The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMary LeeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Mary LeeAuthor: Geoffrey DennisRelease date: May 31, 2020 [eBook #62295]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by ellinora, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY LEE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Mary LeeAuthor: Geoffrey DennisRelease date: May 31, 2020 [eBook #62295]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by ellinora, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
Title: Mary Lee
Author: Geoffrey Dennis
Author: Geoffrey Dennis
Release date: May 31, 2020 [eBook #62295]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by ellinora, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY LEE ***
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Mary Lee, by Geoffrey Pomeroy Dennis
MARYLEE
MARYLEE
NEW BORZOI NOVELS FALL, 1922
Title page
BY
GEOFFREY DENNIS
NEW YORKALFRED A. KNOPFMCMXXII
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BYALFRED A. KNOPF,Inc.
Published, August, 1922
Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.Paper (Warren's) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I was born at Tawborough on March the Second, 1848.
It seems to have been a great year in the history books. Fires of revolution sweeping over Europe; half the capitals aflame. From Prague to Palermo, from Paris to Pesth, the peoples rising against their rulers. Wars and rumours of wars; civil strife everywhere. Radicals in Prussia, revolutionaries in Italy, rebels in Austria, republicans in France. Even in old England we had our chartists.
All such troubles failed to touch Tawborough. What did she know of it all, or care if she knew? She was a good old peaceful English country town, with her own day's work to do. The great world might go its way for all she cared—a wild and noisy way it seemed. She would go hers.
Not that Tawborough had always been without a say in England's affairs. She had indeed a long and honourable history. At the dawn of time there was a settlement in the marshes where the little stream of Yeo empties itself into the Taw: a primitive village of wattled huts, known to the Britons as Artavia. The Phœnicians record the name for us, and describe the place as a great mart for their commerce. Here the tin of the western mines was bartered against the rich products of the East: camphire and calamus, spikenard and saffron, fine linen and purple silk. This was the origin of Tawborough market, which is the first in Devonshire to this day. Artavia seems to have been an important seat of the old British worship. The see of the Arch-Druid of the West was near at hand in the Valley of the Rocks at Lynton; from the sacred oak-groves above the Taw on a clear day the Druids could see the fires of the great altar on the Promontory of Hercules—Hartland Point they call it now.
Religion, indeed, in one way or another, seems to have coloured most of the big events of the town's history. The next great fight was between pagans and Christian men.
It was the foeman from the North, threatening the men of Wessex with desolation. One day the terrified townsfolk heard clanging in their ears the great ivory horns of the Northmen, and beheld the blood-red banners sailing up the Taw. One of the standards had upon it a Raven. Then the Englishmen knew their foe for the wild Hubba, King of the Vikings; since the Raven floated always at his mast. The banner was of crimson. It had been worked by the King's three sisters in a noontide and blessed by a strange Icelandic wizard, who endowed the Raven sewn upon it with this magical gift: that she clapped her wings to announce success to the Viking arms, and drooped them to presage failure. Never till this day had the black wings drooped; they drooped this winter's morning. So the English took heart. Odin, Earl of Devon, sallied forth from Kenwith Castle, defeated and slew King Hubba, and captured the magic banner. Then came peace for a while. King Alfred, full of piety, came to Tawborough and set up the great Mound by the Castle. King Athelstan gave the town a charter, and housed himself in a magnificent palace at Umberleigh hard by.
In the wake of the Normans came the religious orders. The Cluniacs built a monastery in the town, the Benedictines another at Pilton just outside. With the monks came light and learning, better lives and milder ways. Tawborough became rich and prosperous. Her trade excelled that of Bristol. Her fair and market were famous "tyme out of mynde." For many years the Taw—that "greate, hugy, mighty, perylous and dredful water"—became a highway for the ships of all nations.
When the New World was found, Englishmen sailed west for glory. Devon led the way, Tawborough men among the foremost, and Tawborough ships did valiant deeds against the Invincible Armada. Those were the great days of England. The townsfolk were all for the new religion. Spaniard and Papist were twin-children of the devil. A murrain on both! They favoured the Puritan party in the civil wars, stood out against the rest of the county, and shouted for the Parliament. Though when the Royalists took the town and gay Prince Charles made it his headquarters, the townspeople were charmed with His Merry Highness; and he, as he told Lord Clarendon, with them. All the courtiers were of the samemind. Lord Clarendon himself declared that Tawborough was "a very fine sweet town as ever I saw," while Lady Fanshawe thought that the cherry pies they made there "with their sort of cream" were the best things that man, or woman, could eat. Gay John Gay, who wrote the Beggar's Opera, showed to the world the fair and likeable character of his native town, which at heart, however, was always of the godly serious-minded quality, Puritan to the core. No town in England gave a warmer welcome to the poor Huguenots, who were flying from King Lewis. One Sunday morning as the townsfolk were coming forth from Church they saw against the sky—not this time the scarlet banners of the North—the brown sails of an old French schooner, bearing up the Taw a band of exiled French Puritans, weary and wretched after their voyage. Tawborough found every one of them a home. In return the grateful Frenchmen taught the natives new ways of cloth-weaving, which sent the fame of Tawborough Bays through all the land.
Later came a change, a new century, the reign of King Coal; and Tawborough, like many another historic Western town, sank into comparative decay. What did the new industrial cities know of such as her, or care if they knew? For her part, she was indifferent to their ignorance or their indifference alike. She was a good old English country town with her own day's work to do. Troubles, invasions, vicissitudes had assailed her before. New blood, Saxon, Danish, Norman, Huguenot had coursed through her veins. Her dead had buried their dead. The people pass, the place alone is abiding.... Abiding, yet not eternal; for there comes the day when the old earth will fall into the sun.... Meanwhile, Town Tawborough had her daily life to live, her townsfolk had theirs.
