A Daughter of StrifeCHAPTER I
A Daughter of Strife
CHAPTER I
As long ago as the year 1710 there lived in London town a girl of the name of Anne Champion—a straw-plaiter by trade, and by hard fortune a beauty. Anne lived alone in a garret, and earned her bread by the sweat of her brow, plaiting straws for hats from early morning to late at night. Then she would go out and buy her food for the next day, if she had earned enough to buy food with, and if she had not, she would do without food and work on.
A hard life enough; but it was not to last for ever. For Anne had a fine lover at the wars—Surgeon Sebastian Shepley,—and ere very long he was to return, and Anne was to say farewell to work. Partings were partings in those days, and Anne never thought of getting a letter from Flanders more than once in seven or eight weeks. When she got one, poor girl, she could not read it—no, nor answer it; for she had no ‘book-learning,’ and had never been taught to write; but she used to take her letters to a former adorer of her own who served in a print-shop, and he kindly read his rival’s love-letters aloud, and, when Anne could afford to send one in return, would even be forgiving enough to write it for her. Anne’s fine lover had caused considerable jealousy among her neighbours, and old Mrs. Nare, the mother of Matthew, the young man in the news-shop, was never tired of hinting to Anne that no good ever came of such unequal alliances. When she saw that Anne was quite undisturbed by these prognostications, Mrs. Nare tried to persuade her that there was little chance Shepley would ever return from the wars.
‘The surgeons do come by their deaths in war-time so well as the soldiers,’ she would say; ‘best not set your heart overly on him, Anne.’ And Anne would whiten, and turn away at her words.
Yard’s Entry, where Anne Champion and Mrs. Nare lived, is a place that smells of age now—it was counted old even in these far-away days I write of,—and the stone stairs leading up to Anne’s garret were worn away into crescent shape by the tread of many generations. At the foot of these stairs, on warm evenings, Mrs. Nare used to stand and watch all her neighbours’ affairs; so it was natural enough that a stranger coming in to the Entry one evening should address himself to her when he made inquiry for Anne Champion. He was a young man with very bright eyes, and his voice, as clear as the note of a flute, echoed up the stair as he spoke.
‘Doth Anne Champion live here, my good woman?’ he asked.
‘No, sir. Anne she lives at the top of the stair,’ said Mrs. Nare, squinting up at the stranger out of her narrow old eyes, then, actuated by unknown motives, she added—
‘Anne she’ve got a lover at the wars,’ in a sort of interrogative tone. She had seen Shepley more than once, and knew this was not he; perhaps she wished to find out the stranger’s errand.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ was all he said, however, as he disappeared up the winding old stair. Up and up he went, feeling his way, for there was little or no light to guide him, then he stumbled against a door, and knocked at haphazard, hoping it was the door he sought.
‘Come in,’ said some one, and at that the man, groping with the latch for a moment, at last got the door open, and stood on the threshold looking in.
The sunshine fell across the floor in a flood of smoky brightness, and full in the sun’s beams sat Anne Champion, surrounded by the straw she was plaiting. It was piled up round her, within reach of her fingers, that moved like lightning at her mechanical toil.
Anne wore a gown of pink calico, and, whether for greater comfort or from mere untidiness, all her yellow hair hung over her shoulders in splendid confusion. She let her work fall at sight of a stranger, started up, and standing almost knee-deep among the straw, caught at her hair, and began to wind it up into a knot.
The young man stood still on the threshold for a full minute, as I have said. Then he seemed to recollect himself, and stepping across the floor he held out his hand to the girl, smiling very pleasantly.
‘I scarce need to ask if you are Anne Champion,’ he said.
Anne seemed too much taken aback by this unexpected visitor to make any reply. She stood looking at him and twisting her long yellow hair between her fingers. At last she said—
‘Yes, sir, I be Anne Champion,’ and waited for him to make known his errand.
The young man did not seem to be in any hurry, however. He looked round the bare little room, and then looked again at Anne before he spoke.
‘I am come to make excuses,’ he said then; ‘and if you will allow me to sit down, for I am weak still from a fever, I shall make them to the best of my ability.’
Anne produced a stool from a corner and proffered it to her visitor.
‘I am come from Flanders,’ he began again; but he did not speak like one intent on his business: his bright eyes were fixed on Anne; he seemed to be speaking of one thing and thinking of another. His words, however, had a quick effect on Anne—her look of perplexed shyness had vanished.
‘From Flanders? Ah, sir, ’tis welcome thrice over you are!’ she cried; ‘an’ are you bringing me news of my dear man?’ Her face was radiant; she smiled, and the beautiful dimples in her cheek were revealed, and her white even teeth. Her very eyes seemed to smile.
The young man began to speak again—with unaccountable stumblings and hesitations, still reading Anne’s face with his quick bright eyes as he spoke.
‘I am come—Sebastian Shepley,’ he said, and paused.
