← catalogue

Clara Hopgood

by William Hale White · English · Gutenberg #5986 · 290,926 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Clara Hopgood
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Clara Hopgood

Author: William Hale White


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5986]
                Most recently updated: July 15, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5986

Credits: Transcribed from the 1907 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLARA HOPGOOD ***


Transcribed from the 1907 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

                          [Picture: Book cover]





                              CLARA HOPGOOD


                                    BY
                             MARK RUTHERFORD

                           EDITED BY HIS FRIEND
                             REUBEN SHAPCOTT

                                * * * * *

                            _THIRD IMPRESSION_

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                             T. FISHER UNWIN
                             ADELPHI TERRACE

_First Edition_          _March_ 1896
_Second Impression_       _June_ 1896
_Third Impression_        _July_ 1907

                                * * * * *

                          _All rights reserved_

                                * * * * *




CHAPTER I


ABOUT ten miles north-east of Eastthorpe lies the town of Fenmarket, very
like Eastthorpe generally; and as we are already familiar with
Eastthorpe, a particular description of Fenmarket is unnecessary.  There
is, however, one marked difference between them.  Eastthorpe, it will be
remembered, is on the border between the low uplands and the Fens, and
has one side open to soft, swelling hills.  Fenmarket is entirely in the
Fens, and all the roads that lead out of it are alike level, monotonous,
straight, and flanked by deep and stagnant ditches.  The river, also,
here is broader and slower; more reluctant than it is even at Eastthorpe
to hasten its journey to the inevitable sea.  During the greater part of
the year the visitor to Fenmarket would perhaps find it dull and
depressing, and at times, under a grey, wintry sky, almost unendurable;
but nevertheless, for days and weeks it has a charm possessed by few
other landscapes in England, provided only that behind the eye which
looks there is something to which a landscape of that peculiar character
answers.  There is, for example, the wide, dome-like expanse of the sky,
there is the distance, there is the freedom and there are the stars on a
clear night.  The orderly, geometrical march of the constellations from
the extreme eastern horizon across the meridian and down to the west has
a solemn majesty, which is only partially discernible when their course
is interrupted by broken country.

On a dark afternoon in November 1844, two young women, Clara and Madge
Hopgood, were playing chess in the back parlour of their mother’s house
at Fenmarket, just before tea.  Clara, the elder, was about
five-and-twenty, fair, with rather light hair worn flat at the side of
her face, after the fashion of that time.  Her features were tolerably
regular.  It is true they were somewhat marred by an uneven nasal
outline, but this was redeemed by the curved lips of a mouth which was
small and rather compressed, and by a definite, symmetrical and graceful
figure.  Her eyes were grey, with a curious peculiarity in them.
Ordinarily they were steady, strong eyes, excellent and renowned optical
instruments.  Over and over again she had detected, along the stretch of
the Eastthorpe road, approaching visitors, and had named them when her
companions could see nothing but specks.  Occasionally, however, these
steady, strong, grey eyes utterly changed.  They were the same eyes, the
same colour, but they ceased to be mere optical instruments and became
instruments of expression, transmissive of radiance to such a degree that
the light which was reflected from them seemed insufficient to account
for it.  It was also curious that this change, though it must have been
accompanied by some emotion, was just as often not attended by any other
sign of it.  Clara was, in fact, little given to any display of feeling.

Madge, four years younger than her sister, was of a different type
altogether, and one more easily comprehended.  She had very heavy dark
hair, and she had blue eyes, a combination which fascinated Fenmarket.
Fenmarket admired Madge more than it was admired by her in return, and
she kept herself very much to herself, notwithstanding what it considered
to be its temptations.  If she went shopping she nearly always went with
her sister; she stood aloof from all the small gaieties of the town;
walked swiftly through its streets, and repelled, frigidly and
decisively, all offers, and they were not a few, which had been made to
her by the sons of the Fenmarket tradesfolk.  Fenmarket pronounced her
‘stuck-up,’ and having thus labelled her, considered it had exhausted
her.  The very important question, Whether there was anything which
naturally stuck up?  Fenmarket never asked.  It was a great relief to
that provincial little town in 1844, in this and in other cases, to find
a word which released it from further mental effort and put out of sight
any troublesome, straggling, indefinable qualities which it would
otherwise have been forced to examine and name.  Madge was certainly
stuck-up, but the projection above those around her was not artificial.
Both she and her sister found the ways of Fenmarket were not to their
taste.  The reason lay partly in their nature and partly in their
history.

Mrs Hopgood was the widow of the late manager in the Fenmarket branch of
the bank of Rumbold, Martin & Rumbold, and when her husband died she had
of course to leave the Bank Buildings.  As her income was somewhat
straitened, she was obliged to take a small house, and she was now living
next door to the ‘Crown and Sceptre,’ the principal inn in the town.
There was then no fringe of villas to Fenmarket for retired quality; the
private houses and shops were all mixed together, and Mrs Hopgood’s
cottage was squeezed in between the ironmonger’s and the inn.  It was
very much lower than either of its big neighbours, but it had a brass
knocker and a bell, and distinctly asserted and maintained a kind of
aristocratic superiority.

Mr Hopgood was not a Fenmarket man.  He came straight from London to be
manager.  He was in the bank of the London agents of Rumbold, Martin &
Rumbold, and had been strongly recommended by the city firm as just the
person to take charge of a branch which needed thorough reorganisation.
He succeeded, and nobody in Fenmarket was more respected.  He lived,
however, a life apart from his neighbours, excepting so far as business
was concerned.  He went to church once on Sunday because the bank
expected him to go, but only once, and had nothing to do with any of its
dependent institutions.  He was a great botanist, very fond of walking,
and in the evening, when Fenmarket generally gathered itself into groups
for gossip, either in the street or in back parlours, or in the ‘Crown
and Sceptre,’ Mr Hopgood, tall, lean and stately, might be seen wandering
along the solitary roads searching for flowers, which, in that part of
the world, were rather scarce.  He was also a great reader of the best
books, English, German and French, and held high doctrine, very high for
those days, on the training of girls, maintaining that they need, even
more than boys, exact discipline and knowledge.  Boys, he thought, find
health in an occupation; but an uncultivated, unmarried girl dwells with
her own untutored thoughts, which often breed disease.  His two
daughters, therefore, received an education much above that which was
usual amongst people in their position, and each of them—an unheard of
wonder in Fenmarket—had spent some time in a school in Weimar.  Mr
Hopgood was also peculiar in his way of dealing with his children.  He
talked to them and made them talk to him, and whatever they read was
translated into speech; thought, in his house, was vocal.

Mrs Hopgood, too, had been the intimate friend of her husband, and was
the intimate friend of her daughters.  She was now nearly sixty, but
still erect and graceful, and everybody could see that the picture of a
beautiful girl of one-and-twenty, which hung opposite the fireplace, had
once been her portrait.  She had been brought up, as thoroughly as a
woman could be brought up, in those days, to be a governess.  The war
prevented her education abroad, but her father, who was a clergyman, not
too rich, engaged a French emigrant lady to live in his house to teach
her French and other accomplishments.  She consequently spoke French
perfectly, and she could also read and speak Spanish fairly well, for the
French lady had spent some years in Spain.  Mr Hopgood had never been
particularly in earnest about religion, but his wife was a believer,
neither High Church nor Low Church, but inclined towards a kind of
quietism not uncommon in the Church of England, even during its bad time,
a reaction against the formalism which generally prevailed.  When she
married, Mrs Hopgood did not altogether follow her husband.  She never
separated herself from her faith, and never would have confessed that she
had separated herself from her church.  But although she knew that his
creed externally was not hers, her own was not sharply cut, and she
persuaded herself that, in substance, his and her belief were identical.
As she grew older her relationship to the Unseen became more and more
intimate, but she was less and less inclined to criticise her husband’s
freedom, or to impose on the children a rule which they would certainly
have observed, but only for her sake.  Every now and then she felt a
little lonely; when, for example, she read one or two books which were
particularly her own; when she thought of her dead father and mother, and
when she prayed her solitary prayer.  Mr Hopgood took great pains never
to disturb that sacred moment.  Indeed, he never for an instant permitted
a finger to be laid upon what she considered precious.  He loved her
because she had the strength to be what she was when he first knew her
and she had so fascinated him.  He would have been disappointed if the
mistress of his youth had become some other person, although the change,
in a sense, might have been development and progress.  He did really love
her piety, too, for its own sake.  It mixed something with her behaviour
to him and to the children which charmed him, and he did not know from
what other existing source anything comparable to it could be supplied.
Mrs Hopgood seldom went to church.  The church, to be sure, was horribly
dead, but she did not give that as a reason.  She had, she said, an
infirmity, a strange restlessness which prevented her from sitting still
for an hour.  She often pleaded this excuse, and her husband and
daughters never, by word or smile, gave her the least reason to suppose
that they did not believe her.




CHAPTER II


BOTH Clara and Madge went first to an English day-school, and Clara went
straight from this school to Germany, but Madge’s course was a little
different.  She was not very well, and it was decided that she should
have at least a twelvemonth in a boarding-school at Brighton before going
abroad.  It had been very highly recommended, but the head-mistress was
Low Church and aggressive.  Mr Hopgood, far away from the High and Low
Church controversy, came to the conclusion that, in Madge’s case, the
theology would have no effect on her.  It was quite impossible, moreover,
to find a school which would be just what he could wish it to be.  Madge,
accordingly, was sent to Brighton, and was introduced into a new world.
She was just beginning to ask herself _why_ certain things were right and
other things were wrong, and the Brighton answer was that the former were
directed by revelation and the latter forbidden, and that the ‘body’ was
an affliction to the soul, a means of ‘probation,’ our principal duty
being to ‘war’ against it.

Madge’s bedroom companion was a Miss Selina Fish, daughter of Barnabas
Fish, Esquire, of Clapham, and merchant of the City of London.  Miss Fish
was not traitorous at heart, but when she found out that Madge had not
been christened, she was so overcome that she was obliged to tell her
mother.  Miss Fish was really unhappy, and one cold night, when Madge
crept into her neighbour’s bed, contrary to law, but in accordance with
custom when the weather was very bitter, poor Miss Fish shrank from her,
half-believing that something dreadful might happen if she should by any
chance touch unbaptised, naked flesh.  Mrs Fish told her daughter that
perhaps Miss Hopgood might be a Dissenter, and that although Dissenters
were to be pitied, and even to be condemned, many of them were
undoubtedly among the redeemed, as for example, that man of God, Dr
Doddridge, whose _Family Expositor_ was read systematically at home, as
Selina knew.  Then there were Matthew Henry, whose commentary her father
preferred to any other, and the venerable saint, the Reverend William Jay
of Bath, whom she was proud to call her friend.  Miss Fish, therefore,
made further inquiries gently and delicately, but she found to her horror
that Madge had neither been sprinkled nor immersed!  Perhaps she was a
Jewess or a heathen!  This was a happy thought, for then she might be
converted.  Selina knew what interest her mother took in missions to
heathens and Jews; and if Madge, by the humble instrumentality of a
child, could be brought to the foot of the Cross, what would her mother
and father say?  What would they not say?  Fancy taking Madge to Clapham
in a nice white dress—it should be white, thought Selina—and presenting
her as a saved lamb!

The very next night she began,—

‘I suppose your father is a foreigner?’

‘No, he is an Englishman.’

‘But if he is an Englishman you must have been baptised, or sprinkled, or
immersed, and your father and mother must belong to church or chapel.  I
know there are thousands of wicked people who belong to neither, but they
are drunkards and liars and robbers, and even they have their children
christened.’

‘Well, he is an Englishman,’ said Madge, smiling.

‘Perhaps,’ said Selina, timidly, ‘he may be—he may be—Jewish.  Mamma and
papa pray for the Jews every morning.  They are not like other
unbelievers.’

‘No, he is certainly not a Jew.’

‘What is he, then?’

‘He is my papa and a very honest, good man.’

‘Oh, my dear Madge! honesty is a broken reed.  I have heard mamma say
that she is more hopeful of thieves than honest people who think they are
saved by works, for the thief who was crucified went to heaven, and if he
had been only an honest man he never would have found the Saviour and
would have gone to hell.  Your father must be something.’

‘I can only tell you again that he is honest and good.’

Selina was confounded.  She had heard of those people who were _nothing_,
and had always considered them as so dreadful that she could not bear to
think of them.  The efforts of her father and mother did not extend to
them; they were beyond the reach of the preacher—mere vessels of wrath.
If Madge had confessed herself Roman Catholic, or idolator, Selina knew
how to begin.  She would have pointed out to the Catholic how
unscriptural it was to suppose that anybody could forgive sins excepting
God, and she would at once have been able to bring the idolator to his
knees by exposing the absurdity of worshipping bits of wood and stone;
but with a person who was nothing she could not tell what to do.  She was
puzzled to understand what right Madge had to her name.  Who had any
authority to say she was to be called Madge Hopgood?  She determined at
last to pray to God and again ask her mother’s help.

She did pray earnestly that very night, and had not finished until long
after Madge had said her Lord’s Prayer.  This was always said night and
morning, both by Madge and Clara.  They had been taught it by their
mother.  It was, by the way, one of poor Selina’s troubles that Madge
said nothing but the Lord’s Prayer when she lay down and when she rose;
of course, the Lord’s Prayer was the best—how could it be otherwise,
seeing that our Lord used it?—but those who supplemented it with no
petitions of their own were set down as formalists, and it was always
suspected that they had not received the true enlightenment from above.
Selina cried to God till the counterpane was wet with her tears, but it
was the answer from her mother which came first, telling her that however
praiseworthy her intentions might be, argument with such a _dangerous_
infidel as Madge would be most perilous, and she was to desist from it at
once.  Mrs Fish had by that post written to Miss Pratt, the
schoolmistress, and Selina no doubt would not be exposed to further
temptation.  Mrs Fish’s letter to Miss Pratt was very strong, and did not
mince matters.  She informed Miss Pratt that a wolf was in her fold, and
that if the creature were not promptly expelled, Selina must be removed
into safety.  Miss Pratt was astonished, and instantly, as her custom
was, sought the advice of her sister, Miss Hannah Pratt, who had charge
of the wardrobes and household matters generally.  Miss Hannah Pratt was
never in the best of tempers, and just now was a little worse than usual.
It was one of the rules of the school that no tradesmen’s daughters
should be admitted, but it was very difficult to draw the line, and when
drawn, the Misses Pratt were obliged to admit it was rather ridiculous.
There was much debate over an application by an auctioneer.  He was
clearly not a tradesman, but he sold chairs, tables and pigs, and, as
Miss Hannah said, used vulgar language in recommending them.  However,
his wife had money; they lived in a pleasant house in Lewes, and the line
went outside him.  But when a druggist, with a shop in Bond Street,
proposed his daughter, Miss Hannah took a firm stand.  What is the use of
a principle, she inquired severely, if we do not adhere to it?  On the
other hand, the druggist’s daughter was the eldest of six, who might all
come when they were old enough to leave home, and Miss Pratt thought
there was a real difference between a druggist and, say, a bootmaker.

‘Bootmaker!’ said Miss Hannah with great scorn.  ‘I am surprised that you
venture to hint the remotest possibility of such a contingency.’

At last it was settled that the line should also be drawn outside the
druggist.  Miss Hannah, however, had her revenge.  A tanner in Bermondsey
with a house in Bedford Square, had sent two of his children to Miss
Pratt’s seminary.  Their mother found out that they had struck up a
friendship with a young person whose father compounded prescriptions for
her, and when she next visited Brighton she called on Miss Pratt,
reminded her that it was understood that her pupils would ‘all be taken
from a superior class in society,’ and gently hinted that she could not
allow Bedford Square to be contaminated by Bond Street.  Miss Pratt was
most apologetic, enlarged upon the druggist’s respectability, and more
particularly upon his well-known piety and upon his generous
contributions to the cause of religion.  This, indeed, was what decided
her to make an exception in his favour, and the piety also of his
daughter was ‘most exemplary.’  However, the tanner’s lady, although a
shining light in the church herself, was not satisfied that a retail
saint could produce a proper companion for her own offspring, and went
away leaving Miss Pratt very uncomfortable.

‘I warned you,’ said Miss Hannah; ‘I told you what would happen, and as
to Mr Hopgood, I suspected him from the first.  Besides, he is only a
banker’s clerk.’

‘Well, what is to be done?’

‘Put your foot down at once.’  Miss Hannah suited the action to the word,
and put down, with emphasis, on the hearthrug a very large, plate-shaped
foot cased in a black felt shoe.

‘But I cannot dismiss them.  Don’t you think it will be better, first of
all, to talk to Miss Hopgood?  Perhaps we could do her some good.’

‘Good!  Now, do you think we can do any good to an atheist?  Besides, we
have to consider our reputation.  Whatever good we might do, it would be
believed that the infection remained.’

‘We have no excuse for dismissing the other.’

‘Excuse! none is needed, nor would any be justifiable.  Excuses are
immoral.  Say at once—of course politely and with regret—that the school
is established on a certain basis.  It will be an advantage to us if it
is known why these girls do not remain.  I will dictate the letter, if
you like.’

