CHAPTER X.
‘ALAS! I HAVE NOR HOPE NOR HEALTH.’
Bella Scratchell, tripping to the Park one frosty morning, and entering Mrs. Piper’s sitting-room, all beaming with smiles, like a small edition of Aurora, found the invalid in tears, and sniffing feebly at a bottle of aromatic vinegar.
‘Dear Mrs. Piper, have you had one of your bad headaches?’
‘No, my dear, it is not my bodily health, but my spiritual condition that affects me. I feel as if I had been holding on by an anchor, and somebody had taken the anchor away and left me tossing on a stormy sea. I had such faith in him. He put things in a clearer light than Mr. Mowler. The Reverend Josiah Mowler is a sainted creature—and I shall always say so, but he is not equal to Mr. Culverhouse. He hasn’t the inspiration. Oh, Bella, I am grateful to you for having brought that good manhere, but I feel it hard to lose him, just as I had pinned my faith upon his teaching.’
Mrs. Piper wiped away her tears with the fine hem-stitched cambric that befitted her wealth and position, and applied herself disconsolately to her smelling-bottle.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Bella, all the pinkness fading out of her cheeks.
‘Why, surely you have heard?’
‘I have heard nothing. Is it about Mr. Culverhouse?’
‘My dear, he has left us. He has gone to Bridford—a horrible place in Lancashire, where they have small-pox every year. You might have knocked me down with a feather when Ebenezer came in and told me about it.’
Bella sat pale and speechless. Was it for this that she had schemed? She had slandered her familiar friend, sold herself to Satan, in the hope of winning this man; and behold! he was gone, and there was no more chance of winning him than there had been before she perilled her soul by this sin. For Bella knew that she had sinned.She was quite capable of doing a wicked thing for her own advantage, or to gratify her evil temper, but she knew that the act was wicked, and she had a lurking idea that she would have to pay for it in some manner in the future. Bella regarded sin as some people regard going into debt for present gratification; a matter to be settled in a remote future, and hardly worth thinking about while the day of reckoning is so far off.
‘Do you mean that he has really gone,’ she faltered presently, ‘for ever?’
‘Yes, my dear, he has left us for a permanency. I suppose it is to better himself; but I can’t fancy anybody bettering themselves at Bridford, where the small-pox has been raging, on and off, ever since I can remember, and where they have cholera worse than anywhere in the kingdom.’
‘How did you hear of it?’ asked Bella, with the faint hope that this piece of information might prove a fable.
‘From himself, dear. He wrote me the sweetestletter, full of comfort. But I don’t know what I shall do without him. His visits buoyed me up.’
‘Other people will be sorry,’ said Bella, faintly.
‘Everybody must be sorry. He is a saintly young man.’
‘When did he leave?’
‘Yesterday morning.’
‘And I never heard of it,’ exclaimed Bella.
She was thinking how all things had looked the same, though he was gone. There had been nothing in earth or sky to tell her that the light had faded out of her life. The dull village street—with her mother’s vagabond fowls pecking in the highway—had looked not a shade duller than usual. She had passed Mrs. Pomfret’s trim garden, and had looked tenderly at the square unpretending cottage, thinking that those walls sheltered him; and he was far away. He was gone, and she had not known it.
‘He might have called to wish me good-bye,’ she complained, ‘after my working for his poor.’
‘It must have been very sudden at the last,’ suggested Mrs. Piper.
Bella went to the schoolroom to grapple with theunruly young Pipers, sick at heart. All her misery was Mrs. Dulcimer’s fault, she thought, not taking into consideration her own readiness to lend herself to Mrs. Dulcimer’s plans.
There was only one ray of comfort, a lurid and unholy light, in the dark gulf of her thoughts. If Cyril had gone away taking her hopes with him, he had left Beatrix also hopeless. There was an end of the tie between those two. If he had meant to marry Miss Harefield he would not have left Little Yafford.
