Heriot's Choice: A Tale

'SAY YES, MILLY'

'Man's importunity is God's opportunity.'

'O fair, O fine, O lot to be desired! Early and late my heart appeals to me, And says, "O work, O will--Thou man, be fired, To earn this lot--" she says--"I would not be A worker for mine own bread, or one hired For mine own profit. O, I would be free To work for others; love so earned of them Should be my wages and my diadem."'--Jean Ingelow.

'Say yes, Milly.'

Three short words, and yet they went straight to Milly's heart. It was only the postscript of a long, sorrowful letter--the finale brief but eloquent--of a quiet, dispassionate appeal; but it sounded to Mildred Lambert much as the Macedonian cry must have sounded of old: 'Come over and help us.'

Mildred's soft, womanly nature was capable of only one response to such a demand. Assent was more than probable, and bordered on certainty, even before the letter was laid aside, and while her cheek was yet paling at the thought of new responsibilities and the vast unknown, wherein duty must tread on the heel of inclination, and life must press out thought and the worn-out furrows of intro- and retrospection.

And so it was that the page of a negative existence was turned; and Mildred agreed to become the inmate of her brother's home.

'Aunt Milly!' How pleasant it would be to hear that again, and to be in the centre of warm young life and breathless activity, after the torpor of long waiting and watching, and the hush and the blank and the drawn-out pain, intense yet scarcely felt, of the last seven years.

To begin life in its fulness at eight-and-twenty; to taste of its real sweets and bitters, after it had offered to her nothing but the pale brackish flavour of regret for a passing youth and wasted powers, responsive rather than suggestive (if there be such monstrous anomaly on the whole face of God's creation), nothing being wasted, and all pronounced good, that comes direct from the Divine Hand. To follow fresh tracks when the record of the years had left nothing but the traces of the chariot-wheels of daily monotonous duties that dragged heavily, when summer and winter and seed-time and harvest found Mildred still through those seven revolving courses of seasons within the walls of that quiet sickroom.

It is given to some women to look back on these long level blanks of life; on mysteries of waiting, that intervene between youth and work, when the world's noise comes dimly to them, like the tumult of city's streets through closed shutters; when pain and hardship seem preferable to their death-in-life, and they long to prove the armour that has grown rusted with disuse.

How many a volume could be written, and with profit, on the watchers as well as the workers of life, on the bystanders as well as the sufferers. 'Patient hearts their pain to see.' Well has this thought been embodied in the words of a nineteenth-century Christian poet; while to many a pallid malcontent, wearied with inaction and panting for strife, might the Divine words still be applied: 'Could ye not have watched with Me one hour?'

Mildred Lambert's life for eight-and-twenty years might be summed up in a few sentences. A happy youth, scarcely clouded by the remembrance of a dead father and the graves of the sisters that came between her infancy and the maturer age of her only brother; and then the blurred brightness when Arnold, who had married before he had taken orders, became the hard-working vicar of a remote Westmorland parish--and he and his wife and children passed out of Milly's daily life.

Milly was barely nineteen when this happened; but even then her mother--who had always been ailing--was threatened with a chronic complaint involving no ordinary suffering; and now began the long seven years' watching which faded Milly's youth and roses together.

Milly had never known how galling had been the strain to the nerves--how intense her own tenacity of will and purpose, till she had folded her mother's pale hands together; and with a lassitude too great for tears, felt as she crept away that her work was finished none too soon, and that even her firm young strength was deserting her.

Trouble had not come singly to Mildred. News of her sister-in-law's unexpected death had reached her, just before her mother's last brief attack, and her brother had been too much stunned by his own loss to come to her in her loneliness.

Not that Milly wondered at this. She loved Arnold dearly; but he was so much older, and they had grown necessarily so apart. He and his wife had been all in all to each other; and the family in the vicarage had seemed so perfected and completed that the little petted Milly of old days might well plead that she was all but forgotten.

But Betha's death had altered this; and Arnold's letter, written as good men will write when their heart is well-nigh broken, came to Mildred as she sat alone in her black dress in her desolate home.

New work--unknown work--and that when youth's elasticity seemed gone, and spirits broken or at least dangerously quieted by the morbid atmosphere of sickness and hypochondria. They say the prisoner of twenty years will weep at leaving his cell. The tears that Mildred shed that night were more for the mother she had lost and the old safe life of the past, than pity for the widowed brother and motherless children.

Do we ever outlive our selfishness? Do we ever cease to be fearful for ourselves?

And yet Mildred was weary of solitude. Arnold was her own, her only brother; and Aunt Milly--well, perhaps it might be pleasant.

