Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.
— EMERSON.
“OF course, Hester,” said Mr. Gresley, leading the way to his study and speaking in his lesson-for-the-day voice, “I don’t pretend to write”—(“They always say that,” thought Hester)—“I have not sufficient leisure to devote to the subject to ensure becoming a successful author. And even if I had I am afraid I should not be willing to sell my soul to obtain popularity, for that is what it comes to in these days. The public must be pandered to. It must be amused. The public likes smooth things, and the great truths — the only things I should care to write about — are not smooth, far from it.”
“No, indeed.”
“This little paper on ‘Dissent,’ which I propose to publish in pamphlet form after its appearance as a serial — it will run to two numbers in the Southminster Advertiser — was merely thrown off in a few days when I had influenza, and could not attend to my usual work.”
“It must be very difficult to work in illness,” said Hester, who had evidently made a vow during her brief sojourn in the garden, and was now obviously going through that process which the society of some of our fellow creatures makes as necessary as it is fatiguing — namely, that of thinking beforehand what we are going to say.
Mr. Gresley liked Hester immensely when she had freshly ironed herself flat under one of these resolutions. He was wont to say that no one was pleasanter than Hester when she was reasonable, or made more suitable remarks. He perceived with joy that she was reasonable now, and the brother and sister sat down close together at the writing-table with the printed sheets between them.
“I will read aloud,” said Mr. Gresley, “and you can follow me, and stop me if you think — er — the sense is not quite clear.”
“I see.”
The two long noses, the larger freckled one surmounted by a pince-nez, the other slightly pink as if it had absorbed the tint of the blotting-paper over which it was so continually poised, both bent over the sheets.
Through the thin wall which separated the schoolroom from the study came the sound of Mary’s scales. Mary was by nature a child of wrath, as far as music was concerned, and Fraülein — anxious, musical Fraülein — was strenuously endeavouring to impart to her pupil the rudiments of what was her chief joy in life.
“Modern Dissent,” read aloud Mr. Gresley, “by Veritas.”
“Veritas!“ repeated Hester. Astonishment jerked the word out of her before she was aware. She pulled herself hastily together.
“Certainly,” said the author, looking at his sister through his glasses, which made the pupils of his eyes look as large as the striped marbles on which Mary and Regie spent their pennies. “Veritas,” he continued, “is a Latin word signifying Truth.”
“So I fancied. But is not Truth rather a large name to adopt as a nom de guerre? Might it not seem rather — er — in a layman it would appear arrogant.”
“I am not a layman, and I do not pretend to write on subjects of which I am ignorant,” said Mr. Gresley with dignity. “This is not a work of fiction. I don’t imagine this, or fancy that, or invent the other. I merely place before the public forcibly and in a novel manner a few great truths.”
Mary was doing her finger exercises. C C C with the thumb, D D D with the first finger. Fraülein was repeating, “Won! Two! Free! Won! Two! Free!” with a new intonation of cheerful patience at each repetition.
“Ah!” said Hester. “A few great truths. Then the name must be Veritas. You would not reconsider it.”
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Gresley, his eye challenging hers. “It is the name I am known by as the author of ‘Schism.’”
“I had momentarily forgotten ‘Schism’,” said Hester dropping her glance.
“I went through a good deal of obloquy about ‘Schism,’” said Mr. Gresley with pride, “and I should not wonder if ‘Modern Dissent’ caused quite a ferment in Middleshire. If it does I am willing to bear a little spite and ill-will. All history shows that truth is met at first by opposition. Half the country clergy round here are asleep. Good men, but lax. They want waking up. I said as much to the Bishop the other day, and he agreed with me, for he said that if some of his younger clergy could be waked up to a sense of their own arrogance and narrowness he would hold a public thanksgiving in the cathedral. But he added that he thought nothing short of the last trump would do it.”
“I agree with him,” said Hester, having first said the sentence to herself, and having decided it was innocuous.
The climax of the music lesson had arrived. “The Blue Bells of Scotland”-the sole Klavier Stück which Mary’s rigidly extended little starfishes of hands could wrench out of the schoolroom piano — was at its third bar.
“Well,” said Mr. Gresley, refreshed by a cheering retrospects. “Now for ‘Modern Dissent.’”
A strenuous hour ensued.
Hester was torn in different directions, at one moment tempted to allow the most flagrant passages to pass unchallenged rather than attempt the physical impossibility of interrupting the reader only to be drawn into a dispute with him at another burning to save her brother from the consequences which wait on certain utterances.
Presently Mr. Gresley’s eloquence, after various tortuous and unnatural windings, swept in the direction of a pun, as a carriage after following the artificial curves of a deceptive approach nears a villa. Hester had seen the pun coming for half a page, as we see the villa through the trees long before we are allowed to approach it, and she longed to save her brother from what was in her eyes as much a degradation as a tu quoque. But she remembered in time that the Gresleys considered she had no sense of humour, and she decided to let it pass. Mr. Gresley enjoyed it so much himself that he hardly noticed her fixed countenance.
Why does so deep a gulf separate those who have a sense of humour and those who, having none, are compensated by the conviction that they possess it more abundantly. The crevasse seems to extend far inland to the very heights and water-sheds of character. Those who differ on humour will differ on principles. The Gresleys and the Pratts belonged to that large class of our fellow creatures, who, conscious of a genius for adding to the hilarity of our sad planet, discover an irresistible piquancy in putting a woman’s hat on a man’s head, and in that “verbal romping” which playfully designates a whisky and soda as a gargle, and says “au reservoir” instead of “au revoir.”
At last, however, Hester nervously put her hand over the next sheet, as he read the final words of the last.
“Wait a moment,” she said hurriedly. “This last page, James. Might it not be well to reconsider it? Is it politic to assume such great ignorance on the part of Nonconformists? Many I know are better educated than I am.”
“My dear,” said Mr. Gresley, “ignorance is at the root of any difference of opinion on such a subject as this. I do not say wilful ignorance, but the want of sound Church teaching. I must cut at the roots of this ignorance.”
“Dear James, it is thrice killing the slain. No one believes these fallacies which you are exposing; the Nonconformists least of all. Those I have talked with don’t hold these absurd opinions that you put down to them. You don’t even touch their real position. You are elaborately knocking down ninepins that have never stood up because they have nothing to stand on.”
“I am not proposing to play a game of mental skittles,” said the clerical author. “It is enough for me, as I said before, to cut at the roots of ignorance wherever I see it flourishing, not to pull off the leaves one by one as you would have me to do by dissecting their opinions. This may not be novel, it may not even be amusing, but nevertheless, Hester, a clergyman’s duty is to wage unceasing war against spiritual ignorance. And what,” read on Mr. Gresley, after a triumphant moment in which Hester remained silent, “is the best means of coping against ignorance, against darkness”—(“It was a root a moment ago,” thought Hester)—“but by the infusion of light? The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” Half a page more and the darkness was modern Dissent. Hester put her hand over her mouth and kept it there.
The familiar drama of a clerical bull and a red rag was played out before her eyes, and, metaphorically speaking, she followed the example of the majority of laymen, and crept up a tree to be out of the way.
When it was all over she came down trembling.
“Well! what do you think of it?” said Mr. Gresley, rising and pacing up and down the room.
“You hit very hard,” said Hester, after a moment’s consideration. She did not say “You strike home.”
“I have no opinion of being mealy mouthed,” said Mr. Gresley, who was always perfectly satisfied with a vague statement. “If you have anything worth saying say it plainly. That is my motto. Don’t hint this or that, but take your stand upon a truth and strike out.”
“Why not hold out our hands to our fellow creatures instead of striking at them?” said Hester, moving towards the door.
“I have no belief in holding out our hands to the enemies of Christ," Mr. Gresley began, who in the course of his pamphlet had thus gracefully designated the great religious bodies who did not view Christianity through the convex glasses of his own mental pince-nez. “In these days we see too much of that. I leave that to the Broad Church who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I, on the contrary —”
But Hester had vanished.
There was a dangerous glint in her grey eyes, as she ran up to her little attic.
“According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist,” she said to herself. “If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so. For once I got out of the room in time.”
Hester’s attic was blisteringly hot. It was over the kitchen, and through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly wedded to boiled cabbage. Hester had learned during the last six months all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering, of which the preparation of food — and still worse the preparation of chicken food — is capable. She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled out of the house.
She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the old gardener Abel was planting something large in the way of “runners” or “suckers,” making a separate hole for each with his thumb.
Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who passed through life bent double over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as “curly kebbidge,” or “salary,” or “sparrow-grass.”
Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was visible as he stooped over his work. Occasionally he could be induced to straighten himself, and — holding himself strongly at the hinge, with earth-ingrained hands — to discourse on politics and religion, and to opine that our policy in China was “neither my eye nor my elber.” “The little lady,” as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and crossing the churchyard sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath, under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his flock by their young pastor.
“How dreadful is this place. This is none other but the house of God,” was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.? Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chance looked at it. She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called it, by “interfering in church matters,” when he nailed it up. After a few minutes she dropped over the low churchyard wall into the meadow below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew near at hand. What little air there was to be had came to her across the Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank, and whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred times before.
? A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in August 1898, in the porch of a country church.
Hester’s irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could afford to smile.
“Dear James,” she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, “I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, ‘dabblers with the pen.’ One dabbler in a Vicarage is quite enough.”
She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been opened.
“I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings,” she said as she settled herself comfortably.
Rachel’s letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.
“And so she is leaving London — isn’t this rather sudden? — and coming down at once — to-day — no, yesterday, to South minster, to the Palace. And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired.”
Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!
The miller’s old white horse with a dip in his long back and a corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor’s.
A little bunch of red and white cows knee-deep in the water were swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of the contemplative life by an exhibition of humour, and scrambling out of the water proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails, with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just above the tuft.
“How like James and the Pratts,” hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. “It must be very fatiguing to be so comic.”
Hester had been up since five o’clock, utilising the quiet hours before the house was astir. She was tired out. A “bumble bee” was droning sleepily near at hand. The stream talked and talked and talked about what he was going to do when he was a river. “How tired the banks must be of listening to him,” thought Hester with closed eyes.
And the world melted slowly away in a delicious sense of well-being, from which the next moment, as it seemed to her, she was suddenly awakened by Mr. Gresley’s voice near at hand.
“Hester! Hester! HESTER!”
“Here! Here!” gasped Hester with a start, upsetting her lapful of letters, as she scrambled hastily to her feet.
The young Vicar drew near, and looked over the churchyard wall. A large crumb upon his upper lip did not lessen the awful severity of his countenance.
“We have nearly finished luncheon,” he observed. “The servants could not find you anywhere. I don’t want to be always finding fault, Hester, but I wish for your own sake as well as ours you would be more punctual at meals.”
Hester had never been late before, but she felt that this was not the moment to remind her brother of that fact.
“I beg pardon,” she said humbly. “I fell asleep.”
“You fell asleep!” said Mr. Gresley, who had been wrestling all the morning with platitudes on Thy will be done. “All I can say, Hester, is that it is unfortunate you have no occupation. I cannot believe it is for the good of any of us to lead so absolutely idle a life that we fall asleep in the morning.”
Hester made no reply.
It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.
— GEORGE ELIOT.
THE children, who had reached the pear stage, looked with round awed eyes at “Auntie Hester” as she sat down at the luncheon table, beside the black bottle which marked her place. The Gresleys were ardent total abstainers, and were of opinion that Hester’s health would be greatly benefited by following their example. But Hester’s doctor differed from them — he was extremely obstinate — with the result that the Gresleys were obliged to tolerate the obnoxious bottle on their very table. It was what Mrs. Gresley called a “cross,” and Mr. Gresley was always afraid that the fact of its presence might become known and hopelessly misconstrued in Warpington and the world at large.
