There & Back - George MacDonald (best e book reader for android TXT) 📗

Miss Malliver, "has not an idea of social distinction. She cannot understand why she should not talk to any farmer's man or dairymaid she happens to meet! It is not her talking to them I mind so much as the familiar way she does it. If they take liberties, it will be her own fault. Any groom might be pardoned for fancying she thought him as good as herself!"

"But she does," answered Theodora. "Yesterday, I found her talking to the bookbinder as familiarly as if he had been Arthur!"

This was hardly correct, for Barbara talked to the bookbinder with a deference she never showed Lestrange.

"She lacks self-respect!" said lady Ann. "But we must deal with her gently, and try to do her good. I think myself there is not much amiss with her beyond love of her own way. Her dislike of restraint certainly does not befit a communicant!"

Lady Ann was an unfaltering church-goer, rigidly decorous in rendering what she imagined God, and knew the clergyman expected, and as rank a mammon-worshipper as any in the land.

"But I so far agree with sir Wilton," she went on, "as to grant that her manners have in them the germ of possible distinction; and I think they will come to be all, or nearly all, that could be desired. We ought at least to give her the advantage of any doubt, and do what we can to lead her in the right direction."

"It's a fine thing to go to church and have your wits sharpened!" said the baronet, with an ungenial laugh.

Sir Wilton regarded lady Ann as the coldest-blooded and most selfish woman in creation, and certainly she was not less selfish and was colder-blooded than he. Full of his own importance as any Pharisee-as full as he could be without making himself ridiculous, he resented the slight regard she showed to that importance. He believed himself wise in human nature, when in truth he was only quick to read in another what lay within the limited range of his own consciousness. Of the noble in humanity he knew next to nothing. To him all men were only selfish. The cause, though by no means the logical ground of this his belief, was his own ingrained selfishness. With his hazy yet keen cold eye, he was quick to see in another, and prompt to lay to his charge, the faults he pardoned in himself. He had some power over himself, for he very seldom went into a rage; but he kept his temper like a devil, and was coldly cruel. His wife had tamed him a good deal, without in the least reforming him. He would have hated her quite, but for the sort of respect she roused in him by surpassing him in his own kind. He cringed to her with a sneer. It was long since he had learned from her society to remember, with the nearest approach to compunction of which his moth-eaten heart was capable, the woman who had forsaken her own rank to brave the perils of his, and had sunk frozen to death by the cold of his contact. For some years he felt far more friendly to the offspring of the high-born lady than to that of the blacksmith's daughter; but as time went on, and the memory of the more plebeian infant's ugliness faded, he began to think how jolly it would be-how it would serve out her ladyship and her brood of icicles, if after all the blacksmith's grandson turned up to oust the earl's. He grinned as he lay awake in the night, picturing to himself how the woman in the next room would take it. Him and his son together her ladyship might find almost too much for her! But for many years he had indulged in no allusion to the possible improbable, allowing her ladyship to refer to Arthur as the heir without hinting at the uncertainty of his position.

Lady Ann, from dwelling on what she counted the shame of his origin, had got so far toward persuading herself that the vanished child was base-born, that she scarcely doubted the possibility, were he to appear, of proving his claim false, and originated by conspiracy. Unable to learn from her husband when and where the baby was baptized, she concluded that he had never been baptized, and that there was no record of his birth. As the years went by, and nothing was heard of him, she grew more and more confident. Now and then a fear would cross her, but she always succeeded in stifling it-without, however, arriving at such a degree of certainty, that the thought of the child had no share in her regard for the wealthy Barbara, her encouragement of her general relations with the family, and her connivance at her frequent and prolonged visits during the absence of herself and sir Wilton.

She was now returned, and had found everything as she left it, with the insignificant difference that the bay-window of the library was occupied by a man at work repairing the books. She had resumed the reins of the family-coach, and now went on to play the part of a good providence, and drive the said coach to the top of the hill.