Two of them, indeed, were living theirs with plenty of zest, somewhere in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Jael and Hannah Vickary were the daughters of an old sea-captain, Ebenezer Vickary of Torribridge. He and his brother had three or four vessels of their own, trading with the Indies in sugar and molasses, or with the Spanish Main, as it then still was, in logwood and mahogany. The brother died in Cuba of the yellow fever. Soon afterwards Ebenezer gave up the sea,settled down in Tawborough, and died in his time. He left his two daughters enough money to live upon in the quiet style of those days, together with a big dwelling house by the old North Gate. Here Jael and Hannah Vickary lived alone, with an old servant whose years were unknown and unnumbered, and whose wages were six pounds a year. They had a few friends and visitors, faithful women of the Parish Church, chief among whom were the Other Six of "the Seven Old Maids of Tawborough." By a strange coincidence seven female children had been born in Tawborough on August the First 1785, all of whom had risen to be devout handmaidens of the Lord in the work of the Parish Church, shining lights around the central figure of the Vicar, and all of whom had dwindled into a sure spinsterhood. "We are the wise virgins," said Jael Vickary, their leader and spiritual chief, in whom the scorn of all menfolk except the Vicar (who had a meek wife and twelve children) amounted to a prophet's passion. This passion was shared in various degrees by the Other Six, to wit: Miss Lucy Clarke, Miss Fanny Baker, Miss Keturah Crabb, Miss Sarah Tombstone, and last but not least the Heavenly Twins, the Misses Glory and Salvation Clinker. The Twins were the only regular visitors at Northgate House. There were a few others, no relatives among them. Jael and Hannah had indeed an elder brother, John: Ebenezer's only son. He had gone to London as a boy, worked his way up in a wholesale sugar house in the City, and become passing rich. His sisters were kept aware of his existence only by receiving occasional presents and more occasional letters. He never married. Thus it was that his death, if nothing so crude as a self-acknowledged source of financial hope to Miss Jael, would nevertheless have been borne by her with true Christian fortitude.
If alike in a salt and shrewdness of personality unknown to our end of the century, in most ways the two sisters differed as much as two human beings can. Miss Jael was hard, Miss Hannah kindly; Miss Jael stern, Miss Hannah gentle; Miss Jael was feared, Miss Hannah loved. Though Hannah was less than eighteen months her sister's junior, this unbridgeable gulf enabled Miss Jael throughout life to refer to Miss Hannah as "a young woman," and to treat heraccordingly. Then, behold, in the year 1822, when both were nearer forty than thirty, the Young Woman brazenly gave ear to the suit of one Edward Lee, an old sea-captain, who had sailed under her father, and was twenty years her senior. Jael mocked (Why did he choose her? asked her heart bitterly); yet stayed on at Northgate House, when Captain Lee came to live there, to bully and bludgeon the dear old man into his grave. This procedure took but five years. The old man died, leaving to his widow two little girls and a boy: Rachel, Martha and Christian.
In the godlier activities of Tawborough life Jael and her widowed sister were leading lights, with the parish church as General Headquarters of their operations. Miss Jael was the vicar's right-handman. She ran his poor club, his guild, his Dorcas-meeting, effacing completely the meek many-childrened little lady of the Rectory. He thought her a queen among women, a tower set upon a rock.
All this was in the twenties and thirties of the century, ere yet the Church of England had taken her earliest step on the swift steep path to Rome. The same wave of evangelical fervour that had swelled Wesley's great following had strengthened also the Church from which they broke away. This fervour, whether Methodist or Established, did not however go nearly far enough for certain pious souls, especially in the West country, who formed themselves into little bodies for the Worship of God in the strictest and simplest Gospel fashion. "They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayer." They called themselves the Saints, or more modestly the Brethren. Outsiders called them the Plymouth Brethren—they flourished in the great seaport—or more profanely, the Plymouth Rocks. They were drawn from all communions and no communion, if principally from the Established Church; from all classes and conditions, the humbler trades-folk perhaps predominating. In Tawborough they were especially active. From the days of the primitive Druids away through the long story of missionaries and monks, seafaring Protestants and Huguenot exiles, here was a town that took her religion neat. She preferred the good Calvin flavouring, and thus it was that the Plymouth evangel sent upa savoury smell in her nostrils. There were literally hundreds of converts. The Parish Church lost some of its leading members. Arose the cry "The Church in danger!"; and of all who responded, most valiant was the Vicar's right-hand man. She stemmed the tide of deserters with loins girt for battle. Like St. Paul, she breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the new sect. She encouraged the faithful, visited the wavering, anathematized deserters. To crown her efforts she counselled the vicar to summon a great Church Defence Meeting in the Parish Room, to rally and re-affirm the confidence of the faithful. The Vicar agreed. The hour of commencement saw a right goodly and godly assembly foregathered together. On the platform sat a Canon of Exeter, the old Marquess of Exmoor, several county bigwigs, the Mayor and the Churchwardens. Seven o'clock struck, the Vicar was about to open the proceedings, everything was ready—except—except that two honoured places on the platform (in those days a place on a platform was for a woman an honour indeed) were not yet occupied. Miss Vickary and her sister were late. The Vicar hesitated. There was a distinguished company, true: but start the meeting without its guiding spirit—never! Give her five minutes.... Some one handed the Vicar an envelope. He opened it, read through the contents, and fainted then and there.
How the reverend gentleman was brought round from his swoon by the joint endeavours of the Canon, the Marquess, two Churchwardens, nine ladies and a bottle of sal-volatile; how the great Church Defence Meeting fizzled to an inglorious end; and how Jael Vickary and Hannah Lee were baptized in the Taw in the presence of three thousand five hundred spectators, there is no need to relate here. The facts were well enough known to the older generation in the town. Some say that the Vicar made a last despairing effort to retain his apostate right-hand man; that, with tears in his eyes, he went down on his knees before her. If so, as Hannah wickedly said, he was the only man who ever did so, and in any case he achieved nothing. On the contrary The Great Betrayal encouraged wholesale desertions. The Other Six deserteden masse.
Henceforward Jael Vickary's life was occupied with twomain things: building up the new sect, and bringing up her sister's family. She filled the vacant post of father with thoroughness and vigour. Her method was the rod, or to be accurate the thorned stick, and a horrible weapon it was. Hannah approved the method in moderation, though she could never have applied it herself. Much of her life, indeed, was spent in protecting her children from her sister. Rachel, the eldest, was best beloved. She was a sweet, gentle child; bright, tender and gay. Martha was quieter, even morose. Christian was a peevish child, weak and ailing from birth. With no husband to help her, and her sister on the scold from morn till night, Hannah Lee's life was not an easy one. She gave her two daughters the best schooling in Devonshire, as schooling for girls went in those days; so that when they grew up they were able to take positions as governesses in the best families of the county. Rachel went to Woolthy Hall to teach Guy, the Lord Tawborough's five year old heir. Martha was employed by the Groves, of Grove House near Exeter, to begin the education of their daughter. The two girls' attainments and appearance explained their good fortune. Rachel in particular was a refined and attractive young woman, with bright eyes, a peerless skin, and a gentle winning expression. Dressed oftenest in a dove-coloured cotton robe, she had a Quakerish charm, simple yet sure.
