmly into it than on any former occasion, that we, the spectators, were all roused to double observation. Johnnie sat behind the little table in the corner, with the stereoscope before him, blazing the wildest rage out of his half-hidden eyes upon his brother, and sometimes quite trembling with passion. Alice moved about with a little indignant dilation of her person and elevation of her head—half out of regard to the honor of her “sex,” which Miss Reredos, she supposed, was compromising, and half out of shame and annoyance at the “infatuation” of her brother. And not quite knowing what this new fervor might portend, I took an opportunity as I passed by Maurice’s chair to speak to him quietly—

“Is Miss Reredos, then, to be more attractive than the fellowship?” I said, lingering a moment as I passed.

Maurice looked up at me with a certain gleam of boyish malice and temper in his eye.

“You know we are very well matched, and I cannot do her much harm,” he said, quoting my own words.

This was the good I had done him—this, out of a conversation which ended so seriously, was the only seed that had remained in that fertile and productive soil, the mind of Maurice Harley, and behold already its fructifications. I went back to my seat, and sat down speechless. I was inexpressibly angry and mortified for the moment. To be sure it was a little private and personal vanity which made the special sting. Yet he had been unquestionably moved by my candid opinion of him, in which very little admiration was mingled with the regret—but had I not piqued his vanity as well?

As for Johnnie, having been taken into his confidence, I was doubly alive to the feelings with which he watched his brother. Miss Reredos managed admirably well between the lover real and the lover make-believe, her vanity being of course in play even more decidedly than anybody else’s. I believe she was quite deceived by the sudden warmth of Maurice. I believe the innocent young woman fell captive in an instant, not to his fascinations, but to the delusion of believing that she had fascinated him, and that the name of the Fellow of Exeter was that evening inscribed upon her long list of victims; but, notwithstanding, she would not give up Johnnie; I suppose his youthful adoration was something new and sweet to the experienced young lady—the absoluteness of his trust in her and admiration of her was delicious to the pretty coquette, with whom warier men were on their guard. Over Johnnie she was absolute, undisputed sovereign—he was ready to defy the whole world in her behalf, and disown every friend he had at her bidding. Such homage, even from a cripple, was too sweet to be parted with. Somehow, by means of those clever eyes of hers, even while at the height of her flirtation with Maurice, she kept Johnnie in hand, propitiated, and calmed him. I don’t know how it is done—I don’t think Alice knew either; but I am not sure that a certain instinctive perception of the manner of that skilful double movement did not come natural to Clara Sedgwick, and stimulate her disgust at the proceeding. If she had not been married so early and been so happy a little wife, Clara might have been a little flirt herself—who knows? I saw that she had an intuition how it was done.

As for Miss Polly, she could do nothing but talk about the advantages of useful training for girls. “If these poor children should turn out flirts, Clare!” she cried, in dismay. To be sure, Emmy, the pretty one, was only ten and a half—but still if education could hinder such a catastrophe, there was certainly no time to be lost.

Mr. Owen came to dinner next day, according to my invitation. He was a young man, younger than Maurice, and a hundred times more agreeable. He was curate of St. Peter’s, in Simonborough, where a curate among the multitude of divines congregated about the cathedral, was as hard to find or make any note of as the famous needle in the bundle of hay. And it is very probable that he was not a brilliant preacher, or noted for any gift in particular; but I liked the honest, manful young fellow, who was not ashamed either to do his work or to talk of it when occasion called—nor afraid to marry upon his minute income, nor to tell me with a passing blush and a happy laugh, which became him, what a famous little housekeeper his wife was, and what fun they had over her economics. Maurice heard and smiled—calm, ineffable, superior—and wished he could only submit his unhappily more enlightened mind to a simple faith like Owen’s. And Owen, on his part, was respectful of the dainty disbeliever, and took off his hat to that scepticism, born of idleness and an unoccupied mind, for which I, in my secret heart, for sheer impatience and disgust, could have whipped the Fellow of Exeter. Mr. Owen was as respectful of it as if that pensive negation had been something actual and of solemn importance. He shook his head and talked to me mysteriously of poor Harley. Maurice had rather distinguished himself at college before he sank into his fellowship. His old companions who were of the same standing were a little proud of his scholarly attainments. “He could be anything if he chose,” they said to themselves; and because Maurice did not choose, his capabilities looked all the grander. Owen was quite a partisan of Harley. “What a pity it was!” the honest fellow said, “with such a mind, if he could but get right views”–

At which juncture I struck the excellent young man dumb and breathless by uttering aloud a fervent desire and prayer that by some happy chance Maurice should fall in love.

Mr. Owen looked at me for a moment thunderstruck, the words of his own former sensible sentence hanging half-formed about his lips; then, when he had recovered himself a little, he smiled and said, “You have so much confidence in a female preacher? No doubt they are irresistible—but not in matters of doctrine, perhaps.”

“No such thing,” said I, “I have no confidence in female preachers or religious courtship; but apart from the intense satisfaction which I own I should have in seeing Maurice make, as people say, a fool of himself, that is the only means I see of bringing him back to life.”

“To life!” said my new acquaintance, with a lively look of interrogation.

“Oh, I do not mean anything grand; I mean common life, with the housekeeping to be provided for,” said I smiling, “and the daily bread, and the other mouths that have to eat it. I daresay, even you yourself, who seem to stand in no such need as Maurice, have found out something in the pleasant jingle you were talking of—of Mrs. Owen’s basket of keys.”

The young man blushed once more that slight passing color of happiness, and answered gravely, yet with a smile, “It is true, I see what you mean—and it is very possible indeed—but,” he added, stopping abruptly, and looking at his friend, who was in the full tide of flirtation with Miss Reredos, “Mrs. Crofton, look there!”

I shook my head. “Nothing will come of it,” said I; “they are amusing themselves.”

Condign punishment came upon my head almost as I spoke; I had turned my head incautiously, and Johnnie and Alice had both heard me.

“Amusing themselves!” cried Johnnie, hissing the words into my ears in a whisper. “Amusing! do you suppose that it is anything but her angel-sweetness, Mrs. Crofton, that makes her so forbearing with Maurice—my brother? I adore her for it,” cried (but in a whisper) the deluded boy.

“Amusing themselves!” cried Alice, raising her head, “and you can say so, Mrs. Crofton? Oh, I am ashamed, to think a woman should forget herself so strangely; I could forgive anything—almost anything,” said Alice, correcting herself with a blush, “which really sprang from true strong feeling; but flirting—amusing themselves! Oh, Mrs. Crofton!”

“My dear child, it is not my fault,” said I, “I have no hand in the matter, either one way or the other.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Alice, with that lively impatience and disinclination to suffer a dear friend to rest in an opinion different from her own, which I have felt myself and understood perfectly,—“but you will not see how unworthy it is—how dishonoring to women! That is what wounds me.”

“Is it not dishonoring to men as well?—two are playing at it, and the other creature is accountable likewise. Are you not concerned for the credit of your sex?” said I, turning to Owen.

The young curate laughed, Alice blushed and looked deeply affronted, and Johnnie, turning all the fury of his jealousy upon me, looked as if it would have pleased him to do me some bodily harm. Well, well, one can bear all that—and I am happy to say that I think I accelerated distantly and humbly by this said conversation, the coming on of Maurice Harley’s fate.