CHAPTER II.TORDALE.
It was so seldom that the Vicar of Tordale met with any man able and willing to talk about the outside world in which he had once played his part, that he felt loth to lose his new acquaintance, and insisted on Captain Stondon accompanying him home, and accepting of such hospitality as a widower’sménagecould afford.
Finding the prospect of rest and refreshment by no means disagreeable, the officer availed himself of the invitation, and before the afternoon was ended, very friendly relations were established between himself and his host.
Both were lonely men; but there all similarity between themselves or their antecedents stopped. The one had lost; the other had never possessed.The one had hoped much, and yet the low-ceiled parlour of a country vicarage, which a stranger rarely entered, to which there came few new books, no excitement, no change, sufficed him now; the other had started in life with his way to make, with no apparent future save what his own right arm should win for him, and yet at forty-five he came back from India to enter into possession of Marshland Manor and four thousand a year.
The vicar had married young, and been the father of many children; the officer had never married, and at fifty-six had no nearer relative than Montague Stondon, barrister-at-law, who was some fifteenth cousin of the owner of Marshlands, and next heir to that desirable property and the rents appertaining thereto.
Captain Stondon had done his best for his relative; he had invited him to Marshlands; he sent him up presents of game and fruit and—money; he paid for the education of Montague Stondon’s only son; and the thanks he got for all his kindness was a morning and evening aspiration whichthe barrister never failed to utter for his speedy translation to a better world.
Montague Stondon would have driven his relative into matrimony years before, had it not been for that little romantic corner of his heart, wherein he had placed his young ideal of what marriage should be—an ideal from which the world and its ways had never estranged him; and so it was quite a settled matter with everybody who knew anything about the property that Captain Stondon would never have chick nor child, and that if Montague Stondon outlived his cousin, he might confidently expect to enter into possession of the Norfolk estates, which were, by the way, strictly entailed.
Without domestic ties, without household treasures, it was natural that Captain Stondon should reside but little in Norfolk—that he should remain indeed only for a very short period in any place.
During the ten years that had elapsed since his return from India he had visited many countries, seen many and many a foreign town. His passportswould have bound up into quite a bulky volume; and whenever he started on a fresh pilgrimage, Montague Stondon offered up his little litany for him to be brought back to England a corpse.
It might be excusable, and very probably was excessively natural; but still nobody could say it was pleasant for a man to know, as Captain Stondon knew perfectly well, that his cousin, limping with bleeding feet along the flinty road to ruin, was cursing him for wearing good shoes and declining to take them off for his benefit.
Wherever he went, Captain Stondon felt that he had his cousin’s best wishes for some misadventure to befall him; and as he sat opposite to the clergyman, and listened to his tale of how this boy had been drowned, of how that one had studied too hard to pass his examination, and died three weeks afterwards of brain-fever; of how his only daughter had married happily, only to be laid a twelvemonth afterwards in her coffin with her baby on her breast—he thought that after all it might be better to have these memories thannone at all—to have loved and lost, rather than never to have had anything on earth to take home and love and entreat the Lord to spare.
For these children were with the vicar still; their memories were green in his heart, and would remain there till he went to join them; and it seemed preferable to endure much misery rather than know no happiness; to bear partings on earth, to the end that some friends might be waiting to greet the wayfarer when he reached the eternal shores.
To the vicar his children were not dead—they slept; they were not lost—merely gone before.
“He had one boy in India,” he said; and Captain Stondon at once inquired in what part.
“Benares—he is buried there,” explained the clergyman, and he covered his face with his hands for a moment, before he went on to tell how his son had gone out to India full of youth, and hope, and life—to die.
By degrees, when he had exhausted the tale of his troubles, Mr. Conbyr grew quite cheerful, andtalked at large of his parishioners, their peculiarities, their prejudices, their attachments. Like all clergymen, he had his little budget of petty annoyances to open and explain—how there was a strong element of Dissent in Tordale; how Methodists from Grassenfel held house-to-house meetings; how the service was not conducted exactly to his liking; how he wanted a new collection of psalms, and his congregation would have none of it; how the choir was poor, and required an organ to back it; how sorely Tordale stood in need of a squire and squire’s family to take a high hand in the parish; and how, in fact, Tordale required but being altered in every particular to become a model valley—a valley for all England to hear of and envy.
Then he retraced his steps, and praised his people, their sturdy independence, their rough-and-ready kindness, their thorough devotion, their willingness to help one another; and how long he would have gone on lauding their virtues it is impossible to say, had Captain Stondon, seizing his opportunity, not inquired,—
“Pray what is the name of that young person who was in the same pew with me to-day—a girl with auburn hair, and a magnificent voice?”
“Oh! you remarked her voice, did you? That is the cousin, or niece, or niece by marriage, or something, of the very singular individual who plays the violin in church. She is called Phemie Keller—sings sweetly, I consider, and is pretty, too. Do you not think so?”
“Sings sweetly! What can the man be made of,” thought Captain Stondon, “to use such an expression about the matter? Sings sweetly! If the nightingale came outside his bedroom window and trilled to him all the night long, he would get up in the morning and say he had heard a nice bird whistling. Pretty, too!” Straightway the officer fell to wondering what manner of woman the deceased Mrs. Conbyr had been—whether she had black hair as coarse as a horse’s mane, and a Roman nose, high cheekbones, and hard eyes; or whether she was a washed-out looking creature, with the pink of her face running into the white, and sandy-colouredcorkscrew curls, and an anxious, frightened expression of countenance.
He thought a person who called Miss Keller only pretty must have very benighted ideas on the subject of beauty; and yet the fact was, Mr. Conbyr had married quite a belle, a sparkling brunette, whose friends all thought she threw herself away when she accepted a curate with only a prospective living for his fortune.
