Meanwhilethe wreck still lay in shattered fragments on the beach, and had brought discredit and disaster to at least one family in the village before it disappeared in another and still heavier gale.
It was the best-looking young woman in the parish and the best-looking young man whom I had united to-day in the holy bond of matrimony. And now the wedding-dance was being held in a room twelve feet by twelve, while the wedding-feast of light refreshments was spread in the wash-house adjoining.
Ned Baker was a young fellow of the pale, refined type, looking younger even than his years, and they numbered only twenty-four—a type rarely met with in a country village, with clean and well-cut features, light wavy hair, and the slim hand and tapering fingers that one assigns to a musician, and associates not at all with the rough training of a village carpenter. More fitted, you would say, to stand behind a London counter and minister yards of drapery to some west-end beauty. Perhaps his refinement may have been partially due to delicate health since boyhood; nothing serious his friends would tell you, but just sufficient to unfit him for out-door labour, and direct the tenor of his life to the comparative ease of a carpenter’s workshop.
His wife in all probability, judging from her appearance, would rule the roost. A woman of the strong, well-bosomed order, outcome oftenerof the village than the town, with the wild westerly breezes and salt sea air of the Atlantic mantling in her cheek.
Truth to say, Ned was hardly a popular inmate of what was now his native village. In appearance and refinement he was far above the tribe of fishermen who inhabited the scattered hamlet, and won a precarious livelihood from fishing and boating—sometimes, ’twas said, from the jetson cast up by the sea beyond, when a wreck, such as still lay in fragments not one hundred yards from their doors, would strew the shore for miles and miles with drift of freight and timber.
It was natural, perhaps, that they should resent a superiority which contrasted only too strongly with their own rough and rugged natures. Besides, he was an alien—literally a drift from the sea—cast up and laid for dead upon the sand some twenty years ago.
No one knew aught of him—he did not know anything of himself—though his wavy sun-locks and bright blue eyes might have proclaimed him of the north, the fragile incarnation of some Viking of the past. But all was guess-work and mystery, for he was a little lad of three years old when the sea laid him at their doors, after claiming for its own the ship and everything, dead or living, that it had carried for its freight.
Kindly hands had welcomed him. An old fisherman and his wife, without children or relations of their own, had loved and cherished the boy to manhood. But they were dead and gone, and for years since he had lived his life alone, till Arabella Bond, the beauty of the village, had been won by the very grace and refinement which had made him alien and outcast from the other villagers.
Indeed, with the single exception of the couple who had reared him, Arabella had been his firstand only friend. Three or four years older than himself, she had, as a child, taken him under her special protection, comforting him in all his troubles, and waging incessant war with the lads of the village on his behalf. Her strong motherly instincts, fired as time went on by a warm passion of love, had gone out in pity to the youth who had been flung, alien and isolated, among a world of strangers. And her devotion never wavered. Even now her feeling towards him was rather that of the mother than the wife, and, but for her, his prayer would have been that the sea might yet reclaim its gift of life. Nameless and unknown, he was from the first an object of suspicion to the villagers. Add to which, he had been cast up by the sea, and the awe which clings round such a one, and the peril that it foreshadows to his preservers, were for ever present in their minds.
With a race of men animated by their traditionsKing Arthur himself, if he had been cast upon their shore, would never have gained their confidence. And with Ned’s growth in years the feeling against him had only become stronger and more accentuated. A high regard for honour—honour in every word and deed—was the dominant characteristic of his life, shown in nothing more conspicuously than in his scrupulous honesty respecting all property recovered from the sea. Such views were in hopeless antagonism to all the traditions of the neighbourhood, where the villagers, whose ancestors may have smuggled a little in the days gone by, held a rooted belief that the sea was their property, placed where it was by a beneficent Providence to afford them a livelihood, and sometimes, though not half so often as they wished, to present them with an unearned increment in the shape of a wreck and the perquisites that followed from it.
And, most unfortunately for Ned, no one held this faith with stronger persistence than Arabella’s mother. To discover, if possible, the owner of such property, or to report it to the recognised authorities would have been judged by her a superlative act of folly, a wanton flying in the face of Providence, which sent them such windfalls, as it did the mackerel and the herrings—only with less regularity. It may be, I fancy, that the northern nations, from whom Ned inherited his birthright, are as punctilious in the practice of honour as southerners are in the profession of it.
Anyhow, Ned and his folly were perpetual irritants to Arabella’s mother. And matters were in no wise improved when he became a suitor for her daughter’s hand. Even his personal appearance and his love-locks, “clustering o’er his fair forehead like a girl’s,” came in for her abuse. “A fine gen’elman you be,” she would say, “to teachus all our duties, and make out as how we be thieves an’ liars. Why, you bain’t no better nor a gal—an’ a poor ’un at that—wi’ all your long hair a-danglin’ about your forehead, an’ no strength in ye to pull an oar or gi’ a hand to the fishin’-tackle or the lobster-pots. Blest if I can tell what Arabella sees in ye. But there—there’s no accountin’ for tastes. ’Twas sommat liker to a man that would ha’ suited I, when I was lookin’ round me for a husband.”
Then Arabella would heal the wound and say: “Never ’e mind, Ned. ’Tis because ye be so much better than they that they hates ye so cruel. Wi’ yer fine language and looks that shames ’em all every time they meets ye, no wonder they can’t stomach ye. Not but what you be learnin’ a lot of our talk now along, and ye clips yer words fine, same a’ most as we does. May be they’ll think the better of ye by and bye, when you gets a bitliker to ’em. Not that I wishes it, my dear, never think it. ’Tisn’t I that would have loved ye so fondly if ye hadn’t been better an’ cleverer an’ handsomer than all the rest of ’m.”
But to-day all past animosities were forgotten, and the company who had been called to the festivities could only bethink themselves of the arrangements provided for their comfort.
