CHAPTER VIII.

THE SISTERS.

Mrs. Grimshawe's eldest daughter, Mary, the poor hunchback before alluded to, was a great comfort to her afflicted parent. She seldom left her bed-side, and was ever at hand to administer to her wants. Mary was a neat and rapid plain sewer; and she contributed greatly to her mother's support by the dexterity with which she plied her needle. Her deformity, which was rendered doubly conspicuous by her diminutive stature, was not the only disadvantage under which Mary Grimshawe laboured. She was afflicted with such an impediment in her speech, that it was only the members of her own family who could at all understand the meaning of the uncouth sounds in which she tried to communicate her ideas. So sensible was she of this terrible defect, and the ridicule it drew upon her from thoughtless and unfeeling people, that she seldom spoke to strangers, and was considered by many as both deaf and dumb.

Poor Mary! she was one of the meekest of God's creatures,--a most holy martyr to patience and filial love. What a warm heart--what depths of tenderness and affection dwelt in the cramped confines of that little misshapen body! Virtue in her was like a bright star seen steadily shining through the heavy clouds of a dark night. The traveller, cheered by its beams, forgot the blackness and gloom of the surrounding atmosphere.

How distinctly I can recal that plain, earnest face, after the long lapse of years! The dark, sallow cheeks; the deep, sunken, pitiful, pleading eyes; those intelligent, deep-set, iron-grey eyes, which served her for a tongue, and were far more eloquent than speech, as they gleamed from beneath her strongly-marked, jet black eyebrows; the thin lips that seldom unclosed to give utterance to what was passing in her mind, and that never smiled, yet held such a treasure of pearls within. Nature had so completely separated her from her kind, that mirth would have appeared out of place. She was plain in form and feature, but the beauty of the soul enshrined in that humble misshapen tenement, shed over her personal deformities a spiritual and holy light.

From the time of her father's death, Mary had worked steadily at her needle to support herself and the rest of the family. The constant assiduity with which she plied her task, greatly increased the projection of her shoulder, and brought on an occasional spitting of blood, which resulted from a low, hacking cough. The parish doctor who attended her bed-ridden mother, and who felt interested in her good, dutiful child, assured her that she must give up her sedentary employment, or death would quickly terminate her labour.

"But how then," asked Mary, "can I contribute to the support of the family? My mother's helpless condition requires my constant exertions. If I cease to work, she must starve."

The good doctor suggested respectable service as a more remunerative and healthier occupation.

"Alas!" said Mary, "to go into service is impossible. Who will hire a domestic who is in delicate health,--is deformed, and to strangers unintelligible? You, sir, have known me from a child. You understand my broken words. You never hurry me, so that I can make you comprehend the meaning of my jargon. But who else would have the patience to listen to my uncouth sounds?"

The doctor sighed, and said that she was right, that going out would only expose her to constant mortification and ridicule; and he felt sorry that his own means were so limited, and his family so large, that he could only afford to keep one servant, and that an active, stirring, healthy woman, able to execute, without much bodily fatigue, her multitudinous daily tasks. He left the cottage with regret; and Mary, for the first time, felt the bitter curse of hopeless poverty; and a sense of her own weakness and helplessness fell heavily on her soul.

In this emergency, Mrs. Mason offered her a trifling weekly stipend, to attend during the day upon the customers, and to assist her in washing glass and crockery, and keeping the house in order. She knew her to be honest and faithful, and she was too homely to awaken any interest in the heart of her dissipated worthless son.

Mary hesitated a long time before she accepted the offer of her repulsive neighbour; but her mother's increasing infirmities, and the severe illness of her youngest sister Charlotte, left her no choice. Day after day you might see the patient hunchback performing the menial drudgeries of the little inn, silent and self-possessed--an image of patient endurance, in a house of violence and crime. It was to her care that the house owed its appearance of neatness and outward respectability. It was her active industrious spirit that arranged and ordered its well-kept household stuff, that made the walls so cheery, the grate so gay with flowers, that kept the glittering array of pewter so bright. It was her taste that had arranged the branches of the wild rose to twine so gracefully over the rustic porch that shaded her sick mother's dwelling; who, forbidden by the nature of her disease to walk abroad, might yet see from her pillow the fragrant boughs of the brier bud and blossom, while she inhaled their fragrance in every breeze that stirred the white cotton curtains that shaded her narrow casement.

