Chapter XXVII: Elizabeth's Grievances

IT was quite true that Walter Wilson's state of health seemed to improve during his prolonged sojourn in his native place. But it was not his home now—(where, indeed, was his home?)—and he was after a short time made to feel, in a certain sort of way, that his visit had been sufficiently extended. I daresay if he had chosen to reveal in full the state of his worldly affairs, he would have been made more welcome than he was to the hospitalities of Low Beech. But to gratify a whim of his own, or for some other reason, he kept this knowledge locked up in his own breast, except so far as he had shared it with his confidential man of business.

So, in the end, notwithstanding the hopes he had at first raised at Low Beech, it came to be considered that Walter was come home no better than he went out, or perhaps rather worse than better.

There are other vices in the world besides those that brand all those who practise them with disrepute, and eventually with infamy. Mark Wilson, as we have seen, gave himself up to the love of drink, adding drunkenness to thirst, till he brought himself to poverty, disgrace, ruin, and death. On the other hand, Matthew Wilson, sober, industrious; plodding, highly respectable, and positively fancying that God was pleased with him, and was rewarding him by increasing his property, gave himself up to the love of money, adding penny to penny and pound to pound, till he had the repute of being wealthy, and was lauded accordingly; for "men will praise thee when thou doest well to thyself."

But covetousness is no less a vice than intemperance. It is equally detestable in God's sight, and its effects on the human soul are equally debasing. Its effect on Matthew's soul was to destroy, or at least to weaken, natural affection, and to make him calculate, after a while, how much it was costing him to entertain his son; just as he knew, almost to a fraction, how much in money value was consumed, day by day, by each inmate in his house. No doubt he was glad when Walter, whom he had thought long dead, unexpectedly made his appearance; and, for a time, his detestable (I beg pardon, his most respectable) vice of avarice (for he was avaricious as well as covetous) was held in abeyance.

But when a full month had elapsed, and the returned son gave no sign of opulence, Matthew's ruling passion regained its sway. Here was Walter come back, most likely poor, in ill-health, and with a daughter for somebody to support. It was all very well for Mr. Tincroft to say what he had said about nobody needing to be troubled on that score, but who was to make Mr. Tincroft keep to his word when it came to the pinch?

The same feelings influenced other members of the family to a degree. Even the poor mother had been so accustomed to scrape together pence that, though Walter was her son, she felt uneasy when she thought of the possibility of having him to keep, nobody knew how long. And the brothers—well, they were pleased enough, no doubt—at least, they said they were—to see Walter again; and they made him welcome, after their fashion, at their several homes. But they knew what money was made of, and what it was made for, as well as most people; at least, they thought they did, and it would have done no good to try to convince them that they were altogether mistaken. And by this time they had come to the conclusion, each in his own mind, that Walter would be after wanting "some of the old man's money to take a farm with, or to set up in business with," and then there would be so much the less for them to share by-and-by. So their welcome at last became less cordial and more perforce.

The only one who did not share in these forebodings was the daughter and sister. Elizabeth had always been fond of her brother Walter; even when she, so many years ago, had so heartily and strenuously set herself to make mischief between him and their cousin Sarah, she honestly believed she was doing it for his good, and was attempting, in the only way she knew how, to undo the mischief which she at first had a hand in, when she believed her uncle Mark to have money, which Sarah would eventually inherit.

We have seen how, afterwards, she came to be sorry for the part she had taken in separating the lovers. And now, when she looked at Walter's wan countenance, and watched his tottering steps, love and sorrow welled up from her full heart in a mingled current, the more that she believed, with the rest, in her brother's comparative poverty, and traced it all, or much of it, to herself, in having driven him away from England, where he was getting on so well.

Hitherto Elizabeth had not had much opportunity of conversing with Walter, for at Low Beech every one had his or her share of hard work to perform, which filled up every hour of the day, leaving little time for what would have been called idling.

One fine afternoon however—and it happened to be the same day as that on which Sarah and Helen, three hundred miles away, had their chat under the beech tree—Walter announced his intention of walking up to High Beech Farm, to take leave of his brother George's wife, and he asked Elizabeth to bear him company, and assist him with her stronger arm.

After some little demur, leave of absence was granted by Mrs. Matthew, and the brother and sister set out together. For some time they walked on in silence; but presently Walter spoke.

"You don't seem very happy, Elizabeth. I have been trying to get a chat with you alone all the time I have been here, and haven't been able; but I have watched and noticed you. There's something on your mind, I think."

"Why, Walter, what should there be?" said Elizabeth, with assumed lightness of speech. And then she added, more quickly, and with evident feeling, "It does not make one any the happier, Walter, to see you in such a poor way."

"Then I had better not have come to the old place to see you at all, if that makes you sorrowful," said the invalid brother.

"Oh, I don't say so, Walter. Of course, it was a very pleasant surprise when you came in so unexpectedly; but when that feeling went off, it gave way, perhaps, to another sort of feeling, when we saw you looking so bad, and showing such signs of weakness and illness."

