Notwithstanding Part 18

"I'm happy here," she said. "I've never been so happy before. I don't want to go."

CHAPTER XIX

"In the winter, when all the flowers are dead, the experienced Bee Keeper places before His hive a saucer of beer and treacle to sustain the inmates during the frost. And some of the less active bees, who have not used their wings, but have heard about honey, taste the compound, and finding it wonderfully sustaining and exactly suited to their aspirations, they religiously store it, dark and sticky, in waxen cells, as if it were what they genuinely believe it to be--the purest honey.

"But the other surly, unsympathetic bees with worn-out wings contend that honey is not come by as easily as that: that you must fly far, and work hard, and penetrate many flower-cups to acquire it. This naturally arouses the indignation of the beer and treacle gatherers.

"And the Bee Keeper as He pa.s.ses His hive hears His little people buzzing within, and--smiles."--M. N.

"And now," said Aunt Harriet, the same evening,--"now that we have made Mr. Stirling's acquaintance and been to tea with him, and may expect to see him frequently, I think we ought to take a little course of his books. What do you say, Maria? Eh! Annette? You seem strangely apathetic and inert this evening, my dear. So different from me at your age. I was gaiety and energy itself until my health failed. You might read aloud some extracts from _The Magnet_, instead of the _Times_. It is a book which none of us can afford to disregard. How I cried over it when it came out! I wrote to him after I had finished it, even though I did not know him. Authors like it, don't they, Maria? I felt very audacious, but I am a child of impulse. I have never been able to bind myself down with conventional ideas as I see others do. I felt I simply must tell him what that book had been to me, what it had done for me, coming like a ray of light into a darkened room."

Mrs. Stoddart had read aloud _The Magnet_ to Annette at Teneriffe, and it was intimately a.s.sociated with her slow reawakening to life. It had had a part, and not a small part, in sending her back humbled and contrite to her aunts. But she felt a deep repugnance to the thought of hearing their comments upon it.

She took the offered book reluctantly, but Aunt Harriet's long thin finger was already pointing to a paragraph.

"Begin at 'How we follow Self at first,' the top of the page," she said.

And she leaned back among her cus.h.i.+ons. Aunt Maria took up her knitting, and Annette began to read:--

"How we follow Self at first! How long we follow her! How pallid, how ephemeral is all else beside that one bewitching form! We call her by many beautiful names--our career, our religion, our work for others. The face of Self is veiled, but we follow that mysterious rainbow-tinted figure as some men follow art, as some men follow Christ, leaving all else behind. We follow her across the rivers. If the stepping-stones are alive and groan beneath our feet, what of that? We follow her across the hills. Love weeps and falls behind, but what of that? The love which will not climb the hills with us is not the love we need. Our friends appeal to us and one by one fall behind. False friends! Let them go. Our ideals are broken and left behind. Miserable impediments and hindrances!

Let them go too.

"For some of us Self flits veiled to the last, and we trudge to our graves, looking ever and only at her across the brink. But sometimes she takes pity on us. Sometimes she turns and confronts us in a narrow place, and lifts her veil. We are alone at last with her we love. The leprous face, the chasms where the eyes should be, the awful discoloured hand are revealed to us, the crawling horror of every fold of that alluring drapery.

"Here is the bride. Take her!

"And we turn, sick unto death, and flee for our lives.

"After that day, certain easy self-depreciations we say never again while we have speech. After that day our cheap admission of our egotism freezes on our lips. For we have seen. We know."

"We have seen. We know," repeated Aunt Harriet solemnly. "That last bit simply changed my life. If I had a talent for writing like you, Maria, which of course I have not, that is just the kind of thing I should have said myself to help other sufferers. Unselfishness, that must be the key-note of our lives. If the stepping-stones are alive and groan beneath our feet, what of that? How often I have said those words to myself when the feet of the world have gone over me, poor stepping-stone, trying hard, trying so hard not to groan. And if I am to be perfectly honest just for once, you know, dear Maria, you and Annette _do_ trample somewhat heavily at times. Of course you are absorbed in your work, and Annette is young, and you don't either of you mean it. I know that, and I make allowances for you both. I am making allowances all the time. But I sometimes wish you could remember that the poor stepping-stone is alive."

There was a moment's silence. Annette got up and gently replaced the _couvre-pied_ which had slipped from the stepping-stone's smart high-heeled shoes. Aunt Harriet wiped away a delicious tear.

"Our ideals are broken and left behind," she went on. "Only the invalid knows how true _that_ is. Dear me! When I think of all the high ideals I had when I was your age, Annette, who don't seem to have any! But perhaps it is happier for you that you haven't. Though Mr. Stirling looks so strong I feel sure that he must at one time have known a sofa-life. Or perhaps he loved some one like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was as great a prisoner to her couch as I am. He simply couldn't have written those lines otherwise. I often think as I lie here in solitude, hour after hour, how different my life might have been if anyone like Browning had sought me out--had---- But it's no use repining: all these things are ordered for the best. Go on, my dear, go on."

When the reading was over and Aunt Harriet, still emotional, had gone to bed, after embracing them both with unusual fervour, Annette opened the window as her custom was, and let in the soft night air. Aunt Harriet was a lifelong foe to fresh air. Aunt Maria gave a sigh of relief. She was stout and felt the heat.

The earth was resting. The white pinks below the window gave forth their scent. The low moon had laid a slanting black shadow of the dear old house and its tall chimney-stacks upon the silvered gra.s.s.

