When the family separated for the night and Hester reached her room, she sat down and fell a thinking, not more earnestly but more continuously.
She was one of those women—not few in number, I have good reason to think, though doubtless few comparatively, who from the first dawn of consciousness have all their lives endeavored, with varying success, with frequent failure of strength, and occasional brief collapse of effort, to do the right thing. Therein she had but followed in the footsteps of her mother, who, though not so cultivated as she, walked no less steady in the true path of humanity. But the very earnestness of Hester's endeavor along with the small reason she found for considering it successful; the frequent irritation with herself because of failure; and the impossibility of satisfying the hard master Self, who, while he flatters some, requires of others more than they can give—all tended to make her less evenly sympathetic with those about her than her heart's theory demanded. Willing to lay down her life for them, a matchless nurse in sickness, and in trouble revealing a tenderness perfectly lovely, she was yet not the one to whom first either of the children was ready to flee with hurt or sorrow: she was not yet all human, because she was not yet at home with the divine.
Thousands that are capable of great sacrifices are yet not capable of the little ones which are all that are required of them. God seems to take pleasure in working by degrees; the progress of the truth is as the permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed: a multitude of successive small sacrifices may work more good in the world than many a large one. What would even our Lord's death on the cross have been, except as the crown of a life in which he died daily, giving himself, soul, body and spirit, to his men and women? It is theBeingthat is the precious thing. Being is the mother to all little Doings as well as the grown-up Deeds and the mighty heroic Sacrifice; and these little Doings, like the good children of the house, make the bliss of it. Hester had not had time, neither had she prayed enough tobequite yet, though she was growing well towards it. She was a good way up the hill, and the Lord was coming down to meet her, but they had not quite met yet, so as to go up the rest of the way together.
In religious politics, Hester was what is called a good churchwoman, which in truth means a good deal of a sectarian. She not merely recoiled from such as venerated the more primitive modes of church-government rather than those of later expediency, and preferred far inferior extempore prayers to the best possible prayers in print, going therefore to some chapel instead of the church, but she looked down upon them as from a superior social standing—that is, with the judgment of this world, and not that of Christ the carpenter's son. In short, she had a repugnance to the whole race of dissenters, and would not have soiled her dress with the dust of one of their school-rooms even. She regarded her own conscience as her Lord, but had not therefore any respect for that of another man where it differed from her in the direction of what she counted vulgarity. So she was scarcely in the kingdom of heaven yet, any more than thousands who regard themselves as choice Christians. I do not say these feelings were very active in her, for little occurred to call them out; but she did not love her dissenting neighbor, and felt good and condescending when, brought into contact with one, she behaved kindly to him.
I well know that some of my readers will heartily approve of her in this very thing, and that not a fewgood dissenterson the other hand, who are equally and in precisely the same way sectarians, that is bad Christians, will scorn her for it; but for my part I would rather cut off my right hand than be so cased and stayed in a narrow garment of pride and satisfaction, condemned to keep company with myself instead of the Master as he goes everywhere—into the poorest companies of them that love each other, and so invite his presence.
The Lord of truth and beauty has died for us: shall we who, by haunting what we call his courts, have had our sense of beauty, our joy in grace tenfold exalted, gather around us, in the presence of those we count less refined than ourselves, skirts trimmed with the phylacteries of the world's law, turning up the Pharisaical nose, and forgetting both what painful facts self-criticism has revealed to ourselves, and the eyes upon us of the yet more delicate refinement and the yet gentle breeding of the high countries? May these not see in us some malgrace which it needs the gentleness of Christ to get over and forget, some savagery of which we are not aware, somegaucheriethat repels though it cannot estrange them? Casting from us our own faults first, let us cast from us and from him our neighbor's also. O gentle man, the common man is yet thy brother, and thy gentleness should make him great, infecting him with thy humility, not rousing in him the echo of a vile unheavenly scorn. Wilt thou, with thy lofty condescension, more intrinsically vulgar than even his ugly self-assertion, give him cause too good to hate thy refinement? It is not thy refinement makes thee despise him; it is thy own vulgarity; and if we dare not search ourselves close enough to discover the low breeding, the bad blood in us, it will one day come out plain as the smitten brand of theforçat.
That Hester had a tendency to high church had little or nothing to do with the matter. Such exclusiveness is simply a form of that pride, justify or explain it as you will, which found its fullest embodiment in the Jewish Pharisee—the evil thing that Christ came to burn up with his lovely fire, and which yet so many of us who call ourselves by his name keep hugging to our bosoms—I mean the pride that says, "I am better than thou." If these or those be in any true sense below us, it is of Satan to despise—of Christ to stoop and lay hold of and lift the sister soul up nearer to the heart of the divine tenderness.
