Weighed and Wanting

G >> George MacDonald >> Weighed and Wanting

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He had scarcely read half the first page when she saw his countenance
change a little, then flush a little, then grow a little fixed, and
quite inscrutable. He folded the letter, laid it down by the side of his
plate, and began to eat again.

"Well, dear?" said his wife.

"It is not quite what I thought," he answered, with a curious smile, and
said nothing more, but ate his toast in a brooding silence. Never in the
habit of _making_ secrets, like his puny son, he had a strong
dislike to showing his feelings, and from his wife even was inclined to
veil them. He was besides too proud to manifest his interest in the
special contents of this letter.

The poor, but, because of its hopelessness, hardly indulged ambition of
Mr. Raymount's life, was to possess a portion, however small, of the
earth's surface--if only an acre or two. He came of families both
possessing such property, but none of it had come near him except that
belonging to the cousin mentioned. He was her nearest relation, but had
never had much hope of inheriting from her, and after a final quarrel
put an end to their quarelling, had had none. Even for Mammon's sake Mr.
Raymount was not the man to hide or mask his opinions.

He worshipped his opinions indeed as most men do Mammon. For many years
in consequence there had not been the slightest communication between
the cousins. But in the course of those years all the other relatives of
the old lady had died, and, as the letter he now held informed him, he
was after all heir to her property, a small estate in a lovely spot
among the roots of the Cumberland hills. It was attended by not a few
thousands in government securities.

But while Mr. Raymount was not a money-lover in any notable sense--the
men are rare indeed of whom it might be said absolutely they do not love
money--his delight in having land of his own was almost beyond
utterance. This delight had nothing to do with the money value of the
property; he scarcely thought of that: it came in large part of a new
sense of room and freedom; the estate was an extension of his body and
limbs--and such an extension as any lover of the picturesque would have
delighted in. It made him so glad he could hardly get his toast down.

Mrs. Raymount was by this time tolerably familiar with her husband's
moods, but she had never before seen him look just so, and was puzzled.
The fact was he had never before had such a pleasant surprise, and sat
absorbed in a foretaste of bliss, of which the ray of March sun that
lighted up the delicate transparencies of the veined crocuses purple and
golden, might seem the announcing angel.

Presently he rose and left the room. His wife followed him. The moment
she entered his study behind him he turned and took her in his arms.

"Here's news, wifie!" he said. "You'll be just as glad of it as I am.
Yrndale is ours after all!--at least so my old friend Heron says, and he
ought to know! Cousin Strafford left no will. He is certain there is
none. She persistently put off making one, with the full intention, he
believes, that the property shall come to me, her heir at law and next
of kin. He thinks she had not the heart to leave it away from her old
friend. Thank God! It is a lovely place. Nothing could have happened to
give me more pleassure."

"I am indeed glad, Raymount," said his wife--who called him by his
family name on important occasions. "You always had a fancy for playing
the squire, you know."

"A great fancy for a little room, rather," replied her husband--"not
much, I fear, for the duties of a squire. I know little of them; and
happily we shall not be dependent on the result of my management. There
is money as well, I am glad to say--enough to keep the place up anyhow."

"It would be a poor property," replied his wife with a smile, that could
not keep itself up. I have no doubt you will develop into a model farmer
and landlord."

"You must take the business part--at least till Corney is fit to look
after it," he returned.

But his wife's main thought was what influence would the change have on
the prospects of Hester. In her heart she abjured the notion of property
having anything to do with marriage--yet this was almost her first
thought! Inside us are played more fantastic tricks than any we play in
the face of the world.

"Are the children to be told?" she asked.

"I suppose so. It would be a shame not to let them share in our
gladness. And yet one hates to think of their talking about it as
children will."

"I am not afraid of the children," returned his wife. "I have but to
tell them not. I am sure of Mark as if he were fifty. Saffy might
forget, but Mark will keep her in mind."

When she returned to the dining-room Cornelius was gone, but the rest
were still at the table. She told them that God had given them a
beautiful house in the country, with hills and woods and a swift-flowing
river. Saffy clapped her hands, cried, "Oh, mam_mah_!" and could
hardly sit on her chair till she had done speaking. Mark was perfectly
still, his eyes looking like ears. The moment her mother ceased, Saffy
jumped down and made a rush for the door.