Hannah was left alone at Tawborough with Jael and young Christian. As the years passed, life turned greyer. When the Devon and Three Counties' Bank collapsed, nearly half the household income disappeared. Jael's imperiousness grew with her years, while her temper soured. Christian was in a decline, dying slowly before his mother's eyes. Then came Martha's marriage. She had fallen in with one Simeon Greeber, a retired chemist, who lived over at Torribridge—the Taw's twin-river's port, and Tawborough's immemorial rival. This Greeber was the local leader of the extreme wing of the Saints, the Close or Exclusive Brethren; a man twice Martha Lee's age, and one who filled her aunt and her mother with a special sense of dislike and mistrust. Against their will she married him, gave up her excellent post with the Grove family, and went to live at Torribridge.
Hannah's consolation was always Rachel, whom she lovedmost dearly. Then, in its turn, came Rachel's marriage.
At Woolthy Hall the young governess had come into contact with Lord Tawborough's cousin, Mr. Philip Traies, who was a frequent if not welcome guest. He had served in the Navy, but had left the service under doubtful circumstances. He had led a scandalous life and earned a reputation to match it. A clear-cut handsome mouth set in a proud aristocratic face, a fine bearing, a fine speech, and an honoured name, deluded many and were his own undoing. In ill odour with his family and his Maker, he decided to come to terms with the latter. At the age of forty, he joined the Plymouth Brethren. When the Devil turns saint he does a very sharp round-about, and no withered Anglo-Indian colonel who communed with the Saints in his dotage to ensure himself as gay a time in the next world as he had passed in this, ever excelled Mr. Philip Traies in fervour and piety. He worshipped occasionally with the Tawborough Saints, who were duly honoured. Sometimes here, and sometimes at his cousin's, he met Rachel Lee, at this time a girl of twenty-one. He bestowed upon her the favour of eager kindly patronage, as such men will; though if she were beneath him in station, and his equal in manners and good looks, she was far above him in everything else: goodness and purity and wholeness of heart. Quite how it happened nobody knew; but one day Rachel came home from Woolthy Hall, and said to her mother, "I am going to marry Mr. Philip Traies."
Hannah entreated. A "good" match with a bad man had no attraction for her. She pleaded with Rachel. Aunt Jael would not stoop to plead; she gave her niece instead a plain outline of Mr. Philip Traies' past.
"I know," said the girl, and murmured something about "reforming" him.
Neither mother nor aunt achieved her surrender. Pleading and plain-speaking did nothing, nor ever do. The wedding took place at the registry office, as in those days the Brethren's Meeting Houses were not licensed for solemnization of marriages, and neither bride nor bridegroom would enter a church or chapel: temples of Antichrist. Hannah sat through the ceremony with a queer sense of foreboding, of sickness, and coming sorrow; an order of sentiment which,as a sensible Devon woman with no tomfool tombstone fancies ever in her head, in sixty years she had not known. Immediately after the ceremony, at the registry office door, the bridegroom suddenly loosened himself from the bride's arm, and walked sharply away without saying a word. Nobody knew why. Everybody stared. The wedding breakfast at Northgate House began without him. They waited; he did not come. After an hour the tension became unbearable. The guests whispered in groups; Rachel and her mother bore already on their brows the sorrow of the years to come. Aunt Jael's face was a gloomy triumphant "I told you so." Pastries were nibbled, wine was sipped; the joy-feast continued. After nearly two hours a bell rang, and the bridegroom appeared.
"Your explanation?" asked Hannah. Rachel dared not look.
"Oh, I had another woman to see. A glass of sherry please. Besides, it amused me."
He took her away to his house at Torquay. Their married life was wretched from the start. Among many evil passions these two predominated in Mr. Philip Traies: desire and cruelty. Here was a lovely and gentle girl who would satisfy both. The first was soon appeased (shattering love in her heart once and for all), the second never. Cruelty is insatiable. With this man it was a devouring passion. It is doubtful perhaps if he was sane. Taunts, foulness, sneers.... He starved her sometimes, taunted her with her lowlier birth, engaged the servants on the condition of ill-treating their mistress, dismissed them if they wavered. All the time he talked religion. The knees of his elegant trousers were threadbare with prayer. He could fit a text to every taunt. Then a baby-boy came to cheer the sinking heart. A few hours after the child was born, when the young mother lay in the agony and weakness she alone can know, Mr. Philip Traies entered the room—with a gentler word to-day surely?—no, with this: "So this is how you keep your fine promises to make a good lady of the house, a busy housewife and the rest of it"—he raised his voice savagely—"idling in bed at four in the afternoon.Get up, you idle bitch!" Leaning over the end-rail, he spat in her face.
The baby soon died. He taunted her with nursing it badly; and doubled every cruelty he knew save blows.
"Strike me," she said once.
Her patience was a fool's, a saint's, a loving woman's; her goodness, if not her spirits, unfailing. In writing home she made the best of things. But her heart was broken, her spirit wasting away.
"Why did you marry me?" she asked.
"To break your spirit," was the amused reply.
"Then your marriage has fulfilled its purpose," she said wearily. "My spirit is broken. Now I can go home."
That night she wrote to Hannah. The letter is faded, and stained with three women's tears, wife's, mother's, daughter's. "Dearest Mother," she wrote, "I am ill and weary. Another little child is coming, but I may not live for it to be born. I can leave him without failing in my wife's duty now, for the end is very near. I am coming home to die. Your loving broken-hearted Daughter."
Next day she packed for home.
"Deserting me, are you? Fine Jezebel ways! A good Christian wifely thing to do, I'm sure. I thought we were proud of doing our duty."
His sneers did not move her now. She was going home to die.
Northgate House was a dismal place to return to. It was a wet cheerless winter. Hannah was tired and heart-sore. Christian was dying. Jael was evil-tempered, scolding harshly: her comfort to her mother and daughter was still "I told you so." Rachel went straight to bed. In a few days Christian died, a sickly pitiful boy of twenty. "It is the Lord's will," said his mother. Hannah had everything to do, for Simeon Greeber would not let Martha come over from Torribridge, and Jael took to her bed with a convenient fit of the ague. Faith in the eternal love of God was Hannah's only stay. Always, ever, "It was the Lord's will." This sufficed her, though the times were bitter. The day after Christian's funeral was wet and wintry: March the Second 1848. Rachel was twenty-four. Three years ago she had been a happy healthy girl. Now she was a dying broken woman. The morning of that day she gave birth to a daughter. Thenshe was very weak. Her eyes closed, yet she seemed to see something.
