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Life's Little Ironies

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #3047 · 449,871 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Life's Little Ironies

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: January 1, 2002 [eBook #3047]
                Most recently updated: October 3, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3047

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE'S LITTLE IRONIES ***




Life’s Little Ironies

a set of tales
with some colloquial sketches
entitled
A FEW CRUSTED CHARACTERS

by Thomas Hardy

with a map of wessex

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT

_First Collected Edition_ 1894. _New Edition and reprints_ 1896-1900
_First published by Macmillan & Co._, _Crown_ 8_ov_, 1903. _Reprinted_
1910, 1915
_Pockets Edition_ 1907, 1910, 1913, 1916, 1919 (_twice_), 1920
_Wessex Edition_ 1912




Contents

 The Son’s Veto
 For Conscience’ Sake
 A Tragedy of Two Ambitions
 On the Western Circuit
 To Please his Wife
 The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion
 The Fidler of the Reels
 A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four
 A Few Crusted Characters




THE SON’S VETO


CHAPTER I

To the eyes of a man viewing it from behind, the nut-brown hair was a
wonder and a mystery. Under the black beaver hat, surmounted by its
tuft of black feathers, the long locks, braided and twisted and coiled
like the rushes of a basket, composed a rare, if somewhat barbaric,
example of ingenious art. One could understand such weavings and
coilings being wrought to last intact for a year, or even a calendar
month; but that they should be all demolished regularly at bedtime,
after a single day of permanence, seemed a reckless waste of successful
fabrication.

And she had done it all herself, poor thing. She had no maid, and it
was almost the only accomplishment she could boast of. Hence the
unstinted pains.

She was a young invalid lady—not so very much of an invalid—sitting in
a wheeled chair, which had been pulled up in the front part of a green
enclosure, close to a bandstand, where a concert was going on, during a
warm June afternoon. It had place in one of the minor parks or private
gardens that are to be found in the suburbs of London, and was the
effort of a local association to raise money for some charity. There
are worlds within worlds in the great city, and though nobody outside
the immediate district had ever heard of the charity, or the band, or
the garden, the enclosure was filled with an interested audience
sufficiently informed on all these.

As the strains proceeded many of the listeners observed the chaired
lady, whose back hair, by reason of her prominent position, so
challenged inspection. Her face was not easily discernible, but the
aforesaid cunning tress-weavings, the white ear and poll, and the curve
of a cheek which was neither flaccid nor sallow, were signals that led
to the expectation of good beauty in front. Such expectations are not
infrequently disappointed as soon as the disclosure comes; and in the
present case, when the lady, by a turn of the head, at length revealed
herself, she was not so handsome as the people behind her had supposed,
and even hoped—they did not know why.

For one thing (alas! the commonness of this complaint), she was less
young than they had fancied her to be. Yet attractive her face
unquestionably was, and not at all sickly. The revelation of its
details came each time she turned to talk to a boy of twelve or
thirteen who stood beside her, and the shape of whose hat and jacket
implied that he belonged to a well-known public school. The immediate
bystanders could hear that he called her ‘Mother.’

When the end of the recital was reached, and the audience withdrew,
many chose to find their way out by passing at her elbow. Almost all
turned their heads to take a full and near look at the interesting
woman, who remained stationary in the chair till the way should be
clear enough for her to be wheeled out without obstruction. As if she
expected their glances, and did not mind gratifying their curiosity,
she met the eyes of several of her observers by lifting her own,
showing these to be soft, brown, and affectionate orbs, a little
plaintive in their regard.

She was conducted out of the gardens, and passed along the pavement
till she disappeared from view, the schoolboy walking beside her. To
inquiries made by some persons who watched her away, the answer came
that she was the second wife of the incumbent of a neighbouring parish,
and that she was lame. She was generally believed to be a woman with a
story—an innocent one, but a story of some sort or other.

In conversing with her on their way home the boy who walked at her
elbow said that he hoped his father had not missed them.

‘He have been so comfortable these last few hours that I am sure he
cannot have missed us,’ she replied.

‘_Has_, dear mother—not _have_!’ exclaimed the public-school boy, with
an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. ‘Surely you know
that by this time!’

His mother hastily adopted the correction, and did not resent his
making it, or retaliate, as she might well have done, by bidding him to
wipe that crumby mouth of his, whose condition had been caused by
surreptitious attempts to eat a piece of cake without taking it out of
the pocket wherein it lay concealed. After this the pretty woman and
the boy went onward in silence.

That question of grammar bore upon her history, and she fell into
reverie, of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance. It might have been
assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping her
life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this.

In a remote nook in North Wessex, forty miles from London, near the
thriving county-town of Aldbrickham, there stood a pretty village with
its church and parsonage, which she knew well enough, but her son had
never seen. It was her native village, Gaymead, and the first event
bearing upon her present situation had occurred at that place when she
was only a girl of nineteen.

How well she remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-comedy,
the death of her reverend husband’s first wife. It happened on a spring
evening, and she who now and for many years had filled that first
wife’s place was then parlour-maid in the parson’s house.

When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was
announced, she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents, who were
living in the same village, to tell them the sad news. As she opened
the white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose westward,
shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she discerned, without
much surprise, the figure of a man standing in the hedge, though she
roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form, ‘Oh, Sam, how you frightened
me!’

He was a young gardener of her acquaintance. She told him the
particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young
people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic mind which is engendered
when a tragedy has happened close at hand, and has not happened to the
philosophers themselves. But it had its bearing upon their relations.

‘And will you stay on now at the Vicarage, just the same?’ asked he.

She had hardly thought of that. ‘Oh, yes—I suppose!’ she said.
‘Everything will be just as usual, I imagine?’

He walked beside her towards her mother’s. Presently his arm stole
round her waist. She gently removed it; but he placed it there again,
and she yielded the point. ‘You see, dear Sophy, you don’t know that
you’ll stay on; you may want a home; and I shall be ready to offer one
some day, though I may not be ready just yet.

‘Why, Sam, how can you be so fast! I’ve never even said I liked ’ee;
and it is all your own doing, coming after me!’

‘Still, it is nonsense to say I am not to have a try at you like the
rest.’ He stooped to kiss her a farewell, for they had reached her
mother’s door.

‘No, Sam; you sha’n’t!’ she cried, putting her hand over his mouth.
‘You ought to be more serious on such a night as this.’ And she bade
him adieu without allowing him to kiss her or to come indoors.

The vicar just left a widower was at this time a man about forty years
of age, of good family, and childless. He had led a secluded existence
in this college living, partly because there were no resident
landowners; and his loss now intensified his habit of withdrawal from
outward observation. He was still less seen than heretofore, kept
himself still less in time with the rhythm and racket of the movements
called progress in the world without. For many months after his wife’s
decease the economy of his household remained as before; the cook, the
housemaid, the parlour-maid, and the man out-of-doors performed their
duties or left them undone, just as Nature prompted them—the vicar knew
not which. It was then represented to him that his servants seemed to
have nothing to do in his small family of one. He was struck with the
truth of this representation, and decided to cut down his
establishment. But he was forestalled by Sophy, the parlour-maid, who
said one evening that she wished to leave him.

‘And why?’ said the parson.

‘Sam Hobson has asked me to marry him, sir.’

‘Well—do you want to marry?’

‘Not much. But it would be a home for me. And we have heard that one of
us will have to leave.’

A day or two after she said: ‘I don’t want to leave just yet, sir, if
you don’t wish it. Sam and I have quarrelled.’

He looked up at her. He had hardly ever observed her before, though he
had been frequently conscious of her soft presence in the room. What a
kitten-like, flexuous, tender creature she was! She was the only one of
the servants with whom he came into immediate and continuous relation.
What should he do if Sophy were gone?

Sophy did not go, but one of the others did, and things went on quietly
again.

When Mr. Twycott, the vicar, was ill, Sophy brought up his meals to
him, and she had no sooner left the room one day than he heard a noise
on the stairs. She had slipped down with the tray, and so twisted her
foot that she could not stand. The village surgeon was called in; the
vicar got better, but Sophy was incapacitated for a long time; and she
was informed that she must never again walk much or engage in any
occupation which required her to stand long on her feet. As soon as she
was comparatively well she spoke to him alone. Since she was forbidden
to walk and bustle about, and, indeed, could not do so, it became her
duty to leave. She could very well work at something sitting down, and
she had an aunt a seamstress.

The parson had been very greatly moved by what she had suffered on his
account, and he exclaimed, ‘No, Sophy; lame or not lame, I cannot let
you go. You must never leave me again!’

He came close to her, and, though she could never exactly tell how it
happened, she became conscious of his lips upon her cheek. He then
asked her to marry him. Sophy did not exactly love him, but she had a
respect for him which almost amounted to veneration. Even if she had
wished to get away from him she hardly dared refuse a personage so
reverend and august in her eyes, and she assented forthwith to be his
wife.

Thus it happened that one fine morning, when the doors of the church
were naturally open for ventilation, and the singing birds fluttered in
and alighted on the tie-beams of the roof, there was a marriage-service
at the communion-rails, which hardly a soul knew of. The parson and a
neighbouring curate had entered at one door, and Sophy at another,
followed by two necessary persons, whereupon in a short time there
emerged a newly-made husband and wife.

Mr. Twycott knew perfectly well that he had committed social suicide by
this step, despite Sophy’s spotless character, and he had taken his
measures accordingly. An exchange of livings had been arranged with an
acquaintance who was incumbent of a church in the south of London, and
as soon as possible the couple removed thither, abandoning their pretty
country home, with trees and shrubs and glebe, for a narrow, dusty
house in a long, straight street, and their fine peal of bells for the
wretchedest one-tongued clangour that ever tortured mortal ears. It was
all on her account. They were, however, away from every one who had
known her former position; and also under less observation from without
than they would have had to put up with in any country parish.

Sophy the woman was as charming a partner as a man could possess,
though Sophy the lady had her deficiencies. She showed a natural
aptitude for little domestic refinements, so far as related to things
and manners; but in what is called culture she was less intuitive. She
had now been married more than fourteen years, and her husband had
taken much trouble with her education; but she still held confused
ideas on the use of ‘was’ and ‘were,’ which did not beget a respect for
her among the few acquaintances she made. Her great grief in this
relation was that her only child, on whose education no expense had
been and would be spared, was now old enough to perceive these
deficiencies in his mother, and not only to see them but to feel
irritated at their existence.

Thus she lived on in the city, and wasted hours in braiding her
beautiful hair, till her once apple cheeks waned to pink of the very
faintest. Her foot had never regained its natural strength after the
accident, and she was mostly obliged to avoid walking altogether. Her
husband had grown to like London for its freedom and its domestic
privacy; but he was twenty years his Sophy’s senior, and had latterly
been seized with a serious illness. On this day, however, he had seemed
to be well enough to justify her accompanying her son Randolph to the
concert.

CHAPTER II

The next time we get a glimpse of her is when she appears in the
mournful attire of a widow.

Mr. Twycott had never rallied, and now lay in a well-packed cemetery to
the south of the great city, where, if all the dead it contained had
stood erect and alive, not one would have known him or recognized his
name. The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave, and was now
again at school.

Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she was
in nature though not in years. She was left with no control over
anything that had been her husband’s beyond her modest personal income.
In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he had
safeguarded with trustees all he possibly could. The completion of the
boy’s course at the public school, to be followed in due time by Oxford
and ordination, had been all previsioned and arranged, and she really
had nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink, and make a
business of indolence, and go on weaving and coiling the nut-brown
hair, merely keeping a home open for the son whenever he came to her
during vacations.

Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in
his lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa in the
same long, straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced, which
was to be hers as long as she chose to live in it. Here she now
resided, looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front, and through
the railings at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward over the
window-sill on the first floor, stretching her eyes far up and down the
vista of sooty trees, hazy air, and drab house-façades, along which
echoed the noises common to a suburban main thoroughfare.

Somehow, her boy, with his aristocratic school-knowledge, his grammars,
and his aversions, was losing those wide infantine sympathies,
extending as far as to the sun and moon themselves, with which he, like
other children, had been born, and which his mother, a child of nature
herself, had loved in him; he was reducing their compass to a
population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people, the mere veneer
of a thousand million or so of others who did not interest him at all.
He drifted further and further away from her. Sophy’s _milieu_ being a
suburb of minor tradesmen and under-clerks, and her almost only
companions the two servants of her own house, it was not surprising
that after her husband’s death she soon lost the little artificial
tastes she had acquired from him, and became—in her son’s eyes—a mother
whose mistakes and origin it was his painful lot as a gentleman to
blush for. As yet he was far from being man enough—if he ever would
be—to rate these sins of hers at their true infinitesimal value beside
the yearning fondness that welled up and remained penned in her heart
till it should be more fully accepted by him, or by some other person
or thing. If he had lived at home with her he would have had all of it;
but he seemed to require so very little in present circumstances, and
it remained stored.

Her life became insupportably dreary; she could not take walks, and had
no interest in going for drives, or, indeed, in travelling anywhere.
Nearly two years passed without an event, and still she looked on that
suburban road, thinking of the village in which she had been born, and
whither she would have gone back—O how gladly!—even to work in the
fields.

Taking no exercise, she often could not sleep, and would rise in the
night or early morning and look out upon the then vacant thoroughfare,
where the lamps stood like sentinels waiting for some procession to go
by. An approximation to such a procession was indeed made early every
morning about one o’clock, when the country vehicles passed up with
loads of vegetables for Covent Garden market. She often saw them
creeping along at this silent and dusky hour—waggon after waggon,
bearing green bastions of cabbages nodding to their fall, yet never
falling, walls of baskets enclosing masses of beans and peas, pyramids
of snow-white turnips, swaying howdahs of mixed produce—creeping along
behind aged night-horses, who seemed ever patiently wondering between
their hollow coughs why they had always to work at that still hour when
all other sentient creatures were privileged to rest. Wrapped in a
cloak, it was soothing to watch and sympathize with them when
depression and nervousness hindered sleep, and to see how the fresh
green-stuff brightened to life as it came opposite the lamp, and how
the sweating animals steamed and shone with their miles of travel.

They had an interest, almost a charm, for Sophy, these semirural people
and vehicles moving in an urban atmosphere, leading a life quite
distinct from that of the daytime toilers on the same road. One morning
a man who accompanied a waggon-load of potatoes gazed rather hard at
the house-fronts as he passed, and with a curious emotion she thought
his form was familiar to her. She looked out for him again. His being
an old-fashioned conveyance, with a yellow front, it was easily
recognizable, and on the third night after she saw it a second time.
The man alongside was, as she had fancied, Sam Hobson, formerly
gardener at Gaymead, who would at one time have married her.

She had occasionally thought of him, and wondered if life in a cottage
with him would not have been a happier lot than the life she had
accepted. She had not thought of him passionately, but her now dismal
situation lent an interest to his resurrection—a tender interest which
it is impossible to exaggerate. She went back to bed, and began
thinking. When did these market-gardeners, who travelled up to town so
regularly at one or two in the morning, come back? She dimly
recollected seeing their empty waggons, hardly noticeable amid the
ordinary day-traffic, passing down at some hour before noon.

It was only April, but that morning, after breakfast, she had the
window opened, and sat looking out, the feeble sun shining full upon
her. She affected to sew, but her eyes never left the street. Between
ten and eleven the desired waggon, now unladen, reappeared on its
return journey. But Sam was not looking round him then, and drove on in
a reverie.

‘Sam!’ cried she.

Turning with a start, his face lighted up. He called to him a little
boy to hold the horse, alighted, and came and stood under her window.

‘I can’t come down easily, Sam, or I would!’ she said. ‘Did you know I
lived here?’

‘Well, Mrs. Twycott, I knew you lived along here somewhere. I have
often looked out for ’ee.’

He briefly explained his own presence on the scene. He had long since
given up his gardening in the village near Aldbrickham, and was now
manager at a market-gardener’s on the south side of London, it being
part of his duty to go up to Covent Garden with waggon-loads of produce
two or three times a week. In answer to her curious inquiry, he
admitted that he had come to this particular district because he had
seen in the Aldbrickham paper, a year or two before, the announcement
of the death in South London of the aforetime vicar of Gaymead, which
had revived an interest in her dwelling-place that he could not
extinguish, leading him to hover about the locality till his present
post had been secured.

They spoke of their native village in dear old North Wessex, the spots
in which they had played together as children. She tried to feel that
she was a dignified personage now, that she must not be too
confidential with Sam. But she could not keep it up, and the tears
hanging in her eyes were indicated in her voice.

‘You are not happy, Mrs. Twycott, I’m afraid?’ he said.

‘O, of course not! I lost my husband only the year before last.’

‘Ah! I meant in another way. You’d like to be home again?’

‘This is my home—for life. The house belongs to me. But I
understand’—She let it out then. ‘Yes, Sam. I long for home—_our_ home!
I _should_ like to be there, and never leave it, and die there.’ But
she remembered herself. ‘That’s only a momentary feeling. I have a son,
you know, a dear boy. He’s at school now.’

‘Somewhere handy, I suppose? I see there’s lots on ’em along this
road.’

‘O no! Not in one of these wretched holes! At a public school—one of
the most distinguished in England.’

‘Chok’ it all! of course! I forget, ma’am, that you’ve been a lady for
so many years.’

‘No, I am not a lady,’ she said sadly. ‘I never shall be. But he’s a
gentleman, and that—makes it—O how difficult for me!’

CHAPTER III

The acquaintance thus oddly reopened proceeded apace. She often looked
out to get a few words with him, by night or by day. Her sorrow was
that she could not accompany her one old friend on foot a little way,
and talk more freely than she could do while he paused before the
house. One night, at the beginning of June, when she was again on the
watch after an absence of some days from the window, he entered the
gate and said softly, ‘Now, wouldn’t some air do you good? I’ve only
half a load this morning. Why not ride up to Covent Garden with me?
There’s a nice seat on the cabbages, where I’ve spread a sack. You can
be home again in a cab before anybody is up.’

She refused at first, and then, trembling with excitement, hastily
finished her dressing, and wrapped herself up in cloak and veil,
afterwards sidling downstairs by the aid of the handrail, in a way she
could adopt on an emergency. When she had opened the door she found Sam
on the step, and he lifted her bodily on his strong arm across the
little forecourt into his vehicle. Not a soul was visible or audible in
the infinite length of the straight, flat highway, with its
ever-waiting lamps converging to points in each direction. The air was
fresh as country air at this hour, and the stars shone, except to the
north-eastward, where there was a whitish light—the dawn. Sam carefully
placed her in the seat, and drove on.

They talked as they had talked in old days, Sam pulling himself up now
and then, when he thought himself too familiar. More than once she said
with misgiving that she wondered if she ought to have indulged in the
freak. ‘But I am so lonely in my house,’ she added, ‘and this makes me
so happy!’

‘You must come again, dear Mrs. Twycott. There is no time o’ day for
taking the air like this.’

It grew lighter and lighter. The sparrows became busy in the streets,
and the city waxed denser around them. When they approached the river
it was day, and on the bridge they beheld the full blaze of morning
sunlight in the direction of St. Paul’s, the river glistening towards
it, and not a craft stirring.

Near Covent Garden he put her into a cab, and they parted, looking into
each other’s faces like the very old friends they were. She reached
home without adventure, limped to the door, and let herself in with her
latch-key unseen.

The air and Sam’s presence had revived her: her cheeks were quite
pink—almost beautiful. She had something to live for in addition to her
son. A woman of pure instincts, she knew there had been nothing really
wrong in the journey, but supposed it conventionally to be very wrong
indeed.

