Shirley by Charlotte Brontë (free biff chip and kipper ebooks .txt) 📖

Quail where no eye sees you!"

"How dare you," she would ask herself—"how dare you show your weakness and betray your imbecile anxieties? Shake them off; rise above them. If you cannot do this, hide them."

And to hide them she did her best. She once more became resolutely lively in company. When weary of effort and forced to relax, she sought solitude—not the solitude of her chamber (she refused to mope, shut up between four walls), but that wilder solitude which lies out of doors, and which she could chase, mounted on Zoë, her mare. She took long rides of half a day. Her uncle disapproved, but he dared not remonstrate. It was never pleasant to face Shirley's anger, even when she was healthy and gay; but now that her face showed thin, and her large eye looked hollow, there was something in the darkening of that face and kindling of that eye which touched as well as alarmed.

To all comparative strangers who, unconscious of the alterations in her spirits, commented on the alteration in her looks, she had one reply,—

"I am perfectly well; I have not an ailment."

And health, indeed, she must have had, to be able to bear the exposure to the weather she now encountered. Wet or fair, calm or storm, she took her daily ride over Stilbro' Moor, Tartar keeping up at her side, with his wolf-like gallop, long and untiring.

Twice, three times, the eyes of gossips—those eyes which are everywhere, in the closet and on the hill-top—noticed that instead of turning on Rushedge, the top ridge of Stilbro' Moor, she rode forwards all the way to the town. Scouts were not wanting to mark her destination there. It was ascertained that she alighted at the door of one Mr. Pearson Hall, a solicitor, related to the vicar of Nunnely. This gentleman and his ancestors had been the agents of the Keeldar family for generations back. Some people affirmed that Miss Keeldar was become involved in business speculations connected with Hollow's Mill—that she had lost money,[Pg 436] and was constrained to mortgage her land. Others conjectured that she was going to be married, and that the settlements were preparing.

Mr. Moore and Henry Sympson were together in the schoolroom. The tutor was waiting for a lesson which the pupil seemed busy in preparing.

"Henry, make haste. The afternoon is getting on."

"Is it, sir?"

"Certainly. Are you nearly ready with that lesson?"

"No."

"Not nearly ready?"

"I have not construed a line."

Mr. Moore looked up. The boy's tone was rather peculiar.

"The task presents no difficulties, Henry; or, if it does, bring them to me. We will work together."

"Mr. Moore, I can do no work."

"My boy, you are ill."

"Sir, I am not worse in bodily health than usual, but my heart is full."

"Shut the book. Come hither, Harry. Come to the fireside."

Harry limped forward. His tutor placed him in a chair; his lips were quivering, his eyes brimming. He laid his crutch on the floor, bent down his head, and wept.

"This distress is not occasioned by physical pain, you say, Harry? You have a grief; tell it me."

"Sir, I have such a grief as I never had before. I wish it could be relieved in some way; I can hardly bear it."

"Who knows but, if we talk it over, we may relieve it? What is the cause? Whom does it concern?"

"The cause, sir, is Shirley; it concerns Shirley."

"Does it? You think her changed?"

"All who know her think her changed—you too, Mr. Moore."

"Not seriously—no. I see no alteration but such as a favourable turn might repair in a few weeks; besides, her own word must go for something: she says she is well."

"There it is, sir. As long as she maintained she was well, I believed her. When I was sad out of her sight, I soon recovered spirits in her presence. Now——"

"Well, Harry, now. Has she said anything to you? You and she were together in the garden two hours this[Pg 437] morning. I saw her talking, and you listening. Now, my dear Harry, if Miss Keeldar has said she is ill, and enjoined you to keep her secret, do not obey her. For her life's sake, avow everything. Speak, my boy."

"She say she is ill! I believe, sir, if she were dying, she would smile, and aver, 'Nothing ails me.'"

"What have you learned then? What new circumstance?"

"I have learned that she has just made her will."

"Made her will?"

The tutor and pupil were silent.

"She told you that?" asked Moore, when some minutes had elapsed.

"She told me quite cheerfully, not as an ominous circumstance, which I felt it to be. She said I was the only person besides her solicitor, Pearson Hall, and Mr. Helstone and Mr. Yorke, who knew anything about it; and to me, she intimated, she wished specially to explain its provisions."

"Go on, Harry."

"'Because,' she said, looking down on me with her beautiful eyes—oh! they are beautiful, Mr. Moore! I love them! I love her! She is my star! Heaven must not claim her! She is lovely in this world, and fitted for this world. Shirley is not an angel; she is a woman, and she shall live with men. Seraphs shall not have her! Mr. Moore, if one of the 'sons of God,' with wings wide and bright as the sky, blue and sounding as the sea, having seen that she was fair, descended to claim her, his claim should be withstood—withstood by me—boy and cripple as I am."

"Henry Sympson, go on, when I tell you."