"What do you see, Rachel, my dear?" asked her mother.
The spirit was already half away, looking through the golden gates of Heaven.
"There is a little angel born. I see her in God's cradle.Mylittle angel, God's little angel. I shall be with her always—though far away. I see ... the King in His beauty ... I behold the land ... that is very far off."
Her face was radiant as a lover's, yet sad as Love is. Hannah could not reply. The dying woman seemed to sleep. Her mother watched. An hour passed. Rachel opened her eyes.
"Mother."
"Yes, my dear."
"Love my little baby for me; and—tellhim—I forgive him." The eyes closed, this time for ever.
My poor mother.
My first memory in this life is of a moving. I am sitting in a high chair, kept in by a stick placed through a hole in each arm. I am surrounded by the utmost disarray. In front of me is an old sponge-bath, crammed full of knick-knacks and drawing-room ornaments. I stretch out my hands yearningly, acquisitively, and make signs of wrenching from its offensive gaolerlike position the stick which bars my way. My Grandmother coaxes me to keep it in, and uses the words she is to use so often later on—words which will punctuate my daily life in days to come:
"Don't 'ee do it, my dear. Sit 'ee still and give no trouble. Ye'll tumble and hurt yourself, so leave the stick alone. Don't 'ee do it."
"If she don't, I'll take it out myself and lay it about her," comes another voice, which is to punctuate as regularly and much more raucously my early doings. And Aunt Jael shakes her fist, and lowers at me.
Perhaps I don't really remember the trifling incident. Most likely I only remember that I remember. It is a photograph of a photograph, smudged by the fingers of Time. Yet I see as clearly as ever the dark room in disarray, my Grandmother kind and coaxing, Aunt Jael threatening and harsh. The memory is clearer because Time has not blurred but rather sharpened it. I grew up the gauge of an unequal battle between Grandmother and Great-Aunt. Moving-day is merely the moment in which my infant intelligence first caught news of the struggle.
At this time I must have been about three years old, for it was some three years after my mother's death that we moved from the High Street, at the time when—I think it was in 1852—the old North Gate was removed, and our house pulled down. Our new house was Number Eight, Bear Lawn. The Lawn was a biggish patch of grass with houses on both sides. At the far end from the road it merged into a steep grassy bank, crownedwith poplars, which allowed no egress. At the near end a big iron gate barred us off from the plebeian houses of Bear Street, to which the Lawn mansions felt themselves notably superior.
The Lawn lay to the right of the street some little way out of the town. In reality it was an old barrack-square, "converted." The houses on each side of it were barracks put up during the French Revolutionary Wars. When Boney was beaten and the soldiers sent away, an enterprising builder turned the barracks into two terraces of houses, and sowed the barrack-square with grass seed. Bear Lawn became one of the most elegant quarters of Tawborough, a quiet preserve of genteel habitation; though the houses never quite lost their barrack quality. They were too square and bare and big to be truly genteel. And too roomy.
Number Eight was one of the squarest and barest.
It was gloomy. How far the aspect it will always bear in my mind may be a reflection of the dark and unhappy days I spent there, and how far it was real, I cannot ever say. It was a house of big empty corridors, dark bare spaces, and an incommunicable dreariness that somehow stilled you as you crossed the doorstep. There was none of the cosy warmth that makes so many dark old houses a homely joy to the senses and a warm fragrance for the memory. It had the silence in it that only large empty spaces can create, did not seem inhabited, and smelt of coffins, I used to think. Even in summer there was a suggestion of damp and cold and bleakness, and always there was the silence which made me wait—and listen.
Downstairs there were three big rooms: Aunt Jael's, the dining-room and the kitchen. Aunt Jael's was the front one. The door was always unlocked, yet the key was left on the outside of the door, and I was forbidden to enter. Like Mrs. Bluebeard (of whom I had never heard) or our first mother Eve (in the knowledge of whom I grew to understanding), I felt that prohibition made perfect; and the forbidden room attracted me beyond all others. I visited it usually in the afternoon, when the thunder and trumpets of Aunt Jael's after-dinner doze in the dining-room announced that the road was clear. The blinds were always drawn, winter and summer alike; and the windows closed. The room seemed filled witha dull yellowish kind of mist, the ochre-coloured blind toning the darkness, and just permitting you to see a yellowish carpet and dull yellowish furniture. A row of dismal plants, standing in saucers on the floor, filled the bay window. There was a great oak sideboard, stuffed with Aunt Jael's preserves and pickles; though it was long before I had the courage and the opportunity to ransack it thoroughly. The walls were covered with spears and daggers, trophies of the Gospel in distant lands. In a corner reposed the supreme trophy, a huge wooden god, sitting with arms akimbo. His votaries (until salvation, in the person of Brother Immanuel Greeber, had turned them from their ways) dwelt, I believe, in the Society Islands; though he looked for all the world like a Buddha, with his painless impenetrable eyes and his smile of changeless calm. In his dark unwholesome corner he dominated the room. The yellow mist was incense in his nostrils.
The middle room we called the dining-room, though Aunt Jael favoured "back parlour." Here we lived and prayed and ate, and here a large part of this story took place. The window overlooked our small backyard, which being flanked by out-houses gave little light; so this room too was dark, though not as dark as Aunt Jael's, since the blinds were not usually drawn. It was more barely furnished. There was the table, a chiffonier, a side-board, a bookcase, and two principal chairs: a "gentleman's" armchair to the left of the fireplace, with two big arms; and a "lady's," armless, to the right. One was comfortable, the other was not. One was Aunt Jael's, the other was my Grandmother's. There were four bedrooms on the first floor, and I must note their strategic positions. Aunt Jael's was the first on the right, my own the second; we were over the dining-room and surveyed the backyard. My Grandmother's chamber, the first on the left, and the spare-room beyond it overlooked the Lawn. At the half-landing above was Mrs. Cheese's bedroom, while the top of the house consisted of an enormous whitewashed attic, lighted by an unwashed skylight and suffused by a cold bluish gloom that contrasted queerly with the foggy yellow of the front room downstairs yet excelled it in silent cheerlessness. Here I would spend hours, or whole days, either of my own free will, that I might moon and mope to my heart's content, and talk aloud tomyself without fear of mocking audience; or perforce, banished by the frequent judgment of Aunt Jael.
