Far Above Rubies

"I must be out of the house first, Mr. Hector," she said—and I think she meant—"before I confess my love."

The impression Annie had made upon her master may be judged from the fact that he rose and went, leaving his son and the parlor-maid together.

What then passed between them I cannot narrate precisely. Overwhelmed by Hector's avowal, and quite unprepared as she had been for it, it was yet no unwelcome news to Annie. Indeed, the moment he addressed her, she knew in her heart that she had been loving him for a long time, though never acknowledging to herself the fact. Such must often be the case between two whom God has made for each other. And although he were a bold man who said that marriages were made in heaven, he were a bolder who denied that love at first sight was never there decreed. For where God has fitted persons for each other, what can they do but fall mutually in love? Who will then dare to say he did not decree that result? As to what may follow after from their own behavior, I would be as far from saying that was not decreed as from saying the conduct itself was decreed. Surely there shall be room left, even in the counsels of God, for as much liberty as belongs to our being made in his image—free like him to choose the good and refuse the evil! He who has chosen the good remains in the law of liberty, free to choose right again. He who always chooses the right, will at length be free to choose like God himself, for then shall his will itself be free. Freedom to choose and freedom of the will are two different conditions.

Before the lovers, which it wanted no moment to make them, left the room, they had agreed that Annie must at once leave the house. Hector took her to her mother's door, and when he returned he found that his father and mother had retired. But it may be well that I should tell a little more of what had passed between the lovers before they parted.

Annie's first thought when they were left together was, "Alas! what will my mistress say? She must think the worst possible of me!"

"Oh, Hector!" she broke out, "whatever will your mother think of me?"

"No good, I'm afraid," answered Hector honestly. "But that is hardly what we have to think of at this precise moment."

"Take back what you said!" cried Annie; "I will promise you never to think of it again—at least, I will try never once to do so. It must have been all my fault—though I do not know how, and never dreamed it was coming. Perhaps I shall find out, when I think over it, where I was to blame."

"I have no doubt you are capable of inventing a hundred reasons—after hearing your awful guilty confession to my father, you little innocent!" answered Hector.

And the ice thus broken, things went on a good deal better, and they came to talk freely.

"Of course," said Hector, "I am not so silly or so wicked as to try to persuade you that my mother will open her arms to you. She knows neither you nor herself."

"Will she be terribly angry?" said Annie, with a foreboding quaver in her voice.

"Rather, I am afraid," allowed Hector.

"Then don't you think we had better give it up at once?"

"Never forever!" cried Hector. "That is not what I fell in love with you for! I will not give you up even for Death himself! He is not the ruler of our world. No lover is worthy of the name who does not defy Death and all his works!"

"I am not afraid of him, Hector. I, too, am ready to defy him. But is it right to defy your mother?"

"It is, when she wants one to be false and dishonorable. For herself, I will try to honor her as much as she leaves possible to me. But my mother is not my parents."

"Oh, please, Hector, don't quibble. You would make me doubt you!"

"Well, we won't argue about it. Let us wait to hear what your mother will say to it to-morrow, when I come to see you."

"You really will come? How pleased my mother will be!"

"Why, what else should I do? I thought you were just talking of the honor we owe to our parents! Your mother is mine too."

"I was thinking of yours then."

"Well, I dare say I shall have a talk with my mother first, but what your mother will think is of far more consequence to me. I know only too well what my mother will say; but you must not take that too much to heart. She has always had some girl or other in her mind for me; but if a man has any rights, surely the strongest of all is the right to choose for himself the girl to marry—if she will let him."

"Perhaps his mother would choose better."

"Perhaps you do not know, Annie, that I am five-and-twenty years of age: if I have no right yet to judge for myself, pray when do you suppose I shall?"

"It's not the right I'm thinking of, but the experience."

