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The Farringdons

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler · English · Gutenberg #19798 · 617,173 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Farringdons

Author: Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler


        
Release date: November 13, 2006 [eBook #19798]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19798

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, Sigal Alon and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FARRINGDONS ***




Produced by Chuck Greif, Sigal Alon and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net










                         THE FARRINGDONS
                  BY ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER

   AUTHOR OF CONCERNING ISABEL CARNABY, A DOUBLE THREAD, ETC.

                             NEW YORK
                   D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1900
                         COPYRIGHT, 1900,
                       _All rights reserved._




                            DEDICATION


    For all such readers as have chanced to be
    Either in Mershire or in Arcady,
    I write this book, that each may smile, and say,
    "Once on a time I also passed that way."




                 CONTENTS


CHAPTER                              PAGE
    I.--THE OSIERFIELD                  1
   II.--CHRISTOPHER                    12
  III.--MRS. BATESON'S TEA-PARTY       29
   IV.--SCHOOL-DAYS                    51
    V.--THE MOAT HOUSE                 70
   VI.--WHIT MONDAY                    90
  VII.--BROADER VIEWS                 114
 VIII.--GREATER THAN OUR HEARTS       137
   IX.--FELICIA FINDS HAPPINESS       156
    X.--CHANGES                       187
   XI.--MISS FARRINGDON'S WILL        213
  XII.--"THE DAUGHTERS OF PHILIP"     232
 XIII.--CECIL FARQUHAR                249
  XIV.--ON THE RIVER                  272
   XV.--LITTLE WILLIE                 292
  XVI.--THIS SIDE OF THE HILLS        306
 XVII.--GEORGE FARRINGDON'S SON       325
XVIII.--THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILLS   346

       *       *       *       *       *




                 THE FARRINGDONS




CHAPTER I

THE OSIERFIELD

    They herded not with soulless swine,
      Nor let strange snares their path environ:
    Their only pitfall was a mine--
      Their pigs were made of iron.


In the middle of Sedgehill, which is in the middle of Mershire, which is
in the middle of England, there lies a narrow ridge of high table-land,
dividing, as by a straight line, the collieries and ironworks of the
great coal district from the green and pleasant scenery of the western
Midlands. Along the summit of this ridge runs the High Street of the
bleak little town of Sedgehill; so that the houses on the east side of
this street see nothing through their back windows save the huge
slag-mounds and blazing furnaces and tall chimneys of the weird and
terrible, yet withal fascinating, Black Country; while the houses on the
west side of the street have sunny gardens and fruitful orchards,
sloping down toward a fertile land of woods and streams and meadows,
bounded in the far distance by the Clee Hills and the Wrekin, and in the
farthest distance of all by the blue Welsh mountains.

In the dark valley lying to the immediate east of Sedgehill stood the
Osierfield Works, the largest ironworks in Mershire in the good old
days when Mershire made iron for half the world. The owners of these
works were the Farringdons, and had been so for several generations. So
it came to pass that the Farringdons were the royal family of Sedgehill;
and the Osierfield Works was the circle wherein the inhabitants of that
place lived and moved. It was as natural for everybody born in Sedgehill
eventually to work at the Osierfield, as it was for him eventually to
grow into a man and to take unto himself a wife.

The home of the Farringdons was called the Willows, and was separated by
a carriage-drive of half a mile from the town. Its lodge stood in the
High Street, on the western side; and the drive wandered through a fine
old wood, and across an undulating park, till it stopped in front of a
large square house built of gray stone. It was a handsome house inside,
with wonderful oak staircases and Adams chimneypieces; and there was an
air of great stateliness about it, and of very little luxury. For the
Farringdons were a hardy race, whose time was taken up by the making of
iron and the saving of souls; and they regarded sofas and easy-chairs in
very much the same light as they regarded theatres and strong drink,
thereby proving that their spines were as strong as their consciences
were stern.

Moreover, the Farringdons were of "the people called Methodists";
consequently Methodism was the established religion of Sedgehill,
possessing there that prestige which is the inalienable attribute of all
state churches. In the eyes of Sedgehill it was as necessary to
salvation to pray at the chapel as to work at the Osierfield; and the
majority of the inhabitants would as soon have thought of worshipping at
any other sanctuary as of worshipping at the beacon, a pillar which
still marks the highest point of the highest table-land in England.

At the time when this story begins, the joint ownership of the
Osierfield and the Willows was vested in the two Miss Farringdons, the
daughters and co-heiresses of John Farringdon. John Farringdon and his
brother William had been partners, and had arranged between themselves
that William's only child, George, should marry John's eldest daughter,
Maria, and so consolidate the brothers' fortunes and their interest in
the works. But the gods--and George--saw otherwise. George was a
handsome, weak boy, who objected equally to work and to Methodism; and
as his father cared for nothing beyond those sources of interest, and
had no patience for any one who did, the two did not always see eye to
eye. Perhaps if Maria had been more unbending, things might have turned
out differently; but Methodism in its severest aspects was not more
severe than Maria Farringdon. She was a thorough gentlewoman, and
extremely clever; but tenderness was not counted among her excellencies.
George would have been fond of almost any woman who was pretty enough to
be loved and not clever enough to be feared; but his cousin Maria was
beyond even his powers of falling in love, although, to do him justice,
these powers were by no means limited. The end of it was that George
offended his father past forgiveness by running away to Australia rather
than marry Maria, and there disappeared. Years afterward a rumour
reached his people that he had married and died out there, leaving a
widow and an only son; but this rumour had not been verified, as by that
time his father and uncle were dead, and his cousins were reigning in
his stead; and it was hardly to be expected that the proud Miss
Farringdon would take much trouble concerning the woman whom her
weak-kneed kinsman had preferred to herself.

William Farringdon left all his property and his share in the works to
his niece Maria, as some reparation for the insult which his
disinherited son had offered to her; John left his large fortune between
his two daughters, as he never had a son; so Maria and Anne Farringdon
lived at the Willows, and carried on the Osierfield with the help of
Richard Smallwood, who had been the general manager of the collieries
and ironworks belonging to the firm in their father's time, and knew as
much about iron (and most other things) as he did. Maria was a good
woman of business, and she and Richard between them made money as fast
as it had been made in the days of William and John Farringdon. Anne, on
the contrary, was a meek and gentle soul, who had no power of governing
but a perfect genius for obedience, and who was always engaged on the
Herculean task of squaring the sternest dogmas with the most indulgent
practices.

Even in the early days of this history the Miss Farringdons were what is
called "getting on"; but the Willows was, nevertheless, not without a
youthful element in it. Close upon a dozen years ago the two sisters had
adopted the orphaned child of a second cousin, whose young widow had
died in giving birth to a posthumous daughter; and now Elisabeth
Farringdon was the light of the good ladies' eyes, though they would
have considered it harmful to her soul to let her have an inkling of
this fact.

She was not a pretty little girl, which was a source of much sorrow of
heart to her; and she was a distinctly clever little girl, of which she
was utterly unconscious, it being an integral part of Miss Farringdon's
system of education to imbue the young with an overpowering sense of
their own inferiority and unworthiness. During the first decade of her
existence Elisabeth used frequently and earnestly to pray that her hair
might become golden and her eyes brown; but as on this score the heavens
remained as brass, and her hair continued dark brown and her eyes
blue-gray, she changed her tactics, and confined her heroine-worship to
ladies of this particular style of colouring; which showed that, even at
the age of ten, Elisabeth had her full share of adaptability.

One day, when walking with Miss Farringdon to chapel, Elisabeth
exclaimed, _à propos_ of nothing but her own meditations, "Oh! Cousin
Maria, I do wish I was pretty!"

Most people would have been too much afraid of the lady of the Willows
to express so frivolous a desire in her august hearing; but Elisabeth
was never afraid of anybody, and that, perhaps, was one of the reasons
why her severe kinswoman loved her so well.

"That is a vain wish, my child. Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain;
and the Lord looketh on the heart and not on the outward appearance."

"But I wasn't thinking of the Lord," replied Elisabeth: "I was thinking
of other people; and they love you much more if you are pretty than if
you aren't."

"That is not so," said Miss Farringdon--and she believed she was
speaking the truth; "if you serve God and do your duty to your
neighbour, you will find plenty of people ready to love you; and
especially if you carry yourself well and never stoop." Like many
another elect lady, Cousin Maria regarded beauty of face as a vanity,
but beauty of figure as a virtue; and to this doctrine Elisabeth owed
the fact that her back always sloped in the opposite direction to the
backs of the majority of people.

But it would have surprised Miss Farringdon to learn how little real
effect her strict Methodist training had upon Elisabeth; fortunately,
however, few elder people ever do learn how little effect their training
has upon the young committed to their charge; if it were so, life would
be too hard for the generation that has passed the hill-top. Elisabeth's
was one of those happy, pantheistic natures that possess the gift of
finding God everywhere and in everything. She early caught the Methodist
habit of self-analysis and introspection, but in her it did not
develop--as it does in more naturally religious souls--into an almost
morbid conscientiousness and self-depreciation; she merely found an
artistic and intellectual pleasure in taking the machinery of her soul
to pieces and seeing how it worked.

In those days--and, in fact, in all succeeding ones--Elisabeth lived in
a world of imagination. There was not a nook in the garden of the
Willows which was not peopled by creatures of her fancy. At this
particular time she was greatly fascinated by the subject of heathen
mythology, as set forth in Mangnall's Questions, and had devoted herself
to the service of Pallas Athene, having learned that that goddess was
(like herself) not surpassingly beautiful, and was, moreover,
handicapped by the possession of gray eyes. Miss Farringdon would have
been horrified had she known that a portion of the wood was set apart by
Elisabeth as "Athene's Grove," and that the contents of the waste-paper
basket were daily begged from the servants by the devotee, and offered
up, by the aid of real matches, on the shrine of the goddess.

"Have you noticed, sister," Miss Anne remarked on one occasion, "how
much more thoughtful dear Elisabeth is growing?" Miss Anne's life was
one long advertisement of other people's virtues. "She used to be
somewhat careless in letting the fires go out, and so giving the
servants the trouble to relight them; but now she is always going round
the rooms to see if more coal is required, without my ever having to
remind her."

"It is so, and I rejoice. Carelessness in domestic matters is a grave
fault in a young girl, and I am pleased that Elisabeth has outgrown her
habit of wool-gathering, and of letting the fire go out under her very
nose without noticing it. It is a source of thanksgiving to me that the
child is so much more thoughtful and considerate in this matter than she
used to be."

Miss Farringdon's thanksgiving, however, would have been less fervent
had she known that, for the time being, her _protégée_ had assumed the
rôle of a Vestal virgin, and that Elisabeth's care of the fires that
winter was not fulfilment of a duty but part of a game. This, however,
was Elisabeth's way; she frequently received credit for performing a
duty when she was really only taking part in a performance; which merely
meant that she possessed the artist's power of looking at duty through
the haze of idealism, and of seeing that, although it was good, it might
also be made picturesque. Elisabeth was well versed in The Pilgrim's
Progress and The Fairchild Family. The spiritual vicissitudes of Lucy,
Emily, and Henry Fairchild were to her a drama of never-failing
interest; while each besetment of the Crosbie household--which was as
carefully preserved for its particular owner as if sin were a species of
ground game--never failed to thrill her with enjoyable disgust. She
knew a great portion of the Methodist hymn-book by heart, and pondered
long over the interesting preface to that work, wondering much what
"doggerel" and "botches" could be--she inclined to the supposition that
the former were animals and the latter were diseases; but even her vivid
imagination failed to form a satisfactory representation of such queer
kittle-cattle as "feeble expletives." Every Sunday she gloated over the
frontispiece of John Wesley, in his gown and bands and white ringlets,
feeling that, though poor as a picture, it was very superior to the
letterpress; the worst illustrations being better than the best poetry,
as everybody under thirteen must know. But Elisabeth's library was not
confined to the volumes above mentioned; she regularly perused with
interest two little periodicals, called respectively Early Days and The
Juvenile Offering. The former treated of youthful saints at home; and
its white paper cover was adorned by the picture of a shepherd,
comfortably if peculiarly attired in a frock coat and top
hat--presumably to portray that it was Sunday. The latter magazine
devoted itself to histories dealing with youthful saints abroad; and its
cover was decorated with a representation of young black persons
apparently engaged in some religious exercise. In this picture the frock
coats and top hats were conspicuous by their absence.

There were two pictures in the breakfast-room at the Willows which
occupied an important place in Elisabeth's childish imaginings. The
first hung over the mantelpiece, and was called The Centenary Meeting.
It represented a chapel full of men in suffocating cravats, turning
their backs upon the platform and looking at the public instead--a more
effective if less realistic attitude than the ordinary one of sitting
the right way about; because--as Elisabeth reasoned, and reasoned
rightly--if these gentlemen had not happened to be behind before when
their portraits were taken, nobody would ever have known whose portraits
they were. It was a source of great family pride to her that her
grandfather appeared in this galaxy of Methodist worth; but the hero of
the piece, in her eyes, was one gentleman who had managed to swarm up a
pillar and there screw himself "to the sticking-place"; and how he had
done it Elisabeth never could conceive.

The second picture hung over the door, and was a counterfeit presentment
of John Wesley's escape from the burning rectory at Epworth. In those
days Elisabeth was so small and the picture hung so high that she could
not see it very distinctly; but it appeared to her that the boy Wesley
(whom she confused in her own mind with the infant Samuel) was flying
out of an attic window by means of flowing white wings, while a horse
was suspended in mid-air ready to carry him straight to heaven.

Every Sunday she accompanied her cousins to East Lane Chapel, at the
other end of Sedgehill, and here she saw strange visions and dreamed
strange dreams. The distinguishing feature of this sanctuary was a sort
of reredos in oils, in memory of a dead and gone Farringdon, which
depicted a gigantic urn, surrounded by a forest of cypress, through the
shades whereof flitted "young-eyed cherubims" with dirty wings and
bilious complexions, these last mentioned blemishes being, it is but
fair to add, the fault of the atmosphere and not of the artist. For
years Elisabeth firmly believed that this altar-piece was a trustworthy
representation of heaven; and she felt, therefore, a pleasant,
proprietary interest in it, as the view of an estate to which she would
one day succeed.

There was also a stained-glass window in East Lane Chapel, given by the
widow of a leading official. The baptismal name of the deceased had been
Jacob; and the window showed forth Jacob's Dream, as a delicate
compliment to the departed. Elisabeth delighted in this window, it was
so realistic. The patriarch lay asleep, with his head on a little white
tombstone at the foot of a solid oak staircase, which was covered with a
red carpet neatly fastened down by brass rods; while up and down this
staircase strolled fair-haired angels in long white nightgowns and
purple wings.

Not of course then, but in after years, Elisabeth learned to understand
that this window was a type and an explanation of the power of early
Methodism, the strength whereof lay in its marvellous capacity of
adapting religion to the needs and use of everyday life, and of bringing
the infinite into the region of the homely and commonplace. We, with our
added culture and our maturer artistic perceptions, may smile at a
Jacob's Ladder formed according to the domestic architecture of the
first half of the nineteenth century; but the people to whom the other
world was so near and so real that they perceived nothing incongruous in
an ordinary stair-carpet which was being trodden by the feet of angels,
had grasped a truth which on one side touched the divine, even though on
the other it came perilously near to the grotesque. And He, Who taught
them as by parables, never misunderstood--as did certain of His
followers--their reverent irreverence; but, understanding it, saw that
it was good.

The great day in East Lane Chapel was the Sunday School anniversary;
and in Elisabeth's childish eyes this was a feast compared with which
Christmas and Easter sank to the level of black-letter days. On these
festivals the Sunday School scholars sat all together in those parts of
the gallery adjacent to the organ, the girls wearing white frocks and
blue neckerchiefs, and the boys black suits and blue ties. The pews were
strewn with white hymn-sheets, which lay all over the chapel like snow
in Salmon, and which contained special spiritual songs more stirring in
their character than the contents of the Hymn-book; these hymns the
Sunday School children sang by themselves, while the congregation sat
swaying to and fro to the tune. And Elisabeth's soul was uplifted within
her as she listened to the children's voices; for she felt that mystical
hush which--let us hope--comes to us all at some time or other, when we
hide our faces in our mantles and feel that a Presence is passing by,
and is passing by so near to us that we have only to stretch out our
hands in order to touch it. At sundry times and in divers manners does
that wonderful sense of a Personal Touch come to men and to women. It
may be in a wayside Bethel, it may be in one of the fairest fanes of
Christendom, or it may be not in any temple made with hands: according
to the separate natures which God has given to us, so must we choose the
separate ways that will lead us to Him; and as long as there are
different natures there must be various ways. Then let each of us take
the path at the end whereof we see Him standing, always remembering that
wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein; and never forgetting
that--come whence and how they may--whosoever shall touch but the hem of
His garment shall be made perfectly whole.




CHAPTER II

CHRISTOPHER

    And when perchance of all perfection
          You've seen an end,
    Your thoughts may turn in my direction
          To find a friend.


There are two things which are absolutely necessary to the well-being of
the normal feminine mind--namely, one romantic attachment and one
comfortable friendship. Elisabeth was perfectly normal and extremely
feminine; and consequently she provided herself early with these two
aids to happiness.

In those days the object of her romantic attachment was her cousin Anne.
Anne Farringdon was one of those graceful, elegant women who appear so
much deeper than they really are. All her life she had been inspiring
devotion which she was utterly unable to fathom; and this was still the
case with regard to herself and her adoring little worshipper.

People always wondered why Anne Farringdon had never married; and
explained the mystery to their own satisfaction by conjecturing that she
had had a disappointment in her youth, and had been incapable of loving
twice. It never struck them--which was actually the case--that she had
been incapable of loving once; and that her single-blessedness was due
to no unforgotten love-story, but to the unromantic fact that among her
score of lovers she had never found a man for whom she seriously cared.
In a delicate and ladylike fashion she had flirted outrageously in her
time; but she had always broken hearts so gently, and put away the
pieces so daintily, that the owners of these hearts had never dreamed of
resenting the damage she had wrought. She had refused them with such a
world of pathos in her beautiful eyes--the Farringdon gray-blue eyes,
with thick black brows and long black lashes--that the poor souls had
never doubted her sympathy and comprehension; nor had they the slightest
idea that she was totally ignorant of the depth of the love which she
had inspired, or the bitterness of the pain which she had caused.

All the romance of Elisabeth's nature--and there was a great deal of
it--was lavished upon Anne Farringdon. If Anne smiled, Elisabeth's sky
was cloudless; if Anne sighed, Elisabeth's sky grew gray. The mere sound
of Anne's voice vibrated through the child's whole being; and every
little trifle connected with her cousin became a sacred relic in
Elisabeth's eyes.

Like every Methodist child, Elisabeth was well versed in her Bible; but,
unlike most Methodist children, she regarded it more as a poetical than
an ethical work. When she was only twelve, the sixty-eighth Psalm
thrilled her as with the sound of a trumpet; and she was completely
carried away by the glorious imagery of the Book of Isaiah, even when
she did not in the least understand its meaning. But her favourite book
was the Book of Ruth; for was not Ruth's devotion to Naomi the exact
counterpart of hers to Cousin Anne? And she used to make up long stories
in her own mind about how Cousin Anne should, by some means, lose all
her friends and all her money, and be driven out of Sedgehill and away
from the Osierfield Works; and then how Elisabeth would say, "Entreat me
not to leave thee," and would follow Cousin Anne to the ends of the
earth.

People sometimes smile at the adoration of a young girl for a woman, and
there is no doubt but that the feeling savours slightly of school-days
and bread-and-butter; but there is also no doubt that a girl who has
once felt it has learned what real love is, and that is no small item in
the lesson-book of life.

But Elisabeth had her comfortable friendship as well as her romantic
attachment; and the partner in that friendship was Christopher Thornley,
the nephew of Richard Smallwood.

In the days of his youth, when his father was still manager of the
Osierfield Works, Richard had a very pretty sister; but as Emily
Smallwood was pretty, so was she also vain, and the strict atmosphere of
her home life did not recommend itself to her taste. After many quarrels
with her stern old father (her mother having died when she was a baby),
Emily left home, and took a situation in London as governess, in the
house of some wealthy people with no pretensions to religion. For this
her father never forgave her; he called it "consorting with children of
Belial." In time she wrote to tell Richard that she was going to be
married, and that she wished to cut off entirely all communication with
her old home. After that, Richard lost sight of her for many years; but
some time after his father's death he received a letter from Emily,
begging him to come to her at once, as she was dying. He complied with
her request, and found his once beautiful sister in great poverty in a
London lodging-house. She told him that she had endured great sorrow,
having lost her husband and her five eldest children. Her husband had
never been unkind to her, she said, but he was one of the men who lack
the power either to make or to keep money; and when he found he was
foredoomed to failure in everything to which he turned his hand, he had
not the spirit to continue the fight against Fate, but turned his face
to the wall and died. She had still one child left, a fair-haired boy of
about two years old, called Christopher; to her brother's care she
confided this boy, and then she also turned her face to the wall and
died.

