“YES, mum, I see un go up to the churchyard. He’s tidyin’ up the place a bit for the weddin’.”
“The wedding?” repeated Hadria vaguely. Mrs. Gullick looked at her as at one whose claims to complete possession of the faculties there seems sad reason to doubt.
“Oh, Miss Jordan’s, yes. When is it?”
“Why, it’s this mornin’, ma’am!” cried Mrs. Gullick.
“Dear me, of course. Ithoughtthe village looked rather excited.”
People were all standing at their doors, and the children had gathered at the gate of the church, with hands full of flowers. The wedding party was, it appeared, to arrive almost immediately. The children set up a shout as the first carriage was heard coming up the hill.
The bride appeared to be a popular character in Craddock. “Dear, dear, she will be missed, she will, she was a real lady, she was; did her duty too to richandpoor.”
The Professor asked his companion if she remarked that the amiable lady was spoken of universally in the past tense, as some one who had passed from the light of day.
Hadria laughed. “Whenever I am in a cynical mood I come to Craddock and talk to the villagers.”
Dodge was found resting on a broom-handle, with a flower in his button-hole. Marion Jordan had supplied him with port wine when he was “took bad” in the winter. Dodge found it of excellent quality. He approved of the institution of landed property, and had a genuine regard for the fair-haired, sweet-voiced girl who used to come in her pony-cart to distribute her bounty to the villagers. Her class in the Sunday-school, as he remarked, was always the best behaved.
The new schoolmistress, a sour and uncompromising looking person, had issued from her cottage in her Sunday best to see the ceremony.
“That’s where little Martha’s mother used to live,” said Hadria, “and that is where she died.”
“Indeed, yes. I think Mr. Walker pointed it out to me.”
“Ah! of course, and then you know the village of old.”
“’Ere they comes!” announced a chorus of children’s voices, as the first carriage drove up. The excitement was breathless. The occupants alighted and made their way to the church. After that, the carriages came in fairly quick succession. The bridegroom was criticised freely by the crowd. They did not think him worthy of his bride. “They du say as it was a made up thing,” Dodge observed, “and that it wasn’t’imas she’d like to go up to the altar with.”
“Well,Idon’t sort o’ take to ’im neither,” Mrs. Gullick observed, sympathizing with the bride’s feeling. “I do hope he’ll be kind to the pore young thing; that I do.”
“She wouldn’t never give it ’im back; she’s that good,” another woman remarked.
“Who’s the gentleman as she had set her heart on?” a romantic young woman enquired.
“Oh, it’s only wot they say,” said Dodge judicially; “it’s no use a listening to all one hears—not by a long way.”
“You ’ad it from Lord Engleton’s coachman, didn’t you?” prompted Mrs. Gullick.
“Which he heard it said by the gardener at Mr. Jordan’s, as Miss Marion was always about with Mr. Fleming.”
The murmur of interest at this announcement was drowned by the sound of carriage wheels. The bride had come.
“See the ideal and ethereal being whom you have been so faithfully impersonating all the afternoon!” exclaimed Hadria.
A fair, faint, admirably gentle creature, floating in a mist of tulle, was wafted out of the brougham, the spring sunshine burnishing the pale hair, and flashing a dazzling sword-like glance on the string of diamonds at her throat.
It seemed too emphatic, too keen a greeting for the faint ambiguous being, about to put the teaching of her girlhood, and her pretty hopes and faiths, to the test.
She gave a start and shiver as she stepped out into the brilliant day, turning with a half-scared look to the crowd of faces. It seemed almost as if she were seeking help in a blind, bewildered fashion.
Hadria had an impulse. “What would she think if I were to run down those steps and drag her away?” Professor Theobald shook his head.
Within the church, the procession moved up the aisle, to the sound of the organ. Hadria compared the whole ceremony to some savage rite of sacrifice: priest and people with the victim, chosen for her fairness, decked as is meet for victims.
“But she may be happy,” Lady Engleton suggested when the ceremony was over, and the organ was pealing out the wedding march.
“That does not prevent the analogy. What a magnificent hideous thing the marriage-service is! and how exactly it expresses the extraordinary mixture of the noble and the brutal that is characteristic of our notions about these things!”
“The bride is certainly allowed to remain under no misapprehension as to her function,” Lady Engleton admitted, with a laugh that grated on Hadria. Professor Theobald had fallen behind with Joseph Fleming, who had turned up among the crowd.
“But, after all, why mince matters?”
“Why indeed?” said Hadria. Lady Engleton seemed to have expected dissent.
“I think,” she said, “that we are getting too squeamish nowadays as to speech. Women are so frightened to call a spade a spade.”
“It is thespadethat is ugly, not the name.”
“But, my dear?”
“Oh, it is not a question of squeamishness, it is the insult of the thing. One insult after another, and everyone stands round, looking respectable.”
Lady Engleton laughed and said something to lead her companion on.
She liked to listen to Mrs. Temperley when she was thoroughly roused.
“It is the hideous mixture of the delicately civilized with the brutally savage that makes one sick. A frankly barbarous ceremony, where there was no pretence of refinement and propriety and so forth, would be infinitely less revolting.”
“Which your language is plain,” observed Lady Engleton, much amused.
“I hope so. Didn’t you see how it all hurt that poor girl? One of her training too—suspended in mid air—not an earthward glance. You know Mrs. Jordan’s views on the education of girls. Poor girls. They are morally skinned, in such a way as to make contact with Fact a veritable torture, and then suddenly they are sent forth defenceless into Life to be literally curry-combed.”
“They adjust themselves,” said Lady Engleton.
“Adjust themselves!” Hadria vindictively flicked off the head of a dandelion with her parasol. “They awake to find they have been living in a Fool’s Paradise—a little upholstered corner with stained glass windows and rose-coloured light. They find that suddenly they are expected to place in the centre of their life everything that up to that moment they have scarcely been allowed even to know about; they find that they must obediently veer round, with the amiable adaptability of a well-oiled weather-cock. Every instinct, every prejudice must be thrown over. All the effects of their training must be instantly overcome. And all this with perfect subjection and cheerfulness, on pain of moral avalanches and deluges, and heaven knows what convulsions of conventional nature!”
“There certainly is some curious incongruity in our training,” Lady Engleton admitted.
“Incongruity! Think what it means for a girl to have been taught to connect the idea of something low and evil with that which nevertheless is to lie at the foundation of all her after life. That is what it amounts to, and people complain that women are not logical.”
Lady Engleton laughed. “Fortunately things work better in practice than might be expected, judging them in the abstract. How bashful Professor Theobald seems suddenly to have become! Why doesn’t he join us, I wonder? However, so much the better; I do like to hear you talk heresy.”
“I do more than talk it, Imeanit,” said Hadria. “I fail utterly to get at the popular point of view.”
“But you misrepresent it—therearemodifying facts in the case.”