But this tenderness, which has its roots in every human heart, had larger roots in the heart of Hester than in most. Whatever her failings, whatever ugly weeds grew in the neglected corners of her nature, the moment she came in contact with any of her kind in whatever condition of sadness or need, the pent-up love of God—I mean the love that came of God and was divine in her—would burst its barriers and rush forth, sometimes almost overwhelming herself in its torrent. She would then be ready to die, nothing less, to help the poor and miserable. She was not yet far enough advanced to pity vulgarity in itself—perhaps none but Christ is able to do that—but she could and did pity greatly its associated want and misery, nor was repelled from them by their accompanying degradation.
The tide of action, in these later years flowing more swiftly in the hearts of women—whence has resulted so much that is noble, so much that is paltry, according to the nature of the heart in which it swells—had been rising in that of Hester also. She must not waste her life! She mustdosomething! What should it be? Her deep sense of the misery around her had of course suggested that it must be something in the way of help. But what form was the help to take? "I have no money!" she said to herself—for this the last and feeblest of means for the doing of good is always the first to suggest itself to one who has not perceived the mind of God in the matter. To me it seems that the first thing in regard to money is to prevent it from doing harm. The man who sets out to do good with his fortune is like one who would drive a team of tigers through the streets of a city, or hunt the fox with cheetahs. I would think of money as Christ thought of it, not otherwise; for no other way is true, however it may recommend itself to good men; and neither Christ nor his apostles did anything by means of money; nay, he who would join them in their labors had to abandon hisfortune.
This evening, then, the thought of the vulgar, miserable, ruinous old man, with his wretched magic lantern, kept haunting Hester, and made her very pitiful; and naturally, starting from him, her thoughts went wandering abroad over the universe of misery. For was not the world full of men and women who groaned, not merely under poverty and cruelty, weakness and sickness, but under dullness and stupidity, hugged in the paralyzing arms of that devil-fish, The Commonplace, or held fast to the rocks by the crab Custom, while the tide of moral indifference was fast rising to choke them? Was there no prophet, no redemption, no mediator for such as these? Were there not thousands of women, born with a trembling impulse towards the true and lovely, in whom it was withering for lack of nurture, and they themselves continuously massing into common clay, a summer-fall of human flowers off the branches of hope and aspiration? How many young wives, especially linked to the husbands of their choice, and by this very means disenchanted, as they themselves would call it, were doomed to look no more upon life as the antechamber of the infinite, but as the counting-house of the king of the nursery-ballad, where you may, if you can, eat bread and honey, but where youmustcount your money! At the windows of the husband-house no more looks out the lover but the man of business, who takes his life to consist in the abundance of the things he possesses! He must make money for his children!—and would make money if he had nor chick nor child. Could she do nothing for such wives at least? The man who by honest means made people laugh, sent a fire-headed arrow into the ranks of the beleaguering enemy of his race; he who beguiled from another a genuine tear, made heavenly wind visit his heart with a cool odor of paradise! What was there for her to do?
But possibly Hester might neither have begun nor gone on thinking thus, had it not been for a sense of power within her springing from, or at least associated with, a certain special gift which she had all her life, under the faithful care of her mother, been cultivating. Endowed with a passion for music—what is a true passion but a heavenly hunger?—which she indulged; relieved, strengthened, nor ever sated, by a continuous study of both theoretical and practical music, she approached both piano and organ with eager yet withholding foot, each as a great and effectual door ready to open into regions of delight. But she was gifted also with a fine contralto voice, of exceptional scope and flexibility, whose capacity of being educated into an organ of expression was not thrown away upon one who had a world inside her to express—doubtless as yet not a little chaotic, but in process of assuming form that might demand utterance; and this angelic instrument had for some years been under careful training. And now this night came to Hester, if not for the first time, yet more clearly than ever before, the thought whether she might not in some way make use of this her one gift for the service she desired—for the comfort, that was, and the uplifting of humanity, especially such humanity as had sunk below even its individual level. Thus instinctively she sought relief from sympathetic pain in the alleviation and removal of its cause.
