"If I could 'ave the one I love,'Ow 'appy I should be!"
"If I could 'ave the one I love,'Ow 'appy I should be!"
"If I could 'ave the one I love,
'Ow 'appy I should be!"
"That's Charlie Nokes," said Roger, feeling he ought to go, and singularly disinclined to move, and casting about for a little small-talk to keep him under this comfortable apple tree. "His father used to sing that song at Harvest Homes before he took to the drink. Jesse Nokes. He's dead now. He and my cousin Dick, the present squire, used to get into all kinds of scrapes together when they were boys. I've seen them climb up that vine and hide behind the chimney-stack when Uncle John was looking for them with his whip. They might have broken their necks, but they never thought of that. Poor Jesse! He's dead. And Dick's dying."
It was the first time Roger had ever spoken to her of the present owner of Hulver, the black sheep of the family, of whose recklessness and folly she had heard many stories from his foster-mother, Mrs. Nicholls. Janey, in spite of their intimacy, never mentioned him.
And partly because he wanted to remain under the apple tree, partly because he was fond of Janey, and partly because a change of listeners is grateful to the masculine mind, Roger talked long about his two cousins, Janey and Dick Manvers: of her courage and unselfishness, and what a pity it was that she had not been the eldest son of the house. And then he told her a little of the havoc Dick was making of his inheritance and of the grief he had caused his mother, and what, according to Roger, mattered still more, to Janey.
"Janey loved Dick," he said, "and I was fond of him myself. Everybody was fond of him. You couldn't help liking Dick. There was something very taking about him. Can't say what it was, but one felt it. But it seems as if those taking people sometimes wear out all their takingness before they die, spend it all like money, so that at last there is nothing left for the silly people that have been so fond of them and stuck so long to them. Dick is like that. He's worn us all out, every one, even Janey. And now he's dying. I'm afraid there's no one left to care much—except, of course——"
He stopped short.
"I've just been to see him in Paris," he went on. "Didn't you live in Paris at one time? I wonder if you ever came across him?"
Annette shook her head.
"I never met a Mr. Manvers that I know of."
"But he dropped the Manvers when he started his racing-stables. He had the decency to do that. He always went by his second name, Le Geyt."
"Le Geyt?"
"Yes; Dick Le Geyt. Lady Louisa's mother was a Le Geyt of Noyes, you know, the last of the line. She married Lord Stour, as his second wife, and had no son. So her daughter, Lady Louisa, inherited Noyes."
"Dick Le Geyt?"
"Yes. Did you ever meet him? But I don't suppose you did. Dick never went among the kind of people you would be likely to associate with."
Annette was silent for a moment, and then said—
"Yes, I have met him. I used to see him sometimes at my father's cabaret." She saw he did not know what a cabaret was, and she added, "My father keeps a public-house in the Rue du Bac." Roger was so astonished that he did not perceive that Annette had experienced a shock.
"Your father!" he said. "A publican!"
"He was a courier first," she said, speaking with difficulty, like one stunned but forcing herself to attend to some trivial matter. "That was how my mother met him. And after her death he set up a little drinking-shop, and married again—a woman in his own class of life. I lived with them for a year, till—last September."
"Good Lord!" said Roger, and he said no more. He could only look at Annette in sheer astonishment. The daughter of a publican! He was deeply perturbed. The apple tree had quite ceased to be comfortable. He got slowly to his feet, and said he must be going. She bade him "good-bye" absently, and he walked away, thinking that no other woman in Lowshire would have let him go after four o'clock without offering him a cup of tea.
Just when she thought he was really gone she found he had come back and was standing before her.
"Miss Georges," he began, awkwardly enough, "I dare say I have no business to offer advice, but you don't seem to know country-life very well. Never seen hay in cock before, I think you mentioned. So perhaps you would not think it cheek of me if I said anything."
"About the hay?"
"No, no. About what you've just told me."
"About my father keeping a public-house?"
"Yes. None of my business,"—he had become plum colour,—"but——"
She looked blankly at him. She felt unableto give him sufficient attention to help him out. He had to flounder on without assistance.
"If you mentioned that fact to anyone like Miss Black, it would go the round of the parish in no time."
"Would that matter?"
Roger was nonplussed for a moment. Her ignorance was colossal.
"Some things are better not talked about," he said. "I have been telling you of poor Dick, but there were things inhislife that were better not talked about, so I did not mention them."
His words transfixed her. Was it possible that he was warning her that he was aware of her adventure with Dick? At any rate, she gave him her full attention now.
She raised her eyes to his and looked searchingly at him. And she saw with a certainty that nothing could shake, that he knew nothing, that he was only trying to save her from a petty annoyance.
"The Miss Nevills have always been very close about your father," he added. "You can ask them, but I think you would find they wouldn't be much pleased if his—profession was known down here. It might vex them. So many vexatious things in this world that can't be helped, aren't there? And if there are any thatcan, so much the better. That was all I came back to say. I should not volunteer it, if I were you. It seemed to dropout so naturally that I thought you might have said the same to Miss Black."
"Certainly I might. I do hate concealments of any kind." Annette spoke with conviction.
"So do I," said Roger whole-heartedly. "I've hushed up too many scrawls not to hate them. But this isn't a concealment. It's—it's—you see, Miss Blackdoesrun round with her tongue out and no mistake, and Uncle John's advice when I settled down here as his agent was, 'Never say more than you must.' So I just pass it on to you, now that you've settled down at Riff too."
