"Weave, weave, weave,
The tiniest thread will
do;
The filmiest thread
from a spider’s bed
Is stout enough for
you.
"Twist, twist, twist,
With fingers dainty
and small;
Let the wily net be
quietly set,
That the innocent may
fall."
Arthur never got his thrashing.
The serious results, of which he had been the primary
cause, for a while put his naughtiness out of every
body’s head; and when, after an hour or more,
Christian went up stairs, and found the poor little
fellow waiting patiently and obediently in mother’s
bedroom, it seemed rather hard to punish him.
She went down again into the study,
and had a long talk with her husband, in which she
spoke her mind very freely-more freely than
she had ever done before, and told him things which
had come to her knowledge concerning the children
of which he, poor man! had hitherto been kept in total
ignorance.
Thus taking counsel together, the
father and mother decided that, except in very rare
instances, corporal punishment should be entirely
abolished, and never, under any circumstances, should
be administered by Phillis. That Phillis’s
sway was to be narrowed as much as possible, without
any absolute laws being made that would wound her feelings,
or show indifference to her long fidelity.
“For,” said Dr. Grey,
“we must not forget, Christian, that she loved
the children when they had not quite so much love
as they have now.”
No, Arthur was not thrashed-was
promised faithfully that Phillis should never be allowed
to thrash him any more; but his step-mother made him
write the meekest, humblest letter of apology to his
Aunt Henrietta, which that lady returned unanswered.
This, however, as Christian took some pains to explain
to him, was a matter of secondary consequence.
Whatever she did, he had done only what was his duty.
And he was enjoined, when they did meet, to address
her politely and respectfully, as a nephew and a gentleman
should-as his father always addressed her,
even in answer to those sharp speeches which, though
in his children’s presence, Miss Gascoigne continually
let fall.
Nevertheless, Dr. Grey bore them,
and so did his wife, which was harder. She did
not mind rudeness to herself, but to hear her husband
thus spoken to and spoken of was a sufficient trial
to make her long for the time of release. And
yet through it all came the deep sense of pity that
any woman who could show herself in so pleasant a light
abroad- for many of the morning visitors
quite condoled with Mrs. Grey on the impending change
at the Lodge, and of the great loss she would have
in her sister-in-law-should be so obnoxious
at home that her nearest relatives counted the days
until her shadow should cease to darken their doors.
And so, gradually and often painfully,
but still with a firm conviction on every body’s
mind that the plan so suddenly decided on had been
the best for all parties, came round the time of the
aunts’ departure.
Christian had spent all the previous
day at Avonside, which she found a very pretty cottage,
all woodbine and roses, with nothing at all poverty-stricken
about it, either within or without. She had gone
over it from garret to basement, making every thing
as comfortable as possible, as she had carte
blanche from her husband to do, and gladly did;
for on her tender conscience rankled every bitter word
of Miss Gascoigne’s as though it were real truth;
and sometimes, in spite of herself, she could not
suppress an uneasy feeling as if the aunts were being
“turned out.” The last day of their
stay at the Lodge was so exceedingly painful, that,
having done all she could, she at length rushed out
of the house with Arthur for a breath of fresh air
and a quiet half hour before dinner, if such were
possible.
She did not go far, only just crossing
the bridge to the cottage grounds opposite where,
in sight of the Lodge windows, she could walk up and
down the beautiful avenue, which still bears the name
of the old philosopher who loved it. If his
wise, gentle ghost still haunted the place, it might
well have watched with pleasure this fair, grave, sweet-looking
young woman sauntering up and down with the boy in
her hand, listening vaguely to his chatter, and now
and then putting in a smiling answer. She had
a smiling, peaceful face, and her thoughts were peaceful
too. She was thinking to herself how pretty Avonsbridge
was in its June dress of freshest green, how quietly
and innocently life passed under shadow of these college
walls, and how could any one have the heart to make
it otherwise?
She would not after today. She
would cease to vex herself, or let her husband vex
himself about Miss Gascoigne. With a mile and
a half between them, the Lodge would certainly feel
safe from her. And oh! what a wonderful peace
would come into the house when she left it! How
good the children would be! How happy their father!-yes,
he could be made happy, Christian knew that, and it
was she who could make him so. The consciousness
of power in this sweet sense, and the delight of exercising
it was becoming the most exquisite happiness Christian
had ever known. She sat dreaming over it almost
like a girl in her first love-dream-only
this dream was deeper and calmer, with all the strength
of daily duty added to the joy of loving and being
loved. Not that she reasoned much-she
was not given to much analyzing of herself-she
only knew that she was content, and found content in
every thing-in the ripple of the river
at her feet, the flutter of the leaves over her head,
the soft blue sky above the colleges, and the green
grass gemmed with daisies, where an old man was mowing
on the one side, and a large thrush, grown silent
with summer, was hopping about on the other.
