Felix Holt Page 15

  But this course of his was severely disapproved by his church. There were various signs that the minister was under some evil influence: his preaching wanted its old fervour, he seemed to shun the intercourse of his brethren, and very mournful suspicions were entertained. A formal remonstrance was presented to him, but he met it as if he had already determined to act in anticipation of it. He admitted that external circumstances, conjoined with a peculiar state of mind, were likely to hinder the fruitful exercise of his ministry, and he resigned it. There was much sorrowing, much expostulation, but he declared that for the present he was unable to unfold himself more fully; he only wished to state solemnly that Annette Ledru, though blind in spiritual things, was in a worldly sense a pure and virtuous woman. No more was to be said, and he departed to a distant town. Here he maintained himself, Annette, and the child, with the remainder of his stipend, and with the wages he earned as a printer’s reader. Annette was one of those angelic-faced helpless women who take all things as manna from heaven: the good image of the well-beloved Saint John wished her to stay with him, and there was nothing else that she wished for except the unattainable. Yet for a whole year Mr Lyon never dared to tell Annette that he loved her: he trembled before this woman; he saw that the idea of his being her lover was too remote from her mind for her to have any idea that she ought not to live with him. She had never known, never asked the reason why he gave up his ministry. She seemed to entertain as little concern about the strange world in which she lived as a bird in its nest: an avalanche had fallen over the past, but she sat warm and uncrushed – there was food for many morrows, and her baby flourished. She did not seem even to care about a priest, or about having her child baptized; and on the subject of religion Mr Lyon was as timid, and shrank as much from speaking to her, as on the subject of his love. He dreaded anything that might cause her to feel a sudden repulsion towards him. He dreaded disturbing her simple gratitude and content. In these days his religious faith was not slumbering; it was awake and achingly conscious of having fallen in a struggle. He had had a great treasure committed to him, and had flung it away: he held himself a backslider. His unbelieving thoughts never gained the full ear and consent of his soul. His prayers had been stifled by the sense that there was something he preferred to complete obedience: they had ceased to be anything but intermittent cries and confessions, and a submissive presentiment, rising at times even to an entreaty, that some great discipline might come, that the dulled spiritual sense might be roused to full vision and hearing as of old, and the supreme facts become again supreme in his soul. Mr Lyon will perhaps seem a very simple personage, with pitiably narrow theories; but none of our theories are quite large enough for all the disclosures of time, and to the end of men’s struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight and die.

  One day, however, Annette learned Mr Lyon’s secret. The baby had a tooth coming, and being large and strong now, was noisily fretful. Mr Lyon, though he had been working extra hours and was much in need of repose, took the child from its mother immediately on entering the house and walked about with it, patting and talking soothingly to it. The stronger grasp, the new sensations, were a successful anodyne, and baby went to sleep on his shoulder. But fearful lest any movement should disturb it, he sat down, and endured the bondage of holding it still against his shoulder.

  ‘You do nurse baby well,’ said Annette, approvingly. ‘Yet you never nursed before I came?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Lyon. ‘I had no brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Why were you not married?’ Annette had never thought of asking that question before.

  ‘Because I never loved any woman – till now. I thought I should never marry. Now I wish to marry.’

  Annette started. She did not see at once that she was the woman he wanted to marry; what had flashed on her mind was, that there might be a great change in Mr Lyon’s life. It was as if the lightning had entered into her dream and half awaked her.

  ‘Do you think it foolish, Annette, that I should wish to marry?’

  ‘I did not expect it,’ she said, doubtfully. ‘I did not know you thought about it.’

  ‘You know the woman I should like to marry?’

  ‘I know her?’ she said, interrogatively, blushing deeply.

  ‘It is you, Annette – you whom I have loved better than my duty. I forsook everything for you.’

  Mr Lyon paused: he was about to do what he felt would be ignoble – to urge what seemed like a claim.

  ‘Can you love me, Annette? Will you be my wife?’ Annette trembled and looked miserable.

  ‘Do not speak – forget it,’ said Mr Lyon, rising suddenly and speaking with loud energy. ‘No, no – I do not want it – I do not wish it.’

  The baby awoke as he started up; he gave the child into Annette’s arms, and left her.

  His work took him away early the next morning and the next again. They did not need to speak much to each other. The third day Mr Lyon was too ill to go to work. His frame had been overwrought; he had been too poor to have sufficiently nourishing food, and under the shattering of his long-deferred hope his health had given way. They had no regular servant – only occasional help from an old woman, who lit the fires and put on the kettles. Annette was forced to be the sick-nurse, and this sudden demand on her shook away some of her torpor. The illness was a serious one, and the medical man one day hearing Mr Lyon in his delirium raving with an astonishing fluency in Biblical language, suddenly looked round with increased curiosity at Annette, and asked if she were the sick man’s wife, or some other relative.

  ‘No – no relation,’ said Annette, shaking her head. ‘He has been good to me.’