"Ah, I see! You want me to fall in love with a score of women first, so that I may have a chance of choosing. Really, Annie, I had not thought you would count that a great advantage. For my part, I have never once been in love but with you, and I confess to a fancy that that might almost prove a recommendation to you. But I suppose you will at least allow it desirable that a man should love the girl he marries? If my preference for you be a mere boyish fancy, as probably my mother is at this moment trying to persuade my father, at what age do you suppose it will please God to give me the heart of a man? My mother is sure to prefer somebody not fit to stand in your dingiest cotton frock. Anybody but you for my wife is a thing unthinkable. God would never degrade me to any choice of my mother's! He knows you for the very best woman I shall ever have the chance of marrying. Shall I tell you the sort of woman my mother would like me to marry? Oh, I know the sort! First, she must be tall and handsome, with red, fashionable hair, and cool, offhand manners. She must never look shy or put out, or as if she did not know what to say. On the contrary, she must know who's who, and what's what, and never wear a dowdy bonnet, but always a stunning hat. And she must have a father who can give her something handsome when she is married. That's my mother's girl for me. I can't bear to look such a girl in the face! She makes me ashamed of myself and of her. The sort I want is one that grows prettier and prettier the more you love and trust her, and always looks best when she is busiest doing something for somebody. Yes, she has black hair, black as the night; and you see the whiteness of her face in the darkest night. And her eyes, they are blue, oh, as blue as bits of the very sky at midnight! and they shine and flash so—just like yours, and nobody else's, my darling."

But here they heard footsteps on the stair—those of Mrs. Macintosh, hurrying up to surprise them. They guessed that her husband had just left her, and that she was in a wild fury; simultaneously they rose and fled. Hector would have led the way quietly out by the front door; but Annie turning the other way to pass through the kitchen, Hector at once turned and followed her. But he had hardly got up with her before she was safe in her mother's house, and the door shut behind them. There Hector bade her goodnight, and, hastening home, found all the lights out, and heard his father and mother talking in their own room; but what they said he never knew.

The next morning Annie had hardly done dressing when she heard a knock at the street-door.

"That'll be Hector, mother," she said. "I'm thinking he'll be come to have a word with you."

"Annie!" exclaimed her mother, in rebuke of the liberty she took. "But if you mean young Mr. Macintosh, what on earth can he want with me?"

"Bide a minute, mother," answered Annie, "and he'll tell you himself."

So Mrs. Melville went to the door and opened it to the young man, who stood there shy and expectant.

"Mrs. Melville," he said, "I have come to tell you that I love your Annie, and want to make her my Annie as well. I am more sorry than I can tell you to confess that I am not able to marry at once, but please wait a little while for me. I shall do my best to take you both home with me as soon as possible."

She looked for a moment silently in his face, then, throwing her arms round his neck, answered:

"And I wonder who wouldn't be glad to wait for your sweet face to the very Day of Judgment, sir, when all must have their own at last."

Therewith she burst into tears, and, turning, led the way to the parlor.

"Here's your Hector, Annie," she said as she opened the door. "Take him, and make much of him, for I'm sure he deserves it."

Then she drew him hastily into the room, and closed the door.

"You see," Hector went on, "I must let you both know that my mother is dead against my having Annie. She thinks, of course, that I might do better; but I know she is only far too good for me, and that I shall be a fortunate as well as happy man the day we come together. She has already proved herself as true a woman as ever God made."

"She is that, sir, as I know and can testify, who have known her longer than anybody else. But sit you down and love each other, and never mind me; I'll not be a burden to you as long as I can lift a hand to earn my own bread. And when I'm old and past work, I'll not be too proud to take whatever you can spare me, and eat it with thankfulness."

So they sat down, and were soon making merry together.

