There was not in Aram any thing that savoured of the harshness of pedantry, or the petty vanities of dogmatism: his voice was soft and low, and his manner always remarkable for its singular gentleness, and a certain dignified humility. His language did indeed, at times, assume a tone of calm and patriarchal command; but it was only the command arising from an intimate persuasion of the truth of what he uttered. Moralizing upon our nature, or mourning over the delusions of the world, a grave and solemn strain breathed throughout his lofty words and the profound melancholy of his wisdom; but it touched, not offendedelevated, not humbledthe lesser intellect of his listeners; and even this air of unconscious superiority vanished when he was invited to teach or explain. That task which so few do gracefully, that an accurate and shrewd thinker has said: It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to instruct even our friends, [Note: Lacon.] Aram performed with a meekness and simplicity that charmed the vanity, even while it corrected the ignorance, of the applicant; and so various and minute was the information of this accomplished man, that there scarcely existed any branch even of that knowledge usually called practical, to which he could not impart from his stores something valuable and new. The agriculturist was astonished at the success of his suggestions; and the mechanic was indebted to him for the device which abridged his labour in improving its result.
It happened that the study of botany was not, at that day, so favourite and common a diversion with young ladies as it is now, and Ellinor, captivated by the notion of a science that gave a life and a history to the loveliest of earths offspring, besought Aram to teach her its principles.
As Madeline, though she did not second the request, could scarcely absent herself from sharing the lesson, this pursuit brought the pairalready loverscloser and closer together. It associated them not only at home, but in their rambles throughout that enchanting country; and there is a mysterious influence in Nature, which renders us, in her loveliest scenes, the most susceptible to love! Then, too, how often in their occupation their hands and eyes met:how often, by the shady wood or the soft water-side, they found themselves alone. In all times, how dangerous the connexion, when of different sexes, between the scholar and the teacher! Under how many pretences, in that connexion, the heart finds the opportunity to speak out.
Yet it was not with ease and complacency that Aram delivered himself to the intoxication of his deepening attachment. Sometimes he was studiously cold, or evidently wrestling with the powerful passion that mastered his reason. It was not without many throes, and desperate resistance, that love at length overwhelmed and subdued him; and these alternations of his mood, if they sometimes offended Madeline and sometimes wounded, still rather increased than lessened the spell which bound her to him. The doubt and the fearthe caprice and the change, which agitate the surface, swell also the tides, of passion. Woman, too, whose love is so much the creature of her imagination, always asks something of mystery and conjecture in the object of her affection. It is a luxury to her to perplex herself with a thousand apprehensions; and the more restlessly her lover occupies her mind, the more deeply he enthrals it.
Mingling with her pure and tender attachment to Aram, a high and unswerving veneration, she saw in his fitfulness, and occasional abstraction and contradiction of manner, a confirmation of the modest sentiment that most weighed upon her fears; and imagined that at those times he thought her, as she deemed herself, unworthy of his love. And this was the only struggle which she conceived to pass between the affection he evidently bore her, and the feelings which had as yet restrained him from its open avowal.
One evening, Lester and the two sisters were walking with the Student along the valley that led to the house of the latter, when they saw an old woman engaged in collecting firewood among the bushes, and a little girl holding out her apron to receive the sticks with which the crones skinny arms unsparingly filled it. The child trembled, and seemed half-crying; while the old woman, in a harsh, grating croak, was muttering forth mingled objurgation and complaint.
There was something in the appearance of the latter at once impressive and displeasing; a dark, withered, furrowed skin was drawn like parchment over harsh and aquiline features; the eyes, through the rheum of age, glittered forth black and malignant; and even her stooping posture did not conceal a height greatly above the common stature, though gaunt and shrivelled with years and poverty. It was a form and face that might have recalled at once the celebrated description of Otway, on a part of which we have already unconsciously encroached, and the remaining part of which we shall wholly borrow.
On her crooked shoulders had she wrapped The tattered remnants of an old stript hanging, That served to keep her carcase from the cold, So there was nothing of a piece about her. Her lower weeds were all oer coarsely patched With different coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow, And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness.
See, said Lester, one of the eyesores of our village, (I might say) the only discontented person.
