The Vicar's Daughter

I thought there was something wrong, mis'ess. You and master looked so scared-like. Please, mis'ess, don't send me away."

"I never wanted to send you away, Jemima. You wanted to go yourself."

"No, ma'am; that I didn't. I only wanted you to ask me to stop. Wirra! wirra! It's myself is sorry I was so rude. It's not me; it's my temper, mis'ess. I do believe I was born with a devil inside me."

I could not help laughing, partly from amusement, partly from relief.

"But you see I can't ask you to stop," I said. "I've got no money,—not even enough to pay you to-day; so I can't keep you."

"I don't want no money, ma'am. Let me stop, and I'll cook for yez, and wash and scrub for yez, to the end o' my days. An' I'll eat no more than'll keep the life in me. I must eat something, or the smell o' the meat would turn me sick, ye see, ma'am; and then I shouldn't be no good to yez. Please 'm, I ha' got fifteen pounds in the savings bank: I'll give ye all that, if ye'll let me stop wid ye."

When I confess that I burst out crying, my reader will be kind enough to take into consideration that I hadn't had much to eat for some time; that I was therefore weak in body as well as in mind; and that this was the first gleam of sunshine I had had for many weeks.

"Thank you very much, Jemima," I said, as soon as I could speak. "I won't take your money, for then you would be as poor as I am. But, if you would like to stop with us, you shall; and I won't pay you till I'm able."

The poor girl was profuse in her thanks, and left the room sobbing in her apron.

It was a gloomy, drizzly, dreary afternoon. The children were hard to amuse, and I was glad when their bedtime arrived. It was getting late before Percivale returned. He looked pale, and I found afterwards that he had walked home. He had got wet, and had to change some of his clothes. When we went in to supper, there was the neck of mutton on the table, almost as we had left it. This led me, before asking him any questions, to relate what had passed with Jemima; at which news he laughed merrily, and was evidently a good deal relieved. Then I asked him where he had been.

"To the city," he answered.

"Have you sold another picture?" I asked, with an inward tribulation, half hope, half fear; for, much as we wanted the money, I could ill bear the thought of his pictures going for the price of mere pot-boilers.

"No," he replied: "the last is stopping the way. Mr. – has been advertising it as a bargain for a hundred and fifty. But he hasn't sold it yet, and can't, he says, risk ten pounds on another. What's to come of it, I don't know," he added. "But meantime it's a comfort that Jemima can wait a bit for her money."

As we sat at supper, I thought I saw a look on Percivale's face which I had never seen there before. All at once, while I was wondering what it might mean, after a long pause, during which we had been both looking into the fire, he said,—

"Wynnie, I'm going to paint a better picture than I've ever painted yet. I can, and I will."

"But how are we to live in the mean time?" I said.

His face fell, and I saw with shame what a Job's comforter I was. Instead of sympathizing with his ardor, I had quenched it. What if my foolish remark had ruined a great picture! Anyhow, it had wounded a great heart, which had turned to labor as its plainest duty, and would thereby have been strengthened to endure and to hope. It was too cruel of me. I knelt by his knee, and told him I was both ashamed and sorry I had been so faithless and unkind. He made little of it, said I might well ask the question, and even tried to be merry over it; but I could see well enough that I had let a gust of the foggy night into his soul, and was thoroughly vexed with myself. We went to bed gloomy, but slept well, and awoke more cheerful.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE SUNSHINE

As we were dressing, it came into my mind that I had forgotten to give him a black-bordered letter which had arrived the night before. I commonly opened his letters; but I had not opened this one, for it looked like a business letter, and I feared it might be a demand for the rent of the house, which was over due. Indeed, at this time I dreaded opening any letter the writing on which I did not recognize.

"Here is a letter, Percivale," I said. "I'm sorry I forgot to give it you last night."

"Who is it from?" he asked, talking through his towel from his dressing-room.

"I don't know. I didn't open it. It looks like something disagreeable."

"Open it now, then, and see."

"I can't just at this moment," I answered; for I had my back hair half twisted in my hands. "There it is on the chimney-piece."

He came in, took it, and opened it, while I went on with my toilet. Suddenly his arms were round me, and I felt his cheek on mine.

"Read that," he said, putting the letter into my hand.

