“To me it matters very much indeed. I don’t consider it a trifle,” said Temperley, in some bewilderment.
“Oh, not to ourselves. But of what importance are we?”
“None at all, in a certain sense,” Temperley admitted; “but in another sense we are all important. I cannot help being intensely personal at this moment. I can’t help grasping at the hope of happiness. Hadria, it lies in your hand. Won’t you be generous?”
She gave a distressed gesture, and seemed to make some vain effort, as when the victim of a nightmare struggles to overcome the paralysis that holds him.
“Then I may hope a little, Hadria—Imusthope.”
Still the trance seemed to hold her enthralled. The music was diabolically merry. She could fancy evil spirits tripping to it in swarms around her. They seemed to point at her, and wave their arms around her, and from them came an influence, magnetic in its quality, that forbade her to resist. All had been pre-arranged. Nothing could avert it. She seemed to be waiting rather than acting. Against her inner judgment, she had allowed those accursed practices to go on. Against her instinct, she had permitted Henriette to become intimate at Dunaghee; indeed it would have been hard to avoid it, for Miss Temperley was not easy to discourage. Why had she assured Hadria so pointedly that Hubert would not misinterpret her consent to renew the practices? Was it not a sort of treachery? Had not Henriette, with her larger knowledge of the world, been perfectly well aware that whatever might be said, the renewal of the meetings would be regarded as encouragement? Did she not know that Hadria herself would feel implicated by the concession?
Temperley’s long silence had been misleading. The danger had crept up insidiously. And had she not been treacherous to herself? She had longed for companionship, for music, for something to break the strain of her wild, lonely life. Knowing, or rather half-divining the risk, she had allowed herself to accept the chance of relief when it came. Lack of experience had played a large part in the making of to-night’s dilemma. Hadria’s own strange mood was another ally to her lover, and for that, old Mrs. McPherson and her reels were chiefly responsible. Of such flimsy trifles is the human fate often woven.
“Tell me, did you ask your sister to——?”
“No, no,” Hubert interposed. “My sister knows of my hopes, and is anxious that I should succeed.”
“I thought that she was helping you.”
“She would take any legitimate means to help me,” said Hubert. “You cannot resent that. Ah, Hadria, why will you not listen to me?” He bent forward, covering his face with his hands in deep dejection. His hope had begun to wane.
“You know what I think,” said Hadria. “You know how I should act if I married. Surely that ought to cure you of all——.”
He seized her hand.
“No, no, nothing that you may think could cure me of the hope of making you my wife. I care for what youare, not for what youthink. You know how little I cling to the popular version of the domestic story. I have told you over and over again that it offends me in a thousand ways. I hate thebourgeoiselement in it. What have we really to disagree about?”
He managed to be very convincing. He shewed that for a woman, life in her father’s house is far less free than in her own home; that existence could be moulded to any shape she pleased. If Hadria hesitated only on this account her last reason was gone. It was not fair to him. He had been patient. He had kept silence for many months. But he could endure the suspense no longer. He took her hand. Then suddenly she rose.
“No, no. I can’t, I can’t,” she cried desperately.
“I will not listen to denial,” he said following her. “I cannot stand a second disappointment. You have allowed me to hope.”
“How? When? Never!” she exclaimed.
“Ah, yes, Hadria. I am older than you and I have more experience. Do you think a man will cease to hope while he continues to see the woman he loves?”
Hadria turned very pale.
“You seemed to have forgotten—your sister assured me—Ah, it was treacherous, it was cruel. She took advantage of my ignorance, my craving for companionship.”
“No, it is you who are cruel, Hadria, to make such accusations. I do not claim the slightest consideration because you permitted those practices. But you cannot suppose that my feeling has not been confirmed and strengthened since I have seen you again. Why should you turn from me? Why may I not hope to win you? If you have no repugnance to me, why should not I have a chance? Hadria, Hadria, answer me, for heaven’s sake. Oh, if I could only understand what is in your mind!”
She would have found it a hard task to enlighten him. He had succeeded, to some extent, in lulling her fears, not in banishing them, for a sinister dread still muttered its warning beneath the surface thoughts.
The strength of Temperley’s emotion had stirred her. The magic of personal influence had begun to tell upon her. It was so hard not to believe when someone insisted with such certainty, with such obvious sincerity, that everything would be right. He seemed so confident that she could make him happy, strange as it appeared. Perhaps after all——? And what a release from the present difficulties. But could one trust? A confused mass of feeling struggled together. A temptation to give the answer that would cause pleasure was very strong, and beneath all lurked a trembling hope that perhaps this was the way of escape. In apparent contradiction to this, or to any other hope, lay a sense of fatality, a sad indifference, interrupted at moments by flashes of very desperate caring, when suddenly the love of life, the desire for happiness and experience, for the exercise of her power, for its use in the service of her generation, became intense, and then faded away again, as obstacles presented their formidable array before the mind. In the midst of the confusion the thought of the Professor hovered vaguely, with a dim distressing sense of something wrong, of something within her lost and wretched and forlorn.
Mrs. Fullerton passed through the room on the arm of Mr. Gordon. How delighted her mother would be if she were to give up this desperate attempt to hold out against her appointed fate. What if her mother and Mrs. Gordon and all the world were perfectly right and far-seeing and wise? Did it not seem more likely, on the face of it, that theyshouldbe right, considering the enormous majority of those who would agree with them, than that she, Hadria, a solitary girl, unsupported by knowledge of life or by fellow-believers, should have chanced upon the truth? Had only Valeria been on her side, she would have felt secure, but Valeria was dead against her.
“We are not really at variance, believe me,” Temperley pleaded. “You state things rather more strongly than I do—a man used to knocking about the world—but I don’t believe there is any radical difference between us.” He worked himself up into the belief that there never were two human beings so essentially at one, on all points, as he and Hadria.
“Do you remember the debate that evening in the garret? Do you remember the sentiments that scared your sister so much?” she asked.
Temperley remembered.
“Well, I don’t hold those sentiments merely for amusement and recreation. I mean them. I should not hesitate a moment to act upon them. If things grew intolerable, according to my view of things, I should simply go away, though twenty marriage-services had been read over my head. Neither Algitha nor I have any of the notions that restrain women in these matters. We would brook no such bonds. The usual claims and demands we would neither make nor submit to. You heard Algitha speak very plainly on the matter. So you see, we are entirely unsuitable as wives, except to the impossible men who might share our rebellion. Please let us go back to the hall. They are just beginning to dance another reel.”
“I cannot let you go back. Oh, Hadria, you can’t be so unjust as to force me to break off in this state of uncertainty. Just give me a word of hope, however slight, and I will be satisfied.”
Hadria looked astonished. “Have you really taken in what I have just said?”
“Every word of it.”
“And you realise that I mean it,meanit, with every fibre of me.”
“I understand; and I repeat that I shall not be happy until you are my wife. Have what ideas you please, only be my wife.”
She gazed at him in puzzled scrutiny. “You don’t think I am really in earnest. Let us go.”