But nothing could reconcile Mrs. Macintosh to the thought of Annie for her daughter-in-law; her pride, indignation, and disappointment were much too great, and they showed themselves the worse that her husband would not say a word against either Annie or Hector, who, he insisted, had behaved very well. He would not go a step beyond confessing that the thing was not altogether as he could have wished, but upheld that it contained ground for satisfaction. In vain he called to his wife's mind the fact that neither she nor he were by birth or early position so immeasurably above Annie. Nothing was of any use to calm her; nothing would persuade her that Annie had not sought their service with the express purpose of carrying away her son. Her behavior proved, indeed, that Annie had done prudently in going at once home to her mother, where presently her late mistress sought and found her; acting royally the part of one righteously outraged in her dearest dignity. Her worst enemy could have desired for her nothing more degrading than to see and hear her. She insisted that Hector should abjure Annie, or leave the house. Hector laid the matter before his father. He encouraged him to humor his mother as much as he could, and linger on, not going every night to see the girl, in the hope that time might work some change. But the time passed in bitter reproaches on the part of the mother, and expostulations on the part of the son, and there appeared no sign of the amelioration the father had hoped for. The fact was that Mrs. Macintosh's natural vulgarity had been so pampered by what she regarded as wealth, and she had grown so puffed up, that her very person seemed to hold the door wide for the devil. For self-importance is perhaps a yet deeper root of all evil than even the love of money. Any deep, honest affection might have made it too hot for the devil, but in her heart there was little room for such a love. She seemed to believe in nothing but mode and fashion, to care for nothing but what she called "the thing." She grew in self-bulk, and gathered more and more weight in her own esteem: she wore yet showier and more vulgar clothes, and actually cultivated a slang that soon bade farewell to delicacy, so that she sank and she sank, and she ate and she drank, until at last she impressed her good-natured clergyman himself as one but a very little above the beasts that perish—if, indeed, she was in any respect equal to a good, conscientious dog! She retained, however, this much respect for her son, for which that son gave her little thanks, that by-and-by she limited herself to ex-pending all her contempt upon Annie, and toward Hector settled into a dogged silence, where upon he, finding it impossible to make any progress toward an understanding where he could not even get a reply, at last gave up the attempt and became as silent as she.

To poor Annie it was a terrible thought that she should thus have come between mother and son; but she remembered that she had read of mothers who without cause had even hated their own flesh, and how much the more might not she who knew her ambitions and designs so utterly opposed to the desires of her son?

And thereupon all at once awoke in Annie the motherhood that lies deepest of all in the heart of every good woman, making her know in herself that, his mother having forsaken him, she had no choice but take him up and be to him henceforward both wife and mother. What remains of my story will perhaps serve to show how far she succeeded in fulfilling this her vow.

At last Mr. Macintosh saw that things could not thus continue, and that he had better accept an offer made him some time before by a London correspondent—to take Hector into his banking-house and give him the opportunity of widening his experience and knowledge of business; and Hector, on his part, was eager to accept the proposal. The salary offered for his services was certainly not a very liberal one, but the chief attraction was that the hours were even shorter than they had been with his father, and would yet enlarge his liberty of an evening. Hector's delights, as we have seen, had always lain in literature, and in that direction the labor in him naturally sought an outlet. Now there seemed a promise of his being able to pursue it yet more devotedly than before: who could tell but he might ere long produce something that people might care to read? Some publisher might even care to put it in print, and people might care to buy it! That would start him in a more genuine way of living, and he might the sooner be able to marry Annie—an aspiration surely legitimate and not too ambitious. He had had a good education, and considered himself to be ably equipped. It was true he had not been to either Oxford or Cambridge, but he had enjoyed the advantages possessed by a Scotch university even over an English one, consisting mainly in the freedom of an unhampered development. Since then he had read largely, and had cultivated naturally wide sympathies. As his vehicle for utterance, we have already seen that he had a great attraction to verse, and had long held and argued that the best training for effective prose was exercise in the fetters of verse—a conviction in which he had lived long enough to confirm himself, and perhaps one or two besides.

