"There's no smoke in the chimney,And the rain beats on the floor;There's no glass in the window,There's no wood in the door;The heather grows behind the house,And the sand lies before.No hand hath trained the ivy,The walls are gray and bare;The boats upon the sea sail by,Nor ever tarry there;No beast of the field comes nigh,Nor any bird of the air."Mary Coleridge.
"There's no smoke in the chimney,And the rain beats on the floor;There's no glass in the window,There's no wood in the door;The heather grows behind the house,And the sand lies before.No hand hath trained the ivy,The walls are gray and bare;The boats upon the sea sail by,Nor ever tarry there;No beast of the field comes nigh,Nor any bird of the air."Mary Coleridge.
"There's no smoke in the chimney,And the rain beats on the floor;There's no glass in the window,There's no wood in the door;The heather grows behind the house,And the sand lies before.
"There's no smoke in the chimney,
And the rain beats on the floor;
There's no glass in the window,
There's no wood in the door;
The heather grows behind the house,
And the sand lies before.
No hand hath trained the ivy,The walls are gray and bare;The boats upon the sea sail by,Nor ever tarry there;No beast of the field comes nigh,Nor any bird of the air."Mary Coleridge.
No hand hath trained the ivy,
The walls are gray and bare;
The boats upon the sea sail by,
Nor ever tarry there;
No beast of the field comes nigh,
Nor any bird of the air."
Mary Coleridge.
It was black dark inside the house, instead of the white darkness outside.
Knocking Annette carefully against pieces of furniture, Roger guided her down a narrow passage into what felt like a room. Near the ceiling were two bars of white where the fog looked in over the tops of the shutters.
He struck another match, and a little chamber revealed itself, with faded carpet and a long mirror. But no sooner was it seen than it was gone.
"Did you see that chair near you?" said Roger. "I haven't many matches left."
"There is a candle on the mantelpiece," she said.
Roger was amazed at Annette's cleverness. He had not seen it himself, but she had. He exulted in the thought.
He lit it, and the poor little tall drawing-room came reluctantly into view, with its tarnished mirror from which the quicksilver had ebbed, and its flowered wall-paper over which the damp had scrawled its own irregular patterns. The furniture was of the kind that expresses only one idea and that a bad one. The foolish sofa, with a walnut backbone showing through a slit in its chintz cover, had a humped excrescence at one end like an uneasy chair, and the other four chairs had servilely imitated this hump, and sunk their individuality, if they ever had any, to be "a walnut suite." A glass-fronted chiffonier had done its horrid best to "be in keeping" with the suite. On the walls were a few prints of race-horses stretched out towards a winning-post; and steel engravings of the Emperor of the French in an order and the Empress Eugénie all smiles and ringlets served as pendants to two engravings of stags by Landseer.
Annette took off Roger's coat and laid it on a chair.
"Some one has been very unhappy here," she said, below her breath.
Roger did not hear her. He was drawing together the litter of waste-paper in the grate. And then—careful man!—having ascertainedwith the poker that the register was open, he set a light to it.
The dancing, garish firelight made the sense of desolation acute.
"Who lived here?" said Annette.
Roger hesitated a moment, and then said—
"A Mrs. Deane."
"Was she very old?"
"Not very—not more than twenty-seven."
"And is she dead?"
Roger put some more paper on the fire, and held it down with the poker.
"No. She has left. Her child died here a month ago."
"Poor soul! Her only child?"
"Yes."
"And her husband? Is he dead too?"
Roger thought a moment, and then said slowly, "As good as dead."
He looked round the room and added, "Dick Manvers lent her the house. It used to be the agent's, but no one has lived in it since I can remember. It has always been to let furnished, but no one ever took it. People seem to think it is rather out of the way."
The rollicking, busy flame died down and left them in the candle-light once more. But after a few moments the ghostly pallor above the shutters deepened. Roger went to them and opened them. They fell back creaking, revealing a tall French window. The fog was eddying past, showing the tops of the clumpof firs, and then hiding them anew. He gazed intently at the drifting waves of mist.
"The wind is shifting," he said. "It will blow from the land directly, and then the roke will go. I shall run down to the farm and bring the dogcart up here."
After all, he should have to propose in the dogcart. Men must have proposed and have been accepted in dogcarts before now. Anyhow, he could not say anything in this house when he remembered who had lived here, and the recent tragedy that had been enacted within its walls.
"You must put on your coat again," she said, bringing it to him. "And mayn't I come with you? Wouldn't that be better than bringing the cart up here?"
"Oh, Merrylegs can see anywhere. Besides, there's the ford: I doubt you could get over it dry-shod, and I shall have to go a couple of miles round. And you've had walking enough. I shan't be gone more than half an hour. I dare say by then the sun will be full out."
"I would rather come with you."
"You're not afraid to stay here, are you? There is nothing to hurt you, and that candle will last an hour. I don't believe there's even a live mouse in the place."
