Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Harvest/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her."
It is Sunday morning, and all Silverbridge that is not bed-ridden, infidel, and naked, is sitting in church listening to Mr. Skipworth's droning voice that makes up in sound what it lacks in sense. The chancel door is open, and through it my eyes, weary of gazing at the vacuous rotundity of my pastor and master's countenance, wander, refreshed by the pale green of the young leaves on which the lights and shadows quiver and leap. A bird, alighted on the threshold, is sending his shrill clear song straight into the church, and Mr. Skipworth shakes his head impatiently, as though he said, "How dare that impudent bird lift up its voice while I am speaking?" But oh! how much more sweetly does the voice of the ignorant bird inform our hearts and ears than that of the preaching, reasoning man!
The bucolic part of the congregation sits stolid and sleepy. They have listened to him Sunday after Sunday for the last twenty years, most of them will listen twenty more; and if he were suddenly to awake out of his sloth and preach a good rousing sermon, it would probably disagree with them horribly, and give them a moral indigestion, making them uncomfortable for weeks. If you put the question to them whether they would like to be spiritually awakened, they would tell you that they do very well as they are, and see no necessity whatever for a vigorous stirring up. To them, heaven is on the right hand, hell on the left, and church in the middle; to go to church is to be safe for the former, to stay away from church is to go to the latter sharp and sure. Church is church, and it does not much signify to them what they hear there—there's always the Bible and the Prayer-book to fall back upon. They do not make any very strenuous efforts to unlock the gate that leads into the kingdom of heaven: they walk decorously and slowly according to their lights. There are certain well-known landmarks in sin that they steer clear of; for the rest, it is out of all conscience to suppose that honest industrious bodies, who say their responses and amens every Sunday of their lives, can be anything but safe for a comfortable place in the next world. Among these simple folks are some wolves in sheep's clothing; men who beat their wives, neglect their children, and spend their earnings in the ale-house, who are, in fact, veritable mauvais sujets. But mark the difference! These men come up to time every Sunday morning: in their places they sit with their pommelled wives and hungry children, with a decent coat, and a clean face, and steady legs—respectable. Let them commit one tithe of these misdemeanours and stop away from worship, and they are outcasts.
Under the pulpit, in the square red-curtained pew of the Vashers, sits Silvia, Paul Vasher's wife. I know she is there, though I have not glanced once in her direction. But now, as Mr. Skipworth closes his book and we all rise, I look across the church and we meet each other's eyes fully and fairly, face to face at last. The dawning look of triumph wavers and dies before the cold steady scorn of mine. Ay, Madam Silvia! though you stand there, his wife, and I stand here lonely, forsaken—though your words have come true and you have got your heart's desire—you are a cheat, an interloper: it is I who am conqueror, not you. You stole Paul's body and name from me: but his heart, his love, his life are mine, and you know it. He will not even be seen by your side on this your first appearance among his own people. All this my eyes say to her as we look upon each other, and then we kneel down. At the gate Mrs. Vasher's carriage awaits her, superbly appointed, as are all her surroundings at all times; and I think to myself of how small I should feel in spite of all the frippery and bravery of it if I had to get into it and drive away alone.
"Handsomest woman I ever saw in my life;" I hear the governor's voice saying as we cross the churchyard behind him; "and Vasher ought to have been with her."
I smile to myself as I listen. Will not every man who looks on Silvia's face condemn Paul as a selfish, cold-hearted wretch for his indifference? Talk about "Beauty being only skin deep," "Handsome is as handsome does," and the rest of these worthless, lying sayings that man never spoke, which are rather the embodied spite of generations of plain women, who, finding the grapes denied them, declared them to be sour—it is no such thing. Beauty is power, love, influence, rank, and riches; beauty covers a multitude of sins for which the possessor will never be punished so long as she can ravish the eyes of men with her sweet looks and smiles. Ugly folks may starve and nobody cares, but Providence sends good things to fill the mouths of the beautiful. Who does not feel his heart turn warmly towards the joyous, winsome, lovely woman, as to a flower, a picture, or anything else delightful to the eye? The very sense of pleasure it communicates to us makes us grateful to the cause, therefore we love it.
Yes, Silvia will have consolation offered to her, enough and to spare. She is altered: there is more expression in her face. She has suffered keenly, I think, since that night at Luttrell when I saw her last. She has her wish, but, if her eyes speak truth, it has brought her little peace.