“I know you are in earnest,” he cried, eagerly following her, “and still I——”
At that moment Harold Wilkins came up to claim Hadria for a promised dance. Temperley gave a gesture of impatience. But Harold insisted, and Hadria walked with her partner into the hall where Mrs. Gordon was now playing a sentimental waltz, with considerable poetic license as to time. As everyone said: Mrs. Gordon played with so much expression.
Temperley stood about in corners watching Hadria. She was flushed and silent, dancing with a still gliding movement under the skilful guidance of her partner.
Temperley tried to win a glance as she passed round, but her eyes were resolutely fixed on the floor.
Algitha followed her sister’s movements uneasily. She had noticed her absence during the last reel, and observed that Temperley also was not to be seen. She felt anxious. She knew Hadria’s emotional susceptibility. She knew Temperley’s convincing faculty, and also Hadria’s uneasy feeling that she had done wrong in allowing the practices to be resumed.
Henriette had not failed to notice the signs of the times, and she annoyed Algitha beyond endurance by her obviously sisterly manner of addressing the family. She had taken to calling the boys by their first names.
Fred shared his sister’s dislike to Henriette. “Tact!” he cried with a snort, “why a Temperley rushes in where a bull in a china-shop would fear to tread!”
Algitha saw that Hubert was again by Hadria’s side before the evening was out. The latter looked white, and she avoided her sister’s glance. This last symptom seemed to Algitha the worst.
“What’s the matter with Hadria?” asked Fred, “she will scarcely speak to me. I was just telling her the best joke I’ve heard this year, and, will you believe me, she didn’t see the point! Yes, you may well stare! I tried again and she gave a nervous giggle; I am relating to you the exact truth. Do any of the epidemics come on like that?”
“Yes, one of the worst,” said Algitha gloomily. Fred glared enquiry.
“I am afraid she has been led into accepting Hubert Temperley.”
Fred opened his mouth and breathed deep. “Stuff! Hadria would as soon think of selling her soul to the devil.”
“Oh, she is quite capable of that too,” said Algitha, shaking her head.
“Well, I’m blowed,” cried Fred.
Not long after this, the guests began to disperse. Mrs. Gordon and her party were among the last to leave, having a shorter distance to go.
Hubert Temperley was quiet and self-possessed, but Algitha felt sure that she detected a look of suppressed exultation in his demeanour, and something odiously brotherly in his mode of bidding them all good-night.
When everyone had left, and the family were alone, they gathered round the hall fire for a final chat, before dispersing for the night.
“What a delightful evening we have had, Mrs. Fullerton,” said Miss Temperley. “It was most picturesque and characteristic. I shall always remember the charm and kindliness of Scottish hospitality.”
“And I,” said Ernest,sotto voceto Algitha, “shall always remember the calm and thoroughness of English cheek!”
“Why, we had almost forgotten that the New Year is just upon us,” exclaimed Mr. Fullerton. The first stroke of twelve began to sound almost as he spoke. He threw up the window and disclosed a night brilliant with stars. (“And under us graves,” said Hadria to herself.)
They all crowded up, keeping silence as the slow strokes of the clock told the hour.
“A Happy New Year to all!” cried Mr. Fullerton heartily.
“... when the steamFloats up from those dim fields about the homesOf happy men that have the power to die.”Tithonius,Tennyson.
“... when the steamFloats up from those dim fields about the homesOf happy men that have the power to die.”Tithonius,Tennyson.
A COUNTRYMAN with stooping gait touched his cap and bid good-day to a young woman who walked rapidly along the crisp high road, smiling a response as she passed.
The road led gradually upward through a country blazing with red and orange for rolling miles, till the horizon closed in with the far-off blue of English hills.
The old man slowly turned to watch the wayfarer, whose quick step and the look in her eyes of being fixed on objects beyond their owner’s immediate ken, might have suggested to the observant, inward perturbation. The lissom, swiftly moving figure was almost out of sight before the old man slowly wheeled round and continued on his way towards the hamlet of Craddock Dene, that lay in the valley about a mile further on. Meanwhile the young woman was speeding towards the village of Craddock on the summit of the gentle slope before her. A row of broad-tiled cottages came in sight, and on the hill-side the Vicarage among trees, and a grey stone church which had seen many changes since its tower first looked out from the hill-top over the southern counties.
The little village seemed as if it had forgotten to change with the rest of the country, for at least a hundred years. The spirit of the last century lingered in its quiet cottages, in the little ale-house with half-obliterated sign, in its air of absolute repose and leisure. There was no evidence of contest anywhere—except perhaps in a few mouldy advertisements of a circus and of a remarkable kind of soap, that were half peeling off a moss-covered wall. There were not even many indications of life in the place. The sunshine seemed to have the village street to itself. A couple of women stood gossiping over the gate of one of the cottages. They paused in their talk as a quick step sounded on the road.
“There be Mrs. Temperley again!” one matron exclaimed. “Why this is the second time this week, as she’s come and sat in the churchyard along o’ the dead. Don’t seem nat’ral to my thinking.”
Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Gullick continued to discuss this gloomy habit with exhaustive minuteness, involving themselves in side issues regarding the general conduct of life on the part of Mrs. Temperley, that promised solid material for conversation for the next week. It appeared from the observations of Mrs. Gullick, whose husband worked on Lord Engleton’s model farm, that about five years ago Mr. Temperley had rented the Red House at Craddock Dene, and had brought his new wife to live there. The Red House belonged to Professor Fortescue, who also owned the Priory, which had stood empty, said Mrs. Gullick, since that poor Mrs. Fortescue killed herself in the old drawing-room. Mr. Temperley went every day to town to attend to his legal business, and returned by the evening train to the bosom of his family. That family now consisted in his wife and two small boys; pretty little fellows, added Mrs. Dodge, the pride of their parents’ hearts; at least, so she had heard Mr. Joseph Fleming say, and he was intimate at the Red House. Mrs. Gullick did not exactly approve of Mrs. Temperley. The Red House was not, it would seem, an ever-flowing fount of sustaining port wine and spiritually nourishing literature. The moral evolution of the village had proceeded on those lines. The prevailing feeling was vaguely hostile; neither Mrs. Gullick nor Mrs. Dodge exactly knew why. Mrs. Dodge said that her husband (who was the sexton and gravedigger) had found Mrs. Temperley always ready for a chat. He spoke well of her. But Dodge was not one of many. Mrs. Temperley was perhaps too sensitively respectful of the feelings of her poorer neighbours to be very popular among them. At any rate, her habits of seclusion did not seem to village philosophy to be justifiable in the eyes of God or man. Her apparent fondness for the society of the dead also caused displeasure. Why she went to the churchyard could not be imagined: one would think she had a family buried there, she who was, “as one might say, a stranger to the place,” and could not be supposed to have any interest in the graves, which held for her nor kith nor kin!
