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The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #3469 · 817,483 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: October 1, 2002 [eBook #3469]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3469

Credits: This eBook was produced from the 1907 Macmillan and Co. edition by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA: A COMEDY IN CHAPTERS ***




This eBook was produced from the 1907 Macmillan and Co. edition by Les
Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.





THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA--A COMEDY IN CHAPTERS
by Thomas Hardy.


   "Vitae post-scenia celant."--Lucretius.




PREFACE


This somewhat frivolous narrative was produced as an interlude between
stories of a more sober design, and it was given the sub-title of a
comedy to indicate--though not quite accurately--the aim of the
performance.  A high degree of probability was not attempted in the
arrangement of the incidents, and there was expected of the reader a
certain lightness of mood, which should inform him with a good-natured
willingness to accept the production in the spirit in which it was
offered.  The characters themselves, however, were meant to be consistent
and human.

On its first appearance the novel suffered, perhaps deservedly, for what
was involved in these intentions--for its quality of unexpectedness in
particular--that unforgivable sin in the critic's sight--the immediate
precursor of 'Ethelberta' having been a purely rural tale.  Moreover, in
its choice of medium, and line of perspective, it undertook a delicate
task: to excite interest in a drama--if such a dignified word may be used
in the connection--wherein servants were as important as, or more
important than, their masters; wherein the drawing-room was sketched in
many cases from the point of view of the servants' hall.  Such a reversal
of the social foreground has, perhaps, since grown more welcome, and
readers even of the finer crusted kind may now be disposed to pardon a
writer for presenting the sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Chickerel as
beings who come within the scope of a congenial regard.

T. H.

December 1895.




CONTENTS


 1.  A STREET IN ANGLEBURY--A HEATH NEAR IT--INSIDE THE 'RED LION' INN
 2.  CHRISTOPHER'S HOUSE--SANDBOURNE TOWN--SANDBOURNE MOOR
 3.  SANDBOURNE MOOR (continued)
 4.  SANDBOURNE PIER--ROAD TO WYNDWAY--BALLROOM IN WYNDWAY HOUSE
 5.  AT THE WINDOW--THE ROAD HOME
 6.  THE SHORE BY WYNDWAY
 7.  THE DINING-ROOM OF A TOWN HOUSE--THE BUTLER'S PANTRY
 8.  CHRISTOPHER'S LODGINGS--THE GROUNDS ABOUT ROOKINGTON
 9.  A LADY'S DRAWING-ROOMS--ETHELBERTA'S DRESSING-ROOM
10.  LADY PETHERWIN'S HOUSE
11.  SANDBOURNE AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD--SOME LONDON STREETS
12.  ARROWTHORNE PARK AND LODGE
13.  THE LODGE (continued)--THE COPSE BEHIND
14.  A TURNPIKE ROAD
15.  AN INNER ROOM AT THE LODGE
16.  A LARGE PUBLIC HALL
17.  ETHELBERTA'S HOUSE
18.  NEAR SANDBOURNE--LONDON STREETS--ETHELBERTA'S
19.  ETHELBERTA'S DRAWING-ROOM
20.  THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE HALL--THE ROAD HOME
21.  A STREET--NEIGH'S ROOMS--CHRISTOPHER'S ROOMS
22.  ETHELBERTA'S HOUSE
23.  ETHELBERTA'S HOUSE (continued)
24.  ETHELBERTA'S HOUSE (continued)--THE BRITISH MUSEUM
25.  THE ROYAL ACADEMY--THE FARNFIELD ESTATE
26.  ETHELBERTA'S DRAWING-ROOM
27.  MRS. BELMAINE'S--CRIPPLEGATE CHURCH
28.  ETHELBERTA'S--MR. CHICKEREL'S ROOM
29.  ETHELBERTA'S DRESSING-ROOM--MR. DONCASTLE'S HOUSE
30.  ON THE HOUSETOP
31.  KNOLLSEA--A LOFTY DOWN--A RUINED CASTLE
32.  A ROOM IN ENCKWORTH COURT
33.  THE ENGLISH CHANNEL--NORMANDY
34.  THE HOTEL BEAU SEJOUR, AND SPOTS NEAR IT
35.  THE HOTEL (continued), AND THE QUAY IN FRONT
36.  THE HOUSE IN TOWN
37.  KNOLLSEA--AN ORNAMENTAL VILLA
38.  ENCKWORTH COURT
39.  KNOLLSEA--MELCHESTER
40.  MELCHESTER (continued)
41.  WORKSHOPS--AN INN--THE STREET
42.  THE DONCASTLES' RESIDENCE, AND OUTSIDE THE SAME
43.  THE RAILWAY--THE SEA--THE SHORE BEYOND
44.  SANDBOURNE--A LONELY HEATH--THE 'RED LION'--THE HIGHWAY
45.  KNOLLSEA--THE ROAD THENCE--ENCKWORTH
46.  ENCKWORTH (continued)--THE ANGLEBURY HIGHWAY
47.  ENCKWORTH AND ITS PRECINCTS--MELCHESTER
SEQUEL.  ANGLEBURY--ENCKWORTH--SANDBOURNE




1. A STREET IN ANGLEBURY--A HEATH NEAR IT--INSIDE THE 'RED LION' INN


Young Mrs. Petherwin stepped from the door of an old and well-appointed
inn in a Wessex town to take a country walk.  By her look and carriage
she appeared to belong to that gentle order of society which has no
worldly sorrow except when its jewellery gets stolen; but, as a fact not
generally known, her claim to distinction was rather one of brains than
of blood.  She was the daughter of a gentleman who lived in a large house
not his own, and began life as a baby christened Ethelberta after an
infant of title who does not come into the story at all, having merely
furnished Ethelberta's mother with a subject of contemplation.  She
became teacher in a school, was praised by examiners, admired by
gentlemen, not admired by gentlewomen, was touched up with
accomplishments by masters who were coaxed into painstaking by her many
graces, and, entering a mansion as governess to the daughter thereof, was
stealthily married by the son.  He, a minor like herself, died from a
chill caught during the wedding tour, and a few weeks later was followed
into the grave by Sir Ralph Petherwin, his unforgiving father, who had
bequeathed his wealth to his wife absolutely.

These calamities were a sufficient reason to Lady Petherwin for pardoning
all concerned.  She took by the hand the forlorn Ethelberta--who seemed
rather a detached bride than a widow--and finished her education by
placing her for two or three years in a boarding-school at Bonn.  Latterly
she had brought the girl to England to live under her roof as daughter
and companion, the condition attached being that Ethelberta was never
openly to recognize her relations, for reasons which will hereafter
appear.

The elegant young lady, as she had a full right to be called if she cared
for the definition, arrested all the local attention when she emerged
into the summer-evening light with that diadem-and-sceptre bearing--many
people for reasons of heredity discovering such graces only in those
whose vestibules are lined with ancestral mail, forgetting that a bear
may be taught to dance.  While this air of hers lasted, even the
inanimate objects in the street appeared to know that she was there; but
from a way she had of carelessly overthrowing her dignity by versatile
moods, one could not calculate upon its presence to a certainty when she
was round corners or in little lanes which demanded no repression of
animal spirits.

'Well to be sure!' exclaimed a milkman, regarding her.  'We should freeze
in our beds if 'twere not for the sun, and, dang me! if she isn't a
pretty piece.  A man could make a meal between them eyes and chin--eh,
hostler?  Odd nation dang my old sides if he couldn't!'

The speaker, who had been carrying a pair of pails on a yoke, deposited
them upon the edge of the pavement in front of the inn, and straightened
his back to an excruciating perpendicular.  His remarks had been
addressed to a rickety person, wearing a waistcoat of that preternatural
length from the top to the bottom button which prevails among men who
have to do with horses.  He was sweeping straws from the carriage-way
beneath the stone arch that formed a passage to the stables behind.

'Never mind the cursing and swearing, or somebody who's never out of
hearing may clap yer name down in his black book,' said the hostler, also
pausing, and lifting his eyes to the mullioned and transomed windows and
moulded parapet above him--not to study them as features of ancient
architecture, but just to give as healthful a stretch to the eyes as his
acquaintance had done to his back.  'Michael, a old man like you ought to
think about other things, and not be looking two ways at your time of
life.  Pouncing upon young flesh like a carrion crow--'tis a vile thing
in a old man.'

''Tis; and yet 'tis not, for 'tis a naterel taste,' said the milkman,
again surveying Ethelberta, who had now paused upon a bridge in full
view, to look down the river.  'Now, if a poor needy feller like myself
could only catch her alone when she's dressed up to the nines for some
grand party, and carry her off to some lonely place--sakes, what a pot of
jewels and goold things I warrant he'd find about her!  'Twould pay en
for his trouble.'

'I don't dispute the picter; but 'tis sly and untimely to think such
roguery.  Though I've had thoughts like it, 'tis true, about high
women--Lord forgive me for't.'

'And that figure of fashion standing there is a widow woman, so I hear?'

'Lady--not a penny less than lady.  Ay, a thing of twenty-one or
thereabouts.'

'A widow lady and twenty-one.  'Tis a backward age for a body who's so
forward in her state of life.'

'Well, be that as 'twill, here's my showings for her age.  She was about
the figure of two or three-and-twenty when a' got off the carriage last
night, tired out wi' boaming about the country; and nineteen this morning
when she came downstairs after a sleep round the clock and a clane-washed
face: so I thought to myself, twenty-one, I thought.'

'And what's the young woman's name, make so bold, hostler?'

'Ay, and the house were all in a stoor with her and the old woman, and
their boxes and camp-kettles, that they carry to wash in because hand-
basons bain't big enough, and I don't know what all; and t'other folk
stopping here were no more than dirt thencefor'ard.'

'I suppose they've come out of some noble city a long way herefrom?'

'And there was her hair up in buckle as if she'd never seen a clay-cold
man at all.  However, to cut a long story short, all I know besides about
'em is that the name upon their luggage is Lady Petherwin, and she's the
widow of a city gentleman, who was a man of valour in the Lord Mayor's
Show.'

'Who's that chap in the gaiters and pack at his back, come out of the
door but now?' said the milkman, nodding towards a figure of that
description who had just emerged from the inn and trudged off in the
direction taken by the lady--now out of sight.

'Chap in the gaiters?  Chok' it all--why, the father of that nobleman
that you call chap in the gaiters used to be hand in glove with half the
Queen's court.'

'What d'ye tell o'?'

'That man's father was one of the mayor and corporation of Sandbourne,
and was that familiar with men of money, that he'd slap 'em upon the
shoulder as you or I or any other poor fool would the clerk of the
parish.'

'O, what's my lordlin's name, make so bold, then?'

'Ay, the toppermost class nowadays have left off the use of wheels for
the good of their constitutions, so they traipse and walk for many years
up foreign hills, where you can see nothing but snow and fog, till
there's no more left to walk up; and if they reach home alive, and ha'n't
got too old and weared out, they walk and see a little of their own
parishes.  So they tower about with a pack and a stick and a clane white
pocket-handkerchief over their hats just as you see he's got on his.  He's
been staying here a night, and is off now again.  "Young man, young man,"
I think to myself, "if your shoulders were bent like a bandy and your
knees bowed out as mine be, till there is not an inch of straight bone or
gristle in 'ee, th' wouldstn't go doing hard work for play 'a b'lieve."'

'True, true, upon my song.  Such a pain as I have had in my lynes all
this day to be sure; words don't know what shipwreck I suffer in these
lynes o' mine--that they do not!  And what was this young widow lady's
maiden name, then, hostler?  Folk have been peeping after her, that's
true; but they don't seem to know much about her family.'

'And while I've tended horses fifty year that other folk might straddle
'em, here I be now not a penny the better!  Often-times, when I see so
many good things about, I feel inclined to help myself in common justice
to my pocket.

   "Work hard and be poor,
   Do nothing and get more."

But I draw in the horns of my mind and think to myself, "Forbear, John
Hostler, forbear!"--Her maiden name?  Faith, I don't know the woman's
maiden name, though she said to me, "Good evening, John;" but I had no
memory of ever seeing her afore--no, no more than the dead inside church-
hatch--where I shall soon be likewise--I had not.  "Ay, my nabs," I think
to myself, "more know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows."'

'More know Tom Fool--what rambling old canticle is it you say, hostler?'
inquired the milkman, lifting his ear.  'Let's have it again--a good
saying well spit out is a Christmas fire to my withered heart.  More know
Tom Fool--'

'Than Tom Fool knows,' said the hostler.

'Ah!  That's the very feeling I've feeled over and over again, hostler,
but not in such gifted language.  'Tis a thought I've had in me for
years, and never could lick into shape!--O-ho-ho-ho!  Splendid!  Say it
again, hostler, say it again!  To hear my own poor notion that had no
name brought into form like that--I wouldn't ha' lost it for the world!
More know Tom Fool than--than--h-ho-ho-ho-ho!'

'Don't let your sense o' vitness break out in such uproar, for heaven's
sake, or folk will surely think you've been laughing at the lady and
gentleman.  Well, here's at it again--Night t'ee, Michael.'  And the
hostler went on with his sweeping.

'Night t'ee, hostler, I must move too,' said the milkman, shouldering his
yoke, and walking off; and there reached the inn in a gradual diminuendo,
as he receded up the street, shaking his head convulsively, 'More
know--Tom Fool--than Tom Fool--ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!'

The 'Red Lion,' as the inn or hotel was called which of late years had
become the fashion among tourists, because of the absence from its
precincts of all that was fashionable and new, stood near the middle of
the town, and formed a corner where in winter the winds whistled and
assembled their forces previous to plunging helter-skelter along the
streets.  In summer it was a fresh and pleasant spot, convenient for such
quiet characters as sojourned there to study the geology and beautiful
natural features of the country round.

The lady whose appearance had asserted a difference between herself and
the Anglebury people, without too clearly showing what that difference
was, passed out of the town in a few moments and, following the highway
across meadows fed by the Froom, she crossed the railway and soon got
into a lonely heath.  She had been watching the base of a cloud as it
closed down upon the line of a distant ridge, like an upper upon a lower
eyelid, shutting in the gaze of the evening sun.  She was about to return
before dusk came on, when she heard a commotion in the air immediately
behind and above her head.  The saunterer looked up and saw a wild-duck
flying along with the greatest violence, just in its rear being another
large bird, which a countryman would have pronounced to be one of the
biggest duck-hawks that he had ever beheld.  The hawk neared its intended
victim, and the duck screamed and redoubled its efforts.

Ethelberta impulsively started off in a rapid run that would have made a
little dog bark with delight and run after, her object being, if
possible, to see the end of this desperate struggle for a life so small
and unheard-of.  Her stateliness went away, and it could be forgiven for
not remaining; for her feet suddenly became as quick as fingers, and she
raced along over the uneven ground with such force of tread that, being a
woman slightly heavier than gossamer, her patent heels punched little D's
in the soil with unerring accuracy wherever it was bare, crippled the
heather-twigs where it was not, and sucked the swampy places with a sound
of quick kisses.

Her rate of advance was not to be compared with that of the two birds,
though she went swiftly enough to keep them well in sight in such an open
place as that around her, having at one point in the journey been so near
that she could hear the whisk of the duck's feathers against the wind as
it lifted and lowered its wings.  When the bird seemed to be but a few
yards from its enemy she saw it strike downwards, and after a level
flight of a quarter of a minute, vanish.  The hawk swooped after, and
Ethelberta now perceived a whitely shining oval of still water, looking
amid the swarthy level of the heath like a hole through to a nether sky.

Into this large pond, which the duck had been making towards from the
beginning of its precipitate flight, it had dived out of sight.  The
excited and breathless runner was in a few moments close enough to see
the disappointed hawk hovering and floating in the air as if waiting for
the reappearance of its prey, upon which grim pastime it was so intent
that by creeping along softly she was enabled to get very near the edge
of the pool and witness the conclusion of the episode.  Whenever the duck
was under the necessity of showing its head to breathe, the other bird
would dart towards it, invariably too late, however; for the diver was
far too experienced in the rough humour of the buzzard family at this
game to come up twice near the same spot, unaccountably emerging from
opposite sides of the pool in succession, and bobbing again by the time
its adversary reached each place, so that at length the hawk gave up the
contest and flew away, a satanic moodiness being almost perceptible in
the motion of its wings.

The young lady now looked around her for the first time, and began to
perceive that she had run a long distance--very much further than she had
originally intended to come.  Her eyes had been so long fixed upon the
hawk, as it soared against the bright and mottled field of sky, that on
regarding the heather and plain again it was as if she had returned to a
half-forgotten region after an absence, and the whole prospect was
darkened to one uniform shade of approaching night.  She began at once to
retrace her steps, but having been indiscriminately wheeling round the
pond to get a good view of the performance, and having followed no path
thither, she found the proper direction of her journey to be a matter of
some uncertainty.

'Surely,' she said to herself, 'I faced the north at starting:' and yet
on walking now with her back where her face had been set, she did not
approach any marks on the horizon which might seem to signify the town.
Thus dubiously, but with little real concern, she walked on till the
evening light began to turn to dusk, and the shadows to darkness.

Presently in front of her Ethelberta saw a white spot in the shade, and
it proved to be in some way attached to the head of a man who was coming
towards her out of a slight depression in the ground.  It was as yet too
early in the evening to be afraid, but it was too late to be altogether
courageous; and with balanced sensations Ethelberta kept her eye sharply
upon him as he rose by degrees into view.  The peculiar arrangement of
his hat and pugree soon struck her as being that she had casually noticed
on a peg in one of the rooms of the 'Red Lion,' and when he came close
she saw that his arms diminished to a peculiar smallness at their
junction with his shoulders, like those of a doll, which was explained by
their being girt round at that point with the straps of a knapsack that
he carried behind him.  Encouraged by the probability that he, like
herself, was staying or had been staying at the 'Red Lion,' she said,
'Can you tell me if this is the way back to Anglebury?'

'It is one way; but the nearest is in this direction,' said the
tourist--the same who had been criticized by the two old men.

At hearing him speak all the delicate activities in the young lady's
person stood still: she stopped like a clock.  When she could again fence
with the perception which had caused all this, she breathed.

'Mr. Julian!' she exclaimed.  The words were uttered in a way which would
have told anybody in a moment that here lay something connected with the
light of other days.

'Ah, Mrs. Petherwin!--Yes, I am Mr. Julian--though that can matter very
little, I should think, after all these years, and what has passed.'

No remark was returned to this rugged reply, and he continued
unconcernedly, 'Shall I put you in the path--it is just here?'

'If you please.'

'Come with me, then.'

She walked in silence at his heels, not a word passing between them all
the way: the only noises which came from the two were the brushing of her
dress and his gaiters against the heather, or the smart rap of a stray
flint against his boot.

They had now reached a little knoll, and he turned abruptly: 'That is
Anglebury--just where you see those lights.  The path down there is the
one you must follow; it leads round the hill yonder and directly into the
town.'

'Thank you,' she murmured, and found that he had never removed his eyes
from her since speaking, keeping them fixed with mathematical exactness
upon one point in her face.  She moved a little to go on her way; he
moved a little less--to go on his.

'Good-night,' said Mr. Julian.

The moment, upon the very face of it, was critical; and yet it was one of
those which have to wait for a future before they acquire a definite
character as good or bad.

Thus much would have been obvious to any outsider; it may have been
doubly so to Ethelberta, for she gave back more than she had got,
replying, 'Good-bye--if you are going to say no more.'

Then in struck Mr. Julian: 'What can I say?  You are nothing to me. . . .
I could forgive a woman doing anything for spite, except marrying for
spite.'

'The connection of that with our present meeting does not appear, unless
it refers to what you have done.  It does not refer to me.'

'I am not married: you are.'

She did not contradict him, as she might have done.  'Christopher,' she
said at last, 'this is how it is: you knew too much of me to respect me,
and too little to pity me.  A half knowledge of another's life mostly
does injustice to the life half known.'

'Then since circumstances forbid my knowing you more, I must do my best
to know you less, and elevate my opinion of your nature by forgetting
what it consists in,' he said in a voice from which all feeling was
polished away.

'If I did not know that bitterness had more to do with those words than
judgment, I--should be--bitter too!  You never knew half about me; you
only knew me as a governess; you little think what my beginnings were.'

'I have guessed.  I have many times told myself that your early life was
superior to your position when I first met you.  I think I may say
without presumption that I recognize a lady by birth when I see her, even
under reverses of an extreme kind.  And certainly there is this to be
said, that the fact of having been bred in a wealthy home does slightly
redeem an attempt to attain to such a one again.'

Ethelberta smiled a smile of many meanings.

'However, we are wasting words,' he resumed cheerfully.  'It is better
for us to part as we met, and continue to be the strangers that we have
become to each other.  I owe you an apology for having been betrayed into
more feeling than I had a right to show, and let us part friends.  Good
night, Mrs. Petherwin, and success to you.  We may meet again, some day,
I hope.'