Mary's native sense of propriety was constantly shocked by unseemly sights and sounds; but their impurity served to render vice in her eyes more repulsive, and to strengthen that purity of heart from which she derived all her enjoyment. Night always released her from her laborious duties, and brought her back to be a ministering angel at the sick bed of her mother and sister.

These sisters I must now introduce to my readers, for with one of them my tale has mostly to do. Unlike Mary, they were both pretty, delicate-looking girls, ready of speech and remarkably pleasing in person and manners.

Mr. Rollins had paid for the instruction of these girls at the village school, in which they had been taught all sorts of plain work; had mastered all the difficulties of Mavor's Spelling-book, had read the Bible, the Dairyman's Daughter, Pilgrim's Progress, and Goldsmith's abridged History of England, and all the books in the shape of penny tracts and sixpenny novels they could borrow from their playmates when school was over.

Sophy, the elder of the two, who was eighteen years of age, had been apprenticed for the last two years with a milliner of an inferior grade in the little seaport town; and her term of service having expired, she had commenced making dresses in a humble way for the servants in respectable families. She had to work very hard for a very small remuneration, for the competition was very great, and without lowering her prices to nearly one-half, she could not have obtained employment at all. She could easily have procured a service as a nurse-girl or housemaid in a gentleman's family, but the novels she had read during her residence with Mrs. Makewell, the milliner, had filled her head with foolish notions of her own beauty and consequence, and given her ideas far above her humble station, quite unfitting her to submit patiently to the control of others. Besides being vain of a very lovely face, she was very fond of dress. A clever hand at her business, she contrived to give a finish and style to the homely materials she made, and which fitted so well her slender and gracefully-formed person.

Her love of admiration induced her to lay out all her scanty earnings in adorning herself, instead of reserving a portion to help to provide their daily food. Her sewing was chiefly done at home, and she attended upon her mother and sister, and prepared their frugal meals during the absence of Mary, whose situation in the "Brig's Foot" she considered a perfect degradation.

Such was Sophy Grimshawe, and there are many like her in the world. Ashamed of poverty, in which there is no real disgrace, and repining at the subordinate situation in which she found herself placed, she made no mental effort to improve her condition by frugal and patient industry, and a cheerful submission to the Divine will. She considered her lot hard, the dispensations of Providence cruel and unjust. She could not see why others should be better off than herself; that women with half her personal attractions should be permitted to ride in their carriages, while she had to wear coarse shoes and walk through the dust. She regarded every well-dressed female who passed the door with feelings of envy and hatred, which embittered her life, and formed the most painful feature in the poverty she loathed and despised.

Charlotte, the sick girl, was two years younger than Sophy, and very different in person, mind, and character. A fair, soft, delicate face, more winning than handsome, but full of gentleness and sweetness, was a perfect transcript of the pure spirit that animated the faithful heart in which it was enshrined. She might have been described in those charming lines of Wordsworth, as--

"The sweetest flower that ever grew Beside a cottage door."

Contented in the midst of poverty, happy in the consciousness of moral improvement, patient under suffering, and pious without cant, or affectation of superior godliness, she offered, under the most painful circumstances, a rare example of Christian resignation to the will of God.

