[208]CHAPTER XIXGWENDOLEN TREVALLION AND A SOLDIER BRAVE AND TRUE“Some blank verse and blanker prose,And more of both than any one knows.”Soevery one took up their usual evening employment. Clif and Mrs. Wise played chess in the drawing-room, and Ted in a quiet corner not far away buried himself in a book. In the dining-room Alf and Richie and Weenie, when it could no longer be postponed, got out their books to prepare their home-lessons, and the two latter, as a customary preliminary, played “French and English” on their slates, until Phyl heard the tell-tale sounds of “I’ve got a gun,” “Two tents now,” “Hurrah, all my men have legs!” “Shot—t—t,” and unkindly separated them.Alf with his fingers in his ears wrestled with the onus of proving that “the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal,” and occasionally refreshed himself by telling Phyl interesting anecdotes about rat-catching fox-terriers. Dolly, with a great bundle[209]of books and papers, retreated up to her bedroom, for real work down-stairs was an impossibility. She put on a jacket against the spring cold, and she lifted the jug and basin and soap-dish off the wash-stand.It was a very roomy old wash-stand with a marble top, necessarily concealed by a toilet-cover, for its whiteness was for ever seamed with irregular veins of ink. It bore also dabs of Prussian blue and sepia and vermilion, testifying to the fact that Dolly sometimes forsook the pen for the brush. Indeed Dolly’s energy from the age of sixteen to eighteen was a thing to wonder at. Phyl went on more quietly, reading, writing, helping in the house, teaching Freddie. But Dolly pursued everything.The Girls’ Own Paperwas her stimulating friend at the time, and she was always anxious to try every experiment or suggestion it gave.There was a time when ginger-jars and old bottles painted various colours and with strange excrescences upon them were foisted by her on the rest of the family as ornaments for the different rooms. That was when the articles on “Imitation Barbotine Pottery” were running. Even Freddie was interested in this craze of Dolly’s. It was pleasant to see her bring an old bottle into the house, after persuading Clif to knock half the neck off very neatly, and to watch it being painted in delightfully merging shades of blue. And the next day’s work was always absolutely fascinating. Putty was obtained from the glazier’s—Freddie[210]always went to buy it himself—threepence worth. Dolly used to knead this, roll it and make it smooth with water, and then with sharp bits of wood cut out strange leaves and flowers. Sometimes she made berries by squeezing little putty balls in mosquito-net; Freddie loved this. This vegetation was with much pains made to adhere to the blue bottles and ginger-jars, and then painted over. The effect was quite handsome—until a week or two’s time or Freddie’s itching fingers made the excrescent spiky leaves and sprays crumble off and leave white patches. When articles appeared on “The Difficulties of a Young Housekeeper, and How She Overcame Them,” Dolly was ever to be found in the kitchen labelling all the store bottles with immaculate labels, making “Fairy Butter,” “Dutch Scrambled Eggs,” and trying to persuade Mary to cook potatoes after a new method.She started a museum, a collection of skeleton leaves, a bush house; she wheedled Clif into making her an easel, and she bought big sheets of Bristol board—canvases were too expensive—and painted away, with green and yellow pigment in dabs on her pink cheeks, at Red Riding Hoods and Cinderellas whose anatomy would have made an artist shriek, lurid sunsets, seascapes, with strangely-shaped boats sailing full in the wind’s eye.She had a music craze, and in a month gave the piano more work than she usually did in a year. She decided to learn to sing, and when the boys were all[211]away, practised vocal exercises from a book of her mother’s until Phyl and Mrs. Wise took to sitting in the orchard to be out of the sound. Sometimes Mrs. Wise grew rather anxious. “Everything attempted and nothing done,” she said to her husband. “What sort of a training for her?”But the doctor thought nothing of it. “It is only youthful effervescence,” he said; “more of it perhaps than most girls have. Before long she will settle down and put her whole heart into some one thing.”At the present time she ought to have been putting her whole heart into her examination, which loomed close, but she merely placed her Cicero and her Euclid andThe Essay on Manin a stack on the wash-stand to be in readiness when she could spare time, and