Annette's heart throbbed. Must she leave it all? She longed to go to her own room and think over what had happened, but she had an intuitive feeling that Aunt Maria had been in some mysterious way depressed by the reading aloud, and was in need of consolation.

"I think," said Aunt Maria after a time, "that Mr. Stirling rather exaggerates, don't you?--that he has yielded to the temptation of picturesque overstatement in that bit about following Self."

"It seems to me--just right."

"You don't feel he is writing for the sake of effect?"

"No. Oh no."

"I am afraid I do a little. But then the picture is so very highly coloured, and personally I don't care much for garish colouring."

Annette did not answer.

"I should like to know what you think about it, Annette."

Whenever Aunt Maria used that phrase, she wanted confirmation of her own opinion. Annette considered a moment.

"I think he has really seen it exactly as he says. I think perhaps he was selfish once, and--and had a shock."

"He is quite right to write from his experience," continued Aunt Maria.

"I have drawn largely from mine in my books, and I am thankful I have had such a deep and rich experience to draw from. Experience, of course, must vary with each one of us. But I can't say I have ever felt what he describes. Have you?"

"Yes."

"The veiled figure meeting you in a narrow place and raising its veil?"

"Yes."

Aunt Maria was momentarily taken aback. When our opinions do not receive confirmation from others we generally feel impelled to restate them at length.

"I have never looked at selfishness like that," she said, "as something which we idealize. I have always held that egotism is the thing of all others which we ought to guard against. And egotism seems to me ugly--not beautiful or rainbow-tinted at all. I tried to show in _Crooks and Coronets_ what an obstacle it is to our spiritual development, and how happiness is to be found in little deeds of kindness, small sacrifices for the sake of others, rather than in always considering ourselves."

Annette did not answer. She knew her aunt's faith in spiritual h.o.m.oeopathy.

"I have had hundreds of letters," continued the h.o.m.oeopath uneasily, "from my readers, many of them perfect strangers, thanking me for pointing out the danger of egotism so fearlessly, and telling me how much happier they have been since they followed the example of Angela Towers in _Crooks and Coronets_ in doing a little act of kindness every day."

If Aunt Maria were alive now she would have been thrilled by the knowledge that twenty years after she had preached it the Boy Scouts made that precept their own.

"Perhaps the man who was following the veiled figure did little kindnesses too, in order to feel comfortable," said Annette half to herself. Fortunately her aunt did not hear her.

"I yield to no one in my admiration of Mr. Stirling," continued Miss Nevill, "but he suggests no remedy for the selfishness he describes. He just says people flee for their lives. Now, my experience is that they don't flee, that they don't see how selfish they are, and need helpful suggestions to overcome it. That is just what I have tried to do in my books, which I gather he has never opened."

There was a subdued bitterness in her aunt's voice which made Annette leave her seat by the window and sit down beside her.

"You have plenty of readers without Mr. Stirling," she said soothingly.

It was true. Miss Nevill had a large public. She had never lived, she had never come in close contact with the lives of others, she had no perception of character, and she was devoid of humour. She had a meagre, inflexible vocabulary, no real education, no delicacy of description, no sense of language, no love of nature. But she possessed the art of sentimental facile narration, coupled with a great desire to preach, and a genuine and quenchless pa.s.sion for the obvious. And the long succession of her popular novels, each exactly like the last, met what a large circle of readers believed to be its spiritual needs: she appealed to the vast society of those who have never thought, and who crave to be edified without mental effort on their part. Her books had demanded no mental effort from their author, and were models of unconscious tact in demanding none from their readers, and herein, together with their evident sincerity, had lain part of the secret of their success. Also, partly because her gentle-people--and her books dealt mainly with them--were not quite so unlike gentle-people as in the majority of novels. If she did not call a spade a spade, neither did she call an earl an earl. Old ladies adored her novels. The Miss Blinketts preferred them to Shakespeare. Canon Wetherby dipped into them in his rare moments of leisure. Cottage hospitals laid them on the beds of their convalescents. Clergymen presented them as prizes. If the great Miss Nevill had had a different temperament, she might have been a happy as she was a successful woman; for she represented culture to the semi-cultivated, and to succeed in doing that results in a large income and streams of flattering letters. But it does not result in recognition as a thinker, and that was precisely what she hankered after. She craved to be regarded as a thinker, without having thought. It chagrined her that her books were not read by what she called "the right people,"--that, as she frequently lamented, her work was not recognized.

In reality it was recognized--at first sight. The opening chapter, as Mr. Stirling had found that morning, was enough. The graver reviews never noticed her. No word of praise ever reached her from the masters of the craft. She had to the full the adulation of her readers, but she wanted adulation, alas! from the educated, from men like Mr. Stirling rather than Canon Wetherby. Mr. Stirling had not said a word about her work this afternoon, though he had had time to refresh his memory of it, and she had alluded to it herself more than once. For the hundredth time Aunt Maria felt vaguely disturbed and depressed. The reading aloud of _The Magnet_ had only accentuated that depression.

Annette's hand felt very soft and comforting in hers. The troubled auth.o.r.ess turned instinctively towards possible consolation nearer at hand.

"I will own," she said tentatively, "that when I see you, my dear Annette, so different from what you were when you left us two years ago, so helpful, and so patient with poor Harriet, who is trying beyond words, so considerate and so thoughtful for others, I will own that I have sometimes hoped that the change might have been partly, I don't say entirely, but partly brought about by _Crooks and Coronets_, which I sent to you at Teneriffe, and into which I had poured all that was best in me. When you rejoined us here it seemed as if you had laid its precepts to heart." Aunt Maria looked at her niece almost imploringly.