"Because we have chosen what is bad, and do not know how ugly it is--that is why," answered her father.

"Isn't that rather hard on the fish, though?" said Vavasor. "How can innocent creatures be an embodiment of evil?"

"But what do you mean by _innocent_?" returned Mr. Raymount. "The nature of an animal may be low and even hateful, and its looks correspondent, while no conscience accuses it of evil. I have known half a dozen cows, in a shed large enough for a score, and abundantly provisioned, unite to keep the rest of the herd out of it. Many a man is a far lower and worse creature in his nature that his conscience tells him. It is the conscience educated by strife and failure and success that is severe upon the man, demanding of him the all but unattainable."

Talk worse and worse for an aquarium! But happily they had now reached the tank of the octopods.

Alas, there had been some mismanagement of the pipes, and the poor devil-fishes had been boiled, or at least heated to death! One small, wretched, skinny thing, hardly distinguishable from a discolored clout, was all that was left of a dozen. Cornelius laughed heartily when informed of the mischance.

"It's a pity it wasn't the devil himself instead of his fish!" he said.

"Wouldn't it be a jolly lark, Mr. Vavasor, if some of the rascals down below were to heat that furnace too hot, and rid us of the whole potful at one fell swoop!"

"What is that you are saying, Corney?" said his mother, who had but just rejoined them.

"I was only uttering the pious wish that the devil was dead," answered Cornelius; "--boiled like an octopus! ha! ha! ha!"

"What good would that do?" said his father. "The human devils would be no better, and the place would soon be re-occupied. The population of the pit must be kept up by immigration. There may be babies born in heaven, for any thing I know, but certain I am there can be none in the other place. This world of ours is the nursery of devils as well as of saints."

"And what becomes of those that are neither?" asked Vavasor.

"It were hard to say," replied Mr. Raymount with some seriousness.

"A confoundedly peculiar family!" said Vavasor to himself. "There's a bee in every bonnet of them! An odd, irreverent way the old fellow has with him--for an old fellow pretending to believe what he says!"

Vavasor was not one of the _advanced_ of the age; he did not deny there was a G.o.d: he thought that the worse form that it was common in the bank; the fellows he a.s.sociated with never took the trouble to deny him; they took their own way, and asked no questions. When a man has not the slightest intention that the answer shall influence his conduct, why should he inquire whether there be a G.o.d or not? Vavasor cared more about the top of his cane than the G.o.d whose being he did not take the trouble to deny. He believed a little less than the maiden aunt with whom he lived; she believed less than her mother, and her mother had believed less than hers; so that for generations the faith, so called, of the family had been dying down, simply because all that time it had sent out no fresh root of obedience. It had in truth been no faith at all, only a.s.sent. Miss Vavasor went to church because it was the right thing to do: G.o.d was one of the heads of society, and his drawing-rooms had to be attended. Certain objections not altogether unreasonable might be urged against doing so: several fictions were more or less countenanced in them--such as equality, love of your neighbor, and forgiveness of your enemy, but then n.o.body really heeded them: religion had worked its way up to a respectable position, and no longer required the support of the unwashed--that is, those outside the circle whose center is May-fair. As to her personal religion, why, G.o.d had heard her prayers, and might again: he did show favor occasionally. That she should come out of it all as well as other people when this life of family and incomes and match-making was over, she saw no reason to doubt. Ranters and canters might talk as they pleased, but G.o.d knew better than make the existence of thoroughly respectable people quite unendurable! She was kind-hearted, and treated her maid like an equal up to the moment of offense--then like a dog of the east up to that of atonement. She had the power of keeping her temper even in family differences, and hence was regarded as a very model of wisdom, prudence and _tact_, the last far the first in the consideration of her judges. The young of her acquaintance fled to her for help in need, and she gave them no hard words, but generally more counsel than comfort--always, however, the best she had, which was of Polonius' kind, an essence of wise selfishness, so far as selfishness can be wise, with a strong dash of self-respect, nowise the more sparing that it was independent of desert. The good man would find it rather difficult to respect himself were he to try; his gaze is upward to the one good; but had it been possible for such a distinction to enter Miss Vavasor's house, it would have been only to be straightway dismissed. She was devoted to her nephew, as she counted devotion, but would see that he made a correspondent return.