Soon, however, she gave way to the temptation of going with him again,
and on this occasion their conversation was distinctly tender, and Sam
said he never should forget her, notwithstanding that she had served
him rather badly at one time. After much hesitation he told her of a
plan it was in his power to carry out, and one he should like to take
in hand, since he did not care for London work: it was to set up as a
master greengrocer down at Aldbrickham, the county-town of their native
place. He knew of an opening—a shop kept by aged people who wished to
retire.

‘And why don’t you do it, then, Sam?’ she asked with a slight
heartsinking.

‘Because I’m not sure if—you’d join me. I know you wouldn’t—couldn’t!
Such a lady as ye’ve been so long, you couldn’t be a wife to a man like
me.’

‘I hardly suppose I could!’ she assented, also frightened at the idea.

‘If you could,’ he said eagerly, ‘you’d on’y have to sit in the back
parlour and look through the glass partition when I was away
sometimes—just to keep an eye on things. The lameness wouldn’t hinder
that . . . I’d keep you as genteel as ever I could, dear Sophy—if I
might think of it!’ he pleaded.

‘Sam, I’ll be frank,’ she said, putting her hand on his. ‘If it were
only myself I would do it, and gladly, though everything I possess
would be lost to me by marrying again.’

‘I don’t mind that! It’s more independent.’

‘That’s good of you, dear, dear Sam. But there’s something else. I have
a son . . . I almost fancy when I am miserable sometimes that he is not
really mine, but one I hold in trust for my late husband. He seems to
belong so little to me personally, so entirely to his dead father. He
is so much educated and I so little that I do not feel dignified enough
to be his mother . . . Well, he would have to be told.’

‘Yes. Unquestionably.’ Sam saw her thought and her fear. ‘Still, you
can do as you like, Sophy—Mrs. Twycott,’ he added. ‘It is not you who
are the child, but he.’

‘Ah, you don’t know! Sam, if I could, I would marry you, some day. But
you must wait a while, and let me think.’

It was enough for him, and he was blithe at their parting. Not so she.
To tell Randolph seemed impossible. She could wait till he had gone up
to Oxford, when what she did would affect his life but little. But
would he ever tolerate the idea? And if not, could she defy him?

She had not told him a word when the yearly cricket-match came on at
Lord’s between the public schools, though Sam had already gone back to
Aldbrickham. Mrs. Twycott felt stronger than usual: she went to the
match with Randolph, and was able to leave her chair and walk about
occasionally. The bright idea occurred to her that she could casually
broach the subject while moving round among the spectators, when the
boy’s spirits were high with interest in the game, and he would weigh
domestic matters as feathers in the scale beside the day’s victory.
They promenaded under the lurid July sun, this pair, so wide apart, yet
so near, and Sophy saw the large proportion of boys like her own, in
their broad white collars and dwarf hats, and all around the rows of
great coaches under which was jumbled the _débris_ of luxurious
luncheons; bones, pie-crusts, champagne-bottles, glasses, plates,
napkins, and the family silver; while on the coaches sat the proud
fathers and mothers; but never a poor mother like her. If Randolph had
not appertained to these, had not centred all his interests in them,
had not cared exclusively for the class they belonged to, how happy
would things have been! A great huzza at some small performance with
the bat burst from the multitude of relatives, and Randolph jumped
wildly into the air to see what had happened. Sophy fetched up the
sentence that had been already shaped; but she could not get it out.
The occasion was, perhaps, an inopportune one. The contrast between her
story and the display of fashion to which Randolph had grown to regard
himself as akin would be fatal. She awaited a better time.

It was on an evening when they were alone in their plain suburban
residence, where life was not blue but brown, that she ultimately broke
silence, qualifying her announcement of a probable second marriage by
assuring him that it would not take place for a long time to come, when
he would be living quite independently of her.

The boy thought the idea a very reasonable one, and asked if she had
chosen anybody? She hesitated; and he seemed to have a misgiving. He
hoped his stepfather would be a gentleman? he said.

‘Not what you call a gentleman,’ she answered timidly. ‘He’ll be much
as I was before I knew your father;’ and by degrees she acquainted him
with the whole. The youth’s face remained fixed for a moment; then he
flushed, leant on the table, and burst into passionate tears.

His mother went up to him, kissed all of his face that she could get
at, and patted his back as if he were still the baby he once had been,
crying herself the while. When he had somewhat recovered from his
paroxysm he went hastily to his own room and fastened the door.

Parleyings were attempted through the keyhole, outside which she waited
and listened. It was long before he would reply, and when he did it was
to say sternly at her from within: ‘I am ashamed of you! It will ruin
me! A miserable boor! a churl! a clown! It will degrade me in the eyes
of all the gentlemen of England!’

‘Say no more—perhaps I am wrong! I will struggle against it!’ she cried
miserably.

Before Randolph left her that summer a letter arrived from Sam to
inform her that he had been unexpectedly fortunate in obtaining the
shop. He was in possession; it was the largest in the town, combining
fruit with vegetables, and he thought it would form a home worthy even
of her some day. Might he not run up to town to see her?

She met him by stealth, and said he must still wait for her final
answer. The autumn dragged on, and when Randolph was home at Christmas
for the holidays she broached the matter again. But the young gentleman
was inexorable.

It was dropped for months; renewed again; abandoned under his
repugnance; again attempted; and thus the gentle creature reasoned and
pleaded till four or five long years had passed. Then the faithful Sam
revived his suit with some peremptoriness. Sophy’s son, now an
undergraduate, was down from Oxford one Easter, when she again opened
the subject. As soon as he was ordained, she argued, he would have a
home of his own, wherein she, with her bad grammar and her ignorance,
would be an encumbrance to him. Better obliterate her as much as
possible.

He showed a more manly anger now, but would not agree. She on her side
was more persistent, and he had doubts whether she could be trusted in
his absence. But by indignation and contempt for her taste he
completely maintained his ascendency; and finally taking her before a
little cross and altar that he had erected in his bedroom for his
private devotions, there bade her kneel, and swear that she would not
wed Samuel Hobson without his consent. ‘I owe this to my father!’ he
said.

The poor woman swore, thinking he would soften as soon as he was
ordained and in full swing of clerical work. But he did not. His
education had by this time sufficiently ousted his humanity to keep him
quite firm; though his mother might have led an idyllic life with her
faithful fruiterer and greengrocer, and nobody have been anything the
worse in the world.

Her lameness became more confirmed as time went on, and she seldom or
never left the house in the long southern thoroughfare, where she
seemed to be pining her heart away. ‘Why mayn’t I say to Sam that I’ll
marry him? Why mayn’t I?’ she would murmur plaintively to herself when
nobody was near.

Some four years after this date a middle-aged man was standing at the
door of the largest fruiterer’s shop in Aldbrickham. He was the
proprietor, but to-day, instead of his usual business attire, he wore a
neat suit of black; and his window was partly shuttered. From the
railway-station a funeral procession was seen approaching: it passed
his door and went out of the town towards the village of Gaymead. The
man, whose eyes were wet, held his hat in his hand as the vehicles
moved by; while from the mourning coach a young smooth-shaven priest in
a high waistcoat looked black as a cloud at the shop keeper standing
there.

_December_ 1891.




FOR CONSCIENCE’ SAKE


CHAPTER I

Whether the utilitarian or the intuitive theory of the moral sense be
upheld, it is beyond question that there are a few subtle-souled
persons with whom the absolute gratuitousness of an act of reparation
is an inducement to perform it; while exhortation as to its necessity
would breed excuses for leaving it undone. The case of Mr. Millborne
and Mrs. Frankland particularly illustrated this, and perhaps something
more.

There were few figures better known to the local crossing-sweeper than
Mr. Millborne’s, in his daily comings and goings along a familiar and
quiet London street, where he lived inside the door marked eleven,
though not as householder. In age he was fifty at least, and his habits
were as regular as those of a person can be who has no occupation but
the study of how to keep himself employed. He turned almost always to
the right on getting to the end of his street, then he went onward down
Bond Street to his club, whence he returned by precisely the same
course about six o’clock, on foot; or, if he went to dine, later on in
a cab. He was known to be a man of some means, though apparently not
wealthy. Being a bachelor he seemed to prefer his present mode of
living as a lodger in Mrs. Towney’s best rooms, with the use of
furniture which he had bought ten times over in rent during his
tenancy, to having a house of his own.

None among his acquaintance tried to know him well, for his manner and
moods did not excite curiosity or deep friendship. He was not a man who
seemed to have anything on his mind, anything to conceal, anything to
impart. From his casual remarks it was generally understood that he was
country-born, a native of some place in Wessex; that he had come to
London as a young man in a banking-house, and had risen to a post of
responsibility; when, by the death of his father, who had been
fortunate in his investments, the son succeeded to an income which led
him to retire from a business life somewhat early.

One evening, when he had been unwell for several days, Doctor Bindon
came in, after dinner, from the adjoining medical quarter, and smoked
with him over the fire. The patient’s ailment was not such as to
require much thought, and they talked together on indifferent subjects.

‘I am a lonely man, Bindon—a lonely man,’ Millborne took occasion to
say, shaking his head gloomily. ‘You don’t know such loneliness as mine
. . . And the older I get the more I am dissatisfied with myself. And
to-day I have been, through an accident, more than usually haunted by
what, above all other events of my life, causes that
dissatisfaction—the recollection of an unfulfilled promise made twenty
years ago. In ordinary affairs I have always been considered a man of
my word and perhaps it is on that account that a particular vow I once
made, and did not keep, comes back to me with a magnitude out of all
proportion (I daresay) to its real gravity, especially at this time of
day. You know the discomfort caused at night by the half-sleeping sense
that a door or window has been left unfastened, or in the day by the
remembrance of unanswered letters. So does that promise haunt me from
time to time, and has done to-day particularly.’

There was a pause, and they smoked on. Millborne’s eyes, though fixed
on the fire, were really regarding attentively a town in the West of
England.

‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘I have never quite forgotten it, though during
the busy years of my life it was shelved and buried under the pressure
of my pursuits. And, as I say, to-day in particular, an incident in the
law-report of a somewhat similar kind has brought it back again
vividly. However, what it was I can tell you in a few words, though no
doubt you, as a man of the world, will smile at the thinness of my skin
when you hear it . . . I came up to town at one-and-twenty, from
Toneborough, in Outer Wessex, where I was born, and where, before I
left, I had won the heart of a young woman of my own age. I promised
her marriage, took advantage of my promise, and—am a bachelor.’

‘The old story.’

The other nodded.

‘I left the place, and thought at the time I had done a very clever
thing in getting so easily out of an entanglement. But I have lived
long enough for that promise to return to bother me—to be honest, not
altogether as a pricking of the conscience, but as a dissatisfaction
with myself as a specimen of the heap of flesh called humanity. If I
were to ask you to lend me fifty pounds, which I would repay you next
midsummer, and I did not repay you, I should consider myself a shabby
sort of fellow, especially if you wanted the money badly. Yet I
promised that girl just as distinctly; and then coolly broke my word,
as if doing so were rather smart conduct than a mean action, for which
the poor victim herself, encumbered with a child, and not I, had really
to pay the penalty, in spite of certain pecuniary aid that was given.
There, that’s the retrospective trouble that I am always unearthing;
and you may hardly believe that though so many years have elapsed, and
it is all gone by and done with, and she must be getting on for an old
woman now, as I am for an old man, it really often destroys my sense of
self-respect still.’

‘O, I can understand it. All depends upon the temperament. Thousands of
men would have forgotten all about it; so would you, perhaps, if you
had married and had a family. Did she ever marry?’

‘I don’t think so. O no—she never did. She left Toneborough, and later
on appeared under another name at Exonbury, in the next county, where
she was not known. It is very seldom that I go down into that part of
the country, but in passing through Exonbury, on one occasion, I learnt
that she was quite a settled resident there, as a teacher of music, or
something of the kind. That much I casually heard when I was there two
or three years ago. But I have never set eyes on her since our original
acquaintance, and should not know her if I met her.’

‘Did the child live?’ asked the doctor.

‘For several years, certainly,’ replied his friend. ‘I cannot say if
she is living now. It was a little girl. She might be married by this
time as far as years go.’

‘And the mother—was she a decent, worthy young woman?’

‘O yes; a sensible, quiet girl, neither attractive nor unattractive to
the ordinary observer; simply commonplace. Her position at the time of
our acquaintance was not so good as mine. My father was a solicitor, as
I think I have told you. She was a young girl in a music-shop; and it
was represented to me that it would be beneath my position to marry
her. Hence the result.’

‘Well, all I can say is that after twenty years it is probably too late
to think of mending such a matter. It has doubtless by this time mended
itself. You had better dismiss it from your mind as an evil past your
control. Of course, if mother and daughter are alive, or either, you
might settle something upon them, if you were inclined, and had it to
spare.’

‘Well, I haven’t much to spare; and I have relations in narrow
circumstances—perhaps narrower than theirs. But that is not the point.
Were I ever so rich I feel I could not rectify the past by money. I did
not promise to enrich her. On the contrary, I told her it would
probably be dire poverty for both of us. But I did promise to make her
my wife.’

‘Then find her and do it,’ said the doctor jocularly as he rose to
leave.

‘Ah, Bindon. That, of course, is the obvious jest. But I haven’t the
slightest desire for marriage; I am quite content to live as I have
lived. I am a bachelor by nature, and instinct, and habit, and
everything. Besides, though I respect her still (for she was not an
atom to blame), I haven’t any shadow of love for her. In my mind she
exists as one of those women you think well of, but find uninteresting.
It would be purely with the idea of putting wrong right that I should
hunt her up, and propose to do it off-hand.’

‘You don’t think of it seriously?’ said his surprised friend.

‘I sometimes think that I would, if it were practicable; simply, as I
say, to recover my sense of being a man of honour.’

‘I wish you luck in the enterprise,’ said Doctor Bindon. ‘You’ll soon
be out of that chair, and then you can put your impulse to the test.
But—after twenty years of silence—I should say, don’t!’

CHAPTER II

The doctor’s advice remained counterpoised, in Millborne’s mind, by the
aforesaid mood of seriousness and sense of principle, approximating
often to religious sentiment, which had been evolving itself in his
breast for months, and even years.

The feeling, however, had no immediate effect upon Mr. Millborne’s
actions. He soon got over his trifling illness, and was vexed with
himself for having, in a moment of impulse, confided such a case of
conscience to anybody.

But the force which had prompted it, though latent, remained with him
and ultimately grew stronger. The upshot was that about four months
after the date of his illness and disclosure, Millborne found himself
on a mild spring morning at Paddington Station, in a train that was
starting for the west. His many intermittent thoughts on his broken
promise from time to time, in those hours when loneliness brought him
face to face with his own personality, had at last resulted in this
course.

The decisive stimulus had been given when, a day or two earlier, on
looking into a Post-Office Directory, he learnt that the woman he had
not met for twenty years was still living on at Exonbury under the name
she had assumed when, a year or two after her disappearance from her
native town and his, she had returned from abroad as a young widow with
a child, and taken up her residence at the former city. Her condition
was apparently but little changed, and her daughter seemed to be with
her, their names standing in the Directory as ‘Mrs. Leonora Frankland
and Miss Frankland, Teachers of Music and Dancing.’

Mr. Millborne reached Exonbury in the afternoon, and his first
business, before even taking his luggage into the town, was to find the
house occupied by the teachers. Standing in a central and open place it
was not difficult to discover, a well-burnished brass doorplate bearing
their names prominently. He hesitated to enter without further
knowledge, and ultimately took lodgings over a toyshop opposite,
securing a sitting-room which faced a similar drawing or sitting-room
at the Franklands’, where the dancing lessons were given. Installed
here he was enabled to make indirectly, and without suspicion,
inquiries and observations on the character of the ladies over the way,
which he did with much deliberateness.

He learnt that the widow, Mrs. Frankland, with her one daughter,
Frances, was of cheerful and excellent repute, energetic and
painstaking with her pupils, of whom she had a good many, and in whose
tuition her daughter assisted her. She was quite a recognized
townswoman, and though the dancing branch of her profession was perhaps
a trifle worldly, she was really a serious-minded lady who, being
obliged to live by what she knew how to teach, balanced matters by
lending a hand at charitable bazaars, assisting at sacred concerts, and
giving musical recitations in aid of funds for bewildering happy
savages, and other such enthusiasms of this enlightened country. Her
daughter was one of the foremost of the bevy of young women who
decorated the churches at Easter and Christmas, was organist in one of
those edifices, and had subscribed to the testimonial of a silver
broth-basin that was presented to the Reverend Mr. Walker as a token of
gratitude for his faithful and arduous intonations of six months as
sub-precentor in the Cathedral. Altogether mother and daughter appeared
to be a typical and innocent pair among the genteel citizens of
Exonbury.

As a natural and simple way of advertising their profession they
allowed the windows of the music-room to be a little open, so that you
had the pleasure of hearing all along the street at any hour between
sunrise and sunset fragmentary gems of classical music as interpreted
by the young people of twelve or fourteen who took lessons there. But
it was said that Mrs. Frankland made most of her income by letting out
pianos on hire, and by selling them as agent for the makers.

The report pleased Millborne; it was highly creditable, and far better
than he had hoped. He was curious to get a view of the two women who
led such blameless lives.

He had not long to wait to gain a glimpse of Leonora. It was when she
was standing on her own doorstep, opening her parasol, on the morning
after his arrival. She was thin, though not gaunt; and a good,
well-wearing, thoughtful face had taken the place of the one which had
temporarily attracted him in the days of his nonage. She wore black,
and it became her in her character of widow. The daughter next
appeared; she was a smoothed and rounded copy of her mother, with the
same decision in her mien that Leonora had, and a bounding gait in
which he traced a faint resemblance to his own at her age.

For the first time he absolutely made up his mind to call on them. But
his antecedent step was to send Leonora a note the next morning,
stating his proposal to visit her, and suggesting the evening as the
time, because she seemed to be so greatly occupied in her professional
capacity during the day. He purposely worded his note in such a form as
not to require an answer from her which would be possibly awkward to
write.

No answer came. Naturally he should not have been surprised at this;
and yet he felt a little checked, even though she had only refrained
from volunteering a reply that was not demanded.

At eight, the hour fixed by himself, he crossed over and was passively
admitted by the servant. Mrs. Frankland, as she called herself,
received him in the large music-and-dancing room on the first-floor
front, and not in any private little parlour as he had expected. This
cast a distressingly business-like colour over their first meeting
after so many years of severance. The woman he had wronged stood before
him, well-dressed, even to his metropolitan eyes, and her manner as she
came up to him was dignified even to hardness. She certainly was not
glad to see him. But what could he expect after a neglect of twenty
years!

‘How do you do, Mr. Millborne?’ she said cheerfully, as to any chance
caller. ‘I am obliged to receive you here because my daughter has a
friend downstairs.’

‘Your daughter—and mine.’

‘Ah—yes, yes,’ she replied hastily, as if the addition had escaped her
memory. ‘But perhaps the less said about that the better, in fairness
to me. You will consider me a widow, please.’

‘Certainly, Leonora . . . ’ He could not get on, her manner was so cold
and indifferent. The expected scene of sad reproach, subdued to
delicacy by the run of years, was absent altogether. He was obliged to
come to the point without preamble.

‘You are quite free, Leonora—I mean as to marriage? There is nobody who
has your promise, or—’

‘O yes; quite free, Mr. Millborne,’ she said, somewhat surprised.

‘Then I will tell you why I have come. Twenty years ago I promised to
make you my wife; and I am here to fulfil that promise. Heaven forgive
my tardiness!’