And Roger departed for the second time. She watched him go, and a minute later heard him ride out of the courtyard.
She sat quite still where he had left her, gazing in front of her, so motionless that the birds, disturbed by Roger's exodus, resumed possession of the grass-plot at once.
The plebeian sparrows came hopping clumsily as if they were made of wood, propped up by their stiff tails. A bulging thrush with wide speckled waistcoat hastened up and down, throwing out his wing each time he darted forward. A thin water-wagtail came walking with quick steps, and exquisite tiny movements of head and neck and long balancing tail. A baby-wagtail, brown and plump and voracious, bustled after it, shouting, "More! More!" the instant after its overworked, partially baldparent had stuffed a billful down its yellow throat.
Annette looked with wide eyes at the old dim house with its latticed windows and the vine across it—the vine which Dick had climbed as a lad.
Dick was Mr. Manvers of Hulver.
The baby-wagtail bolted several meals, fluttering its greedy little wings, while Annette said to herself over and over again, half stupefied—
"Dick is Mr. Manvers. Dick is Janey's brother."
She was not apprehensive by nature, but gradually a vague alarm invaded her. She must tell Mrs. Stoddart at once. What would Mrs. Stoddart say? What would she do? With a slow sinking of the heart, Annette realized that that practical and cautious woman would probably insist on her leaving Riff. Tears came into her eyes at the thought. Was it then unalloyed bliss to live with the Miss Nevills, or was there some other subtle influence at work which made the thought of leaving Riff intolerable? Annette did not ask herself that question. She remembered with a pang her two friends Janey and Roger, and the Miss Blinketts, and Mrs. Nicholls, and her Sunday-school class, and the choir. And she looked at the mignonette she had sown, and the unfinished annuals, and the sweet peas which she had raised in the frame, and which would be out in another fortnight.
She turned and put her arms round the little old apple tree, and pressed her face against the bark.
"I'm happy here," she said. "I've never been so happy before. I don't want to go."
"In the winter, when all the flowers are dead, the experienced Bee Keeper places before His hive a saucer of beer and treacle to sustain the inmates during the frost. And some of the less active bees, who have not used their wings, but have heard about honey, taste the compound, and finding it wonderfully sustaining and exactly suited to their aspirations, they religiously store it, dark and sticky, in waxen cells, as if it were what they genuinely believe it to be—the purest honey."But the other surly, unsympathetic bees with worn-out wings contend that honey is not come by as easily as that: that you must fly far, and work hard, and penetrate many flower-cups to acquire it. This naturally arouses the indignation of the beer and treacle gatherers."And the Bee Keeper as He passes His hive hears His little people buzzing within, and—smiles."—M. N.
"In the winter, when all the flowers are dead, the experienced Bee Keeper places before His hive a saucer of beer and treacle to sustain the inmates during the frost. And some of the less active bees, who have not used their wings, but have heard about honey, taste the compound, and finding it wonderfully sustaining and exactly suited to their aspirations, they religiously store it, dark and sticky, in waxen cells, as if it were what they genuinely believe it to be—the purest honey.
"But the other surly, unsympathetic bees with worn-out wings contend that honey is not come by as easily as that: that you must fly far, and work hard, and penetrate many flower-cups to acquire it. This naturally arouses the indignation of the beer and treacle gatherers.
"And the Bee Keeper as He passes His hive hears His little people buzzing within, and—smiles."—M. N.
"And now," said Aunt Harriet, the same evening,—"now that we have made Mr. Stirling's acquaintance and been to tea with him, and may expect to see him frequently, I think we ought to take a little course of his books. What do you say, Maria? Eh! Annette? You seem strangely apathetic and inert this evening, my dear. So different from me at your age. I was gaiety and energy itself until my health failed. You might read aloud some extracts fromThe Magnet, instead of theTimes. It is a book which none of us can afford to disregard. How I cried over it when it came out! I wroteto him after I had finished it, even though I did not know him. Authors like it, don't they, Maria? I felt very audacious, but I am a child of impulse. I have never been able to bind myself down with conventional ideas as I see others do. I felt I simply must tell him what that book had been to me, what it had done for me, coming like a ray of light into a darkened room."
Mrs. Stoddart had read aloudThe Magnetto Annette at Teneriffe, and it was intimately associated with her slow reawakening to life. It had had a part, and not a small part, in sending her back humbled and contrite to her aunts. But she felt a deep repugnance to the thought of hearing their comments upon it.
She took the offered book reluctantly, but Aunt Harriet's long thin finger was already pointing to a paragraph.
"Begin at 'How we follow Self at first,' the top of the page," she said. And she leaned back among her cushions. Aunt Maria took up her knitting, and Annette began to read:—
"How we follow Self at first! How long we follow her! How pallid, how ephemeral is all else beside that one bewitching form! We call her by many beautiful names—our career, our religion, our work for others. The face of Self is veiled, but we follow that mysterious rainbow-tinted figure as some men follow art, as some men follow Christ, leaving all else behind. We follow her across the rivers. If thestepping-stones are alive and groan beneath our feet, what of that? We follow her across the hills. Love weeps and falls behind, but what of that? The love which will not climb the hills with us is not the love we need. Our friends appeal to us and one by one fall behind. False friends! Let them go. Our ideals are broken and left behind. Miserable impediments and hindrances! Let them go too.
