Weighed and Wanting

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DIFFERENCE.

About noon the next day, lord Gartley called. Whether he had got over his fright, or thought the danger now less imminent, or was vexed that he had appeared to be afraid, I do not know. Hester was very glad to see him again.

"I think I am a safe companion to-day," she said. "I have not been out of the house yet. But till the bad time is over among my people, we had better be content not to meet, I think."

Lord Gartley mentally gasped. He stood for a moment speechless, gathering his thoughts, which almost refused to be gathered.

"Do I understand you, Hester?" he said. "It would trouble me more than I can tell to find I do."

"I fear I understand you, Gartley!" said Hester. "Is it possible you would have me abandon my friends to the small-pox, as a hireling his sheep to the wolf?"

"There are those whose business it is to look after them."

"I am one of those," returned Hester.

"Well," answered his lordship, "for the sake of argument we will allow it has been your business; but how can you imagine it your business any longer?"

Indignation, a fire always ready "laid" in Hester's bosom, but seldom yet lighted by lord Gartley, burst into flame, and she spoke as he had never heard her speak before.

"I am aware, my lord," she said, "that I must by and by have new duties to perform, but I have yet to learn that they must annihilate the old. The claims of love cannot surely obliterate those of friendship! The new should make the old better, not sweep it away."

"But, my dear girl, the thing is preposterous!" exclaimed his lordship. "Don't you see you will enter on a new life! In the most ordinary cases even, the duties of a wife are distinct from those of an unmarried woman."

"But the duties of neither can supersede those of a human being. If the position of a wife is higher than that of an unmarried woman, it must enable her to do yet better the things that were her duty as a human being before."

"But if it be impossible she should do the same things?"

"Whatever is impossible settles its own question. I trust I shall never desire to attempt the impossible."

"You have begun to attempt it now."

"I do not understand you."

"It is impossible you should perform the duties of the station you are about to occupy, and continue to do as you are doing now. The attempt wuld be absurd."

"I have not tried it yet."

"But I know what your duties will be, and I assure you, my dear Hester, you will find the thing cannot be done."

"You set me thinking of more things than I can manage all at once," she replied in a troubled way. "I must think."

"The more you think, the better satisfied you will be of what I say. All I want of you is to think; for I am certain if you do, your good sense will convince you I am right."

He paused a moment. Hester did not speak. He resumed:

"Just think," he said, "what it would be to have you coming home to go out again straight from one of these kennels of the small-pox! The idea is horrible! Wherever you were suspected of being present, the house would be shunned like the gates of death."

"In such circumstances I should not go out."

"The suspicion of it would be enough. And in your absence, as certainly as in your presence, though not so fatally, you would be neglecting your duty to society."

"Then," said Hester, "the portion of society that is healthy, wealthy, and--merry, has stronger claims than the portion that is poor and sick and in prison!"

Lord Gartley was for a moment bewildered--not from any feeling of the force of what she said, but from inability to take it in. He had to turn himself about two or three times mentally before he could bring himself to believe she actually meant that those to whom she alluded were to be regarded as a portion of the same society that ruled his life. He thought another moment, then said:

"There are the sick in every class: you would have those of your own to visit. Why not leave others to visit those of theirs?"

"Then of course you would have no objection to my visiting a duchess in the small-pox?"

Lord Gartley was on the point of saying that duchesses 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 duchess, 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 God, and do not fear what the small-pox can do to me, I would therefore neglect any necessary preventive! That would be to tempt God: 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 hitherto 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 God 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 God's life to the service of the stupid Satan! It was a sad breakdown to the hopes that had clustered 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, God 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 God 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!"

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