‘To hear with eyes is part of love’s rare wit.’
— SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
‘Custom calls me to’t :—
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t?
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to over-peer.’ — Coriolanus.
IN the afternoon Mr Lyon went out to see the sick amongst his flock, and Esther, who had been passing the morning in dwelling on the memories and the few remaining relics of her parents, was left alone in the parlour amidst the lingering odours of the early dinner, not easily got rid of in that small house. Rich people, who know nothing of these vulgar details, can hardly imagine their significance in the history of multitudes of human lives in which the sensibilities are never adjusted to the external conditions. Esther always felt so much discomfort from those odours that she usually seized any possibility of escaping from them, and today they oppressed her the more because she was weary with long-continued agitation. Why did she not put on her bonnet as usual and get out into the open air? It was one of those pleasant November afternoons — pleasant in the wide country — when the sunshine is on the clinging brown leaves of the young oaks, and the last yellow leaves of the elms flutter down in the fresh but not eager breeze. But Esther sat still on the sofa — pale and with reddened eyelids, her curls all pushed back carelessly, and her elbow resting on the ridgy black horse-hair, which usually almost set her teeth on edge if she pressed it even through her sleeve — while her eyes rested blankly on the dull street. Lyddy had said, ‘Miss, you look sadly; if you can’t take a walk, go and lie down.’ She had never seen the curls in such disorder, and she reflected that there had been a death from typhus recently. But the obstinate miss only shook her head.
Esther was waiting for the sake of — not a probability, but — a mere possibility, which made the brothy odours endurable. Apparently, in less than half an hour, the possibility came to pass, for she changed her attitude, almost started from her seat, sat down again, and listened eagerly. If Lyddy should send him away, could she herself rush out and call him back? Why not? Such things were permissible where it was understood, from the necessity of the case, that there was only friendship. But Lyddy opened the door and said, ‘Here’s Mr Holt, miss, wants to know if you’ll give him leave to come in. I told him you was sadly.’
‘O yes, Lyddy, beg him to come in.’
‘I should not have persevered,’ said Felix, as they shook hands, ‘only I know Lyddy’s dismal way. But you do look ill,’ he went on, as he seated himself at the other end of the sofa. ‘Or rather — for that’s a false way of putting it — you look as if you had been very much distressed. Do you mind about my taking notice of it?’
He spoke very kindly, and looked at her more persistently than he had ever done before, when her hair was perfect.
‘You are quite right. I am not at all ill. But I have been very much agitated this morning. My father has been telling me things I never heard before about my mother, and giving me things that belonged to her. She died when I was a very little creature.’
‘Then it is no new pain or trouble for you and Mr Lyon? I could not help being anxious to know that.’
Esther passed her hand over her brow before she answered. ‘I hardly know whether it is pain, or something better than pleasure. It has made me see things I was blind to before — depths in my father’s nature.’
As she said this, she looked at Felix, and their eyes met very gravely.
‘It is such a beautiful day,’ he said, ‘it would do you good to go into the air. Let me take you along the river towards Little Treby, will you?’
‘I will put my bonnet on,’ said Esther, unhesitatingly, though they had never walked out together before.
It is true that to get into the fields they had to pass through the street; and when Esther saw some acquaintances, she reflected that her walking alone with Felix might be a subject of remark — all the more because of his cap, patched boots, no cravat, and thick stick. Esther was a little amazed herself at what she had come to. So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
When they were in the streets Esther hardly spoke. Felix talked with his usual readiness, as easily as if he were not doing it solely to divert her thoughts, first about Job Tudge’s delicate chest, and the probability that the little white-faced monkey would not live long; and then about a miserable beginning of a night-school, which was all he could get together at Sproxton; and the dismalness of that hamlet, which was a sort of lip to the coalpit on one side and the ‘public’ on the other — and yet a paradise compared with the wynds of Glasgow, where there was little more than a chink of daylight to show the hatred in women’s faces.
But soon they got into the fields, where there was a right of way towards Little Treby, now following the course of the river, now crossing towards a lane, and now turning into a cart-track through a plantation.
‘Here we are!’ said Felix, when they had crossed the wooden bridge, and were treading on the slanting shadows made by the elm trunks. ‘I think this is delicious. I never feel less unhappy than in these late autumn afternoons when they are sunny.’
‘Less unhappy! There now!’ said Esther, smiling at him with some of her habitual sauciness, ‘I have caught you in self-contradiction. I have heard you quite furious against puling, melancholy people. If I had said what you have just said, you would have given me a long lecture, and told me to go home and interest myself in the reason of the rule of three.’
