As men count prosperity, John Rosewarne had lived prosperously. He had a philosophy, too, to steel him against the blows of fate, and behind his philosophy a great natural courage. Nevertheless, as he gazed across his acres for the last time—knowing well that it might be the last—and across them to Damelioc, the wider acres of his stewardship, his eyes for one weak moment grew dim. He had reached the stile at the summit of Parc-an-hal, and was leaning there, when he felt a cool, damp touch upon his fingers. The little greyhound, puzzled at his standing there so long motionless, had reached up on her hind legs, and was licking his hand affectionately.
He frowned, pushed her off, and started to descend the hill. Night was falling fast, with a heavy dew. The children had left their play and crept to bed. They never sought him to say good-night.
He returned slowly, leaning on his staff, went to his room, lit the lamp, and spent a couple of hours with his papers. This had become his nightly habit of late.
On Wednesday he arose early, packed a hand-bag, crossed the ferry, and took train for Plymouth.
From the railway station at Plymouth John Rosewarne walked straight to Lockyer Street, to a house with a brass plate on the door, and on the brass plate the name of a physician famous throughout the West of England.
The doctor had just come to the end of his morning consultations, and received Rosewarne at once. The pair talked for five minutes on indifferent matters, then of Paris, and the terrible doings of the Commune—for this was the month of May 1871. At length Rosewarne stood up.
"Best get it over," said he.
The doctor felt his pulse, took the stethoscope and listened, tapped and sounded him, back and chest, then listened again.
"Worse?" asked Rosewarne.
"It is worse," answered the doctor gravely.
"I knew it. One or two in my family have died in the same way. The pains are sharper of late, and more frequent."
"You keep that little phial handy?"
Rosewarne showed where it lay, close at hand in his watch-pocket.
"How long?" he asked.
"A few months, perhaps." The doctor seemed to hesitate.
"And you won't answer forthat?"
"With care. It is folly for a man like you to be overworking."
Rosewarne laughed grimly. "You're right there, and I've often enough asked myself why I do it. To what end, good Lord! But I'm taking no care, all the same. Good-bye."
"Good-bye, my friend." The doctor did not remonstrate further. He knew his man.
From Lockyer Street Rosewarne walked to his hotel, ordered a beef-steak and a pint of champagne, and lunched leisurably. Lunch over, he lit a cigar, and strolled in the direction of the Barbican. The streets were full of holiday-keepers, and he counted a dozen brakes full of workers pouring out of town to breathe the air of Dartmoor on this fine afternoon. He himself was conscious of elation.
"I'll drink it regularly," he muttered to himself. "It's hard if a man with maybe a month more to live cannot afford himself champagne."
The air in Southside Street differed from that of Dartmoor, being stuffy, not to say malodorous. He rapped on the door of a dingy office, and it was opened by his son, Mr. Samuel Rosewarne.
"How d'ye do, Sam?" he nodded, not offering to shake hands. "All alone? That's right. I hope, by the way, I'm not depriving you of a holiday?"
"I seldom take a holiday," Mr. Sam answered.
The old man eyed him ironically. Mr. Sam wore a black suit, with some show of dingy white shirt-front, relieved by a wisp of black cravat and two onyx studs. His coat-cuffs were long and frayed, and his elastic-side boots creaked as he led the way to the office.
In the office the old man came to business at once. "First of all," said he, with a nod toward the safe, "I'd like a glance into your books."
"Certainly, sir," answered Mr. Sam, after a moment's hesitation. He unlocked the safe. "Do you wish to take the books in order? You will find it a long business."
"Man, I don't propose to audit your accounts. If you let me pick and choose, half an hour will tell me all I want."
Well knowing that his son detested the smell of tobacco, he pulled out another cigar and lit it. "You can open the window," said he, "if you prefer the smell of your street. Is this the pass-book?"
For about three-quarters of an hour he ransacked the ledgers, tracking casual entries from one to another apparently at random. His fingers raced through the pages. Now and again he looked up to put a sharp question; and paused, drumming on the table while Mr. Sam explained. Once he said, "Bad debt? Not a bit; the man was right enough, if you had made inquiries."
"Ididmake inquiries."
"Ay, into his balance. So you pinched him at the wrong moment, and pinched out ninepence in the pound. Why the devil couldn't you have learnt something of theman? Hewas all right. If you'd done that, you might have recovered every penny, earned his gratitude, and done dashed good business."
He shut the ledger with a slam. "Lock 'em up," he commanded, lighting a fresh cigar, "and come up to the Hoe for a stroll. Where the deuce did you pick up that hat?"
"Bankrupt stock."
"I thought so. Maybe you've invested in a full suit of mourning forme, at the same time?"
"No, sir."
"Why not? The books are all right. You've no range. Still, within your scope you're efficient. You'll get to your goal, such as it is. You wear a hat that makes me ill, but in some way you and your hat will represent the survival of the fittest. What's the boy like?"
"He ails at times, sir—being without a mother's care. I am having him privately instructed. He has some youthful stirrings toward grace."
Old Rosewarne swung round at a standstill. "Grace?" he echoed, for the moment supposing it the name of a girl. Then perceiving his mistake, he broke out into a short laugh; but the laugh ended bitterly, and his face twitched with pain.
"Look here, Sam; I'm going to leave you the money. Don't stare—and don't, I beg, madden me with your thanks."—
"I'm sure, sir."—
"You'll get it because I can't help myself. There's your half-sister's children at home; but of what use to me is a girl or a blind boy? You are narrow—narrow as the grave: but I find that, like the grave, you are inevitable; and, like the grave, you keep what you get. For the kind of finance that was the true game of manhood to your grandfather and me, you have no capacity whatever. No, I cannot explain. Finance? Why, you haven't even asenseof it. Yet in a way you are capable. You will make the money yield interest, and will keep the race going. That is what I look to—you will keep the race going. Now I want to speak about that boy of yours. Do me the only favour I have ever asked you—send him to a public school, and afterwards to college, and let him have his fling."