While reading the Gospel at school, as a portion of her daily task, it had pleased the All-Wise Dispenser of that blessed revelation to man, to open her eyes to the importance of those noble truths that were destined to set her free from the bondage of sin and death. She read, and believing that she had received a message from the skies, like the man who found the pearl of great price, she gave her whole heart and soul to God, in order to secure such an inestimable treasure. The sorrows and trials of her lowly lot were to her as stepping-stones to the heavenly land, on which all her hopes were placed, and she regarded the fatal disease which wasted her feeble frame, and which had now confined her to the same bed with her mother, as the means employed by God to release her from the sufferings of earth, and open for her the gates of heaven. How earnestly, yet how tenderly, she tried to inspire her afflicted mother with the same hopes that animated her breast! She read to her, she prayed with her, and endeavoured to explain in the best way she could that mysterious change which had been wrought in her own soul, and which now, on the near approach of death, filled her mind with inexpressible joy.

This reading of the Scriptures was a great consolation to the poor widow, and one day she remarked in a tone of deep regret and with many tears--

"Who will read the Bible to me, Charlotte, when you are gone? Mary cannot read, and if she could, who could understand what she read, and Sophy hates everything that is serious, and is too selfish to trouble herself to read aloud to me."

"Mother, I have thought much about that of late," said the sick girl, raising herself on the pillow into a sitting posture, and speaking with great earnestness. "The doctor said yesterday that I might survive for six or seven weeks longer,--'perhaps,' he added, 'until the latter end of Autumn.' During that time, could I not teach you to read?"

"At fifty years of age, Charlotte?" and the poor widow smiled at the enthusiasm of her child.

"And why not, mother?" said Charlotte, calmly. "It would be a great comfort to you, during the long, lonely hours you pass in bed; the thing may appear difficult, but I assure you that it is not impossible."

"And then your weak state; think how it would fatigue you, my dear child?"

"So far from that, mother, it would afford me the greatest delight," and the sick girl clasped her thin, wasted hands together, and looked upward with an expression of gratitude and love beaming on her pale, placid face.

"Well, I will try to please you, my dear Charlotte," said Dorothy, whose breast was thrilled to its inmost core by the affectionate solicitude which that glance of angelic benevolence conveyed to her heart; "but you will find me so stupid that you will soon give it up as a bad job."

"With God all things are possible," said Charlotte, reverentially. "With His blessing, mother, we will begin to-morrow."

It was a strange but beautiful sight[B] to see that dying girl lying in the same bed instructing her helpless mother,--a sight which drew tears from sterner eyes than mine. And virtue triumphed over obstacles which at first appeared insurmountable. Before death summoned the good daughter to a better world, she had the inexpressible joy of hearing her mother read distinctly to her Christ's Sermon on the Mount. As the old woman concluded her delightful task, the grateful Charlotte exclaimed gently, in a sort of ecstasy--"Now, Lord, let thy servant depart in peace." Her prayer was granted; and a few minutes after this good and faithful disciple entered into the joy of her Lord.

[B] This touching scene was witnessed by the Author.

This event, though long expected by Dorothy Grimshawe, was felt with keen anguish. The tuneful voice was silent, that day and night for many weeks had spoken peace to her soul. The warm young heart was still, that had so ardently hoped and prayed for her salvation, that had solved her doubts and strengthened her wavering faith, and to whom now could she turn for comfort and consolation? To Mary, whispered the voice in her soul; but Mary was absent during the greater part of the day, and Sophy was too busy with her own affairs to pay much attention to her heart-broken parent.

But deep as was the mother's grief for the loss of her dutiful child, the sorrow of the poor hunchback (for this her beloved sister, who had been the idolized pet of her joyless childhood) was greater still. Worn down with an incurable disease, Mrs. Grimshawe looked forward to a speedy reunion with the departed, but years of toil and suffering might yet be reserved for the patient creature who never was heard to murmur over her painful lot.

The death of the young Charlotte, the peacemaker, the comforter and monitor to the rest of the household, was as if her good angel had departed, and the sunshine of heaven had been dimmed by her absence.

"Oh, my sister!" she murmured in the depths of her soul, "thou wert justly dear to all; but oh! how dear to me! No one on earth loved the poor hunchback, or could read the language of her heart like you. To others dumb and uncouth, to you my voice was natural; for it spoke to you of feelings and hopes which you alone could understand."