Mrs. Temperley, however, appeared to be able to dispense with this element of attraction in the “grassy barrows.” She and a company of youthful Cochin-China fowls remained for hours among them, on this cheerful morning, and no observer could have determined whether it was the graves or the fowls that riveted her attention. She had perched herself on the stile that led from the churchyard to the fields: a slender figure in serviceable russet and irresponsible-looking hat, autumn-tinted too, in sympathy with the splendid season. In her ungloved left hand, which was at once sensitive and firm, she carried a book, keeping a forefinger between the pages to mark a passage.
Her face bore signs of suffering, and at this moment, a look of baffled and restless longing, as if life had been for her a festival whose sounds came from a hopeless distance. Yet there was something in the expression of the mouth, that suggested a consistent standing aloof from herself and her desires. The lines of the face could never have been drawn by mere diffusive, emotional habits. Thought had left as many traces as feeling in the firm drawing. The quality of the face was of that indefinable kind that gives to all characteristic things their peculiar power over the imagination. The more powerful the quality, the less can it be rendered into terms. It is the one marvellous, remaining, musical fact not to be defined that makes the Parthenon, or some other masterpiece of art, translate us to a new plane of existence, and inspire, for the time being, the pessimist with hope and the sceptic with religion.
The Cochin-Chinas pecked about with a contented mien among the long grass, finding odds and ends of nourishment, and here and there eking out their livelihood with a dart at a passing fly. Their long, comic, tufted legs, which seemed to form a sort of monumental pedestal whereon the bird itself was elevated, stalked and scratched about with an air of industrious serenity.
There were few mornings in the year which left unstirred the grass which grew long over the graves, but this was one of the few. Each blade stood up still and straight, bearing its string of dewdrops. There were one or two village sounds that came subdued through the sunshine. The winds that usually haunted the high spot had fallen asleep, or were lying somewhere in ambush among the woodlands beyond.
The look of strain had faded from the face of Mrs. Temperley, leaving only an expression of sadness. The removal of all necessity for concealing thought allowed her story to write itself on her face. The speculative would have felt some curiosity as to the cause of a sadness in one seemingly so well treated by destiny. Neither poverty nor the cares of great wealth could have weighed upon her spirit; she had beauty, and a quality more attractive than beauty, which must have placed many things at her command; she had evident talent—her very attitude proclaimed it—and the power over Fortune that talent ought to give. Possibly, the observer might reflect, the gift was of that kind which lays the possessor peculiarly open to her outrageous slings and arrows. Had Mrs. Temperley shown any morbid signs of self-indulgent emotionalism the problem would have been simple enough; but this was not the case.
The solitude was presently broken by the approach of an old man laden with pickaxe and shovel. He remarked upon the fineness of the day, and took up his position at a short distance from the stile, where the turf had been cleared away in a long-shaped patch. Here, with great deliberation he began his task. The sound of his steady strokes fell on the stillness. Presently, the clock from the grey tower gave forth its announcement—eleven. One by one, the slow hammer sent the waves of air rolling away, almost visibly, through the sunshine, their sound alternating with the thud of the pickaxe, so as to produce an effect of intentional rhythm. One might have fancied that clock and pickaxe iterated in turn, “Time, Death! Time, Death! Time, Death!” till the clock had come to the end of its tale, and then the pickaxe went on alone in the stillness—“Death! Death! Death! Death!”
A smile, not easy to be accounted for, flitted across the face of Mrs. Temperley.
The old gravedigger paused at last in his toil, leaning on his pickaxe, and bringing a red cotton handkerchief out of his hat to wipe his brow.
“That seems rather hard work, Dodge,” remarked the onlooker, leaning her book upright on her knee and her chin on her hand.
“Ay, that it be, mum; this clay’s that stiff! Lord! folks is almost as much trouble to them as buries as to them as bears ’em; it’s all trouble together, to my thinkin’.”
She assented with a musing nod.
“And when a man’s not a troublin’ o’ some other body, he’s a troublin’ of hisself,” added the philosopher.
“You are cursed with a clear-sightedness that must make life a burden to you,” said Mrs. Temperley.
“Well, mum, I do sort o’ see the bearin’s o’ things better nor most,” Dodge modestly admitted. The lady knew, and liked to gratify, the gravedigger’s love of long-worded discourse.
“Some people,” she said, “are born contemplative, while others never reflect at all, whatever the provocation.”
“Yes’m, that’s just it; folks goes on as if they was to live for ever, without no thought o’ dyin’. As you was a sayin’ jus’ now, mum, there’s them as contemflecs natural like, and there’s them as is born without provocation——”
“Everlastingly!” assented Mrs. Temperley with a sudden laugh. “You evidently, Dodge, are one of those who strive to read the riddle of this painful earth. Tell me what you think it is all about.”
Gratified by this appeal to his judgment, Dodge scratched his head, and leant both brawny arms upon his pickaxe.
“Well, mum,” he said, “I s’pose it’s the will o’ th’ Almighty as we is brought into the world, and I don’t say nothin’ agin it—’tisn’t my place—but it do come over me powerful at times, wen I sees all the vexin’ as folks has to go through, as God A’mighty might ’a found somethin’ better to do with His time; not as I wants to find no fault with His ways, which is past finding out,” added the gravedigger, falling to work again.
A silence of some minutes was broken by Mrs. Temperley’s enquiry as to how long Dodge had followed this profession.
“Nigh on twenty year, mum, come Michaelmas,” replied Dodge. “I’ve lain my couple o’ hundred under the sod, easy; and a fine lot o’ corpses they was too, take ’em one with another.” Dodge was evidently prepared to stand up for the average corpse of the Craddock district against all competitors.
“This is a very healthy neighbourhood, I suppose,” observed Mrs. Temperley, seemingly by way of supplying an explanation of the proud fact.
“Lord bless you, as healthy as any place in the kingdom. There wasn’t one in ten as was ill when he died, as one may say.”
“But that scarcely seems an unmixed blessing,” commented the lady musingly, “to go off suddenly in the full flush of health and spirits; it would be so discouraging.”
“Most was chills, took sudden,” Dodge explained; “chills is wot chokes up yer churchyards for yer. If we has another hard winter this year, we shall have a job to find room in here. There’s one or two in the village already, as I has my eye on, wot——”
“Was this one a chill?” interrupted Mrs. Temperley, with a nod towards the new grave.
“Wot, this here? Lord bless you, no, mum. This here’s our schoolmarm. Didn’t you never hear tell abouther?” This damning proof of his companion’s aloofness from village gossip seemed to paralyse the gravedigger.
“Why everybody’s been a talkin’ about it. Over varty, she war, and ought to ’a knowed better.”
“But, with advancing years, it is rare that peopledoget to know better—about dying,” Mrs. Temperley suggested, in defence of the deceased schoolmistress.
“I means about her conduc’,” Dodge explained; “scand’lous thing. Why, she’s been in Craddock school since she war a little chit o’ sixteen.”
“That seems to me a trifle dull, but scarcely scandalous,” Mrs. Temperley murmured.
“... And as steady and respectable a young woman as you’d wish to see ... pupil teacher she was, and she rose to be schoolmarm,” Dodge went on.