'Good night,' she said, extending her hand.  He touched it, turned about,
and in a short time nothing remained of him but quick regular brushings
against the heather in the deep broad shadow of the moor.

Ethelberta slowly moved on in the direction that he had pointed out.  This
meeting had surprised her in several ways.  First, there was the
conjuncture itself; but more than that was the fact that he had not
parted from her with any of the tragic resentment that she had from time
to time imagined for that scene if it ever occurred.  Yet there was
really nothing wonderful in this: it is part of the generous nature of a
bachelor to be not indisposed to forgive a portionless sweetheart who, by
marrying elsewhere, has deprived him of the bliss of being obliged to
marry her himself.  Ethelberta would have been disappointed quite had
there not been a comforting development of exasperation in the middle
part of his talk; but after all it formed a poor substitute for the
loving hatred she had expected.

When she reached the hotel the lamp over the door showed a face a little
flushed, but the agitation which at first had possessed her was gone to a
mere nothing.  In the hall she met a slender woman wearing a silk dress
of that peculiar black which in sunlight proclaims itself to have once
seen better days as a brown, and days even better than those as a
lavender, green, or blue.

'Menlove,' said the lady, 'did you notice if any gentleman observed and
followed me when I left the hotel to go for a walk this evening?'

The lady's-maid, thus suddenly pulled up in a night forage after lovers,
put a hand to her forehead to show that there was no mistake about her
having begun to meditate on receiving orders to that effect, and said at
last, 'You once told me, ma'am, if you recollect, that when you were
dressed, I was not to go staring out of the window after you as if you
were a doll I had just manufactured and sent round for sale.'

'Yes, so I did.'

'So I didn't see if anybody followed you this evening.'

'Then did you hear any gentleman arrive here by the late train last
night?'

'O no, ma'am--how could I?' said Mrs. Menlove--an exclamation which was
more apposite than her mistress suspected, considering that the speaker,
after retiring from duty, had slipped down her dark skirt to reveal a
light, puffed, and festooned one, put on a hat and feather, together with
several pennyweights of metal in the form of rings, brooches, and
earrings--all in a time whilst one could count a hundred--and enjoyed
half-an-hour of prime courtship by an honourable young waiter of the
town, who had proved constant as the magnet to the pole for the space of
the day and a half that she had known him.

Going at once upstairs, Ethelberta ran down the passage, and after some
hesitation softly opened the door of the sitting-room in the best suite
of apartments that the inn could boast of.

In this room sat an elderly lady writing by the light of two candles with
green shades.  Well knowing, as it seemed, who the intruder was, she
continued her occupation, and her visitor advanced and stood beside the
table.  The old lady wore her spectacles low down her cheek, her glance
being depressed to about the slope of her straight white nose in order to
look through them.  Her mouth was pursed up to almost a youthful shape as
she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the lip
accompanied every downstroke.  There were two large antique rings on her
forefinger, against which the quill rubbed in moving backwards and
forwards, thereby causing a secondary noise rivalling the primary one of
the nib upon the paper.

'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.'

A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea,
knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a full
stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone, not
rising to interrogation.  After signing her name to the letter, she
raised her eyes.

'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said.
'I have been quite alarmed about you.  What do you say has happened?'

The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was
the accidental meeting with an old lover whom she had once quarrelled
with; and Ethelberta's honesty would have delivered the tidings at once,
had not, unfortunately, all the rest of her attributes been dead against
that act, for the old lady's sake even more than for her own.

'I saw a great cruel bird chasing a harmless duck!' she exclaimed
innocently.  'And I ran after to see what the end of it would be--much
further than I had any idea of going.  However, the duck came to a pond,
and in running round it to see the end of the fight, I could not remember
which way I had come.'

'Mercy!' said her mother-in-law, lifting her large eyelids, heavy as
window-shutters, and spreading out her fingers like the horns of a snail.
'You might have sunk up to your knees and got lost in that swampy
place--such a time of night, too.  What a tomboy you are!  And how did
you find your way home after all!'

'O, some man showed me the way, and then I had no difficulty, and after
that I came along leisurely.'

'I thought you had been running all the way; you look so warm.'

'It is a warm evening. . . .  Yes, and I have been thinking of old times
as I walked along,' she said, 'and how people's positions in life alter.
Have I not heard you say that while I was at Bonn, at school, some family
that we had known had their household broken up when the father died, and
that the children went away you didn't know where?'

'Do you mean the Julians?'

'Yes, that was the name.'

'Why, of course you know it was the Julians.  Young Julian had a day or
two's fancy for you one summer, had he not?--just after you came to us,
at the same time, or just before it, that my poor boy and you were so
desperately attached to each other.'

'O yes, I recollect,' said Ethelberta.  'And he had a sister, I think.  I
wonder where they went to live after the family collapse.'

'I do not know,' said Lady Petherwin, taking up another sheet of paper.
'I have a dim notion that the son, who had been brought up to no
profession, became a teacher of music in some country town--music having
always been his hobby.  But the facts are not very distinct in my
memory.'  And she dipped her pen for another letter.

Ethelberta, with a rather fallen countenance, then left her mother-in-
law, and went where all ladies are supposed to go when they want to
torment their minds in comfort--to her own room.  Here she thoughtfully
sat down awhile, and some time later she rang for her maid.

'Menlove,' she said, without looking towards a rustle and half a footstep
that had just come in at the door, but leaning back in her chair and
speaking towards the corner of the looking-glass, 'will you go down and
find out if any gentleman named Julian has been staying in this house?
Get to know it, I mean, Menlove, not by directly inquiring; you have ways
of getting to know things, have you not?  If the devoted George were here
now, he would help--'

'George was nothing to me, ma'am.'

'James, then.'

'And I only had James for a week or ten days: when I found he was a
married man, I encouraged his addresses very little indeed.'

'If you had encouraged him heart and soul, you couldn't have fumed more
at the loss of him.  But please to go and make that inquiry, will you,
Menlove?'

In a few minutes Ethelberta's woman was back again.  'A gentleman of that
name stayed here last night, and left this afternoon.'

'Will you find out his address?'

Now the lady's-maid had already been quick-witted enough to find out
that, and indeed all about him; but it chanced that a fashionable
illustrated weekly paper had just been sent from the bookseller's, and
being in want of a little time to look it over before it reached her
mistress's hands, Mrs. Menlove retired, as if to go and ask the
question--to stand meanwhile under the gas-lamp in the passage,
inspecting the fascinating engravings.  But as time will not wait for
tire-women, a natural length of absence soon elapsed, and she returned
again and said,

'His address is, Upper Street, Sandbourne.'

'Thank you, that will do,' replied her mistress.

The hour grew later, and that dreamy period came round when ladies'
fancies, that have lain shut up close as their fans during the day, begin
to assert themselves anew.  At this time a good guess at Ethelberta's
thoughts might have been made from her manner of passing the minutes
away.  Instead of reading, entering notes in her diary, or doing any
ordinary thing, she walked to and fro, curled her pretty nether lip
within her pretty upper one a great many times, made a cradle of her
locked fingers, and paused with fixed eyes where the walls of the room
set limits upon her walk to look at nothing but a picture within her
mind.




2. CHRISTOPHER'S HOUSE--SANDBOURNE TOWN--SANDBOURNE MOOR


During the wet autumn of the same year, the postman passed one morning as
usual into a plain street that ran through the less fashionable portion
of Sandbourne, a modern coast town and watering-place not many miles from
the ancient Anglebury.  He knocked at the door of a flat-faced brick
house, and it was opened by a slight, thoughtful young man, with his hat
on, just then coming out.  The postman put into his hands a book packet,
addressed, 'Christopher Julian, Esq.'

Christopher took the package upstairs, opened it with curiosity, and
discovered within a green volume of poems, by an anonymous writer, the
title-page bearing the inscription, 'Metres by E.'  The book was new,
though it was cut, and it appeared to have been looked into.  The young
man, after turning it over and wondering where it came from, laid it on
the table and went his way, being in haste to fulfil his engagements for
the day.

In the evening, on returning home from his occupations, he sat himself
down cosily to read the newly-arrived volume.  The winds of this
uncertain season were snarling in the chimneys, and drops of rain spat
themselves into the fire, revealing plainly that the young man's room was
not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue,
and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse,
the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here.
However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat
contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted
of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old
articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of
the new.  An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and a heavy cabinet-piano
with a cornice like that of an Egyptian temple, adjoined a harmonium of
yesterday, and a harp that was almost as new.  Printed music of the last
century, and manuscript music of the previous evening, lay there in such
quantity as to endanger the tidiness of a retreat which was indeed only
saved from a chronic state of litter by a pair of hands that sometimes
played, with the lightness of breezes, about the sewing-machine standing
in a remote corner--if any corner could be called remote in a room so
small.

Fire lights and shades from the shaking flames struck in a butterfly
flutter on the underparts of the mantelshelf, and upon the reader's cheek
as he sat.  Presently, and all at once, a much greater intentness
pervaded his face: he turned back again, and read anew the subject that
had arrested his eyes.  He was a man whose countenance varied with his
mood, though it kept somewhat in the rear of that mood.  He looked sad
when he felt almost serene, and only serene when he felt quite cheerful.
It is a habit people acquire who have had repressing experiences.

A faint smile and flush now lightened his face, and jumping up he opened
the door and exclaimed, 'Faith! will you come here for a moment?'

A prompt step was heard on the stairs, and the young person addressed as
Faith entered the room.  She was small in figure, and bore less in the
form of her features than in their shades when changing from expression
to expression the evidence that she was his sister.

'Faith--I want your opinion.  But, stop, read this first.'  He laid his
finger upon a page in the book, and placed it in her hand.

The girl drew from her pocket a little green-leather sheath, worn at the
edges to whity-brown, and out of that a pair of spectacles, unconsciously
looking round the room for a moment as she did so, as if to ensure that
no stranger saw her in the act of using them.  Here a weakness was
uncovered at once; it was a small, pretty, and natural one; indeed, as
weaknesses go in the great world, it might almost have been called a
commendable trait.  She then began to read, without sitting down.

These 'Metres by E.' composed a collection of soft and marvellously
musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de societe.  The lines
presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of
womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage--the whole teeming with
ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial, yet forming a
brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men.  The pervading
characteristic of the mass was the means of forcing into notice, by
strangeness of contrast, the single mournful poem that the book
contained.  It was placed at the very end, and under the title of
'Cancelled Words,' formed a whimsical and rather affecting love-lament,
somewhat in the tone of many of Sir Thomas Wyatt's poems.  This was the
piece which had arrested Christopher's attention, and had been pointed
out by him to his sister Faith.

'It is very touching,' she said, looking up.

'What do you think I suspect about it--that the poem is addressed to me!
Do you remember, when father was alive and we were at Solentsea that
season, about a governess who came there with a Sir Ralph Petherwin and
his wife, people with a sickly little daughter and a grown-up son?'

'I never saw any of them.  I think I remember your knowing something
about a young man of that name.'

'Yes, that was the family.  Well, the governess there was a very
attractive woman, and somehow or other I got more interested in her than
I ought to have done (this is necessary to the history), and we used to
meet in romantic places--and--and that kind of thing, you know.  The end
of it was, she jilted me and married the son.'

'You were anxious to get away from Solentsea.'

'Was I?  Then that was chiefly the reason.  Well, I decided to think no
more of her, and I was helped to do it by the troubles that came upon us
shortly afterwards; it is a blessed arrangement that one does not feel a
sentimental grief at all when additional grief comes in the shape of
practical misfortune.  However, on the first afternoon of the little
holiday I took for my walking tour last summer, I came to Anglebury, and
stayed about the neighbourhood for a day or two to see what it was like,
thinking we might settle there if this place failed us.  The next evening
I left, and walked across the heath to Flychett--that's a village about
five miles further on--so as to be that distance on my way for next
morning; and while I was crossing the heath there I met this very woman.
We talked a little, because we couldn't help it--you may imagine the kind
of talk it was--and parted as coolly as we had met.  Now this strange
book comes to me; and I have a strong conviction that she is the writer
of it, for that poem sketches a similar scene--or rather suggests it; and
the tone generally seems the kind of thing she would write--not that she
was a sad woman, either.'

'She seems to be a warm-hearted, impulsive woman, to judge from these
tender verses.'

'People who print very warm words have sometimes very cold manners.  I
wonder if it is really her writing, and if she has sent it to me!'

'Would it not be a singular thing for a married woman to do?  Though of
course'--(she removed her spectacles as if they hindered her from
thinking, and hid them under the timepiece till she should go on
reading)--'of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and
custom is no argument with them.  I am sure I would not have sent it to a
man for the world!'

'I do not see any absolute harm in her sending it.  Perhaps she thinks
that, since it is all over, we may as well die friends.'

'If I were her husband I should have doubts about the dying.  And "all
over" may not be so plain to other people as it is to you.'

'Perhaps not.  And when a man checks all a woman's finer sentiments
towards him by marrying her, it is only natural that it should find a
vent somewhere.  However, she probably does not know of my downfall since
father's death.  I hardly think she would have cared to do it had she
known that.  (I am assuming that it is Ethelberta--Mrs. Petherwin--who
sends it: of course I am not sure.)  We must remember that when I knew
her I was a gentleman at ease, who had not the least notion that I should
have to work for a living, and not only so, but should have first to
invent a profession to work at out of my old tastes.'

'Kit, you have made two mistakes in your thoughts of that lady.  Even
though I don't know her, I can show you that.  Now I'll tell you! the
first is in thinking that a married lady would send the book with that
poem in it without at any rate a slight doubt as to its propriety: the
second is in supposing that, had she wished to do it, she would have
given the thing up because of our misfortunes.  With a true woman the
second reason would have had no effect had she once got over the first.
I'm a woman, and that's why I know.'

Christopher said nothing, and turned over the poems.

* * * * *

He lived by teaching music, and, in comparison with starving, thrived;
though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with
thriving he starved.  During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he
would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done
for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on
him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon.

The next morning before starting on his rounds a new circumstance induced
him to direct his steps to the bookseller's, and ask a question.  He had
found on examining the wrapper of the volume that it was posted in his
own town.

'No copy of the book has been sold by me,' the bookseller's voice replied
from far up the Alpine height of the shop-ladder, where he stood dusting
stale volumes, as was his habit of a morning before customers came.  'I
have never heard of it--probably never shall;' and he shook out the
duster, so as to hit the delicate mean between stifling Christopher and
not stifling him.

'Surely you don't live by your shop?' said Christopher, drawing back.

The bookseller's eyes rested on the speaker's; his face changed; he came
down and placed his hand on the lapel of Christopher's coat.  'Sir,' he
said, 'country bookselling is a miserable, impoverishing, exasperating
thing in these days.  Can you understand the rest?'

'I can; I forgive a starving man anything,' said Christopher.

'You go a long way very suddenly,' said the book seller.  'Half as much
pity would have seemed better.  However, wait a moment.'  He looked into
a list of new books, and added: 'The work you allude to was only
published last week; though, mind you, if it had been published last
century I might not have sold a copy.'

Although his time was precious, Christopher had now become so interested
in the circumstance that the unseen sender was somebody breathing his own
atmosphere, possibly the very writer herself--the book being too new to
be known--that he again passed through the blue shadow of the spire which
stretched across the street to-day, and went towards the post-office,
animated by a bright intention--to ask the postmaster if he knew the
handwriting in which the packet was addressed.

Now the postmaster was an acquaintance of Christopher's, but, as regarded
putting that question to him, there was a difficulty.  Everything turned
upon whether the postmaster at the moment of asking would be in his under-
government manner, or in the manner with which mere nature had endowed
him.  In the latter case his reply would be all that could be wished; in
the former, a man who had sunk in society might as well put his tongue
into a mousetrap as make an inquiry so obviously outside the pale of
legality as was this.

So he postponed his business for the present, and refrained from entering
till he passed by after dinner, when pleasant malt liquor, of that
capacity for cheering which is expressed by four large letter X's
marching in a row, had refilled the globular trunk of the postmaster and
neutralized some of the effects of officiality.  The time was well
chosen, but the inquiry threatened to prove fruitless: the postmaster had
never, to his knowledge, seen the writing before.  Christopher was
turning away when a clerk in the background looked up and stated that
some young lady had brought a packet with such an address upon it into
the office two days earlier to get it stamped.

'Do you know her?' said Christopher.

'I have seen her about the neighbourhood.  She goes by every morning; I
think she comes into the town from beyond the common, and returns again
between four and five in the afternoon.'

'What does she wear?'

'A white wool jacket with zigzags of black braid.'

Christopher left the post-office and went his way.  Among his other
pupils there were two who lived at some distance from Sandbourne--one of
them in the direction indicated as that habitually taken by the young
person; and in the afternoon, as he returned homeward, Christopher
loitered and looked around.  At first he could see nobody; but when about
a mile from the outskirts of the town he discerned a light spot ahead of
him, which actually turned out to be the jacket alluded to.  In due time
he met the wearer face to face; she was not Ethelberta Petherwin--quite a
different sort of individual.  He had long made up his mind that this
would be the case, yet he was in some indescribable way disappointed.

Of the two classes into which gentle young women naturally divide, those
who grow red at their weddings, and those who grow pale, the present one
belonged to the former class.  She was an April-natured, pink-cheeked
girl, with eyes that would have made any jeweller in England think of his
trade--one who evidently took her day in the daytime, frequently caught
the early worm, and had little to do with yawns or candlelight.  She came
and passed him; he fancied that her countenance changed.  But one may
fancy anything, and the pair receded each from each without turning their
heads.  He could not speak to her, plain and simple as she seemed.

It is rarely that a man who can be entered and made to throb by the
channel of his ears is not open to a similar attack through the channel
of his eyes--for many doors will admit to one mansion--allowance being
made for the readier capacity of chosen and practised organs.  Hence the
beauties, concords, and eloquences of the female form were never without
their effect upon Christopher, a born musician, artist, poet, seer,
mouthpiece--whichever a translator of Nature's oracles into simple speech
may be called.  The young girl who had gone by was fresh and pleasant;
moreover, she was a sort of mysterious link between himself and the past,
which these things were vividly reviving in him.

The following week Christopher met her again.  She had not much dignity,
he had not much reserve, and the sudden resolution to have a holiday
which sometimes impels a plump heart to rise up against a brain that
overweights it was not to be resisted.  He just lifted his hat, and put
the only question he could think of as a beginning: 'Have I the pleasure
of addressing the author of a book of very melodious poems that was sent
me the other day?'

The girl's forefinger twirled rapidly the loop of braid that it had
previously been twirling slowly, and drawing in her breath, she said,
'No, sir.'

'The sender, then?'

'Yes.'

She somehow presented herself as so insignificant by the combined effect
of the manner and the words that Christopher lowered his method of
address to her level at once.  'Ah,' he said, 'such an atmosphere as the
writer of "Metres by E." seems to breathe would soon spoil cheeks that
are fresh and round as lady-apples--eh, little girl?  But are you
disposed to tell me that writer's name?'

By applying a general idea to a particular case a person with the best of
intentions may find himself immediately landed in a quandary.  In saying
to the country girl before him what would have suited the mass of country
lasses well enough, Christopher had offended her beyond the cure of
compliment.

'I am not disposed to tell the writer's name,' she replied, with a
dudgeon that was very great for one whose whole stock of it was a trifle.
And she passed on and left him standing alone.

Thus further conversation was checked; but, through having rearranged the
hours of his country lessons, Christopher met her the next Wednesday, and
the next Friday, and throughout the following week--no further words
passing between them.  For a while she went by very demurely, apparently
mindful of his offence.  But effrontery is not proved to be part of a
man's nature till he has been guilty of a second act: the best of men may
commit a first through accident or ignorance--may even be betrayed into
it by over-zeal for experiment.  Some such conclusion may or may not have
been arrived at by the girl with the lady-apple cheeks; at any rate,
after the lapse of another week a new spectacle presented itself; her
redness deepened whenever Christopher passed her by, and embarrassment
pervaded her from the lowest stitch to the tip of her feather.  She had
little chance of escaping him by diverging from the road, for a figure
could be seen across the open ground to the distance of half a mile on
either side.  One day as he drew near as usual, she met him as women meet
a cloud of dust--she turned and looked backwards till he had passed.

This would have been disconcerting but for one reason: Christopher was
ceasing to notice her.  He was a man who often, when walking abroad, and
looking as it were at the scene before his eyes, discerned successes and
failures, friends and relations, episodes of childhood, wedding feasts
and funerals, the landscape suffering greatly by these visions, until it
became no more than the patterned wall-tints about the paintings in a
gallery; something necessary to the tone, yet not regarded.  Nothing but
a special concentration of himself on externals could interrupt this
habit, and now that her appearance along the way had changed from a
chance to a custom he began to lapse again into the old trick.  He gazed
once or twice at her form without seeing it: he did not notice that she
trembled.

