Шарлотта Бронте
Shirley
Cradled at last in blissful self-complacency, she took her knitting, and sat down tranquil. Drawn curtains, a clear fire, a softly-shining lamp, gave now to the little parlour its best, its evening charm. It is probable that the three there present felt this charm. They all looked happy.
“What shall we do now, Caroline?” asked Mr. Moore, returning to his seat beside his cousin.
“What shall we do, Robert?” repeated she playfully. “You decide.”
“Not play at chess?”
“No.”
“Nor draughts, nor backgammon?”
“No, no; we both hate silent games that only keep one’s hands employed, don’t we?”
“I believe we do. Then shall we talk scandal?”
“About whom? Are we sufficiently interested in anybody to take a pleasure in pulling their character to pieces?”
“A question that comes to the point. For my part, unamiable as it sounds, I must say no.”
“And I too. But it is strange, though we want no third – fourth, I mean (she hastily and with contrition glanced at Hortense), living person among us – so selfish we are in our happiness – though we don’t want to think of the present existing world, it would be pleasant to go back to the past, to hear people that have slept for generations in graves that are perhaps no longer graves now, but gardens and fields, speak to us and tell us their thoughts, and impart their ideas.”
“Who shall be the speaker? What language shall he utter? French?”
“Your French forefathers don’t speak so sweetly, nor so solemnly, nor so impressively as your English ancestors, Robert. Tonight you shall be entirely English. You shall read an English book.”
“An old English book?”
“Yes, an old English book – one that you like; and I will choose a part of it that is toned quite in harmony with something in you. It shall waken your nature, fill your mind with music; it shall pass like a skilful hand over your heart, and make its strings sound. Your heart is a lyre, Robert; but the lot of your life has not been a minstrel to sweep it, and it is often silent. Let glorious William come near and touch it. You will see how he will draw the English power and melody out of its chords.”
“I must read Shakespeare?”
“You must have his spirit before you; you must hear his voice with your mind’s ear; you must take some of his soul into yours.”
“With a view to making me better? Is it to operate like a sermon?”
“It is to stir you, to give you new sensations. It is to make you feel your life strongly – not only your virtues, but your vicious, perverse points.”
“Dieu! que dit-elle?” cried Hortense, who hitherto had been counting stitches in her knitting, and had not much attended to what was said, but whose ear these two strong words caught with a tweak.
“Never mind her, sister; let her talk. Now just let her say anything she pleases tonight. She likes to come down hard upon your brother sometimes. It amuses me, so let her alone.”
Caroline, who, mounted on a chair, had been rummaging the bookcase, returned with a book.
“Here’s Shakespeare,” she said, “and there’s Coriolanus. Now, read, and discover by the feelings the reading will give you at once how low and how high you are.”
“Come, then, sit near me, and correct when I mispronounce.”
“I am to be the teacher then, and you my pupil?”
“Ainsi, soit-il!”
“And Shakespeare is our science, since we are going to study?”
“It appears so.”
“And you are not going to be French, and sceptical, and sneering? You are not going to think it a sign of wisdom to refuse to admire?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you do, Robert, I’ll take Shakespeare away; and I’ll shrivel up within myself, and put on my bonnet and go home.”
“Sit down. Here I begin.”
“One minute, if you please, brother,” interrupted mademoiselle. “When the gentleman of a family reads, the ladies should always sew. – Caroline, dear child, take your embroidery. You may get three sprigs done tonight.”
Caroline looked dismayed. “I can’t see by lamplight; my eyes are tired, and I can’t do two things well at once. If I sew, I cannot listen; if I listen, I cannot sew.”
“Fi, donc! Quel enfantillage!” began Hortense. Mr. Moore, as usual, suavely interposed.
“Permit her to neglect the embroidery for this evening. I wish her whole attention to be fixed on my accent; and to ensure this, she must follow the reading with her eyes – she must look at the book.”
He placed it between them, reposed his arm on the back of Caroline’s chair, and thus began to read.
The very first scene in Coriolanus came with smart relish to his intellectual palate, and still as he read he warmed. He delivered the haughty speech of Caius Marcius to the starving citizens with unction; he did not say he thought his irrational pride right, but he seemed to feel it so. Caroline looked up at him with a singular smile.