Miss Hannah Pratt had not received the education which had been given to
her younger sister, and therefore, was nominally subordinate, but really
she was chief.  She considered it especially her duty not only to look
after the children’s clothes, the servants and the accounts, but to
maintain _tone_ everywhere in the establishment, and to stiffen her
sister when necessary, and preserve in proper sharpness her orthodoxy,
both in theology and morals.

Accordingly, both the girls left, and both knew the reason for leaving.
The druggist’s faith was sorely tried.  If Miss Pratt’s had been a
worldly seminary he would have thought nothing of such behaviour, but he
did not expect it from one of the faithful.  The next Sunday morning
after he received the news, he stayed at home out of his turn to make up
any medicines which might be urgently required, and sent his assistant to
church.

As to Madge, she enjoyed her expulsion as a great joke, and her Brighton
experiences were the cause of much laughter.  She had learned a good deal
while she was away from home, not precisely what it was intended she
should learn, and she came back with a strong, insurgent tendency, which
was even more noticeable when she returned from Germany.  Neither of the
sisters lived at the school in Weimar, but at the house of a lady who had
been recommended to Mrs Hopgood, and by this lady they were introduced to
the great German classics.  She herself was an enthusiast for Goethe,
whom she well remembered in his old age, and Clara and Madge, each of
them in turn, learned to know the poet as they would never have known him
in England.  Even the town taught them much about him, for in many ways
it was expressive of him and seemed as if it had shaped itself for him.
It was a delightful time for them.  They enjoyed the society and constant
mental stimulus; they loved the beautiful park; not a separate enclosure
walled round like an English park, but suffering the streets to end in
it, and in summer time there were excursions into the Thüringer Wald,
generally to some point memorable in history, or for some literary
association.  The drawback was the contrast, when they went home, with
Fenmarket, with its dulness and its complete isolation from the
intellectual world.  At Weimar, in the evening, they could see Egmont or
hear Fidelio, or talk with friends about the last utterance upon the
Leben Jesu; but the Fenmarket Egmont was a travelling wax-work show, its
Fidelio psalm tunes, or at best some of Bishop’s glees, performed by a
few of the tradesfolk, who had never had an hour’s instruction in music;
and for theological criticism there were the parish church and Ram Lane
Chapel.  They did their best; they read their old favourites and
subscribed for a German as well as an English literary weekly newspaper,
but at times they were almost beaten.  Madge more than Clara was liable
to depression.

No Fenmarket maiden, other than the Hopgoods, was supposed to have any
connection whatever, or to have any capacity for any connection with
anything outside the world in which ‘young ladies’ dwelt, and if a
Fenmarket girl read a book, a rare occurrence, for there were no
circulating libraries there in those days, she never permitted herself to
say anything more than that it was ‘nice,’ or it was ‘not nice,’ or she
‘liked it’ or did ‘not like it;’ and if she had ventured to say more,
Fenmarket would have thought her odd, not to say a little improper.  The
Hopgood young women were almost entirely isolated, for the tradesfolk
felt themselves uncomfortable and inferior in every way in their
presence, and they were ineligible for rectory and brewery society, not
only because their father was merely a manager, but because of their
strange ways.  Mrs Tubbs, the brewer’s wife, thought they were due to
Germany.  From what she knew of Germany she considered it most
injudicious, and even morally wrong, to send girls there.  She once made
the acquaintance of a German lady at an hotel at Tunbridge Wells, and was
quite shocked.  She could see quite plainly that the standard of female
delicacy must be much lower in that country than in England.  Mr Tubbs
was sure Mrs Hopgood must have been French, and said to his daughters,
mysteriously, ‘you never can tell who Frenchwomen are.’

‘But, papa,’ said Miss Tubbs, ‘you know Mrs Hopgood’s maiden name; we
found that out.  It was Molyneux.’

‘Of course, my dear, of course; but if she was a Frenchwoman resident in
England she would prefer to assume an English name, that is to say if she
wished to be married.’

Occasionally the Miss Hopgoods were encountered, and they confounded
Fenmarket sorely.  On one memorable occasion there was a party at the
Rectory: it was the annual party into which were swept all the
unclassifiable odds-and-ends which could not be put into the two
gatherings which included the aristocracy and the democracy of the place.
Miss Clara Hopgood amazed everybody by ‘beginning talk,’ by asking Mrs
Greatorex, her hostess, who had been far away to Sidmouth for a holiday,
whether she had been to the place where Coleridge was born, and when the
parson’s wife said she had not, and that she could not be expected to
make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of an infidel, Miss Hopgood expressed
her surprise, and declared she would walk twenty miles any day to see
Ottery St Mary.  Still worse, when somebody observed that an
Anti-Corn-Law lecturer was coming to Fenmarket, and the parson’s daughter
cried ‘How horrid!’  Miss Hopgood talked again, and actually told the
parson that, so far as she had read upon the subject—fancy her reading
about the Corn-Laws!—the argument was all one way, and that after Colonel
Thompson nothing new could really be urged.

‘What is so—’ she was about to say ‘objectionable,’ but she recollected
her official position and that she was bound to be politic—‘so odd and
unusual,’ observed Mrs Greatorex to Mrs Tubbs afterwards, ‘is not that
Miss Hopgood should have radical views.  Mrs Barker, I know, is a radical
like her husband, but then she never puts herself forward, nor makes
speeches.  I never saw anything quite like it, except once in London at a
dinner-party.  Lady Montgomery then went on in much the same way, but she
was a baronet’s wife; the baronet was in Parliament; she received a good
deal and was obliged to entertain her guests.’

Poor Clara! she was really very unobtrusive and very modest, but there
had been constant sympathy between her and her father, not the dumb
sympathy as between man and dog, but that which can manifest itself in
human fashion.




CHAPTER III


CLARA and her father were both chess-players, and at the time at which
our history begins, Clara had been teaching Madge the game for about six
months.

‘Check!’ said Clara.

‘Check! after about a dozen moves.  It is of no use to go on; you always
beat me.  I should not mind that if I were any better now than when I
started.  It is not in me.’

‘The reason is that you do not look two moves ahead.  You never say to
yourself, “Suppose I move there, what is she likely to do, and what can I
do afterwards?”’

‘That is just what is impossible to me.  I cannot hold myself down; the
moment I go beyond the next move my thoughts fly away, and I am in a
muddle, and my head turns round.  I was not born for it.  I can do what
is under my nose well enough, but nothing more.’

‘The planning and the forecasting are the soul of the game.  I should
like to be a general, and play against armies and calculate the
consequences of manœuvres.’

‘It would kill me.  I should prefer the fighting.  Besides, calculation
is useless, for when I think that you will be sure to move such and such
a piece, you generally do not.’

‘Then what makes the difference between the good and the bad player?’

‘It is a gift, an instinct, I suppose.’

‘Which is as much as to say that you give it up.  You are very fond of
that word instinct; I wish you would not use it.’

‘I have heard you use it, and say you instinctively like this person or
that.’

‘Certainly; I do not deny that sometimes I am drawn to a person or
repelled from him before I can say why; but I always force myself to
discover afterwards the cause of my attraction or repulsion, and I
believe it is a duty to do so.  If we neglect it we are little better
than the brutes, and may grossly deceive ourselves.’

At this moment the sound of wheels was heard, and Madge jumped up, nearly
over-setting the board, and rushed into the front room.  It was the
four-horse coach from London, which, once a day, passed through Fenmarket
on its road to Lincoln.  It was not the direct route from London to
Lincoln, but the _Defiance_ went this way to accommodate Fenmarket and
other small towns.  It slackened speed in order to change horses at the
‘Crown and Sceptre,’ and as Madge stood at the window, a gentleman on the
box-seat looked at her intently as he passed.  In another minute he had
descended, and was welcomed by the landlord, who stood on the pavement.
Clara meanwhile had taken up a book, but before she had read a page, her
sister skipped into the parlour again, humming a tune.

‘Let me see—check, you said, but it is not mate.’

She put her elbows on the table, rested her head between her hands, and
appeared to contemplate the game profoundly.

‘Now, then, what do you say to that?’

It was really a very lucky move, and Clara, whose thoughts perhaps were
elsewhere, was presently most unaccountably defeated.  Madge was
triumphant.

‘Where are all your deep-laid schemes?  Baffled by a poor creature who
can hardly put two and two together.’

‘Perhaps your schemes were better than mine.’

‘You know they were not.  I saw the queen ought to take that bishop, and
never bothered myself as to what would follow.  Have you not lost your
faith in schemes?’

‘You are very much mistaken if you suppose that, because of one failure,
or of twenty failures, I would give up a principle.’

‘Clara, you are a strange creature.  Don’t let us talk any more about
chess.’

Madge swept all the pieces with her hand into the box, shut it, closed
the board, and put her feet on the fender.

‘You never believe in impulses or in doing a thing just because here and
now it appears to be the proper thing to do.  Suppose anybody were to
make love to you—oh! how I wish somebody would, you dear girl, for nobody
deserves it more—’  Madge put her head caressingly on Clara’s shoulder
and then raised it again.  ‘Suppose, I say, anybody were to make love to
you, would you hold off for six months and consider, and consider, and
ask yourself whether he had such and such virtues, and whether he could
make you happy?  Would not that stifle love altogether?  Would you not
rather obey your first impression and, if you felt you loved him, would
you not say “Yes”?’

‘Time is not everything.  A man who is prompt and is therefore thought to
be hasty by sluggish creatures who are never half awake, may in five
minutes spend more time in consideration than his critics will spend in
as many weeks.  I have never had the chance, and am not likely to have
it.  I can only say that if it were to come to me, I should try to use
the whole strength of my soul.  Precisely because the question would be
so important, would it be necessary to employ every faculty I have in
order to decide it.  I do not believe in oracles which are supposed to
prove their divinity by giving no reasons for their commands.’

‘Ah, well, _I_ believe in Shakespeare.  His lovers fall in love at first
sight.’

‘No doubt they do, but to justify yourself you have to suppose that you
are a Juliet and your friend a Romeo.  They may, for aught I know, be
examples in my favour.  However, I have to lay down a rule for my own
poor, limited self, and, to speak the truth, I am afraid that great men
often do harm by imposing on us that which is serviceable to themselves
only; or, to put it perhaps more correctly, we mistake the real nature of
their processes, just as a person who is unskilled in arithmetic would
mistake the processes of anybody who is very quick at it, and would be
led away by them.  Shakespeare is much to me, but the more he is to me,
the more careful I ought to be to discover what is the true law of my own
nature, more important to me after all than Shakespeare’s.’

‘Exactly.  I know what the law of mine is.  If a man were to present
himself to me, I should rely on that instinct you so much despise, and I
am certain that the balancing, see-saw method would be fatal.  It would
disclose a host of reasons against any conclusion, and I should never
come to any.’

Clara smiled.  Although this impetuosity was foreign to her, she loved it
for the good which accompanied it.

‘You do not mean to say you would accept or reject him at once?’

‘No, certainly not.  What I mean is that in a few days, perhaps in a
shorter time, something within me would tell me whether we were suited to
one another, although we might not have talked upon half-a-dozen
subjects.’

‘I think the risk tremendous.’

‘But there is just as much risk the other way.  You would examine your
friend, catalogue him, sum up his beliefs, note his behaviour under
various experimental trials, and miserably fail, after all your
scientific investigation, to ascertain just the one important point
whether you loved him and could live with him.  Your reason was not meant
for that kind of work.  If a woman trusts in such matters to the faculty
by which, when she wishes to settle whether she is to take this house or
that, she puts the advantages of the larger back kitchen on one side and
the bigger front kitchen on the other, I pity her.’

Mrs Hopgood at this moment came downstairs and asked when in the name of
fortune they meant to have the tea ready.




CHAPTER IV


FRANK PALMER, the gentleman whom we saw descend from the coach, was the
eldest son of a wholesale and manufacturing chemist in London.  He was
now about five-and-twenty, and having just been admitted as a partner, he
had begun, as the custom was in those days, to travel for his firm.  The
elder Mr Palmer was a man of refinement, something more than a Whig in
politics, and an enthusiastic member of the Broad Church party, which was
then becoming a power in the country.  He was well-to-do, living in a
fine old red-brick house at Stoke Newington, with half-a-dozen acres of
ground round it, and, if Frank had been born thirty years later, he would
probably have gone to Cambridge or Oxford.  In those days, however, it
was not the custom to send boys to the Universities unless they were
intended for the law, divinity or idleness, and Frank’s training, which
was begun at St Paul’s school, was completed there.  He lived at home,
going to school in the morning and returning in the evening.  He was
surrounded by every influence which was pure and noble.  Mr Maurice and
Mr Sterling were his father’s guests, and hence it may be inferred that
there was an altar in the house, and that the sacred flame burnt thereon.
Mr Palmer almost worshipped Mr Maurice, and his admiration was not blind,
for Maurice connected the Bible with what was rational in his friend.
‘What! still believable: no need then to pitch it overboard: here after
all is the Eternal Word!’  It can be imagined how those who dared not
close their eyes to the light, and yet clung to that book which had been
so much to their forefathers and themselves, rejoiced when they were able
to declare that it belonged to them more than to those who misjudged them
and could deny that they were heretics.  The boy’s education was entirely
classical and athletic, and as he was quick at learning and loved his
games, he took a high position amongst his school-fellows.  He was not
particularly reflective, but he was generous and courageous, perfectly
straightforward, a fair specimen of thousands of English public-school
boys.  As he grew up, he somewhat disappointed his father by a lack of
any real interest in the subjects in which his father was interested.  He
accepted willingly, and even enthusiastically, the household conclusions
on religion and politics, but they were not properly his, for he accepted
them merely as conclusions and without the premisses, and it was often
even a little annoying to hear him express some free opinion on religious
questions in a way which showed that it was not a growth but something
picked up.  Mr Palmer, senior, sometimes recoiled into intolerance and
orthodoxy, and bewildered his son who, to use one of his own phrases,
‘hardly knew where his father was.’  Partly the reaction was due to the
oscillation which accompanies serious and independent thought, but mainly
it was caused by Mr Palmer’s discontent with Frank’s appropriation of a
sentiment or doctrine of which he was not the lawful owner.  Frank,
however, was so hearty, so affectionate, and so cheerful, that it was
impossible not to love him dearly.

In his visits to Fenmarket, Frank had often noticed Madge, for the ‘Crown
and Sceptre’ was his headquarters, and Madge was well enough aware that
she had been noticed.  He had inquired casually who it was who lived next
door, and when the waiter told him the name, and that Mr Hopgood was
formerly the bank manager, Frank remembered that he had often heard his
father speak of a Mr Hopgood, a clerk in a bank in London, as one of his
best friends.  He did not fail to ask his father about this friend, and
to obtain an introduction to the widow.  He had now brought it to
Fenmarket, and within half an hour after he had alighted, he had
presented it.

Mrs Hopgood, of course, recollected Mr Palmer perfectly, and the welcome
to Frank was naturally very warm.  It was delightful to connect earlier
and happier days with the present, and she was proud in the possession of
a relationship which had lasted so long.  Clara and Madge, too, were both
excited and pleased.  To say nothing of Frank’s appearance, of his
unsnobbish, deferential behaviour which showed that he understood who
they were and that the little house made no difference to him, the girls
and the mother could not resist a side glance at Fenmarket and the
indulgence of a secret satisfaction that it would soon hear that the son
of Mr Palmer, so well known in every town round about, was on intimate
terms with them.

Madge was particularly gay that evening.  The presence of sympathetic
people was always a powerful stimulus to her, and she was often
astonished at the witty things and even the wise things she said in such
company, although, when she was alone, so few things wise or witty
occurred to her.  Like all persons who, in conversation, do not so much
express the results of previous conviction obtained in silence as the
inspiration of the moment, Madge dazzled everybody by a brilliancy which
would have been impossible if she had communicated that which had been
slowly acquired, but what she left with those who listened to her, did
not always seem, on reflection, to be so much as it appeared to be while
she was talking.  Still she was very charming, and it must be confessed
that sometimes her spontaneity was truer than the limitations of speech
more carefully weighed.

‘What makes you stay in Fenmarket, Mrs Hopgood?  How I wish you would
come to London!’

‘I do not wish to leave it now; I have become attached to it; I have very
few friends in London, and lastly, perhaps the most convincing reason, I
could not afford it.  Rent and living are cheaper here than in town.’

‘Would you not like to live in London, Miss Hopgood?’

Clara hesitated for a few seconds.

‘I am not sure—certainly not by myself.  I was in London once for six
months as a governess in a very pleasant family, where I saw much
society; but I was glad to return to Fenmarket.’

‘To the scenery round Fenmarket,’ interrupted Madge; ‘it is so romantic,
so mountainous, so interesting in every way.’

‘I was thinking of people, strange as it may appear.  In London nobody
really cares for anybody, at least, not in the sense in which I should
use the words.  Men and women in London stand for certain talents, and
are valued often very highly for them, but they are valued merely as
representing these talents.  Now, if I had a talent, I should not be
satisfied with admiration or respect because of it.  No matter what
admiration, or respect, or even enthusiasm I might evoke, even if I were
told that my services had been immense and that life had been changed
through my instrumentality, I should feel the lack of quiet, personal
affection, and that, I believe, is not common in London.  If I were
famous, I would sacrifice all the adoration of the world for the love of
a brother—if I had one—or a sister, who perhaps had never heard what it
was which had made me renowned.’