Sir Wilton, I have said, liked Barbara. She amused him, and amusement was the nearest to sunshine his soul was capable of reaching. All his weather else was gray, with a touch of the lurid on the western horizon-of which he was not weather-wise enough to take heed. He had been at school with Barbara's father, but did not like her any better for that. In youth they had not been friends, except in a way that brought their interests too much in collision for their friendship to last. It had ended in a quiet hate, each knowing too well how much the other knew to dare an open quarrel. But all that was many years away, and Tom Wylder had been long abroad and almost forgotten. Sir Wilton, notwithstanding, admired the forgivingness of his own disposition when he found himself wondering how Tom Wylder would regard an alliance with his old rival. Doubtless he would like his daughter to be my lady , but he might be looking for a loftier title than his son could give her!

Sir Wilton was incapable, however, of taking any active interest in the matter. The well-being of his family, when he himself should be out of the way, did not much affect him. Nothing but his lower nature had ever roused him to action of any kind. How far the idea of betterment had ever shown itself to him, God only knows. Apparently, he was a child of the evil one, whom nothing but the furnace could cleanse. Almost the only thing he could now imagine giving him vivid pleasure, was to see his wife thoroughly annoyed.

All he had ever had of the manners of a gentleman, remained with him. He was courteous to ladies, never swore in their presence-except sometimes in a mutter at his wife, and could upon occasion show a kindness that cost him nothing. Humanity was not all dead out of him; neither was there a purely human thought in him. On Barbara he smiled his sweetest smile: it owed most of its sweetness to the dentist.


CHAPTER XXI.


THE PARSON'S PARABLE.

Mr. Wingfold went as he had come, thoughtful even to trouble. What was to be done for the woman? What was his part, as parson of the parish, with regard to her behaviour in church? Was it or was it not his part to take public notice of what she intended, if not as a defiance to God, at least as an open expression of her bitter resentment of his dealing with her? The creator's discipline did not suit his creature's taste, and she would let him know it: whether it suited her necessities, she did not ask or care; she knew nothing of her necessities-only of her desires. Had she had a suspicion that she was an eternal creature, poor as well as miserable, blind and naked as well as bereaved and angry, she might have allowed some room for God to show himself right. But she was ignorant of herself as any savage. Was Wingfold to take her insolence in church as a thing done to himself, which he must endure with patience? or, putting himself out of the question, and regarding her conduct only as a protest against the ways of God with her, must he leave reproof as well as vengeance to the Lord? Was it his business, or was it not, to rebuke her, and make his rebuke as open as her offence? It troubled him almost beyond bearing to think that some of his flock might imagine that the great lady of the parish was allowed to behave herself unseemly, where another would be exposed to shame. But how abhorrent to him was a public contention in the church, and on the Lord's day! Mrs. Wylder was just the woman to challenge forcible expulsion, and make the circumstances of it as flagrant as possible! She might even use both pistol and whip! What better opportunity could she find for giving point to her appeal against God! A man might, in the rage of disappointment, cry out that there could be no God where baffle met the holiest instinct-that blundering chance must rule; he might, illogical with grief, declare that as God could treat him so, he would believe in him no longer; or he might assert that an evil being, not a good, was at the heart of life-a devil and not a God, for he was one who created and forgot, or who remembered and did not care-who quickened exposure but gave no shield! called from the void a being filled with doorless avenues to pain, and abandoned him to incarnate cruelty, that he might make him sport with the wildness of his dismay! but here was a woman who did not say that God was not, or that he was not good, but with passionate self-party-spirit cried out, "He is against me! he sides with my husband! He is not my friend, but his: I will let him know how I resent his unfairness!" Whether God was good or bad she did not care-that was not a point she was concerned in; all she heeded was how he behaved to her-whether he took part with her husband or herself. He had torn from her the desire of her heart and left her desolate: she would worship him no longer! She had been brought up to believe there was a God, and had never doubted his existence: with her whole will and passion she opposed that which she called God. She had never learned to yield when wrong, and now she was sure she was right. Though hopeless she resisted. She cried out against God, but believed him by his own act helpless to deliver her, for what could he do against the grave? Powerless for her as unfriendly toward her, why should she worship him? Why should she pay court to one who neither would nor could give her what she wanted? What was he God for? Was she to go to his house, and carry herself courteously, as if he were her friend! She would not! And that there might be no mistake as to how she regarded him, she would sit in her pew and read her novel, while the friends of God said their prayers to him! If she annoyed them, so much the better, for the surer she might hope that he was annoyed!

It may seem to