At the sight of his perturbation Anne came quickly towards him and laid her hand on his shoulder.
‘Sir, sir,’ she cried. ‘Don’t tell me as there is aught amiss with my Sebastian.’
‘Anne, I am come from your old lover Shepley, as you surmise,’ began the young man again; ‘he—he is well in health.’
The colour which had left Anne’s face rushed back to it in a beautiful scarlet tide.
‘Lord! sir, Sebastian’s not old, begging your pardon, sir,’ she said, letting her hand fall from his shoulder, rather ashamed of her sudden familiarity.
‘I—’twas not that way I meant it, Anne; I scarce know,’ stammered the young man. ‘Come, sit down by me and I shall tell you all.’
Anne, however, would not have felt easy sitting down in the presence of this fine stranger in lace ruffles. She stood opposite him and still looked anxious in spite of his assurances.
‘There hath ill come to him, sir; he’s wounded; or—or—’ she said.
The young man seemed suddenly to have collected himself; his embarrassment, if embarrassment it had been, vanished as suddenly as it had come. He rose and came over to where Anne stood.
‘He hath no wound nor hurt of any sort, Anne, but he hath sent me with a message to you, and this is it:—The war is like to keep him so long in the Low Country he dare not ask you to wait.’
‘I’d wait a lifetime for him,’ laughed Anne. ‘If that be all his message he hath troubled you for naught, sir.’
‘ ’Tis not all. The fact is Sebastian has married—married a pretty Dutch wife. He feared to exhaust your patience. He asked me to tell you. “For,” said he, “Anne hath so many lovers ’twill be neither here nor there to her.” As like as not he may be years abroad still.’
There was a moment’s silence. Anne looked her visitor straight in the eyes; she had whitened down to her very lips.
‘You are but fooling with me, sir,’ she said, half whispering the words.
‘I am in sober earnest; ’tis no matter for jest this,’ said the young man, looking at Anne’s blanching cheeks.
‘O good Lord!’ then cried Anne in a piteous crying voice—the note of a bird over its harried nest. She seemed to forget the presence of a stranger, and, sinking down against a settle that stood by the wall, she hid her face in her hands and sobbed, rocking herself back and forwards in her bitter grief.
‘Sebastian, Sebastian dear, you are not wedded true and certain?’ she cried. ‘O God help me, an’ what am I to do now? O Lord! O Lord!’
The young man who had brought this ill news did not go away and leave Anne alone with her sorrow, as most men would have done. He sat down on the settle she leant against and laid his hand kindly on her shoulder though he said nothing. Anne sobbed on, with hidden face, and all the time her visitor’s bright eyes were roving round the room, taking in every detail of its poor arrangements, yet ever and again he would pat the girl’s shoulder in token of sympathy.
Suddenly Anne rose to her feet.
‘He’s not worth a tear,’ she said. ‘He’s like the rest of you. I had no opinion of men before that I took up with Sebastian, an’ a fool I was to be deceived with him. You’re all like that,’ she cried, pointing to the pile of straw at her feet. ‘A spark’ll send you up in a blaze, and you’re as much to be leaned on as that.’ She plucked a straw from the heap, and snapped the brittle yellow stalk across as she spoke, with an unconsciously dramatic gesture.
‘Come, not all,’ said the young man, surprised by her words.
‘Yes, all. Well, this I do say for Sebastian, he’s as fine a liar as he was a lover—would take in Judas hisself with them straight eyes o’ his.’
‘I am grieved to have borne such bitter news to any one,’ said the young man. ‘But you take it the right way, Anne, and when Shepley returns ’twill be to find a better man in his place.’
‘Better man! There’s not one good among ’em—no, not one,’ said Anne, bitterly. She walked away to the little window, through which the sunshine was pouring in with garish brightness, and leant her forehead against the panes.
‘Come, Anne,’ urged her visitor, following her to the window. ‘You must do your endeavour to forget him. ’Tis a scurvy trick he has played you, but there’s a proverb suited to your case I would have you remember, about the good fish in the sea! Come, here is a coin as yellow as your hair to help you to the forgetting. Buy yourself a new gown with ribbands and have a night at the play.’
Anne looked askance at the stranger’s gold for a moment; then she flung back her head and laughed a harsh-sounding mirthless laugh.
‘I had best make sure ’tis gold I’ve got this time!’ she said, catching up the coin and ringing it on the table.
‘I shall bid you good-night then, my good girl,’ said the stranger, and held out his hand once again.
A minute later he plunged down the dark old stair. ‘What is it like? going down thus into darkness?’ he said to himself; but he did not reply to the question.
CHAPTER II
The young man Richard Meadowes found a coach waiting for him round the corner of Yard’s Entry; he jumped in and bade the coachman drive home to St. James’ Square: a long drive, but Meadowes did not find it so, his thoughts were amply occupied. When he reached home he went in and sat down in a chair beside the fire, apparently in a brown study. What was he thinking about so intently all the time? About a lie: for the whole story of Sebastian Shepley’s marriage had been invented by Richard Meadowes on the spur of the moment, as he stood stammering and hesitating before Anne Champion.