‘Certainly,’ said Madge, laughing, ‘for the love of _such_ a sister.
But, Mr Palmer, I like London.  I like the people, just the people,
although I do not know a soul, and not a soul cares a brass farthing
about me.  I am not half so stupid in London as in the country.  I never
have a thought of my own down here.  How should I?  But in London there
is plenty of talk about all kinds of things, and I find I too have
something in me.  It is true, as Clara says, that nobody is anything
particular to anybody, but that to me is rather pleasant.  I do not want
too much of profound and eternal attachments.  They are rather a burden.
They involve profound and eternal attachment on my part; and I have
always to be at my best; such watchfulness and such jealousy!  I prefer a
dressing-gown and slippers and bonds which are not so tight.’

‘Madge, Madge, I wish you would sometimes save me the trouble of
laboriously striving to discover what you really mean.’

Mrs Hopgood bethought herself that her daughters were talking too much to
one another, as they often did, even when guests were present, and she
therefore interrupted them.

‘Mr Palmer, you see both town and country—which do you prefer?’

‘Oh!  I hardly know; the country in summer-time, perhaps, and town in the
winter.’

This was a safe answer, and one which was not very original; that is to
say, it expressed no very distinct belief; but there was one valid reason
why he liked being in London in the winter.

‘Your father, I remember, loves music.  I suppose you inherit his taste,
and it is impossible to hear good music in the country.’

‘I am very fond of music.  Have you heard “St Paul?”  I was at Birmingham
when it was first performed in this country.  Oh! it _is_ lovely,’ and he
began humming ‘_Be thou faithful unto death_.’

Frank did really care for music.  He went wherever good music was to be
had; he belonged to a choral society and was in great request amongst his
father’s friends at evening entertainments.  He could also play the
piano, so far as to be able to accompany himself thereon.  He sang to
himself when he was travelling, and often murmured favourite airs when
people around him were talking.  He had lessons from an old Italian, a
little, withered, shabby creature, who was not very proud of his pupil.
‘He is a talent,’ said the Signor, ‘and he will amuse himself; good for a
ballad at a party, but a musician? no!’ and like all mere ‘talents’ Frank
failed in his songs to give them just what is of most value—just that
which separates an artistic performance from the vast region of
well-meaning, respectable, but uninteresting commonplace.  There was a
curious lack in him also of correspondence between his music and the rest
of himself.  As music is expression, it might be supposed that something
which it serves to express would always lie behind it; but this was not
the case with him, although he was so attractive and delightful in many
ways.  There could be no doubt that his love for Beethoven was genuine,
but that which was in Frank Palmer was not that of which the sonatas and
symphonies of the master are the voice.  He went into raptures over the
slow movement in the _C minor_ Symphony, but no _C minor_ slow movement
was discernible in his character.

‘What on earth can be found in “St Paul” which can be put to music?’ said
Madge.  ‘Fancy a chapter in the Epistle to the Romans turned into a
duet!’

‘Madge!  Madge!  I am ashamed of you,’ said her mother.

‘Well, mother,’ said Clara, ‘I am sure that some of the settings by your
divinity, Handel, are absurd.  “_For as in Adam all die_” may be true
enough, and the harmonies are magnificent, but I am always tempted to
laugh when I hear it.’

Frank hummed the familiar apostrophe ‘_Be not afraid_.’

‘Is that a bit of “St Paul”?’ said Mrs Hopgood.

‘Yes, it goes like this,’ and Frank went up to the little piano and sang
the song through.

‘There is no fault to be found with that,’ said Madge, ‘so far as the
coincidence of sense and melody is concerned, but I do not care much for
oratorios.  Better subjects can be obtained outside the Bible, and the
main reason for selecting the Bible is that what is called religious
music may be provided for good people.  An oratorio, to me, is never
quite natural.  Jewish history is not a musical subject, and, besides,
you cannot have proper love songs in an oratorio, and in them music is at
its best.’

Mrs Hopgood was accustomed to her daughter’s extravagance, but she was,
nevertheless, a little uncomfortable.

‘Ah!’ said Frank, who had not moved from the piano, and he struck the
first two bars of ‘_Adelaide_.’

‘Oh, please,’ said Madge, ‘go on, go on,’ but Frank could not quite
finish it.

She was sitting on the little sofa, and she put her feet up, lay and
listened with her eyes shut.  There was a vibration in Mr Palmer’s voice
not perceptible during his vision of the crown of life and of fidelity to
death.

‘Are you going to stay over Sunday?’ inquired Mrs Hopgood.

‘I am not quite sure; I ought to be back on Sunday evening.  My father
likes me to be at home on that day.’

‘Is there not a Mr Maurice who is a friend of your father?’

‘Oh, yes, a great friend.’

‘He is not High Church nor Low Church?’

‘No, not exactly.’

‘What is he, then?  What does he believe?’

‘Well, I can hardly say; he does not believe that anybody will be burnt
in a brimstone lake for ever.’

‘That is what he does not believe,’ interposed Clara.

‘He believes that Socrates and the great Greeks and Romans who acted up
to the light that was within them were not sent to hell.  I think that is
glorious, don’t you?’

‘Yes, but that also is something he does not believe.  What is there in
him which is positive?  What has he distinctly won from the unknown?’

‘Ah, Miss Hopgood, you ought to hear him yourself; he is wonderful.  I do
admire him so much; I am sure you would like him.’

‘If you do not go home on Saturday,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘we shall be
pleased if you will have dinner with us on Sunday; we generally go for a
walk in the afternoon.’

Frank hesitated, but at that moment Madge rose from the sofa.  Her hair
was disarranged, and she pushed its thick folds backward.  It grew rather
low down on her forehead and stood up a little on her temples, a mystery
of shadow and dark recess.  If it had been electrical with the force of a
strong battery and had touched him, he could not have been more
completely paralysed, and his half-erect resolution to go back on
Saturday was instantly laid flat.

‘Thank you, Mrs Hopgood,’ looking at Madge and meeting her eyes, ‘I think
it very likely I shall stay, and if I do I will most certainly accept
your kind invitation.’




CHAPTER V


SUNDAY morning came, and Frank, being in the country, considered himself
absolved from the duty of going to church, and went for a long stroll.
At half-past one he presented himself at Mrs Hopgood’s house.

‘I have had a letter from London,’ said Clara to Frank, ‘telling me a
most extraordinary story, and I should like to know what you think of it.
A man, who was left a widower, had an only child, a lovely daughter of
about fourteen years old, in whose existence his own was completely
wrapped up.  She was subject at times to curious fits of self-absorption
or absence of mind, and while she was under their influence she resembled
a somnambulist rather than a sane human being awake.  Her father would
not take her to a physician, for he dreaded lest he should be advised to
send her away from home, and he also feared the effect which any
recognition of her disorder might have upon her.  He believed that in
obscure and half-mental diseases like hers, it was prudent to suppress
all notice of them, and that if he behaved to her as if she were
perfectly well, she would stand a chance of recovery.  Moreover, the
child was visibly improving, and it was probable that the disturbance in
her health would be speedily outgrown.  One hot day he went out shopping
with her, and he observed that she was tired and strange in her manner,
although she was not ill, or, at least, not so ill as he had often before
seen her.  The few purchases they had to make at the draper’s were
completed, and they went out into the street.  He took her hand-bag, and,
in doing so, it opened and he saw to his horror a white silk
pocket-handkerchief crumpled up in it, which he instantly recognised as
one which had been shown him five minutes before, but he had not bought.
The next moment a hand was on his shoulder.  It was that of an assistant,
who requested that they would both return for a few minutes.  As they
walked the half dozen steps back, the father’s resolution was taken.  “I
am sixty,” he thought to himself, “and she is fourteen.”  They went into
the counting-house and he confessed that he had taken the handkerchief,
but that it was taken by mistake and that he was about to restore it when
he was arrested.  The poor girl was now herself again, but her mind was
an entire blank as to what she had done, and she could not doubt her
father’s statement, for it was a man’s handkerchief and the bag was in
his hands.  The draper was inexorable, and as he had suffered much from
petty thefts of late, had determined to make an example of the first
offender whom he could catch.  The father was accordingly prosecuted,
convicted and sentenced to imprisonment.  When his term had expired, his
daughter, who, I am glad to say, never for an instant lost her faith in
him, went away with him to a distant part of the country, where they
lived under an assumed name.  About ten years afterwards he died and kept
his secret to the last; but he had seen the complete recovery and happy
marriage of his child.  It was remarkable that it never occurred to her
that she might have been guilty, but her father’s confession, as already
stated, was apparently so sincere that she could do nothing but believe
him.  You will wonder how the facts were discovered.  After his death a
sealed paper disclosing them was found, with the inscription, “_Not to be
opened during my daughter’s life_, _and if she should have children or a
husband who may survive her_, _it is to be burnt_.”  She had no children,
and when she died as an old woman, her husband also being dead, the seal
was broken.’

‘Probably,’ said Madge, ‘nobody except his daughter believed he was not a
thief.  For her sake he endured the imputation of common larceny, and was
content to leave the world with only a remote chance that he would ever
be justified.’

‘I wonder,’ said Frank, ‘that he did not admit that it was his daughter
who had taken the handkerchief, and excuse her on the ground of her
ailment.’

‘He could not do that,’ replied Madge.  ‘The object of his life was to
make as little of the ailment as possible.  What would have been the
effect on her if she had been made aware of its fearful consequences?
Furthermore, would he have been believed?  And then—awful thought, the
child might have suspected him of attempting to shield himself at her
expense!  Do you think you could be capable of such sacrifice, Mr
Palmer?’

Frank hesitated.  ‘It would—’

‘The question is not fair, Madge,’ said Mrs Hopgood, interrupting him.
‘You are asking for a decision when all the materials to make up a
decision are not present.  It is wrong to question ourselves in cold
blood as to what we should do in a great strait; for the emergency brings
the insight and the power necessary to deal with it.  I often fear lest,
if such-and-such a trial were to befall me, I should miserably fail.  So
I should, furnished as I now am, but not as I should be under stress of
the trial.’

‘What is the use,’ said Clara, ‘of speculating whether we can, or cannot,
do this or that?  It _is_ now an interesting subject for discussion
whether the lie was a sin.’

‘No,’ said Madge, ‘a thousand times no.’

‘Brief and decisive.  Well, Mr Palmer, what do you say?’

‘That is rather an awkward question.  A lie is a lie.’

‘But not,’ broke in Madge, vehemently, ‘to save anybody whom you love.
Is a contemptible little two-foot measuring-tape to be applied to such an
action as that?’

‘The consequences of such a philosophy, though, my dear,’ said Mrs
Hopgood, ‘are rather serious.  The moment you dispense with a fixed
standard, you cannot refuse permission to other people to dispense with
it also.’

‘Ah, yes, I know all about that, but I am not going to give up my
instinct for the sake of a rule.  Do what you feel to be right, and let
the rule go hang.  Somebody, cleverer in logic than we are, will come
along afterwards and find a higher rule which we have obeyed, and will
formulate it concisely.’

‘As for my poor self,’ said Clara, ‘I do not profess to know, without the
rule, what is right and what is not.  We are always trying to transcend
the rule by some special pleading, and often in virtue of some fancied
superiority.  Generally speaking, the attempt is fatal.’

‘Madge,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘your dogmatic decision may have been
interesting, but it prevented the expression of Mr Palmer’s opinion.’

Madge bent forward and politely inclined her head to the embarrassed
Frank.

‘I do not know what to say.  I have never thought much about such
matters.  Is not what they call casuistry a science among Roman
Catholics?  If I were in a difficulty and could not tell right from
wrong, I should turn Catholic, and come to you as my priest, Mrs
Hopgood.’

‘Then you would do, not what you thought right yourself, but what I
thought right.  The worth of the right to you is that it is your right,
and that you arrive at it in your own way.  Besides, you might not have
time to consult anybody.  Were you never compelled to settle promptly a
case of this kind?’

‘I remember once at school, when the mathematical master was out of the
class-room, a boy named Carpenter ran up to the blackboard and wrote
“Carrots” on it.  That was the master’s nickname, for he was red-haired.
Scarcely was the word finished, when Carpenter heard him coming along the
passage.  There was just time partially to rub out some of the big
letters, but CAR remained, and Carpenter was standing at the board when
“Carrots” came in.  He was an excitable man, and he knew very well what
the boys called him.

‘“What have you been writing on the board, sir?”

‘“Carpenter, sir.”

‘The master examined the board.  The upper half of the second R was
plainly perceptible, but it might possibly have been a P.  He turned
round, looked steadily at Carpenter for a moment, and then looked at us.
Carpenter was no favourite, but not a soul spoke.

‘“Go to your place, sir.”

‘Carpenter went to his place, the letters were erased and the lesson was
resumed.  I was greatly perplexed; I had acquiesced in a cowardly
falsehood.  Carrots was a great friend of mine, and I could not bear to
feel that he was humbugged, so when we were outside I went up to
Carpenter and told him he was an infernal sneak, and we had a desperate
fight, and I licked him, and blacked both his eyes.  I did not know what
else to do.’

The company laughed.

‘We cannot,’ said Madge, ‘all of us come to terms after this fashion with
our consciences, but we have had enough of these discussions on morality.
Let us go out.’

They went out, and, as some relief from the straight road, they turned
into a field as they came home, and walked along a footpath which crossed
the broad, deep ditches by planks.  They were within about fifty yards of
the last and broadest ditch, more a dyke than a ditch, when Frank,
turning round, saw an ox which they had not noticed, galloping after
them.

‘Go on, go on,’ he cried, ‘make for the plank.’

He discerned in an instant that unless the course of the animal could be
checked it would overtake them before the bridge could be reached.  The
women fled, but Frank remained.  He was in the habit of carrying a heavy
walking-stick, the end of which he had hollowed out in his schooldays and
had filled up with lead.  Just as the ox came upon him, it laid its head
to the ground, and Frank, springing aside, dealt it a tremendous,
two-handed blow on the forehead with his knobbed weapon.  The creature
was dazed, it stopped and staggered, and in another instant Frank was
across the bridge in safety.  There was a little hysterical sobbing, but
it was soon over.

‘Oh, Mr Palmer,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘what presence of mind and what
courage!  We should have been killed without you.’

‘The feat is not original, Mrs Hopgood.  I saw it done by a tough little
farmer last summer on a bull that was really mad.  There was no ditch for
him though, poor fellow, and he had to jump a hedge.’

‘You did not find it difficult,’ said Madge, ‘to settle your problem when
it came to you in the shape of a wild ox.’

‘Because there was nothing to settle,’ said Frank, laughing; ‘there was
only one thing to be done.’

‘So you believed, or rather, so you saw,’ said Clara.  ‘I should have
seen half-a-dozen things at once—that is to say, nothing.’

‘And I,’ said Madge, ‘should have settled it the wrong way: I am sure I
should, even if I had been a man.  I should have bolted.’

Frank stayed to tea, and the evening was musical.  He left about ten, but
just as the door had shut he remembered he had forgotten his stick.  He
gave a gentle rap and Madge appeared.  She gave him his stick.

‘Good-bye again.  Thanks for my life.’

Frank cursed himself that he could not find the proper word.  He knew
there was something which might be said and ought to be said, but he
could not say it.  Madge held out her hand to him, he raised it to his
lips and kissed it, and then, astonished at his boldness, he instantly
retreated.  He went to the ‘Crown and Sceptre’ and was soon in bed, but
not to sleep.  Strange, that the moment we lie down in the dark, images,
which were half obscured, should become so intensely luminous!  Madge
hovered before Frank with almost tangible distinctness, and he felt his
fingers moving in her heavy, voluptuous tresses.  Her picture at last
became almost painful to him and shamed him, so that he turned over from
side to side to avoid it.  He had never been thrown into the society of
women of his own age, for he had no sister, and a fire was kindled within
him which burnt with a heat all the greater because his life had been so
pure.  At last he fell asleep and did not wake till late in the morning.
He had just time to eat his breakfast, pay one more business visit in the
town, and catch the coach due at eleven o’clock from Lincoln to London.
As the horses were being changed, he walked as near as he dared venture
to the windows of the cottage next door, but he could see nobody.  When
the coach, however, began to move, he turned round and looked behind him,
and a hand was waved to him.  He took off his hat, and in five minutes he
was clear of the town.  It was in sight a long way, but when, at last, it
disappeared, a cloud of wretchedness swept over him as the vapour sweeps
up from the sea.  What was she doing? talking to other people, existing
for others, laughing with others!  There were miles between himself and
Fenmarket.  Life! what was life?  A few moments of living and long,
dreary gaps between.  All this, however, is a vain attempt to delineate
what was shapeless.  It was an intolerable, unvanquishable oppression.
This was Love; this was the blessing which the god with the ruddy wings
had bestowed on him.  It was a relief to him when the coach rattled
through Islington, and in a few minutes had landed him at the ‘Angel.’