Her surprise was increased, but she was not agitated. She seemed to
become gloomy, disapproving. ‘I could not entertain such an idea at
this time of life,’ she said after a moment or two. ‘It would
complicate matters too greatly. I have a very fair income, and require
no help of any sort. I have no wish to marry . . . What could have
induced you to come on such an errand now? It seems quite
extraordinary, if I may say so!’

‘It must—I daresay it does,’ Millborne replied vaguely; ‘and I must
tell you that impulse—I mean in the sense of passion—has little to do
with it. I wish to marry you, Leonora; I much desire to marry you. But
it is an affair of conscience, a case of fulfilment. I promised you,
and it was dishonourable of me to go away. I want to remove that sense
of dishonour before I die. No doubt we might get to love each other as
warmly as we did in old times?’

She dubiously shook her head. ‘I appreciate your motives, Mr.
Millborne; but you must consider my position; and you will see that,
short of the personal wish to marry, which I don’t feel, there is no
reason why I should change my state, even though by so doing I should
ease your conscience. My position in this town is a respected one; I
have built it up by my own hard labours, and, in short, I don’t wish to
alter it. My daughter, too, is just on the verge of an engagement to be
married, to a young man who will make her an excellent husband. It will
be in every way a desirable match for her. He is downstairs now.’

‘Does she know—anything about me?’

‘O no, no; God forbid! Her father is dead and buried to her. So that,
you see, things are going on smoothly, and I don’t want to disturb
their progress.’

He nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said, and rose to go. At the door, however,
he came back again.

‘Still, Leonora,’ he urged, ‘I have come on purpose; and I don’t see
what disturbance would be caused. You would simply marry an old friend.
Won’t you reconsider? It is no more than right that we should be
united, remembering the girl.’

She shook her head, and patted with her foot nervously.

‘Well, I won’t detain you,’ he added. ‘I shall not be leaving Exonbury
yet. You will allow me to see you again?’

‘Yes; I don’t mind,’ she said reluctantly.

The obstacles he had encountered, though they did not reanimate his
dead passion for Leonora, did certainly make it appear indispensable to
his peace of mind to overcome her coldness. He called frequently. The
first meeting with the daughter was a trying ordeal, though he did not
feel drawn towards her as he had expected to be; she did not excite his
sympathies. Her mother confided to Frances the errand of ‘her old
friend,’ which was viewed by the daughter with strong disfavour. His
desire being thus uncongenial to both, for a long time Millborne made
not the least impression upon Mrs. Frankland. His attentions pestered
her rather than pleased her. He was surprised at her firmness, and it
was only when he hinted at moral reasons for their union that she was
ever shaken. ‘Strictly speaking,’ he would say, ‘we ought, as honest
persons, to marry; and that’s the truth of it, Leonora.’

‘I have looked at it in that light,’ she said quickly. ‘It struck me at
the very first. But I don’t see the force of the argument. I totally
deny that after this interval of time I am bound to marry you for
honour’s sake. I would have married you, as you know well enough, at
the proper time. But what is the use of remedies now?’

They were standing at the window. A scantly-whiskered young man, in
clerical attire, called at the door below. Leonora flushed with
interest.

‘Who is he?’ said Mr. Millborne.

‘My Frances’s lover. I am so sorry—she is not at home! Ah! they have
told him where she is, and he has gone to find her . . . I hope that
suit will prosper, at any rate!’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘Well, he cannot marry yet; and Frances sees but little of him now he
has left Exonbury. He was formerly doing duty here, but now he is
curate of St. John’s, Ivell, fifty miles up the line. There is a tacit
agreement between them, but—there have been friends of his who object,
because of our vocation. However, he sees the absurdity of such an
objection as that, and is not influenced by it.’

‘Your marriage with me would help the match, instead of hindering it,
as you have said.’

‘Do you think it would?’

‘It certainly would, by taking you out of this business altogether.’

By chance he had found the way to move her somewhat, and he followed it
up. This view was imparted to Mrs. Frankland’s daughter, and it led her
to soften her opposition. Millborne, who had given up his lodging in
Exonbury, journeyed to and fro regularly, till at last he overcame her
negations, and she expressed a reluctant assent.

They were married at the nearest church; and the goodwill—whatever that
was—of the music-and-dancing connection was sold to a successor only
too ready to jump into the place, the Millbornes having decided to live
in London.

CHAPTER III

Millborne was a householder in his old district, though not in his old
street, and Mrs. Millborne and their daughter had turned themselves
into Londoners. Frances was well reconciled to the removal by her
lover’s satisfaction at the change. It suited him better to travel from
Ivell a hundred miles to see her in London, where he frequently had
other engagements, than fifty in the opposite direction where nothing
but herself required his presence. So here they were, furnished up to
the attics, in one of the small but popular streets of the West
district, in a house whose front, till lately of the complexion of a
chimney-sweep, had been scraped to show to the surprised wayfarer the
bright yellow and red brick that had lain lurking beneath the soot of
fifty years.

The social lift that the two women had derived from the alliance was
considerable; but when the exhilaration which accompanies a first
residence in London, the sensation of standing on a pivot of the world,
had passed, their lives promised to be somewhat duller than when, at
despised Exonbury, they had enjoyed a nodding acquaintance with
three-fourths of the town. Mr. Millborne did not criticise his wife; he
could not. Whatever defects of hardness and acidity his original
treatment and the lapse of years might have developed in her, his sense
of a realized idea, of a re-established self-satisfaction, was always
thrown into the scale on her side, and out-weighed all objections.

It was about a month after their settlement in town that the household
decided to spend a week at a watering-place in the Isle of Wight, and
while there the Reverend Percival Cope (the young curate aforesaid)
came to see them, Frances in particular. No formal engagement of the
young pair had been announced as yet, but it was clear that their
mutual understanding could not end in anything but marriage without
grievous disappointment to one of the parties at least. Not that
Frances was sentimental. She was rather of the imperious sort, indeed;
and, to say all, the young girl had not fulfilled her father’s
expectations of her. But he hoped and worked for her welfare as
sincerely as any father could do.

Mr. Cope was introduced to the new head of the family, and stayed with
them in the Island two or three days. On the last day of his visit they
decided to venture on a two hours’ sail in one of the small yachts
which lay there for hire. The trip had not progressed far before all,
except the curate, found that sailing in a breeze did not quite agree
with them; but as he seemed to enjoy the experience, the other three
bore their condition as well as they could without grimace or
complaint, till the young man, observing their discomfort, gave
immediate directions to tack about. On the way back to port they sat
silent, facing each other.

Nausea in such circumstances, like midnight watching, fatigue, trouble,
fright, has this marked effect upon the countenance, that it often
brings out strongly the divergences of the individual from the norm of
his race, accentuating superficial peculiarities to radical
distinctions. Unexpected physiognomies will uncover themselves at these
times in well-known faces; the aspect becomes invested with the
spectral presence of entombed and forgotten ancestors; and family
lineaments of special or exclusive cast, which in ordinary moments are
masked by a stereotyped expression and mien, start up with crude
insistence to the view.

Frances, sitting beside her mother’s husband, with Mr. Cope opposite,
was naturally enough much regarded by the curate during the tedious
sail home; at first with sympathetic smiles. Then, as the middle-aged
father and his child grew each gray-faced, as the pretty blush of
Frances disintegrated into spotty stains, and the soft rotundities of
her features diverged from their familiar and reposeful beauty into
elemental lines, Cope was gradually struck with the resemblance between
a pair in their discomfort who in their ease presented nothing to the
eye in common. Mr. Millborne and Frances in their indisposition were
strangely, startlingly alike.

The inexplicable fact absorbed Cope’s attention quite. He forgot to
smile at Frances, to hold her hand; and when they touched the shore he
remained sitting for some moments like a man in a trance.

As they went homeward, and recovered their complexions and contours,
the similarities one by one disappeared, and Frances and Mr. Millborne
were again masked by the commonplace differences of sex and age. It was
as if, during the voyage, a mysterious veil had been lifted,
temporarily revealing a strange pantomime of the past.

During the evening he said to her casually: ‘Is your step-father a
cousin of your mother, dear Frances?’

‘Oh, no,’ said she. ‘There is no relationship. He was only an old
friend of hers. Why did you suppose such a thing?’

He did not explain, and the next morning started to resume his duties
at Ivell.

Cope was an honest young fellow, and shrewd withal. At home in his
quiet rooms in St. Peter’s Street, Ivell, he pondered long and
unpleasantly on the revelations of the cruise. The tale it told was
distinct enough, and for the first time his position was an
uncomfortable one. He had met the Franklands at Exonbury as
parishioners, had been attracted by Frances, and had floated thus far
into an engagement which was indefinite only because of his inability
to marry just yet. The Franklands’ past had apparently contained
mysteries, and it did not coincide with his judgment to marry into a
family whose mystery was of the sort suggested. So he sat and sighed,
between his reluctance to lose Frances and his natural dislike of
forming a connection with people whose antecedents would not bear the
strictest investigation.

A passionate lover of the old-fashioned sort might possibly never have
halted to weigh these doubts; but though he was in the church Cope’s
affections were fastidious—distinctly tempered with the alloys of the
century’s decadence. He delayed writing to Frances for some while,
simply because he could not tune himself up to enthusiasm when worried
by suspicions of such a kind.

Meanwhile the Millbornes had returned to London, and Frances was
growing anxious. In talking to her mother of Cope she had innocently
alluded to his curious inquiry if her mother and her step-father were
connected by any tie of cousinship. Mrs. Millborne made her repeat the
words. Frances did so, and watched with inquisitive eyes their effect
upon her elder.

‘What is there so startling in his inquiry then?’ she asked. ‘Can it
have anything to do with his not writing to me?’

Her mother flinched, but did not inform her, and Frances also was now
drawn within the atmosphere of suspicion. That night when standing by
chance outside the chamber of her parents she heard for the first time
their voices engaged in a sharp altercation.

The apple of discord had, indeed, been dropped into the house of the
Millbornes. The scene within the chamber-door was Mrs. Millborne
standing before her dressing-table, looking across to her husband in
the dressing-room adjoining, where he was sitting down, his eyes fixed
on the floor.

‘Why did you come and disturb my life a second time?’ she harshly
asked. ‘Why did you pester me with your conscience, till I was driven
to accept you to get rid of your importunity? Frances and I were doing
well: the one desire of my life was that she should marry that good
young man. And now the match is broken off by your cruel interference!
Why did you show yourself in my world again, and raise this scandal
upon my hard-won respectability—won by such weary years of labour as
none will ever know!’ She bent her face upon the table and wept
passionately.

There was no reply from Mr. Millborne. Frances lay awake nearly all
that night, and when at breakfast-time the next morning still no letter
appeared from Mr. Cope, she entreated her mother to go to Ivell and see
if the young man were ill.

Mrs. Millborne went, returning the same day. Frances, anxious and
haggard, met her at the station.

Was all well? Her mother could not say it was; though he was not ill.

One thing she had found out, that it was a mistake to hunt up a man
when his inclinations were to hold aloof. Returning with her mother in
the cab Frances insisted upon knowing what the mystery was which
plainly had alienated her lover. The precise words which had been
spoken at the interview with him that day at Ivell Mrs. Millborne could
not be induced to repeat; but thus far she admitted, that the
estrangement was fundamentally owing to Mr. Millborne having sought her
out and married her.

‘And why did he seek you out—and why were you obliged to marry him?’
asked the distressed girl. Then the evidences pieced themselves
together in her acute mind, and, her colour gradually rising, she asked
her mother if what they pointed to was indeed the fact. Her mother
admitted that it was.

A flush of mortification succeeded to the flush of shame upon the young
woman’s face. How could a scrupulously correct clergyman and lover like
Mr. Cope ask her to be his wife after this discovery of her irregular
birth? She covered her eyes with her hands in a silent despair.

In the presence of Mr. Millborne they at first suppressed their
anguish. But by and by their feelings got the better of them, and when
he was asleep in his chair after dinner Mrs. Millborne’s irritation
broke out. The embittered Frances joined her in reproaching the man who
had come as the spectre to their intended feast of Hymen, and turned
its promise to ghastly failure.

‘Why were you so weak, mother, as to admit such an enemy to your
house—one so obviously your evil genius—much less accept him as a
husband, after so long? If you had only told me all, I could have
advised you better! But I suppose I have no right to reproach him,
bitter as I feel, and even though he has blighted my life for ever!’

‘Frances, I did hold out; I saw it was a mistake to have any more to
say to a man who had been such an unmitigated curse to me! But he would
not listen; he kept on about his conscience and mine, till I was
bewildered, and said Yes! . . . Bringing us away from a quiet town
where we were known and respected—what an ill-considered thing it was!
O the content of those days! We had society there, people in our own
position, who did not expect more of us than we expected of them. Here,
where there is so much, there is nothing! He said London society was so
bright and brilliant that it would be like a new world. It may be to
those who are in it; but what is that to us two lonely women; we only
see it flashing past! . . . O the fool, the fool that I was!’

Now Millborne was not so soundly asleep as to prevent his hearing these
animadversions that were almost execrations, and many more of the same
sort. As there was no peace for him at home, he went again to his club,
where, since his reunion with Leonora, he had seldom if ever been seen.
But the shadow of the troubles in his household interfered with his
comfort here also; he could not, as formerly, settle down into his
favourite chair with the evening paper, reposeful in the celibate’s
sense that where he was his world’s centre had its fixture. His world
was now an ellipse, with a dual centrality, of which his own was not
the major.

The young curate of Ivell still held aloof, tantalizing Frances by his
elusiveness. Plainly he was waiting upon events. Millborne bore the
reproaches of his wife and daughter almost in silence; but by degrees
he grew meditative, as if revolving a new idea. The bitter cry about
blighting their existence at length became so impassioned that one day
Millborne calmly proposed to return again to the country; not
necessarily to Exonbury, but, if they were willing, to a little old
manor-house which he had found was to be let, standing a mile from Mr.
Cope’s town of Ivell.

They were surprised, and, despite their view of him as the bringer of
ill, were disposed to accede. ‘Though I suppose,’ said Mrs. Millborne
to him, ‘it will end in Mr. Cope’s asking you flatly about the past,
and your being compelled to tell him; which may dash all my hopes for
Frances. She gets more and more like you every day, particularly when
she is in a bad temper. People will see you together, and notice it;
and I don’t know what may come of it!’

‘I don’t think they will see us together,’ he said; but he entered into
no argument when she insisted otherwise. The removal was eventually
resolved on; the town-house was disposed of; and again came the
invasion by furniture-men and vans, till all the movables and servants
were whisked away. He sent his wife and daughter to an hotel while this
was going on, taking two or three journeys himself to Ivell to
superintend the refixing, and the improvement of the grounds. When all
was done he returned to them in town.

The house was ready for their reception, he told them, and there only
remained the journey. He accompanied them and their personal luggage to
the station only, having, he said, to remain in town a short time on
business with his lawyer. They went, dubious and discontented—for the
much-loved Cope had made no sign.

‘If we were going down to live here alone,’ said Mrs Millborne to her
daughter in the train; ‘and there was no intrusive tell-tale presence!
. . . But let it be!’

The house was a lovely little place in a grove of elms, and they liked
it much. The first person to call upon them as new residents was Mr.
Cope. He was delighted to find that they had come so near, and (though
he did not say this) meant to live in such excellent style. He had not,
however, resumed the manner of a lover.

‘Your father spoils all!’ murmured Mrs. Millborne.

But three days later she received a letter from her husband, which
caused her no small degree of astonishment. It was written from
Boulogne.

It began with a long explanation of settlements of his property, in
which he had been engaged since their departure. The chief feature in
the business was that Mrs. Millborne found herself the absolute owner
of a comfortable sum in personal estate, and Frances of a life-interest
in a larger sum, the principal to be afterwards divided amongst her
children if she had any. The remainder of his letter ran as hereunder:—

‘I have learnt that there are some derelictions of duty which cannot be
blotted out by tardy accomplishment. Our evil actions do not remain
isolated in the past, waiting only to be reversed: like locomotive
plants they spread and re-root, till to destroy the original stem has
no material effect in killing them. I made a mistake in searching you
out; I admit it; whatever the remedy may be in such cases it is not
marriage, and the best thing for you and me is that you do not see me
more. You had better not seek me, for you will not be likely to find
me: you are well provided for, and we may do ourselves more harm than
good by meeting again.


‘F. M.’


Millborne, in short, disappeared from that day forward. But a searching
inquiry would have revealed that, soon after the Millbornes went to
Ivell, an Englishman, who did not give the name of Millborne, took up
his residence in Brussels; a man who might have been recognized by Mrs.
Millborne if she had met him. One afternoon in the ensuing summer, when
this gentleman was looking over the English papers, he saw the
announcement of Miss Frances Frankland’s marriage. She had become the
Reverend Mrs. Cope.

‘Thank God!’ said the gentleman.

But his momentary satisfaction was far from being happiness. As he
formerly had been weighted with a bad conscience, so now was he
burdened with the heavy thought which oppressed Antigone, that by
honourable observance of a rite he had obtained for himself the reward
of dishonourable laxity. Occasionally he had to be helped to his
lodgings by his servant from the _Cercle_ he frequented, through having
imbibed a little too much liquor to be able to take care of himself.
But he was harmless, and even when he had been drinking said little.

_March_ 1891.




A TRAGEDY OF TWO AMBITIONS


CHAPTER I

The shouts of the village-boys came in at the window, accompanied by
broken laughter from loungers at the inn-door; but the brothers
Halborough worked on.

They were sitting in a bedroom of the master-millwright’s house,
engaged in the untutored reading of Greek and Latin. It was no tale of
Homeric blows and knocks, Argonautic voyaging, or Theban family woe
that inflamed their imaginations and spurred them onward. They were
plodding away at the Greek Testament, immersed in a chapter of the
idiomatic and difficult Epistle to the Hebrews.

The Dog-day sun in its decline reached the low ceiling with slanting
sides, and the shadows of the great goat’s-willow swayed and
interchanged upon the walls like a spectral army manoeuvring. The open
casement which admitted the remoter sounds now brought the voice of
some one close at hand. It was their sister, a pretty girl of fourteen,
who stood in the court below.

‘I can see the tops of your heads! What’s the use of staying up there?
I like you not to go out with the street-boys; but do come and play
with me!’

They treated her as an inadequate interlocutor, and put her off with
some slight word. She went away disappointed. Presently there was a
dull noise of heavy footsteps at the side of the house, and one of the
brothers sat up. ‘I fancy I hear him coming,’ he murmured, his eyes on
the window.

A man in the light drab clothes of an old-fashioned country tradesman
approached from round the corner, reeling as he came. The elder son
flushed with anger, rose from his books, and descended the stairs. The
younger sat on, till, after the lapse of a few minutes, his brother
re-entered the room.

‘Did Rosa see him?’

‘No.’

‘Nor anybody?’

‘No.’

‘What have you done with him?’

‘He’s in the straw-shed. I got him in with some trouble, and he has
fallen asleep. I thought this would be the explanation of his absence!
No stones dressed for Miller Kench, the great wheel of the saw-mills
waiting for new float-boards, even the poor folk not able to get their
waggons wheeled.’

‘What _is_ the use of poring over this!’ said the younger, shutting up
Donnegan’s _Lexicon_ with a slap. ‘O if we had only been able to keep
mother’s nine hundred pounds, what we could have done!’

‘How well she had estimated the sum necessary! Four hundred and fifty
each, she thought. And I have no doubt that we could have done it on
that, with care.’

