The Vicar's Daughter. George MacDonald
and from the tone I knew the tears had begun to gather in those eyes.
"Why do you pity me, Connie?" he asked.
"Because you will have such a wretched little creature for a wife some day,—or perhaps never,—which would be best after all."
He answered cheerily.
"If you will kindly allow me my choice, I prefer just such a wretched little creature to any one else in the world."
"And why, pray? Give a good reason, and I will forgive your bad taste."
"Because she won't be able to hurt me much when she beats me."
"A better reason, or she will."
"Because I can punish her if she isn't good by taking her up in my arms, and carrying her about until she gives in."
"A better reason, or I shall be naughty directly."
"Because I shall always know where to find her."
"Ah, yes! she must leave you to find her. But that's a silly reason. If you don't give me a better, I'll get up and walk into the house."
"Because there won't be any waste of me. Will that do?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, with mock imperiousness.
"I mean that I shall be able to lay not only my heart but my brute strength at her feet. I shall be allowed to be her beast of burden, to carry her whither she would; and so with my body her to worship more than most husbands have a chance of worshipping their wives."
"There! take me, take me!" she said, stretching up her arms to him. "How good you are! I don't deserve such a great man one bit. But I will love him. Take me directly; for there's Wynnie listening to every word we say to each other, and laughing at us. She can laugh without looking like it."
The fact is, I was crying, and the creature knew it. Turner brought her to me, and held her down for me to kiss; then carried her in to her mother.
I believe the county people round considered our family far gone on the inclined plane of degeneracy. First my mother, the heiress, had married a clergyman of no high family; then they had given their eldest daughter to a poor artist, something of the same standing as—well, I will be rude to no order of humanity, and therefore avoid comparisons; and now it was generally known that Connie was engaged to a country practitioner, a man who made up his own prescriptions. We talked and laughed over certain remarks of the kind that reached us, and compared our two with the gentlemen about us,—in no way to the advantage of any of the latter, you may be sure. It was silly work; but we were only two loving girls, with the best possible reasons for being proud of the men who had honored us with their love.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONNIE'S BABY
It is time I told my readers something about the little Theodora. She was now nearly four years old I think,—a dark-skinned, lithe-limbed, wild little creature, very pretty,—at least most people said so, while others insisted that she had a common look. I admit she was not like a lady's child—only one has seen ladies' children look common enough; neither did she look like the child of working people—though amongst such, again, one sees sometimes a child the oldest family in England might be proud of. The fact is, she had a certain tinge of the savage about her, specially manifest in a certain furtive look of her black eyes, with which she seemed now and then to be measuring you, and her prospects in relation to you. I have seen the child of cultivated parents sit and stare at a stranger from her stool in the most persistent manner, never withdrawing her eyes, as if she would pierce to his soul, and understand by very force of insight whether he was or was not one to be honored with her confidence; and I have often seen the side-long glance of sly merriment, or loving shyness, or small coquetry; but I have never, in any other child, seen that look of self-protective speculation; and it used to make me uneasy, for of course, like every one else in the house, I loved the child. She was a wayward, often unmanageable creature, but affectionate,—sometimes after an insane, or, at least, very ape-like fashion. Every now and then she would take an unaccountable preference for some one of the family or household, at one time for the old housekeeper, at another for the stable-boy, at another for one of us; in which fits of partiality she would always turn a blind and deaf side upon every one else, actually seeming to imagine she showed the strength of her love to the one by the paraded exclusion of the others. I cannot tell how much of this was natural to her, and how much the result of the foolish and injurious jealousy of the servants. I say servants, because I know such an influencing was all but impossible in the family itself. If my father heard any one utter such a phrase as "Don't you love me best?"—or, "better than" such a one? or, "Ain't I your favorite?"—well, you all know my father, and know him really, for he never wrote a word he did not believe—but you would have been astonished, I venture to think, and perhaps at first bewildered as well, by the look of indignation flashed from his eyes. He was not the gentle, all-excusing man some readers, I know, fancy him from his writings. He was gentle even to tenderness when he had time to think a moment, and in any quiet judgment he always took as much the side of the offender as was possible with any likelihood of justice; but in the first moments of contact with what he thought bad in principle, and that in the smallest trifle, he would speak words that made even those who were not included in the condemnation tremble with sympathetic fear. "There, Harry, you take it—quick, or Charley will have it," said the nurse one day, little thinking who overheard her. "Woman!" cried a voice of wrath from the corridor, "do you know what you are doing? Would you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourself?" An hour after, she was sent for to the study; and when she came out her eyes were very red. My father was unusually silent at dinner; and, after the younger ones were gone, he turned to my mother, and said, "Ethel, I spoke the truth. All that is of the Devil,—horribly bad; and yet I am more to blame in my condemnation of them than she for the words themselves. The thought of so polluting the mind of a child makes me fierce, and the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. The old Adam is only too glad to get a word in, if even in behalf of his supplanting successor." Then he rose, and, taking my mother by the arm, walked away with her. I confess I honored him for his self-condemnation the most. I must add that the offending nurse had been ten years in the family, and ought to have known better.
But to return to Theodora. She was subject to attacks of the most furious passion, especially when any thing occurred to thwart the indulgence of the ephemeral partiality I have just described. Then, wherever she was, she would throw herself down at once,—on the floor, on the walk or lawn, or, as happened on one occasion, in the water,—and kick and scream. At such times she cared nothing even for my father, of whom generally she stood in considerable awe,—a feeling he rather encouraged. "She has plenty of people about her to represent the gospel," he said once. "I will keep the department of the law, without which she will never appreciate the gospel. My part will, I trust, vanish in due time, and the law turn out to have been, after all, only the imperfect gospel, just as the leaf is the imperfect flower. But the gospel is no gospel till it gets into the heart, and it sometimes wants a torpedo to blow the gates of that open." For no torpedo or Krupp gun, however, did Theodora care at such times; and, after repeated experience of the inefficacy of coaxing, my father gave orders, that, when a fit occurred, every one, without exception, should not merely leave her alone, but go out of sight, and if possible out of hearing,—at least out of her hearing—that she might know she had driven her friends far from her, and be brought to a sense of loneliness and need. I am pretty sure that if she had been one of us, that is, one of his own, he would have taken sharper measures with her; but he said we must never attempt to treat other people's children as our own, for they are not our own. We did not love them enough, he said, to make severity safe either for them or for us.
The plan worked so far well, that after a time, varied in length according to causes inscrutable, she would always re-appear smiling; but, as to any conscience of wrong, she seemed to have no more than Nature herself, who looks out with her smiling face after hours of thunder, lightning, and rain; and, although this treatment brought her out of them sooner, the fits themselves came quite as frequently as before.
But she had another habit, more alarming, and more troublesome as well: she would not unfrequently vanish, and have to be long sought, for in such case she never reappeared