The children knew that Hester was in disgrace, as she vainly tried to eat the congealed slice of roast mutton with blue slides in it, which had been put before her chair half an hour ago, when the joint was sent out for the servants’ dinner. The children liked “Auntie Hester,” but without enthusiasm, except Regie, the eldest, who loved her as himself. She could tell them stories, and make butterflies and horses and dogs out of paper, but she could never join in their games, not even in the delightful new ones she invented for them. She was always tired directly. And she would never give them rides on her back, as the large good-natured Pratt girls did. And she was dreadfully shocked if they did not play fair, so much so, that on one occasion Mr. Gresley had to interfere, and to remind her that a game was a game, and that it would be better to let the children play as they liked than to be perpetually finding fault with them.
Perhaps nothing in her life at the Vicarage was a greater trial to Hester than to see the rules of fair play broken by the children with the connivance of their parents. Mr. Gresley had never been to a public school, and had thus missed the A B C of what in its later stages is called “honour.” He was an admirable hockey player, but he was not in request at the frequent Slumberleigh matches, for he never hit off fair, or minded being told so.
“Auntie Hester is leaving all her fat,” said Mary suddenly in a shrill voice, her portion of pear held in her left cheek as she spoke. She had no idea that she ought not to draw attention to the weakness of others. She was only anxious to be the first to offer interesting information.
“Never mind,” said Mrs. Gresley, admiring her own moderation. “Finish your pear.”
If there was one thing more than another in Hester’s behaviour that annoyed Mrs. Gresley — and there were several others — it was Hester’s manner of turning her food over on her plate, and leaving half of it.
Hester did it again now, and Mrs. Gresley, already irritated by her unpunctuality, tried to look away so as not to see her and prayed for patience. The hundred a year which Hester contributed to the little establishment had eased the struggling household in many ways; but Mrs. Gresley sometimes wondered if the money, greatly needed as it was, counterbalanced the perpetual friction of her sister-in-law’s presence.
“Father!”
“Yes, my son.”
“Isn’t it wrong to drink wine?”
“Yes, my son.”
“Then why does Auntie Hester drink it?”
Hester fixed her eyes intently on her brother. Would he uphold her before the children?
“Because she thinks it does her good,” said Mr. Gresley.
She withdrew her eyes. Her hand, holding a spoonful of cold rice pudding, shook. A delicate colour flooded her face, and finally settled in the tip of her nose. In her own way she loved the children.
“Ach, mein Herr,” almost screamed Fraülein, who adored Hester, and saw the gravity of the occasion, “aber Sie vergessen that the Herr Doctor Br-r-r-r-r-own has so strong — so very strong command —”
“I cannot allow a discussion as to the merits or demerits of alcohol at my table,” said Mr. Gresley. “I hold one opinion, Dr. Brown holds another. I must beg to be allowed to differ from him. Children, say grace,”
It was Wednesday and a half-holiday, and Mrs. Gresley had arranged to take the children in the pony-carriage to be measured for new boots. These expeditions to Westhope were a great event. At two o’clock exactly the three children rushed downstairs, Regie bearing in his hand his tin money-box, in which a single coin could be heard to leap. Hester produced a bright threepenny piece for each child, one of which was irretrievably buried in Regie’s money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow and white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear their tails high.
Hester saw them drive off, and a few minutes later Mr. Gresley started on his bicycle for a ruri-dicanal Chapter meeting in the opposite direction. She heard the Vicarage gate “clink” behind him as she crossed the little hall, and then she suddenly stopped short and wrung her hands. She had forgotten to tell either of them that the Bishop of Southminster was going to call that afternoon. She knew he was coming on purpose to see her, but this would have been incredible to the Gresleys. She had not read Rachel’s letter announcing his coming till she had taken refuge in the field where she had fallen asleep, and her mental equilibrium had been so shaken by the annoyance she felt she had caused the Gresleys at luncheon that she had entirely forgotten the subject till this moment.
She darted out of the house and flew down the little drive. But Fortune frowned on Hester to-day. She reached the turn of the road only to see the bent figure of Mr. Gresley whisk swiftly out of sight, his clerical coat-tails flowing gracefully out behind like a divided skirt on each side of the back wheel.
Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry with vexation. “They will never believe I forgot to tell them,” she said to herself. “Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my own.” And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs, and leaned her head against the banisters.
To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fraülein, who had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit lamp, and now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two thin slices of bread and butter.
“You are all goodness, Fraülein,” said Hester, raising her small haggard face out of her hands. “It is wrong of me to give so much trouble.” She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only shape in which Fraülein could express her silent sympathy. So she accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly severe Fraülein watching every mouthful.
Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was finished. There were breaks in the clouds after all. Rachel was coming to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fraülein often said, "easy cast down, and easy cast up.” The mild stimulant of the egg “cast her up” once more. She kissed Fraülein and ran up to her room, where she divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush after her brother, and then came down smiling and composed to await her friend in the drawing-room.
Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her sister-in-law’s only sitting-room, and partly because it was the regular haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat impossible.
The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the neighbourhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in “their Vicar’s sister.” Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn Hester not to count too much on their attentions, “as they sometimes dropped people as quickly as they took them up.”
Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbours just because they were neighbours; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs. Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven’s two younger brothers — with whom they were not acquainted — as Jack and Harry, though they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.
When after her aunt’s death she had, by the advice of her few remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that at any rate she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus’ time, for whom she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well, but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the existence of a large under-current of society of which she knew nothing at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by the fact that she was her brother’s sister.
Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but he had evidently though involuntarily adopted it for better for worse; perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice and a tendency to monologue chequered by prehistoric jokes and tortured puns may meet with a more patient audience. Hester made many discoveries about herself during the first months of her life at Warpington, and the first of the series amazed her more than any of the later ones.
She discovered that she was proud. Perhaps she had not the enormous opinion of herself which Mrs. Gresley so frequently deplored, for Hester’s thoughts seldom dwelt upon herself. But the altered circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask curtain.
So far, during the eight years since she had left the schoolroom, she had always been “Miss Gresley,” a little personage treated with consideration wherever she went, and choyée for her delicate humour and talent for conversation. She now experienced the interesting sensation, as novel to her as it is familiar to most of us, of being nobody, and she disliked it. The manners of the set in which she found herself also grated continually on her fastidious taste. She was first amazed and then indignant at bearing her old Middleshire friends, whose simplicity far surpassed that of her new acquaintance, denounced by the latter — without being acquainted with them except officially — as “fine,” as caring only for “London people,” and as being “tuft-hunters,” because they frequently entertained at their houses persons of rank, to half of whom they were related. All this was new to Hester. She discovered that, though she might pay visits at these houses, she must never mention them, as it was considered the height of vulgarity to speak of people of rank.
Mrs. Gresley, who had been quite taken aback when the first of these invitations came, felt it her duty to warn Hester against a love of rank, reminding her that it was a very bad thing to get a name for running after titled people.
“James and I have always kept clear of that,” she remarked with dignity. “For my part, I daresay you will think me very old-fashioned, but I must own I never can see that people with titles or wealth are one bit nicer or pleasanter than those without them.”
Hester agreed.
“And,” continued Mrs. Gresley, “it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them as I do now.”
If Lady Susan Gresley had passed her acquaintance through a less exclusive sieve, Hester might have had the advantage of hearing all these well-worn sentiments, and of realising the point of view of a large number of her fellow creatures before she became an inconspicuous unit in their midst.
But if Mrs. Gresley was pained by Hester’s predilection for the society of what she called “swells” (the word though quite extinct in civilised parts can occasionally be found in country districts), she was still more pained by the friendship Hester formed with persons whom her sister-in-law considered “not quite.”
Mrs. Gresley was always perfectly civil, and the Pratts imperfectly so to Miss Brown, the doctor’s invalid sister. But Hester made friends with her, in spite of the warnings of Mrs. Gresley that kindness was one thing and intimacy another.
“The truth is,” Mrs. Gresley would say, “Hester loves adulation, and as she can’t get it from the Pratts and us, she has to go to those below her in the social scale, like Miss Brown, who will give it to her. Miss Brown may be very cultivated. I dare say she is, but she makes up to Hester.”
Sybell Loftus, who lived close at hand at Wilderleigh, across the Drone, was one of the very few besides Miss Brown among her new acquaintances who hailed Hester at once as a kindred spirit, to the unconcealed surprise of the Pratts and the Gresleys. Sybell adored Hester’s book, which the Gresleys and Pratts considered rather peculiar “as emanating from the pen of a clergyman’s sister.” She enthusiastically suggested to Hester several improvements which might easily be made in it, which would have changed its character altogether. She even entrenched on the sacred precinct of a married woman’s time to write out the openings of several romances, which she was sure Hester with her wonderful talent could build up into magnificent works of art. She was always running over to the Vicarage to confide to Hester the unique thoughts which had been vouchsafed to her while contemplating a rose, or her child or her husband, or all three together.
Hester was half amused, half fascinated, and ruefully lost many of the mornings still left her by the Pratts and Gresleys, in listening to the outpourings of this butterfly soul which imagined every flower it involuntarily alighted on and drew honey from to be its own special production.
But Hester’s greatest friend in Middleshire was the Bishop of Southminster, with whom Rachel was staying, and whom she was expecting this afternoon.
The depth and dream of my desire
The bitter paths wherein I stray,
Thou knowest Who hast made the Fire,
Thou knowest Who hast made the Clay!
— RUDYARD KIPLING.
THE unbalanced joys and sorrows of emotional natures are apt to arouse the pity of the narrow-hearted, and the mild contempt of the obtuse of their fellow creatures.
But perhaps it is a mistake to feel compassion for persons like Hester, for if they have many evil days and weeks in their usually short lives, they have also moments of sheer bliss, hours of awed contemplation and of exquisite rapture which possibly in the long run equal the more solid joys of a good income and a good digestion, nay, even the perennial glow of that happiest of happy temperaments which limits the nature of others by its own, which sees no uncomfortable difference between a moral and a legal right, and believes it can measure life with the same admirable accuracy with which it measures its drawing-room curtains.
As Hester and Rachel sat together in the Vicarage drawing-room, Rachel’s faithful dog-like eyes detected no trace of tears in Hester’s dancing, mischievous ones. They were alone, for the Bishop had dropped Rachel on his way to visit a sick clergyman, and had arranged to call at the Vicarage on his way back.
Hester quickly perceived that Rachel did not wish to talk of herself, and drew a quaint picture of her own life at Warpington, which she described "not wisely but too well." But she was faithful to her salt. She said nothing of the Gresleys to which those worthies could have objected had they been present. Indeed, she spoke of them in what they would have termed “a very proper manner,” of their kindness to her when she had been ill, of how Mr. Gresley had himself brought up her breakfast tray every morning, and how in the spring he had taught her to bicycle.
“But oh! Rachel,” added Hester, “during the last nine months my self-esteem has been perforated with wounds, each large enough to kill the poor creature. My life here has shown me horrible faults in myself of which I never dreamed. I feel as if I had been ironed all over since I came here, and all kinds of ugly words in invisible ink are coming out clear in the process.”
“I am quite alarmed,” said Rachel tranquilly.
“You ought to be. First of all I did think I cared nothing about food. I don’t remember ever giving it a thought when I lived with Aunt Susan. But here I— I am difficult about it. I do try to eat it, but often I really can’t. And then I leave it on my plate, which is a disgusting habit which always offends me in other people. Now I am as bad as any of them; indeed, it is worse in me because I know poor James is not very rich.”
“I suppose the cooking is vile?”
“I don’t know. I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can’t judge. Perhaps it is not very good. But the dreadful part is that I should mind. I could not have believed it of myself. James and Minna never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must.”
Rachel looked critically at Hester’s innocent, childlike face. When Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child. There was, alas! no medium in her character. Rachel noticed how thin her face and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes. The faint colour in her cheek had a violet tinge.
