"Come up-stairs," he said, "and tell me all about it."

He turned and led the way. Without a second thought, Amy followed him.

Sarah stood for a moment with a stare, wondering who the lady could be: Mr. Cornelius was so much at home with her! and she had never been to the house before! "A cousin from Australia," she concluded: they had cousins there.

Cornelius went into the drawing-room, Amy after him, and opened the shutters of a window, congratulating himself on his good luck. Not often did anything so pleasant enter the stupid old place! He made her sit on the sofa in the half-dark, sat down beside her, and in a few minutes had all her story. Moved by her sweet bright face and pretty manners, pleased with the deference, amounting to respect, which she showed him, he began to think her the nicest girl he had ever known. For her behavior made him feel a large person with power over her, in which power she seemed pleased to find herself. After a conversation of about half an hour, she rose.

"What!" said Corney, "you're not going already, Amy?"

"Yes, sir," replied Amy, "I think I had better go. I am so sorry not to see Miss Raymount! She was very kind to me!"

"You mustn't go yet," said Corney. "Sit down and rest a little.

Come--you used to like music: I will sing to you, and you shall tell me whether I have improved since you heard me last."

He went to the piano, and Amy sat down again. He sang with his usual inferiority--which was not so inferior that he failed of pleasing simple Amy. She expressed herself delighted. He sang half a dozen songs, then showed her a book of photographs, chiefly portraits of the more famous actresses of the day, and told her about them. With one thing and another he kept her--until Sarah grew fidgety, and was on the point of stalking up from the kitchen to the drawing-room, when she heard them coming down. Cornelius took his hat and stick, and said he would walk with her. Amy made no objection; she was pleased to have his company; he went with her all the way to the lodging she shared with her friend in a quiet little street in Kensington. Before they parted, her manner and behavior, her sweetness, and the prettiness which would have been beauty had it been on a larger scale, had begun to fill what little there was of Corney's imagination; and he left her with a feeling that he knew where a treasure lay. He walked with an enlargement of strut as he went home through the park, and swung his cane with the air of a man who had made a conquest of which he had reason to be proud.

CHAPTER XXVI.

WAITING A PURPOSE.

The hot dreamy days rose and sank in Yrndale. Hester would wake in the morning oppressed with the feeling that there was something she ought to have begun long ago, and must positively set about this new day. Then as her inner day cleared, she would afresh recognize her duty as that of those who stand and wait. She had no great work to do--only the common family duties of the day, and her own education for what might be the will of Him who, having made her for something, would see that the possibility of that something should not be wanting. In the heat of the day she would seek a shady spot with a book for her companion--generally some favorite book, for she was not one of those who say of one book as of another--"Oh, I've read that!" It was some time before she came to like any particular spot: so many drew her, and the spirit of exploration in that which was her own was strong in her. Under the shadow of some rock, the tent-roof of some umbrageous beech, or the solemn gloom of some pine-grove, the brooding spirit of the summer would day after day find her when the sun was on the height of his great bridge, and fill her with the sense of that repose in which alone she herself can work. Then would such a quiescence pervade Hester's spirit, such a sweet spiritual sleep creep over her, that nothing seemed required of her but to live; mere existence was conscious well-being.

But the feeling never lasted long. All at once would start awake in her the dread that she was forsaking the way, inasmuch as she was more willing to be idle, and rest in inaction. Then would faith rouse herself and say: "But G.o.d will take care of you in this thing too. You have not to watch lest He should forget, but to be ready when He gives you the lightest call. You have to keep listening." And the ever returning corrective to such mood came with the evening; for, regularly as she went to bed at night and left it in the morning, she went from the tea-table in the afternoon to her piano, and there, through all the sweet evening movements and atmospheric changes of the brain--for the brain has its morning and evening, its summer and winter as well as the day and the year--would meditate aloud, or brood aloud over the musical meditations of some master in harmony. And oftener than she knew, especially in the twilight, when the days had grown shorter, and his mother feared for him the falling dew, would Mark be somewhere in the dusk listening to her, a lurking cherub, feeding on her music--sometimes ascending on its upward torrent to a solitude where only G.o.d could find him.

At such time the thought of Vavasor would come, and for a while remain; but it was chiefly as one who would be a welcome helper in her work.