“I don’t see them. Girls are told: ‘So and so is not a nice thing for you to talk about. Wait, however, until the proper signal is given, and then woe betide you if you don’t cheerfully accept it as your bounden duty.’ Ifthatdoes not enjoin abject slavishness and deliberate immorality of the most cold-blooded kind, I simply don’t know what does.”
Lady Engleton seemed to ponder somewhat seriously, as she stood looking down at the grave beside her.
“How we ever came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me,” Hadria continued, “and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight through one’s fingers.”
“Chiefly, perhaps, because women won’t speak out,” suggested Lady Engleton.
“They have been so drilled,” cried Hadria, “so gagged, so deafened, by ‘the shrieks of near relations.’”
Lady Engleton was asking for an explanation, when the wedding-bells began to clang out from the belfry, merry and roughly rejoicing. “Tom-boy bells,” Hadria called them. They seemed to tumble over one another and pick themselves up again, and give chase, and roll over in a heap, and then peal firmly out once more, laughing at their romping digression, joyous and thoughtless and simple-hearted. “Evidently without the least notion what they are celebrating,” said Hadria.
The bride came out of church on her husband’s arm. The children set up a shout. Hadria and Lady Engleton, and, farther back, Professor Theobald and Joseph Fleming, could see the two figures pass down to the carriage and hear the carriage drive away. Hadria drew a long breath.
“I am afraid she was in love with Joseph Fleming,” remarked Lady Engleton. “I hoped at one time that he cared for her, but that Irish friend of Marion’s, Katie O’Halloran, came on the scene and spoilt my little romance.”
“I wonder why she married this man? I wonder why the wind blows?” was added in self-derision at the question.
The rest of the party were now departing. “O sleek wedding guests,” Hadria apostrophized them, “how solemnly they sat there, like all-knowing sphinxes, watching, watching, and that child so helpless—handcuffed, manacled! How many prayers will be offered at the shrine of the goddess of Duty within the next twelve months!”
Mrs. Jordan, a British matron of solid proportions, passed down the path on the arm of a comparatively puny cavalier. The sight seemed to stir up some demon in Hadria’s bosom. Fantastic, derisive were her comments on that excellent lady’s most cherished principles, and on her well-known and much-vaunted mode of training her large family of daughters.
“Only the traditional ideas carried out by a woman of narrow mind and strong will,” said Lady Engleton.
“Oh those traditional ideas! They might have issued fresh and hot from an asylum for criminal lunatics.”
“You are deliciously absurd, Hadria.”
“It is the criminal lunatics who are absurd,” she retorted. “Do you remember how those poor girls used to bewail the restrictions to their reading?”
“Yes, it was really areductio ad absurdumof our system. The girls seemed afraid to face anything. They would rather die than think. (I wonder why Professor Theobald lingers so up there by the chancel? The time must be getting on.)”
Hadria glanced towards him and made no comment. She was thinking of Mrs. Jordan’s daughters.
“What became of their personality all that time I cannot imagine: their woman’s nature that one hears so much about, and from which such prodigious feats were to be looked for, in the future.”
“Yes,thatis where the inconsistency of a girl’s education strikes me most,” said Lady Engleton. “If she were intended for the cloister one could understand it. But since she is brought up for the express purpose of being married, it does seem a little absurd not to prepare her a little more for her future life.”
“Exactly,” cried Hadria, “if the orthodox are really sincere in declaring that life to be so sacred and desirable, why on earth don’t they treat it frankly and reverently and teach their girls to understand and respect it, instead of allowing a furtive, sneaky, detestable spirit to hover over it?”
“Yes, I agree with you there,” said Lady Engleton.
“And if theydon’treally in their hearts think it sacred and so on (and how theycan, under our present conditions, I fail to see), why do they deliberately bring up their girls to be married, as they bring up their sons to a profession? It is inconceivable, and yet good people do it, without a suspicion of the real nature of their conduct, which it wouldn’t be polite to describe.”
Mrs. Jordan—her face irradiated with satisfaction—was acknowledging the plaudits of the villagers, who shouted more or less in proportion to the eye-filling properties of the departing guests.
Hadria was seized with a fit of laughter. It was an awkward fact, that she never could see Mrs. Jordan’s majestic form and noble bonnet without feeling the same overwhelming impulse to laugh.
“This is disgraceful conduct!” cried Lady Engleton.
Hadria was clearly in one of her most reckless moods to-day.
“You have led me on, and must take the consequences!” she cried. “Imagine,” she continued with diabolical deliberation, “if Marion, on any daypreviousto this, had gone to her mother and expressed an overpowering maternal instinct—a deep desire to have a child!”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Engleton.
“Why so shocked, since it is so holy?”
“But that is different.”
“Ah! then it is holy only when the social edict goes forth, and proclaims the previous evil good and the previous good evil.”
“Come, come; the inconsistency is not quite so bad as that. (How that man does dawdle!)”
Hadria shrugged her shoulders. “It seems to me so; for now suppose, on the other hand, that this same Marion, on any daysubsequentto this, should go to that same mother, and announce an exactly opposite feeling—a profound objection to the maternal function—how would she be received? Heavens, with what pained looks, with what platitudes and proverbs, with what reproofs and axioms and sentiments! She would issue forth from that interview like another St. Sebastian, stuck all over with wounds and arrows. ‘Sacred mission,’ ‘tenderest joy,’ ‘holiest mission,’ ‘highest vocation’—one knows the mellifluous phrases.”
“But after all she would be wrong in her objection. The instinct is a true one,” said Lady Engleton.
“Oh, then why should she be pelted for expressing it previously, if the question is not indiscreet?”
“Well, it would seem rather gruesome, if girls were to be overpowered with that passion.”
“So we are all to be horribly shocked at the presence of an instinct to-day, and then equally shocked and indignant at its absence to-morrow; our sentiment being determined by the performance or otherwise of the ceremony we have just witnessed. It really shows a touching confidence in the swift adaptability of the woman’s sentimental organization!”
Lady Engleton gave an uneasy laugh, and seemed lost in uncomfortable thought. She enjoyed playing with unorthodox speculations, but she objected to have her customary feelings interfered with, by a reasoning which she did not see her way to reduce to a condition of uncertainty. She liked to leave a question delicately balanced, enjoying all the fun of “advanced” thought without endangering her favourite sentiments. Like many women of talent, she was intensely maternal, in the instinctive sense; and for that reason had a vague desire to insist on all other women being equally so; but the notion of the instinct becoming importunate in a girl revolted her; a state of mind that struggled to justify itself without conscious entrenchment behind mere tradition. Lady Engleton sincerely tried to shake off prejudice.
“You are in a mixed condition of feeling, I see,” Hadria said. “I am not surprised. Our whole scheme of things indeed is so mixed, that the wonder only is we are not all in a state of chronic lunacy. I believe, as a matter of fact, that weare; but as we are all lunatics together, there is no one left to put us into asylums.”
Lady Engleton laughed.
