The Vicar's Daughter

She lay moaning, with her eyes shut, when a hand was laid on hers, and Miss Clare's voice was in her ear. She had come to give her usual lesson to one of the girls who had as yet escaped the infection: for, while she took every precaution, she never turned aside from her work for any dread of consequences; and when she heard that Mrs. Morley had been taken ill, she walked straight to her room.

"Go away!" said Judy. "Do you want to die too?"

"Dear Mrs. Morley," said Miss Clare, "I will just run home, and make a few arrangements, and then come back and nurse you."

"Never mind me," said Judy. "The children! the children! What shall I do?"

"I am quite able to look after you all—if you will allow me to bring a young woman to help me."

"You are an angel!" said poor Judy. "But there is no occasion to bring any one with you. My servants are quite competent."

"I must have every thing in my own hands," said Miss Clare; "and therefore must have some one who will do exactly as I tell her. This girl has been with me now for some time, and I can depend upon her. Servants always look down upon governesses."

"Do whatever you like, you blessed creature," said Judy. "If any one of my servants behaves improperly to you, or neglects your orders, she shall go as soon as I am up again."

"I would rather give them as little opportunity as I can of running the risk. If I may bring this friend of my own, I shall soon have the house under hospital regulations. But I have been talking too much. I might almost have returned by this time. It is a bad beginning if I have hurt you already by saying more than was necessary."

She had hardly left the room before Judy had fallen asleep, so much was she relieved by the offer of her services. Ere she awoke, Marion was in a cab on her way back to Bolivar Square, with her friend and two carpet-bags. Within an hour, she had intrenched herself in a spare bedroom, had lighted a fire, got encumbering finery out of the way, arranged all the medicines on a chest of drawers, and set the clock on the mantle-piece going; made the round of the patients, who were all in adjoining rooms, and the round of the house, to see that the disinfectants were fresh and active, added to their number, and then gone to await the arrival of the medical attendant in Mrs. Morley's room.

"Dr. Brand might have been a little more gracious," said Judy; "but I thought it better not to interrupt him by explaining that you were not the professional nurse he took you for."

"Indeed, there was no occasion," answered Miss Clare. "I should have told him so myself, had it not been that I did a nurse's regular work in St. George's Hospital for two months, and have been there for a week or so, several times since, so that I believe I have earned the right to be spoken to as such. Anyhow, I understood every word he said."

Meeting Mr. Morley in the hall, the doctor advised him not to go near his wife, diphtheria being so infectious; but comforted him with the assurance that the nurse appeared an intelligent young person, who would attend to all his directions; adding,—

"I could have wished she had been older; but there is a great deal of illness about, and experienced nurses are scarce."

Miss Clare was a week in the house before Mr. Morley saw her, or knew she was there. One evening she ran down to the dining-room, where he sat over his lonely glass of Madeira, to get some brandy, and went straight to the sideboard. As she turned to leave the room, he recognized her, and said, in some astonishment,—

"You need not trouble yourself, Miss Clare. The nurse can get what she wants from Hawkins. Indeed, I don't see"—

"Excuse me, Mr. Morley. If you wish to speak to me, I will return in a few minutes; but I have a good deal to attend to just at this moment."

She left the room; and, as he had said nothing in reply, did not return.

Two days after, about the same hour, whether suspecting the fact, or for some other reason, he requested the butler to send the nurse to him.

"The nurse from the nursery, sir; or the young person as teaches the young ladies the piano?" asked Hawkins.

"I mean the sick-nurse," said his master.

In a few minutes Miss Clare entered the dining-room, and approached Mr. Morley.

"How do you do, Miss Clare?" he said stiffly; for to any one in his employment he was gracious only now and then. "Allow me to say that I doubt the propriety of your being here so much. You cannot fail to carry the infection. I think your lessons had better be postponed until all your pupils are able to benefit by them. I have just sent for the nurse; and,—if you please"—

"Yes. Hawkins told me you wanted me," said Miss Clare.

"I did not want you. He must have mistaken."

"I am the nurse, Mr. Morley."

"Then I must say it is not with my approval," he returned, rising from his chair in anger. "I was given to understand that a properly-qualified person was in charge of my wife and family. This is no ordinary case, where a little coddling is all that is wanted."