When for the time she had had enough of music, softly as she would have covered a child, she would close her piano, then glide like a bat into the night, and wander hither and thither through the gloom without conscious choice. Then most would she think what it would be to have a man for a friend, one who would strengthen her heart and make her bold to do what was needful and right; and if then the thoughts of the maiden would fall to the natural architecture of maidens, and build one or two of the airy castles into which no man has looked or can look, and if through them went flitting the form of Vavasor, who will wonder! It is not the building of castles in the steepest heights of air that is to be blamed, but the building of such as inspector conscience is not invited to enter. To cherish the ideal of a man with whom to walk on her way through the world, is as right for a woman as it was for G.o.d to make them male and female; and to the wise virgin it will ever be a solemn thought, lovelily dwelt upon, and never mockingly, when most playfully handled. For there is a play even with most serious things that has in it no offense. Humor has its share even in religion--but oh, how few seem to understand its laws! I confess to a kind of foreboding shudder when even a clergyman begins to jest upon the borders of sacred things.

It is not humor that is irreverent, but the mind that gives it the wrong turn. As we may be angry and not sin, so may we jest and not sin. But there is a poor ambition to be married, which is, I fear, the thought most present with too many young women. They feel as if their worth remained unacknowledged, as if there were for them no place they could call their own in society, until they find a man to take them under his wing. She degrades womanhood who thinks thus of herself. It says ill for the relation of father and mother if the young women of a family recoil from the thought of being married, but it says ill for the relation of parents and children if they are longing to be married.

One evening towards the end of July, when the summer is at its heat, and makes the world feel as if there never had been, and never ought to be anything but summer; and when the wind of its nights comes to us from the land where the sun is not, to tell human souls that, dear as is the sunlight to their eyes, there are sweeter things far with which the sun has little to do--Hester was sitting under a fir-tree on the gathered leaves of numberless years, pine-odors filling the air around her, as if they, too, stole out with the things of the night when the sun was gone.

It happened that a man came late in the day to tune her piano, and she had left him at his work, and wandered up the hill in the last of the sunlight. All at once the wind awoke, and began to sing the strange, thin, monotonous Elysian ghost-song of the pine-wood--for she sat in a little grove of pines, and they were all around her. The sweet melancholy of the hour moved her spirit. So close was her heart to that of nature that, when alone with it, she seldom or never longed for her piano; she _had_ the music, and did not need to hear it. When we are very near to G.o.d, we do not desire the Bible. When we feel far from him, we may well make haste to it. Most people, I fear, wait till they are inclined to seek him. They do not stir themselves up to lay hold on G.o.d; they breathe the dark airs of the tomb till the morning break, instead of rising at once and setting out on their journey to meet it.

As she sat in music-haunted reverie, she heard a slight rustle on the dry carpet around her feet, and the next moment saw dark in the gloom the form of a man. She was startled, but he spoke instantly; it was Vavasor. She was still, and could not answer for a moment.

"I am so sorry I frightened you!" he said.

"It is nothing," she returned. "Why can't one help being silly? I don't see why ladies should ever be frightened more than gentlemen."

"Men are quite as easily startled as ladies," he answered, "though perhaps they come to themselves a little quicker. Nothing is more startling than to find some one near when you thought you were alone."

"Except," said Hester, "finding yourself alone when you thought some one was near. But how did you find me?"

"They told me at the house you were somewhere in this direction. Mark had followed you apparently some distance. So I ventured to come and look for you, and--something led me right. But all the time I seem going to lose myself instead of finding you."

"It might be both," returned Hester; "for I don't at all know my way with certainty, especially in the dusk. We are on the shady side of the hill, you see."

"I cannot have lost myself if I have found you," rejoined Vavasor, but did not venture to carry the speech farther.

"It is time we were moving," said Hester, "seeing we are both so uncertain of the way. Who knows when we may reach the house!"

"Do let us risk it a few minutes longer," said Vavasor. "This is delicious. Just think a moment: this my first burst from the dungeon-land of London for a whole year! This is paradise! I could fancy I was dreaming of fairyland! But it is such an age since you left London, that I fear you must be getting used to it, and will scarcely understand my delight!"

"It is only the false fairyland of mechanical inventors," replied Hester, "that children ever get tired of. And yet I don't know," she added, correcting herself; "it is true the things that delight Saffy are a contempt to Mark; but I am sorry to say the things Mark delights in, Saffy says are so dull; there is hardly a giant in them!"

As they talked Vavasor had seated himself on the fir-spoil beside her.

She asked him about his journey and about Cornelius; then told him how she came to be there instead of at her piano,

"The tuner must have finished by this time!" she said; "let us go and try his work!"

So saying she rose, and was on her feet before Vavasor. The way seemed to reveal itself to her as they went, and they were soon at home.