I pause in untying my bonnet-strings, to think of how Paul and I would have spent this Sabbath morning if I had been his wife, he my husband. We should have walked to church, I think, across the glistening, fresh park and fields; we should have paused now and again to gather a flower or two by the way. We should have given each other lectures as to our deportment when we got into church; he would have put my bonnet straight, and made me tidy in the porch before we went in. In the Litany I am sure he would have kissed me, and in the Ten Commandments I am sure I should have kissed him, and during the sermon—for there is nobody to see—I should have slipped my hand into his big brown one.
I catch the reflection of my face in the mirror, and start back: it warns me of what I am doing—thinking; and I have vowed that I will never look back—that I will keep my eyes fixed straight and steady on the monotonous level of to-day.
"If you don't want to find the governor dancing a hornpipe on the dining-room table, come down!" says Dolly, rushing in; and I follow her in hot haste.
Heavy as my heart is, my heels are light enough. On Sundays, for some unknown reason, papa always seems to feel our numbers pressing more heavily upon him than any other day, and so to speak throws our existences in our faces as a fact of which we ought to be deeply and abidingly ashamed, although what finger we had in the pie, and why our presence in this life should be set down to our own determined and unaided obstinacy and vice, is rather more than we can understand. At these times the governor does not look upon us as decent responsible souls, but as so many mouths that he is bound to fill, and for my part I feel intensely ashamed of being obliged to eat at all, and that I should hold a very different position in his eyes if I could do without any such sublunary matters as food and drink and clothing. While he fulminates against the beef, the butcher, the carving knife, the plates, and the round world and all that is therein, I speculate as to whom he might consider a suitable person to rear and maintain his family, reserving to himself the small rights of controlling our souls, bodies, looks, words, and actions. Clearly he thinks it no legitimate affair of his; but a man who will adopt ten children and provide for them, is not to be met with every day. While as to Providence—whom he possibly regards as the person to blame—why, Providence, in providing us with a father, evidently considers it has done its duty, and there is an end o't. By the time the governor's plate is empty his angry mutters have ceased, and peace, dove-like and beef inspired, broods mildly over us.
The best of men is better full than empty, and the most rampagious of men is ten degrees less rampagious when he has eaten a good dinner; and if I were going to keep house, I would not forget that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. I will give Dolly excellent advice on the subject when she marries.
At dessert a remark of papa's strikes me like a blow.
"Vasher is coming here this afternoon; I saw him yesterday, and made a point of it."
Fancy papa pressing anybody to enter his hospitable house—it sounds wonderfully like the spider and the fly!
"Did he seem unwilling to come, then?" asks mother.
"Not exactly, but he hesitated in a queer way—said he never went anywhere. He inquired for you!" continues the governor, nodding at me.
"Did he?" I say, with my eyes fixed on the apple I am peeling.
"You will call there to-morrow," he says to mother, "and take the girls?"
"I will call."
"I won't go," says Dolly, in an angry tone aside to me: not if I am tied in a cart like a pig going to market!"
"Supposing he comes now," I say to myself, "before I can get away;" and I sit in a restless misery until the familiar chuck of papa's thumb releases us.
"Mother," I say, in the drawing-room," I am going out at once. I shall not come in until the coast is clear."
"May I come with you?" asks Dolly.
"Not now, dear," I say, kissing the soft cheek that has never blushed or paled for love of any man living yet; "we will go out together to-morrow."
As I go through the garden I press my hands hard against my heart, and a mist creeps over my eyes, blotting out the garden, the flowers, and the sky. He is coming, here where his feet trod every nook and corner beside mine, here where we had our one perfect day of happiness and content; but he is not coming to me—he will sit in the old familiar room where we sat together so often, and I shall be out here alone. We are both alive, and well, and strong, living in the same place; but between us lies a woman's plain gold wedding-ring.
I hurry away to the orchard, and sit down under the very same tree where Jack and I sat so many years ago with our beasts and birds all about us. I wonder if the time seems as long to him as it does to me, or if I look as old as I feel? (Jack's ridiculous old question of whether I would rather be a bigger fool than I look, or look a bigger fool than I am, here comes into my mind, and provokes a smile.) Twenty-two next birthday is a considerable age; but, perhaps, if I were happy, it would not seem so much. How the bees are humming and buzzing all about the trees, as though they smelt the pink and white buds that are forcing their way through the dull brown boughs! How carelessly the birds are singing! O bees! O birds! can you not give me a little of your light-heartedness, your forgetfulness? You have hardships, no doubt, but you do not seem to be able to remember. . . . God does well to make your memories blank ones.