“’Tisa rare sight this, granfer, for a weddin’. I only wish as how my old mother what’s bedridden upstairs—her’s ninety, come Thursday—could crawl down along and glad her aged eyes wi’ it. But that’s more a’most than we can claim o’ the Almighty, seein’ she’s kept her bed now for nigh on five years. Not but what she’s rare and hearty still, and can eat her bread an’ cheese and drain a pot of beer most as well as I can. ’Tis a wonderful strong and lusty constitution, tobesure. Her eyesight don’t fail her—onlyher limbs ain’t so strong as once they was. And no wonder, what wi’ lyin’ a-bed all this ’ere time, which she thinks more comferable and gives less trouble. Wi’ her pipe, too, most allus a goin’, and some day there’ll be the ’ouse o’ fire along o’ it, I’m afeard. And how cleverly she do hid’ en, to be sure—right under piller or blanket ’e goes, smokin’ hot—soon as ever she hears passon’s footstep on the stairs. Talk of good ’bacca hurtin’ a man. They Lunnon doctors should come and ha’ a look at she, and they’ll see an ole woman what’s smoked her ounce of shag a day for twenty years tomysure and sartain knowledge.”
“Aye, ’tis a grand sight truly this ’ere weddin’, and a credit to the village and yerself, Michael. Such a company o’ rare young maids and lusty young fellows I don’t know as ever I see’d congregated together in one room. And the beer and the sperrits you’ve provided for ’em! I’ve beeninto that there wash-house of yourn, and made glad my eyes wi’ as rare a cask of strong beer—none of your fourpenny ale, I allow—and as neat a keg o’ sperrits as ever I cast eyes on. The wenches to-night need have comeliness and grace to tempt the young fellows out o’ that there shed. For ale and sperrits is better nor beauty, Michael; ’tis so at least when men be gettin’ in the vale, the likes o’ you and I. And what’s more, I’ll go and sample it, just that I may tell the others what ’tis like, ’fore as ever the dancin’ begins. Not but what I likes a funeral better nor a weddin’. ’Tis quieter and more sober-like, and you takes your vittles more peaceable. None of this ’ere het an’ dust an’ potheration what comes o’ the dancin’. No, gi’ I a funeral for comfort, specially when ye be a bit aged. Not but what ’tis disperitin’, and craves a mortal lot of stimmilent to carry one thro’ wi’ it. An’ some there be what doesn’t hold wi’ feastin’ onthe dead. But ’tis mostly they of a savin’ sullen nature, what grudges the vittles, an’ finds no comfort in thanksgivin’ an’ the voice o’ merriment.”
The fun was at its height, and the ale cask and the spirit keg would have been valued at one half their original cost, when the company were startled by two hurriedly-repeated knocks at the door, and a young girl stood panting in their midst. No wedding guest this—rather a ghost in all but the strong and youthful grace of budding womanhood.
“Heaven help us! What’s happened to ’e, Meg? Why on earth do you bust in upon a house o’ merriment lookin’ like a corpse? Out wi’ it, lass, and don’t stand gapin’ there, scarin’ us out of our wits, for all the world like a frighted owl.”
“’Tis the p’leece!” she cried.
“Be ye gone stark starin’ mad, you fule of a girl? We ain’t that drunk and disorderly yet that we need fear to look a p’leeceman in the face.P’leece indeed—to a decent respectable woman what’s had no dealin’s wi’ such truck, time out of memory.”
“’Tain’t the drink—’tis the copper off the ship that was wrecked while ago on the Rudge. Some of us ha’ been handlin’ it, and they’re a-comin’ round to every house in the village, wi’ a search-warrant they calls it, and they’re at top o’ street now, an’ ’ll be punchin’ at your door afore you can say Jack Robinson.”
Fear—was it fear for themselves or for others?—had sobered the guests on the instant. Silent and shamed they slunk away into corners, as if they prayed for the earth to swallow them, or were assisting at a funeral instead of a wedding.
Only the mistress of the house retained her self-possession. With a nod at her husband to follow her she retreated with him for consultation into an adjoining room. When they returned—“We’ve been thinkin’ this ’ere matter over,” she said, “and there’s nowt to be done but a corpse in the house.”
“Sakes alive!” cried grandfer, “and whose is the corpse? Not mine, I tell ’e straight. I be as full o’ life and health as the youngest among ’e. Not but what they tell I that I be nearin’ life’s end. Not a bit of it, says I; I be younger and lustier, I be, than this time last year, and lustier then than the year afore. I be intended, I allow, to follow Methusalum, and show what we can do now-along when we sets ourselves serious to the job of livin’.”
“Stop yer silly nonsense, you old fule,” cried the dame, “we’ve no time to listen to your fulery, and none of us wants yer corpse. Not but what a corpse we must have—or maybe a dyin’ man’ll do. Then they wont dare search the house, and we’ll ha’ time to pick up the odds and ends ofcopper and bury it in the garden. Bad luck that ever I set eyes on it. And ’tis young Ned there that must be the dyin’ man. He’s far and away the most nesh and tender-lookin’ of all of us. And crop his hair short, and lay him in bed wi’ a bandage full over his face, and no one’ll know whether he’s dyin’ or dead. And he was allus that weakly and bad in his breath that we can say he was taken wi’ heart disease, or summat, along o’ the dancin’, and no one’ll be the wiser. Besides, ’tis he what took the copper, so ’tis only fair as he should be at the trouble o’ savin’ on’t. An’ we’ll put ye in Arabella’s room, Ned—sure ’tis no shame to do so for as how ye be a wedded couple. An’ ’tis safer the copper’ll be, seein’ it be stored under her bed, the main of it; not but what there’s two sheets as was flatter nor the rest, an’ they lies ’twixt mattress and blanket. Rare an’ uncomferable ’twill be for ye to lay on, but ’tis yourselfwhat made the bed an’ you must lay on’t. An’ we’ll come an’ let ’e out as soon as ever the p’leece be gone, an’ ’twon’t be long as they’ll stay, soon as ever they hears we’ve dead an’ dyin’ in the house. Up wi’ ’e, Ned, and we’ll have ’e tucked up afore as ever they come nigh the place. Sure ’tis no falsity neither, for what wi’ the scare and the fright ye looks most dead already, so help me, ye does.”
