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

my own. Every summer I make an excursion. This season I propose spending two months either at the Scotch lochs or the English lakes⁠—that is, I shall go there provided you consent to accompany me. If you refuse, I shall not stir a foot.”

“You are very good, Shirley.”

“I would be very good if you would let me. I have every disposition to be good. It is my misfortune and habit, I know, to think of myself paramount to anybody else; but who is not like me in that respect? However, when Captain Keeldar is made comfortable, accommodated with all he wants, including a sensible, genial comrade, it gives him a thorough pleasure to devote his spare efforts to making that comrade happy. And should we not be happy, Caroline, in the Highlands? We will go to the Highlands. We will, if you can bear a sea-voyage, go to the Isles⁠—the Hebrides, the Shetland, the Orkney Islands. Would you not like that? I see you would.⁠—Mrs. Pryor, I call you to witness. Her face is all sunshine at the bare mention of it.”

“I should like it much,” returned Caroline, to whom, indeed, the notion of such a tour was not only pleasant, but gloriously reviving. Shirley rubbed her hands.

“Come; I can bestow a benefit,” she exclaimed. “I can do a good deed with my cash. My thousand a year is not merely a matter of dirty banknotes and jaundiced guineas (let me speak respectfully of both, though, for I adore them), but, it may be, health to the drooping, strength to the weak, consolation to the sad. I was determined to make something of it better than a fine old house to live in, than satin gowns to wear, better than deference from acquaintance and homage from the poor. Here is to begin. This summer, Caroline, Mrs. Pryor and I go out into the North Atlantic, beyond the Shetland, perhaps to the Faroe Isles. We will see seals in Suderoe, and, doubtless, mermaids in Stromoe.⁠—Caroline is laughing, Mrs. Pryor. I made her laugh; I have done her good.”

“I shall like to go, Shirley,” again said Miss Helstone. “I long to hear the sound of waves⁠—ocean-waves⁠—and to see them as I have imagined them in dreams, like tossing banks of green light, strewed with vanishing and reappearing wreaths of foam, whiter than lilies. I shall delight to pass the shores of those lone rock-islets where the seabirds live and breed unmolested. We shall be on the track of the old Scandinavians⁠—of the Norsemen. We shall almost see the shores of Norway. This is a very vague delight that I feel, communicated by your proposal, but it is a delight.”

“Will you think of Fitful Head now when you lie awake at night, of gulls shrieking round it, and waves tumbling in upon it, rather than of the graves under the rectory back-kitchen?”

“I will try; and instead of musing about remnants of shrouds, and fragments of coffins, and human bones and mould, I will fancy seals lying in the sunshine on solitary shores, where neither fisherman nor hunter ever come; of rock crevices full of pearly eggs bedded in seaweed; of unscared birds covering white sands in happy flocks.”

“And what will become of that inexpressible weight you said you had on your mind?”

“I will try to forget it in speculation on the sway of the whole great deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and liquid thunder down from the frozen zone⁠—a hundred of them, perhaps, wallowing, flashing, rolling in the wake of a patriarch bull, huge enough to have been spawned before the Flood, such a creature as poor Smart had in his mind when he said⁠—

‘Strong against tides, the enormous whale
Emerges as he goes.’ ”

“I hope our bark will meet with no such shoal, or herd as you term it, Caroline. (I suppose you fancy the sea-mammoths pasturing about the bases of the ‘everlasting hills,’ devouring strange provender in the vast valleys through and above which sea-billows roll.) I should not like to be capsized by the patriarch bull.”

“I suppose you expect to see mermaids, Shirley?”

“One of them, at any rate⁠—I do not bargain for less⁠—and she is to appear in some such fashion as this. I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon. Something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that moon mounts silent and hangs glorious. The object glitters and sinks. It rises again. I think I hear it cry with an articulate voice; I call you up from the cabin; I show you an image, fair as alabaster, emerging from the dim wave. We both see the long hair, the lifted and foam-white arm, the oval mirror brilliant as a star. It glides nearer; a human face is plainly visible⁠—a face in the style of yours⁠—whose straight, pure (excuse the word, it is appropriate)⁠—whose straight, pure lineaments paleness does not disfigure. It looks at us, but not with your eyes. I see a preternatural lure in its wily glance. It beckons. Were we men, we should spring at the sign⁠—the cold billow would be dared for the sake of the colder enchantress; being women, we stand safe, though not dreadless. She comprehends our unmoved gaze; she feels herself powerless; anger crosses her front; she cannot charm, but she will appal us; she rises high, and glides all revealed on the dark wave-ridge. Temptress-terror! monstrous likeness of ourselves! Are you not glad, Caroline, when at last, and with a wild shriek, she dives?”

“But, Shirley, she is not like us. We are neither temptresses, nor terrors, nor monsters.”

“Some of our kind, it is said, are all three. There are men who ascribe to ‘woman,’ in general, such attributes.”

“My dears,” here interrupted Mrs. Pryor, “does it not strike you that your conversation for the last ten minutes has been rather fanciful?”

“But there is no harm in our fancies; is there,