“The present age is truly a strange one,” she exclaimed.
“Do you think so? It always seems to me that the present age is finding out for the first time how very strange all theotherages have been.”
“However that may be, it seems to me, that a sort of shiver is going through all Society, as if it had suddenly become very much aware of things and couldn’t make them out—nor itself.”
“Like a creature beginning to struggle through a bad illness. I do think it is all extremely remarkable, especially the bad illness.”
“You are as strange as your epoch,” cried Lady Engleton.
“It is a sorry sign when one remarks health instead of disease.”
“Upon my word, you have a wholesome confidence in yourself!”
“I do not, in that respect, differ from my kind,” Hadria returned calmly.
“It is that whichwasthat seems to you astonishing, not that which is to be,” Lady Engleton commented, pensively. “For my part I confess I am frightened, almost terrified at times, at that which is to be.”
“I am frightened, terrified, so that the thought becomes unbearable, at that whichis,” said Hadria.
There was a long silence. Lady Engleton appeared to be again plunged in thought.
“The maternal instinct—yes; it seems to be round that unacknowledged centre that the whole storm is raging.”
“A desperate question that Society shrinks from in terror: whether women shall be expected to conduct themselves as if the instinct had been weighed out accurately, like weekly stores, and given to all alike, or whether choice and individual feeling is to be held lawful in this matter—thereis the red-hot heart of the battle.”
“Remember men of science are against freedom in this respect. (I do wishourman of science would make haste.)”
“They rush to the rescue when they see the sentimental defences giving way,” said Hadria. “If the ‘sacred privilege’ and ‘noblest vocation’ safeguards won’t hold, science must throw up entrenchments.”
“I prefer the more romantic and sentimental presentment of the matter,” said Lady Engleton.
“Naturally. Ah! it is pathetic, the way we have tried to make things decorative; but it won’t hold out much longer. Women are driving their masters to plain speaking—the ornaments are being dragged down. And what do we find? Bare and very ugly fact. And if we venture to hint that this unsatisfactory skeleton may be modified in form, science becomes stern. She wishes things, in this department, left as they are. Women are made for purposes of reproduction; let them clearly understand that. No picking and choosing.”
“Men pick and choose, it is true,” observed Lady Engleton in a musing tone, as if thinking aloud.
“Ah, but that’s different—a real scientific argument, though a superficial observer might not credit it. At any rate, it is quite sufficiently scientific for this particular subject. Our leaders of thought don’t bring out their Sunday-best logic on this question. They lounge in dressing-gown and slippers. One gets to know the oriental pattern of that dressing-gown and the worn-down heels of those old slippers.”
“They may be right though, notwithstanding their logic,” said Lady Engleton.
“By good luck, not good guidance. I wonder what her Serene Highness Science would say if she heard us?”
“That we two ignorant creatures are very presumptuous.”
“Yes, people always fall back on that, when they can’t refute you.”
Lady Engleton smiled.
“I should like to hear the question discussed by really competent persons. (Well, if luncheon is dead cold it will be his own fault.)”
“Oh, really competent persons will tell us all about the possibilities of woman: her feelings, desires, capabilities, and limitations, now and for all time to come. And the wildly funny thing is that women are ready, with open mouths, to reverently swallow this male verdict on their inherent nature, as if it were gospel divinely inspired. I may appear a little inconsistent,” Hadria added with a laugh, “but I do think women are fools!”
They had strolled on along the path till they came to the schoolmistress’s grave, which was green and daisy-covered, as if many years had passed since her burial. Hadria stood, for a moment, looking down at it.
“Fools, fools, unutterable, irredeemable fools!” she burst out.
“My dear, my dear, we are in a churchyard,” remonstrated Lady Engleton, half laughing.
“We are at this grave,” said Hadria.
“The poor woman would have been among the first to approve of the whole scheme, though it places her here beneath the daisies.”
“Exactly. Am I not justified then in crying ‘fool’? Don’t imagine that I exclude myself,” she added.
“I think you might be less liable to error if youwererather more of a fool, if I may say so,” observed Lady Engleton.
“Oh error! I daresay. One can guard against that, after a fashion, by never making a stretch after truth. And the reward comes, of its kind. How green the grave is. The grass grows so fast on graves.”
Lady Engleton could not bear a churchyard. It made one think too seriously.
“Oh, you needn’t unless you like!” said Hadria with a laugh. “Indeed a churchyard might rather teach us what nonsense it is to take things seriously—our little affairs. This poor woman, a short while ago, was dying of grief and shame and agony, and the village was stirred with excitement, as if the solar system had come to grief. It all seemed so stupendous and important, yet now—look at that tall grass waving in the wind!”
PROFESSOR THEOBALD had been engaged, for the last ten minutes, in instructing Joseph Fleming and a few stragglers, among whom was Dodge, in the characteristics of ancient architecture. He was pointing out the fine Norman window of the south transept, Joseph nodding wearily, Dodge leaning judicially on his broom and listening with attention. Joseph, as Lady Engleton remarked, was evidently bearing the Normans a bitter grudge for making interesting arches. The Professor seemed to have no notion of tempering the wind of his instruction to the shorn lambs of his audience.
“Ican’tunderstand why he does not join us,” said Lady Engleton. “It must be nearly luncheon time. However, it doesn’t much matter, as everyone seems to be up here. I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “what the bride would think if she had heard our conversation this morning!”
“Probably she would recognize many a half-thought of her own,” said Hadria.
Lady Engleton shook her head.
“They alarm me, all these ideas. For myself, I feel bound to accept the decision of wise and good men, who have studied social questions deeply.”
Personal feeling had finally overcome her desire to fight off the influence of tradition.
“I do not feel competent to judge in a matter so complex, and must be content to abide by the opinions of those who have knowledge and experience.”
Lady Engleton thus retreated hastily behind cover. That was a strategic movement always available in difficulties, and it left one’s companion in speculation alone in the open, arrogantly sustaining an eagle-gaze in the sun’s face. The advantages of feminine humility were obvious. One could come out for a skirmish and then run for shelter, in awkward moments. No woman ought to venture out on the bare plain without a provision of the kind.
Hadria had a curious sensation of being so exposed, when Lady Engleton retreated behind her “good and wise men,” and she had the usual feminine sense of discomfort in the feeling of presumption that it produced. Heredity asserted itself, as it will do, in the midst of the fray, just when its victim seems to have shaken himself free from the mysterious obsession. But Hadria did not visibly flinch. Lady Engleton received the impression that Mrs. Temperley was too sure of her own judgment to defer even to the wisest.
She experienced a pleasant little glow of humility, wrapping herself in it, as in a protecting garment, and unconsciously comparing her more moderate and modest attitude favourably with her companion’s self-confidence. Just at that moment, Hadria’s self-confidence was gasping for breath. But her sense of the comic in her companion’s tactics survived, and set her off in an apparently inconsequent laugh, which goaded Lady Engleton into retreating further, to an encampment of pure orthodoxy.