CHAPTER VI


THERE was to be a grand entertainment in the assembly room of the ‘Crown
and Sceptre’ in aid of the County Hospital.  Mrs Martin, widow of one of
the late partners in the bank, lived in a large house near Fenmarket, and
still had an interest in the business.  She was distinctly above anybody
who lived in the town, and she knew how to show her superiority by
venturing sometimes to do what her urban neighbours could not possibly
do.  She had been known to carry through the street a quart bottle of
horse physic although it was wrapped up in nothing but brown paper.  On
her way she met the brewer’s wife, who was more aggrieved than she was
when Mrs Martin’s carriage swept past her in the dusty, narrow lane which
led to the Hall.  Mrs Martin could also afford to recognise in a measure
the claims of education and talent.  A gentleman came from London to
lecture in the town, and showed astonished Fenmarket an orrery and a
magic lantern with dissolving views of the Holy Land.  The exhibition had
been provided in order to extinguish a debt incurred in repairing the
church, but the rector’s wife, and the brewer’s wife, after consultation,
decided that they must leave the lecturer to return to his inn.  Mrs
Martin, however, invited him to supper.  Of course she knew Mr Hopgood
well, and knew that he was no ordinary man.  She knew also something of
Mrs Hopgood and the daughters, and that they were no ordinary women.  She
had been heard to say that they were ladies, and that Mr Hopgood was a
gentleman; and she kept up a distant kind of intimacy with them, always
nodded to them whenever she met them, and every now and then sent them
grapes and flowers.  She had observed once or twice to Mrs Tubbs that Mr
Hopgood was a remarkable person, who was quite scientific and therefore
did not associate with the rest of the Fenmarket folk; and Mrs Tubbs was
much annoyed, particularly by a slight emphasis which she thought she
detected in the ‘therefore,’ for Mr Tubbs had told her that one of the
smaller London brewers, who had only about fifty public-houses, had
refused to meet at dinner a learned French chemist who had written books.
Mrs Martin could not make friends with the Hopgoods, nor enter the
cottage.  It would have been a transgression of that infinitely fine and
tortuous line whose inexplicable convolutions mark off what is forbidden
to a society lady.  Clearly, however, the Hopgoods could be requested to
co-operate at the ‘Crown and Sceptre;’ in fact, it would be impolitic not
to put some of the townsfolk on the list of patrons.  So it came about
that Mrs Hopgood was included, and that she was made responsible for the
provision of one song and one recitation.  For the song it was settled
that Frank Palmer should be asked, as he would be in Fenmarket.  Usually
he came but once every half year, but he had not been able, so he said,
to finish all his work the last time.  The recitation Madge undertook.

The evening arrived, the room was crowded and a dozen private carriages
stood in the ‘Crown and Sceptre’ courtyard.  Frank called for the
Hopgoods.  Mrs Hopgood and Clara sat with presentation tickets in the
second row, amongst the fashionable folk; Frank and Madge were upon the
platform.  Frank was loudly applauded in ‘_Il Mio Tesoro_,’ but the
loudest applause of the evening was reserved for Madge, who declaimed
Byron’s ‘_Destruction of Sennacherib_’ with much energy.  She certainly
looked very charming in her red gown, harmonising with her black hair.
The men in the audience were vociferous for something more, and would not
be contented until she again came forward.  The truth is, that the wily
young woman had prepared herself beforehand for possibilities, but she
artfully concealed her preparation.  Looking on the ground and
hesitating, she suddenly raised her head as if she had just remembered
something, and then repeated Sir Henry Wotton’s ‘_Happy Life_.’  She was
again greeted with cheers, subdued so as to be in accordance with the
character of the poem, but none the less sincere, and in the midst of
them she gracefully bowed and retired.  Mrs Martin complimented her
warmly at the end of the performance, and inwardly debated whether Madge
could be asked to enliven one of the parties at the Hall, and how it
could, at the same time, be made clear to the guests that she and her
mother, who must come with her, were not even acquaintances, properly so
called, but were patronised as persons of merit living in the town which
the Hall protected.  Mrs Martin was obliged to be very careful.  She
certainly was on the list at the Lord Lieutenant’s, but she was in the
outer ring, and she was not asked to those small and select little
dinners which were given to Sir Egerton, the Dean of Peterborough, Lord
Francis, and his brother, the county member.  She decided, however, that
she could make perfectly plain the conditions upon which the Hopgoods
would be present, and the next day she sent Madge a little note asking
her if she would ‘assist in some festivities’ at the Hall in about two
months’ time, which were to be given in celebration of the twenty-first
birthday of Mrs Martin’s third son.  The scene from the ‘_Tempest_,’
where Ferdinand and Miranda are discovered playing chess, was suggested,
and it was proposed that Madge should be Miranda, and Mr Palmer
Ferdinand.  Mrs Martin concluded with a hope that Mrs Hopgood and her
eldest daughter would ‘witness the performance.’

Frank joyously consented, for amateur theatricals had always attracted
him, and in a few short weeks he was again at Fenmarket.  He was obliged
to be there for three or four days before the entertainment, in order to
attend the rehearsals, which Mrs Martin had put under the control of a
professional gentleman from London, and Madge and he were consequently
compelled to make frequent journeys to the Hall.

At last the eventful night arrived, and a carriage was hired next door to
take the party.  They drove up to the grand entrance and were met by a
footman, who directed Madge and Frank to their dressing-rooms, and
escorted Mrs Hopgood and Clara to their places in the theatre.  They had
gone early in order to accommodate Frank and Madge, and they found
themselves alone.  They were surprised that there was nobody to welcome
them, and a little more surprised when they found that the places
allotted to them were rather in the rear.  Presently two or three
fiddlers were seen, who began to tune their instruments.  Then some
Fenmarket folk and some of the well-to-do tenants on the estate made
their appearance, and took seats on either side of Mrs Hopgood and Clara.
Quite at the back were the servants.  At five minutes to eight the band
struck up the overture to ‘_Zampa_,’ and in the midst of it in sailed Mrs
Martin and a score or two of fashionably-dressed people, male and female.
The curtain ascended and Prospero’s cell was seen.  Alonso and his
companions were properly grouped, and Prospero began,—

             ‘Behold, Sir King,
    The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero.’

The audience applauded him vigorously when he came to the end of his
speech, but there was an instantaneous cry of ‘hush!’ when Prospero
disclosed the lovers.  It was really very pretty.  Miranda wore a loose,
simple, white robe, and her wonderful hair was partly twisted into a
knot, and partly strayed down to her waist.  The dialogue between the two
was spoken with much dramatic feeling, and when Ferdinand came to the
lines—

             ‘Sir, she is mortal,
    But by immortal Providence she’s mine,’

old Boston, a worthy and wealthy farmer, who sat next to Mrs Hopgood,
cried out ‘hear, hear!’ but was instantly suppressed.

He put his head down behind the people in front of him, rubbed his knees,
grinned, and then turned to Mrs Hopgood, whom he knew, and whispered,
with his hand to his mouth,—

‘And a precious lucky chap he is.’

Mrs Hopgood watched intently, and when Gonzalo invoked the gods to drop a
blessed crown on the couple, and the applause was renewed, and Boston
again cried ‘hear, hear!’ without fear of check, she did not applaud, for
something told her that behind this stage show a drama was being played
of far more serious importance.

The curtain fell, but there were loud calls for the performers.  It rose,
and they presented themselves, Alonso still holding the hands of the
happy pair.  The cheering now was vociferous, more particularly when a
wreath was flung at the feet of the young princess, and Ferdinand,
stooping, placed it on her head.

Again the curtain fell, the band struck up some dance music and the
audience were treated to ‘something light,’ and roared with laughter at a
pretty chambermaid at an inn who captivated and bamboozled a young booby
who was staying there, pitched him overboard; ‘wondered what he meant;’
sang an audacious song recounting her many exploits, and finished with a
_pas-seul_.

The performers and their friends were invited to a sumptuous supper, and
the Fenmarket folk were not at home until half-past two in the morning.
On their way back, Clara broke out against the juxtaposition of
Shakespeare and such vulgarity.

‘Much better,’ she said, ‘to have left the Shakespeare out altogether.
The lesson of the sequence is that each is good in its way, a perfectly
hateful doctrine to me.

Frank and Madge were, however, in the best of humours, especially Frank,
who had taken a glass of wine beyond his customary very temperate
allowance.

‘But, Miss Hopgood, Mrs Martin had to suit all tastes; we must not be too
severe upon her.’

There was something in this remark most irritating to Clara; the word
‘tastes,’ for example, as if the difference between Miranda and the
chambermaid were a matter of ‘taste.’  She was annoyed too with Frank’s
easy, cheery tones for she felt deeply what she said, and his mitigation
and smiling latitudinarianism were more exasperating than direct
opposition.

‘I am sure,’ continued Frank, ‘that if we were to take the votes of the
audience, Miranda would be the queen of the evening;’ and he put the
crown which he had brought away with him on her head again.

Clara was silent.  In a few moments they were at the door of their house.
It had begun to rain, and Madge, stepping out of the carriage in a hurry,
threw a shawl over her head, forgetting the wreath.  It fell into the
gutter and was splashed with mud.  Frank picked it up, wiped it as well
as he could with his pocket-handkerchief, took it into the parlour and
laid it on a chair.




CHAPTER VII


THE next morning it still rained, a cold rain from the north-east, a very
disagreeable type of weather on the Fenmarket flats.  Madge was not awake
until late, and when she caught sight of the grey sky and saw her finery
tumbled on the floor—no further use for it in any shape save as rags—and
the dirty crown, which she had brought upstairs, lying on the heap, the
leaves already fading, she felt depressed and miserable.  The breakfast
was dull, and for the most part all three were silent.  Mrs Hopgood and
Clara went away to begin their housework, leaving Madge alone.

‘Madge,’ cried Mrs Hopgood, ‘what am I to do with this thing?  It is of
no use to preserve it; it is dead and covered with dirt.’

‘Throw it down here.’

She took it and rammed it into the fire.  At that moment she saw Frank
pass.  He was evidently about to knock, but she ran to the door and
opened it.

‘I did not wish to keep you waiting in the wet.’

‘I am just off but I could not help calling to see how you are.  What!
burning your laurels, the testimony to your triumph?’

‘Triumph! rather transitory; finishes in smoke,’ and she pushed two or
three of the unburnt leaves amongst the ashes and covered them over.  He
stooped down, picked up a leaf, smoothed it between his fingers, and then
raised his eyes.  They met hers at that instant, as she lifted them and
looked in his face.  They were near one another, and his hands strayed
towards hers till they touched.  She did not withdraw; he clasped the
hand, she not resisting; in another moment his arms were round her, his
face was on hers, and he was swept into self-forgetfulness.  Suddenly the
horn of the coach about to start awoke him, and he murmured the line from
one of his speeches of the night before—

    ‘But by immortal Providence she’s mine.’

She released herself a trifle, held her head back as if she desired to
survey him apart from her, so that the ecstasy of union might be renewed,
and then fell on his neck.

The horn once more sounded, she let him out silently, and he was off.
Mrs Hopgood and Clara presently came downstairs.

‘Mr Palmer came in to bid you good-bye, but he heard the coach and was
obliged to rush away.’

‘What a pity,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘that you did not call us.’

‘I thought he would be able to stay longer.’

The lines which followed Frank’s quotation came into her head,—

    ‘Sweet lord, you play me false.’
          ‘No, my dearest love,
       I would not for the world.’

‘An omen,’ she said to herself; ‘“he would not for the world.”’

She was in the best of spirits all day long.  When the housework was over
and they were quiet together, she said,—

‘Now, my dear mother and sister, I want to know how the performance
pleased you.’

‘It was as good as it could be,’ replied her mother, ‘but I cannot think
why all plays should turn upon lovemaking.  I wonder whether the time
will ever come when we shall care for a play in which there is no
courtship.’

‘What a horrible heresy, mother,’ said Madge.

‘It may be so; it may be that I am growing old, but it seems astonishing
to me sometimes that the world does not grow a little weary of endless
variations on the same theme.’

‘Never,’ said Madge, ‘as long as it does not weary of the thing itself,
and it is not likely to do that.  Fancy a young man and a young woman
stopping short and exclaiming, “This is just what every son of Adam and
daughter of Eve has gone through before; why should we proceed?”
Besides, it is the one emotion common to the whole world; we can all
comprehend it.  Once more, it reveals character.  In _Hamlet_ and
_Othello_, for example, what is interesting is not solely the bare love.
The natures of Hamlet and Othello are brought to light through it as they
would not have been through any other stimulus.  I am sure that no
ordinary woman ever shows what she really is, except when she is in love.
Can you tell what she is from what she calls her religion, or from her
friends, or even from her husband?’

‘Would it not be equally just to say women are more alike in love than in
anything else?  Mind, I do not say alike, but more alike.  Is it not the
passion which levels us all?’

‘Oh, mother, mother! did one ever hear such dreadful blasphemy?  That the
loves, for example, of two such cultivated, exquisite creatures as Clara
and myself would be nothing different from those of the barmaids next
door?’

‘Well, at anyrate, I do not want to see _my_ children in love to
understand what they are—to me at least.’

‘Then, if you comprehend us so completely—and let us have no more
philosophy—just tell me, should I make a good actress?  Oh! to be able to
sway a thousand human beings into tears or laughter!  It must be divine.’

‘No, I do not think you would,’ replied Clara.

‘Why not, miss?  _Your_ opinion, mind, was not asked.  Did I not act to
perfection last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why are you so decisive?’

‘Try a different part some day.  I may be mistaken.’

‘You are very oracular.’

She turned to the piano, played a few chords, closed the instrument,
swung herself round on the music stool, and said she should go for a
walk.




CHAPTER VIII


IT was Mr Palmer’s design to send Frank abroad as soon as he understood
the home trade.  It was thought it would be an advantage to him to learn
something of foreign manufacturing processes.  Frank had gladly agreed to
go, but he was now rather in the mood for delay.  Mr Palmer conjectured a
reason for it, and the conjecture was confirmed when, after two or three
more visits to Fenmarket, perfectly causeless, so far as business was
concerned, Frank asked for the paternal sanction to his engagement with
Madge.  Consent was willingly given, for Mr Palmer knew the family well;
letters passed between him and Mrs Hopgood, and it was arranged that
Frank’s visit to Germany should be postponed till the summer.  He was now
frequently at Fenmarket as Madge’s accepted suitor, and, as the spring
advanced, their evenings were mostly spent by themselves out of doors.
One afternoon they went for a long walk, and on their return they rested
by a stile.  Those were the days when Tennyson was beginning to stir the
hearts of the young people in England, and the two little green volumes
had just become a treasure in the Hopgood household.  Mr Palmer, senior,
knew them well, and Frank, hearing his father speak so enthusiastically
about them, thought Madge would like them, and had presented them to her.
He had heard one or two read aloud at home, and had looked at one or two
himself, but had gone no further.  Madge, her mother, and her sister had
read and re-read them.

‘Oh,’ said Madge, ‘for that Vale in Ida.  Here in these fens how I long
for something that is not level!  Oh, for the roar of—

    “The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine
    In cataract after cataract to the sea.”

Go on with it, Frank.’

‘I cannot.’

‘But you know _Œnone_?’

‘I cannot say I do.  I began it—’

‘Frank, how could you begin it and lay it down unfinished?  Besides,
those lines are some of the first; you _must_ remember—

    “Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
    Stands up and takes the morning.”’

‘No, I do not recollect, but I will learn them; learn them for your
sake.’

‘I do not want you to learn them for my sake.’

‘But I shall.’

She had taken off her hat and his hand strayed to her neck.  Her head
fell on his shoulder and she had forgotten his ignorance of _Œnone_.
Presently she awoke from her delicious trance and they moved homewards in
silence.  Frank was a little uneasy.

‘I do greatly admire Tennyson,’ he said.

‘What do you admire?  You have hardly looked at him.’

‘I saw a very good review of him.  I will look that review up, by the
way, before I come down again.  Mr Maurice was talking about it.’

Madge had a desire to say something, but she did not know what to say, a
burden lay upon her chest.  It was that weight which presses there when
we are alone with those with whom we are not strangers, but with whom we
are not completely at home, and she actually found herself impatient and
half-desirous of solitude.  This must be criminal or disease, she thought
to herself, and she forcibly recalled Frank’s virtues.  She was so far
successful that when they parted and he kissed her, she was more than
usually caressing, and her ardent embrace, at least for the moment,
relieved that unpleasant sensation in the region of the heart.  When he
had gone she reasoned with herself.  What a miserable counterfeit of
love, she argued, is mere intellectual sympathy, a sympathy based on
books!  What did Miranda know about Ferdinand’s ‘views’ on this or that
subject?  Love is something independent of ‘views.’  It is an attraction
which has always been held to be inexplicable, but whatever it may be it
is not ‘views.’  She was becoming a little weary, she thought, of what
was called ‘culture.’  These creatures whom we know through Shakespeare
and Goethe are ghostly.  What have we to do with them?  It is idle work
to read or even to talk fine things about them.  It ends in nothing.
What we really have to go through and that which goes through it are
interesting, but not circumstances and character impossible to us.  When
Frank spoke of his business, which he understood, he was wise, and some
observations which he made the other day, on the management of his
workpeople, would have been thought original if they had been printed.
The true artist knows that his hero must be a character shaping events
and shaped by them, and not a babbler about literature.  Frank, also, was
so susceptible.  He liked to hear her read to him, and her enthusiasm
would soon be his.  Moreover, how gifted he was, unconsciously, with all
that makes a man admirable, with courage, with perfect unselfishness!
How handsome he was, and then his passion for her!  She had read
something of passion, but she never knew till now what the white
intensity of its flame in a man could be.  She was committed, too,
happily committed; it was an engagement.