She did not waste words on the cookery question. She saw plainly enough that Hester’s weak health was slipping further down the hill.
“And all this time you have been working?”
“If you call it working. I used to call it so once, but I never do now. Yes, I manage about four hours a day. I have made another pleasant discovery about myself, that I have the temper of a fiend if I am interrupted.”
“But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not be interrupted at certain hours?”
“I did. I did. But of course — it is very natural — they think that rather self-important and silly. I am thought very silly here, Rachel. And James does not mind being interrupted in writing his sermons. And the Pratts have got the habit of running in in the mornings.”
“Who on earth are the Pratts?”
“They are what they call ‘county people.’ Their father made a fortune in oil, and built a house covered with turrets near here a few years ago. I used to know Captain Pratt, the son, very slightly in London. I never would dance with him. He used to come to our ‘At Homes,’ but he was never asked to dinner. He is a great ‘parti’ among a certain set down here. His mother and sisters were very kind to me when I came, but I was not so accustomed then as I am now to be treated familiarly and called ‘Hessie,’ which no one has ever called me before, and I am afraid I was not so responsive as I see now I ought to have been. Down here it seems your friends are the people whom you live near, not the ones you like. It seems a curious arrangement. And as the Pratts are James’ and Minna’s greatest friends, I did not wish to offend them. And then, of course, I did offend them mortally at last by losing my temper when they came up to my room to what they called ‘rout me out,’ though I had told them I was busy in the mornings. I was in a very difficult place, and when they came in I did not know who they were, because only the people in the book were real just then. And then when I recognised them, and the scene in my mind which I had been waiting for for weeks was shattered like a pane of glass, I became quite giddy and spoke wildly. And then — I was so ashamed afterwards — I burst into tears of rage and despair.”
Even the remembrance was too much. Hester wiped away two large tears on to a dear little handkerchief just large enough to receive them, and went on with a quaver in her voice.
“I was so shocked at myself that I found it quite easy to tell them next day that I was sorry I had lost my temper, but they have not been the same since. Not that I wanted them to be the same. I would rather they were different. But I was anxious to keep on cordial terms with Minna’s friends. She quarrels with them herself, but that is different. I suppose it is inevitable if you are on terms of great intimacy with people you don’t really care for.”
“At any rate, they have not interrupted you again?”
“N— no. But still, I was often interrupted. Minna has too much to do, and she is not strong just now, and she often sends up one of the children, and I was so nearly fierce with one of them, poor little things, that I felt the risk was becoming too great, so I have left off writing between breakfast and luncheon, and I get up directly it is light instead. It is light very early now. Only the worst part of it is that I am so tired for the rest of the day that I can hardly drag myself about.”
Rachel said nothing. She seldom commented on the confidences that were made to her. She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail disastrous effects on her health. The book was sapping her strength like a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties. Rachel did not know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes are holden.
“And the book itself? Is it nearly finished?”
Hester’s face changed. Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically, she talked to her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover. Everything else was forgotten. Hester’s eyes burned. Her colour came and went. She was transfigured.
The protecting anxious affection died out of Rachel’s face as she looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half envious admiration. She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself, years ago, when she was in love. She had regarded them as a revelation while they lasted; and — afterwards — as a steep step, a very steep step upon the stair of life. But she realised now that such as Hester live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed to level their ridicule and contempt.
Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it complete, beautiful, an entrancing vision, inaccessible as a sunset.
“I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it,” she said. “When I try to write it it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labour day by day travestying it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And gradually I understand and know. And I listen and Nature speaks, really speaks — not a fa?on de parler as some people think who explain to you that you mean this or that by your words which you don’t mean — and her spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone, and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to translate it into. But there are no words, or if there are I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And Oh! Rachel, the worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have been, when the vision fades, I know I shall admire what I have written. It is that that breaks my heart.”
The old, old lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester idealised Nature, as she idealised her fellow creatures, as she idealised everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in despair because she could not speak adequately of life or Nature as she saw them. Rachel thought with bewilderment that that was just what she could do.
At this moment a carriage drew up at the door, and after a long interval, during which the wrathful voice of the cook could be distinctly heard through the kitchen window recalling “Hemma” to a sense of duty from the backyard, “Hemma” breathlessly ushered in the Bishop of Southminster.
Originality irritates the religious classes, who will not be taken out of their indolent ways of thinking; who have a standing grievance against it, and heresy and heterodoxy are bad words ready for it.
— W.W. PEYTON.
THE Bishop was an undersized, spare man, with a rugged, weather-beaten face and sinewy frame. If you had seen him working a crane in a stonemason’s yard, or leading a cut-and-thrust forlorn-hope, or sailing paper-boats with a child, you would have felt he was the right man in the right place. That he was also in his right place as a bishop had never been doubted by any one. Mr. Gresley was the only person who had occasionally had misgivings as to the Bishop’s vocation as a true priest, but he had put them aside as disloyal.
Jowett is believed to have said, “A Bishop without a sense of humour is lost.” Perhaps that may have been one of the reasons why, by Jowett’s advice, the See of Southminster was offered to its present occupant. The Bishop’s mouth, though it spoke of an indomitable will, had a certain twist of the lip, his deep-set, benevolent eyes had a certain twinkle which made persons like Lord Newhaven and Hester hail him at once as an ally, but which ought to have been a danger-signal to some of his clerical brethren — to Mr. Gresley in particular.
The Bishop respected and upheld Mr. Gresley as a clergyman, but as a conversationalist the young Vicar wearied him. If the truth were known (which it never was) he had arranged to visit Hester when he knew Mr. Gresley would be engaging the reluctant attention of a ruri-dicanal meeting.
He gave a sigh of relief as he became aware that Hester and Rachel were the only occupants of the cool, darkened room. Mrs. Gresley, it seemed, was also out.
Hester made tea, and presently the Bishop, who looked much exhausted, roused himself. He had that afternoon attended two deathbeds, one the deathbed of a friend, and the other that of the last vestige of peace, expiring amid the clamour of a distracted Low Church parish and High Church parson, who could only meet each other after the fashion of cymbals. For the moment even his courageous spirit had been disheartened.
“I met a son of Anak the other night at the Newhavens,” he said to Hester, “who claimed you as a cousin — a Mr. Richard Vernon. He broke the ice by informing me that I had confirmed him, and that perhaps I should like to know that he had turned out better than he expected.”
“How like Dick,” said Hester.
“I remembered him at last. His father was the squire of Fallow, where I was rector before I came to Southminster. Dick was not a source of unmixed pleasure to his parents. As a boy of eight he sowed the parental billiard-table with mustard and cress in his father’s absence, and raised a very good crop, and performed other excruciating experiments. I believe he beat all previous records of birch rods at Eton. I remember while he was there he won a bet from another boy who could not pay, and he foreclosed on the loser’s cricketing trousers. His parents were distressed about it when he brought them home, and I tried to make him see that he ought not to have taken them. But Dick held firm. He said it was like tithe, and if he could not get his own in money as I did he must collect it in trousers. I must own he had me there. I noticed that he wore the garments daily as long as any question remained in his parents’ minds as to whether they ought to be returned. After that I felt sure he would succeed in life.”
“I believe he is succeeding in Australia.”
“I advised his father to send him abroad. There really was not room for him in England, and unfortunately for the army, the examiners jibbed at his strictly phonetic spelling. He tells me he has given up being an A.D.C. and has taken to vine-growing, because if people are up in the world they always drink freely, and if they are ‘down on their luck’ they drink all the more to drown care. The reasoning appeared to me sound.”
“He and James used to quarrel frightfully in the holidays,” said Hester. “It was always the same reason, about playing fair. Poor James did not know that games were matters of deadly importance, and that a rule was a sacred thing. I wonder why it is that clergymen so often have the same code of honour as women; quite a different code from that of the average man.”
“I think,” said the Bishop, “it is owing to that difference of code that women clash so hopelessly with men when they attempt to compete or work with them. Women have not to begin with the esprit de corps which the most ordinary men possess. With what difficulty can one squeeze out of a man any fact that is detrimental to his friend, or even to his acquaintance, however obviously necessary it may be that the information should be asked for and given. Yet I have known many good and earnest and affectionate women who lead unselfish lives, who will ‘give away’ their best woman friend at the smallest provocation, or without any provocation at all; will inform you à propos of nothing that she was jilted years ago, or that her husband married her for her money. The causes of humiliation and disaster in a woman’s life seem to have no sacredness for her women friends. Yet if that same friend whom she has run down is ill, the runner down will nurse her day and night with absolutely selfless devotion.”
“I have often been puzzled by that,” said Rachel. “I seem to be always making mistakes about women, and perhaps that is the reason. They show themselves capable of some deep affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would never stoop to.”
Hester’s eyes fixed on her friend.
“Do you tell them? Do you show them up to themselves?” she asked; “or do you leave them?”
“I do neither,” said Rachel. “I treat them just the same as before.”
“Then aren’t you a hypocrite, too?”
Hester’s small face was set like a flint.
“I think not,” said Rachel tranquilly, “any more than they are. The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain. Why should I take most notice of the evil which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently while the good will remain.”
“I think Rachel is right,” said the Bishop.
“I don’t think she is, at all,” said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. “I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then —”
“Then what?” said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.
“Then leave them in silence.”
“I only know of a woman’s silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?”
“I do not. It is my own fault if I idealise a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honour certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation — and — I withdraw.”
“You withdraw!” echoed the Bishop. “This is terrible.”
“Just as I should,” continued Hester, “if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should —”
“Denounce him as an apostate?” suggested the Bishop.
“No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen.”
“Thrice miserable man!”
“You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?”
“Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more.”
At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called “very Frenchy,” and he now showed his “Frenchyness” by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.
“Mother got out at Mrs. Brown’s,” shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, “and I drove up.”
“Oh, Regie,” expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. “You held the reins, but William walked beside.”
Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.
Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time. The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.
“I am not satisfied about Hester,” said the Bishop. “She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience.”
“She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife.”
“I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighbourhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen’s sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work. She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be. Originality is out of place in a clergyman’s family, just because it is so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people who regard her as a nonenity, who have no sense of humour, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her ‘Idyll’ she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it, and an outer one of amiable country neighbours, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in sympathy with them, and appreciate them as I do; but that is another story. She has been working at this new book all winter with a fervour and concentration which her isolation has helped to bring about. She owes a debt of gratitude to her surroundings, and some day I shall tell her so.”
“She says her temper has become that of a fiend.”
“She is passionate, there is no doubt. She nearly fell on us both this afternoon. She is too much swayed by every little incident. Everything makes a vivid impression on her and shakes her to pieces. It is rather absurd and disproportionate now, like the long legs of a foal, but it is a sign of growth. My experience is that people without that fire of enthusiasm on the one side and righteous indignation on the other never achieve anything except in domestic life. If Hester lives she will outgrow her passionate nature, or at least she will grow up to it and become passive, contemplative. Then instead of unbalanced anger and excitement, the same nature which is now continually upset by them will have learnt to receive impressions calmly, and, by reason of that receptiveness and insight, she will go far.”
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life — the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it — can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
— GEORGE ELIOT.
HESTER in the meanwhile was expressing wonder and astonishment at the purchases of the children, who, with the exception of Mary, had spent their little all on presents for Fraülein, whose birthday was on the morrow. After Mary’s tiny white bone umbrella had been discovered to be a needle-case, and most of the needles had been recovered from the floor, Regie extracted from its paper a little china cow. But, alas! the cow’s ears and horns remained in the bag, owing possibly to the incessant passage of the parcel from one pocket to another on the way home. Regie looked at the remnants in the bag and his lip quivered, while Mary, her own umbrella safely warehoused, exclaimed, “Oh! Regie” in tones of piercing reproach.
But Hester quickly suggested that she could put them on again quite easily, and Fraülein would like it just as much. Still it was a blow. Regie leaned his head against Hester’s shoulder.
