The Heavenly Twins by Madame Sarah Grand

M >> Madame Sarah Grand >> The Heavenly Twins

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62

It was her father who struck the keynote to which the tune of her early
intellectual life was set. She was about twelve years old at the time, and
they were sitting out on the lawn at Fraylingay one day after dinner, as
was their wont in the summer--he, on this occasion, under the influence of
a good cigar, mellow in mind and moral in sentiment, but inclining to be
didactic for the moment because the coffee was late; she in a receptive
mood, ready to gather silently, and store with care, in her capacious
memory any precept that might fall from his lips, to be taken out and
tried as opportunity offered.

"Where is your mother?" he asked.

"I don't know, father," Evadne answered. "I think she is in the drawing
room."

"Never say you _think_, my dear, about matters of fact," he said.
"When it is possible to _know_ it is your business to find out, and
if you cannot find out you must say you don't know. It is moral cowardice,
injurious to yourself, not to own your ignorance; and you may also be
misleading, or unintentionally deceiving, someone else."

"How might the moral cowardice of not owning my ignorance be injurious to
myself, father?" she asked.

"Why, don't you see," he answered, "you would suffer in two ways? If the
habit of inaccuracy became confirmed, your own character would deteriorate;
and by leading people to suppose that you are as wise as themselves, you
lose opportunities of obtaining useful information. They won't tell you
things they think you know already."

Evadne bent her brows upon this lesson and reflected; and doubtless it was
the origin of the verbal accuracy for which she afterward became notable.
Patient investigation had always been a pleasure, but from that time
forward it became a principle also. She understood from what her father
had said that to know the facts of life exactly is a positive duty; which,
in a limited sense, was what he had intended to teach her; but the extent
to which she carried the precept would have surprised him.

Her mind was prone to experiment with every item of information it
gathered, in order to test its practical value; if she could turn it to
account she treasured it; if not, she rejected it, from whatever source it
came. But she was not herself aware of any reservation in her manner of
accepting instruction. The trick was innate, and in no way interfered with
her faith in her friends, which was profound. She might have justified it,
however, upon her father's authority, for she once heard him say to one of
her brothers: "Find out for yourself, and form your own opinions," a
lesson which she had laid to heart also. Not that her father would have
approved of her putting it into practice. He was one of those men who
believe emphatically that a woman should hold no opinion which is not of
masculine origin, and the maxims he had for his boys differed materially
in many respects from those which he gave to his girls. But these precepts
of his were, after all, only matches to Evadne which fired whole trains of
reflection, and lighted her to conclusions quite other than those at which
he had arrived himself. In this way, however, he became her principal
instructor. She had attached herself to him from the time that she could
toddle, and had acquired from his conversation a proper appreciation of
masculine precision of thought. If his own statements were not always
accurate it was from no want of respect for the value of facts; for he was
great on the subject, and often insisted that a lesson or principle of
action is contained in the commonest fact; but he snubbed Evadne promptly
all the same on one occasion when she mentioned a fact of life, and drew a
principle of action therefrom for herself. "Only confusion comes of women
thinking for themselves on social subjects," he said, "You must let me
decide all such matters for you, or you must refer them to your husband
when you come under his control."

Evadne did not pay much attention to this, however, because she remembered
another remark of his with which she could not make it agree. The remark
was that women never had thought for themselves, and that therefore it was
evident that they could not think, and that they should not try. Now, as
it is obvious that confusion cannot come of a thing that has never been
done, the inaccuracy in one or other of these statements was glaring
enough to put both out of the argument. But what Evadne did note was the
use of the word control.

As she grew up she became her father's constant companion in his walks,
and, flattered by her close attention, he fell into the way of talking a
good deal to her. He enjoyed the fine flavour of his own phrase-making,
and so did she, but in such a silent way that nothing ever led him to
suspect it was having any but the most desirable effect upon her mind. She
never attempted to argue, and only spoke in order to ask a question on
some point which was not clear to her, or to make some small comment when
he seemed to expect her to do so. He often contradicted himself, and the
fact never escaped her attention, but she loved him with a beautiful
confidence, and her respect remained unshaken.