It was from a lawyer in Shrewsbury, informing him that his god-mother, with whom he had been a great favorite when a boy, was dead, and had left him three hundred pounds.

It was like a reprieve to one about to be executed. I could only weep and thank God, once more believing in my Father in heaven. But it was a humbling thought, that, if he had not thus helped me, I might have ceased to believe in him. I saw plainly, that, let me talk to Percivale as I might, my own faith was but a wretched thing. It is all very well to have noble theories about God; but where is the good of them except we actually trust in him as a real, present, living, loving being, who counts us of more value than many sparrows, and will not let one of them fall to the ground without him?

"I thought, Wynnie, if there was such a God as you believed in, and with you to pray to him, we shouldn't be long without a hearing," said my husband.

There was more faith in his heart all the time, though he could not profess the belief I thought I had, than there ever was in mine.

But our troubles weren't nearly over yet. Percivale wrote, acknowledging the letter, and requesting to know when it would be convenient to let him have the money, as he was in immediate want of it. The reply was, that the trustees were not bound to pay the legacies for a year, but that possibly they might stretch a point in his favor if he applied to them. Percivale did so, but received a very curt answer, with little encouragement to expect any thing but the extreme of legal delay. He received the money, however, about four months after; lightened, to the great disappointment of my ignorance, of thirty pounds legacy-duty.

In the mean time, although our minds were much relieved, and Percivale was working away at his new picture with great energy and courage, the immediate pressure of circumstances was nearly as painful as ever. It was a comfort, however, to know that we might borrow on the security of the legacy; but, greatly grudging the loss of the interest which that would involve, I would have persuaded Percivale to ask a loan of Lady Bernard. He objected: on what ground do you think? That it would be disagreeable to Lady Bernard to be repaid the sum she had lent us! He would have finally consented, however, I have little doubt, had the absolute necessity for borrowing arrived.

About a week or ten days after the blessed news, he had a note from Mr. –, whom he had authorized to part with the picture for thirty guineas. How much this was under its value, it is not easy to say, seeing the money-value of pictures is dependent on so many things: but, if the fairy godmother's executors had paid her legacy at once, that picture would not have been sold for less than five times the amount; and I may mention that the last time it changed hands it fetched five hundred and seventy pounds.

Mr. – wrote that he had an offer of five and twenty for it, desiring to know whether he might sell it for that sum. Percivale at once gave his consent, and the next day received a check for eleven pounds, odd shillings; the difference being the borrowed amount upon it, its interest, the commission charged on the sale, and the price of a small picture-frame.

The next day, Percivale had a visitor at the studio,—no less a person than Mr. Baddeley, with his shirt-front in full blossom, and his diamond wallowing in light on his fifth finger,—I cannot call it his little finger, for his hands were as huge as they were soft and white,—hands descended of generations of laborious ones, but which had never themselves done any work beyond paddling in money.

He greeted Percivale with a jolly condescension, and told him, that, having seen and rather liked a picture of his the other day, he had come to inquire whether he had one that would do for a pendant to it; as he should like to have it, provided he did not want a fancy price for it.

Percivale felt as if he were setting out his children for sale, as he invited him to look about the room, and turned round a few from against the wall. The great man flitted hither and thither, spying at one after another through the cylinder of his curved hand, Percivale going on with his painting as if no one were there.

"How much do you want for this sketch?" asked Mr. Baddeley, at length, pointing to one of the most highly finished paintings in the room.

"I put three hundred on it at the Academy Exhibition," answered Percivale. "My friends thought it too little; but as it has been on my hands a long time now, and pictures don't rise in price in the keeping of the painter, I shouldn't mind taking two for it."

"Two tens, I suppose you mean," said Mr. Baddeley.

"I gave him a look," said Percivale, as he described the interview to me; and I knew as well as if I had seen it what kind of a phenomenon that look must have been.

"Come, now," Mr. Baddeley went on, perhaps misinterpreting the look, for it was such as a man of his property was not in the habit of receiving, "you mustn't think I'm made of money, or that I'm a green hand in the market. I know what your pictures fetch; and I'm a pretty sharp man of business, I believe. What do you really mean to say and stick to? Ready money, you know."

"Three hundred," said Percivale coolly.