"I am sure there isn't. Everything here is dead and broken-hearted. I would rather go with you."
Roger's face became the face of a husband, obstinacy personified. She did not realize that they had been in danger, that he had felt anxiety for her, and that he had no intention of being so acutely uncomfortable again if he could help it.
"You will stay quietly here," he said doggedly. "This is the most comfortable chair."
She sat down meekly in it at once, and smiled at him—not displeased at being dragooned.
He smiled back, and was gone. She heard him go cautiously along the passage, and open and shut the front door.
The light was increasing steadily, and a few minutes after he had left the house the sun came pallidly out, and a faint breeze stirred the tops of the fir trees. Perhaps this was the land breeze of which he had spoken. A sense of irksomeness and restlessness laid hold on her. She turned from the window, and wandered into the little entrance hall, and unbarred a shutter to see if Roger were coming back. But no one was in sight on the long, straight, moss-rutted road that led to the house. She peered into the empty kitchen, and then, seeing a band of sunlight on the staircase, went up it. Perhaps she should see Roger from one of the upper windows. There were no shutters on them. She glanced into one after another of the little cluster of dishevelled bedrooms, with crumpled newspapers left over from a hurried packing still strewing the floors. The furniture wasmassive, early Victorian, not uncomfortable, but direfully ugly.
There was one fair-sized south bedroom, and on the window-sill was a young starling with outspread, grimy wings. Annette ran to open the window, but as she did so she saw it was dead, had died beating against the glass trying to get out into the sunshine, after making black smirches on the walls and ceiling.
Everything in this one room was gay and pretty. The curtains and bed-hangings were of rosebud chintz. Perhaps the same hand that had made them had collected from the other rooms the old swinging mirror with brass rosettes, and the chest of drawers with drop handles, and the quaint painted chairs. Annette saw the crib in the corner. This room had been the nursery. It was here, no doubt, that Mrs. Deane had watched her child die. Some of the anguish of the mother seemed to linger in the sunny room with its rose-coloured curtains, and something, alas! more terrible than grief had left its traces there.
A devastating hand, a fierce destructive anger had been at work. Little pictures had evidently been torn down from the wall and flung into the fire. The fireplace was choked high with half-burned débris—small shoes, pinafores, and toys. A bit of a child's linen picture-book had declined to burn, and hung forlornly through the bars, showing a comic picture of Mrs. Pig driving home from market. A green wheelhad become unfastened, and had rolled into the middle of the room when the wooden horse and cart were thrust into the fire.
"She must have cried all the time," said Annette to herself, and she shivered. She remembered her own mad impulse of destruction.
"It's no use being angry," she whispered to the empty walls. "No use. No use."
The photograph frames had evidently been swept into the fire too, all but one, for there was broken glass in the fender and on the floor. But one framed photograph stood on the mantelpiece, the man in it, smiling and debonair, looking gaily out at Annette and the world in general. Under it was written in a large clear hand, "Daddy."
It was Dick Le Geyt, but younger and handsomer than Annette had ever known him. She looked long at it, slowly realizing that this, then, had been the home of Dick's mistress, the Mary of whom he had spoken and her child, to whom he had done a tardy justice in his will, the will she had helped him to make. The child, Dick's child, was dead. Its empty crib was in the corner. Its memorials had perished with it.
All that was left now of that little home was Dick's faded photograph smiling in its frame, purposely, vindictively left when all the others had been destroyed. Mary Deane had not cared to take it with her when she cut herself adrift from her past. She had not had theclemency to destroy it with the rest. She had left it to smile mockingly across the ruins of the deserted nursery. While Annette stood motionless the fierce despair of the mother became almost visible to her: the last wild look round the room and at the empty crib, the eyes averted from the smiling face on the mantelpiece, and then—the closed door and the lagging, hurrying footfall on the stairs.
"It's no use being angry," she whispered again. "Even Dick knew that. No use. No use."
And with pitying hands she took Dick's photograph out of the frame and tore it up small, and thrust the pieces among the charred remains of his child's toys. It was all she could do for him.
Oh! if she had but known Mary Deane, if she could but have come to her, and put her arms round her and told her that Dick had not been as heartless as she thought, that he had remembered her at the last, and as far as he could had made a late amends for all the evil he had done her.
But the child was dead, and Mary Deane herself was gone. Gone whither? She had flung away in anger and despair, as she, Annette, had once flung away. Perhaps there had been no Mrs. Stoddart to care for Mary in her hour of need.
Annette's heart sank as if a cold hand had been laid upon it.
The peaceful, radiant faith and joy of a few hours ago—where were they now? In their place, into this close, desolate room with the dead bird on the sill, came an overwhelming fear.
Men were cruel, ruthless creatures, who did dreadful things to women under the name of love.
