AN OLD WOMAN’S FAVOUR.

When the heads of the house resumed the reins at Redcot, the family fell back into its normal condition, even to the renewal of the alienation partially dissolved between John Prior and his wife. The couple slipped again sadly, but as it were inevitably into their former attitude. But the friendship between Jane Prior and Miss Gray continued. None rejoiced with greater sincerity at the alliance than did Mrs. Prior, though it shut her up still more to her book, her needlework, and Tommy--the old blue Skye terrier. She would look up with shining eyes at the two girls standing exchanging endless last words over the fire or in the doorway. Miss Gray’s heart ached for the woman left out in the cold--an experience which Mrs. Prior was too magnanimous and self-forgetful to resent for herself. Her own daughter was too well accustomed to it, too inobservant otherwise, too absorbed in the grand mental gains which lay before her--for intellectual ambition, no less than the pursuit of pleasure, has its unconscious devouring selfishness--to notice her mother’s isolation.

Bennet Gray sought by the deepest, most well-laid strategy, to court the friendship of the mistress of the house. The enterprise was not easy, in spite of Mrs. Prior’s gentleness--she was shy and proud and humble all in one. She could not help looking with distrustful eyes on the beautiful, clever young woman--solid enough to satisfy Jane, brilliant enough, even in the comparative shadow of her governess’s position, to cause John Prior in his pre-occupation and discontent to look up and listen to her remarks with a gleam of entertainment. Why should such an one come to Mrs. Prior? She had nothing to give beyond the courteous consideration she had never withheld in the old days from Miss Rossiter, and the admiration she had freely bestowed on this stranger. Miss Gray had a great deal that was worth having in life, probably about as much--seeing that the public estimate of a governess’s career is undergoing a great change, and that she looked a reasonable, happy-tempered girl--as she cared for. Why need Miss Gray seek an increase of her well-being from Mrs. Prior, who was not herself so much at ease or so richly endowed, though she refused to complain, that she was qualified to shower benefits on all around her?

Mrs. Prior knew in the depth of her heart that for the present, at least, she had lost nearly all that she most prized which had once belonged to her, and, in the belonging, made her passing rich. Husband, daughters, even her son--her only son Jack--who had not grown away from her, was gone for the time to the ends of the earth, across leagues of land and sea, into unknown regions, amidst undreamt-of dangers, and the wife and mother was angrily or calmly relegated to her books, her needlework, and Tommy! What had Mrs. Prior to give to Miss Gray? What had the elder woman to do comforting and petting the younger?

But one afternoon, after luncheon was over, Miss Gray, instead of retiring to the schoolroom or her own room and her learned associations like Jane, instead of setting out alone or with her friend on one of the long walks to which they were given, came creeping into the drawing-room with a pitiful story of bad toothache, amply corroborated by heavy eyes and a flushed and swollen face. She begged a loan of one of Mrs. Prior’s perennial stock of novels, to keep her from dwelling on the pain she was suffering.

The woman addressed felt at once the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin, and responded readily to the human cry. ‘Oh! poor thing; I beg your pardon, Miss Gray, but I am so sorry. I need not speak of a dentist, for there is none nearer than Newton, to which you cannot go at a moment’s notice; and at the best, the tender mercies of a dentist are cruel. The only thing to do is to keep yourself warm, and perhaps the pain will go of itself before morning. I am afraid your room is draughty, though I sent up a screen. Will you spend the afternoon with me? That is a cosy corner opposite; you can lean back in the low chair, and you may drop off into a nice sleep. I shall not speak a word to disturb you.’

‘You are too good,’ protested the patient, willingly consenting to be installed into the comfortable chair on the other side of the hearth. ‘But I am not so ill as that comes to. If you will let me come across to your bookcase for anything you can spare, I am quite able to read, and forget the ache of the tooth in that way.’

‘You are perfectly welcome,’ said Mrs. Prior, simply but more formally; ‘only I am afraid there is nothing you will care for.’

‘Not care!--I!’ exclaimed Bennet in such an energetic disclaimer that she forgot her ailment, and started up bolt upright from her half-reclining posture, ‘when I read the names of William Black’s last novel, and Mrs. Oliphant’s second last, as Miss Prior was taking the books from the book-box, and I have been dying to get a look at them ever since.’

‘Dear me, Miss Gray, do you care for novels?’ cried Mrs. Prior, opening her eyes.