But pity and instinctive recoil from pain were by no means all the elements of the impulse moving Hester in this direction. An honest and active mind such as hers could not have carried her so often to church and for so long a time, whatever might be the nature of the direct teaching she there received, without gaining some glimpses of the mightiest truth of our being, that we belong to God in actual fact of spiritual property and profoundest relationship. She had much to learn in this direction yet—as who has not who is ages in advance of life?—but this night came back to her, as it had often already returned, the memory of a sermon she had heard some twelve months before on the text, "Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's." It was a dull enough sermon, yet not so dull but it enabled her to supply in some degree its own lack; and when she went out of the dark church into the sunshine,—and heard the birds singing as if they knew without any St. Francis to tell them that their bodies and their spirits were God's, a sense awoke in her such as she had not had before, that the grand voice lying like an unborn angel in the chest and throat of her, belonged not to herself but to God, and must be used in some way for the working of his will in the world which as well as the voice he had made. She had no real notion yet of what is meant by the glory of God. She had not quite learned that simplest of high truths that the glory of God is the beauty of Christ's face. She had a lingering idea—a hideously frightful one, though its vagueness kept it in great measure from injuring her—that the One only good, the One only unselfish thought a great deal of himself, and looked strictly after his rights in the way of homage. Hence she thought first of devoting the splendor and richness of her voice to swell the song of some church-choir. With her notion of God and of her relation to him, how could she yet have escaped the poor pagan fancy—good for a pagan, but beggarly for a Christian, that church and its goings-on are a serving of God? She had not begun to ask how these were to do God any good—or if my reader objects to the phrase, I will use a common one saying the same thing—how these were to do anything for God. She had not begun to see that God is the one great servant of all, and that the only way to serve him is to be a fellow-servant with him—to be, say, a nurse in his nursery, and tend this or that lonely, this or that rickety child of his. She had not yet come to see that it is as absurd to call song and prayer a serving of God, as it would be to say the thief on the cross did something for Christ in consenting to go with him to paradise. But now some dim perception of this truth began to wake in her. Vaguely she began to feel that perhaps God had given her this voice and this marriage of delight and power in music and song for some reason like that for which he had made the birds the poets of the animal world: what if her part also should be to drive dull care away? what if she too were intended to be a door-keeper in the house of God, and open or keep open windows in heaven that the air of the high places might reach the low swampy ground? If while she sang, her soul mounted on the wings of her song till it fluttered against the latticed doors of heaven as a bird flutters against the wires of its cage; if also God has made of one blood all nations of men—why, then, surely her song was capable of more than carrying merely herself up into the regions of delight! Nay more, might there not from her throat go forth a trumpet-cry of truth among such as could hear and respond to the cry? Then, when the humblest servant should receive the reward of his well-doing, she would not be left outside, but enter into the joy of her Lord. How specially such work might be done by her she did not yet see, but the truth had drawn nigh her that, to serve God in any true sense, we must serve him where he needs service—among his children lying in the heart of lack, in sin and pain and sorrow; and she saw that, if she was to serve at all, it must be with her best, with her special equipment.
I need not follow the gradations, unmarked of herself, by which she at length came to a sort of conclusion: the immediate practical result was, that she gave herself more than ever to the cultivation of her gift, seeing in the distance the possibility of her becoming, in one mode or another, or in all modes perhaps together, a songstress to her generation.
The cry of the human heart in all ages and in every moment is, "Where is God and how shall I find him?"—No, friend, I will not accept your testimony to the contrary—not though you may be as well fitted as ever one of eight hundred millions to come forward with it. You take it for granted that you know your own heart because you call it yours, but I say that your heart is a far deeper thing than you know or are capable of knowing. Its very nature is hid from you. I use but a poor figure when I say that the roots of your heart go down beyond your knowledge—whole eternities beyond it—into the heart of God. If you have never yet made one discovery in your heart, your testimony concerning it is not worth a tuft of flue; and if you have made discoveries in it, does not the fact reveal that it is but little known to you, and that there must be discoveries innumerable yet to be made in it? To him who has been making discoveries in it for fifty years, the depths of his heart are yet a mystery—a mystery, however, peopled with loveliest hopes. I repeat whether the man knows it or not, his heart in its depths is ever crying out for God.
Where the man does not know it, it is because the unfaithful Self, a would-be monarch, has usurped the consciousness; the demon-man is uppermost, not Christ-man; he is down in the crying heart, and the demon-man—that is the self that worships itself—is trampling on the heart and smothering it up in the rubbish of ambitions, lusts, and cares. If ever its cry reaches that Self, it calls it childish folly, and tramples the harder. It does not know that a child crying on God is mightier than a warrior dwelling in steel.
If we had none but fine weather, the demon-Self would be too much for the divine-Self, and would always keep it down; but bad weather, misfortune, ill-luck, adversity, or whatever name but punishment or the love of God men may call it, sides with the Christ-self down below, and helps to make its voice heard. On the other hand if we had nothing but bad weather, the hope of those in whom the divine Self is slowly rising would grow too faint; while those in whom the bad weather had not yet begun to work good would settle down into weak, hopeless rebellion. Without hope can any man repent?
To the people at Burcliff came at length a lovely morning, with sky and air like the face of a repentant child—a child who has repented so thoroughly that the sin has passed from him, and he is no longer even ashamed. The water seemed dancing in the joy of a new birth, and the wind, coming and going in gentle conscious organ-like swells, was at it with them, while the sun kept looking merrily down on the glad commotion his presence caused.
"Ah," thought the mother, as she looked from her windows ere she began to dress for this new live day, "how would it be if the Light at the heart of the sun were shining thus on the worlds made in his image!"