As at a great distance, far far away in the depths of childhood, she heard her mother sobbing in the dark. Almost her only recollection of her mother was being waked in the night by that passionate sobbing. The remembrance of her father came next, sordid, good-humoured, mercenary, and she shuddered. No wonder her mother had cried so bitterly! Close behind it followed the sensitive, sensual face of the musician who had offered to train her. And then, sudden and overwhelming, blotting out everything else, came the beautiful young lover whom she had cast forth from her heart with passion a year ago. All the agony and despair which she had undergone then surged back upon her, seemed to rush past her to join forces with the cold desolation lingering in the empty room. Annette hid her face in her hands. She had put it all behind her. She had outlived it. But the sudden remembrance of it shook her like a leaf.
In that grim procession Dick came last—poor, poor Dick! He had not been wicked, but he had done wicked things. He had betrayed and broken faith. He had made as much desolationand anguish as if he had been hard-hearted. Oh! why did women love men? Why did they trust them?
Annette stood a long time with her face in her hands. Then she went out and closed the door behind her. The sun was shining bravely, and she longed to get out of this death-shadowed house into the warm, living sunshine. She went back to the drawing-room, her quiet step echoing loudly down the passage, and looked out of the long window. But the outlook was not calculated to lessen her oppression.
Close at hand, as she knew, were gracious expanses of sea and sky and gleaming river. But a stone wall surrounded the house, and on the top of it a tall wooden fence had been erected, so high that from the ground floor you could not look over it. This wooden fence came up close to the house on every side, so close that there was only just room for the thin firs and a walnut tree to grow within the narrow enclosure, their branches touching the windows.
Annette did not know that the wall and the fence and the trees were there to protect the house from the east wind, which in winter swept with arctic ferocity from the sea.
In the narrow strip between the fenced wall and the house Mary Deane had tried to make a little garden. Vain effort! The walnut tree and the firs took all sun from the strip of flower-bed against the wall of the house, where a few Michaelmas daisies and snap-dragons hung theirheads. She had trained a rose against the wall, but it clung more dead than alive, its weak shoots slipping down from its careful supports. She had made a gravel path beside it, and had paced up and down it. How worn and sunk that path was! There was not room for two to go abreast in it. One footfall had worn that narrow groove, narrow almost as a sheep track in the marsh. And now the path was barely visible for the dead leaves of the walnut, falling untimely, which had drifted across it, and had made an eddy over the solitary clump of yellow snap-dragon.
Annette drew back the bolt of the window, and stepped out. The air, chill with the mist which had silvered everything, was warm compared to the atmosphere of the house.
She drew a long breath, and her mind, never accustomed to dwell long upon herself, was instantly absorbed in freeing the snap-dragon from the dead leaves which had invaded it. Two birds were bathing themselves sedulously in the only sunny corner at the end of the garden. Annette saw that their bath also was choked with leaves, and when she had released the snap-dragon, she applied her energies to the birds' bath.
But she had hardly removed a few leaves from it when she stopped short. It was a day of revelations. The birds' bath was really a lake: a miniature lake with rocks in it, and three tin fishes, rather too large it must be owned tobe quite probable, and a tin frog spread out in a swimming attitude, and four ducks all jostling each other on its small expanse. It was a well-stocked lake. Tears rose in Annette's eyes as she explored still farther, lifting the drifted leaves gently one by one.
They covered a doll's garden about a yard square. Some one, not a child, had loved that garden, and had made it for a beloved child. The enclosure with its two-inch fence had no grass in it, but it had winding walks, marked with sand and tiny white stones. And it had a little avenue of French lavender which was actually growing, and which led to the stone steps on the top of which the house stood, flanked by shells. It was a wooden house, perhaps originally a box; of rather debased architecture, it must be conceded. But it had windows and a green door painted on it, and a chimney. On the terrace were two garden-seats, evidently made out of match-boxes; and outside the fence was a realistic pigsty with two china pigs in it, and a water-butt, and a real hay-stack. Close at hand lay a speckled china cow, and near it were two seated crinkly white lambs.
Annette kneeling by the lake, crying silently, was so absorbed in tenderly clearing the dead leaves from the work of art, and in setting the cow on its legs again, that she did not hear a step on the path behind her. Roger had come back and was watching her.
When she discovered the two lambs sitting facing each other, she seized them up, and kissed them, sobbing violently.
Something in Annette's action vaguely repelled him as he watched her. It was what he would have defined as "French." And though he had swallowed down the French father, he hated all symptoms of him in Annette. It was alien to him to kiss little china lambs. Janey would never have done that. And Janey was the test, the touchstone of all that was becoming in woman.
And then all in a moment the tiny wave of repulsion was submerged in the strong current of his whole being towards her. It was as if some dormant generous emotion had been roused and angered by his petty pin-prick opposition to put out its whole strength and brush it away.
"Don't cry," said Roger gruffly. But there were tears in his small round eyes as well as in hers.