"Why, Mr. Percivale!" cried Mr. Baddeley, drawing himself up, as my husband said, with the air of one who knew a trick worth two of that, "I paid Mr. – fifty pounds, neither more nor less, for a picture of yours yesterday—a picture, allow me to say, worth"—

He turned again to the one in question with a critical air, as if about to estimate to a fraction its value as compared with the other.

"Worth three of that, some people think," said Percivale.

"The price of this, then, joking aside, is—?"

"Three hundred pounds," answered Percivale,—I know well how quietly.

"I understood you wished to sell it," said Mr. Baddeley, beginning, for all his good nature, to look offended, as well he might.

"I do wish to sell it. I happen to be in want of money."

"Then I'll be liberal, and offer you the same I paid for the other. I'll send you a check this afternoon for fifty—with pleasure."

"You cannot have that picture under three hundred."

"Why!" said the rich man, puzzled, "you offered it for two hundred, not five minutes ago."

"Yes; and you pretended to think I meant two tens."

"Offended you, I fear."

"At all events, betrayed so much ignorance of painting, that I would rather not have a picture of mine in your house."

"You're the first man ever presumed to tell me I was ignorant of painting," said Mr. Baddeley, now thoroughly indignant.

"You have heard the truth, then, for the first time," said Percivale, and resumed his work.

Mr. Baddeley walked out of the study.

I am not sure that he was so very ignorant. He had been in the way of buying popular pictures for some time, paying thousands for certain of them. I suspect he had eye enough to see that my husband's would probably rise in value, and, with the true huckster spirit, was ambitious of boasting how little he had given compared with what they were really worth.

Percivale in this case was doubtless rude. He had an insuperable aversion to men of Mr. Baddeley's class,—men who could have no position but for their money, and who yet presumed upon it, as if it were gifts and graces, genius and learning, judgment and art, all in one. He was in the habit of saying that the plutocracy, as he called it, ought to be put down,—that is, negatively and honestly,—by showing them no more respect than you really entertained for them. Besides, although he had no great favors for Cousin Judy's husband, he yet bore Mr. Baddeley a grudge for the way in which he had treated one with whom, while things went well with him, he had been ready enough to exchange hospitalities.

Before long, through Lady Bernard, he sold a picture at a fair price; and soon after, seeing in a shop-window the one Mr. – had sold to Mr. Baddeley, marked ten pounds, went in and bought it. Within the year he sold it for a hundred and fifty.

By working day and night almost, he finished his new picture in time for the Academy; and, as he had himself predicted, it proved, at least in the opinion of all his artist friends, the best that he had ever painted. It was bought at once for three hundred pounds; and never since then have we been in want of money.

CHAPTER XXXV.

WHAT LADY BERNARD THOUGHT OF IT

My reader may wonder, that, in my record of these troubles, I have never mentioned Marion. The fact is, I could not bring myself to tell her of them; partly because she was in some trouble herself, from strangers who had taken rooms in the house, and made mischief between her and her grandchildren; and partly because I knew she would insist on going to Lady Bernard; and, although I should not have minded it myself, I knew that nothing but seeing the children hungry would have driven my husband to consent to it.

One evening, after it was all over, I told Lady Bernard the story. She allowed me to finish it without saying a word. When I had ended, she still sat silent for a few moments; then, laying her hand on my arm, said,—

My dear child, you were very wrong, as well as very unkind. Why did you not let me know?"

"Because my husband would never have allowed me," I answered.

"Then I must have a talk with your husband," she said.

"I wish you would," I replied; "for I can't help thinking Percivale too severe about such things."

The very next day she called, and did have a talk with him in the study to the following effect:—

"I have come to quarrel with you, Mr. Percivale," said Lady Bernard.

"I'm sorry to hear it," he returned. "You're the last person I should like to quarrel with, for it would imply some unpardonable fault in me."

"It does imply a fault—and a great one," she rejoined; "though I trust not an unpardonable one. That depends on whether you can repent of it."

She spoke with such a serious air, that Percivale grew uneasy, and began to wonder what he could possibly have done to offend her. I had told him nothing of our conversation, wishing her to have her own way with him.

When she saw him troubled, she smiled.

"Is it not a fault, Mr. Percivale, to prevent one from obeying the divine law of bearing another's burden?"