She was thinking of her boy, whom perhaps, in all the world, she only was able to love heartily—there was so little in the personal being of the lad, that is, in the thing he was to himself, and was making of himself, to help anyone to love him! But in the absolute mere existence is reason for love, and upon that God does love—so love, that he will suffer and cause suffering for the development of that existence into a thing in its own full nature lovable, namely, an existence in its own will one with the perfect love whence it issued; and the mother's heart more than any other God has made is like him in power of loving. Alas that she is so seldom like him in wisdom—so often thwarting the work of God, and rendering more severe his measures with her child by her attempts to shield him from His law, and save him from saving sorrow. How often from his very infancy—if she does not, like the very nurse she employs, actively teach him to be selfish—does she get between him and the right consequences of his conduct, as if with her one feeble loving hand, she would stay the fly-wheel of the holy universe. It is the law that the man who does evil shall suffer; it is the only hope for him, and a hope for the neighbor he wrongs. When he forsakes his evil, one by one the dogs of suffering will halt and drop away from his track; and he will find at last they have but hounded him into the land of his nativity, into the home of his Father in heaven.
As soon as breakfast was over, the whole family set out for a walk. Mr. Raymount seldom left the house till after lunch, but even he, who cared comparatively little for the open air, had grown eager after it. Streets, hills and sands were swarming with human beings, all drawn out by the sun.
"I sometimes wonder," he said, "that so many people require so little to make them happy. Let but the sun break through the clouds, and he sets them all going like ants in an ant-hill!"
"Yes," returned his wife, "but then see how little on the other hand is required to make them miserable! Let the sun hide his head for a day, and they grumble!"
Making the remark, the good woman never thought of her son Cornelius, the one of her family whose conduct illustrated it. At the moment she saw him cheerful, and her love looked upon him as good. She was one of the best of women herself: whatever hour she was called, her lamp was sure to have oil in it; and yet all the time since first he lay in her arms, I doubt if she had ever done anything to help the youth to conquer himself. Now it was too late, even had she known what could be done. But the others had so far turned out well: why should not this one also? The moment his bad humors were over, she looked on him as reformed; and when he uttered worldliness, she persuaded herself he was but jesting. But alas! she had no adequate notion—not a shadow of one—of the selfishness of the man-child she had given to the world. This matter of the black sheep in the white flock is one of the most mysterious of the facts of spiritual generation.
Sometimes, indeed, the sheep is by no means so black as to the whiter ones he seems; perhaps neither are they so much whiter as their friends and they themselves think; for to be altogether respectable is not to be clean; and the black sheep may be all the better than some of the rest that he looks what he is, and does not dye his wool. But on the other hand he may be a great deal worse than some of his own family think him.
"Then," said Hester, after a longish pause, "those that need more to make them happy, are less easily made unhappy?"
To this question rather than remark, she received no reply. Her father and mother both felt it not altogether an easy one to answer: it suggested points requiring consideration. To Cornelius, it was a mere girl's speech, not worth heeding where the girl was his sister. He turned up at it a mental nose, the merest of snubs; and well he might, for he had not the least notion of what it meant or involved.
As little notion had his father that his son Cornelius was a black sheep. He was not what the world would have called a black sheep, but his father, could he have seen into him, would have counted him a very black sheep indeed—and none the whiter that he recognized in the blackness certain shades that were of paternal origin. It was, however, only to the rest of the family that Cornelius showed his blackness: of his father he was afraid; and that father, being proud of his children, would have found it hard to believe anything bad of them: like his faults they were his own! His faith in his children was in no small measure conceit of that which was his, and blinded him to their faults as it blinded him to some of his own. The discovery of any serious fault in one of them would be a sore wound to his vanity, a destruction of his self-content.
The co-existence of good and evil in the same person is perhaps the most puzzling of all facts. What a shock it gives one to hear a woman who loves God, and spends both time and money on the betterment of her kind, call a pauper child abrat, and see her turn with disgust from the idea of treating any strange child, more especially one of low birth, as her own. "O Christ!" cries the heart, "is this one of the women that follows thee?" And sheisone of the women that follow him—only she needs such a lesson as he gave his disciples through the Syrophenician woman.
Mr. Raymount had such an opinion of himself, that while he never obtruded his opinions upon others, he never imagined them disregarded in his own family. It never entered his mind that any member of it might in this or that think differently from himself. But both his wife and Hester were able to think, and did think for themselves, as they were bound in the truth of things to do; and there were considerable divergements of the paths in which they walked from that he had trodden. He had indeed always taken too much for granted, and ought to have used more pains to have his notions understood by them, if he laid so much on their intellectual sympathy. He supposed all the three read what he wrote; and his wife and daughter did read the most of it; but what would he think when he came to know that his son not only read next to nothing of it, but read that little with a contempt not altogether unconscious—for no other reason than that it was his father who wrote it? Nor was the youth quite without justification—for was he not himself a production of his father? But then he looked upon the latter as one of altogether superior quality! It is indeed strange how vulgar minds despise the things they have looked upon and their hands have handled, just because they have looked upon them and their hands have handled them; is there not in the fact a humiliating lesson, which yet they are unable to read, of the degrading power of their own presence upon themselves and their judgments? Whether a man is a hero to his valet or the opposite, depends as much on the valet as on the man: The bond, then, between the father and the son, was by no means so strong as the father thought it. Indeed the selfishness of Cornelius made him almost look upon his father as his enemy, because of his intentions with regard to the division of his property. And selfishness rarely fails of good arguments. Nor can anything destroy it but such a turning of things upside down as only he that made them can work.