Sam thought his father must have gone mad. "What, sir! After all you have said of such places! 'Dens of idleness,' 'sinks of iniquity'—I have heard you scores of times!"
"I spoke as a fool. 'Twas my punishment, perhaps, to believe it; but, Lord!"—he eyed his son up and down—"to think my punishment should take this form!" He caught Sam's arm suddenly and wheeled him about in face of a glass shop-front. "Man, look at yourself! Make the boy something different fromthat!Do what I'd have done for you if ever you had given me a chance. Turn him loose among gentlemen; don't be afraid if he idles and wastes money; let him riot out his youth if he will—he'll be learning all the time, learning something you don't know how to teach, and maybe when his purse is emptied he'll come back to you a gentleman. I tell you there's no difference in the world like that between a gentleman and a man who's not a gentleman. Money can't buy it; and, after the start, money can't change or hide it. The thing is there, or it isn't."
"Whatever the thing is," said Sam sullenly, "you are asking me to peril my son's soul for it."
They had reached the Hoe by this time. John Rosewarne dropped upon a bench and sat resting both hands on his staff and gazing over the twinkling waters of the Sound.
"Anne married a gentleman," pursued Sam.
"Ay, and a rake. A-ah!" muttered the old man after a moment, drawing a long breath, "if only that boy of hers weren't blind! But he doesn't carry the name, whileyou."—He broke off with a savage laugh. "What's that you said a moment ago?—something about immortal souls."
"I said there's a world beyond this, and,"—
"Is there? That's what I'm concerned to know just now. Andyou?What are you proposing to do when you get there?" He withdrew his eyes from the bright seascape and let them travel slowly over his son. "You!sitting there like a blot on God's sunshine! By what right should you expect another world, who have cut such a figure in this one? I have known love and lust, and drink and hard work and hard fighting; I have been down in the depths, and again I have known moments to make a man smack his hands together for joy to be alive and doing. But you? What kind of man are you, you son of mine? What do you live for? Why did you marry? And what did you and your poor woman find to talk about?"
Whatever bullying Sam suffered, he had his revenge in this—that he and no other man could exasperate his father to weakness. He rubbed his thin side whiskers now and muttered something about 'an acceptable sacrifice.'
The old man jabbed viciously at the gravel with his staff. "And your religion?" he broke forth again. "What is it? In some secret way it satisfies you—but how? I look into the Bible, and I find that the whole of religion rests on a man's giving himself away to help others. I don't believe in it myself; I believe in the exact contrary. Still there the thing is, set out in black and white. It upsets law and soldiering and nine-tenths of men's doings in trade: to me it's folly; but so it stands, honest as daylight. When didyouhelp a man down on his luck? or forgive your debtor? You'll get my money because you never did aught of the kind. Yet somehow you're a Christian, and prate of your mean life as an acceptable sacrifice. In my belief you're a Christian precisely because Christianity—how you work it out I don't know—will give you a sanction for any dirty trick that comes in your way. When good feeling, or even common honour, denies you, there's always a text somewhere to oil your conscience."
"I've one, sir, on which I can rely—'Be just, and fear not.'"
"I'll test it. You'll have my money; on which you hardly dared to count, eh? Be honest."
"Only on so much of it as is entailed, sir."
For a while John Rosewarne sat silent, with his eyes on the horizon.
"That," said he at length, "is just what you could not count on." He turned and looked Sam squarely in the face. "You were born out of wedlock, my son."
Sam's hand gripped the iron arm of the bench. The muscles of his face scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a sickly drab.
"Ay," pursued the old man, "I am sorry for you at this moment; but you mustn't look for apologies and repentance and that sort of thing. The fact is, I never could feel about it in that way. I was young and fairly wild, and it happened. One doesn't think of possible injury to someone who doesn't yet exist. But that, I grant you, doesn't make it any the less an injury. Now what have you to say?"
"The sins of the fathers."—
"—Are visited on the children: quite so. Afterwards we did our best, and married. No one knows; no one has ever guessed; and the proof would be hard to trace. In case of accident, I give you Port Royal for a clue."
Sam rose and stood for a moment staring gloomily down on the gravel. "Why did you tell me, then?" he broke out. "What need was there to tell?"
His father winced, for the first time. "I see your point. Why didn't I, you ask, having played the game so far, play it out? Why couldn't I take my secret with me into the last darkness, and be judged for it—my own sole sin and complete? Well, but there's the blind child. By law the house and home estate would he his. I might have kept silence, to be sure, and let him be robbed; but somehow I couldn't. I've a conscience somewhere, I suppose."
"Have you?" Sam flamed out, with sudden spirit. "A nice sort of conscience it must be! I call it cowardice, this dragging me in to help you compensate the child. Conscience? If you had one, you wouldn't be shifting the responsibility on to mine."
"You are mistaken," said his father calmly. "And by the way, I advise you not to take that tone with me. It may all be very proper under the circumstances; but there's the simple fact that I won't stand it. You're mistaken," he repeated. "I mean to settle the compensation alone, without consulting you; though, by George! if 'tweren't for pitying the poor child, I'd like to leave it to you as a religious man, and watch you developing your reasons for giving him nothing."
"And it was you," muttered Sam, with a kind of stony wonder, "who advised me just now to let my son run wild!"
"I did, and I do." John Rosewarne stood up and gripped his staff. "By the way, too," he said, "your mother was a good woman."
"I don't want to hear anything about it."
"I know; but I wanted to tell you. Good-bye." He turned abruptly and went his way down the hill. As he went, his lips moved. He was talking not to himself, but to an unseen companion—
"Mary! Mary!—that this should be the fruit of our sowing!"