"For some of us Self flits veiled to the last, and we trudge to our graves, looking ever and only at her across the brink. But sometimes she takes pity on us. Sometimes she turns and confronts us in a narrow place, and lifts her veil. We are alone at last with her we love. The leprous face, the chasms where the eyes should be, the awful discoloured hand are revealed to us, the crawling horror of every fold of that alluring drapery.
"Here is the bride. Take her!
"And we turn, sick unto death, and flee for our lives.
"After that day, certain easy self-depreciations we say never again while we have speech. After that day our cheap admission of our egotism freezes on our lips. For we have seen. We know."
"We have seen. We know," repeated Aunt Harriet solemnly. "That last bit simply changed my life. If I had a talent for writing like you, Maria, which of course I have not, that is just the kind of thing I should have saidmyself to help other sufferers. Unselfishness, that must be the key-note of our lives. If the stepping-stones are alive and groan beneath our feet, what of that? How often I have said those words to myself when the feet of the world have gone over me, poor stepping-stone, trying hard, trying so hard not to groan. And if I am to be perfectly honest just for once, you know, dear Maria, you and Annettedotrample somewhat heavily at times. Of course you are absorbed in your work, and Annette is young, and you don't either of you mean it. I know that, and I make allowances for you both. I am making allowances all the time. But I sometimes wish you could remember that the poor stepping-stone is alive."
There was a moment's silence. Annette got up and gently replaced thecouvre-piedwhich had slipped from the stepping-stone's smart high-heeled shoes. Aunt Harriet wiped away a delicious tear.
"Our ideals are broken and left behind," she went on. "Only the invalid knows how truethatis. Dear me! When I think of all the high ideals I had when I was your age, Annette, who don't seem to have any! But perhaps it is happier for you that you haven't. Though Mr. Stirling looks so strong I feel sure that he must at one time have known a sofa-life. Or perhaps he loved some one like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was as great a prisoner to her couch as I am. He simply couldn't have writtenthose lines otherwise. I often think as I lie here in solitude, hour after hour, how different my life might have been if anyone like Browning had sought me out—had—— But it's no use repining: all these things are ordered for the best. Go on, my dear, go on."
When the reading was over and Aunt Harriet, still emotional, had gone to bed, after embracing them both with unusual fervour, Annette opened the window as her custom was, and let in the soft night air. Aunt Harriet was a lifelong foe to fresh air. Aunt Maria gave a sigh of relief. She was stout and felt the heat.
The earth was resting. The white pinks below the window gave forth their scent. The low moon had laid a slanting black shadow of the dear old house and its tall chimney-stacks upon the silvered grass.
Annette's heart throbbed. Must she leave it all? She longed to go to her own room and think over what had happened, but she had an intuitive feeling that Aunt Maria had been in some mysterious way depressed by the reading aloud, and was in need of consolation.
"I think," said Aunt Maria after a time, "that Mr. Stirling rather exaggerates, don't you?—that he has yielded to the temptation of picturesque overstatement in that bit about following Self."
"It seems to me—just right."
"You don't feel he is writing for the sake of effect?"
"No. Oh no."
"I am afraid I do a little. But then the picture is so very highly coloured, and personally I don't care much for garish colouring."
Annette did not answer.
"I should like to know what you think about it, Annette."
Whenever Aunt Maria used that phrase, she wanted confirmation of her own opinion. Annette considered a moment.
"I think he has really seen it exactly as he says. I think perhaps he was selfish once, and—and had a shock."
"He is quite right to write from his experience," continued Aunt Maria. "I have drawn largely from mine in my books, and I am thankful I have had such a deep and rich experience to draw from. Experience, of course, must vary with each one of us. But I can't say I have ever felt what he describes. Have you?"
"Yes."
"The veiled figure meeting you in a narrow place and raising its veil?"
"Yes."
Aunt Maria was momentarily taken aback. When our opinions do not receive confirmation from others we generally feel impelled to restate them at length.
"I have never looked at selfishness like that," she said, "as something which we idealize. I have always held that egotism is the thing of all others which we ought to guard against. Andegotism seems to me ugly—not beautiful or rainbow-tinted at all. I tried to show inCrooks and Coronetswhat an obstacle it is to our spiritual development, and how happiness is to be found in little deeds of kindness, small sacrifices for the sake of others, rather than in always considering ourselves."
Annette did not answer. She knew her aunt's faith in spiritual homœopathy.
"I have had hundreds of letters," continued the homœopath uneasily, "from my readers, many of them perfect strangers, thanking me for pointing out the danger of egotism so fearlessly, and telling me how much happier they have been since they followed the example of Angela Towers inCrooks and Coronetsin doing a little act of kindness every day."
If Aunt Maria were alive now she would have been thrilled by the knowledge that twenty years after she had preached it the Boy Scouts made that precept their own.
"Perhaps the man who was following the veiled figure did little kindnesses too, in order to feel comfortable," said Annette half to herself. Fortunately her aunt did not hear her.
"I yield to no one in my admiration of Mr. Stirling," continued Miss Nevill, "but he suggests no remedy for the selfishness he describes. He just says people flee for their lives. Now, my experience is that they don't flee, that they don't see how selfish they are, and need helpful suggestions to overcome it. That is just whatI have tried to do in my books, which I gather he has never opened."
There was a subdued bitterness in her aunt's voice which made Annette leave her seat by the window and sit down beside her.
"You have plenty of readers without Mr. Stirling," she said soothingly.