“I fear there is an element of the morbid, in all this fretful revolt against the old-established destiny of our sex,” she said.
The advance-guard of Professor Theobald’s party was coming up. The Professor himself still hung back, playing the Ancient Mariner to Joseph Fleming’s Wedding Guest. Most unwilling was that guest, most pertinacious that mariner.
Hadria had turned to speak to Dodge, who had approached, broom in hand. “Seems only yesterday as we was a diggin’ o’ that there grave, don’t it, mum?” he remarked pleasantly, including Hadria in the credit of the affair, with native generosity.
“It does indeed, Dodge. I see you have been tidying it up and clearing away the moss from the name. I can read it now.Ellen Jervis.—Requiescat in pace.”
“We was a wonderin’ wot that meant, me and my missus.”
Hadria explained.
“Oh indeed, mum. She didn’t die in peace, whatever she be a doin’ now, notshedidn’t, pore thing. I was jest a tellin’ the gentleman” (Dodge indicated Professor Theobald with a backward movement of the thumb), “about the schoolmarm. He was talkin’ like a sermon—beautiful—about the times wen the church was built; and about them as come over from France and beat the English—shameful thing for our soldiers, ’pears to me, not as I believes all them tales. Mr. Walker says as learnin’ is a pitfall, wich I don’t swaller everything as Mr. Walker says neither. Seems to me as it don’t do to be always believin’ wot’s told yer, or there’s no sayin’ wot sort o’ things you wouldn’t come to find inside o’ yer, before you’d done.”
Hadria admitted the danger of indiscriminate absorption, but pointed out that if caution were carried too far, one might end by finding nothing inside of one at all, which also threatened to be attended with inconvenience.
Dodge seemed to feel that thedésagrémentsin this last case were trivial as compared with those of the former.
“Dodge is a born sceptic,” said Lady Engleton. “What would you say, Dodge, if some tiresome, reasonable person were to come and point out something to you that you couldn’t honestly deny, and yet that seemed to upset all the ideas that you had felt were truest and best?”
Dodge scratched his head. “I should say as what he said wasn’t true,” replied Dodge.
“But if you couldn’t help seeing that it was true?”
“That ud be arkard,” Dodge admitted.
“Then what would you do?”
Dodge leant upon the broom-handle, apparently in profound thought. His words were waited for.
“I think,” he announced at last, “as I shouldn’t do nothin’ partic’lar.”
“Dodge, you really are an oracle!” Hadria exclaimed. “What could more simply describe the action of our Great Majority?”
“You are positively impish in your mood to-day!” exclaimed Lady Engleton. “What should we do without our Great Majority, as you call it? It is absolutely necessary to put some curb on the wild impulses of pure reason”—a sentiment that Hadria greeted with chuckles of derision.
Joseph Fleming was looking longingly towards the grave, but his face was resigned, for the Ancient Mariner had him button-holed securely.
“Whatarethey lingering for so long, I wonder?” cried Lady Engleton impatiently. “Professor Theobald is really too instructive to-day. I will go and hurry him.”
Joseph welcomed her as his deliverer.
“I was merely waiting for you two ladies to move; I would have come on with Mr. Fleming. I am extremely sorry,” said the Professor.
He followed Lady Engleton down the path between the graves, with something of the same set expression that had been on his face when he came up the path of the cottage garden to admire the baby.
“It appears that we were all waiting for each other,” said Lady Engleton.
“This ’ere’s the young woman’s grave, sir—Ellen Jervis—’er as I was a tellin’ you of,” said Dodge, pointing an earth-stained finger at the mound.
“Oh, yes; very nice,” said the Professor vaguely. Hadria’s laugh disconcerted him. “I mean—pretty spot—well chosen—well made.”
Hadria continued to laugh. “I never heard less skilled comment on a grave!” she exclaimed. “It might be a pagoda!”
“It’s not so easy as you seem to imagine to find distinctive epithets. I challenge you. Begin with the pagoda.”
“One of the first canons of criticism is never to attempt the feat yourself; jeer rather at others.”
“The children don’t like the new schoolmarm near so well as this ’un,” observed Dodge, touching the grave with his broom. “Lord, it was an unfort’nate thing, for there wasn’t a better girl nor she were in all Craddock (as I was a tellin’ of you, sir), not when she fust come as pupil teacher. It was all along of her havin’ no friends, and her mother far away. She used to say to me at times of an afternoon wen she was a passin’ through the churchyard—‘Dodge,’ says she, ‘do you know I have no one to care for, or to care for me, in all the world?’ I used to comfort her like, and say as there was plenty in Craddock as cared for her, but she always shook her head, sort o’ sad.”
“Poor thing!” Lady Engleton exclaimed.
“And one mornin’ a good time after, I found her a cryin’ bitter, just there by her own grave, much about where the gentleman ’as his foot at this moment” (the Professor quickly withdrew it). “It was in the dusk o’ the evenin’, and she was a settin’ on the rail of old Squire Jordan’s grave, jes’ where you are now, sir. We were sort o’ friendly, and wen I heard ’er a taking on so bad, I jes’ went and stood alongside, and I sez, ‘Wy Ellen Jervis,’ I sez, ‘wot be you a cryin’ for?’ But she kep’ on sobbin’ and wouldn’t answer nothin’. So I waited, and jes’ went on with my work a bit, and then I sez again, ‘Ellen Jervis, wot be you a cryin’ for?’ And then she took her hands from her face and she sez, ‘Because I am that miserable,’ sez she, and she broke out cryin’ wuss than ever. ‘Dear, dear,’ I sez, ‘wot is it? Can’t somebody do nothin’ for you?’
“‘No; nobody in the world can help me, and nobody wants to; it would be better if I was under there.’ And she points to the ground just where she lies now—I give you my word she did—and sure enough, before another six months had gone by, there she lay under the sod, ’xacly on the spot as she had pointed to. She was a sinner, there’s no denyin’, but she ’ad to suffer for it more nor most.”
“Very sad,” observed Professor Theobald nervously, with a glance at Hadria, as if expecting derision.
“It is a hard case,” said Lady Engleton, “but I suppose errorhasto be paid for.”
“Well, I don’t know ’xacly,” said Dodge, “it depends.”
“On the sex,” said Hadria.
“I have known them as spent all their lives a’ injurin’ of others, and no harm seemed to come to ’em. And I’ve seed them as wouldn’t touch a fly and always doin’ their neighbours a kind turn, wot never ’ad a day’s luck.”
“Let us hope it will be made up in the next world,” said Lady Engleton. Dodge hoped it would, but there was something in the turn of his head that seemed to denote a disposition to base his calculations on this, rather than on the other world. He was expected home by his wife, at this hour, so wishing the company good day, and pocketing the Professor’s gratuity with a gleam of satisfaction in his shrewd and honest face, he trudged off with his broom down the path, and out by the wicket-gate into the village street.