Mrs. Mason scolded and grumbled, that, for weeks after Charlotte's death, Mary Grimshawe performed her daily tasks with less alacrity, and wandered to and fro like one in a dream. Sometimes, the pent-up anguish of her heart found a vent in sad and unintelligible sounds--"A gibberish," her mistress said, "that was enough to frighten all the customers from the house."

Mary had other causes of annoyance to grieve and perplex her, independent of the death of her sister. For some weeks past, the coarse, dissolute Robert Mason had shown a decided preference for her sister Sophy, whom he proclaimed in her hearing, to his bad associates, "to be the prettiest gal in the neighbourhood--the only gal that he cared a bit for, or deemed worth a fellow's thoughts. But then," added he carelessly, and with an air of superiority which galled Mary not a little, "the wench was poor--too poor for him. He wanted some fun with lots of tin, that would enable him to open a good public-house in town."

Mary, as she listened, secretly blessed God that they were poor, while the ruffian continued:

"His mother, the old jade! would never consent to his marrying one so much beneath him. If she only suspected him of casting a sheep's eye at Sophy Grimshawe, she would set marks on the gal's face that would spoil her beauty. But if the gal had not been so decidedly poor, he would please himself, without asking Mammy's leave, he could tell her."

His coarse comrades received his disrespectful insubordination to his mother's authority as an excellent joke; while Mary only shuddered at his indelicate avowal of his liking for her sister, which filled her mind with a thousand indefinite fears.

Sophy, of late, had been able to obtain but little work in the neighbourhood; she was silent and dejected, and murmured constantly against her poverty, and the want of every comfort that could render life tolerable. Sometimes she talked of going into service, but, against this project, so new from her mouth, her mother objected, as she had no one else during the day to wait upon her, or speak to her. More generally, however, she speculated upon some wealthy tradesman making her his wife, and placing her at once above want and work.

"I care not," she would say, "how old or ugly he might be, if he would only take me out of this, and make a lady of me."

Mary shook her head, and tried, in hoarse ejaculations, to express her disapprobation of such an immoral avowal of sentiments she could but regard with horror; while she fixed upon her sister those piercing eyes, which seemed to look into her very soul--those eyes which, gleaming through fast-falling tears, made the vain girl shiver and turn away.

"Sophy," said Mrs. Grimshawe gravely, for the remark was made one evening, by her mother's bed-side; "Mary cannot speak her thoughts, but I understand her perfectly, and can speak them for her, and would seriously ask you, if you think it a crime to sell your soul for money?"

"Certainly not; I would do anything to get rid of the weary life I lead. All day chained down to my needle, and all night kept awake by the moans of the sick. At eighteen years of age, is it not enough to drive me mad?"

"It is what the Lord has been pleased to appoint--a heavy burden, doubtless, but meant for your good. Look at Mary: her lot is harder than yours, yet she never repines."

Sophy flashed a scornful look at her sister, as she replied--

"Mary is not exposed to the same temptations. Nature has placed her beyond them. I am handsome, and several years younger than her. She is deformed, and has a frightful impediment in her speech, and is so plain that no one could fall in love with her, or wish to make her a wife. Men think her hideous, but they do not laugh at her for being poor and shabby as they do at me."

This speech was made under the influence of vehement passion, and was concluded with a violent burst of tears.

Her cruel words inflicted a deep wound in the heart of the poor deformed girl. For the first time she felt degraded in her own eyes; and the afflictions under which she laboured seemed disgraceful; and she wished that she had been deaf as well as unintelligible. But these feelings, so foreign to her nature, were of short duration; after a brief but severe mental struggle, she surmounted her just resentment, and forgave her thoughtless sister for the unmerited reproach. Wiping the tears from her pale dark cheeks, she smoothed the pillows for her sick mother, and murmured with a sigh,--"Lord, it was Thy hand that made me as I am; let me not rebel against Thy will."

The old woman was greatly excited by Sophy's unworthy conduct. With a great effort she raised herself nearly upright in her bed, gazing sternly upon her rebellious child.