This loss of the nine hundred pounds was the sharp thorn of their
crown. It was a sum which their mother had amassed with great exertion
and self-denial, by adding to a chance legacy such other small amounts
as she could lay hands on from time to time; and she had intended with
the hoard to indulge the dear wish of her heart—that of sending her
sons, Joshua and Cornelius, to one of the Universities, having been
informed that from four hundred to four hundred and fifty each might
carry them through their terms with such great economy as she knew she
could trust them to practise. But she had died a year or two before
this time, worn out by too keen a strain towards these ends; and the
money, coming unreservedly into the hands of their father, had been
nearly dissipated. With its exhaustion went all opportunity and hope of
a university degree for the sons.

‘It drives me mad when I think of it,’ said Joshua, the elder. ‘And
here we work and work in our own bungling way, and the utmost we can
hope for is a term of years as national schoolmasters, and possible
admission to a Theological college, and ordination as despised
licentiates.’

The anger of the elder was reflected as simple sadness in the face of
the other. ‘We can preach the Gospel as well without a hood on our
surplices as with one,’ he said with feeble consolation.

‘Preach the Gospel—true,’ said Joshua with a slight pursing of mouth.
‘But we can’t rise!’

‘Let us make the best of it, and grind on.’

The other was silent, and they drearily bent over their books again.

The cause of all this gloom, the millwright Halborough, now snoring in
the shed, had been a thriving master-machinist, notwithstanding his
free and careless disposition, till a taste for a more than adequate
quantity of strong liquor took hold of him; since when his habits had
interfered with his business sadly. Already millers went elsewhere for
their gear, and only one set of hands was now kept going, though there
were formerly two. Already he found a difficulty in meeting his men at
the week’s end, and though they had been reduced in number there was
barely enough work to do for those who remained.

The sun dropped lower and vanished, the shouts of the village children
ceased to resound, darkness cloaked the students’ bedroom, and all the
scene outwardly breathed peace. None knew of the fevered youthful
ambitions that throbbed in two breasts within the quiet creeper-covered
walls of the millwright’s house.

In a few months the brothers left the village of their birth to enter
themselves as students in a training college for schoolmasters; first
having placed their young sister Rosa under as efficient a tuition at a
fashionable watering-place as the means at their disposal could
command.

CHAPTER II

A man in semi-clerical dress was walking along the road which led from
the railway-station into a provincial town. As he walked he read
persistently, only looking up once now and then to see that he was
keeping on the foot track and to avoid other passengers. At those
moments, whoever had known the former students at the millwright’s
would have perceived that one of them, Joshua Halborough, was the
peripatetic reader here.

What had been simple force in the youth’s face was energized judgment
in the man’s. His character was gradually writing itself out in his
countenance. That he was watching his own career with deeper and deeper
interest, that he continually ‘heard his days before him,’ and cared to
hear little else, might have been hazarded from what was seen there.
His ambitions were, in truth, passionate, yet controlled; so that the
germs of many more plans than ever blossomed to maturity had place in
him; and forward visions were kept purposely in twilight, to avoid
distraction.

Events so far had been encouraging. Shortly after assuming the
mastership of his first school he had obtained an introduction to the
Bishop of a diocese far from his native county, who had looked upon him
as a promising young man and taken him in hand. He was now in the
second year of his residence at the theological college of the
cathedral-town, and would soon be presented for ordination.

He entered the town, turned into a back street, and then into a yard,
keeping his book before him till he set foot under the arch of the
latter place. Round the arch was written ‘National School,’ and the
stonework of the jambs was worn away as nothing but boys and the waves
of ocean will wear it. He was soon amid the sing-song accents of the
scholars.

His brother Cornelius, who was the schoolmaster here, laid down the
pointer with which he was directing attention to the Capes of Europe,
and came forward.

‘That’s his brother Jos!’ whispered one of the sixth standard boys.
‘He’s going to be a pa’son, he’s now at college.’

‘Corney is going to be one too, when he’s saved enough money,’ said
another.

After greeting his brother, whom he had not seen for several months,
the junior began to explain his system of teaching geography.

But Halborough the elder took no interest in the subject. ‘How about
your own studies?’ he asked. ‘Did you get the books I sent?’

Cornelius had received them, and he related what he was doing.

‘Mind you work in the morning. What time do you get up?’

The younger replied: ‘Half-past five.’

‘Half-past four is not a minute too soon this time of the year. There
is no time like the morning for construing. I don’t know why, but when
I feel even too dreary to read a novel I can translate—there is
something mechanical about it I suppose. Now, Cornelius, you are rather
behindhand, and have some heavy reading before you if you mean to get
out of this next Christmas.’

‘I am afraid I have.’

‘We must soon sound the Bishop. I am sure you will get a title without
difficulty when he has heard all. The sub-dean, the principal of my
college, says that the best plan will be for you to come there when his
lordship is present at an examination, and he’ll get you a personal
interview with him. Mind you make a good impression upon him. I found
in my case that that was everything and doctrine almost nothing. You’ll
do for a deacon, Corney, if not for a priest.’

The younger remained thoughtful. ‘Have you heard from Rosa lately?’ he
asked; ‘I had a letter this morning.’

‘Yes. The little minx writes rather too often. She is homesick—though
Brussels must be an attractive place enough. But she must make the most
of her time over there. I thought a year would be enough for her, after
that high-class school at Sandbourne, but I have decided to give her
two, and make a good job of it, expensive as the establishment is.’

Their two rather harsh faces had softened directly they began to speak
of their sister, whom they loved more ambitiously than they loved
themselves.

‘But where is the money to come from, Joshua?’

‘I have already got it.’ He looked round, and finding that some boys
were near withdrew a few steps. ‘I have borrowed it at five per cent.
from the farmer who used to occupy the farm next our field. You
remember him.’

‘But about paying him?’

‘I shall pay him by degrees out of my stipend. No, Cornelius, it was no
use to do the thing by halves. She promises to be a most attractive,
not to say beautiful, girl. I have seen that for years; and if her face
is not her fortune, her face and her brains together will be, if I
observe and contrive aright. That she should be, every inch of her, an
accomplished and refined woman, was indispensable for the fulfilment of
her destiny, and for moving onwards and upwards with us; and she’ll do
it, you will see. I’d half starve myself rather than take her away from
that school now.’

They looked round the school they were in. To Cornelius it was natural
and familiar enough, but to Joshua, with his limited human sympathies,
who had just dropped in from a superior sort of place, the sight jarred
unpleasantly, as being that of something he had left behind. ‘I shall
be glad when you are out of this,’ he said, ‘and in your pulpit, and
well through your first sermon.’

‘You may as well say inducted into my fat living, while you are about
it.’

‘Ah, well—don’t think lightly of the Church. There’s a fine work for
any man of energy in the Church, as you’ll find,’ he said fervidly.
‘Torrents of infidelity to be stemmed, new views of old subjects to be
expounded, truths in spirit to be substituted for truths in the letter
. . . ’ He lapsed into reverie with the vision of his career,
persuading himself that it was ardour for Christianity which spurred
him on, and not pride of place. He had shouldered a body of doctrine,
and was prepared to defend it tooth and nail, solely for the honour and
glory that warriors win.

‘If the Church is elastic, and stretches to the shape of the time,
she’ll last, I suppose,’ said Cornelius. ‘If not—. Only think, I bought
a copy of Paley’s _Evidences_, best edition, broad margins, excellent
preservation, at a bookstall the other day for—ninepence; and I thought
that at this rate Christianity must be in rather a bad way.’

‘No, no!’ said the other almost, angrily. ‘It only shows that such
defences are no longer necessary. Men’s eyes can see the truth without
extraneous assistance. Besides, we are in for Christianity, and must
stick to her whether or no. I am just now going right through Pusey’s
_Library of the Fathers_.’

‘You’ll be a bishop, Joshua, before you have done!’

‘Ah!’ said the other bitterly, shaking his head. ‘Perhaps I might have
been—I might have been! But where is my D.D. or LL.D.; and how be a
bishop without that kind of appendage? Archbishop Tillotson was the son
of a Sowerby clothier, but he was sent to Clare College. To hail Oxford
or Cambridge as _alma mater_ is not for me—for us! My God! when I think
of what we should have been—what fair promise has been blighted by that
cursed, worthless—’

‘Hush, hush! . . . But I feel it, too, as much as you. I have seen it
more forcibly lately. You would have obtained your degree long before
this time—possibly fellowship—and I should have been on my way to
mine.’

‘Don’t talk of it,’ said the other. ‘We must do the best we can.’

They looked out of the window sadly, through the dusty panes, so high
up that only the sky was visible. By degrees the haunting trouble
loomed again, and Cornelius broke the silence with a whisper: ‘He has
called on me!’

The living pulses died on Joshua’s face, which grew arid as a clinker.
‘When was that?’ he asked quickly.

‘Last week.’

‘How did he get here—so many miles?’

‘Came by railway. He came to ask for money.’

‘Ah!’

‘He says he will call on you.’

Joshua replied resignedly. The theme of their conversation spoilt his
buoyancy for that afternoon. He returned in the evening, Cornelius
accompanying him to the station; but he did not read in the train which
took him back to the Fountall Theological College, as he had done on
the way out. That ineradicable trouble still remained as a squalid spot
in the expanse of his life. He sat with the other students in the
cathedral choir next day; and the recollection of the trouble obscured
the purple splendour thrown by the panes upon the floor.

It was afternoon. All was as still in the Close as a cathedral-green
can be between the Sunday services, and the incessant cawing of the
rooks was the only sound. Joshua Halborough had finished his ascetic
lunch, and had gone into the library, where he stood for a few moments
looking out of the large window facing the green. He saw walking slowly
across it a man in a fustian coat and a battered white hat with a
much-ruffled nap, having upon his arm a tall gipsy-woman wearing long
brass earrings. The man was staring quizzically at the west front of
the cathedral, and Halborough recognized in him the form and features
of his father. Who the woman was he knew not. Almost as soon as Joshua
became conscious of these things, the sub-dean, who was also the
principal of the college, and of whom the young man stood in more awe
than of the Bishop himself, emerged from the gate and entered a path
across the Close. The pair met the dignitary, and to Joshua’s horror
his father turned and addressed the sub-dean.

What passed between them he could not tell. But as he stood in a cold
sweat he saw his father place his hand familiarly on the sub-dean’s
shoulder; the shrinking response of the latter, and his quick
withdrawal, told his feeling. The woman seemed to say nothing, but when
the sub-dean had passed by they came on towards the college gate.

Halborough flew along the corridor and out at a side door, so as to
intercept them before they could reach the front entrance, for which
they were making. He caught them behind a clump of laurel.

‘By Jerry, here’s the very chap! Well, you’re a fine fellow, Jos, never
to send your father as much as a twist o’ baccy on such an occasion,
and to leave him to travel all these miles to find ye out!’

‘First, who is this?’ said Joshua Halborough with pale dignity, waving
his hand towards the buxom woman with the great earrings.

‘Dammy, the mis’ess! Your step-mother! Didn’t you know I’d married? She
helped me home from market one night, and we came to terms, and struck
the bargain. Didn’t we, Selinar?’

‘Oi, by the great Lord an’ we did!’ simpered the lady.

‘Well, what sort of a place is this you are living in?’ asked the
millwright. ‘A kind of house-of-correction, apparently?’

Joshua listened abstractedly, his features set to resignation. Sick at
heart he was going to ask them if they were in want of any necessary,
any meal, when his father cut him short by saying, ‘Why, we’ve called
to ask ye to come round and take pot-luck with us at the
Cock-and-Bottle, where we’ve put up for the day, on our way to see
mis’ess’s friends at Binegar Fair, where they’ll be lying under canvas
for a night or two. As for the victuals at the Cock I can’t testify to
’em at all; but for the drink, they’ve the rarest drop of Old Tom that
I’ve tasted for many a year.’

‘Thanks; but I am a teetotaller; and I have lunched,’ said Joshua, who
could fully believe his father’s testimony to the gin, from the odour
of his breath. ‘You see we have to observe regular habits here; and I
couldn’t be seen at the Cock-and-Bottle just now.’

‘O dammy, then don’t come, your reverence. Perhaps you won’t mind
standing treat for those who can be seen there?’

‘Not a penny,’ said the younger firmly. ‘You’ve had enough already.’

‘Thank you for nothing. By the bye, who was that spindle-legged,
shoe-buckled parson feller we met by now? He seemed to think we should
poison him!’

Joshua remarked coldly that it was the principal of his college,
guardedly inquiring, ‘Did you tell him whom you were come to see?’

His father did not reply. He and his strapping gipsy wife—if she were
his wife—stayed no longer, and disappeared in the direction of the High
Street. Joshua Halborough went back to the library. Determined as was
his nature, he wept hot tears upon the books, and was immeasurably more
wretched that afternoon than the unwelcome millwright. In the evening
he sat down and wrote a letter to his brother, in which, after stating
what had happened, and expatiating upon this new disgrace in the gipsy
wife, he propounded a plan for raising money sufficient to induce the
couple to emigrate to Canada. ‘It is our only chance,’ he said. ‘The
case as it stands is maddening. For a successful painter, sculptor,
musician, author, who takes society by storm, it is no drawback, it is
sometimes even a romantic recommendation, to hail from outcasts and
profligates. But for a clergyman of the Church of England! Cornelius,
it is fatal! To succeed in the Church, people must believe in you,
first of all, as a gentleman, secondly as a man of means, thirdly as a
scholar, fourthly as a preacher, fifthly, perhaps, as a Christian,—but
always first as a gentleman, with all their heart and soul and
strength. I would have faced the fact of being a small machinist’s son,
and have taken my chance, if he’d been in any sense respectable and
decent. The essence of Christianity is humility, and by the help of God
I would have brazened it out. But this terrible vagabondage and
disreputable connection! If he does not accept my terms and leave the
country, it will extinguish us and kill me. For how can we live, and
relinquish our high aim, and bring down our dear sister Rosa to the
level of a gipsy’s step-daughter?’

CHAPTER III

There was excitement in the parish of Narrobourne one day. The
congregation had just come out from morning service, and the whole
conversation was of the new curate, Mr. Halborough, who had officiated
for the first time, in the absence of the rector.

Never before had the feeling of the villagers approached a level which
could be called excitement on such a matter as this. The droning which
had been the rule in that quiet old place for a century seemed ended at
last. They repeated the text to each other as a refrain: ‘O Lord, be
thou my helper!’ Not within living memory till to-day had the subject
of the sermon formed the topic of conversation from the church door to
church-yard gate, to the exclusion of personal remarks on those who had
been present, and on the week’s news in general.

The thrilling periods of the preacher hung about their minds all that
day. The parish being steeped in indifferentism, it happened that when
the youths and maidens, middle-aged and old people, who had attended
church that morning, recurred as by a fascination to what Halborough
had said, they did so more or less indirectly, and even with the
subterfuge of a light laugh that was not real, so great was their
shyness under the novelty of their sensations.

What was more curious than that these unconventional villagers should
have been excited by a preacher of a new school after forty years of
familiarity with the old hand who had had charge of their souls, was
the effect of Halborough’s address upon the occupants of the
manor-house pew, including the owner of the estate. These thought they
knew how to discount the mere sensational sermon, how to minimize flash
oratory to its bare proportions; but they had yielded like the rest of
the assembly to the charm of the newcomer.

Mr. Fellmer, the landowner, was a young widower, whose mother, still in
the prime of life, had returned to her old position in the family
mansion since the death of her son’s wife in the year after her
marriage, at the birth of a fragile little girl. From the date of his
loss to the present time, Fellmer had led an inactive existence in the
seclusion of the parish; a lack of motive seemed to leave him listless.
He had gladly reinstated his mother in the gloomy house, and his main
occupation now lay in stewarding his estate, which was not large. Mrs.
Fellmer, who had sat beside him under Halborough this morning, was a
cheerful, straightforward woman, who did her marketing and her
alms-giving in person, was fond of old-fashioned flowers, and walked
about the village on very wet days visiting the parishioners. These,
the only two great ones of Narrobourne, were impressed by Joshua’s
eloquence as much as the cottagers.

Halborough had been briefly introduced to them on his arrival some days
before, and, their interest being kindled, they waited a few moments
till he came out of the vestry, to walk down the churchyard-path with
him. Mrs. Fellmer spoke warmly of the sermon, of the good fortune of
the parish in his advent, and hoped he had found comfortable quarters.

Halborough, faintly flushing, said that he had obtained very fair
lodgings in the roomy house of a farmer, whom he named.

She feared he would find it very lonely, especially in the evenings,
and hoped they would see a good deal of him. When would he dine with
them? Could he not come that day—it must be so dull for him the first
Sunday evening in country lodgings?

Halborough replied that it would give him much pleasure, but that he
feared he must decline. ‘I am not altogether alone,’ he said. ‘My
sister, who has just returned from Brussels, and who felt, as you do,
that I should be rather dismal by myself, has accompanied me hither to
stay a few days till she has put my rooms in order and set me going.
She was too fatigued to come to church, and is waiting for me now at
the farm.’

‘Oh, but bring your sister—that will be still better! I shall be
delighted to know her. How I wish I had been aware! Do tell her,
please, that we had no idea of her presence.’

Halborough assured Mrs. Fellmer that he would certainly bear the
message; but as to her coming he was not so sure. The real truth was,
however, that the matter would be decided by him, Rosa having an almost
filial respect for his wishes. But he was uncertain as to the state of
her wardrobe, and had determined that she should not enter the
manor-house at a disadvantage that evening, when there would probably
be plenty of opportunities in the future of her doing so becomingly.

He walked to the farm in long strides. This, then, was the outcome of
his first morning’s work as curate here. Things had gone fairly well
with him. He had been ordained; he was in a comfortable parish, where
he would exercise almost sole supervision, the rector being infirm. He
had made a deep impression at starting, and the absence of a hood
seemed to have done him no harm. Moreover, by considerable persuasion
and payment, his father and the dark woman had been shipped off to
Canada, where they were not likely to interfere greatly with his
interests.

Rosa came out to meet him. ‘Ah! you should have gone to church like a
good girl,’ he said.

‘Yes—I wished I had afterwards. But I do so hate church as a rule that
even your preaching was underestimated in my mind. It was too bad of
me!’

The girl who spoke thus playfully was fair, tall, and sylph-like, in a
muslin dress, and with just the coquettish _désinvolture_ which an
English girl brings home from abroad, and loses again after a few
months of native life. Joshua was the reverse of playful; the world was
too important a concern for him to indulge in light moods. He told her
in decided, practical phraseology of the invitation.

‘Now, Rosa, we must go—that’s settled—if you’ve a dress that can be
made fit to wear all on the hop like this. You didn’t, of course, think
of bringing an evening dress to such an out-of-the-way place?’

But Rosa had come from the wrong city to be caught napping in those
matters. ‘Yes, I did,’ said she. ‘One never knows what may turn up.’

‘Well done! Then off we go at seven.’

The evening drew on, and at dusk they started on foot, Rosa pulling up
the edge of her skirt under her cloak out of the way of the dews, so
that it formed a great wind-bag all round her, and carrying her satin
shoes under her arm. Joshua would not let her wait till she got indoors
before changing them, as she proposed, but insisted on her performing
that operation under a tree, so that they might enter as if they had
not walked. He was nervously formal about such trifles, while Rosa took
the whole proceeding—walk, dressing, dinner, and all—as a pastime. To
Joshua it was a serious step in life.

A more unexpected kind of person for a curate’s sister was never
presented at a dinner. The surprise of Mrs. Fellmer was unconcealed.
She had looked forward to a Dorcas, or Martha, or Rhoda at the outside,
and a shade of misgiving crossed her face. It was possible that, had
the young lady accompanied her brother to church, there would have been
no dining at Narrobourne House that day.