The next fortnight Vavasor spent at Yrndale. In those days Nature had the best chance with him she had yet had since first he came into her dominions. For a man is a man, however he may have been "dragged up,"

and however much injured he may be by the dragging. Society may have sought to subst.i.tute herself for both G.o.d and Nature, and may have had a horrible amount of success: the rout of Comus see no beast-faces among them. Yet, I repeat, man is potentially a man, however far he may be from actual manhood. What one man has, every man has, however hidden and unrecognizable. Who knows what may not sometimes be awakened in him! The most heartless scoffer may be suddenly surprised by emotion in a way to him unaccountable; of all its approaches and all the preparation for it he has been profoundly unaware. During that fortnight, Vavasor developed not merely elements of which he had had no previous consciousness, but elements in whose existence he could not be said to have really believed. He believed in them the less in fact that he had affected their existence in himself, and thought he possessed what there was of them to be possessed. The most remarkable event at once of his inner and outer history, and the only one that must have seemed almost incredible to those who knew him best, was, that one morning he got up in time to see, and for the purpose of seeing, the sun rise. I hardly expect to be believed when I tell the fact! I am not so much surprised that he formed the resolution the night before. Something Hester said is enough to account for that. But that a man like him should already have got on so far as, in the sleepiness of the morning, to keep the resolve he had come to in the wakefulness of the preceding night, fills me with astonishment. It was a great stride forward. Nor was this all: he really enjoyed it! I do not merely mean that, as a victorious man, he enjoyed the conquest of himself when the struggle was over, attributing to it more heroism than it could rightly claim; nor yet that, as any young human animal may, he enjoyed the clear invigorating clean air that filled his lungs like a new gift of life and strength. He had poetry enough to feel something of the indwelling greatness that belonged to the vision itself--for a vision and a prophecy it is, as much as when first it rose on the wondering gaze of human spirit, to every soul that through its eyes can see what those eyes cannot see. He felt a power of some kind present to his soul in the sight--though he but set it down to poetic feeling, which he never imagined to have anything to do with fact. It was in the so-called Christian the mere rudiment of that worship of the truth which in the old Guebers was developed into adoration of it in its symbol. It was the drawing of the eternal Nature in him towards the naturing Eternal, whom he was made to understand, but of whom he knew so little.

When the evening came, after almost a surfeit of music, if one dare, un-self-accused, employ such a word concerning a holy thing, they went out to wander a little about the house in the twilight.

"In such a still soft negative of life," he said, "as such an evening gives us, really one could almost doubt whether there was indeed such a constantly recurring phenomenon in nature as I saw this morning!"

"What did you see this morning?" asked Hester, wondering.

"I saw the sun rise," he answered.

"Did you really? I'm so glad! That is a sight rarely seen in London--at least if I may judge by my own experience."

"One goes to bed so late and so tired!" he replied simply.

"True! and even if one be up in time, where could you see it from?"

"I _have_ seen it rise coming home from a dance; but then somehow you don't seem to have anything to do with it. I have, however, often smelt the hay in the streets in the morning."

Hester was checked by this mention of the hay--as if the sun was something that belonged to the country, like the gra.s.s he withered; but ere she had time to explain to herself what she felt, the next thing he said got her over it.

"I a.s.sure you I felt as if I had never seen the sun before. His way of getting up was a new thing to me altogether. He seemed to mean shining--and somehow I felt that he did. In London he always looks indifferent--just as if he had got it to do, and couldn't help it, like everybody else in the horrible place. Who is it that says--'G.o.d made the country, and man made the town'?"

"I think it was Cowper, but I'm not sure," answered Hester. "It can't be quite true though. I suspect man has more to do with the unmaking than the making of either. We have reason to be glad he has not come near enough to us yet to destroy either our river or our atmosphere."

"He is creeping on, though. The quarries are not very far from you even now."

"The quarries do little or no harm. There are a great many things man may do that only make nature show her beauty the more. I have been thinking a good deal about it lately: it is the rubbish that makes all the difficulty--the refuse of the mills and the pits and the iron-works and the potteries that does all the mischief."

"So it is! and worst of all the human rubbish--especially that which gathers in our great cities, and gives so much labor in vain to clergyman and philanthropist!"

Hester smiled--not that she was pleased with the way Vavasor spoke, for she could not but believe he would in his _rubbish_ include many of her dear people, but that she was amused at his sympathetic tone towards the clergy as generally concerned in the matter. For she had had a little experience, and had listened to much testimony from such as knew, and firmly believed that the clergy were very near the root of the evil; and that not with the hoe and weeder, but with the watering pot and artificial manure, helping largely to convert the poor--into beggars, and the lawless into hypocrites, heaping cairn upon cairn on the grave of their poor prostrate buried souls. But thank G.o.d, it is by the few, but fast increasing exceptions, that she knew what the rest were doing!

But perhaps he meant only the wicked when he used the word.

"What do you mean by the human rubbish, Mr. Vavasor?" she asked.