Meadowes had known Sebastian Shepley from his childhood. They had been born and brought up in the same little country village of Wynford, where Meadowes’ father had owned the Manor House and the wide lands appertaining to it, while Shepley’s father was the village apothecary. Then they both went to the wars; Meadowes to fight, Shepley to heal; now, tired of campaigning, which had never been to his mind, Meadowes had left the service and returned to England, where, since his parents’ death, he had inherited, together with the Manor House of Fairmeadowes, this house in St. James’ Square and enough of money to ruin most men.
But Richard Meadowes was neither idle nor without interests. The whole of life appealed vividly to him, every day was crowded with incident and amusement, his difficulty was to select between his pleasures: now of a sudden he had brought himself into a curious place. It had been from the easy pleasantness of his nature that Meadowes had offered, when leaving Flanders, to carry any letters home to Wynford for Dr. Sebastian Shepley. The young surgeon had hesitated for a moment before asking if, instead of bearing a letter to Wynford, Meadowes would deliver one in London.
‘With all my heart—a dozen an’ you please,’ said Meadowes kindly; for he liked the young man with his steady blue eyes, who came moreover from Wynford like himself.
So Sebastian Shepley had intrusted a bulky letter to his care, and along with it a package containing, said he, some amber beads for ‘Annie,’ ‘as yellow as her hair.’ These were to be given to his sweetheart by Meadowes’ own hand.
Now, like most men who are good at making pleasant promises, Meadowes was not quite so good at keeping them. He forgot all about Sebastian Shepley’s love-letter for several weeks, and lost the amber beads, so that when at last he set out to deliver the letter, he had determined to make such apologies as he might for the loss of the beads.
But when first his eyes rested on Anne Champion he thought only of her beauty. He stood and stammered before her, and then there came a whisper: Shepley was in Flanders . . . might never return . . . might have forgotten Anne when he did . . . why could he not supplant him in the meantime?
No wonder he had hesitated for a little before inventing the story; but now that it was done a host of difficulties presented themselves to Meadowes’ fancy. First of all, Shepley might write again to Anne any day—in all probability he would not do so for some weeks, but still he might—therefore Anne must be induced to leave her present home as quickly as might be. Secondly, Anne had impressed him as a self-respecting woman, quite able to take care of herself; she was no silly child to be easily deceived, and, so far as he could judge, not to be bought either. It is true Anne had taken the coin he offered her, but Meadowes acknowledged that she had scarcely seemed to know what she was about at the time. How then was he to gain favour in her eyes? How manage to ingratiate himself with her quickly without rousing her suspicions? He had no possible pretext for going to visit her again, yet go he must, and that speedily, or he ran the risk of Anne’s having received another letter from her lover, which might make her disbelieve all the statements she had accepted to-day.
As Meadowes weighed the matter in his mind, he remembered Shepley’s amber beads. Find them he must, and they might be offered to Anne as a farewell gift from her faithless adorer. So he prosecuted an active search for the missing package, and when at last it had been discovered, sat down and opened it. Then Meadowes slipped the warm yellow beads through his fingers like a monk at his devotions, but all the while darting fears and shivers of shame overcame him, for he was a man of quick sensitiveness, fully conscious of the base part he was playing.
There was no time to be lost; the next day at latest he must go to see Anne again.
Thus it came about that Meadowes stood once more at Anne Champion’s door the next afternoon and knocked.
Anne opened it herself; she stood on the threshold, and did not invite her visitor to come in.
‘Oh, ’tis you again,’ was all she said for greeting.
‘I am come with the remainder of my message, Anne,’ said Meadowes. ‘I forgot yesterday to make over this part of it to you.’
‘Come in then,’ said Anne, curtly enough, and she moved across to the little window, which stood open for the heat. The room had a deserted air, Anne seemed to have been sitting idle, for there were no signs of her usual occupation.
‘Sit down, sir,’ she said, and waited for Meadowes to make known this further errand of his.
‘Shepley asked me to deliver this amber chain into your hand as a keepsake, and to bear him no ill will,’ he said, handing the necklace to Anne.
‘A likely thing it is I’ll have his gifts!’ cried the girl. She flushed angrily, and with a quick movement of her arm flung the chain out at the window; it fell on the opposite roof, and the smooth beads slid down the slates and lodged in some unseen crevice.
‘There they may rot for me!’ she cried.
‘Ah, come,’ began Meadowes; ‘he meant kindly by the gift.’
‘I’ll have none o’ his kindness then,’ said Anne. She did not seem disposed for further conversation. But Meadowes persisted:—
‘You seem scarce so busy to-day.’
‘No more I am, sir; I be tired of work.’