"Do you think so? I have rather fancied, now, that father and mother, and the rest of them, except yourself, don't seem to mind it much."

"There are different ways of showing such things," Elizabeth remarked. And then she added, "But very likely I have felt more than the others have done. You and I were always good friends, Walter, till—" and here she stopped short.

"Yes, always good friends, Elizabeth. They were happy times when you and I used to play together in the old barn, and go out gathering primroses and violets in spring, and blackberries in autumn, all alone by ourselves," said Walter, with a sigh.

"They were too happy to last, Walter; but, you know, I never took to either of the others as I did to you, even when we were all children. They were mostly ready to quarrel with me if I didn't let them have their way, and they were younger than me. But it was different with you; you were older than me, and you always took my part, and we shared what we either of us had; and if it hadn't been for—oh dear, oh dear!" And here the sister could not restrain herself, but broke into loud, sorrowful lamentations.

"Don't distress yourself, Elizabeth dear. We always were good friends, as you say, and so we are now. And it being so, let us talk to one another as we used to do when we went hand in hand over the fields together, telling our little secrets and troubles."

"Oh, Walter, but we are man and woman now!"

"But brother and sister too; nothing can alter that. And I want you to tell me if there isn't something here at your home—" (Walter could not bring himself to say our home, or my old home)—"something at your home that makes you unhappy?"

"Well, come to that, there are a good many things not altogether agreeable," Elizabeth answered, more composedly, and yet with apparent bitterness of feeling; "it is not pleasant to be treated as a child, as I many times am, and at forty years old, too, if a day, as you know, Walter."

"Yes, of course you are," said the brother; "but I should have thought you had known how to hold your own too, and would not have allowed any one to put upon you, or treat you as a child, as you say. I think I have noticed a good deal of spirit in you at times, Elizabeth."

"Yes, likely enough in some things. There are some things that none of them, not even father, cares to say to me, nor even to talk about when I am by; and he knows the reason why. But when it comes to work—about the house, I mean—and how it is to be done, and who is to do it, I am just nobody to be considered," said the sister. "There isn't a servant girl in the place slaves as I do, Walter; and that you must have seen."

Walter had seen that his sister worked very hard, was up early in the morning, was the last to go to bed, and seemed to have her hands full of household matters all day long. He said this.

"Well, then, isn't that enough to make one go wild with vexation? But that isn't the worst. You heard what mother said to me only yesterday at dinner-time? The servant girl there to hear it too?"

"Well, it was something I did not quite understand, about some Smith or other; but I saw it made you very angry, so that you left the room."

"Yes, I should think so, to be insulted in that way! It was a shame, and that is how they go on with me, as if it was my fault not being married. But it all serves me right, it does!" And then poor Elizabeth made known to her brother the great grievance of her life, adding—

"And ever since then, whenever I have wanted to buy anything for myself, and have had to get the money out of them, I am sure to be told of it. And father is as bad as another about it every bit, for he is getting more stingy than ever, and it is as much as I can do to get a decent Sunday dress or bonnet; as you must have seen how old mine are," continued Elizabeth, ready to cry with vexation.

"Don't distress yourself about that, Elizabeth," said Walter, soothingly; "perhaps that trouble can be remedied easier than you think for. I haven't said much about it, but I happen to have a little money more than I want, and before I go—But, my dear, I am feeling very faint."

He said this with difficulty and panting. "I think the walk has been too much for my strength; I must rest somewhere."

It was evident to Elizabeth, now that she turned her eyes on him, that her brother was fearfully exhausted. The walk from Low Beech to High Beech was not a long one, but it was all up hill, and the afternoon sun beat upon them hotly. Plainly, Walter had overtaxed his strength. Fortunately, as it seemed, they were near George's farm now, and there they could rest. Still nearer to them was the garden gate—that gate which opened into the filbert alley, with the holly arbour at the end of it, which Walter had such good cause for remembering, and which he had not yet cared to revisit.

"Let us go into the summer-house before we go indoors," said Walter, painfully; "it will be cool there, and we can have our talk out all by ourselves when I am rested a bit."

And so the garden gate was passed through, and the brother and sister walked silently up the alley, and Elizabeth took off her shawl and wrapped it carefully round Walter, so that he should not get chilled, she said.

And Walter with unwonted tenderness, took his sister's hand, roughened by hard work, and put it to his lips, and a tear fell upon it in the short moment that he held it there. All this Elizabeth afterwards remembered.

There are times when hard, practical men and women, who, if they have feelings, think it a weakness to make display of them, seem to lose their boasted self-command and become as little children. It was so with Elizabeth Wilson, as she sat in the holly arbour with her hand still clasped in her brother's. It may be that the sight of his pale face, rendered more ghastly by the dark beard which concealed the lower part of it, and of his shrunken limbs, and the touch of the weak, bony, nerveless hand which held hers in its cold clasp, had something to do with the change which came over her. Or perhaps the kind, gentle, brotherly tone Walter had adopted towards her in their previous conversation softened her. But whatever might be the cause, her rugged temper broke down, and tears which she at most times would have scorned to see on another woman's face, and which rarely moistened her own, at any rate when there were any to see them, began to run down her cheeks without any attempt on her part to check or to hide them. Presently she spoke.

