Phemie Keller

“ At which performance Phemie—Phemie Keller no longer—broke out crying, to the dismay of Captain Stondon, who hurried her through the churchyard and down the steps, inwardly anathematizing Davie in particular, and the lookers on in general.
“It’s all along of you,” remarked Mrs. Aggland, giving Duncan a shake. “If you had taken the 233dog back, as I told you, she would have been all right. Was ever woman plagued as I am by a set of disobedient, headstrong boys?” ”

“ Well, well, the dark days were at hand when Phemie could have nothing but recollection; when the picture hung in the innermost chamber would be all she might ever hope to see more; when the man’s memory would be encircled with a halo of mystery; when a sad and tender interest would surround the last hours of Basil Stondon’s life, giving to his fate that sad and pathetic interest which was alone needed to fill Phemie’s cup of love and sorrow full unto overflowing. ”

“ Dear Phemie Keller! pretty, vain, gay, fanciful, dreamy Phemie—thinking of you as you walked up and down that little sitting-room, hushing the child into quietness, it seems to me that Captain Stondon might well be excused for forgetting his own age and your youth, and remembering only the beauty which he saw, and the true, faithful nature that he had penetration enough to know you possessed.
“Poor baby Danny,” muttered Mrs. Aggland sotto voce, as she watched the girl soothing the child’s distress; “you won’t have her long to coo over you and humour you at every turn ”

“ Further, he admired beauty, and the beautiful, in his opinion, had no business to be useful likewise; 53for both of which reasons Mr. Aggland, with his wife’s complaints of Phemie’s “uppishness” still ringing in his ears, could not help but pause and look at the girl who, if Mrs. Aggland’s oft-repeated assertion might be believed, “was not worth her salt.”
A really pretty woman always looks prettier without her bonnet, and Phemie Keller proved no exception to this rule. ”

“ Phemie would watch him talking to other women, smiling his smiles for them, speaking his tenderest, looking his handsomest, until she grew sick with jealousy, until she went almost mad to think how she must always keep him at a distance—how it ought to be her greatest happiness to see him angry with her, indifferent to her, fond of some one else. ”

“ How terrible must have been that wound which prevented Basil Stondon seeking consolation for the frowns of one woman in the smiles of another! How wonderful the power of that love which could still retain a hold over him when he was travelling on—on—over the sea, away from the smiles and the tears and the weakness and the strength of Phemie, who had said, “You shall never forget me—never love girl, nor woman, nor wife as you have loved me. When you are lying awake in the darkness you shall think of me; when you are standing in the twilight you shall remember me. ”

“ Life—life; if we could only seize your opportunities as they slip by us; if we could only see the end of the paths we blindly pursue; if we could only understand that there are cases in which silence is not wisdom, in which speech is golden—I think and believe even this world might be happier than it is, freer from misunderstanding, more perfect in its bliss. As it was, Phemie, even at the eleventh hour, did not trust her husband; did not throw herself on his charity, his forbearance, his trust; but went wandering away through the twilight to keep her tryst, a mistaken woman, a lonely wife. ”

“ Phemie thought about Mr. Stondon’s brown eyes and elaborate whiskers and expensive dinner, as the train swept through the flat lands surrounding Cambridge.
“How foolish they were to live beyond their means!” thought this wise young woman, and she would have said and thought the same about any other sin or shortcoming. That her fellow-creatures were but fallible; that flesh and blood is prone to error; that to most the right is difficult, the wrong easy; that the way to hell is broad, that the path to heaven is narrow;—these were things Phemie had yet to learn ”

“ Aggland—who could have defined his or her sensations; but, nevertheless, every one felt the absence of that intangible something which Phemie Keller might never now become 230acquainted with, sinlessly, through all the years to come.
That was it—for better, for worse—she was resigning all hope, all chance of happy love; love with its bliss and agony; love with its doubts and distractions; love without which no life, be it otherwise ever so symmetrical, can be perfect. ”