He sometimes read as he walked, and book in hand he frequently approached
her now.  This went on till six weeks had passed from the time of their
first encounter.  Latterly might have been once or twice heard, when he
had moved out of earshot, a sound like a small gasping sigh; but no
arrangements were disturbed, and Christopher continued to keep down his
eyes as persistently as a saint in a church window.

The last day of his engagement had arrived, and with it the last of his
walks that way.  On his final return he carried in his hand a bunch of
flowers which had been presented to him at the country-house where his
lessons were given.  He was taking them home to his sister Faith, who
prized the lingering blossoms of the seeding season.  Soon appeared as
usual his fellow-traveller; whereupon Christopher looked down upon his
nosegay.  'Sweet simple girl,' he thought, 'I'll endeavour to make peace
with her by means of these flowers before we part for good.'

When she came up he held them out to her and said, 'Will you allow me to
present you with these?'

The bright colours of the nosegay instantly attracted the girl's
hand--perhaps before there had been time for thought to thoroughly
construe the position; for it happened that when her arm was stretched
into the air she steadied it quickly, and stood with the pose of a
statue--rigid with uncertainty.  But it was too late to refuse:
Christopher had put the nosegay within her fingers.  Whatever pleasant
expression of thanks may have appeared in her eyes fell only on the bunch
of flowers, for during the whole transaction they reached to no higher
level than that.  To say that he was coming no more seemed scarcely
necessary under the circumstances, and wishing her 'Good afternoon' very
heartily, he passed on.

He had learnt by this time her occupation, which was that of
pupil-teacher at one of the schools in the town, whither she walked daily
from a village near.  If he had not been poor and the little teacher
humble, Christopher might possibly have been tempted to inquire more
briskly about her, and who knows how such a pursuit might have ended?  But
hard externals rule volatile sentiment, and under these untoward
influences the girl and the book and the truth about its author were
matters upon which he could not afford to expend much time.  All
Christopher did was to think now and then of the pretty innocent face and
round deep eyes, not once wondering if the mind which enlivened them ever
thought of him.




3. SANDBOURNE MOOR (continued)


It was one of those hostile days of the year when chatterbox ladies
remain miserably in their homes to save the carriage and harness, when
clerks' wives hate living in lodgings, when vehicles and people appear in
the street with duplicates of themselves underfoot, when bricklayers,
slaters, and other out-door journeymen sit in a shed and drink beer, when
ducks and drakes play with hilarious delight at their own family game, or
spread out one wing after another in the slower enjoyment of letting the
delicious moisture penetrate to their innermost down.  The smoke from the
flues of Sandbourne had barely strength enough to emerge into the
drizzling rain, and hung down the sides of each chimney-pot like the
streamer of a becalmed ship; and a troop of rats might have rattled down
the pipes from roof to basement with less noise than did the water that
day.

On the broad moor beyond the town, where Christopher's meetings with the
teacher had so regularly occurred, were a stream and some large pools;
and beside one of these, near some hatches and a weir, stood a little
square building, not much larger inside than the Lord Mayor's coach.  It
was known simply as 'The Weir House.'  On this wet afternoon, which was
the one following the day of Christopher's last lesson over the plain, a
nearly invisible smoke came from the puny chimney of the hut.  Though the
door was closed, sounds of chatting and mirth fizzed from the interior,
and would have told anybody who had come near--which nobody did--that the
usually empty shell was tenanted to-day.

The scene within was a large fire in a fireplace to which the whole floor
of the house was no more than a hearthstone.  The occupants were two
gentlemanly persons, in shooting costume, who had been traversing the
moor for miles in search of wild duck and teal, a waterman, and a small
spaniel.  In the corner stood their guns, and two or three wild mallards,
which represented the scanty product of their morning's labour, the
iridescent necks of the dead birds replying to every flicker of the fire.
The two sportsmen were smoking, and their man was mostly occupying
himself in poking and stirring the fire with a stick: all three appeared
to be pretty well wetted.

One of the gentlemen, by way of varying the not very exhilarating study
of four brick walls within microscopic distance of his eye, turned to a
small square hole which admitted light and air to the hut, and looked out
upon the dreary prospect before him.  The wide concave of cloud, of the
monotonous hue of dull pewter, formed an unbroken hood over the level
from horizon to horizon; beneath it, reflecting its wan lustre, was the
glazed high-road which stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past a
directing-post where another road joined it, and on to the less regular
ground beyond, lying like a riband unrolled across the scene, till it
vanished over the furthermost undulation.  Beside the pools were
occasional tall sheaves of flags and sedge, and about the plain a few
bushes, these forming the only obstructions to a view otherwise unbroken.

The sportsman's attention was attracted by a figure in a state of gradual
enlargement as it approached along the road.

'I should think that if pleasure can't tempt a native out of doors to-
day, business will never force him out,' he observed.  'There is, for the
first time, somebody coming along the road.'

'If business don't drag him out pleasure'll never tempt en, is more like
our nater in these parts, sir,' said the man, who was looking into the
fire.

The conversation showed no vitality, and down it dropped dead as before,
the man who was standing up continuing to gaze into the moisture.  What
had at first appeared as an epicene shape the decreasing space resolved
into a cloaked female under an umbrella: she now relaxed her pace, till,
reaching the directing-post where the road branched into two, she paused
and looked about her.  Instead of coming further she slowly retraced her
steps for about a hundred yards.

'That's an appointment,' said the first speaker, as he removed the cigar
from his lips; 'and by the lords, what a day and place for an appointment
with a woman!'

'What's an appointment?' inquired his friend, a town young man, with a
Tussaud complexion and well-pencilled brows half way up his forehead, so
that his upper eyelids appeared to possess the uncommon quality of
tallness.

'Look out here, and you'll see.  By that directing-post, where the two
roads meet.  As a man devoted to art, Ladywell, who has had the honour of
being hung higher up on the Academy walls than any other living painter,
you should take out your sketch-book and dash off the scene.'

Where nothing particular is going on, one incident makes a drama; and,
interested in that proportion, the art-sportsman puts up his eyeglass (a
form he adhered to before firing at game that had risen, by which
merciful arrangement the bird got safe off), placed his face beside his
companion's, and also peered through the opening.  The young
pupil-teacher--for she was the object of their scrutiny--re-approached
the spot whereon she had been accustomed for the last many weeks of her
journey home to meet Christopher, now for the first time missing, and
again she seemed reluctant to pass the hand-post, for that marked the
point where the chance of seeing him ended.  She glided backwards as
before, this time keeping her face still to the front, as if trying to
persuade the world at large, and her own shamefacedness, that she had not
yet approached the place at all.

'Query, how long will she wait for him (for it is a man to a certainty)?'
resumed the elder of the smokers, at the end of several minutes of
silence, when, full of vacillation and doubt, she became lost to view
behind some bushes.  'Will she reappear?'  The smoking went on, and up
she came into open ground as before, and walked by.

'I wonder who the girl is, to come to such a place in this weather?  There
she is again,' said the young man called Ladywell.

'Some cottage lass, not yet old enough to make the most of the value set
on her by her follower, small as that appears to be.  Now we may get an
idea of the hour named by the fellow for the appointment, for, depend
upon it, the time when she first came--about five minutes ago--was the
time he should have been there.  It is now getting on towards five--half-
past four was doubtless the time mentioned.'

'She's not come o' purpose: 'tis her way home from school every day,'
said the waterman.

'An experiment on woman's endurance and patience under neglect.  Two to
one against her staying a quarter of an hour.'

'The same odds against her not staying till five would be nearer
probability.  What's half-an-hour to a girl in love?'

'On a moorland in wet weather it is thirty perceptible minutes to any
fireside man, woman, or beast in Christendom--minutes that can be felt,
like the Egyptian plague of darkness.  Now, little girl, go home: he is
not worth it.'

Twenty minutes passed, and the girl returned miserably to the hand-post,
still to wander back to her retreat behind the sedge, and lead any chance
comer from the opposite quarter to believe that she had not yet reached
this ultimate point beyond which a meeting with Christopher was
impossible.

'Now you'll find that she means to wait the complete half-hour, and then
off she goes with a broken heart.'

All three now looked through the hole to test the truth of the
prognostication.  The hour of five completed itself on their watches; the
girl again came forward.  And then the three in ambuscade could see her
pull out her handkerchief and place it to her eyes.

'She's grieving now because he has not come.  Poor little woman, what a
brute he must be; for a broken heart in a woman means a broken vow in a
man, as I infer from a thousand instances in experience, romance, and
history.  Don't open the door till she is gone, Ladywell; it will only
disturb her.'

As they had guessed, the pupil-teacher, hearing the distant town-clock
strike the hour, gave way to her fancy no longer, and launched into the
diverging path.  This lingering for Christopher's arrival had, as is
known, been founded on nothing more of the nature of an assignation than
lay in his regular walk along the plain at that time every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday of the six previous weeks.  It must be said that he
was very far indeed from divining that his injudicious peace-offering of
the flowers had stirred into life such a wearing, anxious, hopeful,
despairing solicitude as this, which had been latent for some time during
his constant meetings with the little stranger.

She vanished in the mist towards the left, and the loiterers in the hut
began to move and open the door, remarking, 'Now then for Wyndway House,
a change of clothes, and a dinner.'




4. SANDBOURNE PIER--ROAD TO WYNDWAY--BALL-ROOM IN WYNDWAY HOUSE


The last light of a winter day had gone down behind the houses of
Sandbourne, and night was shut close over all.  Christopher, about eight
o'clock, was standing at the end of the pier with his back towards the
open sea, whence the waves were pushing to the shore in frills and coils
that were just rendered visible in all their bleak instability by the row
of lights along the sides of the jetty, the rapid motion landward of the
wavetips producing upon his eye an apparent progress of the pier out to
sea.  This pier-head was a spot which Christopher enjoyed visiting on
such moaning and sighing nights as the present, when the sportive and
variegated throng that haunted the pier on autumn days was no longer
there, and he seemed alone with weather and the invincible sea.

Somebody came towards him along the deserted footway, and rays from the
nearest lamp streaked the face of his sister Faith.

'O Christopher, I knew you were here,' she said eagerly.  'You are
wanted; there's a servant come from Wyndway House for you.  He is sent to
ask if you can come immediately to play at a little dance they have
resolved upon this evening--quite suddenly it seems.  If you can come,
you must bring with you any assistant you can lay your hands upon at a
moment's notice, he says.'

'Wyndway House; why should the people send for me above all other
musicians in the town?'

Faith did not know.  'If you really decide to go,' she said, as they
walked homeward, 'you might take me as your assistant.  I should answer
the purpose, should I not, Kit? since it is only a dance or two they seem
to want.'

'And your harp I suppose you mean.  Yes; you might be competent to take a
part.  It cannot be a regular ball; they would have had the quadrille
band for anything of that sort.  Faith--we'll go.  However, let us see
the man first, and inquire particulars.'

Reaching home, Christopher found at his door a horse and wagonette in
charge of a man-servant in livery, who repeated what Faith had told her
brother.  Wyndway House was a well-known country-seat three or four miles
out of the town, and the coachman mentioned that if they were going it
would be well that they should get ready to start as soon as they
conveniently could, since he had been told to return by ten if possible.
Christopher quickly prepared himself, and put a new string or two into
Faith's harp, by which time she also was dressed; and, wrapping up
herself and her instrument safe from the night air, away they drove at
half-past nine.

'Is it a large party?' said Christopher, as they whizzed along.

'No, sir; it is what we call a dance--that is, 'tis like a ball, you
know, on a small scale--a ball on a spurt, that you never thought of till
you had it.  In short, it grew out of a talk at dinner, I believe; and
some of the young people present wanted a jig, and didn't care to play
themselves, you know, young ladies being an idle class of society at the
best of times.  We've a house full of sleeping company, you
understand--been there a week some of 'em--most of 'em being mistress's
relations.'

'They probably found it a little dull.'

'Well, yes--it is rather dull for 'em--Christmas-time and all.  As soon
as it was proposed they were wild for sending post-haste for somebody or
other to play to them.'

'Did they name me particularly?' said Christopher.

'Yes; "Mr. Christopher Julian," she says.  "The gent who's turned music-
man?" I said.  "Yes, that's him," says she.'

'There were music-men living nearer to your end of the town than I.'

'Yes, but I know it was you particular: though I don't think mistress
thought anything about you at first.  Mr. Joyce--that's the butler--said
that your name was mentioned to our old party, when he was in the room,
by a young lady staying with us, and mistress says then, "The Julians
have had a downfall, and the son has taken to music."  Then when dancing
was talked of, they said, "O, let's have him by all means."'

'Was the young lady who first inquired for my family the same one who
said, "Let's have him by all means?"'

'O no; but it was on account of her asking that the rest said they would
like you to play--at least that's as I had it from Joyce.'

'Do you know that lady's name?'

'Mrs. Petherwin.'

'Ah!'

'Cold, sir?'

'O no.'

Christopher did not like to question the man any further, though what he
had heard added new life to his previous curiosity; and they drove along
the way in silence, Faith's figure, wrapped up to the top of her head,
cutting into the sky behind them like a sugar-loaf.  Such gates as
crossed the roads had been left open by the forethought of the coachman,
and, passing the lodge, they proceeded about half-a-mile along a private
drive, then ascended a rise, and came in view of the front of the
mansion, punctured with windows that were now mostly lighted up.

'What is that?' said Faith, catching a glimpse of something that the
carriage-lamp showed on the face of one wall as they passed, a marble bas-
relief of some battle-piece, built into the stonework.

'That's the scene of the death of one of the squire's forefathers--Colonel
Sir Martin Jones, who was killed at the moment of victory in the battle
of Salamanca--but I haven't been here long enough to know the rights of
it.  When I am in one of my meditations, as I wait here with the carriage
sometimes, I think how many more get killed at the moment of victory than
at the moment of defeat.  This is the entrance for you, sir.'  And he
turned the corner and pulled up before a side door.

They alighted and went in, Christopher shouldering Faith's harp, and she
marching modestly behind, with curly-eared music-books under her arm.
They were shown into the house-steward's room, and ushered thence along a
badly-lit passage and past a door within which a hum and laughter were
audible.  The door next to this was then opened for them, and they
entered.

* * * * *

Scarcely had Faith, or Christopher either, ever beheld a more shining
scene than was presented by the saloon in which they now found
themselves.  Coming direct from the gloomy park, and led to the room by
that back passage from the servants' quarter, the light from the
chandelier and branches against the walls, striking on gilding at all
points, quite dazzled their sight for a minute or two; it caused Faith to
move forward with her eyes on the floor, and filled Christopher with an
impulse to turn back again into some dusky corner where every thread of
his not over-new dress suit--rather moth-eaten through lack of feasts for
airing it--could be counted less easily.

He was soon seated before a grand piano, and Faith sat down under the
shadow of her harp, both being arranged on a dais within an alcove at one
end of the room.  A screen of ivy and holly had been constructed across
the front of this recess for the games of the children on Christmas Eve,
and it still remained there, a small creep-hole being left for entrance
and exit.

Then the merry guests tumbled through doors at the further end, and
dancing began.  The mingling of black-coated men and bright ladies gave a
charming appearance to the groups as seen by Faith and her brother, the
whole spectacle deriving an unexpected novelty from the accident of
reaching their eyes through interstices in the tracery of green leaves,
which added to the picture a softness that it would not otherwise have
possessed.  On the other hand, the musicians, having a much weaker light,
could hardly be discerned by the performers in the dance.

The music was now rattling on, and the ladies in their foam-like dresses
were busily threading and spinning about the floor, when Faith, casually
looking up into her brother's face, was surprised to see that a change
had come over it.  At the end of the quadrille he leant across to her
before she had time to speak, and said quietly, 'She's here!'

'Who?' said Faith, for she had not heard the words of the coachman.

'Ethelberta.'

'Which is she?' asked Faith, peeping through with the keenest interest.

'The one who has the skirts of her dress looped up with convolvulus
flowers--the one with her hair fastened in a sort of Venus knot behind;
she has just been dancing with that perfumed piece of a man they call Mr.
Ladywell--it is he with the high eyebrows arched like a girl's.'  He
added, with a wrinkled smile, 'I cannot for my life see anybody answering
to the character of husband to her, for every man takes notice of her.'

They were interrupted by another dance being called for, and then, his
fingers tapping about upon the keys as mechanically as fowls pecking at
barleycorns, Christopher gave himself up with a curious and far from
unalloyed pleasure to the occupation of watching Ethelberta, now again
crossing the field of his vision like a returned comet whose
characteristics were becoming purely historical.  She was a plump-armed
creature, with a white round neck as firm as a fort--altogether a
vigorous shape, as refreshing to the eye as the green leaves through
which he beheld her.  She danced freely, and with a zest that was
apparently irrespective of partners.  He had been waiting long to hear
her speak, and when at length her voice did reach his ears, it was the
revelation of a strange matter to find how great a thing that small event
had become to him.  He knew the old utterance--rapid but not frequent, an
obstructive thought causing sometimes a sudden halt in the midst of a
stream of words.  But the features by which a cool observer would have
singled her out from others in his memory when asking himself what she
was like, was a peculiar gaze into imaginary far-away distance when
making a quiet remark to a partner--not with contracted eyes like a
seafaring man, but with an open full look--a remark in which little words
in a low tone were made to express a great deal, as several single
gentlemen afterwards found.

The production of dance-music when the criticizing stage among the
dancers has passed, and they have grown full of excitement and animal
spirits, does not require much concentration of thought in the producers
thereof; and desultory conversation accordingly went on between Faith and
her brother from time to time.

'Kit,' she said on one occasion, 'are you looking at the way in which the
flowers are fastened to the leaves?--taking a mean advantage of being at
the back of the tapestry?  You cannot think how you stare at them.'

'I was looking through them--certainly not at them.  I have a feeling of
being moved about like a puppet in the hands of a person who legally can
be nothing to me.'

'That charming woman with the shining bunch of hair and convolvuluses?'

'Yes: it is through her that we are brought here, and through her writing
that poem, "Cancelled Words," that the book was sent me, and through the
accidental renewal of acquaintance between us on Anglebury Heath, that
she wrote the poem.  I was, however, at the moment you spoke, thinking
more particularly of the little teacher whom Ethelberta must have
commissioned to send the book to me; and why that girl was chosen to do
it.'

'There may be a hundred reasons.  Kit, I have never yet seen her look
once this way.'

Christopher had certainly not yet received look or gesture from her; but
his time came.  It was while he was for a moment outside the recess, and
he caught her in the act.  She became slightly confused, turned aside,
and entered into conversation with a neighbour.

It was only a look, and yet what a look it was!  One may say of a look
that it is capable of division into as many species, genera, orders, and
classes, as the animal world itself.  Christopher saw Ethelberta
Petherwin's performance in this kind--the well-known spark of light upon
the well-known depths of mystery--and felt something going out of him
which had gone out of him once before.

Thus continually beholding her and her companions in the giddy whirl, the
night wore on with the musicians, last dances and more last dances being
added, till the intentions of the old on the matter were thrice exceeded
in the interests of the young.  Watching the couples whirl and turn,
advance and recede as gently as spirits, knot themselves like house-flies
and part again, and lullabied by the faint regular beat of their
footsteps to the tune, the players sank into the peculiar mesmeric quiet
which comes over impressionable people who play for a great length of
time in the midst of such scenes; and at last the only noises that
Christopher took cognizance of were those of the exceptional kind,
breaking above the general sea of sound--a casual smart rustle of silk, a
laugh, a stumble, the monosyllabic talk of those who happened to linger
for a moment close to the leafy screen--all coming to his ears like
voices from those old times when he had mingled in similar scenes, not as
servant but as guest.




5. AT THE WINDOW--THE ROAD HOME


The dancing was over at last, and the radiant company had left the room.
A long and weary night it had been for the two players, though a
stimulated interest had hindered physical exhaustion in one of them for a
while.  With tingling fingers and aching arms they came out of the alcove
into the long and deserted apartment, now pervaded by a dry haze.  The
lights had burnt low, and Faith and her brother were waiting by request
till the wagonette was ready to take them home, a breakfast being in
course of preparation for them meanwhile.

Christopher had crossed the room to relieve his cramped limbs, and now,
peeping through a crevice in the window curtains, he said suddenly,
'Who's for a transformation scene?  Faith, look here!'