‘Have you ever lived in the country?’ queried Meadowes, who had since the day before evolved his plans a little. ‘Work is none so hard there, and living pleasant; quiet is good for a sad heart.’
‘You’ll have tried it, sir?’ said Anne sarcastically. ‘For sad hearts be mighty common.’
‘Ah! I have had my sad days too.’
‘I’d scarce have thought it, sir,’ said Anne, taking a survey of her visitor. ‘But there,’ she added, as if on second thoughts, ‘you have mayhap felt things like the rest of us.’
‘I have—I have. God knows I feel things,’ said Meadowes, with sudden curious earnestness. He crossed over to where Anne stood, and laid his fine, white, ringed hand on her arm for a moment.
‘I am grieved for you, Anne; indeed I am; I had not thought ’twould be such a stroke to you, this. I would it were in my power to help you.’
Anne shook her head.
‘ ’Tis kind of you, sir, and thank you; there’s but the cure of time for me, I do fear,’ she said, drawing back slightly from the touch of Meadowes’ hand as she spoke.
‘I have a cottage in the country,’ he began, ‘where an old nurse of mine keeps bees and flowers and the like: mayhap a change to country air would help you to the forgetting of your trouble.’
Anne shook her head and smiled.
‘I’d get no sale for my straw-plaits thereaway,’ she said.
‘Oh, I would pay you——’ began Meadowes, but Anne cut him short.
‘For what, sir?’ she asked sharply.
Meadowes became certain of what he had only suspected before,—that Anne Champion was quite able to take care of herself.
‘For your work, my good girl,’ he said, drawing himself up rather stiffly for a moment. ‘Martha hath over much on her hands between the bees and the flowers. If you care to live with her it would be to give her your assistance in these matters.’
‘I’ve no knowledge o’ flowers nor any skill with bees, sir,’ said Anne, still speaking in a suspicious tone. Then she added: ‘And where will this place be, sir? for I have been no more than ten miles from London all my days.’
‘Not farther than that; ’tis out Richmond way,’ said Meadowes. ‘But pray do not hasten yourself to decide. I can get another woman any day. ’Twas but that I fancied the country might change your thoughts for you that I made you the offer.’ He rose as he spoke and held out his hand.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Anne, curtseying to her fine visitor, and rather impressed by his sudden assumption of dignity.
Meadowes was quick to observe the advantage he had gained.
‘If you care to take a week wherein to think over the offer,’ he said, ‘I shall keep the place vacant for you till then.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ again said Anne.
‘Shall I come and see you at the week’s end?’ asked Meadowes.
‘I thank you; yes, sir,’ said Anne.
When her visitor had gone Anne sat down by the window to consider the matter. ‘Him an’ his bees!’ was her first contemptuous conclusion, for, as she would have expressed it herself, ‘handsome women they do know their own know about the men.’ Then she thought over the past, with its hard work and scanty pay, over the present, that was swept empty of hope and pleasure, into a future, that had nothing to offer but work, work, work. It was a fixed belief with Anne that men were seldom wholly disinterested in their motives. She could not bring herself to imagine that Meadowes offered her this situation because he wished his work done—no, no, it was because she was ‘so rarely fine-looking,’ that was all. But then what if it proved to be a good situation—good pay, little work?—she would be a fool to refuse it. And further, she was well able to take care of herself.
There are moods of mind when only some change in the outward conditions of life can promise hope or comfort. It seemed to Anne impossible that she could stay on here in her old surroundings when everything in the future had changed for her. She was even weak and feminine enough to imagine the delight of Mrs. Nare when she discovered that her prophecies had come true and Anne’s fine lover had proved faithless. This thought recurred to her again and again, for women are curious creatures, and bad as they find it to be jilted, they perhaps find it worse still that other women should be able to marvel and gossip over their deserted state! Said Anne, when this thought had become intolerable, ‘I shall go away to the country; Mrs. Nare shall be none the wiser,’ and with that she decided to accept the offered situation, whatever it might prove to be.
So when on the following Sunday afternoon Meadowes appeared once more at Yard’s Entry, he found Anne quite ready to undertake the unknown duties she had hesitated over the week before.
‘I’m happy to go, sir,’ she said; ‘and if so be as I do fail at the work, ’tis your own fault, sir, offering the place to one as knows nought of country ways.’
‘You will learn—you will learn,’ said Meadowes hastily.
‘And your name, sir? if I may make bold to ask.’
‘Mr. Richard Sundon; I fancied I had given you my name ere this.’
‘No, sir, and mayhap you live in the country thereaway?’
It scarcely suited Meadowes to answer this with absolute veracity.
‘No, in town—in rooms just now; some day I shall settle down,’ he replied.
‘O yes, sir, a home’s a fine thing they do say,’ said Anne, in a dreary voice that had the echo of tears in it.
CHAPTER III
Meadowes did not pay much heed to where he was going as he left Yard’s Entry that Sunday afternoon. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he walked forward without aim or direction. And these thoughts were curiously involved: a horror of what he was about; a determination to persist in it.