Not so with the young widower, her son. He resembled a sleeper who had
awaked in a summer noon expecting to find it only dawn. He could
scarcely help stretching his arms and yawning in their faces, so strong
was his sense of being suddenly aroused to an unforeseen thing. When
they had sat down to table he at first talked to Rosa somewhat with the
air of a ruler in the land; but the woman lurking in the acquaintance
soon brought him to his level, and the girl from Brussels saw him
looking at her mouth, her hands, her contour, as if he could not quite
comprehend how they got created: then he dropped into the more
satisfactory stage which discerns no particulars.

He talked but little; she said much. The homeliness of the Fellmers, to
her view, though they were regarded with such awe down here, quite
disembarrassed her. The squire had become so unpractised, had dropped
so far into the shade during the last year or so of his life, that he
had almost forgotten what the world contained till this evening
reminded him. His mother, after her first moments of doubt, appeared to
think that he must be left to his own guidance, and gave her attention
to Joshua.

With all his foresight and doggedness of aim, the result of that dinner
exceeded Halborough’s expectations. In weaving his ambitions he had
viewed his sister Rosa as a slight, bright thing to be helped into
notice by his abilities; but it now began to dawn upon him that the
physical gifts of nature to her might do more for them both than
nature’s intellectual gifts to himself. While he was patiently boring
the tunnel Rosa seemed about to fly over the mountain.

He wrote the next day to his brother, now occupying his own old rooms
in the theological college, telling him exultingly of the unanticipated
_début_ of Rosa at the manor-house. The next post brought him a reply
of congratulation, dashed with the counteracting intelligence that his
father did not like Canada—that his wife had deserted him, which made
him feel so dreary that he thought of returning home.

In his recent satisfaction at his own successes Joshua Halborough had
well-nigh forgotten his chronic trouble—latterly screened by distance.
But it now returned upon him; he saw more in this brief announcement
than his brother seemed to see. It was the cloud no bigger than a man’s
hand.

CHAPTER IV

The following December, a day or two before Christmas, Mrs. Fellmer and
her son were walking up and down the broad gravel path which bordered
the east front of the house. Till within the last half-hour the morning
had been a drizzling one, and they had just emerged for a short turn
before luncheon.

‘You see, dear mother,’ the son was saying, ‘it is the peculiarity of
my position which makes her appear to me in such a desirable light.
When you consider how I have been crippled at starting, how my life has
been maimed; that I feel anything like publicity distasteful, that I
have no political ambition, and that my chief aim and hope lie in the
education of the little thing Annie has left me, you must see how
desirable a wife like Miss Halborough would be, to prevent my becoming
a mere vegetable.’

‘If you adore her, I suppose you must have her!’ replied his mother
with dry indirectness. ‘But you’ll find that she will not be content to
live on here as you do, giving her whole mind to a young child.’

‘That’s just where we differ. Her very disqualification, that of being
a nobody, as you call it, is her recommendation in my eyes. Her lack of
influential connections limits her ambition. From what I know of her, a
life in this place is all that she would wish for. She would never care
to go outside the park-gates if it were necessary to stay within.’

‘Being in love with her, Albert, and meaning to marry her, you invent
your practical reasons to make the case respectable. Well, do as you
will; I have no authority over you, so why should you consult me? You
mean to propose on this very occasion, no doubt. Don’t you, now?’

‘By no means. I am merely revolving the idea in my mind. If on further
acquaintance she turns out to be as good as she has hitherto
seemed—well, I shall see. Admit, now, that you like her.’

‘I readily admit it. She is very captivating at first sight. But as a
stepmother to your child! You seem mighty anxious, Albert, to get rid
of me!’

‘Not at all. And I am not so reckless as you think. I don’t make up my
mind in a hurry. But the thought having occurred to me, I mention it to
you at once, mother. If you dislike it, say so.’

‘I don’t say anything. I will try to make the best of it if you are
determined. When does she come?’

‘To-morrow.’

All this time there were great preparations in train at the curate’s,
who was now a householder. Rosa, whose two or three weeks’ stay on two
occasions earlier in the year had so affected the squire, was coming
again, and at the same time her younger brother Cornelius, to make up a
family party. Rosa, who journeyed from the Midlands, could not arrive
till late in the evening, but Cornelius was to get there in the
afternoon, Joshua going out to meet him in his walk across the fields
from the railway.

Everything being ready in Joshua’s modest abode he started on his way,
his heart buoyant and thankful, if ever it was in his life. He was of
such good report himself that his brother’s path into holy orders
promised to be unexpectedly easy; and he longed to compare experiences
with him, even though there was on hand a more exciting matter still.
From his youth he had held that, in old-fashioned country places, the
Church conferred social prestige up to a certain point at a cheaper
price than any other profession or pursuit; and events seemed to be
proving him right.

He had walked about half an hour when he saw Cornelius coming along the
path; and in a few minutes the two brothers met. The experiences of
Cornelius had been less immediately interesting than those of Joshua,
but his personal position was satisfactory, and there was nothing to
account for the singularly subdued manner that he exhibited, which at
first Joshua set down to the fatigue of over-study; and he proceeded to
the subject of Rosa’s arrival in the evening, and the probable
consequences of this her third visit. ‘Before next Easter she’ll be his
wife, my boy,’ said Joshua with grave exultation.

Cornelius shook his head. ‘She comes too late!’ he returned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look here.’ He produced the Fountall paper, and placed his finger on a
paragraph, which Joshua read. It appeared under the report of Petty
Sessions, and was a commonplace case of disorderly conduct, in which a
man was sent to prison for seven days for breaking windows in that
town.

‘Well?’ said Joshua.

‘It happened during an evening that I was in the street; and the
offender is our father.’

‘Not—how—I sent him more money on his promising to stay in Canada?’

‘He is home, safe enough.’ Cornelius in the same gloomy tone gave the
remainder of his information. He had witnessed the scene, unobserved of
his father, and had heard him say that he was on his way to see his
daughter, who was going to marry a rich gentleman. The only good
fortune attending the untoward incident was that the millwright’s name
had been printed as Joshua Alborough.

‘Beaten! We are to be beaten on the eve of our expected victory!’ said
the elder brother. ‘How did he guess that Rosa was likely to marry?
Good Heaven Cornelius, you seem doomed to bring bad news always, do you
not!’

‘I do,’ said Cornelius. ‘Poor Rosa!’

It was almost in tears, so great was their heart-sickness and shame,
that the brothers walked the remainder of the way to Joshua’s dwelling.
In the evening they set out to meet Rosa, bringing her to the village
in a fly; and when she had come into the house, and was sitting down
with them, they almost forgot their secret anxiety in contemplating
her, who knew nothing about it.

Next day the Fellmers came, and the two or three days after that were a
lively time. That the squire was yielding to his impulses—making up his
mind—there could be no doubt. On Sunday Cornelius read the lessons, and
Joshua preached. Mrs. Fellmer was quite maternal towards Rosa, and it
appeared that she had decided to welcome the inevitable with a good
grace. The pretty girl was to spend yet another afternoon with the
elder lady, superintending some parish treat at the house in observance
of Christmas, and afterwards to stay on to dinner, her brothers to
fetch her in the evening. They were also invited to dine, but they
could not accept owing to an engagement.

The engagement was of a sombre sort. They were going to meet their
father, who would that day be released from Fountall Gaol, and try to
persuade him to keep away from Narrobourne. Every exertion was to be
made to get him back to Canada, to his old home in the
Midlands—anywhere, so that he would not impinge disastrously upon their
courses, and blast their sister’s prospects of the auspicious marriage
which was just then hanging in the balance.

As soon as Rosa had been fetched away by her friends at the manor-house
her brothers started on their expedition, without waiting for dinner or
tea. Cornelius, to whom the millwright always addressed his letters
when he wrote any, drew from his pocket and re-read as he walked the
curt note which had led to this journey being undertaken; it was
despatched by their father the night before, immediately upon his
liberation, and stated that he was setting out for Narrobourne at the
moment of writing; that having no money he would be obliged to walk all
the way; that he calculated on passing through the intervening town of
Ivell about six on the following day, where he should sup at the Castle
Inn, and where he hoped they would meet him with a carriage-and-pair,
or some other such conveyance, that he might not disgrace them by
arriving like a tramp.

‘That sounds as if he gave a thought to our position,’ said Cornelius.

Joshua knew the satire that lurked in the paternal words, and said
nothing. Silence prevailed during the greater part of their journey.
The lamps were lighted in Ivell when they entered the streets, and
Cornelius, who was quite unknown in this neighbourhood, and who,
moreover, was not in clerical attire, decided that he should be the one
to call at the Castle Inn. Here, in answer to his inquiry under the
darkness of the archway, they told him that such a man as he had
described left the house about a quarter of an hour earlier, after
making a meal in the kitchen-settle. He was rather the worse for
liquor.

‘Then,’ said Joshua, when Cornelius joined him outside with this
intelligence, ‘we must have met and passed him! And now that I think of
it, we did meet some one who was unsteady in his gait, under the trees
on the other side of Hendford Hill, where it was too dark to see him.’

They rapidly retraced their steps; but for a long stretch of the way
home could discern nobody. When, however, they had gone about
three-quarters of the distance, they became conscious of an irregular
footfall in front of them, and could see a whitish figure in the gloom.
They followed dubiously. The figure met another wayfarer—the single one
that had been encountered upon this lonely road—and they distinctly
heard him ask the way to Narrobourne. The stranger replied—what was
quite true—that the nearest way was by turning in at the stile by the
next bridge, and following the footpath which branched thence across
the meadows.

When the brothers reached the stile they also entered the path, but did
not overtake the subject of their worry till they had crossed two or
three meads, and the lights from Narrobourne manor-house were visible
before them through the trees. Their father was no longer walking; he
was seated against the wet bank of an adjoining hedge. Observing their
forms he shouted, ‘I’m going to Narrobourne; who may you be?’

They went up to him, and revealed themselves, reminding him of the plan
which he had himself proposed in his note, that they should meet him at
Ivell.

‘By Jerry, I’d forgot it!’ he said. ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’
His tone was distinctly quarrelsome.

A long conversation followed, which became embittered at the first hint
from them that he should not come to the village. The millwright drew a
quart bottle from his pocket, and challenged them to drink if they
meant friendly and called themselves men. Neither of the two had
touched alcohol for years, but for once they thought it best to accept,
so as not to needlessly provoke him.

‘What’s in it?’ said Joshua.

‘A drop of weak gin-and-water. It won’t hurt ye. Drin’ from the
bottle.’ Joshua did so, and his father pushed up the bottom of the
vessel so as to make him swallow a good deal in spite of himself. It
went down into his stomach like molten lead.

‘Ha, ha, that’s right!’ said old Halborough. ‘But ’twas raw spirit—ha,
ha!’

‘Why should you take me in so!’ said Joshua, losing his self-command,
try as he would to keep calm.

‘Because you took me in, my lad, in banishing me to that cursed country
under pretence that it was for my good. You were a pair of hypocrites
to say so. It was done to get rid of me—no more nor less. But, by
Jerry, I’m a match for ye now! I’ll spoil your souls for preaching. My
daughter is going to be married to the squire here. I’ve heard the
news—I saw it in a paper!’

‘It is premature—’

‘I know it is true; and I’m her father, and I shall give her away, or
there’ll be a hell of a row, I can assure ye! Is that where the
gennleman lives?’

Joshua Halborough writhed in impotent despair. Fellmer had not yet
positively declared himself, his mother was hardly won round; a scene
with their father in the parish would demolish as fair a palace of
hopes as was ever builded. The millwright rose. ‘If that’s where the
squire lives I’m going to call. Just arrived from Canady with her
fortune—ha, ha! I wish no harm to the gennleman, and the gennleman will
wish no harm to me. But I like to take my place in the family, and
stand upon my rights, and lower people’s pride!’

‘You’ve succeeded already! Where’s that woman you took with you—’

‘Woman! She was my wife as lawful as the Constitution—a sight more
lawful than your mother was till some time after you were born!’

Joshua had for many years before heard whispers that his father had
cajoled his mother in their early acquaintance, and had made somewhat
tardy amends; but never from his father’s lips till now. It was the
last stroke, and he could not bear it. He sank back against the hedge.
‘It is over!’ he said. ‘He ruins us all!’

The millwright moved on, waving his stick triumphantly, and the two
brothers stood still. They could see his drab figure stalking along the
path, and over his head the lights from the conservatory of Narrobourne
House, inside which Albert Fellmer might possibly be sitting with Rosa
at that moment, holding her hand, and asking her to share his home with
him.

The staggering whitey-brown form, advancing to put a blot on all this,
had been diminishing in the shade; and now suddenly disappeared beside
a weir. There was the noise of a flounce in the water.

‘He has fallen in!’ said Cornelius, starting forward to run for the
place at which his father had vanished.

Joshua, awaking from the stupefied reverie into which he had sunk,
rushed to the other’s side before he had taken ten steps. ‘Stop, stop,
what are you thinking of?’ he whispered hoarsely, grasping Cornelius’s
arm.

‘Pulling him out!’

‘Yes, yes—so am I. But—wait a moment—’

‘But, Joshua!’

‘Her life and happiness, you know—Cornelius—and your reputation and
mine—and our chance of rising together, all three—’

He clutched his brother’s arm to the bone; and as they stood breathless
the splashing and floundering in the weir continued; over it they saw
the hopeful lights from the manor-house conservatory winking through
the trees as their bare branches waved to and fro.

The floundering and splashing grew weaker, and they could hear gurgling
words: ‘Help—I’m drownded! Rosie—Rosie!’

‘We’ll go—we must save him. O Joshua!’

‘Yes, yes! we must!’

Still they did not move, but waited, holding each other, each thinking
the same thought. Weights of lead seemed to be affixed to their feet,
which would no longer obey their wills. The mead became silent. Over it
they fancied they could see figures moving in the conservatory. The air
up there seemed to emit gentle kisses.

Cornelius started forward at last, and Joshua almost simultaneously.
Two or three minutes brought them to the brink of the stream. At first
they could see nothing in the water, though it was not so deep nor the
night so dark but that their father’s light kerseymere coat would have
been visible if he had lain at the bottom. Joshua looked this way and
that.

‘He has drifted into the culvert,’ he said.

Below the foot-bridge of the weir the stream suddenly narrowed to half
its width, to pass under a barrel arch or culvert constructed for
waggons to cross into the middle of the mead in haymaking time. It
being at present the season of high water the arch was full to the
crown, against which the ripples clucked every now and then. At this
point he had just caught sight of a pale object slipping under. In a
moment it was gone.

They went to the lower end, but nothing emerged. For a long time they
tried at both ends to effect some communication with the interior, but
to no purpose.

‘We ought to have come sooner!’ said the conscience-stricken Cornelius,
when they were quite exhausted, and dripping wet.

‘I suppose we ought,’ replied Joshua heavily. He perceived his father’s
walking-stick on the bank; hastily picking it up he stuck it into the
mud among the sedge. Then they went on.

‘Shall we—say anything about this accident?’ whispered Cornelius as
they approached the door of Joshua’s house.

‘What’s the use? It can do no good. We must wait until he is found.’

They went indoors and changed their clothes; after which they started
for the manor-house, reaching it about ten o’clock. Besides their
sister there were only three guests; an adjoining landowner and his
wife, and the infirm old rector.

Rosa, although she had parted from them so recently, grasped their
hands in an ecstatic, brimming, joyful manner, as if she had not seen
them for years. ‘You look pale,’ she said.

The brothers answered that they had had a long walk, and were somewhat
tired. Everybody in the room seemed charged full with some sort of
interesting knowledge: the squire’s neighbour and his wife looked
wisely around; and Fellmer himself played the part of host with a
preoccupied bearing which approached fervour. They left at eleven, not
accepting the carriage offered, the distance being so short and the
roads dry. The squire came rather farther into the dark with them than
he need have done, and wished Rosa good-night in a mysterious manner,
slightly apart from the rest.

When they were walking along Joshua said, with desperate attempt at
joviality, ‘Rosa, what’s going on?’

‘O, I—’ she began between a gasp and a bound. ‘He—’

‘Never mind—if it disturbs you.’

She was so excited that she could not speak connectedly at first, the
practised air which she had brought home with her having disappeared.
Calming herself she added, ‘I am not disturbed, and nothing has
happened. Only he said he wanted to ask me _something_, some day; and I
said never mind that now. He hasn’t asked yet, and is coming to speak
to you about it. He would have done so to-night, only I asked him not
to be in a hurry. But he will come to-morrow, I am sure!’

CHAPTER V

It was summer-time, six months later, and mowers and haymakers were at
work in the meads. The manor-house, being opposite them, frequently
formed a peg for conversation during these operations; and the doings
of the squire, and the squire’s young wife, the curate’s sister—who was
at present the admired of most of them, and the interest of all—met
with their due amount of criticism.

Rosa was happy, if ever woman could be said to be so. She had not
learnt the fate of her father, and sometimes wondered—perhaps with a
sense of relief—why he did not write to her from his supposed home in
Canada. Her brother Joshua had been presented to a living in a small
town, shortly after her marriage, and Cornelius had thereupon succeeded
to the vacant curacy of Narrobourne.

These two had awaited in deep suspense the discovery of their father’s
body; and yet the discovery had not been made. Every day they expected
a man or a boy to run up from the meads with the intelligence; but he
had never come. Days had accumulated to weeks and months; the wedding
had come and gone: Joshua had tolled and read himself in at his new
parish; and never a shout of amazement over the millwright’s remains.

But now, in June, when they were mowing the meads, the hatches had to
be drawn and the water let out of its channels for the convenience of
the mowers. It was thus that the discovery was made. A man, stooping
low with his scythe, caught a view of the culvert lengthwise, and saw
something entangled in the recently bared weeds of its bed. A day or
two after there was an inquest; but the body was unrecognizable. Fish
and flood had been busy with the millwright; he had no watch or marked
article which could be identified; and a verdict of the accidental
drowning of a person unknown settled the matter.

As the body was found in Narrobourne parish, there it had to be buried.
Cornelius wrote to Joshua, begging him to come and read the service, or
to send some one; he himself could not do it. Rather than let in a
stranger Joshua came, and silently scanned the coroner’s order handed
him by the undertaker:—

‘I, Henry Giles, Coroner for the Mid-Division of Outer Wessex, do
hereby order the Burial of the Body now shown to the Inquest Jury as
the Body of an Adult Male Person Unknown . . . ,’ etc.

Joshua Halborough got through the service in some way, and rejoined his
brother Cornelius at his house. Neither accepted an invitation to lunch
at their sister’s; they wished to discuss parish matters together. In
the afternoon she came down, though they had already called on her, and
had not expected to see her again. Her bright eyes, brown hair, flowery
bonnet, lemon-coloured gloves, and flush beauty, were like an
irradiation into the apartment, which they in their gloom could hardly
bear.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said, ‘of a curious thing which happened to
me a month or two before my marriage—something which I have thought may
have had a connection with the accident to the poor man you have buried
to-day. It was on that evening I was at the manor-house waiting for you
to fetch me; I was in the winter-garden with Albert, and we were
sitting silent together, when we fancied we heard a cry. We opened the
door, and while Albert ran to fetch his hat, leaving me standing there,
the cry was repeated, and my excited senses made me think I heard my
own name. When Albert came back all was silent, and we decided that it
was only a drunken shout, and not a cry for help. We both forgot the
incident, and it never has occurred to me till since the funeral to-day
that it might have been this stranger’s cry. The name of course was
only fancy, or he might have had a wife or child with a name something
like mine, poor man!’