Beside the winding Avon above Warwick bridge there stretches a flat meadow, along the brink of which on a summer evening you may often count a score of anglers seated and watching their floats; decent citizens of Warwick, with a sprinkling of redcoats from the garrison. They say that two-thirds of the Trappist brotherhood are ex-soldiers; and perhaps if we knew the reason we might also know why angling has a peculiar fascination for the military.
Angling was but a pretext, however, with a young corporal of the 6th Regiment, who sat a few yards away on John Rosewarne's right, and smoked his pipe, and cast frequent furtive glances, now along the river path, now back and across the meadow where another path led from the town. Each of these glances ended in a resentful stare at his too-near neighbour, who fished on unregarding.
"Is this a favourite corner of yours?" the corporal asked after a while, with meaning.
"I have fished on this exact spot for thirty-five years," answered John Rosewarne, not lifting his eyes from the float.
The corporal whistled. "Thirty-five years! It's queer, now, that I never set eyes on you before—and I come here pretty often."
Rosewarne let a full minute go by before he answered again. "There's nothing queer about it, Unless you've been stationed long in Warwick."
"Best part of a year."
"Quite so: I fish in Avon once a year only."
"Belong to the town?"
"No; nor within two hundred miles of it."
"You must think better of the sport than I do, to come all that distance."
John Rosewarne lifted his eyes for the first time and turned them upon the young man.
"Whatsport?" he asked.
"Eh? Why, fishing, to be sure. What else?" stammered the corporal, taken aback.
"Tut!" said the old man curtly. "Here she comes. Now, what are you going to do?"
Without waiting for an answer, he bent his gaze on the float again, and kept it fastened there, as a pretty shop-girl came strolling along the river path. She had taken off her hat, of broad-brimmed straw with artificial poppies and cornflowers, and swung it in her hand as she came. Her eyes roamed the landscape carelessly, avoiding only that particular spot where the corporal, as she approached, scrambled to his feet; then, her start of surprise was admirable.
"Oh, it'syou!Good-evening."
"Good-evening, miss."
"Why, whoever—! It seems to me you spend most of your time fishing."
She paused, gathering in her skirt a little—and this obviously was the cue for a gallant soldier. The corporal began, indeed, to wind up his line, but with a foolish grin and a glance at Rosewarne's back.
"It keeps beautiful weather," he answered at length.
"Icall it sultry." She held out her hat with a little deprecating laugh. "I took it off for the sake of fresh air," she explained. Then, as he stood stock-still, a flush crept up her cheek to her pretty forehead.
"Well, good-evening; I won't interrupt you by talking," she said, and began to move away.
Come to think of it, itdolook like thunder, "the corporal remarked to Rosewarne, staring after her and then up at the sky.
"If you had eyes in your head, you'd have seen that without her telling you. That cloud yonder has been rising against the wind for an hour. Look you along the bank, how every man Jack is unjointing his rod and making for home. Go, and leave me in peace!"
He did not turn his head even when the corporal, having packed together his gear, wished him good-night and hurried after the print frock as it vanished in the twilit shadows. One or two of the departing anglers paused as they went by to promise him that a storm was imminent and the fish had ceased feeding. He thanked them, yet sat on—solitary, in the leaden dusk.
The scene he had just witnessed—how it called up the irremediable past, with all the memories which had drawn him hither, summer after summer! And yet how common it was and minutely unimportant! Nightly by the banks of Avon couples had been courting—thousands in these thirty-five years— each of them dreaming, poor fools, that their moment's passion held the world in its hands. But the world teemed with rivers ten times lordlier than Avon—rivers stretching out in an endless map, with bridges on which lovers met and whispered, with banks down which they went with linked arms into the shadows—
"Were I but young for thee, as I hae been,We should hae been gallopin' doun in yon green,And linkin' it owre the lily-white lea—And wow gin I were but young for thee!"
"Were I but young for thee, as I hae been,We should hae been gallopin' doun in yon green,And linkin' it owre the lily-white lea—And wow gin I were but young for thee!"
"Were I but young for thee, as I hae been,We should hae been gallopin' doun in yon green,And linkin' it owre the lily-white lea—And wow gin I were but young for thee!"
He had been young, and had loved and wronged a woman, and bitterly repented. He had married her, and marriage had killed neither love nor remorse. The woman was dead long since: he had married again, but never forgotten her nor ceased to repent. She, a pretty tradesman's daughter of Warwick, had collected her savings and taken ship for the West Indies, trusting to his word, facing a winter's passage in the sole hope that he would right her. Until the day of embarking she had never seen the sea; and the sea, after buffeting her to the verge of death, in the end betrayed her. A gale delayed the ship, and in the height of it her child was born. Rosewarne, a private soldier, went to his captain, as soon as she was landed, made a clean breast of it, and married her. But it was too late. She lived to return with him to England; but he knew well enough when she died that her sufferings on the passage out, and the abiding anguish of her shame, had killed her. A common tale! Men and women still go the way of their instinct, by which the race survives. "All the rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea is not full. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done."
A tale as common as sunset! Yet upon all rivers and upon every bridge and willow-walk along their courses the indifferent sun shines for each pair of fools with a difference, lighting their passion with a separate flame. The woman was dead; and he—he that had been young—sat face to face with death.
He leaned forward, oblivious of the clouded dusk, with his half-shut eyes watching the grey gleam of the river; but his mind's eye saw the shadowy mead behind him, and a girlish figure crossing it with feet that seemed to faint, holding her back from doom, yet to be impelled against their will.
They drew nearer. He heard their step, and faced about with a start. An actual woman stood there on the river path, most like in the dusk to that other of thirty-five years ago; but whereasshehad worn a print frock, this one was clad in total black.
"Mr. Rosewarne,"—she began; but her words came to a halt, checked by a near flash of lightning and by what it revealed.
He was in the act of rising—had risen, in fact, on one knee—when a spasm of pain took him, and his hand went up to his breast. For a moment he knelt so, turning on her a face of anguish; then sank and dropped in a heap at her feet.