“I never heard that part of the story before,” said Lady Engleton, when the gravedigger had left.
It was new to everybody. “It brings her nearer, makes one realize her suffering more painfully.”
Hadria was silent.
Professor Theobald cast a quick, scrutinizing glance at her.
“I can understand better now how you were induced to take the poor child, Mrs. Temperley,” Lady Engleton remarked.
They were strolling down the path, and Professor Theobald was holding open the gate for his companions to pass through. His hand seemed to shake slightly.
“I don’t enjoy probing my motives on that subject,” said Hadria.
“Why? I am sure they were good.”
“I can’t help hoping that that child may live to avenge her mother; to make some man know what it is to be horribly miserable—but, oh, I suppose it’s like trying to reach the feelings of a rhinoceros!”
“There you are much mistaken, Mrs. Temperley,” said the Professor. “Men are as sensitive, in some respects, as women.”
“So much the better.”
“Then do you think it quite just to punish one man for the sin of another?”
“No; but there is a deadly feud between the sexes: it is a hereditary vendetta: the duty of vengeance is passed on from generation to generation.”
“Oh, Mrs. Temperley!” Lady Engleton’s tone was one of reproach.
“Yes, it is vindictive, I know; one does not grow tender towards the enemy at the grave of Ellen Jervis.”
“At least, there weretwosinners, not only one.”
“Only one dies of a broken heart.”
“But why attempt revenge?”
“Oh, a primitive instinct. And anything is better than this meek endurance, this persistent heaping of penalties on the scapegoat.”
“No good ever came of mere revenge, however,” said Professor Theobald.
“Sometimes that is the only form of remonstrance that is listened to,” said Hadria. “When people have the law in their own hands and Society at their back, they can afford to be deaf to mere verbal protest.”
“As for the child,” said Lady Engleton, “she will be in no little danger of a fate like her mother’s.”
Hadria’s face darkened.
“At least then, she shall have some free and happy hours first; at least she shall not be driven to it by the misery of moral starvation, starvation of the affections. She shall be protected from the solemn fools—with sawdust for brains and a mechanical squeaker for heart—who, on principle, cut off from her mother all joy and all savour in life, and then punished her for falling a victim to the starved emotional condition to which they had reduced her.”
“The matter seems complex,” said Lady Engleton, “and I don’t see how revenge comes in.”
“It is a passion that has never been eradicated. Oh, if I could but find that man!”
“A man is a hard thing to punish,—unless he is in love with one.”
“Well, let him be in love!” cried Hadria fiercely.
THE sound of music stole over the gardens of the Priory, at sunset. It was the close of one of the most exquisite days of Spring. A calm had settled over the country with the passing away of the sun-god. His attendant winds and voices had been sacrificed on his funeral pyre.
Two figures sat on the terrace by the open window of the drawing-room, listening to the utterance, in music, of a tumultuous, insurgent spirit. In Professor Fortescue, the musical passion was deeply rooted, as it is in most profoundly sympathetic and tender natures. Algitha anxiously watched the effect of her sister’s playing on her companion.
The wild power of the composer was not merely obvious, it was overwhelming. It was like “a sudden storm among mountains,” “the wind-swept heavens at midnight,” “the lonely sea”: he struggled for the exactly-fitting simile. There was none, because of its many-sidedness. Loneliness remained as an ever-abiding quality. There were moon-glimpses and sun-bursts over the scenery of the music; there was sweetness, and a vernal touch that thrilled the listeners as with the breath of flowers and the fragrance of earth after rain, but always, behind all fancy and grace and tenderness, and even passion, lurked that spectral loneliness. The performer would cease for some minutes, and presently begin again in a new mood. The music was always characteristic, often wild and strange, yet essentially sane.
“There is a strong Celtic element in it,” said the Professor. “This is a very wonderful gift. I suppose one never does really know one’s fellows: her music to-night reveals to me new sides of Hadria’s character.”
“I confess they alarm me,” said Algitha.
“Truly, this is not the sort of power that can be safely shut up and stifled. It is the sort of power for which everything ought to be set aside. That is my impression of it.”
“I am worried about Hadria,” Algitha said. “I know her better than most people, and I know how hard she takes things and what explosive force that musical instinct of hers has. Yet, it is impossible, as things are, for her to give it real utterance. She can only open the furnace door now and then.”
The Professor shook his head gravely. “It won’t do: it isn’t safe. And why should such a gift be lost?”
“That’s what I say! Yet what is to be done? There is no one really to blame. As for Hubert, I am sorry for him. He had not the faintest idea of Hadria’s character, though she did her best to enlighten him. It is hard for him (since he feels it so) and it is desperate for her. You are such an old friend, that I feel I may speak to you about it. You see what is going on, and I know it is troubling you as it does me.”
“It is indeed. If I am not very greatly mistaken, here is real musical genius of the first order, going to waste: strong forces being turned in upon the nature, to its own destruction; and, as you say, it seems as if nothing could be done. It is the more ironically cruel, since Hubert is himself musical.”
“Oh, yes, but in quite a different way. His fetish is good taste, or what he thinks such. Hadria’s compositions set his teeth on edge. His nature is conventional through and through. He fears adverse comment more than any earthly thing. And yet the individual opinions that compose the general ‘talk’ that he so dreads, are nothing to him. He despises them heartily. But he would give his soul (and particularly Hadria’s) rather than incur a whisper from people collectively.”
“That is a very common trait. If we feared only the opinions that we respect, our fear would cover but a small area.”
The music stole out again through the window. The thoughts of the listeners were busy. It was not until quite lately that Professor Fortescue had fully realised the nature of Hadria’s present surroundings. It had taken all his acuteness and his sympathy to enable him to perceive the number and strength of the little threads that hampered her spontaneity. As she said, they were made of heart-strings. A vast spider’s web seemed to spread its tender cordage round each household, for the crippling of every winged creature within its radius. Fragments of torn wings attested the struggles that had taken place among the treacherous gossamer.
“And the maddening thing is,” cried Algitha, “that there is nobody to swear at. Swearing at systems and ideas, as Hadria says, is a Barmecide feast to one’s vindictiveness.”
“It is the tyranny of affection that has done so much to ruin the lives of women,” the Professor observed, in a musing tone.
Then after a pause: “I fear your poor mother has never got overyourlittle revolt, Algitha.”
“Never, I am sorry to say. If I had married and settled in Hongkong, she would scarcely have minded, but as it is, she feels deserted. Of course the boys are away from home more than I am, yet she is not grieved at that. You see how vast these claims are. Nothing less than one’s entire life and personality will suffice.”
“Your mother feels that you are throwing your life away, remember. But truly it seems, sometimes, as if people were determined to turn affection into a curse instead of a blessing!”
“I never think of it in any other light,” Algitha announced serenely.