“There’s a vicious point hit already,” she said. “You sympathize with that proud patrician who does not sympathize with his famished fellow-men, and insults them. There, go on.” He proceeded. The warlike portions did not rouse him much; he said all that was out of date, or should be; the spirit displayed was barbarous; yet the encounter single-handed between Marcius and Tullus Aufidius he delighted in. As he advanced, he forgot to criticise; it was evident he appreciated the power, the truth of each portion; and, stepping out of the narrow line of private prejudices, began to revel in the large picture of human nature, to feel the reality stamped upon the characters who were speaking from that page before him.
He did not read the comic scenes well; and Caroline, taking the book out of his hand, read these parts for him. From her he seemed to enjoy them, and indeed she gave them with a spirit no one could have expected of her, with a pithy expression with which she seemed gifted on the spot, and for that brief moment only. It may be remarked, in passing, that the general character of her conversation that evening, whether serious or sprightly, grave or gay, was as of something untaught, unstudied, intuitive, fitful – when once gone, no more to be reproduced as it had been than the glancing ray of the meteor, than the tints of the dew-gem, than the colour or form of the sunset cloud, than the fleeting and glittering ripple varying the flow of a rivulet.
Coriolanus in glory, Coriolanus in disaster, Coriolanus banished, followed like giant shades one after the other. Before the vision of the banished man Moore’s spirit seemed to pause. He stood on the hearth of Aufidius’s hall, facing the image of greatness fallen, but greater than ever in that low estate. He saw “the grim appearance,” the dark face “bearing command in it,” “the noble vessel with its tackle torn.” With the revenge of Caius Marcius, Moore perfectly sympathized; he was not scandalized by it; and again Caroline whispered, “There I see another glimpse of brotherhood in error.”
The march on Rome, the mother’s supplication, the long resistance, the final yielding of bad passions to good, whichever must be the case in a nature worthy the epithet of noble, the rage of Aufidius at what he considered his ally’s weakness, the death of Coriolanus, the final sorrow of his great enemy – all scenes made of condensed truth and strength – came on in succession and carried with them in their deep, fast flow the heart and mind of reader and listener.
“Now, have you felt Shakespeare?” asked Caroline, some ten minutes after her cousin had closed the book.
“I think so.”
“And have you felt anything in Coriolanus like you?”
“Perhaps I have.”
“Was he not faulty as well as great?”
Moore nodded.
“And what was his fault? What made him hated by the citizens? What caused him to be banished by his countrymen?”
“What do you think it was?”
“I ask again
Whether was it pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man? whether defect of judgment,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which he was lord of? or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From the casque to the cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war?”
“Well, answer yourself, Sphinx.”
“It was a spice of all; and you must not be proud to your workpeople; you must not neglect chances of soothing them; and you must not be of an inflexible nature, uttering a request as austerely as if it were a command.”
“That is the moral you tack to the play. What puts such notions into your head?”
“A wish for your good, a care for your safety, dear Robert, and a fear, caused by many things which I have heard lately, that you will come to harm.”
“Who tells you these things?”
“I hear my uncle talk about you. He praises your hard spirit, your determined cast of mind, your scorn of low enemies, your resolution not ‘to truckle to the mob,’ as he says.”
“And would you have me truckle to them?”
“No, not for the world. I never wish you to lower yourself; but somehow I cannot help thinking it unjust to include all poor working people under the general and insulting name of ‘the mob,’ and continually to think of them and treat them haughtily.”
“You are a little democrat, Caroline. If your uncle knew, what would he say?”
“I rarely talk to my uncle, as you know, and never about such things. He thinks everything but sewing and cooking above women’s comprehension, and out of their line.”
“And do you fancy you comprehend the subjects on which you advise me?”
“As far as they concern you, I comprehend them. I know it would be better for you to be loved by your workpeople than to be hated by them, and I am sure that kindness is more likely to win their regard than pride. If you were proud and cold to me and Hortense, should we love you? When you are cold to me, as you are sometimes, can I venture to be affectionate in return?”
“Now, Lina, I’ve had my lesson both in languages and ethics, with a touch on politics; it is your turn. Hortense tells me you were much taken by a little piece of poetry you learned the other day, a piece by poor André Chénier—‘La Jeune Captive.’ Do you remember it still?”