“It strikes me as a most blameless career,” said his companion. “Perhaps, as you say, considering her years, she ought to have known better, but——”
“She sort o’ belongs to the place, as one may say,” Dodge proceeded, evidently quite unaware that he had omitted to give the clue to the situation. “She’s lived here all her life.”
“Then much may be forgiven her,” muttered Mrs. Temperley.
“And everybody respected of her, and the parson he thought a deal o’ her, he did, and used to hold her up as a sample to the other young women, and nobody dreamt as she’d go and bring this here scandal on the place; nobody knows who the man was, but itissaid as there’s someonenottwenty miles from here as knows more about it nor he didn’t ought to,” Dodge added with sinister meaning. This dark hint conveyed absolutely no enlightenment to the mind of Mrs. Temperley, from sheer lack of familiarity, on her part, with the rumours of the district. Dodge applied himself with a spurt to his work.
“When she had her baby, she was like one out of her mind,” he continued; “she couldn’t stand the disgrace and the neighbours talkin’, and that. Mrs. Walker she went and saw her, and brought her nourishin’ things, and kep’ on a-telling her how she must try and make up for what she had done, and repent and all that; but she never got up her heart again like, and the poor soul took fever from grievin’, the doctor says, and raved on dreadful, accusin’ of somebody, and sayin’ he’d sent her to hell; and then Wensday morning, ten o’clock, she died. Didn’t you hear the passing bell a-tolling, mum?”
“Yes, the wind brought it down the valley; but I did not know whom it was tolling for.”
“That’s who it was,” said Dodge.
“This is an awfully sad story,” cried Mrs. Temperley.
Dodge ran his fingers through his hair judicially. “I don’t hold with them sort o’ goings on for young women,” he observed.
“Do you hold with them for young men?”
Dodge puckered up his face into an odd expression of mingled reflection and worldly wisdom. “You can’t prevent young fellers bein’ young fellers,” he at length observed.
“It seems almost a pity that being young fellows should also mean being blackguards,” observed Mrs. Temperley calmly.
“Well, there’s somethin’ to be said for that way o’ lookin’ at it,” Dodge was startled into agreeing.
“I supposeshegets all the blame of the thing,” the lady went on, with quiet exasperation. Dodge seemed thrown off his bearings.
“Everybody in Craddock was a-talking about it, as was only to be expected,” said the gravedigger. “Well, well, we’re all sinners. Don’t do to be too hard on folks. ’Pears sad like after keepin’ ’spectable for all them years too—sort o’ waste.”
Mrs. Temperley gave a little laugh, which seemed to Dodge rather eccentric.
“Who is looking after the baby?” she asked.
“One of the neighbours, name o’ Gullick, as her husband works for Lord Engleton, which she takes in washing,” Dodge comprehensively explained.
“Had its mother no relatives?”
“Well, she had an aunt down at Southampton, I’ve heard tell, but she didn’t take much notice of her, notshedidn’t. Her mother only died last year, took off sudden before her daughter could get to her.”
“Your schoolmistress has known trouble,” observed Mrs. Temperley. “Had she no one, no sister, no friend, during all this time that she could turn to for help or counsel?”
“Not as I knows of,” Dodge replied.
There was a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility.
“She ain’t got no more to suffer now,” Dodge remarked, nodding with an aspect of half apology towards the grave. “They sleeps soft as sleeps here.”
“Good heavens, I hope so!” Mrs. Temperley exclaimed.
The grave had made considerable progress before she descended from the stile and prepared to take her homeward way. On leaving, she made Dodge come with her to the gate, and point out the red-roofed cottage covered with monthly roses and flaming creeper, where the schoolmistress had passed so many years, and where she now lay with her work and her days all over, in the tiny upper room, at whose latticed window the sun used to wake her on summer mornings, or the winter rain pattered dreary prophecies of the tears that she would one day shed.
“IF you please, ma’am, the cook says as the meat hasn’t come for lunch, and what is she to do?”
“Without,” replied Mrs. Temperley automatically.
The maid waited for more discreet directions. She had given a month’s notice that very morning, because she found Craddock Dene too dull.
“Thank goodness, that barbarian is going!” Hubert had exclaimed.
“We shall but exchange a Goth for a Vandal,” his wife replied.
Mrs. Temperley gazed intently at her maid, the light of intelligence gradually dawning in her countenance. “Is there anything else in the house, Sapph—Sophia?”
“No, ma’am,” replied Sophia.
“Oh, tell the cook to make it into a fricassee, and be sure it is well flavoured.” The maid hesitated, but seeing from the wandering expression of her employer’s eye that her intellect was again clouded over, she retired to give the message to the cook—with comments.
The library at the Red House was the only room that had been radically altered since the days of the former tenants, whose taste had leant towards the florid rather than the classic. The general effect had been toned down, but it was impossible to disguise the leading motive; or what Mrs. Temperley passionately described as its brutal vulgarity. The library alone had been subjected topeine forte et dure. Mrs. Temperley said that it had been purified by suffering. By dint of tearing down and dragging out offending objects (“such a pity!” cried the neighbours) its prosperous and complacent absurdity had been humbled. Mrs. Temperley retired to this refuge after her encounter with Sophia. That perennially aggrieved young person entered almost immediately afterwards and announced a visitor, with an air that implied—“She’ll stay to lunch; see if she don’t, and what’ll you do then? Yah!”
The pronunciation of the visitor’s name was such, that, for the moment, Mrs. Temperley did not recognize it as that of Miss Valeria Du Prel.
She jumped up joyfully. “Ah, Valeria, thisisdelightful!”
The visit was explained after a characteristic fashion. Miss Du Prel realized that over two years had passed since she had seen Hadria, and moreover she had been seized with an overwhelming longing for a sight of country fields and a whiff of country air, so she had put a few things together in a handbag, which she had left at Craddock station by accident, and come down. Was there anyone who could go and fetch her handbag? It was such a nuisance; she laid it down for a moment to get at her ticket—she never could find her pocket, dressmakers always hid them in such an absurd way; could Hadria recommend any dressmaker who did not hide pockets? Wasn’t it tiresome? She had no time-table, and so she had gone to the station that morning and waited till a Craddock train started, and by this arrangement it had come to pass that she had spent an hour and a half on the platform: she did not think she ever had such an unpleasant time; why didn’t they have trains oftener? They did to Putney.
Mrs. Temperley sat down and laughed. Whereupon the other’s face lightened and she joined in the laugh at her own expense, settling into the easy chair that her hostess had prepared for her, with a gesture of helplessness and comfort.
“Well, in spite of that time at the station, I’m glad I came. It seems so long since I have seen you, dear Hadria, and the last time you know you were very unhappy, almost mad——”
“Yes, yes; never mind about that,” interposed Mrs. Temperley hastily, setting her teeth together.
“You take things too hard, too hard,” said Miss Du Prel. “I used to thinkIwas bad in that way, but I am phlegmatic compared with you. One would suppose that——”
“Valeria, don’t, don’t, don’t,” cried Mrs. Temperley. “I can’t stand it.” Her teeth were still set tight and hard, her hands were clenched.