The Professor laughed. “Oh, there are exceptions, I hope,” he said. “Love, like everything else that is great, is very, very rare. We call the disposition to usurp and absorb another person by that name, but woe betide him or her who is the object of such a sentiment. Yet happily, the real thingisto be found now and again. And from that arises freedom.”
Hadria was playing some joyous impromptu, which seemed to express the very spirit of Freedom herself.
“I think Hadria has something of the gipsy in her,” said Algitha. “She is so utterly and hopelessly unfitted to be the wife of a prim, measured, elegant creature like Hubert—good fellow though he is—and to settle down for life at Craddock Dene.”
“Yes,” returned the Professor, “it has occurred to me, more than once, that there must be a drop of nomad blood somewhere among the ancestry.”
“Hadria always says herself, that she is a vagabond in disguise.”
He laughed. Then, as he drew out a tobacco-pouch from his pocket and proceeded to light his pipe, he went on, in quiet meditative fashion, as if thinking aloud: “The fact of the matter is, that in this world, the dead weight of the mass bears heavily upon the exceptional natures. It comes home to one vividly, in cases like this. The stupidity and blindness of each individual goes to build up the dead wall, the impassable obstacle, for some other spirit. The burden that we have cast upon the world has to be borne by our fellow man or woman, and perhaps is doomed to crush a human soul.”
“It seems to me that most people are engaged in that crushing industry,” said Algitha with a shrug. “Don’t I know their bonnets, and their frock-coats and their sneers!”
The Professor smiled. He thought that most of us were apt to take that attitude at times. The same spirit assumed different forms. “While we are sneering at our fellow mortal, and assuring him loftily that he can certainly prevail, if only he is strong enough, it may beourparticular dulness orourhardness that is dragging him down to a tragic failure, before our eyes.”
The sun was low when the player came out to the terrace and took her favourite seat on the parapet. The gardens were steeped in profound peace. One could hear no sound for miles round. The broad country made itself closely felt by its stirring silence. The stretches of fields beyond fields, the woodlands in their tender green, the long, long sweep of the quiet land, formed a benign circle round the garden, and led the sense of peace out and out to the horizon, where the liquid light of the sky touched the hills.
The face of the Professor had a transparent look and a singular beauty of expression, such as is seen on the faces of the dead, or on the faces of those who are carried beyond themselves by some generous enthusiasm.
They watched, in silence, the changes creeping over the heavens, the subtle transmutations of tint; the fairylands of cloud, growing like dreams, and melting in golden annihilation; the more delicate and exquisite, the sooner the end.
The first pale hints of splendour had spread, till the whole West was throbbing with the radiance. But it was short-lived. The soul of the light, with its vital vibrating quality, seemed to die, and then slowly the glow faded, till every sparkle was gone, and the amphitheatre of the sky lay cold, and dusk, and empty. It was not till the last gleam had melted away that a word was spoken.
“It is like a prophecy,” said Hadria.
“To-morrow the dawn, remember.”
Hadria’s thoughts ran on in the silence.
The dawn? Yes; but all that lost splendour, those winged islands, those wild ranges of mountain where the dreams dwell; to-morrow’s dawn brings no resurrection for them. Other pageants there will be, other cloud-castles, but never again just those.
Had the Professor been following her thoughts?
“Life,” he said, “offers her gifts as the Sibyl her books; they grow fewer as we refuse them.”
“Ah! that is the truth that clamours in my brain, warning and pointing to an empty temple, like the deserted sky, a little while ahead.”
“Be warned then.”
“Ah! but what to do? I am out of myself now with the spring; there are so many benign influences. I too have winged islands, and wild ranges where the dreams dwell; life is a fairy-tale; but there is always that terror of the departure of the sun.”
“Carpe diem.”
Hadria turned a startled and eager face towards the Professor, who was leaning back in his chair, thoughtfully smoking. The smoke curled away serenely through the calm air of the evening.
“You have a great gift,” he said.
“One is afraid of taking a thing too seriously because it is one’s own.”
The Professor turned almost angrily.
“Good heavens, what does it matter whose it is? There may be a sort of inverted vanity in refusing fair play to a power, on that ground. Alas! here is one of the first morbid signs of the evil at work upon you. If you had been wholesomely moving and striving in the right direction, do you think you would have been guilty of that piece of egotism?”
“Vanity pursues one into hidden corners of the mind. I am so used to that sort of spirit among women. Apparently I have caught the infection.”
“I would not let it go farther,” advised the Professor.
“To do myself justice, I think it is superficial,” said Hadria with a laugh. “I would dare anything,anything for a chance of freedom, for——,” she broke off, hesitating. “I remember once—years ago, when I was quite a girl—seeing a young ash-tree that had got jammed into a chink so that it couldn’t grow straight, or spread, as its inner soul, poor stripling, evidently inspired it to grow. Outside, there were hundreds of upright, vigorous, healthful young trees, fulfilling that innate idea in apparent gladness, and with obvious general advantage, since they were growing into sound, valuable trees, straight of trunk, nobly developed. I felt like the poor sapling in the cranny, that had just the same natural impetus of healthy growth as all the others, but was forced to become twisted, and crooked, and stunted and wretched. I think most women have to grow in a cranny. It is generally known as their Sphere.” Algitha gave an approving chuckle. “I noticed,” Hadria added, “that the desperate struggle to grow of that young tree had begun to loosen the masonry of the edifice that cramped it. There was a great dangerous-looking crack right across the building. The tree was not saved from deformity,butit had its revenge! Some day that noble institution would come down by the run.”
“Yes. Well, the thing to do is to get out of it,” said the Professor.
“You really advise that?”
“Advise? One dare not advise. It is too perilous. No general theories will hold in all instances.”
“Tell me,” said Hadria, “what are the qualities in a human being that make him most serviceable, or least harmful?”
“What qualities?” Professor Fortescue watched the smoke of his pipe curling away, as if he expected to find the answer in its coils. He answered slowly, and with an air of reflection.
“Mental integrity, and mercy. A resolute following of reason (in which I should include insight) to its conclusion, though the heavens fall, and an unfailing fellow-feeling for the pain and struggle and heart-ache and sin that life is so full of. But one must add the quality of imagination. Without imagination and its fruits, the world would be a howling wilderness.”
“I wish you would come down with me, some day, to the East End and hold out the hand of fellowship to some of the sufferers there,” cried Algitha. “I am, at times, almost in despair at the mass of evil to be fought against, but somehow you always make me feel, Professor, that the race has all the qualities necessary for redemption enfolded within itself.”
“But assuredly it has!” cried the Professor. “And assuredly those redeeming qualities will germinate. Otherwise the race would extinguish itself in cruelty and corruption. Let people talk as they please about the struggle for existence, it is through the development of the human mind and the widening of human mercy that better things will come.”
“One sees, now and then, in a flash, what the world may some day be,” said Hadria. “The vision comes, perhaps, with the splendour of a spring morning, or opens, scroll-like, in a flood of noble music. It sounds unreal, yet it brings a sense of conviction that is irresistible.”