"But," said Percivale, "I read as well, that every man shall bear his own burden."

"Ah!" returned Lady Bernard; "but I learn from Mr. Conybeare that two different Greek words are there used, which we translate only by the English burden. I cannot tell you what they are: I can only tell you the practical result. We are to bear one another's burdens of pain or grief or misfortune or doubt,—whatever weighs one down is to be borne by another; but the man who is tempted to exalt himself over his neighbor is taught to remember that he has his own load of disgrace to bear and answer for. It is just a weaker form of the lesson of the mote and the beam. You cannot get out at that door, Mr. Percivale. I beg you will read the passage in your Greek Testament, and see if you have not misapplied it. You ought to have let me bear your burden."

"Well, you see, my dear Lady Bernard," returned Percivale, at a loss to reply to such a vigorous assault, "I knew how it would be. You would have come here and bought pictures you didn't want; and I, knowing all the time you did it only to give me the money, should have had to talk to you as if I were taken in by it; and I really could not stand it."

"There you are altogether wrong. Besides depriving me of the opportunity of fulfilling a duty, and of the pleasure and the honor of helping you to bear your burden, you have deprived me of the opportunity of indulging a positive passion for pictures. I am constantly compelled to restrain it lest I should spend too much of the money given me for the common good on my own private tastes; but here was a chance for me! I might have had some of your lovely pictures in my drawing-room now—with a good conscience and a happy heart—if you had only been friendly. It was too bad of you, Mr. Percivale! I am not pretending in the least when I assert that I am really and thoroughly disappointed."

"I haven't a word to say for myself," returned Percivale.

"You couldn't have said a better," rejoined Lady Bernard; "but I hope you will never have to say it again."

"That I shall not. If ever I find myself in any difficulty worth speaking of, I will let you know at once."

"Thank you. Then we are friends again. And now I do think I am entitled to a picture,—at least, I think it will be pardonable if I yield to the very strong temptation I am under at this moment to buy one. Let me see: what have you in the slave-market, as your wife calls it?"

She bought "The Street Musician," as Percivale had named the picture taken from Dr. Donne. I was more miserable than I ought to have been when I found he had parted with it, but it was a great consolation to think it was to Lady Bernard's it had gone. She was the only one, except my mother or Miss Clare, I could have borne to think of as having become its possessor.

He had asked her what I thought a very low price for it; and I judge that Lady Bernard thought the same, but, after what had passed between them, would not venture to expostulate. With such a man as my husband, I fancy, she thought it best to let well alone. Anyhow, one day soon after this, her servant brought him a little box, containing a fine brilliant.

"The good lady's kindness is long-sighted," said my husband, as he placed it on his finger. "I shall be hard up, though, before I part with this. Wynnie, I've actually got a finer diamond than Mr. Baddeley! It is a beauty, if ever there was one!"

My husband, with all his carelessness of dress and adornment, has almost a passion for stones. It is delightful to hear him talk about them. But he had never possessed a single gem before Lady Bernard made him this present. I believe he is child enough to be happier for it all his life.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

RETROSPECTIVE

Suddenly I become aware that I am drawing nigh the close of my monthly labors for a long year. Yet the year seems to have passed more rapidly because of this addition to my anxieties. Not that I haven't enjoyed the labor while I have been actually engaged in it, but the prospect of the next month's work would often come in to damp the pleasure of the present; making me fancy, as the close of each chapter drew near, that I should not have material for another left in my head. I heard a friend once remark that it is not the cares of to-day, but the cares of to-morrow, that weigh a man down. For the day we have the corresponding strength given, for the morrow we are told to trust; it is not ours yet.

When I get my money for my work, I mean to give my husband a long holiday. I half think of taking him to Italy,—for of course I can do what I like with my own, whether husband or money,—and so have a hand in making him a still better painter. Incapable of imitation, the sight of any real work is always of great service to him, widening his sense of art, enlarging his idea of what can be done, rousing what part of his being is most in sympathy with it,—a part possibly as yet only half awake; in a word, leading him another step towards that simplicity which is at the root of all diversity, being so simple that it needs all diversity to set it forth.