It was not till the end of this harangue that Ned’s temper broke loose, though an angry flush that flamed on his delicate cheek had showed he was nearing the end of his self-control.
“Shame on ye, woman,” he cried, as the last of the guests filed out of the room, “shame on ye to belie me thus afore the face of your own daughter, and her my wedded wife. I’d a’ saved the copper for ye willingly—rot the stuff—and I’ll save it now if I can. An’ I’ve kept silence afore all your company rather than let ’em know you was lying.But I’ll not begin wedded life wi’ disgrace ’twixt me an’ my wife. So I tell ye, Arabella, where ye stand, and glad I am of the chance, that I never fingered aught of the copper—only to help ’em in hidin’ it—and ’twas your own father and mother what stript it and stored it, and you needn’t be afeared but what you’ve wedded an honest man. And now,” turning to his mother-in-law, “I’m ready to go along wi’ ye. May be I’ll save your honour; we can’t make worse o’ mine.”
In ten minute’s time the house that had been ablaze with lights was shrouded in darkness, and resumed its ordinary well-conditioned aspect. The blinds were drawn, articles of furniture that had been ousted and piled to meet the requirements of the dancing had been re-placed in position. The guests had slunk away, more or less disquieted according to the state of each man’s inner consciousness, and, to the onlooker from without, itwas as reposeful and undisturbed as any of its neighbours in the quiet well-ordered street.
Scarcely had this transformation scene been effected when the expected summons came. “Sorry to disturb ye, Mrs. Bond, when ye be all arranged so quiet for the night. But ’tis our bounden duty, ma’am, and we’ve a very particular reason here (exhibiting the warrant) for wishin’ to look through your premises, if so be as you has no objection.”
“Aye, ye can come in, Bob Davis. An’ if I can’t gi’ ye a hearty welcome, ’tis only yerself you has to thank for it. ’Twould ha’ been more neighbour-like, I’m thinkin’, if ye’d come in open daylight, ’stead o’ disturbin’ a peaceful family at this hour o’ the night. An’ we wi’ sickness in the house that’s like to be death afore the mornin’. For sure as ever Ned sees yer face an’ that great lout you’ve brought in wi’ ye, ’twill scare the lifebreath out on ’m. An’ ’tis more nor that scrap o’ paper you’ll be needin’ then to make yer peace, wi’ murder on yer soul.”
“Come, old lady, none of that gammon; it’s too good for us. Don’t we know that your daughter has been married this very day, and that you was a-keepin’ the weddin’ wi’ a fiddle and dancin’ till half-an-hour ago? Besides, there’s a strong suspicion that some of the copper we’re a-lookin’ for is to be found in this here house—and perhaps that’s why you shut up so sharp, hearin’ that we were comin’ along to have a look at ye.”
But when the search elsewhere was ended, and the door of Arabella’s room had been opened to admit them, Mrs. Bond enjoyed a short-lived triumph. Not the most strenuous of officials, urged by the strongest sense of duty, but would have paused in the presence of what looked like death.
“No, ma’am—though thank you kindly—we’ll not intrude. We’ve done our duty, an’ the law itself can’t call on us for more. An’ you’ll look after that lad of yourn, Mrs. Bond; you’ll excuse me for sayin’ it. ’Tis close on death he looks, though glad I’d be to be mistaken. An’ if so be ’twill ease your mind, I’ll make time to go an’ fetch the doctor for ye afore as ever I goes home to-night.”
But in the bedroom upstairs, as the steps of the officers were heard retreating down the street, the bride was saying: “Up wi’ you, Ned! You’ll be glad, I allow, that I be come to release you. ’Tain’t becomin’ no wise that a bridegroom on the night of his weddin’ should be lyin’ all stark an’ streaked like a corpse. Not but what you look finer and grander-like than ever you’ll do in life agin. Up wi’ you, man, though I be most sorry, that I be, to untie ye.”
But no voice or sound made answer from the bed. Only the jaw had fallen, and the eyes stared full on the speaker, and the silence of death—death itself—was in the room. Fear and excitement had done their work on an enfeebled heart, and Ned had crossed the narrow borderland—the “space between the spears” the ancients called it—which separates God’s great twin armies, the living and the dead.
The villagers will tell you that Death came to him in anger, because of the jest that travestied his grim prerogative. Rather, I think, it was in pity for the lad, and to save him from disillusions sadder still, that
“God’s finger touched him, and he slept.”
“God’s finger touched him, and he slept.”
So the marriage was followed by a death, and the lighter refreshments of the dance were merged in the splendours of a funeral feast. And the soul of granfer Wiseman was satisfied withal.
The Rector was sorely troubled by the disaster that had taken from him another of his prime favourites among the lads of the village.
But of the events that had led up to it he was strangely tolerant. “It’s heredity,” he said, “and you can’t fight against it. Not an angel from heaven could persuade them that the sea has not made over to them all the property it lays at their doors. It mayn’t be good law,” he added, “but, after all, there’s something to be said in favour of their view.”
Andnow, during the calm and quiet summer months that followed, my life took its tone from the harmony of Nature, and rested itself for a while in one great calm. Taking its rest like Nature, the better to prepare itself against the advent of stress and storm.
Hardly a day passed during this halcyon time that I did not see Marion. Sometimes it would be at the Rectory, sometimes at the Manor House; oftener still in some cottage where there was sicknessor trouble which she could comfort and relieve. To ourselves, at any rate, life in those days was full of interest; it may be, for that very reason, void of interest to those who only watched its progress from without.
One day the rooks re-appeared in the trees of the Manor House farm. I suppose it was one of the periodical visits which they are accustomed to pay, off and on, before they close their summer establishment finally to take up their abode in some mysterious winter residence. In my boyish days it seemed to me the height of unwisdom to abandon your city of habitation just when the winter gales were due. But perhaps a rook lives his real life elsewhere, and only comes down to rusticate in the country as a volunteer or militiaman goes into camp,i.e.for duty’s sake, which, in the case of the rook, means the fatigue duty of rearing and raising a family. Somewhere (in the pages of the‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ for example) and some day I will look up their winter address. In this neighbourhood it is probably among the cliffs of Portland or on the rock-bound promontory of St. Aldhelm’s Head that a letter would find them. Anyhow, they were with us again to-day.
