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TITLE: WEIGHED AND WANTING
AUTHOR: GEORGE MACDONALD
EBOOK: E07057 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

[Illustration: Hester at her piano.]

WEIGHED AND WANTING

BY GEORGE MACDONALD

CONTENTS.

      I. Bad Weather

     II. Father, Mother and Son

    III. The Magic Lantern

     IV. Hester alone

      V. Truly the Light is sweet

     VI. The Aquarium

    VII. Amy Amber

   VIII. Cornelius and Vavasor

     IX. Songs and Singers

      X. Hester and Amy

     XI. At Home

    XII. A Beginning

   XIII. A private Exhibition

    XIV. Vavasor and Hester

     XV. A small Failure

    XVI. The Concert Room

   XVII. An uninvited Guest

  XVIII. Catastrophe

    XIX. Light and Shade

     XX. The Journey

    XXI. Mother and Daughter

   XXII. Gladness

  XXIII. Down the Hill

   XXIV. Out of the Frying pan

    XXV. Was it into the Fire?

   XXVI. Waiting a Purpose

  XXVII. Major H. G. Marvel

 XXVIII. The Major and Vavasor

   XXIX. A brave Act

    XXX. In another Light

   XXXI. The Major and Cousin Helen's Boys

  XXXII. A distinguished Guest

 XXXIII. Courtship in earnest

  XXXIV. Calamity

   XXXV. In London

  XXXVI. A Talk with the Major

 XXXVII. Rencontres

XXXVIII. In the House

  XXXIX. The Major and the Small-pox

     XL. Down and down

    XLI. Difference

   XLII. Deep calleth unto Deep

  XLIII. Deliverance

   XLIV. On the Way up

    XLV. More yet

   XLVI. Amy and Corney

  XLVII. Miss Vavasor

 XLVIII. Mr. Christopher

   XLIX. An Arrangement

      L. Things at Home

     LI. The Return

    LII. A heavenly Vision

   LIII. A sad Beginning

    LIV. Mother and Son

     LV. Miss Dasomma and Amy

    LVI. The sick Room

   LVII. Vengeance is Mine

  LVIII. Father and Daughter-in-law

    LIX. The Message

     LX. A birthday Gift

CHAPTER I.

BAD WEATHER.

It was a gray, windy noon in the beginning of autumn. The sky and the
sea were almost of the same color, and that not a beautiful one. The
edge of the horizon where they met was an edge no more, but a bar thick
and blurred, across which from the unseen came troops of waves that
broke into white crests, the flying manes of speed, as they rushed at,
rather than ran towards the shore: in their eagerness came out once more
the old enmity between moist and dry. The trees and the smoke were
greatly troubled, the former because they would fain stand still, the
latter because it would fain ascend, while the wind kept tossing the
former and beating down the latter. Not one of the hundreds of fishing
boats belonging to the coast was to be seen; not a sail even was
visible; not the smoke of a solitary steamer ploughing its own miserable
path through the rain-fog to London or Aberdeen. It was sad weather and
depressing to not a few of the thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a
holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the
labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter,
while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful
vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a
day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was
every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains,
seemed a huge bite snatched by that vague enemy against whom the
grumbling of the world is continually directed out of the cake that by
every right and reason belonged to them. For were they not born to be
happy, and how was human being to fulfill his destiny in such
circumstances?

There are men and women who can be happy in any--even in such
circumstances and worse, but they are rare, and not a little better
worth knowing than the common class of mortals--alas that they
_will_ be common! _content_ to be common they are not and cannot
be. Among these exceptional mortals I do not count such as, having
secured the corner of a couch within the radius of a good fire,
forget the world around them by help of the magic lantern of a novel
that interests them: such may not be in the least worth knowing for
their disposition or moral attainment--not even although the noise of
the waves on the sands, or the storm in the chimney, or the rain on the
windows but serves to deepen the calm of their spirits. Take the novel
away, give the fire a black heart; let the smells born in a
lodging-house kitchen invade the sitting-room, and the person, man or
woman, who can then, on such a day, be patient with a patience pleasant
to other people, is, I repeat, one worth knowing--and such there are,
though not many. Mrs. Raymount, half the head and more than half the
heart of a certain family in a certain lodging house in the forefront of
Burcliff, was one of such.

It was not a large family, yet contained perhaps as many varieties of
character and temper as some larger ones, with as many several ways of
fronting such a misfortune--for that is what poor creatures, the slaves
of the elements, count it--as rainy weather in a season concerning which
all men agree that it ought to be fine, and that something is out of
order, giving ground of complaint, if it be not fine. The father met it
with tolerably good humor; but he was so busy writing a paper for one of
the monthly reviews, that he would have kept the house had the day been
as fine as both the church going visitors, and the mammon-worshipping
residents with income depending on the reputation of their weather,
would have made it if they could, nor once said _by your leave_;
therefore he had no credit, and his temper must pass as not proven. But
if you had taken from the mother her piece of work--she was busy
embroidering a lady's pinafore in a design for which she had taken
colors and arrangement from a peacock's feather, but was disposing them
in the form of a sun which with its rays covered the stomacher, the
deeper tints making the shadow between the golden arrows--had you taken
from her this piece of work, I say, and given her nothing to do instead,
she would yet have looked and been as peaceful as she now looked, for

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