When she had to set herself right between his discrepancies she did not
dwell on the latter as faults in him, but only thought of how wise he was
when he warned her to be accurate, and felt grateful. And in this way she
formed her mind upon his sayings; and as a direct result of the long,
informal, generally peripatetic lectures to which she listened without
prejudice, and upon which she brought unsuspected powers of discrimination
to bear, he had unconsciously made her a more logical, reasoning,
reasonable being than he believed it possible for a woman to be. Poor
papa! All that he really knew of his most interesting daughter was that
she was growing up a good child, physically strong and active, morally
well educated, with a fortunately equable temper; and that she owed a
great deal to him. What, precisely, was never defined. But when the
thought of his kindness recurred to him it always suffused him with
happiness.

He was a portly man, with a place in the country, and a house in town; not
rich for his position, but well off; a magistrate, and much respected;
well educated in the ideas of the ancients, with whom his own ideas on
many subjects stopped short, and hardly to be called intellectual; a
moderate Churchman, a bigoted Conservative, narrow and strongly prejudiced
rather than highly principled. He was quite ignorant of the moral progress
of the world at the present time, and ready to resent even the upward
tendency of evolution when it presented itself to him in the form of any
change, including, of course, changes for the better, and more especially
so if such change threatened to bring about an improvement in the position
of women, or increase the weight of their influence for good in the world.
The mere mention of the subject made him rabid, and he grew apoplectic
whenever he reflected upon the monstrous pretensions of the sex at the
present time. But the thing that roused his scorn and indignation most was
when a woman ventured to enter any protest against the established order
of iniquity. He allowed that a certain number of women must of necessity
be abandoned, and raised no objection to that; but what he did consider
intolerable was that any one woman should make a stand against the
degradation of her own sex. He thought that immoral.

He was well enough to live with, however, this obstinate English country
gentleman, although without sympathetic insight, and liable to become a
petty domestic tyrant at any moment. "Sound" was what he would have called
himself. And he was a man to be envied upon the whole, for his family
loved him, and his friends knew no ill of him.

CHAPTER II.

Evadne, like the Vicar of Wakefield, was by nature a lover of happy human
faces, and she could be playful herself on occasion; but she had little if
any of the saving sense of humor.

Her habit was to take everything _au grand serieux_, and to consider
it. When other people were laughing she would be gravely observant, as if
she were solving a problem; and she would sooner have thought of trying to
discover what combination of molecules resulted in a joke, with a view to
benefiting her species by teaching them how to produce jokes at will, than
of trying to be witty herself. She had, too, a quite irritating trick of
remaining, to all outward seeming, stolidly unmoved by events which were
causing an otherwise general commotion; but in cases of danger or
emergency she was essentially swift to act--as on one occasion, for
instance, when the Hamilton House twins were at Fraylingay.

The twins had arrived somewhat late in the married lives of their parents,
and had been welcomed as angel visitants, under which fond delusion they
were christened respectively Angelica and Theodore. Before they were well
out of their nurse's arms, however, society, with discernment, had changed
Theodore's name to Diavolo, but "Angelica" was sanctioned, the irony being
obvious.

The twins were alike in appearance, but not nearly so much so as twins
usually are. It would have been quite easy to distinguish them apart, even
if one had not been dark and the other fair, and for this mercy everybody
connected with them had reason to be thankful, for as soon as they reached
the age of active indiscretion they would certainly have got themselves
mixed if they could. Angelica was the dark one, and she was also the
elder, taller, stronger, and wickeder of the two, the organizer and
commander of every expedition. Before they were five years old everybody
about the place was upon the alert, both in self-defence and also to see
that the twins did not kill themselves. Bars of iron had to be put on the
upstairs windows to prevent them making ladders of the traveller's joy and
wisteria, modes of egress which they very much preferred to commonplace
doors; and Mr. Hamilton-Wells had been reluctantly obliged to have the
moat, which was deep and full of fish, and had been the glory of Hamilton
House for generations, drained for fear of accidents. Argument was
unavailing with the twins as a means of repression, but they were always
prepared to argue out any question of privilege with their father and
mother cheerfully. Punishment, too, had an effect quite other than that
intended. They were interested at the moment, but they would slap each
other's hands and put each other in the corner for fun five minutes after
they had received similar chastisement in solemn earnest.