“I think so.”
“Repeat it, then. Take your time and mind your accent; especially let us have no English u’s.”
Caroline, beginning in a low, rather tremulous voice, but gaining courage as she proceeded, repeated the sweet verses of Chénier. The last three stanzas she rehearsed well.
“Mon beau voyage encore est si loin de sa fin!
Je pars, et des ormeaux qui bordent le chemin
J’ai passé le premiers à peine.
Au banquet de la vie à peine commencé,
Un instant seulement mes lèvres ont pressé
La coupe en mes mains encore pleine.”
“Je ne suis qu’au printemps – je veux voir la moisson;
Et comme le soleil, de saison en saison,
Je veux achever mon année,
Brillante sur ma tige, et l’honneur du jardin
Je n’ai vu luire encore que les feux du matin,
Je veux achever ma journée!”
Moore listened at first with his eyes cast down, but soon he furtively raised them. Leaning back in his chair he could watch Caroline without her perceiving where his gaze was fixed. Her cheek had a colour, her eyes a light, her countenance an expression this evening which would have made even plain features striking; but there was not the grievous defect of plainness to pardon in her case. The sunshine was not shed on rough barrenness; it fell on soft bloom. Each lineament was turned with grace; the whole aspect was pleasing. At the present moment – animated, interested, touched – she might be called beautiful. Such a face was calculated to awaken not only the calm sentiment of esteem, the distant one of admiration, but some feeling more tender, genial, intimate – friendship, perhaps, affection, interest. When she had finished, she turned to Moore, and met his eye.
“Is that pretty well repeated?” she inquired, smiling like any happy, docile child.
“I really don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? Have you not listened?”
“Yes – and looked. You are fond of poetry, Lina?”
“When I meet with real poetry, I cannot rest till I have learned it by heart, and so made it partly mine.”
Mr. Moore now sat silent for several minutes. It struck nine o’clock. Sarah entered, and said that Mr. Helstone’s servant was come for Miss Caroline.
“Then the evening is gone already,” she observed, “and it will be long, I suppose, before I pass another here.”
Hortense had been for some time nodding over her knitting; fallen into a doze now, she made no response to the remark.
“You would have no objection to come here oftener of an evening?” inquired Robert, as he took her folded mantle from the side table, where it still lay, and carefully wrapped it round her.
“I like to come here; but I have no desire to be intrusive. I am not hinting to be asked; you must understand that.”
“Oh! I understand thee, child. You sometimes lecture me for wishing to be rich, Lina; but if I were rich, you should live here always – at any rate, you should live with me wherever my habitation might be.”
“That would be pleasant; and if you were poor – ever so poor – it would still be pleasant. Good night, Robert.”
“I promised to walk with you up to the rectory.”
“I know you did; but I thought you had forgotten, and I hardly knew how to remind you, though I wished to do it. But would you like to go? It is a cold night, and as Fanny is come, there is no necessity”
“Here is your muff; don’t wake Hortense – come.”
The half mile to the rectory was soon traversed. They parted in the garden without kiss, scarcely with a pressure of hands; yet Robert sent his cousin in excited and joyously troubled. He had been singularly kind to her that day – not in phrase, compliment, profession, but in manner, in look, and in soft and friendly tones.
For himself, he came home grave, almost morose. As he stood leaning on his own yard-gate, musing in the watery moonlight all alone, the hushed, dark mill before him, the hill-environed hollow round, he exclaimed, abruptly;
“This won’t do! There’s weakness – there’s downright ruin in all this. However,” he added, dropping his voice, “the frenzy is quite temporary. I know it very well; I have had it before. It will be gone tomorrow.”
Chapter VII
The Curates at Tea
Caroline Helstone was just eighteen years old, and at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to be commenced. Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvellous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dream-scenes; darker woods and stranger hills, brighter skies, more dangerous waters, sweeter flowers, more tempting fruits, wider plains, drearier deserts, sunnier fields than are found in nature, overspread our enchanted globe. What a moon we gaze on before that time! How the trembling of our hearts at her aspect bears witness to its unutterable beauty! As to our sun, it is a burning heaven – the world of gods.