‘What’s this I am doing? what’s this I’ve done? Broken a woman’s heart, and played a good man false . . . and I am gaining (perhaps) my desires, and losing (certainly) my soul. . . . Soul? Have we got souls? I that am doing this, have I a soul? I doubt it . . . we are but as the beasts that perish—and yet——’
He stumbled along through the narrow, crowded streets. ‘I’ll go and pray,’ he said, stopping suddenly before the door of one of the old city churches (it stands there yet, grey and cool).
‘Here,’ he said to the verger, ‘is the church empty?’
‘Empty as a new-made grave, sir,’ said the man cheerfully.
Meadowes passed into the musty coolness of the church. He walked up the aisle and chose out the darkest corner he could find, where to offer up his strange petitions. There was a brass let into the wall here commemorating the brave fall of men who had died gallant deaths; a banner, bullet-singed and tattered, hung from the roof. Meadowes knelt under the faded fringes and covered his eyes with his hands, to shut out the world.
Then the former doubt invaded him, and the terror that the unseen was a delusion and man but a soulless higher brute with a hand-breadth of Time to sport in, overcame him with the blackness of despair.
‘Better far have a lost soul than none at all,’ he cried out in horror. He looked up at the banner above him; for things, after all, as intangible as the soul he doubted of, some happy mortals had bled and died—for Honour, Patriotism, Courage. Had they forfeited the merry years for shadows, been fools for their pains? Remembrances crowded on him of War and Death: he seemed to see whole spectral armies of the slain arise. He named them happy as they rose; for had they not died undoubtingly, bartering life for these intangible realities so worthy the life-blood of men! Ah for the unquestioning heart—to be able to walk straight forward in a plain path! But for him question would rise upon question: and this, the darkest doubt, the poisoning of Effort at its very sources, was worst of all—no Unseen, nothing but the solid merry world really to be counted upon! If this was so, then good-bye to aspiration, grasp at the Seen, hold it fast, for seventy miserable years only were to be depended on—depended on! not seventy seconds were assured to him. ‘Lord! I must have my pleasures!’ he cried, remembering the few and evil years. Then in spite of the doubts that tormented him, Meadowes suddenly began to pray. He came before the God whose existence he could not be sure of, with a confession he would not have made to his fellow-men.
‘O God,’ he prayed, speaking low into his clasped hands, ‘I have planned this thing and am going on with it—’tis pure devilry, but I am going on. Lord, I do it open-eyed. Some day punish me as I deserve—now I must take my pleasure——’
A curious prayer; but perhaps better than no prayer at all. For herein lies the world’s hope, that every man—the blackest sinner amongst us—is on his own extraordinary terms with the Unseen. Were we as grossly material as appears, we were lost indeed.
Meadowes’ faith truly was reduced to the minimum, and yet, and yet—to Something he made confession, assured only of this, that if any Presence listened it must be with pity. He rose from his knees and went out again into the crowded streets, filled not with any sudden resolutions of repentance, but with the determination to persist in the course he had originally planned out. He even felt a certain relief of conscience. ‘I have explained it with God,’ he found himself saying, adding a moment later, ‘If there be such an One.’ Then his thoughts seemed to fall into question and answer:
‘And doth that make all straight?’
‘Straighter: for I have said that such punishment as I deserve for this, I shall take.’
‘Did you mean what you prayed?’
‘If there are punishments in truth.’
‘Do you think there are?’
‘No: I doubt it.’
‘Then you will have your pleasure without risk?’
‘I hope for it.’
But conscience had after all the last word, for it spoke suddenly and loudly then:—
‘No, no; “a sword shall pierce thine own heart also.”’
CHAPTER IV
Till a few years ago the cottage was still standing where Anne Champion went to live at the bounty of Richard Meadowes. It stood on one of the crossways leading off the great west London road; but few people passed down the green lane, few even looked that way. The cottage was one of those deep thatched old dwellings that look like an owl with its feathers drawn up over its head; it had a garden filled with flowers and bee-hives, and the straight walk leading up to the door was bordered with flowering shrubs. Anne worked in the garden, clumsily enough at first, and she looked after the bees and got stung frequently, and time went on. Each week the old woman, Martha Hare, who occupied the house along with her, received a certain sum of money to be divided between herself and Anne; but Meadowes only came occasionally to the cottage at first: he was very cautious, having weighed Anne’s character pretty accurately. Then his visits became more frequent, and were somewhat prolonged, then he brought Anne a present from town. Anne began to draw her usual conclusions from these things: ‘He’s a-making up to me,’ she said to Martha Hare.
But she was scarcely prepared for it when Meadowes suddenly asked her one day if she would marry him.
‘I have been thinking of it for long, Anne,’ he said.
‘Sir, sir!’ said vulgar Anne. ‘I’m not your kind.’