“I think it was Pythagoras who declared that the woes of men are the work of their own hands,” said the Professor. “So are their joys. Nothing ever shakes my belief that what the mind of man can imagine, that it can achieve.”
“But there are so many pulling the wrong way,” said Algitha sadly.
“Ah, one man may be miserable through the deeds of others; the race can only be miserable through its own.”
After a pause, Algitha put a question: How far was it justifiable to give pain to others in following one’s own idea of right and reasonable? How far might one attempt to live a life of intellectual integrity and of the widest mercy that one’s nature would stretch to?
Professor Fortescue saw no limits but those of one’s own courage and ability. Algitha pointed out that in most lives the limit occurred much sooner. If “others”—those tyrannical and absorbent “others”—had intricately bound up their notions of happiness with the prevention of any such endeavour, and if those notions were of the usual negative, home-comfort-and-affection order, narrowly personal, fruitful in nothing except a sort of sentimental egotism that spread over a whole family—what Hadria called anegotism à douze—how far ought these ideas to be respected, and at what cost?
Professor Fortescue was unqualified in his condemnation of the sentiment which erected sacrificial altars in the family circle. He spoke scornfully of the doctrine of renunciation, so applied, and held the victims who brought their gifts of power and liberty more culpable than those who demanded them, since the duty of resistance to recognised wrong was obvious, while great enlightenment was needed to teach one to forego an unfair privilege or power that all the world concurred in pressing upon one.
“Then you think a person—even a feminine person—justified in giving pain by resisting unjust demands?”
“I certainly think that all attempts to usurp another person’s life on the plea of affection should be stoutly resisted. But I recognise that cases must often occur when resistance is practically impossible.”
“One ought not to be too easily melted by the ‘shrieks of a near relation,’” said Hadria. “Ah, I have a good mind to try. I don’t fear any risk for myself, nor any work; the stake is worth it. I don’t want to grow cramped and crooked, like my poor ash-tree. Perhaps this may be a form of vanity too; I don’t know, I was going to say I don’t care.”
The scent of young leaves and of flowers came up, soft and rich from the garden, and as Hadria leant over the parapet, a gust of passionate conviction of power swept over her; not merely of her own personal power, but of some vast, flooding, beneficent well-spring from which her own was fed. And with the inrush, came a glimpse as of heaven itself.
“I wonder,” she said after a long silence, “why it is that when weknowfor dead certain, we call it faith.”
“Because, I suppose, our certainty is certainty only for ourselves. If you have found some such conviction to guide you in this wild world, you are very fortunate. We need all our courage and our strength——”
“And just a little more,” Hadria added.
“Yes; sometimes just a little more, to save us from its worst pitfalls.”
It struck both Hadria and her sister that the Professor was looking very ill and worn this evening.
“You are always giving help and sympathy to others, and you never get any yourself!” Hadria exclaimed.
But the Professor laughed, and asserted that he was being spoilt at Craddock Dene. They had risen, and were strolling down the yew avenue. A little star had twinkled out.
“I am very glad to have Professor Fortescue’s opinion of your composition, Hadria. I was talking to him about you, and he quite agrees with me.”
“What? that I ought to——?”
“That you ought not to go on as you are going on at present.”
“But that is so vague.”
“I suppose you have long ago tried all the devices of self-discipline?” said the Professor. “There are ways, of course, of arming oneself against minor difficulties, of living within a sort of citadel. Naturally much force has to go in keeping up the defences, but it is better than having none to keep up.”
Hadria gave a quiet smile. “There is not a method, mental or other, that I have not tried, and tried hard. If it had not been for the sternest self-discipline, my mind at this moment, would be so honeycombed with small pre-occupations (pleasant and otherwise), that it would be incapable of consecutive ideas of any kind. As it is, I feel a miserable number of holes here”—she touched her brow—“a loss of absorbing power, at times, and a mental slackness that is really alarming. What remains of me has been dragged ashore as from a wreck, amidst a rush of wind and wave. But just now, thanks greatly to your sympathy and Algitha’s, I seem restored to myself. I can never describe the rapture of that sensation to one who has never felt himself sinking down and down into darkness, to a dim hell, where the doom is a slow decay instead of the fiery pains of burning.”
“This is all wrong, wrong!” cried the Professor anxiously.
“Ah! but I feel now, such certainty, such courage. It seems as if Fate were giving me one more chance. I have often run very close to making a definite decision—to dare everything rather than await this fool’s disaster. But then comes that everlasting feminine humility, sneaking up with its simper: ‘Is not this presumptuous, selfish, mistaken, wrong? What business haveyou, one out of so many, to break roughly through the delicate web that has been spun for your kindly detention?’ Of course my retort is: ‘What business have they to spin the web?’ But one can never get up a real sense of injured innocence. It is always the spiders who seem injured and innocent. However, this time I am going to try, though the heavens fall!”
A figure appeared, in the dusk, at the further end of the avenue. It proved to be Miss Du Prel, who had come to find Hadria. Henriette had arrived unexpectedly by the late afternoon train, and Valeria had volunteered to announce her arrival to her sister-in-law.
“Ah!” exclaimed Hadria, “heaven helps him who helps himself! This will fit in neatly with my plans.”
VALERIA DU PREL, finding that Miss Temperley proposed a visit of some length, returned to town by the early morning train.
“Valeria, do you know anyone in Paris to whom you could give me a letter of introduction?” Hadria asked, at the last moment, when there was just time to write the letter, and no more.
“Are you going to Paris?” Valeria asked, startled.
“Please write the letter and I will tell you some day what I want it for.”
“Nothing very mad, I hope?”
“No, only a little—judiciously mad.”
“Well, there is Madame Bertaux, in the Avenue Kleber, but her you know already. Let me see. Oh yes, Madame Vauchelet, a charming woman; very kind and very fond of young people. She is about sixty; a widow; her husband was in the diplomatic service.”
Valeria made these hurried comments while writing the letter.
“She is musical too, and will introduce you, perhaps, to the great Joubert, and others of that set. You will like her, I am sure. She is one of the truly good people of this world. If you really are going to Paris, I shall feel happier if I know that Madame Vauchelet is your friend.”
Sophia’s successor announced that the pony-cart was at the door.
Miss Du Prel looked rather anxiously at Hadria and her sister-in-law, as they stood on the steps to bid her good-bye. There was a look of elation mixed with devilry, in Hadria’s face. The two figures turned and entered the house together, as the pony-cart passed through the gate.
Hadria always gave Miss Temperley much opportunity for the employment of tact, finding this tact more elucidating than otherwise to the designs that it was intended to conceal; it affected them in the manner of a magnifying-glass. About a couple of years ago, the death of her mother had thrown Henriette on her own resources, and set free a large amount of energy that craved a legitimate outlet. The family with whom she was now living in London, not being related to her, offered but limited opportunities.