"Oh, Roger," said Annette, speaking to him for the first time by his Christian name, "have you seen it, the fishes and the ducks, and the pigsty, and the little lambs and everything?"
Roger nodded. He had watched that property in course of construction. He might have added that he had provided most of the animals for it. But if he had added that, he would not have been Roger.
"And she's burnt everything in the nursery,"continued Annette, rising and going to him, the tears running down her face. "The toys and everything. And she's torn down the little pictures from the wall and broken them and thrown them on the fire. And I think she only left the garden because—poor thing—because she forgot it."
Roger did not answer. He took her in his arms, and said with gruff tenderness, as if to a child, "Don't cry."
She leaned against him, and let his arms fold her to him. And as they stood together in silence their hearts went out to each other, and awe fell upon them. All about them seemed to shake, the silvered firs, the pale sunshine, the melancholy house, the solid earth beneath their feet.
"You will marry me, won't you, Annette?" he said hoarsely.
Remembrance rushed back upon her. She drew away from him, and looked earnestly at him with tear-dimmed, wistful eyes.
The poor woman who had lived here, who had worn the little path on which they were standing, had loved Dick, but he had not married her. She herself, for one brief hour, had loved some one, but he had had no thought of marrying her. Was Roger, after all, like other men? Would he also cast her aside when he knew all, weigh her in the balance, and find her not good enough to be his wife?
There was a loud knocking at the door, andthe bell pealed. It echoed through the empty house.
Roger started violently. Annette did not move. So absorbed was she that she heard nothing, and continued gazing at him with unfathomable eyes. After one bewildered glance at her, he hurried into the house, and she followed him half dazed.
In the hall she found him reading a telegram while a dismounted groom held a smoking horse at the door. At the gate the dogcart was waiting, tied to the gate-post.
Roger crushed the telegram in his hand, and stared out of the window for a long moment. Then he said to Annette—
"Janey has sent me on this telegram to say her brother Dick is dead. It has been following me about for hours. I must go at once."
He turned to the groom. "I will take your horse. And you will drive Miss Georges back to Noyes in the dogcart."
The man held the stirrup, and Roger mounted, raised his cap gravely to Annette, turned his horse carefully in the narrow path, and was gone.
"Even the longest lane has a turning, though the path trodden by some people is so long and so straight that it seems less like a lane than 'a permanent way.'"—Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.
"Even the longest lane has a turning, though the path trodden by some people is so long and so straight that it seems less like a lane than 'a permanent way.'"—Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.
Time moves imperceptibly at Riff, as imperceptibly as the Rieben among its reeds.
To Janey it seemed as if life stood stock-still. Nevertheless, the slow wheel of the year was turning. The hay was long since in, standing in high ricks in the farmyards, or built up into stacks in lonely fields with a hurdle round them to keep off the cattle. The wheat and the clover had been reaped and carried. The fields were bare, waiting for the plough. It was the time of the Harvest Thanksgiving.
Janey had been at work ever since breakfast helping to decorate the church, together with Harry and Miss Black, and her deaf friend Miss Conder, the secretary of the Plain Needlework Guild. Miss Conder's secretarial duties apparently left her wide margins of leisure which were always at the disposal of Miss Black.
Except for the somewhat uninspiring presence of Miss Black and Miss Conder and her eartrumpet, it had all been exactly as it had been ever since Janey could remember.
As she stood by the Ringers' Arch it seemed to her as if she had seen it all a hundred times before: the children coming crowding round her, flaxen and ruddy, with their hot little posies tied with grass,—the boys made as pretty posies as the girls,—and Hesketh, "crome from the cradle," limping up the aisle with his little thatched stack under his arm; and Sayler with his loaf; and the farmers' wives bringing in their heavy baskets of apples and vegetables.
Sometimes there is great joy in coming home after long absence and finding all exactly as we left it and as we have pictured it in memory. We resent the displacement of a chair, or the lopping of one of the cedar's boughs, and we note the new tool-shed with an alien eye.
But it is not always joyful, nay, it can have an element of despair in it, to stay at home, and never go away, and see the wheel of life slowly turn and turn, and re-turn, and yet again re-turn, always the same, yet taking every year part of our youth from us. The years must come which will strip from us what we have. Yes, we know that. But life should surely give us something first, before it begins to take away.
Janey was only five-and-twenty, and it seemed to her that already the plundering years had come. What little she had was being wrested from her. And an immense distaste and fatigue of life invaded her as she made herlily and maiden-hair cross for the font. How often she had made it, as she was making it now! Should she go on for ever, till she was sixty, making crosses for the font at Harvest Homes, and putting holly in the windows at Christmas, and "doing the reading-desk" with primroses at Easter?
Harry working beside her, concocting little sheaves out of the great bundle of barley which Roger had sent in the night before, was blissfully happy. He held up each sheaf in turn, and she nodded surprise and approbation. It seemed to her that after all Harry had the best of the bargain, the hard bargain which life drives with some of us.