It was true. Miss Nevill had a large public. She had never lived, she had never come in close contact with the lives of others, she had no perception of character, and she was devoid of humour. She had a meagre, inflexible vocabulary, no real education, no delicacy of description, no sense of language, no love of nature. But she possessed the art of sentimental facile narration, coupled with a great desire to preach, and a genuine and quenchless passion for the obvious. And the long succession of her popular novels, each exactly like the last, met what a large circle of readers believed to be its spiritual needs: she appealed to the vast society of those who have never thought, and who crave to be edified without mental effort on their part. Her books had demanded no mental effort from their author, and were models of unconscious tact in demanding none from their readers, and herein, together with their evident sincerity, had lain part of the secret of their success. Also, partly because her gentle-people—and her books dealt mainly with them—were not quite so unlike gentle-people as in the majority of novels. If she did not call a spade a spade,neither did she call an earl an earl. Old ladies adored her novels. The Miss Blinketts preferred them to Shakespeare. Canon Wetherby dipped into them in his rare moments of leisure. Cottage hospitals laid them on the beds of their convalescents. Clergymen presented them as prizes. If the great Miss Nevill had had a different temperament, she might have been a happy as she was a successful woman; for she represented culture to the semi-cultivated, and to succeed in doing that results in a large income and streams of flattering letters. But it does not result in recognition as a thinker, and that was precisely what she hankered after. She craved to be regarded as a thinker, without having thought. It chagrined her that her books were not read by what she called "the right people,"—that, as she frequently lamented, her work was not recognized. In reality it was recognized—at first sight. The opening chapter, as Mr. Stirling had found that morning, was enough. The graver reviews never noticed her. No word of praise ever reached her from the masters of the craft. She had to the full the adulation of her readers, but she wanted adulation, alas! from the educated, from men like Mr. Stirling rather than Canon Wetherby. Mr. Stirling had not said a word about her work this afternoon, though he had had time to refresh his memory of it, and she had alluded to it herself more than once. For the hundredth time Aunt Maria felt vaguely disturbed and depressed. The readingaloud ofThe Magnethad only accentuated that depression.
Annette's hand felt very soft and comforting in hers. The troubled authoress turned instinctively towards possible consolation nearer at hand.
"I will own," she said tentatively, "that when I see you, my dear Annette, so different from what you were when you left us two years ago, so helpful, and so patient with poor Harriet, who is trying beyond words, so considerate and so thoughtful for others, I will own that I have sometimes hoped that the change might have been partly, I don't say entirely, but partly brought about byCrooks and Coronets, which I sent to you at Teneriffe, and into which I had poured all that was best in me. When you rejoined us here it seemed as if you had laid its precepts to heart." Aunt Maria looked at her niece almost imploringly.
Annette was not of those who adhere to a rigid truthfulness on all occasions.
She stroked her aunt's hand.
"It was borne in on me at Teneriffe, after I was ill there, how selfish I had been," she said, and her voice trembled. "I ought never to have left you all. If only I had not left you all! Then I should not be—I shouldn't have—but I was selfish to the core. And my eyes were only opened too late."
"No, my dear, not too late. Just in the nick of time, at the very moment we needed youmost, after dear Cathie's death. You don't know what a comfort you have been to us."
"Too late for Aunt Cathie," said Annette hoarsely. "Poor, kind, tired Aunt Cathie, who came to me in my room the last night and asked me not to leave her, told me she needed my help. But my mind was absolutely set on going. I cried, and told her that later on I would come back and take care of her, but that I must go. Self in her rainbow veil beckoned and—and I followed. If Aunt Cathie was the stepping-stone which groaned beneath my feet, what of that? What did I care? I passed over it, I trampled on it without a thought."
The subdued passion in Annette's voice stirred anew the vague trouble in Aunt Maria's mind.
For a moment her own view of life, even her heroine's puny and universally admired repentance, tottered, dwindled. For a brief moment she saw that the writer ofThe Magnetmade a great demand on his reader, and that Annette had passionately responded to it. For a moment Mr. Stirling's gentle, ruthless voice seemed to overthrow her whole position, to show her to herself as petty and trivial. For a moment she even doubted whetherCrooks and Coronetshad really effected the great change she perceived in Annette, and the doubt disheartened her still more. She withdrew resolutely into the stronghold of her success, and rose slowly to her feet.
"Well," she said, "it's time to go to bed. Close the shutters, Annette. It's very natural you should be impressed byThe Magnet. I should have been at your age. Young people are always attracted by eloquence. But as one gets older I find one instinctively prefers plainer language, as one prefers plainer clothes, less word-painting, and more spiritual teaching."
It was already late, but Annette sat up still later writing a long letter to Mrs. Stoddart.
"Yourself are with yourself the sole consortressIn that unleaguerable fortress;It knows you not for portress."Francis Thompson.
"Yourself are with yourself the sole consortressIn that unleaguerable fortress;It knows you not for portress."Francis Thompson.
"Yourself are with yourself the sole consortressIn that unleaguerable fortress;It knows you not for portress."Francis Thompson.
"Yourself are with yourself the sole consortress
In that unleaguerable fortress;
It knows you not for portress."
Francis Thompson.
I have often envied Lesage's stratagem in which he makes Le diable boiteux transport his patron to a high point in the city, and then obligingly remove roof after roof from the houses spread out beneath his eyes, revealing with a sublime disregard for edification what is going on in each of them in turn. That is just what I should like to do with you, Reader, transport you to the top of, shall we say, the low church tower of Riff, and take off one red roof after another of the clustering houses beneath us. But I should not choose midnight, as Lesage did, but tea-time for my visitation, and then if you appeared bored, I would quickly whisk off another roof.