“Do you think they talk to one another, Peggy?” I said, as they were making a great to-do in the trees adjoining our garden.
“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure; but if they do, it’s pretty much, I allow, on the same subject. Seems like a warning of some kind to my ears.”
“Perhaps it may be, Peggy, and, so far as I can read it, couched in very classical language. It sounds to me exactly like the Latin word ‘cave,’ which your favourite Reggie must often have told you means ‘take care.’ We pronounce the word now-a-days ‘caue,’ which, in the clipt pronunciation of an excited rook, might easily have degeneratedinto ‘caw.’ If so, they are very lavish of their presentiments at the present moment.”
“And no wonder,” was Peggy’s reply, “for there’s trouble enough and to spare in the village to-day. And will be through all the country round for the matter of that. You know, I suppose, sir, that the bank has failed? There were whispers of it in the street last evening, and to-day the postman tells me that the shutters are up.”
I glanced at the letters on the table before me—at an aggressive-looking blue one in particular, which might possibly contain a bill—a letter of the kind that one ordinarily leaves unopened till the last. In it was a short circular, confirming the fact of the failure in the plain unsympathetic language with which a disaster that spells ruin to hundreds is officially announced.
There are many ways in which a bank may fail, though the result in all of them is pretty muchthe same in the end. Sometimes it dies of inanition, by a slow decay of life and credit, and this is the form of suicide that novelists and journalists prefer. For it offers a fine field for sensational writing—the whispers in the air, the mysteries and doubts; then the ‘run,’ with all its train of interesting incidents, the reinforcements of gold that are hurried down post haste from London, the noise and tumult of desperate claimants, with the cashier’s final announcement that his resources are exhausted.
Sometimes, on the other hand, the suicide is sudden, without preliminary word or warning—‘foudroyant,’ as the French would call it. And this is how our bank elected to fall. To the last it drew in money and paid it out, and then on a grey November morning the shutters were up, for the bank had died in the night. But for us in Fleetwater there was not even the poor satisfactionof watching its last hours or gazing upon the closed shutters. For the bank had died elsewhere, at the county town some miles away, and the news had only filtered to us at second hand (as Peggy told me) through the postman.
Most people, I suppose, were stunned at first by the novelty of the disaster. I can remember that for some definite period, how long I never knew, I studied the circular before me dreamily, with a strange feeling that it would be bad for some other people, but never realising what it meant for me. “What will Peggy do?” I asked myself. “She had all her savings, I know, invested in it. And what again of Richard Smiley, who only two days ago placed in it all that the Old Inn has earned for him in twenty years?”
Worse still, I thought, for Andrew Strong and his widowed mother, before whom I saw nothing but the refuge of the Union, for they were old andfeeble now, and had been living, I knew, for years on the slender pittance they drew in driblets from the bank. And so by degrees, and through many vague wanderings of thought, by realising all that it meant for others, I came at last to realise all that it meant for me.
At this point in my meditations I did what it would have been wiser for me to do a few months earlier, when I should have been in time to act upon the Squire’s advice. I bethought me of turning up the original prospectus of the bank where it had lain forgotten among a number of old papers, mostly unimportant, that had come into my possession at the time of my father’s death. The information that I gained from it was startling. It was to the effect that the company had been registered in shares of £50 each, only half of which had been as yet called up. So I had no need to go to London to win the knowledge that I was a ruined man.
This time I did not lose myself in vain misgivings. I had become, I suppose, already somewhat callous to surprise. But I set myself the task of looking the future in the face by thinking and working out my plans on the basis of this new discovery. And I took the business in hand with something of that strange unquestioning instinct which leads the fatalist to work out his destiny in a crisis that has come upon him suddenly, and over which he has lost the control.
Whereby I saw that, under the best possible conditions, I had no right to continue my claim to Marion’s hand. Even now there were rumours afloat in the village that the failure was a bad one, and that the bank would only pay a small dividend. And, though I could not satisfy myself on this point till I had been to London to consult my agents, as I intended to do on the following day, it was already perfectly clear that the companywould have to call up all its capital, and that, dividend or no dividend, the result to me would be the loss of most of my small fortune.
And this meant, first of all, the loss of Marion. How could I ask her father to consent to our marriage, even if his opinion on a contingency which was now realised had been less plainly given at the time of our engagement?
No; neither he nor I could have consented to it. And so the failure meant to me the loss of all that, for the time at any rate, made life worth living. Other work I could get, of course; possibly other friends. But a love like Marion’s never again. And, for the time, I could bring myself to think of nothing save the loss of her. I was young, it is true, but not weak, I think, in character; and I could never picture myself in the future as loving another with such love as I had given her. Yet she and I must surely part. The clearest and mostdecisive judgment dictated it. And I must be the one to go.
Even if I had been content to remain among my present surroundings, every smallest detail of which reminded me of her, yet for her sake my continuance in Fleetwater was impossible. If I stayed, it would mean for her nothing less than banishment from her father and her home.
I had asked the Rector to tell her of my discovery and of the changes that must follow from it. Not yet could I see her personally. Only I asked her to meet me a few hours later for a walk in the adjoining forest. Perhaps that few hours’ interval might tell me in what words to greet her.
With the Rector my arrangements were quickly made. Once put in possession of the facts he saw, clearly as I had done, that I had decided on the only course that was open to me under the circumstancesof the case. “No honourable man could have done otherwise,” he said, and, as he grasped my hand at parting, the same kindly look came into his eye that had welcomed me on the first day we met in the Rectory study. Only time and our warm friendship had strengthened it into the look with which a father greets his well-beloved son.
TheSquire was wise enough not to embitter my position by attempting to alter my resolution. He had meant what he said at our former interview, and remembered it too. It was too late for him to retract now, even if he had been tempted to do so from a false regard for his daughter’s happiness.
