Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

“ Poor dear papa!
I had a third reason. Sometimes I feared, by words Penelope dropped, that she and my father had laid their heads together concerning me and my weak health, and imagined—things which were not true. No; I repeat they were not true. I was ill of fever and ague, that was all; I should have recovered in time. If I were not quite happy, I should have recovered from that, also, in time. I should not have broken my heart. No one ought who has still another good heart to believe in; no one need, who has neither done wrong nor been wronged. ”

“ This grand “show” house has no pretensions to the character of “nest,” or “home.” To use the word in it seems half-ridiculous, or pathetic; though Lisa does not find it so. Stately and easy, our girl moves through these magnificent rooms, and enjoys her position as if she were born to it. She shows good taste and good feeling too—treats meek, prosy, washed-out Lady Augusta Treherne, and little, fussy, infirm Sir William, whose brown scratch-wig and gold spectacles rarely appear out of his own room, with unfailing respect and consideration. They are mightily proud of her, as they need to be. ”

“ I can understand women's renouncing love, or dying of it, or learning to live without it: but marrying without it, either for “spite,” or for money, necessity, pity, or persuasion, is to me utterly incomprehensible. Nay, the self-devoted heroines of the Emilia Wyndham school seem creatures so weak that if not compassionating one would simply despise them. Out of duty or gratitude, it might be possible to work, live, or even die for a person, but never to marry him.
So, when Colin, recovering, tried to take my hand again, I shrunk into myself, and became my right self at once. ”

“ Theodora, it is hardly eight hours since your innocent arms were round my neck, and your kisses on my mouth—and now! Well, it will be over soon. However I have lived, I shall not die a hypocrite.
I do not attempt to retrace the course of reasoning by which I persuaded myself to act as I did. I was only a boy; this long sleep of the mind had re-established my bodily health;—life and youth were strong within me—also the hope of honour—the dread of shame. Yet sometimes conscience struggled so fiercely with all these, that I was half tempted to a medium course, the coward's last escape—suicide. ”

“ I sat by the fire, watching her play off her loving jests upon her father, and prattle with him, childish-like, about all that was going on downstairs.
“You little quiz!” he cried at last. “Doctor, this girl is growing—I can't say witty—but absolutely mischievous.”
I said, talents long dormant sometimes appeared. We might yet discover in Miss Theodora Johnston the most brilliant wit of her day.
“Doctor Urquhart, it's a shame! How can you laugh at me so? But I don't care. You are all the better for having somebody to laugh at. You know you are.” ”

“ Talk of Penelope's long courtship—Lisabel's marriage—it was I that was, in heart and soul, the real wife; ay, though Max and I were never more to one another than now; though I lived as Theodora Johnston to the end of my days.
So I took courage—and since it was not allowed me to comfort him in any other way, I just stole my hand inside his, which clasped instantly and tightly round it. That was all, and that was enough. Thus we sat side by side, when the door opened—and in walked papa.
How strangely the comic and the serious are mixed up together in life, and even in one's own nature. ”

“ Charteris, having come for a day from London, was admitted, quiet, scared, and shocked, to spend a few minutes by the old man's bed-side—her Augustus, full of lively rattle and rude animal spirits, was carefully kept out of the room.
“You plan it all between you,” she said, one day, half sulkily, to her sister and myself. “You play into one another's hands as if you had lived together all your lives. Confess, Doctor,—confess, Miss Nurse, you would keep me too out of papa's room, if you could.” ”

“ Sickness sharpens our senses, making nothing seem sudden or unnatural. I knew as well as if she had told me, who it was she wanted me to see—who it was even now at the parlour-door.
Doctor Urquhart came in, and sat down beside my sofa. I do not remember anything that was said or done by any of us, except that I felt him sitting there, and heard him in his familiar voice talking to Mrs. Granton, about the pleasant view from this low window, and the sunshiny morning, and the blackbird that was solemnly hopping about under the sun-dial. ”

“ She is more cheerful too than she ever used to be, not restlessly lively, like her eldest sister, but seeming to carry about in her heart a well-spring of content, which bubbles out refreshingly upon everything and everybody about her. It is especially welcome in the sick room, where, she knows, our chief aim is to keep the mind at ease, and the feeble brain in absolute rest. I could smile, remembering the hours we have spent—patient, doctor and nurse, in the most puerile amusements, and altogether delicious nonsense, since Mr. Johnston became convalescent. ”

“ I saw him afterwards stand by a window, of the library, reading Penelope's letter, with an expression of such perplexity and pain that I should have been alarmed, had not hers to me been so cheerful. They cannot have been quarrelling, for then she is never cheerful. No wonder. Silences, or slight clouds of doubt between friends are hard enough to bear: a real quarrel, and between lovers, must be heart-breaking. With all Francis's peculiarities, I trust it will never come to that. ”