Thus, whenever doubt obtruded itself, she poured a self-raised tide over
it and concealed it.  Alas! it could not be washed away; it was a little
sharp rock based beneath the ocean’s depths, and when the water ran low
its dark point reappeared.  She was more successful, however, than many
women would have been, for, although her interest in ideas was deep,
there was fire in her blood, and Frank’s arm around her made the world
well nigh disappear; her surrender was entire, and if Sinai had thundered
in her ears she would not have heard.  She was destitute of that power,
which her sister possessed, of surveying herself from a distance.  On the
contrary, her emotion enveloped her, and the safeguard of reflection on
it was impossible to her.

As to Frank, no doubt ever approached him.  He was intoxicated, and
beside himself.  He had been brought up in a clean household, knowing
nothing of the vice by which so many young men are overcome, and woman
hitherto had been a mystery to him.  Suddenly he found himself the
possessor of a beautiful creature, whose lips it was lawful to touch and
whose heartbeats he could feel as he pressed her to his breast.  It was
permitted him to be alone with her, to sit on the floor and rest his head
on her knees, and he had ventured to capture one of her slippers and
carry it off to London, where he kept it locked up amongst his treasures.
If he had been drawn over Fenmarket sluice in a winter flood he would not
have been more incapable of resistance.

Every now and then Clara thought she discerned in Madge that she was not
entirely content, but the cloud-shadows swept past so rapidly and were
followed by such dazzling sunshine that she was perplexed and hoped that
her sister’s occasional moodiness might be due to parting and absence, or
the anticipation of them.  She never ventured to say anything about Frank
to Madge, for there was something in her which forbade all approach from
that side.  Once when he had shown his ignorance of what was so familiar
to the Hopgoods, and Clara had expected some sign of dissatisfaction from
her sister, she appeared ostentatiously to champion him against
anticipated criticism.  Clara interpreted the warning and was silent,
but, after she had left the room with her mother in order that the lovers
might be alone, she went upstairs and wept many tears.  Ah! it is a sad
experience when the nearest and dearest suspects that we are aware of
secret disapproval, knows that it is justifiable, throws up a rampart and
becomes defensively belligerent.  From that moment all confidence is at
an end.  Without a word, perhaps, the love and friendship of years
disappear, and in the place of two human beings transparent to each
other, there are two who are opaque and indifferent.  Bitter, bitter!  If
the cause of separation were definite disagreement upon conduct or
belief, we could pluck up courage, approach and come to an understanding,
but it is impossible to bring to speech anything which is so close to the
heart, and there is, therefore, nothing left for us but to submit and be
dumb.




CHAPTER IX


IT was now far into June, and Madge and Frank extended their walks and
returned later.  He had come down to spend his last Sunday with the
Hopgoods before starting with his father for Germany, and on the Monday
they were to leave London.

Wordsworth was one of the divinities at Stoke Newington, and just before
Frank visited Fenmarket that week, he had heard the _Intimations of
Immortality_ read with great fervour.  Thinking that Madge would be
pleased with him if she found that he knew something about that famous
Ode, and being really smitten with some of the passages in it, he learnt
it, and just as they were about to turn homewards one sultry evening he
suddenly began to repeat it, and declaimed it to the end with much
rhetorical power.

‘Bravo!’ said Madge, ‘but, of all Wordsworth’s poems, that is the one for
which I believe I care the least.’

Frank’s countenance fell.

‘Oh, me!  I thought it was just what would suit you.’

‘No, not particularly.  There are some noble lines in it; for example—

    “And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
    Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”

But the very title—_Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood_—is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which is in
everybody’s mouth—

    “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;”

and still worse the vision of “that immortal sea,” and of the children
who “sport upon the shore,” they convey nothing whatever to me.  I find
though they are much admired by the clergy of the better sort, and by
certain religiously-disposed people, to whom thinking is distasteful or
impossible.  Because they cannot definitely believe, they fling
themselves with all the more fervour upon these cloudy Wordsworthian
phrases, and imagine they see something solid in the coloured fog.’

It was now growing dark and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, but
in a minute or two they ceased.  Frank, contrary to his usual wont, was
silent.  There was something undiscovered in Madge, a region which he had
not visited and perhaps could not enter.  She discerned in an instant
what she had done, and in an instant repented.  He had taken so much
pains with a long piece of poetry for her sake: was not that better than
agreement in a set of propositions?  Scores of persons might think as she
thought about the ode, who would not spend a moment in doing anything to
gratify her.  It was delightful also to reflect that Frank imagined she
would sympathise with anything written in that temper.  She recalled what
she herself had said when somebody gave Clara a copy in ‘Parian’ of a
Greek statue, a thing coarse in outline and vulgar.  Clara was about to
put it in a cupboard in the attic, but Madge had pleaded so pathetically
that the donor had in a measure divined what her sister loved, and had
done her best, although she had made a mistake, that finally the statue
was placed on the bedroom mantelpiece.  Madge’s heart overflowed, and
Frank had never attracted her so powerfully as at that moment.  She took
his hand softly in hers.

‘Frank,’ she murmured, as she bent her head towards him, ‘it is really a
lovely poem.’

Suddenly there was a flash of forked lightning at some distance, followed
in a few seconds by a roll of thunder increasing in intensity until the
last reverberation seemed to shake the ground.  They took refuge in a
little barn and sat down.  Madge, who was timid and excited in a
thunderstorm, closed her eyes to shield herself from the glare.

The tumult in the heavens lasted for nearly two hours and, when it was
over, Madge and Frank walked homewards without speaking a word for a good
part of the way.

‘I cannot, cannot go to-morrow,’ he suddenly cried, as they neared the
town.

‘You _shall_ go,’ she replied calmly.

‘But, Madge, think of me in Germany, think what my dreams and thoughts
will be—you here—hundreds of miles between us.’

She had never seen him so shaken with terror.

‘You _shall_ go; not another word.’

‘I must say something—what can I say?  My God, my God, have mercy on me!’

‘Mercy! mercy!’ she repeated, half unconsciously, and then rousing
herself, exclaimed, ‘You shall not say it; I will not hear; now,
good-bye.’

They had come to the door; he went inside; she took his face between her
hands, left one kiss on his forehead, led him back to the doorway and he
heard the bolts drawn.  When he recovered himself he went to the ‘Crown
and Sceptre’ and tried to write a letter to her, but the words looked
hateful, horrible on the paper, and they were not the words he wanted.
He dared not go near the house the next morning, but as he passed it on
the coach he looked at the windows.  Nobody was to be seen, and that
night he left England.

‘Did you hear,’ said Clara to her mother at breakfast, ‘that the
lightning struck one of the elms in the avenue at Mrs Martin’s yesterday
evening and splintered it to the ground?’




CHAPTER X


IN a few days Madge received the following letter:—

                                                        ‘FRANKFORT, O. M.,
                                                        HÔTEL WAIDENBUSCH.

    ‘MY DEAREST MADGE,—I do not know how to write to you.  I have begun a
    dozen letters but I cannot bring myself to speak of what lies before
    me, hiding the whole world from me.  Forgiveness! how is any
    forgiveness possible?  But Madge, my dearest Madge, remember that my
    love is intenser than ever.  What has happened has bound you closer
    to me.  I _implore_ you to let me come back.  I will find a thousand
    excuses for returning, and we will marry.  We had vowed marriage to
    each other and why should not our vows be fulfilled?  Marriage,
    marriage _at once_.  You will not, you _cannot_, no, you _cannot_,
    you must see you cannot refuse.  My father wishes to make this town
    his headquarters for ten days.  Write by return for mercy’s
    sake.—Your ever devoted

                                                                  ‘FRANK.’

The reply came only a day late.

    ‘MY DEAR FRANK,—Forgiveness!  Who is to be forgiven?  Not you.  You
    believed you loved me, but I doubted my love, and I know now that no
    true love for you exists.  We must part, and part forever.  Whatever
    wrong may have been done, marriage to avoid disgrace would be a wrong
    to both of us infinitely greater.  I owe you an expiation; your
    release is all I can offer, and it is insufficient.  I can only plead
    that I was deaf and blind.  By some miracle, I cannot tell how, my
    ears and eyes are opened, and I hear and see.  It is not the first
    time in my life that the truth has been revealed to me suddenly,
    supernaturally, I may say, as if in a vision, and I know the
    revelation is authentic.  There must be no wavering, no
    half-measures, and I absolutely forbid another letter from you.  If
    one arrives I must, for the sake of my own peace and resolution,
    refuse to read it.  You have simply to announce to your father that
    the engagement is at an end, and give no reasons.—Your faithful
    friend

                                                          ‘MADGE HOPGOOD.’

Another letter did come, but Madge was true to her word, and it was
returned unopened.

For a long time Frank was almost incapable of reflection.  He dwelt on an
event which might happen, but which he dared not name; and if it should
happen!  Pictures of his father, his home his father’s friends,
Fenmarket, the Hopgood household, passed before him with such wild
rapidity and intermingled complexity that it seemed as if the reins had
dropped out of his hands and he was being hurried away to madness.

He resisted with all his might this dreadful sweep of the imagination,
tried to bring himself back into sanity and to devise schemes by which,
although he was prohibited from writing to Madge, he might obtain news of
her.  Her injunction might not be final.  There was but one hope for him,
one possibility of extrication, one necessity—their marriage.  It _must_
be.  He dared not think of what might be the consequences if they did not
marry.

Hitherto Madge had given no explanation to her mother or sister of the
rupture, but one morning—nearly two months had now passed—Clara did not
appear at breakfast.

‘Clara is not here,’ said Mrs Hopgood; ‘she was very tired last night,
perhaps it is better not to disturb her.’

‘Oh, no! please let her alone.  I will see if she still sleeps.’

Madge went upstairs, opened her sister’s door noiselessly, saw that she
was not awake, and returned.  When breakfast was over she rose, and after
walking up and down the room once or twice, seated herself in the
armchair by her mother’s side.  Her mother drew herself a little nearer,
and took Madge’s hand gently in her own.

‘Madge, my child, have you nothing to say to your mother?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Cannot you tell me why Frank and you have parted?  Do you not think I
ought to know something about such an event in the life of one so close
to me?’

‘I broke off the engagement: we were not suited to one another.’

‘I thought as much; I honour you; a thousand times better that you should
separate now than find out your mistake afterwards when it is
irrevocable.  Thank God, He has given you such courage!  But you must
have suffered—I know you must;’ and she tenderly kissed her daughter.

‘Oh, mother! mother!’ cried Madge, ‘what is the worst—at least to—you—the
worst that can happen to a woman?’

Mrs Hopgood did not speak; something presented itself which she refused
to recognise, but she shuddered.  Before she could recover herself Madge
broke out again,—

‘It has happened to me; mother, your daughter has wrecked your peace for
ever!’

‘And he has abandoned you?’

‘No, no; I told you it was I who left him.’

It was Mrs Hopgood’s custom, when any evil news was suddenly communicated
to her, to withdraw at once if possible to her own room.  She detached
herself from Madge, rose, and, without a word, went upstairs and locked
her door.  The struggle was terrible.  So much thought, so much care,
such an education, such noble qualities, and they had not accomplished
what ordinary ignorant Fenmarket mothers and daughters were able to
achieve!  This fine life, then, was a failure, and a perfect example of
literary and artistic training had gone the way of the common wenches
whose affiliation cases figured in the county newspaper.  She was shaken
and bewildered.  She was neither orthodox nor secular.  She was too
strong to be afraid that what she disbelieved could be true, and yet a
fatal weakness had been disclosed in what had been set up as its
substitute.  She could not treat her child as a sinner who was to be
tortured into something like madness by immitigable punishment, but, on
the other hand, she felt that this sorrow was unlike other sorrows and
that it could never be healed.  For some time she was powerless, blown
this way and that way by contradictory storms, and unable to determine
herself to any point whatever.  She was not, however, new to the tempest.
She had lived and had survived when she thought she must have gone down.
She had learned the wisdom which the passage through desperate straits
can bring.  At last she prayed and in a few minutes a message was
whispered to her.  She went into the breakfast-room and seated herself
again by Madge.  Neither uttered a word, but Madge fell down before her,
and, with a great cry, buried her face in her mother’s lap.  She remained
kneeling for some time waiting for a rebuke, but none came.  Presently
she felt smoothing hands on her head and the soft impress of lips.  So
was she judged.




CHAPTER XI


IT was settled that they should leave Fenmarket.  Their departure caused
but little surprise.  They had scarcely any friends, and it was always
conjectured that people so peculiar would ultimately find their way to
London.  They were particularly desirous to conceal their movements, and
therefore determined to warehouse their furniture in town, to take
furnished apartments there for three months, and then to move elsewhere.
Any letters which might arrive at Fenmarket for them during these three
months would be sent to them at their new address; nothing probably would
come afterwards, and as nobody in Fenmarket would care to take any
trouble about them, their trace would become obliterated.  They found
some rooms near Myddelton Square, Pentonville, not a particularly
cheerful place, but they wished to avoid a more distant suburb, and
Pentonville was cheap.  Fortunately for them they had no difficulty
whatever in getting rid of the Fenmarket house for the remainder of their
term.

For a little while London diverted them after a fashion, but the absence
of household cares told upon them.  They had nothing to do but to read
and to take dismal walks through Islington and Barnsbury, and the gloom
of the outlook thickened as the days became shorter and the smoke began
to darken the air.  Madge was naturally more oppressed than the others,
not only by reason of her temperament, but because she was the author of
the trouble which had befallen them.  Her mother and Clara did everything
to sustain and to cheer her.  They possessed the rare virtue of
continuous tenderness.  The love, which with many is an inspiration, was
with them their own selves, from which they could not be separated; a
harsh word could not therefore escape from them.  It was as impossible as
that there should be any failure in the pressure with which the rocks
press towards the earth’s centre.  Madge at times was very far gone in
melancholy.  How different this thing looked when it was close at hand;
when she personally was to be the victim!  She had read about it in
history, the surface of which it seemed scarcely to ripple; it had been
turned to music in some of her favourite poems and had lent a charm to
innumerable mythologies, but the actual fact was nothing like the poetry
or mythology, and threatened to ruin her own history altogether.  Nor
would it be her own history solely, but more or less that of her mother
and sister.

Had she believed in the common creed, her attention would have been
concentrated on the salvation of her own soul; she would have found her
Redeemer and would have been comparatively at peace; she would have
acknowledged herself convicted of infinite sin, and hell would have been
opened before her, but above the sin and the hell she would have seen the
distinct image of the Mediator abolishing both.  Popular theology makes
personal salvation of such immense importance that, in comparison
therewith, we lose sight of the consequences to others of our misdeeds.
The sense of cruel injustice to those who loved her remained with Madge
perpetually.

To obtain relief she often went out of London for the day; sometimes her
mother and sister went with her; sometimes she insisted on going alone.
One autumn morning, she found herself at Letherhead, the longest trip she
had undertaken, for there were scarcely any railways then.  She wandered
about till she discovered a footpath which took her to a mill-pond, which
spread itself out into a little lake.  It was fed by springs which burst
up through the ground.  She watched at one particular point, and saw the
water boil up with such force that it cleared a space of a dozen yards in
diameter from every weed, and formed a transparent pool just tinted with
that pale azure which is peculiar to the living fountains which break out
from the bottom of the chalk.  She was fascinated for a moment by the
spectacle, and reflected upon it, but she passed on.  In about
three-quarters of an hour she found herself near a church, larger than an
ordinary village church, and, as she was tired, and the gate of the
church porch was open, she entered and sat down.  The sun streamed in
upon her, and some sheep which had strayed into the churchyard from the
adjoining open field came almost close to her, unalarmed, and looked in
her face.  The quiet was complete, and the air so still, that a yellow
leaf dropping here and there from the churchyard elms—just beginning to
turn—fell quiveringly in a straight path to the earth.  Sick at heart and
despairing, she could not help being touched, and she thought to herself
how strange the world is—so transcendent both in glory and horror; a
world capable of such scenes as those before her, and a world in which
such suffering as hers could be; a world infinite both ways.  The porch
gate was open because the organist was about to practise, and in another
instant she was listening to the _Kyrie_ from Beethoven’s Mass in C.  She
knew it; Frank had tried to give her some notion of it on the piano, and
since she had been in London she had heard it at St Mary’s, Moorfields.
She broke down and wept, but there was something new in her sorrow, and
it seemed as if a certain Pity overshadowed her.

She had barely recovered herself when she saw a woman, apparently about
fifty, coming towards her with a wicker basket on her arm.  She sat down
beside Madge, put her basket on the ground, and wiped her face with her
apron.

‘Marnin’ miss! its rayther hot walkin’, isn’t it?  I’ve come all the way
from Darkin, and I’m goin’ to Great Oakhurst.  That’s a longish step
there and back again; not that this is the nearest way, but I don’t like
climbing them hills, and then when I get to Letherhead I shall have a
lift in a cart.’

Madge felt bound to say something as the sunburnt face looked kind and
motherly.

‘I suppose you live at Great Oakhurst?’