He touched the blind, up it flew, and a gorgeous scene presented itself
to her eyes.  A huge inflamed sun was breasting the horizon of a wide
sheet of sea which, to her surprise and delight, the mansion overlooked.
The brilliant disc fired all the waves that lay between it and the shore
at the bottom of the grounds, where the water tossed the ruddy light from
one undulation to another in glares as large and clear as mirrors,
incessantly altering them, destroying them, and creating them again;
while further off they multiplied, thickened, and ran into one another
like struggling armies, till they met the fiery source of them all.

'O, how wonderful it is!' said Faith, putting her hand on Christopher's
arm.  'Who knew that whilst we were all shut in here with our puny
illumination such an exhibition as this was going on outside!  How sorry
and mean the grand and stately room looks now!'

Christopher turned his back upon the window, and there were the hitherto
beaming candle-flames shining no more radiantly than tarnished javelin-
heads, while the snow-white lengths of wax showed themselves clammy and
cadaverous as the fingers of a corpse.  The leaves and flowers which had
appeared so very green and blooming by the artificial light were now seen
to be faded and dusty.  Only the gilding of the room in some degree
brought itself into keeping with the splendours outside, stray darts of
light seizing upon it and lengthening themselves out along fillet, quirk,
arris, and moulding, till wasted away.

'It seems,' said Faith, 'as if all the people who were lately so merry
here had died: we ourselves look no more than ghosts.'  She turned up her
weary face to her brother's, which the incoming rays smote aslant, making
little furrows of every wrinkle thereon, and shady ravines of every
little furrow.

'You are very tired, Faith,' he said.  'Such a heavy night's work has
been almost too much for you.'

'O, I don't mind that,' said Faith.  'But I could not have played so long
by myself.'

'We filled up one another's gaps; and there were plenty of them towards
the morning; but, luckily, people don't notice those things when the
small hours draw on.'

'What troubles me most,' said Faith, 'is not that I have worked, but that
you should be so situated as to need such miserable assistance as mine.
We are poor, are we not, Kit?'

'Yes, we know a little about poverty,' he replied.

While thus lingering

   'In shadowy thoroughfares of thought,'

Faith interrupted with, 'I believe there is one of the dancers now!--why,
I should have thought they had all gone to bed, and wouldn't get up again
for days.'  She indicated to him a figure on the lawn towards the left,
looking upon the same flashing scene as that they themselves beheld.

'It is your own particular one,' continued Faith.  'Yes, I see the blue
flowers under the edge of her cloak.'

'And I see her squirrel-coloured hair,' said Christopher.

Both stood looking at this apparition, who once, and only once, thought
fit to turn her head towards the front of the house they were gazing
from.  Faith was one in whom the meditative somewhat overpowered the
active faculties; she went on, with no abundance of love, to theorize
upon this gratuitously charming woman, who, striking freakishly into her
brother's path, seemed likely to do him no good in her sisterly
estimation.  Ethelberta's bright and shapely form stood before her critic
now, smartened by the motes of sunlight from head to heel: what Faith
would have given to see her so clearly within!

'Without doubt she is already a lady of many romantic experiences,' she
said dubiously.

'And on the way to many more,' said Christopher.  The tone was just of
the kind which may be imagined of a sombre man who had been up all night
piping that others might dance.

Faith parted her lips as if in consternation at possibilities.
Ethelberta, having already become an influence in Christopher's system,
might soon become more--an indestructible fascination--to drag him about,
turn his soul inside out, harrow him, twist him, and otherwise torment
him, according to the stereotyped form of such processes.

They were interrupted by the opening of a door.  A servant entered and
came up to them.

'This is for you, I believe, sir,' he said.  'Two guineas;' and he placed
the money in Christopher's hand.  'Some breakfast will be ready for you
in a moment if you like to have it.  Would you wish it brought in here;
or will you come to the steward's room?'

'Yes, we will come.'  And the man then began to extinguish the lights one
by one.  Christopher dropped the two pounds and two shillings singly into
his pocket, and looking listlessly at the footman said, 'Can you tell me
the address of that lady on the lawn?  Ah, she has disappeared!'

'She wore a dress with blue flowers,' said Faith.

'And remarkable bright in her manner?  O, that's the young widow,
Mrs--what's that name--I forget for the moment.'

'Widow?' said Christopher, the eyes of his understanding getting
wonderfully clear, and Faith uttering a private ejaculation of thanks
that after all no commandments were likely to be broken in this matter.
'The lady I mean is quite a girlish sort of woman.'

'Yes, yes, so she is--that's the one.  Coachman says she must have been
born a widow, for there is not time for her ever to have been made one.
However, she's not quite such a chicken as all that.  Mrs. Petherwin,
that's the party's name.'

'Does she live here?'

'No, she is staying in the house visiting for a few days with her mother-
in-law.  They are a London family, I don't know her address.'

'Is she a poetess?'

'That I cannot say.  She is very clever at verses; but she don't lean
over gates to see the sun, and goes to church as regular as you or I, so
I should hardly be inclined to say that she's the complete thing.  When
she's up in one of her vagaries she'll sit with the ladies and make up
pretty things out of her head as fast as sticks a-breaking.  They will
run off her tongue like cotton from a reel, and if she can ever be got in
the mind of telling a story she will bring it out that serious and awful
that it makes your flesh creep upon your bones; if she's only got to say
that she walked out of one door into another, she'll tell it so that
there seems something wonderful in it.  'Tis a bother to start her, so
our people say behind her back, but, once set going, the house is all
alive with her.  However, it will soon be dull enough; she and Lady
Petherwin are off to-morrow for Rookington, where I believe they are
going to stay over New Year's Day.'

'Where do you say they are going?' inquired Christopher, as they followed
the footman.

'Rookington Park--about three miles out of Sandbourne, in the opposite
direction to this.'

'A widow,' Christopher murmured.

Faith overheard him.  'That makes no difference to us, does it?' she said
wistfully.

Forty minutes later they were driving along an open road over a ridge
which commanded a view of a small inlet below them, the sands of this
nook being sheltered by crumbling cliffs.  Here at once they saw, in the
full light of the sun, two women standing side by side, their faces
directed over the sea.

'There she is again!' said Faith.  'She has walked along the shore from
the lawn where we saw her before.'

'Yes,' said the coachman, 'she's a curious woman seemingly.  She'll talk
to any poor body she meets.  You see she had been out for a morning walk
instead of going to bed, and that is some queer mortal or other she has
picked up with on her way.'

'I wonder she does not prefer some rest,' Faith observed.

The road then dropped into a hollow, and the women by the sea were no
longer within view from the carriage, which rapidly neared Sandbourne
with the two musicians.




6. THE SHORE BY WYNDWAY


The east gleamed upon Ethelberta's squirrel-coloured hair as she said to
her companion, 'I have come, Picotee; but not, as you imagine, from a
night's sleep.  We have actually been dancing till daylight at Wyndway.'

'Then you should not have troubled to come!  I could have borne the
disappointment under such circumstances,' said the pupil-teacher, who,
wearing a dress not so familiar to Christopher's eyes as had been the
little white jacket, had not been recognized by him from the hill.  'You
look so tired, Berta.  I could not stay up all night for the world!'

'One gets used to these things,' said Ethelberta quietly.  'I should have
been in bed certainly, had I not particularly wished to use this
opportunity of meeting you before you go home to-morrow.  I could not
have come to Sandbourne to-day, because we are leaving to return again to
Rookington.  This is all that I wish you to take to mother--only a few
little things which may be useful to her; but you will see what it
contains when you open it.'  She handed to Picotee a small parcel.  'This
is for yourself,' she went on, giving a small packet besides.  'It will
pay your fare home and back, and leave you something to spare.'

'Thank you,' said Picotee docilely.

'Now, Picotee,' continued the elder, 'let us talk for a few minutes
before I go back: we may not meet again for some time.'  She put her arm
round the waist of Picotee, who did the same by Ethelberta; and thus
interlaced they walked backwards and forwards upon the firm flat sand
with the motion of one body animated by one will.

'Well, what did you think of my poems?'

'I liked them; but naturally, I did not understand all the experience you
describe.  It is so different from mine.  Yet that made them more
interesting to me.  I thought I should so much like to mix in the same
scenes; but that of course is impossible.'

'I am afraid it is.  And you posted the book as I said?'

'Yes.'  She added hurriedly, as if to change the subject, 'I have told
nobody that we are sisters, or that you are known in any way to me or to
mother or to any of us.  I thought that would be best, from what you
said.'

'Yes, perhaps it is best for the present.'

'The box of clothes came safely, and I find very little alteration will
be necessary to make the dress do beautifully for me on Sundays.  It is
quite new-fashioned to me, though I suppose it was old-fashioned to you.
O, and Berta, will the title of Lady Petherwin descend to you when your
mother-in-law dies?'

'No, of course not.  She is only a knight's widow, and that's nothing.'

'The lady of a knight looks as good on paper as the lady of a lord.'

'Yes.  And in other places too sometimes.  However, about your journey
home.  Be very careful; and don't make any inquiries at the stations of
anybody but officials.  If any man wants to be friendly with you, try to
find out if it is from a genuine wish to assist you, or from admiration
of your fresh face.'

'How shall I know which?' said Picotee.

Ethelberta laughed.  'If Heaven does not tell you at the moment I
cannot,' she said.  'But humanity looks with a different eye from love,
and upon the whole it is most to be prized by all of us.  I believe it
ends oftener in marriage than do a lover's flying smiles.  So that for
this and other reasons love from a stranger is mostly worthless as a
speculation; and it is certainly dangerous as a game.  Well, Picotee, has
any one paid you real attentions yet?'

'No--that is--'

'There is something going on.'

'Only a wee bit.'

'I thought so.  There was a dishonesty about your dear eyes which has
never been there before, and love-making and dishonesty are inseparable
as coupled hounds.  Up comes man, and away goes innocence.  Are you going
to tell me anything about him?'

'I would rather not, Ethelberta; because it is hardly anything.'

'Well, be careful.  And mind this, never tell him what you feel.'

'But then he will never know it.'

'Nor must he.  He must think it only.  The difference between his
thinking and knowing is often the difference between your winning and
losing.  But general advice is not of much use, and I cannot give more
unless you tell more.  What is his name?'

Picotee did not reply.

'Never mind: keep your secret.  However, listen to this: not a kiss--not
so much as the shadow, hint, or merest seedling of a kiss!'

'There is no fear of it,' murmured Picotee; 'though not because of me!'

'You see, my dear Picotee, a lover is not a relative; and he isn't quite
a stranger; but he may end in being either, and the way to reduce him to
whichever of the two you wish him to be is to treat him like the other.
Men who come courting are just like bad cooks: if you are kind to them,
instead of ascribing it to an exceptional courtesy on your part, they
instantly set it down to their own marvellous worth.'

'But I ought to favour him just a little, poor thing?  Just the smallest
glimmer of a gleam!'

'Only a very little indeed--so that it comes as a relief to his misery,
not as adding to his happiness.'

'It is being too clever, all this; and we ought to be harmless as doves.'

'Ah, Picotee! to continue harmless as a dove you must be wise as a
serpent, you'll find--ay, ten serpents, for that matter.'

'But if I cannot get at him, how can I manage him in these ways you speak
of?'

'Get at him?  I suppose he gets at you in some way, does he not?--tries
to see you, or to be near you?'

'No--that's just the point--he doesn't do any such thing, and there's the
worry of it!'

'Well, what a silly girl!  Then he is not your lover at all?'

'Perhaps he's not.  But I am his, at any rate--twice over.'

'That's no use.  Supply the love for both sides?  Why, it's worse than
furnishing money for both.  You don't suppose a man will give his heart
in exchange for a woman's when he has already got hers for nothing?
That's not the way old Adam does business at all.'

Picotee sighed.  'Have you got a young man, too, Berta?'

'A young man?'

'A lover I mean--that's what we call 'em down here.'

'It is difficult to explain,' said Ethelberta evasively.  'I knew one
many years ago, and I have seen him again, and--that is all.'

'According to my idea you have one, but according to your own you have
not; he does not love you, but you love him--is that how it is?'

'I have not quite considered how it is.'

'Do you love him?'

'I have never seen a man I hate less.'

'A great deal lies covered up there, I expect!'

'He was in that carriage which drove over the hill at the moment we met
here.'

'Ah-ah--some great lord or another who has his day by candlelight, and so
on.  I guess the style.  Somebody who no more knows how much bread is a
loaf than I do the price of diamonds and pearls.'

'I am afraid he's only a commoner as yet, and not a very great one
either.  But surely you guess, Picotee?  But I'll set you an example of
frankness by telling his name.  My friend, Mr. Julian, to whom you posted
the book.  Such changes as he has seen!--from affluence to poverty.  He
and his sister have been playing dances all night at Wyndway--What is the
matter?'

'Only a pain!'

'My dear Picotee--'

'I think I'll sit down for a moment, Berta.'

'What--have you over-walked yourself, dear?'

'Yes--and I got up very early, you see.'

'I hope you are not going to be ill, child.  You look as if you ought not
to be here.'

'O, it is quite trifling.  Does not getting up in a hurry cause a sense
of faintness sometimes?'

'Yes, in people who are not strong.'

'If we don't talk about being faint it will go off.  Faintness is such a
queer thing that to think of it is to have it.  Let us talk as we were
talking before--about your young man and other indifferent matters, so as
to divert my thoughts from fainting, dear Berta.  I have always thought
the book was to be forwarded to that gentleman because he was a
connection of yours by marriage, and he had asked for it.  And so you
have met this--this Mr. Julian, and gone for walks with him in evenings,
I suppose, just as young men and women do who are courting?'

'No, indeed--what an absurd child you are!' said Ethelberta.  'I knew him
once, and he is interesting; a few little things like that make it all
up.'

'The love is all on one side, as with me.'

'O no, no: there is nothing like that.  I am not attached to any one,
strictly speaking--though, more strictly speaking, I am not unattached.'

''Tis a delightful middle mind to be in.  I know it, for I was like it
once; but I had scarcely been so long enough to know where I was before I
was gone past.'

'You should have commanded yourself, or drawn back entirely; for let me
tell you that at the beginning of caring for a man--just when you are
suspended between thinking and feeling--there is a hair's-breadth of time
at which the question of getting into love or not getting in is a matter
of will--quite a thing of choice.  At the same time, drawing back is a
tame dance, and the best of all is to stay balanced awhile.'

'You do that well, I'll warrant.'

'Well, no; for what between continually wanting to love, to escape the
blank lives of those who do not, and wanting not to love, to keep out of
the miseries of those who do, I get foolishly warm and foolishly cold by
turns.'

'Yes--and I am like you as far as the "foolishly" goes.  I wish we poor
girls could contrive to bring a little wisdom into our love by way of a
change!'

'That's the very thing that leading minds in town have begun to do, but
there are difficulties.  It is easy to love wisely, but the rich man may
not marry you; and it is not very hard to reject wisely, but the poor man
doesn't care.  Altogether it is a precious problem.  But shall we clamber
out upon those shining blocks of rock, and find some of the little yellow
shells that are in the crevices?  I have ten minutes longer, and then I
must go.'




7. THE DINING-ROOM OF A TOWN HOUSE--THE BUTLER'S PANTRY


A few weeks later there was a friendly dinner-party at the house of a
gentleman called Doncastle, who lived in a moderately fashionable square
of west London.  All the friends and relatives present were nice people,
who exhibited becoming signs of pleasure and gaiety at being there; but
as regards the vigour with which these emotions were expressed, it may be
stated that a slight laugh from far down the throat and a slight
narrowing of the eye were equivalent as indices of the degree of mirth
felt to a Ha-ha-ha! and a shaking of the shoulders among the minor
traders of the kingdom; and to a Ho-ho-ho! contorted features, purple
face, and stamping foot among the gentlemen in corduroy and fustian who
adorn the remoter provinces.

The conversation was chiefly about a volume of musical, tender, and
humorous rhapsodies lately issued to the world in the guise of verse,
which had been reviewed and talked about everywhere.  This topic,
beginning as a private dialogue between a young painter named Ladywell
and the lady on his right hand, had enlarged its ground by degrees, as a
subject will extend on those rare occasions when it happens to be one
about which each person has thought something beforehand, instead of, as
in the natural order of things, one to which the oblivious listener
replies mechanically, with earnest features, but with thoughts far away.
And so the whole table made the matter a thing to inquire or reply upon
at once, and isolated rills of other chat died out like a river in the
sands.

'Witty things, and occasionally Anacreontic: and they have the
originality which such a style must naturally possess when carried out by
a feminine hand,' said Ladywell.

'If it is a feminine hand,' said a man near.

Ladywell looked as if he sometimes knew secrets, though he did not wish
to boast.

'Written, I presume you mean, in the Anacreontic measure of three feet
and a half--spondees and iambics?' said a gentleman in spectacles,
glancing round, and giving emphasis to his inquiry by causing bland
glares of a circular shape to proceed from his glasses towards the person
interrogated.

The company appeared willing to give consideration to the words of a man
who knew such things as that, and hung forward to listen.  But Ladywell
stopped the whole current of affairs in that direction by saying--

'O no; I was speaking rather of the matter and tone.  In fact, the Seven
Days' Review said they were Anacreontic, you know; and so they are--any
one may feel they are.'

The general look then implied a false encouragement, and the man in
spectacles looked down again, being a nervous person, who never had time
to show his merits because he was so much occupied in hiding his faults.

'Do you know the authoress, Mr. Neigh?' continued Ladywell.

'Can't say that I do,' he replied.

Neigh was a man who never disturbed the flesh upon his face except when
he was obliged to do so, and paused ten seconds where other people only
paused one; as he moved his chin in speaking, motes of light from under
the candle-shade caught, lost, and caught again the outlying threads of
his burnished beard.

'She will be famous some day; and you ought at any rate to read her
book.'

'Yes, I ought, I know.  In fact, some years ago I should have done it
immediately, because I had a reason for pushing on that way just then.'

'Ah, what was that?'

'Well, I thought of going in for Westminster Abbey myself at that time;
but a fellow has so much to do, and--'

'What a pity that you didn't follow it up.  A man of your powers, Mr.
Neigh--'

'Afterwards I found I was too steady for it, and had too much of the
respectable householder in me.  Besides, so many other men are on the
same tack; and then I didn't care about it, somehow.'

'I don't understand high art, and am utterly in the dark on what are the
true laws of criticism,' a plain married lady, who wore archaeological
jewellery, was saying at this time.  'But I know that I have derived an
unusual amount of amusement from those verses, and I am heartily thankful
to "E." for them.'

'I am afraid,' said a gentleman who was suffering from a bad shirt-front,
'that an estimate which depends upon feeling in that way is not to be
trusted as permanent opinion.'

The subject now flitted to the other end.

'Somebody has it that when the heart flies out before the understanding,
it saves the judgment a world of pains,' came from a voice in that
quarter.

'I, for my part, like something merry,' said an elderly woman, whose face
was bisected by the edge of a shadow, which toned her forehead and
eyelids to a livid neutral tint, and left her cheeks and mouth like metal
at a white heat in the uninterrupted light.  'I think the liveliness of
those ballads as great a recommendation as any.  After all, enough misery
is known to us by our experiences and those of our friends, and what we
see in the newspapers, for all purposes of chastening, without having
gratuitous grief inflicted upon us.'

'But you would not have wished that "Romeo and Juliet" should have ended
happily, or that Othello should have discovered the perfidy of his
Ancient in time to prevent all fatal consequences?'

'I am not afraid to go so far as that,' said the old lady.  'Shakespeare
is not everybody, and I am sure that thousands of people who have seen
those plays would have driven home more cheerfully afterwards if by some
contrivance the characters could all have been joined together
respectively.  I uphold our anonymous author on the general ground of her
levity.'

'Well, it is an old and worn argument--that about the inexpedience of
tragedy--and much may be said on both sides.  It is not to be denied that
the anonymous Sappho's verses--for it seems that she is really a
woman--are clever.'

'Clever!' said Ladywell--the young man who had been one of the shooting-
party at Sandbourne--'they are marvellously brilliant.'

'She is rather warm in her assumed character.'

'That's a sign of her actual coldness; she lets off her feeling in
theoretic grooves, and there is sure to be none left for practical ones.
Whatever seems to be the most prominent vice, or the most prominent
virtue in anybody's writing is the one thing you are safest from in
personal dealings with the writer.'

'O, I don't mean to call her warmth of feeling a vice or virtue exactly--'

'I agree with you,' said Neigh to the last speaker but one, in tones as
emphatic as they possibly could be without losing their proper character
of indifference to the whole matter.  'Warm sentiment of any sort,
whenever we have it, disturbs us too much to leave us repose enough for
writing it down.'

'I am sure, when I was at the ardent age,' said the mistress of the
house, in a tone of pleasantly agreeing with every one, particularly
those who were diametrically opposed to each other, 'I could no more have
printed such emotions and made them public than I--could have helped
privately feeling them.'

'I wonder if she has gone through half she says?  If so, what an
experience!'