When she was gone the brothers were silent till Cornelius said, ‘Now
mark this, Joshua. Sooner or later she’ll know.’

‘How?’

‘From one of us. Do you think human hearts are iron-cased safes, that
you suppose we can keep this secret for ever?’

‘Yes, I think they are, sometimes,’ said Joshua.

‘No. It will out. We shall tell.’

‘What, and ruin her—kill her? Disgrace her children, and pull down the
whole auspicious house of Fellmer about our ears? No! May I—drown where
he was drowned before I do it! Never, never. Surely you can say the
same, Cornelius!’

Cornelius seemed fortified, and no more was said. For a long time after
that day he did not see Joshua, and before the next year was out a son
and heir was born to the Fellmers. The villagers rang the three bells
every evening for a week and more, and were made merry by Mr. Fellmer’s
ale; and when the christening came on Joshua paid Narrobourne another
visit.

Among all the people who assembled on that day the brother clergymen
were the least interested. Their minds were haunted by a spirit in
kerseymere in the evening they walked together in the fields.

‘She’s all right,’ said Joshua. ‘But here are you doing journey-work,
Cornelius, and likely to continue at it till the end of the day, as far
as I can see. I, too, with my petty living—what am I after all? . . .
To tell the truth, the Church is a poor forlorn hope for people without
influence, particularly when their enthusiasm begins to flag. A social
regenerator has a better chance outside, where he is unhampered by
dogma and tradition. As for me, I would rather have gone on mending
mills, with my crust of bread and liberty.’

Almost automatically they had bent their steps along the margin of the
river; they now paused. They were standing on the brink of the
well-known weir. There were the hatches, there was the culvert; they
could see the pebbly bed of the stream through the pellucid water. The
notes of the church-bells were audible, still jangled by the
enthusiastic villagers.

‘Why see—it was there I hid his walking-stick!’ said Joshua, looking
towards the sedge. The next moment, during a passing breeze, something
flashed white on the spot to which the attention of Cornelius was
drawn.

From the sedge rose a straight little silver-poplar, and it was the
leaves of this sapling which caused the flicker of whiteness.

‘His walking-stick has grown!’ Joshua added. ‘It was a rough one—cut
from the hedge, I remember.’

At every puff of wind the tree turned white, till they could not bear
to look at it; and they walked away.

‘I see him every night,’ Cornelius murmured . . . ‘Ah, we read our
_Hebrews_ to little account, Jos! Υπέμεινε σταυρον, αισχυνης
καταφρονησας. To have endured the cross, despising the shame—there lay
greatness! But now I often feel that I should like to put an end to
trouble here in this self-same spot.’

‘I have thought of it myself,’ said Joshua.

‘Perhaps we shall, some day,’ murmured his brother. ‘Perhaps,’ said
Joshua moodily.

With that contingency to consider in the silence of their nights and
days they bent their steps homewards.

_December_ 1888.




ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT


CHAPTER I

The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet lives hereafter
depicted—no great man, in any sense, by the way—first had knowledge of
them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been
standing in the Close, vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a
glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediæval architecture in
England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward in
front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was
revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but
they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a
street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building,
was flung back upon him.

He postponed till the morrow his attempt to examine the deserted
edifice, and turned his attention to the noise. It was compounded of
steam barrel-organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells,
the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men. A lurid
light hung in the air in the direction of the tumult. Thitherward he
went, passing under the arched gateway, along a straight street, and
into the square.

He might have searched Europe over for a greater contrast between
juxtaposed scenes. The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the
Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the
Homeric heaven. A smoky glare, of the complexion of brass-filings,
ascended from the fiery tongues of innumerable naphtha lamps affixed to
booths, stalls, and other temporary erections which crowded the
spacious market-square. In front of this irradiation scores of human
figures, more or less in profile, were darting athwart and across, up,
down, and around, like gnats against a sunset.

Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by
machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery
indeed; the figures being those of the patrons of swings, see-saws,
flying-leaps, above all of the three steam roundabouts which occupied
the centre of the position. It was from the latter that the din of
steam-organs came.

Throbbing humanity in full light was, on second thoughts, better than
architecture in the dark. The young man, lighting a short pipe, and
putting his hat on one side and one hand in his pocket, to throw
himself into harmony with his new environment, drew near to the largest
and most patronized of the steam circuses, as the roundabouts were
called by their owners. This was one of brilliant finish, and it was
now in full revolution. The musical instrument around which and to
whose tones the riders revolved, directed its trumpet-mouths of brass
upon the young man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles,
which revolved with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and
hobby horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes.

It could now be seen that he was unlike the majority of the crowd. A
gentlemanly young fellow, one of the species found in large towns only,
and London particularly, built on delicate lines, well, though not
fashionably dressed, he appeared to belong to the professional class;
he had nothing square or practical about his look, much that was
curvilinear and sensuous. Indeed, some would have called him a man not
altogether typical of the middle-class male of a century wherein sordid
ambition is the master-passion that seems to be taking the
time-honoured place of love.

The revolving figures passed before his eyes with an unexpected and
quiet grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest
gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was
imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which was really the
triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness—a galloping rise and
fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring
while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by
these equine undulations in this most delightful holiday-game of our
times. There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years,
with every age between. At first it was difficult to catch a
personality, but by and by the observer’s eyes centred on the prettiest
girl out of the several pretty ones revolving.

It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been
at first attracted by; no, it was the one with the black cape, grey
skirt, light gloves and—no, not even she, but the one behind her; she
with the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves.
Unmistakably that was the prettiest girl.

Having finally selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as
he was able during each of her brief transits across his visual field.
She was absolutely unconscious of everything save the act of riding:
her features were rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess; for the moment she
did not know her age or her history or her lineaments, much less her
troubles. He himself was full of vague latter-day glooms and popular
melancholies, and it was a refreshing sensation to behold this young
thing then and there, absolutely as happy as if she were in a Paradise.

Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind
the glittering rococo-work, should decide that this set of riders had
had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine,
horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and
silence, he waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently
over the intervening forms, including the two plainer girls, the old
woman and child, the two youngsters, the newly-married couple, the old
man with a clay pipe, the sparkish youth with a ring, the young ladies
in the chariot, the pair of journeyman-carpenters, and others, till his
select country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen
a fairer product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark in
his sentiments. The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders
were audible.

He moved round to the place at which he reckoned she would alight; but
she retained her seat. The empty saddles began to refill, and she
plainly was deciding to have another turn. The young man drew up to the
side of her steed, and pleasantly asked her if she had enjoyed her
ride.

‘O yes!’ she said, with dancing eyes. ‘It has been quite unlike
anything I have ever felt in my life before!’

It was not difficult to fall into conversation with her. Unreserved—too
unreserved—by nature, she was not experienced enough to be reserved by
art, and after a little coaxing she answered his remarks readily. She
had come to live in Melchester from a village on the Great Plain, and
this was the first time that she had ever seen a steam-circus; she
could not understand how such wonderful machines were made. She had
come to the city on the invitation of Mrs. Harnham, who had taken her
into her household to train her as a servant, if she showed any
aptitude. Mrs. Harnham was a young lady who before she married had been
Miss Edith White, living in the country near the speaker’s cottage; she
was now very kind to her through knowing her in childhood so well. She
was even taking the trouble to educate her. Mrs. Harnham was the only
friend she had in the world, and being without children had wished to
have her near her in preference to anybody else, though she had only
lately come; allowed her to do almost as she liked, and to have a
holiday whenever she asked for it. The husband of this kind young lady
was a rich wine-merchant of the town, but Mrs. Harnham did not care
much about him. In the daytime you could see the house from where they
were talking. She, the speaker, liked Melchester better than the lonely
country, and she was going to have a new hat for next Sunday that was
to cost fifteen and ninepence.

Then she inquired of her acquaintance where he lived, and he told her
in London, that ancient and smoky city, where everybody lived who lived
at all, and died because they could not live there. He came into Wessex
two or three times a year for professional reasons; he had arrived from
Wintoncester yesterday, and was going on into the next county in a day
or two. For one thing he did like the country better than the town, and
it was because it contained such girls as herself.

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted
girl, the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its
lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began
moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her
right hand, she being as it were the fixed point in an undulating,
dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of
all the form of her late interlocutor. Each time that she approached
the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other
with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so
little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache,
union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content,
resignation, despair.

When the horses slowed anew he stepped to her side and proposed another
heat. ‘Hang the expense for once,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay!’

She laughed till the tears came.

‘Why do you laugh, dear?’ said he.

‘Because—you are so genteel that you must have plenty of money, and
only say that for fun!’ she returned.

‘Ha-ha!’ laughed the young man in unison, and gallantly producing his
money she was enabled to whirl on again.

As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his
hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and wideawake that he had put on
for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford
Raye, Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the
Bar at Lincoln’s-Inn, now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in
Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to
the next county-town?

CHAPTER II

The square was overlooked from its remoter corner by the house of which
the young girl had spoken, a dignified residence of considerable size,
having several windows on each floor. Inside one of these, on the first
floor, the apartment being a large drawing-room, sat a lady, in
appearance from twenty-eight to thirty years of age. The blinds were
still undrawn, and the lady was absently surveying the weird scene
without, her cheek resting on her hand. The room was unlit from within,
but enough of the glare from the market-place entered it to reveal the
lady’s face. She was what is called an interesting creature rather than
a handsome woman; dark-eyed, thoughtful, and with sensitive lips.

A man sauntered into the room from behind and came forward.

‘O, Edith, I didn’t see you,’ he said. ‘Why are you sitting here in the
dark?’

‘I am looking at the fair,’ replied the lady in a languid voice.

‘Oh? Horrid nuisance every year! I wish it could be put a stop to’

‘I like it.’

‘H’m. There’s no accounting for taste.’

For a moment he gazed from the window with her, for politeness sake,
and then went out again.

In a few minutes she rang.

‘Hasn’t Anna come in?’ asked Mrs. Harnham.

‘No m’m.’

‘She ought to be in by this time. I meant her to go for ten minutes
only.’

‘Shall I go and look for her, m’m?’ said the house-maid alertly.

‘No. It is not necessary: she is a good girl and will come soon.’

However, when the servant had gone Mrs. Harnham arose, went up to her
room, cloaked and bonneted herself, and proceeded downstairs, where she
found her husband.

‘I want to see the fair,’ she said; ‘and I am going to look for Anna. I
have made myself responsible for her, and must see she comes to no
harm. She ought to be indoors. Will you come with me?’

‘Oh, she’s all right. I saw her on one of those whirligig things,
talking to her young man as I came in. But I’ll go if you wish, though
I’d rather go a hundred miles the other way.’

‘Then please do so. I shall come to no harm alone.’

She left the house and entered the crowd which thronged the
market-place, where she soon discovered Anna, seated on the revolving
horse. As soon as it stopped Mrs. Harnham advanced and said severely,
‘Anna, how can you be such a wild girl? You were only to be out for ten
minutes.’

Anna looked blank, and the young man, who had dropped into the
background, came to her assistance.

‘Please don’t blame her,’ he said politely. ‘It is my fault that she
has stayed. She looked so graceful on the horse that I induced her to
go round again. I assure you that she has been quite safe.’

‘In that case I’ll leave her in your hands,’ said Mrs. Harnham, turning
to retrace her steps.

But this for the moment it was not so easy to do. Something had
attracted the crowd to a spot in their rear, and the wine-merchant’s
wife, caught by its sway, found herself pressed against Anna’s
acquaintance without power to move away. Their faces were within a few
inches of each other, his breath fanned her cheek as well as Anna’s.
They could do no other than smile at the accident; but neither spoke,
and each waited passively. Mrs. Harnham then felt a man’s hand clasping
her fingers, and from the look of consciousness on the young fellow’s
face she knew the hand to be his: she also knew that from the position
of the girl he had no other thought than that the imprisoned hand was
Anna’s. What prompted her to refrain from undeceiving him she could
hardly tell. Not content with holding the hand, he playfully slipped
two of his fingers inside her glove, against her palm. Thus matters
continued till the pressure lessened; but several minutes passed before
the crowd thinned sufficiently to allow Mrs. Harnham to withdraw.

‘How did they get to know each other, I wonder?’ she mused as she
retreated. ‘Anna is really very forward—and he very wicked and nice.’

She was so gently stirred with the stranger’s manner and voice, with
the tenderness of his idle touch, that instead of re-entering the house
she turned back again and observed the pair from a screened nook.
Really she argued (being little less impulsive than Anna herself) it
was very excusable in Anna to encourage him, however she might have
contrived to make his acquaintance; he was so gentlemanly, so
fascinating, had such beautiful eyes. The thought that he was several
years her junior produced a reasonless sigh.

At length the couple turned from the roundabout towards the door of
Mrs. Harnham’s house, and the young man could be heard saying that he
would accompany her home. Anna, then, had found a lover, apparently a
very devoted one. Mrs. Harnham was quite interested in him. When they
drew near the door of the wine-merchant’s house, a comparatively
deserted spot by this time, they stood invisible for a little while in
the shadow of a wall, where they separated, Anna going on to the
entrance, and her acquaintance returning across the square.

‘Anna,’ said Mrs. Harnham, coming up. ‘I’ve been looking at you! That
young man kissed you at parting I am almost sure.’

‘Well,’ stammered Anna; ‘he said, if I didn’t mind—it would do me no
harm, and, and, him a great deal of good!’

‘Ah, I thought so! And he was a stranger till to-night?’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘Yet I warrant you told him your name and every thing about yourself?’

‘He asked me.’

‘But he didn’t tell you his?’

‘Yes ma’am, he did!’ cried Anna victoriously. ‘It is Charles Bradford,
of London.’

‘Well, if he’s respectable, of course I’ve nothing to say against your
knowing him,’ remarked her mistress, prepossessed, in spite of general
principles, in the young man’s favour. ‘But I must reconsider all that,
if he attempts to renew your acquaintance. A country-bred girl like
you, who has never lived in Melchester till this month, who had hardly
ever seen a black-coated man till you came here, to be so sharp as to
capture a young Londoner like him!’

‘I didn’t capture him. I didn’t do anything,’ said Anna, in confusion.

When she was indoors and alone Mrs. Harnham thought what a well-bred
and chivalrous young man Anna’s companion had seemed. There had been a
magic in his wooing touch of her hand; and she wondered how he had come
to be attracted by the girl.

The next morning the emotional Edith Harnham went to the usual week-day
service in Melchester cathedral. In crossing the Close through the fog
she again perceived him who had interested her the previous evening,
gazing up thoughtfully at the high-piled architecture of the nave: and
as soon as she had taken her seat he entered and sat down in a stall
opposite hers.

He did not particularly heed her; but Mrs. Harnham was continually
occupying her eyes with him, and wondered more than ever what had
attracted him in her unfledged maid-servant. The mistress was almost as
unaccustomed as the maiden herself to the end-of-the-age young man, or
she might have wondered less. Raye, having looked about him awhile,
left abruptly, without regard to the service that was proceeding; and
Mrs. Harnham—lonely, impressionable creature that she was—took no
further interest in praising the Lord. She wished she had married a
London man who knew the subtleties of love-making as they were
evidently known to him who had mistakenly caressed her hand.

CHAPTER III

The calendar at Melchester had been light, occupying the court only a
few hours; and the assizes at Casterbridge, the next county-town on the
Western Circuit, having no business for Raye, he had not gone thither.
At the next town after that they did not open till the following
Monday, trials to begin on Tuesday morning. In the natural order of
things Raye would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon;
but it was not till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig,
curled in tiers, in the best fashion of Assyrian bas-reliefs, were seen
blowing and bobbing behind him as he hastily walked up the High Street
from his lodgings. But though he entered the assize building there was
nothing for him to do, and sitting at the blue baize table in the well
of the court, he mended pens with a mind far away from the case in
progress. Thoughts of unpremeditated conduct, of which a week earlier
he would not have believed himself capable, threw him into a mood of
dissatisfied depression.

He had contrived to see again the pretty rural maiden Anna, the day
after the fair, had walked out of the city with her to the earthworks
of Old Melchester, and feeling a violent fancy for her, had remained in
Melchester all Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday; by persuasion obtaining
walks and meetings with the girl six or seven times during the
interval; had in brief won her, body and soul.

He supposed it must have been owing to the seclusion in which he had
lived of late in town that he had given way so unrestrainedly to a
passion for an artless creature whose inexperience had, from the first,
led her to place herself unreservedly in his hands. Much he deplored
trifling with her feelings for the sake of a passing desire; and he
could only hope that she might not live to suffer on his account.

She had begged him to come to her again; entreated him; wept. He had
promised that he would do so, and he meant to carry out that promise.
He could not desert her now. Awkward as such unintentional connections
were, the interspace of a hundred miles—which to a girl of her limited
capabilities was like a thousand—would effectually hinder this summer
fancy from greatly encumbering his life; while thought of her simple
love might do him the negative good of keeping him from idle pleasures
in town when he wished to work hard. His circuit journeys would take
him to Melchester three or four times a year; and then he could always
see her.

The pseudonym, or rather partial name, that he had given her as his
before knowing how far the acquaintance was going to carry him, had
been spoken on the spur of the moment, without any ulterior intention
whatever. He had not afterwards disturbed Anna’s error, but on leaving
her he had felt bound to give her an address at a stationer’s not far
from his chambers, at which she might write to him under the initials
‘C. B.’

In due time Raye returned to his London abode, having called at
Melchester on his way and spent a few additional hours with his
fascinating child of nature. In town he lived monotonously every day.
Often he and his rooms were enclosed by a tawny fog from all the world
besides, and when he lighted the gas to read or write by, his situation
seemed so unnatural that he would look into the fire and think of that
trusting girl at Melchester again and again. Often, oppressed by absurd
fondness for her, he would enter the dim religious nave of the Law
Courts by the north door, elbow other juniors habited like himself, and
like him unretained; edge himself into this or that crowded court where
a sensational case was going on, just as if he were in it, though the
police officers at the door knew as well as he knew himself that he had
no more concern with the business in hand than the patient idlers at
the gallery-door outside, who had waited to enter since eight in the
morning because, like him, they belonged to the classes that live on
expectation. But he would do these things to no purpose, and think how
greatly the characters in such scenes contrasted with the pink and
breezy Anna.

An unexpected feature in that peasant maiden’s conduct was that she had
not as yet written to him, though he had told her she might do so if
she wished. Surely a young creature had never before been so reticent
in such circumstances. At length he sent her a brief line, positively
requesting her to write. There was no answer by the return post, but
the day after a letter in a neat feminine hand, and bearing the
Melchester post-mark, was handed to him by the stationer.

The fact alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative
sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not
begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its
terms of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last he
turned his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was
surprised and pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity
was there. It was the most charming little missive he had ever received
from woman. To be sure the language was simple and the ideas were
slight; but it was so self-possessed; so purely that of a young girl
who felt her womanhood to be enough for her dignity that he read it
through twice. Four sides were filled, and a few lines written across,
after the fashion of former days; the paper, too, was common, and not
of the latest shade and surface. But what of those things? He had
received letters from women who were fairly called ladies, but never so
sensible, so human a letter as this. He could not single out any one
sentence and say it was at all remarkable or clever; the _ensemble_ of
the letter it was which won him; and beyond the one request that he
would write or come to her again soon there was nothing to show her
sense of a claim upon him.

To write again and develop a correspondence was the last thing Raye
would have preconceived as his conduct in such a situation; yet he did
send a short, encouraging line or two, signed with his pseudonym, in
which he asked for another letter, and cheeringly promised that he
would try to see her again on some near day, and would never forget how
much they had been to each other during their short acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received
Raye’s letter.