‘Yes.  I do: my husband, God bless him! he was a kind of foreman at The
Towers, and when he died I was left alone and didn’t know what to be at,
as both my daughters were out and one married; so I took the general shop
at Great Oakhurst, as Longwood used to have, but it don’t pay for I ain’t
used to it, and the house is too big for me, and there isn’t nobody
proper to mind it when I goes over to Darkin for anything.’

‘Are you going to leave?’

‘Well, I don’t quite know yet, miss, but I thinks I shall live with my
daughter in London.  She’s married a cabinetmaker in Great Ormond Street:
they let lodgings, too.  Maybe you know that part?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘You don’t live in London, then?’

‘Yes, I do.  I came from London this morning.’

‘The Lord have mercy on us, did you though!  I suppose, then, you’re
a-visitin’ here.  I know most of the folk hereabouts.’

‘No: I am going back this afternoon.’

Her interrogator was puzzled and her curiosity stimulated.  Presently she
looked in Madge’s face.

‘Ah! my poor dear, you’ll excuse me, I don’t mean to be forward, but I
see you’ve been a-cryin’: there’s somebody buried here.’

‘No.’

That was all she could say.  The walk from Letherhead, and the excitement
had been too much for her and she fainted.  Mrs Caffyn, for that was her
name, was used to fainting fits.  She was often ‘a bit faint’ herself,
and she instantly loosened Madge’s gown, brought out some smelling-salts
and also a little bottle of brandy and water.  Something suddenly struck
her.  She took up Madge’s hand: there was no wedding ring on it.

Presently her patient recovered herself.

‘Look you now, my dear; you aren’t noways fit to go back to London
to-day.  If you was my child you shouldn’t do it for all the gold in the
Indies, no, nor you sha’n’t now.  I shouldn’t have a wink of sleep this
night if I let you go, and if anything were to happen to you it would be
me as ’ud have to answer for it.’

‘But I must go; my mother and sister will not know what has become of
me.’

‘You leave that to me; I tell you again as you can’t go.  I’ve been a
mother myself, and I haven’t had children for nothing.  I was just
a-goin’ to send a little parcel up to my daughter by the coach, and her
husband’s a-goin’ to meet it.  She’d left something behind last week when
she was with me, and I thought I’d get a bit of fresh butter here for her
and put along with it.  They make better butter in the farm in the bottom
there, than they do at Great Oakhurst.  A note inside now will get to
your mother all right; you have a bit of something to eat and drink here,
and you’ll be able to walk along of me just into Letherhead, and then you
can ride to Great Oakhurst; it’s only about two miles, and you can stay
there all night.’

Madge was greatly touched; she took Mrs Caffyn’s hands in hers, pressed
them both and consented.  She was very weary, and the stamp on Mrs
Caffyn’s countenance was indubitable; it was evidently no forgery, but of
royal mintage.  They walked slowly to Letherhead, and there they found
the carrier’s cart, which took them to Great Oakhurst.




CHAPTER XII


MRS CAFFYN’S house was a roomy old cottage near the church, with a
bow-window in which were displayed bottles of ‘suckers,’ and of Day &
Martin’s blacking, cotton stuffs, a bag of nuts and some mugs, cups and
saucers.  Inside were salt butter, washing-blue, drapery, treacle,
starch, tea, tobacco and snuff, cheese, matches, bacon, and a few drugs,
such as black draught, magnesia, pills, sulphur, dill-water, Dalby’s
Carminative, and steel-drops.  There was also a small stock of
writing-paper, string and tin ware.  A boy was behind the counter.  When
Mrs Caffyn was out he always asked the customers who desired any article,
the sale of which was in any degree an art, to call again when she
returned.  He went as far as those things which were put up in packets,
such as what were called ‘grits’ for making gruel, and he was also
authorised to venture on pennyworths of liquorice and peppermints, but
the sale of half-a-dozen yards of cotton print was as much above him as
the negotiation of a treaty of peace would be to a messenger in the
Foreign Office.  In fact, nobody, excepting children, went into the shop
when Mrs Caffyn was not to be seen there, and, if she had to go to
Dorking or Letherhead on business, she always chose the middle of the
day, when the folk were busy at their homes or in the fields.  Poor
woman! she was much tried.  Half the people who dealt with her were in
her debt, but she could not press them for her money.  During winter-time
they were discharged by the score from their farms, but as they were not
sufficiently philosophic, or sufficiently considerate for their fellows
to hang or drown themselves, they were obliged to consume food, and to
wear clothes, for which they tried to pay by instalments during spring,
summer and autumn.  Mrs Caffyn managed to make both ends meet by the help
of two or three pigs, by great economy, and by letting some of her
superfluous rooms.  Great Oakhurst was not a show place nor a Spa, but
the Letherhead doctor had once recommended her to a physician in London,
who occasionally sent her a patient who wanted nothing but rest and fresh
air.  She also, during the shooting-season, was often asked to find a
bedroom for visitors to The Towers.

She might have done better had she been on thoroughly good terms with the
parson.  She attended church on Sunday morning with tolerable regularity.
She never went inside a dissenting chapel, and was not heretical on any
definite theological point, but the rector and she were not friends.  She
had lived in Surrey ever since she was a child, but she was not Surrey
born.  Both her father and mother came from the north country, and
migrated southwards when she was very young.  They were better educated
than the southerners amongst whom they came; and although their daughter
had no schooling beyond what was obtainable in a Surrey village of that
time, she was distinguished by a certain superiority which she had
inherited or acquired from her parents.  She was never subservient to the
rector after the fashion of her neighbours; she never curtsied to him,
and if he passed and nodded she said ‘Marnin’, sir,’ in just the same
tone as that in which she said it to the smallest of the Great Oakhurst
farmers.  Her church-going was an official duty incumbent upon her as the
proprietor of the only shop in the parish.  She had nothing to do with
church matters except on Sunday, and she even went so far as to neglect
to send for the rector when one of her children lay dying.  She was
attacked for the omission, but she defended herself.

‘What was the use when the poor dear was only seven year old?  What call
was there for him to come to a blessed innocent like that?  I did tell
him to look in when my husband was took, for I know as before we were
married there was something atween him and that gal Sanders.  He never
would own up to me about it, and I thought as he might to a clergyman,
and, if he did, it would ease his mind and make it a bit better for him
afterwards; but, Lord! it warn’t no use, for he went off and we didn’t so
much as hear her name, not even when he was a-wandering.  I says to
myself when the parson left, “What’s the good of having you?”’

Mrs Caffyn was a Christian, but she was a disciple of St James rather
than of St Paul.  She believed, of course, the doctrines of the
Catechism, in the sense that she denied none, and would have assented to
all if she had been questioned thereon; but her belief that ‘faith, if it
hath not works, is dead, being alone,’ was something very vivid and very
practical.

Her estimate, too, of the relative values of the virtues and of the
relative sinfulness of sins was original, and the rector therefore told
all his parishioners that she was little better than a heathen.  The
common failings in that part of the country amongst the poor were
Saturday-night drunkenness and looseness in the relations between the
young men and young women.  Mrs Caffyn’s indignation never rose to the
correct boiling point against these crimes.  The rector once ventured to
say, as the case was next door to her,—

‘It is very sad, is it not, Mrs Caffyn, that Polesden should be so
addicted to drink.  I hope he did not disturb you last Saturday night.  I
have given the constable directions to look after the street more closely
on Saturday evening, and if Polesden again offends he must be taken up.’

Mrs Caffyn was behind her own counter.  She had just served a customer
with two ounces of Dutch cheese, and she sat down on her stool.  Being
rather a heavy woman she always sat down when she was not busy, and she
never rose merely to talk.

‘Yes, it is sad, sir, and Polesden isn’t no particular friend of mine,
but I tell you what’s sad too, sir, and that’s the way them people are
mucked up in that cottage.  Why, their living room opens straight on the
road, and the wind comes in fit to blow your head off, and when he goes
home o’ nights, there’s them children a-squalling, and he can’t bide
there and do nothing.’

‘I am afraid, though, Mrs Caffyn, there must be something radically wrong
with that family.  I suppose you know all about the eldest daughter?’

‘Yes, sir, I _have_ heard it: it wouldn’t be Great Oakhurst if I hadn’t,
but p’r’aps, sir, you’ve never been upstairs in that house, and yet a
house it isn’t.  There’s just two sleeping-rooms, that’s all; it’s
shameful, it isn’t decent.  Well, that gal, she goes away to service.
Maybe, sir, them premises at the farm are also unbeknown to you.  In the
back kitchen there’s a broadish sort of shelf as Jim climbs into o’
nights, and it has a rail round it to keep you from a-falling out, and
there’s a ladder as they draws up in the day as goes straight up from
that kitchen to the gal’s bedroom door.  It’s downright disgraceful, and
I don’t believe the Lord A’mighty would be marciful to neither of _us_ if
we was tried like that.’

Mrs Caffyn bethought herself of the ‘us’ and was afraid that even she had
gone a little too far; ‘leastways, speaking for myself, sir,’ she added.

The rector turned rather red, and repented his attempt to enlist Mrs
Caffyn.

‘If the temptations are so great, Mrs Caffyn, that is all the more reason
why those who are liable to them should seek the means which are provided
in order that they may be overcome.  I believe the Polesdens are very lax
attendants at church, and I don’t think they ever communicated.’

Mrs Polesden at that moment came in for an ounce of tea, and as Mrs
Caffyn rose to weigh it, the rector departed with a stiff ‘good-morning,’
made to do duty for both women.




CHAPTER XIII


MRS CAFFYN persuaded Madge to go to bed at once, after giving her
‘something to comfort her.’  In the morning her kind hostess came to her
bedside.

‘You’ve got a mother, haven’t you—leastways, I know you have, because you
wrote to her.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, and you lives with her and she looks after you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And she’s fond of you, maybe?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘That’s a marcy; well then, my dear, you shall go back in the cart to
Letherhead, and you’ll catch the Darkin coach to London.’

‘You have been very good to me; what have I to pay you?’

‘Pay?  Nothing! why, if I was to let you pay, it would just look as if
I’d trapped you here to get something out of you.  Pay! no, not a penny.’

‘I can afford very well to pay, but if it vexes you I will not offer
anything.  I don’t know how to thank you enough.’

Madge took Mrs Caffyn’s hand in hers and pressed it firmly.

‘Besides, my dear,’ said Mrs Caffyn, smoothing the sheets a little, ‘you
won’t mind my saying it, I expex you are in trouble.  There’s something
on your mind, and I believe as I knows pretty well what it is.’

Madge turned round in the bed so as no longer to face the light; Mrs
Caffyn sat between her and the window.

‘Look you here, my dear; don’t you suppose I meant to say anything to
hurt you.  The moment I looked on you I was drawed to you like; I
couldn’t help it.  I see’d what was the matter, but I was all the more
drawed, and I just wanted you to know as it makes no difference.  That’s
like me; sometimes I’m drawed that way and sometimes t’other way, and
it’s never no use for me to try to go against it.  I ain’t a-going to say
anything more to you; God-A’mighty, He’s above us all; but p’r’aps you
may be comm’ this way again some day, and then you’ll look in.’

Madge turned again to the light, and again caught Mrs Caffyn’s hand, but
was silent.

The next morning, after Madge’s return, Mrs Cork, the landlady, presented
herself at the sitting-room door and ‘wished to speak with Mrs Hopgood
for a minute.’

‘Come in, Mrs Cork.’

‘Thank you, ma’am, but I prefer as you should come downstairs.’

Mrs Cork was about forty, a widow with no children.  She had a face of
which it was impossible to recollect, when it had been seen even a dozen
times, any feature except the eyes, which were steel-blue, a little bluer
than the faceted head of the steel poker in her parlour, but just as
hard.  She lived in the basement with a maid, much like herself but a
little more human.  Although the front underground room was furnished Mrs
Cork never used it, except on the rarest occasions, and a kind of apron
of coloured paper hung over the fireplace nearly all the year.  She was a
woman of what she called regular habits.  No lodger was ever permitted to
transgress her rules, or to have meals ten minutes before or ten minutes
after the appointed time.  She had undoubtedly been married, but who Cork
could have been was a marvel.  Why he died, and why there were never any
children were no marvels.  At two o’clock her grate was screwed up to the
narrowest possible dimensions, and the ashes, potato peelings, tea leaves
and cabbage stalks were thrown on the poor, struggling coals.  No meat,
by the way, was ever roasted—it was considered wasteful—everything was
baked or boiled.  After half-past four not a bit of anything that was not
cold was allowed till the next morning, and, indeed, from the first of
April to the thirty-first of October the fire was raked out the moment
tea was over.  Mrs Hopgood one night was not very well and Clara wished
to give her mother something warm.  She rang the bell and asked for hot
water.  Maria came up and disappeared without a word after receiving the
message.  Presently she returned.

‘Mrs Cork, miss, wishes me to tell you as it was never understood as ’ot
water would be required after tea, and she hasn’t got any.’

Mrs Hopgood had a fire, although it was not yet the thirty-first of
October, for it was very damp and raw.  She had with much difficulty
induced Mrs Cork to concede this favour (which probably would not have
been granted if the coals had not yielded a profit of threepence a
scuttleful), and Clara, therefore, asked if she could not have the kettle
upstairs.  Again Maria disappeared and returned.

‘Mrs Cork says, miss, as it’s very ill-convenient as the kettle is
cleaned up agin to-morrow, and if you can do without it she will be
obliged.’

It was of no use to continue the contest, and Clara bethought herself of
a little ‘Etna’ she had in her bedroom.  She went to the druggist’s,
bought some methylated spirit, and obtained what she wanted.

Mrs Cork had one virtue and one weakness.  Her virtue was cleanliness,
but she persecuted the ‘blacks,’ not because she objected to dirt as
dirt, but because it was unauthorised, appeared without permission at
irregular hours, and because the glittering polish on varnished paint and
red mahogany was a pleasure to her.  She liked the dirt, too, in a way,
for she enjoyed the exercise of her ill-temper on it and the pursuit of
it to destruction.  Her weakness was an enormous tom-cat which had a bell
round its neck and slept in a basket in the kitchen, the best-behaved and
most moral cat in the parish.  At half-past nine every evening it was let
out into the back-yard and vanished.  At ten precisely it was heard to
mew and was immediately admitted.  Not once in a twelvemonth did that cat
prolong its love making after five minutes to ten.

Mrs Hopgood went upstairs to her room, Mrs Cork following and closing the
door.

‘If you please, ma’am, I wish to give you notice to leave this day week.’

‘What is the matter, Mrs Cork?’

‘Well, ma’am, for one thing, I didn’t know as you’d bring a bird with
you.’

It was a pet bird belonging to Madge.

‘But what harm does the bird do?  It gives no trouble; my daughter
attends to it.’

‘Yes, ma’am, but it worrits my Joseph—the cat, I mean.  I found him the
other mornin’ on the table eyin’ it, and I can’t a-bear to see him
urritated.’

‘I should hardly have thought that a reason for parting with good
lodgers.’

Mrs Hopgood had intended to move, as before explained, but she did not
wish to go till the three months had expired.

‘I don’t say as that is everything, but if you wish me to tell you the
truth, Miss Madge is not a person as I like to keep in the house.  I wish
you to know’—Mrs Cork suddenly became excited and venomous—‘that I’m a
respectable woman, and have always let my apartments to respectable
people, and do you think I should ever let them to respectable people
again if it got about as I had had anybody as wasn’t respectable?  Where
was she last night?  And do you suppose as me as has been a married woman
can’t see the condition she’s in?  I say as you, Mrs Hopgood, ought to be
ashamed of yourself for bringing of such a person into a house like mine,
and you’ll please vacate these premises on the day named.’  She did not
wait for an answer, but banged the door after her, and went down to her
subterranean den.

Mrs Hopgood did not tell her children the true reason for leaving.  She
merely said that Mrs Cork had been very impertinent, and that they must
look out for other rooms.  Madge instantly recollected Great Ormond
Street, but she did not know the number, and oddly enough she had
completely forgotten Mrs Caffyn’s name.  It was a peculiar name, she had
heard it only once, she had not noticed it over the door, and her
exhaustion may have had something to do with her loss of memory.  She
could not therefore write, and Mrs Hopgood determined that she herself
would go to Great Oakhurst.  She had another reason for her journey.  She
wished her kind friend there to see that Madge had really a mother who
cared for her.  She was anxious to confirm Madge’s story, and Mrs
Caffyn’s confidence.  Clara desired to go also, but Mrs Hopgood would not
leave Madge alone, and the expense of a double fare was considered
unnecessary.

When Mrs Hopgood came to Letherhead on her return, the coach was full
inside, and she was obliged to ride outside, although the weather was
cold and threatening.  In about half an hour it began to rain heavily,
and by the time she was in Pentonville she was wet through.  The next
morning she ought to have lain in bed, but she came down at her
accustomed hour as Mrs Cork was more than usually disagreeable, and it
was settled that they would leave at once if the rooms in Great Ormond
Street were available.  Clara went there directly after breakfast, and
saw Mrs Marshall, who had already received an introductory letter from
her mother.