  ‘How long have you lived with him?’

  ‘More than a year.’

  ‘Was he a preacher once?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did he leave off being a preacher?’

  ‘Soon after he took care of me.’

  ‘Is that his child?’

  ‘Sir,’ said Annette, colouring indignantly. ‘I am a widow.’

  The doctor, she thought, looked at her oddly, but he asked no more questions.

  When the sick man was getting better, and able to enjoy invalid’s food, he observed one day, while he was taking some broth, that Annette was looking at him; he paused to look at her in return, and was struck with a new expression in her face, quite distinct from the merely passive sweetness which usually characterized it. She laid her little hand on his, which was now transparently thin, and said, ‘I am getting very wise; I have sold some of the books to make money – the doctor told me where; and I have looked into the shops where they sell caps and bonnets and pretty things, and I can do all that, and get more money to keep us. And when you are well enough to get up, we will go out and be married – shall we not? See! and la petite’ (the baby had never been named anything else) ‘shall call you Papa – and then we shall never part.’

  Mr Lyon trembled. This illness – something else, perhaps – had made a great change in Annette. A fortnight after that they were married. The day before, he had ventured to ask her if she felt any difficulty about her religion, and if she would consent to have la petite baptized and brought up as a Protestant. She shook her head and said very simply: –

  ‘No: in France, in other days, I would have minded; but all is changed. I never was fond of religion, but I knew it was right. J’aimais les fleurs, les bals, la musique, et mon mari qui était beau. But all that is gone away. There is nothing of my religion in this country. But the good God must be here, for you are good; I leave all to you.’

  It was clear that Annette regarded her present life as a sort of death to the world – an existence on a remote island where she had been saved from wreck. She was too indolent mentally, too little interested, to acquaint herself with any secrets of the isle. The transient energy, the more vivid consciousness and sympathy which had been stirred in her during Mr Lyon’s ill
ness, had soon subsided into the old apathy to everything except her child. She withered like a plant in strange air, and the three years of life that remained were but a slow and gentle death. Those three years were to Mr Lyon a period of such self-suppression and life in another as few men know. Strange! that the passion for this woman, which he felt to have drawn him aside from the right as much as if he had broken the most solemn vows – for that only was right to him which he held the best and highest – the passion for a being who had no glimpse of his thoughts induced a more thorough renunciation than he had ever known in the time of his complete devotion to his ministerial career. He had no flattery now, either from himself or the world; he knew that he had fallen, and his world had forgotten him, or shook their heads at his memory. The only satisfaction he had was the satisfaction of his tenderness – which meant untiring work, untiring patience, untiring wakefulness even to the dumb signs of feeling in a creature whom he alone cared for.

  The day of parting came, and he was left with little Esther as the one visible sign of that four years’ break in his life. A year afterwards he entered the ministry again, and lived with the utmost sparingness that Esther might be so educated as to be able to get her own bread in case of his death. Her probable facility in acquiring French naturally suggested his sending her to a French school, which would give her a special advantage as a teacher. It was a Protestant school, and French Protestantism had the high recommendation of being non-Prelatical. It was understood that Esther would contract no Papistical superstitions; and this was perfectly true; but she contracted, as we see, a good deal of non-Papistical vanity.

  Mr Lyon’s reputation as a preacher and devoted pastor had revived; but some dissatisfaction beginning to be felt by his congregation at a certain laxity detected by them in his views as to the limits of salvation, which he had in one sermon even hinted might extend to unconscious recipients of mercy, he had found it desirable seven years ago to quit this ten years’ pastorate and accept a call from the less important church in Malthouse Yard, Treby Magna.

  This was Rufus Lyon’s history, at that time unknown in its fulness to any human being besides himself. We can perhaps guess what memories they were that relaxed the stringency of his doctrine on the point of salvation. In the deepest of all senses his heart said,

  ‘Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives,

  And feed my mind, that dies for want of her.’

  CHAPTER VII

  M. It was but yesterday you spoke him well –

  You’ve changed your mind so soon?

  N. Not I – ’tis he

  That, changing to my thought, has changed my mind.

  No man puts rotten apples in his pouch

  Because their upper side looked fair to him.

  Constancy in mistake is constant folly.

  The news that the rich heir of the Transomes was actually come back, and had been seen at Treby, was carried to some one else who had more reasons for being interested in it than the Reverend Rufus Lyon was yet conscious of having. It was owing to this that at three o’clock, two days afterwards, a carriage and pair, with coachman and footman in crimson and drab,1 passed through the lodge-gates of Transome Court. Inside there was a hale good-natured-looking man of sixty, whose hands rested on a knotted stick held between his knees; and a blue-eyed, well-featured lady, fat and middle-aged – a mountain of satin, lace, and exquisite muslin embroidery. They were not persons of highly remarkable appearance, but to most Trebians they seemed absolutely unique, and likely to be known anywhere. If you had looked down on them from the box of Sampson’s coach, he would have said, after lifting his hat, ‘Sir Maximus and his lady – did you see?’ thinking it needless to add the surname.