It was all as it had always been.
Soon after eleven, Miss Amy Blinkett, a little fluttered and self-conscious, appeared as usual, followed up the aisle by a wheelbarrow, in which reposed an enormous vegetable marrow with "Trust in the Lord" blazoned on it in red flannel letters. These "marrer texes," as the villagers called them, were in great request, not only in Riff, but in the adjoining parishes; and it was not an uncommon thing for "Miss Amy's marrer" to be bespoken, after it had served at Riff, for succeeding Harvest Homes in the neighbourhood. It had been evolved out of her inner consciousness in her romantic youth, and in the course of thirty years it had grown from a dazzling novelty to an important asset, and was now an institution. Even the lamentableMr. Jones, who had "set himself against" so many Riff customs, had never set himself against "Miss Amy's marrer." And an admiring crowd always gathered round it after service to view it reclining on a bed of moss beneath the pulpit.
By common consent, Miss Amy had always been presented with the largest vegetable marrow that Riff could produce. But this year none adequate for the purpose could be found, and considerable anxiety had been felt on the subject. Mrs. Nicholls, who sent in the finest, had to own that even hers was only about fourteen inches long. "No bigger nor your foot," as she expressed it to Janey. Fortunately, at the last moment Roger obtained one from Sweet Apple Tree, about the size of a baby, larger than any which had been produced in Riff for many years past. That Sweet Apple Tree could have had one of such majestic proportions when the Riff marrows had failed, was not a source of unmixed congratulation to Riff. It was feared that the Sweet Applers "might get cocked up."
The suspense had in the meanwhile given Miss Amy a sharp attack of neuralgia, and the fact that the marrow really came up to time in the wheelbarrow was the result of dauntless and heroic efforts on her part.
This splendid contribution was wheeled up the aisle, having paused near the font to receive Janey's tribute of admiration, and then a fewminutes later, to her amazement, she saw it being wheeled down again, Miss Amy walking very erect in dignified distress beside it. With cold asperity, and without according it a second glance, Miss Black had relegated it—actually relegated "Miss Amy's marrer"—to the Ringers' Arch. The other helpers stopped in their work and gazed at Miss Black, who, unconscious of the doubts of her sanity which had arisen in their minds, continued rearing white flowers against the east window, regardless of the fact that nothing but their black silhouettes were visible to the congregation.
At this moment Mr. Black came into the church, so urbane, and so determined to show that he was the kind of man who appreciated the spirit in which the humblest offerings were made, that it was some time before Janey could make him aware of the indignity to which Miss Amy's unique work of art had been subjected.
"But its grotesqueness will not be so obvious at the Ringers' Arch," he said. "It's impossible, of course, but it has been a labour of love, I can see that, and I should be the last man in the world to laugh at it."
He had to work through so many sentiments which did him credit that Janey despaired of making him understand, of ever getting him to listen to her.
"Miss Blinkett's marrow is always under the pulpit," she repeated anxiously. "No, the Ringers' Arch isnotconsidered such animportant place as the pulpit. The people simply love it, and will be disappointed if they don't see it there as usual. And Miss Blinkett will be deeply hurt. She is hurt now, though she does not show it."
At last her words took effect, and Mr. Black was guided into becoming the last man to wound the feelings of one of his parishioners. Greatly to Janey's relief, the marrow was presently seen once more to ascend the aisle, was assisted out of its wheelbarrow by Mr. Black himself and installed on a bed of moss at the pulpit foot; Miss Black standing coldly aloof during the transaction, while Miss Conder, short-sighted and heavy-footed, walked backwards into an arrangement of tomatoes and dahlias in course of construction round the reading-desk.
Mr. Black and his sister had had an amicable discussion the evening before as to the decoration of the church, and especially of the pulpit, for this their first Harvest Thanksgiving at Riff. They had both agreed, with a cordiality which had too often been lacking in their conversations of late, that they would make an effort to raise the decoration to a higher artistic level than in the other churches in the neighbourhood, some of which had already celebrated their Harvest Thanksgivings. Miss Black had held up to scorn the naïve attempts of Heyke and Drum, at which her brother had preached the sermon, and he had smiled indulgently and had agreed with her.
But Riff was his first country post, and he had not been aware until he stepped into it, of the network of custom which surrounded Harvest decoration, typified by Miss Blinkett's vegetable marrow. With admirable good sense, he adjusted himself to the occasion, and shutting his ears to the hissing whispers of his sister, who for the hundredth time begged him not to be weak, gave himself up to helping his parishioners in their own way. This way, he soon found, closely resembled the way of Heyke and Drum, and presently he was assisting Mrs. Nicholls to do "Thy Will be Done" in her own potatoes, backed by white paper roses round the base of the majestic monument of the Welyshams of Swale, with its two ebony elephants at which Harry always looked with awe and admiration.