CHAPTER XIV


THE Marshall family included Marshall and his wife.  He was rather a
small man, with blackish hair, small lips, and with a nose just a little
turned up at the tip.  As we have been informed, he was a cabinet-maker.
He worked for very good shops, and earned about two pounds a week.  He
read books, but he did not know their value, and often fancied he had
made a great discovery on a bookstall of an author long ago superseded
and worthless.  He belonged to a mechanic’s institute, and was fond of
animal physiology; heard courses of lectures on it at the institute, and
had studied two or three elementary handbooks.  He found in a second-hand
dealer’s shop a model, which could be taken to pieces, of the inside of
the human body.  He had also bought a diagram of a man, showing the
circulation, and this he had hung in his bedroom, his mother-in-law
objecting most strongly on the ground that its effect on his wife was
injurious.  He had a notion that the world might be regenerated if men
and women were properly instructed in physiological science, and if
before marriage they would study their own physical peculiarities, and
those of their intended partners.  The crossing of peculiarities
nevertheless presented difficulties.  A man with long legs surely ought
to choose a woman with short legs, but if a man who was mathematical
married a woman who was mathematical, the result might be a mathematical
prodigy.  On the other hand the parents of the prodigy might each have
corresponding qualities, which, mixed with the mathematical tendency,
would completely nullify it.  The path of duty therefore was by no means
plain.  However, Marshall was sure that great cities dwarfed their
inhabitants, and as he himself was not so tall as his father, and,
moreover, suffered from bad digestion, and had a tendency to ‘run to
head,’ he determined to select as his wife a ‘daughter of the soil,’ to
use his own phrase, above the average height, with a vigorous
constitution and plenty of common sense.  She need not be bookish, ‘he
could supply all that himself.’  Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn.
His mother and Mrs Caffyn had been early friends.  He was not mistaken in
Sarah.  She was certainly robust; she was a shrewd housekeeper, and she
never read anything, except now and then a paragraph or two in the weekly
newspaper, notwithstanding (for there were no children), time hung rather
heavily on her hands.  One child had been born, but to Marshall’s
surprise and disappointment it was a poor, rickety thing, and died before
it was a twelvemonth old.

Mrs Marshall was not a very happy woman.  Marshall was a great politician
and spent many of his evenings away from home at political meetings.  He
never informed her what he had been doing, and if he had told her, she
would neither have understood nor cared anything about it.  At Great
Oakhurst she heard everything and took an interest in it, and she often
wished with all her heart that the subject which occupied Marshall’s
thoughts was not Chartism but the draining of that heavy, rush-grown bit
of rough pasture that lay at the bottom of the village.  He was very good
and kind to her, and she never imagined, before marriage, that he ought
to be more.  She was sure that at Great Oakhurst she would have been
quite comfortable with him but somehow, in London, it was different.  ‘I
don’t know how it is,’ she said one day, ‘the sort of husband as does for
the country doesn’t do for London.’

At Great Oakhurst, where the doors were always open into the yard and the
garden, where every house was merely a covered bit of the open space,
where people were always in and out, and women never sat down, except to
their meals, or to do a little stitching or sewing, it was really not
necessary, as Mrs Caffyn observed, that husband and wife should ‘hit it
so fine.’  Mrs Marshall hated all the conveniences of London.  She
abominated particularly the taps, and longed to be obliged in all
weathers to go out to the well and wind up the bucket.  She abominated
also the dust-bin, for it was a pleasure to be compelled—so at least she
thought it now—to walk down to the muck-heap and throw on it what the pig
could not eat.  Nay, she even missed that corner of the garden against
the elder-tree, where the pig-stye was, for ‘you could smell the
elder-flowers there in the spring-time, and the pig-stye wasn’t as bad as
the stuffy back room in Great Ormond Street when three or four men were
in it.’  She did all she could to spend her energy on her cooking and
cleaning, but ‘there was no satisfaction in it,’ and she became much
depressed, especially after the child died.  This was the main reason why
Mrs Caffyn determined to live with her.  Marshall was glad she resolved
to come.  His wife had her full share of the common sense he desired, but
the experiment had not altogether succeeded.  He knew she was lonely, and
he was sorry for her, although he did not see how he could mend matters.
He reflected carefully, nothing had happened which was a surprise to him,
the relationship was what he had supposed it would be, excepting that the
child did not live and its mother was a little miserable.  There was
nothing he would not do for her, but he really had nothing more to offer
her.

Although Mrs Marshall had made up her mind that husbands and wives could
not be as contented with one another in the big city as they would be in
a village, a suspicion crossed her mind one day that, even in London, the
relationship might be different from her own.  She was returning from
Great Oakhurst after a visit to her mother.  She had stayed there for
about a month after her child’s death, and she travelled back to town
with a Letherhead woman, who had married a journeyman tanner, who
formerly worked in the Letherhead tan-yard, and had now moved to
Bermondsey, a horrid hole, worse than Great Ormond Street.  Both Marshall
and the tanner were at the ‘Swan with Two Necks’ to meet the covered van,
and the tanner’s wife jumped out first.

‘Hullo, old gal, here you are,’ cried the tanner, and clasped her in his
brown, bark-stained arms, giving her, nothing loth, two or three hearty
kisses.  They were so much excited at meeting one another, that they
forgot their friends, and marched off without bidding them good-bye.  Mrs
Marshall was welcomed in quieter fashion.

‘Ah!’ she thought to herself.  ‘Red Tom,’ as the tanner was called, ‘is
not used to London ways.  They are, perhaps, correct for London, but
Marshall might now and then remember that I have not been brought up to
them.’

To return, however, to the Hopgoods.  Before the afternoon they were in
their new quarters, happily for them, for Mrs Hopgood became worse.  On
the morrow she was seriously ill, inflammation of the lungs appeared, and
in a week she was dead.  What Clara and Madge suffered cannot be told
here.  Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we discover that although
death is commonplace it is terribly original.  We may have thought about
it all our lives, but if it comes close to us, it is quite a new, strange
thing to us, for which we are entirely unprepared.  It may, perhaps, not
be the bare loss so much as the strength of the bond which is broken that
is the surprise, and we are debtors in a way to death for revealing
something in us which ordinary life disguises.  Long after the first
madness of their grief had passed, Clara and Madge were astonished to
find how dependent they had been on their mother.  They were grown-up
women accustomed to act for themselves, but they felt unsteady, and as if
deprived of customary support.  The reference to her had been constant,
although it was often silent, and they were not conscious of it.  A
defence from the outside waste desert had been broken down, their mother
had always seemed to intervene between them and the world, and now they
were exposed and shelterless.

Three parts of Mrs Hopgood’s little income was mainly an annuity, and
Clara and Madge found that between them they had but seventy-five pounds
a year.




CHAPTER XV


FRANK could not rest.  He wrote again to Clara at Fenmarket; the letter
went to Mrs Cork’s, and was returned to him.  He saw that the Hopgoods
had left Fenmarket, and suspecting the reason, he determined at any cost
to go home.  He accordingly alleged ill-health, a pretext not altogether
fictitious, and within a few days after the returned letter reached him
he was back at Stoke Newington.  He went immediately to the address in
Pentonville which he found on the envelope, but was very shortly informed
by Mrs Cork that ‘she knew nothing whatever about them.’  He walked round
Myddelton Square, hopeless, for he had no clue whatever.

What had happened to him would scarcely, perhaps, have caused some young
men much uneasiness, but with Frank the case was altogether different.
There was a chance of discovery, and if his crime should come to light
his whole future life would be ruined.  He pictured his excommunication,
his father’s agony, and it was only when it seemed possible that the
water might close over the ghastly thing thrown in it, and no ripple
reveal what lay underneath, that he was able to breathe again.
Immediately he asked himself, however, _if_ he could live with his father
and wear a mask, and never betray his dreadful secret.  So he wandered
homeward in the most miserable of all conditions; he was paralysed by the
intricacy of the coil which enveloped and grasped him.

That evening it happened that there was a musical party at his father’s
house; and, of course, he was expected to assist.  It would have suited
his mood better if he could have been in his own room, or out in the
streets, but absence would have been inconsistent with his disguise, and
might have led to betrayal.  Consequently he was present, and the gaiety
of the company and the excitement of his favourite exercise, brought
about for a time forgetfulness of his trouble.  Amongst the performers
was a distant cousin, Cecilia Morland, a young woman rather tall and
fully developed; not strikingly beautiful, but with a lovely
reddish-brown tint on her face, indicative of healthy, warm, rich
pulsations.  She possessed a contralto voice, of a quality like that of a
blackbird, and it fell to her and to Frank to sing.  She was dressed in a
fashion perhaps a little more courtly than was usual in the gatherings at
Mr Palmer’s house, and Frank, as he stood beside her at the piano, could
not restrain his eyes from straying every now and then a way from his
music to her shoulders, and once nearly lost himself, during a solo which
required a little unusual exertion, in watching the movement of a locket
and of what was for a moment revealed beneath it.  He escorted her amidst
applause to a corner of the room, and the two sat down side by side.

‘What a long time it is, Frank, since you and I sang that duet together.
We have seen nothing of you lately.’

‘Of course not; I was in Germany.’

‘Yes, but I think you deserted us before then.  Do you remember that
summer when we were all together at Bonchurch, and the part songs which
astonished our neighbours just as it was growing dark?  I recollect you
and I tried together that very duet for the first time with the old
lodging-house piano.’

Frank remembered that evening well.

‘You sang better than you did to-night.  You did not keep time: what were
you dreaming about?’

‘How hot the room is!  Do you not feel it oppressive?  Let us go into the
conservatory for a minute.’

The door was behind them and they slipped in and sat down, just inside,
and under the orange tree.

‘You must not be away so long again.  Now mind, we have a musical evening
this day fortnight.  You will come?  Promise; and we must sing that duet
again, and sing it properly.’

He did not reply, but he stooped down, plucked a blood-red begonia, and
gave it to her.

‘That is a pledge.  It is very good of you.’

She tried to fasten it in her gown, underneath the locket, but she
dropped a little black pin.  He went down on his knees to find it; rose,
and put the flower in its proper place himself, and his head nearly
touched her neck, quite unnecessarily.

‘We had better go back now,’ she said, ‘but mind, I shall keep this
flower for a fortnight and a day, and if you make any excuses I shall
return it faded and withered.’

‘Yes, I will come.’

‘Good boy; no apologies like those you sent the last time.  No bad
throat.  Play me false, and there will be a pretty rebuke for you—a dead
flower.’

_Play me false_!  It was as if there were some stoppage in a main artery
to his brain.  _Play me false_!  It rang in his ears, and for a moment he
saw nothing but the scene at the Hall with Miranda.  Fortunately for him,
somebody claimed Cecilia, and he slunk back into the greenhouse.

One of Mr Palmer’s favourite ballads was _The Three Ravens_.  Its pathos
unfits it for an ordinary drawing-room, but as the music at Mr Palmer’s
was not of the common kind, _The Three Ravens_ was put on the list for
that night.

    ‘_She was dead herself ere evensong time_.  _With a down_, _hey
    down_, _hey down_,
    _God send every gentleman_
    _Such hawks_, _such hounds_, _and such a leman_.  _With down_, _hey
    down_, _hey down_.’

Frank knew well the prayer of that melody, and, as he listened, he
painted to himself, in the vividest colours, Madge in a mean room, in a
mean lodging, and perhaps dying.  The song ceased, and one for him stood
next.  He heard voices calling him, but he passed out into the garden and
went down to the further end, hiding himself behind the shrubs.
Presently the inquiry for him ceased, and he was relieved by hearing an
instrumental piece begin.

Following on that presentation of Madge came self-torture for his
unfaithfulness.  He scourged himself into what he considered to be his
duty.  He recalled with an effort all Madge’s charms, mental and bodily,
and he tried to break his heart for her.  He was in anguish because he
found that in order to feel as he ought to feel some effort was
necessary; that treason to her was possible, and because he had looked
with such eyes upon his cousin that evening.  He saw himself as something
separate from himself, and although he knew what he saw to be flimsy and
shallow, he could do nothing to deepen it, absolutely nothing!  It was
not the betrayal of that thunderstorm which now tormented him.  He could
have represented that as a failure to be surmounted; he could have
repented it.  It was his own inner being from which he revolted, from
limitations which are worse than crimes, for who, by taking thought, can
add one cubit to his stature?




CHAPTER XVI


THE next morning found Frank once more in Myddelton Square.  He looked up
at the house; the windows were all shut, and the blinds were drawn down.
He had half a mind to call again, but Mrs Cork’s manner had been so
offensive and repellent that he desisted.  Presently the door opened, and
Maria, the maid, came out to clean the doorsteps.  Maria, as we have
already said, was a little more human than her mistress, and having
overheard the conversation between her and Frank at the first interview,
had come to the conclusion that Frank was to be pitied, and she took a
fancy to him.  Accordingly, when he passed her, she looked up and
said,—‘Good-morning.’  Frank stopped, and returned her greeting.

‘You was here the other day, sir, asking where them Hopgoods had gone.’

‘Yes,’ said Frank, eagerly, ‘do you know what has become of them?’

‘I helped the cabman with the boxes, and I heard Mrs Hopgood say “Great
Ormond Street,” but I have forgotten the number.’

‘Thank you very much.’

Frank gave the astonished and grateful Maria half-a-crown, and went off
to Great Ormond Street at once.  He paced up and down the street half a
dozen times, hoping he might recognise in a window some ornament from
Fenmarket, or perhaps that he might be able to distinguish a piece of
Fenmarket furniture, but his search was in vain, for the two girls had
taken furnished rooms at the back of the house.  His quest was not
renewed that week.  What was there to be gained by going over the ground
again?  Perhaps they might have found the lodgings unsuitable and have
moved elsewhere.  At church on Sunday he met his cousin Cecilia, who
reminded him of his promise.

‘See,’ she said, ‘here is the begonia.  I put it in my prayer-book in
order to preserve it when I could keep it in water no longer, and it has
stained the leaf, and spoilt the Athanasian Creed.  You will have it sent
to you if you are faithless.  Reflect on your emotions, sir, when you
receive a dead flower, and you have the bitter consciousness also that
you have damaged my creed without any recompense.’

It was impossible not to protest that he had no thought of breaking his
engagement, although, to tell the truth, he had wished once or twice he
could find some way out of it.  He walked with her down the churchyard
path to her carriage, assisted her into it, saluted her father and
mother, and then went home with his own people.

The evening came, he sang with Cecilia, and it was observed, and he
himself observed it, how completely their voices harmonised.  He was not
without a competitor, a handsome young baritone, who was much commended.
When he came to the end of his performance everybody said what a pity it
was that the following duet could not also be given, a duet which Cecilia
knew perfectly well.  She was very much pressed to take her part with
him, but she steadily refused, on the ground that she had not practised
it, that she had already sung once, and that she was engaged to sing once
more with her cousin.  Frank was sitting next to her, and she added, so
as to be heard by him alone, ‘He is no particular favourite of mine.’

There was no direct implication that Frank was a favourite, but an
inference was possible, and at least it was clear that she preferred to
reserve herself for him.  Cecilia’s gifts, her fortune, and her gay,
happy face had made many a young fellow restless, and had brought several
proposals, none of which had been accepted.  All this Frank knew, and how
could he repress something more than satisfaction when he thought that
perhaps he might have been the reason why nobody as yet had been able to
win her.  She always called him Frank, for although they were not first
cousins, they were cousins.  He generally called her Cecilia, but she was
Cissy in her own house.  He was hardly close enough to venture upon the
more familiar nickname, but to-night, as they rose to go to the piano, he
said, and the baritone sat next to her,—

‘Now, _Cissy_, once more.’

She looked at him with just a little start of surprise, and a smile
spread itself over her face.  After they had finished, and she never sang
better, the baritone noticed that she seemed indisposed to return to her
former place, and she retired with Frank to the opposite corner of the
room.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if being happy in a thing is a sign of being born
to do it.  If it is, I am born to be a musician.’

‘I should say it is; if two people are quite happy in one another’s
company, it is as a sign they were born for one another.’

‘Yes, if they are sure they are happy.  It is easier for me to be sure
that I am happier with a thing than with a person.’

‘Do you think so?  Why?’

‘There is the uncertainty whether the person is happy with me.  I cannot
be altogether happy with anybody unless I know I make him happy.’

‘What kind of person is he with whom you _could_ be without making him
happy?’

The baritone rose to the upper F with a clash of chords on the piano, and
the company broke up.  Frank went home with but one thought in his
head—the thought of Cecilia.

His bedroom faced the south-west, its windows were open, and when he
entered, the wind, which was gradually rising, struck him on the face and
nearly forced the door out of his hand; the fire in his blood was
quenched, and the image of Cecilia receded.  He looked out, and saw
reflected on the low clouds the dull glare of the distant city.  Just
over there was Great Ormond Street, and underneath that dim, red light,
like the light of a great house burning, was Madge Hopgood.  He lay down,
turning over from side to side in the vain hope that by change of
position he might sleep.  After about an hour’s feverish tossing, he just
lost himself, but not in that oblivion which slumber usually brought him.
He was so far awake that he saw what was around him, and yet, he was so
far released from the control of his reason that he did not recognise
what he saw, and it became part of a new scene created by his delirium.
The full moon, clearing away the clouds as she moved upwards, had now
passed round to the south, and just caught the white window-curtain
farthest from him.  He half-opened his eyes, his mad dream still clung to
him, and there was the dead Madge before him, pale in death, and holding
a child in her arms!  He distinctly heard himself scream as he started up
in affright; he could not tell where he was; the spectre faded and the
furniture and hangings transformed themselves into their familiar
reality.  He could not lie down again, and rose and dressed himself.  He
was not the man to believe that the ghost could be a revelation or a
prophecy, but, nevertheless, he was once more overcome with fear, a vague
dread partly justifiable by the fact of Madge, by the fact that his
father might soon know what had happened, that others also might know,
Cecilia for example, but partly also a fear going beyond all the facts,
and not to be accounted for by them, a strange, horrible trembling such
as men feel in earthquakes when the solid rock shakes, on which
everything rests.