‘But that is just my difficulty, and if you will listen to me I shall explain it. You cannot but see, Anne, that you are scarce in my class, as you say, and for that reason ’twill be better to keep the matter private, else my father will cut me off with a shilling. But if you will marry me privately, Anne, I swear to you I’ll be a good husband to you.’
Anne had been listening intently; but here she suddenly held up her hand.
‘There,’ she cried, ‘I’ll have you with no promises if I have you at all. I’ll take you as I know you, sir, and trust you but so far as I sees you.’
‘But you will trust me, Anne?’ he said.
‘No. I’ll never trust no man again this side time. But I’ll come an’ live along of you, sir, if so be I’m done with work and care for ever.’
‘Anne, Anne, do not be so bitter,’ said Meadowes. Anne stood looking at him silently for a moment, then she laughed.
‘ ’Tis like I’m marrying you for love, sir?’ she said.
‘Well, I have done what I could for you,’ said Meadowes (but he blushed hotly as he spoke. ‘I am a devil,’ he said to himself).
‘You have, sir, one way, but now you’ve showed your hand, so to say. I knew as it would be this way some day—I’ve had lovers an’ lovers by the score. Not but that you’ve been civil and taken your time, sir. Well, as I do say, sir, you be kind and I’ll take you for that. But ’tis not for love, sir. I have no heart left in me now, but a stone where it once was. A woman she do have two throws o’ the dice in her life—one’s love an’ t’other’s money. Lose the first; you’d best, if you’re a wise woman, have a try for the second, for with never the one nor t’other you be in a sad case.’
Meadowes listened gravely to this, Anne’s gospel of prudence.
‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘that’s your way of thinking, Anne, and mayhap mine is not so different—to take what I can get.’
‘What are you gettin’, sir?’ asked Anne, turning suddenly to him. ‘Lor’ sakes, sir! what hath gone agin you in life that you take second best so soon?’
‘Second best?’ queried Meadowes.
‘Ay, second best. You’ll not make me believe as how you are wedding for love, sir.’
‘I—I am very fond of you,’ Meadowes began, but Anne stopped him impatiently.
‘Not you, sir. I’m rarely fine-looking, an’ men be terrible fools. You’ve a mind to marry—that’s short and long for it,—but for love——’
The silence that Anne ended her sentence with was more expressive than words. Then she turned and laid her hand in his.
‘Here, sir,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask no questions. Mayhap you’ve had your story like myself. Leastways you’ve been kind to me, and I’ll be a good wife to you if you’re wishful to marry with me. Like enough some day we may both forget——’
She turned hastily away with a sob that would not be kept back.
‘Shall we say Friday of next week, then, Anne?’ said Meadowes, passing his arm round her and patting her shoulder very kindly.
‘When you please, sir.’
‘And we shall be married here, not in church, for the reason I have mentioned?’
‘Any place you please, sir.’
‘My friend Mr. Prior will marry us.’
‘Any parson you have a mind for, sir.’
Meadowes drew Anne closer to him, and kissed her lovely tear-stained face. Then he bade her good-bye, and she went into the cottage and sat there face to face with life, as every woman is when she makes up her mind on what now-a-days we term the Marriage Problem.
Anne was very clear-sighted; she saw, as every woman with her wits about her must see, that it is not good for woman—especially pretty woman—to be alone. She saw in ‘Dick Sundon,’ as she called him, a protector whom she had every reason to like. In the bitterness of her heart she had vowed never to trust any man again, but she must have had some vague feeling of confidence in this kindly bright-eyed suitor, else Anne would have hesitated more than she did before coming to her decision. She had hitherto been rather suspicious of the attentions of ‘fine gentlemen,’ as she termed them, but this offer of marriage seemed honourable to a degree. ‘I’ll never forget Sebastian—not for all he hath done by me—but mayhap I’d be happier wedded to Dick Sundon than living alone all my days. Oh, he’s kind enough for certain, an’ free with his money, and now he do wish to marry me what better can I do?’ she asked herself.
Unanswerable arguments.
Meadowes, on his part, went home profoundly miserable. For the sinner who would sin enjoyably must be of another stuff from that of which this man was made. Just as he had achieved success, his heart turned with a perfectly genuine emotion of pity towards the woman he had deceived so cruelly.
Yet on he went.
That evening he called upon his friend Mr. Simon Prior, at his rooms in Piccadilly.
‘A somewhat late visitor, I fear, Prior,’ he said.
‘Never too late to be welcome,’ said Prior.
‘Well, I am come on business, which must be my excuse,’ said Meadowes. He sat down, and Prior waited to hear what the business might be.
‘The fact is, I wish you to do me a favour,—I wish your assistance to the carrying out of—of an affair of some delicacy.’
‘I shall be delighted; but I find it difficult to imagine . . . my money affairs,’ . . . began Prior, whose one idea of a difficulty was money.