We might look in at Roger's cottage near the church first of all, and see what he is doing.
On this particular afternoon, some three weeks after his conversation with Annette under the apple tree, I am sorry to record that he was doing nothing. That was a pity, for there was a great deal waiting to be done. July anda new quarter were at hand. Several new leases had to be looked over, the death of one of his farmers had brought up the old hateful business of right of heriot, the accounts of the Aldeburgh house property were in at last and must be checked. There was plenty to do, but nevertheless Roger was sitting in his office-room, with his elbow on his last labour-sheet, and his chin in his hand. He, usually so careful, had actually blotted the names of half a dozen labourers. His housekeeper, the stoutest woman in Riff, sister to the late Mr. Nicholls, had put his tea near him half an hour before. Mr. Nicholls' spinster sister was always called "Mrs. Nicholls." But it was the wedded Mrs. Nicholls who had obtained the situation of Roger's housekeeper by sheer determination for the unwedded lady of the same name, and when Roger had faintly demurred at the size of his housekeeper designate, had informed him sternly that "she was stout only in appearance."
It was a pity he had let his tea grow cold, and had left his plate of thick, rectangular bread-and-butter untouched.
Roger was a person who hated thought, and he was thinking, and the process was fatiguing to him. He had for years "hustled" along like a sturdy pony on the rounds of his monotonous life, and had been fairly well satisfied with it till now. But lately the thoughts which would have been invading a more imaginative man for a long time past had at last reached him,had filtered down through the stiff clay of the upper crust of his mind.
Was he going onfor everkeeping another man's property assiduously together, doing two men's work for one man's pay? When his uncle made him his agent he lived in the house at Hulver, and his horses were kept for him, and the two hundred a year was a generous allowance. But Dick had not increased it when he succeeded. He had given him the cottage, which was in use as an estate office, rent free, but nothing else. Roger had not liked to say anything at first, even when his work increased, and later on Dick had not been "to be got at." And the years were passing, and Roger was thirty-five. He ought to be marrying if he was ever going to marry at all. Of course, if Dick were in a state of health to be appealed to at close quarters—he never answered letters—he would probably act generously. He had always been open-handed. But Dick, poor beggar, was dead already as far as any use he could be to himself or others.
Roger shuddered at the recollection of the shapeless, prostrate figure, with the stout, vacant face, and the fat hand, that had once been so delicate and supple, which they had wanted to guide to do it knew not what.
Roger could not see that he had any future. But then he had not had any for years past, so why was he thinking about that now? Annette was the reason. Till Annette came to Riff hehad always vaguely supposed that he and Janey would "make a match of it" some day. Janey was the only person he really knew. I do not mean to imply for a moment that Roger in his pink coat at the Lowshire Hunt Ball was not a popular partner. He was. And in times past he had been shyly and faintly attracted by more than one of his pretty neighbours. But he was fond of Janey. And now that his uncle was dead, Janey was, perhaps, the only person left for whom he had a rooted attachment. But it seemed there were disturbing women who could inspire feelings quite different from the affection and compassion he felt for his cousin. Annette was one of them. Roger resented the difference, and then dwelt upon it. He distrusted Annette's parentage. "Take a bird out of a good nest." That was his idea of a suitable marriage. Never in his wildest moments would he have thought of marrying a woman whose father was a Frenchman, much less a Frenchman who kept a public-house. He wasn't thinking of such a thing now—at least, he told himself he wasn't. But he had been deeply chagrined at Annette's mention of her father all the same, so deeply that he had not repeated the odious fact even to Janey, the recipient of all the loose matter in his mind.
How kind Annette had been to poor Janey during these last weeks! Janey had unaccountably and dumbly hung back at first, but Annette was not to be denied. Roger, with his elbowon his labour-sheet, saw that whatever her father might be, the least he could do would be to ride up to Riff at an early date and thank her.
It is only a step from Roger's cottage to the Dower House.
All was silent there. Janey and Harry had gone up to Hulver to sail his boat after tea, and the house was deserted. Tommy, the gardener's boy, the only person to whom Harry had confided his marriage, was clipping the edges of the newly-mown grass beneath Lady Louisa's window.
And Lady Louisa herself?
She lay motionless with fixed eyes, while the nurse, her daughter-in-law, read a novel near the open window.
She knew what had happened. She remembered everything. Her hearing and sight were as clear as ever. But she could make no sign of understanding or recognition. A low, guttural sound she could sometimes make, but not always, and the effort was so enormous that she could hardly induce herself to make it. At first she had talked unceasingly, unable to remember that the words which were so clear to herself had no sound for those bending over her, trying to understand what she wished. Janey and the doctor had encouraged her, had comforted her, had made countless experiments in order to establish means of communication with her, but without avail.
"Would you like me to read, mother? See, I am holding your hand. Press it ever so little, and I shall know you would like a little reading."
No faintest pressure.
"Don't trouble to answer, mother, but if you would like to see Roger for a few minutes, shut your eyes."
The eyes remained open, fixed. Lady Louisa tried to shut them, but she could not.
"Now I am going to hold up these large letters one after another. If there is something you wish me to do, spell it to me. Make a sound when I reach the right letter. I begin with A. Now we come to B. Here is C."
But after many fruitless attempts Janey gave up the letters. Her mother groaned at intervals, but when the letters were written down they did not make sense. No bridge could span the gulf. At last the doctor advised Janey to give up trying to span it.
