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Hetty Wesley, a novel by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
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Book 3 - Chapter 5 |
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_ BOOK III CHAPTER V Hetty had found a patch of ragged turf and mallow where the woodstack hid her from the parsonage windows; and sat there in the morning sun--unconsciously, as usual, courting its full rays. Between her and the stack the ground was bare, strewn with straw and broken twigs. She supposed that her father would send for her soon: but she was preparing no defence, no excuses. She hoped, indeed, that the interview would be short, but simply because the account she must render to him seemed trivial beside that which she must render to herself. Her eyes watched the hens as they scratched pits in the warm dust, snuggled down and adjusted and readjusted their wing-feathers. But her brain was busied over and over with the same thought--"I am now a bad woman. Is there yet any way for me to be good?" Yet her wits were alert enough. She heard her father's footstep on the path twenty yards away, guessed the moment which would bring him into sight of her. Though she did not look up, she knew that he had come to a halt. She waited. He turned and walked slowly away. She knew why he had faltered. Her mind ran back to the problem. "I am a bad woman. Is there any way for me to be good?" Half an hour passed. Emilia came round the rick, talking to herself, holding a wooden bowl from which she had been feeding the chickens. She came upon Hetty unawares and stood still, with a face at first confused, but gradually hardening. "Sit down, Emmy." Hetty pointed to a faggot lying a few paces off. Emilia hesitated. "You may sit down: near enough to listen--"
"What secret?" asked Emilia, reddening in spite of herself. "Oh, I have known it a long while! But if you want me to whisper it, you must come closer. Nay, my dear, I know very little of the stage--perhaps as little as you: but, from what I have read, it will bring you close to creatures worse than I." Emilia was scared now. "Who told you? Have you heard from Jacky?-- no, he couldn't, because--" "--Because you never told him, although you may have hinted at it. And if you told him, he would laugh and call it the ambition of a girl who knows nothing of the world." "I will not starve here. And now that this--this disgrace--" "Father would think it no less disgrace to see you an actress. Listen: a little while ago he came this way, meaning to curse me, but he turned back and did not. And now you come, and are confused, and I read you just as plainly. While my wits are so clear I want to say one or two things to you. Yesterday--only yesterday--I left home for ever, and here I am back again. I have been wicked, you say, and there is nothing sinful in becoming an actress. Perhaps not: yet I am sure father would think it sinful--even more selfishly sinful than my fault, because it would hurt the careers of Jacky and Charles; and that, as you know, he would never forgive." "Who are you, to be lecturing me?" "I am your sister, who has done wrong: I have tasted bitter fruit and must go eating it all my life. But it is fruit of knowledge--ah, listen, Emmy! If you do this and become famous, the greater your fame, the greater the injury; or so father would hold it, and perhaps our brothers too. Hetty can be hidden and forgotten in a far country parish. But can Jacky become a bishop, having an actress for sister?" "You are sudden in this thought for your brothers." "It is not of them I am thinking. I say that if you succeed you will lose father's forgiveness and always carry with you this sorrowful knowledge. Yet I would bid you go and do it; for to be great is worth much cost of sorrow, and sorrow might even increase your greatness. But have you that strength? And if you should not succeed?--We know nothing of the world: all our thoughts of it come out of books and dreaming. You imagine yourself treading the boards and holding all hearts captive with your voice. So I used to imagine myself slaying dragons. So, only yesterday, I believed--" She sat erect with a shiver. "To wake and find all your dreams changed to squalor, and for you no turning back! Have you the strength, Emmy--to go forward and change that squalor back again by sheer force into beautiful dreams? Have you the strength?" She gazed at Emilia and added musingly, "No, you have not the strength. You will stay on here in the cage, an obedient woman, your talent repressed to feed the future of those grand brothers of ours who take all we give, yet cannot help us one whit. They take it innocently; they do not know; and they are dear good fellows. But they cannot help. I only have done what may injure them--though I do not think it will: and when father came along the path just now, he was thinking of them rather than of me--of me only as I might injure them." She was right indeed. Mr. Wesley had left the house thinking of her: but a few steps had called up the faces of his sons, and by habit, since he thought of them always on his walks. His studies put aside, to think of them was his one recreation. Coming upon Hetty, he had felt himself taken at unawares, and retreated. "--And when he turned away," Hetty went on, "I understood. And I felt sorry for him; because all of a sudden it came to me that he may be wiser than any of us, and one day it will be made plain to us, what we have helped to do--or to spoil." "Here is someone you had better be sorry for," said Emilia, glancing along the path at the sound of footsteps and catching sight of Nancy. "She has made up her mind that John Lambert will have no more