What! Dame Darkmans! said Ellinor, quickly. Ah! let us turn back. I hate to encounter that old woman; there is something so evil and savage in her manner of talkand look, how she rates that poor girl, whom she has dragged or decoyed to assist her!
Aram looked curiously on the old hag. Poverty, said he, makes some humble, but more malignant; is it not want that grafts the devil on this poor womans nature? Come, let us accost herI like conferring with distress.
It is hard labour this? said the Student gently.
The old woman looked up askantthe music of the voice that addressed her sounded harsh on her ear.
Ay, ay! she answered. You fine gentlefolks can know what the poor suffer; ye talk and ye talk, but ye never assist.
Say not so, Dame, said Lester; did I not send you but yesterday bread and money? and when do you ever look up at the Hall without obtaining relief?
But the bread was as dry as a stick, growled the hag: and the money, what was it? will it last a week? Oh, yes! Ye think as much of your doits and mites, as if ye stripped yourselves of a comfort to give it to us. Did ye have a dish lessa tato less, the day ye sent meyour charity I spose ye calls it? Och! fie! But the Bibles the poor creturs comfort.
I am glad to hear you say that, Dame, said the good-natured Lester; and I forgive every thing else you have said, on account of that one sentence.
The old woman dropped the sticks she had just gathered, and glowered at the speakers benevolent countenance with a malicious meaning in her dark eyes.
An ye do? Well, Im glad I please ye there. Och! yes! the Bibles a mighty comfort; for it says as much that the rich man shall not inter the kingdom of Heaven! Theres a truth for you, that makes the poor folks heart chirp like a cricketho! ho! I sits by the imbers of a night, and I thinks and thinks as how I shall see you all burning; and yell ask me for a drop o water, and I shall laugh thin from my pleasant seat with the angels. Ochits a book for the poor that!
The sisters shuddered. And you think then that with envy, malice, and all uncharitableness at your heart, you are certain of Heaven? For shame! Pluck the mote from your own eye!
The sisters shuddered. And you think then that with envy, malice, and all uncharitableness at your heart, you are certain of Heaven? For shame! Pluck the mote from your own eye!
What sinnifies praching? Did not the Blessed Saviour come for the poor? Them as has rags and dry bread here will be ixalted in the nixt world; an if we poor folk have malice as ye calls it, whose faults that? What do ye tache us? Eh?answer me that. Ye keeps all the larning an all the other fine things to yoursel, and then ye scould, and thritten, and hang us, cause we are not as wise as you. Och! there is no jistice in the Lamb, if Heaven is not made for us; and the iverlasting Hell, with its brimstone and fire, and its gnawing an gnashing of teeth, an its theirst, an its torture, and its worm that niver dies, for the like o you.
Come! come away, said Ellinor, pulling her fathers arm.
And if, said Aram, pausing, if I were to say to you,name your want and it shall be fulfilled, would you have no charity for me also?
Umph, returned the hag, ye are the great scolard; and they say ye knows what no one else do. Till me now, and she approached, and familiarly, laid her bony finger on the students arm; till me,have ye iver, among other fine things, known poverty?
I have, woman! said Aram, sternly.
Och ye have thin! And did ye not sit and gloat, and eat up your oun heart, an curse the sun that looked so gay, an the winged things that played so blithe-like, an scowl at the rich folk that niver wasted a thought on ye? till me now, your honour, till me!
And the crone curtesied with a mock air of beseeching humility.
I never forgot, even in want, the love due to my fellow-sufferers; for, woman, we all suffer,the rich and the poor: there are worse pangs than those of want!
Ye think there be, do ye? thats a comfort, umph! Well, Ill till ye now, I feel a rispict for you, that I dont for the rest on em; for your face does not insult me with being cheary like theirs yonder; an I have noted ye walk in the dusk with your eyes down and your arms crossed; an I have said,that man I do not hate, somehow, for he has something dark at his heart like me!
The lot of earth is woe, answered Aram calmly, yet shrinking back from the crones touch; judge we charitably, and act we kindly to each other. Therethis money is not much, but it will light your hearth and heap your table without toil, for some days at least!