‘Care!’ reiterated Bennet, ‘I should think so. Care for “Adam Bede,” and “Mary Barton,” and “Westward-Ho,” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” and “The Virginians,” and “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Waverley.” I have sat up till two in the morning, and what is more, I have risen at six to read some of them. Why, Mrs. Prior, if you will forgive me for asking, what do you take me for?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered the elder woman with a little blush and laugh, more gratified than disconcerted. ‘None of my children except Jack, who ought to have been better employed--everybody said--cared much for novels. Poor Alice married out of the schoolroom, I may say; Susie went a great deal out into company; and Jane is far beyond novels. I thought you were like Jane.’

‘I am supposed to go in for history,’ said Miss Gray, in an easy colloquial strain, which was enough to show that one pupil from the college of preceptresses wore her learning lightly, let us say nothing about gracefully. ‘Did you never hear what was said by Lord Holland--was it Lord Holland or Sir Robert Walpole?--anyhow, it was a great statesman, when somebody proposed to read history to him on his death-bed? His answer was to the effect that he was sick of lies, let them read poetry to him. He might as well have said novels--good novels.’

‘Well, I was brought up on Walter Scott and Jane Austen, and I don’t think there is much falsehood in them,’ corroborated Mrs. Prior, with a deep sigh of satisfaction; ‘and I have got many a glimpse of real life that I should otherwise have missed--even out of authors little known and soon forgotten. When the children were young and my health was delicate I visited little--hardly more than I do now. Without novels I should have had small chance of change of scene and company. I was not strong enough, even if I had got the brains, to cope with heavier books; and, though travels might have given me change of scene, and biography introduced me to one other person and his immediate set, I should still have wanted the constant succession of fresh company. Mr. Prior was fond of travels, but he liked novels too in those days, and would read one out for half an evening, when I sat at work.’ Her voice fell as she revived the peaceful picture, and she quickly obliterated it by another reminiscence. ‘I have read not only “Evelina,” and “Cecilia,” but the whole five volumes of “Camilla,”’ she announced with innocent pride. ‘It was a favourite book of my mother’s, and she used to quote it to me. I have read the original “Sir Charles Grandison” and “Clarissa,” with a little skipping. I have even dipped into an odd volume of the “Fool of Quality.”

‘Oh! Mrs. Prior, say no more; your novel lore is stupendous,’ cried Bennet. And then, in spite of her toothache, the two fell to comparing notes on the couple’s favourite stories and what were the tit-bits. The young woman and the old crossed the Rubicon by the bridge of romance, just as Jane and Bennet had passed it with the help of philosophy and the classics.

The confabulation was renewed from day to day, when fresh volumes were exchanged. ‘What is she doing now?’ Mrs. Prior would be heard to inquire breathlessly with regard to a new and refractory heroine, into whose entrancing history Miss Gray, with her young eyes, had got before her fellow-reader by several chapters.

‘Well, she has gone and misunderstood Sir Harry for the fourth time. I have no patience with her.’

‘But Sir Harry is trying, you’ll admit that,’ remonstrated the most generous of critics.

‘Oh yes, he is the most trying hero I ever encountered. But that is no reason why she should take to philandering with the curate. I like that curate, though, immensely. The fact is, I’m deeply in love with him myself. If I had been Dorothy I’m sure I should have thrown over Sir Harry and married the Rev. Giles’s flat feet and gawky laugh. I should have done it just because of the afternoon when he was caught sliding on the pond with all the bad boys in the parish. I should have sought to make up to him for the disgrace he got into when he sent the tickets for groceries and coals to the dreadful old pauper who shut the door in his face and his vicar’s, and called names to them over the window.’

‘But you could not have been allowed to throw over poor Sir Harry, and you would certainly not have got the Rev. Giles,’ objected the reader of long experience. ‘He is reserved for reforming the Hon. Mary, who cares only for what is beautiful and graceful, and is so vindictive that she has kept up a silly schoolgirl feud with a lady who has become her sister-in-law.’

The chat grew more and more a matter of course, until Mrs. Prior’s tongue would wag the faster of the two. It was a winning tongue, that could express thick-coming fancies, quick turns of thought, even merry jests--all dashed with the latent enthusiasm which was so strong a feature in the woman, though the tongue shrank into silence before a little coolness, harshness, rudeness.

‘You have got into my mother’s good graces,’ said Jane Prior to Miss Gray, without a particle of jealousy. ‘I heard her talking quite gaily to-day as she has not talked since that unsatisfactory brother of mine bade us good-bye before he took a trip to Australia.’

John Prior coming in unexpectedly, and hearing his wife’s voice, so often quiet of late, raised in tones of interest and animation, turned and looked in wonder, which was in danger of becoming offence in the mood that had become chronic with him. And immediately the speaker did him the further wrong of appearing caught and put out.