‘I had best make a long story short,’ said Meadowes, ‘I want you to act cleric for me; I’ve seen your powers of mimicry ere this, and I swear you’d play the parson to a nicety.’
‘Phew!’ whistled Prior. ‘So ’tis a woman is the difficulty; but why, Meadowes, if I may intrude upon your secrets, why do you demand a parson?’
‘Ah! there is my difficulty. There are women, you see, who value their good name, and this woman is of the number. ’Tis unfortunate, but a fact I cannot get over. She hath promised to be my wife, however, and I have explained to her that family reasons make a private marriage necessary at present. I trusted to you for the rest of it.’
Simon Prior leant back in his chair and eyed his visitor narrowly.
‘And what are you going to give to me in return for these valuable services?’ he said.
Meadowes leant forward—his bright eyes blazed in the lamplight.
‘I’ll pay every debt you have, if that will do,’ he said.
Prior went through a quick mental sum.
‘Yes, that will do,’ he said, when it had been added up. ‘I have played many a part, and have no doubt I could acquit myself with credit in this. I’ll go to church and hear the parson’s drawl (I’ve not heard it this many a year), and I’ll reproduce it for you whenever you please with becoming gravity.’
‘Thanks! I’ve no manner of doubt you will. Then you will tell me what I owe you? And, by the way, this matter must never cross your lips, Prior; I may trust you for that?’
‘You may.’
‘Then on Saturday of next week, all being well?’
‘On Saturday of next week, all being well,’ repeated Prior, in such a startling reproduction of Meadowes’ voice that both men laughed aloud.
But laughter was not in Meadowes’ heart though it was on his lips. He rose to say good-night soon after, and Simon Prior lay back in his arm-chair and smiled.
CHAPTER V
Perhaps it was because he felt the knot so obligingly tied by Simon Prior not quite impossible to untie, that Richard Meadowes took his marital obligations very lightly. He was well pleased with his new acquisition, and used to ride out from town constantly to see Anne. They would walk out together in the long spring twilights, and gradually Anne began to lose her dread of such a fine lover and spoke to him freely and naturally.
Anne could be a very amusing companion; for she had quick wits; and that for companionship is far better than being well educated. She would tell Meadowes all about her life; excepting one episode only, no mention of which ever crossed her lips—of the men who had courted her, and the women who had hated her, of the straits of poverty, and all she had seen and suffered and enjoyed in her five-and-twenty years’ pilgrimage. In return, she would ask Meadowes about the unknown world to which he belonged. Had they always enough to eat without thinking about it or working for it? (‘Lord sakes, how grand!’) Had they never to walk when they were weary, or toil when they were faint? Was it possible he had never known what it was to be cold for want of clothing, or run out of fuel in the winter? (‘You scarce know you’re alive!’) Or, sorest strait of all, was it possible he had never known sickness and want together? (‘You’ve not felt the Lord’s hand on you yet then, Dick.’) And she would listen with delight to Meadowes’ tales of his world. Outwardly, indeed, Anne was cheerful enough now; Meadowes began to think she was forgetting the past. Only her entire silence about Sebastian Shepley seemed to mark any feeling on the subject. Yet every now and then he fancied she was thinking of her former lover. Once as they walked together down the lane on a lovely summer night—the birds were singing as if their little throats would burst, the year’s jubilee was at its height—Meadowes turned to her in his sudden, impulsive way.
‘ ’Tis fine to be alive and young,’ he said; ‘and the birds sing like the angels of Paradise!’
‘I think to have heard the sparrows in the Green Park——’ Anne began to say, almost as if she were speaking to herself—then she broke off in the middle of her sentence and turned away. A moment later she added—
‘You do speak rarely clear, Dick—for all the world like a flute’s note. I like to hearken to your voice better than them birds by far.’
Meadowes was charmed with this pretty speech; he flung his arm round Anne’s waist and kissed her. She looked up at him with her brown eyes full of tears; but they may have been tears of mirth, for all she said was, ‘Good sakes! but men be mortal vain,’ and with that she drew herself away from his embrace.
‘Why should she cry over the sparrows in the Green Park?’ Meadowes wondered; how should he know how often Anne had walked there with Sebastian Shepley?
Time wore on, summer merged into autumn, and still Anne had never spoken once to Meadowes about Sebastian Shepley; they were the best of friends, Anne welcomed his coming and mourned at his going, but without a trace of sentiment, as Meadowes found himself forced to admit. Men do not like a want of sentiment in women: they may condone it in their own sex, it is considered an essential in ours; so Meadowes, who had never blamed himself for lacking this quality, found it in his heart to be surprised and a little indignant with Anne for doing so. ‘She should be beginning to care more for me by now,’ he thought; he had been a very devoted husband.
It was devotion indeed, which urged him to ride out from London one cruel night of wind and rain. The miles seemed as though they would never be got over; yet Meadowes rode on and on, out into the deep country, his head bowed before the lashing of the rain and the onslaught of the wind. At the Cross Roads Inn he dismounted, and leaving his horse there, strode on through the darkness to Anne’s cottage.