This happened a year or so before the Miss Farringdons adopted
Elisabeth; so that when that young lady appeared upon the scene, and
subsequently grew up sufficiently to require a playfellow, she found
Christopher Thornley ready to hand. He lived with his bachelor uncle in
a square red house on the east side of Sedgehill High Street, exactly
opposite to the Farringdons' lodge. It was one of those big, bald houses
with unblinking windows, that stare at you as if they had not any
eyebrows or eyelashes; and there was not even a strip of greenery
between it and the High Street. So to prevent the passers-by from
looking in and the occupants from looking out, the lower parts of the
front windows were covered with a sort of black crape mask, which put
even the sunbeams into half-mourning.

Unlike Elisabeth, Christopher had a passion for righteousness and for
honour, but no power of artistic perception. His standard was whether
things were right or wrong, honourable or dishonourable; hers was
whether they were beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant.
Consequently the two moved along parallel lines; and she moved a great
deal more quickly than he did. Christopher had deep convictions, but was
very shy of expressing them; Elisabeth's convictions were not
particularly deep, but such as they were, all the world was welcome to
them as far as she was concerned.

As the children grew older, one thing used much to puzzle and perplex
Christopher. Elisabeth did not seem to care about being good nearly as
much as he cared: he was always trying to do right, and she only tried
when she thought about it; nevertheless, when she did give her attention
to the matter, she had much more comforting and beautiful thoughts than
he had, which appeared rather hard. He was not yet old enough to know
that this difference between them arose from no unequal division of
divine favour, but was simply and solely a question of temperament. But
though he did not understand, he did not complain; for he had been
brought up under the shadow of the Osierfield Works, and in the fear and
love of the Farringdons; and Elisabeth, whatever her shortcomings, was a
princess of the blood.

Christopher was a day-boy at the Grammar School at Silverhampton, a fine
old town some three miles to the north of Sedgehill; and there and back
he walked every day, wet or fine, and there he learned to be a scholar
and a gentleman, and sundry other important things.

"Do you hear that noise?" said Elisabeth, one afternoon in the holidays,
when she was twelve and Christopher fifteen; "that's Mrs. Bateson's pig
being killed."

"Hear it?--rather," replied Christopher, standing still in the wood to
listen.

"Let's go and see it," Elisabeth suggested.

Christopher looked shocked. "Well, you are a horrid girl! Nothing would
induce me to go, or to let you go either; but I'm surprised at your
being so horrid as to wish for such a thing."

"It isn't really horridness," Elisabeth explained meekly; "it is
interest. I'm so frightfully interested in things; and I want to see
everything, just to know what it looks like."

"Well, I call it horrid. And, what's more, if you saw it, it would make
you feel ill."

"No; it wouldn't."

"Then it ought to," said Christopher, who, with true masculine dulness
of perception, confounded weakness of nerve with tenderness of heart.

Elisabeth sighed. "Nothing makes me feel ill," she replied
apologetically; "not even an accident or an after-meeting."

Christopher could not help indulging in a certain amount of envious
admiration for an organism that could pass unmoved through such physical
and spiritual crises as these; but he was not going to let Elisabeth see
that he admired her. He considered it "unmanly" to admire girls.

"Well, you are a rum little cove!" he said.

"Of course, I don't want to go if you think it would be horrid of me;
but I thought we might pretend it was the execution of Mary Queen of
Scots, and find it most awfully exciting."

"How you do go on about Mary Queen of Scots! Not long ago you were
always bothering about heathen goddesses, and now you have no thought
for anything but Mary."

"Oh! but I'm still immensely interested in goddesses, Chris; and I do
wish, when you are doing Latin and Greek at school, you'd find out what
colour Pallas Athene's hair was. Couldn't you?"

"No; I couldn't."

"But you might ask one of the masters. They'd be sure to know."

Christopher laughed the laugh of the scornful. "I say, you are a duffer
to suppose that clever men like schoolmasters bother their heads about
such rot as the colour of a woman's hair."

"Of course, I know they wouldn't about a woman's," Elisabeth hastened to
justify herself; "but I thought perhaps they might about a goddess's."

"It is the same thing. You've no idea what tremendously clever chaps
schoolmasters are--much too clever to take any interest in girls' and
women's concerns. Besides, they are too old for that, too--they are
generally quite thirty."

Elisabeth was silent for a moment; and Christopher whistled as he looked
across the green valley to the sunset, without in the least knowing how
beautiful it was. But Elisabeth knew, for she possessed an innate
knowledge of many things which he would have to learn by experience. But
even she did not yet understand that because the sunset was beautiful
she felt a sudden hunger and thirst after righteousness.

"Chris, do you think it is wicked of people to fall in love?" she asked
suddenly.

"Not exactly wicked; more silly, I should say," replied Chris
generously.

"Because if it is wicked, I shall give up reading tales about it." This
was a tremendous and unnatural sacrifice to principle on the part of
Elisabeth.

Christopher turned upon her sharply. "You don't read tales that Miss
Farringdon hasn't said you may read, do you?"

"Yes; lots. But I never read tales that she has said I mustn't read."

"You oughtn't to read any tale till you have asked her first if you
may."

Elisabeth's face fell. "I never thought of doing such a thing as asking
her first. Oh! Chris, you don't really think I ought to, do you? Because
she'd be sure to say no."

"That is exactly why you ought to ask." Christopher's sense of honour
was one of his strong points.

Then Elisabeth lost her temper. "That is you all over! You are the most
tiresome boy to have anything to do with! You are always bothering about
things being wrong, till you make them wrong. Now I hardly ever think of
it; but I can't go on doing things after you've said they are wrong,
because that would be wrong of me, don't you see? And yet it wasn't a
bit wrong of me before I knew. I hate you!"

"I say, Betty, I'm awfully sorry lo have riled you; but you asked me."

"I didn't ask you whether I need ask Cousin Maria, stupid! You know I
didn't. I asked you whether it was wrong to fall in love, and then you
went and dragged Cousin Maria in. I wish I'd never asked you anything; I
wish I'd never spoken to you; I wish I'd got somebody else to play with,
and then I'd never speak to you again as long as I live."

Of course it was unwise of Christopher to condemn a weakness to which
Elisabeth was prone, and to condone one to which she was not; but no man
has learned wisdom at fifteen, and but few at fifty.

"You are the most disagreeable boy I have ever met, and I wish I could
think of something to do to annoy you. I know what I'll do; I'll go by
myself and see Mrs. Bateson's pig, just to show you how I hate you."

And Elisabeth flew off in the direction of Mrs. Bateson's cottage, with
the truly feminine intention of punishing the male being who had dared
to disapprove of her, by making him disapprove of her still more. Her
programme, however, was frustrated; for Mrs. Bateson herself intervened
between Elisabeth and her unholy desires, and entertained the latter
with a plate of delicious bread-and-dripping instead. Finally, that
young lady returned to her home in a more magnanimous frame of mind; and
fell asleep that night wondering if the whole male sex were as stupid as
the particular specimen with which she had to do--a problem which has
puzzled older female brains than hers.

But poor Christopher was very unhappy. It was agony to him when his
conscience pulled him one way and Elisabeth pulled him the other; and
yet this form of torture was constantly occurring to him. He could not
bear to do what he knew was wrong, and he could not bear to vex
Elisabeth; yet Elisabeth's wishes and his own ideas of right were by no
means always synonymous. His only comfort was the knowledge that his
sovereign's anger was, as a rule, short-lived, and that he himself was
indispensable to that sovereign's happiness. This was true; but he did
not then realize that it was in his office as admiring and sympathizing
audience, and not in his person as Christopher Thornley, that he was
necessary to Elisabeth. A fuller revelation was vouchsafed to him
later.

The next morning Elisabeth was herself again, and was quite ready to
enjoy Christopher's society and to excuse his scruples. She knew that
self of hers when she said that she wished she had somebody else to play
with, in order that she might withdraw the light of her presence from
her offending henchman. To thus punish Christopher, until she had found
some one to take his place, was a course of action which would not have
occurred to her. Elisabeth's pride could never stand in the way of her
pleasure; Christopher's, on the contrary, might. It was a remarkable
fact that after Christopher had reproved Elisabeth for some fault--which
happened neither infrequently nor unnecessarily--he was always repentant
and she forgiving; yet nine times out of ten he had been in the right
and she in the wrong. But Elisabeth's was one of those exceptionally
generous natures which can pardon the reproofs and condone the virtues
of their friends; and she bore no malice, even when Christopher had been
more obviously right than usual. But she was already enough of a woman
to adapt to her own requirements his penitence for right-doing; and on
this occasion she took advantage of his chastened demeanour to induce
him to assist her in erecting a new shrine to Athene in the wood--which
meant that she gave all the directions and he did all the work.

"You are doing it beautifully, Chris--you really are!" she exclaimed
with delight. "We shall be able to have a splendid sacrifice this
afternoon. I've got some feathers to offer up from the fowl cook is
plucking; and they make a much better sacrifice than waste paper."

"Why?"

Christopher was too shy in those days to put the fact into words;
nevertheless, the fact remained that Elisabeth interested him
profoundly. She was so original, so unexpected, that she was continually
providing him with fresh food for thought. Although he was cleverer at
lessons than she was, she was by far the cleverer at play; and though he
had the finer character, hers was the stronger personality. It was
because Elisabeth was so much to him that he now and then worried her
easy-going conscience with his strictures; for, to do him justice, the
boy was no prig, and would never have dreamed of preaching to anybody
except her. But it must be remembered that Christopher had never heard
of such things as spiritual evolutions and streams of tendency: to him
right or wrong meant heaven or hell--neither more nor less; and he was
overpowered by a burning anxiety that Elisabeth should eventually go to
heaven, partly for her own sake, and partly (since human love is
stronger than dogmas and doctrines) because a heaven, uncheered by the
presence of Elisabeth, seemed a somewhat dreary place wherein to spend
one's eternity.

"Why do feathers make a better sacrifice than paper?" repeated
Christopher, Elisabeth being so much absorbed in his work that she had
not answered his question.

"Oh! because they smell; and it seems so much more like a real
sacrifice, somehow, if it smells."

"I see. What ideas you do get into your head!"

But Elisabeth's volatile thoughts had flown off in another direction.
"You really have got awfully nice-coloured hair," she remarked, Chris
having taken his cap off for the sake of coolness, as he was heated
with his toil. "I do wish I had light hair like yours. Angels, and
goddesses, and princesses, and people of that kind always have golden
hair; but only bad fairies and cruel stepmothers have nasty dark hair
like me. I think it is horrid to have dark hair."

"I don't: I like dark hair best; and I don't think yours is half bad."
Christopher never overstated a case; but then one had the comfort of
knowing that he always meant what he said, and frequently a good deal
more.

"Don't you really, Chris? I think it is hideous," replied Elisabeth,
taking one of her elf-locks between her fingers and examining it as if
it were a sample of material; "it is like that ugly brown seaweed which
shows which way the wind blows--no, I mean that shows whether it is
going to rain or not."

"Never mind; I've seen lots of people with uglier hair than yours."
Chris really could be of great consolation when he tried.

"Aren't the trees lovely when they have got all their leaves off?" said
Elisabeth, her thoughts wandering again. "I believe I like them better
now than I do in summer. Now they are like the things you wish for, and
in the summer they are like the things you get; and the things you get
are never half as nice as the things you wish for."

This was too subtle for Christopher. "I like them best with the leaves
on; but anyhow they are nicer to look at than the chimneys that we see
from our house. You can't think how gloomy it is for your rooms to look
out on nothing but smoke and chimneys and furnaces. When you go to bed
at night it's all red, and when you get up in the morning it's all
black."

"I should like to live in a house like that. I love the smoke and the
chimneys and the furnaces--they are all so big and strong and full of
life; and they make you think."

"What on earth do they make you think about?"

Elisabeth's gray eyes grew dreamy. "They make me think that the Black
Country is a wilderness that we are all travelling through; and over it
there is always the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by
night, to tell us which way to go. I make up tales to myself about the
people in the wilderness; and how they watch the pillar, and how it
keeps them from idling in their work, or selling bad iron, or doing
anything that is horrid or mean, because it is a sign to them that God
is with them, just as it used to be to the Children of Israel."

Christopher looked up from his work. Here was the old problem: Elisabeth
did not think about religion half as much as he did, and yet the helpful
and beautiful thoughts came to her and not to him. Still, it was
comforting to know that the smoke and the glare, which he had hated,
could convey such a message; and he made up his mind not to hate them
any more.

"And then I pretend that the people come out of the wilderness and go to
live in the country over there," Elisabeth continued, pointing to the
distant hills; "and I make up lovely tales about that country, and all
the beautiful things there. That is what is so nice about hills: you
always think there are such wonderful places on the other side of them."

For some minutes Christopher worked silently, and Elisabeth watched him.
Then the latter said suddenly:

"Isn't it funny that you never hate people in a morning, however much
you may have hated them the night before?"

"Don't you?" Rapid changes of sentiment were beyond Christopher's
comprehension. He was by no means a variable person.

"Oh! no. Last night I hated you, and made up a story in my own mind that
another really nice boy came to play with me instead of you. And I said
nice things to him, and horrid things to you; he and I played in the
wood, and you had to do lessons all by yourself at school, and had
nobody to play with. But when I woke up this morning I didn't care about
the pretending boy any more, and I wanted you."

Christopher looked pleased; but it was not his way to express his
pleasure in words. "And so, I suppose, you came to look for me," he
said.

"Not the first thing. Somehow it always makes you like a person better
when you have hated them for a bit, so I liked you awfully when I woke
this morning and remembered you. When you really are fond of a person,
you always want to do something to please them; so I went and told
Cousin Maria that I'd read a lot of books in the library without
thinking whether I ought to or not; but that now I wanted her to say
what I might read and what I mightn't."

This was a course of action that Christopher could thoroughly understand
and appreciate. "Was she angry?" he asked.

"Not a bit. That is the best of Cousin Maria--she never scolds you
unless you really deserve it; and she is very sharp at finding out
whether you deserve it or not. She said that there were a lot of books
in the library that weren't suitable for a little girl to read; but
that it wasn't naughty of me to have read what I chose, since nobody had
told me not to. And then she said it was good of me to have told her,
for she should never have found it out if I hadn't."

"And so it was," remarked Christopher approvingly.

"No; it wasn't--and I told her it wasn't. I told her that the goodness
was yours, because it was you that made me tell. I should never have
thought of it by myself."

"I say, you are a regular brick!"

Elisabeth looked puzzled. "I don't see anything brickish in saying that;
it was the truth. It was you that made me tell, you know; and it wasn't
fair for me to be praised for your goodness."

"You really are awfully straight, for a girl," said Christopher, with
admiration; "you couldn't be straighter if you were a boy."

This was high praise, and Elisabeth's pale little face glowed with
delight. She loved to be commended.

"It was really very good of you to speak to Miss Farringdon about the
books," continued Christopher; "for I know you'll hate having to ask
permission before you read a tale."

"I didn't do it out of goodness," said Elisabeth thoughtfully--"I did it
to please you; and pleasing a person you are fond of isn't goodness. I
wonder if grown-up people get to be as fond of religion as they are of
one another. I expect they do; and then they do good things just for the
sake of doing good."

"Of course they do," replied Christopher, who was always at sea when
Elisabeth became metaphysical.

"I suppose," she continued seriously, "that if I were really good,
religion ought to be the same to me as Cousin Anne."

"The same as Cousin Anne! What do you mean?"

"I mean that if I were really good, religion would give me the same sort
of feelings as Cousin Anne does."

"What sort of feelings?"

"Oh! they are lovely feelings," Elisabeth answered--"too lovely to
explain. Everything is a treat if Cousin Anne is there. When she speaks,
it's just like music trickling down your back; and when you do something
that you don't like to please her, you feel that you do like it."

"Well, you are a rum little thing! I should think nobody ever thought of
all the queer things that you think of."

"Oh! I expect everybody does," retorted Elisabeth, who was far too
healthy minded to consider herself peculiar. After another pause, she
inquired: "Do you like me, Chris?"

"Rather! What a foolish question to ask!" Christopher replied, with a
blush, for he was always shy of talking about his feelings; and the more
he felt the shyer he became.

But Elisabeth was not shy, and had no sympathy with anybody who was.
"How much do you like me?" she continued.

"A lot."

"But I want to know exactly how much."

"Then you can't. Nobody can tell how much they like anybody. You do ask
silly questions!"

"Yes; they can. I can tell how much I like everybody," Elisabeth
persisted.

"How?"

"I have a sort of thermometer in my mind, just like the big thermometer
in the hall; and I measure how much I like people by that."

"How much do you like your Cousin Anne?" he asked.

"Ninety-six degrees," replied Elisabeth promptly.

"And your Cousin Maria?"

"Sixty."

"And Mrs. Bateson?"

"Fifty-four." Elisabeth always knew her own mind.

"I say, how--how--how much do you like me?" asked Christopher, with some
hesitation.

"Sixty-two," answered Elisabeth, with no hesitation at all.

And Christopher felt a funny, cold feeling round his loyal heart. He
grew to know the feeling well in after years, and to wonder how
Elisabeth could understand so much and yet understand so little; but at
present he was too young to understand himself.




CHAPTER III

MRS. BATESON'S TEA-PARTY

    The best of piggie when he dies
      Is not "interred with his bones,"
    But, in the form of porcine pies,
    Blesses a world that heard his cries,
      Yet heeded not those dying groans.


"Cousin Maria, please may I go to tea at Mrs. Bateson's with
Christopher?" said Elisabeth one day, opening the library door a little,
and endeavouring to squeeze her small person through as narrow an
aperture as possible, as is the custom with children. She never called
her playmate "Chris" in speaking to Miss Farringdon; for this latter
regarded it as actually sinful to address people by any abbreviation of
their baptismal names, just as she considered it positively immoral to
partake of any nourishment between meals. "Mrs. Bateson has killed her
pig, and there will be pork-pies for tea."

Miss Farringdon looked over her spectacles at the restless little
figure. "Yes, my child; I see no reason why you should not. Kezia
Bateson is a God-fearing woman, and her husband has worked at the
Osierfield for forty years. I have the greatest respect for Caleb
Bateson; he is a worthy man and a good Methodist, as his father was
before him."

"He is a very ignorant man: he says Penny-lope."

"Says what, Elisabeth?"

"Penny-lope. I was showing him a book the other day about Penelope--the
woman with the web, you know--and he called her Penny-lope. I didn't
like to correct him, but I said Penelope afterward as often and as loud
as I could."

"That was very ill-bred of you. Come here, Elisabeth."

The child came and stood by the old lady's chair, and began playing with
a bunch of seals that were suspended by a gold chain from Miss
Farringdon's waist. It was one of Elisabeth's little tricks that her
fingers were never idle when she was talking.

"What have I taught you are the two chief ends at which every woman
should aim, my child?"

"To be first a Christian and then a gentlewoman," quoted Elisabeth
glibly.

"And how does a true gentlewoman show her good breeding?"

"By never doing or saying anything that could make any one else feel
uncomfortable," Elisabeth quoted again.

"Then do you think that to display your own knowledge by showing up
another person's ignorance would make that person feel comfortable,
Elisabeth?"

"No, Cousin Maria."

"Knowledge is not good breeding, remember; it is a far less important
matter. A true gentlewoman may be ignorant; but a true gentlewoman will
never be inconsiderate."

Elisabeth hung her head. "I see."

"If you keep your thoughts fixed upon the people to whom you are
talking, and never upon yourself, you will always have good manners, my
child. Endeavour to interest and not to impress them."

"You mean I must talk about their things and not about mine?"

"More than that. Make the most of any common ground between yourself and
them; make the least of any difference between yourself and them; and,
above all, keep strenuously out of sight any real or fancied superiority
you may possess over them. I always think that Saint Paul's saying, 'To
the weak became I as weak,' was the perfection of good manners."

"I don't think I quite understand."

Miss Farringdon spoke in parables. "Then listen to this story. There was
once a common soldier who raised himself from the ranks and earned a
commission. He was naturally very nervous the first night he dined at
the officers' mess, as he had never dined with gentlemen before, and he
was afraid of making some mistake. It happened that the wine was served
while the soup was yet on the table, and with the wine the ice. The poor
man did not know what the ice was for, so took a lump and put it in his
soup."

Elisabeth laughed.

