Shirley, Charlotte Brontë [free children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

Caroline stole a quiet gaze towards her, dwelling on her young, absorbed countenance, and observing a certain unconscious movement of the mouth as she read⁠—a movement full of character. Caroline had tact, and she had fine instinct. She felt that Rose Yorke was a peculiar child⁠—one of the unique; she knew how to treat her. Approaching quietly, she knelt on the carpet at her side, and looked over her little shoulder at her book. It was a romance of Mrs. Radcliffe’s⁠—The Italian.

Caroline read on with her, making no remark. Presently Rose showed her the attention of asking, ere she turned the leaf, “Are you ready?”

Caroline only nodded.

“Do you like it?” inquired Rose ere long.

“Long since, when I read it as a child, I was wonderfully taken with it.”

“Why?”

“It seemed to open with such promise⁠—such foreboding of a most strange tale to be unfolded.”

“And in reading it you feel as if you were far away from England⁠—really in Italy⁠—under another sort of sky⁠—that blue sky of the south which travellers describe.”

“You are sensible of that, Rose?”

“It makes me long to travel, Miss Helstone.”

“When you are a woman, perhaps, you may be able to gratify your wish.”

“I mean to make a way to do so, if one is not made for me. I cannot live always in Briarfield. The whole world is not very large compared with creation. I must see the outside of our own round planet, at least.”

“How much of its outside?”

“First this hemisphere where we live; then the other. I am resolved that my life shall be a life. Not a black trance like the toad’s, buried in marble; nor a long, slow death like yours in Briarfield rectory.”

“Like mine! what can you mean, child?”

“Might you not as well be tediously dying as forever shut up in that glebe-house⁠—a place that, when I pass it, always reminds me of a windowed grave? I never see any movement about the door. I never hear a sound from the wall. I believe smoke never issues from the chimneys. What do you do there?”

“I sew, I read, I learn lessons.”

“Are you happy?”

“Should I be happy wandering alone in strange countries as you wish to do?”

“Much happier, even if you did nothing but wander. Remember, however, that I shall have an object in view; but if you only went on and on, like some enchanted lady in a fairy tale, you might be happier than now. In a day’s wandering you would pass many a hill, wood, and watercourse, each perpetually altering in aspect as the sun shone out or was overcast; as the weather was wet or fair, dark or bright. Nothing changes in Briarfield rectory. The plaster of the parlour ceilings, the paper on the walls, the curtains, carpets, chairs, are still the same.”

“Is change necessary to happiness?”

“Yes.”

“Is it synonymous with it?”

“I don’t know; but I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.”

Here Jessie spoke.

“Isn’t she mad?” she asked.

“But, Rose,” pursued Caroline, “I fear a wanderer’s life, for me at least, would end like that tale you are reading⁠—in disappointment, vanity, and vexation of spirit.”

“Does The Italian so end?”

“I thought so when I read it.”

“Better to try all things and find all empty than to try nothing and leave your life a blank. To do this is to commit the sin of him who buried his talent in a napkin⁠—despicable sluggard!”

“Rose,” observed Mrs. Yorke, “solid satisfaction is only to be realized by doing one’s duty.”

“Right, mother! And if my Master has given me ten talents, my duty is to trade with them, and make them ten talents more. Not in the dust of household drawers shall the coin be interred. I will not deposit it in a broken-spouted teapot, and shut it up in a china closet among tea-things. I will not commit it to your worktable to be smothered in piles of woollen hose. I will not prison it in the linen press to find shrouds among the sheets. And least of all, mother” (she got up from the floor)⁠—“least of all will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pastry, and ham on the shelves of the larder.”

She stopped, then went on, “Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The teapot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen will yield up their barren deposit in many a house. Suffer your daughters, at least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master’s coming to pay Him His own with usury.”

“Rose, did you bring your sampler with you, as I told you?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Sit down, and do a line of marking.”

Rose sat down promptly, and wrought according to orders. After a busy pause of ten minutes, her mother asked, “Do you think yourself oppressed now⁠—a victim?”

“No, mother.”

“Yet, as far as I understood your tirade, it was a protest against all womanly and domestic employment.”

“You misunderstood it, mother. I should be sorry not to learn to sew. You do right to teach me, and to make me work.”

“Even to the mending of your brothers’ stockings and the making of sheets?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the use of ranting and spouting about it, then?”

“Am I to do nothing but that? I will do that, and then I will do more. Now, mother, I have said my say. I am twelve years old at present, and not till I am sixteen will I speak again about talents. For four years I bind myself an industrious apprentice to all you can teach me.”

“You see what my daughters are, Miss Helstone,” observed Mrs. Yorke; “how precociously wise in their own conceits! ‘I would rather this, I prefer that’⁠—such is Jessie’s cuckoo song; while Rose utters the bolder cry, ‘I will, and I will not!’ ”

“I render a reason, mother; besides, if my cry is bold, it is only heard once in a twelvemonth. About each