Every thing seemed beautiful, for the beauty began
in her own heart.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Grey.”
People talk about “looking as
if they had seen a ghost”-and perhaps
that look was not unlike Christian’s as she started
at this salutation behind her. He must have
come stealthily across the grass, for she had heard
nothing, did not even know that any body was near,
till she looked up and saw Sir Edwin Uniacke.
The surprise was so great that it
brought (oh, what shame to feel it, and feel sure
that he saw it!) the blood up to her face-to
her very forehead. She half rose, and then sat
down again, with a blind instinct that any thing was
better than either to be or to appear afraid.
Without waiting for either a reply
or a recognition-which indeed came not,
nothing but that miserable blush-the young
man seated himself on the bench and began to make
acquaintance with Arthur.
“I believe I have seen you before,
my little friend. You are Dr. Grey’s son,
and I once offered to carry you, but was refused.
Are you quite well now, Master Albert? Isn’t
that your name?”
“No; Arthur,” said the
boy, rather flattered at being noticed. “Are
you one of the men at our college? You haven’t
your gown on.”
“Not now,” with a queer
look, half amusement, half irritation. “I
don’t belong to Avonsbridge. I have a
house of my own in the country-such a pretty
place, with a park, and deer, and a lake, and a boat
to row on it. Wouldn’t you like to see
it?”
“Yes.” said Arthur, all eyes and ears.
“I live there, but I am always
coming over to Avonsbridge. Do what I will,
I can not keep away.”
The tone, the glance across the child,
were unmistakable. Christian rose, her momentary
stupefaction gone.
“Come, Arthur, papa will be
waiting dinner. We never keep papa waiting, you
know.”
Simple as the words were, they expressed volumes.
For an instant her composed matronly
grace-her perfect indifference, silenced,
nay, almost awed the young man, and then irritated
him into resistance. He caught hold of Arthur
in passing.
“You need not go yet.
It is only just five, and your papa does not dine
till six.”
“How do you know?” asked the child.
“Oh. I know every thing.
I watch you in and out of the Lodge, and am aware
of all you do. But about the boat I promised
you. It is at my place, Lake Hall, near-”
“Arthur. we must go.”
Arthur jumped up at once. Gentle
as it was, he had learned that that voice must never
be disobeyed.
“I can’t stay, sir; mother
calls me. But I’ll tell papa we met you,
and ask him to let me come and see you, if you will
tell me your name.”
Sir Edwin hesitated.
“There is no necessity,”
said Mrs. Grey. “Arthur, I know this gentleman.
I myself shall tell your papa that we have met him
here. Good-morning, Sir Edwin Uniacke.”
She bowed with that perfect, repellant
courtesy against which there is no appeal, and passed
on; had she seen-she did not, for she looked
straight on and saw nothing-but had she
seen the look of mingled hate and love which darkened
over Sir Edwin’s face, it might have terrified
her. But no, she was too courageous a woman to
fear anything save doing wrong.
After a minute’s angry beating
of his boot with his stick, the young man rose and
followed them down the avenue, contriving, by dint
of occasional conversation with Arthur, to keep along
side of them the whole way as far as the bridge which
connected the college grounds with the college buildings,
and which was overlooked by the whole frontage of
the Lodge.
With a vague sense of relief and protection,
Christian glanced to the windows of her home, and
there, at the open nursery casement, she saw a group,
Phillis, Oliver, Letitia, and behind Letitia another
person-Miss Susan Bennett, who had come
with a message from old Mrs. Ferguson, and whom, in
her kindness, Mrs. Grey had sent to have a cup of tea
in the nursery before returning to the village, where
the girl said she was “quite comfortable.”
There she stood, she and Phillis, watching, as they
doubtless had watched the whole interview, from the
time Sir Edwin sat down, on the bench till his parting
shake of the hand to Arthur, and farewell bow to herself,
which bow was rather easy and familiar than distantly
ceremonious.
Had he done it on purpose? Had
he too seen the group at the window, and, moved by
a contemptible vanity, or worse, behaved so that these
others ought notice his manner to Mrs. Grey, and put
upon it any construction they pleased?
Yet what possible construction could
be put upon it, even by the most ill-natured and malicious
witnesses? The college grounds were free to
all; this meeting was evidently accidental and all
that had passed thereat was a few words with the boy,
which Arthur would be sure to repent at once; nor
did Christian desire to prevent him.