The walk with Marion, to which I had looked forward with something of dread, was made almost a happiness by her quiet fortitude. I need not, I found, have steeled my heart and strengthened my mind with arguments for leaving her. She wasnot the woman to make of my sorrow a burden heavier still to bear. She might have told her love in the words of which quotation has made a platitude:—
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,Loved I not honour more.”
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,Loved I not honour more.”
Not by so much as a suggestion would she have made the path before me more difficult. She had realised, almost before I had told her my intention, that not only my honour, but even my very love for her, necessitated our parting. Only, instead of the parting almost without hope as I had pictured it, she made of it a parting that had in it sure promise that we should meet again.
We knew each other’s love too well by now for need of speech. Our walk was almost a silent one, except for the words with which she ever and again encouraged my despondency, and directed it, byher own strong confidence, towards the hopefulness she was determined I should share.
Instinctively, and without acknowledged purpose, our steps led us to a spot that we had visited again and again in the earlier part of the summer that was gone.
It was a miniature forest, embedded in a sheltered valley that lay beyond the outskirts of the village between the elbows of two mighty hills. Protected by these watchful guardians, it was safe from the withering gales that swept up from the Atlantic. When all the surrounding trees stood bare and blighted by recurrent storms, Nature, in this quiet nook, was permitted to fulfil her perfect work, changing her garb, as month by month passed on, from emerald to sober green, but always keeping her brightest tints to weave her funeral robe, folding it at last upon her bosom with the air of one who has lived her life and done herwork, and now falls peacefully to sleep in painless, restful weariness.
It was one of those perfect days in latest autumn that seem intended to give us, just once or twice in the year, and especially before it leaves us, an idea of all the glorious adornments Nature has in her keeping. Perhaps the brightest beds in a nobleman’sparterremight suggest the colouring. But the stiff arrangement and orderly rows of bloom are the very antipodes of Nature’s handiwork. A flush of crimson mountain-ash, thrusting itself in irregular patches between groups of dusky pines, and these in their turn lost among beeches of burnished gold, with oak and hornbeam and ash to give the softer intermediate tones is, at best, a poverty-stricken catalogue of the colours that flamed all round us on that autumn day. No marvel that to a dweller by our storm-swept seas, when a gale in August will wither all the rest ofour foliage two months before it falls, the scene I am describing should be the one we chose to close around our parting.
It was in the depths of this fairy forest that we lost ourselves—Marion and I. We met no one by the way. Nothing but the silent trees above us with their mist of tangled colours, and at our feet a maze of undergrowth only just less brilliant in colouring than the tree-tops overhead, with an occasional squirrel or blackbird or thrush to suggest the life with which the scene had palpitated in the sweltering summer heat. Even the voices of the birds were silent. They would only have marred the peaceful stillness of that wondrous day. Till the early autumn evening began to close about us, and it was time to set our faces homewards.
And after we had left the forest we turned aside through a bye-lane of the village to mountonce more the Chapel hill, feeling, both of us, that the spot which had seen the consecration of our love would be the fitting witness of its untimely end. And there we said good-bye. “I shall never marry, Harold,” Marion said, “till you come back again to claim me. For come again you surely will. And never think I blame you for this parting. In honour you could not have done otherwise than leave me now. And hard as it is, dear, for us to part so soon, my love (if that be possible) is only made the stronger by the parting.”
And so she left me—with none of the prayers and protests that would only have made my duty harder for me. With nothing but a confident hope, in which I could not bring myself as yet to share, that time in its course would smooth away all difficulties in the fulfilment of our love.
“When that day comes,” and these were her last words, “we will meet once more, Harold, inthis same place, and dedicate anew the love which chances like this will have been powerless to change.”
The next day we parted: I on my visit to Eric in London, and she to a relative in the Midlands, with whom she was to stay during the month I should remain at Fleetwater.
“Ofcourse you’re going to stay with me, old man?” said Eric, when he met me at Waterloo station next day. “You surely didn’t imagine I should let you go to an hotel?”
Nothing in these few words of the studied tone of unimpeachable politeness to which he had accustomed me at our last meeting. This was the hearty undergraduate greeting of old, and I needed no more to tell me that his sorrow on my account had dispersed the cloud that lay between us.
It was good to see him again; to feel the graspof his strong hand, and read the look of welcome in his troubled eyes. And then we went to dine at ‘Simpson’s’ in reminiscence of the past, when I had had a pleasant balance to draw upon, and banks had not taken to breaking. And then for a long stroll and back again to his rooms.
“You see I’ve got them all ready for you, and the lobster supper that you always favoured, though how on earth you manage to sleep after it, passes my comprehension. And then we’ll chat on as in the good old days, and fancy ourselves undergraduates again, and that all this trouble is an evil dream. And remember that a room will always be kept ready for you in the future. Send me a wire when you want to use it, and the oftener you come and the longer you stay the better for me. But it’s late in the day of our friendship to be telling you all this, as if you hadn’t known it years and years ago.”
All my vague misgivings had vanished before his welcome, and it has dwelt with me since as a pleasurable thought that Eric, I am sure, meant fairly by me then, and that for what happened later on between us, the blame in part must rest with me, who had spread, however unwittingly, a snare before his feet.
After supper we drew up our chairs side-by-side before the fire—for the autumn evenings had become chilly now in town—and discussed the situation from every possible view and bearing, without, I candidly admit, finding any means of bettering it.
Eric was far too wise to offer me monetary help. But his hand-grasp told me I might have had it for the asking—aye, anything he could have given me. And I grew cheerier and more hopeful of the future, and thought with thankfulness how much it means to any man to have just one truefriend in life. How few of us can say as much, especially when life’s sun begins to verge towards its setting, and the friends we have made are gone before us, and ourselves have lost the will and opportunity to win us new ones.
To-night I was tasting this cup of happiness in fullest measure. Time for me had rolled backwards, and he and I were together again—the friend in whom I could see no change; the lad who in days gone by had slipped up with me from Cambridge for many an evening just like this.
The next morning I went to call upon my agents, after arranging with Eric to meet him in the Strand at the private gallery where his picture was on view.