‘Very likely,’ said Felix, beating the weeds, according to the foible of our common humanity when it has a stick in its hand. ‘But I don’t think myself a fine fellow because I’m melancholy. I don’t measure my force by the negations in me, and think my soul must be a mighty one because it is more given to idle suffering than to beneficent activity. That’s what your favourite gentlemen do, of the Byronic bilious style.’ ‘I don’t admit that those are my favourite gentlemen.’
‘I’ve heard you defend them — gentlemen like your Renes, who have no particular talent for the finite, but a general sense that the infinite is the right thing for them. They might as well boast of nausea as a proof of a strong inside.’
‘Stop, stop! You run on in that way to get out of my reach. I convicted you of confessing that you are melancholy.’
‘Yes!’ said Felix, thrusting his left hand into his pocket, with a shrug; ‘as I could confess to a great many other things I’m not proud of. The fact is, there are not many easy lots to be drawn in the world at present; and such as they are I am not envious of them. I don’t say life is not worth having: it is worth having to a man who has some sparks of sense and feeling and bravery in him. And the finest fellow of all would be the one who could be glad to have lived because the world was chiefly miserable, and his life had come to help some one who needed it. He would be the man who had the most powers and the fewest selfish wants. But I’m not up to the level of what I see to be best. I’m often a hungry discontented fellow.’
‘Why have you made life so hard then?’ said Esther, rather frightened as she asked the question. ‘It seems to me you have tried to find just the most difficult task.’
‘Not at all,’ said Felix, with curt decision. ‘My course was a very simple one. It was pointed out to me by conditions that I saw as clearly as I see the bars of this stile. It’s a difficult stile too,’ added Felix, striding over. ‘Shall I help you, or will you be left to yourself?’
‘I can do without help, thank you.’
‘It was all simple enough,’ continued Felix, as they walked on. ‘If I meant to put a stop to the sale of those drugs, I must keep my mother, and of course at her age she would not leave the place she had been used to. And I had made up my mind against what they call genteel businesses.’
‘But suppose every one did as you do? Please to forgive me for saying so; but I cannot see why you could not have lived as honourably with some employment that presupposes education and refinement.’
‘Because you can’t see my history or my nature,’ said Felix, bluntly. ‘I have to determine for myself, and not for other men. I don’t blame them, or think I am better than they; their circumstances are different. I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labour and common burthen of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and the scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefited by the push and the scramble in the long-run. But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky.’
Esther did not speak, and there was silence between them for a minute or two, till they passed through a gate into a plantation where there was no large timber, but only thin-stemmed trees and underwood, so that the sunlight fell on the mossy spaces which lay open here and there.
‘See how beautiful those stooping birch-stems are with the light on them!’ said Felix. ‘Here is an old felled trunk they have not thought worth carrying away. Shall we sit down a little while?’
‘Yes, the mossy ground with the dry leaves sprinkled over it is delightful to one’s feet.’ Esther sat down and took off her bonnet, that the light breeze might fall on her head. Felix, too, threw down his cap and stick, lying on the ground with his back against the felled trunk.
‘I wish I felt more as you do,’ she said, looking at the point of her foot, which was playing with a tuft of moss. ‘I can’t help caring very much what happens to me. And you seem to care so little about yourself.’
‘You are thoroughly mistaken,’ said Felix. ‘It is just because I’m a very ambitious fellow, with very hungry passions, wanting a great deal to satisfy me, that I have chosen to give up what people call worldly good. At least that has been one determining reason. It all depends on what a man gets into his consciousness — what life thrusts into his mind, so that it becomes present to him as remorse is present to the guilty, or a mechanical problem to an inventive genius. There are two things I’ve got present in that way: one of them is the picture of what I should hate to be. I’m determined never to go about making my face simpering or solemn, and telling professional lies for profit; or to get tangled in affairs where I must wink at dishonesty and pocket the proceeds, and justify that knavery as part of a system that I can’t alter. If I once went into that sort of struggle for success, I should want to win — I should defend the wrong that I had once identified myself with. I should become everything that I see now beforehand to be detestable. And what’s more, I should do this, as men are doing it every day, for a ridiculously small prize — perhaps for none at all — perhaps for the sake of two parlours, a rank eligible for the church-wardenship, a discontented wife and several unhopeful children.’
Esther felt a terrible pressure on her heart — the certainty of her remoteness from Felix — the sense that she was utterly trivial to him.
‘The other thing that’s got into my mind like a splinter,’ said Felix, after a pause, ‘is the life of the miserable — the spawning life of vice and hunger. I’ll never be one of the sleek dogs. The old Catholics are right, with their higher rule and their lower. Some are called to subject themselves to a harder discipline, and renounce things voluntarily which are lawful for others. It is the old word — “necessity is laid upon m............