"I am perfectly qualified, Mr. Morley."

He walked up and down the room several times.

"I must speak to Mrs. Morley about this." he said.

"I entreat you will not disturb her. She is not so well this afternoon."

"How is this, Miss Clare? Pray explain to me how it is that you come to be taking a part in the affairs of the family so very different from that for which Mrs. Morley—which—was arranged between Mrs. Morley and yourself."

"It is but an illustration of the law of supply and demand," answered Marion. "A nurse was wanted; Mrs. Morley had strong objections to a hired nurse, and I was very glad to be able to set her mind at rest."

"It was very obliging in you, no doubt," he returned, forcing the admission; "but—but"—

"Let us leave it for the present, if you please; for while I am nurse, I must mind my business. Dr. Brand expresses himself quite satisfied with me, so far as we have gone; and it is better for the children, not to mention Mrs. Morley, to have some one about them they are used to."

She left the room without waiting further parley.

Dr. Brand, however, not only set Mr. Morley's mind at rest as to her efficiency, but when a terrible time of anxiety was at length over, during which one after another, and especially Judy herself, had been in great danger, assured him that, but for the vigilance and intelligence of Miss Clare, joined to a certain soothing influence which she exercised over every one of her patients, he did not believe he could have brought Mrs. Morley through. Then, indeed, he changed his tone to her, in a measure, still addressing her as from a height of superiority.

They had recovered so far that they were to set out the next morning for Hastings, when he thus addressed her, having sent for her once more to the dining-room:—

"I hope you will accompany them, Miss Clare," he said. "By this time you must be in no small need of a change yourself."

"The best change for me will be Lime Court," she answered, laughing.

"Now, pray don't drive your goodness to the verge of absurdity," he said pleasantly.

"Indeed, I am anxious about my friends there," she returned. "I fear they have not been getting on quite so well without me. A Bible-woman and a Roman Catholic have been quarrelling dreadfully, I hear."

Mr. Morley compressed his lips. It was annoying to be so much indebted to one who, from whatever motives, called such people her friends.

"Oblige me, then," he said loftily, taking an envelope from the mantle-piece, and handing it to her, "by opening that at your leisure."

"I will open it now, if you please," she returned.

It contained a bank-note for a hundred pounds. Mr. Morley, though a hard man, was not by any means stingy. She replaced it in the envelope, and laid it again on the chimney-piece.

"You owe me nothing, Mr. Morley," she said.

"Owe you nothing! I owe you more than I can ever repay."

"Then don't try it, please. You are very generous; but indeed I could not accept it."

"You must oblige me. You might take it from me," he added, almost pathetically, as if the bond was so close that money was nothing between them.

"You are the last—one of the last I could take money from, Mr. Morley."

"Why?"

"Because you think so much of it, and yet would look down on me the more if I accepted it."

He bit his lip, rubbed his forehead with his hand, threw back his head, and turned away from her.

"I should be very sorry to offend you," she said; "and, believe me, there is hardly any thing I value less than money. I have enough, and could have plenty more if I liked. I would rather have your friendship than all the money you possess. But that cannot be, so long as"—

She stopped: she was on the point of going too far, she thought.

"So long as what?" he returned sternly.

"So long as you are a worshipper of Mammon," she answered; and left the room.

She burst out crying when she came to this point. She had narrated the whole with the air of one making a confession.

"I am afraid it was very wrong," she said; "and if so, then it was very rude as well. But something seemed to force it out of me. Just think: there was a generous heart, clogged up with self-importance and wealth! To me, as he stood there on the hearth-rug, he was a most pitiable object—with an impervious wall betwixt him and the kingdom of heaven! He seemed like a man in a terrible dream, from which I must awake him by calling aloud in his ear—except that, alas! the dream was not terrible to him, only to me! If he had been one of my poor friends, guilty of some plain fault, I should have told him so without compunction; and why not, being what he was? There he stood,—a man of estimable qualities, of beneficence, if not bounty; no miser, nor consciously unjust; yet a man whose heart the moth and rust were eating into a sponge!—who went to church every Sunday, and had many friends, not one of whom, not even his own wife, would tell him that he was a Mammon-worshipper, and losing his life. It may have been useless, it may have been wrong; but I felt driven to it by bare human pity for the misery I saw before me."