"The younger officers began to giggle, as you are doing," Miss
Farringdon continued; "but the colonel, to whom the ice was handed next,
took a lump and put it in his soup also; and then the young officers did
not want to laugh any more. The colonel was a perfect gentleman."

"It seems to me," said Elisabeth thoughtfully, "that you've got to be
good before you can be polite."

"Politeness appears to be what goodness really is," replied Miss
Farringdon, "and is an attitude rather than an action. Fine breeding is
not the mere learning of any code of manners, any more than gracefulness
is the mere learning of any kind of physical exercise. The gentleman
apparently, as the Christian really, looks not on his own things, but on
the things of others; and the selfish person is always both unchristian
and ill-bred."

Elisabeth gazed wistfully up into Miss Farringdon's face. "I should like
to be a real gentlewoman, Cousin Maria; do you think I ever shall be?"

"I think it quite possible, if you bear all these maxims in mind, and if
you carry yourself properly and never stoop. I can not approve of the
careless manners of the young people of to-day, who loll upon
easy-chairs in the presence of their elders, and who slouch into a room
with constrained familiarity and awkward ease," replied Miss Farringdon,
who had never sat in an easy-chair in her life, and whose back was still
as straight as an arrow.

So in the afternoon of that day Christopher and Elisabeth attended Mrs.
Bateson's tea-party.

The Batesons lived in a clean little cottage on the west side of High
Street, and enjoyed a large garden to the rearward. It was a singular
fact that whereas all their windows looked upon nothing more interesting
than the smokier side of the bleak and narrow street, their pigsties
commanded a view such as can rarely be surpassed for beauty and extent
in England. But Mrs. Bateson called her front view "lively" and her back
view "dull," and congratulated herself daily upon the aspect and the
prospect of her dwelling-place. The good lady's ideas as to what
constitutes beauty in furniture were by no means behind her opinions as
to what is effective in scenery. Her kitchen was paved with bright red
tiles, which made one feel as if one were walking across a coral reef,
and was flanked on one side with a black oak dresser of unnumbered
years, covered with a brave array of blue-and-white pottery. An artist
would have revelled in this kitchen, with its delicious effects in red
and blue; but Mrs. Bateson accounted it as nothing. Her pride was
centred in her parlour and its mural decorations, which consisted
principally of a large and varied assortment of funeral-cards, neatly
framed and glazed. In addition to these there was a collection of family
portraits in daguerreotype, including an interesting representation of
Mrs. Bateson's parents sitting side by side in two straight-backed
chairs, with their whole family twining round them--a sort of Swiss
Family Laocoon; and a picture of Mr. Bateson--in the attitude of Juliet
and the attire of a local preacher--leaning over a balcony, which was
overgrown with a semi-tropical luxuriance of artificial ivy, and which
was obviously too frail to support him. But the masterpiece in Mrs.
Bateson's art-gallery was a soul-stirring illustration of the death of
the revered John Wesley. This picture was divided into two compartments:
the first represented the room at Wesley's house in City Road, with the
assembled survivors of the great man's family weeping round his bed; and
the second depicted the departing saint flying across Bunhill Fields
burying-ground in his wig and gown and bands, supported on either side
by a stalwart angel.

As Elisabeth had surmised, the entertainment on this occasion was
pork-pie; and Mrs. Hankey, a near neighbour, had also been bidden to
share the feast. So the tea-party was a party of four, the respective
husbands of the two ladies not yet having returned from their duties at
the Osierfield.

"I hope that you'll all make yourselves welcome," said the hostess,
after they had sat down at the festive board. "Master Christopher, my
dear, will you kindly ask a blessing?"

Christopher asked a blessing as kindly as he could, and Mrs. Bateson
continued:

"Well, to be sure, it is a pleasure to see you looking so tall and
strong, Master Christopher, after all your schooling. I'm not in favour
of much schooling myself, as I think it hinders young folks from
growing, and puts them off their vittles; but you give the contradiction
to that notion--doesn't he, Mrs. Hankey?"

Mrs. Hankey shook her head. It was her rule in life never to look on the
bright side of things; she considered that to do so was what she called
"tempting Providence." Her theory appeared to be that as long as
Providence saw you were miserable, that Power was comfortable about you
and let you alone; but if Providence discovered you could bear more
sorrow than you were then bearing, you were at once supplied with that
little more. Naturally, therefore, her object was to convince Providence
that her cup of misery was full. But Mrs. Hankey had her innocent
enjoyments, in spite of the sternness of her creed. If she took light
things seriously, she took serious things lightly; so she was not
without her compensations. For instance, a Sunday evening's discourse on
future punishment and the like, with illustrations, was an unfailing
source of pure and healthful pleasure to her; while a funeral
sermon--when the chapel was hung with black, and the bereaved family
sat in state in their new mourning, and the choir sang Vital Spark as an
anthem--filled her soul with joy. So when Mrs. Bateson commented with
such unseemly cheerfulness upon Christopher's encouraging appearance, it
was but consistent of Mrs. Hankey to shake her head.

"You can never tell," she replied--"never; often them that looks the
best feels the worst; and many's the time I've seen folks look the very
picture of health just before they was took with a mortal illness."

"Ay, that's so," agreed the hostess; "but I think Master Christopher's
looks are the right sort; such a nice colour as he's got, too!"

"That comes from him being so fair complexioned--it's no sign of
health," persisted Mrs. Hankey; "in fact, I mistrust those fair
complexions, especially in lads of his age. Why, he ought to be as brown
as a berry, instead of pink and white like a girl."

"It would look hideous to have a brown face with such yellow hair as
mine," said Christopher, who naturally resented being compared to a
girl.

"Master Christopher, don't call anything that the Lord has made hideous.
We must all be as He has formed us, however that may be," replied Mrs.
Hankey reprovingly; "and it is not our place to pass remarks upon what
He has done for the best."

"But the Lord didn't make him with a brown face and yellow hair; that's
just the point," interrupted Elisabeth, who regarded the bullying of
Christopher as her own prerogative, and allowed no one else to indulge
in that sport unpunished.

"No, my love; that's true enough," Mrs. Bateson said soothingly: "a
truer word than that never was spoken. But I wish you could borrow some
of Master Christopher's roses--I do, indeed. For my part, I like to see
little girls with a bit of colour in their cheeks; it looks more
cheerful-like, as you might say; and looks go a long way with some
folks, though a meek and quiet spirit is better, taking it all round."

"Now Miss Elisabeth does look delicate, and no mistake," assented Mrs.
Hankey; "she grows too fast for her strength, I'll be bound; and her
poor mother died young, you know, so it is in the family."

Christopher looked at Elisabeth with the quick sympathy of a sensitive
nature. He thought it would frighten her to hear Mrs. Hankey talk in
that way, and he felt that he hated Mrs. Hankey for frightening
Elisabeth.

But Elisabeth was made after a different pattern, and was not in the
least upset by Mrs. Hankey's gloomy forebodings. She was essentially
dramatic; and, unconsciously, her first object was to attract notice.
She would have preferred to do this by means of unsurpassed beauty or
unequalled talent; but, failing these aids to distinction, an early
death-bed was an advertisement not to be despised. In her mind's eye she
saw a touching account of her short life in Early Days, winding up with
a heart-rending description of its premature close; and her mind's eye
gloated over the sight.

The hostess gazed at her critically. "She is pale, Mrs. Hankey, there's
no doubt of that; but pale folks are often the healthiest, though they
mayn't be the handsomest. And she is wiry, is Miss Elisabeth, though she
may be thin. But is your tea to your taste, or will you take a little
more cream in it?"

"It is quite right, thank you, Mrs. Bateson; and the pork-pie is just
beautiful. What a light hand for pastry you always have! I'm sure I've
said over and over again that I don't know your equal either for making
pastry or for engaging in prayer."

Mrs. Bateson, as was natural, looked pleased. "I doubt if I ever made a
better batch of pies than this. When they were all ready for baking,
Bateson says to me, 'Kezia,' he says, 'them pies is a regular
picture--all so smooth and even-like, you can't tell which from
t'other.' 'Bateson,' said I, 'I've done my best with them; and if only
the Lord will be with them in the oven, they'll be the best batch of
pies this side Jordan.'"

"And so they are," said Elisabeth; "they are perfectly lovely."

"I'm glad you fancy them, my love; take some more, deary, it'll do you
good."

"No, thanks; I'd rather have a wig now." And Elisabeth helped herself to
one of the three-cornered cakes, called "wigs," which are peculiar to
Mershire.

"You always are fortunate in your pigs," Mrs. Hankey remarked; "such
fine hams and such beautiful roaded bacon I never see anywhere equal to
yours. It'll be a sad day for you, Mrs. Bateson, when swine fever comes
into the district. I know no one as'll feel it more."

"Now you must tell us all about your niece's wedding, Mrs. Hankey," Mrs.
Bateson said--"her that was married last week. My word alive, but your
sister is wonderful fortunate in settling her daughters! That's what I
call a well-brought-up family, and no mistake. Five daughters, and each
one found peace and a pious husband before she was five-and-twenty."

"The one before last married a Churchman," said Mrs. Hankey
apologetically, as if the union thus referred to were somewhat
morganatic in its character, and therefore no subject for pride or
congratulation.

"Well, to be sure! Still, he may make her a good husband."

"He may or he may not; you never can tell. It seems to me that husbands
are like new boots--you can't tell where they're going to pinch you till
it's too late to change 'em. And as for creaking, why, the boots that
are quietest in the shop are just the ones that fairly disgrace you when
you come into chapel late on a Sunday morning, and think to slip in
quietly during the first prayer; and it is pretty much the same with
husbands--those that are the meekest in the wooing are the most
masterful to live with."

"What was the name of the Churchman your niece married?" asked Mrs.
Bateson. "I forget."

"Wilkins--Tom Wilkins. He isn't a bad fellow in some respects--he is
steady and sober, and never keeps back a farthing of his wages for
himself; but his views are something dreadful. I can not stand them at
any price, and so I'm forever telling his wife."

"Dear me! That's sad news, Mrs. Hankey."

"Would you believe it, he don't hold with the good old Methodist habit
of telling out loud what the Lord has done for your soul? He says
religion should be acted up to and not talked about; but, for my part, I
can't abide such closeness."

"Nor I," agreed Mrs. Bateson warmly; "I don't approve of treating the
Lord like a poor relation, as some folks seem to do. They'll go to His
house and they'll give Him their money; but they're fairly ashamed of
mentioning His Name in decent company."

"Just so; and that's Tom Wilkins to the life. He's a good husband and a
regular church-goer; but as for the word that edifieth, you might as
well look for it from a naked savage as from him. Many a time have I
said to his wife, 'Tom may be a kind husband in the time of prosperity,
as I make no doubt he is--there's plenty of that sort in the world; but
you wait till the days of adversity come, and I doubt that then you'll
be wishing you'd not been in such a hurry to get married, but had waited
till you had got a good Methodist!' And so she will, I'll be bound; and
the sooner she knows it the better."

Mrs. Bateson sighed at the gloomy prospect opening out before young Mrs.
Wilkins; then she asked:

"How did the last daughter's wedding go off? She married a Methodist,
surely?"

"She did, Mrs. Bateson; and a better match no mother could wish for her
daughter, not even a duchess born; he's a chapel-steward and a
master-painter, and has six men under him. There he is, driving to work
and carrying his own ladders in his own cart, like a lord, as you may
say, by day; and there he is on a Thursday evening, letting and
reletting the pews and sittings after service, like a real gentleman. As
I said to my sister, I only hope he may be spared to make Susan a good
husband; but when a man is a chapel-steward at thirty-four, and drives
his own cart, you begin to think that he is too good for this world, and
that he is almost ripe for a better one."

"You do indeed; there's no denying that."

"But the wedding was beautiful: I never saw its equal--never; and as for
the prayer that the minister offered up at the end of the service, I
only wish you'd been there to hear it, Mrs. Bateson, it was so
interesting and instructive. Such a lot of information in it about love
and marriage and the like as I'd never heard before; and when he
referred to the bridegroom's first wife, and drew a picture of how she'd
be waiting to welcome them both, when the time came, on the further
shore--upon my word, there wasn't a dry eye in the chapel!" And Mrs.
Hankey wiped hers at the mere remembrance of the scene.

"But what did Susan say?" asked Elisabeth, with great interest. "I
expect she didn't want another wife to welcome them on the further
shore."

"Oh! Miss Elisabeth, what a naughty, selfish little girl you are!"
exclaimed Susan's aunt, much shocked. "What would Miss Farringdon think
if she heard you? Why, you don't suppose, surely, that when folks get to
heaven they'll be so greedy and grasping that they'll want to keep
everything to themselves, do you? My niece is a good girl and a member
of society, and she was as pleased as anybody at the minister's
beautiful prayer."

Elisabeth was silent, but unconvinced.

"How is your sister herself?" inquired Mrs. Bateson. "I expect she's a
bit upset now that the fuss is all over, and she hasn't a daughter left
to bless herself with."

Mrs. Hankey sighed cheerfully. "Well, she did seem rather low-spirited
when all the mess was cleared up, and Susan had gone off to her own
home; but I says to her, 'Never mind, Sarah, and don't you worry
yourself; now that the weddings are over, the funerals will soon begin.'
You see, you must cheer folks up a bit, Mrs. Bateson, when they're
feeling out of sorts."

"You must indeed," agreed the lady of the house, feeling that her guest
had hit upon a happy vein of consolation; "it is dull without daughters
when you've once got accustomed to 'em, daughters being a sight more
comfortable and convenient than sons, to my mind."

"Well, you see, daughters you can teach to know theirselves, and sons;
you can't. Though even daughters can never rest till they've got
married, more's the pity. If they knowed as much about men as I do,
they'd be thanking the Lord that He'd created them single, instead of
forever fidgeting to change the state to which they were born."

"Well, I holds with folks getting married," argued Mrs. Bateson; "it
gives 'em something to think about between Sunday's sermon and
Thursday's baking; and if folks have nothing to think about, they think
about mischief."

"That's true, especially if they happen to be men."

"Why do men think about mischief more than women do?" asked Elisabeth,
who always felt hankerings after the why and wherefore of things.

"Because, my dear, the Lord made 'em so, and it is not for us to
complain," replied Mrs. Hankey, in a tone which implied that, had the
rôle of Creator been allotted to her, the idiosyncrasies of the male sex
would have been much less marked than they are at present. "They've no
sense, men haven't; that's what is the matter with them."

"You never spoke a truer word, Mrs. Hankey," agreed her hostess; "the
very best of them don't properly know the difference between their souls
and their stomachs; and they fancy that they are a-wrestling with their
doubts, when really it is their dinners that are a-wrestling with them.
Now take Bateson hisself, and a kinder husband or a better Methodist
never drew breath; yet so sure as he touches a bit of pork, he begins to
worn hisself about the doctrine of Election till there's no living with
him."

"That's a man all over, to the very life," said Mrs. Hankey
sympathetically; "and he never has the sense to see what's wrong with
him, I'll be bound."

"Not he--he wouldn't be a man if he had. And then he'll sit in the front
parlour and engage in prayer for hours at a time, till I says to him,
'Bateson,' says I, 'I'd be ashamed to go troubling the Lord with a
prayer when a pinch o' carbonate o' soda would set things straight
again.'"

"And quite right, Mrs. Bateson; it's often a wonder to me that the Lord
has patience with men, seeing that their own wives haven't."

"And to me, too. Now Bateson has been going on like this for thirty
years or more; yet if there's roast pork on the table, and I say a word
to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad
to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary
work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's
your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you
particularly warned him against going in."

Mrs. Hankey groaned. "The Bible says true when it tells us that men are
born to give trouble as the sparks fly upward; and it is a funny
Providence, to my mind, as ordains for women to be so bothered with 'em.
At my niece's wedding, as we were just speaking about, 'Susan,' I says,
'I wish you happiness; and I only hope you won't live to regret your
marriage as I have done mine.' For my part, I can't see what girls want
with husbands at all; they are far better without them."

"Not they, Mrs. Hankey," replied Mrs. Bateson warmly; "any sort of a
husband is better than none, to my mind. Life is made up of naughts and
crosses; and the folks that get the crosses are better off than those
that get the naughts, though that husbands are crosses I can't pretend
to deny; but I haven't patience with single women, I haven't--they have
nothing to occupy their minds, and so they get to talking about their
health and such-like fal-lals."

"Saint Paul didn't hold with you," said Mrs. Hankey, with reproach in
her tone; "he thought that the unmarried women minded the things of the
Lord better than the married ones."

"Saint Paul didn't know much about the subject, and how could he be
expected to, being only a bachelor himself, poor soul? But if he'd had a
wife, she'd soon have told him what the unmarried women were thinking
about; and it wouldn't have been about the Lord, I'll be bound. Now take
Jemima Stubbs; does she mind the things of the Lord more than you and I
do, Mrs. Hankey, I should like to know?"

"I can't say; it is not for us to judge."

"Not she! Why, she's always worrying about that poor little brother of
hers, what's lame. I often wish that the Lord would think on him and
take him, for he's a sore burden on Jemima, he is. If you're a woman you
are bound to work for some man or another, and to see to his food and to
bear with his tantrums; and, for my part, I'd rather do it for a husband
than for a father or a brother. There's more credit in it, as you might
say."

"There's something in that, maybe."

"And after all, in spite of the botheration he gives, there's something
very cheerful in having a man about the house. They keep you alive, do
men. The last time I saw Jemima Stubbs she was as low as low could be.
'Jemima,' I says, 'you are out of spirits.' 'Mrs. Bateson,' says she,
'I am that. I wish I was either in love or in the cemetery, and I don't
much mind which.'"

"Did she cry?" asked Elisabeth, who was always absorbingly interested in
any one who was in trouble. With her, to pity was to love; and it was
difficult for her ever to love where she did not pity. Christopher did
not understand this, and was careful not to appeal to Elisabeth's
sympathy for fear of depressing her. Herein, both as boy and man, he
made a great mistake. It was not as easy to depress Elisabeth as it was
to depress him; and, moreover, it was sometimes good for her to be
depressed. But he did unto her as he would she should do unto him; and,
when all is said and done, it is difficult to find a more satisfactory
rule of conduct than this.

"Cry, lovey?" said Mrs. Bateson; "I should just think she did--fit to
break her heart."

Thereupon Jemima Stubbs became a heroine of romance in Elisabeth's eyes,
and a new interest in her life. "I shall go and see her to-morrow," she
said, "and take her something nice for her little brother. What do you
think he would like, Mrs. Bateson?"

"Bless the child, she is one of the Good Shepherd's own lambs!"
exclaimed Mrs. Bateson, with tears in her eyes.

Mrs. Hankey sighed. "It is the sweetest flowers that are the readiest
for transplanting to the Better Land," she said; and once again
Christopher hated her.

But Elisabeth was engrossed in the matter in hand. "What would he like?"
she persisted--"a new toy, or a book, or jam and cake?"

"I should think a book, lovey; he's fair set on books, is Johnnie
Stubbs; and if you'd read a bit to him yourself, it would be a fine
treat for the lad."

Elisabeth's eyes danced with joy. "I'll go the first thing to-morrow
morning, and read him my favourite chapter out of The Fairchild Family;
and then I'll teach him some nice games to play all by himself."

"That's a dear young lady!" exclaimed Mrs. Bateson, in an ecstasy of
admiration.

"Do you think Jemima will cry when I go?"

"No, lovey; she wouldn't so far forget herself as to bother the gentry
with her troubles, surely."

"But I shouldn't be bothered; I should be too sorry for her. I always am
frightfully interested in people who are unhappy--much more interested
than in people who are happy; and I always love everybody when I've seen
them cry. It is so easy to be happy, and so dull. But why doesn't Jemima
fall in love if she wants to?"

"There now!" cried Mrs. Bateson, in a sort of stage aside to an
imaginary audience. "What a clever child she is! I'm sure I don't know,
dearie."

"It is a pity that she hasn't got a Cousin Anne," said Elisabeth, her
voice trembling with sympathy. "When you've got a Cousin Anne, it makes
everything so lovely."

"And so it does, dearie--so it does," agreed Mrs. Bateson, who did not
in the least understand what Elisabeth meant.

On the way home, after the tea-party was over, Christopher remarked:

"Old Mother Bateson isn't a bad sort; but I can't stand Mother Hankey."

"Why not?"

"She says such horrid things." He had not yet forgiven Mrs. Hankey for
her gloomy prophecies respecting Elisabeth.

"Not horrid, Chris. She is rather stupid sometimes, and doesn't know
when things are funny; but she never means to be really horrid, I am
sure."

"Well, I think she is an old cat," persisted Christopher.

"The only thing I don't like about her is her gloves," added Elisabeth
thoughtfully; "they are so old they smell of biscuit. Isn't it funny
that old gloves always smell of biscuit. I wonder why?"