Quick as thought she was down on her knees beside him, and, slipping an arm beneath his head, drew it upon her lap. While with swift fingers she loosened his collar and neckcloth, a peal of thunder rumbled out, and the first large raindrops fell splashing on her hand. She recalled that last gesture of his, and with sudden inspiration searched in his breast-pocket, found and drew out a small phial, uncorked it, and forced the liquid between his teeth before they clenched in a second spasm. Two or three sharp flashes followed the first. In the glare of them her eyes searched along the river-bank, if haply help might be near; but all the anglers had departed. Rosewarne's face stared up at her, blue as a dead man's in the dazzling light. At first it seemed to twitch with each opening of the heavens; but this must have been a trick of eyesight, for his head lay quiet against her arm as she raised him a little, shielding him against the torrential rain which now hissed down, in ten seconds drenching her to the skin, blotting out river and meadow in a sheet of grey. It forced her to stoop her shoulders, and, so covering him, she put out a hand and laid it over his heart. Yes, it beat, though feebly. Once more she picked up the phial and gave him to drink, and in a little while he stirred feebly and found his voice.
"Rain? Is it rain?" he muttered.
"Yes; but I can spread my skirt over you. It will keep off a little. Are you better?"
"Better? Yes, better. Let me feel the rain—it does me good." He lay silent for a minute or so. "I shall be right again in a few minutes. Did you find the phial?"
"Yes."
"Good girl. It was touch and go." By and by he made a movement to sit up. "Let us get home quickly. You can throw the rod into the river. I shan't want it again."
But she stood up, and, groping for the rod, drew the float ashore, and untackled it, still in the hissing rain. The storm, after a brief lull, had redoubled its rage. The darkness opened and shut as with a rapidly moving slide, the white battlements of Caesar's Tower gleaming and vanishing above the castle elms, and reappearing while their fierce candour yet blinded the eye. The thunder-peals, blending, wrapped Warwick as with one roar of artillery. Rosewarne had risen, and stood panting. He grasped her shoulder. "Come!" he commanded. The girl, dazzled by the lightning, puzzled by his sudden renewal of strength, turned and peered at him. He declined her arm. They walked back across the sodden meadow to the town, over the roofs of which, as the storm passed away northward, the lightning yet glimmered at intervals, turning the gaslights to a dirty orange.
At the summit of the High Street, hard by the Leycester Hospital, they came to the doorway of a small shuttered shop, over which by the light of a street lamp one could read the legend, "J. Marvin, Secondhand Bookseller." The girl opened the door with a latchkey. An oil lamp burned in an office at the back of the shop—if that can be spoken of as a separate room which was, in fact, entirely walled off with books laid flat and rising in stacks from the floor. The place, in fact, suggested a cave or den rather than a shop, with stalagmites of piled literature and a subtle pervading odour of dust and decayed leather. The girl, after shutting the bolts behind her, led the way cautiously, and, crossing a passage at the rear of the shop, opened a door upon a far more cheerful scene. Here, in a neat parlour hung with old prints and mezzotints and water-colours, a hanging lamp shed its rays on a China bowl heaped with Warwickshire roses, and on a white cloth and a table spread for supper.
"H'm!" grunted Rosewarne, glancing in through the doorway, while she lit a candle for him at the foot of the stairs. "Your father and I used to sup in the kitchen, with old Selina to wait on us."
"But since there is no longer any Selina! I had to pension her off, poor old soul, and she is gone to the almshouse."
She handed him the light.
"Now, if you will go up to your room, I will fetch the hot water, and then you must give me your change of clothes. They shall be warmed for a few minutes at the kitchen fire, and you shall have them hot-and-hot."
"It seems to me that while all this is doing, you will stand an excellent chance of rheumatic fever."
"Oh, I shall be all right," she announced cheerfully. "No—don't look at me, please. I know very well that the dye has run out of these crapes, and my face is beautifully streaked with black! Can you walk upstairs alone? Very well. And if you feel another attack coming, you are to call me at once."
She must have been expeditious; for when he came downstairs again he found her awaiting him in the parlour, clad in a frock of duffel-grey, which, with her damp, closely plaited hair, gave her a Quakerish look. Yet the frock became her; the natural wave of her hair, defying moisture, showed here and there rebelliously, and her cheeks glowed after a vigorous towelling.
Rosewarne drew from under his coat a bottle of champagne, and set it on the table, where the lamp's ray fell full on its gold foil. Her eyes opened wide; for he had always visited this house in his oldest clothes and passed for a poor man.
"Since you insist upon the parlour," said he, "I must try to live up to it." He produced a knife from his pocket, with a pair of nippers, and began to cut the wire. "Why are you wearing grey?" he demanded.
She flushed. "This is my school frock. I have only one suit of mourning as yet."
"And you sent away Selina. You wanted money, I suppose?"
"No," she answered, after a moment, meeting his eyes frankly; "at least, not in the way you mean. The doctor's bills were heavy, and for years father had done business enough to keep the roof over him and no more. So at first there was—well, a pinch. The books will sell, of course; two honest men are already bidding for them—one at Birmingham and the other at Bristol. But meanwhile I must pinch a little or run in debt. I hate debt."
"And afterwards?" Rosewarne broke off sharply, with a glance around the table. "But, excuse me, you have laid for one only."
"If it is your pleasure, Mr. Rosewarne."—
"Say that I claim it as an honour, Miss Hester," he answered, with a mock-serious bow.
She laughed, and ran off to the pantry.
"And afterwards?" he resumed, as they seated themselves.
"Afterwards? Oh, I go back to the teaching. I like it, you know."
He brimmed her glass with champagne, then filled his own. "You saved my life just now, Miss Hester; and life is good to look forward to, even when a very little remains. I drink to your happiness."
"Thank you, sir."
"How old are you?"
"I shall be twenty-five in August."
"And how long have you been teaching?"
"Eight years."