fell to covering sheets of exercise-book paper with the woes of one Gwendolen Trevallion. And her spirits, saddened at the news about Alf, caused her to drown Gwendolen with detail and gloom, and many harrowing last words.Next week when the paper came out, the impressionable ones among the school-girls would weep at the sad end of the heroine, whose chequered career they had followed in very short chapters for months. And but for Alf she might have been left alive to pursue her adventures indefinitely. But Dolly also wept as she wrote; the tears invariably ran down her cheeks when she was engaged in killing any one, but[212]she never flinched from a detail of the death on that account.“And now,” she wrote, when the evening waxed late, and she knew a certain number of those lesson-books must at all events be looked at, “now at length Gwendolen was left alone—alone with death. Yes, she could deceive herself no longer; before the man could lay down Ermentrude, for whom she had given her life, and swim back to her through the voracious, clamouring sea” (it need hardly be said that Gwendolen had gone to save Ermentrude, who had ventured on to a dangerous part of the coast and was cut off by the tide), “the waves would be dashing high above the narrow ledge where she stood, and she would be ‘where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’ So young, so fair for death she seemed. She was clad in a simple white muslin dress, her deep violet eyes with their long sweeping black lashes looked like frightened stars, her heavy golden waves of hair blew out with the wind” (anyone’s hair but Gwendolen’s would have been wet, seeing she had been in the water), “and seemed to make a halo for her face. No cry of anguish rose to her sweet white lips as the last wave rolled up for its victim . . . a holy solemn light shone in her eyes; already the scales of this dim earthly vision seemed falling from them, already she seemed to see beyond the veil—the veil white Death alone can lift.“The advancing wave rolled up and broke . . . sweeping over the rock, shooting its spray high into[213]the air and retreating, leaving the ledge vacant. Gwendolen was gone . . . gone to a fairer heritage than earth . . . gone Home.“‘Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!’”Neither Phyl nor Dolly would have dreamed of ending a story of any kind without some favourite verse; there were even times when the end of the story shaped itself so that a particular verse might be worked in.Down-stairs, just after the dinner-things had been cleared away, Phyl had looked at Freddie, and Freddie looked at Phyl.“I wonder,” was Phyl’s thought, shame in her heart at having neglected his studies so badly during the day, “I wonder if I could coax him to do some parsing now to make up.”And Freddie had quaked beneath her blue considering eye.“I’m in for it now,” he thought to himself.“What are you going to do to-night, Freddie?” she said, and actually stroked his round little head.Freddie kept his head very still under her hand, but stole an amazed glance at her through his[214]eyelashes—the affectionate diminutive of his name, and a caress!“Oh,” he said in his kindest and most hearty little way, “I thought I’d just do a bit of gography for you, Phyl dear, I don’t know my capesverywell, do I?”And he actually sat down without much ado and committed them to memory, to Phyl’s deepest astonishment. Just before nine she went up-stairs to Dolly, her old tin hat-box in her hand.“There’s that essay of mine on Moral Rectitude,” she said, “that will fill a column.”“Oh, yes,” Dolly said, “I’d forgotten that, and I liked itverymuch.”She took the closely-written sheets from her sister and glanced through them, deep admiration on her face. Phyl had of late, after a somewhat severe course of reading Ruskin, Emerson, and Marcus Aurelius, abjured story-writing for a time, and fallen instead to composing essays on high and abstruse subjects. They were written in a very lofty strain, contained as many quotations as she could possibly put in, and were full of moral reflections.“But you said you’d write a poem too,” said the ever rapacious little editor. Phyl had been on the staff of the paper until a year ago, when she left school, and she was still always pressed into the service to help to fill up yawning columns, for the body of school-girls very, very seldom furnished any[215]work, and the editor and staff were often hard pushed for material.Phyl produced her poem, not without anxiety on her face for her sister’s opinion; they criticized each other very frankly, these two, and hard truths often flew, though on frequent occasions they yielded each other the warmest admiration.