"Then of course you would have no objection to my visiting a d.u.c.h.ess in the small-pox?"

Lord Gartley was on the point of saying that d.u.c.h.esses never took the smallpox, but he did not, afraid Hester might know to the contrary.

"There could be no occasion for that," he said. "She would have everything she could want."

"And the others are in lack of everything! To desert them would be to desert the Lord. He will count it so."

"Well, certainly," said his lordship, returning on the track, "there would be less objection in the case of the d.u.c.h.ess, in as much as every possible precaution would in her house be taken against the spread of the disease. It would be horribly selfish to think only of the person affected!"

"You show the more need that the poor should not be deserted of the rich in their bitter necessity! Who among them is able to take the right precautions against the spread of the disease? And if it spread among them, there is no security against its reaching those at last who take every possible care of themselves and none of their neighbours. You do not imagine, because I trust in G.o.d, and do not fear what the small-pox can do to me, I would therefore neglect any necessary preventive! That would be to tempt G.o.d: means as well as results are his. They are a way of giving us a share in his work."

"If I should have imagined such neglect possible, would not yesterday go far to justify me?" said lord Gartley.

"You are ungenerous," returned Hester. "You know I was then taken unprepared! The smallpox had but just appeared--at least I had not heard of it before."

"Then you mean to give up society for the sake of nursing the poor?"

"Only upon occasion, when there should be a necessity--such as an outbreak of infectious disease."

"And how, pray, should I account for your absence--not to mention the impossibility of doing my part without you? I should have to be continually telling stories; for if people came to know the fact, they would avoid me too as if I were the pest itself!"

It was to Hester as if a wall rose suddenly across the path hitherto stretching before her in long perspective. It became all but clear to her that he and she had been going on without any real understanding of each other's views in life. Her expectations tumbled about her like a house of cards. If he wanted to marry her, full of designs and aims in which she did not share, and she was going to marry him, expecting sympathies and helps which he had not the slightest inclination to give her, where was the hope for either of anything worth calling success?

She sat silent. She wanted to be alone that she might think. It would be easier to write than talk further! But she must have more certainty as to what was in his mind.

"Do you mean then, Gartley," she said, "that when I am your wife, if ever I am, I shall have to give up all the friendships to which I have hitherto devoted so much of my life?"

Her tone was dominated by the desire to be calm, and get at his real feeling. Gartley mistook it, and supposed her at length betraying the weakness. .h.i.therto so successfully concealed. He concluded he had only to be firm now to render future discussion of the matter unnecessary.

"I would not for a moment act the tyrant, or say you must never go into such houses again. Your own good sense, the innumerable engagements you will have, the endless calls upon your time and accomplishments, will guide you--and I am certain guide you right, as to what attention you can spare to the claims of benevolence. But just please allow me one remark: in the circle to which you will in future belong, nothing is considered more out of place than any affectation of enthusiasm. I do not care to determine whether your way or theirs is the right one; all I want to say is, that as the one thing to be avoided is peculiarity, you would do better not to speak of these persons, whatever regard you may have for their spiritual welfare, as _your friends_. One cannot have so many friends--not to mention that a unity of taste and feeling is necessary to that much-abused word _friendship_. You know well enough such persons cannot be your friends."

This was more than Hester could bear. She broke out with a vehemence for which she was afterwards sorry, though nowise ashamed of it.

"They _are_ my friends. There are twenty of them would do more for me than you would."

Lord Gartley rose. He was hurt. "Hester," he said, "you think so little of me or my anxiety about your best interests, that I cannot but suppose it will be a relief to you if I go."

She answered not a word--did not even look up, and his lordship walked gently but unhesitatingly from the room.

"It will bring her to her senses!" he said to himself. "--How grand she looked!"

Long after he was gone, Hester sat motionless, thinking, thinking. What she had vaguely foreboded--she knew now she had foreboded it all the time--at least she thought she knew it--was come! They were not, never had been, never could be at one about anything! He was a mere man of this world, without relation to the world of truth! To be tied to him for life would be to be tied indeed! And yet she loved him--would gladly die for him--not to give him his own way--for that she would not even marry him; but to save him from it--to save him from himself, and give him G.o.d instead--that would be worth dying for, even if it were the annihilation unbelievers took it for! To marry him, swell his worldly triumphs, help gild the chains of his slavery was not to be thought of!

It was one thing to die that a fellow-creature might have all things good! another to live a living death that he might persist in the pride of life! She could not throw G.o.d's life to the service of the stupid Satan! It was a sad breakdown to the hopes that had cl.u.s.tered about Gartley!

But did she not deserve it?

Therewith began a self-searching which did not cease until it had prostrated her in sorrow and shame before him whose charity is the only pledge of ours.

Was it then all over between them? Might he not bethink himself, and come again, and say he was sorry he had so left her? He might indeed; but would that make any difference to her? Had he not beyond a doubt disclosed his real way of thinking and feeling? If he could speak thus now, after they had talked so much, what spark of hope was there in marriage?

To forget her friends that she might go into _society_ a countess!