"Let's go and see the people at the aquarium," said Cornelius.
"Do you mean the fishes?" asked his father.
"No, I don't care about them; I said the people," answered Cornelius stupidly.
"The people of an aquarium must surely be fishes, eh, Saffy?" said the father to the bright child, walking hand in hand with him. It was Josephine. Her eyes were so blue that but for the association he would have called her Sapphira. Between the two he contented himself with the pet name ofSaffy.
"Ah but, papa," said Hester, "Corney didn't say the peopleofthe aquarium, but the peopleatthe aquarium!"
"Two of you are too many for me!" returned the father playfully. "Well, then, Saffy, let us go and see the peopleofand the peopleatthe aquarium.—Which do you want to see, Hester?"
"Oh, the fishes of course, papa!"
"Why of course?"
"Because they're so much more interesting than the people," said Hester rebuked in herself as she said it—before she knew why.
"Fishes more interesting than people!" exclaimed her father.
"They're so like people, papa!"
"Oh, then surely the people must be the more interesting after all, if it is the likeness of the fishes to people that makes them interesting! Which of all the people you love do you see likest a fish now?"
"Oh, papa!"
"What! is it only people you hate that you see like fishes?"
"I don't hate anybody, papa."
"There's a way of not caring about people, though—looking down on them and seeing them like fishes, that's precious like hating them," said Cornelius, who enjoyed a crowd, and putting his sister in the wrong still better: to that end he could easily say a sensible thing.
"If you mean me, Corney, I think you do me injustice," said Hester. "The worst I do is to look at them the wrong way of the telescope."
"But why do you never see anyone you love like a fish?" persisted her father.
"Perhaps because I could not love anybody that was like a fish."
"Certainly there is something not beautiful about them!" said Mr. Raymount.
"They're beastly ugly," said Cornelius.
"Let us look into it a little," continued his father. "What is it about them that is ugly? Their colors are sometimes very beautiful—and their shapes, too."
"Their heads and faces," said Hester, "are the only parts of them in which they can be like human beings, and those are very ugly."
"I'm not sure that you are right, Hester," said the mother, who had not spoken till now. "There must surely be something human in their bodies as well, for now and then I see their ways and motions so like those of men and women, that I felt for a moment almost as if I understood how they were feeling, and were just going to know what they were thinking."
"I suspect," said Mr. Raymount, "your mother's too much of a poet to be trusted alone in an aquarium. It would have driven Shelley crazy—to judge from his Sensitive Plant."
They had now reached the middle of the descent to the mysteries of the place, when Cornelius, who, with an interest Hester could not understand in him, and which was partly owing to a mere love of transition, had been staring at the ascending faces, uttered a cry of recognition, and darted down to the next landing. With a degree of respect he seldom manifested they saw him there accost a gentleman leaning over the balustrade, and shake hands with him. He was several years older than Cornelius, not a few inches taller, and much better-looking—one indeed who could hardly fail to attract notice even in a crowd. Corney's weakest point, next to his heart, was his legs, which perhaps accounted for his worship of Mr. Vavasor's calves, in themselves nothing remarkable. He was already glancing stolen looks at these objects of his jealous admiration when the rest reached the landing, and Mr. Raymount, willing to know his son's friend, desired Corney to introduce him.
Cornelius had been now eighteen months in the bank, and had never even mentioned the name of a fellow clerk. He was one of those youths who take the only possible way for emptiness to make itself of consequence—that of concealment and affected mystery. Not even now but for his father's request, would he have presented his bank friend to him or any of the family.
The manners and approach of Mr. Vavasor were such as at once to recommend him to the friendly reception of all, from Mr. Raymount to little Saffy, who had the rare charm of being shy without being rude. If not genial, his manners were yet friendly, and his carriage if not graceful was easy; both were apt to be abrupt where he was familiar. It was a kind of company bearing he had, but dashed with indifference, except where he desired to commend himself. He shook hands with little Saffy as respectfully as with her mother, but with neither altogether respectfully; and immediately the pale-faced, cold, loving boy, Mark, unwillingly, therefore almost unconsciously, disliked him. He was beyond question handsome, with a Grecian nose nearly perfect, which had its large part in the aristocratic look he bore. This was favored also by the simplicity of his dress. He turned with them, and re-descended the stairs.
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming, Mr. Vavasor? I could have met you," said Cornelius, with just a little stretch of the degree of familiarity in use between them.
"I didn't know myself till the last minute," answered Vavasor. "It was a sudden resolve of my aunt's. Neither had I the remotest idea you were here."
"Have you been seeing the fishes?" asked Hester, at whose side their new acquaintance was walking now they had reached the subterranean level.