In those early days there was little information, I knew, to be expected from them, and such as it was it only went to confirm my gloomy forecast. The bank, they told me, was irretrievably ruined, andall the capital it could command would infallibly be called up.
Afterwards I joined Eric in the Strand, and he took me into a room from which all natural light had been carefully excluded. And as I stood looking at a curtain which shrouded the farther wall, it suddenly rolled back, and under a perfect light, and with all the accessories that art could lend to its environment, I saw before me the picture that had made him famous.
It was in no wise a sensational subject. Only a precipitous rock, rent in twain by a huge fissure, through which I looked down upon a valley which opened and fell away in front of me. From its foot a mountain stream foamed and fretted down a steep incline. And on either side of the valley, wherever a projection or an eminence promised safety from the torrents that scored the declivities, tiny sparks of fire, few and far between, flickeredfrom the cottage windows, with a pleasant suggestion of the cheeriness within. Crowning the precipice which occupied the foreground on the right hand of the picture, I could see the outline of the village church, where glowed a larger, ruddier flame, from the lamp, no doubt, which burned before the altar of the sanctuary.
It was a wonderful piece of work for a lad so young in years. I am no painter, and the defects there may have been in it were all invisible to me. But the cleverness of the composition, and the marvellous adjustment of the lights and shadows, flung by the afterglow upon the surrounding hills, could only have been inspired by genius. No wonder that his work had made him famous.
He had entitled it “Val Verde.”
“It commemorates a story, Harold,” he whispered—for there were visitors besides ourselves—“that has grown up around a picture which formsthe altar-piece of the church. Whether the legend rests on any historic ground-work, I could never satisfactorily determine. I only know that versions of it, in many various forms, are current in most of the adjoining villages. But this evening, if you like, I will tell it to you precisely as it was told to me by the curé of the parish. True or untrue, it is interesting enough as a story, though I could wish we had fallen upon a more cheerful topic for the enlivenment of our last evening.”
As we were leaving the gallery, I bethought me of the picture which Reggie had unearthed for me at Cambridge.
“By the way, Eric,” I said, “I’ve got a picture, too, in my possession, on which I want your opinion. If you don’t mind the trouble, old man, I’ll send it up to you when I get home to-morrow. It’s only a copy, for I’ve seen the original. But it’s a fairly good one, unless I am much mistaken.And in these days, when I don’t know where to look for a five-pound note, anything, however small, will come in handy. So, if you think it’s worth a few pounds, please do the best you can for me, and I’ll be awfully grateful.”
Inthe evening, as we sat before the fire, Eric told me the story.[190]
“I had lost my way in the Abruzzi. All the day long I had wandered in fruitless quest of a subject to complete my series of Italian sketches. And now the twilight had fallen upon me with the suddenness of an Italian autumn. Up to this time I had followed the guidance of a faint bridle-path, but on a sudden the ground shelved downwards, and I found myself at the entrance of a narrow ravine, confronted by a blank, precipitous rock,while the path I had been following wandered off to the left, and was lost in the obscurity of the moor beyond. Nothing in the shape of a village, nothing that promised me a shelter for the night, was visible on the moorland I had been traversing. So my only hope lay in the chance of what might lie beyond the rock that barred my progress.
“Stumbling and halting at every step, for the night was falling rapidly and progress rendered difficult by boulders and watercourses, I at length made my way past the obstruction through a fissure at the side, and found to my delight that the subject of my picture lay before me. What it was you have seen to-day.
“Cheered by my good fortune, for the wind was rising rapidly, and there was every suggestion of an autumn gale, I made for one of the larger cottages that faced me. I had chosen well, as the event proved, for I found it to be the residence ofthe village priest—a kindly and refined old man—who met me at the door with outstretched hands, and with a welcome that in England we accord only to long-established friends.
“‘You are welcome, my son, most welcome,’ he began. ‘Few visitors reach me in this Val Verde—for so I have christened it, not very appropriately, I fear, but in memory of my home in Spain—and when they do come we keep them, be assured, for as long as they will stay. But now let me show you my guest-chamber. Poor as it is, it is better than would have fallen to your lot if you had missed the entrance to our valley. And in an hour Annetta will be ready with our evening meal, and afterwards we will sit and talk over a flask of Chianti till late into the night. Or rather, you shall talk and I will listen, for news of the outer world is the payment we exact from our visitors for such welcome as we can give them.’
“Annetta was still busy with her preparations when I rejoined him in the little sitting-room, so comfortable in its contrast with the world outside, where a hurricane raged and roared through the ravines that fell away from either side of the house.
“I went to the window and looked out at the tiny lights blinking from the cottages like glow-worms that had lost their confidence. And right on the top of the grim rock facing me gleamed the red light from the church that crowned its summit.
“‘The story of a terrible tragedy attaches to that lamp,’ said my host, who had come forward to join me. And his words, by a strange coincidence, came almost as an answer to my thought. ‘When we settle down,’ he added, ‘for our evening chat, my contribution to our entertainment shall be the story of the tragedy that it commemorates. Meanwhile, as Annetta is behindhand with her preparations, and will not serve usyet awhile, do you feel bold enough to climb that hill with me in face of the storm, and see for yourself what my church contains? It can boast, at any rate, of one good picture, which, by the way, you ought to study before you hear the story I have promised you, and with which it is connected.’
“‘With pleasure,’ was my reply, ‘though surely it is hardly fair to judge a picture on a night like this, and by what looks like the glimmer of one feeble lamp. It would be difficult, I imagine, to devise worse conditions for appreciating an artist’s work.’
“‘As a rule, no doubt. But remember that pictures, like music, may be composed to suit certain accompaniments; and this is one of them, as I think you will admit, if you are content to take my words on trust and brave the storm in faith of them.’
“Lantern in hand, the old man sallied forth, and I followed him. The distance was not so great as I had anticipated, nor the wind so overpowering. The church was really nearer than I had judged it to be in the twilight of the approaching night, and the precipice up which our pathway lay acted as a barrier to the wind, which had gathered in the moorland beyond, and, parted into two currents, swept the defiles on either side of us.