How impossible it seemed to me that I should ever write a book! Well or ill done, it is almost finished, for the next month is the twelfth. I must look back upon what I have written, to see what loose ends I may have left, and whether any allusion has not been followed up with a needful explanation; for this way of writing by portions—the only way in which I could have been persuaded to attempt the work, however—is unfavorable to artistic unity; an unnecessary remark, seeing that to such unity my work makes no pretensions. It is but a collection of portions detached from an uneventful, ordinary, and perhaps in part therefore very blessed life. Hence, perhaps, it was specially fitted for this mode of publication. At all events, I can cast upon it none of the blame of what failure I may have to confess.

A biography cannot be constructed with the art of a novel, for this reason: that a novel is constructed on the artist's scale, with swift-returning curves; a biography on the divine scale, whose circles are so large that they shoot beyond this world, sometimes even before we are able to detect in them the curve by which they will at length round themselves back towards completion. Hence, every life must look more or less fragmentary, and more or less out of drawing perhaps; not to mention the questionable effects in color and tone where the model himself will insist on taking palette and brushes, and laying childish, if not passionate, conceited, ambitious, or even spiteful hands to the work.

I do not find that I have greatly blundered, or omitted much that I ought to have mentioned. One odd thing is, that, in the opening conversation in which they urge me to the attempt, I have not mentioned Marion. I do not mean that she was present, but that surely some one must have suggested her and her history as affording endless material for my record. A thing apparently but not really strange is, that I have never said a word about the Mrs. Cromwell mentioned in the same conversation. The fact is, that I have but just arrived at the part of my story where she first comes in. She died about three months ago; and I can therefore with the more freedom narrate in the next chapter what I have known of her.

I find also that I have, in the fourth chapter, by some odd cerebro-mechanical freak, substituted the name of my Aunt Martha for that of my Aunt Millicent, another sister of my father, whom he has not, I believe, had occasion to mention in either of his preceding books. My Aunt Martha is Mrs. Weir, and has no children; my Aunt Millicent is Mrs. Parsons, married to a hard-working attorney, and has twelve children, now mostly grown up.

I find also, in the thirteenth chapter, an unexplained allusion. There my husband says, "Just ask my brother his experience in regard of the word to which you object." The word was stomach, at the use of which I had in my ill-temper taken umbrage: however disagreeable a word in itself, surely a husband might, if need be, use it without offence. It will be proof enough that my objection arose from pure ill-temper when I state that I have since asked Roger to what Percivale referred. His reply was, that, having been requested by a certain person who had a school for young ladies—probably she called it a college—to give her pupils a few lectures on physiology, he could not go far in the course without finding it necessary to make a not unfrequent use of the word, explaining the functions of the organ to which the name belonged, as resembling those of a mill. After the lecture was over, the school-mistress took him aside, and said she really could not allow her young ladies to be made familiar with such words. Roger averred that the word was absolutely necessary to the subject upon which she had desired his lectures; and that he did not know how any instruction in physiology could be given without the free use of it. "No doubt," she returned, "you must recognize the existence of the organ in question; but, as the name of it is offensive to ears polite, could you not substitute another? You have just said that its operations resemble those of a mill: could you not, as often as you require to speak of it, refer to it in the future as the mill?" Roger, with great difficulty repressing his laughter, consented; but in his next lecture made far more frequent reference to the mill than was necessary, using the word every time—I know exactly how—with a certain absurd solemnity that must have been irresistible. The girls went into fits of laughter at the first utterance of it, and seemed, he said, during the whole lecture, intent only on the new term, at every recurrence of which their laughter burst out afresh. Doubtless their school-mistress had herself prepared them to fall into Roger's trap. The same night he received a note from her, enclosing his fee for the lectures given, and informing him that the rest of the course would not be required. Roger sent back the money, saying that to accept part payment would be to renounce his claim for the whole; and that, besides, he had already received an amount of amusement quite sufficient to reward him for his labor. I told him I thought he had been rather cruel; but he said such a woman wanted a lesson. He said also, that to see the sort of women who sometimes had the responsibility of training girls must make the angels weep; none but a heartless mortal like himself could laugh where conventionality and insincerity were taught in every hint as to posture and speech. It was bad enough, he said, to shape yourself into your own ideal; but to have to fashion yourself after the ideal of one whose sole object in teaching was to make money, was something wretched indeed.