Hester pressed her cheek against his little dark head. Sybell Loftus had often told Hester that she could have no idea of the happiness of a child’s touch till she was a mother: that she herself had not an inkling till then. But perhaps some poor substitute for that exquisite feeling was vouchsafed to Hester.
“The tail is still on,” she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.
The cow’s tail was painted in blue upon its side.
“When I bought it,” said Regie, in a strangled voice, “and it was a great deal of money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that.”
“All the best cows have their tails on the side,” said Hester. “And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before.” And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.
“And now what has Stella got?”
Stella produced a bag of “bull’s-eyes” which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.
“Fraülein never eats bull’s-eyes,” said Mary, who was what her parents called “a very truthful child.”
“I eats them,” said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa, till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upwards, were visible.
Stella always turned upside down if the conversation took a personal turn. In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.
Hester had hardly set Stella right side upwards when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.
“Run upstairs, my pets,” she said. “Hester, you should not keep them down here now. It is past their tea-time.”
“We came ourselves, mother,” said Regie. “Fraülein said we might, to show Auntie Hester our secrets.”
“Well, never mind; run away now,” said the poor mother, sitting down heavily in a low chair, “and take Boulou.”
“You are tired out,” said Hester, slipping on to her knees and unlacing her sister-in-law’s brown boots.
Mrs. Gresley looked with a shade of compunction at the fragile kneeling figure, with its face crimsoned by the act of stooping, and by the obduracy of the dust-ingrained bootlaces. But as she looked she noticed the flushed cheeks, and being a diviner of spirits, wondered what Hester was ashamed of now.
As Hester rose her sister-in-law held out, with momentary hesitation, a thin paper bag, in which an oval form allowed its moist presence to be discerned by partial adhesion to its envelope.
“I saw you ate no luncheon, Hester, so I have brought you a little sole for supper.”
Some of us poor Marthas spend all our existence, so to speak, in the kitchens of life. We never get so far as the drawing-room. Our conquests, our self-denials are achieved through the medium of suet and lard and necks of mutton. We wrestle with the dripping, and rise on stepping-stones — not of our dead selves, but of sheep and oxen — to higher things.
The sole was a direct answer to prayer. Mrs. Gresley had been enabled to stifle her irritation against this delicate, whimsical, fine lady of a sister-in-law — laced in, too, we must not forget that — who, in Mrs. Gresley’s ideas, knew none of the real difficulties of life, its butcher’s bills, its monthly nurses, its constant watchfulness over delicate children, its long, long strain at two ends which won’t meet. We must know but little of our fellow creatures if the damp sole in the bag appears to us other than the outward and homely sign of an inward and spiritual conquest.
As such Hester saw it, and she kissed Mrs. Gresley and thanked her, and then ran herself to the kitchen with the peace offering, and came back with her sister-in-law’s down-at-heel indoor shoes.
Mr. Gresley was stabling his bicycle in the hall as she crossed it. He was generally excessively jocose with his bicycle. He frequently said, “Woah, Emma!” to it. But to-day he, too, was tired, and put Emma away in silence.
When Hester returned to the drawing-room Mrs. Gresley had recovered sufficiently to notice her surroundings. She was sitting with her tan-stockinged feet firmly planted on the carpet instead of listlessly outstretched, her eyes ominously fixed on the tea-table and seed cake.
Hester’s silly heart nudged her side like an accomplice.
“Who has been here to tea?” said Mrs. Gresley. “I met the Pratts and the Thursbys in Westhope.”
Hester was frightened. We need to be, in the presence of those who judge others by themselves.
“The Bishop was here and Rachel West,” she said colouring. “They left a few minutes ago.”
“Well, of all unlucky things that James and I should have been out. James, do you hear that? The Bishop’s been while we were away. And I do declare, Hester,” looking again at the table, “you never so much as asked for the silver teapot.”
“I never thought of it,” said Hester ruefully. It was almost impossible to her to alter the habit of a lifetime, and to remember to dash out and hurriedly change the daily routine if visitors were present. Lady Susan had always used her battered old silver teapot every day, and for the life of her Hester could not understand why there should be one kind one day and one kind another. She glanced resentfully at the little brown earthenware vessel which she had wielded so cheerfully half an hour ago. Why did she never remember the Gresleys’ wishes?
“Hester,” said Mrs. Gresley suddenly, taking new note of Hester’s immaculate brown holland gown, which contrasted painfully with her own dilapidated pink shirt with hard collars and cuffs and imitation tie, tied for life in the shop where it was born. “You are so smart; I do believe you knew they were coming.”
If there was one thing more than another which offended Hester, it was being told that she was smart.
“I trust I am never smart,” she replied; not with any touch of the haughtiness that some ignorant persons believe to be the grand manner, but with a subtle change of tone and carriage which seemed instantly to remove her to an enormous distance from the other woman with her insinuation and tan stockings. Mrs. Gresley unconsciously drew in her feet. “I did not know when I dressed this morning that the Bishop was coming to-day.”
“Then you did know later that he was coming?”
“Yes, Rachel West wrote to tell me so this morning, but I did not open her letter at breakfast, and I was so vexed at being late for luncheon that I forgot to mention it then. I remembered as soon as James had started and ran after him, but he was too far off to hear me call to him.”
It cost Hester a good deal to give this explanation, as she was aware that the Bishop’s visit had been to her and to her alone.
“Come, come,” said Mr. Gresley, judicially, with the natural masculine abhorrence of a feminine skirmish. “Don’t go on making foolish excuses, Hester, which deceive no one; and you, Minna, don’t criticise Hester’s clothes. It is the Bishop’s own fault for not writing his notes himself. He might have known that Miss West would have written to Hester instead of to me. I can’t say I think Hester behaved kindly towards us in acting as she did, but I won’t hear any more argument about it. I desire the subject should now DROP.”
The last words were uttered in the same tone in which Mr. Gresley closed morning service, and were felt to be final. He was not in reality greatly chagrined at missing the Bishop, whom he regarded with some of the suspicious distrust with which a certain class of mind ever regards that which is superior to it. Hester left the room, closing the door gently behind her.
“James,” said Mrs. Gresley, looking at her priest with tears of admiration in her eyes, “I shall never be good like you, so you need not expect it. How you can be so generous and patient with her I don’t know. It passes me.”
We must learn to make allowances for each other, said Mr. Gresley, in his most affectionate cornet, drawing his tired, tearful little wife down beside him on the sofa. And he made some fresh tea for her, and waited on her, and she told him about the children’s boots and the sole, and he told her about a remarkable speech he had made at the chapter meeting, and a feeling that had been borne in on him on the way home that he should shortly write something striking about Apostolic Succession. And they were happy together; for though he sometimes reproved her as a priest if she allowed herself to dwell on the probability of his being made a Bishop, he was very kind to her as a husband.
Beware of a silent dog and of still water.
IF you are travelling across Middleshire on the local line between Southminster and Westhope, after you have passed Wilderleigh with its grey gables and park wall, close at hand you will perceive to nestle (at least Mr. Gresley said it nestled) Warpington Vicarage; and perhaps, if you know where to look, you will catch a glimpse of Hester’s narrow bedroom window under the roof. Half a mile further on Warpington Towers, the gorgeous residence of the Pratts, bursts into view, with flag on turret flying, and two tightly-bitted rustic bridges leaping high over the Drone. You cannot see all the lodges of Warpington Towers from the line, which is a source of some regret to Mr. Pratt; but if he happens to be travelling with you he will point out two of them, chaste stucco Gothic erections with church windows, and inform you that the three others are on the northern and eastern sides, vaguely indicating the directions of Scotland and Ireland.
And the Drone kept in order on your left by the low line of the Slumberleigh hills will follow you and leave you, leave you and return all the way to Westhope. You are getting out at Westhope, of course, if you are a Middleshire man. For Westhope is on the verge of Middleshire, and the train does not go any further; at least, it only goes into one of the insignificant counties which jostle each other to hold on to Middleshire, unknown Saharas, where passengers who oversleep themselves wake to find themselves cast away.
Westhope Abbey stands in its long low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep cobbled streets.
Down the great central aisle you may walk on mossy stones between the high shafts of broken pillars under the sky. God’s stars look down once more where the piety of man had for a time shut them out. Through the slender tracery of what was once the east window, instead of glazed saint and crucifix, you may see the little town clasping its hill.
The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer. The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches. The soft contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer. A thin wind-whipped grass holds the summit of the broken walls against all comers. The fallen stones, quaintly carved with angel and griffin, are going slowly back year by year, helped by the rain and hindered by the frost, slowly back through the sod to the generations of human hands that held and hewed them, and fell to dust below them hundreds of years ago. The spirit returns to the God who gave it, and the stone to the hand that fashioned it.
The adjoining monastery had been turned into a dwelling house, without altering it externally, and it was here that Lord Newhaven loved to pass the summer months. Into its one long upper passage all the many rooms opened, up white stone steps through arched doors, rooms which had once been monks’ dormitories, abbots’ cells, where Lady Newhaven and her guests now crimped their hair, and slept under down quilts till noon.
It was this long passage with its interminable row of low latticed windows that Lord Newhaven was turning into a depository for the old English weapons which he was slowly collecting. He was standing now gazing lovingly at them, drawing one finger slowly along an inlaid arquebus, when a yell from the garden made him turn and look out.
It was not a yell of anguish, and Lord Newhaven remained at the window leaning on his elbows, and watching at his ease the little scene which was taking place below him.
On his bicycle on the smooth shaven lawn was Dick wheeling slowly in and out among the stone-edged flower-beds, an apricot in each broad palm, while he discoursed in a dispassionate manner to the two excited little boys who were making futile rushes for the apricots. The governess and Rachel were looking on. Rachel had arrived at Westhope the day before from Southminster. “Take your time, my son,” said Dick, just eluding by a hairsbreadth a charge through a geranium bed on the part of the eldest boy. “If you are such jolly little fools as to crack your little skulls on the sun-dial I shall eat them both myself. Miss Turner says you may have them, so you’ve only got to take them. I can’t keep on offering them all day long. My time” (Dick ran his bicycle up a terrace, and as soon as the boys were up, glided down again) “my time is valuable. You don’t want them?” A shrill disclaimer and a fresh onslaught. “Miss Turner, they thank you very much, but they don’t care for apricots.”
Half a second more and Dick skilfully parted from his bicycle and was charged by his two admirers and severely pummelled as high as they could reach. When they had been led away by Miss Turner, each biting an apricot and casting longing backward looks at their friend, Rachel and Dick wandered to the north side of the abbey and sat down there in the shade.
Lord Newhaven could still see them, could still note her amused face under her wide white hat. He was doing his best for Dick, and Dick was certainly having his chance, and making the most of it according to his lights.
“But all the same I don’t think he has a chance,” said Lord Newhaven to himself. “That woman, in spite of her frank manner and her self-possession, is afraid of men; not of being married for her money, but of man himself. And whatever else he may not be, Dick is a man. It’s the best chance she will ever get, so it is probable she won’t take it.”
Lord Newhaven sauntered back down the narrow black oak staircase to his own room on the ground-floor. He sat down at his writing-table and took out of his pocket a letter which he had evidently read before. He now read it slowly once more.
“Your last letter to me had been opened,” wrote his brother from India, “or else it had not been properly closed. As you wrote on business, I wish you would be more careful.”
“I will,” said Lord Newhaven, and he wrote a short letter in his small upright hand, closed the envelope, addressed and stamped it, and sauntered out through the low-arched door into the garden.
Dick was sitting alone on the high-carved stone edge of the round pool where the monks used to wash, and where gold-fish now lived cloistered lives. A moment of depression seemed to have overtaken that cheerful personage.
“Come as far as the post-office,” said Lord Newhaven.
Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.
“You millionaires are all the same,” he said. “Because you have a house crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to the post-office to buy a penny stamp. It’s like keeping a dog and barking yourself.”