When Vavasor reached their encampment in the Imperial Hotel, he went to his own room, got out his Russia-leather despatch-box, half-filled with songs and occasional verses, which he never travelled without, and set himself to see what he could do with the dog-fish--in what kind of poetic jelly, that is, he could enclose his shark-like mouth and evil look. But prejudiced as he always was in favor of whatever issued from his own brain--as yet nothing had come from his heart--he was anything but satisfied with the result of his endeavor. It was, in fact, an utter failure so far as the dog-fish was concerned, for he was there unnamed, a mere indistinguishable presence among many monsters. But notwithstanding the gravity of this defect, and the distance between his idea and its outcome, he yet concluded the homage to Hester which it embodied of a value to justify the presentation of the verses. And poor as they were they were nearly as good as anything he had done hitherto.

Here they are:

To H.R.

Lo, Beauty climbs the watery steep, Sets foot on many a slimy stair; Treads on the monsters of the deep, And rising seeks the earth and air.

On every form she sets her foot, She lifts it straight and pa.s.ses on; With flowers and trees she takes no root, This, that caresses, and is gone.

Imperfect, poorly lovely things On all sides round she sighing sees; She flies, nor for her flying wings Finds any refuge, rest, or ease!

At last, at last, on Burcliff's sh.o.r.e, She spies a thoughtful wanderer; She speeds--she lights for evermore, Incorporated, one with her!

CHAPTER VII.

AMY AMBER.

Some gentle crisis must have arrived in the history of Hester, for in these days her heart was more sensitive and more sympathetic than ever before. The circ.u.mvolant troubles of humanity caught upon it as it it had been a thorn-bush, and hung there. It was not greatly troubled, neither was its air murky, but its very repose was like a mother's sleep which is no obstacle between the cries of her children and her sheltering soul: it was ready to wake at every moan of the human sea around her. Unlike most women, she had not needed marriage and motherhood to open the great gate of her heart to her kind: I do not mean there are not many like her in this. Why the tide of human affection should have begun to rise so rapidly in her just at this time, there is no need for conjecturing: much of every history must for the long present remain inexplicable. No man creates his history any more than he creates himself; he only modifies it--sometimes awfully; gathers to him swift help, or makes intervention necessary. But the tide of which I speak flowed yet more swiftly from the night of the magic lantern. That experience had been as a mirror in which she saw the misery of the low of her kind, including, alas! her brother Cornelius.

He had never before so plainly revealed to her his heartlessness, and the painful consequence of the revelation was, that now, with all her swelling love for human beings, she felt her heart shrink from him as if he were of another nature. She could never indeed have loved him as she did but that, being several years his elder, she had had a good deal to do with him as baby and child: the infant motherhood of her heart had gathered about him, and not an eternity of difference could after that destroy the relation between them. But as he grew up, the boy had undermined and weakened her affection, though hardly her devotion; and now the youth had given it a rude shock. So far was she, however, from yielding to this decay of feeling that it did not merely cause her much pain but gave rise in her to much useless endeavor; while every day she grew more anxious and careful to carry herself toward him as a sister ought.

The Raymounts could not afford one of the best lodgings in Burcliff, and were well contented with a floor in an old house in an unfashionable part of the town, looking across the red roofs of the port, and out over the flocks of Neptune's white sheep on the blue-gray German ocean. It was kept by two old maids whose hearts had got flattened under the pressure of poverty--no, I am wrong, it was not poverty, but _care_; pure poverty never flattened any heart; it is the care which poverty is supposed to justify that does the mischief; it gets inside it and burrows, as well as lies on the top of it; of mere outside poverty a heart can bear a mountainous weight without the smallest injury, yea with inestimable result of the only riches. Our Lord never mentions poverty as one of the obstructions to his kingdom, neither has it ever proved such; riches, cares and desires he does mention. The sisters Witherspin had never yet suffered from the lack of a single necessary; not the less they frayed their mornings, wore out their afternoons, scorched their evenings, and consumed their nights, in sc.r.a.ping together provision for an old age they were destined never to see. They were a small meager pair, with hardly a smile between them.