As he and Janey were tying their bunches of barley to its high iron railings, a telegram was brought to her. Telegrams were not so common twenty years ago as they are now, and Janey's heart beat. Her mind flew to Roger. Had he had some accident? She knew he had gone to Noyes about the bridge.
She opened it and read it, and then looked fixedly at Harry, stretching his hand through the railing to stroke the elephants and whisper gently to them. She almost hated him at that moment.
She folded up the telegram and sought out Mr. Black, who, hot and tired, and with an earwigexploring down his neck, was now making a cardboard dais for Sayer's loaf of bread.
"My brother Dick is dead," she said. "I must go home at once. Harry can stay and finish the railings. He knows exactly how to do them, and he has been looking forward to helping for days."
Harry looked towards her for approval, and her heart smote her. It was not his fault if his shadowy existence was the occasion of a great injustice. She went up to him and patted his cheek, and said, "Capital, capital! What should we do without you, Harry?"
"I'm taking my place, aren't I?" he said, delighted. "That's what Nurse is always saying. I must assert myself and take my place."
"Remember, Lord, Thou didst not make me good.Or if Thou didst, it was so long agoI have forgotten—and never understood,I humbly think."George MacDonald.
"Remember, Lord, Thou didst not make me good.Or if Thou didst, it was so long agoI have forgotten—and never understood,I humbly think."George MacDonald.
"Remember, Lord, Thou didst not make me good.Or if Thou didst, it was so long agoI have forgotten—and never understood,I humbly think."George MacDonald.
"Remember, Lord, Thou didst not make me good.
Or if Thou didst, it was so long ago
I have forgotten—and never understood,
I humbly think."
George MacDonald.
On a sunny September day Dick the absentee was gathered to his fathers at Riff.
Is there any church in the world as beautiful as the old church of Riff where he was buried?—with its wonderful flint-panelled porch; with the chalice, host, and crown carved in stone on each side of the arched doorway as you go in; beautiful still in spite of the heavy hand of Cromwell's men who tore all the dear little saints out of their niches in the great wooden font cover, which mounts richly carved and dimly painted like a spire, made of a hundred tiny fretted spires, to the very roof of the nave, almost touching the figures of the angels leaning with outstretched wings from their carved and painted hammerbeams. In spite of all the sacrilege of which it has been the victim, the old font cover with the coloured sunshine falling aslant upon it through the narrow pictured windows remains a tangle of worn, mysterioussplendour. And the same haggard, forlorn beauty rests on the remains of the carved screen, with its company of female saints painted one in each panel.
Poor saints! savagely obliterated by the same Protestant zeal, so that now you can barely spell out their names in semicircle round their heads: Saint Cecilia, Saint Agatha, Saint Osyth.
But no desecrating hand was laid on the old oaken benches with their carved finials. Quaint intricate carvings of kings and queens, and coifed ladies kneeling on tasselled cushions, and dogs licking their own backs,—outlandish dogs with curly manes and shaved bodies and rosetted tails,—and harts crowned and belted with branching antlers larger than their bodies, and knights in armour, and trees with acorns on them so big that each tree had only room for two or three, and the ragged staff of the Earls of Warwick with the bear. All these were spared, seeing they dealt with man and beast, and not with God and saint. And by mistake Saint Catherine and her wheel and Saint Margaret and her dragon were overlooked and left intact. Perhaps because the wheel and the dragon were so small that the destroyers did not recognize that the quaint little ladies with their parted hair were saints at all. And there they all are to this day, broken some of them, alas!—one of them surreptitiously mutilated by Dick as a small boy,—but many intact still, worn to a deep black polish by the hands of generation aftergeneration of the sturdy people of Riff taking hold of them as they go into their places.
The Manvers monuments and hatchments jostle each other all along the yellow-plastered walls: from the bas-relief kneeling figure of the first Roger Manvers, Burgess of Dunwich, to the last owner, John Manvers, the husband of Lady Louisa Manvers.
But their predecessors, the D'Urbans and de Uffords, had fared ill at the hands of Dowsing and his men, who tore up their brasses with "orate pro anima" on them, and hacked their "popish" monuments to pieces, barely leaving the figures of Apphia de Ufford, noseless and fingerless, beside her lord, Nicholas D'Urban of Valenes. One Elizabethan brass memorial of John de la Pole, drowned at Walberswick, was spared, representing a skeleton, unkindly telling others that as he is we soon shall be, which acid inscription no doubt preserved him. But you must look up to the hammerbeams if you care to see all that is left of the memorials of the D'Urbans and De la Poles and the de Uffords, where their shields still hang among the carved angels.
Dick had not been worthy of his forbears, and it is doubtful whether if he had had any voice in the matter he would have wished to be buried with them. But Roger brought his coffin back to Riff as a matter of course.