They would have lived out of doors altogether by choice, and they managed
to make their escape in all weathers. If the vigilant watch that was kept
upon them were relaxed for a moment, they disappeared as if by magic, and
would probably only be recovered at the farthest limit of their father's
property, or in the kitchen of some neighbouring country gentleman, where
they were sure to be popular. They were always busy about something, and
when every usual occupation failed, they fought each other. After a battle
they counted scars and scratches for the honour of having most, and if
there were not bruises enough to satisfy one of them, the other was always
obligingly ready to fight again until there were.

Mr. Hamilton-Wells had great faith in the discipline of the Church service
for them, and was anxious that they should be early accustomed to go
there. They behaved pretty well while the solemnity was strange enough to
awe them, and one Sunday when Lady Adeline--their mother--could not
accompany him, Mr. Hamilton-Wells ventured to go alone with them. He took
the precaution to place them on either side of him so as to separate them
and interpose a solid body between them and any signals they might make to
each other; but in the quietest part of the service, when everybody was
kneeling, some movement of Diavolo's attracted his attention for a moment
from Angelica, and when he looked again the latter had disappeared. She
had discovered that it was possible to creep from pew to pew beneath the
seats, and had started to explore the church. On her way, however, she
observed a pair of stout legs belonging to a respectable elderly woman who
was too deep in her devotion to be aware of the intruder, and, being
somewhat astonished by their size, she proceeded to test their quality
with a pin, the consequence being an appalling shriek from the woman,
which started a shrill treble cry from herself. The service was suspended,
and Mr. Hamilton-Wells, the most precise of men, hastened down the aisle,
and fished his daughter out, an awful spectacle of dust, from under the
seat, incontinently.

When Mr. and Lady Adeline Hamilton-Wells went from home for any length of
time they were obliged to take their children with them, as servants who
knew the latter would rather leave than be left in charge of them, and
this was how it happened that Evadne made their acquaintance at an early
age.

It was during their first visit to Fraylingay, while they were still quite
tiny, and she was hardly in her teens, that the event referred to in
illustration of one of Evadne's characteristics occurred.

The twins had arrived late in the afternoon, and were taken into the
dining room, where the table was already decorated for dinner. It
evidently attracted a good deal of their attention, but they said nothing.
At dessert, however, to which Evadne had come down with the elder
children, the dining room door was seen to open with portentous slowness,
and there appeared in the aperture two little figures in long nightgowns,
their forefingers in their mouths, their inquisitive noses tilted in the
air, and their bright eyes round with astonishment. It was like the middle
of the night to them, and they had expected to find the room empty.

"Oh, you naughty children!" Lady Adeline exclaimed.

"The _darlings!_" cried Mrs. Frayling, Evadne's mother. "_Do_
let them come in," and she picked up Angelica, and held her on her knee,
one of the other ladies at the opposite end of the long table taking
Diavolo up at the same time. But the moment the children found themselves
on a level with the table they made a dart for the centre piece
simultaneously on their hands and knees, regardless of the smash of
dessert plates, decanters, wineglasses, and fruit dishes, which they upset
by the way.

"It _is!_" shrieked Angelica, thumping the flat mirror which was part
of the table decorations triumphantly.

"It is _what?_" cried Lady Adeline, endeavoring to reach the child.

"It's looking-glass, mamma. Diavolo said it was water."