"I think they do," agreed Christopher; "but nobody except you would ever
have thought of saying it. You have a knack of saying what everybody
else is thinking; and that is what makes you so amusing."

"I'm glad you think I'm amusing; but I can't see much funniness in just
saying what is true."

"Well, I can't explain why it is funny; but you really are simply
killing sometimes," said Christopher graciously.

The next day, and on many succeeding ones, Elisabeth duly visited Jemima
Stubbs and the invalid boy, although Christopher entreated her not to
worry herself about them, and offered to go in her place. But he failed
to understand that Elisabeth was goaded by no depressing sense of duty,
as he would have been in similar circumstances; she went because pity
was a passion with her, and therefore she was always absorbingly
interested in any one whom she pitied. Strength and success and
such-like attributes never appealed to Elisabeth, possibly because she
herself was strong, and possessed all the qualities of the successful
person; but weakness and failure were all-powerful in enlisting her
sympathy and interest and, through these, her love. As Christopher grew
older he dreamed dreams of how in the future he should raise himself
from being only the nephew of Miss Farringdon's manager to a position of
wealth and importance; and how he should finally bring all his glories
and honours and lay them at Elisabeth's feet. His eyes were not opened
to see that Elisabeth would probably turn with careless laughter from
all such honours thus manufactured into her pavement; but if he came to
her bent and bruised and brokenhearted, crushed with failure instead of
crowned with success, her heart would never send him empty away, but
would go out to him with a passionate longing to make up to him for all
that he had missed in life.

A few days after Mrs. Bateson's tea-party he said to Elisabeth, for
about the twentieth time:

"I say, I wish you wouldn't tire yourself with going to read to that
Stubbs brat."

"Tire myself? What rubbish! nothing can tire me. I never felt tired in
my life; but I shouldn't mind it just once, to see what it feels like."

"It feels distinctly unpleasant, I can tell you. But I really do wish
you'd take more care of yourself, or else you'll get ill, or have
headaches or something--you will indeed."

"No, I shan't; I never had a headache. That's another of the things that
I don't know what they feel like; and yet I want to know what everything
feels like--even disagreeable things."

"You'll know fast enough, I'm afraid," replied Christopher; "but even if
it doesn't tire you, you would enjoy playing in the garden more than
reading to Johnnie Stubbs--you know you would; and I can go and read to
the little chap, if you are set on his being read to."

"But you would much rather play in the garden than read to him; and
especially as it is your holidays, and your own reading-time will soon
begin."

"Oh! _I_ don't matter. Never bother your head about _me_; remember I'm
all right as long as you are; and that as long as you're jolly, I'm
bound to have a good time. But it riles me to see you worrying and
overdoing yourself."

"You don't understand, Chris; you really are awfully stupid about
understanding things. I don't go to see Jemima and Johnnie because I
hate going, and yet think I ought; I go because I am so sorry for them
both that my sorriness makes me like to go."

But Christopher did not understand, and Elisabeth could not make him do
so. The iron of duty had entered into his childish soul; and,
unconsciously, he was always trying to come between it and Elisabeth,
and to save her from the burden of obligation which lay so heavily upon
his spirit. He was a religious boy, but his religion was of too stern a
cast to bring much joy to him; and he was passionately anxious that
Elisabeth should not be distressed in like manner. His desire was that
she should have sufficient religion to insure heaven, but not enough to
spoil earth--a not uncommon desire on behalf of their dear ones among
poor, ignorant human beings, whose love for their neighbour will surely
atone in some measure for their injustice toward God.

"You see," Elisabeth continued, "there is nothing that makes you so fond
of people as being sorry for them. The people that are strong and happy
don't want your fondness, so it is no use giving it to them. It is the
weak, unhappy people that want you to love them, and so it is the weak,
unhappy people that you love."

"But I don't," replied Christopher, who was always inclined to argue a
point; "when I like people, I should like them just the same as if they
went about yelling Te Deums at the top of their voices; and when I don't
like them, it wouldn't make me like them to see them dressed from head
to foot in sackcloth and ashes."

"Oh! that's a stupid way of liking, I think."

"It may be stupid, but it's my way."

"Don't you like me better when I cry than when I laugh?" asked
Elisabeth, who never could resist a personal application.

"Good gracious, no! I always like you the same; but I'd much rather you
laughed than cried--it is so much jollier for you; in fact, it makes me
positively wretched to see you cry."

"It always vexes me," Elisabeth said thoughtfully, "to read about
tournaments, because I think it was so horrid of the Queen of Beauty to
give the prize to the knight who won."

Christopher laughed with masculine scorn. "What nonsense! Who else could
she have given it to?"

"Why, to the knight who lost, of course. I often make up a tale to
myself that I am the Queen of Beauty at a tournament; and when the
victorious knight rides up to me with his visor raised, I just laugh at
him, and say, 'You can have the fame and the glory and the cheers of the
crowd; that's quite enough for you!' And then I go down from my daïs,
right into the arena where the unhorsed knight is lying wounded, and
take off his helmet, and lay his head on my lap, and say, 'You shall
have the prize, because you have got nothing else!' So then that knight
becomes my knight, and always wears my colours; and that makes up to him
for having been beaten at the tournament, don't you see?"

"It would have been a rotten sort of tournament that was carried on in
that fashion; and your prize would have been no better than a
booby-prize," persisted Christopher.

"How silly you are! I'm glad I'm not a boy; I wouldn't have been as
stupid as a boy for anything!"

"Don't be so cross! You must see that the knight who wins is the best
knight; chaps that are beaten are not up to much."

"Well, they are the sort I like best; and if you had any sense you'd
like them best, too." Whereupon Elisabeth removed the light of her
offended countenance from Christopher, and dashed off in a royal rage.

As for him, he sighed over the unreasonableness of the weaker sex, but
accepted it philosophically as one of the rules of the game; and Chris
played games far too well to have anything but contempt for any one who
rebelled against the rules of any game whatsoever. It was a man's
business, he held, not to argue about the rules, but to play the game
according to them, and to win; or, if that was out of his power, to lose
pluckily and never complain.




CHAPTER IV

SCHOOL-DAYS

    Up to eighteen we fight with fears,
      And deal with problems grave and weighty,
    And smile our smiles and weep our tears,
    Just as we do in after years
      From eighteen up to eighty.


When Elisabeth was sixteen her noonday was turned into night by the
death of her beloved Cousin Anne. For some time the younger Miss
Farringdon had been in failing health; but it was her rôle to be
delicate, and so nobody felt anxious about her until it was too late for
anxiety to be of any use. She glided out of life as gracefully as she
had glided through it, trusting that the sternness of her principles
would expiate the leniency of her practice; and was probably surprised
at the discovery that it was the leniency of her practice which finally
expiated the sternness of her principles.

She left a blank, which was never quite filled up, in the lives of her
sister Maria and her small cousin Elisabeth. The former bore her sorrow
better, on the whole, than did the latter, because she had acquired the
habit of bearing sorrow; but Elisabeth mourned with all the hopeless
misery of youth.

"It is no use trying to make me interested in things," she sobbed in
response to Christopher's clumsy though well-meant attempts to divert
her. "I shall never be interested in anything again--never. Everything
is different now that Cousin Anne is gone away."

"Not quite everything," said Christopher gently.

"Yes; everything. Why, the very trees don't look the same as they used
to look, and the view isn't a bit what it used to be when she was here.
All the ordinary things seem queer and altered, just as they do when you
see them in a dream."

"Poor little girl!"

"And now it doesn't seem worth while for anything to look pretty. I used
to love the sunsets, but now I hate them. What is the good of their
being so beautiful and filling the sky with red and gold, if _she_ isn't
here to see them? And what is the good of trying to be good and clever
if she isn't here to be pleased with me? Oh dear! oh dear! Nothing will
ever be any good any more."

Christopher laid an awkward hand upon Elisabeth's dark hair, and began
stroking it the wrong way. "I say, I wish you wouldn't fret so; it's
more than I can stand to see you so wretched. Isn't there anything that
I can do to make it up to you, somehow?"

"No; nothing. Nothing will ever comfort me any more; and how could a
great, stupid boy like you make up to me for having lost her?" moaned
poor little Elisabeth, with the selfishness of absorbing grief.

"Well, anyway, I am as fond of you as she was, for nobody could be
fonder of anybody than I am of you."

"That doesn't help. I don't miss her so because she loved me, but
because I loved her; and I shall never, never love any one else as much
as long as I live."

"Oh yes, you will, I expect," replied Christopher, who even then knew
Elisabeth better than she knew herself.

"No--I shan't; and I should hate myself if I did."

Elisabeth fretted so terribly after her Cousin Anne that she grew paler
and thinner than ever; and Miss Farringdon was afraid that the girl
would make herself really ill, in spite of her wiry constitution. After
much consultation with many friends, she decided to send Elisabeth to
school, for it was plain that she was losing her vitality through lack
of an interest in life; and school--whatever it may or may not
supply--invariably affords an unfailing amount of new interests. So
Elisabeth went to Fox How--a well-known girls' school not a hundred
miles from London--so called in memory of Dr. Arnold, according to whose
principles the school was founded and carried on.

It would be futile to attempt to relate the history of Elisabeth
Farringdon without telling in some measure what her school-days did for
her; and it would be equally futile to endeavour to convey to the
uninitiated any idea of what that particular school meant--and still
means--to all its daughters.

When Elisabeth had left her girlhood far behind her, the mere mention of
the name, Fox How, never failed to send thrills all through her, as God
save the Queen, and Home, sweet Home have a knack of doing; and for any
one to have ever been a pupil at Fox How, was always a sure and certain
passport to Elisabeth's interest and friendliness. The school was an
old, square, white house, standing in a walled garden; and those walls
enclosed all the multifarious interests and pleasures and loves and
rivalries and heart-searchings and soul-awakenings which go to make up
the feminine life from twelve to eighteen, and which are very much the
same in their essence, if not in their form, as those which go to make
up the feminine life from eighteen to eighty. In addition to these, the
walls enclosed two lawns and an archery-ground, a field and a pond
overgrown with water-lilies, a high mound covered with grass and trees,
and a kitchen-garden filled with all manner of herbs and pleasant
fruits--in short, it was a wonderful and extensive garden, such as one
sees now and then in some old-fashioned suburb, but which people have
neither the time nor the space to lay out nowadays. It also contained a
long, straight walk, running its whole length and shaded by impenetrable
greenery, where Elisabeth used to walk up and down, pretending that she
was a nun; and some delightful swings and see-saws, much patronized by
the said Elisabeth, which gave her a similar physical thrill to that
produced in later years by the mention of her old school.

The gracious personality which ruled over Fox How in the days of
Elisabeth had mastered the rarely acquired fact that the word _educate_
is derived from _educo_, to _draw out_, and not (as is generally
supposed) from _addo_, to _give to_; so the pupils there were trained to
train themselves, and learned how to learn--a far better equipment for
life and its lessons than any ready-made cloak of superficial knowledge,
which covers all individualities and fits none. There was no cramming or
forcing at Fox How; the object of the school was not to teach girls how
to be scholars, but rather how to be themselves--that is to say, the
best selves which they were capable of becoming. High character rather
than high scholarship was the end of education there; and good breeding
counted for more than correct knowledge. Not that learning was
neglected, for Elisabeth and her schoolfellows worked at their books for
eight good hours every day; but it did not form the first item on the
programme of life.

And who can deny that the system of Fox How was the correct system of
education, at any rate, as far as girls are concerned? Unless a woman
has to earn her living by teaching, what does it matter to her how much
hydrogen there is in a drop of rain-water, or in what year Hannibal
crossed the Alps? But it will matter to her infinitely, for the
remainder of her mortal existence, whether she is one of those graceful,
sympathetic beings, whose pathway is paved by the love of Man and the
friendship of Woman; or one of that much-to-be-blamed, if
somewhat-to-be-pitied, sisterhood, who are unloved because they are
unlovely, and unlovely because they are unloved.

It is not good for man, woman, or child to be alone; and the
companionship of girls of her own age did much toward deepening and
broadening Elisabeth's character. The easy give-and-take of perfect
equality was beneficial to her, as it is to everybody She did not forget
her Cousin Anne--the art of forgetting was never properly acquired by
Elisabeth; but new friendships and new interests sprang up out of the
grave of the old one, and changed its resting-place from a cemetery into
a garden. Elisabeth Farringdon could not be happy--could not exist, in
fact--without some absorbing affection and interest in life. There are
certain women to whom "the trivial round" and "the common task" are
all-sufficing who ask nothing more of life than that they shall always
have a dinner to order or a drawing-room to dust, and to whom the
delinquencies of the cook supply a drama of never-failing attraction and
a subject of never-ending conversation; but Elisabeth was made of other
material; vital interests and strong attachments were indispensable to
her well-being. The death of Anne Farringdon had left a cruel blank in
the young life which was none too full of human interest to begin with;
but this blank was to a great measure filled up by Elisabeth's adoration
for the beloved personage who ruled over Fox How, and by her devoted
friendship for Felicia Herbert.

In after years she often smiled tenderly when she recalled the absolute
worship which the girls at Fox How offered to their "Dear Lady," as they
called her, and of which the "Dear Lady" herself was supremely
unconscious. It was a feeling of loyalty stronger than any ever excited
by crowned heads (unless, perhaps, by the Pope himself), as she
represented to their girlish minds the embodiment of all that was right,
as well as of all that was mighty--and represented it so perfectly that
through all their lives her pupils never dissociated herself from the
righteousness which she taught and upheld and practised. And this
attitude was wholly good for girls born in a century when it was the
fashion to sneer at hero-worship and to scoff at authority when the word
obedience in the Marriage Service was accused of redundancy, and the
custom of speaking evil of dignities was mistaken for self-respect.

As for Felicia Herbert, she became for a time the very mainspring of
Elisabeth's life. She was a beautiful girl, with fair hair and clear-cut
features; and Elisabeth adored her with the adoration that is freely
given, as a rule, to the girl who has beauty by the girl who has not.
She was, moreover, gifted with a sweet and calm placidity, which was
very restful to Elisabeth's volatile spirit; and the latter consequently
greeted her with that passionate and thrilling friendship which is so
satisfying to the immature female soul, but which is never again
experienced by the woman who has once been taught by a man the nature of
real love. Felicia was much more religious than Elisabeth, and much more
prone to take serious views of life. The training of Fox How made for
seriousness, and in that respect Felicia entered into the spirit of the
place more profoundly than Elisabeth was capable of doing; for Elisabeth
was always tender rather than serious, and broad rather than deep.

"I shall never go to balls when I leave school," said Felicia to her
friend one day of their last term at Fox How, as the two were sitting in
the arbour at the end of the long walk. "I don't think it is right to go
to balls."

"Why not? There can be no harm in enjoying oneself, and I don't believe
that God ever thinks there is."

"Not in enjoying oneself in a certain way; but the line between
religious people and worldly people ought to be clearly marked. I think
that dancing is a regular worldly amusement, and that good people should
openly show their disapproval of it by not joining in it."

"But God wants us to enjoy ourselves," Elisabeth persisted. "And He
wouldn't really love us if He didn't."

"God wants us to do what is right, and it doesn't matter whether we
enjoy ourselves or not."

"But it does; it matters awfully. We can't really be good unless we are
happy."

Felicia shook her head. "We can't really be happy unless we are good;
and if we are good we shall 'love not the world,' but shall stand apart
from it."

"But I must love the world; I can't help loving the world, it is so
grand and beautiful and funny. I love the whole of it: all the trees and
the fields, and the towns and the cities, and the prim old people and
the dear little children. I love the places--the old places because I
have known them so long, and the new places because I have never seen
them before; and I love the people best of all. I adore people, Felicia;
don't you?"

"No; I don't think that I do. Of course I like the people that I like;
but the others seem to me dreadfully uninteresting."

"But they are not; they are all frightfully interesting when once you
get to know them, and see what they really are made of inside. Outsides
may seem dull; but insides are always engrossing. That's why I always
love people when once I've seen them cry, because when they cry they are
themselves, and not any make-ups."

"How queer to like people because you have seen them cry!"

"Well, I do. I'd do anything for a person that I had seen cry; I would
really."

Felicia opened her large hazel eyes still wider. "What a strange idea!
It seems to me that you think too much about feelings and not enough
about principles."

"But thinking about feelings makes you think about principles; feelings
are the only things that ever make me think about principles at all."

After a few minutes' silence Elisabeth asked suddenly:

"What do you mean to do with your life when you leave here and take it
up?"

"I don't know. I suppose I shall fall in love and get married. Most
girls do. And I hope it will be with a clergyman, for I do so love
parish work."

"I don't think I want to get married," said Elisabeth slowly, "not even
to a clergyman."

"How queer of you! Why not?"

"Because I want to paint pictures and to become a great artist. I feel
there is such a lot in me that I want to say, and that I must say; and I
can only say it by means of pictures. It would be dreadful to die before
you had delivered the message that you had been sent into the world to
deliver, don't you think?"

"It would be more dreadful to die before you had found one man to whom
you would be everything, and who would be everything to you," replied
Felicia.

"Oh! I mean to fall in love, because everybody does, and I hate to be
behindhand with things; but I shall do it just as an experience, to make
me paint better pictures. I read in a book the other day that you must
fall in love before you can become a true artist; so I mean to do so.
But it won't be as important to me as my art," said Elisabeth, who was
as yet young enough to be extremely wise.

"Still, it must be lovely to know there is one person in the world to
whom you can tell all your thoughts, and who will understand them, and
be interested in them."

"It must be far lovelier to know that you have the power to tell all
your thoughts to the whole world, and that the world will understand
them and be interested in them," Elisabeth persisted.

"I don't think so. I should like to fall in love with a man who was so
much better than I, that I could lean on him and learn from him in
everything; and I should like to feel that whatever goodness or
cleverness there was in me was all owing to him, and that I was nothing
by myself, but everything with him."

"I shouldn't. I should like to feel that I was so good and clever that I
was helping the man to be better and cleverer even than he was before."

"I should like all my happiness and all my interest to centre in that
one particular man," said Felicia; "and to feel that he was a fairy
prince, and that I was a poor beggar-maid, who possessed nothing but his
love."

"Oh! I shouldn't. I would rather feel that I was a young princess, and
that he was a warrior, worn-out and wounded in the battle of life; but
that my love would comfort and cheer him after all the tiresome wars
that he'd gone through. And as for whether he'd lost or won in the wars,
I shouldn't care a rap, as long as I was sure that he couldn't be happy
without me."

"You and I never think alike about things," said Felicia sadly.

"You old darling! What does it matter, as long as we agree in being fond
of each other?"

At eighteen Elisabeth said farewell to Fox How with many tears, and came
back to live at the Willows with Miss Farringdon. While she had been at
school, Christopher had been first in Germany and then in America,
learning how to make iron, so that they had never met during Elisabeth's
holidays; therefore, when he beheld her transformed from a little girl
into a full-blown young lady, he straightway fell in love with her. He
was, however, sensible enough not to mention the circumstance, even to
Elisabeth herself, as he realized, as well as anybody, that the nephew
of Richard Smallwood would not be considered a fitting mate for a
daughter of the house of Farringdon; but the fact that he did not
mention the circumstance in no way prevented him from dwelling upon it
in his own mind, and deriving much pleasurable pain and much painful
pleasure therefrom. In short, he dwelt upon it so exclusively and so
persistently that it went near to breaking his heart; but that was not
until his heart was older, and therefore more capable of being broken
past mending again.

Miss Farringdon and the people of Sedgehill were alike delighted to have
Elisabeth among them once more; she was a girl with a strong
personality; and people with strong personalities have a knack of making
themselves missed when they go away.

"It's nice, and so it is, to have Miss Elisabeth back again," remarked
Mrs. Bateson to Mrs. Hankey; "and it makes it so much cheerfuller for
Miss Farringdon, too."

"Maybe it'll only make it the harder for Miss Farringdon when the time
comes for Miss Elisabeth to be removed by death or by marriage; and
which'll be the best for her--poor young lady!--the Lord must decide,
for I'm sure I couldn't pass an opinion, only having tried one, and that
nothing to boast of."

"I wonder if Miss Farringdon will leave her her fortune," said Mrs.
Bateson, who, in common with the rest of her class, was consumed with an
absorbing curiosity as to all testamentary dispositions.

"She may, and she may not; there's no prophesying about wills. I'm
pleased to say I can generally foretell when folks is going to die,
having done a good bit of sick-nursing in my time afore I married
Hankey; but as to foretelling how they're going to leave their money, I
can no more do it than the babe unborn; nor nobody can, as ever I heard
tell on."