'O no--not at all likely,' said Mr. Neigh.  'It is as risky to calculate
people's ways of living from their writings as their incomes from their
way of living.'

'She is as true to nature as fashion is false,' said the painter, in his
warmth becoming scarcely complimentary, as sometimes happens with young
persons.  'I don't think that she has written a word more than what every
woman would deny feeling in a society where no woman says what she means
or does what she says.  And can any praise be greater than that?'

'Ha-ha!  Capital!'

'All her verses seem to me,' said a rather stupid person, 'to be simply--

   "Tral'-la-la-lal'-la-la-la',
   Tral'-la-la-lal'-la-la-lu',
   Tral'-la-la-lal'-la-la-lalla',
   Tral'-la-la-lu'."

When you take away the music there is nothing left.  Yet she is plainly a
woman of great culture.'

'Have you seen what the London Light says about them--one of the finest
things I have ever read in the way of admiration?' continued Ladywell,
paying no attention to the previous speaker.  He lingered for a reply,
and then impulsively quoted several lines from the periodical he had
named, without aid or hesitation.  'Good, is it not?' added Ladywell.

They assented, but in such an unqualified manner that half as much
readiness would have meant more.  But Ladywell, though not experienced
enough to be quite free from enthusiasm, was too experienced to mind
indifference for more than a minute or two.  When the ladies had
withdrawn, the young man went on--

'Colonel Staff said a funny thing to me yesterday about these very poems.
He asked me if I knew her, and--'

'Her?  Why, he knows that it is a lady all the time, and we were only
just now doubting whether the sex of the writer could be really what it
seems.  Shame, Ladywell!' said his friend Neigh.

'Ah, Mr. Ladywell,' said another, 'now we have found you out.  You know
her!'

'Now--I say--ha-ha!' continued the painter, with a face expressing that
he had not at all tried to be found out as the man possessing
incomparably superior knowledge of the poetess.  'I beg pardon really,
but don't press me on the matter.  Upon my word the secret is not my own.
As I was saying, the Colonel said, "Do you know her?"--but you don't care
to hear?'

'We shall be delighted!'

'So the Colonel said, "Do you know her?" adding, in a most comic way,
"Between U. and E., Ladywell, I believe there is a close
affinity"--meaning me, you know, by U.  Just like the Colonel--ha-ha-ha!'

The older men did not oblige Ladywell a second time with any attempt at
appreciation; but a weird silence ensued, during which the smile upon
Ladywell's face became frozen to painful permanence.

'Meaning by E., you know, the "E" of the poems--heh-heh!' he added.

'It was a very humorous incident certainly,' said his friend Neigh, at
which there was a laugh--not from anything connected with what he said,
but simply because it was the right thing to laugh when Neigh meant you
to do so.

'Now don't, Neigh--you are too hard upon me.  But, seriously, two or
three fellows were there when I said it, and they all began laughing--but,
then, the Colonel said it in such a queer way, you know.  But you were
asking me about her?  Well, the fact is, between ourselves, I do know
that she is a lady; and I don't mind telling a word--'

'But we would not for the world be the means of making you betray her
confidence--would we, Jones?'

'No, indeed; we would not.'

'No, no; it is not that at all--this is really too bad!--you must listen
just for a moment--'

'Ladywell, don't betray anybody on our account.'

'Whoever the illustrious young lady may be she has seen a great deal of
the world,' said Mr. Doncastle blandly, 'and puts her experience of the
comedy of its emotions, and of its method of showing them, in a very
vivid light.'

'I heard a man say that the novelty with which the ideas are presented is
more noticeable than the originality of the ideas themselves,' observed
Neigh.  'The woman has made a great talk about herself; and I am quite
weary of people asking of her condition, place of abode, has she a
father, has she a mother, or dearer one yet than all other.'

'I would have burlesque quotation put down by Act of Parliament, and all
who dabble in it placed with him who can cite Scripture for his
purposes,' said Ladywell, in retaliation.

After a pause Neigh remarked half-privately to their host, who was his
uncle: 'Your butler Chickerel is a very intelligent man, as I have
heard.'

'Yes, he does very well,' said Mr. Doncastle.

'But is he not a--very extraordinary man?'

'Not to my knowledge,' said Doncastle, looking up surprised.  'Why do you
think that, Alfred?'

'Well, perhaps it was not a matter to mention.  He reads a great deal, I
dare say?'

'I don't think so.'

'I noticed how wonderfully his face kindled when we began talking about
the poems during dinner.  Perhaps he is a poet himself in disguise.  Did
you observe it?'

'No.  To the best of my belief he is a very trustworthy and honourable
man.  He has been with us--let me see, how long?--five months, I think,
and he was fifteen years in his last place.  It certainly is a new side
to his character if he publicly showed any interest in the conversation,
whatever he might have felt.'

'Since the matter has been mentioned,' said Mr. Jones, 'I may say that I
too noticed the singularity of it.'

'If you had not said otherwise,' replied Doncastle somewhat warmly, 'I
should have asserted him to be the last man-servant in London to infringe
such an elementary rule.  If he did so this evening, it is certainly for
the first time, and I sincerely hope that no annoyance was caused--'

'O no, no--not at all--it might have been a mistake of mine,' said Jones.
'I should quite have forgotten the circumstance if Mr. Neigh's words had
not brought it to my mind.  It was really nothing to notice, and I beg
that you will not say a word to him about it on my account.'

'He has a taste that way, my dear uncle, nothing more, depend upon it,'
said Neigh.  'If I had such a man belonging to me I should only be too
proud.  Certainly do not mention it.'

'Of course Chickerel is Chickerel,' Mr. Doncastle rejoined.  'We all know
what that means.  And really, on reflecting, I do remember that he is of
a literary turn of mind--not further by an inch than is commendable, you
know.  I am quite aware as I glance down the papers and prints any
morning that Chickerel's eyes have been over the ground before mine, and
that he generally forestalls the rest of us by a chapter or so in the
last new book sent home; but in these vicious days that particular
weakness is really virtue, just because it is not quite a vice.'

'Yes,' said Mr. Jones, the reflective man in spectacles, 'positive
virtues are getting moved off the stage: negative ones are moved on to
the place of positives; we thank bare justice as we used only to thank
generosity; call a man honest who steals only by law, and consider him a
benefactor if he does not steal at all.'

'Hear, hear!' said Neigh.  'We will decide that Chickerel is even a
better trained fellow than if he had shown no interest at all in his
face.'

'The action being like those trifling irregularities in art at its
vigorous periods, which seemed designed to hide the unpleasant monotony
of absolute symmetry,' said Ladywell.

'On the other hand, an affected want of training of that sort would be
even a better disguise for an artful man than a perfectly impassible
demeanour.  He is two removes from discovery in a hidden scheme, whilst a
neutral face is only one.'

'You quite alarm me by these subtle theories,' said Mr. Doncastle,
laughing; and the subject then became compounded with other matters, till
the speakers rose to rejoin the charming flock upstairs.

* * * * *

In the basement story at this hour Mr. Chickerel the butler, who had
formed the subject of discussion on the floor above, was busily engaged
in looking after his two subordinates as they bustled about in the
operations of clearing away.  He was a man of whom, if the shape of
certain bones and muscles of the face is ever to be taken as a guide to
the character, one might safely have predicated conscientiousness in the
performance of duties, a thorough knowledge of all that appertained to
them, a general desire to live on without troubling his mind about
anything which did not concern him.  Any person interested in the matter
would have assumed without hesitation that the estimate his employer had
given of Chickerel was a true one--more, that not only would the butler
under all ordinary circumstances resolutely prevent his face from showing
curiosity in an unbecoming way, but that, with the soul of a true
gentleman, he would, if necessary, equivocate as readily as the noblest
of his betters to remove any stain upon his honour in such trifles.  Hence
it is apparent that if Chickerel's countenance really appeared, as Neigh
had asserted, full of curiosity with regard to the gossip that was going
on, the feelings which led to the exhibition must have been of a very
unusual and irrepressible kind.

His hair was of that peculiar bluish-white which is to be observed when
the oncoming years, instead of singling out special locks of a man's head
for operating against, advance uniformly over the whole field, and
enfeeble the colour at all points before absolutely extinguishing it
anywhere; his nose was of the knotty shape in the gristle and earthward
tendency in the flesh which is commonly said to carry sound judgment
above it, his eyes were thoughtful, and his face was thin--a contour
which, if it at once abstracted from his features that cheerful assurance
of single-minded honesty which adorns the exteriors of so many of his
brethren, might have raised a presumption in the minds of some beholders
that perhaps in this case the quality might not be altogether wanting
within.

The coffee having been served to the people upstairs, one of the footmen
rushed into his bedroom on the lower floor, and in a few minutes emerged
again in the dress of a respectable clerk who had been born for better
things, with the trifling exceptions that he wore a low-crowned hat, and
instead of knocking his heels on the pavement walked with a gait as
delicate as a lady's.  Going out of the area-door with a cigar in his
mouth, he mounted the steps hastily to keep an appointment round the
corner--the keeping of which as a private gentleman necessitated the
change of the greater part of his clothes twice within a quarter of an
hour--the limit of his time of absence.  The other footman was upstairs,
and the butler, finding that he had a few minutes to himself, sat down at
the table and wrote:--

   'MY DEAR ETHELBERTA,--I did not intend to write to you for some few
   days to come, but the way in which you have been talked about here
   this evening makes me anxious to send a line or two at once, though I
   have very little time to spare, as usual.  We have just had a dinner-
   party--indeed the carriages have not yet been brought round--and the
   talk at dinner was about your verses, of course.  The thing was
   brought up by a young fellow named Ladywell--do you know him?  He is a
   painter by profession, but he has a pretty good private income beyond
   what he gets by practising his line of business among the nobility,
   and that I expect is not little, for he is well known, and encouraged
   because he is young, and good-looking, and so forth.  His family own a
   good bit of land somewhere out Aldbrickham way.  However, I am before
   my story.  From what they all said it is pretty clear that you are
   thought a great deal of in fashionable society as a poetess--but
   perhaps you know this as well as I--moving in it as you do yourself,
   my dear.

   'The ladies afterwards got very curious about your age, so curious, in
   fact, and so full of certainty that you were thirty-five and a
   blighted existence, if an hour, that I felt inclined to rap out there
   and then, and hang what came of it: "My daughter, ladies, was to my
   own and her mother's certain knowledge only twenty-one last birthday,
   and has as bright a heart as anybody in London."  One of them actually
   said that you must be fifty to have got such an experience.  Her guess
   was a very shrewd one in the bottom of it, however, for it was
   grounded upon the way you use those strange experiences of mine in the
   society that I tell you of, and dress them up as if they were yours;
   and, as you see, she hit off my own age to a year.  I thought it was
   very sharp of her to be so right, although so wrong.

   'I do not want to influence your plans in any way about things which
   your school learning fits you to understand much better than I, who
   never had such opportunities, but I think that if I were in your
   place, Berta, I would not let my name be known just yet, for people
   always want what's kept from them, and don't value what's given.  I am
   not sure, but I think that after the women had gone upstairs the
   others turned their thoughts upon you again; what they said about you
   I don't know, for if there's one thing I hate 'tis hanging about the
   doors when the men begin to get moved by their wine, which they did to
   a large extent to-night, and spoke very loud.  They always do here,
   for old Don is a hearty giver in his way.  However, as you see these
   people from their own level now, it is not much that I can tell you in
   seeing them only from the under side, though I see strange things
   sometimes, and of course--

      "What great ones do the less will prattle of,"

   as it says in that book of select pieces that you gave me.

   'Well, my dear girl, I hope you will prosper.  One thing above all
   others you'll have to mind, and it is that folk must continually
   strain to advance in order to remain where they are: and you
   particularly.  But as for trying too hard, I wouldn't do it.  Much
   lies in minding this, that your best plan for lightness of heart is to
   raise yourself a little higher than your old mates, but not so high as
   to be quite out of their reach.  All human beings enjoy themselves
   from the outside, and so getting on a little has this good in it, you
   still keep in your old class where your feelings are, and are
   thoughtfully treated by this class: while by getting on too much you
   are sneered at by your new acquaintance, who don't know the skill of
   your rise, and you are parted from and forgot by the old ones who do.
   Whatever happens, don't be too quick to feel.  You will surely get
   some hard blows when you are found out, for if the great can find no
   excuse for hitting with a mind, they'll do it and say 'twas in fun.
   But you are young and healthy, and youth and health are power.  I wish
   I could have a decent footman here with me, but I suppose it is no use
   trying.  It is such men as these that provoke the contempt we get.
   Well, thank God a few years will see the end of me, for I am growing
   ashamed of my company--so different as they are to the servants of old
   times.--Your affectionate father,             R. CHICKEREL.

   'P.S.--Do not press Lady Petherwin any further to remove the rules on
   which you live with her.  She is quite right: she cannot keep us, and
   to recognize us would do you no good, nor us either.  We are content
   to see you secretly, since it is best for you.'




8. CHRISTOPHER'S LODGINGS--THE GROUNDS ABOUT ROOKINGTON


Meanwhile, in the distant town of Sandbourne, Christopher Julian had
recovered from the weariness produced by his labours at the Wyndway
evening-party where Ethelberta had been a star.  Instead of engaging his
energies to clear encumbrances from the tangled way of his life, he now
set about reading the popular 'Metres by E.' with more interest and
assiduity than ever; for though Julian was a thinker by instinct, he was
a worker by effort only; and the higher of these kinds being dependent
upon the lower for its exhibition, there was often a lamentable lack of
evidence of his power in either.  It is a provoking correlation, and has
conduced to the obscurity of many a genius.

'Kit,' said his sister, on reviving at the end of the bad headache which
had followed the dance, 'those poems seem to have increased in value with
you.  The lady, lofty as she appears to be, would be flattered if she
only could know how much you study them.  Have you decided to thank her
for them?  Now let us talk it over--I like having a chat about such a
pretty new subject.'

'I would thank her in a moment if I were absolutely certain that she had
anything to do with sending them, or even writing them.  I am not quite
sure of that yet.'

'How strange that a woman could bring herself to write those verses!'

'Not at all strange--they are natural outpourings.'

Faith looked critically at the remoter caverns of the fire.

'Why strange?' continued Christopher.  'There is no harm in them.'

'O no--no harm.  But I cannot explain to you--unless you see it partly of
your own accord--that to write them she must be rather a fast lady--not a
bad fast lady; a nice fast lady, I mean, of course.  There, I have said
it now, and I daresay you are vexed with me, for your interest in her has
deepened to what it originally was, I think.  I don't mean any absolute
harm by "fast," Kit.'

'Bold, forward, you mean, I suppose?'

Faith tried to hit upon a better definition which should meet all views;
and, on failing to do so, looked concerned at her brother's somewhat
grieved appearance, and said, helplessly, 'Yes, I suppose I do.'

'My idea of her is quite the reverse.  A poetess must intrinsically be
sensitive, or she could never feel: but then, frankness is a rhetorical
necessity even with the most modest, if their inspirations are to do any
good in the world.  You will, for certain, not be interested in something
I was going to tell you, which I thought would have pleased you
immensely; but it is not worth mentioning now.'

'If you will not tell me, never mind.  But don't be crabbed, Kit!  You
know how interested I am in all your affairs.'

'It is only that I have composed an air to one of the prettiest of her
songs, "When tapers tall"--but I am not sure about the power of it.  This
is how it begins--I threw it off in a few minutes, after you had gone to
bed.'

He went to the piano and lightly touched over an air, the manuscript copy
of which he placed in front of him, and listened to hear her opinion,
having proved its value frequently; for it was not that of a woman
merely, but impersonally human.  Though she was unknown to fame, this was
a great gift in Faith, since to have an unsexed judgment is as precious
as to be an unsexed being is deplorable.

'It is very fair indeed,' said the sister, scarcely moving her lips in
her great attention.  'Now again, and again, and again.  How could you do
it in the time!'

Kit knew that she admired his performance: passive assent was her usual
praise, and she seldom insisted vigorously upon any view of his
compositions unless for purposes of emendation.

'I was thinking that, as I cannot very well write to her, I may as well
send her this,' said Christopher, with lightened spirits, voice to
correspond, and eyes likewise; 'there can be no objection to it, for such
things are done continually.  Consider while I am gone, Faith.  I shall
be out this evening for an hour or two.'

When Christopher left the house shortly after, instead of going into the
town on some errand, as was customary whenever he went from home after
dark, he ascended a back street, passed over the hills behind, and walked
at a brisk pace inland along the road to Rookington Park, where, as he
had learnt, Ethelberta and Lady Petherwin were staying for a time, the
day or two which they spent at Wyndway having formed a short break in the
middle of this visit.  The moon was shining to-night, and Christopher
sped onwards over the pallid high-road as readily as he could have done
at noonday.  In three-quarters of an hour he reached the park gates; and
entering now upon a tract which he had never before explored, he went
along more cautiously and with some uncertainty as to the precise
direction that the road would take.  A frosted expanse of even grass, on
which the shadow of his head appeared with an opal halo round it, soon
allowed the house to be discovered beyond, the other portions of the park
abounding with timber older and finer than that of any other spot in the
neighbourhood.  Christopher withdrew into the shade, and wheeled round to
the front of the building that contained his old love.  Here he gazed and
idled, as many a man has done before him--wondering which room the fair
poetess occupied, waiting till lights began to appear in the upper
windows--which they did as uncertainly as glow-worms blinking up at
eventide--and warming with currents of revived feeling in perhaps the
sweetest of all conditions.  New love is brightest, and long love is
greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth.

Occupied thus, Christopher was greatly surprised to see, on casually
glancing to one side, another man standing close to the shadowy trunk of
another tree, in a similar attitude to his own, gazing, with arms folded,
as blankly at the windows of the house as Christopher himself had been
gazing.  Not willing to be discovered, Christopher stuck closer to his
tree.  While he waited thus, the stranger began murmuring words, in a
slow soft voice.  Christopher listened till he heard the following:--

   'Pale was the day and rayless, love,
      That had an eve so dim.'

Two well-known lines from one of Ethelberta's poems.

Jealousy is a familiar kind of heat which disfigures, licks playfully,
clouds, blackens, and boils a man as a fire does a pot; and on
recognizing these pilferings from what he had grown to regard as his own
treasury, Christopher's fingers began to nestle with great vigour in the
palms of his hands.  Three or four minutes passed, when the unknown rival
gave a last glance at the windows, and walked away.  Christopher did not
like the look of that walk at all--there was grace enough in it to
suggest that his antagonist had no mean chance of finding favour in a
woman's eyes.  A sigh, too, seemed to proceed from the stranger's breast;
but as their distance apart was too great for any such sound to be heard
by any possibility, Christopher set down that to imagination, or to the
brushing of the wind over the trees.

The lighted windows went out one by one, and all the house was in
darkness.  Julian then walked off himself, with a vigour that was
spasmodic only, and with much less brightness of mind than he had
experienced on his journey hither.  The stranger had gone another way,
and Christopher saw no more of him.  When he reached Sandbourne, Faith
was still sitting up.

'But I told you I was going to take a long walk,' he said.

'No, Christopher: really you did not.  How tired and sad you do
look--though I always know beforehand when you are in that state: one of
your feet has a drag about it as you pass along the pavement outside the
window.'

'Yes, I forgot that I did not tell you.'

He could not begin to describe his pilgrimage: it was too silly a thing
even for her to hear of.

'It does not matter at all about my staying up,' said Faith assuringly;
'that is, if exercise benefits you.  Walking up and down the lane, I
suppose?'

'No; not walking up and down the lane.'

'The turnpike-road to Rookington is pleasant.'

'Faith, that is really where I have been.  How came you to know?'

'I only guessed.  Verses and an accidental meeting produce a special
journey.'

'Ethelberta is a fine woman, physically and mentally, both.  I wonder
people do not talk about her twice as much as they do.'

'Then surely you are getting attached to her again.  You think you
discover in her more than anybody else does; and love begins with a sense
of superior discernment.'

'No, no.  That is only nonsense,' he said hurriedly.  'However, love her
or love her not, I can keep a corner of my heart for you, Faith.  There
is another brute after her too, it seems.'

'Of course there is: I expect there are many.  Her position in society is
above ours, so that it is an unwise course to go troubling yourself more
about her.'

'No.  If a needy man must be so foolish as to fall in love, it is best to
do so where he cannot double his foolishness by marrying the woman.'

'I don't like to hear you talk so slightingly of what poor father did.'

Christopher fixed his attention on the supper.  That night, late as it
was, when Faith was in bed and sleeping, he sat before a sheet of music-
paper, neatly copying his composition upon it.  The manuscript was
intended as an offering to Ethelberta at the first convenient
opportunity.