“ Nobody knew better than Peggy that Phemie was mistaken. Nobody knew better than the old Scotch woman that there is a deal of difference between a fairy tale and everyday life; between the lover of a winter evening’s story and the suitor who, in the broad daylight, comes in his proper flesh and blood to ask for the fair maiden’s hand. Since the suitor had come across the hills—since such astonishing good fortune had fallen to Phemie’s lot as to secure a real live gentleman for her lover—Peggy M‘Nab had seen light. ”

“ That is the cousin, or niece, or niece by marriage, or something, of the very singular individual who plays the violin in church. She is called Phemie Keller—sings sweetly, I consider, and is pretty, too. Do you not think so?”
“Sings sweetly! What can the man be made of,” thought Captain Stondon, “to use such an expression about the matter? Sings sweetly! If the nightingale came outside his bedroom window and trilled to him all the night long, he would get up in the morning and say he had heard a nice bird whistling. Pretty, too!” ”

“ Ah, Phemie, not alone by you have those words been spoken. Tremblingly, despairingly, when it was too late, white lips have murmured that sentence—faltering tongues uttered it hopelessly.
If she had but known! Is not that the burden of most human lamentations, of most mortal regret? What might we not all, men and 127women alike, have made of our lives, which are now past and gone, squandered and lost to us, if we had but known—oh, God! if we had but known!
Silently Miss Derno folded up the letter and gave it back to her friend. ”

“ Phemie was still beautiful enough to attract admiration—still young enough to love and be loved—still fascinating enough to choose a second husband and rule over a new home. The prospect opened out before Phemie by Captain Stondon’s death seemed to society like a vision of fairyland. She might marry an earl. The Duke of Seelands had inquired particularly who she was one day when he beheld her driving from the Disley Station. How would Phemie like the strawberry leaves? ”

“ Eighteen years, or thereabouts, have elapsed since first in the church at Tordale, when the summer sun was shining on the earth, you, reader, were introduced to Phemie Keller. Should you care in that which is the darkest and coldest hour of all the night to gaze upon her again?
Those authors who, commencing with heroines of eighteen, take leave of them when they quit the church-door at twenty, have a great advantage over the other members of their craft who are compelled to talk of women when they have passed the Rubicon of female attractiveness. ”

“ To do Phemie justice, she did not couple together the sentences—Basil is living, and I am free. She had never thought of marrying him, and she did not now; but she had loved him, and, as I have said, the old love never dies; it is the one thing in this mutable world which is immutable; it is the one temporal possession of our mortality which is immortal. ”

“ The day may come when you will look back to the blushing, timid, ignorant Phemie, three parts through her teens, and wish you could steal her back from the past to have and to hold for ever—wish unavailingly, for along the road you will then have travelled there is no return, and the Phemie you can dimly remember—the Phemie who was married while yet almost a child in Tordale Church, may return to you in the flesh, only when the rivers flow back to their springs, when the grain ripens in December, and the flowers and the trees bloom and look green among winter frosts and snows. ”

“ It was all very vague—it was all very sweet, but there was a terrible sadness in it notwithstanding—a minor that brought tears into Phemie’s eyes oftentimes, she scarcely knew why or wherefore.
Yet it was a happy time—sinfully happy to the poor misguided woman—until the Hurlfords and Miss Derno arrived at Hastings also. Then in a day all seemed changed; the liveliest tunes sounded sad to Phemie; the sweetest airs grew wearisome; she tired of the rush of the hurrying feet ”

“ And fully aware of all this, in her deep self-abasement, in the first agony of her mortified pride and vanity, with the first smart of the dreadful wound spurring her on, with the past spread open before her like a book, Phemie wrote such a letter to her old friend as caused Miss Derno, when at length it reached her, to mourn with an exceeding sorrow for the misery of the woman whom she had first met so young, so guileless, so shy and unsophisticated. ”