It was our moving into this house that supplies my first earthly memory. My first important—dramatic, historic—remembrance must date from several months later, when I was nearly four years old. The scene was our evening reading of the Word. We were sitting in our usual positions round the dining-room fire after supper.
To the left of the chimney-piece, in the big black horsehair chair—the comfortable one, the one with sides and arms—sat my Great-Aunt Jael. This was her permanent post. From this coign of vantage she issued ukases, thundered commands, hurled anathemas and brandished her sceptre—that thorned stick of whose grim and governmental qualities I have the fullest knowledge of any soul (or body) on earth. She was a short, stout, stocky, strong-looking woman, yet bent; when walking, bent sometimes almost double. Leaning on her awful stick, she looked the old witch she was. Peaky black cap surmounting beetling black brows and bright black eyes, wrinkled swarthy skin, beaky nose, a hard mouth whiskered like a man's, and a harder chin: feature for feature, she was the witch of the picture-books. All her dresses, silk, serge or bombazine, were black. On the night I speak of, an ordinary week-night, she was dressed in her oldest serge. The great Holy Bible on her knees might have been some unholy wizard's tome.
To the right of the chimney-piece sat my Grandmother. She resembled her sister in feature; the character of the face was as different as is heaven from hell. This indeed was the very quality of the difference, and I had a fancy that they were thesameface, one given to God, the other sold to Satan. My Grandmother had the same beaky nose and nut-cracker face. Her mouth and chin were firm, but kind instead of cruel. Her skin was milk-white instead of swarthy, her caps were of white lace. Her eyes were as bright as my Great-Aunt's, but bright with kindliness instead of menace. Her whole face spoke of goodwill to others and perfect peace. It was a sweet old face. I love it still.
In the middle, facing the fire, sat Mrs. Cheese. She was a farmer's daughter and widow from near South Molton; andlooked it. She was short, fat and ruddy; a few years younger than her mistresses, perhaps at this time a woman of sixty.
I myself crouched on a little stool between Mrs. Cheese and Aunt Jael; but nearer the latter, that I might be watched, and cuffed, with ease. On this particular evening, my heart was hot with rage against Aunt Jael, who had flogged me and locked me in the attic: I don't remember what for. She ordered me more sternly than usual not to dare to move my eyes from her face as she read the nightly portion from the Word of God. To-night it was from her favourite Proverbs, the thirtieth chapter: the words of Agur the son of Jakeh,eventhe prophecy; the words the man spake unto Ithiel, even unto Ithiel and Ucal.
Aunt Jael read, or rather declaimed the Word, in a harsh staccato way; not without a certain power, especially in the dourer passages of Proverbs or the dismaller in Job or Lamentations. In one of her favourite Psalms, the eighteenth or the sixty-eighth, reeking with battle and revenge, and bespattered with the blood of the enemies of Jehovah, her voice would rise to a dark triumphal shout, terrible as an army with banners. This evening I looked sullenly at the floor as she boomed forth the words of Agur, determinednotto fix my eyes on her face at any rate until Stick coaxed me. Suddenly my eyes were transfixed to the floor. A gigantic cockroach was crawling about near my feet. I wanted to cry out but managed to contain myself until, behold, the creature crawled away from my left foot towards the leg of Aunt Jael's chair, reached the chair leg, began to climb it with resolution. I watched, half in fascination, half in fear. It reached the level of the horsehair upholstery. Aunt Jael had reached verse thirteen.
"Their eyelids are lifted up." She looked meaningly at me.
Fortunately my eyelids were by this time well lifted up, as the beetle was now half way up the chair, approaching the awful place where Aunt Jael's shoulder touched the upholstery. No—yes: it crawled on to the arm, and mounted her sleeve right up to the shoulder. Righteous revenge for her cruelty and harshness counselled silence. "Let her suffer," I said to myself, "let the cockroach do his worst." Fear of interrupting gave like counsel. On the other side spoke theprickings of conscience and pity, and above all a wild desire to scream.
Aunt Jael read on, innocent of the unbidden guest upon her shoulder. "The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid—"
"Ay, and the way of a beetle with a Great-Aunt," I could have shouted. The beast, after a moment's hesitation and survey, had now turned along the shoulder to the neck. The warm hairy flesh of Aunt Jael's neck was but six inches away.
"The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer; The conies are but a feeble folk, yet they make their houses in the rocks; The locusts have no King, yet go they forth all of them by bands; The spider taketh hold with her hands—"
"Yes," I shrieked—in a moment shot through with terror, joy, relief; suffused by a new beatific sense of speaking historic words—"and the beetle taketh hold with his claws!" As I uttered the words the insect crawled from her collar on to the very flesh of her neck. She understood, with Spartan calm took hold of him, squashed him carefully between her thumb and forefinger and threw him on the fire, where he sizzled sickeningly.
"Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood: so the forcing of wrath bringeth forth strife."
There the chapter ended. She slammed the book and turned on me.
"You have forced wrath, Child. I shall bring forth strife."
And despite my Grandmother's entreaties, she led me from the room by the nose, which she pulled unmercifully: though no blood was brought forth. Out in the passage she gave me a cruel beating with the thorned stick, till I screamed for mercy, and my Grandmother intervened.
"'Tis cruel, Jael. The child cried out about the beetle foryoursake."
"Sake or no sake, she cried out unseemly and irreverent. That's all I look at."
I was sore in body and sorer in heart. I had screamed outto warn Aunt Jael of the insect's approach, and now I was flogged for my pains. I knew in my own heart that what Grandmother had pleaded was not in point of fact quite true, I knew I had been secretly glad to see the creature making for Aunt Jael's skin, and for this reason had kept silence for so long. The physical instinct to scream had merely been stronger in the end than my resolution to say nothing. In a dim sort of way I realized this, and saw that my Grandmother's plea was unwarranted. But I saw more clearly that the common-sense of the position was that I had done Aunt Jael a good turn, and that the flogging was—in the light of the facts as she (not the Lord or I) knew them—mean and undeserved. I brooded revenge, as always. Aunt Jael's beatings were always more or less cruel, always more or less unjust; this I knew with a child's instinct, distorted and exaggerated no doubt by wretchedness and pride. So always I planned revenge, which sooner or later brought on the next flogging.