"Ah! is it eight years since I came and missed you? I remember, the last time we three supped together—you and your father and I—I remember taking note of you, and telling myself, 'She will be married before I return next year.' Why haven't you married?"
It was the essence of Hester Marvin's charm that she dealt straightly with all people.
"It takes two to make even that quarrel," she answered frankly and gaily. "Will you believe that nobody has ever asked me?"
"Make light of it if you will, but I bid you to beware. You were a good-looking missie, and you have grown—yes, one can say it without making you simper—into a more than good-looking woman. But the days slip by, child, and your looks will slip away with them. You are wasting your life in worrying over other folk's children. Those eyes of yours were meant for children of your own. What's more, you are muddling the world's work. Which do you teach now—boys or girls?"
"Girls for the most part; but I have a class of small boys."
"And what do you teach 'em—I mean, as the first and most important thing?"
Hester knit her brows for a moment before answering. "Well, I suppose, to be honourable to one another and gentle to their sisters."
"Just so. In other words, you relieve a mother of her proper duty. Who but a mother ought to teach a boy those things, if he's ever to learn 'em? That's what I call muddling the world's work. By the time a boy gets to school he ought to be ripe for a harder lesson, and learn that life's a fight in which brains and toil bring a man to the top. As for girls, one-half of present-day teaching is time and money thrown away. Teach 'em to be wives and mothers—to sew and cook."—
"Does your supper displease you, Mr. Rosewarne?"
He set down knife and fork with a comical stare around the board.
"Eh? No—but did you really—?"
Their eyes met, and they both broke into a laugh.
"I should very much like to know," said Hester, resting her elbows on the table and gazing at him over her folded hands, "ifyouhave treated life as a fight in which men get the better of their neighbours."
He eyed her with sudden, sharp suspicion.
"You have at any rate a woman's curiosity," said he. "When you wrote to me that your father was dead, but that I might have, for the last time, my usual lodging here, had you any reason to suppose me a rich man?"
"I think," answered Hester slowly, after a pause, "that I must have spoken so as to hurt you somehow. If so, I am sorry; but you must hear now just why I wrote. I knew that, ever since I was born, and long before, you had come once a year and lodged here for a night. I knew that you came because my father was the parish clerk and let you spend the night in St Mary's Church; and I know that, though he allowed it secretly, you did no harm there, else he would never have allowed it. Now he is dead, and meanwhile I keep the keys by the parson's wish until a new parish clerk is appointed. And so I wrote, thinking to serve you for one year more as my father had served you for many."
"I thank you, Miss Hester, and I beg your pardon. Yet there is a question I need to ask, though you may very properly refuse to answer it. Beyond my name and address and my yearly visits, what do you know of me?"
"Nothing at all."
"You must have wondered why I should do this strange thing, year by year?"
"To wonder is not to be inquisitive. Of course I have wondered; but I supposed that you came to strengthen yourself in some purpose, or to keep alive a memory—of someone dear to you, perhaps. Into what has brought you to us year after year I have no wish at all to pry. But there is a look on your face—and when children come to me with that look they are unhappy with some secret, and want to be understood without having to tell all particulars. A schoolmistress gets to know that look, and recognises it sometimes in grown-up folk, even in quite old persons. Yes, and there is another look on your face. You are not strong enough to go alone to the church to-night, and you know it."
"I am going, I tell you."
He had pushed back his chair, and answered her, after a long pause, during which he watched her removing the cloth.
"To-morrow you may have recovered; but to-night you are faint from that attack. If you really must go, will you not let me go too, and take my promise neither to look nor to listen?"
"Get me the key," he commanded, and walked obstinately to the door. But there his strength betrayed him. He put out a hand against the jamb. "I am no better than a child," he groaned, and turned weakly to her. "Come if you will, girl. There is nothing to see, nothing to overhear."
She fetched cloak and bonnet and found the great keys. He and she stepped out by a back entrance upon a lane leading to the church. The storm had passed. Aloft, in a clear space of the sky, the moon rode and a few stars shone down whitely, as if with freshly washed faces. Hester carried a dark lantern under her cloak; but, within, the church was light enough for Rosewarne to grope his way to his accustomed pew. Hester saw him take his seat there, and choosing a pew at some distance, in the shadow of the south aisle, dropped on her knees.
Nothing happened. The tall figure in the chancel sat motionless. Rosewarne did not even pray—since he did not believe in God. But because a woman, now long dead, had believed and had implored him to believe also, that they two might one day meet in heaven, he consecrated this night to her, sitting in the habitation of her faith, keeping his gaze upon that spot in the darkness where on a bright Sunday morning a young soldier had caught sight of her and met her eyes for the first time. Year after year he had kept this vigil, concentrating his thought upon her and her faith; but never for an instant had that faith come near to touching him, except with a sentimental pity which he rejected, despising it; never had he come near to piercing the well of that mysterious comfort and releasing its waters. To him the dust of the great dead yonder in the Beauchamp Chapel—dust of men and women who had died in faith—was dust merely, arid, unbedewed by any promise of a life beyond. They had played their parts, and great tombs and canopies covered their final nothingness. This was the last time he would watch, and to-night he knew there was less chance than ever of any miracle; for weariness weighed on him, and the thought of coming annihilation held no terror, but only an invitation to be at rest.
From the tower overhead the airy chimes floated over Warwick, beating out a homely tune to mingle with homely dreams. He sat on, nor stirred.
The June dawn broke, with the twittering of birds in the churchyard. He stood up and stretched himself, with a frown for the painted windows with their unreal saints and martyrs. His footsteps as he walked down the aisle did not arouse the girl, who slept in the corner of the pew, with her loosened hair pencilling, as the dawn touched it, lines of red-gold light upon the dark panels. Her face was pale, and sleep gave it a childlike beauty. He understood, as he stooped and touched her shoulder, why the apparition of her on the river-bank had so startled him.
"Come, child," he said; "the night is over."