'Say yes, Milly--for Betha's sake--for my darling's sake (she was so fond of you), if not for mine. Think how her children miss her! Matters are going wrong already. It is not their fault, poor things; but I am so helpless to decide. I used to leave everything to her, and we are all so utterly lost.

'I could not have asked you if our mother had lingered; but your faithful charge, my poor Milly, is over--your martyrdom, as Betha called it. She was so bright, and loved to have things so bright round her, that your imprisonment in the sickroom quite oppressed her. It was "poor Milly," "our dear good Milly," to the last. I wish her girls were more like her; but she only laughed at their odd ways, and told me I should live to be proud of them.

'Olive is as left-handed as ever, and Chrissy little better. Richard is mannish, but impracticable, and a little difficult to understand. We should none of us get on at all but for Roy: he has his mother's heart-sunshine and loving smile; but even Roy has his failures.

'We want a woman among us, Milly--a woman with head and hands, and a tolerable stock of patience. Even Heriot is in difficulties, but that will keep till you come--for you will come, will you not, my dear?'

'Come! how could you doubt me, Arnold?' replied Mildred, as she laid down the letter; but 'God help me and them' followed close on the sigh.

'After all, it is a clear call to duty,' she soliloquised. 'It is not my business to decide on my fitness or unfitness, or to measure myself to my niche. We are not promised strength before the time, and no one can tell before he tries whether he be likely to fail. Richard's mannishness, and Olive's left-handed ways, and Chrissy's poorer imitation, shall not daunt me. Arnold wants me. I shall be of use to some one again, and I will go.'

But Mildred, for all her bravery, grew a little pale over her brother's second letter:--'You must come at once, and not wait to summer and winter it, or, as some of our old women say, "to bide the bitterment on't." Shall I send Richard to help you about your house business, and to settle your goods and chattels? Let the old furniture go, Milly; it has stood a fair amount of wear and tear, and you are young yet, my dear. Shall I send Dick? He was his mother's right hand. The lad's mannish for his nineteen years.' Mannish again! This Richard began to be formidable. He was a bright well-looking lad of thirteen when Mildred had seen him last. But she remembered his mother's fond descriptions of Cardie's cleverness and goodness. One sentence had particularly struck her at the time. Betha had been comparing her boys, and dwelling on their good points with a mother's partiality. 'As to Roy, he needs no praise of mine; he stands so well in every one's estimation--and in his own, too--that a little fault-finding would do him good. Cardie is different: his diffidence takes the form of pride; no one understands him but I--not even his father. The one speaks out too much, and the other too little; but one of these days he will find out his son's good heart.'

'I wonder if Arnold will recognise me,' thought Mildred, sorrowfully, that night, as she sat by her window, looking out on her little strip of garden, shimmering in the moonlight. 'I feel so old and changed, and have grown into such quiet ways. Are there some women who are never young, I wonder? Am I one of them? Is it not strange,' she continued, musingly, 'that such beautiful lives as Betha's are struck so suddenly out of the records of years, while I am left to take up the incompleted work she discharged so lovingly? Dear Betha! what a noble heart it was! Arnold reverenced as much as he loved her. How vain to think of replacing, even in the faintest degree; one of the sweetest women this earth ever saw: sweet, because her whole life was in exact harmony with her surroundings.' And there rose before Mildred's eyes a faint image that often haunted her--of a face with smiling eyes, and brown hair just touched with gold--and the small firm hand that, laid on unruly lips, could hush coming wrath, and smooth the angry knitting of baby brows.

It was strange, she thought, that neither Olive nor Chrissy were like their mother. Roy's fairness and steady blue eyes were her sole relics--Roy, who was such a pretty little fellow when Mildred had seen him last.

Mildred tried to trace out a puzzled thought in her head before she slept that night. A postscript in Arnold's letter, vaguely worded, but most decidedly mysterious, gave rise to a host of conjectures.

'I have just found out that Heriot's business must be settled long before the end of next month--when you come to us. You know him by name and repute, though not personally. I have given him your address. I think it will be better for you both to talk the matter over, and to give it your full consideration, before you start for the north. Make any arrangements you like about the child. Heriot's a good fellow, and deserves to be helped; he has been everything to us through our trouble.'

What could Arnold mean? Betha's chatty letters--thoroughly womanly in their gossip--had often spoken of Arnold's friend, Dr. Heriot, and of his kindness to their boys. She had described him as a man of great talents, and an undoubted acquisition to their small society. 'Arnold (who was her universal referee) wondered that a man like Dr. Heriot should bury himself in a Westmorland valley. Some one had told them that he had given up a large West End practice. There was some mystery about him; his wife made him miserable. No one knew the rights or the wrongs of it; but they would rather believe any thing than that he was to blame.'