"That's so, Mrs. Hankey. Wills seem to me to have been invented by the
devil for the special upsetting of the corpse's memory. Why, some of the
peaceablest folks as I've ever known--folks as wouldn't have scared a
lady-cow in their lifetime--have left wills as have sent all their
relations to the right-about, ready to bite one another's noses off.
Bateson often says to me, 'Kezia,' he says, 'call no man honest till his
will's read.' And I'll be bound he's in the right. Still, it would be
hard to see Miss Elisabeth begging her bread after the way she's been
brought up, and Miss Farringdon would never have the conscience to let
her do it."

"Folks leave their consciences behind with their bodies," said Mrs.
Hankey; "and I've lived long enough to be surprised at nothing where
wills are concerned."

"That is quite true," replied Mrs. Bateson. "Now take Miss Anne, for
instance: she seemed so set on Miss Elisabeth that you'd have thought
she'd have left her a trifle; but not she! All she had went to her
sister, Miss Maria, who'd got quite enough already. Miss Anne was as
sweet and gentle a lady as you'd wish to see; but her will was as hard
as the nether millstone."

"There's nothing like a death for showing up what a family is made of."

"There isn't. Now Mr. William Farringdon's will was a very cruel one,
according to my ideas, leaving everything to his niece and nothing to
his son. True, Mr. George was but a barber's block with no work in him,
and I'm the last to defend that; and then he didn't want to marry his
cousin, Miss Maria, for which I shouldn't blame him so much; if a man
can't choose his own wife and his own newspaper, what can he
choose?--certainly not his own victuals, for he isn't fit. But if folks
only leave their money to them that have followed their advice in
everything, most wills would be nothing but a blank sheet of paper."

"And if they were, it wouldn't be a bad thing, Mrs. Bateson; there would
be less sorrow on some sides, and less crape on others, and far less
unpleasantness all round. For my part, I doubt if Miss Farringdon will
leave her fortune to Miss Elisabeth, and her only a cousin's child; for
when all is said and done, cousins are but elastic relations, as you may
say. The well-to-do ones are like sisters and brothers, and the poor
ones don't seem to be no connection at all."

"Well, let's hope that Miss Elisabeth will marry, and have a husband to
work for her when Miss Farringdon is dead and gone."

"Husbands are as uncertain as wills, Mrs. Bateson, and more sure to give
offence to them that trust in them; besides, I doubt if Miss Elisabeth
is handsome enough to get a husband. The gentry think a powerful lot of
looks in choosing a wife."

Mrs. Bateson took up the cudgels on Elisabeth's behalf. "She mayn't be
exactly handsome--I don't pretend as she is; but she has a wonderful way
of dressing herself, and looking for all the world like a fashion-plate;
and some men have a keen eye for clothes."

"I think nothing of fine clothes myself. Saint Peter warns us against
braiding of hair and putting on of apparel; and when all's said and done
it don't go as far as a good complexion, and we don't need any apostle
to tell us that--we can see it for ourselves."

"And as for cleverness, there ain't her like in all Mershire," continued
Mrs. Bateson.

"Bless you! cleverness never yet helped a woman in getting a husband,
and never will; though if she's got enough of it, it may keep her from
ever having one. I don't hold with cleverness in a woman myself; it has
always ended in mischief, from the time when the woman ate a bit of the
Tree of Knowledge, and there was such a to-do about it."

"I wish she'd marry Mr. Christopher; he worships the very ground she
walks on, and she couldn't find a better man if she swept out all the
corners of the earth looking for one."

"Well, at any rate, she knows all about him; that is something. I always
say that men are the same as kittens--you should take 'em straight from
their mothers, or else not take 'em at all; for, if you don't, you never
know what bad habits they may have formed or what queer tricks they will
be up to."

"Maybe the manager's nephew ain't altogether the sort of husband you'd
expect for a Farringdon," said Mrs. Bateson thoughtfully; "I don't deny
that. But he's wonderful fond of her, Mr. Christopher is; and there's
nothing like love for smoothing things over when the oven ain't properly
heated, and the meat is done to a cinder on one side and all raw on the
other. You find that out when you're married."

"You find a good many things out when you're married, Mrs. Bateson, and
one is that this world is a wilderness of care. But as for love, I
don't rightly know much about it, since Hankey would always rather have
had my sister Sarah than me, and only put up with me when she gave him
the pass-by, being set on marrying one of the family. I'm sure, for my
part, I wish Sarah had had him; though I've no call to say so, her
always having been a good sister to me."

"Well, love's a fine thing; take my word for it. It keeps the men from
grumbling when nothing else will; except, of course, the grace of God,"
added Mrs. Bateson piously, "though even that don't always seem to have
much effect, when things go wrong with their dinners."

"That's because they haven't enough of it; they haven't much grace in
their hearts, as a rule, haven't men, even the best of them; and the
best of them don't often come my way. But as for Miss Elisabeth, she
isn't a regular Farringdon, as you may say--not the real daughter of the
works; and so she shouldn't take too much upon herself, expecting dukes
and ironmasters and the like to come begging to her on their bended
knees. She is only Miss Farringdon's adopted daughter, at best; and I
don't hold with adopted children, I don't; I think it is better and more
natural to be born of your own parents, like most folk are."

"So do I," agreed Mrs. Bateson; "I'd never have adopted a child myself.
I should always have been expecting to see its parents' faults coming
out in it--so different from the peace you have with your own flesh and
blood."

Mrs. Hankey groaned. "Your own flesh and blood may take after their
father; you never can tell."

"So they may, Mrs. Hankey--so they may; but, as the Scripture says, it
is our duty to whip the old man out of them."

"Just so. And that's another thing against adopted children--you'd
hesitate about punishing them enough; I don't fancy as you'd ever feel
the same pleasure in whipping 'em as you do in whipping your own. You'd
feel you ought to be polite-like, as if they was sort of visitors."

"My children always took after my side of the house, I'm thankful to
say," said Mrs. Bateson; "so I hadn't much trouble with them."

"I wish I could say as much; I do, indeed. But the Lord saw fit to try
me by making my son Peter the very moral of his father; as like as two
peas they are. And when you find one poor woman with such a double
portion, you are tempted to doubt the workings of Providence."

Mrs. Bateson looked sympathetic. "That's bad for you, Mrs. Hankey!"

"It is so; but I take up my cross and don't complain. You know what a
feeble creature Hankey is--never doing the right thing; and, when he
does, doing it at the wrong time; well, Peter is just such another. Only
the other day he was travelling by rail, and what must he do but get an
attack of the toothache? Those helpless sort of folks are always having
the toothache, if you notice."

"So they are."

"Peter's toothache was so bad that he must needs take a dose of some
sleeping-stuff or other--I forget the name--and fell so sound asleep
that he never woke at the station, but was put away with the carriage
into a siding. Fast asleep he was, with his handkerchief over his face
to keep the sun off, and never heard the train shunted, nor nothing."

"Well, to be sure! Them sleeping-draughts are wonderful soothing, as
I've heard tell, but I never took one on 'em. The Lord giveth His
beloved sleep, and His givings are enough for them as are in health; but
them as are in pain want something a bit stronger, doubtless."

"So it appears," agreed Mrs. Hankey. "Well, there lay Peter fast asleep
in the siding, with his handkerchief over his face. And one of the
porters happens to come by, and sees him, and jumps to the conclusion
that there's been a murder in the train, and that our Peter is the
corpse. So off he goes to the station-master and tells him as there's a
murdered body in one of the carriages in the siding; and the
station-master's as put out as never was."

Mrs. Bateson's eyes and mouth opened wide in amazement and interest.
"What a tale, to be sure!"

"And then," added Peter's mother, growing more dramatic as the story
proceeded, "the station-master sends for the police, and the police
sends for the crowner, so as everything shall be decent and in order;
and they walks in a solemn procession--with two porters carrying a
shutter--to the carriage where Peter lies, all as grand and nice as if
it was a funeral."

"I never heard tell of such a thing in my life--never!"

"Then the station-master opens the door with one of them state keys
which always take such a long time to open a door which you could open
with your own hands in a trice--you know 'em by sight."

Mrs. Bateson nodded. Of course she knew them by sight; who does not?

"And then the crowner steps forward to take the handkerchief off the
face of the body, it being the perquisite of a crowner so to do," Mrs.
Hankey continued, with the maternal regret of a mother whose son has
been within an inch of fame, and missed it; "and just picture to
yourself the vexation of them all, when it was no murdered corpse they
found, but only our Peter with an attack of the toothache!"

"Well, I never! They must have been put about; as you would have been
yourself, Mrs. Hankey, if you'd found so little after expecting so
much."

"In course I should; it wasn't in flesh and blood not to be, and
station-master and crowner are but mortal, like the rest of us. I assure
you, when I first heard the story, I pitied them from the bottom of my
heart."

"And what became of Peter in the midst of it all, Mrs. Hankey?"

"Oh! it woke him up with a vengeance; and, of course, it flustered him a
good deal, when he rightly saw how matters stood, to have to make his
excuses to all them grand gentlemen for not being a murdered corpse. But
as I says to him afterward, he'd no one but himself to blame; first for
being so troublesome as to have the toothache, and then for being so
presumptuous as to try and cure it. And his father is just the same; if
you take your eye off him for a minute he is bound to be in some
mischief or another."

"There's no denying that husbands is troublesome, Mrs. Hankey, and sons
is worse; but all the same I stand up for 'em both, and I wish Miss
Elisabeth had got one of the one and half a dozen of the other. Mark my
words, she'll never do better, taking him all round, than Master
Christopher."

Mrs. Hankey sighed. "I only hope she'll find it out before it is too
late, and he is either laid in an early grave or else married to a
handsomer woman, as the case may be, and both ways out of her reach. But
I doubt it. She was a dark baby, if you remember, was Miss Elisabeth;
and I never trust them as has been dark babies, and never shall."

"And how is Peter's toothache now?" inquired Mrs. Bateson, who was a
more tender-hearted matron than Peter's mother.

"Oh! it's no better; and I know no one more aggravating than folks who
keep sayin' they are no better when you ask 'em how they are. It always
seems so ungrateful. Only this morning I asked our Peter how his tooth
was, and he says, 'No better, mother; it was so bad in the night that I
fairly wished I was dead.' 'Don't go wishing that,' says I; 'for if you
was dead you'd have far worse pain, and it 'ud last for ever and ever.'
I really spoke quite sharp to him, I was that sick of his grumbling; but
it didn't seem to do him no good."

"Speaking sharp seldom does do much good," Mrs. Bateson remarked
sapiently, "except to them as speaks."




CHAPTER V

THE MOAT HOUSE

    You thought you knew me in and out
        And yet you never knew
    That all I ever thought about
               Was you.


Sedgehill High Street is nothing but a part of the great high road which
leads from Silverhampton to Studley and Slipton and the other towns of
the Black Country; but it calls itself Sedgehill High Street as it
passes through the place, and so identifies itself with its environment,
after the manner of caterpillars and polar bears and other similarly
wise and adaptable beings. At the point where this road adopts the
pseudonym of the High Street, close by Sedgehill Church, a lane branches
off from it at right angles, and runs down a steep slope until it comes
to a place where it evidently experiences a difference of opinion as to
which is the better course to pursue--an experience not confined to
lanes. But in this respect lanes are happier than men and women, in that
they are able to pursue both courses, and so learn for themselves which
is the wiser one, as is the case with this particular lane. One course
leads headlong down another steep hill--so steep that unwary travellers
usually descend from their carriages to walk up or down it, and thus
are enabled to ensure relief to their horses and a chill to themselves
at the same time; for it is hot work walking up or down that sunny
precipice, and the cold winds of Mershire await one with equal gusto at
the top and at the bottom. At the foot of the hill stretches a breezy
common, wide enough to make one think "long, long thoughts"; and if the
traveller looks backward when he has crossed this common, he will see
Sedgehill Church, crowning and commanding the vast expanse, and pointing
heavenward with its slender spire to remind him, and all other wayfaring
men, that the beauty and glory of this present world is only an earnest
and a foretaste of something infinitely fairer.

The second course of the irresolute lane is less adventurous, and
wanders peacefully through Badgering Woods, a dark and delightful spot,
once mysterious enough to be a fitting hiding-place for the age-long
slumbers of some sleeping princess. As a matter of fact, so it was; the
princess was black but comely, and her name was Coal. There she had
slept for a century of centuries, until Prince Iron needed and sought
and found her, and awakened her with the noise of his kisses. So now the
wood is not asleep any more, but is filled with the tramping of the
prince's men. The old people wring their hands and mourn that the former
things are passing away, and that Mershire's youthful beauty will soon
be forgotten; but the young people laugh and are glad, because they know
that life is greater than beauty, and that it is by her black
coalfields, and not by her green woodlands, that Mershire will save her
people from poverty, and will satisfy her poor with bread.

When Elisabeth Farringdon was a girl, the princess was still asleep in
the heart of the wood, and no prince had yet attempted to disturb her;
and the lane passed through a forest of silence until it came to a dear
little brown stream, which, by means of a dam, was turned into a moat,
encircling one of the most ancient houses in England. The Moat House had
been vacant for some time, as the owner was a delicate man who preferred
to live abroad; and great was the interest at Sedgehill when, a year or
two after Elisabeth left school, it was reported that a stranger, Alan
Tremaine by name, had taken the Moat House for the sake of the hunting,
which was very good in that part of Mershire.

So Alan settled there, and became one of the items which went to the
making of Elisabeth's world. He was a small, slight man,
interesting-looking rather than regularly handsome, of about
five-and-twenty, who had devoted himself to the cultivation of his
intellect and the suppression of his soul. Because his mother had been a
religious woman, he reasoned that faith was merely an amiable feminine
weakness, and because he himself was clever enough to make passable
Latin verses, he argued that no Supernatural Being could have been
clever enough to make him.

"Have you seen the new man who has come to the Moat House?" asked
Elisabeth of Christopher. The latter had now settled down permanently at
the Osierfield, and was qualifying himself to take his uncle's place as
general manager of the works, when that uncle should retire from the
post. He was also qualifying himself to be Elisabeth's friend instead of
her lover--a far more difficult task.

"Yes; I have seen him."

"What is he like? I am dying to know."

"When I saw him he was exactly like a man riding on horseback; but as he
was obviously too well-dressed to be a beggar, I have no reason to
believe that the direction in which he was riding was the one which
beggars on horseback are proverbially expected to take."

"How silly you are! You know what I mean."

"Perfectly. You mean that if you had seen a man riding by, at the rate
of twelve miles an hour, it would at once have formed an opinion as to
all the workings of his mind and the meditations of his heart. But my
impressions are of slower growth, and I am even dull enough to require
some foundation for them." Christopher loved to tease Elisabeth.

"I am awfully quick in reading character," remarked that young lady,
with some pride.

"You are. I never know which impresses me more--the rapidity with which
you form opinions, or their inaccuracy when formed."

"I'm not as stupid as you think."

"Pardon me, I don't think you are at all stupid; but I am always hoping
that the experience of life will make you a little stupider."

"Don't be a goose, but tell me all you know about Mr. Tremaine."

"I don't know much about him, except that he is well-off, that he
apparently rides about ten stone, and that he is not what people call
orthodox. By the way. I didn't discover his unorthodoxy by seeing him
ride by, as you would have done; I was told about it by some people who
know him."

"How very interesting!" cried Elisabeth enthusiastically. "I wonder how
unorthodox he is. Do you think he doesn't believe in anything?"

"In himself, I fancy. Even the baldest creed is usually self-embracing.
But I believe he indulges in the not unfashionable luxury of doubts.
You might attend to them, Elisabeth; you are the sort of girl who would
enjoy attending to doubts."

"I suppose I really am too fond of arguing."

"There you misjudge yourself. You are instructive rather than
argumentative. Saying the same thing over and over again in different
language is not arguing, you know; I should rather call it preaching, if
I were not afraid of hurting your feelings."

"You are a very rude boy! But, anyway, I have taught you a lot of
things; you can't deny that."

"I don't wish to deny it; I am your eternal debtor. To tell the truth, I
believe you have taught me everything I know, that is worth knowing,
except the things that you have tried to teach me. There, I must
confess, you have signally failed."

"What have I tried to teach you?"

"Heaps of things: that pleasure is more important than duty; that we are
sent into the world to enjoy ourselves; that the worship of art is the
only soul-satisfying form of faith; that conscience is an exhausted
force; that feelings and emotions ought to be labelled and scheduled;
that lobster is digestible; that Miss Herbert is the most attractive
woman in the world; etcetera, etcetera."

"And what have I taught you without trying?"

"Ah! that is a large order; and it is remarkable that the things you
have taught me are just the things that you have never learned
yourself."

"Then I couldn't have taught them."

"But you did; that is where your genius comes in."

"I really am tremendously quick in judging character," repeated
Elisabeth thoughtfully; "if I met you for the first time I should know
in five minutes that you were a man with plenty of head, and heaps of
soul, and very little heart."

"That would show wonderful penetration on your part."

"You may laugh, but I should. Of course, as it is, it is not
particularly clever of me to understand you thoroughly; I have known you
so long."

"Exactly; it would only be distinctly careless of you if you did not."

"Of course it would; but I do. I could draw a map of your mind with my
eyes shut, I know it so well."

"I wish you would. I should value it even if it were drawn with your
eyes open, though possibly in that case it might be less correct."

"I will, if you will give me a pencil and a sheet of paper."

Christopher produced a pencil, and tore a half-sheet off a note that he
had in his pocket. The two were walking through the wood at the Willows
at that moment, and Elisabeth straightway sat down upon a felled tree
that happened to be lying there, and began to draw.

The young man watched her with amusement. "An extensive outline," he
remarked; "this is gratifying."

"Oh yes! you have plenty of mind, such as it is; nobody could deny
that."

"But why is the coast-line all irregular, with such a lot of bays and
capes and headlands?"

"To show that you are an undecided person, and given to split hairs, and
don't always know your own opinion. First you think you'll do a thing
because it is nice; and then you think you won't do it because it is
wrong; and in the end you drop between two stools, like Mahomet's
coffin."

"I see. And please what are the mountain-ranges that you are drawing
now?"

"These," replied Elisabeth, covering her map with herring-bones, "are
your scruples. Like all other mountain-ranges they hinder commerce, make
pleasure difficult, and render life generally rather uphill work."
"Don't I sound exactly as if I was taking a geography class?"

"Or conducting an Inquisition," added Christopher.

"I thought an Inquisition was a Spanish thing that hurt."

"So certain ignorant people say; but it was originally invented, I
believe, to eradicate error and to maintain truth."

"I am going on with my geography class, so don't interrupt. The rivers
in this map, which are marked by a few faint lines, are narrow and
shallow; they are only found near the coast, and never cross the
interior of the country at all. These represent your feelings."

"Very ingenious of you! And what is that enormous blotch right in the
middle of the country, which looks like London and its environs?"

"That is your conscience; its outlying suburbs cover nearly the whole
country, you will perceive. You will also notice that there are no
seaports on the coast of my map; that shows that you are self-contained,
and that you neither send exports to, nor receive imports from, the
hearts and minds of other people."

"What ever are those queer little castellated things round the coast
that you are drawing now?"

"Those are floating icebergs, to show that it is a cold country. There,
my map is finished," concluded Elisabeth, half closing her eyes and
contemplating her handiwork through her eyelashes; "and I consider it a
most successful sketch."

"It is certainly clever."

"And true, too."

Christopher's eyes twinkled. "Give it me," he said, stretching out his
hand; "but sign it with your name first. Not there," he added hastily,
as Elisabeth began writing a capital E in one corner; "right across the
middle."

Elisabeth looked up in surprise. "Right across the map itself, do you
mean?"

"Yes."

"But it is such a long name that it will cover the whole country."

"I know that."

"It will spoil it."

"I shouldn't be surprised; nevertheless, I always am in favour of
realism."

"I don't know where the realism comes in; but I am such an obliging
person that I will do what you want," said Elisabeth, writing her name
right across the half-sheet of paper, in her usual dashing style.

"Thank you," said Christopher, taking the paper from her; and he smiled
to himself as he saw that the name "Elisabeth Farringdon" covered the
whole of the imaginary continent from east to west. Elisabeth naturally
did not know that this was the only true image in her allegory; she was
as yet far too clever to perceive obvious things. As Chris said, it was
not when her eyes were open that she was most correct.

"I have seen Mr. Tremaine," said Elisabeth to him, a day or two after
this. "Cousin Maria left her card upon him, and he returned her call
yesterday and found us at home. I think he is perfectly delightful."

"You do, do you? I knew you would."

"Why?"

"Because, like the Athenians, you live to see or to hear some new
thing."

"It wasn't his newness that made me like him; I liked him because he was
so interesting. I do adore interesting people! I hadn't known him five
minutes before he began to talk about really deep things; and then I
felt I had known him for ages, he was so very understanding."

"Indeed," Christopher said drily.