A strange impatience haunted Rosewarne on his homeward journey; an almost intolerable longing to arrive and get something over—he scarcely knew what. When at length he stood on the ferry slipway, with but a furlong or two of water between him and home, the very tranquillity of the scene irritated him subtly—the slow strength of the evening tide, the few ships idle at their moorings, the familiar hush of the town resting after its day's business. He tapped his foot on the cobbles as though this fretful action could quicken Uncle Nicky Vro, who came rowing across deliberately as ever, working his boat down the farther shore and then allowing the tide to slant it upstream to the landing-place.
"Eh? So 'tis you?" was Nicky's greeting. "Well, and I hope that you've enjoyed your holiday—not that I know, for my part, what a holiday means."
"It's time you took one, then," Rosewarne answered.
The old man chuckled. "Pretty things would happen if I did! 'Took a day off, one time, to marry my old woman, and another to bury her, and that's all in five-and-forty year. Not a day's sickness in all that time, thank the Lord!"
Rosewarne watched the old fellow's feeble digging stroke. "I preach capability," he said to himself, "and this is the sort of thing I allow!" His gaze travelled from the oar to the oarsman. "You're getting past your work, all the same," he said aloud. "What does it feel like?"
"Eh?"
"To give up life little by little. Some men run till they drop—are still running strong, maybe, when the grave opens at their feet, and in they go. With you 'tis more like the crumbling of rotten timber; a little dribble of sawdust day by day to show where the worms are boring. What does it feel like?"
"I don't feel it at all," Nicky answered cheerfully. "Folks tell me from time to time that I'm getting past. My own opinion is, they're in a greater hurry to get to market than of yore. 'Competition '—that's a cry sprung up since my young days: it used to be 'Religion,' and 'Nicholas Vro, be you a saved man?' The ferry must ply, week-day or Sabbath: I put it to you, What time have I got to be a saved man? The Lord is good, says I. Now I'll tell you a fancy of mine about Him. One day He'll come down to the slip calling 'Over!' and whiles I put Him across—scores of times I've a-seen myself doing it, and 'tis always in the cool of the evening after a spell of summer weather—He'll speak up like a gentleman, and ask, 'Nicholas Vro, how long have you been a-working this here boat?' 'Lord,' I'll answer, 'for maybe a matter of fifty year, calm or blow, week-days and Sabbaths alike; and that's the reason your Honour has missed me up to church, as you may have noticed.' 'You must be middlin' tired of it,' He'll say: and I shall answer up, 'Lord, if you say so, I don't contradict 'ee; but 'tis no bad billet for a man given to chat with his naybours and talk over the latest news and be sociable, and warning to leave don't come from me.' 'You'd best give me over they oars, all the same,' He'll say; and with that I shall hand 'em over and be rowed across to a better world."
Rosewarne was not listening. "Surely, man, the tide's slack enough by this time!" he interrupted, his irritation again overcoming him. "You needn't be fetching across sideways, like a crab."
Nicky Rested on his oars, and stared at him for a moment. As if Rosewarne or any man alive could teachhimhow to pull the ferry! He disdained to argue.
"Talking about news," said he, resuming his stroke, "theVirtuous Ladyarrived yesterday, and began to unload this morning. You can see her top-m'sts down yonder, over the town quay."
"Has Mrs. Purchase been ashore?" Mrs. Purchase was Rosewarne's only sister, who had married a merchant skipper and sailed with him ever since in theVirtuous Lady, in which she held a preponderance of the shares.
"Came ashore this very afternoon in a bonnet as large as St. Paul's, with two-thirds of a great hummingbird a-top. She's balancing up the freight accounts at this moment with Peter Benny. Indeed, master, you'll find a plenty of folk have been inquiring for 'ee. There's the parson for one. To my knowledge he've been down three times to ask when you'd be back, and if you'd forgotten the School Managers' meeting, that's fixed for to-morrow." Uncle Nicky brought his boat at length to shore. "And there's Aun' Butson in terror that you'll be bringing in some stranger to teach the children, and at her door half the day listening for your footstep, to petition 'ee."
Somehow Rosewarne had promised himself that the restlessness would leave him as soon as he reached his own side of the water. He stepped ashore and began to walk up the slipway at a brisk pace; and then on a sudden his brain harked backward to Uncle Nicky's talk, to which a minute before he had listened so inattentively. In his hurry he had let an opportunity pass. The old man had talked of death; had been on the point of saying something important, perhaps—for all that concerned death and men's views of death had become important now. He halted and turned irresolutely. But the moment had gone by.
"Good-night!" he called back, and resumed his way up the village street.
Uncle Nicky, bending to replace a worn thole-pin with a new one, dropped the pair with a clatter. In all his experience Rosewarne had never before flung him a salutation.
"And a minute ago trying to tell me how to work the ferry!" the old man muttered, staring after him. "The man must be ailing."
As a hunted deer puts the water between him and the hounds, Rosewarne had hoped to shake off his worry at the ferry-crossing. But no; it dogged him yet as he mounted the hill. Only, as a dreamer may suffer the horror of nightmare, yet know all the while that it is a dream, he felt the impatience and knew it for a vain thing. All his life he had been hurrying desperately, and all his life the true moments had offered themselves and been left ungrasped.
Before the doorway of a cottage halfway up the hill an old woman waited to intercept him—Aunt Butson, the village schoolmistress. She was a spinster well over sixty, and lodged with a widow woman, Sarah Trevarthen, to whom the cottage belonged.
Rosewarne frowned at the sight of her. She wore her best cap and shawl, and her cheeks were flushed. Behind her in the doorway sat a young sailor, with a cage on the ground beside him and a parrot perched on his forefinger close against his cheek. He glanced up with a shy, very good-natured smile, touched his forelock to Rosewarne, and went on whispering to the bird.