"Leave her in peace," he said in Lady Louisa's hearing, that acute hearing which was as intact as her eyesight.
So Lady Louisa was left in peace.
She saw the reins and whip which she had held so tightly slip out of her hands. She who had imposed her will on others all her life could impose it no longer. She was tended by a traitor whom she hated, yet she was unable to denounce her, to rid herself of her daily, hourly presence.
A wood pigeon cooed tranquilly in the cedar, and Lady Louisa groaned.
The nurse put down her book, and came and stood beside the bed. The two enemies looked at each other, the younger woman boldly meeting the impotent hatred of her patient's eyes.
"It's no use, milady," she said, replacing a little cushion under her elbow. "You're down, and I'm up, and you've got to make up your mind to it. Harry told me you'd got it out of him. Are you any the happier for knowing I'm your daughter-in-law? I'd meant to spare you that. It was that as brought on the stroke. Very clever you were to wheedle it out of Harry, but it didn't do you much good. You'd turn me out without a character if you could, wouldn't you? But you can't. And listen to me. You won't ever be any better, or I shouldn't talk like this. I dare say I'm pretty bad, but I'd never say there wasn't a chance while there was the least little scrap of one left. But there isn't, not one scrap. It's all over with your high and mighty ways, and riding rough-shod over everybody, and poor Miss Manvers. It's no use crying. You've made others cry often enough. Now it's your turn. And don't go and think I'm going to be cruel to you because you've been cruel to others. I'm not. I'm sorry enough for you, lying there like a log, eating your heart out. I'm going to make you as comfortable as ever I can, and to do my duty by you. And when you're gone I'm going to make Harry happierthan he's ever been under your thumb. So now you understand."
Lady Louisa understood. Her eyes, terrible, fierce as a wounded panther's, filled with tears. She made no other sign.
The nurse wiped them away.
"The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it."—George Eliot.
The Vicarage is within a stone's throw of the Dower House. On this particular afternoon Mr. and Miss Black were solemnly seated opposite each other at tea, and Mr. Black was ruefully reflecting, as he often did at meal-times, on his sister's incapacity as a housekeeper.
We sometimes read in the biographies of eminent men how trains and boats always eluded those distinguished personages, in spite of their pathetic eagerness to overtake them; how their luggage and purses and important papers fled from them; how their empty chairs too frequently represented them on state occasions.
Miss Black was not eluded by such bagatelles as trains and omnibuses, but by things of greater importance, by new-laid eggs, and fresh butter, and cottage loaves. No egg until it was of advanced middle age would come within a mile of Miss Black. The whole village was aware that old Purvis sold her "potted eggs" at "new-laid" prices, and that she neverdetected the lime on them. Scones and tea-cakes and loaves with "kissing crust" remained obdurately huddled in the baker's cart at the Vicarage back door. All that ever found their way into the house were those unappropriated blessings, those emotionless rectangular travesties of bread called "tin loaves."
Coffee and Miss Black were not on speaking terms. After years of deadly enmity she had relinquished the fruitless struggle, and gave her brother coffee essence instead for breakfast—two spoonfuls to a cup of tepid milk.
Fire and water would not serve Miss Black. The bath water was always cold at the Vicarage, and the drinking water was invariably warm. Butter, that sensitive ally of the housekeeper, bore her a grudge. Miss Black said all the Riff butter was bad. In London she had said the same. Biscuits became demoralized directly they set tin in the house. The first that emerged from the box were crisp, delicious, but in a day or two they were all weary, tough, and tasteless. They were kept on plates on sideboards in the sun, or thrust into mousy cupboards. She left off ordering gingerbread nuts at last, which her brother liked, because they all stuck together like putty. She attributed this peculiarity to the proximity of the Rieben.
Miss Black was no more perturbed by the ostracism in which she lived as regards the vegetable and mineral kingdom than Napoleon was by the alliance of Europe against him. Shecombined a high opinion of herself with a rooted conviction that everything vexatious or disagreeable was inherent in the nature of things—a sort of original sin. It was in the fallen nature of butter to be rancid, and eggs to be laid stale, and milk to be sour, and villagers to cheat, and old people to be fretful, and pretty women (like Annette) to be vain and unscrupulous, and men (like her brother) to care inordinately about food and to be enslaved by external attractions. She expected these things, and many more, as she stumped through life, and she was not disappointed.
"I think you are wrong, Walter," she said, masticating a plasmon biscuit, "in making Miss Georges take that bit in the anthem as a solo. I went to see Mrs. Cocks this afternoon, and we got talking of the choir, and I am sure she did not like it."
"I cannot steer my course entirely by Mrs. Cocks."
"Of course not. But she told me that in Mr. Jones's time——"
"I am rather tired of hearing of Mr. Jones and his times."
"In his time all the trebles took the solo together, to prevent any jealousy or ill-feeling."
"I can't prevent jealousy of Miss Georges," said Mr. Black, looking coldly at his sister, and then still more coldly at the cup of tea she handed him, made quarter of an hour before by the young servant who, as the Miss Blinkettswho had trained her had faithfully warned Miss Black, "mistook bubbling for boiling."
The tea was the consistency of treacle, and the cream his sister poured into it instantly took the contorted worm-like shapes which sour cream does take. Miss Black drank hers slowly, not finding it good, but thinking it was like all other tea.
"You won't make the jealousy less by putting her forward in everything."
"It irritates me to hear Miss Georges' voice muffled up with Mrs. Cocks and Jane Smith. I don't suppose Riff Church has ever had such a voice in it since it was built."