It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds.
She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and
over. ‘It is mine?’ she said.

‘Why, yes, can’t you see it is?’ said the postman, smiling as he
guessed the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.

‘O yes, of course!’ replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly
tittering, and blushing still more.

Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman’s
departure. She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the
letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with
tears.

A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her
bed-chamber. Anna’s mistress looked at her, and said: ‘How dismal you
seem this morning, Anna. What’s the matter?’

‘I’m not dismal, I’m glad; only I—’ She stopped to stifle a sob.

‘Well?’

‘I’ve got a letter—and what good is it to me, if I can’t read a word in
it!’

‘Why, I’ll read it, child, if necessary.’

‘But this is from somebody—I don’t want anybody to read it but myself!’
Anna murmured.

‘I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?’

‘I think so.’ Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: ‘Then will you
read it to me, ma’am?’

This was the secret of Anna’s embarrassment and flutterings. She could
neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by
marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain
where, even in days of national education, there had been no school
within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there
had been nobody to investigate Anna’s circumstances, nobody to care
about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she
had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had
come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a
kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in
which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not
unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of
her mistress’s phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting
a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was
slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the
letter.

Edith Harnham’s large dark eyes expressed some interest in the
contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into
her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the
short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna
to send him a tender answer.

‘Now—you’ll do it for me, won’t you, dear mistress?’ said Anna eagerly.
‘And you’ll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn’t
bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the
earth with shame if he knew that!’

From some words in the letter Mrs. Harnham was led to ask questions,
and the answers she received confirmed her suspicions. Deep concern
filled Edith’s heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her
happiness to the issue of this new-sprung attachment. She blamed
herself for not interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so
seriously for the poor little creature in her charge; though at the
time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly
within her province to nip young affection in the bud. However, what
was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna’s only
protector, to help her as much as she could. To Anna’s eager request
that she, Mrs. Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this
young London man’s letter, she felt bound to accede, to keep alive his
attachment to the girl if possible; though in other circumstances she
might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.

A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham’s
hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in.
Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna’s humble
note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life,
the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham’s.

‘Won’t you at least put your name yourself?’ she said. ‘You can manage
to write that by this time?’

‘No, no,’ said Anna, shrinking back. ‘I should do it so bad. He’d be
ashamed of me, and never see me again!’

The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have
seen, power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such
a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same
process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her
mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter
being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer
read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.

Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs.
Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her husband had
retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which
takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been
brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day.
For the first time since Raye’s visit Anna had gone to stay over a
night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence
had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had
replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart,
without waiting for her maid’s collaboration. The luxury of writing to
him what would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she
had indulged herself therein.

Why was it a luxury?

Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the
British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than
free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had
consented to marry the elderly wine-merchant as a _pis aller_, at the
age of seven-and-twenty—some three years before this date—to find
afterwards that she had made a mistake. That contract had left her
still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.

She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the
bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so
much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and
voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing
of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had
insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till
there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents,
notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own. That
he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning
though unrecognized fascination for her as the she-animal.

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas—lowered to monosyllabic
phraseology in order to keep up the disguise—that Edith put into
letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna’s delight,
who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty
fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith
found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the
young barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added
from Anna’s own lips made apparently no impression upon him.

The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her
return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about
something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.

There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs.
Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking
down at Edith’s knees, she made confession that the result of her
relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.

Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast
Anna adrift at this conjuncture. No true woman ever is so inclined from
her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking
such steps to safeguard those dear to her. Although she had written to
Raye so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note
hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.

Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was affected by her
news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.

But a week later the girl came to her mistress’s room with another
note, which on being read informed her that after all he could not find
time for the journey. Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham’s
counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and
bitterness customary from young women so situated. One thing was
imperative: to keep the young man’s romantic interest in her alive.
Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her _protégée_, request him
on no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to
inconvenience himself to hasten down. She desired above everything to
be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities.
She had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it
again from his mind. Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he
should come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to
discuss what had better be done.

It may well be supposed that Anna’s own feelings had not been quite in
accord with these generous expressions; but the mistress’s judgment had
ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. ‘All I want is that _niceness_ you can
so well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can’t
for the life o’ me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same
thing and feel it exactly when you’ve written it down!’

When the letter had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone,
she bowed herself on the back of her chair and wept.

‘I wish it was mine—I wish it was!’ she murmured. ‘Yet how can I say
such a wicked thing!’

CHAPTER V

The letter moved Raye considerably when it reached him. The
intelligence itself had affected him less than her unexpected manner of
treating him in relation to it. The absence of any word of reproach,
the devotion to his interests, the self-sacrifice apparent in every
line, all made up a nobility of character that he had never dreamt of
finding in womankind.

‘God forgive me!’ he said tremulously. ‘I have been a wicked wretch. I
did not know she was such a treasure as this!’

He reassured her instantly; declaring that he would not of course
desert her, that he would provide a home for her somewhere. Meanwhile
she was to stay where she was as long as her mistress would allow her.

But a misfortune supervened in this direction. Whether an inkling of
Anna’s circumstances reached the knowledge of Mrs. Harnham’s husband or
not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of Edith’s
entreaties, to leave the house. By her own choice she decided to go
back for a while to the cottage on the Plain. This arrangement led to a
consultation as to how the correspondence should be carried on; and in
the girl’s inability to continue personally what had been begun in her
name, and in the difficulty of their acting in concert as heretofore,
she requested Mrs. Harnham—the only well-to-do friend she had in the
world—to receive the letters and reply to them off-hand, sending them
on afterwards to herself on the Plain, where she might at least get
some neighbour to read them to her, if a trustworthy one could be met
with. Anna and her box then departed for the Plain.

Thus it befel that Edith Harnham found herself in the strange position
of having to correspond, under no supervision by the real woman, with a
man not her husband, in terms which were virtually those of a wife,
concerning a condition that was not Edith’s at all; the man being one
for whom, mainly through the sympathies involved in playing this part,
she secretly cherished a predilection, subtle and imaginative truly,
but strong and absorbing. She opened each letter, read it as if
intended for herself, and replied from the promptings of her own heart
and no other.

Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl’s absence, the
high-strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious
intimacy engendered such a flow of passionateness as was never
exceeded. For conscience’ sake Edith at first sent on each of his
letters to Anna, and even rough copies of her replies; but later on
these so-called copies were much abridged, and many letters on both
sides were not sent on at all.

Though selfish, and, superficially at least, infested with the
self-indulgent vices of artificial society, there was a substratum of
honesty and fairness in Raye’s character. He had really a tender regard
for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found
her apparently capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the
simplest words. He meditated, he wavered; and finally resolved to
consult his sister, a maiden lady much older than himself, of lively
sympathies and good intent. In making this confidence he showed her
some of the letters.

‘She seems fairly educated,’ Miss Raye observed. ‘And bright in ideas.
She expresses herself with a taste that must be innate.’

‘Yes. She writes very prettily, doesn’t she, thanks to these elementary
schools?’

‘One is drawn out towards her, in spite of one’s self, poor thing.’

The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly
advised to do it, Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never
have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that he could
not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her
looming difficulty by marrying her.

This bold acceptance of the situation was made known to Anna by Mrs.
Harnham driving out immediately to the cottage on the Plain. Anna
jumped for joy like a little child. And poor, crude directions for
answering appropriately were given to Edith Harnham, who on her return
to the city carried them out with warm intensification.

‘O!’ she groaned, as she threw down the pen. ‘Anna—poor good little
fool—hasn’t intelligence enough to appreciate him! How should she?
While I—don’t bear his child!’

It was now February. The correspondence had continued altogether for
four months; and the next letter from Raye contained incidentally a
statement of his position and prospects. He said that in offering to
wed her he had, at first, contemplated the step of retiring from a
profession which hitherto had brought him very slight emolument, and
which, to speak plainly, he had thought might be difficult of practice
after his union with her. But the unexpected mines of brightness and
warmth that her letters had disclosed to be lurking in her sweet nature
had led him to abandon that somewhat sad prospect. He felt sure that,
with her powers of development, after a little private training in the
social forms of London under his supervision, and a little help from a
governess if necessary, she would make as good a professional man’s
wife as could be desired, even if he should rise to the woolsack. Many
a Lord Chancellor’s wife had been less intuitively a lady than she had
shown herself to be in her lines to him.

‘O—poor fellow, poor fellow!’ mourned Edith Harnham.

Her distress now raged as high as her infatuation. It was she who had
wrought him to this pitch—to a marriage which meant his ruin; yet she
could not, in mercy to her maid, do anything to hinder his plan. Anna
was coming to Melchester that week, but she could hardly show the girl
this last reply from the young man; it told too much of the second
individuality that had usurped the place of the first.

Anna came, and her mistress took her into her own room for privacy.
Anna began by saying with some anxiety that she was glad the wedding
was so near.

‘O Anna!’ replied Mrs. Harnham. ‘I think we must tell him all—that I
have been doing your writing for you?—lest he should not know it till
after you become his wife, and it might lead to dissension and
recriminations—’

‘O mis’ess, dear mis’ess—please don’t tell him now!’ cried Anna in
distress. ‘If you were to do it, perhaps he would not marry me; and
what should I do then? It would be terrible what would come to me! And
I am getting on with my writing, too. I have brought with me the
copybook you were so good as to give me, and I practise every day, and
though it is so, so hard, I shall do it well at last, I believe, if I
keep on trying.’

Edith looked at the copybook. The copies had been set by herself, and
such progress as the girl had made was in the way of grotesque
facsimile of her mistress’s hand. But even if Edith’s flowing
caligraphy were reproduced the inspiration would be another thing.

‘You do it so beautifully,’ continued Anna, ‘and say all that I want to
say so much better than I could say it, that I do hope you won’t leave
me in the lurch just now!’

‘Very well,’ replied the other. ‘But I—but I thought I ought not to go
on!’

‘Why?’

Her strong desire to confide her sentiments led Edith to answer truly:

‘Because of its effect upon me.’

‘But it _can’t_ have any!’

‘Why, child?’

‘Because you are married already!’ said Anna with lucid simplicity.

‘Of course it can’t,’ said her mistress hastily; yet glad, despite her
conscience, that two or three outpourings still remained to her. ‘But
you must concentrate your attention on writing your name as I write it
here.’

CHAPTER VI

Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of
what he feared was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest
for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for
greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester;
Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw
herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna’s departure.
In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the
death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of
telepathy had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up
with Anna and be with her through the ceremony—‘to see the end of her,’
as her mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl
gratefully accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the
part of companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly
bridegroom, in such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made
an irremediable social blunder.

It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel
cab at the door of a registry-office in the S.W. district of London,
and carefully handed down Anna and her companion Mrs. Harnham. Anna
looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs.
Harnham had helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, an
innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the
wooden horse at Melchester Fair.

Mrs. Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young
man—a friend of Raye’s—having met them at the door, all four entered
the registry-office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had
never known the wine-merchant’s wife, except at that first casual
encounter, and in the flutter of the performance before them he had
little opportunity for more than a brief acquaintance. The contract of
marriage at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its
progress, Raye discovered a strange and secret gravitation between
himself and Anna’s friend.

The formalities of the wedding—or rather ratification of a previous
union—being concluded, the four went in one cab to Raye’s lodgings,
newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which
he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye
had bought at a pastrycook’s on his way home from Lincoln’s Inn the
night before. But she did not do much besides. Raye’s friend was
obliged to depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only
ones virtually present were Edith and Raye who exchanged ideas with
much animation. The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as
a domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed
startled in awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with
her inadequacy.

At last, more disappointed than he cared to own, he said, ‘Mrs.
Harnham, my darling is so flurried that she doesn’t know what she is
doing or saying. I see that after this event a little quietude will be
necessary before she gives tongue to that tender philosophy which she
used to treat me to in her letters.’

They had planned to start early that afternoon for Knollsea, to spend
the few opening days of their married life there, and as the hour for
departure was drawing near Raye asked his wife if she would go to the
writing-desk in the next room and scribble a little note to his sister,
who had been unable to attend through indisposition, informing her that
the ceremony was over, thanking her for her little present, and hoping
to know her well now that she was the writer’s sister as well as
Charles’s.

‘Say it in the pretty poetical way you know so well how to adopt,’ he
added, ‘for I want you particularly to win her, and both of you to be
dear friends.’

Anna looked uneasy, but departed to her task, Raye remaining to talk to
their guest. Anna was a long while absent, and her husband suddenly
rose and went to her.

He found her still bending over the writing-table, with tears brimming
up in her eyes; and he looked down upon the sheet of note-paper with
some interest, to discover with what tact she had expressed her
good-will in the delicate circumstances. To his surprise she had
progressed but a few lines, in the characters and spelling of a child
of eight, and with the ideas of a goose.

‘Anna,’ he said, staring; ‘what’s this?’

‘It only means—that I can’t do it any better!’ she answered, through
her tears.

‘Eh? Nonsense!’

‘I can’t!’ she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. ‘I—I—didn’t
write those letters, Charles! I only told _her_ what to write! And not
always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear husband! And
you’ll forgive me, won’t you, for not telling you before?’ She slid to
her knees, abjectly clasped his waist and laid her face against him.

He stood a few moments, raised her, abruptly turned, and shut the door
upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something
untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each
other.

‘Do I guess rightly?’ he asked, with wan quietude. ‘_You_ were her
scribe through all this?’

‘It was necessary,’ said Edith.

‘Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?’

‘Not every word.’

‘In fact, very little?’

‘Very little.’

‘You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own
conceptions, though in her name!’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you wrote many of the letters when you were alone, without
communication with her?’

‘I did.’

He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and
Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.

‘You have deceived me—ruined me!’ he murmured.

‘O, don’t say it!’ she cried in her anguish, jumping up and putting her
hand on his shoulder. ‘I can’t bear that!’

‘Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it—_why_ did you!’

‘I began doing it in kindness to her! How could I do otherwise than try
to save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it
for pleasure to myself.’

Raye looked up. ‘Why did it give you pleasure?’ he asked.

‘I must not tell,’ said she.

He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to
quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started
aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return
train: could a cab be called immediately?

But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. ‘Well, to think
of such a thing as this!’ he said. ‘Why, you and I are
friends—lovers—devoted lovers—by correspondence!’

‘Yes; I suppose.’

‘More.’

‘More?’

‘Plainly more. It is no use blinking that. Legally I have married
her—God help us both!—in soul and spirit I have married you, and no
other woman in the world!’

‘Hush!’

‘But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth,
when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me
that the bond is—not between me and her! Now I’ll say no more. But, O
my cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!’

She did not say what, and he drew her towards him, and bent over her.
‘If it was all pure invention in those letters,’ he said emphatically,
‘give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips.
It is for the first and last time, remember!’

She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. ‘You forgive me?’ she
said crying.

‘Yes.’

‘But you are ruined!’

‘What matter!’ he said shrugging his shoulders. ‘It serves me right!’

She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who
had not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the
letter. Raye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in
a hansom driving to the Waterloo station.

He went back to his wife. ‘Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day,’ he
said gently. ‘Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly.’

The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married,
showed her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the
disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were
a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for
the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to
his side.

Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face that showed the
very stupor of grief; her lips still tingling from the desperate
pressure of his kiss. The end of her impassioned dream had come. When
at dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to
meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not
see each other, and she went out of the station alone.

She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly. Entering, she
could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to
where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then
returned to the drawing-room, and not knowing what she did, crouched
down upon the floor.

‘I have ruined him!’ she kept repeating. ‘I have ruined him; because I
would not deal treacherously towards her!’

In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the
apartment.

‘Ah—who’s that?’ she said, starting up, for it was dark.

‘Your husband—who should it be?’ said the worthy merchant.

‘Ah—my husband!—I forgot I had a husband!’ she whispered to herself.

‘I missed you at the station,’ he continued. ‘Did you see Anna safely
tied up? I hope so, for ’twas time.’

‘Yes—Anna is married.’

Simultaneously with Edith’s journey home Anna and her husband were
sitting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped
along to Knollsea. In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets
closely written over. Unfolding them one after another he read them in
silence, and sighed.

‘What are you doing, dear Charles?’ she said timidly from the other
window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god.

‘Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed “Anna,”’ he replied
with dreary resignation.

_Autumn_ 1891.




TO PLEASE HIS WIFE


CHAPTER I

The interior of St. James’s Church, in Havenpool Town, was slowly
darkening under the close clouds of a winter afternoon. It was Sunday:
service had just ended, the face of the parson in the pulpit was buried
in his hands, and the congregation, with a cheerful sigh of release,
were rising from their knees to depart.

For the moment the stillness was so complete that the surging of the
sea could be heard outside the harbour-bar. Then it was broken by the
footsteps of the clerk going towards the west door to open it in the
usual manner for the exit of the assembly. Before, however, he had
reached the doorway, the latch was lifted from without, and the dark
figure of a man in a sailor’s garb appeared against the light.

The clerk stepped aside, the sailor closed the door gently behind him,
and advanced up the nave till he stood at the chancel-step. The parson
looked up from the private little prayer which, after so many for the
parish, he quite fairly took for himself; rose to his feet, and stared
at the intruder.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said the sailor, addressing the minister in a
voice distinctly audible to all the congregation. ‘I have come here to
offer thanks for my narrow escape from shipwreck. I am given to
understand that it is a proper thing to do, if you have no objection?’

The parson, after a moment’s pause, said hesitatingly, ‘I have no
objection; certainly. It is usual to mention any such wish before
service, so that the proper words may be used in the General
Thanksgiving. But, if you wish, we can read from the form for use after
a storm at sea.’

‘Ay, sure; I ain’t particular,’ said the sailor.

The clerk thereupon directed the sailor to the page in the prayer-book
where the collect of thanksgiving would be found, and the rector began
reading it, the sailor kneeling where he stood, and repeating it after
him word by word in a distinct voice. The people, who had remained
agape and motionless at the proceeding, mechanically knelt down
likewise; but they continued to regard the isolated form of the sailor
who, in the precise middle of the chancel-step, remained fixed on his
knees, facing the east, his hat beside him, his hands joined, and he
quite unconscious of his appearance in their regard.

When his thanksgiving had come to an end he rose; the people rose also,
and all went out of church together. As soon as the sailor emerged, so
that the remaining daylight fell upon his face, old inhabitants began
to recognize him as no other than Shadrach Jolliffe, a young man who
had not been seen at Havenpool for several years. A son of the town,
his parents had died when he was quite young, on which account he had
early gone to sea, in the Newfoundland trade.

He talked with this and that townsman as he walked, informing them
that, since leaving his native place years before, he had become
captain and owner of a small coasting-ketch, which had providentially
been saved from the gale as well as himself. Presently he drew near to
two girls who were going out of the churchyard in front of him; they
had been sitting in the nave at his entry, and had watched his doings
with deep interest, afterwards discussing him as they moved out of
church together. One was a slight and gentle creature, the other a
tall, large-framed, deliberative girl. Captain Jolliffe regarded the
loose curls of their hair, their backs and shoulders, down to their
heels, for some time.

‘Who may them two maids be?’ he whispered to his neighbour.

‘The little one is Emily Hanning; the tall one Joanna Phippard.’

‘Ah! I recollect ’em now, to be sure.’

He advanced to their elbow, and genially stole a gaze at them.

‘Emily, you don’t know me?’ said the sailor, turning his beaming brown
eyes on her.

‘I think I do, Mr. Jolliffe,’ said Emily shyly.

The other girl looked straight at him with her dark eyes.

‘The face of Miss Joanna I don’t call to mind so well,’ he continued.
‘But I know her beginnings and kindred.’