His death had caused genuine regret among the village people, if to no one else. They hadall known him from a boy. There had been a reckless bonhomie about him which had endeared him to his people, in a way that Roger, who had to do all the disagreeable things, could not expect. In time past, Dick had fought and ferreted and shared the same hunk of cake and drunk out of the same mug with half the village lads of Riff. They had all liked him, and later on in life, if he would not or could not attend to their grievances or spend money on repairs, he always "put his hand in his pocket" very freely whenever he came across them. Even the local policeman and the bearers decorously waiting at the lychgate had sown their few boyish wild oats in Dick's delightful company. He was indissolubly associated with that short heyday of delirious joy; he had given them their one gulp from the cup of adventure and escapade. They remembered the taste of it as the hearse with its four plumed black horses came in sight between the poplars along the winding road from Riebenbridge. Dick had died tragically at thirty-three, and the kindly people of Riff were sorry.
Janey and Roger were the only chief mourners, for at the last moment Harry had been alarmed by the black horses, and had been left behind under the nurse's charge. They followed the coffin up the aisle, and sat together in the Squire's seats below the step. Close behind them, pale and impassive, sittingalone, was Jones the valet, perhaps the only person who really mourned for Dick. And behind him again was a crowd of neighbours and family friends, and the serried ranks of the farmers and tenants.
In the chancel was the choir, every member present except Mrs. Nicholls, Dicks foster-mother, who was among the tenantry. So the seat next to Annette was empty, and to Mr. Stirling down by the font it seemed as if Annette were sitting alone near the coffin.
Janey sat and stood and knelt, very pale behind her long veil, her black-gloved hands pinching tightly at a little Prayer Book. She was not thinking of Dick. She had been momentarily sorry. It is sad to die at thirty-three. It was Roger she thought of, for already she knew that no will could be found. Roger had told her so on his return from Paris two days ago. A sinister suspicion was gradually taking form in her mind that her mother on her last visit to Dick in Paris had perhaps obtained possession of his will and had destroyed it, in the determination that Harry should succeed. Janey reproached herself for her assumption of her mother's treachery, but the suspicion lurked nevertheless like a shadow at the back of her mind. Was poor Roger to be done out of his inheritance? for by every moral right Hulver ought to be his. Was treachery at work oneveryside of him? Janey looked fixedly at Annette. Was she not deceivinghim too? How calm she looked, how pure, and how beautiful! Yet she had been the mistress of the man lying in his coffin between them. Janey's brain seemed to shake. It could not be. But so it was. She shut her eyes and prayed for Roger, and Dick, and Annette. It was all she could do.
Roger, beside her, kept his eyes fixed on a carved knob in front of him. He knew he must not look round, though he was anxious to know whether Cocks and Sayler had seated the people properly. His mind was as full of detail as a hive is full of bees. He was tired out, and he had earache, but he hardly noticed it. He had laboured unremittingly at the funeral. It was the last thing he could do for Dick, whom he had once been fond of, whom he had known better than anyone, for whom he had worked so ruefully and faithfully; who had caused him so many hours of exasperation, and who had failed and frustrated him at every turn in his work for the estate.
He had arranged everything himself, the distant tenants' meals, the putting up of their horses. He had chosen the bearers, and had seen the gloves and hat-bands distributed, and the church hung with black. His mind travelled over all the arrangements, and he did not think anything had been forgotten. And all the time at the back of his mind also was the thought that no will was forthcoming, even while he followed the service.
"Dick might have left Hulver to me. 'We brought nothing into the world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.' Poor old Dick! I dare say he meant to. But he was too casual, and had a bee in his bonnet. But if he had done nothing else, he ought to have made some provision for Mary Deane and his child. He could not tell Molly would die before him. 'For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday.' Seeing Harry is what he is and Janey is to have Noyes, Dick might have remembered me. I shall have to work the estate for Harry now, I suppose. Doesn't seem quite fair, does it? 'O teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.' Never heard Black read the service better. He'll be a bishop some day. And now that Dick has forgotten me, how on earth am I ever to marry? 'Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.' That's the truest text of the whole lot."
Roger looked once at Annette, and then fixed his eyes once more on the carved finial of the old oaken bench on which he was sitting, where his uncle had sat before him, and where he could just remember seeing his grandfather sit in a blue frock-coat thirty years ago. He looked for the hundredth time at the ragged staff of the Warwicks carved above the bear, the poor bear which had lost its ears if it ever had any. His hand in its split glove closed convulsively on thebear's head.How was he going to marry Annette!
Annette's eyes rested on the flower-covered coffin in front of her, but she did not see it. She was back in the past. She was kneeling by Dick's bed with her cheek against the pillow, while his broken voice whispered, "The wind is coming again, and I am going with it."
The kind wind had taken the poor leaf at last, the drifting shredded leaf.