"I'm sure I can't tell about that. But Miss Georges has been partly trained for a public singer."
"Has she? I did not know that."
"The truth is we know very little about her. I am not sure we ought not to have made more inquiries before we admitted her to the choir and the Sunday school."
"My dear, pure good-nature on her part is responsible for her being in either. And could anything be more ultra respectable than her aunts?"
"We don't know who her father was. I should not wonder if he were an actor, her manner of singing is so theatrical. Not quite a good example for the other trebles. She draws attention to herself."
"She can't help that, Angela. That ispartly due to her appearance, for which she is not responsible."
Mr. Black, patient and kindly by nature, showed to greater advantage with his sister than with Annette, because he never attempted to show Miss Black the sort of man he was. You could not be two minutes in her society without realizing that she saw no more difference between one person and another than she did between fresh eggs and stale. Men were men to her, as eggs were eggs. And that was all about it.
"She is responsible for a good deal of the attention she courts," said Miss Black scornfully, and with a modicum of truth on her side. "She need not let her hair stand out over her ears, or make those two little curls in the nape of her neck. And did you notice her absurd hat?"
"I noticed nothing absurd about it."
"When every one is wearing trimmed hats she must needs make herself conspicuous in a perfectly plain straw with no trimming at all, except that black ribbon tied under her chin. Everybody was staring at her last Sunday."
"That I can well believe."
"I asked her where she had got that nice garden hat."
"Is it possible? How angry you would have been if she had asked you where you got yours!"
Mr. Black glanced for the first time at a battered but elaborate arrangement sprinkledwith cornflowers, sitting a little crooked, like a badly balanced plate, on the top of his sister's narrow head.
"She wasn't the least angry. There was nothing to be offended at. And she said her aunt in Paris sent it her, who was a milliner."
"How like her to say that—to volunteer it!" said Mr. Black, aware that his sister was watching how he took the news of Annette's connection with trade. "But we must be careful how we repeat it. In this amazing little world of Riff it might be against her to have a milliner for an aunt."
"I don't see that Riff is more amazing than other places," said Miss Black, who had already circulated the story of the dressmaking aunt with the same diligence which she showed in the distribution of the parish magazine. "I hope we can all be civil to Miss Georges, even if her aunt is a dressmaker, and her father lower still in the social scale. She has noDebefore her name. And Georges is a very common surname."
"Indeed!"
"Perhaps you are thinking of asking her to change it," said his sister, whose temper was liable to boil up with all the suddenness of milk.
"I had not got so far as that," he said, rising. "You must remember, Angela, that you see a possible wife for me in every woman I exchange a word with. It is very flattering that you should think so many might be prevailed on toshare my little Vicarage, but the Church only allows me one wife, and the selection I believe rests with me."
"I know that. It's so silly to talk as if I expected anything different."
"All I can say is that if I could delude myself into believing that Miss Georges put on that hat or any other hat with a view to attracting me, I should feel some alacrity in finishing my Sunday sermon, which I must now do without any alacrity at all."
Miss Black swallowed the remains of her plasmon biscuit, and said in the voice of one accustomed to the last word—
"Miss Georges is very good-looking, of course. No one admires that sort of pale, clear complexion and calm manner more than I do. But you must remember that they are merely the result of a constitution free from an excess of uric acid. Non-gouty subjects always look like that."
"Give me the sweet cup wrought of the earth from which I was born, and under which I shall lie dead."—Zonas.
From the church tower, Reader, you can see beyond the mill and the long water meadows the little hamlet of Swale.
That old house in the midst, with its wonderful twisted chimneys and broken wall, was once the home of the extinct Welyshams of Swale. But the name of Welysham, embedded in the history of Lowshire and still renowned in India, is forgotten in Riff. Their old house, fast falling into ruins, is now used as a farm, until Roger can get leave to restore it, or pull it down. The sky looks in at the upper rooms. No one dare go up the wide oak staircase, and Mrs. Nicholls' chickens roost on the carved balustrade of the minstrels' gallery.
We will go there next.
Mrs. Nicholls, the devoted nurse of all the Manvers family and the principal treble in the choir, had married at a portly age the tenant-farmer at Swale, and Annette was having tea with her on this particular afternoon, and hearing a full description, which scorned allomissions, of the last illness of Mr. Nicholls, who had not been able "to take a bite in his head" of anything solid for many weeks before his death.
"And so, miss," said Mrs. Nicholls philosophically, "when he went I felt it was all for the best. It's a poor thing for a man to live by suction."
Annette agreed.
"Swale seems quite empty this afternoon," she said, possibly not unwilling to change the subject. "There is hardly a soul to be seen."
"I expect they've all gone to Sir Harry's 'lection tea," said Mrs. Nicholls. "I used to go while Nicholls was alive, and very convenient it was; but Sir Harry don't want no widders nor single spinsters—only wives of them as has votes."
Politics were not so complicated twenty years ago as they are now. Those were the simple days when Sir Harry Ogden, the Member, urbanely opined that he was for Church and State, and gave tea shortly before the election to the wives of his constituents. And the ladies of Swale and Riff, and even the great Mrs. Nicholls, thought none the worse of their Member because there was always a sovereign at the bottom of the cup.
"Mr. Black wants to start a Mothers' Meeting in Swale," continued Annette. "He asked me to talk it over with you. I know he is hopingfor your nice parlour for it, so beautiful as you always keep it."