“I don’t fancy I bark much,” said Lord Newhaven.
“No, and you don’t bite often, but when you do you take out the piece. Do you remember that coloured chap at Broken Hill?”
“He deserved it,” said Lord Newhaven.
“He richly deserved it. But you took him in, poor devil, all the same. You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he thought he could play you any dog’s trick, and that you would never turn on him.”
“It’s a way worms have.”
“Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I saw him just before I left Adelaide. He’s been lame ever since.”
“He’d have done for me if he could.”
“Of course he would. His blood was up. He meant to break your back. I saw him break a chap’s back once, and it did not take so very long either. I heard it snap. But why did you let him go so far to start with before you pulled him up? That’s what I’ve never been able to understand about you. If you behaved different to start with they would behave different to you. They would know they’d have to.”
“I have not your art,” said Lord Newhaven tranquilly, “of letting a man know when he’s getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will be a row and he’ll be in it. I’m not made like that.”
“It works well,” said Dick. “It’s a sort of peaceful way of rubbing along and keeping friends. If you let those poor bullies know what to expect they aren’t as a rule over anxious to toe the mark. But you never do let them know.”
“No,” said Lord Newhaven, as he shot his letter into the brass mouth in the cottage wall, just below a window of “bulls’-eyes” and peppermints, “I never do. I don’t defend it. But —”
“But what?”
Lord Newhaven’s face underwent some subtle change. His eyes fixed themselves on a bottle of heart-shaped peppermints, and then met Dick’s suddenly, with the clear frank glance of a schoolboy.
“But somehow, for the life of me, until things get serious — I can’t.”
Dick, whose perceptions were rather of a colossal than an acute order, nevertheless perceived that he had received a confidence, and changed the subject.
“Aren’t you going to buy some stamps?” he asked, perfectly aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.
Lord Newhaven, who was being watched with affectionate interest from behind the counter by the grocer postmaster, went in, hit his head against a pendant ham, and presently emerged with brine in his hair, and a shilling’s worth of stamps in his hand.
Later in the day, when he and Dick were riding up the little street with a view to having a look at the moor — for Middleshire actually has a grouse moor, although it is in the Midlands — the grocer in his white apron rushed out and waylaid them.
“Very sorry about the letter, my lord,” he repeated volubly, touching his forelock. “Hope her la-ship told you as I could not get it out again, or I’m sure I would have done to oblige your lordship, and her la-ship calling on purpose. But the post-office is that mean and distrustful as it don’t leave me the key, and once hanything is in, in it is.”
“Ah!” said Lord Newhaven slowly. “Well, Jones, it’s not your fault. I ought not to have changed my mind. I suppose her ladyship gave you my message that I wanted it back?”
“Yes, my lord, and her la-ship come herself, not ten minutes after you was gone. But I’ve no more power over that there recepticle than a hunlaid hegg, and that’s the long and short of it. I’ve allus said, and I say it again, ‘Them as have charge of the post-office should have the key.’”
“When I am made postmaster-general you shall have it,” said Lord Newhaven, smiling. “It is the first reform that I shall bring about.” And he nodded to the smiling apologetic man and trotted on, Dick beside him, who was apparently absorbed in the action of his roan cob.
But Dick’s mind had sustained a severe shock. That Lady Newhaven, “that jolly little woman,” the fond mother of those two “jolly little chaps,” should have been guilty of an underhand trick, was astonishing to him.
Poor Dick had started life with a religious reverence for woman; had carried out his brittle possession to bush life in Australia, from thence through two A.D.C.-ships, and, after many vicissitudes, had brought it safely back with a large consignment of his own Burgundy to his native land. It was still sufficiently intact — save for a chip or two — to make a pretty wedding present to his future wife. But it had had a knock since he mounted the roan cob. For unfortunately the kind of man who has what are called “illusions” about women, is too often the man whose discrimination lies in other directions, in fields where little high-heeled shoes are not admitted.
Rachel had the doubtful advantage of knowing that in spite of Dick’s shrewdness respecting shades of difference in muscatels, she and Lady Newhaven were nevertheless ranged on the same pedestal in Dick’s mind, as flawless twins of equal moral beauty. But after this particular day she observed that Lady Newhaven had somehow slipped off the pedestal, and that she, Rachel, had the honour of occupying it alone.
Une grande passion malheureuse est un grand moyen de sagesse.
RACHEL had left London precipitately after she had been the unwilling confidant of Lady Newhaven’s secret, and had taken refuge with that friend of all perplexed souls the Bishop of Southminster. She felt unable to meet Hugh again without an interval of breathing time. She knew that if she saw much more of him he would confide in her, and she shrank from receiving a confidence the ugliest fact of which she already knew. Perhaps she involuntarily shrank also from fear lest he should lower himself in her eyes by only telling her half the truth. Sad confessions were often poured into Rachel’s ears which she had known for years. She never alluded to that knowledge, never corrected the half-lie which accompanies so many whispered self-accusations. Confidences and confessions are too often a means of evasion of justice, a laying of the case for the plaintiff before a judge without allowing the defendant to be present or to call a witness. Rachel, by dint of long experience, which did slowly for her the work of imagination, had ceased to wonder at the faithfully chronicled harsh words and deeds of generous souls. She knew or guessed at the unchronicled treachery or deceit which had brought about that seemingly harsh word or deed.
She had not the exalted ideas about her fellow creatures which Hester had, but she possessed the rare gift of reticence. She exemplified the text —“Whether it be to friend or foe, talk not of other men’s lives." And in Rachel’s quiet soul a vast love and pity dwelt for these same fellow creatures. She had lived and worked for years among those whose bodies were half starved, half clothed, degraded. When she found money at her command she had spent sums (as her lawyer told her) out of all proportion on that poor human body, stumbling between vice and starvation. But now, during the last year, when her great wealth had thrown her violently into society, she had met, until her strong heart flinched before it, the other side of life: the starved soul in the delicately nurtured, richly clad body, the atrophied spiritual life in hideous contrast with the physical ease and luxury which were choking it. The second experience was harder to bear than the first. And just as in the old days she had shared her bread and cheese with those hungrier than herself, and had taken but little thought for those who had bread and to spare, so now she felt but transient interest in those among her new associates who were successfully struggling against the blackmail of luxury, the leprosy of worldliness, the selfishness that at last coffins the soul it clothes. Her heart yearned instead towards the spiritually starving, the tempted, the fallen in that great little world, whose names are written in the book, not of life, but of Burke — the little world which is called “Society.”
She longed to comfort them, to raise them up, to wipe from their hands and garments the muddy gold stains of the gutter into which they had fallen, to smoothe away the lines of mean care from their faces. But it had been far simpler in her previous life to share her hard-earned bread with those who needed it than it was now to share her equally hard-earned thoughts and slow gleanings of spiritual knowledge, to share the things which belonged to her peace.
Rachel had not yet wholly recovered from the overwhelming passion of love which, admitted without fear a few years ago, had devastated the little city of her heart, as by fire and sword, involving its hospitable dwellings, its temples and its palaces in one common ruin. Out of that desolation she was unconsciously rebuilding her city, but it was still rather gaunt and bare, the trees had not had time to grow in the streets, and there was an ugly fortification round it of defaced, fire-seared stones which had once stood aloft in minaret and tower, and which now served only as a defence against all comers.
If Dick had been in trouble, or rather if she had known the troubles he had been through, and which had made his crooked mouth shut so firmly, Rachel might possibly have been able to give him something more valuable than the paper money of her friendship. But Dick was obviously independent. He could do without her, while Hugh had a claim upon her. Rachel’s thoughts turned to Hugh again and ever again. Did he see his conduct as she saw it? A haunting fear was upon her that he did not. And she longed with an intensity that outbalanced for the time every other feeling that he should confess his sin fully, entirely — see it in all its ugliness and gather himself together into a deep repentance before he went down into silence, or before he made a fresh start in life. She would have given her right hand to achieve that.
And in a lesser degree she was drawn towards Lady Newhaven. Lady Newhaven was conscious of the tender compassion which Rachel felt for her, and used it to the uttermost, but unfortunately she mistook it for admiration of her character, mixed with sympathetic sorrow for her broken heart. If she had seen herself as Rachel saw her she would have conceived, not for herself but for Rachel, some of the aversion which was gradually distilling bitter drop by drop into her mind for her husband. She would not have killed him. She would have thought herself incapable of an action so criminal, so monstrous. But if part of the ruin in the garden were visibly trembling to its fall, she would not have warned him if he had been sitting beneath it, nor would her conscience have ever reproached her afterwards.
“I wish Miss Gresley would come and stay here instead of taking you away from me," she said plaintively to Rachel one morning, when she made the disagreeable discovery that Rachel and Hester were friends. “I don’t care much about her myself, she is so profane, and so dreadfully irreligious. But Edward likes to talk to her. He prefers artificial people. I wonder he did not marry her. That old cat, Lady Susan Gresley, was always throwing her at his head. I wish she was not always persuading you to leave me for hours together. I get so frightened when I am left alone with Edward. I live in perpetual dread that he will say something before the children or the servants. He is quite cruel enough.”
“He will never say anything.”
“You are always so decided, Rachel. You don’t see possibilities, and you don’t know him as I do. He is capable of anything. I will write a note now, and you can take it to Miss Gresley if you must go there to-day.”
“I wish to go very much.”
“And you will stay another week whether she comes or not?”
There was a momentary pause before Rachel said cheerfully, “I will stay another week, with pleasure. But I am afraid Lord Newhaven will turn restive at taking me in to dinner.”
“Oh! he likes you. He always prefers people who are not of his own family.”
Rachel laughed. “You flatter me.”
“I never flatter any one. He does like you, and, besides, there are people coming next week for the grouse shooting. I suppose that heavy young Vernon is going to lumber over with you. It’s not my fault if he is always running after you. Edward insisted on having him. I don’t want him to dance attendance on me.”
“He and I are going to bicycle to Warpington together. The Gresleys are cousins of his. If it turns very hot we will wait till after sunset to return, if we may.”
“Just as you like,” said Lady Newhaven with asperity. “But I advise you to be careful, my dear Rachel. It never seems to occur to you what onlookers see at a glance, namely, that Mr. Vernon is in love with your fortune.”
“According to public opinion that is a very praiseworthy attachment,” said Rachel, who had had about enough. “I often hear it commended.”
Lady Newhaven stared. That her conversation could have the effect of a mustard leaf did not strike her. She saw that Rachel was becoming restive, and, of course, the reason was obvious. She was thinking of marrying Dick.
“Well, my dear,” she said, lying down on a low couch near the latticed window, and opening a novel. “You need not be vexed with me for trying to save you from a mercenary marriage. I only speak because I am fond of you. But one marriage is as good as another. I was married for love myself; I had not a farthing. And yet you see my marriage has turned out a tragedy — a bitter, bitter tragedy.
Tableau. — A beautiful, sad-faced young married woman in white, reclining among pale-green cushions near a bowl of pink carnations, endeavouring to rouse the higher feelings of an inexperienced though not youthful spinster in a short bicycling skirt. Decidedly, the picture was not flattering to Rachel.
On s’ennuie presque toujours avec ceux qu’on ennuie.
HESTER did not fail a second time to warn the Gresleys of the arrival of guests. She mentioned it in time to allow of the making of cakes, and Mr. Gresley graciously signified his intention of returning early from his parochial rounds on the afternoon when Dick and Rachel were expected, while Mrs. Gresley announced that the occasion was a propitious one for inviting the Pratts to tea.
“Miss West will like to meet them,” she remarked to Hester, whose jaw dropped at the name of Pratt. “And it is very likely if they take a fancy to her they will ask her to stay at the Towers while she is in the neighbourhood. If the captain is at home I will ask him to come too. The Pratts are always so pleasant and hospitable.”