At last Bennet ventured to ask to see Mrs. Prior’s needlework, and Mrs. Prior did not mind showing it to her. The mistress of Redcot explained that she had been engaged for a number of years on quilts for each of her children. She worked slowly, but she hoped to finish before her eyes failed her. ‘The work is old-fashioned and of no account compared to the fine artistic embroidery we see nowadays,’ she said, in her modest, deprecating way; ‘but, apart from the value, I think the children may like to have it one day,’ she explained, and there was a soft, far-away look in her eyes which did not leave it doubtful as to what change of circumstances the ‘one day’ referred. ‘And after the children,’ she added cheerfully, ‘I daresay Ally and Molly and the boys will not object to having some remembrance of their granny if only to prove that her stupid old fingers were not always idle, though she read novels by the hundred, and sermons by the score.’

‘And sometimes found the novel the better sermon of the two,’ put in Bennet.

‘Sometimes,’ admitted Mrs. Prior, ‘but each is good in its own way.’

The work was minute and elaborate. There was neither bold drawing, nor striking effect, nor learned conventionality. There was a nearer, though still a distant, approach to exquisiteness of detail, marred by a certain timidity and hesitation belonging to deficient artistic knowledge and training and to comparative ignorance, both with regard to the result to be arrived at, and the limit of what could be attained with the materials employed.

The first impression the interminable work gave was that adopted by Jane Prior--it was a tremendous waste of time in a hurried and crowded age. The next that might occur to a sympathetic soul was a sense of the infinite tender pains which had been taken, until the pains were reflected in the work, and lent a grace to it, like the glory dimly shining from ancient stained glass that only exists in tiniest fragments, which have been fitted together with the most loving, unwearied care.

But to see the quilts as Mrs. Prior saw them and yet was aware that none save one person had ever caught a glimpse of them would have been to have borrowed her imagination. It had enabled her to smell the scent of the hyacinths she was embroidering, and to see in the purple vetch and the pink and brown fumitory, not the poor shadow of the homely weeds, but the shady lanes and the sandy fields round her father’s house, where she had made her first unapproachable child’s posy.

‘Oh, I know there is nothing to be seen,’ cried Mrs. Prior, with a despairing sense that there was nobody there, save herself, with eyes to see anything in her labour of love, except poor, pottering work. ‘I know that even I could make a great deal more of poppies or foxgloves, for instance, than of those small obscure things--too insignificant for art to borrow. But I have a great liking for them, I daresay because they have been seldom copied, and so the most faulty copies bring back the originals more vividly to my mind. I am aware that an artist with her needle can cause a single sunflower or a spray of clematis to be a thousand times more imposing and picturesque, with a thousand times less trouble, than all my heap of trivialities.’

‘I like your flowers best, Mrs. Prior,’ said Miss Gray emphatically.

‘It is very good of you to say so,’ said the complimented worker, shaking her head. ‘But I am not so conceited as to think my work is at all admirable in that sense, or what many people would care for. However, it has been a pleasure as well as an occupation to me, and seems somehow part of myself; no doubt because it has engaged me so long, and it has been my own idea--let it be ever so clumsy or feeble--and so has expressed something in me. And, do you know, my son likes it?’ she broke off, and looked up with her face lit up brightly. ‘He has insisted on gathering all the flowers that I have worked for his quilt, and he says that he sees the dew on the May and the bees on the broom still,’ declared Mrs. Prior, with sparkling eyes. ‘I suppose he inherits the foolish notion from me.’

‘Yes,’ chimed in Bennet Gray, eagerly, ‘and when spring and summer have come again, will you, Mrs. Prior, oh! will you let me bring in from my walks any little flower that does not grow quite at hand? I should be so proud and pleased if you would allow me to help you in that way. I can sew--indeed I can--and I can embroider decently, I am fond of such work; but my work is not like this--nothing can ever be like this, which must be all your own. I understand perfectly I should never presume,’ faltering in her excitement, ‘to have any share in this beyond bringing you the more out-of-the-way flowers. Will you let me?’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Mrs. Prior gratefully, but a good deal puzzled by her companion’s extraordinary zeal; ‘I am exceedingly obliged--yes, for the other quilts. I am glad you like them. Jane thinks them a great waste of time, and I was afraid you might do the same. You see I work at them by turns, and for the other quilts I shall be very much pleased if you can bring me what is a little difficult to find just when it is wanted. Let me see, there is brooklime, or you may call it water forget-me-not. I have none of that, and I should be thankful for a few stalks of grass of Parnassus and some sprigs of the milkwort that used to grow on Kershaw Moor.’

Miss Gray promised willingly to get what was required at the fitting season. But she was half-amused, half-piqued by the quiet reservation which had been made. ‘Yes; for the other quilts’--not for the one which was intended for Jack Prior. She was not to be permitted so much as to gather a flower for that. It was half-comical, half-pathetic.