“Very well, very well. Tell me what you have been making of this ridiculous old world, where everything goes wrong and everybody is stupid or wicked, or both.”
Mrs. Temperley’s face relaxed a little, though the signs of some strong emotion were still visible.
“Well, to answer the general by the particular, I have spent the morning, accompanied by a nice young brood of Cochin-China fowls, in Craddock churchyard.”
“Oh, I hate a churchyard,” exclaimed Miss Du Prel, with a shudder. “It makes one think of the hideous mockery of life, and the more one would like to die, the worse seems the brutality of death and his hideous accompaniments. It is such a savage denial of all human aspirations and affections and hopes. Ah, it is horrible!” The sharply-outlined face grew haggard and white, as its owner crouched over the fire.
“Heaven knows! but it was very serene and very lovely up there this morning.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Valeria with a burst of strange enthusiasm and sadness, that revealed all the fire and yearning and power that had raised her above her fellows in the scale of consciousness, with the penalty of a life of solitude and of sorrow.
“Surely it is not without meaning that the places of the dead are the serenest spots on earth,” said Mrs. Temperley. “If I could keep myself in the mood that the place induces, I think I should not mind anything very much any more. The sunshine seems to rest more tenderly there than elsewhere, and the winds have a reverence for the graves, as if they felt it time that the dead were left in peace—the ‘happier dead,’ as poor immortal Tithonius calls them, who has not the gift of death. And the grey old tower and the weather stains on the stones; there is a conspiracy of beauty in the place, that holds one as one is held by music.”
“Ah! I know the magic of these things; it tempts one to believe at times that Nature isnotall blind and unpitying. But that is a delusion: if there were any pity in Nature, the human spirit would not be dowered with such infinite and terrible longings and such capacities and dreams and prayers and then—then insulted with the mockery of death and annihilation.”
“If there should be no Beyond,” muttered Mrs. Temperley.
“That to me is inconceivable. When we die we fall into an eternal sleep. Moreover, I can see no creed that does not add the fear of future torments to the certainties of these.”
Mrs. Temperley was seized with a bitter mood. “You should cultivate faith,” she said; “it acts the part of the heading ‘Sundries omitted’ in one’s weekly accounts; one can put down under it everything that can’t be understood—but you don’t keep weekly accounts, so it’s no use pointing out to you the peace that comes of that device.”
The entrance of Sophia with firewood turned the current of conversation. “Good heavens! I don’t think we have anything for lunch!” Mrs. Temperley exclaimed. “Are you very hungry? What is to be done? It was the faithlessness of our butcher that disturbed the serenity of my mood this morning. Perhaps the poor beast whose carcase we were intending to devour will feel serene instead of me: but, alas! I fear he has been slaughteredquand même. That is one of the unsatisfactory things about life: that all its worst miseries bring good to no one. One may deny oneself, but not a living thing is necessarily the better for it—generally many are the worse. The wheels of pain go turning day by day, and the gods stand aloof—they will not help us, nor will they stay the ‘wild world’ in its course. No, no,” added Mrs. Temperley with a laugh, “I am not tired of life, but I am tiredwithit; it won’t give me what I want. That is perhaps because I want so much.”
The sound of male footsteps in the hall broke up the colloquy.
“Good heavens! Hubert has brought home a crowd of people to lunch,” exclaimed Hadria, “a thing he scarcely ever does. What fatality can have induced him to choose to-day of all others for this orgy of hospitality?”
“Does the day matter?” enquired Valeria, astonished at so much emotion.
“Does the day matter!Oh irresponsible question of the unwedded! When I tell you the butcher has not sent the meat.”
“Oh ... can’t one eat fish?” suggested Miss Du Prel.
Hadria laughed and opened the door.
“My dear, I have brought Fleming home to lunch.”
“Thank heaven,only one!”
Temperley stared.
“I could not conveniently have brought home several,” he said.
“I thought you would be at least seven,” cried the mistress of the house, “and with all the pertinacity of Wordsworth’s little girl.”
“Whatdoyou mean, if one may ask for simple English?”
“Merely that that intolerable Sanders has broken his word—hinc illæ lacrimæ.”
Hubert Temperley turned away in annoyance. He used to be amused by his wife’s flippancy before her marriage, but he had long since grown to dislike it. He retired to get out some wine, while Hadria went forward to welcome the guest, who now came in from the garden, where he had lingered to talk to the children.
“I am delighted to see you, Mr. Fleming; but I am grieved to say that we have unluckily only a wretched luncheon to give you, and after your long walk over the fields too! I amsosorry. The fact is we are left, this morning, with a gaping larder, at the mercy of a haughty and inconstant butcher, who grinds down his helpless dependents without mercy, overbearing creature that he is! We must ask you to be very tolerant.”
“Oh! please don’t trouble about that; it doesn’t matter in the least,” cried Mr. Fleming, pulling at his yellowish whiskers. He was a man of about five-and-thirty, of medium height, dressed in knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket that had seen some service.
“What is the difficulty?” asked Hubert.
“I was explaining to Mr. Fleming how inhospitably we are forced to treat him, on account of that traitor Sanders.”
Hubert gave a gesture of annoyance.
“I suppose there is something cold in the house.”
“Pudding, perhaps,” said his wife hopelessly. “It is most unlucky.”
“My dear, surely there must be something cold that isn’t pudding.”
“I fear, very little; but I will go and see the cook, though, alas! she is not easy to inspire as regards her particular business. She is extremely entertaining as a conversationalist, but I think she was meant for society rather than the kitchen. I am sure society would be more diverting if she were in it.”
Hadria was just turning to seek this misplaced genius, when she paused in the doorway.
“By the way, I suppose Sapphira has——”
“Do try and cure yourself of the habit of calling the girl by that absurd name, Hadria.”
“Oh, yes; but the name is so descriptive. She has told you of Miss Du Prel’s arrival?”
“She has told me nothing of the sort.”
Temperley did not look overjoyed. There had never been much cordiality between him and Valeria since the afternoon when they had met at Dunaghee, and found their sentiments in hopeless opposition.
Miss Du Prel took no interest in Hubert, though she admired his character. She had every wish to make herself agreeable to him, but her efforts in that direction were somewhat neutralized by an incurable absence of mind. If she was not interested, as Hadria said, she was seldom affable.
Possibly Hubert’s request to her, years ago at Dunaghee, to “think for a moment” had not been forgiven.
“Where is she? Oh!——”
The exclamation was in consequence of Miss Du Prel’s appearing at the door of the library, whence she surveyed the group with absent-minded intentness.
Valeria woke up with a start, and responded to Hubert’s greeting in an erratic fashion, replying tragically, to a casual enquiry as to her health, that she had beenfrightfullyill.
“I thought I was dying. But one never dies,” she added in a disgusted tone, whereat Hadria heartlessly laughed, and hurried the visitor upstairs to help her to unpack.