"It looks to me as if you had the message given you to give him," I said.

"But—though I don't know it—what if I was annoyed with him for offering me that wretched hundred pounds,—in doing which he was acting up to the light that was in him?"

I could not help thinking of the light which is darkness, but I did not say so. Strange tableau, in this our would-be grand nineteenth century,—a young and poor woman prophet-like rebuking a wealthy London merchant on his own hearth-rug, as a worshipper of Mammon! I think she was right; not because he was wrong, but because, as I firmly believe, she did it from no personal motives whatever, although in her modesty she doubted herself. I believe it was from pure regard for the man and for the truth, urging her to an irrepressible utterance. If so, should we not say that she spoke by the Spirit? Only I shudder to think what utterance might, with an equal outward show, be attributed to the same Spirit. Well, to his own master every one standeth or falleth; whether an old prophet who, with a lie in his right hand, entraps an honorable guest, or a young prophet who, with repentance in his heart, walks calmly into the jaws of the waiting lion. [Footnote: See the Sermons of the Rev. Henry Whitehead, vicar of St. John's, Limehouse; as remarkable for the profundity of their insight us for the noble severity of their literary modelling.—G.M.D.]

And no one can tell what effects the words may have had upon him. I do not believe he ever mentioned the circumstance to his wife. At all events, there was no change in her manner to Miss Clare. Indeed, I could not help fancying that a little halo of quiet reverence now encircled the love in every look she cast upon her.

She firmly believed that Marion had saved her life, and that of more than one of her children. Nothing, she said, could equal the quietness and tenderness and tirelessness of her nursing. She was never flurried, never impatient, and never frightened. Even when the tears would be flowing down her face, the light never left her eyes nor the music her voice; and when they were all getting better, and she had the nursery piano brought out on the landing in the middle of the sick-rooms, and there played and sung to them, it was, she said, like the voice of an angel, come fresh to the earth, with the same old news of peace and good-will. When the children—this I had from the friend she brought with her—were tossing in the fever, and talking of strange and frightful things they saw, one word from her would quiet them; and her gentle, firm command was always sufficient to make the most fastidious and rebellious take his medicine.

She came out of it very pale, and a good deal worn. But the day they set off for Hastings, she returned to Lime Court. The next day she resumed her lessons, and soon recovered her usual appearance. A change of work, she always said, was the best restorative. But before a month was over I succeeded in persuading her to accept my mother's invitation to spend a week at the Hall; and from this visit she returned quite invigorated. Connie, whom she went to see,—for by this time she was married to Mr. Turner,—was especially delighted with her delight in the simplicities of nature. Born and bred in the closest town-environment, she had yet a sensitiveness to all that made the country so dear to us who were born in it, which Connie said surpassed ours, and gave her special satisfaction as proving that my oft recurring dread lest such feelings might but be the result of childish associations was groundless, and that they were essential to the human nature, and so felt by God himself. Driving along in the pony-carriage,—for Connie is not able to walk much, although she is well enough to enjoy life thoroughly,—Marion would remark upon ten things in a morning, that my sister had never observed. The various effects of light and shade, and the variety of feeling they caused, especially interested her. She would spy out a lurking sunbeam, as another would find a hidden flower. It seemed as if not a glitter in its nest of gloom could escape her. She would leave the carriage, and make a long round through the fields or woods, and, when they met at the appointed spot, would have her hands full not of flowers only, but of leaves and grasses and weedy things, showing the deepest interest in such lowly forms as few would notice except from a scientific knowledge, of which she had none: it was the thing itself—its look and its home—that drew her attention. I cannot help thinking that this insight was profoundly one with her interest in the corresponding regions of human life and circumstance.

CHAPTER XXVII.

MISS CLARE AMONGST HER FRIENDS

I must give an instance of the way in which Marion—I am tired of calling her Miss Clare, and about this time I began to drop it—exercised her influence over her friends. I trust the episode, in a story so fragmentary as mine, made up of pieces only of a quiet and ordinary life, will not seem unsuitable. How I wish I could give it you as she told it to me! so graphic was her narrative, and so true to the forms of speech amongst the London poor. I must do what I can, well assured it must come far short of the original representation.