‘Good sakes, Dick, is it you!’ cried Anne at sound of his knock. She flung open the door and he passed in, into the warmth and stillness of the cottage kitchen, where he stood laughing and breathless, the water dripping from his drenched clothes on to the sanded floor. Anne, exclamatory and sympathetic, stood beside him.
‘ ’Tis wetted through and through you are, Dick,’ she said, wringing the flap of his riding-coat. ‘For the love of heaven go and cast these wet clothes from off you, while I do heat up some ale for you on the fire. There be naught like hot ale for chills. Good lack! to think of mortal man riding from London this night!’
Meadowes laughed. ‘I shall be none the worse, Anne. But not hot ale—mulled claret for me, my girl.’
‘I have no knowledge of your fine sour-wine drinks, Dick. For certain the hot ale be far wholesomer,’ urged Anne, who clung to tradition as surely as Meadowes.
So to please her hot ale he drank, sitting by the wide cottage fireplace listening to the driving storm. The candle, which had been low in its socket, burned lower; then Anne put it out, and still they sat silently in the pleasant fire-lit room and heard the storm rave on outside. They were sitting side by side on the settle by the fire, Meadowes had his arm round Anne’s shoulder in his kindly caressing fashion, but though Anne permitted the endearment she did not respond to it in any way.
‘You are very quiet to-night?’ said Meadowes at last. Anne shivered, and bent forward to stir up the fire for answer.
‘What ails you, Anne? Has aught distressed you through the day?’ he asked.
Anne turned round and looked at him; her eyes had a curiously wild, frightened expression.
‘ ’Tis like great guns,’ she said. ‘There, there. O Lord, I can’t a-bear to hear it—guns and guns a-thundering on, and when it cometh round the corner o’ the house ’tis for all the world like the shrieks of dying men.’
Meadowes was mystified by her words. He had never seen Anne fanciful before.
‘Well, what of it?—’tis not unlike heavy firing, as you say,’ he admitted. ‘But you are safe enough here, my girl, in all truth.’
‘Eh, Dick! don’tyouunderstand?’ cried Anne. ‘Battles, and guns, and all. . . . I do seem to hear from over seas, from Flanders, bringing to my mind all I’ve a mind to forget. I’ve sat all this day a-hearing of them guns, and times I’d stop my ears.—O Lord! there be the screams again.’ And Anne, turning to the only helper she had, held out her hands to him with a trembling, childish gesture.
‘Dick, Dick,’ she said, ‘you be quick to feel all things, and kind too, more nor I deserve, I that have married you, and my heart turning back to another.’
Quick to feel, Meadowes was feeling a hundred conflicting sensations at that moment. But first of all he must quiet Anne.
‘Come, Anne,’ he said, ‘you are tired and fanciful. ’Tis time you were gone to bed, and by the morning you will have forgot the storm that scares you now. Ah, I understand altogether, Anne; aye, and feel for you too. But these things are better left alone, it but makes them harder to speak of them.’
‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Anne, rising to put a fresh candle in the candlestick. She had appealed to ‘Dick’ in vain, she thought, and would not attempt to make him understand.
‘I have some letters to write,’ said Meadowes, dismissing the subject; ‘I shall sit up and finish them.’
When Anne had gone, however, there, was not much letter-writing done. Meadowes sat and looked into the fire, coming to several conclusions. Well, here was the end of his amour; up to this time he had been quite content with Anne, delighted with her; but now—he simply could not stand this. If she was going to be always thinking about Sebastian Shepley, and even mentioning him, it was high time that the connection between himself and her was at an end. Meadowes, who was a very fastidious man, shuddered at the whole situation. ‘Horrible; truly ’twas in Providence I did not marry her,’ he said. Yet he had quite enough of conscience to make it a difficult matter for him to break with Anne. He dreaded beyond measure her anger when she found herself to have been so duped. It was indeed almost impossible to contemplate telling her. How would it best be done? Offer her money? Anne would never consider that a recompense. Just leave her? ‘Even I am not bad enough for that!’ Trust to time? Time would possibly make matters worse. Yet after hours of thought on the subject this last and very lame conclusion was the one which Meadowes finally adopted. He resolved not to see so much of her now and—to wait.
‘A plague upon Sebastian Shepley, and a plague upon Constancy and Love and all the Virtues!’ he said as he rose from his chair at last; ‘and equally a plague upon Richard Meadowes, and Treachery and Passion and all the Vices,’ he added, as he stood looking down at the last embers of the wood-fire that glowed on the hearth. He gave an angry kick to the red ashes with the toe of his riding-boot that sent a shower of scarlet sparks up into the air; they fell down a moment later in soft grey ash, and the fire was out.
‘The end of all hot fires,’ said Meadowes, as he groped his way across to the door.