Hester was momentarily disconcerted at the magnitude of the social effort which Rachel’s coming seemed to entail. But for once she had the presence of mind not to show her dismay, and she helped Mrs. Gresley to change the crewel-work antimacassars with their washed-out kittens swinging and playing leap-frog for the best tussore silk ones.
The afternoon was still young when all the preparations had been completed, and Mrs. Gresley went upstairs to change her gown, while Hester took charge of the children, as Fraülein had many days previously arranged to make music with Dr. and Miss Brown on this particular afternoon. And very good music it was which proceeded out of the open windows of the doctor’s red brick house opposite Abel’s cottage. Hester could just hear it from the bottom of the garden near the churchyard wall, and there she took the children, and under the sycamore, with a bench round it, the dolls had a tea-party. Hester had provided herself with a lump of sugar and a biscuit, and out of these many dishes were made, and were arranged on a clean pocket-handkerchief spread on the grass. Regie carried out his directions as butler with solemn exactitude, and though Mary, who had inherited the paternal sense of humour, thought fit to tweak the handkerchief and upset everything, she found the witticism so coldly received by “Auntie Hester,” although she explained that father always did it, that she at once suited herself to her company and helped to repair the disaster.
It was very hot. The dolls, from the featureless midshipman to the colossal professional beauty sitting in her own costly perambulator (a present from Mrs. Pratt), felt the heat, and showed it by their moist countenances. The only person who was cool was a small nude china infant in its zinc bath, the property of Stella, whose determination to reach central facts and to penetrate to the root of the matter, at present took the form of tearing or licking off all that could be torn or licked from objects of interest. Hester, who had presented her with the floating baby in the bath, sometimes wondered as she watched Stella conscientiously work through a well-dressed doll down to its stitched sawdust compartments, what Mr. Gresley would make of his daughter when she turned her attention to theology.
They were all sitting in a tight circle round the handkerchief, Regie watching Hester cutting a new supply of plates out of smooth leaves with her little gilt scissors, while Mary and Stella tried alternately to suck an inaccessible grain of sugar out of the bottom of an acorn cup.
Rachel and Dick had come up on their silent wheels, and were looking at them over the wall before Hester was aware of their presence.
“May we join the tea-party?” asked Rachel, and Hester started violently.
“I am afraid the gate is locked,” she said. “But perhaps you can climb it.”
“We can’t leave the bicycles outside though,” said Dick, and he took a good look at the heavy padlocked gate. Then he slowly lifted it off its hinges, wheeled in the bicycles, and replaced the gate in position.
Rachel looked at him.
“Do you always do what you want to do?” she said involuntarily.
“It saves trouble,” he said, “especially as no one can be such a first-class fool as to think a padlock will keep a gate shut. He would expect it to be opened.”
“But father said no one could come in there now,” explained Regie, who had watched open-mouthed the upheaval of the gate. “Father said it could not be opened any more. He told mother.”
“Did he, my son?” said Dick, and he kissed every one, beginning with Hester, and finishing with the dolls. Then they all sat down to the tea-party, and partook largely of the delicacies, and after tea Dick solemnly asked the children if they had seen the flying halfpenny he had brought back with him from Australia. The children crowded round him, and the halfpenny was produced and handed round. Each child touched it and found it real. Auntie Hester and Auntie Rachel examined it. Boulou was requested to smell it. And then it was laid on the grass, and the pocket-handkerchief which had done duty as a tablecloth was spread over it.
The migrations of the halfpenny were so extraordinary that even Rachel and Hester professed amazement. Once it was found in Rachel’s hand, into which another large hand had gently shut it. But it was never discovered twice in the same place, though all the children rushed religiously to look for it where it was last discovered.
Another time, after a long search, the doll in the bath was discovered to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie’s back, and amid the wild excitement of the children its cold descent was described by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over his stocking at his knee.
“Make it fly down my back too, Uncle Dick,” shrieked Mary. “Regie, give it to me.”
But Regie danced in a circle round Dick, holding aloft the wonderful halfpenny.
“Make it fly down my throat,” he cried, too excited to know what he was doing, and he put the halfpenny in his mouth.
“Put it out this instant,” said Dick, without moving.
A moment’s pause followed, in which the blood ebbed away from the hearts of the two women.
“I can’t,” said Regie, “I’ve swallowed it.” And he began to whimper, and then suddenly rolled on the grass screaming.
Dick pounced upon him like a panther, and held him by the feet head downwards, shaking him violently.
The child’s face was terrible to see.
Hester hid her face in her hands. Rachel rose and stood close to Dick.
“I think the shaking is rather too much for him,” she said, watching the poor little purple face intently.
“I’m bound to go on,” said Dick, fiercely. “Is it moving, Regie?”
“It’s going down,” screamed Regie, suddenly.
“That it’s not,” said Dick, and he shook the child again, and the halfpenny flew out upon the grass.
“Thank God,” said Dick, and he laid the gasping child on Hester’s lap and turned away.
A few minutes later Regie was laughing and talking and feeling himself a hero. Presently he slipped off Hester’s knee, and ran to Dick, who was lying on the grass a few paces off, his face hidden in his hands.
“Make the halfpenny fly again, Uncle Dick,” cried all the children, pulling at him.
Dick raised an ashen face for a moment and said hoarsely, “Take them away.”
Hester gathered up the children and took them back to the house through the kitchen garden.
“Don’t say we have arrived,” whispered Rachel to her. “I will come on with him presently.” And she sat down near the prostrate vinegrower. The president of the South Australian Vinegrowers’ Association looked very large when he was down.
Presently he sat up. His face was drawn and haggard, but he met Rachel’s dog-like glance of silent sympathy with a difficult crooked smile.
“He is such a jolly little chap,” he said, winking his hawk eyes.
“It was not your fault.”
“That would not have made it any better for the parents,” said Dick. “I had time to think of that while I was shaking that little money-box. Besides, it was my fault in a way. I’ll never play with other people’s children again. They are too brittle. I’ve had shaves up the Fly River and in the South Sea Islands, but never anything as bad as this, in this blooming little Vicarage garden with a church looking over the wall.”
Hester was skimming back towards them.
“Don’t mention it to James and his wife,” she said to Dick, “He has to speak at a temperance meeting to-night. I will tell them when the meeting is over.”
“That’s just as well,” said Dick, “for I know if James jawed much at me I should act on the text that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
“In what way?”
“Either way,” said Dick. “Tongue or fist. It does not matter which so long as you give more than you get. And the text is quite right. It is blessed for I’ve tried it over and over again, and found it true every time. But I don’t want to try it on James if he’s anything like what he was as a curate.”
“He is not much altered,” said Hester.
“He is the kind of man that would not alter much,” said Dick. “I expect God Almighty likes him as he is.”
Mr. and Mrs. Gresley meanwhile were receiving Mrs. Pratt and the two Miss Pratts in the drawing-room. Selina and Ada Pratt were fine handsome young women with long upper lips, who wore their smart sailor hats tilted backwards to show their bushy fringes, and whose muff-chains with swinging pendant hearts, silk blouses and sequin belts and brown boots represented to Mrs. Gresley the highest pinnacle of the world of fashion.
Selina was the most popular, being liable to shrieks of laughter at the smallest witticisms, and always ready for that species of amusement termed “bally-ragging” or “haymaking.” But Ada was the most admired. She belonged to that type which in hotel society and country towns is always termed “queenly.” She “kept the men at a distance.” She “never allowed them to take liberties,” &c. &c. She held her chin up and her elbows out, and was considered by the section of Middleshire society in which she shone to be very distinguished. Mrs. Pratt was often told that her daughter looked like a duchess; and this facsimile of the aristocracy, or rather of the most distressing traits of its latest recruits, had a manner of lolling with crossed legs in the parental carriage and pair, which was greatly admired. “Looks as if she was born to it all,” Mr. Pratt would say to his wife.
Mrs. Gresley was just beginning to fear her other guests were not coming when two tall figures were seen walking across the lawn, with Hester between them.
Mr. Gresley sallied forth to meet them, and blasts of surprised welcome were borne into the drawing-room by the summer air.
“But it was locked. I locked it myself.”
Inaudible reply.
“Padlocked. Only opens to the word Moon. Key on my own watch chain.”
Inaudible reply.
“Hinges!! Ha! Ha! Ha! very good, Dick. Likely story that. I see you’re the same as ever. Travellers’ tales. But we are not so easily taken in, are we, Hester?”
Mrs. Gresley certainly had the gift of prophecy as far as the Pratts were concerned. Mrs. Pratt duly took the expected “fancy” to Rachel, and pressed her to stay at “The Towers,” while she was in the neighbourhood, and make further acquaintance with her “young ladies.”
“Ada is very pernickety,” she said, smiling towards that individual conversing with Dick. “She won’t make friends with everybody, and she gives it me (with maternal pride) when I ask people to stay whom she does not take to. She says there’s a very poor lot round here, and most of the young ladies so ill-bred and empty she does not care to make friends with them. I don’t know where she gets all her knowledge from. I’m sure it’s not from her mother. Ada, now you come and talk a little to Miss West.”
Ada rose with the air of one who confers a favour, and Rachel made room for her on the sofa while Mrs. Pratt squeezed herself behind the tea-table with Mrs. Gresley.
The conversation turned on bicycling.
“I bike now and then in the country,” said Ada, “but I have not done much lately. We have only just come down from town, and of course I never bike in London.”
Rachel had just said that she did.
“Perhaps you are nervous about the traffic,” said Rachel.
“Oh! I’m not the least afraid of the traffic, but it’s such bad form to bike in London.”
“That of course depends on how it’s done,” said Rachel; “but I am sure in your case you need not be afraid.”
Ada glared at Rachel, and did not answer.
When the Pratts had taken leave she said to her mother. “Well, you can have Rachel West if you want to, but if you do I shall go away. She is only Birmingham, and yet she’s just as stuck up as she can be.”
The Pratts were “Liverpool.”
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Pratt with natural pride. “It’s well known no one is good enough for you. But I took to Miss West, and an orphan and all, with all that money, poor thing.”
“She has no style,” said Selina, “but she has a nice face, and she’s coming to stay with Sibbie Loftus next week, when she leaves Vi Newhaven. She may be Birmingham, Ada, but she’s just as thick with county people as we are.”
“I did not rightly make out,” said Mrs. Pratt reflectively, “whether that tall gentleman, Mr. Vernon, was after Miss West or Hessie Gresley.”
“Oh! Ma! You always think some one’s after somebody else,” said Ada impatiently, whose high breeding obliged her to be rather peremptory with her simple parent. “Mr. Vernon is a pauper, and so is Hessie. And besides Hessie is not the kind of girl that anybody would want to marry.”
“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” said Selina. “But if she had had any chances I know she would have told me because I told her all about Captain Cobbett and Mr. Baxter.”
Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus sages.
— LA FONTAINE
IF, after the departure of the Pratts, Rachel had hoped for a word with Hester she was doomed to disappointment. Mr. Gresley took the seat on the sofa beside Rachel which Ada Pratt had vacated, and after a few kindly eulogistic remarks on the Bishop of Southminster and the responsibilities of wealth, he turned the conversation into the well-worn groove of Warpington.
Rachel proved an attentive listener, and after Mr. Gresley had furnished her at length with nutritious details respecting parochial work, he went on:
“I am holding this evening a temperance meeting in the Parish Room. I wish, Miss West, that I could persuade you to stay for it, and thus enlist your sympathies in a matter of vital importance.”
“They have been enlisted in it for the last ten years,” said Rachel, who was not yet accustomed to the invariable assumption on the part of Mr. Gresley that no one took an interest in the most obvious good work until he had introduced and championed it. “But,” she added, “I will stay with pleasure.”
Dick, who was becoming somewhat restive under Mrs. Gresley’s inquiries about the Newhavens, became suddenly interested in the temperance meeting.
