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

was already rich, but to a good man, who would make the best use of it that any human being could do⁠—a man, she said, that was both gentle and brave, strong and merciful⁠—a man that might not profess to be pious, but she knew he had the secret of religion pure and undefiled before God. The spirit of love and peace was with him. He visited the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and kept himself unspotted from the world. Then she asked, ‘Do you approve what I have done, Harry?’ I could not answer. My tears choked me, as they do now.”

Mr. Moore allowed his pupil a moment to contend with and master his emotion. He then demanded, “What else did she say?”

“When I had signified my full consent to the conditions of her will, she told me I was a generous boy, and she was proud of me. ‘And now,’ she added, ‘in case anything should happen, you will know what to say to Malice when she comes whispering hard things in your ear, insinuating that Shirley has wronged you, that she did not love you. You will know that I did love you, Harry; that no sister could have loved you better⁠—my own treasure.’ Mr. Moore, sir, when I remember her voice, and recall her look, my heart beats as if it would break its strings. She may go to heaven before me⁠—if God commands it, she must; but the rest of my life⁠—and my life will not be long, I am glad of that now⁠—shall be a straight, quick, thoughtful journey in the path her step has pressed. I thought to enter the vault of the Keeldars before her. Should it be otherwise, lay my coffin by Shirley’s side.”

Moore answered him with a weighty calm, that offered a strange contrast to the boy’s perturbed enthusiasm.

“You are wrong, both of you⁠—you harm each other. If youth once falls under the influence of a shadowy terror, it imagines there will never be full sunlight again; its first calamity it fancies will last a lifetime. What more did she say? Anything more?”

“We settled one or two family points between ourselves.”

“I should rather like to know what⁠—”

“But, Mr. Moore, you smile. I could not smile to see Shirley in such a mood.”

“My boy, I am neither nervous, nor poetic, nor inexperienced. I see things as they are; you don’t as yet. Tell me these family points.”

“Only, sir, she asked me whether I considered myself most of a Keeldar or a Sympson; and I answered I was Keeldar to the core of the heart and to the marrow of the bones. She said she was glad of it; for, besides her, I was the only Keeldar left in England. And then we agreed on some matters.”

“Well?”

“Well, sir, that if I lived to inherit my father’s estate, and her house, I was to take the name of Keeldar, and to make Fieldhead my residence. Henry Shirley Keeldar I said I would be called; and I will. Her name and her manor house are ages old, and Sympson and Sympson Grove are of yesterday.”

“Come, you are neither of you going to heaven yet. I have the best hopes of you both, with your proud distinctions⁠—a pair of half-fledged eaglets. Now, what is your inference from all you have told me? Put it into words.”

“That Shirley thinks she is going to die.”

“She referred to her health?”

“Not once; but I assure you she is wasting. Her hands are grown quite thin, and so is her cheek.”

“Does she ever complain to your mother or sisters?”

“Never. She laughs at them when they question her. Mr. Moore, she is a strange being, so fair and girlish⁠—not a manlike woman at all, not an Amazon, and yet lifting her head above both help and sympathy.”

“Do you know where she is now, Henry? Is she in the house, or riding out?”

“Surely not out, sir. It rains fast.”

“True; which, however, is no guarantee that she is not at this moment cantering over Rushedge. Of late she has never permitted weather to be a hindrance to her rides.”

“You remember, Mr. Moore, how wet and stormy it was last Wednesday⁠—so wild, indeed, that she would not permit Zoë to be saddled? Yet the blast she thought too tempestuous for her mare she herself faced on foot; that afternoon she walked nearly as far as Nunnely. I asked her, when she came in, if she was not afraid of taking cold. ‘Not I,’ she said. ‘It would be too much good luck for me. I don’t know, Harry, but the best thing that could happen to me would be to take a good cold and fever, and so pass off like other Christians.’ She is reckless, you see, sir.”

“Reckless indeed! Go and find out where she is, and if you can get an opportunity of speaking to her without attracting attention, request her to come here a minute.”

“Yes, sir.”

He snatched his crutch, and started up to go.

“Harry!”

He returned.

“Do not deliver the message formally. Word it as, in former days, you would have worded an ordinary summons to the schoolroom.”

“I see, sir. She will be more likely to obey.”

“And, Harry⁠—”

“Sir?”

“I will call you when I want you. Till then, you are dispensed from lessons.”

He departed. Mr. Moore, left alone, rose from his desk.

“I can be very cool and very supercilious with Henry,” he said. “I can seem to make light of his apprehensions, and look down du haut de ma grandeur on his youthful ardour. To him I can speak as if, in my eyes, they were both children. Let me see if I can keep up the same role with her. I have known the moment when I seemed about to forget it, when Confusion and Submission seemed about to crush me with their soft tyranny, when my tongue faltered, and I have almost let the mantle drop, and stood in her presence, not master⁠—no⁠—but something else. I trust I shall never so play the fool. It