  ‘We shall find her greatly elated, doubtless,’ Lady Debarry was saying. ‘She has been in the shade so long.’

  ‘Ah, poor thing!’ said Sir Maximus. ‘A fine woman she was in her bloom. I remember the first county ball she attended we were all ready to fight for the sake of dancing with her. I always liked her from that time – I never swallowed the scandal about her myself.’

  ‘If we are to be intimate with her,’ said Lady Debarry, ‘I wish you would avoid making such allusions, Sir Maximus. I should not like Selina and Harriet to hear them.’

  ‘My dear, I should have forgotten all about the scandal, only you remind me of it sometimes,’ retorted the Baronet, smiling and taking out his snuff-box.

  ‘These sudden turns of fortune are often dangerous to an excitable constitution,’ said Lady Debarry, not choosing to notice her husband’s epigram. ‘Poor Lady Alicia Methurst got heart-disease from a sudden piece of luck – the death of her uncle, you know. If Mrs Transome were wise she would go to town – she can afford it now – and consult Dr Truncheon. I should say myself he would order her digitalis: I have often guessed exactly what a prescription would be. But it certainly was always one of her weak points to think that she understood medicine better than other people.’

  ‘She’s a healthy woman enough, surely: see how upright she is, and she rides about like a girl of twenty.’

  ‘She is so thin that she makes me shudder.’

  ‘Pooh! she’s slim and active; women are not bid for by the pound.’

  ‘Pray don’t be so coarse.’

  Sir Maximus laughed and showed his good teeth, which made his laughter very becoming. The carriage stopped, and they were soon ushered into Mrs Transome’s sitting-room, where she was working at her worsted embroidery. A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs Transome’s life; that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted, was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.

  She received much warm congratulation and pressure of her hand with perfect composure of manner; but she became paler than usual, and her hands turned quite cold. The Debarrys did not yet know what Harold’s politics were.

  ‘Well, our lucky youngster is come in the nick of time,’ said Sir Maximus: ‘if he’ll stand, he and Philip can run in harness together and keep out both the Whigs.’

  ‘It is really quite a providential thing – his returning just now,’ said Lady Debarry. ‘I couldn’t help thinking that something would occur to prevent Philip from having such a man as Peter Garstin for his colleague.’

  ‘I call my friend Harold a youngster,’ said Sir Maximus, ‘for, you know, I remember him only as he was when that portrait was taken.’

  ‘That is a long while ago,’ said Mrs Transome. ‘My son is much altered, as you may imagine.’

  There was a confused sound of voices in the library while this talk was going on. Mrs Transome chose to ignore that noise, but her face, from being pale, began to flush a little.

  ‘Yes, yes, on the outside, I daresay. But he was a fine fellow – I always liked him. And if anybody had asked me what I should choose for the good of the county, I couldn’t have thought of anything better than having a young Transome for a neighbour who will take an active part. The Transomes and the Debarrys were always on the right side together in old days. Of course he’ll stand – he has made up his mind to it?’

  The need for an answer to this embarrassing question was deferred by the increase of inarticulate sounds accompanied by a bark from the library, and the sudden appearance at the tapestry-hung doorway of old Mr Transome with a cord round his waist, playing a very poor-paced horse for a black-maned little boy about three years old, who was urging him on with loud encouraging noises and occasional thumps from a stick which he wielded with some difficulty. The old man paused with a vague gentle smile at the doorway, while the Baronet got up to speak to him. Nimrod snuffed at his master’s legs to ascertain that he was not hurt, and the little boy, finding something new to be looked at, let go the cord and came round in front of the company, dragging his stick, and standing at a safe war-dancing distance as he fixed his great black eyes on Lady Debarry.

  ‘Dear me, what a splendid little boy, Mrs Transome! why – it
cannot be – can it be – that you have the happiness to be a grandmamma?’

  ‘Yes; that is my son’s little boy.’

  ‘Indeed!’ said Lady Debarry, really amazed. ‘I never heard you speak of his marriage. He has brought you home a daughter-in-law, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Transome, coldly; ‘she is dead.’

  ‘O – o – oh!’ said Lady Debarry, in a tone ludicrously undecided between condolence, satisfaction, and general mistiness. ‘How very singular – I mean that we should not have heard of Mr Harold’s marriage. But he’s a charming little fellow: come to me, you round-cheeked cherub.’

  The black eyes continued fixed as if by a sort of fascination on Lady Debarry’s face, and her affable invitation was unheeded. At last, putting his head forward and pouting his lips, the cherub gave forth with marked intention the sounds, ‘Nau-o-oom’, many times repeated: apparently they summed up his opinion of Lady Debarry, and may perhaps have meant ‘naughty old woman’, but his speech was a broken lisping polyglot of hazardous interpretation. Then he turned to pull at the Blenheim spaniel, which, being old and peevish, gave a little snap.