She dragged herself through the lesson, somehow, beating time to Elizabeth Fry’s performance of the classic melody of Trab, Trab, with somebody’s variations—the variations of an ancient and stereotyped order, first triplets, then little stunted runs, then octaves, then a dismal minor, all in chords, and then a general banging and flare-up for a finale. The piece was hideous, and Elizabeth Fry’s playing was a degree worse than the piece. Bella’s head ached woefully by the time her pupil had pounded through the brilliant finale, but she bore up heroically, and heard Horne Tooke read about William the Conquerorin a drawling voice—with a nasalad libitumaccompaniment. These children never seemed to get beyond William the Conqueror and his immediate posterity. Their historical ideas were strictly feudal, and it must have appeared to them only yesterday when the curfew was heard from every church tower, and Peter the Hermit was kindling the souls of Christians with his war-cry ofDeus vult.
Bella stopped to see the little Pipers safely through their early dinner, the table of these juveniles being as much a scene of strife and contention as any battle-field in history. It was a hard matter to preserve some semblance of peace, still harder to inculcate anything approaching good manners, the young Pipers having entered the world with an incapacity for using spoons, forks, knives, or other implements of civilized life in a decent manner. The battle-field was generally flooded before dinner was over—not with the gore of the combatants, but with Brougham’s stout, or with Elizabeth’s regulation glass of old port, or a sauce boat that had capsized in a struggle to get it ‘first,’ or a mustard-pot turned over in a free fight. Bella had a little more influenceover these barbarians than the servants, who, coming and going like the wind, were of no authority; but to-day Bella sat at the head of the table looking straight before her, and allowed the young Pipers to squabble, snatch, push, and kick one another to their heart’s content.
She was thinking of that ideal vicarage which might have been hers in the future if Cyril Culverhouse had only cared for her.
‘He might have chosen me if his heart had been free,’ she reflected. ‘Everybody tells me I am pretty; even Mr. Piper, coarse and common as he is, always compliments me about my looks. Why should not Cyril have liked me?’
It seemed a hard thing to Bella that this gift of prettiness should be such a barren boon, that it should not bring her exactly what she wanted. She shed some sullen tears on her way home across the windy Park, along the bleak high road. There was no one to see her tears or to pity her. She was angry with fate, angry with life, in which all things were so unequally meted out. Beatrix was miserable too, no doubt, in her handsome house yonder, thehouse whose dulness Bella had found a shade worse than poverty.
Bella changed her dress and bonnet, and went to make an afternoon call upon Mrs. Dulcimer, certain of hearing all about Cyril’s departure from that loquacious lady. The twilight shadows were falling already, and the half-dozen dingy little shops in the village street were dimly illuminated with oil or tallow, but an hour or so before tea was always the best time for finding Mrs. Dulcimer.
‘Well, my dear, you have heard the news, I suppose?’ said the Vicar’s wife, dispensing with the usual ‘how do d’ye do,’ in her eagerness.
‘I have, dear Mrs. Dulcimer, and I am so surprised.’
‘So is everybody, my dear, Mr. Dulcimer most of all. Such a sudden desertion—an old pupil too, whom we looked upon almost as a son. I think it positively unkind. He wants a wider sphere for his work. Such nonsense. Little Yafford has been wide enough for Mr. Dulcimer for the last twenty years. But the young men of the present day are so restless and ambitious. I suppose he thinks Little Yaffordis not the shortest way to a bishopric. And he has taken a charge at Bridford—a horrible town in Lancashire, where there are nothing but chemical works, and where the river runs sulphur and asafœtida.’
‘Rather a perverted taste,’ said Bella. ‘I wonder he did not stay here and try to marry Miss Harefield. She would be a splendid match for him. And now her father is dead she is free to marry any one she likes.’
Mrs. Dulcimer shook her head with a dismal air, and gave a prolonged sigh.
‘Ah, my dear, it is very sad. Those reports!’
Bella echoed the sigh.
‘I was very fond of her—once,’ she said.