“On entering the church I saw at once that the main building was in darkness, save for the glimmering flame before the sanctuary. But from a side chapel that opened on the choir streamed another and fuller radiance, which had been concentrated by a careful adjustment on the picture I had come to study.
“It was a ‘Descent from the Cross,’ left by the artist, as I gathered at a glance, in an unfinished state. Nothing indeed had been attempted exceptthe central Figure, which lay unattended and alone at the foot of the Cross. One weak and wavering line, visible only to the expert’s eye, might have been taken to imply that, worn out by his task, the painter had flung down his brush, and, satisfied or dissatisfied with the result, had never cared to re-touch his work.
“Yet satisfied he surely must have been, for, in spite of numerous faults, it was great, immeasurably great, in rough untutored power. What most impressed me was the terrible truthfulness with which he had realised the details. Surely, such total collapse, such limp and inert limbs, such lights and shadows on the livid skin, were never the outcome of the painter’s consciousness? Death alone, and death that was only just not life, had been the model from which he drew.
“And then, as I studied it more closely, other minor details grew out of the obscurity and impressedthemselves upon me. It was unfinished, as I said, and had been painted with lightning rapidity, probably at a single sitting. It had been painted, too, by artificial light—the tone of the colouring proved it—but painted certainly to suit its surroundings, and probably on the very spot where we stood to view it. Now and again, as the wind forced its way through the time-worn casement, it swayed the draperies that hung around the picture—only another accessory, or so it seemed, to which the painter had attuned his work.
“‘Strong and terrible as a Ribera,’ was my verdict, ‘but a Ribera inspired and glorified.’ For this was no morbid study of Death the Destroyer’s handiwork. No; the artist had carried his subject far beyond the dominion of Death, when he transfigured the Face on the canvas with the light of an Everlasting Love.”
Inthe evening after supper Eric told me the story of the picture as he had heard it from his friend the priest.
“Years ago,” he said—“for so I heard the story on my arrival in the parish—a rich Englishman, travelling for pleasure, found his way to our village, and, intending to stay three weeks, was detained for eight. For he had caught the fever which prevails in the lower valleys, and only recovered from it thanks to the care he received from my predecessor in the house to which it hasbeen my pleasure to welcome you. On his departure he left a hundred pounds with the priest as a thank-offering for his recovery, on the understanding that it was to be employed in the purchase of an altar-piece for our church, painted, if possible, by some local artist from the surrounding district. Many competed, but it was felt from the first that the honour was as good as won by Agostino Villari, a young painter of extraordinary talent, who lived in the house I showed you at the further end of the village. At that time he was only twenty—hardly more than a boy—and his talent was almost wholly undeveloped. But he only wanted time and teaching. The power was there, as you have seen for yourself to-day. Well, Agostino had but one great friend, a cousin, who shared his house, sat for his model, and whose single hope and assurance was that Agostino would live to be a famous painter. Cecco, for so he wascalled, was about thirty, a pale sedate man, of a gentle loving nature. But why describe him? You have seen him to-day, pictured by his friend’s hand as no words of mine could paint him.
“As the time for the competition drew on, the two friends were wholly absorbed in anticipating the result. Agostino was to be immortalised as the painter, Cecco as the model. And their love for each other made them wholly unselfish; each hoped for success solely in the interest of his friend. Nothing short of a perfect likeness would satisfy Agostino, nothing short of a perfect picture would satisfy Cecco’s ambition for his friend.
“On the night before the pictures were to be sent in, the two went up together to the church, to place the painting in position and to judge of its effect, taking with them the materials for retouching it if it should be required. It was a wild night—a night like this (for the story is precise in its details)—and the two friends had a hard climb up the hill to the church, where they placed the picture in the side chapel, because they could utilise the stronger light to throw into relief the details of the composition.
“You ask for the result? Well, Cecco was in raptures. ‘It is immortality, ’Tino,’ he cried, ‘for both of us. How great you are! It is I—I myself, and to the very life—only grander, nobler, spiritualised.’ ‘Yes, it is you,’ said ’Tino hesitatingly, ‘you, no doubt, and to the very life, as you say. But will that do? Look at that face, that chest, those firm and muscular limbs. True to life, I admit, well-drawn and well-painted. But life, not death, anddeathis what we wanted. Strip yourself, Cecco, and lie at the foot of the Cross; see if you can help me. You know I can never paint the smallest detail without a model. There—fling yourself down in a heap as if you had lost all strength, all energy. Yes, that is well. You have given me the attitude. But the blood, the rich colouring in your face and limbs—it is life, vigorous life, all of it—and I cannot even picture what they would be like, shrunk and colourless and lifeless. If you could only faint, Cecco, I might do something. Can’t you faint—just for one moment—just to oblige me?’ ‘No, ’Tino, but I will do more for you and the picture than that. Only promise to finish it—here, this evening, before you leave the church. ’Tino, remember,I count upon your promise.’
“One short swift stroke, and he had dealt himself the blow before ’Tino’s hand could stay him.
“But ’Tino set up his easel beside the corpse, and all the night through he painted—painted as if the Furies were upon him—till the dawn looked in at the window and his friend’s form took shapeon the canvas, and the task that had been appointed him was done.
“Then ’Tino, too, vanished from among us, leaving the story of Cecco’s death in writing beside the corpse.
“And it was said by some, but never believed by those who knew him, that ’Tino had slain his friend.”
* * * * *
It was some time before I or Eric spoke.
“I wonder what became of ’Tino,” I murmured. “Stay; do not tell me, even if the legend has recorded it. I can picture it without words. Lonely he must have been, for he had seen that which must have built a barrier for ever between him and the world outside. And I can assume with equal certainty that he never handled brush or palette again. And sometimes—always at night—he would reappear at the church and watch throughthe darkness in company with his friend. Yes, lonely he must have been—but not unhappy, brightened by a great love here and by a vision of the Greater beyond.”
WhenI returned to Fleetwater, Marion was gone. It was better so, I felt, much as I missed her. Indeed, our last good-bye had been said in the place she had chosen for it,—on the Chapel Hill where she had turned and left me.