"By the time we had finished tea he understood me better than you do
after all these years. I wonder if I shall get to like him better than I
like you?"

"I wonder, too." And he really did, with an amount of curiosity that was
positively painful.

"Of course," remarked Elisabeth thoughtfully, "I shall always like you,
because we have been friends so long, and you are overgrown with the
lichen of old memories and associations. But you are not very
interesting in the abstract, you see; you are nice and good, but you
have not heart enough to be really thrilling."

"Still, even if I had a heart, it is possible I might not always wear it
on my sleeve for Miss Elisabeth Farringdon to peck at."

"Oh yes, you would; you couldn't help it. If you tried to hide it I
should see through your disguises. I have X rays in my eyes."

"Have you? They must be a great convenience."

"Well, at any rate, they keep me from making mistakes," Elisabeth
confessed.

"That is fortunate for you. It is a mistake to make mistakes."

"I remember our Dear Lady at Fox How once saying," continued the girl,
"that nothing is so good for keeping women from making mistakes as a
sense of humour."

"I wonder if she was right?"

"She was always right; and in that as in everything else. Have you never
noticed that it is not the women with a sense of humour who make fools
of themselves? They know better than to call a thing romantic which is
really ridiculous."

"Possibly; but they are sometimes in danger of calling a thing
ridiculous which is really romantic; and that also is a mistake."

"I suppose it is. I wonder which is worse--to think ridiculous things
romantic, or romantic things ridiculous? It is rather an interesting
point. Which do you think?"

"I don't know. I never thought about it."

"You never do think about things that really matter," exclaimed
Elisabeth, with reproof in her voice; "that is what makes you so
uninteresting to talk to. The fact is you are so wrapped up in that
tiresome old business that you never have time to attend to the deeper
things and the hidden meanings of life; but are growing into a regular
money-grubber."

"Perhaps so; but you will have the justice to admit it isn't my own
money that I am grubbing," replied Christopher, who had only reconciled
himself to giving up all his youthful ambitions and becoming
sub-manager of the Osierfield by the thought that he might thereby in
some roundabout way serve Elisabeth. Like other schoolboys he had
dreamed his dreams, and prospected wonderful roads to success which his
feet were destined never to tread; and at first he had asked something
more of life than the Osierfield was capable of offering him. But
finally he had submitted contentedly to the inevitable, because--in
spite of all his hopes and ambitions--his boyish love for Elisabeth held
him fast; and now his manly love for Elisabeth held him faster still.
But even the chains which love had rivetted are capable of galling us
sometimes; and although we would not break them, even if we could, we
grumble at them occasionally--that is to say, if we are merely human, as
is the case with so many of us.

"It is a great pity," Elisabeth went on, "that you deliberately narrow
yourself down to such a small world and such petty interests. It is bad
enough for old people to be practical and sensible and commonplace and
all that; but for a man as young as you are it is simply disgusting. I
can not understand you, because you really are clever and ought to know
better; but although I am your greatest friend, you never talk to me
about anything except the merest frivolities."

Christopher bowed his head to the storm and was still--he was one of the
people who early learn the power of silence; but Elisabeth, having once
mounted her high horse, dug her spurs into her steed and rode on to
victory. In those days she was so dreadfully sure of herself that she
felt competent to teach anybody anything.

"You laugh at me as long as I am funny and I amuse you; but the minute
I begin to talk about serious subjects--such as feelings and sentiments
and emotions--you lose your interest at once, and turn everything into a
joke. The truth is, you have so persistently suppressed your higher self
that it is dying of inanition; you'll soon have no higher self left at
all. If people don't use their hearts they don't have any, like the
Kentucky fish that can't see in the dark because they are blind, don't
you know? Now you should take a leaf out of Mr. Tremaine's book. The
first minute I saw him I knew that he was the sort of man that
cultivated his higher self; he was interested in just the things that
interest me."

The preacher paused for breath, and looked up to see whether her sermon
was being "blessed" to her hearer; then suddenly her voice changed--

"What is the matter, Chris?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"Because you look so awfully white. I was talking so fast that I didn't
notice it; but I expect it is the heat. Do sit down on the grass and
rest a bit; it is quite dry; and I'll fan you with a big dock leaf."

"I'm all right," replied Christopher, trying to laugh, and succeeding
but indifferently.

"But I'm sure you are not, you are so pale; you look just as you looked
the day that I tumbled off the rick--do you remember it?--and you took
me into Mrs. Bateson's to have my head bound up. She said you'd got a
touch of the sun, and I'm afraid you've got one now."

"Yes, I remember it well enough; but I'm all right now, Betty. Don't
worry about me."

"But I do worry when you're ill; I always did. Don't you remember that
when you had measles and I wasn't allowed to see you, I cried myself to
sleep for three nights running, because I thought you were going to
die, and that everything would be vile without you? And then I had a
prayer-meeting about you in Mrs. Bateson's parlour, and I wrote the
hymns for it myself. The Batesons wept over them and considered them
inspired, and foretold that I should die early in consequence." And
Elisabeth laughed at the remembrance of her fame.

Christopher laughed too. "That was hard on you! I admit that
verse-writing is a crime in a woman, but I should hardly call it a
capital offence. Still, I should like to have heard the hymns. You were
great at writing poetry in those days."

"Wasn't I? And I used to be so proud when you said that my poems weren't
'half bad'!"

"No wonder; that was high praise from me. But can't you recall those
hymns?"

The hymnist puckered her forehead. "I can remember the beginning of the
opening one," she said; "it was a six-line-eights, and we sang it to a
tune called Stella; it began thus:

    "How can we sing like little birds,
      And hop about among the boughs?
    How can we gambol with the herds,
      Or chew the cud among the cows?
    How can we pop with all the weasles
    Now Christopher has got the measles?"

"Bravo!" exclaimed the subject of the hymn. "You are a born hymn-writer,
Elisabeth. The shades of Charles Wesley and Dr. Watts bow to your
obvious superiority."

"Well, at any rate, I don't believe they ever did better at fourteen;
and it shows how anxious I was about you even then when you were ill. I
am just the same now--quite as fond of you as I was then; and you are
of me, too, aren't you?"

"Quite." Which was perfectly true.

"Then that's all right," said Elisabeth contentedly; "and, you see, it
is because I am so fond of you that I tell you of your faults. I think
you are so good that I want you to be quite perfect."

"I see."

The missionary spirit is an admirable thing; but a man rarely does it
full justice when it is displayed--toward himself--by the object of his
devotion.

"If I wasn't so fond of you I shouldn't try to improve you."

"Of course not; and if you were a little fonder of me you wouldn't want
to improve me. I perfectly understand."

"Dear old Chris! You really are extremely nice in some ways; and if you
had only a little more heart you would be adorable. And I don't believe
you are naturally unfeeling, do you?"

"No--I do not; but I sometimes wish I was."

"Don't say that. It is only that you haven't developed that side of you
sufficiently; I feel sure the heart is there, but it is dormant. So now
you will talk more about feelings, won't you?"

"I won't promise that. It is rather stupid to talk about things that one
doesn't understand; I am sure this is correct, for I have often heard
you say so."

"But talking to me about your feelings might help you to understand
them, don't you see?"

"Or might help you."

"Oh! I don't want any help; feelings are among the few things that I can
understand without any assistance. But you are sure you are all right,
Chris, and haven't got a headache or anything?" And the anxious
expression returned to Elisabeth's face.

"My head is very well, thank you."

"You don't feel any pain?"

"In my head? distinctly not."

"You are quite well, you are certain?"

"Perfectly certain and quite well. What a fidget you are! Apparently you
attach as much importance to rosy cheeks as Mother Hankey does."

"A pale face and dark hair are in her eyes the infallible signs of a
depraved nature," laughed Elisabeth; "and I have both."

"Yet you fly at me for having one, and that only for a short time.
Considering your own shortcomings, you should be more charitable."

Elisabeth laughed again as she patted his arm in a sisterly fashion.
"Nice old boy! I am awfully glad you are all right. It would make me
miserable if anything went really wrong with you, Chris."

"Then nothing shall go really wrong with me, and you shall not be
miserable," said Christopher stoutly; "and, therefore, it is fortunate
that I don't possess much heart--things generally go wrong with the
people who have hearts, you know, and not with the people who have not;
so we perceive how wise was the poet in remarking that whatever is is
made after the best possible pattern, or words to that effect." With
which consoling remark he took leave of his liege-lady.

The friendship between Alan Tremaine and Elisabeth Farringdon grew apace
during the next twelve months. His mind was of the metaphysical and
speculative order, which is interesting to all women; and hers was of
the volatile and vivacious type which is attractive to some men. They
discussed everything under the sun, and some things over it; they read
the same books and compared notes afterward; they went out sketching
together, and instructed each other in the ways of art; and they
carefully examined the foundations of each other's beliefs, and
endeavoured respectively to strengthen and undermine the same. Gradually
they fell into the habit of wondering every morning whether or not they
should meet during the coming day; and of congratulating themselves
nearly every evening that they had succeeded in so meeting.

As for Christopher, he was extremely and increasingly unhappy, and, it
must be admitted, extremely and increasingly cross in consequence. The
fact that he had not the slightest right to control Elisabeth's actions,
in no way prevented him from highly disapproving of them; and the fact
that he was too proud to express this disapproval in words, in no way
prevented him from displaying it in manner. Elisabeth was wonderfully
amiable with him, considering how very cross he was; but are we not all
amiable with people toward whom we--in our inner consciousness--know
that we are behaving badly?

"I can not make out what you can see in that conceited ass?" he said to
her, when Alan Tremaine had been living at the Moat House for something
over a year.

"Perhaps not; making things out never is your strong point," replied
Elisabeth suavely.

"But he is such an ass! I'm sure the other evening, when he trotted out
his views on the Higher Criticism for your benefit, he made me feel
positively ill."

"I found it very interesting; and if, as you say, he did it for my
benefit, he certainly succeeded in his aim." There were limits to the
patience of Elisabeth.

"Well, how women can listen to bosh of that kind I can not imagine! What
can it matter to you what he disbelieves or why he disbelieves it? And
it is beastly cheek of him to suppose that it can."

"But he is right in supposing it, and it does matter to me. I like to
know how old-fashioned truths accord or do not accord with modern phases
of thought."

"Modern phases of nonsense, you mean! Well, the old-fashioned truths are
good enough for me, and I'll stick to them, if you please, in spite of
Mr. Tremaine's overwhelming arguments; and I should advise you to stick
to them, too."

"Oh! Chris, I wish you wouldn't be so disagreeable." And Elisabeth
sighed. "It is so difficult to talk to you when you are like this."

"I'm not disagreeable," replied Christopher mendaciously; "only I can
not let you be taken in by a stuck-up fool without trying to open your
eyes; I shouldn't be your friend if I could." And he actually believed
that this was the case. He forgot that it is not the trick of
friendship, but of love, to make "a corner" in affection, and to
monopolize the whole stock of the commodity.

"You see," Elisabeth explained, "I am so frightfully modern, and yet I
have been brought up in such a dreadfully old-fashioned way. It was all
very well for the last generation to accept revealed truth without
understanding it, but it won't do for us."

"Why not?"

"Oh! because we are young and modern."

"So were they at one time, and we shall not be so for long."

Elisabeth sighed again. "How difficult you are! Of course, the sort of
religion that did for Cousin Maria and Mr. Smallwood won't do for Mr.
Tremaine and me. Can't you see that?"

"I can not, I am sorry to say."

"Their religion had no connection with their intellects."

"Still, it changed their hearts, which I have heard is no unimportant
operation."

"They accepted what they were told without trying to understand it,"
Elisabeth continued, "which is not, after all, a high form of faith."

"Indeed. I should have imagined that it was the highest."

"But can't you see that to accept blindly what you are told is not half
so great as to sift it all, and to separate the chaff from the wheat,
and to find the kernel of truth in the shell of tradition?" Elisabeth
had not talked to Alan Tremaine for over a year without learning his
tricks of thought and even of expression. "Don't you think that it is
better to believe a little with the whole intellect than a great deal
apart from it?"

Christopher looked obstinate. "I can't and don't."

"Have you no respect for 'honest doubt'?"

"Honest bosh!"

Elisabeth's face flushed. "You really are too rude for anything."

Christopher was penitent at once; he could not bear really to vex her.
"I am sorry if I was rude; but it riles me to hear you quoting
Tremaine's platitudes by the yard--such rotten platitudes as they are,
too!"

"You don't do Mr. Tremaine justice, Chris. Even though he may have
outgrown the old faiths, he is a very good man; and he has such lovely
thoughts about truth and beauty and love and things like that."

"His thoughts are nothing but empty windbags; for he is the type of man
who is too ignorant to accept truth, too blind to appreciate beauty, and
too selfish to be capable of loving any woman as a woman ought to be
loved."

"I think his ideas about love are quite ideal," persisted the girl.
"Only yesterday he was abusing the selfishness of men in general, and
saying that a man who is really in love thinks of the woman he loves as
well as of himself."

"He said that, did he? Then he was mistaken."

Elisabeth looked surprised. "Then don't you agree with him that a man in
love thinks of the woman as well as of himself?"

"No; I don't. A man who is really in love never thinks of himself at
all, but only of the woman. It strikes me that Master Alan Tremaine
knows precious little about the matter."

"I think he knows a great deal. He said that love was the discovery of
the one woman whereof all other women were but types. That really was a
sweet thing to say!"

"My dear Betty, you know no more about the matter than he does. Falling
in love doesn't merely mean that a man has found a woman who is dearer
to him than all other women, but that he has found a woman who is dearer
to him than himself."

Elisabeth changed her ground. "I admit that he isn't what you might
call orthodox," she said--"not the sort of man who would clothe himself
in the rubric, tied on with red tape; but though he may not be a
Christian, as we count Christianity, he believes with all his heart in
an overruling Power which makes for righteousness."

"That is very generous of him," retorted Christopher; "still, I can not
for the life of me see that the possession of three or four thousand a
year, without the trouble of earning it, gives a man the right to
patronize the Almighty."

"You are frightfully narrow, Chris."

"I know I am, and I am thankful for it. I had rather be as narrow as a
plumbing-line than indulge in the sickly latitudinarianism that such men
as Tremaine nickname breadth."

"Oh! I am tired of arguing with you; you are too stupid for anything."

"But you haven't been arguing--you have only been quoting Tremaine
verbatim; and that that may be tiring I can well believe."

"Well, you can call it what you like; but by any other name it will
irritate you just as much, because you have such a horrid temper. Your
religion may be very orthodox, but I can not say much for its improving
qualities; it is the crossest, nastiest, narrowest, disagreeablest sort
of religion that I ever came across."

And Elisabeth walked away in high dudgeon, leaving Christopher very
angry with himself for having been disagreeable, and still angrier with
Tremaine for having been the reverse.




CHAPTER VI

WHIT MONDAY

    Light shadows--hardly seen as such--
      Crept softly o'er the summer land
    In mute caresses, like the touch
      Of some familiar hand.


"I want to give your work-people a treat," said Tremaine to Elisabeth,
in the early summer.

"That is very nice of you; but this goes without saying, as you are
always planning and doing something nice. I shall be very glad for our
people to have a little pleasure, as at present the annual tea-meeting
at East Lane Chapel seems to be their one and only dissipation; and
although tea-meetings may be very well in their way, they hardly seem to
fulfil one's ideal of human joy."

"Ah! you have touched upon a point to which I was coming," said Alan
earnestly; "it is wonderful how often our minds jump together! Not only
am I anxious to give the Osierfield people something more enjoyable than
a tea-meeting--I also wish to eliminate the tea-meeting spirit from
their idea of enjoyment."

"How do you mean?" It was noteworthy that while Elisabeth was always
ready to teach Christopher, she was equally willing to learn from Alan.

"I mean that I want to show people that pleasure and religion have
nothing to do with each other. It always seems to me such a mistake that
the pleasures of the poor--the innocent pleasures, of course--are
generally inseparable from religious institutions. If they attend a
tea-party, they open it with prayer; if they are taken for a country
drive, they sing hymns by the way."

"Oh! but I think they do this because they like it, and not because they
are made to do it," said Elisabeth eagerly.

"Not a bit of it; they do it because they are accustomed to do it, and
they feel that it is expected of them. Religion is as much a part of
their dissipation as evening dress is of ours, and just as much a purely
conventional part; and I want to teach them to dissociate the two ideas
in their own minds."

"I doubt if you will succeed, Mr. Tremaine."

"Yes, I shall; I invariably succeed. I have never failed in anything
yet, and I never mean to fail. And I do so want to make the poor people
enjoy themselves thoroughly. Of course, it is a good thing to have one's
pills always hidden in jam; but it must be a miserable thing to belong
to a section of society where one's jam is invariably full of pills."

Elisabeth smiled, but did not speak; Alan was the one person of her
acquaintance to whom she would rather listen than talk.

"It is a morbid and unhealthy habit," he went on, "to introduce religion
into everything, in the way that English people are so fond of doing. It
decreases their pleasures by casting its shadow over purely human and
natural joys; and it increases their sorrow and want by teaching them to
lean upon some hypothetical Power, instead of trying to do the best
that they can for themselves. Also it enervates their reasoning
faculties; for nothing is so detrimental to one's intellectual strength
as the habit of believing things which one knows to be impossible."

"Then don't you believe in religion of any kind?"

"Most certainly I do--in many religions. I believe in the religion of
art and of science and of humanity, and countless more; in fact, the
only religion I do not believe in is Christianity, because that spoils
all the rest by condemning art as fleshly, science as untrue, and
humanity as sinful. I want to bring the old Pantheism to life again, and
to teach our people to worship beauty as the Greeks worshipped it of
old; and I want you to help me."

Elisabeth gasped as Elisha might have gasped when Elijah's mantle fell
upon him. She was as yet too young to beware of false prophets. "I
should love to make people happy," she said; "there seems to be so much
happiness in the world and so few that find it."

"The Greeks found it; therefore, why should not the English? I mean to
teach them to find it, and I shall begin with your work-people on Whit
Monday."

"What shall you do?" asked the girl, with intense interest.

"It is no good taking away old lamps until you are prepared to offer new
ones in their place; therefore I shall not take away the consolations
(so called) of religion until I have shown the people a more excellent
way. I shall first show them nature, and then art--nature to arouse
their highest instincts, and art to express the same; and I am
convinced that after they have once been brought face to face with the
beautiful thus embodied, the old faiths will lose the power to move
them."

When Whit Monday came round, the throbbing heart of the Osierfield
stopped beating, as it was obliged to stop on a bank-holiday; and the
workmen, with their wives and sweethearts, were taken by Alan Tremaine
in large brakes to Pembruge Castle, which the owner had kindly thrown
open to them, at Alan's request, for the occasion.

It was a long drive and a wonderfully beautiful one, for the year was at
its best. All the trees had put on their new summer dresses, and never a
pair of them were of the same shade. The hedges were covered with a
wreath of white May-blossom, and seemed like interminable drifts of that
snow in summer which is as good news from a far country; and the roads
were bordered by the feathery hemlock, which covered the face of the
land as with a bridal veil.

"Isn't the world a beautiful place?" said Elisabeth, with a sigh of
content, to Alan, who was driving her in his mail-phaeton. "I do hope
all the people will see and understand how beautiful it is."

"They can not help seeing and understanding; beauty such as this is its
own interpreter. Surely such a glimpse of nature as we are now enjoying
does people more good than a hundred prayer-meetings in a stuffy
chapel."

"Beauty slides into one's soul on a day like this, just as something--I
forget what--slid into the soul of the Ancient Mariner; doesn't it?"

"Of course it does; and you will find that these people--now that they
are brought face to face with it--will be just as ready to worship
abstract beauty as ever the Greeks were. The fault has not been with the
poor for not having worshipped beauty, but with the rich for not having
shown them sufficient beauty to worship. The rich have tried to choke
them off with religion instead, because it came cheaper and was less
troublesome to produce."

"Then do you think that the love of beauty will elevate these people
more and make them happier than Christianity has done?"

"Most assuredly I do. Had our climate been sunnier and the fight for
existence less bitter, I believe that Christianity would have died out
in England years ago; but the worship of sorrow will always have its
attractions for the sorrowful; and the doctrine of renunciation will
never be without its charm for those unfortunate ones to whom poverty
and disease have stood sponsors, and have renounced all life's good
things in their name before ever they saw the light. Man makes his god
in his own image; and thus it comes to pass that while the strong and
joyous Greek adored Zeus on Olympus, the anæmic and neurotic Englishman
worships Christ on Calvary. Do you tell me that if people were happy
they would bow down before a stricken and crucified God? Not they. And I
want to make them so happy that they shall cease to have any desire for
a suffering Deity."