Henriette’s eye was fixed, with increasing fondness, upon the Red House.Therelay the callow brood marked out by Nature and man, for her ministrations. With infinite adroitness, Miss Temperley questioned her sister-in-law, by inference and suggestion, about the affairs of the household. Hadria evaded the attempt, but rejoiced, for reasons of her own, that it was made. She began to find the occupation diverting, and characteristically did not hesitate to allow her critic to form most alarming conclusions as to the state of matters at the Red House. She was pensive, and mild, and a little surprised when Miss Temperley, with a suppressed gasp, urged that the question was deeply serious. It amused Hadria to reproduce, for Henriette’s benefit, the theories regarding the treatment and training of children that she had found current among the mothers of the district.
Madame Bertaux happened to call during the afternoon, and that outspoken lady scoffed openly at these theories, declaring that women made idiots of themselves on behalf of their children, whom they preposterously ill-used with unflagging devotion.
“The moral training of young minds is such a problem,” said Henriette, after the visitor had left, “it must cause you many an anxious thought.”
Hadria arranged herself comfortably among cushions, and let every muscle relax.
“The boys are so young yet,” she said drowsily. “I have no doubt that will all come, later on.”
“But, my dear Hadria, unless they are trained now——”
“Oh, there is plenty of time!”
“Do you mean to say——?”
“Only what other people say. Nothing in the least original, I assure you. I see the folly and the inconvenience of that now. I have consulted hoary experience. I have sat reverently at the feet of old nurses. I have talked with mothers in the spirit of a disciple, and I have learnt, oh, so much!”
“Mothers are most anxious about the moral training of their little ones,” said Henriette, in some bewilderment.
“Of course, but they don’t worry about it so early. One can’t expect accomplished morality from poor little dots of five and six. The charm of infancy would be gone.”
Miss Temperley explained, remonstrated. Hadria was limp, docile, unemphatic. Perhaps Henriette was right, she didn’t know. A sense of honour? (Hadria suppressed a smile.) Could one, after all, expect of six what one did not always get at six and twenty? Morals altogether seemed a good deal to ask of irresponsible youth. Henriette could not overrate the importance of early familiarity with the difference between right and wrong. Certainly it was important, but Hadria shrank from an extreme view. One must not rush into it without careful thought.
“But meanwhile the children are growing up!” cried Henriette, in despair.
Hadria had not found that experienced mothers laid much stress on that fact. Besides, there was considerable difficulty in the matter. Henriette did not see it. The difference between right and wrong could easily be taught to a child.
Perhaps so, but it seemed to be thought expedient to defer the lesson till the distant future; at least, if one might judge from the literature especially designed for growing minds, wherein clever villainy was exalted, and deeds of ferocious cruelty and revenge occurred as a daily commonplace among heroes. The same policy was indicated by the practice of allowing children to become familiar with the sight of slaughter, and of violence of every kind towards animals, from earliest infancy. Hadria concluded from all this, that it was thought wise to postpone the moral training of the young till a more convenient season.
Henriette looked at her sister-in-law, with a sad and baffled mien. Hadria’s expression was solemn, and as much like that of Mrs. Walker as she could make it, without descending to obvious caricature.
“Do you think it quite wise, Henriette, to run dead against the customs of ages? Do you think it safe to ignore the opinion of countless generations of those who were older and wiser than ourselves?”
“Dear me, how youhavechanged!” cried Miss Temperley.
“Advancing years; the sobering effects of experience,” Hadria explained. She was grieved to find Henriette at variance with those who had practical knowledge of education. As the child grew up, one could easily explain to him that the ideas and impressions that he might have acquired, in early years, were mostly wrong, and had to be reversed. That was quite simple. Besides, unless he were a born idiot of criminal tendencies, he was bound to find it out for himself.
“But, my dear Hadria, it is just the early years that are the impressionable years. Nothing can quite erase those first impressions.”
“Oh, do you think so?” said Hadria mildly.
“Yes, indeed, I think so,” cried Henriette, losing her temper.
“Oh, well of course you may be right.”
Hadria had brought out a piece of embroidery (about ten years old), and was working peacefully.
On questions of hygiene, she was equally troublesome. She had taken hints, she said, from mothers of large families. Henriette laid stress upon fresh air, even in the house. Hadria believed in fresh air; but was it not going a little far to have it in the house?
Henriette shook her head.
Fresh air wasalwaysnecessary. In moderation, perhaps, Hadria admitted. But the utmost care was called for, to avoid taking cold. She laid great stress upon that. Children were naturally so susceptible. In all the nurseries that she had visited, where every possible precaution was taken against draughts, the children were incessantly taking cold.
“Perhaps the precautions made them delicate,” Henriette suggested. But this paradox Hadria could not entertain. “Take care of the colds, and the fresh air will take care of itself,” was her general maxim.
“But, my dear Hadria, do you mean to tell me that the people about here are so benighted as really not to understand the importance to the system of a constant supply of pure air?”
Hadria puckered up her brow, as if in thought. “Well,” she said, “several mothershavementioned it, but they take more interest in fluid magnesia and tonics.”
Henriette looked dispirited.
At any rate, there was no reason why Hadria should not be more enlightened than her neighbours, on these points. Hadria shook her head deprecatingly. She hoped Henriette would not mind if she quoted the opinion of old Mr. Jordan, whose language was sometimes a little strong. He said that he didn’t believe all that “damned nonsense about fresh air and drains!” Henriette coughed.
“It is certainly not safe to trust entirely to nurses, however devoted and experienced,” she insisted. Hadria shrugged her shoulders. If the nursedidconstitutionally enjoy a certain stuffiness in her nurseries—well the children were out half the day, and it couldn’t do them much harm. (Hadria bent low over her embroidery.)
The night?
“Oh! then one must, of course, expect to be a little stuffy.”
“But,” cried Miss Temperley, almost hopeless, “impure air breathed, night after night, is an incessant drain on the strength, even if each time it only does a little harm.”
Hadria smiled over her silken arabesques. “Oh, nobody ever objects to things that only do a little harm.” There was a moment of silence.
Henriette thought that Hadria must indeed have changed very much during the last years. Well, of course, when very young, Hadria said, one had extravagant notions: one imagined all sorts of wild things about the purposes of the human brain: not till later did one realize that the average brain was merely an instrument of adjustment, a sort of spirit-level which enabled its owner to keep accurately in line with other people. Henriette ought to rejoice that Hadria had thus come to bow to the superiority of the collective wisdom.
But Henriette had her doubts.
Hadria carefully selected a shade of silk, went to the light to reassure herself of its correctness, and returned to her easy chair by the fire. Henriette resumed her knitting. She was making stockings for her nephews.
“Henriette, don’t you think it would be rather a good plan if you were to come and live here and manage affairs—morals, manners, hygiene, and everything?”
Henriette’s needles stopped abruptly, and a wave of colour came into her face, and a gleam of sudden joy to her eyes.