Aunt Butson stepped out into the roadway. "Good-evening, Mr. Rosewarne, and glad to see you back and in health!" She dropped him a curtsey. "If you've a minute to spare, sir."—
Confound the woman!—he had no minutes to spare. Still frowning, he looked over her head at the young sailor, Sarah Trevarthen's boy Tom, home from his Baltic voyage in theVirtuous Lady. Yes, it was Tom Trevarthen, now a man grown. Rosewarne remembered him as a child in frocks, tumbling about the roadway; as an urchin straddling a stick; as a lad home (with this same parrot) from his first voyage. Who, in a world moving at such a pace, could have a minute to spare?
Aunt Butson had plunged into her petition, and was voluble. It concerned the new schools, of course. "She had taught reading, writing, and ciphering for close on forty years. All the children in the village, and nine-tenths of their parents for that matter, owed their education to her. A little she could do, too, in navigation—as Mr. Rosewarne well knew: enough to prepare a lad for schoolmaster Penrose across the water. Mr. Penrose would rather teach two boys from her school than one from any other parish. Surely—surely—the new Board wouldn't take the bread out of an old woman's mouth and drive her to the workhouse? She didn't believe, as some did, in this new-fangled education, and wouldn't pretend to. Arithmetic up to practice-sums and good writing and spelling— anything up to five syllables—were education enough to her mind for any child that knew his station in life. The rest of it only bred Radicals. Still, let her have a trial at least; let them decide to-morrow to give her a chance; 'twould be no more than neighbourly. Her ways might be old-fashioned; but she could learn. And with Mrs. Trevarthen to keep the grand new schoolroom dusted—if they would give her the job—and look after the fires and lighting."—
Rosewarne pretended to listen. The poor soul was inefficient, and he knew it: beneath all her flow of speech ran an undercurrent of wrath against the new learning and all its works. Poverty—sheer terror of a dwindling cupboard and the workhouse to follow—drove her to plead with that which she hated worse than the plague. He heard, and all the while his mind was miles away from her petition; for some chance word or words let fall by her had seemed for an instant to offer him a clue. Somewhere in the past these words had made part of a phrase or sentence which, could he but find it again, would resolve all this brooding trouble. He searched his memory—in vain; the words drew together like dancers in a figure, and then, on the edge of combining, fell apart and were lost.
Aloud he kept saying, "You mustn't count on it. Some provision will be made for you, no doubt—in these days one must march with the times." This was all the comfort she could win from him, and the poor old creature gazed after him forlornly when at length he broke from her and went his way up the hill.
He reached the entrance-gate. As it clashed behind him, two children at play in the garden lifted their heads. The girl whispered to the boy, and the pair stole away out of sight. From the porch the small greyhound caught sight of him, and, bounding to him, fawned about his feet. In the counting-house he found his sister closeted with Mr. Benny, and a pile of bills on the table between. Mrs. Purchase rose and greeted him with a little pecking kiss. She was a cheerful body, by some five or six years his junior, with a handsome weather-tanned face, eyes wrinkled at the corners like a seaman's, and two troubles in the world—the first being that she had borne no children. She shared her husband's voyaging, kept the ship's accounts, was known to all on board as "The Bos'un," and when battened under hatches in foul weather spent her time in trimming the most wonderful bonnets. Her coquetry stopped short at bonnets. To-day indeed—the weather being warm—in lieu of bodice she had slipped on a grey alpaca coat of her husband's.
"Good-evening, John!" She plunged at once into a narrative of the passage home—how they had picked up a slant off Heligoland and carried it with them well past the Wight; how on this side of Portland they had met with slight and baffling head-winds, and for two days had done little more than drift with the tides. The vessel was foul with weed, and must go into dock. "You could graze a cow on her for a fortnight," Mrs. Purchase declared. "Benny and I have just finished checking the bills. You'd like to run through them?"
"Let be," said Rosewarne. "I'll cast an eye over them to-night maybe." He stepped to the bell-rope and rang for his jug of cider.
Some touch of fatigue in the movement, some slight greyness in his face, caught Mrs. Purchase's sisterly eye.
"It's my belief you're unwell, John."
"Weary, my dear Hannah—weary; that's all." He turned to the little clerk. "That will do for to-night, Benny. You can leave all the papers as they are, just putting these bills together in a heap. Is that the correspondence? Very well; I'll deal with it."
"In all my life I never heard you own to feeling tired," persisted Mrs. Purchase, as Mr. Benny closed the door behind him. "You may take my word for it, you're unwell; been sleeping in some damp bed, belike."
Rosewarne moved to the window and gazed out across the garden. Down by the yew-hedge, where a narrow path of turf wound in and out among beds of tall Madonna lilies and Canterbury bells, the two children were playing a solemn game of follow-my-leader, the blind boy close on his sister's heels, she turning again and again to watch that he came to no harm.
"I wonder if that boy could be trained and made fit for something?" mused Rosewarne aloud.
"Eh? Is it Clem?" She had followed and stood now by his elbow. "My dear man, he has the brains of the family! Leave Myra to teach him for a while. See how she's teaching him now, although she doesn't know it; and that goes on from morning to night."
"Where's the use of it? What's a blind man, at the best?"
"What God means him to be. If God means him to do better—ay, or to see clearer—than other men, 'tisn't a pair of darkened eyes will prevent it."
"Woman's argument, Hannah. I take you on your own ground—God could cure the child's eyes; but God doesn't, you see. On the contrary, God chose to blind 'em. If I'd your religion, it would teach me that Clem's misfortune was a punishment designed—the sins of the fathers."—
"Ay, you're a hard man, like your father and mine. Haven't I cause to know it? Hadn'tshecause to know it—the mother of that pretty pair?"
"She made her bed."
"—And lies in it, poor soul. But I tell you, John, there's a worse blindness than Clem's, and you and father have suffered from it. I mean the blindness of thinking you know God's business so much better than God that you take it out of His hands. 'Punishment,' you say, and 'sins of the fathers'? I'd have you beware how you visit the past on poor Clem, or happen you may find some day that out of the sins of his fathers you have chosen your own to lay on him."