This time, however, my revenge was undetected. Next morning I came downstairs just as Mrs. Cheese was beginning to lay the table for breakfast. There were two separate sets of everything—breakfast-ware, dinner-services, tea-things, plate, knives and forks, even cruets—Grandmother's and Aunt Jael's, which the latter insisted on keeping rigorously separate. So, every day for breakfast or tea there would be two cups and saucers and plates with the gold pattern for my Grandmother and me, and one solitary cup and saucer and plate of Willow-pattern for my Great-Aunt. She had her own tea-pot too, a great fluted thing in old silver-plate, which could have held tea for a dozen; but never a taste of tea was poured forth from it for any one else, save on occasions so rare that I can number them on the fingers of my hand. So there was no mistaking the utensil with which, in which, from which, or out of which Aunt Jael would partake of nourishment. I was wandering round the table when I noticed, at first with fright, then, when I ascertained that it was dead, with interest and purpose, a large beetle much the same as its fumigated brother of the night before, lying on its back, claws heavenward. A divine idea possessed me. I picked it up, squashed it between my thumb and forefinger in the true Aunt Jaelian manner, and smeared the loathsome substance all over my Great-Aunt'steaspoon and the inside of her cup. It was an act of genius, that rare thing: the Revenge Perfect. "With the beetle hast thou slain," I said solemnly out loud, "by the beetle shalt thou perish."
"Perish" was a poetic flight, as Aunt Jael entirely failed to notice the mess in her cup, which she filled with tea from her exclusive pot, or the mess on her spoon, with which she stirred lustily. She drank three cupfuls, and belched as blandly as usual. Now I saw the imperfection of my revenge perfect. In idea and execution it had been superb, and to see her guzzling down the embeetled tea was very sweet. But she did notknowshe was drinking it—this was the eternal thorn that mars the everlasting rose. I had, however, the compensation of safety. All through breakfast, I looked meek and forgiving. Aunt Jael relented.
"Here, child, have a drink of tea out of my cup; 'twill do 'ee more good than the milk-and-water stuff your Grandma always gives 'ee."
"No, thank you, Aunt," I replied. And I triumphed in my heart.
Fate was about to triumph over me. Beetle had led to beating, and I had used beetle (with tea-cup) for revenge. Now Fate used tea-cup for triumph. It befell at tea-time, I think the same day. My arm was on the table-cloth, and, before I knew what I was doing, it (and Fate) had swept Aunt Jael's own old blue exclusive willow-pattern cup on to the floor, where it lay in a thousand avenging fragments. A brutal cuff full in the face changed fear and remorse into rage.
"Careless little slut!" she shouted. "What are 'ee biding there for staring like a half-daft sheep?—Say you're sorry, say you're sorry."
"I was sorry," I faltered, "but I'm not now."
This was the first brave thing I ever did, so brave that I hold my breath now to think of it. I shrank from some monstrous blow.
No blow came; partly because my Grandmother looked warningly ready to interfere, partly because my Great-Aunt had decided on another punishment, the only one I feared worse than blows.
"Oh, not sorry, eh, careless little slut?—"
"Stop it, Jael, I tell 'ee," broke in my Grandmother. "The child must try to be more careful and handy, and she's to say she's sorry, but—"
"Say she's sorry?" echoed Aunt Jael. "But she's just said she's not. 'I'm not sorrynow' quoth she! Not sorry, not sorry, young huzzy, do 'ee know where Not-sorry goes? Do 'ee? I'll tell 'ee: straight to Hell. Obstinacy in sin is the worst sin, and its reward is Hell. Hell, child, where your body will be scorched with flames and racked with awful torments. Devils will twist and twease your flesh, and 'twill be for ever too. You've done a wrong thing, and your nasty proud soul is too wicked to say you're sorry. You spurn the chance of repentance, the free offer of God A'mighty, made through me His servant. You shall suffer eternal punishment."
I quailed. At four the fear of that word had fallen on my soul. She knew it: the beady eyes gleamed.
"No hope, no escape. Flames, pains, coals of fire, coals of fire! Ha, ha, ha!" (Here she cackled.) "Not sorry, eh? Very like you'll be sorry then, when you look across the gulf and see all your dear ones in Abraham's bosom. No hope of ever joining them. Torture for all eternity. Have you thought what the word Eternity means, child? You're young in your sins as yet, but you know that well enough, ha, ha, ha!" (She chuckled again, three hard little cackling noises they always were, cruel enough.) "It means that you will suffer the torments of the lake of fire that is burning with brimstone, not for a mere thousand thousand years, but for ever and ever and ever—"
I was less than four years old, and I could bear it no longer. I flew to my Grandmother's arm for safety, sobbing brokenly, half-wild for fear.
Aunt Jael leaned back, content, pleased with the success of her punishment, and sure of heaven. Though if there be the Hell she raved of, it is for such as her.
My Grandmother comforted me. She was torn, I suppose, between two feelings. Her faith told her that what her sister said was true, her heart that it was cruel. I felt somehow even then that this was the nature of my Grandmother's struggle. The good heart turns away from cruelty, even when it speaks with all the authority of true religion, and so my Grandmotheralways turned away. She compromised: said nothing to Aunt Jael, while she comforted me; while soothing the victim, did not scold the scolder.
"Don't cry my dearie, and don't 'ee be frightened. Nought can harm 'ee. Your good aunt is right. 'Tis true that Hell is terrible, 'tis true that you're a sinful child, and 'tis true that you'll be going to the cruel place, if you have no sorrow and repentance in your heart. You broke your Aunt's fine cup; run to her now, tell her you're sorry. Only then can you be saved from the wrath of Jehovah, freed by repentance, cleansed by love of Christ. And even as Hell is awful, so is Heaven good. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. Run to your Aunt. Say: 'I'm sorry, Aunt.'"
I hesitated. Like my Grandmother's, my four-year-old heart found it had to decide between two calls. The call of fear was, "Say you're sorry, and escape surely from Hell." The call of hate was "Why? She is a bad cruel woman; and you're not sorry at all, you're glad you've smashed her evil cup."
"Besides," added the Tempter, "as you're not sorry, it would be lying to say you are."
I hung doubtfully. At length I pouted, "I don't want to."
"But true repentance," said my Grandmother, "means doing things you don't want to."
I said nothing.
"Mary, child—" my Grandmother paused a moment, "there is a bright angel in heaven who wants you to give way—your dear mother. I seem to hear her speaking to me now, and telling me so."
It is hard for me to explain the power that word had over me from my earliest days. I had a dear angelic vision of kind eyes and two white shining wings. I would shut my eyes in bed at night and see her. Sometimes she seemed to come very near, sometimes she would seem to bend over me and kiss me. Now, as my Grandmother finished speaking, I seemed to see her near. I ran across the room to the old arm-chair.