"Saffy, Saffy, where are you going?" cried her mother.

"To tell Sarah," answered Saffy.

"Come back, my child."

"Oh, do let me run and tell Sarah! I will come back _instantly_."

"Come here," insisted the mother. "Your papa and I wish you to say
nothing whatever about it to _any_ one."

"O-oh!" returned Saffy; and both her look and her tone said, "Where is
the good of it then?" as she stood by her mother's side in momentary
check.

Not a word did Mark utter, but his face shone as if it had been heaven
he was going to. No color, only light came to the surface of it, and
broke in the loveliest smile. When Mark smiled, his whole body and being
smiled. He turned and kissed Saffy, but still said nothing.

Hester's face flushed a "celestial rosy red." Her first thought was of
the lovely things of the country and the joy of them. Like Moses on
mount Pisgah, she looked back on the desert of a London winter, and
forth from the heart of a blustering spring into a land of promise. Her
next thought was of her poor: "Now I shall be able to do something for
them!" Alas! too swiftly followed the conviction that now she would be
able to do less than ever for them. Yrndale was far from London! They
could not come to her, and she could not go to them, except for an
occasional visit, perhaps too short even to see them all. If only her
father and mother would let her stay behind! but that she dared hardly
hope--ought not perhaps to wish! It might be God's will to remove her
because she was doing more harm than good! She had never been allowed to
succeed in anything! And now her endeavor would be at an end! So her
pleasure was speedily damped. The celestial red yielded to earthly pale,
and the tears came in her eyes.

"You don't like the thought of leaving London, Hester!" said her mother
with concern: she thought it was because of Vavasor.

"I am very glad for you and papa, mother dear," answered Hester. "I was
thinking of my poor people, and what they would do without me."

"Wait my child," returned her mother, "I have sometimes found the very
things I dreaded most serve me best. I don't mean because I got used to
them, or because they did me good. I mean they furthered what I thought
they would ruin."

"Thank you, dear mother, you can always comfort me," rejoined Hester.
"For myself I could not imagine anything more pleasant. If only it were
near London!--or," she added, smiling through her tears, "if one hadn't
a troublesome heart and conscience playing into each other's hands!"

She was still thinking of her poor, but her mother was in doubt.

* * * * *

"I suppose, father," said Cornelius, "there will be no occasion for me
to go to the bank any more?"

"There will be more occasion than ever," answered his father: "will
there not be the more to look after when I am gone? What do you imagine
you could employ yourself with down there? You have never taken to
study, else, as you know, I would have sent you to Oxford. When you
leave the bank it will be to learn farming and the management of an
estate--after which you will be welcome to Yrndale."

Cornelius made no reply. His father's words deeply offended him. He was
hardly good at anything except taking offense, and he looked on the
estate as his nearly as much as his father's. True the father had not
spoken so kindly as he might, but had he known his son, he would often
have spoken severely. From the habit of seeking clear and forcible
expression in writing, he had got into a way of using stronger vocal
utterances than was necessary, and what would have been but a blow from
another, was a stab from him. But the feelings of Cornelius in no case
_deserved_ consideration--they were so selfish. And now he
considered that mighty self of his insulted as well as wronged. What
right had his father to keep from him--from him alone, who had the first
right--a share in the good fortunes of the family? He left the study
almost hating his father because of what he counted his injustice; and,
notwithstanding his request that he would say nothing of the matter
until things were riper, made not even an effort to obey him, but, too
sore for silence, and filled with what seemed to him righteous
indignation, took the first opportunity of pouring out everything to
Vavasor, in a torrent of complaint against the fresh wrong. His friend
responded to the communication very sensibly, trying, without exactly
saying it, and without a shadow of success, to make him see what a fool
he was, and congratulating him all the more warmly on his good fortune
that a vague hope went up in him of a share in the same. For Cornelius
had not failed to use large words in making mention of the estate and
the fortune accompanying it; and in the higher position, as Vavasor
considered it, which Mr. Raymount would henceforth occupy as one of the
proprietors of England, therefore as a man of influence in his country
and its politics, he saw something like an approximative movement in the
edges of the gulf that divided him from Hester: she would not unlikely
come in for a personal share in this large fortune; and if he could but
see a possibility of existence without his aunt's money, he would, he
_almost_ said to himself, marry Hester, and take the risk of his
aunt's displeasure. At the same time she would doubtless now look with
more favor on his preference--he must not yet say _choice!_ There
could be nothing insuperably offensive to her pride at least in his
proposing to marry the daughter of a country squire. If she were the
heiress of a rich brewer, that is, of a brewer rich enough, his aunt
would, like the rest of them, get over it fast enough! In the meantime
he would, as Cornelius, after the first burst of his rage was over, had
begged him, be careful to make no illusion to the matter.