"I have just passed along their cages," he answered. "They are not well kept; the glass is dirty, and the water, too. I fancied they looked unhappy, and came away. I can't bear to see creatures pining. It would be a good deed to poison them all."
"Wouldn't it be better to give them some fresh water?" said little Saffy, "that would make them glad."
To this wisdom there was no response.
When they came to the door of the concert-room, Cornelius turned into it, leaving his "friend" with his "people" to go and look at the fishes. Mr. Vavasor kept his place by the side of Hester.
"We were just talking, when we had the pleasure of meeting you, about people and fishes—comparing them in a way," said Hester. "I can't make it clear to myself why I like seeing the fishes better than the people."
"I fancy it must be because you call them fishes and not fish," replied Vavasor. "If the fishes were a shoal of herrings or mackerel, I doubt if you would—at least for many times. If, on the other hand, the men and women in the concert-room were as oddly distinguished one from another as these different fishes, you would prefer going with your brother."
"I'm sure I shouldn't" said Saffy to Mark.
"Phizzes is best on fishes," answered Mark sententiously. "I like faces best; only you don'talwayswant to look at what you like best!—I wonder why."
"And yet I suspect," said Mrs. Raymount to Vavasor, "many of the people are as much distinguished from each other in character as the fishes are in form."
"Possibly," interjected her husband, "they are as different in their faces also, only we are too much of their kind to be able to read the differences so clearly."
"Surely you do not mean," said Vavasor respectfully, "that any two persons in the concert-room can be as much unlike each other as that flounder shuddering along the sandy bottom, and that yard of eel sliding through the water like an embodied wickedness?"
Hester was greatly struck with the poetic tone of the remark.
"I think you may find people as different," replied her father, "if you take into the account the more delicate as well as the more striking differences—the deeper as well as the surface diversities. Now you make me think of it, I begin to doubt whether all these live grotesques may not have been made to the pattern of different developments of humanity."
"Look at that dog-fish," said Vavasor, pointing to the largest in the tank. "What a brute! Don't you hate him, Miss Raymount?"
"I am not willing to hate any live thing," answered Hester with a smile, "—from selfish motives, perhaps; I feel as if it would be to my own loss, causing me some kind of irreparable hurt."
"But you would kill such a creature as that—would you not?" he rejoined.
"In possible circumstances," she answered; "but killing and hating have nothing necessarily to do with each other. He that hates his brother is always a murderer, not always he that kills him."
"This is another sort of girl from any I've met yet!" said Vavasor to himself. "I wonder what she's really like!"
He did not know that what she was really like was just what he, with all his fancied knowledge of women both in life and literature, was incapable of seeing—so different was she in kind from poor-gentleman Vavasor.
"But just look at the head, eyes and mouth of the fiend!" he persisted.
Hester, forcing herself a little, did regard the animal for two or three minutes. Then a slight shudder passed through her, and she turned away her eyes.
"I see you've caught the look of him!" said Vavasor. "Is he not a horror?"
"He is. But that was not what made me turn away: I found if I looked a moment longer I should hate him in spite of myself."
"And why shouldn't you hate him? You would be doing the wretch no wrong. Even if he knew it, it would be only what he deserved."
"That you cannot tell except you knew all about his nature, and every point of his history from the beginning of the creation till now. I dare not judge even a dog-fish. And whatever his deserts, I don't choose to hate him, because I don't choose to hate."
She turned away, and Vavasor saw she wanted no more of the dog-fish.
"Oh!" cried Saffy, with a face of terror, "look, look, mamma! It's staring at me!"
The child hid her face in her mother's gown, yet turned immediately to look again.
Mr. Raymount looked also, following her gaze, and was fascinated by the sight that met his eyes. Through the glass, high above his head, and not far from the surface, he saw a huge thornback, bending toward them and seeming to look down on them, as it flew slowly through the water—the action of the two sides of its body fringed with fins, and its consequent motion, were much more like the act of flying than that of swimming. Behind him floated his long tail, making him yet more resemble the hideously imagined kite which he at once suggested. But the terrible thing about him was the death's-head look of the upper part of him. His white belly was of course toward them, and his eyes were on the other side, but there were nostrils that looked exactly like the empty sockets of eyes, and below them was a hideous mouth. These made the face that seemed to Saffy to be hovering over and watching them.
"Like an infernal angel of death!" thought Mr. Raymount, but would not rouse yet more the imagination of the little one by saying it. Hester gazed with steadfast mien at the floating spectre.
"You seem in no danger from that one," said Vavasor.
"I don't think I understand you," said Hester. "What danger can there be from any of them?"
"I mean of hating him."
"You are right; I do not feel the smallest inclination to hate him."
"Yet the ray is even uglier than the dog-fish."
"That may be—I think not—but who hates for ugliness? I never should. Ugliness only moves my pity."
"Then what do you hate for?" asked Vavasor. "—But I beg your pardon: you never hate! Let me ask then, what is it that makes you feel as if you might hate?"
"If you will look again at the dog-fish, and tell me the expression of its mouth, I may be able to answer you," she returned.