At that time, at eighteen, drawing near the confines of illusive, void dreams, Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of Reality rise in front. These shores are yet distant; they look so blue, soft, gentle, we long to reach them. In sunshine we see a greenness beneath the azure, as of spring meadows; we catch glimpses of silver lines, and imagine the roll of living waters. Could we but reach this land, we think to hunger and thirst no more; whereas many a wilderness, and often the flood of death, or some stream of sorrow as cold and almost as black as death, is to be crossed ere true bliss can be tasted. Every joy that life gives must be earned ere it is secured; and how hardly earned, those only know who have wrestled for great prizes. The heart’s blood must gem with red beads the brow of the combatant, before the wreath of victory rustles over it.
At eighteen we are not aware of this. Hope, when she smiles on us, and promises happiness tomorrow, is implicitly believed; Love, when he comes wandering like a lost angel to our door, is at once admitted, welcomed, embraced. His quiver is not seen; if his arrows penetrate, their wound is like a thrill of new life. There are no fears of poison, none of the barb which no leech’s hand can extract. That perilous passion – an agony ever in some of its phases; with many, an agony throughout – is believed to be an unqualified good. In short, at eighteen the school of experience is to be entered, and her humbling, crushing, grinding, but yet purifying and invigorating lessons are yet to be learned.
Alas, Experience! No other mentor has so wasted and frozen a face as yours, none wears a robe so black, none bears a rod so heavy, none with hand so inexorable draws the novice so sternly to his task, and forces him with authority so resistless to its acquirement. It is by your instructions alone that man or woman can ever find a safe track through life’s wilds; without it, how they stumble, how they stray! On what forbidden grounds do they intrude, down what dread declivities are they hurled!
Caroline, having been convoyed home by Robert, had no wish to pass what remained of the evening with her uncle. The room in which he sat was very sacred ground to her; she seldom intruded on it; and tonight she kept aloof till the bell rang for prayers. Part of the evening church service was the form of worship observed in Mr. Helstone’s household. He read it in his usual nasal voice, clear, loud, and monotonous. The rite over, his niece, according to her wont, stepped up to him.
“Good night, uncle.”
“Hey! You’ve been gadding abroad all day – visiting, dining out, and what not!”
“Only at the cottage.”
“And have you learned your lessons?”
“Yes.”
“And made a shirt?”
“Only part of one.”
“Well, that will do. Stick to the needle, learn shirt-making and gown-making and piecrust-making, and you’ll be a clever woman someday. Go to bed now. I’m busy with a pamphlet here.”
Presently the niece was enclosed in her small bedroom, the door bolted, her white dressing gown assumed, her long hair loosened and falling thick, soft, and wavy to her waist; and as, resting from the task of combing it out, she leaned her check on her hand and fixed her eyes on the carpet, before her rose, and close around her drew, the visions we see at eighteen years.
Her thoughts were speaking with her, speaking pleasantly, as it seemed, for she smiled as she listened. She looked pretty meditating thus; but a brighter thing than she was in that apartment – the spirit of youthful Hope. According to this flattering prophet, she was to know disappointment, to feel chill no more; she had entered on the dawn of a summer day – no false dawn, but the true spring of morning – and her sun would quickly rise. Impossible for her now to suspect that she was the sport of delusion; her expectations seemed warranted, the foundation on which they rested appeared solid.
“When people love, the next step is they marry,” was her argument. “Now, I love Robert, and I feel sure that Robert loves me. I have thought so many a time before; today I felt it. When I looked up at him after repeating Chénier’s poem, his eyes (what handsome eyes he has!) sent the truth through my heart. Sometimes I am afraid to speak to him, lest I should be too frank, lest I should seem forward – for I have more than once regretted bitterly overflowing, superfluous words, and feared I had said more than he expected me to say, and that he would disapprove what he might deem my indiscretion; now, tonight I could have ventured to express any thought, he was so indulgent. How kind he was as we walked up the lane! He does not flatter or say foolish things; his love-making (friendship, I mean; of course I don’t yet account him my lover, but I hope he will be so some day) is not like what we read of in books, – it is far better – original, quiet, manly, sincere. I do like him; I would be an excellent wife to him if he did marry me; I would tell him of his faults (for he has a few faults), but I would study his comfort, and cherish him, and do my best to make him happy. Now, I am sure he will not be cold tomorrow. I feel almost certain that tomorrow evening he will either come here, or ask me to go there.”