Mr. Raymount went to look at his property, and returned more delighted
with house, land, and landscape, than he had expected. He seldom spoke
of his good fortune, however, except to his wife, or betrayed his
pleasure except by a glistening of the eyes. As soon as the warm weather
came they would migrate, and immediately began their preparations--the
young ones by packing and unpacking several times a day a most
heterogeneous assemblage of things. The house was to be left in charge
of old Sarah, who would also wait on Cornelius.

CHAPTER XX.

THE JOURNEY.

It was a lovely morning when they left London. The trains did not then
travel so fast as now, and it was late in the afternoon when they
reached the station at which they must leave the railway for the road.
Before that the weather had changed, or they had changed their weather,
for the sky was one mass of cloud, and rain was falling persistently.
They had been for some time in the abode of the hills, but those they
were passing through, though not without wonder and strange interest,
were but an inferior clan, neither lofty nor lovely. Through the rain
and the mist they looked lost and drear. They were mostly bare, save of
a little grass, and broken with huge brown and yellow gulleys, worn by
such little torrents as were now rushing along them straight from the
clouded heavens. It was a vague sorrowful region of tears, whence the
streams in the valleys below were forever fed.

This part of the journey Saffy had been sound asleep, but Mark had been
standing at the window of the railway-carriage, gazing out on an awful
world. What would he do, he thought, if he were lost there? Would he be
able to sit still all night without being frightened, waiting for God to
come and take him? As they rushed along, it was not through the brain
alone of the child the panorama flitted, but through his mind and heart
as well, and there, like a glacier it scored its passage. Or rather, it
left its ghosts behind it, ever shifting forms and shadows, each
atmosphered in its own ethereal mood. Hardly thoughts were they, but
strange other consciousnesses of life and being. Hills and woods and
valleys and plains and rivers and seas, entering by the gates of sight
into the live mirror of the human, are transformed to another nature, to
a living wonder, a joy, a pain, a breathless marvel as they pass.
Nothing can receive another thing, not even a glass can take into its
depth a face, without altering it. In the mirror of man, things become
thoughts, feelings, life, and send their streams down the cheeks, or
their sunshine over the countenance.

Before Mark reached the end of that journey, there was gathered in the
bottom of his heart a great mass of fuel, there stored for the future
consumption of thinking, and for reproduction in forms of power. He knew
nothing of it. He took nothing consciously. The things kept sinking into
him. The sole sign of his reception was an occasional sigh--of which he
could not have told either the cause or the meaning.