“I’ve seen many a good fellow go to the dogs through drink in the Colonies, more’s the pity," Dick remarked. "I think I’ll come, too, James. And if you want a few plain words you call on me.”
“I will,” said Mr. Gresley, much gratified. “I always make a point of encouraging the laity, at least those among them who are thoroughly grounded in Church teaching, to express themselves. Hear both sides, that is what I always say. The Bishop constantly enjoins on his clergy to endeavour to elicit the lay opinion. The chair this evening will be taken by Mr. Pratt, a layman.”
The temperance meeting was to take place at seven o’clock, and possibly Rachel may have been biased in favour of that entertainment by the hope of a quiet half-hour with Hester in her own room. At any rate, she secured it.
When they were alone Rachel produced Lady Newhaven’s note.
“Do come to Westhope,” she said. “While you are under this roof it seems almost impossible to see you, unless we are close to it,” and she touched the sloping ceiling with her hand. “And yet I came to Westhope, and I am going on to Wilderleigh partly in order to be near you.”
Hester shook her head.
“The book is nearly finished,” she said, the low light from the attic window striking sideways on the small face with its tightly compressed lips.
A spirit indomitable, immortal, looked for a moment out of Hester’s grey eyes. The spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh was becoming weaker day by day.
“When it is finished,” she went on, “I will go anywhere and do anything, but stay here I must till it is done. Besides, I am not fit for society at present. I am covered with blue mould. Do you remember how that horrid Lady Carbury used to laugh at the country squires’ daughters for being provincial? I have gone a peg lower than being provincial, I have become parochial.”
A knock came at the door, and Fraülein’s mild, musical face appeared in the aperture.
“I fear to disturb you,” she said, “but Regie say he cannot go to sleep till he see you.”
Hester introduced Fraülein to Rachel, and slipped downstairs to the night nursery.
Mary and Stella were already asleep in their high-barred cribs. The blind was down, and Hester could only just see the white figure of Regie sitting up in his nightgown. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took him in her arms.
“What is it, my treasure?”
“Auntie Hester, was I naughty about the flying halfpenny?”
“No, darling. Why?”
“Because mother always says not to put pennies in my mouth, and I never did till to-day. And now Mary says I have been very naughty.”
“It does not matter what Mary says,” said Hester, with a withering glance towards the sleeping angel in the next crib, who was only Mary by day. “But you must never do it again, and you will tell mother all about it to-morrow.”
“Yes,” said Regie; “but, but —”
“But what?”
“Uncle Dick did say it was a flying halfpenny, and you said so, too, and that other auntie. And I thought it did not matter putting in flying halfpennies, only common ones.”
Hester saw the difficulty in Regie’s mind. “It felt common when it was inside,” said Regie doubtfully, “and yet you and Uncle Dick did say it was a flying one.”
Regie’s large eyes were turned upon her with solemn inquiry in them. It is in crises like this that our first ideals are laid low.
Regie had always considered Hester as the very soul of honour, that mysterious honour which he was beginning to dimly apprehend through her allegiance to it, and which, in his mind, belonged as exclusively to her as the little bedroom under the roof.
“Regie,” said Hester, tremulously, seeing that she had unwittingly put a stumbling-block before the little white feet she loved, “when we played at the doll’s tea-party, and you were the butler, I did not mean you were really a butler, did I? I knew, and you know, and we all knew, that you were Regie all the time.”
“Ye-es.”
“It was a game. And so when Uncle Dick found us playing the tea-party game he played another game about the flying halfpenny.”
“Then it was a common halfpenny after all,” said Regie with a deep sigh.
“Yes, it was a common halfpenny, only the game was that it could fly, like the other game was that the acorn-cups were real tea-cups. So Uncle Dick and all of us were not saying what was not true. We were all playing at a game. Do you understand, my little mouse?”
“Yes,” said Regie, with another voluminous sigh, and Hester realised with thankfulness that the halfpenny and not herself had fallen from its pedestal. “I see now, but when he said, Hi! Presto! and it flew away, I thought I saw it flying. Mary said she did. And I suppose the gate was only a game too.”
Hester felt that the subject would be quite beyond her powers of explanation if once the gate were introduced into it.
She laid Regie down and covered him.
“And you will go to sleep now. And I will ask Uncle Dick when next he comes to show us how he did the game with the halfpenny.”
“Yes,” said Regie dejectedly. “I’d rather know what there is to be known. Only I thought it was a flying one. Good night, Auntie Hester.”
She stayed beside him a few minutes until his even breathing showed her he was asleep, and then slipped back to her own room. The front door bell was ringing as she came out of the nursery. The temperance deputation from Liverpool had arrived. Mr. Gresley’s voice of welcome could be heard saying that it was only ten minutes to seven.
Accordingly a few minutes before that hour, Mr. Gresley and his party entered the parish room. It was crammed. The back benches were filled with a large contingent of young men, whose half-sheepish, half-sullen expression showed that their presence was due to pressure. Why the parishioners had come in such numbers it would be hard to say. Perhaps even a temperance meeting was a change in the dreary monotony of rural life at Warpington. Many of the faces bore the imprint of this monotony, Rachel thought, as she refused the conspicuous front seat pointed out to her by Mrs. Gresley, and sat down near the door with Hester.
Dick, who had been finishing his cigarette outside, entered a moment later, and stood in the gangway, entirely filling it up, his eye travelling over the assembly, and as Rachel well knew, looking for her. Presently he caught sight of her, wedged in four or five deep by the last arrivals. There was a vacant space between her and the wall, but it was apparently inaccessible. Entirely disregarding the anxious churchwardens who were waving him forward Dick disappeared among the young men at the back, and Rachel thought no more of him until a large Oxford shoe descended quietly out of space upon the empty seat near her, and Dick, who had persuaded the young men to give him footroom on their seats, and had stepped over the high backs of several “school forms,” sat down beside her.
It was neatly done, and Rachel could not help smiling. But the thought darted through her mind that Dick was the kind of man who somehow or other would succeed where he meant to succeed, and would marry the woman he intended to marry. There was no doubt that she was that woman, and as he sat tranquilly beside her she wished with a nervous tremor that his choice had fallen on some one else.
The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighbouring Archdeacon. No one could kneel down except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so. Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the principal speaker. Mr. Pratt’s face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long parti-coloured whiskers. He assumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his “humble brethren,” admirably suited to one, who after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a “county family.”
The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.
The deputation from Liverpool followed, a thin ascetic looking man of many bones and little linen, who spoke with the concentrated fury of a fanatic against alcohol in all its varieties. Dick who had so far taken more interest in Rachel’s gloves, which she had dropped, and with which he was kindly burdening himself, than in the proceedings, drew himself up and fixed his steel eyes on the speaker.
A restive movement in the audience followed the speech, which was loudly clapped by Mr. Gresley and the Pratts.
Mr. Gresley then mounted the platform.
Mr. Gresley had an enormous advantage as a platform speaker, and as a preacher in the twin pulpits of church and home, owing to the conviction that he had penetrated to the core of any subject under discussion, and could pronounce judgment upon it in a conclusive manner. He was wont to approach every subject by the preliminary statement that he had “threshed it out.” This threshing out had been so thorough that there was hardly a subject even of the knottiest description which he was unable to dismiss with a few pregnant words. “Evolution! Ha! ha!! Descended from an ape. I don’t believe that for one.” While women’s rights received their death-blow from a jocose allusion to the woman following the plough, while the man sat at home and rocked the cradle.
With the same noble simplicity he grappled with the difficult and complex subject of temperance, by which he meant total abstinence. He informed his hearers, “in the bigoted tones of a married teetotaler,” that he had gone to the root of the matter — the roots were apparently on the surface — and that it was no use calling black white and white black. He for one did not believe in muddling up black and white as some lukewarm people advocated till they were only a dirty grey. No; either drink was right or it was wrong. If it was not wrong to get drunk, he did not know what was wrong. He was not a man of compromise. Alcohol was a servant of the devil, and to tamper with it was to tamper with the evil one himself; touch not; taste not; handle not. He for his part should never side with the devil.
This lofty utterance having been given time to sink in, Mr. Gresley looked round at the sea of stolid, sullen faces, and concluded with saying that the chairman would now call upon his cousin, Mr. Vernon, to speak to them on the shocking evils he himself had witnessed in Australia as the results of drink.
Dick was not troubled by shyness. He extricated himself from his seat with the help of the young men, and slowly ascended the platform. He looked a size too large for it, and for the other speakers, and his loose tweed suit and heather stockings were as great a contrast to the tightly buttoned up black of the other occupants as were his strong keen face and muscular hands to those of the previous speakers.
“That’s a man,” said a masculine voice behind Rachel. “He worn’t reared on ditch water, you bet.”
“Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen,” said Dick, “You’ve only got to listen to me for half a minute, and you’ll find out without my telling you that Nature did not cut me out for a speaker. I’m no talker. I’m a working man”— an admission which Mr. Pratt would rather have been boiled in his own oil than have made —“for the last seven years I’ve done my twelve hours a day, and I’ve come to think more of what a man gets through with his hands than the sentiments which he can wheeze out after a heavy meal. But Mr. Gresley has asked me to tell you what I know about drink, as I have seen a good many samples of it in Australia.”
Dick then proceeded, with a sublime disregard of grammar, and an earnestness that increased as he went on, to dilate on the evil effects of drink as he himself had witnessed them. He described how he had seen men who could not get spirits make themselves drunk on “Pain-killer”; how he had seen strong young station hands, who had not tasted spirits for months, come down from the hills with a hundred pounds in their pockets, and drink themselves into “doddery” old men in a fortnight in the nearest township, where they were kept drunk on drugged liquor till all their hard-earned wages were gone.
The whole room listened in dead silence. No feet shuffled. Mr. Gresley looked patronisingly at Dick’s splendid figure and large outstretched hand, with the crooked middle finger which he had cut off by mistake in the Bush, and had stuck on again himself. Then the young Vicar glanced smiling at the audience, feeling that he had indeed elicited a “lay opinion” of the best kind.
“Now what are the causes of all these dreadful things?” continued Dick. “I’m speaking to the men here, not the women. What are the causes of all this poverty and vice and scamped workmanship, and weak eyes and shaky hands on the top of high wages? I tell you they come from two things, and one is as bad as the other. One is drinking too much, and the other is drinking bad liquor. Every man who’s worth his salt,” said Dick, balancing his long bent finger on the middle of his other palm, “should know when he has had enough. Some can carry more, some less.” Mr. Gresley started and signed to Dick, but Dick did not notice. “Bad liquor is at the root of half the drunkenness I know. I don’t suppose there are many publicans here to-night, for this meeting isn’t quite in their line, and if there are, they can’t have come expecting compliments. But if you fellows think you get good liquor at the publics round here, I tell you, you are jolly well mistaken.”
“Hear! Hear!” shouted several voices.
“I’ve been in the course of the last week to most of the public-houses in Southminster and Westhope and Warpington to see what sort of stuff they sold, and upon my soul, gentlemen, if I settled in Warpington I’d, I’d”— Dick hesitated for a simile strong enough —“I’d turn teetotaler until I left it again, rather than swallow the snake poison they serve out to you.”
There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Mr. Gresley, whose complexion had deepened, sprang to his feet and endeavoured to attract Dick’s attention, but Dick saw nothing but his audience. Mr. Gresley began to speak in his high sing-song voice.
“My young friend,” he said, “has mistaken the object of this meeting. In short I must —”
“Not a bit,” said Dick, “not a bit; but if the people have had enough of me I’ll take your chair while you have another innings.”
In a moment the room was in an uproar.
Shouts of “No, no,” “Go on,” “Let him speak.”
In the tumult Mr. Gresley’s voice instead of being the solo became but as one instrument — albeit a trombone — in an orchestra.