They walked and talked together, Jolliffe narrating particulars of his
late narrow escape, till they reached the corner of Sloop Lane, in
which Emily Hanning dwelt, when, with a nod and smile, she left them.
Soon the sailor parted also from Joanna, and, having no especial errand
or appointment, turned back towards Emily’s house. She lived with her
father, who called himself an accountant, the daughter, however,
keeping a little stationery-shop as a supplemental provision for the
gaps of his somewhat uncertain business. On entering Jolliffe found
father and daughter about to begin tea.

‘O, I didn’t know it was tea-time,’ he said. ‘Ay, I’ll have a cup with
much pleasure.’

He remained to tea and long afterwards, telling more tales of his
seafaring life. Several neighbours called to listen, and were asked to
come in. Somehow Emily Hanning lost her heart to the sailor that Sunday
night, and in the course of a week or two there was a tender
understanding between them.

One moonlight evening in the next month Shadrach was ascending out of
the town by the long straight road eastward, to an elevated suburb
where the more fashionable houses stood—if anything near this ancient
port could be called fashionable—when he saw a figure before him whom,
from her manner of glancing back, he took to be Emily. But, on coming
up, he found she was Joanna Phippard. He gave a gallant greeting, and
walked beside her.

‘Go along,’ she said, ‘or Emily will be jealous!’

He seemed not to like the suggestion, and remained. What was said and
what was done on that walk never could be clearly recollected by
Shadrach; but in some way or other Joanna contrived to wean him away
from her gentler and younger rival. From that week onwards, Jolliffe
was seen more and more in the wake of Joanna Phippard and less in the
company of Emily; and it was soon rumoured about the quay that old
Jolliffe’s son, who had come home from sea, was going to be married to
the former young woman, to the great disappointment of the latter.

Just after this report had gone about, Joanna dressed herself for a
walk one morning, and started for Emily’s house in the little
cross-street. Intelligence of the deep sorrow of her friend on account
of the loss of Shadrach had reached her ears also, and her conscience
reproached her for winning him away.

Joanna was not altogether satisfied with the sailor. She liked his
attentions, and she coveted the dignity of matrimony; but she had never
been deeply in love with Jolliffe. For one thing, she was ambitious,
and socially his position was hardly so good as her own, and there was
always the chance of an attractive woman mating considerably above her.
It had long been in her mind that she would not strongly object to give
him back again to Emily if her friend felt so very badly about him. To
this end she had written a letter of renunciation to Shadrach, which
letter she carried in her hand, intending to send it if personal
observation of Emily convinced her that her friend was suffering.

Joanna entered Sloop Lane and stepped down into the stationery-shop,
which was below the pavement level. Emily’s father was never at home at
this hour of the day, and it seemed as though Emily were not at home
either, for the visitor could make nobody hear. Customers came so
seldom hither that a five minutes’ absence of the proprietor counted
for little. Joanna waited in the little shop, where Emily had
tastefully set out—as women can—articles in themselves of slight value,
so as to obscure the meagreness of the stock-in-trade; till she saw a
figure pausing without the window apparently absorbed in the
contemplation of the sixpenny books, packets of paper, and prints hung
on a string. It was Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, peering in to ascertain
if Emily were there alone. Moved by an impulse of reluctance to meet
him in a spot which breathed of Emily, Joanna slipped through the door
that communicated with the parlour at the back. She had frequently done
so before, for in her friendship with Emily she had the freedom of the
house without ceremony.

Jolliffe entered the shop. Through the thin blind which screened the
glass partition she could see that he was disappointed at not finding
Emily there. He was about to go out again, when Emily’s form darkened
the doorway, hastening home from some errand. At sight of Jolliffe she
started back as if she would have gone out again.

‘Don’t run away, Emily; don’t!’ said he. ‘What can make ye afraid?’

‘I’m not afraid, Captain Jolliffe. Only—only I saw you all of a sudden,
and—it made me jump!’ Her voice showed that her heart had jumped even
more than the rest of her.

‘I just called as I was passing,’ he said.

‘For some paper?’ She hastened behind the counter.

‘No, no, Emily; why do ye get behind there? Why not stay by me? You
seem to hate me.’

‘I don’t hate you. How can I?’

‘Then come out, so that we can talk like Christians.’

Emily obeyed with a fitful laugh, till she stood again beside him in
the open part of the shop.

‘There’s a dear,’ he said.

‘You mustn’t say that, Captain Jolliffe; because the words belong to
somebody else.’

‘Ah! I know what you mean. But, Emily, upon my life I didn’t know till
this morning that you cared one bit about me, or I should not have done
as I have done. I have the best of feelings for Joanna, but I know that
from the beginning she hasn’t cared for me more than in a friendly way;
and I see now the one I ought to have asked to be my wife. You know,
Emily, when a man comes home from sea after a long voyage he’s as blind
as a bat—he can’t see who’s who in women. They are all alike to him,
beautiful creatures, and he takes the first that comes easy, without
thinking if she loves him, or if he might not soon love another better
than her. From the first I inclined to you most, but you were so
backward and shy that I thought you didn’t want me to bother ’ee, and
so I went to Joanna.’

‘Don’t say any more, Mr. Jolliffe, don’t!’ said she, choking. ‘You are
going to marry Joanna next month, and it is wrong to—to—’

‘O, Emily, my darling!’ he cried, and clasped her little figure in his
arms before she was aware.

Joanna, behind the curtain, turned pale, tried to withdraw her eyes,
but could not.

‘It is only you I love as a man ought to love the woman he is going to
marry; and I know this from what Joanna has said, that she will
willingly let me off! She wants to marry higher I know, and only said
“Yes” to me out of kindness. A fine, tall girl like her isn’t the sort
for a plain sailor’s wife: you be the best suited for that.’

He kissed her and kissed her again, her flexible form quivering in the
agitation of his embrace.

‘I wonder—are you sure—Joanna is going to break off with you? O, are
you sure? Because—’

‘I know she would not wish to make us miserable. She will release me.’

‘O, I hope—I hope she will! Don’t stay any longer, Captain Jolliffe!’

He lingered, however, till a customer came for a penny stick of
sealing-wax, and then he withdrew.

Green envy had overspread Joanna at the scene. She looked about for a
way of escape. To get out without Emily’s knowledge of her visit was
indispensable. She crept from the parlour into the passage, and thence
to the front door of the house, where she let herself noiselessly into
the street.

The sight of that caress had reversed all her resolutions. She could
not let Shadrach go. Reaching home she burnt the letter, and told her
mother that if Captain Jolliffe called she was too unwell to see him.

Shadrach, however, did not call. He sent her a note expressing in
simple language the state of his feelings; and asked to be allowed to
take advantage of the hints she had given him that her affection, too,
was little more than friendly, by cancelling the engagement.

Looking out upon the harbour and the island beyond he waited and waited
in his lodgings for an answer that did not come. The suspense grew to
be so intolerable that after dark he went up the High Street. He could
not resist calling at Joanna’s to learn his fate.

Her mother said her daughter was too unwell to see him, and to his
questioning admitted that it was in consequence of a letter received
from himself; which had distressed her deeply.

‘You know what it was about, perhaps, Mrs. Phippard?’ he said.

Mrs. Phippard owned that she did, adding that it put them in a very
painful position. Thereupon Shadrach, fearing that he had been guilty
of an enormity, explained that if his letter had pained Joanna it must
be owing to a misunderstanding, since he had thought it would be a
relief to her. If otherwise, he would hold himself bound by his word,
and she was to think of the letter as never having been written.

Next morning he received an oral message from the young woman, asking
him to fetch her home from a meeting that evening. This he did, and
while walking from the Town Hall to her door, with her hand in his arm,
she said:

‘It is all the same as before between us, isn’t it, Shadrach? Your
letter was sent in mistake?’

‘It is all the same as before,’ he answered, ‘if you say it must be.’

‘I wish it to be,’ she murmured, with hard lineaments, as she thought
of Emily.

Shadrach was a religious and scrupulous man, who respected his word as
his life. Shortly afterwards the wedding took place, Jolliffe having
conveyed to Emily as gently as possible the error he had fallen into
when estimating Joanna’s mood as one of indifference.

CHAPTER II

A month after the marriage Joanna’s mother died, and the couple were
obliged to turn their attention to very practical matters. Now that she
was left without a parent, Joanna could not bear the notion of her
husband going to sea again, but the question was, What could he do at
home? They finally decided to take on a grocer’s shop in High Street,
the goodwill and stock of which were waiting to be disposed of at that
time. Shadrach knew nothing of shopkeeping, and Joanna very little, but
they hoped to learn.

To the management of this grocery business they now devoted all their
energies, and continued to conduct it for many succeeding years,
without great success. Two sons were born to them, whom their mother
loved to idolatry, although she had never passionately loved her
husband; and she lavished upon them all her forethought and care. But
the shop did not thrive, and the large dreams she had entertained of
her sons’ education and career became attenuated in the face of
realities. Their schooling was of the plainest, but, being by the sea,
they grew alert in all such nautical arts and enterprises as were
attractive to their age.

The great interest of the Jolliffes’ married life, outside their own
immediate household, had lain in the marriage of Emily. By one of those
odd chances which lead those that lurk in unexpected corners to be
discovered, while the obvious are passed by, the gentle girl had been
seen and loved by a thriving merchant of the town, a widower, some
years older than herself, though still in the prime of life. At first
Emily had declared that she never, never could marry any one; but Mr.
Lester had quietly persevered, and had at last won her reluctant
assent. Two children also were the fruits of this union, and, as they
grew and prospered, Emily declared that she had never supposed that she
could live to be so happy.

The worthy merchant’s home, one of those large, substantial brick
mansions frequently jammed up in old-fashioned towns, faced directly on
the High Street, nearly opposite to the grocery shop of the Jolliffes,
and it now became the pain of Joanna to behold the woman whose place
she had usurped out of pure covetousness, looking down from her
position of comparative wealth upon the humble shop-window with its
dusty sugar-loaves, heaps of raisins, and canisters of tea, over which
it was her own lot to preside. The business having so dwindled, Joanna
was obliged to serve in the shop herself; and it galled and mortified
her that Emily Lester, sitting in her large drawing-room over the way,
could witness her own dancings up and down behind the counter at the
beck and call of wretched twopenny customers, whose patronage she was
driven to welcome gladly: persons to whom she was compelled to be civil
in the street, while Emily was bounding along with her children and her
governess, and conversing with the genteelest people of the town and
neighbourhood. This was what she had gained by not letting Shadrach
Jolliffe, whom she had so faintly loved, carry his affection elsewhere.

Shadrach was a good and honest man, and he had been faithful to her in
heart and in deed. Time had clipped the wings of his love for Emily in
his devotion to the mother of his boys: he had quite lived down that
impulsive earlier fancy, and Emily had become in his regard nothing
more than a friend. It was the same with Emily’s feelings for him.
Possibly, had she found the least cause for jealousy, Joanna would
almost have been better satisfied. It was in the absolute acquiescence
of Emily and Shadrach in the results she herself had contrived that her
discontent found nourishment.

Shadrach was not endowed with the narrow shrewdness necessary for
developing a retail business in the face of many competitors. Did a
customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the wondrous
substitute for eggs which a persevering bagman had forced into his
stock, he would answer that ‘when you did not put eggs into a pudding
it was difficult to taste them there’; and when he was asked if his
‘real Mocha coffee’ was real Mocha, he would say grimly, ‘as understood
in small shops.’

One summer day, when the big brick house opposite was reflecting the
oppressive sun’s heat into the shop, and nobody was present but husband
and wife, Joanna looked across at Emily’s door, where a wealthy
visitor’s carriage had drawn up. Traces of patronage had been visible
in Emily’s manner of late.

‘Shadrach, the truth is, you are not a business-man,’ his wife sadly
murmured. ‘You were not brought up to shopkeeping, and it is impossible
for a man to make a fortune at an occupation he has jumped into, as you
did into this.’

Jolliffe agreed with her, in this as in everything else.

‘Not that I care a rope’s end about making a fortune,’ he said
cheerfully. ‘I am happy enough, and we can rub on somehow.’

She looked again at the great house through the screen of bottled
pickles.

‘Rub on—yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘But see how well off Emmy Lester is,
who used to be so poor! Her boys will go to College, no doubt; and
think of yours—obliged to go to the Parish School!’

Shadrach’s thoughts had flown to Emily.

‘Nobody,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘ever did Emily a better turn than
you did, Joanna, when you warned her off me and put an end to that
little simpering nonsense between us, so as to leave it in her power to
say “Aye” to Lester when he came along.’ This almost maddened her.

‘Don’t speak of bygones!’ she implored, in stern sadness. ‘But think,
for the boys’ and my sake, if not for your own, what are we to do to
get richer?’

‘Well,’ he said, becoming serious, ‘to tell the truth, I have always
felt myself unfit for this business, though I’ve never liked to say so.
I seem to want more room for sprawling; a more open space to strike out
in than here among friends and neighbours. I could get rich as well as
any man, if I tried my own way.’

‘I wish you would! What is your way?’

‘To go to sea again.’

She had been the very one to keep him at home, hating the semi-widowed
existence of sailors’ wives. But her ambition checked her instincts
now, and she said: ‘Do you think success really lies that way?’

‘I am sure it lies in no other.’

‘Do you want to go, Shadrach?’

‘Not for the pleasure of it, I can tell ’ee. There’s no such pleasure
at sea, Joanna, as I can find in my back parlour here. To speak honest,
I have no love for the brine. I never had much. But if it comes to a
question of a fortune for you and the lads, it is another thing. That’s
the only way to it for one born and bred a seafarer as I.’

‘Would it take long to earn?’

‘Well, that depends; perhaps not.’

The next morning Shadrach pulled from a chest of drawers the nautical
jacket he had worn during the first months of his return, brushed out
the moths, donned it, and walked down to the quay. The port still did a
fair business in the Newfoundland trade, though not so much as
formerly.

It was not long after this that he invested all he possessed in
purchasing a part-ownership in a brig, of which he was appointed
captain. A few months were passed in coast-trading, during which
interval Shadrach wore off the land-rust that had accumulated upon him
in his grocery phase; and in the spring the brig sailed for
Newfoundland.

Joanna lived on at home with her sons, who were now growing up into
strong lads, and occupying themselves in various ways about the harbour
and quay.

‘Never mind, let them work a little,’ their fond mother said to
herself. ‘Our necessities compel it now, but when Shadrach comes home
they will be only seventeen and eighteen, and they shall be removed
from the port, and their education thoroughly taken in hand by a tutor;
and with the money they’ll have they will perhaps be as near to
gentlemen as Emmy Lester’s precious two, with their algebra and their
Latin!’

The date for Shadrach’s return drew near and arrived, and he did not
appear. Joanna was assured that there was no cause for anxiety,
sailing-ships being so uncertain in their coming; which assurance
proved to be well grounded, for late one wet evening, about a month
after the calculated time, the ship was announced as at hand, and
presently the slip-slop step of Shadrach as the sailor sounded in the
passage, and he entered. The boys had gone out and had missed him, and
Joanna was sitting alone.

As soon as the first emotion of reunion between the couple had passed,
Jolliffe explained the delay as owing to a small speculative contract,
which had produced good results.

‘I was determined not to disappoint ’ee,’ he said; ‘and I think you’ll
own that I haven’t!’

With this he pulled out an enormous canvas bag, full and rotund as the
money-bag of the giant whom Jack slew, untied it, and shook the
contents out into her lap as she sat in her low chair by the fire. A
mass of sovereigns and guineas (there were guineas on the earth in
those days) fell into her lap with a sudden thud, weighing down her
gown to the floor.

‘There!’ said Shadrach complacently. ‘I told ’ee, dear, I’d do it; and
have I done it or no?’

Somehow her face, after the first excitement of possession, did not
retain its glory.

‘It is a lot of gold, indeed,’ she said. ‘And—is this _all_?’

‘All? Why, dear Joanna, do you know you can count to three hundred in
that heap? It is a fortune!’

‘Yes—yes. A fortune—judged by sea; but judged by land—’

However, she banished considerations of the money for the nonce. Soon
the boys came in, and next Sunday Shadrach returned thanks to God—this
time by the more ordinary channel of the italics in the General
Thanksgiving. But a few days after, when the question of investing the
money arose, he remarked that she did not seem so satisfied as he had
hoped.

‘Well you see, Shadrach,’ she answered, ‘_we_ count by hundreds; _they_
count by thousands’ (nodding towards the other side of the Street).
‘They have set up a carriage and pair since you left.’

‘O, have they?’

‘My dear Shadrach, you don’t know how the world moves. However, we’ll
do the best we can with it. But they are rich, and we are poor still!’

The greater part of a year was desultorily spent. She moved sadly about
the house and shop, and the boys were still occupying themselves in and
around the harbour.

‘Joanna,’ he said, one day, ‘I see by your movements that it is not
enough.’

‘It is not enough,’ said she. ‘My boys will have to live by steering
the ships that the Lesters own; and I was once above her!’

Jolliffe was not an argumentative man, and he only murmured that he
thought he would make another voyage.

He meditated for several days, and coming home from the quay one
afternoon said suddenly:

‘I could do it for ’ee, dear, in one more trip, for certain, if—if—’

‘Do what, Shadrach?’

‘Enable ’ee to count by thousands instead of hundreds.’

‘If what?’

‘If I might take the boys.’

She turned pale.

‘Don’t say that, Shadrach,’ she answered hastily.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t like to hear it! There’s danger at sea. I want them to be
something genteel, and no danger to them. I couldn’t let them risk
their lives at sea. O, I couldn’t ever, ever!’

‘Very well, dear, it shan’t be done.’

Next day, after a silence, she asked a question:

‘If they were to go with you it would make a great deal of difference,
I suppose, to the profit?’

‘’Twould treble what I should get from the venture single-handed. Under
my eye they would be as good as two more of myself.’

Later on she said: ‘Tell me more about this.’

‘Well, the boys are almost as clever as master-mariners in handling a
craft, upon my life! There isn’t a more cranky place in the Northern
Seas than about the sandbanks of this harbour, and they’ve practised
here from their infancy. And they are so steady. I couldn’t get their
steadiness and their trustworthiness in half a dozen men twice their
age.’

‘And is it _very_ dangerous at sea; now, too, there are rumours of
war?’ she asked uneasily.

‘O, well, there be risks. Still . . . ’

The idea grew and magnified, and the mother’s heart was crushed and
stifled by it. Emmy was growing _too_ patronizing; it could not be
borne. Shadrach’s wife could not help nagging him about their
comparative poverty. The young men, amiable as their father, when
spoken to on the subject of a voyage of enterprise, were quite willing
to embark; and though they, like their father, had no great love for
the sea, they became quite enthusiastic when the proposal was detailed.

Everything now hung upon their mother’s assent. She withheld it long,
but at last gave the word: the young men might accompany their father.
Shadrach was unusually cheerful about it: Heaven had preserved him
hitherto, and he had uttered his thanks. God would not forsake those
who were faithful to him.

All that the Jolliffes possessed in the world was put into the
enterprise. The grocery stock was pared down to the least that possibly
could afford a bare sustenance to Joanna during the absence, which was
to last through the usual ‘New-f’nland spell.’ How she would endure the
weary time she hardly knew, for the boys had been with her formerly;
but she nerved herself for the trial.

The ship was laden with boots and shoes, ready-made clothing,
fishing-tackle, butter, cheese, cordage, sailcloth, and many other
commodities; and was to bring back oil, furs, skins, fish, cranberries,
and what else came to hand. But much trading to other ports was to be
undertaken between the voyages out and homeward, and thereb

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