[Illustration]“Oh, Phyl, it’s beautiful!”Dolly read the many verses, her eyes kindling at the end.“Oh, Phyl,it’s beautiful!” she said; “It’s the very best thing you’ve done—oh, Phyl!”[216]And Phyl herself had had a secret idea that it was a masterpiece.The poem was about a soldier who clasped a fair maiden in his arms in anguished farewell, then “light to his saddleprest—“Away o’er the grassy plain, far away thro’ the stilly air,Away from all that was lovely,—away from all that was fair.”The maiden of course languished through several verses. Indeed all the school-girls would have been quite hurt had she stayed healthily alive to welcome her lover back from his wars.“‘Good-bye to sadness and sorrow! Good-bye to parting and pain.Oh, welcome to death,’ she cries, ‘which binds us together again.’”And the soldier at last comes spurring back from the battle only tofind—“’Tis over, the hope and the love, the dream of his earthly life,Sorrow has taken his goblet up and filled it with sadness and strife.And now a broken and saddened man bends over a grassy grave,’Tis but the ghost of the lover, the soldier so strong and brave.‘Oh, what are fame and glory?’ cries he in his anguish sore.‘Oh, love, thou art all I care for, wilt thou never come back to me more?’And the river, the silent river, flowing onward into the sea,[217]And the willows bending and waving thro’ the air so sweet and free,Seem whisp’ring low the story of the soldier loving and brave,Of the maiden true and tender—of the grassy, silent grave,Of the end of fame and glory, of riches which too soon rust,Of the end of all things earthly—only the crumbling dust.”How beautiful that poem seemed to them at the time! Perhaps nothing either of them ever wrote in after years afforded them such exquisite satisfaction. Dolly glowed all over with pride in her sister and pride in herself that she should have so beautiful a poem for her beloved paper. And at Dolly’s praises the modest poetess exulted more and more; she even had a rapt vision before she slept that night, of a sweet little volume, in willow green, entitled “Sea Fancies,” or “Rose Petals,” bearing on its front page the words, “By Phyllida Rankin Conway,” and on the next, “Dedicated to my sister, Dorothy Rankin Conway.”From the window, as she stood up to reach her school-books, Dorothy saw the doctor’s silent flying figure come down the moonlit road, and three minutes later there came the dull sound of the bicycle’s wheels along the verandah.Both girls instantly laid down paper and pens and went down-stairs.
“Some blank verse and blanker prose,And more of both than any one knows.”
“Some blank verse and blanker prose,And more of both than any one knows.”
“Some blank verse and blanker prose,And more of both than any one knows.”
“Some blank verse and blanker prose,
And more of both than any one knows.”
Soevery one took up their usual evening employment. Clif and Mrs. Wise played chess in the drawing-room, and Ted in a quiet corner not far away buried himself in a book. In the dining-room Alf and Richie and Weenie, when it could no longer be postponed, got out their books to prepare their home-lessons, and the two latter, as a customary preliminary, played “French and English” on their slates, until Phyl heard the tell-tale sounds of “I’ve got a gun,” “Two tents now,” “Hurrah, all my men have legs!” “Shot—t—t,” and unkindly separated them.
Alf with his fingers in his ears wrestled with the onus of proving that “the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal,” and occasionally refreshed himself by telling Phyl interesting anecdotes about rat-catching fox-terriers. Dolly, with a great bundle[209]of books and papers, retreated up to her bedroom, for real work down-stairs was an impossibility. She put on a jacket against the spring cold, and she lifted the jug and basin and soap-dish off the wash-stand.
It was a very roomy old wash-stand with a marble top, necessarily concealed by a toilet-cover, for its whiteness was for ever seamed with irregular veins of ink. It bore also dabs of Prussian blue and sepia and vermilion, testifying to the fact that Dolly sometimes forsook the pen for the brush. Indeed Dolly’s energy from the age of sixteen to eighteen was a thing to wonder at. Phyl went on more quietly, reading, writing, helping in the house, teaching Freddie. But Dolly pursued everything.The Girls’ Own Paperwas her stimulating friend at the time, and she was always anxious to try every experiment or suggestion it gave.