“But I thoroughly agree with the gentlemen who spoke before me,” said Dick, when peace was restored. “Total abstinence is a long chalk below temperance, but it’s better than drunkenness any day. And if a man can’t get on without three finger-nips let him take the pledge. There are one or two here to-night who would be the better for it. But to my thinking total abstinence is like a water mattress. It is good for a sick man, and it’s good for a man with a weak will, which is another kind of illness. But temperance is for those who are in health. There is a text in the Bible about wine making glad the heart of man. That’s a good text and one to go on. As often as not texts are like bags, and a man crams all his own rubbish into them, and expects you to take them together. There are some men who ought to know better who actually get out of that text by saying the Bible means unfermented liquor”— Mr. Gresley became purple. “Does it? Then how about the other place where we hear of new wine bursting old bottles. What makes them burst? Fermentation, of course, as every village idiot knows. No, I take it when the Bible says wine it means wine. Wine’s fermented liquor, and what’s unfermented liquor? Nothing but ‘pop’.”
Dick pronounced the last word with profound contempt, which was met with enthusiastic applause.
“My last word to you, gentlemen,” continued Dick, “is keep in mind two points: first, look out for an honest publican, if there is such an article, who will buy only the best liquor from the best sources, and is not bound by the breweries to sell any stuff they send along. Join together, and make it hot for a bound publican. Kick him out, even if he is the Squire’s butler.” Mr. Pratt’s complexion became apoplectic. “And the second point is, Remember some men have heads and some haven’t. It is no use for a lame man entering for a hurdle race. A strong man can take his whack — if it’s with his food — and it will do him good, while a weak man can’t hang up his hat after the first smile.”
A storm of applause followed, which was perhaps all the heartier by reason of the furious face of Mr. Gresley. Dick was clapped continuously as he descended the platform, and slowly left the room feeling in his pockets for his tobacco pouch. A squad of young men creaked out after him, and others followed by twos and threes, so that the mellifluous voice of Mr. Pratt was comparatively lost, who, disregarding his position as chairman, now rose to pour oil — of which in manner alone he had always a large supply — on the troubled waters. Mr. Pratt had felt a difficulty in interrupting a member of a county family, which with the eye of faith he plainly perceived Dick to be, and at the same time a guest of “Newhaven’s.” The Pratts experienced in the rare moments of their intercourse with the Newhavens some of that sublime awe, that subdued rapture, which others experience in cathe- drals. Mr. Pratt had also taken a momentary pleasure in the defeat of Mr. Gresley, who did not pay him the deference which he considered due to him and his “seat.” Mr. Pratt always expected that the Vicar should, by reason of his small income, take the position of a sort of upper servant of the Squire; and he had seen so many instances of this happy state of things that he was perpetually nettled by Mr. Gresley’s “independent” attitude; while Mr. Gresley was equally irritated by “the impatience of clerical control” and shepherding which Mr. Pratt, his largest and woolliest sheep, too frequently evinced.
As the chairman benignly expressed his approval of both views, and toned down each to meet the other, the attention of the audience wandered to the occasional laughs and cheers which came from the school playground. And when a few minutes later Rachel emerged with the stream she saw Dick standing under the solitary lamp-post speaking earnestly to a little crowd of youths and men. The laughter had ceased. Their crestfallen appearance spoke for itself.
“Well, good-night, lads,” said Dick cordially, raising his cap to them, and he rejoined Rachel and Hester at the gate.
When Dick and Rachel had departed on their bicycles, and when the deputation after a frugal supper had retired to rest, and when the drawing-room door was shut, then, and not till then, did Mr. Gresley give vent to his feelings.
“And he would not stop,” he repeated over and over again almost in hysterics, when the total abstinence hose of his wrath had been turned on Dick until every reservoir of abuse was exhausted. “I signed to him; I spoke to him. You saw me speak to him, Minna, and he would not stop.”
Hester experienced that sudden emotion which may result either in tears or laughter at the cruel anguish brought upon her brother by the momentary experience of what he so ruthlessly inflicted.
“He talked me down,” said Mr. Gresley, his voice shaking. “He opposed me in my own school-room. Of course, I blame myself for asking him to speak. I ought to have inquired into his principles more thoroughly, but he took me in entirely by saying one thing in this room and the exact opposite on the platform.”
“I thought his views were the same in both places,” said Hester, “and at the time I admired you for asking him to speak, considering he is a vine-grower.”
“A what?” almost shrieked Mr. Gresley.
“A vine-grower. Surely you know he has one of the largest vineyards in South Australia?”
For a moment Mr. Gresley was bereft of speech.
“And you knew this and kept silence,” he said at last, while Mrs. Gresley looked reproachfully, but without surprise, at her sister-in-law.
“Certainly. What was there to speak about? I thought you knew.”
“I never heard it till this instant. That quite accounts for his views. He wants to push his own wines. Of course, drunkenness is working for his interests. I understand it all now. He has undone the work of years by that speech for the sake of booking a few orders. It is contemptible. I trust, Hester, he is not a particular friend of yours, for I shall feel it my duty to speak very strongly to him if he comes again.”
But Dick did not appear again. He was off and away before the terrors of the Church could be brought to bear on him.
But his memory remained green at Warpington.
“They do say,” said Abel to Hester a few days later, planting his spade on the ground, and slowly scraping off upon it the clay from his nailed boots, “as that Muster Vernon gave ’em a dusting in the school-yard as they won’t forget in a hurry. He said he could not speak out before the women folk, but he was noways nesh to pick his words onst he was outside. Barnes said as his tongue ’ud ’ave raised blisters on a hedge stake. But he had a way with him for all that. There was a deal of talk about him at market last Wednesday, and Jones and Peg is just silly to go back to Australy with ’im. I ain’t sure,” continued Abel, closing the conversation by a vigorous thrust of his spade into the earth, “as one of the things that fetched ’em all most wasn’t his saying that since he’s been in a hot climate he knowed what it was to be tempted himself when he was a bit down on his luck or a bit up. Pratts would never have owned to that.” The village always spoke of Mr. Pratt in the plural without a prefix. “I’ve been to a sight of temperance meetings because,” with indulgence, “master likes it, tho’ I always has my glass, as is natural. But I never heard one of the speakers kind of settle to it like that. That’s what the folks say; that for all he was a born gentleman he spoke to ’em as man to man, not as if we was servants or childer.”
Le bruit est pour le fat.
La plainte est pour le sot.
L’honnête homme trompé
S’en va et ne dit mot.
— M. DELANONI.
“AND so you cannot persuade Miss Gresley to come to us next week?” said Lord Newhaven, strolling into the dining-room at Westhope Abbey, where Rachel and Dick were sitting at a little supper-table laid for two in front of the high altar. The dining-room had formerly been the chapel, and the carved stone altar still remained under the east window.
Lord Newhaven drew up a chair, and Rachel felt vaguely relieved at his presence. He had a knack of knowing when to appear, and when to efface himself.
“She can’t leave her book,” said Rachel.
“Her first book was very clever,” said Lord Newhaven, “and what was more, it was true. I hope for her own sake she will outgrow her love of truth, or it will make deadly enemies for her.”
“And good friends,” said Rachel.
“Possibly,” said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at her, and almost obliged to believe that she had spoken without self-consciousness. “But if she outgrows all her principles, I hope at any rate she won’t outgrow her sharp tongue. I liked her ever since she first came to this house, ten years ago, with Lady Susan Gresley. I remember saying that Captain Pratt, who called while she was here, was a ‘bounder.’ And Miss Gresley said she did not think he was quite a bounder, only on the boundary line. If you knew Captain Pratt, that describes him exactly.”
“I wish she had not said it,” said Rachel with a sigh. “She makes trouble for herself by saying things like that. Is Lady Newhaven in the drawing-room?”
“Yes, I heard her singing ‘The Lost Chord’ not ten minutes ago.”
“I will go up to her,” said Rachel.
“I do believe,” said Lord Newhaven, when Rachel had departed, “that she has an affection for Miss Gresley.”
“It is not necessary to be a detective in plain clothes to see that,” said Dick.
“No. It generally needs to be a magnifying glass to see a woman’s friendship, and then they are only expedients till we arrive, Dick. You need not be jealous of Miss Gresley. Miss West will forget all about her when she is Mrs. Vernon.”
“She does not seem very keen about that,” said Dick grimly. “I’m only marking time. I’m no forwarder than I was.”
“Well, it’s your own fault for fixing your affections on a woman who is not anxious to marry. She has no objection to you. It is marriage she does not like.”
“Oh! That’s bosh,” said Dick. “All women wish to be married, and if they don’t they ought to.”
He felt that an invidious reflection had been cast on Rachel.
“All the same, a man with one eye can see that women with money or anything that makes them independent of us don’t flatter us by their alacrity to marry us. They will make fools of themselves for love, none greater, and they will marry for love. But their different attitude towards us, their natural lords and masters, directly we are no longer necessary to them as stepping-stones to a home and a recognised position revolts me. If you had taken my advice at the start, you would have made up to one among the mob of women who are dependent on marriage for their very existence. If a man goes into that herd he will not be refused. And if he is it does not matter. It is the blessed custom of piling everything on to the eldest son, and leaving the women of the family almost penniless, which provides half of us with wives without any trouble to ourselves. Whatever we are, they have got to take us. The average dancing young woman living in luxury in her father’s house is between the devil and the deep sea. We are frequently the devil, but it is not surprising that she can’t face the alternative, a poverty to which she was not brought up, and in which she has seen her old spinster aunts. But I suppose in your case you really want the money?”
Dick looked rather hard at Lord Newhaven.
“I should not have said that unless I had known it to be a lie,” continued the latter, “because I dislike being kicked. But, Dick, listen to me. You have not,” with sudden misgiving, “laid any little matrimonial project before her this evening, have you?”
“No, I was not quite such a fool as that.”
“Well! Such things do occur. Moonlight, you know, &c. &c. I was possessed by a devil once, and proposed by moonlight, as all my wife’s friends know, and probably her maid. But seriously, Dick, you are not making progress, as you say yourself.”
“Well!” rather sullenly.
“Well, onlookers see most of the game. Miss West may — I don’t say she is — but if things go on as they are for another week she may become slightly bored. That was why I joined you at supper. She had had, for the time, enough.”
“Of me?” said Dick, reddening under his tan.
“Just so. It is a matter of no importance after marriage, but it should be avoided beforehand. Are you really in earnest about this?”
Dick delivered himself slowly and deliberately of certain platitudes.
“Well, I hope I shall hear you say all that again some day in a condensed form before a clergyman. In the meanwhile —”
“In the meanwhile I had better clear out.”
“Yes; I don’t enjoy saying so in the presence of my own galantine and mayonnaise, but that is it. Go, and — come back.”
“If you have a Bradshaw,” said Dick, “I’ll look out my train now. I think there is an express to London about seven in the morning, if you can send me to the station.”
“But the post only comes in at eight.”
“Well, you can send my letters after me.”
“I daresay I can, my diplomatist. But you are not going to leave till the post has arrived, when you will receive business letters, requiring your immediate presence in London. You are not going to let a woman know that you leave on her account.”
“You are very sharp, Cackles,” said Dick, drearily. “And I’ll take a leaf out of your book and lie, if you think it is the right thing. But I expect she will know very well that the same business which took me to that infernal temperance meeting has taken me to London.”
Rachel was vaguely relieved when Dick went off next morning. She was not, as a rule, oppressed by the attentions she received from young men, which in due season became “marked,” and then resulted in proposals neatly or clumsily expressed. But she was disturbed when she thought of Dick, and his departure was like the removal of a weight, not a heavy, but still a perceptible one. For Rachel was aware that Dick was in deadly earnest, and that his love was growing steadily, almost unconsciously, was accumulating like snow, flake by flake, upon a mountain-side. Some day, perhaps not for a long time, but some day, there would be an avalanche, and, in his own language, she “would be in it.”