“ And he had loved me ever since—me, not Lisabel; though for a time he tried flirting with her, he owned, just to find out whether or not I cared for him. I hid my face and sobbed.
And then, I had need to recover self-control; it is such an awful thing to see a man weep.
I stood by Colin till we were both calmer: trusting all was safe over; and that without the one question I most dreaded. But it came.
“Dora, why do you not care for me? Is there—tell me or not, as you like—is there any one else?” ”

“ Has there risen up somebody better than I? with fewer faults and nobler virtues? God knows I have small need to be proud. Yet I am myself—this Theodora Johnston—as I was from the first, no better and no worse; honest and true if nothing else, and he knew it. Nobody ever knew me so thoroughly—faults and all.
We women must be constituted differently from men. A word said, a line written and we are happy; omitted, our hearts ache—ache as if for a great misfortune. Men cannot feel it, or guess at it—if they did, the most careless of them would be slow to wound us so. ”

“ Besides, if Penelope is here—”
“You must know quite well, Francis, that Penelope is not here.”
I never scruple to speak my mind to Francis Charteris. We do not much like one another, and are both aware of it. His soft, silken politeness often strikes me as insincere, and my “want of refinement,” as he terms it, may be quite as distasteful to him. We do not suit, and were we ever so fond of one another, this incompatibility would be apparent. People may like and respect one another extremely, yet not suit, even as two good tunes are not always capable of being harmonised. ”

“ When we are sick and weak, to find comfort; when we are sore at heart, to be surrounded by love; when, at five-and-twenty, the world looks blank and dreary, to see it looking bright and sunshiny at sixty—this does one good. If I said I loved Mrs.
Granton, it but weakly expressed what I owed and now owe her—more than she is ever likely to know. ”

“ I always believed that a man circumstanced as I was, had no right ever to think of marriage. Some words of yours led me of late to change this opinion. I resolved, at some future time, to lay my whole history before you—as to a mere friend—to ask you the question whether or not, under the circumstances, I was justified in seeking any woman for my wife, and on your answer to decide either to try and make you love me, or only to love you, as I should have loved and shall for ever. ”

“ Granton. Every line in her nice old withered face is pleasant to me; every creak of her quick footstep; every angular fold in her everlasting black silk gown—a very shabby gown often, for she does not care how she dresses. She is by no means one of your picturesque, ancient gentlewomen, looking as if they had just stepped out of a gilt-frame—she is only a little, active, bright old lady. As a girl, she might have been pretty—I am not sure, though she has still a delicate expressive mouth, and soft grey eyes ”

“ One look into eyes I knew—one clasp of a steadfast kindly hand, and I would be all right again. Merry, happy, brave—afraid of nothing and nobody—not even of myself; it cannot be so bad a self if it is worth being cared for. I can't see to write. There now, there now—as one would say to a child in a passion—cry your heart out, it will do you good, Theodora. ”

“ It is painful to appear like a fool, even when a lively young woman is trying to make you do so. I sat, cruelly conscious how little I have to say—how like an awkward, dull clod I often feel—in the society of young and clever people, when I heard her speaking from the other end of the table—I mean, Miss Theodora.
“Lisabel, you are talking of what you do not understand. You never did, and never will understand my Max and Thekla, any more than Francis there, though he once thought it so fine, when he was teaching Penelope German, a few years ago.” ”

“ If you do not marry—and you seem of an opposite mind to your sisters in that particular—you will, years hence, be a woman, no longer young, perhaps little sought after, for you are not beautiful to most eyes, nor from your peculiar temperament do you please many people. By then, you may have known care and sorrow—will be an orphan and alone. I should despise myself for reckoning up these possibilities, did I not know that in so far as any human hand can shield you from trouble, you shall be shielded, that while one poor life lasts, you never shall be left desolate. ”

“ To have no wife, no child! Never to seek what the idlest, most drunken loon of a mechanic may get for the asking; never to experience the joy which I saw on a poor fellow's face only yesterday; when, in the same room with one dead lad, and another sickening, the wife brought into the world a third, a living child, and the ragged, starved father cried out, “Lord be thankit!” ”

“ Sometimes, though, bright bits come across us—such as when the heavy heart is relieved, or the shadow of death lifted off from a dwelling: moments when the doctor, much to his own conscious humiliation, is apt to be regarded as an angel of deliverance—seasons when he is glad to linger a little amidst the glow of happiness he has been instrumental in bringing, before he turns out again into the shadows of his appointed way.
And such will always be this, which I may v consider the last of my nights at Rockmount. ”