Thank your honour: an what think you Ill do with the money?
What?
Drink, drink, drink! cried the hag fiercely; theres nothing like drink for the poor, for thin we fancy oursels what we wish, and, sinking her voice into a whisper, I thinks thin that I have my foot on the billies of the rich folks, and my hands twisted about their intrails, and I hear them shriek, andthin Im happy!
Go home! said Aram, turning away, and open the Book of life with other thoughts.
The little party proceeded, and, looking back, Lester saw the old woman gaze after them, till a turn in the winding valley hid her from his sight.
That is a strange person, Aram; scarcely a favourable specimen of the happy English peasant; said Lester, smiling.
Yet they say, added Madeline, that she was not always the same perverse and hateful creature she is now.
Ay, said Aram, and what then is her history?
Why, replied Madeline, slightly blushing to find herself made the narrator of a story, some forty years ago this woman, so gaunt and hideous now, was the beauty of the village. She married an Irish soldier whose regiment passed through Grassdale, and was heard of no more till about ten years back, when she returned to her native place, the discontented, envious, altered being you now see her.
She is not reserved in regard to her past life, said Lester. She is too happy to seize the attention of any one to whom she can pour forth her dark and angry confidence. She saw her husband, who was afterwards dismissed the service, a strong, powerful man, a giant of his tribe, pine and waste, inch by inch, from mere physical want, and at last literally die from hunger. It happened that they had settled in the country in which her husband was born, and in that county, those frequent famines which are the scourge of Ireland were for two years especially severe. You may note, that the old woman has a strong vein of coarse eloquence at her command, perhaps acquired in (for it partakes of the natural character of) the country in which she lived so long; and it would literally thrill you with horror to hear her descriptions of the misery and destitution that she witnessed, and amidst which her husband breathed his last. Out of four children, not one survives. One, an infant, died within a week of the father; two sons were executed, one at the age of sixteen, one a year older, for robbery committed under aggravated circumstances; and the fourth, a daughter, died in the hospitals of London. The old woman became a wanderer and a vagrant, and was at length passed to her native parish, where she has since dwelt. These are the misfortunes which have turned her blood to gall; and these are the causes which fill her with so bitter a hatred against those whom wealth has preserved from sharing or witnessing a fate similar to hers.
Oh! said Aram, in a low, but deep tone, whenwhen will these hideous disparities be banished from the world? How many noble natureshow many glorious hopeshow much of the seraphs intellect, have been crushed into the mire, or blasted into guilt, by the mere force of physical want? What are the temptations of the rich to those of the poor? Yet see how lenient we are to the crimes of the one,how relentless to those of the other! It is a bad world; it makes a mans heart sick to look around him. The consciousness of how little individual genius can do to relieve the mass, grinds out, as with a stone, all that is generous in ambition; and to aspire from the level of life is but to be more graspingly selfish.
Can legislators, or the moralists that instruct legislators, do so little, then, towards universal good? said Lester, doubtingly.
Why? what can they do but forward civilization? And what is civilization, but an increase of human disparities? The more the luxury of the few, the more startling the wants, and the more galling the sense, of poverty. Even the dreams of the philanthropist only tend towards equality; and where is equality to be found, but in the state of the savage? No; I thought otherwise once; but I now regard the vast lazar-house around us without hope of relief:Death is the sole Physician!
Ah, no! said the high-souled Madeline, eagerly; do not take away from us the best feeling and the highest desire we can cherish. How poor, even in this beautiful world, with the warm sun and fresh air about us, that alone are sufficient to make us glad, would be life, if we could not make the happiness of others!
Aram looked at the beautiful speaker with a soft and half-mournful smile. There is one very peculiar pleasure that we feel as we grow older,it is to see embodied in another and a more lovely shape the thoughts and sentiments we once nursed ourselves; it is as if we viewed before us the incarnation of our own youth; and it is no wonder that we are warmed towards the object, that thus seems the living apparition of all that was brightest in ourselves! It was with this sentiment that Aram now gazed on Madeline. She felt the gaze, and her heart beat delightedly, but she sunk at once into a silence, which she did not break during the rest of their walk.