It was a hard position. She
had done no wrong-not the shadow of wrong-and
yet here was she, Christian Grey, discovered meeting
and walking with a man whom her husband had distinctly
forbidden the house-discovered both by
her servant, who, having an old servant’s love
of prying into family affairs, no doubt knew of this
prohibition, and by Miss Bennett, to whom she herself
had said that Sir Edwin was a man unfit for any respectable
woman’s acquaintance.
“What would they both think?
And, moreover, when she heard of it-as
assuredly she would-what would Miss Gascoigne
think and say?”
That overpowering dread, “What
will people say?” for the first time in her
life began to creep over Christian’s fearless
heart. Such an innocent heart it was, and oh,
such a contented one only half an hour ago.
“How dare he?” she said,
fiercely, as she found herself alone in her own room,
with but just time enough to dress and take her place
as the fair, stately, high-thoughted, pure-hearted
mistress of her husband’s table. “How
dare he?” and, standing at the glass, she looked
almost with disgust into the beautiful face that burnt,
hotly still only at the remembrance of the last ten
minutes. “But he must see-he
must surely understand how utterly I despise him.
He will not presume again. Oh, if I had only
told my husband! It was a terrible mistake?”
What was-her secret or her marriage? or
both?
Christian did not stop to think.
Whatever it was, she knew that, like most of the
mistakes and miseries of this world, it was made to
be remedied-made possible of remedy.
At all events, the pain must be endured, fought through,
struggled with, any thing but succumbed to.
In the five minutes that, after all,
she found she had to wait in the drawing-room before
the aunts or her husband appeared. Christian
took herself seriously to task for this overwhelming,
cowardly fear. What had she really to dread?
What harm could he do her-the bad man
of whom she had so ignorantly made a girl’s ideal?
The only testimony thereof was her letters, if he
still had them in his possession- her poor,
innocent, girlish letters-very few-just
two or three. Foolish they might have been,
sentimental and ridiculous, but she could not remember
any thing wrong in them-any thing that a
girl in her teens need blush to have written, either
to friend or lover, save for the one fact that, a
girl is wiser to have no friend at all among men-except
her lover. And, whatever they were, most likely
he had destroyed them long ago.
“No, no,” she thought,
“he can not do me any harm; he dare not!”
It was difficult to say what Sir Edwin
Uniacke would not dare; for, going back to her room
for some trifle forgotten, she discovered that he
was still lounging, cigar in mouth, up and down the
river-side avenue opposite, where he could plainly
see and be seen from almost every window in the Lodge.
And there, hurrying to meet him, she
saw Susan Bennett. But the meeting appeared
not satisfactory, and after a few minutes the girl
had left him and he was again seen walking up and
down alone.
A vain woman might have been flattered,
perhaps allured, by this persistence. In Christian
it produced only repulsion, actual hatred, if so gentle
a spirit could hate. An honest love from the
very humblest man alive, she would have been tender
over; but this, which to her, a wife, was necessarily
utter insult and wickedness, awoke in her nothing but
abhorrence-the same sort of righteous abhorrence
that she would have felt-she knew she would-toward
any woman who had tried to win her husband from herself.
Win her husband? The fancy almost made her
smile, and then filled her with a brimming sense of
joy that he was- what he was, a man to
whom the bare idea of loving any woman but his own
wife was so impossible that it became actually ludicrous.
She smiled, she even laughed, with
an ever-growing sense of all he was to her and she
to him, when she heard him open his study-door and
call “Christian.”
She went quickly, to explain in a
word or two, before they went down to dinner, her
rencontre with Sir Edwin Uniacke. Afterward,
in their long, quiet evenings, to which she so looked
forward, she would tell her husband the whole story,
and give herself the comfort of feeling that now at
last he was fully acquainted with her whole outer life
and inmost soul, as a husband ought to be.
But there stood the two aunts, one
stately and grim, the other silent and tearful; and
it took all Dr. Grey’s winning ways to smooth
matters so as to make their last meal together before
the separation any thing like a peaceful one.
He seemed so anxious for this-nervously
anxious-that his wife forgot every thing
in helping him to put a cheerful face on every thing.
And when she watched him, finding a pleasant word
for every one, and patient even with Miss Gascoigne,
who today seemed in her sharpest mood, gray-haired,
quaint, and bookish-looking as he was, it appeared
to Christian that not a young man living could bear
a moment’s comparison with Dr. Arnold Grey.
