Shirley

“‘And you far haughtier. Yours is the monstrous pride which counterfeits humility.’

“‘I am a dependant; I know my place.’

“‘I am a woman; I know mine.’

“‘I am poor; I must be proud.’

“‘I have received ordinances, and own obligations stringent as yours.’

“We had reached a critical point now, and we halted and looked at each other. She would not give in, I felt. Beyond this I neither felt nor saw. A few moments yet were mine. The end was coming – I heard its rush – but not come. I would dally, wait, talk, and when impulse urged I would act. I am never in a hurry; I never was in a hurry in my whole life. Hasty people drink the nectar of existence scalding hot; I taste it cool as dew. I proceeded: ‘Apparently, Miss Keeldar, you are as little likely to marry as myself. I know you have refused three – nay, four – advantageous offers, and, I believe, a fifth. Have you rejected Sir Philip Nunnely?’

“I put this question suddenly and promptly.

“‘Did you think I should take him?’

“‘I thought you might.’

“‘On what grounds, may I ask?’

“‘Conformity of rank, age, pleasing contrast of temper – for he is mild and amiable – harmony of intellectual tastes.’

“‘A beautiful sentence! Let us take it to pieces. “Conformity of rank.” He is quite above me. Compare my grange with his palace, if you please. I am disdained by his kith and kin. “Suitability of age.” We were born in the same year; consequently he is still a boy, while I am a woman – ten years his senior to all intents and purposes. “Contrast of temper.” Mild and amiable, is he; I – what? Tell me.’

“‘Sister of the spotted, bright, quick, fiery leopard.’

“‘And you would mate me with a kid – the millennium being yet millions of centuries from mankind; being yet, indeed, an archangel high in the seventh heaven, uncommissioned to descend? Unjust barbarian! “Harmony of intellectual tastes.” He is fond of poetry, and I hate it’

“‘Do you? That is news.’

“‘I absolutely shudder at the sight of metre or at the sound of rhyme whenever I am at the priory or Sir Philip at Fieldhead. Harmony, indeed! When did I whip up syllabub sonnets or string stanzas fragile as fragments of glass? and when did I betray a belief that those penny-beads were genuine brilliants?’

“‘You might have the satisfaction of leading him to a higher standard, of improving his tastes.’

“‘Leading and improving! teaching and tutoring! bearing and forbearing! Pah! my husband is not to be my baby. I am not to set him his daily lesson and see that he learns it, and give him a sugar-plum if he is good, and a patient, pensive, pathetic lecture if he is bad. But it is like a tutor to talk of the “satisfaction of teaching.” I suppose you think it the finest employment in the world. I don’t. I reject it. Improving a husband! No. I shall insist upon my husband improving me, or else we part.’

“‘God knows it is needed!’

“‘What do you mean by that, Mr. Moore?’

“‘What I say. Improvement is imperatively needed.’

“‘If you were a woman you would school monsieur, votre mari, charmingly. It would just suit you; schooling is your vocation.’

“‘May I ask whether, in your present just and gentle mood, you mean to taunt me with being a tutor?’

“‘Yes, bitterly; and with anything else you please – any defect of which you are painfully conscious.’

“‘With being poor, for instance?’

“‘Of course; that will sting you. You are sore about your poverty; you brood over that.’

“‘With having nothing but a very plain person to offer the woman who may master my heart?’

“‘Exactly. You have a habit of calling yourself plain. You are sensitive about the cut of your features because they are not quite on an Apollo pattern. You abase them more than is needful, in the faint hope that others may say a word in their behalf – which won’t happen. Your face is nothing to boast of, certainly – not a pretty line nor a pretty tint to be found therein.’

“‘Compare it with your own.’

“‘It looks like a god of Egypt – a great sand-buried stone head; or rather I will compare it to nothing so lofty. It looks like Tartar. You are my mastiff’s cousin. I think you as much like him as a man can be like a dog.’

“‘Tartar is your dear companion. In summer, when you rise early, and run out into the fields to wet your feet with the dew, and freshen your cheek and uncurl your hair with the breeze, you always call him to follow you. You call him sometimes with a whistle that you learned from me. In the solitude of your wood, when you think nobody but Tartar is listening, you whistle the very tunes you imitated from my lips, or sing the very songs you have caught up by ear from my voice. I do not ask whence flows the feeling which you pour into these songs, for I know it flows out of your heart, Miss Keeldar. In the winter evenings Tartar lies at your feet. You suffer him to rest his head on your perfumed lap; you let him couch on the borders of your satin raiment. His rough hide is familiar with the contact of your hand. I once saw you kiss him on that snow-white beauty spot which stars his broad forehead. It is dangerous to say I am like Tartar; it suggests to me a claim to be treated like Tartar.’

“‘Perhaps, sir, you can extort as much from your penniless and friendless young orphan girl, when you find her.’

“‘Oh could I find her such as I image her! Something to tame first, and teach afterwards; to break in, and then to fondle. To lift the destitute proud thing out of poverty; to establish power over and then to be indulgent to the capricious moods that never were influenced and never indulged before; to see her alternately irritated and subdued about twelve times in the twenty-four hours; and perhaps, eventually, when her training was accomplished, to behold her the exemplary and patient mother of about a dozen children, only now and then lending little Louis a cordial cuff by way of paying the interest of the vast debt she owes his father. Oh’ (I went on), ‘my orphan girl would give me many a kiss; she would watch on the threshold for my coming home of an evening; she would run into my arms; she would keep my hearth as bright as she would make it warm. God bless the sweet idea! Find her I must.’

“Her eyes emitted an eager flash, her lips opened; but she reclosed them, and impetuously turned away.

“‘Tell me, tell me where she is, Miss Keeldar!’

“Another movement, all haughtiness and fire and impulse.

“‘I must know. You can tell me; you shall tell me.’

“‘I never will.’

“She turned to leave me. Could I now let her part as she had always parted from me? No. I had gone too far not to finish; I had come too near the end not to drive home to it. All the encumbrance of doubt, all the rubbish of indecision, must be removed at once, and the plain truth must be ascertained. She must take her part, and tell me what it was; I must take mine and adhere to it.

“‘A minute, madam,’ I said, keeping my hand on the door-handle before I opened it. ‘We have had a long conversation this morning, but the last word has not been spoken yet. It is yours to speak it.’

“‘May I pass?’

“‘No; I guard the door. I would almost rather die than let you leave me just now, without speaking the word I demand.’

“‘What dare you expect me to say?’

“‘What I am dying and perishing to hear; what I must and will hear; what you dare not now suppress.’

“‘Mr. Moore, I hardly know what you mean. You are not like yourself.’

“I suppose I hardly was like my usual self, for I scared her – that I could see. It was right: she must be scared to be won.

“‘You do know what I mean, and for the first time I stand before you myself. I have flung off the tutor, and beg to introduce you to the man. And remember, he is a gentleman.’

“She trembled. She put her hand to mine as if to remove it from the lock. She might as well have tried to loosen, by her soft touch, metal welded to metal. She felt she was powerless, and receded; and again she trembled.

“What change I underwent I cannot explain, but out of her emotion passed into me a new spirit. I neither was crushed nor elated by her lands and gold; I thought not of them, cared not for them. They were nothing – dross that could not dismay me. I saw only herself – her young beautiful form, the grace, the majesty, the modesty of her girlhood.

“‘My pupil,’ I said.