I leave my place and saunter along to a belt of trees that girdles round a dark, sullen pool, set with dank weeds, and ugly henbane and nightshade lying in the far corner of the orchard. It is, in fact, an outlet to the meadows beyond, for behind the pool rises a low stone wall with a stile. I do not often come this way, for I hate the spot, and yet it fascinates me, and I pause to look down into the sluggish depths. A sudden tongue of sunlight pierces the close-set trees, and trembles on the black water, and in the momentary illumination I see strange, loathsome, misshapen horrors, that writhe, and turn, and wriggle away into dark corners. This pool typifies to me a foul heart that conceals many an ugly secret, and slinks away from the light that reveals its deformity.
A step behind me makes me lift my eyes from its black surface, and there, on the other side of the wall, stands Paul Vasher. I had meant to put out a cool, friendly hand to him so easily (if ever we met), looked at him with such careless, friendly eyes, and said, "How do you do?" to him so glibly. Why then do I stand silent, with unlifted hand, staring at him! I am dumb with pain—not love; I am looking at him in sorrow—not love. Oh! what have these past years held for him that they have altered face, look, and figure so fearfully? You may be loved for your own sake, Paul Vasher, but never more will a woman love you for your beauty. Grey, haggard, worn—who could believe that you had ever been proud, imperious, passionate? A bitter pain shoots through my heart as I recall the face that I saw in my looking-glass three hours ago-pale as it was, and a little fallen; but with such suffering writ on it as on this? No! After all it is he who speaks first, and my words used to be so much more frequent and ready than his.
"I was going to the Manor House," he says.
He is standing beside me now. We make each other no greeting.
"Let me look at you," he says, coming a step nearer; "I have not seen you for three years, remember."
He stands looking into my face, line by line, feature by feature, for a full minute, then he turns away.
"You can never have cared as I did," he says—"never—to look as you look to-day."
"Hush!" I cry, starting aside; "we made our last farewells, spoke our last words on that Christmas morning: in this present we are nothing to each other—nothing."
"And may we not remember?"
"Remember!" I repeat, turning pale. "Do you not see that there is the sin, there the wickedness? We must not remember—we will not!"
"Speak for yourself, child," he says bitterly. "I am too old now to learn the meaning of the word forget. Have you learnt it?" he cries, with the old jealous ring in his voice that I know so well—and it turns me giddy and sick with the memories it brings.
"Why did you come back?" I ask, smiting my two hands together, "why did you do it?"
"Why did I? Because if I had not I should have gone mad, or died of longing to hear the sound of your voice, and for a look of your sweet face."
"Then you did not love her?" the erring words leap straight from my heart to my lips without my own volition.
"Love her?" He looks down at the pool at our feet, looks up at God's heavenly azure shining through the exquisite leaves. "This is my life with that woman"—he makes a gesture towards the black, foul waters;—"that,”—with a gesture towards the sky,—"is my love for you. Tell me," he says,—"tell me how have these years passed with you?"
"They have not killed me," I say, turning away my white face, "and (with a little laugh) they have not made me thin, but———"
Why do I lift my desolate, tearless eyes to those dark, weary ones, heavy with the love that must not, dare not be given to me?
He draws a deep breath and turns as pale as death.
Suddenly I step out of the shadow into the sunlight, and he follows me. Half way across the orchard I turn to him and speak.
"You have come back, Paul, which you should not have done, without warning; and we have met, as we should not have done. But this is our last talk together: henceforward we are acquaintances and meet as such. If ever we fall again into such words as we have fallen into to-day, I shall go away, and never come back while you are here. You will not drive me away, will you? Paul! Paul! you are stronger than I—help me to be strong too!" By which it will appear that my long night of fierce struggle with my unruly heart has availed me but little.
"Am I stronger?" he says, standing still. "Whether I am or not you shall not have appealed to me in vain; have no fear—I will not drive you away."
A minute later, and he is in the dining-room, and I am sitting in my chamber alone.