"Well, you have made them happy enough for to-day, at any rate," said
Elisabeth, as she looked up at him with gratitude and admiration. "I saw
them all when they were starting, and there wasn't one face among them
that hadn't joy written on every feature in capital letters."

"Then in that case they won't be troubling their minds to-day about
their religion; they will save it for the gloomy days, as we save
narcotics for times of pain. You may depend upon that."

"I'm not so sure: their religion is more of a reality to them than you
think," Elisabeth replied.

While Alan was thus, enjoying himself in his own fashion, his guests
were enjoying themselves in theirs; and as they drove through summer's
fairyland, they, too, talked by the way.

"Eh! but the May-blossom's a pretty sight," exclaimed Caleb Bateson, as
the big wagonettes rolled along the country roads. "I never saw it finer
than it is this year--not in all the years I've lived in Mershire; and
Mershire's the land for May-blossom."

"It do look pretty," agreed his wife. "I only wish Lucy Ellen was here
to see it; she was always a one for the May-blossom. Why, when she was
ever such a little girl she'd come home carrying branches of it bigger
than herself, till she looked like nothing but a walking May-pole."

"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Hankey, who happened to be driving in the same
vehicle as the Batesons, "she'll be feeling sad and homesick to see it
all again, I'll be bound."

Lucy Ellen's mother laughed contentedly. "Folks haven't time to feel
homesick when they've got a husband to look after; he soon takes the
place of May-blossom, bless you!"

"You're in luck to see all your children married and settled before the
Lord has been pleased to take you," remarked Mrs. Hankey, with envy in
her voice.

"Well, I'm glad for the two lads to have somebody to look after them,
I'm bound to say; I feel now as they've some one to air their shirts
when I'm not there, for you never can trust a man to look after
himself--never. Men have no sense to know what is good for 'em and what
is bad for 'em, poor things! But Lucy Ellen is a different thing. Of
course I'm pleased for her to have a home of her own, and such nice
furniture as she's got, too, and in such a good circuit; but when your
daughter is married you don't see her as often as you want to, and it is
no good pretending as you do."

"That's true," agreed Caleb Bateson, with a big sigh; "and I never cease
to miss my little lass."

"She ain't no little lass now, Mr. Bateson," argued Mrs. Hankey; "Lucy
Ellen must be forty, if she's a day."

"So she be, Mrs. Hankey--so she be; but she is my little lass to me, all
the same, and always will be. The children never grow up to them as
loves 'em. They are always our children, just as we are always the
Lord's children; and we never leave off a-screening and a-sheltering o'
them, any more than He ever leaves off a-screening and a-sheltering of
us."

"I'm glad to hear as Lucy Ellen has married into a good circuit. Unless
the Lord build the house we know how they labour in vain that build it;
and the Lord can't do much unless He has a good minister to help Him. I
don't deny as He _may_ work through local preachers; but I like a
regular superintendent myself, with one or more ministers under him."

"Oh! Lucy Ellen lives in one of the best circuits in the Connexion,"
said Mrs. Bateson proudly; "they have an ex-president as superintendent,
and three ministers under him, and a supernumerary as well. They never
hear the same preached more than once a month; it's something grand!"

"Eh! it's a fine place is Craychester," added Caleb; "they held
Conference there two years ago."

"It must be a grand thing to live in a place where they hold
Conference," remarked Mrs. Hankey.

"It is indeed," agreed Mrs. Bateson; "Lucy Ellen said it seemed for all
the world like heaven, to see so many ministers about, all in their
black coats and white neckcloths. And then such preaching as they heard!
It isn't often young folks enjoy such privileges, and so I told her."

"When all's said and done, there's nothing like a good sermon for giving
folks real pleasure. Nothing in this world comes up to it, and I doubt
if there'll be anything much better in the next," said Caleb; "I don't
see as how there can be."

His friends all agreed with him, and continued, for the rest of the
drive, to discuss the respective merits of various discourses they had
been privileged to hear.

It was a glorious day. The sky was blue, with just enough white clouds
flitting about to show how blue the blue part really was; and the
varying shadows kept passing, like the caress of some unseen yet
ever-protecting Hand, over the green nearnesses and the violet distances
of a country whose foundations seemed to be of emerald and amethyst, and
its walls and gateways of pearl. The large company from the Osierfield
drove across the breezy common at the foot of Sedgehill Ridge, and then
plunged into a network of lanes which led them, by sweet and mysterious
ways, to the great highway from the Midlands to the coast of the western
sea. On they went, past the little hamlet where the Danes and the Saxons
fought a great fight more than a thousand years ago, and which is still
called by a strange Saxon name, meaning "the burying-place of the
slain"; and the little hamlet smiled in the summer sunshine, as if with
kindly memories of those old warriors whose warfare had been
accomplished so many centuries ago, and who lie together, beneath the
white blossom, in the arms of the great peacemaker called Death, waiting
for the resurrection morning which that blossom is sent to foretell. On,
between man's walls of gray stone, till they came to God's walls of red
sandstone; and then up a steep hill to another common, where the
sweet-scented gorse made a golden pavement, and where there suddenly
burst upon their sight a view so wide and so wonderful that those who
look upon it with the seeing eye and the understanding heart catch
glimpses of the King in His beauty through the fairness of the land that
is very far off. On past the mossy stone, like an overgrown and
illiterate milestone, which marks the boundary between Mershire and
Salopshire; and then through a typical English village, noteworthy
because the rites of Mayday, with May-queen and May-pole to boot, are
still celebrated there exactly as they were celebrated some three
hundred years ago. At last they came to a picturesque wall and gateway,
built of the red stone which belongs to that part of the country, and
which has a trick of growing so much redder at evening-time that it
looks as if the cold stone were blushing with pleasure at being kissed
Good-night by the sun; and then through a wood sloping on the left side
down to a little stream, which was so busy talking to itself about its
own concerns that it had not time to leap and sparkle for the amusement
of passers-by; until they drew up in front of a quaint old castle, built
of the same stone as the outer walls and gateway.

The family were away from home, so the whole of the castle was at the
disposal of Alan and his party, and they had permission to go wherever
they liked. The state-rooms were in front of the building and led out
of each other, so that when all the doors were open any one could see
right from one end of the castle to the other. Dinner was to be served
in the large saloon at the back, built over what was once the courtyard;
and while his servants were laying the tables with the cold viands which
they had brought with them, Alan took his guests through the state-rooms
to see the pictures, and endeavoured to carry out his plan of educating
them by pointing out to them some of the finer works of art.

"This," he said, stopping in front of a portrait, "is a picture of Lady
Mary Wortley-Montagu, who was born here, painted by one of the first
portrait-painters of her day. I want you to look at her hands, and to
notice how exquisitely they are painted. Also I wish to call your
attention to the expression of her face. You know that it is the duty of
art to interpret nature--that is to say, to show to ordinary people
those hidden beauties and underlying meanings of common things which
they would never be able to find out for themselves; and I think that in
the expression on this woman's face the artist has shown forth, in a
most wonderful way, the dissatisfaction and bitterness of her heart. As
you look at her face you seem to see right into her soul, and to
understand how she was foredoomed by nature and temperament to ask too
much of life and to receive too little."

"Well, to be sure!" remarked Mrs. Bateson, in an undertone, to her lord
and master; "she is a bit like our superintendent's wife, only not so
stout. And what a gown she has got on! I should say that satin is worth
five-and-six a yard if it is worth a penny. And I call it a sin and a
shame to have a dirty green parrot sitting on your shoulder when you're
wearing satin like that. If she'd had any sense she'd have fed the
animals before she put her best gown on."

"I never could abide parrots," joined in Mrs. Hankey; "they smell so."

"And as for her looking dissatisfied and all that," continued Mrs.
Bateson, "I for one can't see it. But if she did, it was all a pack of
rubbish. What had she to grumble at, I should like to know, with a satin
gown on at five-and-six a yard?"

By this time Alan had moved on to another picture. "This represents an
unhappy marriage," he explained. "At first sight you see nothing but two
well-dressed people sitting at table; but as you look into the picture
you perceive the misery in the woman's face and the cruelty in the
man's, and you realize all that they mean."

"Well, I see nothing more at second sight," whispered Mrs. Hankey;
"except that the tablecloth might have been cleaner. There's another of
your grumbling fine ladies! Now for sure she'd nothing to grumble at,
sitting so grand at table with a glass of sherry-wine to drink."

"The husband looks a cantankerous chap," remarked Caleb.

"Poor thing! it's his liver," said Mrs. Bateson, taking up the cudgels
as usual on behalf of the bilious and oppressed. "You can see from his
complexion that he is out of order, and that all that rich dinner will
do him no good. It was his wife's duty to see that he had something
plain to eat, with none of them sauces and fal-lals, instead of playing
the fine lady and making troubles out of nothing. I've no patience with
her!"

"Still, he do look as if he'd a temper," persisted Mr. Bateson.

"And if he do, Caleb, what of that? If a man in his own house hasn't the
right to show a bit of temper, I should like to know who has? I've no
patience with the women that will get married and have a man of their
own; and then cry their eyes out because the man isn't an old woman. If
they want meekness and obedience, let 'em remain single and keep lapdogs
and canaries; and leave the husbands for those as can manage 'em and
enjoy 'em, for there ain't enough to go round as it is." And Mrs.
Bateson waxed quite indignant.

Here Tremaine took up his parable. "This weird figure, clothed in skins,
and feeding upon nothing more satisfying than locusts and wild honey, is
a type of all those who are set apart for the difficult and
unsatisfactory lot of heralds and forerunners. They see the good time
coming, and make ready the way for it, knowing all the while that its
fuller light and wider freedom are not for them; they lead their fellows
to the very borders of the promised land, conscious that their own
graves are already dug in the wilderness. No great social or political
movement has ever been carried on without their aid; and they have never
reaped the benefits of those reforms which they lived and died to
compass. Perhaps there are no sadder sights on the page of history than
those solitary figures, of all nations and all times, who have foretold
the coming of the dawn and yet died before it was yet day."'

"Did you ever?" exclaimed Mrs. Bateson _sotto voce_; "a grown man like
that, and not to know John the Baptist when he sees him! Forerunners and
heralds indeed! Why, it's John the Baptist as large as life, and those
as don't recognise him ought to be ashamed of theirselves."

"Lucy Ellen would have known who it was when she was three years old,"
said Caleb proudly.

"And so she ought; I'd have slapped her if she hadn't, and richly she'd
have deserved it."

"It's a comfort as Mr. Tremaine's mother is in her grave," remarked Mrs.
Hankey, not a whit behind the others as regards shocked sensibilities;
"this would have been a sad day for her if she had been alive."

"And it would!" agreed Mrs. Bateson warmly. "I know if one of my
children hadn't known John the Baptist by sight, I should have been that
ashamed I should never have held up my head again in this world--never!"

Mr. Bateson endeavoured to take a charitable view of the situation. "I
expect as the poor lad's schooling was neglected through having lost his
parents; and there's some things as you never seem to master at all
except you master 'em when you're young--the Books of the Bible being
one of them."

"My lads could say the Books of the Bible through, without stopping to
take breath, when they were six, and Lucy Ellen when she was five and a
half."

"Well, then, Kezia, you should be all the more ready to take pity on
them poor orphans as haven't had the advantages as our children have
had."

"So I am, Caleb; and if it had been one of the minor prophets I
shouldn't have said a word--I can't always tell Jonah myself unless
there's a whale somewhere at the back; but John the Baptist----!"

When the inspection of the pictures had been accomplished, the company
sat down to dinner in the large saloon; and Alan was slightly
disconcerted when they opened the proceedings by singing, at the top of
their voices, "Be present at our table, Lord." Elisabeth, on seeing the
expression of his face, sorely wanted to laugh; but she stifled this
desire, as she had learned by experience that humour was not one of
Alan's strong points. Now Christopher could generally see when a thing
was funny, even when the joke was at his own expense; but Alan took life
more seriously, which--as Elisabeth assured herself--showed what a much
more earnest man than Christopher he was, in spite of his less orthodox
opinions. So she made up her mind that she would not catch Christopher's
eye on the present occasion, as she usually did when anything amused
her, because it was cruel to laugh at the frustration of poor Alan's
high-flown plans; and then naturally she looked straight at the spot
where Chris was presiding over a table, and returned his smile of
perfect comprehension. It was one of Elisabeth's peculiarities that she
invariably did the thing which she had definitely made up her mind not
to do.

After dinner the party broke up and wandered about, in small
detachments, over the park and through the woods and by the mere, until
it was tea-time. Alan spent most of his afternoon in explaining to
Elisabeth the more excellent ways whereby the poor may be enabled to
share the pleasures of the rich; and Christopher spent most of his in
carrying Johnnie Stubbs to the mere and taking him for a row, and so
helping the crippled youth to forget for a short time that he was not as
other men are, and that it was out of pity that he, who never worked,
had been permitted to take the holiday which he could not earn.

After tea Alan and Elisabeth were standing on the steps leading from the
saloon to the garden.

"What a magnificent fellow that is!" exclaimed Alan, pointing to the
huge figure of Caleb Bateson, who was talking to Jemima Stubbs on the
far side of the lawn. Caleb certainly justified this admiration, for he
was a fine specimen of a Mershire puddler--and there is no finer race of
men to be found anywhere than the puddlers of Mershire.

Elisabeth's eyes twinkled. "That is one of your anæmic and neurotic
Christians," she remarked demurely.

Displeasure settled on Alan's brow; he greatly objected to Elisabeth's
habit of making fun of things, and had tried his best to cure her of it.
To a great extent he had succeeded (for the time being); but even yet
the cloven foot of Elisabeth's levity now and then showed itself, much
to his regret.

"Exceptions do not disprove rules," he replied coldly. "Moreover,
Bateson is probably religious rather from the force of convention than
of conviction." Tremaine never failed to enjoy his own rounded
sentences, and this one pleased him so much that it almost succeeded in
dispelling the cloud which Elisabeth's ill-timed gibe had created.

"He is a class-leader and a local preacher," she added.

"Those terms convey no meaning to my mind."

"Don't they? Well, they mean that Caleb not only loyally supports the
government of Providence, but is prepared to take office under it,"
Elisabeth explained.

Alan never quarrelled with people; he always reproved them. "You make a
great mistake--and an extremely feminine one--Miss Farringdon, in
invariably deducting general rules from individual instances. Believe
me, this is a most illogical form of reasoning, and leads to erroneous,
and sometimes dangerous, conclusions."

Elisabeth tossed her head; she did not like to be reproved, even by Alan
Tremaine. "My conclusions are nearly always correct, anyhow," she
retorted; "and if you get to the right place, I don't see that it
matters how you go there. I never bother my head about the 'rolling
stock' or the 'permanent way' of my intuitions; I know they'll bring me
to the right conclusion, and I leave them to work out their Bradshaw for
themselves."

In the meantime Jemima Stubbs was pouring out a recital of her
grievances into the ever-sympathetic ear of Caleb Bateson.

"You don't seem to be enjoying yourself, my lass," he had said in his
cheery voice, laying a big hand in tender caress upon the girl's narrow
shoulders.

"And how should I, Mr. Bateson, not having a beau nor nobody to talk
to?" she replied in her quavering treble. "What with havin' first mother
to nurse when I was a little gell, and then havin' Johnnie to look
after, I've never had time to make myself look pretty and to get a beau,
like other gells. And now I'm too old for that sort of thing, and yet
I've never had my chance, as you may say."

"Poor lass! It's a hard life as you've had, and no mistake."

"That it is, Mr. Bateson. Men wants gells as look pretty and make 'em
laugh; they don't care for the dull, dowdy ones, such as me; and yet how
can a gell be light-hearted and gay, I should like to know, when it's
work, work, work, all the day, and nurse, nurse, nurse, all the night?
Yet the men don't make no allowance for that--not they. They just see as
a gell is plain and stupid, and then they has nothing more to do with
her, and she can go to Jericho for all they cares."

"You've had a hard time of it, my lass," repeated Bateson, in his full,
deep voice.

"Right you are, Mr. Bateson; and it's made my hair gray, and my face all
wrinkles, and my hands a sight o' roughness and ugliness, till I'm a
regular old woman and a fright at that. And I'm but thirty-five now,
though no one 'ud believe it to look at me."

"Thirty-five, are you? B'ain't you more than that, Jemima, for surely
you look more?"

"I know I does, but I ain't; and lots o' women--them as has had easy
times and their way made smooth for them--look little more than gells
when they are thirty-five; and the men run after 'em as fast as if they
was only twenty. But I'm an old woman, I am, and I've never had time to
be a young one, and I've never had a beau nor nothing."

"It seems now, Jemima, as if the Lord was dealing a bit hard with you;
but never you fret yourself; He'll explain it all and make it all up to
you in His own good time."

"I only hope He may, Mr. Bateson."

"My lass, do you remember how Saint Paul said, 'From henceforth let no
man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus'? Now
it seems to me that all the gray hairs and the wrinkles and the
roughness that come to us when we are working for others and doing our
duty, are nothing more nor less than the marks of the Lord Jesus."

"That's a comfortin' view of the matter, I don't deny."

"There are lots o' men in this world, Jemima, and still more women, who
grow old before their time working for other people; and I take it that
when folks talk o' their wrinkles, the Lord says, 'My Name shall be in
their foreheads'; and when folks talk o' their gray hairs, He says,
'They shall walk with Me in white: for they are worthy.' And why do we
mark the things that belong to us? Why, so as we can know 'em again and
can claim 'em as our own afore the whole world. And that's just why the
Lord marks us: so as all the world shall know as we are His, and so as
no man shall ever pluck us out of His Hand."

Jemima looked gratefully up at the kindly prophet who was trying to
comfort her. "Law! Mr. Bateson, that's a consolin' way of looking at
things, and I only hope as you're right. But all the same, I'd have
liked to have had a beau of my own just for onst, like other gells. I
dessay it's very wicked o' me to feel like this, and it's enough to make
the Lord angry with me; but it don't seem to me as there's anything in
religion that quite makes up for never havin' had a beau o' your own."

"The Lord won't be angry with you, my lass; don't you fear. He made
women and He understands 'em, and He ain't the one to blame 'em for
being as He Himself made 'em. Remember the Book says, 'as one whom his
mother comforteth'; and I hold that means as He understands women and
their troubles better than the kindest father ever could. And He won't
let His children give up things for His sake without paying them back
some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold; and don't you ever
get thinking that He will."

"As Jemima says, yours is a comfortable doctrine, Bateson, but I am
afraid you have no real foundation for your consoling belief," exclaimed
Alan Tremaine, coming up and interrupting the conversation.

"Eh! but I have, sir, saving your presence; I know in Whom I have
believed; and what a man has once known for certain, he can never not
know again as long as he lives."

"But Christianity is a myth, a fable. You may imagine and pretend that
it is true, but you can not know that it is."

"But I do know, sir, begging your pardon, as well as I know you are
standing here and the sun is shining over yonder."

Alan smiled rather scornfully: how credulous were the lower classes, he
thought in his pride of intellectual superiority. "I do not understand
how you can know a thing that has never been proved," he said.

The giant turned and looked on his fragile frame with eyes full of a
great pity. "You do not understand, you say, sir that's just it; and I
am too foolish and ignorant to be able to explain things rightly to a
gentleman like you; but the Lord will explain it to you when He thinks
fit. You are young yet, sir, and the way stretches long before you, and
the mysteries of God are hidden from your eyes. But when you have loved
and cherished a woman as your own flesh, and when you have had little
children clinging round your knees, you'll understand rightly enough
then without needing any man to teach you."

"My good man, do you suppose a wife and children would teach me more
than the collected wisdom of the ages?"

"A sight more, Mr. Tremaine--a sight more. Folks don't learn the best
things from books, sir. Why, when the Lord Himself wrote the law on
tables of stone, they got broken; but when He writes it on the fleshly
tables of our hearts, it lives forever. And His Handwriting is the love
we bear for our fellow-creatures, and--through them--for Him; at least,
so it seems to me."

"That is pure imagination and sentiment, Bateson. Very pretty and
poetic, no doubt; but it won't hold water."

Caleb smiled indulgently. "Wait till you've got a little lass of your
own, like my Lucy Ellen, sir. Not that you'll ever have one quite as
good as her, bless her! for her equal never has been seen in this world,
and never will. But when you've got a little lass of your own, and know
as you'd be tortured to death quite cheerful-like just to save her a
minute's pain, you'll laugh at all the nonsense that's written in books,
and feel you know a sight better than all of 'em put together."

"I don't quite see why."

"Well, you see, sir, it's like this. When the dove came back to the ark
with the olive leaf in her mouth, Noah didn't begin sayin' how wonderful
it was for a leaf to have grown out of nothing all of a sudden, as some
folks are so fond of saying. Not he; he'd too much sense. He says to his
sons, 'Look here: a leaf here means a tree somewhere, and the sooner we
make for that tree the better!' And so it is with us. When we feel that
all at onst there's somebody that matters more to us than ourselves, we
know that this wonderful feelin' hasn't sprung out of the selfishness
that filled our hearts before, but is just a leaf off a great Tree
which is a shadow and resting-place for the whole world."

