Missy. Miriam Coles Harris
Goneril, a good-looking woman of about forty, a superior American servant who resented her position always, and went as far as she dared to go in endangering it, stooped and picked up the handkerchief and shook it out with suppressed vehemence, and thrust it into her mistress' hand. "Is that all?" she asked, with a sort of sniff, going towards the door.
"Yes, all," said Miss Varian, in a tone that spoke volumes. Goneril indulged in another sniff, and went.
"That insufferable woman," muttered her employer, below her breath.
Missy smiled calmly, but said nothing. It always calmed her to see her step-aunt in a temper with Goneril: it gave her a feeling of superiority. She never would have endured the woman for a day, but she was quite willing her elder should, if she chose. The poor lady's blindness would have given every one a feeling of tenderness, if she had not been too sharp and petulant to permit any one to feel tender long. The position of her attendant was not one to be envied. Goneril was an American farmer's daughter, who had made a bad marriage (and the man who married her had not made altogether a good one). She had had high ambitions, as became an American farmer's daughter, and she had come down to living out at service, and what more cruel statement could be made? No worse fate could have overtaken her she was sure, and she made no secret of her estimate of domestic service for American farmer's daughters. She quarrelled incessantly with the servants of humbler nationality in the house, who did not mind it much, and who laughed a little at her proud parentage. They did not see the difference themselves. She was industrious, and capable, and vigorous, and was indispensable to Miss Varian, out of whom she wrung ever-increasing wages. Her father, the American farmer, had done handsomely by her in the matter of a name; he had called her Regan Goneril. She had grown up in the sanctity of home as Regan, but now that she was cast out into the battle of life, she preferred to be called Goneril. She also hoped to be shielded by this thin disguise from the pursuit of the discarded husband. The belief in the Varian kitchen was, that there was no danger of any such pursuit: in fact, that the husband would go very fast in the opposite direction. But she liked to talk about it, and about her goodness in putting up with Miss Varian's temper; she placed her service rather in the light of missionary work. If she did not feel it to be her duty to stay with the poor blind woman, she said, no money would induce her to remain. (It took more and more money every year, however, to stiffen and hold up her sense of duty.)
Missy took the brawls between Miss Varian and her maid, very calmly. "It gives an interest to her life," she said from a height. On this evening, occupied as she was by her own matters, she heard the story of her aunt's wrongs more indifferently than ever. And even Miss Varian soon forgot that there was anything more absorbing than the waited-for arrival.
"It may be nine o'clock before they get here," she said; "that shows the impropriety of letting a girl go off on journeys with a lover. Such things weren't done in my time. I shouldn't have thought of doing such a thing."
"You don't know; you might have thought of it, if you had ever been engaged," said Missy, with malice.
"Well, my dear, we have neither of us been tempted," retorted her aunt, urbanely. "Let us be charitable. I have no doubt we should, both of us, have been able to take care of ourselves; but it may be different with your sister elect. These very handsome women, you know, are not always wise."
"That is true," said Missy, tapping her foot impatiently as she stood before the fire. "Mamma, you don't think you'd like a cup of tea? You may have to wait a good while."
"No, thank you," said Mrs. Varian meekly.
She always wore a pained expression when her sister-in-law was present; but as the sister-in-law could not see it, it did no harm. She always dreaded the next word. They had always been uncongenial; but it is one thing to have an uncongenial sister-in-law that you can get away from, or go to see only when you are braced up to the business, and another to have her under your own roof, a prisoner, by reason of her misfortune and your sense of duty—able to prey upon you whether you are well or ill; as familiar and everyday as your dressing-gown and slippers; having no respect for your engagements or your indigestions. When this blindness threw Harriet Varian upon her hands, she felt as if her home were invaded, desecrated, spoiled, but she had not a moment's hesitation as to her duty. A frivolous youth and a worldly, pleasure-seeking maturity, had ill prepared the poor woman for her dreary doom. She had fitted herself to it with a bitter philosophy; for do we not all fit ourselves to our lot, in one way or another. "L'homme est en délire s'il ose murmurer," but it is to be hoped Heaven is not always critical in the matter of resignation. Harriet Varian had submitted, but she was in the primer of Christian principle, as it were; attaining with difficulty in middle age the lesson that would have been easy to her, if she had begun in childhood. When you have spent thirty-four years in having your own way, and consulting your own pleasure quite exclusively, it comes a trifle hard to do exactly as you do not wish to do, and to find that pleasure is a term unknown in your vocabulary: when you are old that another should gird you and lead you whither you would not.
But the healthy and Christian surroundings of the home to which she came were not without their influence. Mrs. Varian's sweet endurance of her life-long suffering, St. John's healthy goodness, and Missy's vigorous duty-doing, helped her, against her will. St. John was her great object of interest in life. All her money was to go to him, and she actually felt compensated for her dull and restricted existence, sometimes, when she reflected that it swelled, by so many thousand a year, the fortune that would be his. She had not lost her interest in the world, since she had him to connect her with it, and to give her an excuse for the indulgence of ambition. Of course she had been bitterly set against all the system upon which he had been educated, and would have thwarted it if she had had the power. His entering the church had been a great trial to her, but she openly said it was his mother's plan, and no wish of his, and before he was ordained he would be old enough to see the folly of it, and to get clear of it. Then came his engagement, and at this she was wroth indeed, but as it furnished her with liberal weapons against his disappointed mother, she found her own comfort in it. Now she hoped Dorla would see the folly of her course; now she could understand what other people had known all along: simply that she was keeping him in a false and unhealthy state of religious feeling, that she had forced upon him duties and aspirations all her own and none of his; that there had come a reaction, that there was a flat failure when he came to see even a corner of the world from which she had debarred him. Here he was, carried away by his infatuation for a woman whom he would have been too wise to choose if his mother had not tried to make a monk of him, and to keep him as guileless and ignorant as a girl. Here he was bound to a woman who would ruin his career, spoil his life for him, spend his money, disgrace his name; and it was "all the work of his mother." These were some of the amenities of the family life at Yellowcoats. These were the certain truths that were spoken of and to Mrs. Varian by her candid and unprejudiced sister-in-law.
And there was too much fact in them to be borne as Harriet's criticisms were generally borne by Mrs. Varian. Perhaps it was all true, she said to herself in the morning watches, as the stars grew pale; but of all the failures of her life this was the bitterest. How many hopes, and how high, were centered in her boy! She had dreamed for him, she had schemed for him, she had seen her life retrieved in him. A career, in which earthly ambition had no part, she had planned for him, and into its beginning she had led him. He had been so easily guided, he was so good, he loved her so; had it all been a mistake? could it be all delusion? If he had been headstrong, a willful, rebellious boy, it never could have been. But to have bound him with his own lovingness, to have slain him with his own sweetness, this was a cruel thought. Why had no voice called to her from heaven to warn her of it; why was she left to think she was doing the very best for him, when she was truly acting as the enemy who sought his life? She had led him up such a steep and giddy path, that the first glance downward of his young, untutored eyes, sent him reeling to the bottom. Why had God suffered this? God, who loved him and her. She had thought that she had, long ago, accepted God's will in all and for all, and owned it sweetest and best. But this opened her eyes sadly to her self-deception. She could not abandon herself to a will that seemed to have put a sword into her hand, by which she had wounded her child unwittingly, thinking that she did God service. She could have borne mistake and misconception for herself, but that her boy should bear the penalty