One word is too often profanedFor me to profane it....
One word is too often profanedFor me to profane it....
One word is too often profanedFor me to profane it....
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it....
Yet he must needs utter that word, though the past and the future rise up to belittle it.
“I love you,” he whispered. “Monimé, I love you.”
“Men have said that to me before,” she answered, “and there was one man whom I believed.... We built the house of our life upon that foundation, but it fell to ruins all the same. Soon he ceased to tell me that he loved me.”
“You are a married woman then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Tell me who you are,” he begged.
She shook her head. “No,” she replied. “I have no name. I have left him.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because we disliked one another. It seemed to me altogether wrong that a man and a woman totally out of sympathy with one another should continue to live together. So I made my exit. I live by selling my pictures.”
“Were there any children?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “If there had been, I suppose I should have remained with him. Like flowers, they hide many a sepulchre.”
“It was brave of you to go,” he said.
“I felt it to be a woman’s right,” she declared, spreading her hands in a gesture of conviction. “Since then I have been a wanderer. I’ve had some hours of happiness, some of loneliness, butalways there has been my independence to cheer me, and the knowledge that I have been faithful to my sex, and have not misled others by the usual shams and pretences of the disillusioned wife.”
“And what about the future?” he asked.
“My dear,” she smiled, “the future is a veil of fog that only lifts for the passage of a soul. When I am about to die I will tell you of my future. But now, while I am in the midst of life, only the present counts.”
For some time they talked; but at length when the little band of musicians, whose songs had formed a distant accompaniment to their thoughts, had gone their way, and the sound of the sea alone traversed the silence, she suggested that he should bring down his guitar and play to her.
“The proprietress tells me she has heard you playing in your room,” she smiled. “She described it astrès agréable mais un peu mélancolique.”
Jim was not very willing to comply, for he had been termed a howling jackal at the mines, and, indeed, he had once been obliged to black a man’s eye for throwing something at him. He had no wish to fight anybody to-night.
His companion, however, was so insistent that he was obliged to fetch the instrument and to sing to her. The darkness aided him in overcoming a feeling of shyness, and presently he passed into a mood which was conducive to song. He sang at first in quiet tones, and his fingers struck so lightly upon the strings that sometimes the rich chords were lost in the murmur of the surf. From sad old negro melodies he passed to curious chanties ofthe sea, and thence to the wistful music of the Italian peasants; and as he sang his diffidence left him, and soon his fine voice was strong enough to be heard in the hotel, so that the proprietress and some of her guests came tip-toeing out and stood listening near the open door, the light from the passage illuminating their motionless figures and casting their black shadows across the gravel and on to the encircling palms.
“Listen,” said Jim, at length. “I’ll sing you some verses I made up when I was in Ceylon.”
It was a song which told of a silent, enchanted city built by ancient kings upon the shores of an uncharted sea, where there were pavilions of white marble whose pinnacles shot up to the stars, seeming to touch the Milky Way, and whose domes were so lofty that at moonrise their silver orbs were still tinged with the gold of the sunset. It told how here, upon a bed of crystal, there slept a woman whose hair was as dark as the wrath of heaven, whose breast was as white as the snowclad mountain-tops, and whose lips were as red as sin; and how, upon a hot, still night there came a lost mariner to these shores, who passed up through the deserted streets of the city, and ascended a thousand stairs to the crystal couch, and kissed the mouth of the sleeper....
When he had ended the song there was a moment of silence before Monimé turned to him. “Do you mean to tell me,” she exclaimed, “that you have to earn your living at the mines when you can write verses like that?”
“Oh, it’s only doggerel,” he laughed, “and Icribbed most of the music from things I’d heard.”
“Have you got the poem written down?” she asked.
“No, I’ve lost my only copy,” he answered. “I stuffed it into a hole in the woodwork of my berth on a certain tramp steamer, to keep the cockroaches from coming out. I never could get used to cockroaches.”
“Jim,” she said, taking his hands in hers, “you are wasting your life.”
“I am living for the first time to-night,” he replied.
It was midnight when at length they ascended the stairs to their rooms, but there was on his part a mere pretence of bidding good-night at their doors. He knew well enough that presently he would attempt to renew their wonderful romance upon the balcony which connected their two rooms; but for the moment the serene inscrutability of her face baffled him. She neither made advance towards him, nor retreat from him. She seemed, mentally, to be standing her ground, undisturbed, unmoved. The wisdom of the ages was in her eyes, and the smile of precognition was on her lips.
In love, man is so simple, woman so wise. Man blunders along, taking his chance as to whether he shall find favour or give offence; woman alone knows when the great moment has come, that moment when the time and the place and the person are plaited into the perfect pattern. Some women betray that knowledge in their agitation; some are made shy by the revelation; some, again, have the imperturbable confidence of their intuition, andthese last alone are the celestials, the daughters of Aphrodite, the children of Isis and Hathor.
In his room Jim sat for awhile upon the side of his bed, trying to fathom the unfathomable meaning of her expression. His brain was full of her—her hair black as the Egyptian darkness, her eyes grey as the twilight, and her flesh like the alabaster of the Mokattam Hills. There was such modesty, such reserve in her bearing, and yet with these qualities there went a kind of confidence, a self-assurance, which he could not define. In her presence he became aware of the shortcomings of his own sex, rather than of his mastery; yet at the same time he was conscious of an overwhelming intensification of his manhood.
At last, a cigarette as his excuse, he stepped out on to the balcony, and for some moments stood looking out to sea. When he took courage to turn towards her window he found that though the light in the room was still burning, the shutters were closed; and thus he remained, staring at the green woodwork for what seemed an interminable time.
He was about to go back disconsolately to his room when the light was extinguished, and the shutters were quietly pushed open. Who shall say whether she knew that Jim was standing in silence upon the balcony, or whether, being prepared for her bed, she now merely opened the windows that the cool of the night might bring her refreshing sleep? Woman is wise: she knows if the hour be meet.
Jim awoke next morning with the feeling that he had come back to earth from heaven. The events of the night before seemed to belong to a world of enchantment, and had no relation to the keen, practical sunlight which now struck into his room through the open windows, nor to the cool sea breeze which waved the curtains to and fro, nor yet to the vivid blue sea and the clean-cut rocks which came into sight as he sat up in bed.
“In the next room,” he mused to himself, “sleeps a woman who in the darkness was to me the gateway of my dreams, but who in this bright sunlight will be again only a capable, pretty creature and an amusing companion. Night, after all, is woman’s kingdom, and in it she is mistress of all the magic arts of enchantment, she becomes greater than herself; but day belongs to man. How, then, shall I greet her?—for my very soul seemed surrendered to her a few hours ago, yet now I find myself still master of my destiny.”
Like an artist who steps back to view his picture, or like a poet who measures up his dream, he allowed his mind to take stock of his emotions. When her head had been thrown back upon the pillows, and the white column of her throat could be seen in the dim light of the moon against the black confusion of her hair, it had seemed to him that themarks of the chisel of the Divine Artist were impressed upon the alabaster of her flesh. It was as though, gazing down at her beauty, his eyes had been opened and he had beheld the handicraft of Paradise.
And when, in his ardour, he had had the feeling of not knowing what next to do nor what words to utter, her silencing loveliness had baffled him, so it seemed, because her body was stamped with the seal of the Infinite and fashioned in the likeness of God. True, she was but imperfect woman; yet the art of the Lord of Arts had created her, and, by the magic of the night, he had found her rich in the inimitable craftsmanship of heaven.
He had seen the glory of heaven in her eyes. He had heard the voice of all the ages in her voice. In the touch of her lips there had been the rapture of the spheres, and the gods of the firmament had seemed to ride out upon the tide of her breath.
But was it she whom he had wanted when he held her pinioned in his arms? He could not say. It seemed more reasonable to suppose that through her he was looking towards the splendour which his soul sought. She was but the necromancy by which he had carried earth up to heaven; she was the magic by which he had brought heaven down to the earth. She had been the door of his dreams, the portal of the sky; and through her he had made his incursion into the kingdom beyond the stars.
“It was only an illusion,” he said, as he stood at the window, invigorated by the breeze. “We are actually almost strangers. I don’t know anything about her, and she knows little of me. Itwas the magic of the night employed by scheming Nature for her one unchanging purpose; and all that happened in the darkness will be forgotten in the sunlight. We shall meet as friends.”
To some extent he was right, for when at mid-morning she came down to the blazing beach and seated herself by his side in the shade of the rocks, she greeted him quietly and serenely, with neither embarrassment nor familiarity.
“Are you going to bathe this morning?” he asked her, and on her replying in the affirmative, he told her that he thought he was well enough to do so, too. At this she showed some concern, but he reminded her that the water, at any rate near the shore, was warm to the touch and was hardly likely to do him harm.
The little sandy bay, flanked by rocks which projected into the sea, was the site of a number of bathing huts and tents used by the Europeans who lived in the surrounding villas and bungalows. The breakers rolled in upon this golden crescent, continuously driven forward by the prevalent north-west wind; but at one side a barrier of low, shelving rocks formed a small lagoon where the water was peaceful, and one might look down to the bottom, ten or twelve feet below the surface, and see the brilliant shells and seaweeds almost as clearly as though they were in the open air. So strong was the summer sunlight that every object and every plant at the bottom cast its shadow sharply upon the sparkling bed; and the passage of little wandering fishes was marked by corresponding shadows which moved over the fairyland below.
It was not long before Jim and Monimé were swimming side by side across this small lagoon to the encircling wall of rocks, and soon they had clambered on to them and had seated themselves where the surf rushed towards them from the open azure sea on the one side, drenching them with cool spray, and on the other side the low cliffs and rocks, surmounted by the clustered palms, were reflected in the still water. Here they sunned themselves and talked; and from time to time, when the heat became too great, they dived down together with open eyes into the cool, brilliant depths, gliding amongst the coloured sea-plants, grimacing at one another as they scrambled for some conspicuous pebble or shell, and rising again to the surface in a cloud of bubbles.
It was a joyous, exhilarating, agile occupation, far removed from the enchantments of the darkness; and the glitter of sun and sea effectually diminished the lure of the night’s witchery.
“You know,” said Jim, suddenly looking at his companion, as they lay basking upon the spray-splashed rocks, “I can hardly believe last night was anything but a dream.”
“Let us pretend that it was,” she answered. She pointed down into the translucent water. “Life is like that,” she said. “We dive down into those wonderful depths when the glare of actuality is too great, and we see all the pretty shells down there; and then we have to come up to the surface again, or we should drown.”
“I see,” he replied; “I was just a passing fancy of yours.”
She answered him gravely. “Women in that respect are not so different to men. Judge me by yourself.”
“Oh, but there’s a world of difference,” he said, chilled by her words. “I am simply a vagabond, a wandering Bedouin, here to-day and over the hills and far away to-morrow.”
“I am also a wanderer,” she smiled. “We are both free beings who have broken away from the beaten path. We both earn our living, and claim our independence.”
“Yet the difference is this,” he reminded her, “that the world will shrug its shoulders at my actions, but will condemn yours.”
She made an impatient gesture. “Oh, that threadbare truism!” she said. “I have turned my back on the world, and I don’t care what it thinks. I act according to my principles, and in this sort of thing the first principle is very simple. If a woman is a thoughtful, responsible being, earning her own living, and able to lead her own life without being in the slightest degree dependent on the man of her choice, or on any other living soul, she is entitled to respond to the call of nature at that precious and rare moment when her heart tells her to do so. There should be no such thing as a different law for the man and for the woman: there should only be a different law for the self-supporting and the dependent. The sin is when a woman is a parasite.”
With that she took a header into the water, and he watched her gliding amidst the swaying tendrils of the sea-plants, like a sinuous mermaiden.
When she rose to the surface once more he dived in, and swam over to her, his face emerging but a few inches from hers. “Do you love me?” he asked, smiling amongst the bubbles.
“No, I hate you,” she replied, striking out towards the shore.
“Why?” he called after her.
“Because you haven’t the sense to leave well alone,” she said, and thereat she dived once more, nor came to the surface again until she had reached shallow water.
At luncheon she met him with an ambiguous smile upon her lips; but finding that he was not eating his food with much appetite, she at once became motherly and solicitous, refused to allow him to eat the salad, offered to cut up the meat for him, and directed the waiter to bring some toast in place of the over-fresh roll which he was about to break. At the conclusion of the meal she ordered him to take a siesta in his room, and in this he was glad enough to obey her, for he was certainly tired.
When he woke up, an hour or so later, and presently went out on to the balcony, he saw her standing in her room, contemplating her painting materials.
“May I come in?” he asked.
She nodded. “Have you had a good sleep?” she inquired. “Sit down and talk to me. I have a feeling of loneliness this afternoon. I’m not in a mood to paint; yet I suppose I must, or I shall run short of money.”
He went to her side and put his hands upon hershoulders, drawing her to him; but she pushed him away from her, with averted face.
“I said ‘sit down,’” she repeated.
Jim was abashed. “You’re very difficult,” he told her. “I think that under the circumstances I’d better go. I don’t know where I am with you.”
“You haven’t tried to find out,” she answered. “You’re quite capable of understanding me: I should never have let you come into my life at all if I had not been certain that you had it in you to understand.”
“Tact is not my strong point,” he said. “I’m just a man.”
“Nonsense!” she replied. “Don’t belittle yourself.”
He was puzzled. “Why, what’s wrong with men?”
“Their refusal to study women,” she answered.
She was not in a communicative mood, and would not be drawn into argument. He was left, thus, with a disconcerting sense of frustration, bordering on annoyance. It seemed evident to him that yesterday, by some secret conjunction of the planets, so to speak, their destinies had met together in one sentient hour of sympathy; but that now they had sprung apart once more, and he knew not what stars in their courses would bring back to him the ripe and mystic moment.
An appalling loneliness descended like a cloud upon him, and he was conscious that she too, was experiencing the same feeling. It was the lot, he supposed, of all persons who were born with theBedouin temperament; and he accepted it with resignation.
At length she conducted him—or did he lead her?—down to the verandah of the hotel; and now she had her paints with her, and occupied herself in making some colour-notes of the brilliant sea which stretched before them, and of the golden rocks and vivid green palms. Jim, meanwhile, read an English newspaper, some weeks old, which he had chanced upon in the salon; but from time to time he sat back in his chair and watched her as she worked, his admiration manifesting itself in his eyes.
“What are you staring at?” she asked him, presently.
“I was admiring the way you handle your paints,” he replied. “You’re a real artist.”
“The fact that a woman paints,” she remarked, “does not mean that she is an artist, any more than the fact that she talks means that she is a thinker. To be an artist requires two things, firstly, that you have something to express, and, only secondly, that you know technically how to express it. It is the point of view, the angle of vision, that counts; and in fact one can say that primarily one mustlivean art.”
He nodded. He wondered whether the events of the previous night were but the living of her art; and the thought engendered a kind of mild bitterness which led him to give her measure for measure. “I know what you mean so well,” he said, “because I happen to have the talent to put things into nice metre and rhyme; but it is the subject matter that really counts, and that’s where I feel mystuff is so flat. Sometimes I am obliged to seek experience to help me.”
“You must let me see some of these poems,” she said, pursuing the theme no further.
He shook his head. “They are only doggerel, like the one I sang last night,” he laughed. “They are as shallow as my heart.”
She resumed her painting and he his reading; but his mind was not following the movement of his eyes.
He was thinking how little he understood his companion. She was clearly a woman of strong views, one who had taken her life into her own hands and was facing the world with reliant courage. In fact, it might be said of her that she was the sort of woman who would not be turned from what she knew to be right by any qualms of guilty conscience. He smiled to himself at the epigram, and again allowed his thoughts to speculate upon her alluring personality.
He found at length, however, that the matter was beyond him; and presently he turned to his reading once more.
It was while he was so engaged that suddenly he sat up in his chair, gazing with amazement at the printed page before him.
“Great Scott!” he whispered, pronouncing the words slowly and capaciously. There was a crazy look of astonishment upon his face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing at him, but unable to tell from the whimsical expression of his mouth and eyes what manner of news had taken his attention.
He looked at her as though he did not see her. Then he read once more the words, which seemedto dance before him, and again stared through her into the distance of his breathless thoughts.
“News that concerns you?” she asked.
He nodded, holding his hand to his forehead.
“Bad news?”
“Yes,” he answered, as though speaking in a dream. “Very bad ... wonderful!”
She could not help smiling, and her intuition quickly jumped to the truth. “Somebody has died and left you some money?” she suggested.
He uttered an almost hysterical laugh. “I’m free!” he cried. “Free! I shall never have to go back to the mines.”
He sprang to his feet, folding the newspaper, and crushing it in his hand.
“Don’t go and faint again,” she said, quietly.
He laughed loudly, and a moment later was hastening into the hotel. He snatched his hat from a peg in the hall, and hurried out through the dusty little garden at the front of the building, and so into the afternoon glare of the main road. Here he hailed a carriage, and, telling the driver to take him to the Eastern Exchange Telegraph office, sat back on the jolting seat, and directed his eyes once more to the Agony Column of the newspaper. The incredible message read thus:
James Champernowne Tundering-West, heir to the late Stephen Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, Oxon, is requested to communicate with Messrs. Browne & Beadle, 135a, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.
James Champernowne Tundering-West, heir to the late Stephen Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, Oxon, is requested to communicate with Messrs. Browne & Beadle, 135a, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.
His uncle was dead, then, and the two sons, his unknown cousins, must have predeceased him or died with him! He had never for one moment thought of himself as a possible heir to the little property;and heaven knows how long it might have been before he would have had knowledge of his good fortune had he not chanced upon this old newspaper.
Arrived at his destination, he despatched a cablegram to the solicitors, notifying them that he would come to England by the first possible boat. Then he drove on to Cook’s office in the heart of the city, which he reached not long before it closed; and here, after some anxious delay, he was told that a berth, just returned by its prospective occupant, was available on a French liner sailing for Marseilles that night at eleven o’clock. This he secured without hesitation, and so went galloping back towards the hotel as the sun went down.
In the open road, between the city and the hotel another carriage passed him in which Monimé was sitting, on her way to dine with some friends, of whom she had spoken to him. He waved to her, and both she and he called their drivers to a halt. Then, hastening across to her, he told her excitedly that he was sailing for England that night.
“You see, I’ve inherited some property,” be explained. “I must go and claim it at once.”
Her face was inscrutable, but there was no light of happiness in it. “I’m sorry it has come to an end so soon,” she cried.
“What?” he cried, and it was evident that he was not listening to her. “You’ve been wonderful to me. We mustn’t lose sight of each other. This thing has got to go on and on for ever.”
He hardly knew what he was saying. An hour ago she had been almost the main factor in his existence. Now she was but a fragment of a life he was setting behind him. It was almost as thoughshe were fading into a memory before his very eyes. He was, as it were, looking through her at an amazing picture which was unfolding itself beyond. The yellow walls of the houses, the sea, the palms, the sunset, were dissolving; and in their stead he was staring at the green fields of England, at the timbered walls of an old manor-house last seen when he was a boy, at the grey stone church amongst the ilex-trees and the moss-covered tombstones.
“I must go on and pack at once,” he said, standing first on one leg and then on the other. “You’re sure to be back before I leave. You can get away by ten, can’t you?”
He wrung her hand effusively, and hurried to his carriage, from which, standing up, he waved his hat wildly to her as they drove off in opposite directions.
But when the clock struck ten there was no sign of Monimé and a few minutes later the hotel porter, who was to accompany him to the harbour, began to urge him to delay his departure no longer. Being somewhat flurried, he thought to himself that he would write her a farewell letter from the steamer, and give it to the porter to carry back with him.
But by the time he had found his cabin and seen to his baggage, the siren was blowing, and the porter in alarm was hurrying down the gangway.
“I’ll write or cable from Marseilles,” he said to himself. “I don’t suppose she cares a rap about me: the whole thing was due to our romantic surroundings. But still one would be a fool to lose sight of a real woman like that.... I wish I knew her name.”
The art of life is very largely the art of burying bones. That is the science of mental economy. When a man is confronted with a problem which he cannot solve; when, so to speak, Fate presents him with a bone which he cannot crack, sometimes, without intent, he slinks away with it and, like a dog, buries it, in the undefined hope that at a later date he may unearth it and find it then more manageable.
Even so, during the sea voyage, Jim unconsciously buried the bewildering thought of Monimé. He was a careless fellow, very reprehensible, having no actual harm in him, yet bearing a record pock-marked, so to speak, with the sins of omission. He was one of the world’s tramps by nature; and now once more he was out upon the high road, and the lights of the city wherein he had slept had faded behind him as he wandered onwards into another sunrise. It is true that he wrote her a long and intense letter upon the day after his departure, and that he posted this upon his arrival at Marseilles; but his brain, by then full of other things, conjured up no clear vision of her, and his heart sent forth no impassioned message with the written word. He had been deeply stirred by her, but also he had been baffled; and, as in the case of a dream, he made no effort to retain the sweetness of the memory.
On the morning of his arrival he called at the office of the solicitors who had inserted the advertisement, and was not a little startled to find himself greeted with that kind of obsequiousness which he had supposed to have vanished from Lincoln’s Inn fifty years ago.
The little pink-and-white man who was the senior partner, and whose name was Beadle, rubbed his hands together as though he were washing them, and actually walked backwards for some paces in front of his visitor, bowing him into a shabby leather chair which stood beside the large, imposing desk.
“I hope,” he crooned, when Jim had established his identity, “that we may still have the duty, and pleasure, of serving you, sir, as we have served your uncle and your grandfather.”
“I hope so,” replied Jim. “I suppose you know all the ins and outs of the family affairs.”
Mr. Beadle smilingly directed the young man’s attention to a number of black tin boxes stacked in the corner of the room. “The Tundering-West documents for the last two hundred years,” he declared, blowing his breath through his teeth, an action which served him for laughter.
Jim had a vision of legal formalities and lawyers’ rigmaroles—things which he had always detested; and the passing thought contributed to the growing dislike he felt for the harmless, but sycophantic, Mr. Beadle.
“Well, first of all,” he said, “tell me what my inheritance consists of, and what sort of income I’ve got.”
Mr. Beadle explained that the little propertycomprised some two hundred acres, most of which were rented; the score of houses and cottages which constituted the tiny little village; the small but comfortable manor-house; and twenty thousand pounds of invested capital. This was better than Jim had expected, and his pleasure was manifest by the broad smile upon his tanned face.
“You see, you will have quite a comfortable income in a small way,” the solicitor told him. “I do not think that your duties will embarrass you. You will find your tenants very respectful and deferential country-people, who will give you little bother; and your obligations as landlord will be very easily discharged.”
“They’re a bit behind the times, eh?” suggested Jim.
“Ah, my dear sir,” said Mr. Beadle, “I am thankful to say that there are still some parts of the English countryside where a gentleman may live in comfort, and where the people keep their place.”
Jim was astonished by the remark, for he had believed such sentiments to be entombed in the novels of long ago. “Poor old England!” he murmured. “We’re a comic race, aren’t we, Mr. Beetle?”
“‘Beadle,’” the little old man corrected him; and “Sorry!” said Jim.
They spoke later of the tragedies which had thus brought the inheritance out of the direct line, and hereat came the conventional sighs from Mr. Beadle, as forced as his laughter. Jim was told how his cousin, Mark, had died in India of pneumonia, and how his uncle and the remaining son, James, having gone to the Lakes that the old gentlemanmight recover his equanimity, were both drowned in a sudden squall while sailing at a considerable distance from the shore. The bodies were recovered and brought to Eversfield for burial; and very solemnly the solicitor produced a photograph of the memorial tablet which had been set up in the church.
“Some day, I trust a very long time hence, your own mural tablet will be set up there,” he said, after Jim had handed back the photograph in silence. “‘Nihil enim semper floret; ætas succedit ætati,’ as the good Cicero says.”
“Quite so,” said Jim.
“It has all been a terrible blow to me,” sighed Mr. Beadle. “The late Mr. Tundering-West treated me quite as a personal friend.”
“Did he really?” Jim was going to be rude, but checked himself. He felt an extraordinary hostility to this well-meaning but servile little personage. “I shall go down there to-morrow,” he remarked, as he rose to take his departure, “and I’ll probably have the house thoroughly renovated before I go into it.”
“I don’t think you will find much that requires alteration,” Mr. Beadle assured him, his hand raised in a gesture of deprecation. “Hasty changes are always undesirable; and, when you have grown into the spirit of the place I think you will find that you have a duty to the past.” He checked himself, and bowed. “I trust you will not mind an old man giving you that advice,” he murmured, as they shook hands. He bowed so low that it appeared to be a complete physical collapse.
On the following day Jim motored to Eversfield in a hired open car. He could with greater ease have gone by train to Oxford, and could have driven over in a fly; but he wanted to have the pleasure of spending some of his new money, and, moreover, a fifty-mile drive through the fair lands of Berkshire and Oxfordshire in the radiance of a summer’s day appealed to his imagination. Nor was he disappointed. He acknowledged the beauties of the land of his birth with whole-hearted pleasure; and his eyes, weary with long gazing upon leaden skies and burning sands, were soothed in a manner beyond scope of words by the green fields, the soft foliage of the trees, and grey skies of a hot, hazy morning. It is true that the roads were extremely dusty, and that his face and clothes were soon thickly powdered; but, as the chauffeur had provided him with a pair of motoring glasses, he was not troubled in this respect.
The little hamlet of Eversfield lay seemingly asleep in its hollow amidst the richly timbered hills, as, at midday, he drove up to the grey stone gates of his future home. Here was the narrow village green just as he had last seen it when he was a boy: on one side of the lane which opened on to it were these imposing gates; on the other side were the little church and moss-covered gravestones leaning at all angles, as though the dead were whispering together deferentially at the entrance of the manor. Upon the green were the old stocks, and the stump and worn steps of the ancient cross; and behind them stood the thatched cottages backed by the stately elms.
“I suppose in years to come,” he thought, “I shall be walking through these gates to the church on Sundays, followed by the lady of my choice and half-a-dozen children; and the villagers will nudge one another and say ‘Here comes Squire and all his little squirrels.’ ... Good Lord!”
The exclamation was due to the sudden feeling that he had walked into a trap, that he had been caught by immemorial society, and would soon be forced to conform to its ways; and, as the car passed in at the gates of the manor, he had, for a moment, a desire to jump out and run for his life.
A short, straight drive, flanked by clipped box-trees, led to the main door of the timbered Tudor house; and here the new owner, dusty, and somewhat untidily dressed, was received by the gardener and his buxom wife, who had both grown grey in his uncle’s service. The man held his cap in his hand, and touched his wrinkled forehead with his finger a number of times, painfully anxious to find favour; while his wife curtseyed to him at least thrice.
“Are you the gardener?—what is your name?” Jim asked briskly, feeling almost as awkward as the man he addressed, but determined to go through the ordeal with honour.
“Peter, sir,” said the gardener. “Peter Longarm, sir. I rec’lect you, sir, when you was no more’n so ’igh, I do.”
“Why, of course,” Jim replied. “I remember you now. You’re the fellow who told my uncle when I broke the glass of the forcing frame.”
The old man looked sheepish. “I ’ad to do my dooty, sir,” he said. “I ask your pardon.”
“Duty,” Jim thought to himself. “I’m beginning to know that word. I wonder what it really means.” He turned to the woman. “Now, please go and open the doors of all the rooms, and then leave me to walk through the house by myself.” He wanted to be alone to realize his new possession and to dream his dream of future ease. Mrs. Longarm eyed him nervously for a moment before obeying his instructions; she told her husband afterwards, with tears in her eyes, that she felt as though she were surrendering the house to a cut-throat foreigner.
As he wandered, presently, from room to room he was at first overpowered by the feeling that he was intruding upon the privacy of some sort of family life which he did not understand. His uncle’s wife had been dead for three or four years, but there were still many traces of her influence: the drawing-room, for example, was furnished in a style which called to his mind faded pictures of feminine tea-parties. Here was the old piano upon which the good lady must have tinkled the songs of which the music still lay in the cabinet near by—songs such asMy Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair, andAh, Welladay my Poor Heart. And here was the little sewing-table where had doubtless rested the silks and needles for her embroidery. Perhaps it was she who had chosen the gilt-framed engravings upon the walls—the depressed picture of “Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness;” a youthful portrait of Alexandra, Princess of Wales; “Jacob weepingover Joseph’s coat;” the sprightly “Hawking Party,” and so forth.
Looking around, he experienced a sensation of mingled mirth and awe, and he hoped that the ghost of his aunt would not haunt him when he laid sacrilegious and violent hands upon these things, as at first he intended to do. The chintzes appeared to be of more recent date; but these, too, would have to go, for, as a pattern, he detested sprays of red roses tied with blue ribbons.
The dining-room, hall and staircase, being panelled and hung with family portraits, were impressive in their conveyance of a sense of many generations; and the hereditary library, if sombre, was interesting. Jim was very fond of old books, and he stood there for some time taking the calf-bound volumes from the shelves, and turning over the ancient pages. But, the morning-room, with its red-covered chairs, its mahogany sideboard, and its sham Chinese vases, was distressing. Yet here, as in the drawing-room, there was a chaste and awful solemnity, from which he shrank, as a conscientious Don Juan might shrink at a lady’sprie-Dieu.
The larger bedrooms upstairs, with their mahogany wardrobes and heavy chests of drawers full of clothes, and cupboards full of boots and hats, were startling in their association with their late tenants. On a table beside his uncle’s bed there lay a recent novel, which Jim himself had also just read: it constituted a gruesome link between the living and the dead. He glanced about him and through the window, down the drive, almost expecting to see the apparitions of his relatives stalking up from thefamily vault in the churchyard to see what he was about. His uncle would probably think him a dreadful scallawag, for the old gentleman had been an accredited pillar of Church and State, with, so the cupboards testified, a mania for collecting the top hats he had worn on Sundays or when in town. He had been a model of propriety, and the monumental stone, the photograph of which he had seen at the solicitors, stated that he had “nobly upheld the traditions of his race.”
Jim felt depressed, and presently went out into the garden which was ablaze with flowers; and here, after a late meal of sandwiches, eaten upon an ornamental stone bench, his spirits revived, for the manor and its setting formed a very beautiful picture. If only he could get rid of all those hats and clothes and old photographs!
A sudden idea occurred to him: he would go and find the padre, and tell him to take these things for the poor of the parish. They must be got rid of at once, even though every man in the village be obliged to wear a top hat. They must all be gone before he came here again, or he would never bring himself to live in the house at all! He hurried down the drive, asked Peter Longarm at the lodge to point out the vicarage to him, and thereafter hastened on his errand.
Near the church, however, and at a point where a gap in the trees revealed a distant view of the dreaming, huddled spires of Oxford, flanked by the lonely tower of Magdalen College, he met with a white-bearded clergyman whom he presumed to be the vicar, and at once accosted him.
“Excuse me,” he said, ingratiatingly, barring his way. “Would you care to have some old hats?—I mean of course, would your flock like to wear them?—Top hats, you know, and old boots, too, if you want them.”
The elderly gentleman was annoyed, and, with a curt “No thank you, not to-day,” proceeded on his way. Jim, however, called after him, coaxingly: “They are quite good hats really; they only want brushing.”
At this the man of God stopped and turned, looking at Jim’s somewhat dusty figure with wonderment. “Do I understand that you are selling old hats?” he asked, endeavouring to speak politely.
Jim rushed feverishly into explanation. “No, I want to get rid of them,” he gabbled; “I want to get rid of all sorts of things—hats, coats, trousers, dressing-gowns, shirts, vests, boots, slippers, old photographs, umbrellas ...” He paused for breath, inwardly laughing.
Very slowly and deliberately the clergyman adjusted his eyeglasses low down upon his nose, and stared at Jim. “Young man,” he said, “is this a jest at my expense?”
“Good Lord, no!” Jim answered. “I’m in deadly earnest. I can’t possibly live in the house with all these things. Youwillhelp me, won’t you? How would it be if you came over to-morrow and cleared them all out, and then had a meeting or something, and gave them as prizes to the regular church-goers?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” theclergyman responded, gently but firmly pushing him aside. “Good-day!”
Jim stared at him as he walked. “Youarethe vicar, aren’t you?” he asked.
“No, I’m not,” the other replied somewhat sharply, over his shoulder; “I’m the President of Magdalen.”
Jim uttered an exclamation of impatience, and hastened on to the Vicarage.
The servant who appeared in response to his knock, was about to ask him his name, when the vicar, an old man with a clean-shaven, kindly face, and grey hair, happened to cross the hall.
“Yes, what is it, what is it?” he asked, coming to the door, while the maid retired.
“Are you the vicar?” Jim asked, beginning more cautiously.
“I am,” the other responded.
“You really are? Well I want to ask you about some old clothes. I....”
The vicar held up his hand. “No, I have none to sell you,” he said smiling sadly. “I wear mine out.”
Jim laughed aloud. “First I’m thought to be selling them, and now you think I’m buying them,” he exclaimed. “We certainly are a nation of shop-keepers.”
The vicar was puzzled. “I don’t understand. What is it you want?”
“I have a lot of hats and old clothes I want to get rid of. I thought you might like them.”
The clergyman bowed stiffly. “It is very kind of you,” he said frigidly. “My stipend, I admit, issmall, but I am not yet reduced to the necessity of wearing a stranger’s cast-off clothing.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Jim hastily explained. “And they’re not mine: they belonged to my late relatives. I am just coming to live at the manor, and I thought the poor of the parish would....”
The vicar interrupted him. “I beg your pardon. Are you ...?” He hesitated, incredulous.
“Yes, I’m the new Tundering-West,” Jim told him.
The other held out his hands. “Well, well!” he cried. “And I thought you were....” He hesitated.
“The old clothes man,” laughed Jim.
“Oh, very droll!” the vicar smiled, shaking him warmly by the hand. “How ridiculous of me! Do come in, my dear sir!”
Jim followed him into the drawing-room, and here he found a little old lady, who was introduced to him as Miss Proudfoote, and a florid, middle-aged man with a waxed moustache, who looked like a sergeant-major, and proved to be Dr. Spooner, the local medical man. They had evidently been lunching at the Vicarage, and were now drinking the post-prandial concoction which the English believe to be coffee. They both greeted him with a sort of deference, which however, did not conceal their curiosity.
During the next ten minutes Jim heard a great deal of his “poor dear uncle” and his unfortunate cousins. The tragedy of their deaths, it seemed, had cast the profoundest gloom over the village; but it was a case of “the King is dead; long livethe King!” and all three of his new acquaintances appeared to be anxious to pay him every respect.
Dr. Spooner asked him from what part of England he had just come, and the news that he had been living abroad and had not visited the land of his birth for many years caused a sensation. The thought occurred to him that he ought not to mention Egypt, or any other land which had recently known him as Jim Easton; for any such revelations might bring discredit upon him, and he wished to start his life at Eversfield without any handicap. He therefore spoke only of California, referring to it casually as a country where he had resided.
Miss Proudfoote turned to the vicar. “Is it not extraordinary,” she said, “how many of our young men shoulder what Mr. Kipling calls ‘the white man’s burden’ and go forth to live amongst the heathen?” Her geography was evidently at fault, but out of consideration for her years and her sex, no correction was forthcoming. “I suppose,” she proceeded, “you met with our missionaries out there? It is wonderful what a great work the Church Missionary Society is doing all over the world.”
The Doctor here had the hardihood to interpose. “Oh, but California is a part of the United States of America ...” he ventured.
“How foolish of me!—of course,” smiled the old lady. “The Americans are quite an educated people. I met an American traveller once in Oxford: a pleasant spoken young man he seemed, so far as I could understand what he said.”
“Yes,” remarked the vicar, “America can nolonger be called ‘the common sewer of England,’ as it was when I was a boy.”
Jim stared from one to the other in amazement. “But America is the largest and most progressive part of the Anglo-Saxon race,” he protested. “They are already ahead of us in many ways.”
Miss Proudfoote was shocked, and she showed it. “It is evident that you do not know England,” she replied, coldly.
“I mean,” he emphasized, “it always seems to me a fine thought that England can never die, because she will live again over there; and then she’ll have another lease of life in Australia; and so on. This England here may die, but the English will go on for ever and ever, it seems to me. And wherever their home may be,” he added, laughing, “they’ll always think it ‘God’s own country,’ and think themselves the chosen people.”
Miss Proudfoote looked anxiously at him, hoping that there was some good in him. “I trust,” she said, “that it is now your intention to settle down?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I fancy my wanderings are over.”
“Heaven has placed you in a very responsible position,” she said, gazing earnestly at him. “I am sure our best wishes will be with you in your duties.”
“Yes, indeed,” sighed the vicar, whose name, as Jim had just ascertained, was Glenning. “Are you a married man, may I ask?”
“Oh no,” Jim replied.
Miss Proudfoote patted his arm. “We shall have to find you a wife,” she smiled.
Jim was aghast, and hastily changed the subject. “Now about the old clothes,” he began.
Mr. Glenning coloured, slightly. “What an absurd error for me to have made,” he said. “Now, tell me, what is it you wish me to do?”
“I’m going back to London to-day,” Jim explained, “and I want you, while I am away, to go through all my uncle’s things, and give away to the poor everything you think I shall not want. Just use your own judgment.”
“It will be a melancholy duty,” he replied.
“I’m sure it will,” the new Squire answered, “but, I tell you frankly, anything useless I find here when I return I shall burn.”
The vicar raised his hands; the doctor sniffed; and Miss Proudfoote looked at the stranger indignantly.
“That is rather hasty, is it not?” she asked, tremulously.
Jim felt awkward. He had made a bad impression, and he knew it. “You see,” he tried to explain, “my uncle died so suddenly and the place is littered with his things. All I want to keep is the furniture, and the silver, and the books, and that sort of thing, but I will see to that myself.”
Miss Proudfoote turned away suddenly and Jim, to his horror, saw her raise a handkerchief to her eyes. He could have kicked himself. He wished the floor would open and engulf him. He looked in despair at the two men.
“You know I haven’t seen my uncle since I was a boy,” he stammered. “I am a complete stranger.”
“He was our very dear friend,” said Mr. Glenning.
While the congregation in the little church at Eversfield was singing the last hymn of the morning service the October sun passed from behind an extensive bank of cloud, and its rays shot down through the plain glass window upon the figure of a young woman, whose sudden and surprising illumination instantly attracted many pairs of eyes to her. She looked, and knew it, like a little angel as she stood in this shaft of brilliance, hymn-book in hand, singing the well-known words in a voice which enhanced their ancient sweetness; and the vicar, from his place at the side of the small chancel, fixed his gaze upon her with an expression of such saintly beatitude upon his face as to be almost idiotic.
Her name was Dorothy Darling; but her mother, who here stood beside her in the shadow under the wall, called her Dolly, and rightly congratulated herself upon having chosen for her only baby, twenty-three years ago, a name of which the diminutive was so appropriate to the now grown woman.
In the sunshine the girl’s soft, fair hair looked like a puff of gold, and her skin like coral; and the play of light and shade accentuated the pretty lines of her figure, so that they were by no means lost under the folds of her smart little frock. Her large, soft eyes were as innocent as they were blue,and never a glance betrayed the fact that she was singing for the direct benefit of the new Squire, whose head and shoulders appeared above the carved wooden walls of the sort of loose-box which was his family pew.
The miniature church, though dating from the twelfth century, still retained the features by which it had been transformed and modernized in the obsequious days of Walpole and the first of the Georges. The pews for the “gentry” were boxed in, and each was fitted with its door; but the walls of Jim’s pew were higher than the others and its area bigger. At the back of the church there were the open seats for the villagers and persons of vulgar birth; but the woodwork here was not carved, save with the occasional initials of lads long since passed out of memory.
At the sides of the chancel were set the mural tablets which recorded the genealogical lustres of dead Tundering-Wests, back to the day when a certain Captain of Horse had obtained a grant of the manor from the Commonwealth, in lieu of his devastated estate in Devon, and, with admirable tact, had married the daughter of the exiled Royalist owner. Around the whitewashed walls of the small nave large wooden boards were hung, upon which were painted the arms and quarterings of the successive Squires and their spouses; and above the chancel arch the royal Georgian escutcheon was displayed in still vivid colours.
The church, indeed, was a tiny monument to all that glory of caste which its Divine Founder abhorred, and which the aforesaid Roundhead, misapprehendingthe unalterable character of his fellow-countrymen, had apparently fought in his own day to suppress.
When the hymn was finished, the blessing spoken, and Mr. Glenning gone into the vestry behind the organ, this traditional distinction between the classes was emphasized by the behaviour of the little congregation. Nobody of the meaner sort moved towards the sunlit doorway until Jim, looking extraordinarily embarrassed, had marched down the aisle and had passed out into the autumnal scurry of falling leaves, followed closely by Mrs. and Miss Darling, Mr. Merrivall of Rose Cottage, Dr. and Mrs. Spooner, and old Miss Proudfoote of the Grange; and, when these were gone, way had still to be made for young Farmer Hopkins and his wife, Farmer Cartwright and his idiot son, and the other families of local standing.
Outside, in the keen October air, Jim paused under the ancient ilex-tree, and turned to bid good-morning to the Darlings. Dolly had interested and attracted him during these three months since he took up his residence at the manor; but he had been so much occupied in settling himself into his new home that he had not given her all the attention he felt was her due, now that the shaft of sunlight in the church had revealed her to him in the palpable charm of her maidenhood.
He greeted her, therefore, with cheery ardour, as though she were a new discovery, and walked beside her and her mother down the path which wound between the moss-covered gravestones, and out into the lane under the rustling elms. A great changehad come over him since he had returned to England: he had become in some ways more normal, and the quiet, simple life of an English village had, as it were, taken much of the exotic colour out of his thoughts. In the romantic East he had looked for romance, but here in the domestic West his mind had turned towards domesticity. His poetic imagination was temporarily blunted; and whereas in Alexandria he had responded eagerly to the enchantments of hour and place, in Eversfield he was readily satisfied with a more rational aspect of life.
He turned to the mother. “What a little picture your daughter looked, singing that hymn in the sunlight,” he remarked, with enthusiasm.
Mrs. Darling sighed. Twenty years ago she, too, had been a little picture; but, so she thought to herself, she had had more character in her face than Dolly, and less softness. Outwardly her little girl took after that scamp of a father of hers, whose innocent blue eyes and boyish face had won him more frequent successes than his continence could handle.
“Yes,” she replied, evasively, “that is Dolly’s favourite hymn.... She has a nice little voice.”
“Delightful!” said Jim. “I didn’t know hymns could sound so beautiful!”
Dolly looked at him as our great-grandmothers must have looked when they said, “Fie!”
“Aren’t you a regular church-goer?” she asked, gazing up at him with childlike eyes.
“Can’t say I am,” he answered, with a quick laugh. “I’m new to all this, you know. I’ve knocked about all over the world since I left school.But, I say!—that family pew, and the respectful villagers!—they give me the hump!”
“Oh, I think it is charming, perfectly charming,” said Mrs. Darling.
“Well,” he replied, “I expect I’ll get used to it. I suppose this sort of life grows on one: in some ways I’m beginning to have a sort of settled feeling already.”
They were walking away from the gates of the Manor, which rose opposite the ivy-covered church, and were approaching the picturesque little cottage where the Darlings lived. Jim paused, and as he did so Dolly experienced a sudden sense of disappointment. She had hoped that he would accompany them to their door, and she had intended then to entice him through it, and to show him over their pretty rooms and round the flower-garden and the orchard. Until now they had only occasionally met, and their exchanges of conversational trivialities had been carried on in the lane, or at the door of the church, or outside the cottage which served as the post-office. He seemed to be a difficult man to take hold of; and during the last few weeks, since her mind had begun to be so disastrously full of the thought of him, she had felt ridiculously frustrated in her attempts to develop their friendship. Frustration, of course, is woman’s destiny, which meets her at every turn; but in youth it sometimes serves as her incentive.
“Won’t you come in and see our little home?” she asked. “It’s rather a treasure.”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t,” he replied. “I promised to go round my place with thegardener this morning. He’ll be waiting for me now. But, I say, what about dinner to-night? Won’t you both dine with me?” He was feeling reckless.
Dolly’s heart leapt, and, in a flash, she had selected the dress she would put on, and had considered whether she should wear the little diamond pendant or the sham pearls.
“We shall be delighted,” murmured Mrs. Darling. “Eh, Dolly?”
The girl looked doubtful. “I don’t know that we ought to to-night,” she answered. “We had half promised to drive over to a sort of sacred concert affair in Oxford.”
“Oh, don’t disappoint me,” said Jim. “I’ve got the house almost shipshape now; I’d like you to see it.”
Dolly did not require really to be pressed; and soon the young man was striding homewards down the lane, wondering why it had taken him three months to realize that this girl was perfectly adorable; while she, on her part, was pinching Mrs. Darling’s arm and saying: “Oh, mother dear, doesn’t he look delightfullywicked!”
“Yes, he seems a nice, sardonic fellow,” her mother remarked grimly, as they entered their house. “Why did you begin by saying we were engaged to-night? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
Dolly smiled. “Oh, I made that up, because I thought you were too prompt in accepting. He’ll want us all the more if we are stand-offish. Men are like that.”
Mrs. Darling sniffed. She was a lazy, plump,and rather languid little woman; and sometimes she grew impatient at her daughter’s ingenious method of dealing with these sorts of situations. She herself had grown more direct in her Yea and Nay: perhaps at the age of forty-five she was a little tired of dissimulation. The world had treated her scurvily; and, having a settled grievance, she was inclined now to take whatever pleasant things were to be had for the asking, without any subtle manœuvering for position.
Her husband had left her when Dolly was five years old, and, so far as she knew, he was now dead. For several years she had bravely maintained herself in a tiny Kensington flat by writing social and theatrical articles for pretentious papers. She had been a purveyor of gossip, a tattle-monger, a dealer in bibble-babble; and she had carried on her trade with an increasing inclination to yawn over it, and a growing consciousness of her daughter’s contempt, until the editors who had supported her became aware that her heart was not in her work, and five years ago gave her hercongé.
Then, with a temporary display of energy, she had followed Dolly’s cultured advice, and had established a little business off Sloane Square, which she called “The Purple Shop.” Here she sold purple cushions and lamp-shades, poppy-heads dipped in purple paint, poetry-books in purple covers, sketches by Bakst in purple frames, lengths of purple damask, and so forth. But purple went out of fashion, and her once very considerable profits sank to the vanishing point. She introduced other colours, and softer shades of mauve and lilac. She sold a dollwhich had mauve hair and naughty black eyes; she took in a stock of bottled new potatoes tinged with a harmless purple liquid, and presented them to the jaded world of fashion asPommes de terre pourpres de Tyr; she even sold brilliant bath-robes for bored bachelors, with coloured soap to match.
A financial crash followed, and, after a few months spent in dodging her creditors, she heard of this little cottage at Eversfield, and fled to it with her daughter, leaving no address. She was in receipt of a small annual allowance from the estate of a deceased brother, and this she supplemented by writing the monthly fashion article in one of the journals devoted to the world, the flesh and the devil. She wrote under the nom-de-plume of “Countess X”; and her material was obtained by a monthly visit to London and a tour of the leading modistes.
For eighteen months now she had lain low in this nook of the Midlands where Time stood still, and gradually she had ceased to dread the visit of the postman, and had begun to take a languid interest in the cottage. The colour purple no longer set her fat knees knocking together, and lately she had been able even to look up some of her old friends in London and to greet them with the sad, brave smile of a wronged woman.
To Dolly, however, the enforced seclusion had been a sore trial, and there were times when her pretty eyes were red with weeping. She had been utterly bored by the purposeless existence she was called upon to lead; but now the arrival of the new Squire at the manor, which had hardly seen its previous owner during the last year of his life,had aroused her from her sorrows and had set her heart in a flutter. She liked his strange, swarthy face and his moody eyes, and thought he looked artistic and even intellectual; and she liked his obvious embarrassment at the deference paid to him in this little kingdom which he had inherited.
She spent the afternoon, therefore, in a condition of pleasurable excitement, stitching at the dress she was going to wear and making certain alterations to the shape of the neck.
While she plied her needle, Mrs. Darling sat at the low window overlooking the orchard, and scribbled her monthly article upon a writing-pad resting on her knee. “Here is a charming little conceit I chanced upon in Bond Street t’other day,” she wrote. “It is really a tub-time frock; but its success in the drawing-room is likely to be immediate. Organdy ruchings of moonlight blue, and asoupçonof jet cabochons on the corsage. It is named ‘Hopes in turmoil.’” And again, “I noticed, too, a crisp littletrotteurfrock, with a nipped-in waist-line hesitating behind amoyenagegirdle of beige velours delaine. They have called it ‘Cupid’s Teeth.’ Oh, very snappy, I assure you, my dears!”
She smiled lazily as she wrote, but once she sighed so heavily that her daughter asked her if anything were amiss.
“No,” she replied. “I was only just wondering whether anybody in their senses could understand the nonsense I am writing. The editor’s orders are to make the thing sound French: I should lose my job if I wrote in plain English.”
“Oh dear,” sighed Dolly, “how tedious all that sort of thing seems! I wonder that you can bother with it.”
“I’ve got to,” her mother answered, with irritation. “I shan’t be able to give it up till you are married and off my hands.”
“Yes, so you are always telling me,” said Dolly; and therewith their silence was renewed.
Night had fallen when they set out for the manor, and the lane was intensely dark. They were guided, however, by the light in the window of the lodge at the gates; and from here to their destination they were accompanied by the gardener, who carried a lantern which flung their shadows, like great black monsters, across the high box-hedges flanking the main approach. From the outside the timbered house looked ghostly and forbidding; and by contrast, the front hall which they entered seemed wonderfully well-lit, though only lamps and candles and the flames of the log-fire served for illumination.
Here Jim came to them as they were removing their wraps, and Dolly could see by the expression on his face that her dress had his hearty approval. He led them into the library, where his late uncle’s books, arranged upon the high shelves, and the rather heavy furniture, presented a picture of solid dignity; and presently they were ushered into the panelled dining-room, where they sat down at a warmly lit table, under the silent scrutiny of a gallery of dead Tundering-Wests and that of a gaping village housemaid who appeared to be more or less moribund.
The food provided by Jim’s thoroughly incompetentcook was not a success, and when some rather tough mutton chops had followed a dish of under-boiled cod, which had been preceded by a huge silver tureen of lukewarm soup, their host felt that some words of apology were due to his guests.
“You must try to bear with the menu,” he laughed. “This is my cook’s first situation. She was recommended to me by Mr. Glenning, the vicar, as a girl who was willing to learn; but it only occurred to me afterwards that that was not much good when there was nobody to teach her.”
“You must let me give her a few lessons,” said Dolly, at which her mother stared in astonishment, knowing that her daughter understood about as much of cooking as a dumb-waiter.
Yet the girl was not conscious of deception, nor was she aware that she was acting a part, and acting it mainly for her own edification. She pictured herself just now as a splendid little housewife, and she would have been gravely insulted if her mother had told her that her dream was devoid of reality. In her mind she saw herself as the lady of the manor, quietly, unobtrusively, yet all-wisely, directing its affairs; a sweet smiling Bunty pulling the strings; a little ray of sunshine in the great, grey old house; a source of comfort to her lord which he would not appreciate until she should go away to stay with her mother, whereon he would write to her telling her that since her departure everything had gone wrong.
Throughout her life she had played such parts to herself, her rôles varying according to circumstances. At the Purple Shop she had been the dreamy little artist, destined for higher things, but forcedby cruel poverty to act as assistant saleswoman to a soulless mother, and to smile bravely at the world, though her artist’s heart was breaking. When first she had come to Eversfield and had fallen under the spell of the green woods, she had had a severe bout of “Merrie England.” She had tripped through the fields in a sun-bonnet, and had begged her mother to buy a harpsichord. She had joined a society of ladies in Oxford who were attempting to revive folk-dancing, and she had footed it nimbly on the sward while the curate played “Hey-diddle-diddle” to them on his flute.