"Mary, my darling!" she cried at last, when she saw the deformed vainly striving to control the emotion which convulsed her whole frame--"bear with patience the sinful reproaches of this weak, vain girl. The time will come when she will be severely punished for her cruelty and injustice. It would be well for her if the image of her God were impressed upon her soul as it is upon yours, my good, dutiful child. The clay perishes; but that which gives value to the clay shall flourish in immortal youth and beauty when the heavens shall be no more. 'Then shall the righteous shine forth like the sun'--Ah, me! I have forgotten the rest of the text, but you, Mary, know it well; let it console you, my dear girl, and dry these useless tears. I was pretty, like Sophy, once, and, like her, I thought too highly of myself. Look at me now. Look at these wrinkled care-worn cheeks--these wasted, useless limbs; are they not a lesson to human pride and vanity? I never knew my real character until I knew grief. Sorrow has been blessed to my soul, for had I never tasted the cup of affliction, I had never known the necessity of a Saviour. May his peace and blessing fortify your heart to endure every trial which his wisdom may appoint, my poor afflicted lamb!"

Sophy's heart was softened by her mother's passionate appeal. Heartily ashamed of herself, she approached nearer to her weeping sister.

"Mary," she faltered, in a tone of deep self-reproach, "I did not mean to vex you. I know that you are better than me, and you must not take so to heart my wild words; I am miserable and unhappy; I do not always know what I say."

The eyes of the sisters met; Sophy flung her arms about Mary's neck and kissed her.

"You forgive me, Mary?"

The hunchback smiled through her tears--and such a smile, so eloquent, so full of love and grateful affection, that Sophy felt that she was more than forgiven.

"Why are you unhappy, Sophy?" asked Mrs. Grimshawe, seizing the favourable moment to make a more lasting impression on her mind.

"Because we are so poor."

"We have endured many evils worse than poverty."

"None, none. That one word comprises them all. To be hungry, shabby, despised; and you wonder that my soul rebels against it?"

"Are not unkind words and reproaches more hard to bear?"

Sophy hung her head and was silent.

"Mary would eat dry bread for a week and be cheerful and resigned, and wear a coarse, shabby garment, without shedding a single tear. These are hardships, my girl, but they do not affect the heart, or cause one pang of remorse. But, seriously, Sophy,--Do you think that you would improve your present condition, or render yourself happier, by marrying a man you did not love, for money?"

"Yes." This was said emphatically.

"Oh, do it not, my child! It is a great sin to enter into a solemn covenant, and swear at God's holy altar to love and honour and obey a man for whom you have neither affection nor respect. No blessing from God can follow such an union. Nature would assert her rights, and punish you severely for having broken her laws."

"Nonsense, mother! The thing is done every day, and I see none of these evil results. Johanna Carter married old George Hughes for his money, and they live very comfortably together. I will accept, like her, the first good offer that comes in my way."

Mary writhed, and tried for some time to make her thoughts audible: at last she succeeded in gasping out--

"Robert Mason!--not him--not him!"

"Robert Mason! What, bully Bob? Does he admire me? Well, Mary, I will quiet your apprehensions by assuring you, that the regard is not mutual. And what would the old witch his mother say?"

"Let her never have it to say, that her bad son married Daniel Grimshawe's daughter," said Dorothy, indignantly.

"Oh, but I should like to plague that old fiend, by letting her imagine that I encouraged her son. She has always something spiteful to say to me. It would be rare fun to torment her a little. I will be very sweet to Master Bob for the time to come."

Mary caught her arm, and looked imploringly in her face.

"So you are afraid of my marrying Bob Mason? What foolish women you are! He is not rich enough for me. A drunken spendthrift! When I sell my soul for money, as mother calls my getting a rich husband, it shall be to one who is better able to pay for it."

And in high spirits the hitherto discontented grumbler undressed and retired to bed, leaving Mary to pray for her during the greater part of the night, to entreat God to forgive her volatile sister, and make her sensible of her sin.