* * * * *

'Well, after all my trouble to find out about Ethelberta, here comes the
clue unasked for,' said the musician to his sister a few days later.

She turned and saw that he was reading the Wessex Reflector.

'What is it?' asked Faith.

'The secret of the true authorship of the book is out at last, and it is
Ethelberta of course.  I am so glad to have it proved hers.'

'But can we believe--?'

'O yes.  Just hear what "Our London Correspondent" says.  It is one of
the nicest bits of gossip that he has furnished us with for a long time.'

'Yes: now read it, do.'

'"The author of 'Metres by E.'"' Christopher began, '"a book of which so
much has been said and conjectured, and one, in fact, that has been the
chief talk for several weeks past of the literary circles to which I
belong, is a young lady who was a widow before she reached the age of
eighteen, and is now not far beyond her fourth lustrum.  I was
additionally informed by a friend whom I met yesterday on his way to the
House of Lords, that her name is Mrs. Petherwin--Christian name
Ethelberta; and that she resides with her mother-in-law at their house in
Exonbury Crescent.  She is, moreover, the daughter of the late Bishop of
Silchester (if report may be believed), whose active benevolence, as your
readers know, left his family in comparatively straitened circumstances
at his death.  The marriage was a secret one, and much against the wish
of her husband's friends, who are wealthy people on all sides.  The death
of the bridegroom two or three weeks after the wedding led to a
reconciliation; and the young poetess was taken to the home which she
still occupies, devoted to the composition of such brilliant effusions as
those the world has lately been favoured with from her pen."'

'If you want to send her your music, you can do so now,' said Faith.

'I might have sent it before, but I wanted to deliver it personally.
However, it is all the same now, I suppose, whether I send it or not.  I
always knew that our destinies would lie apart, though she was once
temporarily under a cloud.  Her momentary inspiration to write that
"Cancelled Words" was the worst possible omen for me.  It showed that,
thinking me no longer useful as a practical chance, she would make me
ornamental as a poetical regret.  But I'll send the manuscript of the
song.'

'In the way of business, as a composer only; and you must say to
yourself, "Ethelberta, as thou art but woman, I dare; but as widow I fear
thee."'

Notwithstanding Christopher's affected carelessness, that evening saw a
great deal of nicety bestowed upon the operation of wrapping up and
sending off the song.  He dropped it into the box and heard it fall, and
with the curious power which he possessed of setting his wisdom to watch
any particular folly in himself that it could not hinder, speculated as
he walked on the result of this first tangible step of return to his old
position as Ethelberta's lover.




9. A LADY'S DRAWING-ROOMS--ETHELBERTA'S DRESSING-ROOM


It was a house on the north side of Hyde Park, between ten and eleven in
the evening, and several intelligent and courteous people had assembled
there to enjoy themselves as far as it was possible to do so in a neutral
way--all carefully keeping every variety of feeling in a state of
solution, in spite of any attempt such feelings made from time to time to
crystallize on interesting subjects in hand.

'Neigh, who is that charming woman with her head built up in a novel way
even for hair architecture--the one with her back towards us?' said a man
whose coat fitted doubtfully to a friend whose coat fitted well.

'Just going to ask for the same information,' said Mr. Neigh, determining
the very longest hair in his beard to an infinitesimal nicety by drawing
its lower portion through his fingers.  'I have quite forgotten--cannot
keep people's names in my head at all; nor could my father either--nor
any of my family--a very odd thing.  But my old friend Mrs. Napper knows
for certain.'  And he turned to one of a small group of middle-aged
persons near, who, instead of skimming the surface of things in general,
like the rest of the company, were going into the very depths of them.

'O--that is the celebrated Mrs. Petherwin, the woman who makes rhymes and
prints 'em,' said Mrs. Napper, in a detached sentence, and then continued
talking again to those on the other side of her.

The two loungers went on with their observations of Ethelberta's
headdress, which, though not extraordinary or eccentric, did certainly
convey an idea of indefinable novelty.  Observers were sometimes half
inclined to think that her cuts and modes were acquired by some secret
communication with the mysterious clique which orders the livery of the
fashionable world, for--and it affords a parallel to cases in which
clever thinkers in other spheres arrive independently at one and the same
conclusion--Ethelberta's fashion often turned out to be the coming one.

'O, is that the woman at last?' said Neigh, diminishing his broad general
gaze at the room to a close criticism of Ethelberta.

'"The rhymes," as Mrs. Napper calls them, are not to be despised,' said
his companion.  'They are not quite virginibus puerisque, and the
writer's opinions of life and society differ very materially from mine,
but I cannot help admiring her in the more reflective pieces; the songs I
don't care for.  The method in which she handles curious subjects, and at
the same time impresses us with a full conviction of her modesty, is very
adroit, and somewhat blinds us to the fact that no such poems were
demanded of her at all.'

'I have not read them,' said Neigh, secretly wrestling with his jaw, to
prevent a yawn; 'but I suppose I must.  The truth is, that I never care
much for reading what one ought to read; I wish I did, but I cannot help
it.  And, no doubt, you admire the lady immensely for writing them: I
don't.  Everybody is so talented now-a-days that the only people I care
to honour as deserving real distinction are those who remain in
obscurity.  I am myself hoping for a corner in some biographical
dictionary when the time comes for those works only to contain lists of
the exceptional individuals of whom nothing is known but that they lived
and died.'

'Ah--listen.  They are going to sing one of her songs,' said his friend,
looking towards a bustling movement in the neighbourhood of the piano.  'I
believe that song, "When tapers tall," has been set to music by three or
four composers already.'

'Men of any note?' said Neigh, at last beaten by his yawn, which courtesy
nevertheless confined within his person to such an extent that only a few
unimportant symptoms, such as reduced eyes and a certain rectangular
manner of mouth in speaking, were visible.

'Scarcely,' replied the other man.  'Established writers of music do not
expend their energies upon new verse until they find that such verse is
likely to endure; for should the poet be soon forgotten, their labour is
in some degree lost.'

'Artful dogs--who would have thought it?' said Neigh, just as an exercise
in words; and they drew nearer to the piano, less to become listeners to
the singing than to be spectators of the scene in that quarter.  But
among some others the interest in the songs seemed to be very great; and
it was unanimously wished that the young lady who had practised the
different pieces of music privately would sing some of them now in the
order of their composers' reputations.  The musical persons in the room
unconsciously resolved themselves into a committee of taste.

One and another had been tried, when, at the end of the third, a lady
spoke to Ethelberta.

'Now, Mrs. Petherwin,' she said, gracefully throwing back her face, 'your
opinion is by far the most valuable.  In which of the cases do you
consider the marriage of verse and tune to have been most successful?'

Ethelberta, finding these and other unexpected calls made upon herself,
came to the front without flinching.

'The sweetest and the best that I like by far,' she said, 'is none of
these.  It is one which reached me by post only this morning from a place
in Wessex, and is written by an unheard-of man who lives somewhere down
there--a man who will be, nevertheless, heard a great deal of some day, I
hope--think.  I have only practised it this afternoon; but, if one's own
judgment is worth anything, it is the best.'

'Let us have your favourite, by all means,' said another friend of
Ethelberta's who was present--Mrs. Doncastle.

'I am so sorry that I cannot oblige you, since you wish to hear it,'
replied the poetess regretfully; 'but the music is at home.  I had not
received it when I lent the others to Miss Belmaine, and it is only in
manuscript like the rest.'

'Could it not be sent for?' suggested an enthusiast who knew that
Ethelberta lived only in the next street, appealing by a look to her, and
then to the mistress of the house.

'Certainly, let us send for it,' said that lady.  A footman was at once
quietly despatched with precise directions as to where Christopher's
sweet production might be found.

'What--is there going to be something interesting?' asked a young married
friend of Mrs. Napper, who had returned to her original spot.

'Yes--the best song she has written is to be sung in the best manner to
the best air that has been composed for it.  I should not wonder if she
were going to sing it herself.'

'Did you know anything of Mrs. Petherwin until her name leaked out in
connection with these ballads?'

'No; but I think I recollect seeing her once before.  She is one of those
people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a
little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows
her entirely.  She was the orphan child of some clergyman, I believe.
Lady Petherwin, her mother-in-law, has been taking her about a great deal
latterly.'

'She has apparently a very good prospect.'

'Yes; and it is through her being of that curious undefined character
which interprets itself to each admirer as whatever he would like to have
it.  Old men like her because she is so girlish; youths because she is
womanly; wicked men because she is good in their eyes; good men because
she is wicked in theirs.'

'She must be a very anomalous sort of woman, at that rate.'

'Yes.  Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to
her inconsistencies in principle.'

'These poems must have set her up.  She appears to be quite the correct
spectacle.  Happy Mrs. Petherwin!'

The subject of their dialogue was engaged in a conversation with Mrs.
Belmaine upon the management of households--a theme provoked by a
discussion that was in progress in the pages of some periodical of the
time.  Mrs. Belmaine was very full of the argument, and went on from
point to point till she came to servants.

The face of Ethelberta showed caution at once.

'I consider that Lady Plamby pets her servants by far too much,' said
Mrs. Belmaine.  'O, you do not know her?  Well, she is a woman with
theories; and she lends her maids and men books of the wrong kind for
their station, and sends them to picture exhibitions which they don't in
the least understand--all for the improvement of their taste, and morals,
and nobody knows what besides.  It only makes them dissatisfied.'

The face of Ethelberta showed venturesomeness.  'Yes, and dreadfully
ambitious!' she said.

'Yes, indeed.  What a turn the times have taken!  People of that sort
push on, and get into business, and get great warehouses, until at last,
without ancestors, or family, or name, or estate--'

'Or the merest scrap of heirloom or family jewel.'

'Or heirlooms, or family jewels, they are thought as much of as if their
forefathers had glided unobtrusively through the peerage--'

'Ever since the first edition.'

'Yes.'  Mrs. Belmaine, who really sprang from a good old family, had been
going to say, 'for the last seven hundred years,' but fancying from
Ethelberta's addendum that she might not date back more than a trifling
century or so, adopted the suggestion with her usual well-known courtesy,
and blushed down to her locket at the thought of the mistake that she
might have made.  This sensitiveness was a trait in her character which
gave great gratification to her husband, and, indeed, to all who knew
her.

'And have you any theory on the vexed question of servant-government?'
continued Mrs. Belmaine, smiling.  'But no--the subject is of far too
practical a nature for one of your bent, of course.'

'O no--it is not at all too practical.  I have thought of the matter
often,' said Ethelberta.  'I think the best plan would be for somebody to
write a pamphlet, "The Shortest Way with the Servants," just as there was
once written a terribly stinging one, "The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters," which had a great effect.'

'I have always understood that that was written by a dissenter as a
satire upon the Church?'

'Ah--so it was: but the example will do to illustrate my meaning.'

'Quite so--I understand--so it will,' said Mrs. Belmaine, with clouded
faculties.

Meanwhile Christopher's music had arrived.  An accomplished gentleman who
had every musical talent except that of creation, scanned the notes
carefully from top to bottom, and sat down to accompany the singer.  There
was no lady present of sufficient confidence or skill to venture into a
song she had never seen before, and the only one who had seen it was
Ethelberta herself; she did not deny having practised it the greater part
of the afternoon, and was very willing to sing it now if anybody would
derive pleasure from the performance.  Then she began, and the sweetness
of her singing was such that even the most unsympathetic honoured her by
looking as if they would be willing to listen to every note the song
contained if it were not quite so much trouble to do so.  Some were so
interested that, instead of continuing their conversation, they remained
in silent consideration of how they would continue it when she had
finished; while the particularly civil people arranged their countenances
into every attentive form that the mind could devise.  One emotional
gentleman looked at the corner of a chair as if, till that moment, such
an object had never crossed his vision before; the movement of his finger
to the imagined tune was, for a deaf old clergyman, a perfect mine of
interest; whilst a young man from the country was powerless to put an end
to an enchanted gaze at nothing at all in the exact middle of the room
before him.  Neigh, and the general phalanx of cool men and celebrated
club yawners, were so much affected that they raised their chronic look
of great objection to things, to an expression of scarcely any objection
at all.

'What makes it so interesting,' said Mrs. Doncastle to Ethelberta, when
the song was over and she had retired from the focus of the company, 'is,
that it is played from the composer's own copy, which has never met the
public eye, or any other than his own before to-day.  And I see that he
has actually sketched in the lines by hand, instead of having ruled
paper--just as the great old composers used to do.  You must have been as
pleased to get it fresh from the stocks like that as he probably was
pleased to get your thanks.'

Ethelberta became reflective.  She had not thanked Christopher; moreover,
she had decided, after some consideration, that she ought not to thank
him.  What new thoughts were suggested by that remark of Mrs.
Doncastle's, and what new inclination resulted from the public
presentation of his tune and her words as parts of one organic whole, are
best explained by describing her doings at a later hour, when, having
left her friends somewhat early, she had reached home and retired from
public view for that evening.

Ethelberta went to her room, sent away the maid who did double duty for
herself and Lady Petherwin, walked in circles about the carpet till the
fire had grown haggard and cavernous, sighed, took a sheet of paper and
wrote:--

   'DEAR MR. JULIAN,--I have said I would not write: I have said it
   twice; but discretion, under some circumstances, is only another name
   for unkindness.  Before thanking you for your sweet gift, let me tell
   you in a few words of something which may materially change an aspect
   of affairs under which I appear to you to deserve it.

   'With regard to my history and origin you are altogether mistaken; and
   how can I tell whether your bitterness at my previous silence on those
   points may not cause you to withdraw your act of courtesy now?  But
   the gratification of having at last been honest with you may
   compensate even for the loss of your respect.

   'The matter is a small one to tell, after all.  What will you say on
   learning that I am not the trodden-down "lady by birth" that you have
   supposed me?  That my father is not dead, as you probably imagine;
   that he is working for his living as one among a peculiarly
   stigmatized and ridiculed multitude?

   'Had he been a brawny cottager, carpenter, mason, blacksmith, well-
   digger, navvy, tree-feller--any effective and manly trade, in short, a
   worker in which can stand up in the face of the noblest and daintiest,
   and bare his gnarled arms and say, with a consciousness of superior
   power, "Look at a real man!" I should have been able to show you
   antecedents which, if not intensely romantic, are not altogether
   antagonistic to romance.  But the present fashion of associating with
   one particular class everything that is ludicrous and bombastic
   overpowers me when I think of it in relation to myself and your known
   sensitiveness.  When the well-born poetess of good report melts into.
   . .'

Having got thus far, a faint-hearted look, which had begun to show itself
several sentences earlier, became pronounced.  She threw the writing into
the dull fire, poked and stirred it till a red inflammation crept over
the sheet, and then started anew:--

   'DEAR MR. JULIAN,--Not knowing your present rank as composer--whether
   on the very brink of fame, or as yet a long way off--I cannot decide
   what form of expression my earnest acknowledgments should take.  Let
   me simply say in one short phrase, I thank you infinitely!

   'I am no musician, and my opinion on music may not be worth much: yet
   I know what I like (as everybody says, but I do not use the words as a
   form to cover a hopeless blank on all connected with the subject), and
   this sweet air I love.  You must have glided like a breeze about
   me--seen into a heart not worthy of scrutiny, jotted down words that
   cannot justify attention--before you could have apotheosized the song
   in so exquisite a manner.  My gratitude took the form of wretchedness
   when, on hearing the effect of the ballad in public this evening, I
   thought that I had not power to withhold a reply which might do us
   both more harm than good.  Then I said, "Away with all emotion--I wish
   the world was drained dry of it--I will take no notice," when a lady
   whispered at my elbow to the effect that of course I had expressed my
   gratification to you.  I ought first to have mentioned that your
   creation has been played to-night to full drawing-rooms, and the
   original tones cooled the artificial air like a fountain almost.

   'I prophesy great things of you.  Perhaps, at the time when we are
   each but a row of bones in our individual graves, your genius will be
   remembered, while my mere cleverness will have been long forgotten.

   'But--you must allow a woman of experience to say this--the undoubted
   power that you possess will do you socially no good unless you mix
   with it the ingredient of ambition--a quality in which I fear you are
   very deficient.  It is in the hope of stimulating you to a better
   opinion of yourself that I write this letter.

   'Probably I shall never meet you again.  Not that I think
   circumstances to be particularly powerful to prevent such a meeting,
   rather it is that I shall energetically avoid it.  There can be no
   such thing as strong friendship between a man and a woman not of one
   family.

   'More than that there must not be, and this is why we will not meet.
   You see that I do not mince matters at all; but it is hypocrisy to
   avoid touching upon a subject which all men and women in our position
   inevitably think of, no matter what they say.  Some women might have
   written distantly, and wept at the repression of their real feeling;
   but it is better to be more frank, and keep a dry eye.--Yours,
   ETHELBERTA.'

Her feet felt cold and her heart weak as she directed the letter, and she
was overpowered with weariness.  But murmuring, 'If I let it stay till
the morning I shall not send it, and a man may be lost to fame because of
a woman's squeamishness--it shall go,' she partially dressed herself,
wrapped a large cloak around her, descended the stairs, and went out to
the pillar-box at the corner, leaving the door not quite close.  No gust
of wind had realized her misgivings that it might be blown shut on her
return, and she re-entered as softly as she had emerged.

It will be seen that Ethelberta had said nothing about her family after
all.




10. LADY PETHERWIN'S HOUSE


The next day old Lady Petherwin, who had not accompanied Ethelberta the
night before, came into the morning-room, with a newspaper in her hand.

'What does this mean, Ethelberta?' she inquired in tones from which every
shade of human expressiveness was extracted by some awful and imminent
mood that lay behind.  She was pointing to a paragraph under the heading
of 'Literary Notes,' which contained in a few words the announcement of
Ethelberta's authorship that had more circumstantially appeared in the
Wessex Reflector.

'It means what it says,' said Ethelberta quietly.

'Then it is true?'

'Yes.  I must apologize for having kept it such a secret from you.  It
was not done in the spirit that you may imagine: it was merely to avoid
disturbing your mind that I did it so privately.'

'But surely you have not written every one of those ribald verses?'

Ethelberta looked inclined to exclaim most vehemently against this; but
what she actually did say was, '"Ribald"--what do you mean by that?  I
don't think that you are aware what "ribald" means.'

'I am not sure that I am.  As regards some words as well as some persons,
the less you are acquainted with them the more it is to your credit.'

'I don't quite deserve this, Lady Petherwin.'

'Really, one would imagine that women wrote their books during those
dreams in which people have no moral sense, to see how improper some,
even virtuous, ladies become when they get into print.'

'I might have done a much more unnatural thing than write those poems.
And perhaps I might have done a much better thing, and got less praise.
But that's the world's fault, not mine.'

'You might have left them unwritten, and shown more fidelity.'

'Fidelity! it is more a matter of humour than principle.  What has
fidelity to do with it?'

'Fidelity to my dear boy's memory.'

'It would be difficult to show that because I have written so-called
tender and gay verse, I feel tender and gay.  It is too often assumed
that a person's fancy is a person's real mind.  I believe that in the
majority of cases one is fond of imagining the direct opposite of one's
principles in sheer effort after something fresh and free; at any rate,
some of the lightest of those rhymes were composed between the deepest
fits of dismals I have ever known.  However, I did expect that you might
judge in the way you have judged, and that was my chief reason for not
telling you what I had done.'

'You don't deny that you tried to escape from recollections you ought to
have cherished?  There is only one thing that women of your sort are as
ready to do as to take a man's name, and that is, drop his memory.'

'Dear Lady Petherwin--don't be so unreasonable as to blame a live person
for living!  No woman's head is so small as to be filled for life by a
memory of a few months.  Four years have passed since I last saw my boy-
husband.  We were mere children; see how I have altered since in mind,
substance, and outline--I have even grown half an inch taller since his
death.  Two years will exhaust the regrets of widows who have long been
faithful wives; and ought I not to show a little new life when my husband
died in the honeymoon?'

'No.  Accepting the protection of your husband's mother was, in effect,
an avowal that you rejected the idea of being a widow to prolong the idea
of being a wife; and the sin against your conventional state thus assumed
is almost as bad as would have been a sin against the married state
itself.  If you had gone off when he died, saying, "Thank heaven, I am
free!" you would, at any rate, have shown some real honesty.'

'I should have been more virtuous by being more unfeeling.  That often
happens.'

'I have taken to you, and made a great deal of you--given you the
inestimable advantages of foreign travel and good society to enlarge your
mind.  In short, I have been like a Naomi to you in everything, and I
maintain that writing these poems saps the foundation of it all.'

'I do own that you have been a very good Naomi to me thus far; but Ruth
was quite a fast widow in comparison with me, and yet Naomi never blamed
her.  You are unfortunate in your illustration.  But it is dreadfully
flippant of me to answer you like this, for you have been kind.  But why
will you provoke me!'