One evening, as she was walking up to her attic, she heard a noise in one of the rooms, followed by a sound of weeping. It was occupied by a journeyman house-painter and his wife, who had been married several years, but whose only child had died about six months before, since which loss things had not been going on so well between them. Some natures cannot bear sorrow: it makes them irritable, and, instead of drawing them closer to their own, tends to isolate them. When she entered, she found the woman crying, and the man in a lurid sulk.

"What is the matter?" she asked, no doubt in her usual cheerful tone.

"I little thought it would come to this when I married him," sobbed the woman, while the man remained motionless and speechless on his chair, with his legs stretched out at full length before him.

"Would you mind telling me about it? There may be some mistake, you know."

"There ain't no mistake in that," said the woman, removing the apron she had been holding to her eyes, and turning a cheek towards Marion, upon which the marks of an open-handed blow were visible enough. "I didn't marry him to be knocked about like that."

"She calls that knocking about, do she?" growled the husband. "What did she go for to throw her cotton gownd in my teeth for, as if it was my blame she warn't in silks and satins?"

After a good deal of questioning on her part, and confused and recriminative statement on theirs, Marion made out the following as the facts of the case:—

For the first time since they were married, the wife had had an invitation to spend the evening with some female friends. The party had taken place the night before; and although she had returned in ill-humor, it had not broken out until just as Marion entered the house. The cause was this: none of the guests were in a station much superior to her own, yet she found herself the only one who had not a silk dress: hers was a print, and shabby. Now, when she was married, she had a silk dress, of which she said her husband had been proud enough when they were walking together. But when she saw the last of it, she saw the last of its sort, for never another had he given her to her back; and she didn't marry him to come down in the world—that she didn't!

"Of course not," said Marion. "You married him because you loved him, and thought him the finest fellow you knew."

"And so he was then, grannie. But just look at him now!"

The man moved uneasily, but without bending his outstretched legs. The fact was, that since the death of the child he had so far taken to drink that he was not unfrequently the worse for it; which had been a rare occurrence before.

"It ain't my fault," he said, "when work ain't a-goin,' if I don't dress her like a duchess. I'm as proud to see my wife rigged out as e'er a man on 'em; and that she know! and when she cast the contrairy up to me, I'm blowed if I could keep my hands off on her. She ain't the woman I took her for, miss. She 'ave a temper!"

"I don't doubt it," said Marion. "Temper is a troublesome thing with all of us, and makes us do things we're sorry for afterwards. You're sorry for striking her—ain't you, now?"

There was no response. Around the sullen heart silence closed again. Doubtless he would have given much to obliterate the fact, but he would not confess that he had been wrong. We are so stupid, that confession seems to us to fix the wrong upon us, instead of throwing it, as it does, into the depths of the eternal sea.

"I may have my temper," said the woman, a little mollified at finding, as she thought, that Miss Clare took her part; "but here am I, slaving from morning to night to make both ends meet, and goin' out every job I can get a-washin' or a-charin', and never 'avin' a bit of fun from year's end to year's end, and him off to his club, as he calls it!—an' it's a club he's like to blow out my brains with some night, when he comes home in a drunken fit; for it's worse and worse he'll get, miss, like the rest on 'em, till no woman could be proud, as once I was, to call him hers. And when I do go out to tea for once in a way, to be jeered at by them as is no better nor no worse 'n myself, acause I ain't got a husband as cares enough for me to dress me decent!—that do stick i' my gizzard. I do dearly love to have neighbors think my husband care a bit about me, let-a-be 'at he don't, one hair; and when he send me out like that"—

Here she broke down afresh.

"Why didn't ye stop at home then? I didn't tell ye to go," he said fiercely, calling her a coarse name.

"Richard," said Marion, "such words are not fit for me to hear, still less for your own wife."

"Oh! never mind me: I'm used to sich," said the woman spitefully.

"It's a lie," roared the man: "I never named sich a word to ye afore. It do make me mad to hear ye. I drink the clothes off your back, do I? If I bed the money, ye might go in velvet and lace for aught I cared!"