“Valeria,” said Mrs. Temperley, while that lady was confusedly trying to disentangle hat and hair, hat-pin and head, without involving the entire system in a common ruin—“Valeria, we are not a remarkable people at Craddock Dene. We may be worthy, we may have our good points, but we are not brilliant (except the cook). Should Mr. Fleming fail to impress you as a person of striking personality, I ask you, as a favour,notto emblazon that impression on every feature: should he address to you a remark that you do not find interesting, and it is quite conceivable that he may—do not glare at him scornfully for a moment, and——”
Hadria was not allowed to finish the sentence.
“As if I ever did any such thing—and people are so dull,” said Miss Du Prel.
A few “curried details,” as the hostess dejectedly described the fare, had been supplemented with vegetables, fruit, and impromptu preparations of eggs, and the luncheon was pronounced excellent and ample.
Miss Du Prel said that she hoped the butcher would always forget to send the meat. She liked these imaginative meals.
Temperley purposely misunderstood her to say “imaginary meals,” and hoped that next time she came, Hadria would not have an oratorio in course of composition. Miss Du Prel expressed a fiery interest in the oratorio.
“I judge the presence of oratorio by the absence of food,” Temperley explained suavely.
Hadria watched the encounter with a mingled sense of amusement and discomfort.
Valeria was in no danger. To be morally crushed by an adversary, it is necessary that one should be at least aware that the adversary is engaged in crushing one: a consciousness that was plainly denied to Miss Du Prel. Many a man far less able than Hubert had power to interest her, while he could not even hold her attention. She used to complain to Professor Fortescue that Temperley’s ideas never seemed to have originated in his own brain: they had been imported ready-made. Hubert was among the many who shrink and harden into mental furrows as time passes. What he had thought at twenty, at thirty-five had acquired sanctity and certainty, from having been the opinion of Hubert Temperley for all those favoured years. He had no suspicion that the views which he cherished in so dainty and scholarly a fashion were simply anedition de luxeof the views of everybody else. But his wife had made that discovery long ago. He smiled at the views of everybody else: his own were put forth as something choice and superior. He had the happy knack of beingbourgeoiswith the air of an artist. If one could picture one’s grocer weighing out sugar in a Spanish cloak and brigand’s hat, it would afford an excellent symbol of his spiritual estate. To be perfectly commonplace in a brilliantly original way, is to be notable after all.
Mr. Fleming seemed puzzled by Miss Du Prel, at whom he glanced uneasily from time to time, wondering what she would say next. At Craddock Dene, ladies usually listened with a more or less breathless deference when Temperley spoke. This new-comer seemed recklessly independent.
Mrs. Temperley endeavoured to lead the conversation in ways of peace, but Valeria was evidently on the war-path. Temperley was polite and ironical, with under-meanings for Hadria’s benefit.
“If one asks impossible things of life, one is apt to be disappointed, I fear,” he said serenely. “Ask for the possible and natural harvest of a woman’s career, and see if you don’t get it.”
“Let a canary plead for its cage, in short, and its commendable prayer will be answered!”
“If you like to put it thus ungraciously. I should say that one who makes the most of his opportunities, as they stand, fares better than he who sighs for other worlds to conquer.”
“I suppose that is what his relatives said to Columbus,” observed Miss Du Prel.
“And how do you know they were not right?” he retorted.
Mrs. Temperley gave the signal to rise. “Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested, “the afternoon invites us. Look at it.”
The brilliant sunshine and the exercise brought about a more genial mood. Only once was there anything approaching friction, and then it was Hadria herself who caused it.
“Yes, we all flatter ourselves that we are observing life, when we are merely noting the occasions when some musty old notion of ours happens, by chance, to get fulfilled.”
Hubert Temperley at once roused Miss Du Prel’s interest by the large stores of information that he had to pour forth on the history of the district, from its earliest times to the present. He recalled the days when these lands that looked so smooth and tended had been mere wastes of marsh and forest.
How quickly these great changes were accomplished! Valeria stood on the brow of a wide corn-field, looking out over the sleeping country. A century, after all, was not much more than one person’s lifetime, yet in scarcely nine of these—nine little troubled lifetimes—what incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come about? “Not assuredly,” Valeria remarked with sudden malice, “by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before my eyes at this moment?”
“You would not have been here to see,” said Hadria, lazily rolling stones down the hill with her foot. “We should all of us have been dancing round some huge log-fire on the borders of a primeval forest, and instead of browsing on salads, as we did to-day, we should be sustaining ourselves on the unholy nourishment of boiled parent or grilled aunt.”
Mr. Temperley’s refined appearance and manner seemed to raise an incarnate protest against this revolting picture. For some occult reason, the imagination of all was at work especially and exclusively on the figure of that polished gentleman in war-paint and feathers, sporting round the cauldron that contained the boiled earthly remains of his relations.
Mr. Fleming betrayed the common thought by remarking that it would be very becoming to him.
“Ah! I wish wewereall savages in feathers and war-paint, dancing on the edge of some wild forest, with nothing but the sea and the sky for limits!”
Miss Du Prel surprised her audience by this earnest aspiration.
“Do you feel inclined to revert?” Hadria enquired. “Because if so, I shall be glad to join you.”
“I think thereisa slight touch of the savage about Mrs. Temperley,” observed Fleming pensively. “I mean, don’t you know—of course——.”
“You are quite right!” cried Valeria. “I have often noticed a sort of wildness that crops up now and then through a very smooth surface. Hadria may sigh for the woodlands, yet——!”
THE first break in the unity of the Fullerton family had occurred on the occasion of Hadria’s marriage. The short period that elapsed between that memorable New-Year’s-Eve and the wedding had been a painful experience for Dunaghee. Hadria’s conduct had shaken her brothers’ faith in her and in all womankind. Ernest especially had suffered disillusion. He had supposed her above the ordinary, pettier weaknesses of humanity. Other fellows’ sisters had seemed to him miserable travesties of their sex compared with her. (There was one exception only, to this rule.) But now, what was he to think? She had shattered his faith. If she hadn’t been “so cocksure of herself,” he wouldn’t have minded so much; but after all she had professed, to go and marry, and marry a starched specimen like that!
Fred was equally emphatic. For a long time he had regarded it all as a joke. He shook his head knowingly, and said that sort of thing wouldn’t go down. When he was at length convinced, he danced with rage. He became cynical. He had no patience with girls. They talked for talking’s sake. It meant nothing.
Algitha understood, better than her brothers could understand, how Hadria’s emotional nature had been caught in some strange mood, how the eloquent assurances of her lover might have half convinced her. Algitha’s own experience of proposals set her on the track of the mystery.
“It is most misleading,” she pointed out, to her scoffing brothers. “One would suppose that marrying was the simplest thing in the world—nothing perilous, nothing to object to about it. A man proposes to you as if he were asking you for the sixth waltz, only his manner is perfervid. And my belief is that half the girls who accept don’t realize that they are agreeing to anything much more serious.”
“The more fools they!”
“True; but it really is most bewildering. Claims, obligations, all the ugly sides of the affair are hidden away; the man is at his best, full of refinement and courtesy and unselfishness. And if he persuades the girl that he really does care for her, how can she suppose that she cannot trust her future to him—if he loves her? And yet she can’t!”