There was a time when ginger-jars and old bottles painted various colours and with strange excrescences upon them were foisted by her on the rest of the family as ornaments for the different rooms. That was when the articles on “Imitation Barbotine Pottery” were running. Even Freddie was interested in this craze of Dolly’s. It was pleasant to see her bring an old bottle into the house, after persuading Clif to knock half the neck off very neatly, and to watch it being painted in delightfully merging shades of blue. And the next day’s work was always absolutely fascinating. Putty was obtained from the glazier’s—Freddie[210]always went to buy it himself—threepence worth. Dolly used to knead this, roll it and make it smooth with water, and then with sharp bits of wood cut out strange leaves and flowers. Sometimes she made berries by squeezing little putty balls in mosquito-net; Freddie loved this. This vegetation was with much pains made to adhere to the blue bottles and ginger-jars, and then painted over. The effect was quite handsome—until a week or two’s time or Freddie’s itching fingers made the excrescent spiky leaves and sprays crumble off and leave white patches. When articles appeared on “The Difficulties of a Young Housekeeper, and How She Overcame Them,” Dolly was ever to be found in the kitchen labelling all the store bottles with immaculate labels, making “Fairy Butter,” “Dutch Scrambled Eggs,” and trying to persuade Mary to cook potatoes after a new method.
She started a museum, a collection of skeleton leaves, a bush house; she wheedled Clif into making her an easel, and she bought big sheets of Bristol board—canvases were too expensive—and painted away, with green and yellow pigment in dabs on her pink cheeks, at Red Riding Hoods and Cinderellas whose anatomy would have made an artist shriek, lurid sunsets, seascapes, with strangely-shaped boats sailing full in the wind’s eye.
She had a music craze, and in a month gave the piano more work than she usually did in a year. She decided to learn to sing, and when the boys were all[211]away, practised vocal exercises from a book of her mother’s until Phyl and Mrs. Wise took to sitting in the orchard to be out of the sound. Sometimes Mrs. Wise grew rather anxious. “Everything attempted and nothing done,” she said to her husband. “What sort of a training for her?”
But the doctor thought nothing of it. “It is only youthful effervescence,” he said; “more of it perhaps than most girls have. Before long she will settle down and put her whole heart into some one thing.”
At the present time she ought to have been putting her whole heart into her examination, which loomed close, but she merely placed her Cicero and her Euclid andThe Essay on Manin a stack on the wash-stand to be in readiness when she could spare time, and fell to covering sheets of exercise-book paper with the woes of one Gwendolen Trevallion. And her spirits, saddened at the news about Alf, caused her to drown Gwendolen with detail and gloom, and many harrowing last words.
Next week when the paper came out, the impressionable ones among the school-girls would weep at the sad end of the heroine, whose chequered career they had followed in very short chapters for months. And but for Alf she might have been left alive to pursue her adventures indefinitely. But Dolly also wept as she wrote; the tears invariably ran down her cheeks when she was engaged in killing any one, but[212]she never flinched from a detail of the death on that account.
“And now,” she wrote, when the evening waxed late, and she knew a certain number of those lesson-books must at all events be looked at, “now at length Gwendolen was left alone—alone with death. Yes, she could deceive herself no longer; before the man could lay down Ermentrude, for whom she had given her life, and swim back to her through the voracious, clamouring sea” (it need hardly be said that Gwendolen had gone to save Ermentrude, who had ventured on to a dangerous part of the coast and was cut off by the tide), “the waves would be dashing high above the narrow ledge where she stood, and she would be ‘where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’ So young, so fair for death she seemed. She was clad in a simple white muslin dress, her deep violet eyes with their long sweeping black lashes looked like frightened stars, her heavy golden waves of hair blew out with the wind” (anyone’s hair but Gwendolen’s would have been wet, seeing she had been in the water), “and seemed to make a halo for her face. No cry of anguish rose to her sweet white lips as the last wave rolled up for its victim . . . a holy solemn light shone in her eyes; already the scales of this dim earthly vision seemed falling from them, already she seemed to see beyond the veil—the veil white Death alone can lift.