And then she felt Roger look at her, and other thoughts suddenly surged up. Was it possible—was it possible—that Dick might part her and Roger? Their eyes met for an instant across the coffin.
Already Roger looked remote, as if like Dick he were sinking into the past. She felt a light touch on her hand. The choir had risen for the anthem.
"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,Simple et tranquille.Cette paisible rumeur-làVient de la ville.Qu'as-tu fait, O toi que voilàPleurant sans cesse,Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilàDe ta jeunesse?"Paul Verlaine.
"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,Simple et tranquille.Cette paisible rumeur-làVient de la ville.Qu'as-tu fait, O toi que voilàPleurant sans cesse,Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilàDe ta jeunesse?"Paul Verlaine.
"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,Simple et tranquille.Cette paisible rumeur-làVient de la ville.
"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,
Simple et tranquille.
Cette paisible rumeur-là
Vient de la ville.
Qu'as-tu fait, O toi que voilàPleurant sans cesse,Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilàDe ta jeunesse?"Paul Verlaine.
Qu'as-tu fait, O toi que voilà
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà
De ta jeunesse?"
Paul Verlaine.
The sound of the anthem came faint and sweet over the ivied wall into the garden of the Dower House, where Harry was standing alone under the cedar in his black clothes, his hands behind his back, mournfully contemplating the little mud hut which he and Tommy had made for the hedgehog which lived in the garden. His ally Tommy, who was a member of the choir, was absent. So was the hedgehog. It was not sitting in its own house looking out at the door as it ought to have been, and as Tommy had said it would. Harry had shed tears because the hedgehog did not appreciate its house. That prickly recluse had shown such unwillingness to intrude, to force his society on the other possible inmates, indeed, although conscious of steady pressure from behind, had offeredsuch determined and ball-like resistance at the front door, that a large crack had appeared in the wall.
Harry heaved a deep sigh, and then slowly got out his marbles. Marbles remain when hedgehogs pass away.
Presently the nurse, who had been watching him from the window, came swiftly from the house, and sat down near him, on the round seat under the cedar.
"Must I stop?" he said docilely at once, smiling at her.
"No, no," she said, trying to smile back at him. "Go on. But don't make a noise."
He gravely resumed his game, and she gazed at him intently, as if she had never seen him before, looking herself how worn and haggard in the soft September sunshine.
It was one of those gracious days when the world seems steeped in peace, when bitterness and unrest and self-seeking "fold their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away." No breath stirred. High in the windless spaces above the elms, the rooks were circling and cawing. The unwhispering trees laid cool, transparent shadows across the lawns. All was still—so still that even the hedgehog, that reluctant householder, came slowly out of a clump of dahlias, and hunched himself on the sun-warmed grass.
The woman on the bench saw him, but she did not point him out to Harry. Why shouldnot the hedgehog also have his hour of peace? And presently, very pure and clear, came Annette's voice: "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat."
The Riff Choir knew only two anthems. The nurse leaned her tired head in its speckless little cap against the trunk of the cedar, and the tears welled up into her eyes.
She was tired, oh! so tired of hungering and thirsting, and the sun and the dust, so tired of the trampling struggle and turmoil of life, of being pushed from pillar to post, from patient to patient. For seventeen grinding years she had earned her bread in the house of strangers, and she was sick to death of it. And she had been handsome once, gay and self-confident once, innocent once. She had been determined that her mother should never know want. And she had never known it—never known either the straits to which her daughter had been reduced to keep that tiny home together. That was all over now. Her mother was dead, and her lover, if so he could be called, had passed out of her life. And as she sat on the bench she told herself for the hundredth time that there was no one to fight for her but herself. She felt old and worn-out and ashamed, and the tears fell. She had not been like this, cunning and self-seeking, to start with. Life had made her so. She shut her eyes, so that she might not see that graceful, pathetic creature, with itsbeautiful eyes fixed on the marbles, of whom she had dared to make a cat's paw.
But presently she felt a soft cheek pressed to hers, and an arm round her neck.
"Don't cry, Nursie," Harry said gently. "Brother Dick has gone to heaven," and he kissed her, as a child might kiss its mother. She winced at his touch, and then pushed back her hair, still thick and wavy, with the grey just beginning to show in it, and returned his kiss.
And as he stood before her she took his hands and held them tightly, her miserable eyes fixed on him.
A silent sob shook her, and then she said—
"You know where God lives, Harry?"
Harry disengaged one hand and pointed to the sky above him. He was not often sure of giving the right answer, but he had a happy confidence that this was correct.
"Yes," she went on, "God lives in the sky and looks down on us. He is looking at us now."
Harry glanced politely up at the heavens and then back at his companion.
"He is looking at us now. He hears what I say. I'm not one that believes much in promises. Nobody's ever kept any to me. But I call Him to witness that what I have taken upon myself I will perform, that I will do my duty by you, and I will be good to you always and be your best friend, whatever may happen—so help me God."