There was much amusement at the words, and at the quaint spectacle of the
two little creatures sitting amid the wreckage in the middle of the table
not a bit abashed by the novelty of their conspicuous position. Only
Evadne, who was standing behind her mother's chair, remained grave. She
seemed to be considering the situation severely, and, acting on her own
responsibility, she picked Diavolo up in the midst of the general
hilarity, and carried him out of the room with her hand pressed tight on
his thigh. The child had come down armed with an open penknife, with which
to defend Angelica should they encounter any ogres or giants on the
stairs, and in scrambling up the table he had managed to strike himself in
the thigh with it, and had severed the femoral artery; but, with the
curious shame which makes some children dislike to own that they are hurt,
he had contrived to conceal the accident for a moment with his nightgown
under cover of the flowers, and it was only Evadne's observant eye and
presence of mind that had saved his life. No one in the house could make a
tourniquet, and she sat with the child on her knee while a doctor was
being fetched, keeping him quiet as by a miracle, and, stopping the
hemorrhage with the pressure of her thumb, not even his parents daring to
relieve her, since Diavolo had never been known to be still so long in his
life with anybody else. She held him till the operation of tying the
artery was safely accomplished, by which time Mr. Diavolo was sufficiently
exhausted to be good and go to sleep; and then she quietly fainted. But
she was about again in time to catch him when he woke, and keep him quiet,
and so by unwearied watching she prevented accidents until all danger was
over.

Diavolo afterward heard his parents praise her in unmeasured terms to
_her_ parents one day in her absence. She happened to return while
they were still in the room, and, being doubtless wide awake to the
advantages of such a connection, he took the opportunity of promising
solemnly, in the presence of such respectable witnesses, to marry her as
soon as he was able.

She had added the word "tourniquet" to her vocabulary during this time,
and having looked it up in the dictionary, she requested the doctor to be
so good as to teach her to make one. While doing so the doctor became
interested in his silent, intelligent pupil, and it ended in his teaching
her all that a young lady could learn of bandaging, of antidotes to
poisons, of what to do in case of many possible accidents, and also of
nursing, theoretically.

But this was not a solitary instance of the quiet power of the girl which
already compelled even elderly gentlemen much overworked and
self-absorbed, to sacrifice themselves in her service.

CHAPTER III.

It is a notable thing that in almost every instance it was her father's
influence which forced Evadne to draw conclusions in regard to life quite
unlike any of his own, and very distasteful to him. He was the most
conservative of men, and yet he was continually setting her mind off at a
tangent in search of premises upon which to found ultra-liberal
conclusions.

His primitive theories about women and "all that they are good for," for
one thing, which differed so materially from the facts as she observed
them every day, formed a constant mental stimulus to which her busy brain
was greatly indebted. "Women should confine their attention to
housekeeping," he remarked once when the talk about the higher education
of women first began to irritate elderly gentlemen. "It is all they are
fit for."

"Is it?" said Evadne.

"Yes. And they don't know arithmetic enough to do that properly."

"Don't they? why?" she asked.

"Because they have no brains," he answered.

"But some women have been clever," she ventured seriously.

"Yes, of course; exceptional women. But you can't argue from exceptional
women."

"Then ordinary women have no brains, and cannot learn arithmetic?" she
concluded.

"Precisely," he answered irritably. Such signs of intelligence always did
irritate him, somehow.

Evadne found food for reflection in these remarks. She had done a certain
amount of arithmetic herself in the schoolroom, and had never found it
difficult, but then she had not gone far enough, perhaps. And she went at
once to get a Colenso or a Barnard Smith to see. She found them more
fascinating when she attacked them of her own free will and with all her
intelligence than she had done when necessity, in the shape of her
governess, forced her to pay them some attention, and she went through
them both in a few weeks at odd times, and then asked her father's advice
about a book on advanced mathematics.

"Advanced mathematics!" he exclaimed. "Can you keep accounts?"

"I don't know," she answered doubtfully.

"Then what is this nonsense about advanced mathematics?"

"Oh, I have finished Barnard Smith, and I thought I should like to go on,"
she explained.

"Now, isn't that like your sex?" he observed, smiling at his own
superiority. "You pick things up with a parrot-like sharpness, but haven't
intelligence enough to make any practical application of them. A woman
closely resembles a parrot in her mental processes, and in the use she
makes of fine phrases which she does not understand to produce an effect
of cleverness--such as 'advanced mathematics!'"

Evadne bent her brow, and let him ruminate a little in infinite
self-content, then asked abruptly: "Can men keep accounts who have never
seen accounts kept?"

"No, of course not," he answered, seeing in this a new instance of
feminine imbecility, and laughing.