to do with us now; and the wedding not a month away!" Sure enough, Nancy's eyes were red, and she gazed at Hetty less with reprobation than with lugubrious reproach. "Then she knows less of John Lambert than I do," said Hetty; "and still less how deep he is in love with her. Nancy dear," she asked, "was he to have walked over this morning?" "He was coming from Haxey way," wailed Nancy. "He was to have been here at ten o'clock and it is past that now. Of course he has heard, and does not mean to come." Hetty choked down an exceeding bitter sob. "Anne--sister Anne," she answered in her old light manner, though she desired to be alone and to weep: "go, look along the road and say if you see anyone coming!" Nancy turned away, too generous to upbraid her sister, but hotly ashamed of her and her lack of contrition, and indignantly sorry for herself. Nevertheless she went towards the gate whence she could see along the road. "It seems to me," said Emilia, "that you are scarcely awake yet to your--your situation." She was trying to recover her superiority, which Hetty had shaken by guessing her secret. "Oh, yes I am," Hetty answered. "But my time may be short for talking: so I use what ways I can to make my sisters listen. Hark!" "He is coming!" Nancy announced, running towards them from the gate. Honest love shone in her eyes. "He is coming--and there is someone with him!" "Who?" asked Emilia. Hetty's eyes put the same question, far more eagerly. She rose up: her face was white. "I don't know. He--they--are half a mile away. Yet I seem to know the figure. It is odd now--" Hetty put out a hand and leaned it against the wood-stack to steady herself. The sharpened end of a stake pierced her palm, but she did not feel it. "Is it--is it--" Her lips worked and formed the words, inaudibly. "Run and look again," commanded Emilia. But Hetty turned and walked swiftly away. Could it be _he_? No--and yet why not? Until this moment she had not known how much she built upon that chance. She loved him still: at the bottom of her heart most tenderly. She had reproached herself, saying that her desire for him had nothing to do with love--was no genuine impulse to forgive, but a selfish cowardly longing to be saved, as only he could save her. She was wrong. She desired to be saved: but she desired far more wildly that he should play the man, justify her love and earn forgiveness. She had--and was, alas! to prove it--an almost infinite capacity to forgive. She, Hetty, of the reckless wit and tongue--she would meet him humbly--as one whose sin had been as deep as his . . . Was it he? If so, she would beg his pardon for thoughts which had accused him of cowardice. . . . She could not wait for the truth. So much joy it would bring, or so deep anguish. She walked away blindly towards the fields, not once looking back.
Nancy pushed him away, but half-heartedly. "No, you mustn't!" she protested, and her face grew suddenly tragic. "Oh, I forgot for the moment!" John Lambert tried to look doleful. He was an energetic young land-surveyor, with tow-coloured hair and a face incurably jolly. "You have heard, then?" asked Emilia. "Why, bless you, your father was around to see me at eight o'clock yesterday morning, or some such hour. He must have saddled at once. He's a stickler, is the Rector. 'Young Mr. Lambert,' says he, very formal, or some such words, 'I regret to say I must retract my permission that you should marry into my family, as doubtless you will wish to be released of your troth.' 'Hallo!' says I, a bit surprised, but knowing his crotchets: 'Why, what have I been doing?' 'Nothing,' says he. 'Then what has _she_ been up to?'"--this with a wink at Emilia--"'Nothing,' says he again, and pours out the whole story, or so much of it as he knew and guessed, and winds up with 'I release you,' and a bow very formal and stiff. 'How about Miss Nancy?' I asked; 'does she release me too?' 'I haven't asked her,' he says, and goes on that he is not in the habit of being guided by his daughters. To which I replied: 'Well, I am--by one of 'em, anyhow--or hope to be. And, if you don't mind, I'll step round to-morrow at the hour she expects me. I'd do it this moment if I hadn't a job at Bawtry. And I'm sorry for you, Rector,' I said, 'but if you think it makes a penn'orth of difference to me apart from that, you're mistaken.' And so we parted." "Have you thought of the consequences?" Nancy demanded, tearful, but obviously worshipping this very ordinary young man. "No, I haven't." "She is back again." "Oh, is she? Then she found him out quick. Poor Hetty! She must be in a taking too!" His face expressed commiseration for a moment, but with an effort, and sprang back to jollity as a bow is released from its cord. "Curious, how quickly a bit of news like that gets about! I picked up with a man on the road--said his name was Wright and he comes from Lincoln--a decent fellow--tradesman--plumber, I think. At all events he knows a deal about you, and began, after a while, pumping me about your sister. I saw in a moment that he had heard something, and gave him precious little change for his money. Talked as if he knew more than I did, if only he cared to tell: but of course I didn't encourage him." "Wright?--a plumber from Lincoln?" Emilia faltered, and her eyes met Nancy's. "That's it. He had business with your father, he said. In fact I left him on his way to knock at the door." The two sisters remembered the man on the knoll, and his bill. They were used to duns. Emilia's eye signalled that John Lambert was to be kept away from the house at all costs; nor did she breathe freely until she saw the lovers crossing the fields arm-in-arm. _ |
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