"I will," said Vavasor; and, betaking himself to a farther portion of the tank, he stood there watching a little shoal of those sharks of the northern seas. While he was gone Cornelius rejoined them.
"I wish I knew why God made such ugly creatures," said Saffy to Mark.
The boy gave a curious half-sad smile, without turning his eyes from the thornback, and said nothing.
"Do you know why God made any creatures, pet?" said Hester.
"No, I don't. Why did he, Hessy?"
"I am almost afraid to guess. But if you don't know why he made any, why should you wonder that he made those?"
"Because they are so ugly.—Do tell me why he made them?" she added coaxingly.
"You had better ask mamma."
"But, Hessy, I don't like to ask mamma."
"Why don't you like to ask mamma, you little goose?"
"Because," said Saffy, who was all the time holding her mother's hand, and knew she was hearing her, "mamma mightn't know what to say."
Hester thought with herself, "I am sometimes afraid to pray lest I should have no answer!"
The mother's face turned down toward her little one.
"And what if I shouldn't know what to say, darling?" she asked.
"I feel so awkward when Miss Merton asks me a question I can't answer," said the child.
"And you are afraid of making mamma feel awkward? You pet!" said Hester.
Cornelius burst into a great laugh, and Saffy into silent tears, for she thought she had made a fool of herself. She was not a priggish child, and did not deserve the mockery with which her barbarian brother invaded her little temple. She was such a true child that her mother was her neighbor, and present to all her being—not her eyes only or her brain, but her heart and spirit as well.
The mother led her aside to a seat, saying,
"Come, darling; we must look into this, and try to understand it. Let me see—what is it we have got to understand? I think it is this—why you should be ashamed when you cannot answer the questions of one who knows so much more than you, and I should not be ashamed when I cannot answer the questions of my own little girl who knows so much less that I do. Is that it?"
"I don't know," sobbed Saffy.
"You shouldn't laugh at her, Corney: it hurts her!" said Hester.
"The little fool! How could that hurt her? It's nothing but temper!" said Cornelius with vexation. He was not vexed that he had made her cry, but vexed that she cried.
"You should have a little more sympathy with childhood, Cornelius," said his father. "You used to be angry enough when you were laughed at."
"I was a fool then myself!" answered Cornelius sulkily.
He said no more, and his father put the best interpretation upon his speech.
"Do you remember, Hester," he said, "how you were always ready to cry when I told you I did not know something you had asked me?"
"Quite well, papa," replied Hester; "and I think I could explain it now. I did not know then why I cried. I think now it was because it seemed to bring you down nearer to my level. My heaven of wisdom sank and grew less."
"I hope that is not what Saffy is feeling now; your mother must be telling her she doesn't know why God made the animals. But no! She is looking up in her face with hers radiant!"
And yet her mother had told her she did not know why God made the animals! She had at the same time, however, made her own confessed ignorance a step on which to set the child nearer to the knowledge of God; for she told her it did not matter that she did not know, so long as God knew. The child could see that her mother's ignorance did not trouble her; and also that she who confessed ignorance was yet in close communication with him who knew all about everything, and delighted in making his children understand.
And now came Vavasor from his study of the dog-fish. His nature was a poetic one, though much choked with the weeds of the conventional and commonplace, and he had seen and felt something of what Hester intended. But he was not alive enough to understand hate. He was able to hate and laugh. He could not feel the danger of hate as Hester, for hate is death, and it needs life to know death.
"He is cruel, and the very incarnation of selfishness," he said. "I should like to set my heel on him."
"If I were to allow myself to hate him," returned Hester, "I should hate him too much to kill him. I should let him live on in his ugliness, and hold back my hate lest it should wither him in the cool water. To let him live would be my revenge, the worst I should know. I must not look at him, for it makes me feel as wicked as he looks."
She glanced at Vavasor. His eyes were fixed on her. She turned away uncomfortable: could it be that he was like the dog-fish?
"I declare." said Cornelius, coming between them, "there's no knowing you girls! Would you believe it, Mr. Vavasor—that young woman was crying her eyes out last night over the meanest humbug of a Chadband I ever set mine on! There ain't one of those fishes comes within sight of him for ugliness. And she would have it he was to be pitied—sorrowed over—loved, I suppose!"
The last words of his speech he whined out in a lackadaisical tone.
Hester flushed, but said nothing. She was not going to defend herself before a stranger. She would rather remain misrepresented—even be misunderstood. But Vavasor had no such opinion of the brother as to take any notion of the sister from his mirror. When she turned from Cornelius next, in which movement lay all the expression she chose to give to her indignation, he passed behind him to the other side of Hester, and there stood apparently absorbed in the contemplation of a huge crustacean. Had Cornelius been sensitive, he must have felt he was omitted.
"Why, can it be?" she said—to herself, but audibly—after a moment of silence, during which she also had been apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some inhabitant of the watery cage. But she had in truth been thinking of nothing immediately before her eyes, though they had rested first upon a huge crayfish, balancing himself on stilts innumerable, then turned to one descending a rocky incline—just as a Swiss horse descends a stair in a mountain-path.