"Ah," she observed, then added thoughtfully as she moved away: "I should
like to see how accounts are kept."

She never had any more conversation with her father upon this subject, but
from that time forward mathematics, which had before been only an incident
in the way of lessons, became an interest in life, and a solid part of her
education. But, although she found she could do arithmetic without any
great difficulty, it never occurred to her either that her father could be
wrong or that there might be in herself the making of an exceptional
woman. The habit of love and respect kept her attention from any point
which would have led to a judgment upon her father, and she was too
unconscious of herself as a separate unit to make personal application of
anything as yet. Her mind at this time, like the hold of a ship with a
general cargo, was merely being stored with the raw materials which were
to be distributed over her whole life, and turned by degrees to many
purposes, useful, beautiful--not impossibly detestable.

But that remark of her father's about "all that women are fit for," which
he kept well watered from time to time with other conventional expressions
of a contemptuous kind, was undoubtedly the seed of much more than a
knowledge of the higher mathematics. It was that which set her mind off on
a long and patient inquiry into the condition and capacity of women, and
made her, in the end of the nineteenth century, essentially herself. But
she did not begin her inquiry of set purpose; she was not even conscious
of the particular attention she paid to the subject. She had no foregone
conclusion to arrive at, no wish to find evidence in favour of the woman
which would prove the man wrong. Only, coming across so many sneers at the
incapacity of women, she fell insensibly into the habit of asking why. The
question to begin with was always: "Why are women such inferior beings?"
But, by degrees, as her reading extended, it changed its form, and then
she asked herself doubtfully: "Are women such inferior beings?" a position
which carried her in front of her father at once by a hundred years, and
led her rapidly on to the final conclusion that women had originally no
congenital defect of inferiority, and that, although they have still much
way to make up, it now rests with themselves to be inferior or not, as
they choose.

She had an industrious habit of writing what she thought about the works
she studied, and there is an interesting record still in existence of her
course of reading between the ages of twelve and nineteen. It consists of
one thick volume, on the title page of which she had written roundly, but
without a flourish, "Commonplace Book," and the date. The first entries
are made in a careful, unformed, childish hand, and with diffidence
evidently; but they became rapidly decided both in caligraphy and tone as
she advanced. The handwriting is small and cramped, but the latter
probably with a view to economy of space, and it is always clear and neat.
There are few erasures or mistakes of grammar or spelling, even from the
first, and little tautology; but she makes no attempt at literary style or
elegance of expression. Still, all that she says is impressive, and
probably on that account. She chooses the words best calculated to express
her meaning clearly and concisely, and undoubtedly her meaning is always
either a settled conviction or an honest endeavour to arrive at one. It is
the honesty, in fact, that is so impressive. She never thinks of trying to
shine in the composition of words; there was no idea of budding authorship
in her mind; she had no more consciousness of purpose in her writing than
she had in her pinging, when she sang about the place. The one was as
involuntary as the other, and the outcome of similar sensations. It
pleased her to write, and it pleased her to sing, and she did both when
the impulse came upon her. She must, however, have had considerable
natural facility of expression. Writing seems always to have been her best
mode of communication. She was shy from the first in conversation, but
bold to a fault with her pen. Some of the criticisms she wrote in her
"Commonplace Book" are quite exhaustive; most of them are temperate,
although she does give way occasionally to bursts of fiery indignation at
things which outrage her sense of justice; but the general characteristic
is a marked originality, not only in her point of view, but also in the
use she makes of quite unpromising materials. In fact, the most notable
part of the record is the proof it contains that all the arguments upon
which she formed her opinions were found in the enemy's works alone. She
had drawn her own conclusions; but after having done so, as it happened,
she had the satisfaction of finding confirmation strong in John Stuart
Mill on "The Subjection of Women," which she came across by accident--an
accident, by the way, for which Lady Adeline Hamilton-Wells was
responsible. She brought the book to Fraylingay, and forgot it when she
went home, and Evadne, happening to find it throwing about, took charge of
it, read it with avidity, and found for herself a world of thought in
which she could breathe freely.