Mrs. Nicholls was softened by the compliment to her parlour, the condition of which was as well known as that Queen Victoria was on the throne, but she opined that there had been a deal too much "argybargy" already among the Swale matrons about the Mothers' Meeting, and that she did not see her way to joining it.
Annette, who had been deputed by Mr. Black to find out the mysterious cause of Mrs. Nicholls' reluctance, remarked meditatively, "I don't know how the Vicar will get on without you, Mrs. Nicholls."
"No, miss," said Mrs. Nicholls, "of course not. He was here only yesterday, and he says to me, 'Mrs. Nicholls, the Swale folk oughter all heng together, and we look to you.' And I says, 'Sir, it's not for me to chunter with you; but it's no manner of use setting me up as a queen in Swale when there's Mrs. Tomkins as bounceful as can be, as has been expecting homage ever since she and her spring-cart came in last Lammas, which none of us don't feel obligated to bow down to her.'"
"Of course not. But there are others besides Mrs. Tomkins. There are the Tamsies, your next-door neighbours. They are quiet, hard-working people, with a lot of little ones. She would be very thankful, I know, to join the Mothers' Meeting, if the Vicar can start it."
"Mrs. Tamsy," said Mrs. Nicholls judicially."I dare say Mrs. Tamsywouldlike anything she can get, whether it's out of my pig-tub or her own. That don't make no differ to Mrs. Tamsy, nor what's put on the hedge to dry—if so be as anything's blowed to her side. She's that near she'd take the pence off the eyes of her mother's corp. No, miss! I'd do a deal for the Vicar, but I won't have Mrs. Tamsy in my place, nor I won't set foot in hers. Not that I ain't sorry for her, with Tamsy coming home roaring on a Saturday night, and hectoring and bullocking about till the children has to sleep in the hen-roost."
And in the course of conversation Mrs. Nicholls at last divulged to Annette, what she had kept bottled up from Mr. Black, and indeed from every one, that the real reason that a Mothers' Meeting could not be instituted in the small circle of the Swale matrons, even if the gathering did not include Mrs. Tamsy, was because of old Mr. Thornton's death. Mr. Thornton, it seemed, had been "an octogeranium and the last sediment of his family, and not one of his own kin to put him in his coffin." The Swale ladies had taken the last duties on themselves, and there had been "unpleasantness at the laying out," so that friendly relations had been suspended between them ever since the funeral.
Annette sighed as she left Mrs. Nicholls and set out across the meadows towards Riff. She was to meet Janey in the Hulver gardens, andhelp her to pick the snap-dragons, now blooming riotously there.
But one small sigh for the doomed Mothers' Meeting was the only tribute Annette paid to it. Her thoughts reverted quickly to other subjects.
Her placid, easy-going mind was troubled.
The long letter written at night to Mrs. Stoddart three weeks ago had never been posted. The following morning had brought a hurried line from her friend saying that she was that moment starting on a yachting trip with her son. She mentioned that she was coming down to Annette's neighbourhood in a month's time, on a visit to Mr. Stirling at Noyes, when she hoped for opportunities of seeing her.
Annette had dropped her own letter into the fire, not without a sense of relief. She had hated the idea of immediate action, and she had been spared it. She would go on quietly until she could confer with Mrs. Stoddart. But in spite of the momentary respite the fear remained at the back of her mind that when Mrs. Stoddart did know about the Manvers family she would almost certainly insist on Annette's leaving Riff. Annette could see for herself that her position there was untenable. But the longing to remain grew, nevertheless. She vaguely, foolishly hoped that some way of remaining might yet be found. For she was drawn towards Riff, as she had never been drawn to any other place, partly no doubt because, owing to heraunt's death, all her energies had been called out there for the first time in her life. It had been no sinecure to take Aunt Cathie's place. She had taken it, and she had filled it. She was no longer a pale, useless, discontented girl, cooped up in an airless London house with two self-centred, elder women whom she secretly despised for immolating their sister. Now that her aunts were under her protection and absolutely dependent on her, and, if they had but known it, at her mercy, she had become at first tolerant of them, and then compassionate and amused, and finally affectionate. If she had kept her own life entirely apart from them, they were not aware of it. For neither of the Miss Nevills had yet discovered that though they themselves were not alive others might be, and Annette had done nothing since her return to them to break that illusion so rudely shaken by her departure. In their opinion, Annette had now "settled down," and each aunt was secretly of opinion that her niece's existence was supported by copious draughts from the deep wells of her own wisdom and experience. But perhaps Annette had other incentives for clinging to Riff.
Sometimes as we go through life we become conscious of a mysterious instinctive attraction towards certain homely people, and certain kindly places, for which we cannot account, to which we can only yield. They seem to belong to us, to have a special significance for us. WhenAnnette first saw Janey and Roger she felt that she had known them all her life, that they had long been part of her existence. When first she walked with them beside the Rieben she seemed to recognize every turn of the stream. The deep primrosed lanes welcomed her back to them. Had she wandered down them in some previous existence? When she gathered her first posy of lady's-smock in the long water meadow near the mill, the little milk-white flowers said, "Why have you been away from us so long?" And when, a few days later, she first stood with Janey in the April sunshine on the wide terrace of Hulver, the stately shuttered house had seemed to envelop her with its ancient peace, and to whisper to her, "I am home."
Annette reached the bridge by the mill, and looked across the tranquil water to the village clustering round the church, and the old red-gabled Manor house standing among its hollies.
Her heart throbbed suddenly.
Surely the angel with the sword would not drive her away again!