“ Have we not Marshlands? Have we not every happiness, every comfort? Have we not wood and field and lake and water? If we had fifty sons, could we have more out of the place? Why should I sit down 16and be miserable because children whom I never knew, whom I never heard speak, who might as well never have been born, were not spared perhaps to grow up curses to us? Sometimes I think,” went on Phemie, with the tears starting into her eyes, “that you and Captain Stondon both, would rather the boys had lived and I had died—anything for a son, any sacrifice for an heir.” ”

“ Man could not delight her, nor woman neither, if the man and the woman chanced to be of her own household. From the time she rose in the morning till she laid her pinched, discontented face on the pillow at night, the thing was never done, by child or adult, that pleased her; and the person who seemed able to displease her most was Phemie Keller.
In her youth, which takes us back to a somewhat remote period, Mrs. Aggland had been reckoned rather a beauty by the young men in her own class of life. She was a belle of the genteel sentimental style ”

“ Everything Phemie had ever dreamed of as most lovely in her sex was there for her to fall down before and worship, if she would; but instead of worshipping she envied—silly child—a 277woman who was not half so charming as herself. Is not auburn hair as beautiful as raven curls?—have not men sighed for a glance from blue eyes as well as from black?—has not seventeen its attractions—its young spring freshness—its soft loveliness—though it cannot possess the easy grace, the finished manner of five-and-twenty? ”

“ And she released herself, and stood with her one hand against a fir-tree and the other pressed hard upon her heart. “I have come, for, as I have often told you, we must part.”
“Why, Phemie?”
“Because I cannot bear it—I won’t bear it,” she answered; “because the deception is too great, the burden heavier than I can carry; because I had rather go to him and tell him all—how I never loved him—how I have loved you—than be a hypocrite any more, than listen to the things you say to me any longer.” ”

“ A woman cannot force herself on a man,” said Miss Derno, with a 116slight return of the light, easy manner which Phemie had so much admired in former days. “Even if she believes he wants her, it is a difficult matter for her to press so valuable a possession on his acceptance—I could not, at all events. How was I to know the falsehoods he was told concerning me, and unknowing, I argued, ‘If he wants me he will come back for me; he will come back some day.’ And he has come back,” she finished, “to find me the wreck you see.”
“Was Major Morrice then——?” began Phemie. ”

“ Well, well, life is strange, and women are the strangest part of life, and Phemie could not have given a reason for what she did save this, that she hoped some day to meet Basil Stondon and his wife in society, and astonish them with her cold bright wit, her unimpassioned manner, her worldly ideas, and her unromantic views of life. ”

“ Basil was a fair whip, but he could do nothing. What man ever did do anything with a pair of mad ponies harnessed to a low light phaeton?
The bays had it all their own way over the grass. They dashed through stagnant pools; they flew past bush and bramble; the horses grazing on the common galloped hither and thither, making the brutes more unmanageable still. The sun was shining on the bare, flat Norfolk landscape, and Phemie could see in the distance farmhouses, with their tiled roofs; homesteads, where the new hay had just been stacked; trees standing dark and clear against the sky ”

“ Moreover, Phemie was far more clever than Mrs. Aggland; more clever and quick not merely at catching up book learning, but at needlework, at household duties, and in all other practical affairs. Given opportunity, there could be no doubt but that the girl would have been as accomplished and well-informed as she was pretty. Even as matters stood, she had got a curious smattering of knowledge into her head. She had 99read and re-read all the books in her uncle’s singularly miscellaneous library. He had taught her what he knew of French; she had learned to play the guitar almost without his help ”

“ WIDOWED. Phemie was not in the house two minutes before she knew her husband had had a paralytic stroke. The doctor was still with him; but in such a case, what can a doctor do? When the Almighty strikes—when the blow falls, which no skill is able to avert—of what use are God’s instruments?
From that day Phemie’s work was laid out for her. To nurse him, to tend him, to take the man who had raised her from poverty to wealth, hither and thither as the medical men advised, or as his own fancy dictated; that was the employment of Mrs. Stondon’s life. ”