'Yes, you are flippant, Ethelberta.  You are too much given to that sort
of thing.'

'Well, I don't know how the secret of my name has leaked out; and I am
not ribald, or anything you say,' said Ethelberta, with a sigh.

'Then you own you do not feel so ardent as you seem in your book?'

'I do own it.'

'And that you are sorry your name has been published in connection with
it?'

'I am.'

'And you think the verses may tend to misrepresent your character as a
gay and rapturous one, when it is not?'

'I do fear it.'

'Then, of course, you will suppress the poems instantly.  That is the
only way in which you can regain the position you have hitherto held with
me.'

Ethelberta said nothing; and the dull winter atmosphere had far from
light enough in it to show by her face what she might be thinking.

'Well?' said Lady Petherwin.

'I did not expect such a command as that,' said Ethelberta.  'I have been
obedient for four years, and would continue so--but I cannot suppress the
poems.  They are not mine now to suppress.'

'You must get them into your hands.  Money will do it, I suppose?'

'Yes, I suppose it would--a thousand pounds.'

'Very well; the money shall be forthcoming,' said Lady Petherwin, after a
pause.  'You had better sit down and write about it at once.'

'I cannot do it,' said Ethelberta; 'and I will not.  I don't wish them to
be suppressed.  I am not ashamed of them; there is nothing to be ashamed
of in them; and I shall not take any steps in the matter.'

'Then you are an ungrateful woman, and wanting in natural affection for
the dead!  Considering your birth--'

'That's an intolerable--'

Lady Petherwin crashed out of the room in a wind of indignation, and went
upstairs and heard no more.  Adjoining her chamber was a smaller one
called her study, and, on reaching this, she unlocked a cabinet, took out
a small deed-box, removed from it a folded packet, unfolded it, crumpled
it up, and turning round suddenly flung it into the fire.  Then she stood
and beheld it eaten away word after word by the flames, 'Testament'--'all
that freehold'--'heirs and assigns' appearing occasionally for a moment
only to disappear for ever.  Nearly half the document had turned into a
glossy black when the lady clasped her hands.

'What have I done!' she exclaimed.  Springing to the tongs she seized
with them the portion of the writing yet unconsumed, and dragged it out
of the fire.  Ethelberta appeared at the door.

'Quick, Ethelberta!' said Lady Petherwin.  'Help me to put this out!'  And
the two women went trampling wildly upon the document and smothering it
with a corner of the hearth-rug.

'What is it?' said Ethelberta.

'My will!' said Lady Petherwin.  'I have kept it by me lately, for I have
wished to look over it at leisure--'

'Good heavens!' said Ethelberta.  'And I was just coming in to tell you
that I would always cling to you, and never desert you, ill-use me how
you might!'

'Such an affectionate remark sounds curious at such a time,' said Lady
Petherwin, sinking down in a chair at the end of the struggle.

'But,' cried Ethelberta, 'you don't suppose--'

'Selfishness, my dear, has given me such crooked looks that I can see it
round a corner.'

'If you mean that what is yours to give may not be mine to take, it would
be as well to name it in an impersonal way, if you must name it at all,'
said the daughter-in-law, with wet eyelids.  'God knows I had no selfish
thought in saying that.  I came upstairs to ask you to forgive me, and
knew nothing about the will.  But every explanation distorts it all the
more!'

'We two have got all awry, dear--it cannot be concealed--awry--awry.  Ah,
who shall set us right again?  However, now I must send for Mr.
Chancerly--no, I am going out on other business, and I will call upon
him.  There, don't spoil your eyes: you may have to sell them.'

She rang the bell and ordered the carriage; and half-an-hour later Lady
Petherwin's coachman drove his mistress up to the door of her lawyer's
office in Lincoln's Inn Fields.




11. SANDBOURNE AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD--SOME LONDON STREETS


While this was going on in town, Christopher, at his lodgings in
Sandbourne, had been thrown into rare old visions and dreams by the
appearance of Ethelberta's letter.  Flattered and encouraged to ambition
as well as to love by her inspiriting sermon, he put off now the last
remnant of cynical doubt upon the genuineness of his old mistress, and
once and for all set down as disloyal a belief he had latterly acquired
that 'Come, woo me, woo me; for I am like enough to consent,' was all a
young woman had to tell.

All the reasoning of political and social economists would not have
convinced Christopher that he had a better chance in London than in
Sandbourne of making a decent income by reasonable and likely labour; but
a belief in a far more improbable proposition, impetuously expressed,
warmed him with the idea that he might become famous there.  The greater
is frequently more readily credited than the less, and an argument which
will not convince on a matter of halfpence appears unanswerable when
applied to questions of glory and honour.

The regulation wet towel and strong coffee of the ambitious and
intellectual student floated before him in visions; but it was with a
sense of relief that he remembered that music, in spite of its drawbacks
as a means of sustenance, was a profession happily unencumbered with
those excruciating preliminaries to greatness.

Christopher talked about the new move to his sister, and he was vexed
that her hopefulness was not roused to quite the pitch of his own.  As
with others of his sort, his too general habit of accepting the most
clouded possibility that chances offered was only transcended by his
readiness to kindle with a fitful excitement now and then.  Faith was
much more equable.  'If you were not the most melancholy man God ever
created,' she said, kindly looking at his vague deep eyes and thin face,
which was but a few degrees too refined and poetical to escape the
epithet of lantern-jawed from any one who had quarrelled with him, 'you
would not mind my coolness about this.  It is a good thing of course to
go; I have always fancied that we were mistaken in coming here.
Mediocrity stamped "London" fetches more than talent marked "provincial."
But I cannot feel so enthusiastic.'

'Still, if we are to go, we may as well go by enthusiasm as by
calculation; it is a sensation pleasanter to the nerves, and leads to
just as good a result when there is only one result possible.'

'Very well,' said Faith.  'I will not depress you.  If I had to describe
you I should say you were a child in your impulses, and an old man in
your reflections.  Have you considered when we shall start?'

'Yes.'

'What have you thought?'

'That we may very well leave the place in six weeks if we wish.'

'We really may?'

'Yes.  And what is more, we will.'

* * * * *

Christopher and Faith arrived in London on an afternoon at the end of
winter, and beheld from one of the river bridges snow-white scrolls of
steam from the tall chimneys of Lambeth, rising against the livid sky
behind, as if drawn in chalk on toned cardboard.

The first thing he did that evening, when settled in their apartments
near the British Museum, before applying himself to the beginning of the
means by which success in life might be attained, was to go out in the
direction of Ethelberta's door, leaving Faith unpacking the things, and
sniffing extraordinary smoke-smells which she discovered in all nooks and
crannies of the rooms.  It was some satisfaction to see Ethelberta's
house, although the single feature in which it differed from the other
houses in the Crescent was that no lamp shone from the fanlight over the
entrance--a speciality which, if he cared for omens, was hardly
encouraging.  Fearing to linger near lest he might be detected,
Christopher stole a glimpse at the door and at the steps, imagined what a
trifle of the depression worn in each step her feet had tended to
produce, and strolled home again.

Feeling that his reasons for calling just now were scarcely sufficient,
he went next day about the business that had brought him to town, which
referred to a situation as organist in a large church in the north-west
district.  The post was half ensured already, and he intended to make of
it the nucleus of a professional occupation and income.  Then he sat down
to think of the preliminary steps towards publishing the song that had so
pleased her, and had also, as far as he could understand from her letter,
hit the popular taste very successfully; a fact which, however little it
may say for the virtues of the song as a composition, was a great
recommendation to it as a property.  Christopher was delighted to
perceive that out of this position he could frame an admissible, if not
an unimpeachable, reason for calling upon Ethelberta.  He determined to
do so at once, and obtain the required permission by word of mouth.

He was greatly surprised, when the front of the house appeared in view on
this spring afternoon, to see what a white and sightless aspect pervaded
all the windows.  He came close: the eyeball blankness was caused by all
the shutters and blinds being shut tight from top to bottom.  Possibly
this had been the case for some time--he could not tell.  In one of the
windows was a card bearing the announcement, 'This House to be let
Furnished.'  Here was a merciless clash between fancy and fact.
Regretting now his faint-heartedness in not letting her know beforehand
by some means that he was about to make a new start in the world, and
coming to dwell near her, Christopher rang the bell to make inquiries.  A
gloomy caretaker appeared after a while, and the young man asked whither
the ladies had gone to live.  He was beyond measure depressed to learn
that they were in the South of France--Arles, the man thought the place
was called--the time of their return to town being very uncertain; though
one thing was clear, they meant to miss the forthcoming London season
altogether.

As Christopher's hope to see her again had brought a resolve to do so, so
now resolve led to dogged patience.  Instead of attempting anything by
letter, he decided to wait; and he waited well, occupying himself in
publishing a 'March' and a 'Morning and Evening Service in E flat.'  Some
four-part songs, too, engaged his attention when the heavier duties of
the day were over--these duties being the giving of lessons in harmony
and counterpoint, in which he was aided by the introductions of a man
well known in the musical world, who had been acquainted with young
Julian as a promising amateur long before he adopted music as the staff
of his pilgrimage.

It was the end of summer when he again tried his fortune at the house in
Exonbury Crescent.  Scarcely calculating upon finding her at this
stagnant time of the town year, and only hoping for information, Julian
was surprised and excited to see the shutters open, and the house wearing
altogether a living look, its neighbours having decidedly died off
meanwhile.

'The family here,' said a footman in answer to his inquiry, 'are only
temporary tenants of the house.  It is not Lady Petherwin's people.'

'Do you know the Petherwins' present address?'

'Underground, sir, for the old lady.  She died some time ago in
Switzerland, and was buried there, I believe.'

'And Mrs. Petherwin--the young lady,' said Christopher, starting.

'We are not acquainted personally with the family,' the man replied.  'My
master has only taken the house for a few months, whilst extensive
alterations are being made in his own on the other side of the park,
which he goes to look after every day.  If you want any further
information about Lady Petherwin, Mrs. Petherwin will probably give it.  I
can let you have her address.'

'Ah, yes; thank you,' said Christopher.

The footman handed him one of some cards which appeared to have been left
for the purpose.  Julian, though tremblingly anxious to know where
Ethelberta was, did not look at it till he could take a cool survey in
private.  The address was 'Arrowthorne Lodge, Upper Wessex.'

'Dear me!' said Christopher to himself, 'not far from Melchester; and not
dreadfully far from Sandbourne.'




12. ARROWTHORNE PARK AND LODGE


Summer was just over when Christopher Julian found himself rattling along
in the train to Sandbourne on some trifling business appertaining to his
late father's affairs, which would afford him an excuse for calling at
Arrowthorne about the song of hers that he wished to produce.  He
alighted in the afternoon at a little station some twenty miles short of
Sandbourne, and leaving his portmanteau behind him there, decided to walk
across the fields, obtain if possible the interview with the lady, and
return then to the station to finish the journey to Sandbourne, which he
could thus reach at a convenient hour in the evening, and, if he chose,
take leave of again the next day.

It was an afternoon which had a fungous smell out of doors, all being
sunless and stagnant overhead and around.  The various species of trees
had begun to assume the more distinctive colours of their decline, and
where there had been one pervasive green were now twenty greenish
yellows, the air in the vistas between them being half opaque with blue
exhalation.  Christopher in his walk overtook a countryman, and inquired
if the path they were following would lead him to Arrowthorne Lodge.

''Twill take 'ee into Arr'thorne Park,' the man replied.  'But you won't
come anigh the Lodge, unless you bear round to the left as might be.'

'Mrs. Petherwin lives there, I believe?'

'No, sir.  Leastwise unless she's but lately come.  I have never heard of
such a woman.'

'She may possibly be only visiting there.'

'Ah, perhaps that's the shape o't.  Well, now you tell o't, I have seen a
strange face thereabouts once or twice lately.  A young good-looking maid
enough, seemingly.'

'Yes, she's considered a very handsome lady.'

'I've heard the woodmen say, now that you tell o't, that they meet her
every now and then, just at the closing in of the day, as they come home
along with their nitches of sticks; ay, stalking about under the trees by
herself--a tall black martel, so long-legged and awful-like that you'd
think 'twas the old feller himself a-coming, they say.  Now a woman must
be a queer body to my thinking, to roam about by night so lonesome and
that?  Ay, now that you tell o't, there is such a woman, but 'a never
have showed in the parish; sure I never thought who the body was--no, not
once about her, nor where 'a was living and that--not I, till you spoke.
Well, there, sir, that's Arr'thorne Lodge; do you see they three elms?'
He pointed across the glade towards some confused foliage a long way off.

'I am not sure about the sort of tree you mean,' said Christopher, 'I see
a number of trees with edges shaped like edges of clouds.'

'Ay, ay, they be oaks; I mean the elms to the left hand.'

'But a man can hardly tell oaks from elms at that distance, my good
fellow!'

'That 'a can very well--leastwise, if he's got the sense.'

'Well, I think I see what you mean,' said Christopher.  'What next?'

'When you get there, you bear away smart to nor'-west, and you'll come
straight as a line to the Lodge.'

'How the deuce am I to know which is north-west in a strange place, with
no sun to tell me?'

'What, not know nor-west?  Well, I should think a boy could never live
and grow up to be a man without knowing the four quarters.  I knowed 'em
when I was a mossel of a chiel.  We be no great scholars here, that's
true, but there isn't a Tom-rig or Jack-straw in these parts that don't
know where they lie as well as I.  Now I've lived, man and boy, these
eight-and-sixty years, and never met a man in my life afore who hadn't
learnt such a common thing as the four quarters.'

Christopher parted from his companion and soon reached a stile,
clambering over which he entered a park.  Here he threaded his way, and
rounding a clump of aged trees the young man came in view of a light and
elegant country-house in the half-timbered Gothic style of the late
revival, apparently only a few years old.  Surprised at finding himself
so near, Christopher's heart fluttered unmanageably till he had taken an
abstract view of his position, and, in impatience at his want of nerve,
adopted a sombre train of reasoning to convince himself that, far from
indulgence in the passion of love bringing bliss, it was a folly, leading
to grief and disquiet--certainly one which would do him no good.  Cooled
down by this, he stepped into the drive and went up to the house.

'Is Mrs. Petherwin at home?' he said modestly.

'Who did you say, sir?'

He repeated the name.

'Don't know the person.'

'The lady may be a visitor--I call on business.'

'She is not visiting in this house, sir.'

'Is not this Arrowthorne Lodge?'

'Certainly not.'

'Then where is Arrowthorne Lodge, please?'

'Well, it is nearly a mile from here.  Under the trees by the high-road.
If you go across by that footpath it will bring you out quicker than by
following the bend of the drive.'

Christopher wondered how he could have managed to get into the wrong
park; but, setting it down to his ignorance of the difference between oak
and elm, he immediately retraced his steps, passing across the park
again, through the gate at the end of the drive, and into the turnpike
road.  No other gate, park, or country seat of any description was within
view.

'Can you tell me the way to Arrowthorne Lodge?' he inquired of the first
person he met, who was a little girl.

'You are just coming away from it, sir,' said she.  'I'll show you; I am
going that way.'

They walked along together.  Getting abreast the entrance of the park he
had just emerged from, the child said, 'There it is, sir; I live there
too.'

Christopher, with a dazed countenance, looked towards a cottage which
stood nestling in the shrubbery and ivy like a mushroom among grass.  'Is
that Arrowthorne Lodge?' he repeated.

'Yes, and if you go up the drive, you come to Arrowthorne House.'

'Arrowthorne Lodge--where Mrs. Petherwin lives, I mean.'

'Yes.  She lives there along wi' mother and we.  But she don't want
anybody to know it, sir, cause she's celebrate, and 'twouldn't do at
all.'

Christopher said no more, and the little girl became interested in the
products of the bank and ditch by the wayside.  He left her, pushed open
the heavy gate, and tapped at the Lodge door.

The latch was lifted.  'Does Mrs. Petherwin,' he began, and, determined
that there should be no mistake, repeated, 'Does Mrs. Ethelberta
Petherwin, the poetess, live here?' turning full upon the person who
opened the door.

'She does, sir,' said a faltering voice; and he found himself face to
face with the pupil-teacher of Sandbourne.




13. THE LODGE (continued)--THE COPSE BEHIND


'This is indeed a surprise; I--am glad to see you!' Christopher
stammered, with a wire-drawn, radically different smile from the one he
had intended--a smile not without a tinge of ghastliness.

'Yes--I am home for the holidays,' said the blushing maiden; and, after a
critical pause, she added, 'If you wish to speak to my sister, she is in
the plantation with the children.'

'O no--no, thank you--not necessary at all,' said Christopher, in haste.
'I only wish for an interview with a lady called Mrs. Petherwin.'

'Yes; Mrs Petherwin--my sister,' said Picotee.  'She is in the
plantation.  That little path will take you to her in five minutes.'

The amazed Christopher persuaded himself that this discovery was very
delightful, and went on persuading so long that at last he felt it to be
so.  Unable, like many other people, to enjoy being satirized in words
because of the irritation it caused him as aimed-at victim, he sometimes
had philosophy enough to appreciate a satire of circumstance, because
nobody intended it.  Pursuing the path indicated, he found himself in a
thicket of scrubby undergrowth, which covered an area enclosed from the
park proper by a decaying fence.  The boughs were so tangled that he was
obliged to screen his face with his hands, to escape the risk of having
his eyes filliped out by the twigs that impeded his progress.  Thus
slowly advancing, his ear caught, between the rustles, the tones of a
voice in earnest declamation; and, pushing round in that direction, he
beheld through some beech boughs an open space about ten yards in
diameter, floored at the bottom with deep beds of curled old leaves, and
cushions of furry moss.  In the middle of this natural theatre was the
stump of a tree that had been felled by a saw, and upon the flat stool
thus formed stood Ethelberta, whom Christopher had not beheld since the
ball at Wyndway House.

Round her, leaning against branches or prostrate on the ground, were five
or six individuals.  Two were young mechanics--one of them evidently a
carpenter.  Then there was a boy about thirteen, and two or three younger
children.  Ethelberta's appearance answered as fully as ever to that of
an English lady skilfully perfected in manner, carriage, look, and
accent; and the incongruity of her present position among lives which had
had many of Nature's beauties stamped out of them, and few of the
beauties of Art stamped in, brought him, as a second feeling, a pride in
her that almost equalled his first sentiment of surprise.  Christopher's
attention was meanwhile attracted from the constitution of the group to
the words of the speaker in the centre of it--words to which her auditors
were listening with still attention.

It appeared to Christopher that Ethelberta had lately been undergoing
some very extraordinary experiences.  What the beginning of them had been
he could not in the least understand, but the portion she was describing
came distinctly to his ears, and he wondered more and more.

'He came forward till he, like myself, was about twenty yards from the
edge.  I instinctively grasped my useless stiletto.  How I longed for the
assistance which a little earlier I had so much despised!  Reaching the
block or boulder upon which I had been sitting, he clasped his arms
around from behind; his hands closed upon the empty seat, and he jumped
up with an oath.  This method of attack told me a new thing with wretched
distinctness; he had, as I suppose, discovered my sex, male attire was to
serve my turn no longer.  The next instant, indeed, made it clear, for he
exclaimed, "You don't escape me, masquerading madam," or some such words,
and came on.  My only hope was that in his excitement he might forget to
notice where the grass terminated near the edge of the cliff, though this
could be easily felt by a careful walker: to make my own feeling more
distinct on this point I hastily bared my feet.'

The listeners moistened their lips, Ethelberta took breath, and then went
on to describe the scene that ensued, 'A dreadful variation on the game
of Blindman's buff,' being the words by which she characterized it.

Ethelberta's manner had become so impassioned at this point that the lips
of her audience parted, the children clung to their elders, and
Christopher could control himself no longer.  He thrust aside the boughs,
and broke in upon the group.

'For Heaven's sake, Ethelberta,' he exclaimed with great excitement,
'where did you meet with such a terrible experience as that?'

The children shrieked, as if they thought that the interruption was in
some way the catastrophe of the events in course of narration.  Every one
started up; the two young mechanics stared, and one of them inquired, in
return, 'What's the matter, friend?'

Christopher had not yet made reply when Ethelberta stepped from her
pedestal down upon the crackling carpet of deep leaves.

'Mr. Julian!' said she, in a serene voice, turning upon him eyes of such
a disputable stage of colour, between brown and grey, as would have
commended itself to a gallant duellist of the last century as a point on
which it was absolutely necessary to take some friend's life or other.
But the calmness was artificially done, and the astonishment that did not
appear in Ethelberta's tones was expressed by her gaze.  Christopher was
not in a mood to draw fine distinctions between recognized and
unrecognized organs of speech.  He replied to the eyes.