Rosewarne turned on her with a harsh glance of suspicion. No, her eyes were candid—she had spoken so by chance—she did not guess.
Had he been blind all his life? It was certain that now at the last his eyes saw the world differently, and all things in it. Those children yonder—a hundred times from this window he had watched them at play without heeding. To-night they moved against the dark yew-hedge like figures in a toy theatre, withdrawn within a shadowy world of their own, celebrating a ritual in which he had no concern. The same instant revealed their beauty and removed them beyond his reach. Did he wish to make amends? He could not tell. He only knew it was too late. The world was slipping away from him—these children with it—dissolving into the shadow that climbed about him.
Next morning he saddled his horse and rode. His way led him past the new school-buildings; and he reined up for a minute, while his eyes dwelt on them with a certain pride. As chairman of the new School Board he had chosen the architect, supervised the plans, and seen to it that the contractor used none but the best material. The school would compare with any in the Duchy, and should have a teacher worthy of it—one to open the children's eyes and proclaim and inculcate the doctrine of progress. John Rosewarne was a patriot in his unemotional way. He hated the drift of the rural population into the towns, foreseeing that it sapped the strength of England. He despised it too; his own experience telling him that a countryman might amass wealth if he had brains and used them. As for the brainless herd, they should be kept on the land at all cost, to grow strong, breed strong children, and, when the inevitable hour came, be used as fighters to defend England's wealth.
He rode on pondering, past uplands where the larks sang and the mowers whetted their scythes; down between honeysuckle-hedges to a small village glassing itself in the head waters of a creek, asleep, since all its grown inhabitants had climbed the hill to toil in the hay-harvest, and silent but for a few clucking fowls and a murmur of voices within the infants' school; thence across a bridge, and up and along a winding valley to the park gates at Damelioc. Beyond these the valley narrowed to a sylvan gorge, and the speckless carriage-road mounted under forest trees alongside a river tumbling in miniature cascades, swirling under mossy footbridges, here and there artfully delayed to form a trout-pool, or as artfully veiled by thickets of trailing wild roses and Traveller's Joy. For a mile and more he rode upward under soft green shadows, then lifted his eyes to wide daylight as the coombe opened suddenly upon a noble home-park, smooth as a lawn, rising in waves among the folds of the hills to a high plateau whence Damelioc House looked seaward—a house of wide prospect and in aspect stately, classical in plan, magnificently filling the eye with its bold straight lines and ample symmetries prolonged in terraces and rows of statues interset with pointed yews.
The mistress of this palace gave him audience as usual in her blue-and-white morning-room, from the ceiling of which, from the centre of a painting, "The Nuptials of Venus and Vulcan," her own youthful face smiled down, her husband having for a whim instructed the painter to depict the goddess in her likeness. It smiled down now on a little shrunken lady huddled deep in an easy-chair. Only her dark eyes kept some of their old expressiveness, and her voice an echo of its old full tone.
She asked Rosewarne a polite question or two concerning his holiday, and they fell at once to ordinary talk—of repairs, rents, game, and live-stock generally, the hiring of a couple of under-keepers, the likeliest tenant for a park-lodge which had fallen empty; of investments too, and the money market, since Rosewarne was her man of business as well as steward.
Lady Killiow trusted him absolutely; but only because she had long since proved him. He on his part yielded her the deepest respect, both for her sagacity in business and for the fine self-command with which she, an actress of obscure birth, had put the stage behind her, assumed her rank, and borne it through all these years with something more than adequacy. John Rosewarne, like a true Briton, venerated rank, and had a Briton's instinct for the behaviour proper to rank. About his mistress there could be no question. She was a great lady to the last drop of her blood.
His devotion to her had a touch of high chivalry. It came of long service; of pity for her early widowhood, for her childlessness, for the fate ordaining that all these great possessions must be inherited by strangers; but most of all it was coloured by a memory of which he had never dared, and would never dare, to speak.
He had seen her on the stage. Once, in his wild days, and not long before he enlisted, he had spent a week in Plymouth, where she was acting, the one star in a touring company. Night after night she had laid a spell on him; it was not Rosalind, not Imogen, not Mrs. Haller, not Lady Teazle, that he watched from the pit; but one divine woman passing from avatar to avatar. So, when the last night revealed her as Lady Macbeth, as little could he condemn her of guilt as understand her remorse. He saw her suffering because for so splendid a creature nothing less could be decreed by the jealous gods. It tortured him; and when the officer announced her death, for the moment he could believe no less. 'The queen, my lord, is dead.' 'She should have died hereafter.' How well he remembered the words and Macbeth's reply—those two strokes upon the heart, strokes of a muffled bell following the outcry of women.
He was no reader of poetry. He had bought the book afterwards, and flung it away; it tangled him in words, but showed him nothing of the woman he sought.
Yet to-day, as he stood before Lady Killiow discussing the petty question of a lease, the scene and words flashed upon him together, and he grasped the clue for which his brain had been searching yesterday while he listened to old Mrs. Butson. It was Lady Killiow who called the lease a 'petty' one, and that word unlocked his memory. "This petty pace—
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time—And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death."
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time—And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death."
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time—And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death."
"I beg your pardon," said Lady Killiow, lifting her eyes to him in some astonishment—for he had muttered a word or two—and meeting his fixed stare. "You are not attending, I believe."
"Excuse me, my lady. It is true that I have not been well of late—and that reminds me: in case of illness, my son will post down from Plymouth. He holds himself ready at call. If I may say it, you will find him less of a fool than he looks."
Lady Killiow put up her hands with a little laugh, half comfortable, half wistful. "My good Mr. Rosewarne, I am a very old woman! In a short while you may do as you like; but until I am gone, please understand that you cannot possibly fall ill."
He bowed with a grave smile. Of his mistress's grateful affection he took away these light words only: but they were enough.