“The advancing wave rolled up and broke . . . sweeping over the rock, shooting its spray high into[213]the air and retreating, leaving the ledge vacant. Gwendolen was gone . . . gone to a fairer heritage than earth . . . gone Home.
“‘Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!’”
“‘Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!’”
“‘Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!’”
“‘Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!’”
Neither Phyl nor Dolly would have dreamed of ending a story of any kind without some favourite verse; there were even times when the end of the story shaped itself so that a particular verse might be worked in.
Down-stairs, just after the dinner-things had been cleared away, Phyl had looked at Freddie, and Freddie looked at Phyl.
“I wonder,” was Phyl’s thought, shame in her heart at having neglected his studies so badly during the day, “I wonder if I could coax him to do some parsing now to make up.”
And Freddie had quaked beneath her blue considering eye.
“I’m in for it now,” he thought to himself.
“What are you going to do to-night, Freddie?” she said, and actually stroked his round little head.
Freddie kept his head very still under her hand, but stole an amazed glance at her through his[214]eyelashes—the affectionate diminutive of his name, and a caress!
“Oh,” he said in his kindest and most hearty little way, “I thought I’d just do a bit of gography for you, Phyl dear, I don’t know my capesverywell, do I?”
And he actually sat down without much ado and committed them to memory, to Phyl’s deepest astonishment. Just before nine she went up-stairs to Dolly, her old tin hat-box in her hand.
“There’s that essay of mine on Moral Rectitude,” she said, “that will fill a column.”
“Oh, yes,” Dolly said, “I’d forgotten that, and I liked itverymuch.”
She took the closely-written sheets from her sister and glanced through them, deep admiration on her face. Phyl had of late, after a somewhat severe course of reading Ruskin, Emerson, and Marcus Aurelius, abjured story-writing for a time, and fallen instead to composing essays on high and abstruse subjects. They were written in a very lofty strain, contained as many quotations as she could possibly put in, and were full of moral reflections.
“But you said you’d write a poem too,” said the ever rapacious little editor. Phyl had been on the staff of the paper until a year ago, when she left school, and she was still always pressed into the service to help to fill up yawning columns, for the body of school-girls very, very seldom furnished any[215]work, and the editor and staff were often hard pushed for material.
Phyl produced her poem, not without anxiety on her face for her sister’s opinion; they criticized each other very frankly, these two, and hard truths often flew, though on frequent occasions they yielded each other the warmest admiration.
[Illustration]“Oh, Phyl, it’s beautiful!”
“Oh, Phyl, it’s beautiful!”
Dolly read the many verses, her eyes kindling at the end.
“Oh, Phyl,it’s beautiful!” she said; “It’s the very best thing you’ve done—oh, Phyl!”
[216]And Phyl herself had had a secret idea that it was a masterpiece.
The poem was about a soldier who clasped a fair maiden in his arms in anguished farewell, then “light to his saddleprest—
“Away o’er the grassy plain, far away thro’ the stilly air,Away from all that was lovely,—away from all that was fair.”
“Away o’er the grassy plain, far away thro’ the stilly air,Away from all that was lovely,—away from all that was fair.”
“Away o’er the grassy plain, far away thro’ the stilly air,Away from all that was lovely,—away from all that was fair.”
“Away o’er the grassy plain, far away thro’ the stilly air,
Away from all that was lovely,—away from all that was fair.”
The maiden of course languished through several verses. Indeed all the school-girls would have been quite hurt had she stayed healthily alive to welcome her lover back from his wars.
“‘Good-bye to sadness and sorrow! Good-bye to parting and pain.Oh, welcome to death,’ she cries, ‘which binds us together again.’”
“‘Good-bye to sadness and sorrow! Good-bye to parting and pain.Oh, welcome to death,’ she cries, ‘which binds us together again.’”