“How can a man suppose that one girl is going to be different from every other girl?” asked Fred.
“Different, you mean, from what hesupposesevery other girl to be,” Algitha corrected. “It’s his own look-out if he’s such a fool.”
“I believe Hadria married because she was sick of being the family consolation,” said Ernest.
“Well, of course, the hope of escape was very tempting. You boys don’t know what she went through. We all regret her marriage to Hubert Temperley—though between ourselves, not more thanheregrets it, if I am not much mistaken—but it is very certain that she could not have gone on living at home much longer, as things were.”
Fred said that she ought to have broken out after Algitha’s fashion, if it was so bad as all that.
“I think mother would have died if she had,” said the sister.
“Hadriawasawkwardly placed,” Fred admitted.
“Do you remember that evening in the garret when we all told her what we thought?” asked Ernest.
Nobody had forgotten that painful occasion.
“She said then that if the worst came to the worst, she would simply run away. What could prevent her?”
“That wretched sister of his!” cried Algitha. “If it hadn’t been for her, the marriage would never have taken place. She got the ear of mother after the engagement, and I am certain it was through her influence that mother hurried the wedding on so. If only there had been a little more time, it could have been prevented. And Henriette knew that. She is asknowing——!”
“I wish we had strangled her.”
“I shall never forget,” Algitha went on, “that night when Hadria was taken with a fit of terror—it was nothing less—and wrote to break off the engagement, and that woman undertook to deliver the letter and lost it,on purposeI am always convinced, and then the favourable moment was over.”
“What made her so anxious for the marriage beats me,” cried Ernest. “It was not a particularly good match from a mercenary point of view.”
“She thought us an interesting family to marry into,” suggested Fred, “which is undeniable.”
“Then she must be greatly disappointed at seeing so little of us!” cried Ernest.
In the early days, Miss Temperley had stayed frequently at the Red House, and Hadria had been cut off from her own family, who detested Henriette.
For a year or more, there had been a fair promise of a successful adjustment of the two incongruous natures in the new conditions. They both tried to keep off dangerous ground and to avoid collisions of will. They made the most of their one common interest, although even here they soon found themselves out of sympathy. Hubert’s instincts were scholastic and lawful, Hadria was disposed to daring innovation. Her bizarre compositions shocked him painfully. The two jarred on one another, in great things and in small. The halcyon period was short-lived. The dream, such as it was, came to an end. Hubert turned to his sister, in his bewilderment and disappointment. They had both counted so securely on the effect of experience and the pressure of events to teach Hadria the desirable lesson, and they were dismayed to find that, unlike other women, she had failed to learn it. Henriette was in despair. It was she who had brought about the ill-starred union. How could she ever forgive herself? How repair the error she had made? Only by devoting herself to her brother, and trying patiently to bring his wife to a wiser frame of mind.
A considerable time had elapsed, during which Hadria saw her brothers and sister only at long intervals. Ernest had become estranged from her, to her great grief. He was as courteous and tender in his manner to her as of yore, but there was a change, not to be mistaken. She had lost the brother of her girlhood for ever. While it bitterly grieved, it did not surprise her. She acknowledged in dismay the inconsistency of her conduct. She must have been mad! The universal similarity in the behaviour of girls, herself included, alarmed her. Was there some external will that drove them all, in hordes, to their fate? Were all the intricacies of event and circumstance, of their very emotion, merely the workings of that ruthless cosmic will by which the individual was hypnotised and ruled?
As usual at critical moments, Hadria had been solitary in her encounter with the elements of Fate. There were conflicts that even her sister knew nothing about, the bewilderments and temptations of a nature hampered in its action by its own voluminous qualities and its caprice.
Her brothers supposed that in a short time Hadria would be “wearing bonnets and a card-case, and going the rounds with an elegant expression like the rest of them.”
How different were the little local facts of life—the little chopped-up life that accumulates in odds and ends from moment to moment—from the sun-and-smoke vision of early irresponsible days!
Mrs. Fullerton was pleased with the marriage, not merely because Hubert’s father, Judge Temperley, could secure for his son a prosperous career, but because she was so thankful to see a strange, unaccountable girl like Hadria settling quietly down, with a couple of children to keep her out of mischief.
That was what it had come to! Perhaps they calculated a little too surely. Possibly even two children might not keep her entirely out of mischief. Out of what impulse of malice had Fate pitched upon the most essentially mutinous and erratic of the whole brood, for the sedatestrôle? But perhaps Fate, too, had calculated unscientifically. Mischief was always possible, if one gave one’s mind to it. Or was she growing too old to have the spirit for thorough-going devilry? Youth seemed rather an affair of mental outlook than of years. She felt twenty years older since her marriage. She wondered why it was that marriage did not make all women wicked,—openly and actively so. If ever there was an arrangement by which every evil instinct and every spark of the devil was likely to be aroused and infuriated, surely the customs and traditions that clustered round this estate constituted that dangerous combination! Hardship, difficulty, tragedy could be faced, but not the humiliating, the degrading, the contemptible. Hadria had her own particular ideas as to what ought to be set down under these headings. Most women, she found, ranked certain elements very differently, with lavish use of halos and gilding in their honour, feeling perhaps, she hinted, the dire need of such external decoration.
Good heavens! Did no other woman realize the insult of it all? Hadria knew so few women intimately; none intimately enough to be convinced that no such revolt lay smouldering beneath their smiles. She had a lonely assurance that she had never met the sister-soul (for such there must be by the score, as silent as she), who shared her rage and her detestations. Valeria, with all her native pride, regarded these as proof of a big flaw in an otherwise sound nature. Yet how deep, how passionately strong, these feelings were, how gigantic the flaw!
What possessed people that they did not see what was so brutally clear? As young girls led forth unconscious into the battle, with a bandage over their eyes, and cotton-wool in their ears—yes, then it was inevitable that they should see and hear nothing. Had they been newly imported from the moon they could scarcely have less acquaintance with terrestrial conditions; but afterwards, when ruthlessly, with the grinning assistance of the onlookers, the facts of the social scheme were cynically revealed, and therôleimperiously allotted—with much admonition and moving appeals to conscience and religion, and all the other aides-de-camp at command—after all that, how in the name of heaven could they continue to “babble of green fields”? Was it conceivable that among the thousands of women to whom year after year the facts were disclosed, not one understood and not one—hated?
A flame sprang up in Hadria’s eyes. Theremustbe other women somewhere at this very moment, whose whole being was burning up with this bitter, this sickening and futile hatred! But how few, how few! How vast was the meek majority, fattening on indignity, proud of their humiliation! Yet how wise they were after all. It hurt so to hate—to hate like this. Submission was an affair of temperament, a gift of birth. Nature endowed with a serviceable meekness those whom she designed for insult. Yet it might not be meekness so much as mere brutal necessity that held them all in thrall—the inexorable logic of conditions. Fate knew better than to assail the victim point blank, and so put her on her guard. No; she lured her on gently, cunningly, closing behind her, one by one, the doors of escape, persuading her, forcing her to fasten on her own tethers, appealing to a thousand qualities, good and bad; now to a moment’s weakness or pity, now to her eternal fear of grieving others (thatwas a well-worked vein!), now to her instinct of self-sacrifice, now to grim necessity itself, profiting too by the increasing discouragements, the vain efforts, the physical pain and horrible weariness, the crowding of little difficulties, harassments, the troubles of others—ah! how infinite were these! so that there was no interval for breathing, and scarcely time or space to cope with the legions of the moment; the horizon was black with their advancing hosts!