"I'm sorry, Great-Aunt," I said.
Such a life and such a household encouraged unchildlike emotions. I was puzzled far too soon in life by the puzzle of all life. I could not reconcile the wrath of Jehovah with the love of Christ, or the harshness of my Great-Aunt with the kindness of my Grandmother, which was the near and earthly form of that discrepancy. The world was a mysterious battlefield between Wrath and Love, as No. 8 Bear Lawn was a nearer and more familiar battle-place between Aunt Jael and Grandmother. Hell versus Heaven was another aspect of the battle. These two words were part of our daily life. They helped to make the two battles seem but one; for all the innumerable struggles between Aunt Jael and my Grandmother were conducted in the words and in the ways of our religion.
Our whole life was indeed our religion, or rather our religion was our life. From morn till night our daily life at Bear Lawn was an incessant preparation for our eternal life above. First we said our own private bedside prayers and read our "bedroom portions" of the Word. Then down in the dining-room after breakfast, Aunt Jael read the Word and prayed aloud for half-an-hour or more; the same after supper in the evening. Then, last thing at night, my Grandmother came to my room and prayed with me by my bedside. We lived in the world of our faith in a complete and intense way almost beyond the understanding of a modern household, however God-fearing. The promises of the faith, the unsearchable riches of Christ, the hope of God, the fear of Hell were our mealtime topics. Sin, as personified by me, was a fruitful subject. Both my Grandmother and Aunt Jael returned to it unwearied, the former mournfully because she loved me, the latter with a rough relish because she loved me not.
The main principles of our faith may be summed up in afew capital-letter words. First, there was THE LORD: the God whom all men worship: Who is One. My child's difficulty was that He seemed to be Two. There was Aunt Jael's God, a Prince of battles, revenge and judgment, dipping His foot in the blood of enemies and the tongue of His dogs in the same; a King terrible in anger, dark as a thundercloud; Jehovah, the great I AM. There was my Grandmother's God, a loving Heavenly Father, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, pitying His children like a Father, Whose mercy was from everlasting to everlasting, Whose loving kindness was for ever.
"I will avenge," thundered Aunt Jael from her horsehair throne.
"God is Love," replied my Grandmother.
There was the WORLD, a comprehensive word which covered all concerts, entertainments, parties—whatever they might be, for I cannot say I knew—all merrymakings, junketings, outings, pleasures, joys; all books savetheBook; all affection save for things above; all finery, furbelows, feathers, frills; smart clothes, love of money, lollipops, light conversation and unheavenly thoughts. Everything was of this world worldly which did not savour strongly of the next. There was the FLESH or the World made manifest in our bodies. It existed to be "mortified," chiefly by dancing attendance on Aunt Jael. Not to be up and about, getting Aunt Jael's morning cup-of-tea was fleshly, though it does not seem to have been fleshly to drink the same. Then there was the DEVIL, styled Personal, whom Mrs. Cheese in a fit of regrettable blasphemy once identified with Some One Else, and though the blasphemy shocked, I cannot truly say it pained me.
"She'm the very Dow'l hissel, th' ole biddy," said our bonds-woman one day after an encounter in the kitchen in which "th' ole biddy" had brandished big words, and had ended by brandishing the frying-pan also before leaving the beaten Mrs. Cheese to blaspheme, and later to be soothed by th' ole biddy's sister.
Then there was the BEAST, theso-calledPope of Rome: and his Mistress, that great WHORE that sitteth upon many waters, that Woman sitting upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full ofnames of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns, that Strumpet arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations, upon whose forehead was her name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH—known also, in cravener circles, as the Roman Catholic Church. Beast and Whore were inextricably mixed up in my mind: an amorphous twin mass of scarlet and monstrous horror. I hated them with the passionate hate of ignorance, religion and mystery.
There were the ELECT, the Saints, the Few, God's Chosen Ones. There was the ROOM they worshipped in, the BLOOD which redeemed them, the GRACE which sustained them, and the eternal Rest or REWARD on High they aspired to. There was the WAY they reached it, the PLAN of Salvation which shewed them the Way, and the BOOK in which the Plan was to be found.
The Book! We read it aloud together twice a day, and privately many times. We delved into its pages early and late, in season and out of season. They say that the old Cromwellians were men of one book; No. 8 Bear Lawn was a house of one book with very vengeance, for Aunt Jael would suffer no trumpery sugar-tales such as "The Pilgrim's Progress"—a book which many even of the staunchest Puritans stooped, I have learnt later, to peruse. There were other books in the dining-room bookcase—works of devotion, exhortation and exposition that I shall speak of later—but until I was ten years old, my Grandmother and Aunt decided I should read no other word whatsoever saveTheBook. Looking back, I do not regret their decision.
Day and night we searched the Scriptures. Aunt Jael and Grandmother discussed them interminably, and sometimes I dared to join in. Our preferences varied, and were the best index of our characters. Aunt Jael's favourite book was without doubt the Proverbs. Its salt old wisdom found echo in her mind. Its continual exhortations to chasten and to correct, nor ever to spare the rod, because of the crying of the chastened one, appealed to her nearly. They were quoted at me daily; usually, alas, as the prelude to offensive actionwith the thorned stick. Job was another favourite, and the din and bloodshed of the Books of Kings. Jeremiah, prophesying vengeance and horror, was her best-loved Prophet. Parts of Isaiah found favour too, most of all the thirty-fourth chapter where the prophet sings of the wild terrors that shall fill the day of the Lord's vengeance, when the screech-owl shall make her resting place in Zion and the vultures be gathered together. Of the Psalms she read most the forty-sixth, "God is our refuge and strength!" and the sixty-eighth, "Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered." Ah, she was an Old Testament woman. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth" was a dispensation she could follow better than "Love your enemies." The law of Moses was more acceptable in her sight than the Law of Christ, Jehovah's word from the mountain than the Sermon on the Mount. The Epistle to the Romans, where Saint Paul scolds and scourges the saints of the Imperial City, was her favourite New Testament book. She loved the whole Bible, however, and knew it better than any one I have ever met except my Grandmother. She kept all the commandments, except perhaps the tenth. For she coveted Miss Salvation Clinker's fine white teeth. Her own were few—and black.