Mrs. Conbyr had been a toast, a flirt, a very captivating, winning little creature, and perhaps it was no wonder that now she was dead, her husband held to her memory as to his beau-ideal of all which was most lovely and charming in woman. Nevertheless even he admitted that Miss Keller was pretty.
“And intelligent, too,” he added; “if she wouldn’t giggle so much, and hadn’t such stuck-up ideas, and would dress herself more like a farmer’s niece, she might grow into a superior woman. But vanity is the besetting sin of the whole household. Aggland himself tells you candidly he considers he understands the violin betterthan any man in the country, and he calls his brother farmers, openly, fools and prejudiced donkeys. As for me, he thinks me perfectly ignorant of theology. He has a curious smattering of learning; can talk French a little, German a little, and quote some Latin passages. He draws likewise, and formerly used to play on the guitar. He has begun to build himself an organ, which he offered to present to the church when completed, if I would give him the sole management of the choir. He had laid himself out to have none but the members of his own family in it, and depended on Phemie to lead; but she refused, and saved me the trouble and annoyance of declining. ‘Ah, there is the cloven foot peeping out,’ he said, as if delivering an oration; ‘the taint of aristocracy, which hates to do anything for the democracy, appearing.’”
“And what the deuce did he mean?” asked Captain Stondon, bewildered.
“Why, he meant, I suppose, that she didn’t care to sing, and that there was good blood in her veins. I fancy she is illegitimate. He is alwaysraving against the better classes—quite a character, I assure you.”
“Do your mountains grow many such?” asked his guest.
“He is not a home product,” was the reply. “Erratic genius of that description is not indigenous to the Cumberland soil. He is from Hereford, and his present wife is Lancashire, and his niece Scotch. His first wife was Scotch also, I fancy, and he has a tribe of young Agglands, sturdy, independent children of the hills. It is a strange household altogether, and one that, could I persuade you to stay with me, I should take you to see.”
“Thank you,” said Captain Stondon; “but I must leave Cumberland to-morrow. I am going first to Norfolk, and then abroad. I shall always think pleasantly,” he added, after a pause, “of the valley of Tordale; always retain a memory of the happy Sunday afternoon I have spent with you.” And with that, as it was now getting on towards the hour for evening service, and as he had far to walk before he could reach Grassenfel and his inntogether, the officer rose to go, but his intention was overruled by his host.
“I will not ask you,” he said, “to come to church, because, if you must return to Grassenfel to-night, it would throw you too late on the road; but walk back with me to the waterfall, and then I will show you a path which runs right along the side of Helbeck for a couple of miles at least. You can form no idea of the beauty and grandeur of the defile till you have seen it from above, and the path, an easy one, leads down to the road you came by before you reach the Broken Stone bridge. The view from the top is worth seeing. I only wish this was Monday instead of Sunday, so that I could go with you myself.”
Having made which frank confession the clergyman tookout his sermon, put on his hat, took his stick, and announced his readiness to depart.
“I can accompany you a little way up the path,” he said; and accordingly the pair sallied out again together, and sauntered through the green vale side by side.
If Tordale had looked lovely in the noon time, it was more beautiful still in the soft evening light. It wanted then nearly an hour to sunset, but the western sky was already like molten gold. Down the hill-sides long shadows were lying; still, sad, and stern looked the mountain peaks, with each jagged projection—each sharp outline—clearly reflected against the evening sky. A cloud frowned over Helbeck, which betokened a storm, the clergyman thought.
“But it is scarcely warm enough for thunder,” he added; “and unless the wind dies away we shall not have any rain before morning. Is not our valley lovely, Captain Stondon? When you are abroad—when you are looking at what is considered far more magnificent scenery,—will you ever think, I wonder, of our little nook hidden away among the Cumberland hills?”
“I shall never forget Tordale,” answered the officer, truthfully enough; but little knowing how truthfully, for all that.
In the after days of joy and of sorrow which he was then walking on, to pass through to reachthe end, he forgot the name of many a town—he forgot the road by which he had travelled to many a city; mountain passes, smiling lakes, the weariness of Indian marches, gorgeous Eastern palaces, the brilliancy of Eastern flowers—these things were forgotten, or remembered only as a man remembers dreams. The Hindoo standing by his sacred river, the Arabs in the desert, the long line of foam that alone broke the eternity of waters as the outward-bound ship cleft her way to the Cape, the tramp of the sailors as they paced the deck, the faces of his old comrades faded, as the years stole on out of sight and out of mind; but clear and distinct, like the memory of his mother’s face—like the recollection of his boyhood’s home—Tordale stood out a picture hung on the walls of his heart for ever.
He was never to forget it—never to forget the glory of its noontide, the murmur of its waterfall, the calm of its lonely graveyard, the ivy, the ferns, the foxglove and the broom. In the loneliness and solitude of night he was to feel the calm of that scene soothe his spirit once again.He had but to close his eyes, and he could hear the dull plash of the waterfall, the rustling of the leaves, the mourning farewell of the rivulet. He could look at the long wet blades of grass bending ever and always into the water, and turning down the stream as though wanting to be pulled from their roots, that they might float away and away with the brook, first to the river and then to the sea. He could hear the water trickling among the stones; he could touch the moss with his powerless fingers; he could feel the cool drops touching his parched lips; he could remember how he had drained a deep draught from the basin in the rock; and then he would think likewise, if he hasted not to exorcise the evil thought, of his unavailing petition, of the prayer which had been granted to the letter, not in the spirit, to add to his troubles rather than to increase his joy.