And this assuredly was no unique experience. Hadria remembered how she had once said that if the worst came to the worst, it would be easy to run away. To her inexperience desperate remedies had seemed so simple, so feasible—the factors of life so few and unentwined. She had not understood how prolific are our deeds, how an act brings with it a large and unexpected progeny, which surround us with new influences and force upon us unforeseen conditions. Yet frequent had been the impulse to adopt that girlish solution of the difficulty. She had no picturesque grievances of the kind that would excite sympathy. On the contrary, popular feeling would set dead against her; she would be acting on an idea that nobody shared, not even her most intimate friend.
Miss Du Prel had arrived at the conclusion that she did not understand Hadria. She had attributed many of her peculiarities to her unique education and her inexperience. Hadria had indeed changed greatly since her marriage, but not in the manner that might have been expected. On the contrary, a closer intimacy with popular social ideals had fired her with a more angry spirit of rebellion. Miss Du Prel had met examples of every kind of eccentricity, but she had never before come upon so marked an instance of this particular type. Hadria’s attitude towards life had suggested to Miss Du Prel the idea of her heroine,Caterina. She remonstrated with Hadria, assuring her that no insult towards women was intended in the general scheme of society, and that it was a mistake to regard it in so resentful a spirit.
“But that is just the most insulting thing about it,” Hadria exclaimed. “Insult is so much a matter of course that people are surprised if one takes umbrage at it. Read this passage from Aristotle that I came upon the other day. He is perfectly calm and amiable, entirely unconscious of offence, when he says that ‘a wife ought to shew herself even more obedient to the rein than if she entered the house as a purchased slave. For she has been bought at a high price, for the sake of sharing life and bearing children, than which no higher or holier tie can possibly exist.’ (Henriette to the very life!)”
Miss Du Prel laughed, and re-read the passage from thePolitics, in some surprise.
“Do you suppose insult is deliberately intended in that graceful sentiment?” asked Hadria. “Obviously not. If any woman of that time had blazed up in anger at the well-meant speech, she would have astonished and grieved her contemporaries. Aristotle doubtless professed a high respect for women who followed his precepts—as men do now when we are obedient.”
“Of course, our society in this particular has not wandered far from the Greek idea,” Miss Du Prel observed pensively.
Hadria pronounced the paradox, “The sharpness of the insult lies in its not being intended.”
Miss Du Prel could not prevail upon her to modify the assertion. Hadria pointed out that the Greeks also meant no offence in regarding their respectable women as simple reproductive agents of inferior human quality.
“And though our well-brought-up girls shrink from the frank speech, they do not appear to shrink from the ideas of the old Greeks. They don’t mind playing the part of cows so long as one doesn’t mention it.”
About eighteen months ago, the village had been full of talk and excitement in consequence of the birth of an heir to the house of Engleton, Lady Engleton’s mission in life being frankly regarded as unfulfilled during the previous three or four years, when she had disappointed the hopes of the family. Hadria listened scornfully. In her eyes, the crowning indignity of the whole affair was Lady Engleton’s own smiling acceptance of the position, and her complacent eagerness to produce the tardy inheritor of the property and honours. This expression of sentiment had, by some means, reached the Vicarage and created much consternation.
Mrs. Walker asserted that it was right and Christian of the lady to desire that which gave every one so much pleasure. “A climax of feminine abjectness!” Hadria had exclaimed in Henriette’s presence.
Miss Temperley, after endeavouring to goad her sister-in-law into the expression of jubilant congratulations, was met by the passionate declaration that she felt more disposed to weep than to rejoice, and more disposed to curse than to weep.
Obviously, Miss Temperley had reason to be uneasy about her part in bringing about her brother’s marriage.
These sudden overflows of exasperated feeling had become less frequent as time went on, but the neighbours looked askance at Mrs. Temperley. Though a powder-magazine may not always blow up, one passes it with a grave consciousness of vast stores of inflammable material lying somewhere within, and who knows what spark might set the thing spouting to the skies?
When the occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and downs of no character, but with all the trouble of a mountain district in its complexities of slope and hollow. Hadria suffered from a gnawing home-sickness; a longing for the rougher, bleaker scenery of the North.
The tired spirit translated the homely English country, so deeply reposeful in its spirit, into an image of dull unrest. If only those broken, stupid lines could have been smoothed out into the grandeur of a plain, Hadria thought that it would have comforted her, as if a song had moved across it with the long-stretching winds. As it was, to look from her window only meant to find repeated the trivialities of life, more picturesque indeed, but still trivialities. It was the estimable and domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves: Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood—Mother earth submissive to the dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her body and her soul abandoned supine to his caprice. The sight had an exasperating effect upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. It was, perhaps, the same in kind as the far stronger sensation of disgust that she felt when she first saw Lady Engleton with her new-born child, full of pride and exultation. It was as much as she could do to shake hands with the happy mother.
When Valeria expressed dismay at so strange a feeling Hadria had refused to be treated as a solitary sinner. There were plenty of fellow-culprits, she said, only they did not dare to speak out. Let Valeria study girls and judge for herself.
Hadria was challenged to name a girl.
Well, Algitha for one. Hadria also suspected Marion Jordan, well-drilled though she was by her dragoon of a mother.
Valeria would not hear of it. Marion Jordan! the gentlest, timidest, most typical of young English girls! Impossible!
“I am almost sure of it, nevertheless,” said Hadria. “Oh, believe me, it is common enough! Few grasp it intellectually perhaps, but thousands feel the insult; of that I am morally certain.”
“What leads you to think so in Marion’s case?”
“Some look, or tone, or word; something slight, but to my mind conclusive. Fellow-sinners detect one another, you know.”
“Well, I don’t understand what the world is coming to!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel. “Where are the natural instincts?”
“Sprouting up for the first time perhaps,” Hadria suggested.
“They seem to be disappearing, if what you say has the slightest foundation.”
“Oh, you are speaking of onlyonekind of instinct. The others have all been suppressed. Perhaps women are not altogether animals after all. The thought is startling, I know. Try to face it.”
“I never supposed they were,” cried Valeria, a little annoyed.
“But you never made allowance for the suppressed instincts,” said Hadria.
“I don’t believe theycanbe suppressed.”
“I believe they can be not merely suppressed, but killed past hope of recovery. And I also believe that there may be, that theremustbe, ideas and emotions fermenting in people’s brains, quite different from those that they are supposed and ordered to cherish, and that these heresies go on working in secret for years before they become even suspected, and then suddenly the population exchange confessions.”