She recommenced combing her hair, long as a mermaid’s. Turning her head as she arranged it she saw her own face and form in the glass. Such reflections are soberizing to plain people: their own eyes are not enchanted with the image; they are confident then that the eyes of others can see in it no fascination. But the fair must naturally draw other conclusions: the picture is charming, and must charm. Caroline saw a shape, a head, that, daguerreotyped in that attitude and with that expression, would have been lovely. She could not choose but derive from the spectacle confirmation to her hopes. It was then in undiminished gladness she sought her couch.
And in undiminished gladness she rose the next day. As she entered her uncle’s breakfast-room, and with soft cheerfulness wished him good morning, even that little man of bronze himself thought, for an instant, his niece was growing “a fine girl.” Generally she was quiet and timid with him – very docile, but not communicative; this morning, however, she found many things to say. Slight topics alone might be discussed between them; for with a woman – a girl – Mr. Helstone would touch on no other. She had taken an early walk in the garden, and she told him what flowers were beginning to spring there; she inquired when the gardener was to come and trim the borders; she informed him that certain starlings were beginning to build their nests in the church tower (Briarfield church was close to Briarfield rectory); she wondered the tolling of the bells in the belfry did not scare them.
Mr. Helstone opined that “they were like other fools who had just paired – insensible to inconvenience just for the moment.” Caroline, made perhaps a little too courageous by her temporary good spirits, here hazarded a remark of a kind she had never before ventured to make on observations dropped by her revered relative.
“Uncle,” said she, “whenever you speak of marriage you speak of it scornfully. Do you think people shouldn’t marry?”
“It is decidedly the wisest plan to remain single, especially for women.”
“Are all marriages unhappy?”
“Millions of marriages are unhappy. If everybody confessed the truth, perhaps all are more or less so.”
“You are always vexed when you are asked to come and marry a couple. Why?”
“Because one does not like to act as accessory to the commission of a piece of pure folly.”
Mr. Helstone spoke so readily, he seemed rather glad of the opportunity to give his niece a piece of his mind on this point. Emboldened by the impunity which had hitherto attended her questions, she went a little further.
“But why,” said she, “should it be pure folly? If two people like each other, why shouldn’t they consent to live together?”
“They tire of each other – they tire of each other in a month. A yokefellow is not a companion; he or she is a fellow sufferer.”
It was by no means naïve simplicity which inspired Caroline’s next remark; it was a sense of antipathy to such opinions, and of displeasure at him who held them.
“One would think you had never been married, uncle. One would think you were an old bachelor.”
“Practically, I am so.”
“But you have been married. Why were you so inconsistent as to marry?”
“Every man is mad once or twice in his life.”
“So you tired of my aunt, and my aunt of you, and you were miserable together?”
Mr. Helstone pushed out his cynical lip, wrinkled his brown forehead, and gave an inarticulate grunt.
“Did she not suit you? Was she not good-tempered? Did you not get used to her? Were you not sorry when she died?”
“Caroline,” said Mr. Helstone, bringing his hand slowly down to within an inch or two of the table, and then smiting it suddenly on the mahogany, “understand this: it is vulgar and puerile to confound generals with particulars. In every case there is the rule and there are the exceptions. Your questions are stupid and babyish. Ring the bell, if you have done breakfast.”
The breakfast was taken away, and that meal over, it was the general custom of uncle and niece to separate, and not to meet again till dinner; but today the niece, instead of quitting the room, went to the window-seat, and sat down there. Mr. Helstone looked round uneasily once or twice, as if he wished her away; but she was gazing from the window, and did not seem to mind him: so he continued the perusal of his morning paper – a particularly interesting one it chanced to be, as new movements had just taken place in the Peninsula, and certain columns of the journal were rich in long dispatches from General Lord Wellington. He little knew, meantime, what thoughts were busy in his niece’s mind – thoughts the conversation of the past half-hour had revived but not generated; tumultuous were they now, as disturbed bees in a hive, but it was years since they had first made their cells in her brain.