His relations with his mother, and consequent impediments to seeing Annie, took away the sting of having to part with her for awhile; and, when he finally closed with the offer, she at once resumed her application for a place in the High School, and was soon accepted, for there were not a few in the town capable of doing justice to her fitness for the office; so that now she had the joy not merely of being able to live with her mother as before, and of contributing to her income, but of knowing at the same time that she lived in a like atmosphere with Hector, where her growth in the knowledge of literature, and her experience in the world of thought, would be gradually fitting her for a companion to him whom she continued to regard as so much above her. Her marked receptivity in the matter of verse, and her intrinsic discrimination of nature and character in it, became in her, at length, as they grew, sustaining forces, enlarging her powers both of sympathy and judgment, so that soon she came to feel, in reading certain of the best writers, as if she and Hector were looking over the same book together, reading and pondering it as one, simultaneously seeing what the writer meant and felt and would have them see and feel. So that, by the new intervention of space, they were in no sense or degree separated, but rather brought by it actually, that is, spiritually, nearer to each other. Also Hector wrote to her regularly on a certain day of every week, and very rarely disappointed her of her expected letter, in which he uttered his thoughts and feelings more freely than he had ever been able to do in conversation. This also was a gain to her, for thus she went on to know him better and better, rising rapidly nearer to his level of intellectual development, while already she was more than his equal in the moral development which lies at the root of all capacity for intellectual growth. So Annie grew, as surely—without irreverence I may say—in favor both with God and man; for at the same time she grew constantly in that loveliest of all things—humanity.

Nor was Hector left without similar consolation in his life, although passed apart from Annie. For, not to mention the growing pleasure that he derived from poring over Annie's childlike letters—and here I would beg my reader to note the essential distinction betwixt childish and childlike—full of the keenest perceptions and the happiest phrases, he had soon come to make the acquaintance of a kindred spirit, a man whom, indeed, it took a long time really to know, but who, being from the first attracted to him, was soon running down the inclined plane of acquaintanceship with rapidly increasing velocity toward something far better than mere acquaintance: nor was there any check in their steady approach to a thorough knowledge of each other. He was a slightly older man, with a greater experience of men, and a good deal wider range of interests, as could hardly fail to be the case with a Londoner. But the surprising thing to both of them was that they had so many feelings in common, giving rise to many judgments and preferences also in common; so that Hector had now a companion in whom to find the sympathy necessary to the ripening of his taste in such a delicate pursuit as that of verse; and their proclivities being alike, they ran together like two drops on a pane of glass; whence it came that at length, in the confident expectation of understanding and sympathy, Hector found himself submitting to his friend's judgment the poem he had produced when first grown aware that he was in love with Annie Melville; although such was his sensitiveness in the matter of his own productions that hitherto he had not yet ventured on the experiment with Annie herself.

His new friend read, was delighted; read again, and spoke out his pleasure; and then first Hector knew the power of sympathy to double the consciousness of one's own faculty. He took up again the work he had looked upon as finished, and went over it afresh with wider eyes, keener judgment, and clearer purpose; when the result was that, through the criticisms passed upon it by his friend, and the reflection of the poem afresh in his own questioning mind, he found many things that had to be reconsidered; after which he committed the manuscript, carefully and very legibly re-written, once more to his friend, who, having read it yet again, was more thoroughly pleased with it than before, and proposed to Hector to show it to another friend to whom the ear of a certain publisher lay open. The favorable judgment of this second friend was patiently listened to by the publisher, and his promise given that the manuscript should receive all proper attention.

On this part of my story there is no occasion to linger; for, strange thing to tell,—strange, I mean, from the unlikelihood of its happening,—the poem found the sympathetic spot in the heart of the publisher, who had happily not delegated the task to his reader, but read it himself; and he made Hector the liberal offer to undertake all the necessary expenses, giving him a fair share of resulting profits.