"She would care little to go in gold and diamonds, if you didn't care to see her in them," said Marion.

At this the woman burst into fresh tears, and the man put on a face of contempt,—the worst sign, Marion said, she had yet seen in him, not excepting the blow; for to despise is worse than to strike.

I can't help stopping my story here to put in a reflection that forces itself upon me. Many a man would regard with disgust the idea of striking his wife, who will yet cherish against her an aversion which is infinitely worse. The working-man who strikes his wife, but is sorry for it, and tries to make amends by being more tender after it, a result which many a woman will consider cheap at the price of a blow endured,—is an immeasurably superior husband to the gentleman who shows his wife the most absolute politeness, but uses that very politeness as a breastwork to fortify himself in his disregard and contempt.

Marion saw that while the tides ran thus high, nothing could be done; certainly, at least, in the way of argument. Whether the man had been drinking she could not tell, but suspected that must have a share in the evil of his mood. She went up to him, laid her hand on his shoulder, and said,—

"You're out of sorts, Richard. Come and have a cup of tea, and I will sing to you."

"I don't want no tea."

"You're fond of the piano, though. And you like to hear me sing, don't you?"

"Well, I do," he muttered, as if the admission were forced from him.

"Come with me, then."

He dragged himself up from his chair, and was about to follow her.

"You ain't going to take him from me, grannie, after he's been and struck me?" interposed his wife, in a tone half pathetic, half injured.

"Come after us in a few minutes," said Marion, in a low voice, and led the way from the room.

Quiet as a lamb Richard followed her up stairs. She made him sit in the easy-chair, and began with a low, plaintive song, which she followed with other songs and music of a similar character. He neither heard nor saw his wife enter, and both sat for about twenty minutes without a word spoken. Then Marion made a pause, and the wife rose and approached her husband. He was fast asleep.

"Don't wake him," said Marion; "let him have his sleep out. You go down and get the place tidy, and a nice bit of supper for him—if you can."

"Oh, yes! he brought me home his week's wages this very night."

"The whole?"

"Yes, grannie"

"Then weren't you too hard upon him? Just think: he had been trying to behave himself, and had got the better of the public-house for once, and come home fancying you'd be so pleased to see him; and you"—

"He'd been drinking," interrupted Eliza. "Only he said as how it was but a pot of beer he'd won in a wager from a mate of his."

"Well, if, after that beginning, he yet brought you home his money, he ought to have had another kind of reception. To think of the wife of a poor man making such a fuss about a silk dress! Why, Eliza, I never had a silk dress in my life; and I don't think I ever shall."

"Laws, grannie! who'd ha' thought that now!"

"You see I have other uses for my money than buying things for show."

"That you do, grannie! But you see," she added, somewhat inconsequently, "we ain't got no child, and Dick he take it ill of me, and don't care to save his money; so he never takes me out nowheres, and I do be so tired o' stopping indoors, every day and all day long, that it turns me sour, I do believe. I didn't use to be cross-grained, miss. But, laws! I feels now as if I'd let him knock me about ever so, if only he wouldn't say as how it was nothing to him if I was dressed ever so fine."

"You run and get his supper."

Eliza went; and Marion, sitting down again to her instrument, improvised for an hour. Next to her New Testament, this was her greatest comfort. She sung and prayed both in one then, and nobody but God heard any thing but the piano. Nor did it impede the flow of her best thoughts, that in a chair beside her slumbered a weary man, the waves of whose evil passions she had stilled, and the sting of whose disappointments she had soothed, with the sweet airs and concords of her own spirit. Who could say what tender influences might not be stealing over him, borne on the fair sounds? for even the formless and the void was roused into life and joy by the wind that roamed over the face of its deep. No humanity jarred with hers. In the presence of the most degraded, she felt God there. A face, even if besotted, was a face, only in virtue of being in the image of God. That a man was a man at all, must be because he was God's. And this man was far indeed from being of the worst. With him beside her, she could pray with most of the good of having the door of her closet shut, and some of the good of the gathering together as well. Thus was love, as ever, the assimilator of the foreign, the harmonizer of the unlike; the builder of the temple in the desert, and of the chamber in the market-place.