She was reviewing his character, his disposition, repeating his sentiments on marriage. Many a time had she reviewed them before, and sounded the gulf between her own mind and his; and then, on the other side of the wide and deep chasm, she had seen, and she now saw, another figure standing beside her uncle’s – a strange shape, dim, sinister, scarcely earthly – the half-remembered image of her own father, James Helstone, Matthewson Helstone’s brother.
Rumours had reached her ear of what that father’s character was; old servants had dropped hints; she knew, too, that he was not a good man, and that he was never kind to her. She recollected – a dark recollection it was – some weeks that she had spent with him in a great town somewhere, when she had had no maid to dress her or take care of her; when she had been shut up, day and night, in a high garret room, without a carpet, with a bare uncurtained bed, and scarcely any other furniture; when he went out early every morning, and often forgot to return and give her her dinner during the day, and at night, when he came back, was like a madman, furious, terrible, or – still more painful – like an idiot, imbecile, senseless. She knew she had fallen ill in this place, and that one night, when she was very sick he had come raving into the room, and said he would kill her, for she was a burden to him. Her screams had brought aid; and from the moment she was then rescued from him she had never seen him, except as a dead man in his coffin.
That was her father. Also she had a mother, though Mr. Helstone never spoke to her of that mother, though she could not remember having seen her; but that she was alive she knew. This mother was then the drunkard’s wife. What had their marriage been? Caroline, turning from the lattice, whence she had been watching the starlings (though without seeing them), in a low voice, and with a sad, bitter tone, thus broke the silence of the room;
“You term marriage miserable, I suppose, from what you saw of my father and mother’s. If my mother suffered what I suffered when I was with papa, she must have had a dreadful life.”
Mr. Helstone, thus addressed, wheeled about in his chair, and looked over his spectacles at his niece. He was taken aback.
Her father and mother! What had put it into her head to mention her father and mother, of whom he had never, during the twelve years she had lived with him, spoken to her? That the thoughts were self-matured, that she had any recollections or speculations about her parents, he could not fancy.
“Your father and mother? Who has been talking to you about them?”
“Nobody; but I remember something of what papa was, and I pity mamma. Where is she?”
This “Where is she?” had been on Caroline’s lips hundreds of times before, but till now she had never uttered it.
“I hardly know,” returned Mr. Helstone; “I was little acquainted with her. I have not heard from her for years: but wherever she is, she thinks nothing of you; she never inquires about you. I have reason to believe she does not wish to see you. Come, it is school-time. You go to your cousin at ten, don’t you? The clock has struck.”
Perhaps Caroline would have said more; but Fanny, coming in, informed her master that the churchwardens wanted to speak to him in the vestry. He hastened to join them, and his niece presently set out for the cottage.
The road from the rectory to Hollow’s Mill inclined downwards; she ran, therefore, almost all the way. Exercise, the fresh air, the thought of seeing Robert, at least of being on his premises, in his vicinage, revived her somewhat depressed spirits quickly. Arriving in sight of the white house, and within hearing of the thundering mill and its rushing watercourse, the first thing she saw was Moore at his garden gate. There he stood, in his belted Holland blouse, a light cap covering his head, which undress costume suited him. He was looking down the lane, not in the direction of his cousin’s approach. She stopped, withdrawing a little behind a willow, and studied his appearance.
“He has not his peer,” she thought. “He is as handsome as he is intelligent. What a keen eye he has! What clearly-cut, spirited features – thin and serious, but graceful! I do like his face, I do like his aspect, I do like him so much – better than any of those shuffling curates, for instance – better than anybody; bonny Robert!”
She sought “bonny Robert’s” presence speedily. For his part, when she challenged his sight, I believe he would have passed from before her eyes like a phantom, if he could; but being a tall fact, and no fiction, he was obliged to stand the greeting. He made it brief. It was cousin-like, brother-like, friend-like, anything but lover-like. The nameless charm of last night had left his manner: he was no longer the same man: or, at any rate, the same heart did not beat in his breast. Rude disappointment, sharp cross! At first the eager girl would not believe in the change, though she saw and felt it. It was difficult to withdraw her hand from his, till he had bestowed at least something like a kind pressure; it was difficult to turn her eyes from his eyes, till his looks had expressed something more and fonder than that cool welcome.