Stranger yet, the poem was so far a success that the whole edition, not a large one, was sold, with a result in money necessarily small but far from unsatisfactory to Hector. At the publisher's suggestion, this first volume was soon followed by another; and thus was Hector fairly launched on the uncertain sea of a literary life; happy in this, that he was not entirely dependent on literature for his bodily sustenance, but was in a position otherwise to earn at least his bread and cheese. For some time longer he continued to have no experience of the killing necessity of writing for his daily bread, beneath which so many aspiring spirits sink prematurely exhausted and withered; this was happily postponed, for there are as much Providence and mercy in the orderly arrangement of our trials as in their inevitable arrival.

His reception by what is called the public was by no means so remarkable or triumphant as to give his well-wishers any ground for anxiety as to its possible moral effect upon him; but it was a great joy to him that his father was much interested and delighted in the reception of the poem by the Reviews in general. He was so much gratified, indeed, that he immediately wrote to him stating his intention of supplementing his income by half as much more.

This reflected opinion of others wrought also to the mollifying of his mother's feelings toward him; but those with which she regarded Annie they only served to indurate, as the more revealing the girl's unworthiness of him. And although at first she regarded with favor her husband's kind intention toward Hector, she faced entirely round when he showed her a letter he had from his son thanking him for his generosity, and communicating his intention of begging Annie to come to him and be married at once.

Annie was living at home, feeding on Hector's letters, and strengthened by her mother's sympathy. She was teaching regularly at the High School, and adding a little to their common income by giving a few music lessons, as well as employing her needle in a certain kind of embroidery a good deal sought after, in which she excelled. She had heard nothing of his having begun to distinguish himself, neither had yet seen one of the reviews of his book, for no one had taken the trouble to show her any of them.

One day, however, as she stood waiting a moment for something she wanted in the principal bookshop of the town, a little old lady, rather shabbily dressed, came in, whom she heard say to the shopman, in a gentle voice, and with the loveliest smile:

"Have you another copy of this new poem by your townsman, young Macintosh?"

"I am sorry I have not, ma'am," answered the shopman; "but I can get you one by return of post."

"Do, if you please, and send it me at once. I am very glad to hear it promises to be a great success. I am sure it quite deserves it. I have already read it through twice. You may remember you got me a copy the other day. I cannot help thinking it an altogether remarkable production, especially for so young a man. He is quite young, I believe?"

"Yes, ma'am—to have already published a book. But as to any wonderful success, there is so little sale for poetry nowadays. I believe the one you had yourself, my lady, is the only one we have been asked for."

"Much will depend," said the lady, "on whether it finds a channel of its own soon enough. But get me another copy, anyhow—and as soon as you can, please. I want to send it to my daughter. There is matter between those Quaker-like boards that I have found nowhere else. I want my daughter to have it, and I cannot part with my own copy," concluded the old lady, and with the words she walked out of the shop, leaving Annie bewildered, and with the strange feeling of a surprise, which yet she had been expecting. For what else but such success could come to Hector? Had it not been drawing nearer and nearer all the time? And for a moment she seemed again to stand, a much younger child than now, amid the gusty whirling of the dead leaves about her feet, once more on the point of stooping to pick up what might prove a withered leaf, but was in reality a pound-note, the thing which had wrought her so much misery, and was now filling her cup of joy to the very brim. The book the old lady had talked of could be no other than Hector's book. No other than Hector could have written it. What a treasure there was in the world that she had never seen! How big was it? what was it like? She was sure to know it the moment her eyes fell upon it. But why had he never told her about it? He might have wanted to surprise her, but she was not the least surprised. She had known it all the time! He had never talked about what he was writing, and still less would he talk of what he was going to write. Intentions were not worthy of his beautiful mouth! Perhaps he did not want her to read it yet. When he did, he would send her a copy. And, oh! when would her mother be able to read it? Was it a very dear book? There could be no thought of their buying it! Between them, she and her mother could not have shillings enough for that. When the right time came, he would send it. Then it would be twice as much hers as if she had bought it for herself.