He tried his best, and she tried her
best but it was rather a dull dinner, and she found
no opportunity to say, as at last she had decided to
say publicly, just as a piece of news, no more, that
she had today met Sir Edwin Uniacke. And so
it befell that the first who told the fact was Arthur,
blurting out between his strawberries, “Oh, papa
I want you to let me go to a place called Lake Hall.”
“Lake Hall?”
“Yes; the owner of it invited
me there; he did, indeed. He is the kindest,
pleasantest gentleman I ever met. A ‘Sir,’
too. His name is Sir Edwin Uniacke.”
“My boy, where did you meet Sir Edwin Uniacke?”
So the whole story came out.
Dr. Grey listened in grave silence-even
a little displeasure, or something less like displeasure
than pain. At length, he said,
“I think you must have made
some mistake, Arthur. Your mother could never
have allowed-”
“She did not say she would allow
me to go. She looked rather vexed; I don’t
think she liked Sir Edwin Uniacke. And if she
is very much against my going-well, I won’t
go,” said Arthur, heroically.
“You are a good boy; but I think
this gentleman ought to have hesitated a little before
he thus intruded himself upon my wife and my son.”
“I think so, too,” said
Christian, the first words she had spoken.
Dr. Grey glanced at her sharply, but
the most suspicious husband could have read nothing
in her face beyond what she said.
“And I think,” burst in
Miss Gascoigne, who had listened to it all, her large
eyes growing every minute larger and larger, “that
it must be somehow a lady’s own fault when a
gentleman is intrusive, I never believed-I
never could have believed-after all Dr.
Grey has said about Sir Edwin, that the three figures-a
lady, and gentleman, and a child, whom I saw this
afternoon sitting so comfortably together on the bench-as
comfortably, I vow and declare, as if they had been
sitting there an hour, which perhaps they had-”
“Not more than two minutes,”
interrupted Christian, speaking very quietly, but
conscious of a wild desire to fly at Miss Gascoigne
and shake her as she stood, putting forward, in her
customary way, those mangled fragments of truth which
are more irritating than absolute lies. “Indeed,
it was only two minutes. I did not choose, even
if I had no other reason, that a man of whom Dr. Grey
did not approve should hold any communication with
Arthur?”
“Thank you, that was right,” said Dr.
Greg.
“Yet you let him walk with you-I
know you did, up to the very Lodge door.”
“To the bridge, Miss Gascoigne.”
“Well, it’s all the same.
And I must confess it is most extraordinary conduct.
To refuse a gentleman’s visits-his
open visits here-on the pretext that he
is not good enough for your society, and then to meet
him, sit with him, walk with him in the college grounds.
What will people say.”
Christian turned like a hunted creature
at bay, “I do not care-not a jot,
what people say.”
“I thought not. People
like you never do care. They fly in the face
of society; they-”
“Husband!” with a sort
of wild appeal, the first she had ever made for protection-for
at least justice.
Dr. Grey looked up, started out of
a long fit of thoughtfulness-sadness it
might be, during which he had let the conversation
pass him by.
“The only thing I care for is
what my husband thinks. If he blames me-”
“For what, my dear?”
“Because, when I was walking
in the college grounds, as any lady may walk, that
man, Sir Edwin Uniacke, whose acquaintance I desire
as little as you do, came up and spoke to me, or rather
to Arthur. I could not help it, could I?”
“No, my child,” with a
slight emphasis on the words “my child,”
that went to Christian’s heart. Yes, surely,
if she had only had courage to tell him, in his large
tenderness he could have understood that childish
folly, the dream of a day, and the long misery it had
brought her. She would tell him all the very
first opportunity; however much it pained and humiliated
her, she would tell her good husband all.
“And, papa, have I been naughty
too?” said Arthur? “I am sure I did
not see any thing so very dreadful in Sir Edwin.
He came up and spoke to mother as if he knew her
quite well, and then he talked ever so much to me,
and said if I would visit him he would give me a boat
to row, and a horse to ride. And I’m sure
he seemed the very kindest, pleasantest gentleman.”
“So he is; and nothing shall
ever make me believe he isn’t.” cried Miss
Gascoigne, always delighted to pull against the tide.
“And I must say, Dr. Grey, the way you and
your wife set up your opinion against that of really
good society is perfect nonsense. For my part,
when I have a house of my own once more, and can invite
whomsoever I please-”
“I would nevertheless advise,
so far as a brother may,” interrupted Dr. Grey,
very seriously, “that you do not invite Sir Edwin
Uniacke. And now, aunts both,” with that
sun-shiny smile which could disperse almost any domestic
cloud, “as this conversation is not particularly
interesting to the children, suppose we end it.
When do you intend to have us all to tea at Avonside?”