"Oh, Walter, if we could always have been children!" she sobbed.

"It wouldn't have been good for us, I fancy," said the brother, quietly.

"I know it couldn't have been, except we had died before we could be grown-up; and then we should have been children always and for ever, I suppose?"

"We can be children now, in one sense," said Walter. "The Bible tells us that except we be converted and become as little children, we cannot see the kingdom of heaven. I should like to think of us both as being children in that way."

"Oh, Walter, I wish you could teach me that way, and help me on in it, for I am very, very miserable sometimes; and I know I am not fit for anything good."

"My dear Elizabeth, I suppose we are none of us fit for anything good till we are made so by a power above our own; but we can ask for that power, you know."

"Yes, that is what we are told always, every Sunday at least, in church; but somehow—But I don't want to be talking about myself, and don't mean to," she added, suddenly breaking off, and, as it seemed, angry with herself for showing any emotion. "Only I was saying that if we had always been children together, I shouldn't have been such a mischief-maker as I was afterwards; and you might have stopped in England, and got rich, and been well at this present time, and—there! How stupid that is, for if we had never grown-up, you wouldn't have been able to get money, I expect; and I don't know what I am saying, only I mean that everything would have been so different from what it is; you know it would, Walter."

Elizabeth said all this so rapidly and earnestly, though confusedly, that it seemed as though she were battling with some inward foe whom she was determined to beat down by force of words, if not of argument. She spoke so earnestly that her brother, weak and suffering as he was, could not help smiling.

"I daresay many things would have been different, Elizabeth, if certain other things had not happened, or had not been spoken," said he; "but perhaps they wouldn't have been better, after all."

"I wish you could make that plain to me, Walter."

"Which I am not able to do, because I don't know how matters might have turned out. But if I were you, or if I might advise you, I would not trouble myself about such uncertainties."

Elizabeth, however, did trouble herself. She had the trouble on her mind, she said, and she must get it off somehow, if she could. And then she went on to make her humble confession of the way in which she had traduced her cousin, and the motives which actuated her.

"I thought it would be a good thing for you, Walter, to have done with Sarah for ever; and I didn't care, at that time, what became of her. It was very wicked, I know, and I have been properly punished for it in more ways than one. I did it without intending it, at the time; I mean, I didn't intend to do so much mischief; but if I had known how things would have turned out, I wouldn't have touched it with my little finger, even—I wouldn't. And now I want you to tell me that you forgive me, Walter," she added, laying her hand on his, and looking earnestly and imploringly into his face.

"If there is anything to forgive, I do forgive you with all my heart," said Walter; "and if it will be any comfort to you to believe that all has turned out for the best, I should like you to know it."

And then he went on to tell something of his domestic life in Australia, and of the blessing it had been to him to have a teacher and guide in the woman whom he had had the happiness to call his wife.

"And I am very glad to know that my cousin has so pleasant a home, and so worthy a man for a husband, and is so happy as I have seen her. You see, Elizabeth, if things had gone on in the way that was thought of at one time, the great likelihood is that, after a few years, Sarah and I should have got tired of one another; and, whether we had or not, I wasn't fit or able to teach her anything, or to help her on in anything good; and she, poor thing, wouldn't have known how to set about teaching me. And so we might have gone muddling on till now, nobody knows how. And I haven't a doubt that everything has turned out for the best, and if not in your way exactly, why, it was in a better way, if you would only look at it in that light."

There was a long silence after this, for Walter was wearied, and, closing his eyes, he sank into a deep slumber, as it seemed to his sister, who, after readjusting the shawl so as to more effectually protect his frail form from cold, quietly awaited his awakening.

Yet not idly. Elizabeth was one of those women whose hands are taught never to be idle, and who always contrive to have a pocket full (or two pockets full, for that matter) of material and implements for any unexpected half-hour of vacancy or leisure. On this occasion, therefore, she had recourse to this never-failing reserve fund of feminine industry. If she had been a man, and it had been in the present degenerate days of tobacco-smoking, she, or he rather, would probably have taken out a cigar-case or a tobacco-pouch, with their needful accompaniments: but being what and who she was, Elizabeth Wilson was soon busy at some kind of needlework.

And while thus engaged, her thoughts wandered back into the far-off time of which she had been speaking. And especially she remembered one occasion on which that self-same holly arbour had witnessed a scene which she never thought of now without deep remorse.

She had not often since then revisited that arbour, and now the whole scene was reacted in her imagination. There sat John Tincroft, almost in the identical place now occupied by her brother; and here, where she herself was resting, had been seated her cousin Sarah, busy with her needle, when she broke in upon the two, so cruelly afterwards to traduce them!