Tremaine looked thoughtful; Caleb's childlike faith and extensive
vocabulary were alike puzzles to him. He did not understand that in
homes--however simple--where the Bible is studied until it becomes as
household words, the children are accustomed to a "well of English
undefiled"; and so, unconsciously, mould their style upon and borrow
their expressions from the Book which, even when taken only from a
literary standpoint, is the finest Book ever read by man.

After a minute's silence he said: "I have been wondering whether it
really is any pleasure to the poor to see the homes of the rich, or
whether it only makes them dissatisfied. Now, what do you think,
Bateson?"

"Well, sir, if it makes 'em dissatisfied it didn't ought to."

"Perhaps not. Still, I have a good deal of sympathy with socialism
myself; and I know I should feel it very hard if I were poor, while
other men, not a whit better and probably worse than myself, were rich."

"And so it would be hard, sir, if this was the end of everything, and it
was all haphazard, as it were; so hard that no sensible man could see it
without going clean off his head altogether. But when you rightly
understand as it's all the Master's doing, and that He knows what He's
about a sight better than we could teach Him, it makes a wonderful
difference. Whether we're rich or poor, happy or sorrowful, is His
business and He can attend to that; but whether we serve Him rightly in
the place where He has put us, is our business, and it'll take us all
our time to look after it without trying to do His work as well."

Tremaine merely smiled, and Bateson went on--

"You see, sir, there's work in the world of all kinds for all sorts; and
whether they be lords and ladies, or just poor folks like we, they've
got to do the work that the Lord has set them to do, and not to go
hankering after each other's. Why, Mr. Tremaine, if at our place the
puddlers wanted to do the work of the shinglers, and the shinglers
wanted to do the work of the rollers, and the rollers wanted to do the
work of the masters, the Osierfield wouldn't be for long the biggest
ironworks in Mershire. Not it! You have to use your common sense in
religion as in everything else."

"You think that religion is the only thing to make people contented and
happy? So do I; but I don't think that the religion to do this
effectually is Christianity."

"No more do I, sir; that's where you make a mistake, begging your
pardon; you go confusing principles with persons. It isn't my love for
my wife that lights the fire and cooks the dinner and makes my little
home like heaven to me--it's my wife herself; it wasn't my children's
faith in their daddy that fed 'em and clothed 'em when they were too
little to work for themselves--it was me myself; and it isn't the
religion of Christ that keeps us straight in this world and makes us
ready for the next--it is Christ Himself."

Thus the rich man and the poor man talked together, moving along
parallel lines, neither understanding, and each looking down upon the
other--Alan with the scornful pity of the scholar who has delved in the
dust of dreary negatives which generations of doubters have gradually
heaped up; and Caleb with the pitiful scorn of one who has been into the
sanctuary of God, and so learned to understand the end of these men.

Late that night, when all the merrymakers had gone to their homes,
Tremaine sat smoking in the moonlight on the terrace of the Moat House.

"It is strange," he said to himself, "what a hold the Christian myth has
taken upon the minds of the English people, and especially of the
working classes. I can see how its pathos might appeal to those whose
health was spoiled and whose physique was stunted by poverty and misery;
but it puzzles me to find a magnificent giant such as Bateson, a man too
strong to have nerves and too healthy to have delusions, as thoroughly
imbued with its traditions as any one. I fail to understand the secret
of its power."

At that very moment Caleb was closing the day, as was his custom, with
family prayer, and his prayer ran thus--

"We beseech Thee, O Lord, look kindly upon the stranger who has this day
shown such favour unto Thy servants; pay back all that he has given us
sevenfold into his bosom. He is very young, Lord, and very ignorant and
very foolish; his eyes are holden so that he can not see the operations
of Thy Hands; but he is not very far from Thy Kingdom. Lead him,
Heavenly Father, in the way that he should go; open his eyes that he may
behold the hidden things of Thy Law; look upon him and love him, as Thou
didst aforetime another young man who had great possessions. Lord, tell
him that this earth is only Thy footstool; show him that the beauty he
sees all around him is the hem of Thy garment; and teach him that the
wisdom of this world is but foolishness with Thee. And this we beg, O
Lord, for Christ's sake. Amen."

Thus Caleb prayed, and Alan could not hear him, and could not have
understood him even if he had heard.

But there was One who heard, and understood.




CHAPTER VII

BROADER VIEWS

    He proved that Man is nothing more
      Than educated sod,
    Forgetting that the schoolmen's lore
      Is foolishness with God.


"Do you know what I mean to do as soon as Cousin Maria will let me?"
Elisabeth asked of Christopher, as the two were walking together--as
they walked not unfrequently--in Badgering Woods.

"No; please tell me."

"I mean to go up to the Slade School, and study there, and learn to be a
great artist."

"It is sometimes a difficult lesson to learn to be great."

"Nevertheless, I mean to learn it." The possibility of failure never
occurred to Elisabeth. "There is so much I want to teach the world, and
I feel I can only do it through my pictures; and I want to begin at
once, for fear I shouldn't get it all in before I die. There is plenty
of time, of course; I'm only twenty-one now, so that gives me forty-nine
years at the least; but forty-nine years will be none too much in which
to teach the world all that I want to teach it."

"And what time shall you reserve for learning all that the world has to
teach you?"

"I never thought of that. I'm afraid I sha'n't have much time for
learning."

"Then I am afraid you won't do much good by teaching."

Elisabeth laughed in all the arrogance of youth. "Yes, I shall; the
things you teach best are the things you know, and not the things you
have learned."

"I am not so sure of that."

"Surely genius does greater things than culture."

"I grant you that culture without genius does no great things; neither,
I think, does genius without culture. Untrained genius is a terrible
waste of power. So many people seem to think that if they have a spark
of genius they can do without culture; while really it is because they
have a spark of genius that they ought to be, and are worthy to be,
cultivated to the highest point."

"Well, anyway--culture or no culture--I mean to set the Thames on fire
some day."

"You do, do you? Well, it is a laudable and not uncommon ambition."

"Yes, I do; and you mustn't look so doubtful on the subject, as it isn't
pretty manners."

"Did I look doubtful? I'm very sorry."

"Horribly so. I know exactly what you will do, you are so shockingly
matter-of-fact. First you will prove to a demonstration that it is
utterly impossible for such an inferior being as a woman to set the
Thames on fire at all. Then--when I've done it and London is
illuminated--you will write to the papers to show that the 'flash-point'
of the river is decidedly too low, or else such an unlooked-for
catastrophe could never have occurred. Then you will get the Government
to take the matter up, and to bring a charge of arson against the New
Woman. And, finally, you will have notices put up all along the banks
from Goring to Greenwich, 'Ladies are requested not to bring
inflammatory articles near the river; the right of setting the Thames on
fire is now--as formerly--reserved specially for men.' And then you will
try to set it on fire yourself."

"A most characteristic programme, I must confess. But now tell me; when
you have set your Thames on fire, and covered yourself with laurels, and
generally turned the world upside down, sha'n't you allow some humble
and devoted beggarman to share your kingdom with you? You might find it
a little dull alone in your glory, as you are such a sociable person."

"Well, if I do, of course I shall let some nice man share it with me."

"I see. You will stoop from your solitary splendour and say to the
devoted beggarman, 'Allow me to offer you the post of King Consort; it
is a mere sinecure, and confers only the semblance and not the reality
of power; but I hope you will accept it, as I have nothing better to
give you, and if you are submissive and obedient I will make you as
comfortable as I can under the circumstances.'"

"Good gracious! I hope I am too wise ever to talk to a man in that way.
No, no, Chris; I shall find some nice man, who has seen through me all
the time and who hasn't been taken in by me, as the world has; and I
shall say to him, 'By the way, here is a small fire and a few laurel
leaves; please warm your hands at the one and wear the others in your
button-hole.' That is the proper way in which a woman should treat
fame--merely as a decoration for the man whom she has chosen."

"O noble judge! O excellent young woman!" exclaimed Christopher. "But
what are some of the wonderful things which you are so anxious to
teach?"

Elisabeth's mood changed at once, and her face grew serious. "I want to
teach people that they were sent into the world to be happy, and not to
be miserable; and that there is no virtue in turning their backs to the
sunshine and choosing to walk in the shade. I want to teach people that
the world is beautiful, and that it is only a superficial view that
finds it common and unclean. I want to teach people that human nature is
good and not evil, and that life is a glorious battlefield and not a
sordid struggle. In short, I want to teach people the dignity of
themselves; and there is no grander lesson."

"Except, perhaps, the unworthiness of themselves," suggested
Christopher.

"No, no, Chris; you are wrong to be so hard and cynical. Can't you
understand how I am longing to help the men and women I see around me,
who are dying for want of joy and beauty in their lives? It is the old
struggle between Hellenism and Hebraism--between happiness and
righteousness. We are sorely in need, here in England to-day, of the
Greek spirit of Pantheism, which found God in life and art and nature,
'as well as in sorrow and renunciation and death."

"But it is in sorrow and renunciation and death that we need Him; and
you, who have always had everything you want, can not understand this:
no more could the Pagans and the Royalists; but the early Christians and
the persecuted Puritans could."

"Puritanism has much to answer for in England," said Elisabeth; "we have
to thank Puritanism for teaching men that only by hurting themselves can
they please their Maker, and that God has given them tastes and hopes
and desires merely in order to mortify the same. And it is all
false--utterly false. The God of the Pagan is surely a more merciful
Being than the God of the Puritan."

"A more indulgent Being, perhaps, but not necessarily a more merciful
one, Elisabeth. I disagree with the Puritans on many points, but I can
not help admitting that their conception of God was a fine one, even
though it erred on the side of severity. The Pagan converted the Godhead
into flesh, remember; but the Puritan exalted manhood into God."

"Still, I never could bear the Puritans," Elisabeth went on; "they
turned the England of Queen Elizabeth--the most glorious England the
world has ever known--into one enormous Nonconformist Conscience; and
England has never been perfectly normal since. Besides, they discovered
that nature, and art, and human affection, which are really revelations
of God, were actually sins against Him. As I said before, I can never
forgive the Puritans for eradicating the beauty from holiness, and for
giving man the spirit of heaviness in place of the garment of praise."

"I wonder if Paganism helped you much when you were poor and ill and
unhappy, and things in general had gone wrong with you. I daresay it was
very nice for the cheerful, prosperous people; but how about those who
had never got what they wanted out of life, and were never likely to get
it?" Christopher, like other people, looked at most matters from his own
individual standpoint; and his own individual standpoint was not at all
a comfortable spot just then.

"The Greeks suffered and died as did the Jews and the Christians,"
replied Elisabeth, "yet they were a joyous and light-hearted race. It is
not sorrow that saddens the world, but rather modern Christianity's
idealization of sorrow. I do not believe we should be half as miserable
as we are if we did not believe that there is virtue in misery, and that
by disowning our mercies and discarding our blessings we are currying
favour in the eyes of the Being, Who, nevertheless, has showered those
mercies and those blessings upon us."

Thus had Alan Tremaine's influence gradually unmoored Elisabeth from the
old faiths in which she had been brought up; and he had done it so
gradually that the girl was quite unconscious of how far she had drifted
from her former anchorage. He was too well-bred ever to be blatant in
his unbelief--he would as soon have thought of attacking a man's family
to his face as of attacking his creed; but subtly and with infinite tact
he endeavoured to prove that to adapt ancient revelations to modern
requirements was merely putting new wine into old bottles and mending
old garments with new cloth; and Elisabeth was as yet too young and
inexperienced to see any fallacy in his carefully prepared arguments.

She had nobody to help her to resist him, poor child! and she was
dazzled with the consciousness of intellectual power which his attitude
of mind appeared to take for granted. Miss Farringdon was cast in too
stern a mould to have any sympathy or patience with the blind gropings
of an undisciplined young soul; and Christopher--who generally
understood and sympathized with all Elisabeth's difficulties and
phases--was so jealous of her obvious attachment to Tremaine, and so
unhappy on account of it, that for the time being the faithful friend
was entirely swallowed up in the irate lover, sighing like one of the
Osierfield furnaces. Of course this was very unfair and tiresome of
him--nobody could deny that; but it is sometimes trying to the
amiability of even the best of men to realize that the purely mundane
and undeserved accident of want of money can shut them off entirely from
ever attaining to the best kind of happiness whereof their natures are
capable--and especially when they know that their natures are capable of
attaining and appreciating a very high standard of happiness indeed. It
may not be right to be unsociable because one is unhappy, but it is very
human and most particularly masculine; and Christopher just then was
both miserable and a man.

There was much about Alan that was very attractive to Elisabeth: he
possessed a certain subtlety of thought and an almost feminine quickness
of perception which appealed powerfully to her imagination. Imagination
was Elisabeth's weak, as well as her strong, point. She was incapable of
seeing people as they really were; but erected a purely imaginary
edifice of character on the foundations of such attributes as her rapid
intuition either rightly or wrongly perceived them to possess. As a
rule, she thought better of her friends than they deserved--or, at any
rate, she recognised in them that ideal which they were capable of
attaining, but whereto they sometimes failed to attain.

Life is apt to be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who
idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality;
for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put
their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their
etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to
the fond, trusting souls, half-hearted lovers, semi-sincere friends, and
acquaintances who care for them only as the world can care. Poor
imaginative women--who dreamed that you had found a perfect knight and a
faithful friend, and then discovered that these were only an ordinary
selfish man and woman after all--life has many more such surprises in
store for you; and the surprises will shock you less and hurt you more
as the years roll on! But though life will have its surprises for you,
death perchance will have none; for when the secrets of all hearts are
opened, and all thwarted desires are made known, it may be that the
ordinary selfish man and woman will stand forth as the perfect knight
and faithful friend that God intended them, and you believed them, and
they tried yet failed to be; and you will be satisfied at last when you
see your beloved ones wake up after His likeness, and will smile as you
say to them, "So it is really you after all."

Although Tremaine might be lacking in his duty toward God, he fulfilled
(in the spirit if not in the letter) his duty toward his neighbour; and
Elisabeth was fairly dazzled by his many schemes for making life easier
and happier to the people who dwelt in the darkness of the Black
Country.

It was while he was thus figuring as her ideal hero that Elisabeth went
to stay with Felicia Herbert, near a manufacturing town in Yorkshire.
Felicia had been once or twice to the Willows, and was well acquainted
with the physical and biographical characteristics of the place; and she
cherished a profound admiration both for Miss Farringdon and Christopher
Thornley. Tremaine she had never met--he had been abroad each time that
she had visited Sedgehill--but she disapproved most heartily of his
influence upon Elisabeth, and of his views as set forth by that young
lady. Felicia had been brought up along extremely strict lines, and in a
spirit of comfortable intolerance of all forms of religion not
absolutely identical with her own; consequently, a man with no form of
religion at all was to her a very terrible monster indeed. On the
Sundays of her early youth she had perused a story treating of an
Unbeliever (always spelled with a capital U), and the punishments that
were meted out to the daughter of light who was unequally yoked with
him; and she was imbued with a strong conviction that these same
punishments were destined to fall upon Elisabeth's head, should
Elisabeth incline favourably to the (at present) hypothetical suit of
the master of the Moat House. Thus it happened that when Elisabeth came
to the Herberts', full of girlish admiration for Alan Tremaine, Felicia
did her best to ripen that admiration into love by abusing Alan in and
out of season, and by endeavouring to prove that an attachment to him
would be a soul-destroyer of the most irreparable completeness.

"It is no use talking to me about his goodness," she said; "nobody is
good who isn't a Christian."

"But he is good," persisted Elisabeth--"most tremendously good. The poor
people simply adore him, he does such a lot for them; and he couldn't
have lovelier thoughts and higher ideals if he were a girl instead of a
man. There must be different ways of goodness, Felicia."

"There are not different ways of goodness; mamma says there are not, and
it is very wicked to believe that there are. I am afraid you are not
half as religious as you were at Fox How."

"Yes, I am; but I have learned that true religion is a state of mind
rather than a code of dogmas."

Felicia looked uncomfortable. "I wish you wouldn't talk like that; I am
sure mamma wouldn't like it--she can not bear anything that borders on
the profane."

"I am not bordering on the profane; I am only saying what I uphold is
true. I can not take things for granted as you do; I have to think them
out for myself; and I have come to the conclusion that what a man is is
of far more importance than what a man believes."

"But you ought not to think things like that, Elisabeth; it isn't right
to do so."

"I can't help thinking it. I am an independent being with a mind of my
own, and I must make up that mind according to what I see going on
around me. What on earth is the good of having an intellect, if you
submit that intellect to the will of another? I wonder how you can take
your ideas all ready-made from your mother," exclaimed Elisabeth, who
just then was taking all hers ready-made from Alan Tremaine.

"Well, I can not argue. I am not clever enough; and, besides, mamma
doesn't like us to argue upon religious subjects--she says it is
unsettling; so I will only say that I know you are wrong, and then we
will let the matter drop and talk about Christopher. How is he?"

"Oh, he is all right, only very horrid. To tell you the truth, I am
getting to dislike Christopher."

"Elisabeth!" Felicia's Madonna-like face became quite sorrowful.

"Well, I am; and so would you, if he was as stand-off to you as he is to
me. I can't think what is wrong with him; but whatever I do, and however
nice I try to be to him, the North Pole is warm and neighbourly compared
with him. I'm sick of him and his unsociable ways!"

"But you and he used to be such friends."

"I know that; and I would be friends now if he would let me. But how can
you be friends with a man who is as reserved as the Great Pyramid and as
uncommunicative as the Sphinx, and who sticks up iron palings all round
himself, like a specimen tree in the park, so that nobody can get near
him? If a man wants a girl to like him he should be nice to her, and not
require an introduction every time they meet."

Felicia sighed: her sweet, placid nature was apt to be overpowered by
Elisabeth's rapid changes of front. "But he used to be so fond of you,"
she expostulated feebly.

Elisabeth shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, I suppose he likes me now, in his
cold, self-satisfied way: it isn't that. What I complain of is that he
doesn't admire me enough, and I do so love to be admired."

"Do you mean he doesn't think you are pretty?" Felicia always had to
have things fully explained to her; excess of imagination could never
lead her astray, whatever it might do to her friend.

"Of course not; I don't see how he could, considering that I'm not:
women don't expect men to admire them for things that they don't
possess," replied Elisabeth, who had still much to learn. "What I mean
is he doesn't realize how clever I am--he despises me just as he used to
despise me when I was a little girl and he was a big boy--and that is
awfully riling when you know you are clever."

"Is it? I would much rather a man liked me than thought I was clever."

"I wouldn't; anybody can like you, but it takes a clever person to
appreciate cleverness. I have studied myself thoroughly, and I have
come to the conclusion that I need appreciation far more than affection:
I'm made like that."

"I don't understand you. To me affection is everything, and I can not
live without it. If people are really fond of me, they can think me as
stupid as they like."

Elisabeth's face grew thoughtful; she was always interested in the
analysis of herself and her friends. "How different we two are! I
couldn't forgive a person for thinking me stupid, even if I knew that
person adored me. To me no amount of affection would make up for the
lack of appreciation. I want to be understood as well as liked, and that
is where Christopher and I come across each other; he never understands
me in the least. Now that is why Mr. Tremaine and I get on so well
together; he understands and appreciates me so thoroughly."

Felicia's pretty month fell into stern lines of disapproval. "I am sure
I should hate Mr. Tremaine if I knew him," she said.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't--you simply couldn't, Felicia, he is so
delightful. And, what is more, he is so frightfully interesting:
whatever he says and does, he always makes you think about him. Now,
however fond you were of Chris--and he really is very good and kind in
some ways--you could never think about him: it would be such dreadfully
uninteresting thinking, if you did."

"I don't know about that; Christopher is very comfortable and homelike,
somehow," replied Felicia.

"So are rice-puddings and flannel petticoats, but you don't occupy your
most exalted moments in meditating upon them."

"Do you know, Elisabeth, I sometimes think that Christopher is in love
with you." Unlike Elisabeth, Felicia never saw what did not exist, and
therefore was able sometimes to perceive what did.

"Good gracious, what an idea! He'd simply roar with laughter at the mere
thought of such a thing! Why, Christopher isn't capable of falling in
love with anybody; he hasn't got it in him, he is so frightfully
matter-of-fact."

Felicia looked dubious. "Then don't you think he will ever marry?"

"Oh, yes, he'll marry fast enough--a sweet, domestic woman, who plays
the piano and does crochet-work; and he will talk to her about the price
of iron and the integr

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