The thought was as contemptible as poverty-stricken. She would leave such ambition to women that devoured novels and studied the peerage! One loving look from human eyes was more to her than the admiration of the world! She would go back to her mother as soon as she had found her poor Corney, and seen her people through the smallpox! If only the house was her own, that she might turn it into a hospital! She would make it a home to which any one sick or sad, any cast out of the world, any betrayed by seeming friends, might flee for shelter! She would be more than ever the sister and helper of her own--cling faster than ever to the skirts of the Lord's garment, that the virtue going out of him might flow through her to them! She would be like Christ, a gulf into which wrong should flow and vanish--a sun radiating an uncompromising love!

How easy is the thought, in certain moods, of the loveliest, most unselfish devotion! How hard is the doing of the thought in the face of a thousand unlovely difficulties! Hester knew this, but, G.o.d helping, was determined not to withdraw hand or foot or heart. She rose, and having prepared herself, set out to visit her people. First of all she would go to the bookbinder's, and see how his wife was attended to.

The doctor not being there, she was readily admitted. The poor husband, unable to help, sat a picture of misery by the scanty fire. A neighbor, not yet quite recovered from the disease herself, had taken on her the duties of nurse. Having given her what instructions she thought it least improbable she might carry out, and told her to send for anything she wanted, she rose to take her leave.

"Won't you sing to her a bit, miss, before you go?" said the husband beseechingly. "It'll do her more good than all the doctor's stuff."

"I don't think she's well enough," said Hester.

"Not to get all the good on it, I daresay, miss," rejoined the man; "but she'll hear it like in a dream, an' she'll think it's the angels a singin'; an' that'll do her good, for she do like all them creaturs!"

Hester yielded and sang, thinking all the time how the ways of the open-eyed G.o.d look to us like things in a dream, because we are only in the night of his great day, asleep before the brightness of his great waking thoughts. The woman had been tossing and moaning in an undefined discomfort, but as she sang she grew still, and when she ceased lay as if asleep.

"Thank you, miss," said the man. "You can do more than the doctor, as I told you! When he comes, he always wakes her up; you make her sleep true!"

CHAPTER XLII.

DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP.

In the meantime yet worse trouble had come upon the poor Frankses. About a week after they had taken possession of the cellar, little Moxy, the Serpent of the Prairies, who had been weakly ever since his fall down the steps, by which he had hurt his head and been sadly shaken, became seriously ill, and grew worse and worse. For some days they were not much alarmed, for the child had often been ailing--oftener of late since they had not been faring so well; and even when they were they dared not get a doctor to him for fear of being turned out, and having to go to the workhouse.

By this time they had contrived to make the cellar a little more comfortable. They managed to get some straw, and with two or three old sacks made a bed for the mother and the baby and Moxy on the packing-case. They got also some pieces of matting, and contrived to put up a screen betwixt it and the rickety door. By the exercise of their art they had gained enough to keep them in food, but never enough to pay for the poorest lodging. They counted themselves, however, better off by much than if they had been crowded with all sorts in such lodging as a little more might have enabled them to procure.

The parents loved Moxy more tenderly than either of his brothers, and it was with sore hearts they saw him getting worse. The sickness was a mild smallpox--so mild that they did not recognize it, yet more than Moxy could bear, and he was gradually sinking. When this became clear to the mother, then indeed she felt the hand of G.o.d heavy upon her.

Religiously brought up, she had through the ordinary troubles of a married life sought help from the G.o.d in whom her mother had believed:--we do not worship our fathers and mothers like the Chinese--though I do not envy the man who can scorn them for it--but they are, if at all decent parents, our first mediators with the great father, whom we can worse spare than any baby his mother;--but with every fresh attack of misery, every step further down on the stair of life, she thought she had lost her last remnant of hope, and knew that up to that time she had hoped, while past seasons of failure looked like times of blessed prosperity. No man, however little he may recognize the hope in him, knows what it would be to be altogether hopeless. Now Moxy was about to be taken from them, and no deeper misery seemed, to their imagination, possible! Nothing seemed left them--not even the desire of deliverance. How little hope there is in the commoner phases of religion! The message grounded on the uprising of the crucified man, has as yet yielded but little victory over the sorrows of the grave, but small antic.i.p.ation of the world to come; not a little hope of deliverance from a h.e.l.l, but scarce a foretaste of a blessed time at hand when the heart shall exult and the flesh be glad. In general there is at best but a sad looking forward to a region scarcely less shadowy and far more dreary than the elysium of the pagan poets. When Christ cometh, shall he find faith in the earth--even among those who think they believe that he is risen indeed? Margaret Franks, in the cellar of her poverty, the grave yawning below it for her Moxy, felt as if there was no heaven at all, only a sky.

But a strange necessity was at hand to compel the mother to rouse afresh all the latent hope and faith and prayer that were in her.

By an inexplicable insight the child seemed to know that he was dying.

For, one morning, after having tossed about all the night long, he suddenly cried out in tone most pitiful,

"Mother, don't put me in a hole."

As far as any of them knew, he had never seen a funeral--at least to know what it was--had never heard anything about death or burial: his father had a horror of the subject!

The words went like a knife to the heart of the mother. She sat silent, neither able to speak, not knowing what to answer.

Again came the pitiful cry,

"Mother, don't put me in a hole."

Most mothers would have sought to soothe the child, their own hearts breaking the while, with the a.s.surance that no one should put him into any hole, or anywhere he did not want to go. But this mother could not lie in the face of death, nor had it ever occurred to her that no _person_ is ever put into a hole, though many a body.