They got into their own carriage at the station. The drive was a long
and a tedious one, for the roads were rough and muddy and often steep,
and Mr. Raymount repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction, that they had
not put four horses to. For some time they drove along the side of a
hill, and could see next to nothing except in one direction; and when at
length the road ran into a valley, and along the course of the swollen
river, it was getting so dark, and the rain was coming down so fast,
that they could see next to nothing at all. Long before they reached
their new home, Saffy and Mark were sound asleep, Hester was sunk in her
own thoughts, and the father and mother sat in unbroken silence, hand in
hand. It was pitch-dark ere they arrived; and save what she learned from
the thousand musics of the swollen river along which they had been
driving for the last hour, Hester knew nothing of the country for which
she had left the man-swarming city. Ah, that city! so full of
fellow-creatures! so many of them her friends! and struggling in the
toils of so many foes! Many sorrows had entered in at Hester's ears;
tongues that had never known how to give trouble shape, had grown
eloquent in pouring the tale--of oppression oftener than want, into the
bosom of her sympathy. I do not say many tongues--only many sorrows; she
knew from the spray that reached her on its borders, how that human sea
tossed and raged afar. Reading and interpreting the looks of faces and
the meanings of actions around her by what she had heard, she could not
doubt she had received but a too true sample of experiences innumerable.
One result was, that, young as was Hester, she no longer shrank from the
thought of that invisible, intangible solvent in which the generations
of man vanish from the eyes of their fellows. She said to herself what a
blessed thing was death for countless human myriads--yea doubtless for
the whole race! It looked sad enough for an end; but then it was not the
end; while but for the thought of the change to some other mode of life,
the idea of this world would have been unendurable to her. "Surely they
are now receiving their evil things!" she said. Alas, but even now she
felt as if the gulf of death separated her from those to whom it had
been her painful delight to minister! The weeping wind and the moaning
rush of the river, through which they were slowly moving toward their
earthly paradise, were an orchestral part as of hautboys in the wailing
harmony of her mood.

They turned and went through a gate, then passed through trees and trees
that made yet darker pieces of the night. By and by appeared the faint
lights of the house, with blotchy pallors thinning the mist and
darkness. Presently the carriage stopped.

Both the children continued dead asleep, and were carried off to bed.
The father and mother knew the house of old time, and revived for each
other old memories. But to Hester all was strange, and what with the
long journey, the weariness, the sadness, and the strangeness, it was as
if walking in a dream that she entered the old hall. It had a quiet,
dull, dignified look, as if it expected nobody; as if it was here itself
because it could not help it, and would rather not be here; as if it had
seen so many generations come and go that it had ceased to care much
about new faces. Every thing in the house looked somber and solemn, as
if it had not forgotten its old mistress, who had been so many years in
it, and was such a little while gone out of it. They had supper in a
long, low room, with furniture almost black, against whose windows heavy
roses every now and then softly patted, caught in the fringes of the
rain gusts. The dusky room, the perfect stillness within, the low
mingled sounds of swaying trees and pattering rain without, the sense of
the great darkness folding in its bosom the beauty so near and the
moaning city miles upon miles away--all grew together into one
possessing mood, which rose and sank, like the water in a sea-cave, in
the mind of Hester. But who by words can fix the mood that comes and
goes unbidden, like a ghost whose acquaintance is lost with his
vanishing, whom we know not when we do not see? A single happy phrase,
the sound of a wind, the odor of the mere earth may avail to send us
into some lonely, dusky realm of being; but how shall we take our
brother with us, or send him thither when we would? I doubt if even the
poet ever works just what he means on the mind of his fellow. Sisters,
brothers, we cannot meet save in God.

But the nearest mediator of feeling, the most potent, the most delicate,
the most general, the least articulate, the farthest from thought, yet
perhaps the likest to the breath moving upon the soft face of the waters
of chaos, is music. It rose like a soft irrepressible tide in the heart
of Hester; it mingled and became one with her mood; together swelling
they beat at the gates of silence; for life's sake they must rush,
embodied and born in sound, into the outer world where utterance meets
utterance! She looked around her for such an instrument as hitherto had
been always within her reach--rose and walked around the shadowy room
searching. But there was no creature amongst the aged furniture--nothing
with a brain to it which her soul might briefly inhabit. She returned
and sat again at the table, and the mood vanished in weariness.

But they did not linger there long. Fatigue made the ladies glad to be
shown to the rooms prepared for them. The housekeeper, the ancient
authority of the place, in every motion and tone expressing herself
wronged by their intrusion, conducted them. Every spot they passed was
plainly far more hers than theirs; only law was a tyrant, and she dared
not assert her rights! But she had allotted their rooms well, and they
approved her judgment.