My Grandmother was a New Testament woman. She loved the Gospels best: the story of Jesus. She knew—and lived—better than any one the Sermon on the Mount, but came most often to St. John: the third chapter, "God so loved the world"; the tenth, "I am the Good Shepherd"; and the fifteenth, "I am the True Vine." She read through the Epistles every week, quoting most often from I Corinthians XIII—the Charity chapter—and the Epistles of John. In the Old Testament, she loved best the Psalms. She knew them of course by heart, as did I. The twenty-third and the hundred-and-third meant most to her. Aunt Jael's favourite, the savage sixty-eighth, was alien to her whole faith. She would not say she disliked it—to dislike a word or a letter of God's Word would have been sin. She obeyed the ten commandments that God gave to Moses and the two greater ones that Christ gave to the questioning scribe. She loved the Lord, and she loved her neighbours as herself. She was the only Christian I have ever met.
My own early loves in the Book I can record faithfully. From the age of four to the age of twelve, I always used the same copy; a large musty old Bible that had belonged to my Mother, though not too large to hold comfortably in both hands. It was heavily marked.
There were three different kinds of mark: in ordinary black lead pencil, to show chapters I was studying with Grandmother and Aunt Jael, or portions I had to learn by heart; in blue crayon to indicate well-liked places; in red crayon to mark the passages I loved best of all. That old Bible is open before me now as I write: the red marks are faded a little, but they still tell me what I liked best in those far-off days, and (nearly always) like best still.
My preferences fell under three main heads. First, the bright-coloured stories of the beginning of the Bible, the wondrous lives of the men who began the world: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and Benjamin; with Princes such as Chedorlaomer the King of Elam, Tidal King of nations, and Pharaoh, full of dreams. There were revengeful women and some who suffered revenge: Hagar turned forth by Sarah into the wilderness of Beersheba; Lot's wife on whom God took vengeance and turned into a pillar of salt, and Potiphar's, who took vengeance on Joseph. There were mysterious places: Eden and Egypt, Ur of the Chaldees, the Wilderness and the Cities of the Plain, the land of Canaan flowing with milk and honey, and the slime pits of Siddim into which the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fell. Wonders of earth and heaven: the Tower of Babel, the Serpent in the garden, the Tree of Knowledge; the Creation, the Plagues and the Flood; the Ark of refuge and the fugitive Dove.
My second bent was for the mournful places of the Word; a morbid taste, but then so was I. The gloom of Job and the menace of Lamentations and the Woes of Matthew XXIV seemed to belong to our forbidding house. Up in the dim blueness of the attic I would declaim aloud the twenty-fourth chapter, where Christ spoke of the signs of His coming: wars and rumours of wars, famine and pestilence and earthquakes:
"Wheresoever the carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together."
In my weak childish treble it must have sounded comic, though nobody ever laughed except, maybe, the God above the attic skylight. More even than gloom, I love pure sorrow: Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher talks of the sadness of all life, the eternal misery of Man; and the story of the Passion, the Son of Man Who tasted human bitterness and death. The subtlety of the Preacher may have been beyond me; it needs no wit but a child's understanding of English words to feel his unplumbable woe in her heart. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity. While Gethsemane saw the whole world's sorrow in a night-time.
My third, and chief, happiness was in the words. Passages there are of sounding wrath or matchless imagery. I did not understand them, for they pass all understanding. But I loved them, plastered them marginally with three thicknesses of red crayon, cried them aloud. I have counted, and the books with most markings are these four: The Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and The Revelation. In the last I revelled with a pure ecstasy of awe: in the sixth chapter, where the sun becomes black as sack-cloth of hair, and the moon as blood; in the twenty-first, which tells of the City of Heaven, a city of pure gold, like unto clear glass, the foundations of whose rocks are garnished with jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald and sardonyx and sardius and chrysolyte and beryl and topaz and chrysoprasus and jacinth and amethyst, whose light is the Lamb; most of all in the seventh chapter: "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?These are they which came out of great tribulationand have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
My Psalms, as I called them, as against Grandmother's or Aunt Jael's protégés, were the hundred-and-thirty-seventh,By the waters of Babylon, and the twenty-fourth,Who is the King of glory?
However much I might write about the Book, it would fail to fill the place in this record that it filled in our lives, of which it moulded the very moods. Aunt Jael as lover of the Mosaic law and student of the Proverbs, was herself stern lawgiver and sayer of dark sayings. She ruled. Ruled my Grandmother (nearly always and in nearly everything, thoughthere were exceptions); ruled me (except in one or two awful occasions I shall tell of); ruled Mrs. Cheese (until the latter's Exodus); ruled the household, ruled the Meeting, and could have ruled the whole world with a due sense of her fitness for the post. The old armchair was her throne, the thorned stick her sceptre. As a woman she had, as I can see now, many high qualities. She did her duty as she saw it; was honourable and straightforward. She loved the truth, especially when it was unpalatable to other people. She had a deep fund of common-sense. She was a thrifty, hard-headed, sensible house-wife; and, as I said before, observed with zeal some nine of the Commandments. But of kinder or more endearing qualities I remember none. No doubt some of the child's bitterness and the child's bias remain with me still—perhaps it is merely vain to imagine that I hold the scales evenly and do not let prejudice weight memory—but I look across many years and see, as I believe the world saw, a hard bad old woman. Heaven, they say, forgives those who love much; maybe it forgives also those who are little loved, for they need forgiveness most. Aunt Jael started life hard, but I feel certain that the hardness was made a hundredfold harder because no love—no lover—had ever come her way. Bitter because she had no family of her own, she strove to embitter her sister's. Cheated of the two things we women need most—lordship and love—in revenge she lorded it over everybody, and loved not a soul in the world. Not but what she could have wedded many a time if she'd felt so inclined, including some as "others" didn't mind stooping to take though they were her leavings; not but what—in short, to all the tragical-comical backward boastings of the unchosen woman she would treat us at times. It was one of her few weaknesses, and I have since wondered if, failing to deceive six-year-old me, she succeeded in deceiving herself. During a tirade of this kind, I always fell a-musing what "Uncle Jael" would have been like. I decided he would wear smoked black glasses, like the man who came to tune our old piano; because I once fancied that Aunt Jael's eyes had rested upon the latter with a suspicion of unwonted coyness. This must have been a freak of my imagination, if not of Aunt Jael's after-dinner brandy. "For two good qualities," she used to say, "I thank and praisethe Lord. That he has preserved me all my life from all wanton sentiment; and that it has pleased Him to make me the most fearless and outspoken woman in this town."