She recommenced combing her hair, long as a mermaid’s. Turning her head as she arranged it she saw her own face and form in the glass. Such reflections are soberizing to plain people: their own eyes are not enchanted with the image; they are confident then that the eyes of others can see in it no fascination. But the fair must naturally draw other conclusions: the picture is charming, and must charm. Caroline saw a shape, a head, that, daguerreotyped in that attitude and with that expression, would have been lovely. She could not choose but derive from the spectacle confirmation to her hopes. It was then in undiminished gladness she sought her couch.
And in undiminished gladness she rose the next day. As she entered her uncle’s breakfast-room, and with soft cheerfulness wished him good-morning, even that little man of bronze himself thought, for an instant, his niece was growing “a fine girl.” Generally she was quiet and timid with him — very docile, but not communicative; this morning, however, she found many things to say. Slight topics alone might be discussed between them; for with a woman — a girl — Mr. Helstone would touch on no other. She had taken an early walk in the garden, and she told him what flowers were beginning to spring there; she inquired when the gardener was to come and trim the borders; she informed him that certain starlings were beginning to build their nests in the church-tower (Briarfield church was close to Briarfield rectory); she wondered the tolling of the bells in the belfry did not scare them.
Mr. Helstone opined that “they were like other fools who had just paired — insensible to inconvenience just for the moment.” Caroline, made perhaps a little too courageous by her temporary good spirits, here hazarded a remark of a kind she had never before ventured to make on observations dropped by her revered relative.
“Uncle,” said she, “whenever you speak of marriage you speak of it scornfully. Do you think people shouldn’t marry?”
“It is decidedly the wisest plan to remain single, especially for women.”
“Are all marriages unhappy?”
“Millions of marriages are unhappy. If everybody confessed the truth, perhaps all are more or less so.”
“You are always vexed when you are asked to come and marry a couple. Why?”
“Because one does not like to act as accessory to the commission of a piece of pure folly.”
Mr. Helstone spoke so readily, he seemed rather glad of the opportunity to give his niece a piece of his mind on this point. Emboldened by the impunity which had hitherto attended her questions, she went a little further.
“But why,” said she, “should it be pure folly? If two people like each other, why shouldn’t they consent to live together?”
“They tire of each other — they tire of each other in a month. A yokefellow is not a companion; he or she is a fellow-sufferer.”
It was by no means naïve simplicity which inspired Caroline’s next remark; it was a sense of antipathy to such opinions, and of displeasure at him who held them.
“One would think you had never been married, uncle. One would think you were an old bachelor.”
“Practically, I am so.”
“But you have been married. Why were you so inconsistent as to marry?”
“Every man is mad once or twice in his life.”
“So you tired of my aunt, and my aunt of you, and you were miserable together?”
Mr. Helstone pushed out his cynical lip, wrinkled his brown forehead, and gave an inarticulate grunt.
“Did she not suit you? Was she not good-tempered? Did you not get used to her? Were you not sorry when she died?”
“Caroline,” said Mr. Helstone, bringing his hand slowly down to within an inch or two of the table, and then smiting it suddenly on the mahogany, “understand this: it is vulgar and puerile to confound generals with particulars. In every case there is the rule and there are the exceptions. Your questions are stupid and babyish. Ring the bell, if you have done breakfast.”
The breakfast was taken away, and that meal over, it was the general custom of uncle and niece to separate, and not to meet again till dinner; but to-day the niece, instead of quitting the room, went to the window-seat, and sat down there. Mr. Helstone looked round uneasily once or twice, as if he wished her away; but she was gazing from the window, and did not seem to mind him: so he continued the perusal of his morning paper — a particularly interesting one it chanced to be, as new movements had just taken place in the Peninsula, and certain columns of the journal were rich in long dispatches from General Lord Wellington. He little knew, meantime, what thoughts were busy in his niece’s mind — thoughts the conversation of the past half-hour had revived but not generated; tumultuous were they now, as disturbed bees in a hive, but it was years since they had first made their cells in her brain.
She was reviewing his character, his disposition, repeating his sentiments on marriage. Many a time had she reviewed them before, and sounded the gulf between her own mind and his; and then, on the other side of the wide and deep chasm, she had seen, and she now saw, another figure standing beside her uncle’s — a strange shape, dim, sinister, scarcely earthly — the half-remembered image of her own father, James Helstone, Matthewson Helstone’s brother.
Rumours had reached her ear of what that father’s character was; old servants had dropped hints; she knew, too, that he was not a good man, and that he was never kind to her. She recollected — a dark recollection it was — some weeks that she had spent with him in a great town somewhere, when she had had no maid to dress her or take care of her; when she had been shut up, day and night, in a high garret-room, without a carpet, with a bare uncurtained bed, and scarcely any other furniture; when he went out early every morning, and often forgot to return and give her her dinner during the day, and at night, when he came back, was like a madman, furious, terrible, or — still more painful — like an idiot, imbecile, senseless. She knew she had fallen ill in this place, and that one night, when she was very sick he had come raving into the room, and said he would kill her, for she was a burden to him. Her screams had brought aid; and from the moment she was then rescued from him she had never seen him, except as a dead man in his coffin.
That was her father. Also she had a mother, though Mr. Helstone never spoke to her of that mother, though she could not remember having seen her; but that she was alive she knew. This mother was then the drunkard’s wife. What had their marriage been? Caroline, turning from the lattice, whence she had been watching the starlings (though without seeing them), in a low voice, and with a sad, bitter tone, thus broke the silence of the room, —
“You term marriage miserable, I suppose, from what you saw of my father and mother’s. If my mother suffered what I suffered when I was with papa, she must have had a dreadful life.”
Mr. Helstone, thus addressed, wheeled about in his chair, and looked over his spectacles at his niece. He was taken aback.
Her father and mother! What had put it into her head to mention her father and mother, of whom he had never, during the twelve years she had lived with him, spoken to her? That the thoughts were self-matured, that she had any recollections or speculations about her parents, he could not fancy.
“Your father and mother? Who has been talking to you about them?”
“Nobody; but I remember something of what papa was, and I pity mamma. Where is she?”
This “Where is she?” had been on Caroline’s lips hundreds of times before, but till now she had never uttered it.
“I hardly