"'Because,' she said, 'if I made no will, and died before you, Harry, all my property would go to you; and I do not intend that it should be so, though your father would like it. But you,' she said, 'will have his whole estate, which is large—larger than Fieldhead. Your sisters will have nothing; so I have left them some money, though I do not love them, both together, half so much as I love one lock of your fair hair.' She said these words, and she called me her 'darling,' and let me kiss her. She went on to tell me that she had left Caroline Helstone some money too; that this manor house, with its furniture and books, she had bequeathed to me, as she did not choose to take the old family place from her own blood; and that all the rest of[Pg 438] her property, amounting to about twelve thousand pounds, exclusive of the legacies to my sisters and Miss Helstone, she had willed, not to me, seeing I was already rich, but to a good man, who would make the best use of it that any human being could do—a man, she said, that was both gentle and brave, strong and merciful—a man that might not profess to be pious, but she knew he had the secret of religion pure and undefiled before God. The spirit of love and peace was with him. He visited the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and kept himself unspotted from the world. Then she asked, 'Do you approve what I have done, Harry?' I could not answer. My tears choked me, as they do now."

Mr. Moore allowed his pupil a moment to contend with and master his emotion. He then demanded, "What else did she say?"

"When I had signified my full consent to the conditions of her will, she told me I was a generous boy, and she was proud of me. 'And now,' she added, 'in case anything should happen, you will know what to say to Malice when she comes whispering hard things in your ear, insinuating that Shirley has wronged you, that she did not love you. You will know that I did love you, Harry; that no sister could have loved you better—my own treasure.' Mr. Moore, sir, when I remember her voice, and recall her look, my heart beats as if it would break its strings. She may go to heaven before me—if God commands it, she must; but the rest of my life—and my life will not be long, I am glad of that now—shall be a straight, quick, thoughtful journey in the path her step has pressed. I thought to enter the vault of the Keeldars before her. Should it be otherwise, lay my coffin by Shirley's side."

Moore answered him with a weighty calm, that offered a strange contrast to the boy's perturbed enthusiasm.

"You are wrong, both of you—you harm each other. If youth once falls under the influence of a shadowy terror, it imagines there will never be full sunlight again; its first calamity it fancies will last a lifetime. What more did she say? Anything more?"

"We settled one or two family points between ourselves."

"I should rather like to know what——"

"But, Mr. Moore, you smile. I could not smile to see Shirley in such a mood."

[Pg 439]"My boy, I am neither nervous, nor poetic, nor inexperienced. I see things as they are; you don't as yet. Tell me these family points."

"Only, sir, she asked me whether I considered myself most of a Keeldar or a Sympson; and I answered I was Keeldar to the core of the heart and to the marrow of the bones. She said she was glad of it; for, besides her, I was the only Keeldar left in England. And then we agreed on some matters."

"Well?"

"Well, sir, that if I lived to inherit my father's estate, and her house, I was to take the name of Keeldar, and to make Fieldhead my residence. Henry Shirley Keeldar I said I would be called; and I will. Her name and her manor house are ages old, and Sympson and Sympson Grove are of yesterday."

"Come, you are neither of you going to heaven yet. I have the best hopes of you both, with your proud distinctions—a pair of half-fledged eaglets. Now, what is your inference from all you have told me? Put it into words."

"That Shirley thinks she is going to die."

"She referred to her health?"

"Not once; but I assure you she is wasting. Her hands are grown quite thin, and so is her cheek."

"Does she ever complain to your mother or sisters?"

"Never. She laughs at them when they question her. Mr. Moore, she is a strange being, so fair and girlish—not a man-like woman at all, not an Amazon, and yet lifting her head above both help and sympathy."

"Do you know where she is now, Henry? Is she in the house, or riding out?"

"Surely not out, sir. It rains fast."

"True; which, however, is no guarantee that she is not at this moment cantering over Rushedge. Of late she has never permitted weather to be a hindrance to her rides."

"You remember, Mr. Moore, how wet and stormy it was last Wednesday—so wild, indeed, that she would not permit Zoë to be saddled? Yet the blast she thought too tempestuous for her mare she herself faced on foot; that afternoon she walked nearly as far as Nunnely. I asked her, when she came in, if she was not afraid of taking cold. 'Not I,' she said. 'It would be too much good luck for me. I don't know, Harry, but the best thing that could happen to me would be to take a good cold and fever, and[Pg 440] so pass off like other Christians.' She is reckless, you see, sir."

"Reckless indeed! Go and find out where she is, and if you can get an opportunity of speaking to her without attracting attention, request her to come here a minute."

"Yes, sir."

He snatched his crutch, and started up to go.

"Harry!"

He returned.

"Do not deliver the message formally. Word it as, in former days, you would have worded an ordinary summons to the schoolroom."

"I see, sir. She will be more likely to obey."

"And, Harry——"

"Sir?"

"I will call you when I want you. Till then, you are dispensed from lessons."

He departed. Mr. Moore, left alone, rose from his desk.

"I can be very cool and very supercilious with Henry," he said. "I can seem to make light of his apprehensions, and look down du haut de ma grandeur on his youthful ardour. To him I can speak as if, in my eyes, they were both children. Let me see if I can keep up the same rôle with her. I have known the moment when I seemed about to forget it, when Confusion and Submission seemed about to crush me with their soft tyranny, when my tongue faltered, and I have almost let the mantle drop, and stood in her presence, not master—no—but something else. I trust I shall never so play the fool. It is well for a Sir Philip Nunnely to redden when he meets her eye. He may permit himself the indulgence of submission. He may even, without disgrace, suffer his hand to tremble when it touches hers; but if one of her farmers were to show himself susceptible and sentimental, he would