“‘Good-bye to sadness and sorrow! Good-bye to parting and pain.Oh, welcome to death,’ she cries, ‘which binds us together again.’”
“‘Good-bye to sadness and sorrow! Good-bye to parting and pain.
Oh, welcome to death,’ she cries, ‘which binds us together again.’”
And the soldier at last comes spurring back from the battle only tofind—
“’Tis over, the hope and the love, the dream of his earthly life,Sorrow has taken his goblet up and filled it with sadness and strife.And now a broken and saddened man bends over a grassy grave,’Tis but the ghost of the lover, the soldier so strong and brave.‘Oh, what are fame and glory?’ cries he in his anguish sore.‘Oh, love, thou art all I care for, wilt thou never come back to me more?’And the river, the silent river, flowing onward into the sea,[217]And the willows bending and waving thro’ the air so sweet and free,Seem whisp’ring low the story of the soldier loving and brave,Of the maiden true and tender—of the grassy, silent grave,Of the end of fame and glory, of riches which too soon rust,Of the end of all things earthly—only the crumbling dust.”
“’Tis over, the hope and the love, the dream of his earthly life,Sorrow has taken his goblet up and filled it with sadness and strife.And now a broken and saddened man bends over a grassy grave,’Tis but the ghost of the lover, the soldier so strong and brave.‘Oh, what are fame and glory?’ cries he in his anguish sore.‘Oh, love, thou art all I care for, wilt thou never come back to me more?’And the river, the silent river, flowing onward into the sea,[217]And the willows bending and waving thro’ the air so sweet and free,Seem whisp’ring low the story of the soldier loving and brave,Of the maiden true and tender—of the grassy, silent grave,Of the end of fame and glory, of riches which too soon rust,Of the end of all things earthly—only the crumbling dust.”
“’Tis over, the hope and the love, the dream of his earthly life,Sorrow has taken his goblet up and filled it with sadness and strife.And now a broken and saddened man bends over a grassy grave,’Tis but the ghost of the lover, the soldier so strong and brave.‘Oh, what are fame and glory?’ cries he in his anguish sore.‘Oh, love, thou art all I care for, wilt thou never come back to me more?’And the river, the silent river, flowing onward into the sea,[217]And the willows bending and waving thro’ the air so sweet and free,Seem whisp’ring low the story of the soldier loving and brave,Of the maiden true and tender—of the grassy, silent grave,Of the end of fame and glory, of riches which too soon rust,Of the end of all things earthly—only the crumbling dust.”
“’Tis over, the hope and the love, the dream of his earthly life,
Sorrow has taken his goblet up and filled it with sadness and strife.
And now a broken and saddened man bends over a grassy grave,
’Tis but the ghost of the lover, the soldier so strong and brave.
‘Oh, what are fame and glory?’ cries he in his anguish sore.
‘Oh, love, thou art all I care for, wilt thou never come back to me more?’
And the river, the silent river, flowing onward into the sea,[217]
And the willows bending and waving thro’ the air so sweet and free,
Seem whisp’ring low the story of the soldier loving and brave,
Of the maiden true and tender—of the grassy, silent grave,
Of the end of fame and glory, of riches which too soon rust,
Of the end of all things earthly—only the crumbling dust.”
How beautiful that poem seemed to them at the time! Perhaps nothing either of them ever wrote in after years afforded them such exquisite satisfaction. Dolly glowed all over with pride in her sister and pride in herself that she should have so beautiful a poem for her beloved paper. And at Dolly’s praises the modest poetess exulted more and more; she even had a rapt vision before she slept that night, of a sweet little volume, in willow green, entitled “Sea Fancies,” or “Rose Petals,” bearing on its front page the words, “By Phyllida Rankin Conway,” and on the next, “Dedicated to my sister, Dorothy Rankin Conway.”
From the window, as she stood up to reach her school-books, Dorothy saw the doctor’s silent flying figure come down the moonlit road, and three minutes later there came the dull sound of the bicycle’s wheels along the verandah.
Both girls instantly laid down paper and pens and went down-stairs.