“I was so afraid you would be angry,” she said, wiping her eyes as she dropped his hand; “and now I suppose you know all.”
“All!”
“Yes; how I listened to you every evening, and lay awake the whole night with the music ringing in my ears, till I tried to go over it myself; and so at last I ventured to sing aloud. I like that much better than learning to read.”
All this was delightful to Maltravers: the girl had touched upon one of his weak points; however, he remained silent. Alice continued:
“And now, sir, I hope you will let me come and sit outside the door every evening and hear you; I will make no noise—I will be so quiet.”
“What, in that cold corridor, these bitter nights?”
“I am used to cold, sir. Father would not let me have a fire when he was not at home.”
“No, Alice, but you shall come into the room while I play, and I will give you a lesson or two. I am glad you have so good an ear; it may be a means of your earning your own honest livelihood when you leave me.”
“When I—but I never intend to leave you, sir!” said Alice, beginning fearfully and ending calmly.
Maltravers had recourse to the meerschaum.
Luckily, perhaps, at this time, they were joined by Mr. Simcox, the old writing-master. Alice went in to prepare her books; but Maltravers laid his hand upon the preceptor’s shoulder.
“You have a quick pupil, I hope, sir?” said he.
“Oh, very, very, Mr. Butler. She comes on famously. She practises a great deal when I am away, and I do my best.”
“And,” asked Maltravers, in a grave tone, “have you succeeded in instilling into the poor child’s mind some of those more sacred notions of which I spoke to you at our first meeting?”
“Why, sir, she was indeed quite a heathen—quite a Mahometan, I may say; but she is a little better now.”
“What have you taught her?”
“That God made her.”
“That is a great step.”
“And that He loves good girls, and will watch over them.”
“Bravo! You beat Plato.”
“No, sir, I never beat any one, except little Jack Turner; but he is a dunce.”
“Bah! What else do you teach her?”
“That the devil runs away with bad girls, and—”
“Stop there, Mr. Simcox. Never mind the devil yet a while. Let her first learn to do good, that God may love her; the rest will follow. I would rather make people religious through their best feelings than their worst,—through their gratitude and affections, rather than their fears and calculations of risk and punishment.”
Mr. Simcox stared.
“Does she say her prayers?”
“I have taught her a short one.”
“Did she learn it readily?”
“Lord love her, yes! When I told her she ought to pray to God to bless her benefactor, she would not rest till I had repeated a prayer out of our Sunday School book, and she got it by heart at once.”
“Enough, Mr. Simcox. I will not detain you longer.”
Forgetful of his untasted breakfast, Maltravers continued his meerschaum and his reflections: he did not cease, till he had convinced himself that he was but doing his duty to Alice, by teaching her to cultivate the charming talent she evidently possessed, and through which she might secure her own independence. He fancied that he should thus relieve himself of a charge and responsibility which often perplexed him. Alice would leave him, enabled to walk the world in an honest professional path. It was an excellent idea. “But there is danger,” whispered Conscience. “Ay,” answered Philosophy and Pride, those wise dupes that are always so solemn and always so taken in; “but what is virtue without trial?”
And now every evening, when the windows were closed, and the hearth burnt clear, while the winds stormed, and the rain beat without, a lithe and lovely shape hovered about the student’s chamber; and his wild songs were sung by a voice which Nature had made even sweeter than his own.
Alice’s talent for music was indeed surprising; enthusiastic and quick as he himself was in all he undertook, Maltravers was amazed at her rapid progress. He soon taught her to play by ear; and Maltravers could not but notice that her hand, always delicate in shape, had lost the rude colour and roughness of labour. He thought of that pretty hand more often than he ought to have done, and guided it over the keys when it could have found its way very well without him.
On coming to the cottage he had directed the old servant to provide suitable and proper clothes for Alice; but now that she was admitted “to sit with the gentleman,” the crone had the sense, without waiting for new orders, to buy the “pretty young woman” garments, still indeed simple, but of better materials and less rustic fashion; and Alice’s redundant tresses were now carefully arranged into orderly and glossy curls, and even the texture was no longer the same; and happiness and health bloomed on her downy cheeks, and smiled from the dewy lips, which never quite closed over the fresh white teeth, except when she was sad—but that seemed never, now she was not banished from Maltravers.
To say nothing of the unusual grace and delicacy of Alice’s form and features, there is nearly always something of Nature’s own gentility in very young women (except, indeed, when they get together and fall a-giggling); it shames us men to see how much sooner they are polished into conventional shape than our rough, masculine angles. A vulgar boy requires Heaven knows what assiduity to make three steps—I do not say like a gentleman, but like a body that has a soul in it; but give the least advantage of society or tuition to a peasant girl, and a hundred to one but she will glide into refinement before the boy can make a bow without upsetting the table. There is sentiment in all women, and sentiment gives delicacy to thought, and tact to manner. But sentiment with men is generally acquired, an offspring of the intellectual quality, not, as with the other sex, of the moral.
In the course of his musical and vocal lessons, Maltravers gently took the occasion to correct poor Alice’s frequent offences against grammar and accent: and her memory was prodigiously quick and retentive. The very tones of her voice seemed altered in the ear of Maltravers; and, somehow or other, the time came when he was no longer sensible of the difference in their rank.
The old woman-servant, when she had seen how it would be from the first, and taken a pride in her own prophecy, as she ordered Alice’s new dresses, was a much better philosopher than Maltravers; though he was already up to his ears in the moonlit abyss of Plato, and had filled a dozen commonplace books with criticisms on Kant.
CHAPTER VI
“Young man, I fear thy blood is rosy red, Thy heart is soft.”
As education does not consist in reading and writing only, so Alice, while still very backward in those elementary arts, forestalled some of their maturest results in her intercourse with Maltravers. Before the inoculation took effect, she caught knowledge in the natural way. For the refinement of a graceful mind and a happy manner is very contagious. And Maltravers was encouraged by her quickness in music to attempt such instruction in other studies as conversation could afford.