‘So was I, Bella. And, even now, I should be the last to condemn her. God forbid that I should judge anybody. I hope I know the gospel too well for that. But I confess that I cannot feel the same as I used about Beatrix Harefield. I can’t get over the strangeness of her having bought that laudanum in ever so many different shops. There seems such a lowcunning in it—it is like the act of a criminal,’ continued Mrs. Dulcimer, warming as she went on, and forgetting her protest against judging others. ‘And I am sorry to say,’ she continued, with increasing solemnity, ‘Rebecca thinks as I do.’
‘And Mr. Dulcimer?’ inquired Bella.
‘Oh, Mr. Dulcimer is a very curious man in that respect. He never thinks the same as other people. He is convinced of Beatrix’s innocence, and says the Little Yafford people are a set of venomous idiots for condemning her. But say what he will, he cannot stem the tide of public opinion. The coroner’s verdict was so unsatisfactory.’
‘What does Sir Kenrick think?’ asked Bella.
‘Oh, he and Mr. Dulcimer are of the same opinion.’
‘Beatrix is too handsome to be condemned by gentlemen,’ said Bella, with unconscious venom.
‘Oh, my dear, that consideration would not affect Mr. Dulcimer, however it might influence Kenrick. The best thing she could do would be to marry Kenrick,’ pursued Mrs. Dulcimer, thoughtfully,‘but I could never take the same interest in the match that I should have done a few months ago. In fact, I would rather not have act or part in it. If they were to marry, and Kenrick were to die suddenly—or under mysterious circumstances, and I had been the means of bringing about the marriage, I should feel myself a murderer.’
Mr. Dulcimer came in from his afternoon round at this moment. He nodded to Bella, and sank down with a fatigued air in the comfortable arm-chair that always stood ready for him in the snuggest corner of the hearth.
‘I have been to the Water House,’ he said, as if taking up the thread of his wife’s discourse. ‘Beatrix is very ill.’
‘I am sorry to hear that.’
‘I am more than sorry. These wretches will contrive to kill her before they have done. Namby says that her illness is entirely the result of mental disturbance. That monster Scales has gone off at a moment’s notice—after eating Harefield’s bread for fifteen years—and left that poor child to face thisfoul-mouthed world alone. She is ill—and with no one but servants about her. You ought to go and nurse her, Bella. She has been very good to you. I hope you are not a fair-weather friend, like the old man in the weather-glass, who only comes out when the sun is shining.’
‘Oh, Mr. Dulcimer, how can you think so badly of me?’ remonstrated Bella.
‘I don’t wish to think badly about you. But you have rather deserted Beatrix lately, I have noticed.’
‘Mrs. Piper is so exacting, and such an invalid.’
‘Well, Beatrix is also an invalid now, and Mrs. Piper must give way a little. She has her husband and children to take care of her. Beatrix has no one. As soon as she is well enough to be moved I shall have her brought here.’
‘Oh, Clement!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, with a troubled look.
‘What do you mean by “Oh, Clement”? We have plenty of spare bedrooms. Providence, in denying us children, has balanced matters by giving us spare bedrooms.’
‘Don’t you think people will talk if we have her here?’
‘People will talk whether or no. The business in life of one half of the world is to criticise and misjudge the conduct of the other half. But have you ever reflected how little difference all this evil speaking makes in life? It cannot change a single element in nature. It can worry us into untimely graves, if we are foolish enough to be worried by it—it can divide man and wife, or father and son, if man or wife, or father or son, is idiotic enough to be influenced by the evil tongues of indifferent lookers on—but scandal cannot, of itself, make the slightest difference in us or in the world we inhabit. It cannot shorten our days or prevent the summer sun from shining upon us.’
‘I am sure I don’t know what Miss Coyle will say,’ murmured Mrs. Dulcimer, plaintively.
‘Miss Coyle is not my bishop,’ retorted her husband, ‘and if she were I should not consult her as to my choice of guests.’
Bella went to the Water House next day. She found Beatrix prostrate with some kind of low fever,and light-headed. It was altogether a piteous spectacle, this lonely sick bed. Mr. Namby came in three times in the course of the day and evening, and was full of anxiety about his patient. He found Bella sitting quietly by the bedside, ready to assist the faithful maid-servant in nursing her mistress. Mrs. Peters, the fat housekeeper, came in every half-hour, and was miserable because her beef tea and calves’ foot jelly were not appreciated by the fever-parched invalid.