"Yes, the fellow bristles withwhys," said Vavasor, whose gaze was still fixed on one of them. "Every leg seems to ask 'Why am I a leg?'"
"I should have thought it was asking rather, 'What am I? Am I a leg or a failure?'" rejoined Hester. "But I was not thinking of the crayfish. He is odd, but there is no harm in him. He looks, indeed, highly respectable. See with what a dignity he fans himself!"
"And for the same reason," remarked her father, who had come up and stood behind them, "as the finest lady at the ball: he wants more air. I wonder whether the poor fellow knows he is in a cage?"
"I think he does," said Saffy, "else he would run away from us."
"Are you thinking of the dog-fish still?" asked Vavasor.
The strangeness, as it seemed to him, of the handsome girl's absorption, for such it veritably appeared, in questions of no interest in themselves—so he judged them—attracted him even more than her beauty, for he did not like to feel himself unpossessed of the entrée to such a house. Also he was a writer of society verses—not so good as they might have been, but in their way not altogether despicable—and had already begun to turn it over in his mind whether something might not be made of—what shall I call it?—the situation?
"Iwasthinking of him," Hester answered, "but only as a type of the great difficulty—why there should be evil or ugliness in the world. There must be an answer to it! Is it possible it should be one we would not like?"
"I don't believe there is any answer," said Vavasor. "The ugly things are ugly just because they are ugly. It is a child's answer, but not therefore unphilosophical. We must take things as we find them. We are ourselves just what we are, and cannot help it. We do this or that because it is in us. We are made so."
"You do not believe in free will, then, Mr. Vavasor?" said Hester coldly.
"I see no ground for believing in it. We are but forces—bottled up forces—charged Leyden jars. Every one does just what is in him—acts as he is capable."
He was not given to metaphysics, and, indeed, had few or no opinions in that department of inquiry; but the odd girl interested him, and he was ready to meet her on any ground. He had uttered his own practical unbelief, however, with considerable accuracy. Hester's eyes flashed angrily.
"I sayno. Every one is capable of acting better than he does," she replied; and her face flushed.
"Why does he not then?" asked Vavasor.
"Ah, why?" she responded.
"How can he be made for it if he does not do it?" insisted Vavasor.
"How indeed? That is the puzzle," she answered. "If he were not capable there would be none."
"I should do better, I am sure, if I could," said Vavasor. Had he known himself, he ought to have added, "without trouble."
"Then you think we are all just like the dog-fish—except that destiny has made none of us quite so ugly," rejoined Hester.
"Or so selfish," implemented Vavasor.
"That I can't see," returned Hester. "If we are merely borne helpless hither and thither on the tide of impulse, we can be neither more nor less selfish than the dog-fish. We are, in fact, neither selfish nor unselfish. We are pure nothings, concerning which speculation is not worth the trouble. But the very wordselfishimplies a contrary judgment on the part of humanity itself."
"Then you believe we can make ourselves different from what we are made?"
"Yes; we are made with the power to change. We are meant to take a share in our own making. We are made so and so, it is true, but not made so and so only; we are made with a power in ourselves beside—a power that can lay hold on the original power that made us. We are not made to remain as we are. We are bound to grow."
She spoke rapidly, with glowing eyes, the fire of her utterance consuming every shadow of the didactic.
"You are too much of a philosopher for me, Miss Raymount," said Vavasor with a smile. "But just answer me one question. What if a man is too weak to change?"
"He must change," said Hester.
Then first Vavasor began to feel the conversation getting quite too serious.
"Ah, well!" he said. "But don't you think this is rather—ah—rather—don't you know?—for an aquarium?"
Hester did not reply. Nothing was too serious for her in any place. She was indeed a peculiar girl—the more the pity for the many that made her so!
"Let us go and see the octopus," said Vavasor.
They went, and Mr. Raymount slowly followed them. He had not heard the last turn of their conversation.
"You two have set me thinking," he said, when he joined them; "and brought to my mind an observation I had made—how seldom you find art succeed in representing the hatefully ugly! The painter can accumulate ugliness, but I do not remember a demon worth the name. The picture I can best recall with demons in it is one of Raphael's—a St. Michael slaying the dragon—from the Purgatorio, I think, but I am not sure; not one of the demons in that picture is half so ugly as your dog-fish.—What if it be necessary that we should have lessons in ugliness?"
"But why?" said Hester. "Is not the ugly better let alone? You have always taught that ugliness is the natural embodiment of evil!"
"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 byinnocent?" 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 theadvancedof the age; he did not deny there was a God: he thought that the worse form that it was common in the bank; the fellows he associated 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 God or not? Vavasor cared more about the top of his cane than the God 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 assent. Miss Vavasor went to church because it was the right thing to do: God 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 nobody 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, God 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 God 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 andtact, 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: