Later she had gone through the nymph-and-fairy phase, and, in the depth of the woods, had let her hair down so that it looked in the sunlight, she supposed, like woven gold. She had danced her way barefooted from tree to tree, sipping the dew from the dog-roses, and singing snatches of strange, wild songs about the “little people,” and talking to the birds; and when Farmer Cartwright had caught her at it, she had looked at him, she believed, like a startled fawn.
But now, since the new Squire, with his background of rich lands and ancient tenure, had come into her life, she had played the little helpmate, the goodwife in her dairy, the mistress in her kitchen with whole-hearted enthusiasm. She thought of beginning to collect a book of Simples, in which there would be much mention of Marjoram, Rosemary, Rue and Thyme; soveraign Balsames for Woundes, and Cordiall Tinctures for ye Collicke; receipts for the making of Quince-Wine, or Syllabubs of Apricocks; and so forth. Phrases such as “The littlemistress of the big house,” “My lady in her pleasaunce,” or “—in her herbal garden,” had been drifting through her head for some time past; and hence her offer to set Jim’s cuisine to rights fell naturally from her lips.
Nor was this the only show of interest she displayed in his domestic affairs. After the meal was finished and they were sitting around the fire in the library, she asked Jim to show her the drawing-room, which was not yet in use; and when he was about to lead her to it she made peremptory signs to her mother to refrain from accompanying them.
As she tiptoed down the passage and across the hall at Jim’s side, she laid her hand upon his proffered arm, and he was surprised at the lightness of the touch of her fingers. He did not, perhaps, compare it actually to thistledown, which, at the moment, was the description her own mind was fondly giving it; but her painstaking effort to defeat the Newtonian law resulted, as she desired, in an increased consciousness on his part that she was a very fairy-like creature.
The drawing-room was in darkness, and as they entered it she uttered a little squeak of nervousness which went, as it was intended, straight to his manly heart. He put his disengaged hand on her fingers and felt their response: they seemed to be seeking his protection, and his senses were thrilled at the contact. He could have kissed her as she stood.
“Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll light the candles.”
“No, don’t,” she answered. “It looks so ghostly and wonderful.”
She crept forward into the room, into which onlythe reflected light from the hall penetrated, and presently she came to a stand upon the hearth-rug. He followed her, and stood close at her side; one might have harkened to both their hearts beating. Then, boldly, he put his arm in hers and took hold of her hand. It was trembling.
“Why,” he said, in surprise, “you’re shaking with fright.”
“No, it isn’t fright,” she stammered....
The voice of worldly wisdom whispered to him: “Look out!—this is getting precious close to the danger zone”; and, with a saner impulse, he removed his hand from hers, struck a match, and lit the candle.
“Oh, now you’ve spoilt it!” she exclaimed, not without irritation, and then added quickly: “The ghosts have vanished.”
He held the candle up, and told her to look round the room; but as she did so his own eyes were fixed upon her averted face, and had she turned she would have realized at once that her triumph was nigh.
Upon the following afternoon the vicar came to call at the manor. Jim had handed over to him as the oldest friend of the late Squire all his uncle’s letters, diaries, and other papers, and had asked him to look through them; and, the task being accomplished, he was now bringing them back, carefully docketed and tied up in a large parcel.
As he entered the house there came to his venerable ears the sounds of singing and the twanging of strings.
“Dear me, what is that?” he asked the maid, pausing in the hall.
“Oh, it’s only the master a-playing of ’is banjo,” the girl explained, smiling at the vicar, who had been her friend since her earliest childhood. “’E often gets took like that, sir. Cook says it’s ’is furrin blood.”
“But he has no foreign blood,” Mr. Glenning told her.
“’E looks a furrin gentleman,” she replied, “and ’is ways....” She paused, remembering her manners.
The vicar was shown into the drawing-room, and here he found the Squire seated upon the arm of the sofa, his guitar across his knees.
“Hullo, padre!” said Jim. “Excuse the music.” He was somewhat abashed at thus being taken unawares,for he had little idea that his singing was anything but an infernal noise, intended by Nature to be a vent to the feelings. And these feelings, just now, were of a somewhat violent character, for, though he was not yet aware of his plight, he was in love.
In the early part of the afternoon he had gone for a wandering walk in the woods adjoining the manor, in order to escape a sense of depression which had descended upon him. “It must be this old house,” he had said to himself, “with its weight of years. It feels like a trap in which I’ve been caught, a trap laid by the forefathers to catch the children and teach them their manners.” And therewith he had rushed out into the sunshine.
Mr. Glenning smiled indulgently. “I shall have to make use of your voice in church,” he said.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Jim laughed, pretending to edge away. “Your choir is bad enough as it is.”
The vicar was hurt, and Jim hastened to obliterate his thoughtless words by remarking that he had, not long since, come in from a tour of exploration in the woods, and had found them very pleasant.
“Yes,” his visitor replied, “they have grown up nicely. In the Civil War all the trees were felled by Cromwell’s men during the siege of Oxford; but one of your ancestors replanted the devastated area after the Restoration, and the place now looks, I dare say, just as it did before that unfortunate quarrel.”
The thought did not please Jim. Even the woods, then, which that afternoon seemed to him to be a place of escape from the pall of history, were buta part of the chain of ancient circumstances which bound the whole estate. Even in their depths he would not be out of hearing of the voice of his forefathers, which told him that they had sowed for posterity and that he must do likewise.
He dismissed the irksome reflection by asking the vicar the nature of the parcel which he had deposited on the table.
Mr. Glenning explained that it contained his uncle’s letters, and therewith he unfastened the string, ceremoniously, and revealed a bundle of small packets. “I have been through all these, except this one package,” he said, holding up a small parcel, “and I certainly think they are worth keeping, for they display your uncle’s noble character in a variety of ways.”
“He seems to have been a fine old fellow,” Jim remarked.
“He was, indeed,” replied the vicar. “He represented all the best in our English life.” And therewith he enlarged upon the dead man’s virtues, while Jim listened attentively, feeling that the words were intended as an admonition to himself.
At length Mr. Glenning turned to the unopened package. “I have been much exercised in my mind,” he said, “as to what to do in regard to this one packet. It is marked, as you see, ‘To be destroyed at my death.’ Of course, the words do not actually state that the contents are not to be read; but I thought it would be best to consult you first.”
“Thanks,” replied Jim. “I’ll have a look at it some time.”
He opened the drawer in the bureau, and bundledthe letters into it, while the vicar watched him, feeling that he was sadly lacking in reverence, and not a little disappointed, perhaps, that the young man had not invited him to deal with the unopened packet.
Later, when Jim was alone once more, he took this mysterious packet from the drawer, and, seating himself upon the sofa beside the fire, cut the string.
The nature of the contents was at once apparent: they were the relics of an affair of the heart, and a glance at the signature of two or three of the letters revealed the fact that the writer was not Jim’s aunt. “Ah,” said he, with satisfaction, “then the old paragon was human, like all the rest of us.”
A perusal of the badly-written pages, however, dispelled the atmosphere of romance which the first short messages of twenty years ago had promised. The story began well enough, so far as he could gather. The lady, whose name was Emily, had evidently lost her heart to her middle-aged lover, and was delighted with the little house he had provided for her in a London suburb. Two or three years later she became a mother, but the child had died, and there was a pathetic document recording her grief. In more recent years the intrigue had developed into an established union; and Emily, now grown complacent, and probably fat, became a secondary spouse and mistress of the old gentleman’s alternative home. The tale ended, however, with Emily’s marriage, two years ago, at the age of forty, to a young city clerk; and the only romantic features of the close of his uncle’s double life was the fact thathe had preserved a little handkerchief of hers and a dead rose.
“Well, Emily,” said Jim, aloud, “I wish you luck, wherever you are”; and with that he gently thrust the relics into the flames.
For some time he lay back upon the sofa in the firelight, his arms behind his head, and thought over the story which had been revealed. It seemed, then, that the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out,” was the essential of respectable life. A man could do what he liked, provided that his delinquencies were hidden from his neighbours. Was this sheer hypocrisy?—or was there some principle behind the code? Did not Plato once say: “Every man should exert himself never to appear to any one to be of base metal?” He had read the quotation somewhere. Ought a man’s epitaph, then, to be: “He lived nobly, in that he kept up appearances”?—or would it be better frankly to write: “He tried to walk delicately, but the old Adam tripped him up?”
What would the vicar, what would Miss Proudfoote, have said had either of them known of this double life? Where would then have been the beautiful example of a goodly life which his uncle had left behind him as an inspiration to the whole neighbourhood? Was it not better that the secret was kept?
He found no answer to the questions which he thus put to himself; and all that was apparent to him was that decent society was based not upon the truth, but upon the hiding of the truth, and that the more lofty the pretence the more high-principled would be the community. “Truly,” he muttered,“we Anglo-Saxons are called hypocrites; but it is our hypocrisy that keeps us clean!” And with that he returned to his guitar.
A few days later he took Dolly for a walk across the fields. It was an autumnal afternoon, and although the sun shone down from a cloudless sky, there was a chilly haze over the land, which presaged the coming of the first frosts.
“I don’t know how I’m going to stand an English winter,” he said to her, as they sat to rest upon a stile, under an oak from which the leaves were falling. “Just look at the branches up there. They are nearly bare already.” He shuddered.
She looked at him almost reproachfully. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you say that,” she replied. “I love the winter. I am a child of the North, you know. To me the grey skies and the bare trees have a sort of meaning I can’t quite explain. They are so ... so English. Think of the long, dark evenings, when you sit over the hearth, and the firelight jumps and dances about the walls. Think how cosy one feels when one is tucked up in bed.”
He glanced down at her, and she smiled up at him with innocent eyes.
“Think of the snow on the ground,” she went on, “and the robins hopping about. You should just see me scampering over the snow in my big country boots, and sliding down the lane. Oh, it’s lovely!”
“I shouldn’t think my house is very warm,” he mused.
“It could be made awfully cosy, I’m sure,” she said. “You must have big log fires; and if I wereyou I’d buy some screens to put behind the sofas and armchairs around the fire, so that you can have little lamp-lit corners where you can sit as warm as a toast.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” he answered.
“Have you got a woolly waistcoat?” she asked, and when he replied in the negative she told him that she would knit one for him at once. “I love knitting,” she said; and at the moment she believed that she did.
As they walked on she enlarged upon the delights of winter; and such pleasant pictures did she draw that Jim began to think the coming experience might hold unexpected happiness for him. She managed, somehow, to introduce herself into all the scenes which she sketched, now as a smiling little figure, vibrating with healthy life in the open air, now purring like a warm, sleepy kitten before the fire indoors.
“From what I saw the other night,” she told him, “you seem to have an excellent hot-water supply. You’ll be able to have beautiful hot baths.... I simply love lying in a boiling bath before I go to bed, don’t you?”
“I can’t say I do,” he laughed. “It makes the sheets feel so cold.”
“Oh, but you must have them warmed, with a hot-bottle or something,” she explained. “When it’s very, very cold I sometimes creep into bed with mother, and we cuddle up and warm each other.”
Again he glanced down at her quickly, wondering.... But her eyes were those of a child.
Presently their path led them through a gateinto a field in which a few cows were grazing; and on seeing them Dolly hesitated.
“You’ll think me awfully silly,” she faltered, swallowing nervously, “but I’m rather frightened of cows.”
He smiled down at her. “Take my arm,” he said; and without waiting for her to do so, he linked his own arm in hers and laid his hand over her fingers.
She looked anxiously at a mild-eyed, motherly cow which, weighed down by her full udder, moved towards them slowly. “Oh dear,” she whispered, “d’you think that cow is a bull?”
She tugged at his arm, hurrying him forward; and thereat he closed his hand more tightly over hers and drew her close to him. He had always regarded himself as a man of the world, and his intellect had ever poked fun at his sentiments. Yet now, in a situation so blatantly commonplace that he might have been expected to be totally unmoved by it, he was intrigued like a novice. Protecting a maiden from the cows!—it was the A.B.C. of the bumpkin’s lovelore; and yet that vulgar old lady, Nature, had once more effectually employed her hackneyed device to his undoing, and here was he rejoicing in his protective strength, thrilled by the beating heart of a frightened girl, as all his ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years had been thrilled before him in the heydays of their adolescence and in the morning of life.
The amiable cow breathed heavily at them from a discreet distance, and then, suddenly hilarious,lowered her head, kicked out her hind legs, and gambolled beside them for a few yards.
“Oh, oh!” cried Dolly, grabbing at Jim’s coat with her disengaged hand. “I’m sure he’s going to toss us! Oh, do let’s run!”
Jim halted, and held out his hand to the matronly beast. At that moment the jeering sprite which sits in the brain of every Anglo-Saxon, pointing with the finger of mockery at his heroics, was pushed from its throne; and for a brief spell the bravado of primitive, gasconading man—the young Adam cock-a-hoop—was dominant. Jim stepped forward, dragging Dolly with him, and hit the astonished cow sharply across her flank with his hand, whereat she went off at her best speed across the turf.
“Oh, how brave you are!” whispered Dolly; and with that the jesting sprite climbed back upon its throne, and Jim was covered with shame.
“Nonsense!” he said. “You don’t suppose cows are put into a field through which there’s a right of way unless they are perfectly harmless, do you?”
But pass it off as he might, Nature had played her old, old trick upon him, and in some subtle manner his relationship to Dolly had become more intimate, more alluring; so much so, indeed, that when he said “good-bye” to her he asked to be allowed soon to see her again.
“I want to go in to a lecture in Oxford to-morrow evening,” she replied; “but mother has to go to London, and won’t be back in time to take me. Would you like to come?”
“What’s the lecture about?” he asked.
“‘The Emotional Development of the Child,’”she replied. “I love anything to do with children, and everybody says Professor Robarts is wonderful. He believes that a child’s character is formed in the first three or four years of its life, and he thinks all girls should learn just what to do, so that when they have babies of their own....” She paused, and a dreamy look came into her eyes: a speaking look which told of what the psycho-analysts call “the mother-urge”; and it made precisely that impression upon Jim’s excited senses which it was intended to make.
Wise was the Buddha when, in answer to Ananda’s question as to how he should behave in the presence of women, he made the laconic reply: “Keep wide awake.”
“Right!” said Jim. “I’ll order old Hook’s barouche, and drive you in.”
She told him that the lecture was to begin at nine, and he left her with the promise that he would call for her in good time.
Alone once more in his house, he could not put the thought of her from his mind. This, perhaps, is not to be wondered at, for he was a hot-blooded gipsy in more than appearance, and she was as pretty and soft a little picture of feminine charm as ever graced an English village. He failed, at any rate, to follow her strategy, and permitted himself to be flustered by it, although there was no deliberate method in her movements, nor did she employ any but those wiles which came almost instinctively to her. Jim, with his experience, ought to have realized that a woman who talks to a man innocently on intimate matters, such as those which had croppedup without apparent intent in their recent conversation, is, either consciously or unconsciously, Nature’sagent-provocateur. She is leading his thoughts in that direction which is the goal of her life, according to the ruthless whisperings of Nature, who does not care one snap of the fingers for any but the first member of that blessed trinity, Body, Soul and Spirit. The deft art of suggestion, in the hands of an unscrupulous woman, is dangerous; but in those of a feather-brained little conglomerate of feminine charms and instincts, it is deadly.
These quiet summer and autumn months in the heart of the English countryside had sobered Jim’s mind, and his exalted fancy, which had led him at times as it were to hurl himself at the gates of heaven, was gone from him. He told himself that, having inherited this ancient house, it was his business to take to his bosom a wife and helpmate. His primitive manhood had been stirred by her, and his civilized reason justified the riot of his mere senses by the plea of practical advantage and domestic necessity. She was a splendid little housewife, he mused, a quiet little country girl who had learnt her lesson in the school of privation. She was so dainty, so soft, so pretty; she would always be singing and smiling about the house, arranging the flowers, drawing back the chintz curtains to let the sunlight in, dusting and polishing things, and, in the evenings, sitting curled up in an armchair knitting him waistcoats. It would be a pleasure to adorn her in pretty dresses and jewels, to take her up to London and show her the world, and to give her the keys of the domestic store-cupboards. So often inhis life he had been afflicted by the sense of his loneliness; but with her at his side that mental malady would be exorcized like a dreary ghost.
With such trivialities, when there is no real love, Nature the Unscrupulous disguises her crude designs, and hides the one thing that interests her in a shower of rice. All men and maidens are pawns in the murderous game of Survival; and whether they go to happiness or to their doom is a matter of utter indifference to the Player. Fortunately, there are souls as well as bodies, and of souls a greater than Nature is Master.
The remarkable fact was that Jim, whose mind was now so full of the conjugal idea, was in no way suited to a domestic life. He was a rover, a self-constituted alien from society; but the original line of his thoughts had been warped by his inheritance of the family property, following as it did so closely upon his experience in the rest-house at Kôm-es-Sultân and his consequent distaste for isolation. He was, as it were, a wild Bedouin tribesman from the desert, sojourning in a village caravanserai; and this little maiden who had sidled up to him had so taken his fancy that the habitation of man had come to seem an agreeable home, and the distant uplands were forgotten.
The grey and dreamy spires of Oxford themselves had wrought a change in him. No man can come under their influence and maintain his mental liberty: they are like a drug, soothing him into quiescence; they are like a poem that drones into the brain the vanity of vigorous action. From the windows of the manor they could be seen rising out ofan almost perpetual haze, and sometimes the breeze carried to this ancient house the ancient sound of their chimes and their tolling. They seemed to preach the blessedness of a quiet, peaceful life—home, marriage, children; the continuous reproduction of unchanging types and the mild obedience to the law of nature.
On the following evening Mr. Hook drove them into Oxford in the old barouche. It was a chilly night, and as the carriage rumbled along the dark lanes Jim and Dolly sat close to one another, with a fur rug spread across their knees.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been to a lecture before in my life,” said he, when their destination was reached.
“Nor had I,” she replied, “until we came to live at Eversfield. But it seems to be the correct thing to do in Oxford.” She amended her words: “I mean, the most interesting thing to do.”
The lecture was delivered in the hall of one of the colleges, and the Professor proved to be a dull, reasonable man of the family doctor type, who nevertheless aroused his audience, mostly female, to stern expressions of approval by his declaration that the hand that spanks the baby rules the world, and that Waterloo was won across the British mother’s lap.
It was after ten o’clock when they entered the carriage for the return journey; and before they had passed the outskirts of Oxford Dolly began to yawn.
“I went for a tremendous long ramble in the woods to-day,” she explained, “and now I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
He arranged the rug around her, and made her put her feet up on the opposite seat; then, extending his arm so that it rested behind her back, he told her to take off her hat, lean her head against him, and go to sleep. She settled herself down in this manner, naturally and without any hesitation: she was like a tired child.
In the carriage there was only a glimmer of light from the two lamps outside; and as he sat back somewhat stiffly upon the jolting seat he could but dimly see the mop of her fair hair against his shoulder and the tip of her nose. He felt extraordinarily happy, and there was a tenderness in his attitude towards her which was overwhelming. She seemed so innocent and so trustful; and when for a moment the thought entered his head that there was perhaps some half-conscious artifice in her behaviour, he dismissed the suggestion with resentment.
The carriage rolled on, and in the darkness he dreamt his dream just as all young men have dreamt it since the world began. It seemed clear to him, now, that he had missed the best of life, because he had seldom had an intimate comrade with whom to share his experiences; for, as Seneca said, “the possession of no good thing is pleasant without a companion.” In the days of his wanderings, of course, a companion had been out of the question; but now his travels were done, and there were no hardships to deter him from marriage. He recalled the words of the Caliph Omar which an Egyptian had once quoted to him: “After the Faith, no blessing is equal to a good wife”; and he rememberedsomething in the Bible about her price being far above rubies.
Yet such thoughts as these were but the feeble efforts of the mind to keep pace with the senses. He was like a drunken man who speaks slowly and distinctly to prove that he is not drunk. Had his senses permitted him to be honest with himself he would have admitted that consideration of the advantages of marriage had little influence upon him just now: he wanted Dolly for his own; he wanted to put his arms about her and to kiss her here and now while she slept; he wanted to pull her hair down so that it should tumble about his fingers; he wanted to feel her heart beating under his hand, to hear the sigh of her breath close to his ear....
He bent his head down so that his lips came close to her forehead, and as he did so she raised her face. He was too deeply bewitched to realize that, far from being tired, she was at that moment a conquering woman, working at high pressure, acutely aware of his every movement, her nerves and senses strained to win that which she so greatly desired.
For some minutes he remained abnormally still, a little shy perhaps, perhaps desiring to linger upon the wonderful moment like a child agape at the threshold of a circus. Presently she sat up.
“Why, I’ve been asleep!” she exclaimed. “Are we nearly home?”
“Yes,” he answered, without rousing himself from his dream.
She raised her hands to her head; she did something with her fingers which, in the dim light, hecould not see; and a moment later he felt her hair tumbling about his hand.
“Oh dear, my hair’s fallen down,” she said.
He drew in his breath sharply. “Don’t wake up!” he gasped. “Put your head down again where it was.”
With a sigh of contentment she did as she was told; but now his arms were around her, and all his ten fingers were buried in her hair. He could just discern her eyes looking up at him with a sort of dismay in them; he could see her mouth a little open. He bent down and kissed her lips.
An old proverb says that marriages are made in heaven. It is one of those ridiculous utterances born of primitive fatalism: it is akin to the statement that afflictions are sent by God for His inscrutable purpose. Actually, marriages in their material aspect are made by soulless Nature, who plots and plans for nothing else, and who cares for nothing else except the production of the next generation.
One cannot blame Dolly for using the less worthy arts of her sex to capture the man she wanted. One cannot think ill of Jim for having been betrayed by his senses into an alliance wherein there was little hope of happiness. Nature has strewn the whole world with her traps; she tricks and inveigles all young men and women with these dreams and promises of joy; she schemes and intrigues and conspires for one purpose, and one purpose only; and in so doing she has no more thought of that spiritual union, which is the only sort of marriage made in heaven, than she has when she sends the pollen from one flower to the next upon the wings of the bees.
Human beings in the spring-time of life are the dupes of Nature’s heedlessjoie de vivre, and fortunate are those who can take her animal pranks in good part and avoid getting hurt. Her victims are swayed and tossed about by yearnings and desires, passions and jealousies, tremendous joys anddesperate sorrows: because she is everywhere at work upon the sole occupation which interests her—her scheme of racial survival.
The marvel is that so many marriages are happy, considering that youths and maidens are flung together, haphazard, by mighty forces, upon the irresistibility of which the whole existence of the race depends. Well does Nature know that if once men and women mastered their yearnings, if once men should fail to hunt and women to entice, the game would be lost, and the human race would become extinct.
During the following week Jim and Dolly saw each other every day; but, though their intimacy developed, Jim made no definite proposal of marriage. He was a lazy fellow. It was as though he preferred to drift into that state without undergoing the ordeal of the social formalities. He seemed to be carried along by circumstances, yet he dreaded what may be termed the business side of the matter.
At length Dolly brought matters to a point in her characteristic manner of assumed ingenuousness. “I think, dear,” she said, “we had better tell mother about it now, hadn’t we? She will be so hurt if she finds that we’ve been leaving her out of our happiness.”
Jim made no protest. He felt rather stupid, and the thought of going to Mrs. Darling, hand-in-hand with Dolly, seemed to him to be positively frightening in its crudity. It would be like walking straight into a trap. He would have preferred to slip off to a registry-office, and to see no friend or relative for a year afterwards.
The ordeal, however, proved to be less painful than he had anticipated, thanks to the tact displayed by Mrs. Darling. When Dolly came into the room at the cottage, triumphantly leading in her captive, the elder woman at once checked any utterance which was about to be made by declaring that Jim had just arrived in time to advise her in the choice of a new chintz for her chairs.
“Dolly, dear,” she said, “run upstairs and fetch me that book of patterns, will you?” And as soon as the girl had left the room she added: “I wonder whether your taste will agree with Dolly’s?”
“I expect so,” he replied, significantly.
“I hope so, for your sake,” she smiled; and then, turning confidentially to him, she whispered: “Tell me quickly, before she comes back: do you seriously want to marry her, or shall I help you to get out of it?”
Jim was completely startled, and stammered the beginning of an incoherent reply.
She interrupted him, putting a plump hand on his shoulder. “It has been clear to me for some time that Dolly is desperately in love with you, and I know she has brought you here to settle the thing. But I’m a woman of the world, my dear boy: I don’t want to rush you into anything you don’t intend; for the fact is, I like you very much indeed.”
Jim made the only possible reply. “But,” he said with conviction, “I want to marry her. I’ve come to ask you. May I?”
Mrs. Darling looked at him intently. “You will have to manage her,” she told him. “She is very young and rather full of absurdities, you know. Butyou have knocked about the world: I should think you would be able to get the best out of her, and, anyhow, I shall feel she is in good hands.”
When the girl returned, after a somewhat prolonged absence, her mother looked almost casually at her. “Dolly,” she said, “I don’t know if you are aware of it, but you are engaged to be married.”
Thereat the three of them laughed happily, and the rest was plain sailing.
Later that day Dolly strolled arm-in-arm with Jim around the grounds of the manor, looking about her with an air of proprietorship which he found very fascinating. The linking of their lives and their belongings seemed to him like a delightful game.
“I do like your mother,” he said. “She’s a real good sort.”
Dolly looked up at him quickly. “Poor mother!” she replied. “I don’t know what we can do with her. She won’t like leaving Eversfield.”
“Oh, why should she go?” Jim asked.
“It would never do for her to stay,” Dolly answered firmly. “Mothers-in-law are always in the way, however nice they are. I’m not going to risk her getting on your nerves.” She looked at him with an expression like that of a wise child.
“Well, we’ll rent a flat for her in London,” he suggested, “and I’ll give her the cottage, too, so that she can come down to it sometimes.”
Dolly shook her head. “No,” she said coldly, “she has enough money to keep herself.” His sentiments in regard to her mother had perhaps ruffled her somewhat, and an expression had passed overher face which she hoped he had not seen. She endeavoured, therefore, to turn his thoughts to more intimate matters. “I should hate mother to be a burden to you,” she went on. “It’ll be bad enough for you to have to buy all my clothes.”
“I shall love it,” he replied, with enthusiasm.
“Ah, you don’t know how expensive they are,” she hesitated. “You see, it isn’t only what shows on top”—her voice died down to a luscious whisper—“it’s all the things underneath as well. Women’s clothes are rather wonderful, you know.”
She smiled shyly, and at that moment their marriage was to him a thing most fervently to be desired.
Events moved quickly, and it was decided that the engagement should not be of long duration. The news of the coming wedding caused a great stir in the village; and when the banns were read in the little church all eyes were turned upon them as they sat, he in the Squire’s pew, and she with her mother near by. They formed a curious contrast in type: she, with her fair hair, her childlike face, and her dainty little figure; and he with his swarthy complexion, his dark, restless eyes, and his rather untidy clothes. People wondered whether they would be happy, and the general opinion was that the little lamb had fallen into the power of a wolf. The village, in fact, had not taken kindly to the new Squire and his “foreign” ways; and Mrs. Spooner, the doctor’s wife, had voiced the general opinion by nicknaming him “Black Rupert.”
The weeks passed by rapidly, and soon Christmas was upon them. The wedding was fixed for the end of January, and during that month Jim causedvarious alterations to be made in the furnishing of the manor, in accordance with Dolly’s wishes, for she held very decided views in this regard, and did not agree with his retention of so many of the mid-Victorian features in the drawing-room and the bedrooms. He himself had intended at first to be rid of most of these things, but later he had begun to feel, as Mr. Beadle had said he would, that he owed a certain homage to the past.
“Men don’t understand about these things,” Dolly said to him, patting his face; “but, if you want to please me, you’ll let me make a list of the pieces of furniture that ought to be got rid of and sell them.”
The consequence was that a van-load left the manor a few days later, and Miss Proudfoote and the vicar held one another’s hand as it passed, and choked with every understandable emotion, while Mr. and Mrs. Longarm wept openly at the gates.
The wedding-day at length arrived, and the ceremony proved a very trying ordeal to Jim; for Mr. Glenning had organized the village demonstrations of goodwill, with the result that the school children, blue with cold, were lined up at the church door, the pews inside were packed with uncomfortably-dressed yokels with burnished faces and creaking boots, and a great deal of rice was thrown as the happy couple left the building.
Afterwards there was a reception at the Darling’s cottage; and Jim, wearing a tail-coat and a stiff collar for the first time in his life, suffered torments which were not entirely ended by a later change into a brand-new suit of grey tweed. Throughout this trying time Mrs. Darling, fat and flushed,proved to be his comforter and his stand-by; and it was through her good offices that the hired car, which was to take them to the railway station at Oxford, claimed them an hour too early.
Dolly, who had looked like an angel of Zion in her wedding dress, appeared, in her travelling costume, like a dryad of the Bois de Boulogne, and Jim, who had seen something of her trousseau, turned to Mrs. Darling in rapture.
“I say!” he exclaimed. “You have rigged Dolly out wonderfully! I’ve never seen such clothes.”
Mrs. Darling smiled. “I believe in pretty dresses,” she said, with fervent conviction. “They tend to virtue. I believe that when the respectable women of England took to wearing what were called indecent clothes, they struck their first effective blow at the power of Piccadilly. Has it never occurred to you that young peers have almost ceased to marry chorus girls now that peer’s daughters dress like leading ladies?”
The honeymoon was spent upon the Riviera, and here it was that Jim realized for the first time the exactions of marriage. This exquisitely costumed little wife of his could not be taken to the kind of inn which he had been accustomed to patronize, and he was therefore obliged to endure all the discomforts of fashionable hotel life, with its nerve-racking corollaries—the jabbering crowds, the perspiring, stiff-shirted diners, the clatter, bustle and perplexity, terminating in each case in the dreaded crisis of gratuity-giving and escape.
With all his Bedouin heart he loathed this sort of thing, and, had he not been the slave of love,he would have rebelled against it at once. Dolly saw his distress, but only added to it by her superior efforts to train him in the way in which he should go; and it was with a sigh of profound relief that at length he found himself in Eversfield once more, when the first buds of spring were powdering the trees with green, and the early daffodils were opening to the growing warmth of the sun.
Jim’s work in connection with the estate was not onerous, but he very soon found that various small matters had constantly to be seen to, and often they were the cause of annoyance. Rents were not always paid promptly, and if his agent pressed for them the tenants regarded Jim, who knew nothing about it, as stern and exacting. Mr. Merrivall held his lease of Rose Cottage on terms which provided that the tenant should be responsible for all interior repairs; and now he announced that the kitchen boiler was worn out, and the question had to be decided as to whether a boiler was an interior or a structural fitting. Some eighty acres were farmed by Mr. Hopkins on a sharing agreement, that is to say, Jim took a part of the profits in lieu of rent; but this sort of arrangement is always fruitful of disputes, and, in the case in question, the fact that Jim instinctively mistrusted Farmer Hopkins, and Farmer Hopkins mistrusted Jim, led at once to friction.
Matters came to a head in the early summer. The farmer had decided to remove the remains of a last year’s hayrick from the field where it stood to a shed near his stable, and, during the process, he attempted to make a short-cut by drawing hisheavily-loaded wagon over a disused bridge which spanned a ditch. The bridge, however, collapsed under the weight, and the wagon was wrecked.
The farmer thereupon demanded compensation from Jim, since the latter was the owner of the bridge and therefore responsible for it. Jim, however, replied that that road had been closed for many years to all but pedestrians, and, if anything, the farmer ought to pay for the mending of the bridge. Mr. Hopkins then declared that he was going to law, and, in the meantime, he aired his grievances nightly at the “Green Man,” the village public-house.
The trouble simmered for a time, and then, one morning, the two men met by chance at the scene of the disaster. A wordy argument followed, and Farmer Hopkins, with a mouthful of oaths, repeated his determination to go to law, whereupon Jim lost his temper.
“Look here!” he said. “I don’t know anything about your blasted law, but I do know when I’m being imposed upon. If you mention the word ‘law’ to me again I’ll put my fist through your face.”
“Two can play at that game,” exclaimed the farmer, red with anger.
“Very well, then, come on!” cried Jim, impulsively, and, pulling off his coat and tossing his hat aside, he began to roll up his shirt-sleeves.
Mr. Hopkins was a bigger and heavier man than the Squire, but Jim had the advantage of him in age, being some five years younger, and they were therefore very well matched. The farmer however, did not wish to fight, and, indeed, was so disconcertedat the prospect that he stood staring at Jim’s lithe, wild figure like a puzzled bull.
“Take your coat off!” Jim shouted. “We’ll have this matter out now. Put up your fists!”
The farmer thereupon dragged off his coat, and a moment later the two men were at it hammer and tongs, Mr. Hopkins’ fists swinging like a windmill, and Jim, with more skill, parrying the blows and sending right and left to his opponent’s body with good effect. The first bout was ended by Jim dodging a terrific right and returning his left to the farmer’s jaw, thereby sending him to the ground.
As he rose to his feet Jim shouted at him: “Well, will you now mend your own damned cart and let me mend my bridge?—or do you want to go on?”
For answer the infuriated Mr. Hopkins charged at him, and, breaking his guard, sent his fist into Jim’s eye; but he omitted to follow up the advantage with his idle left, and, in consequence, received an exactly similar blow upon his own bloodshot optic.
It was at this moment that a scream was heard, and Dolly appeared from behind a hedge, a curious habit of hers, that of always wishing to know what her husband was doing, having led her to follow him into the fields.
“James!” she cried in horror—ever since their marriage she had called him “James”—“What are you doing? Mr. Hopkins!—are you both mad?”
“Pretty mad,” replied Jim.
“Call yourself a gentleman!” roared the farmer, holding his hand to his eye.
“Oh, please, please!” Dolly entreated. “Go home, Mr. Hopkins, before he kills you! James,you ought to be ashamed of yourself, fighting like a common man. You have disgraced me!”
Jim, who was recovering his coat, looked up at her out of his one serviceable eye in astonishment. Then, turning to his opponent, he said: “We’ll finish this some other time, if you want to.”
He then walked off the field of battle, his coat slung across his shoulder and his dark hair falling over his forehead, while Mr. Hopkins sat down upon the stump of a tree and spat the blood out of his mouth.
For many days thereafter Dolly would hardly speak to her disfigured husband, except to tell him, when he walked abroad with his blackened eye, that he had no shame. Farmer Hopkins, however, mended his wagon in time, and Jim mended his bridge; and there, save for much village head-shaking at the “Green Man” and melancholy talk at the vicarage, the matter ended. It was a regrettable affair, and the general opinion in the village was that “Black Rupert” was a man to be avoided. Miss Proudfoote, in fact, would hardly bow to him when next she passed him in the lane; and even Mr. Glenning, who quarrelled with no man, gazed at him, in church on the following Sunday, with an expression of deep reproof upon his venerable face.
It was after this painful incident that Jim formed the habit of going for long rambling walks by himself, or of wandering deep into the woods near the manor. Sometimes he would sit for hours upon a stile in the fields, sucking a straw and staring vacantly into the distance at the misty towers and spires of the ancient University, or lie in the grass, gazingup at the sky, listening to the far-off bells, his arms behind his head. Sometimes he would take a book from his uncle’s library—some eighteenth-century romance, or a volume of Elizabethan poetry—and go with it into the woods, there to remain for a whole afternoon, reading in it or in the book of Nature.
These woods had a curious effect upon him, and entering them seemed to be like finding sanctuary. It was not that his life, at this period, was altogether unhappy: his heart was full of tenderness towards Dolly, and, if her behaviour was beginning to disappoint him, his attitude was at first but one of vague disquietude. Yet here amongst the understanding trees he felt that he was taking refuge from some menace which he could not define; and at times he wondered whether the sensation was due to a mental throw-back to some outlawed ancestor who had roamed the merry greenwood, in the manner of Adam Bell and Clim of the Clough and William Cloudesley in the ancient ballads of the North of England.
He was conscious of a decided sense of failure and he felt that he was a useless individual. To a limited extent he used his brains and his pen in writing the verses which always amused him, but he rarely finished any such piece of work, and seldom composed a poem of any considerable length.
His character was not of the kind which would be likely to appeal to the stay-at-home Englishman. He did not play golf, and though as a youth he had been fond of cricket and tennis, his wandering life had given him no opportunities of maintaining his skill in these games, and now it was too late tobegin again. He was not particularly interested in horseflesh, and he had no mechanical turn which might vent itself in motoring. His habits were modest and temperate; he preferred pitch-and-toss or “shove-ha’penny” to bridge; and he was a poor judge of port wine. He was sociable where the company was to his taste, but neither his neighbours at and around Eversfield, nor the professors at Oxford, were congenial to him. When there were visitors to the manor he was generally not able to be found; and when he was obliged to accompany his wife to the houses of other people, he was conscious that her eyes were upon him anxiously, lest he should show himself for what he was—a rebel and an outlaw.
On one occasion the vicar persuaded him to sing and play his guitar at a village concert; but the result was disastrous, and the invitation was never repeated. He chose to sing them Kipling’s “Mandalay”; but the pathos and the romance of the rough words were lost upon his stolid audience, to whom there was no meaning in the picture of the mist on the rice-fields and the sunshine on the palms, nor sense in the contrasting description of the “blasted Henglish drizzle” and the housemaids with beefy faces and grubby hands.
He himself was carried away by the words, and he sang with fervour:—