'I own that your surprise is natural,' he said, with an anxious look into
her face, as if he wished to get beyond this interpolated scene to
something more congenial and understood.  'But my concern at such a
history of yourself since I last saw you is even more natural than your
surprise at my manner of breaking in.'

'That history would justify any conduct in one who hears it--'

'Yes, indeed.'

'If it were true,' added Ethelberta, smiling.  'But it is as false as--'
She could name nothing notoriously false without raising an image of what
was disagreeable, and she continued in a better manner: 'The story I was
telling is entirely a fiction, which I am getting up for a particular
purpose--very different from what appears at present.'

'I am sorry there was such a misunderstanding,' Christopher stammered,
looking upon the ground uncertain and ashamed.  'Yet I am not, either,
for I am very glad you have not undergone such trials, of course.  But
the fact is, I--being in the neighbourhood--I ventured to call on a
matter of business, relating to a poem which I had the pleasure of
setting to music at the beginning of the year.'

Ethelberta was only a little less ill at ease than Christopher showed
himself to be by this way of talking.

'Will you walk slowly on?' she said gently to the two young men, 'and
take the children with you; this gentleman wishes to speak to me on
business.'

The biggest young man caught up a little one under his arm, and plunged
amid the boughs; another little one lingered behind for a few moments to
look shyly at Christopher, with an oblique manner of hiding her mouth
against her shoulder and her eyes behind her pinafore.  Then she
vanished, the boy and the second young man followed, and Ethelberta and
Christopher stood within the wood-bound circle alone.

'I hope I have caused no inconvenience by interrupting the proceedings,'
said Christopher softly; 'but I so very much wished to see you!'

'Did you, indeed--really wish to see me?' she said gladly.  'Never mind
inconvenience then; it is a word which seems shallow in meaning under the
circumstances.  I surely must say that a visit is to my advantage, must I
not?  I am not as I was, you see, and may receive as advantages what I
used to consider as troubles.'

'Has your life really changed so much?'

'It has changed.  But what I first meant was that an interesting visitor
at a wrong time is better than a stupid one at a right time.'

'I had been behind the trees for some minutes, looking at you, and
thinking of you; but what you were doing rather interrupted my first
meditation.  I had thought of a meeting in which we should continue our
intercourse at the point at which it was broken off years ago, as if the
omitted part had not existed at all; but something, I cannot tell what,
has upset all that feeling, and--'

'I can soon tell you the meaning of my extraordinary performance,'
Ethelberta broke in quickly, and with a little trepidation.  'My mother-
in-law, Lady Petherwin, is dead; and she has left me nothing but her
house and furniture in London--more than I deserve, but less than she had
distinctly led me to expect; and so I am somewhat in a corner.'

'It is always so.'

'Not always, I think.  But this is how it happened.  Lady Petherwin was
very capricious; when she was not foolishly kind she was unjustly harsh.
A great many are like it, never thinking what a good thing it would be,
instead of going on tacking from side to side between favour and cruelty,
to keep to a mean line of common justice.  And so we quarrelled, and she,
being absolute mistress of all her wealth, destroyed her will that was in
my favour, and made another, leaving me nothing but the fag-end of the
lease of the town-house and the furniture in it.  Then, when we were
abroad, she turned to me again, forgave everything, and, becoming ill
afterwards, wrote a letter to the brother, to whom she had left the bulk
of her property, stating that I was to have twenty-thousand of the one-
hundred-thousand pounds she had bequeathed to him--as in the original
will--doing this by letter in case anything should happen to her before a
new will could be considered, drawn, and signed, and trusting to his
honour quite that he would obey her expressed wish should she die abroad.
Well, she did die, in the full persuasion that I was provided for; but
her brother (as I secretly expected all the time) refused to be morally
bound by a document which had no legal value, and the result is that he
has everything, except, of course, the furniture and the lease.  It would
have been enough to break the heart of a person who had calculated upon
getting a fortune, which I never did; for I felt always like an intruder
and a bondswoman, and had wished myself out of the Petherwin family a
hundred times, with my crust of bread and liberty.  For one thing, I was
always forbidden to see my relatives, and it pained me much.  Now I am
going to move for myself, and consider that I have a good chance of
success in what I may undertake, because of an indifference I feel about
succeeding which gives the necessary coolness that any great task
requires.'

'I presume you mean to write more poems?'

'I cannot--that is, I can write no more that satisfy me.  To blossom into
rhyme on the sparkling pleasures of life, you must be under the influence
of those pleasures, and I am at present quite removed from
them--surrounded by gaunt realities of a very different description.'

'Then try the mournful.  Trade upon your sufferings: many do, and
thrive.'

'It is no use to say that--no use at all.  I cannot write a line of
verse.  And yet the others flowed from my heart like a stream.  But
nothing is so easy as to seem clever when you have money.'

'Except to seem stupid when you have none,' said Christopher, looking at
the dead leaves.

Ethelberta allowed herself to linger on that thought for a few seconds;
and continued, 'Then the question arose, what was I to do?  I felt that
to write prose would be an uncongenial occupation, and altogether a poor
prospect for a woman like me.  Finally I have decided to appear in
public.'

'Not on the stage?'

'Certainly not on the stage.  There is no novelty in a poor lady turning
actress, and novelty is what I want.  Ordinary powers exhibited in a new
way effect as much as extraordinary powers exhibited in an old way.'

'Yes--so they do.  And extraordinary powers, and a new way too, would be
irresistible.'

'I don't calculate upon both.  I had written a prose story by request,
when it was found that I had grown utterly inane over verse.  It was
written in the first person, and the style was modelled after De Foe's.
The night before sending it off, when I had already packed it up, I was
reading about the professional story-tellers of Eastern countries, who
devoted their lives to the telling of tales.  I unfastened the manuscript
and retained it, convinced that I should do better by telling the story.'

'Well thought of!' exclaimed Christopher, looking into her face.  'There
is a way for everybody to live, if they can only find it out.'

'It occurred to me,' she continued, blushing slightly, 'that tales of the
weird kind were made to be told, not written.  The action of a teller is
wanted to give due effect to all stories of incident; and I hope that a
time will come when, as of old, instead of an unsocial reading of fiction
at home alone, people will meet together cordially, and sit at the feet
of a professed romancer.  I am going to tell my tales before a London
public.  As a child, I had a considerable power in arresting the
attention of other children by recounting adventures which had never
happened; and men and women are but children enlarged a little.  Look at
this.'

She drew from her pocket a folded paper, shook it abroad, and disclosed a
rough draft of an announcement to the effect that Mrs. Petherwin,
Professed Story-teller, would devote an evening to that ancient form of
the romancer's art, at a well-known fashionable hall in London.  'Now you
see,' she continued, 'the meaning of what you observed going on here.
That you heard was one of three tales I am preparing, with a view of
selecting the best.  As a reserved one, I have the tale of my own life--to
be played as a last card.  It was a private rehearsal before my brothers
and sisters--not with any view of obtaining their criticism, but that I
might become accustomed to my own voice in the presence of listeners.'

'If I only had had half your enterprise, what I might have done in the
world!'

'Now did you ever consider what a power De Foe's manner would have if
practised by word of mouth?  Indeed, it is a style which suits itself
infinitely better to telling than to writing, abounding as it does in
colloquialisms that are somewhat out of place on paper in these days, but
have a wonderful power in making a narrative seem real.  And so, in
short, I am going to talk De Foe on a subject of my own.  Well?'

The last word had been given tenderly, with a long-drawn sweetness, and
was caused by a look that Christopher was bending upon her at the moment,
in which he revealed that he was thinking less of the subject she was so
eagerly and hopefully descanting upon than upon her aspect in explaining
it.  It is a fault of manner particularly common among men newly imported
into the society of bright and beautiful women; and we will hope that,
springing as it does from no unworthy source, it is as soon forgiven in
the general world as it was here.

'I was only following a thought,' said Christopher:--'a thought of how I
used to know you, and then lost sight of you, and then discovered you
famous, and how we are here under these sad autumn trees, and nobody in
sight.'

'I think it must be tea-time,' she said suddenly.  'Tea is a great meal
with us here--you will join us, will you not?'  And Ethelberta began to
make for herself a passage through the boughs.  Another rustle was heard
a little way off, and one of the children appeared.

'Emmeline wants to know, please, if the gentleman that come to see 'ee
will stay to tea; because, if so, she's agoing to put in another spoonful
for him and a bit of best green.'

'O Georgina--how candid!  Yes, put in some best green.'

Before Christopher could say any more to her, they were emerging by the
corner of the cottage, and one of the brothers drew near them.  'Mr.
Julian, you'll bide and have a cup of tea wi' us?' he inquired of
Christopher.  'An old friend of yours, is he not, Mrs. Petherwin?  Dan
and I be going back to Sandbourne to-night, and we can walk with 'ee as
far as the station.'

'I shall be delighted,' said Christopher; and they all entered the
cottage.  The evening had grown clearer by this time; the sun was peeping
out just previous to departure, and sent gold wires of light across the
glades and into the windows, throwing a pattern of the diamond quarries,
and outlines of the geraniums in pots, against the opposite wall.  One
end of the room was polygonal, such a shape being dictated by the
exterior design; in this part the windows were placed, as at the east end
of continental churches.  Thus, from the combined effects of the
ecclesiastical lancet lights and the apsidal shape of the room, it
occurred to Christopher that the sisters were all a delightful set of
pretty saints, exhibiting themselves in a lady chapel, and backed up by
unkempt major prophets, as represented by the forms of their big
brothers.

Christopher sat down to tea as invited, squeezing himself in between two
children whose names were almost as long as their persons, and whose tin
cups discoursed primitive music by means of spoons rattled inside them
until they were filled.  The tea proceeded pleasantly, notwithstanding
that the cake, being a little burnt, tasted on the outside like the
latter plums in snapdragon.  Christopher never could meet the eye of
Picotee, who continued in a wild state of flushing all the time, fixing
her looks upon the sugar-basin, except when she glanced out of the window
to see how the evening was going on, and speaking no word at all unless
it was to correct a small sister of somewhat crude manners as regards
filling the mouth, which Picotee did in a whisper, and a gentle
inclination of her mouth to the little one's ear, and a still deeper
blush than before.

Their visitor next noticed that an additional cup-and-saucer and plate
made their appearance occasionally at the table, were silently
replenished, and then carried off by one of the children to an inner
apartment.

'Our mother is bedridden,' said Ethelberta, noticing Christopher's look
at the proceeding.  'Emmeline attends to the household, except when
Picotee is at home, and Joey attends to the gate; but our mother's
affliction is a very unfortunate thing for the poor children.  We are
thinking of a plan of living which will, I hope, be more convenient than
this is; but we have not yet decided what to do.'  At this minute a
carriage and pair of horses became visible through one of the angular
windows of the apse, in the act of turning in from the highway towards
the park gate.  The boy who answered to the name of Joey sprang up from
the table with the promptness of a Jack-in-the-box, and ran out at the
door.  Everybody turned as the carriage passed through the gate, which
Joey held open, putting his other hand where the brim of his hat would
have been if he had worn one, and lapsing into a careless boy again the
instant that the vehicle had gone by.

'There's a tremendous large dinner-party at the House to-night,' said
Emmeline methodically, looking at the equipage over the edge of her
teacup, without leaving off sipping.  'That was Lord Mountclere.  He's a
wicked old man, they say.'

'Lord Mountclere?' said Ethelberta musingly.  'I used to know some
friends of his.  In what way is he wicked?'

'I don't know,' said Emmeline, with simplicity.  'I suppose it is because
he breaks the commandments.  But I wonder how a big rich lord can want to
steal anything.'  Emmeline's thoughts of breaking commandments
instinctively fell upon the eighth, as being in her ideas the only case
wherein the gain could be considered as at all worth the hazard.

Ethelberta said nothing; but Christopher thought that a shade of
depression passed over her.

'Hook back the gate, Joey,' shouted Emmeline, when the carriage had
proceeded up the drive.  'There's more to come.'

Joey did as ordered, and by the time he got indoors another carriage
turned in from the public road--a one-horse brougham this time.

'I know who that is: that's Mr. Ladywell,' said Emmeline, in the same
matter-of-fact tone.  'He's been here afore: he's a distant relation of
the squire's, and he once gave me sixpence for picking up his gloves.'

'What shall I live to see?' murmured the poetess, under her breath,
nearly dropping her teacup in an involuntary trepidation, from which she
made it a point of dignity to recover in a moment.  Christopher's eyes,
at that exhibition from Ethelberta, entered her own like a pair of
lances.  Picotee, seeing Christopher's quick look of jealousy, became
involved in her turn, and grew pale as a lily in her endeavours to
conceal the complications to which it gave birth in her poor little
breast likewise.

'You judge me very wrongly,' said Ethelberta, in answer to Christopher's
hasty look of resentment.

'In supposing Mr. Ladywell to be a great friend of yours?' said
Christopher, who had in some indescribable way suddenly assumed a right
to Ethelberta as his old property.

'Yes: for I hardly know him, and certainly do not value him.'

After this there was something in the mutual look of the two, though
their words had been private, which did not tend to remove the anguish of
fragile Picotee.  Christopher, assured that Ethelberta's embarrassment
had been caused by nothing more than the sense of her odd social
subsidence, recovered more bliss than he had lost, and regarded calmly
the profile of young Ladywell between the two windows of his brougham as
it passed the open cottage door, bearing him along unconscious as the
dead of the nearness of his beloved one, and of the sad buffoonery that
fate, fortune, and the guardian angels had been playing with Ethelberta
of late.  He recognized the face as that of the young man whom he had
encountered when watching Ethelberta's window from Rookington Park.

'Perhaps you remember seeing him at the Christmas dance at Wyndway?' she
inquired.  'He is a good-natured fellow.  Afterwards he sent me that
portfolio of sketches you see in the corner.  He might possibly do
something in the world as a painter if he were obliged to work at the art
for his bread, which he is not.'  She added with bitter pleasantry: 'In
bare mercy to his self-respect I must remain unseen here.'

It impressed Christopher to perceive how, under the estrangement which
arose from differences of education, surroundings, experience, and
talent, the sympathies of close relationship were perceptible in
Ethelberta's bearing towards her brothers and sisters.  At a remark upon
some simple pleasure wherein she had not participated because absent and
occupied by far more comprehensive interests, a gloom as of banishment
would cross her face and dim it for awhile, showing that the free habits
and enthusiasms of country life had still their charm with her, in the
face of the subtler gratifications of abridged bodices, candlelight, and
no feelings in particular, which prevailed in town.  Perhaps the one
condition which could work up into a permanent feeling the passing
revival of his fancy for a woman whose chief attribute he had supposed to
be sprightliness was added now by the romantic ubiquity of station that
attached to her.  A discovery which might have grated on the senses of a
man wedded to conventionality was a positive pleasure to one whose faith
in society had departed with his own social ruin.

The room began to darken, whereupon Christopher arose to leave; and the
brothers Sol and Dan offered to accompany him.




14. A TURNPIKE ROAD


'We be thinking of coming to London ourselves soon,' said Sol, a
carpenter and joiner by trade, as he walked along at Christopher's left
hand.  'There's so much more chance for a man up the country.  Now, if
you was me, how should you set about getting a job, sir?'

'What can you do?' said Christopher.

'Well, I am a very good staircase hand; and I have been called neat at
sash-frames; and I can knock together doors and shutters very well; and I
can do a little at the cabinet-making.  I don't mind framing a roof,
neither, if the rest be busy; and I am always ready to fill up my time at
planing floor-boards by the foot.'

'And I can mix and lay flat tints,' said Dan, who was a house painter,
'and pick out mouldings, and grain in every kind of wood you can
mention--oak, maple, walnut, satinwood, cherry-tree--'

'You can both do too much to stand the least chance of being allowed to
do anything in a city, where limitation is all the rule in labour.  To
have any success, Sol, you must be a man who can thoroughly look at a
door to see what ought to be done to it, but as to looking at a window,
that's not your line; or a person who, to the remotest particular,
understands turning a screw, but who does not profess any knowledge of
how to drive a nail.  Dan must know how to paint blue to a marvel, but
must be quite in the dark about painting green.  If you stick to some
such principle of specialty as this, you may get employment in London.'

'Ha-ha-ha!' said Dan, striking at a stone in the road with the stout
green hazel he carried.  'A wink is as good as a nod: thank'ee--we'll
mind all that now.'

'If we do come,' said Sol, 'we shall not mix up with Mrs. Petherwin at
all.'

'O indeed!'

'O no.  (Perhaps you think it odd that we call her "Mrs. Petherwin," but
that's by agreement as safer and better than Berta, because we be such
rough chaps you see, and she's so lofty.)  'Twould demean her to claim
kin wi' her in London--two journeymen like we, that know nothing besides
our trades.'

'Not at all,' said Christopher, by way of chiming in in the friendliest
manner.  'She would be pleased to see any straightforward honest man and
brother, I should think, notwithstanding that she has moved in other
society for a time.'

'Ah, you don't know Berta!' said Dan, looking as if he did.

'How--in what way do you mean?' said Christopher uneasily.

'So lofty--so very lofty!  Isn't she, Sol?  Why she'll never stir out
from mother's till after dark, and then her day begins; and she'll
traipse about under the trees, and never go into the high-road, so that
nobody in the way of gentle-people shall run up against her and know her
living in such a little small hut after biding in a big mansion-place.
There, we don't find fault wi' her about it: we like her just the same,
though she don't speak to us in the street; for a feller must be a fool
to make a piece of work about a woman's pride, when 'tis his own sister,
and hang upon her and bother her when he knows 'tis for her good that he
should not.  Yes, her life has been quare enough.  I hope she enjoys it,
but for my part I like plain sailing.  None of your ups and downs for me.
There, I suppose 'twas her nater to want to look into the world a bit.'

'Father and mother kept Berta to school, you understand, sir,' explained
the more thoughtful Sol, 'because she was such a quick child, and they
always had a notion of making a governess of her.  Sums?  If you said to
that child, "Berta, 'levenpence-three-farthings a day, how much a year?"
she would tell 'ee in three seconds out of her own little head.  And that
hard sum about the herrings she had done afore she was nine.'

'True, she had,' said Dan.  'And we all know that to do that is to do
something that's no nonsense.'

'What is the sum?' Christopher inquired.

'What--not know the sum about the herrings?' said Dan, spreading his gaze
all over Christopher in amazement.

'Never heard of it,' said Christopher.

'Why down in these parts just as you try a man's soul by the Ten
Commandments, you try his head by that there sum--hey, Sol?'

'Ay, that we do.'

'A herring and a half for three-halfpence, how many can ye get for
'levenpence: that's the feller; and a mortal teaser he is, I assure 'ee.
Our parson, who's not altogether without sense o' week days, said one
afternoon, "If cunning can be found in the multiplication table at all,
Chickerel, 'tis in connection with that sum."  Well, Berta was so clever
in arithmetic that she was asked to teach summing at Miss Courtley's, and
there she got to like foreign tongues more than ciphering, and at last
she hated ciphering, and took to books entirely.  Mother and we were very
proud of her at that time: not that we be stuck-up people at all--be we,
Sol?'

'Not at all; nobody can say that we be that, though there's more of it in
the country than there should be by all account.'

'You'd be surprised to see how vain the girls about here be getting.
Little rascals, why they won't curtsey to the loftiest lady in the land;
no, not if you were to pay 'em to do it.  Now, the men be different.  Any
man will touch his hat for a pint of beer.  But then, of course, there's
some difference between the two.  Touching your hat is a good deal less
to do than bending your knees, as Berta used to say, when she was blowed
up for not doing it.  She was always one of the independent sort--you
never seed such a maid as she was!  Now, Picotee was quite the other
way.'

'Has Picotee left Sandbourne entirely?'

'O no; she is home for the holidays.  Well, Mr. Julian, our road parts
from yours just here, unless you walk into the next town along with us.
But I suppose you get across to this station and go by rail?'

'I am obliged to go that way for my portmanteau,' said Christopher, 'or I
should have been pleased to walk further.  Shall I see you in Sandbourne
to-morrow?  I hope so.'

'Well, no.  'Tis hardly likely that you will see us--hardly.  We know how
unpleasant it is for a high sort of man to have rough chaps like us
hailing him, so we think it best not to meet you--thank you all the same.
So if you should run up against us in the street, we should be just as
well pleased by your taking no notice, if you wouldn't mind.  'Twill save
so much awkwardness--being in our working clothes.  'Tis always the plan
that Mrs. Petherwin and we agree to act upon, and we find it best for
both.  I hope you take our meaning right, and as no offence, Mr. Julian.'

'And do you do the same with Picotee?'

'O Lord, no--'tisn't a bit of use to try.  That's the worst of
Picotee--there's no getting rid of her.  The more in the rough we be the
more she'll stick to us; and if we say she shan't come, she'l

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