One waited and the other cooked. The one that waited had generally her chin tied up with a silk handkerchief, as if she had come to life again, but not quite, and could not do without the handkerchief. The other was rarely seen, but her existence was all day testified by the odors that ascended from the Tartarus of her ever-recurrent labors. It was a marvel how from a region of such fumes could ascend the good dinners she provided. The poor things of course had their weight on the mind of Hester, for, had they tried, they could not have hidden the fact that they lived to save: every movement almost, and certainly every tone betrayed it. And yet, unlike so many lodging-house keepers, resembling more the lion-ant than any other of the symbolic world of insects, they were strictly honest. Had they not been, I doubt if Hester would have been able, though they would then have needed more, to give them so much pity as she did, for she had a great scorn of dishonesty. Her heart, which was full of compa.s.sion for the yielding, the weak, the erring, was not yet able to spend much on the actively vicious--the dishonest and lying and traitorous. The honor she paid the honesty of these women helped her much to pity the sunlessness of their existence, and the poor end for which they lived. It looked as if G.o.d had forgotten them--toiling for so little all day long, while the fact was they forgot G.o.d, and were thus miserable and oppressed because they would not have him interfere as he would so gladly have done. Instead of seeking the kingdom of heaven, and trusting him for old age while they did their work with their might, they exhausted their spiritual resources in sending out armies of ravens with hardly a dove among them, to find and secure a future still submerged in the waves of a friendly deluge. Nor was Hester's own faith in G.o.d so vital yet as to propagate itself by division in the minds she came in contact with. She could only be sorry for them and kind to them.

The morning after the visit to the aquarium, woeful Miss Witherspin, as Mark had epitheted her, entered to remove the ruins of breakfast with a more sad and injured expression of countenance than usual. It was a glorious day, and she was like a live shadow in the sunshine. Most of the Raymounts were already in the open air, and Hester was the only one in the room. The small, round-shouldered, cadaverous creature went moving about the table with a motion that suggested bed as fitter than labor, though she was strong enough to get through her work without more than occasional suffering: if she could only have left pitying herself and let G.o.d love her she would have got on well enough. Hester, who had her own share of the same kind of fault, was rather moodily tr.i.m.m.i.n.g her mother's bonnet with a new ribbon, glancing up from which she at once perceived that something in particular must have exceeded in wrongness the general wrongness of things in the poor little gnome's world. Her appearance was usually that of one with a headache; her expression this morning suggested a mild indeed but all-pervading toothache.

"Is anything the matter, Miss Witherspin?" asked Hester.

"Indeed, miss, there never come nothing to sister and me but it's matter, and now it's a sore matter. But it's the Lord's will and we can't help it; and what are we here for but to have patience? That's what I keep saying to my sister, but it don't seem to do her much good."

She ended with a great sigh; and Hester thought if the unseen sister required the comfort of the one before her, whose evangel just uttered was as gloomy as herself, how very unhappy she must be.

"No doubt we are here to learn patience," said Hester; "but I can hardly think patience is what we are made for. Is there any fresh trouble--if you will excuse me?"

"Well, I don't know, miss, as trouble can anyhow be called fresh--leastways to us it's stale enough; we're that sick of it! I declare to you, miss, I'm clean worn out with havin' patience! An' now there's my sister gone after her husband an' left her girl, brought up in her own way an' every other luxury, an' there she's come on our hands, an' us to take the charge of her! It's a responsibility will be the death of me."

"Is there no provision for her?"

"Oh, yes, there's provision! Her mother kep a shop for fancy goods at Keswick--after John's death, that is--an' sc.r.a.ped together a good bit o'

money, they do say; but that's under trustees--not a penny to be touched till the girl come of age!"

"But the trustees must make you a proper allowance for bringing her up!

And anyhow you can refuse the charge."

"No, miss, that we can't. It was always John's wish when he lay a dyin', that if anything was to happen to Sarah, the child should come to us.

It's the trouble of the young thing, the responsibility--havin' to keep your eyes upon her every blessed moment for fear she do the thing she ought not to--that's what weighs upon me. Oh, yes, they'll pay so much a quarter for her! it's not that. But to be always at the heels of a young, sly puss after mischief--it's more'n I'm equal to, I do a.s.sure you, Miss Raymount."

"When did you see her last?" inquired Hester.

"Not once have I set eyes on her since she was three years old!"

answered Miss Witherspin, and her tone seemed to imply in the fact yet additional wrong.

"Then perhaps she may be wiser by this time," Hester suggested. "How old is she now?"

"Sixteen out. It's awful to think of!"

"But how do you know she will be so troublesome? She mayn't want the looking after you dread. You haven't seen her for thirteen years!"

"I'm sure of it. I know the breed, miss! She's took after her mother, you may take your mortal oath! The sly way she got round our John!--an'

all to take him right away from his own family as bore and bred him! You wouldn't believe it, miss!"

"Girls are not always like their mothers," said Hester. "I'm not half as good as my mother."

"Bless you, miss! if she ain't half as bad as hers--the Lord have mercy upon us! How I'm to attend to my lodgers and look after her, it's more than I know how to think of it with patience."

"When is she coming?"

"She'll be here this blessed day as I'm speakin' to you, miss!"

"Perhaps, your house being full, you may find her a help instead of a trouble. It won't be as if she had nothing to employ her!"