Two days later Eric’s verdict on the picture came. It was short and to the point.
“Dear Harold,“Why, it’s a Bronzino (he wrote), the great Bronzino at Madrid. I mean, of course, a copy. But a remarkably good one, and worth something if only for the excellence of the work. I’ll do what I can with it. The original is safe,as you know, in the Museum at Madrid—at least it was, unless you have stolen it since I left the place last autumn.“Yours affectionately,“Eric.”
“Dear Harold,
“Why, it’s a Bronzino (he wrote), the great Bronzino at Madrid. I mean, of course, a copy. But a remarkably good one, and worth something if only for the excellence of the work. I’ll do what I can with it. The original is safe,as you know, in the Museum at Madrid—at least it was, unless you have stolen it since I left the place last autumn.
“Yours affectionately,
“Eric.”
I do not know what other answer we could have expected. But notwithstanding, it was a disappointment to all of us. Most fortunate it proved that I had seen the original at Madrid, and been able, in consequence, to repress the growing confidence of those around me in the value of the picture. Indeed, I had been obliged to insist on this point again and again in my conversations with the Rector and Marion, neither of whom could in any wise be persuaded that it was only a copy. Marion, if possible, had been the more obstinate of the two, and had almost succeeded in convincing me that I had never seen the original at all. “I believe it was a dream, Harold,” shewould say, “and that you only fancied you saw it. Why, I’ve had the same feeling a hundred times over. Dreams with me often take such a real and tangible form that I’ve found myself hunting again and again for some article which I was sure I had in my possession, and which very possibly never existed at all. Reason in such cases is absolutely powerless. Even to this very day I constantly wake up with a belief that I’ve bought a whole gallery of pictures, and am short of the money to pay for them. And so real is the fancy that I could describe to you at this moment the shop where I bought them, the man who sold them to me, and the subject of each picture in detail.
“Besides, you must have been picture-blind by the time you got to Madrid. By your own showing it came at the end of a long round of galleries, and I suspect that this dream-picture of yours is a sort of blend of all the best picturesyou’d been seeing at Rome and Florence and Dresden. A cardinal gave you the dress, and Bindo Altoviti the face, and lo and behold you had your portrait complete.”
And the Rector, who had a fine eye for drawing and colouring, had been not one whit more easy to persuade. “I can’t solve the mystery, Stirling. But of one thing I’m certain—that no copyist did it. Do you mean to tell me that a painter who could do work like that would waste his time on the slavish task of copying? Why, the man who painted that picture might command the Royal Academy. It’s no such easy matter, remember, to reproduce a picture in flaming scarlet, without a touch of any other colour to relieve it. Try it, my boy—you’re a dabbler in the art yourself—and see if you can produce anything on the same lines that will be worth hanging as a signboard on the village Inn.”
Even Peggy, too, had had her fling at my unbelief. “Why, it’s simply lovely, Mr. Stirling,” she’d tell me, “though I say it as shouldn’t, for it goes sore against my conscience to praise that idolatrous young heathen, who, but for the cut of his dress, might be the Scarlet Woman herself. And even she couldn’t have chosen herself a more beautiful material; I will say that for it, scarlet or no scarlet. You can’t find such a texture as that in a shop now-a-days for love or money. Look at the gloss and sheen on it, and the beautiful folds that it makes, that’ll never show a crease in them till years after that young jackanapes has grown out of it.”
Well, I had my revenge on all of them at last when Eric’s letter came, confirming my statement that I had left the original at Madrid.
But I question whether revenge is ever at any time satisfactory; it certainly was not so to me.
Inthe days that followed, my life took a dull sad monotone, lightened at intervals by the reflection of past memories, which lay along its path like the sunlit pools left on a shore by the receding tide.
Leave-takings are bad enough at any time, unless they form the prelude to a brighter future. And future before me I had none, except a grim monotony of work in a curacy at the East End, into which I intended to throw all the energy I could command, if only to keep my thoughts from brooding on the past.
And yet of quiet happiness there was something left me still. For everyone at Fleetwater seemed sorry at my going. Even Higgins, our one great Calvinist, with whom on questions of theology the Rector and I had found ourselves at bitter feud, was troubled at my leaving. He had hoped, I think, to convert me to his theories. But as his arguments went chiefly to prove that one of the great pleasures of the righteous in the world to come would be to listen to the tortures of the wicked, I declined his ministrations, and became to him in his own words as “the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears.”
Stranger still, even Peggy was sorry, now that the time had come for me to go the way of all the curates, even though I was fulfilling my preordained destiny, and going on the question of Marion’s love. Not even the knowledge that Reggie would soon be home again, to find a fairfield and plenty of her own favour, could reconcile her wholly to the parting.
And at the Rectory all was sadness and dismay. The Rector seldom alluded to my going; I think he could not trust himself. But the children, who had been always fond of me, were less reticent of their grief, especially as they saw before them a blank future, from which the wedding and its attendant festivities had been suddenly withdrawn.
And still the dreary days went on. Each day a Good-bye said to some one who had become a kindly friend, and each day a Good-bye to some haunt in which Marion and I had walked and loved.
If only I could have shared in her firm confidence, the task before me would have been lightened. But each day I heard news of the bank that increased more and more my hopelessness.Already I had been obliged to borrow funds to meet the calls that were in prospect, and, when they should have been paid in full, I foresaw myself starting anew in life with a load of encumbrances about my neck that, out of a curate’s slender pittance, there was small hope of reducing, granted that I could find the means of paying the annual interest.
Even now I found myself hampered by the expenses necessitated by my leaving. And it was in the hope of getting something to relieve my present embarrassment that I wrote again to Eric, reminding him of his promise, and asking him in so many words if he had been able to do anything towards finding me a market for the picture.
He delayed his answer for many days, from the difficulty, I thought, he had found in getting any offer that he would be warranted in accepting.
And then, when the last day of my time at Fleetwater was come, and I had almost given up the hope of hearing any news from him, his answer reached me.