Cyril’s name came more than once from those dry pale lips, while Bella sat by and listened. His desertion was evidently the blow that had struck home.
‘I’m afraid she’s heard some of the unkind gossip that’s been about, and that it has preyed upon her mind,’ said Mr. Namby, in a confidential chat with Miss Scratchell. ‘I can’t account for her illness in any other way. It’s all the mind. Mr. Dulcimer promises to carry her off to the Vicarage directly she is well enough to be moved. That will be a very good thing. Change—change of scene and surroundings will do a great deal.’
To Mr. Namby, whose horizon had for the last five-and-thirty years been bounded by the sulky ridge of the moor that shut in Little Yafford, a change from the Water House to the Vicarage seemed a grand thing. And if in the summer his patient could be taken to Scarborough or Harrogate, the cure ought to be complete. Mr. Namby never thought of prescribing the Tyrol or the Engadine. Those places had for him little more than a traditionary or geographical existence, and were only present in his mind as certain wavy lines upon the map. The days of Cook and Gaze, when even such persons as Mr. Namby may be personally conducted over the face of the Continent, were yet to come.
Beatrix mended slowly under Mr. Namby’s care, and with plenty of nursing from Mrs. Peters, Mary the housemaid, Bella, and Mrs. Dulcimer; the Vicar’s wife being incapable of remaining long in a state of even tacit opposition to her dear Clement. She was not quite comfortable in her own mind about Beatrix, but she tried to be convinced, and she told herself that such a clever man as Clement, whose opinions were supported by the finest library of reference thatever a country parson collected, must be wiser than Miss Coyle.
So one afternoon in windy March, Beatrix was put into the old-fashioned carriage in which her mother had driven during her brief wedded life, and was conveyed to the Vicarage, there to remain till she should be strong enough to travel. She felt a sensation nearer akin to happiness than she had known for a long time when she found herself seated in the Vicar’s firelit library, with a little old-fashioned tea-table by her side, and Rebecca waiting upon her with a cup of strong tea. Rebecca had been talked to seriously by the Vicar, and had seceded in a scandalously abrupt manner from the Coyle faction.
‘Now, Beatrix, this is to be your home as long as you can make yourself happy in it,’ said the Vicar. ‘The Water House is a very fine old place, but it is damp and dismal, and I don’t at all wonder that it made you ill. You are to call this home, and you are to think of me as your father.’
‘And you do not believe—’ faltered Beatrix, and then burst into tears.
‘I believe you are a good and noble girl,’ saidthe Vicar, cheerily, ‘and that a happy and honourable life lies before you.’
‘And after all,’ he reflected, ‘though I detest match-making, it would be no bad thing for that dog Kenrick if he could win this splendid girl for his wife.’
That dog Kenrick was still staying, off and on, at the Vicarage. His leave did not expire till the end of April. He had about six weeks before him.
He came in presently while Beatrix was sitting in the dimly lighted room sipping her tea. Mr. Dulcimer had been called out into the hall to see a parishioner. There was no one else in the room.
‘I am so glad to see you better,’ said Kenrick, heartily, planting himself in a chair near Miss Harefield.
By that doubtful light he was wonderfully like Cyril. The shock of his entrance—something in the likeness, as he sat beside her with the fire-glow flickering upon his face, moved Beatrix painfully. She could hardly answer him.
‘Thank you. I am much better,’ she murmured, faintly.
‘But far from well, I am afraid,’ he said. ‘You seem very weak.’
In the next instant her head fell back upon the cushion of the easy chair. She had fainted. Kenrick rang the bell violently for Rebecca.
He was not a coxcomb, but he had a very good opinion of himself, and this fainting fit of Beatrix’s affected himself curiously. He made up his mind that it was he whom she loved, and not Cyril; and he made up his mind that he would win her for his wife.