Weary as she was, Hester was charmed with hers, and the more charmed the
more she surveyed it. I will not spend time or space in describing it,
but remember how wearisome and useless descriptions often are. I will
but say it was old-fashioned to her heart's content; that it seemed full
of shadowy histories, as if each succeeding occupant had left behind an
ethereal phantasmic record, a memorial imprint of presence on walls and
furniture--to which she now was to add hers. But the old sleep must have
the precedence of all the new things. In weary haste she undressed, and
ascending with some difficulty the high four-post bed which stood
waiting for her like an altar of sleep for its sacrifice, was presently
as still and straight and white as alabaster lady lying upon ancient
tomb.

CHAPTER XXI.

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER.

When she woke it was to a blaze of sunlight, but caught in the net of
her closed curtains. The night had passed and carried the tears of the
day with it. Ah, how much is done in the night when we sleep and know
nothing! Things never stop. The sun was shining as if he too had wept
and repented. All the earth beneath him was like the face of a child who
has ceased to weep and begun to smile, but has not yet wiped away his
tears.

Raindrops everywhere! millions upon millions of them! every one of them
with a sun in it? For Hester had sprung from her bed, and opened the
eyes of her room. How different was the sight from what she saw when she
looked out in Addison square! If heaven be as different from this earth,
and as much better than it, we shall be happy children--except indeed we
be but fit to stand in a corner, with our backs to the blessedness. On
each side she saw green, undulating lawn, with trees and meadows beyond;
but just in front the ground sloped rapidly, still in grass, grew steep,
and fell into the swift river--which, swollen almost to unwieldiness,
went rolling and sliding brown and heavy towards the far off sea; when
its swelling and tumult were over it would sing; now it tumbled along
with a roaring muffled in sullenness. Beyond the river the bank rose
into a wooded hill. She could see walks winding through the wood, here
appearing, there vanishing, and, a little way up the valley, the rails
of a rustic bridge that led to them. It was a paradise! For the roar of
London along Oxford street, there was the sound of the river; for the
cries of rough human voices, the soprano of birds, and the soft mellow
bass of the cattle in the meadows. The only harsh sound in this new
world was the cry of the peacock, but that had somehow got the color of
his tail in it, and was not unpleasant. The sky was a shining blue. Not
a cloud was to be seen upon it. Quietly it looked down, as if saying to
the world over which it stood vaulted, "Yes, you are welcome to it all!"

She thanked God for the country, but soon was praying to him for the
town. The neighborly offer of the country to console her for the loss of
the town she received with alarm, hastening to bethink herself that God
cared more for one miserable, selfish, wife-and-donkey-beating
costermonger of unsavory Shoreditch, than for all the hills and dales of
Cumberland, yea and all the starry things of his heavens.

She would care only as God cared, and from all this beauty gather
strength to give to sorrow.

She dressed quickly, and went to her mother's room. Her father was
already out of doors, but her mother was having breakfast in bed. They
greeted each other with such smiles as made words almost unnecessary.

"What a _lovely_ place it is, mamma! You did not say half enough
about it," exclaimed Hester.

"Wasn't it better to let you discover for yourself, my child?" answered
her mother. "You were so sorry to leave London, that I would not praise
Yrndale for fear of prejudicing you against it."

"Mother," said Hester, with something in her throat, "I did not want to
change; I was content, and had my work to do! I never was one to turn
easily to new things. And perhaps I need hardly tell you that the
conviction has been growing upon me for years and years that my calling
is among my fellow-creatures in London!"

She had never yet, even to her mother, spoken out plainly concerning the
things most occupying her heart and mind. Every one of the family,
except Saffy, found it difficult to communicate--and perhaps to Saffy it
might become so as she grew. Hester trembled as if confessing a fault.
What if to her mother the mere idea of having a calling should seem a
presumption!

"Two things must go, I think, to make up a call," said her mother,
greatly to Hester's relief. "You must not imagine, my child, that
because you have never opened your mind to me, I have not known what you
were thinking, or have left you to think alone about it. Mother and
daughter are too near not to hear each other without words. There is
between you and me a constant undercurrent of communion, and
occasionally a passing of almost definite thought, I believe. We may not
be aware of it at the time, but none the less it has its result."

"O mother!" cried Hester, overjoyed to find she thought them thus near
to each other, "I am _so_ glad! Please tell me the two things you
mean."

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