CHAPTER XVII


WHEN Frank came downstairs to breakfast the conversation turned upon his
return to Germany.  He did not object to going, although it can hardly be
said that he willed to go.  He was in that perilous condition in which
the comparison of reasons is impossible, and the course taken depends
upon some chance impulse of the moment, and is a mere drift.  He could
not leave, however, in complete ignorance of Madge, and with no certainty
as to her future.  He resolved therefore to make one more effort to
discover the house.  That was all which he determined to do.  What was to
happen when he had found it, he did not know.  He was driven to do
something, which could not be of any importance, save for what must
follow, but he was unable to bring himself even to consider what was to
follow.  He knew that at Fenmarket one or other of the sisters went out
soon after breakfast to make provision for the day, and perhaps, if they
kept up this custom, he might be successful in his search.  He
accordingly stationed himself in Great Ormond Street at about half-past
nine, and kept watch from the Lamb’s Conduit Street end, shifting his
position as well as he could, in order to escape notice.  He had not been
there half an hour when he saw a door open, and Madge came out and went
westwards.  She turned down Devonshire Street as if on her way to
Holborn.  He instantly ran back to Theobalds Road, and when he came to
the corner of Devonshire Street she was about ten yards from him, and he
faced her.  She stopped irresolutely, as if she had a mind to return, but
as he approached her, and she found she was recognised, she came towards
him.

‘Madge, Madge,’ he cried, ‘I want to speak to you.  I must speak with
you.’

‘Better not; let me go.’

‘I say I _must_ speak to you.’

‘We cannot talk here; let me go.’

‘I must!  I must! come with me.’

She pitied him, and although she did not consent she did not refuse.  He
called a cab, and in ten minutes, not a word having been spoken during
those ten minutes, they were at St Paul’s.  The morning service had just
begun, and they sat down in a corner far away from the worshippers.

‘Oh, Madge,’ he began, ‘I implore you to take me back.  I love you.  I do
love you, and—and—I cannot leave you.’

She was side by side with the father of her child about to be born.  He
was not and could not be as another man to her, and for the moment there
was the danger lest she should mistake this secret bond for love.  The
thought of what had passed between them, and of the child, his and hers,
almost overpowered her.

‘I cannot,’ he repeated.  ‘I _ought_ not.  What will become of me?’

She felt herself stronger; he was excited, but his excitement was not
contagious.  The string vibrated, and the note was resonant, but it was
not a note which was consonant with hers, and it did not stir her to
respond.  He might love her, he was sincere enough to sacrifice himself
for her, and to remain faithful to her, but the voice was not altogether
that of his own true self.  Partly, at least, it was the voice of what he
considered to be duty, of superstition and alarm.  She was silent.

‘Madge,’ he continued, ‘ought you to refuse?  You have some love for me.
Is it not greater than the love which thousands feel for one another.
Will you blast your future and mine, and, perhaps, that of someone
besides, who may be very dear to you?  _Ought_ you not, I say, to
listen?’

The service had come to an end, the organist was playing a voluntary,
rather longer than usual, and the congregation was leaving, some of them
passing near Madge and Frank, and casting idle glances on the young
couple who had evidently come neither to pray nor to admire the
architecture.  Madge recognised the well-known St Ann’s fugue, and,
strange to say, even at such a moment it took entire possession of her;
the golden ladder was let down and celestial visitors descended.  When
the music ceased she spoke.

‘It would be a crime.’

‘A crime, but I—’  She stopped him.

‘I know what you are going to say.  I know what is the crime to the
world; but it would have been a crime, perhaps a worse crime, if a
ceremony had been performed beforehand by a priest, and the worst of
crimes would be that ceremony now.  I must go.’  She rose and began to
move towards the door.

He walked silently by her side till they were in St Paul’s churchyard,
when she took him by the hand, pressed it affectionately and suddenly
turned into one of the courts that lead towards Paternoster Row.  He did
not follow her, something repelled him, and when he reached home it
crossed his mind that marriage, after such delay, would be a poor
recompense, as he could not thereby conceal her disgrace.




CHAPTER XVIII


IT was clear that these two women could not live in London on
seventy-five pounds a year, most certainly not with the prospect before
them, and Clara cast about for something to do.  Marshall had a
brother-in-law, a certain Baruch Cohen, a mathematical instrument maker
in Clerkenwell, and to him Marshall accidentally one day talked about
Clara, and said that she desired an occupation.  Cohen himself could not
give Clara any work, but he knew a second-hand bookseller, an old man who
kept a shop in Holborn, who wanted a clerk, and Clara thus found herself
earning another pound a week.  With this addition she and her sister
could manage to pay their way and provide what Madge would want.  The
hours were long, the duties irksome and wearisome, and, worst of all, the
conditions under which they were performed, were not only as bad as they
could be, but their badness was of a kind to which Clara had never been
accustomed, so that she felt every particle of it in its full force.  The
windows of the shop were, of course, full of books, and the walls were
lined with them.  In the middle of the shop also was a range of shelves,
and books were stacked on the floor, so that the place looked like a huge
cubical block of them through which passages had been bored.  At the back
the shop became contracted in width to about eight feet, and consequently
the central shelves were not continued there, but just where they ended,
and overshadowed by them were a little desk and a stool.  All round the
desk more books were piled, and some manœuvring was necessary in order to
sit down.  This was Clara’s station.  Occasionally, on a brilliant, a
very brilliant day in summer, she could write without gas, but, perhaps,
there were not a dozen such days in the year.  By twisting herself
sideways she could just catch a glimpse of a narrow line of sky over some
heavy theology which was not likely to be disturbed, and was therefore
put at the top of the window, and once when somebody bought the _Calvin
Joann_.  _Opera Omnia_, 9 _vol. folio_, _Amst._ 1671—it was very clear
that afternoon—she actually descried towards seven o’clock a blessed star
exactly in the middle of the gap the Calvin had left.

The darkness was very depressing, and poor Clara often shut her eyes as
she bent over her day-book and ledger, and thought of the Fenmarket flats
where the sun could be seen bisected by the horizon at sun-rising and
sun-setting, and where even the southern Antares shone with diamond
glitter close to the ground during summer nights.  She tried to reason
with herself during the dreadful smoke fogs; she said to herself that
they were only half-a-mile thick, and she carried herself up in
imagination and beheld the unclouded azure, the filthy smother lying all
beneath her, but her dream did not continue, and reality was too strong
for her.  Worse, perhaps, than the eternal gloom was the dirt.  She was
naturally fastidious, and as her skin was thin and sensitive, dust was
physically a discomfort.  Even at Fenmarket she was continually washing
her hands and face, and, indeed, a wash was more necessary to her after a
walk than food or drink.  It was impossible to remain clean in Holborn
for five minutes; everything she touched was foul with grime; her collar
and cuffs were black with it when she went home to her dinner, and it was
not like the honest, blowing road-sand of Fenmarket highways, but a
loathsome composition of everything disgusting which could be produced by
millions of human beings and animals packed together in soot.  It was a
real misery to her and made her almost ill.  However, she managed to set
up for herself a little lavatory in the basement, and whenever she had a
minute at her command, she descended and enjoyed the luxury of a cool,
dripping sponge and a piece of yellow soap.  The smuts began to gather
again the moment she went upstairs, but she strove to arm herself with a
little philosophy against them.  ‘What is there in life,’ she moralised,
smiling at her sermonising, ‘which once won is for ever won?  It is
always being won and always being lost.’  Her master, fortunately, was
one of the kindest of men, an old gentleman of about sixty-five, who wore
a white necktie, clean every morning.  He was really a _gentle_man in the
true sense of that much misused word, and not a mere _trades_man; that is
to say, he loved his business, not altogether for the money it brought
him, but as an art.  He was known far and wide, and literary people were
glad to gossip with him.  He never pushed his wares, and he hated to sell
them to anybody who did not know their value.  He amused Clara one
afternoon when a carriage stopped at the door, and a lady inquired if he
had a Manning and Bray’s _History of Surrey_.  Yes, he had a copy, and he
pointed to the three handsome, tall folios.

‘What is the price?’

‘Twelve pounds ten.’

‘I think I will have them.’

‘Madam, you will pardon me, but, if I were you, I would not.  I think
something much cheaper will suit you better.  If you will allow me, I
will look out for you and will report in a few days.’

‘Oh! very well,’ and she departed.

‘The wife of a brassfounder,’ he said to Clara; ‘made a lot of money, and
now he has bought a house at Dulwich and is setting up a library.
Somebody has told him that he ought to have a county history, and that
Manning and Bray is the book.  Manning and Bray!  What he wants is a
Dulwich and Denmark Hill Directory.  No, no,’ and he took down one of the
big volumes, blew the dust off the top edges and looked at the old
book-plate inside, ‘you won’t go there if I can help it.’  He took a
fancy to Clara when he found she loved literature, although what she read
was out of his department altogether, and his perfectly human behaviour
to her prevented that sense of exile and loneliness which is so horrible
to many a poor creature who comes up to London to begin therein the
struggle for existence.  She read and meditated a good deal in the shop,
but not to much profit, for she was continually interrupted, and the
thought of her sister intruded itself perpetually.

Madge seldom or never spoke of her separation from Frank, but one night,
when she was somewhat less reserved than usual, Clara ventured to ask her
if she had heard from him since they parted.

‘I met him once.’

‘Madge, do you mean that he found out where we are living, and that he
came to see you?’

‘No, it was just round the corner as I was going towards Holborn.’

‘Nothing could have brought him here but yourself,’ said Clara, slowly.

‘Clara, you doubt?’

‘No, no!  I doubt you?  Never!’

‘But you hesitate; you reflect.  Speak out.’

‘God forbid I should utter a word which would induce you to disbelieve
what you know to be right.  It is much more important to believe
earnestly that something is morally right than that it should be really
right, and he who attempts to displace a belief runs a certain risk,
because he is not sure that what he substitutes can be held with equal
force.  Besides, each person’s belief, or proposed course of action, is a
part of himself, and if he be diverted from it and takes up with that
which is not himself, the unity of his nature is impaired, and he loses
himself.’

‘Which is as much as to say that the prophet is to break no idols.’

‘You know I do not mean that, and you know, too, how incapable I am of
defending myself in argument.  I never can stand up for anything I say.
I can now and then say something, but, when I have said it, I run away.’

‘My dearest Clara,’ Madge put her arm over her sister’s shoulder as they
sat side by side, ‘do not run away now; tell me just what you think of
me.’

Clara was silent for a minute.

‘I have sometimes wondered whether you have not demanded a little too
much of yourself and Frank.  It is always a question of how much.  There
is no human truth which is altogether true, no love which is altogether
perfect.  You may possibly have neglected virtue or devotion such as you
could not find elsewhere, overlooking it because some failing, or the
lack of sympathy on some unimportant point, may at the moment have been
prominent.  Frank loved you, Madge.’

Madge did not reply; she withdrew her arm from her sister’s neck, threw
herself back in her chair and closed her eyes.  She saw again the
Fenmarket roads, that summer evening, and she felt once more Frank’s
burning caresses.  She thought of him as he left St Paul’s, perhaps
broken-hearted.  Stronger than every other motive to return to him, and
stronger than ever, was the movement towards him of that which belonged
to him.

At last she cried out, literally cried, with a vehemence which startled
and terrified Clara,—

‘Clara, Clara, you know not what you do!  For God’s sake forbear!’  She
was again silent, and then she turned round hurriedly, hid her face, and
sobbed piteously.  It lasted, however, but for a minute; she rose, wiped
her eyes, went to the window, came back again, and said,—

‘It is beginning to snow.’

The iron pillar bolted to the solid rock had quivered and resounded under
the blow, but its vibrations were nothing more than those of the rigid
metal; the base was unshaken and, except for an instant, the column had
not been deflected a hair’s-breadth.




CHAPTER XIX


MR COHEN, who had obtained the situation indirectly for Clara, thought
nothing more about it until, one day, he went to the shop, and he then
recollected his recommendation, which had been given solely in faith, for
he had never seen the young woman, and had trusted entirely to Marshall.
He found her at her dark desk, and as he approached her, she hastily put
a mark in a book and closed it.

‘Have you sold a little volume called _After Office Hours_ by a man named
Robinson?’

‘I did not know we had it.  I have never seen it.’

‘I do not wonder, but I saw it here about six months ago; it was up
there,’ pointing to a top shelf.  Clara was about to mount the ladder,
but he stopped her, and found what he wanted.  Some of the leaves were
torn.

‘We can repair those for you; in about a couple of days it shall be
ready.’

He lingered a little, and at that moment another customer entered.  Clara
went forward to speak to him, and Cohen was able to see that it was the
_Heroes and Hero Worship_ she had been studying, a course of lectures
which had been given by a Mr Carlyle, of whom Cohen knew something.  As
the customer showed no signs of departing, Cohen left, saying he would
call again.

Before sending Robinson’s _After Office Hours_ to the binder, Clara
looked at it.  It was made up of short essays, about twenty altogether,
bound in dark-green cloth, lettered at the side, and published in 1841.
They were upon the oddest subjects: such as, _Ought Children to learn
Rules before Reasons_?  _The Higher Mathematics and Materialism_.  _Ought
We to tell Those Whom We love what We think about Them_?  _Deductive
Reasoning in Politics_.  _What Troubles ought We to Make Known and What
ought We to Keep Secret_: _Courage as a Science and an Art_.

Clara did not read any one essay through, she had no time, but she was
somewhat struck with a few sentences which caught her eye; for example—‘A
mere dream, a vague hope, ought in some cases to be more potent than a
certainty in regulating our action.  The faintest vision of God should be
more determinative than the grossest earthly assurance.’

‘I knew a case in which a man had to encounter three successive trials of
all the courage and inventive faculty in him.  Failure in one would have
been ruin.  The odds against him in each trial were desperate, and
against ultimate victory were overwhelming.  Nevertheless, he made the
attempt, and was triumphant, by the narrowest margin, in every struggle.
That which is of most value to us is often obtained in defiance of the
laws of probability.’

‘What is precious in Quakerism is not so much the doctrine of the Divine
voice as that of the preliminary stillness, the closure against other
voices and the reduction of the mind to a condition in which it can
_listen_, in which it can discern the merest whisper, inaudible when the
world, or interest, or passion, are permitted to speak.’

‘The acutest syllogiser can never develop the actual consequences of any
system of policy, or, indeed, of any change in human relationship, man
being so infinitely complex, and the interaction of human forces so
incalculable.’

‘Many of our speculative difficulties arise from the unauthorised
conception of an _omnipotent_ God, a conception entirely of our own
creation, and one which, if we look at it closely, has no meaning.  It is
because God _could_ have done otherwise, and did not, that we are
confounded.  It may be distressing to think that God cannot do any
better, but it is not so distressing as to believe that He might have
done better had He so willed.’

Although these passages were disconnected, each of them seemed to Clara
to be written in a measure for herself, and her curiosity was excited
about the author.  Perhaps the man who called would say something about
him.

Baruch Cohen was now a little over forty.  He was half a Jew, for his
father was a Jew and his mother a Gentile.  The father had broken with
Judaism, but had not been converted to any Christian church or sect.  He
was a diamond-cutter, originally from Holland, came over to England and
married the daughter of a mathematical instrument maker, at whose house
he lodged in Clerkenwell.  The son was apprenticed to his maternal
grandfather’s trade, became very skilful at it, worked at it himself,
employed a man and a boy, and supplied London shops, which sold his
instruments at about three times the price he obtained for them.  Baruch,
when he was very young, married Marshall’s elder sister, but she died at
the birth of her first child and he had been a widower now for nineteen
years.  He had often thought of taking another wife, and had seen, during
these nineteen years, two or three women with whom he had imagined
himself to be really in love, and to whom he had been on the verge of
making proposals, but in each case he had hung back, and when he found
that a second and a third had awakened the same ardour for a time as the
first, he distrusted its genuineness.  He was now, too, at a time of life
when a man has to make the unpleasant discovery that he is beginning to
lose the right to expect what he still eagerly desires, and that he must
beware of being ridiculous.  It is indeed a very unpleasant discovery.
If he has done anything well which was worth doing, or has made himself a
name, he may be treated by women with respect or adulation, but any
passable boy of twenty is really more interesting to them, and,
unhappily, there is perhaps so much of the man left in him that he would
rather see the eyes of a girl melt when she looked at him than be adored
by all the drawing-rooms in London as the author of the greatest poem
since _Paradise Lost_, or as the conqueror of half a continent.  Baruch’s
life during the last nineteen years had been such that he was still
young, and he desired more than ever, because not so blindly as he
desired it when he was a youth, the tender, intimate sympathy of a
woman’s love.  It was singular that, during all those nineteen years, he
should not once have been overcome.  It seemed to him as if he had been
held back, not by himself, but by some external power, which refused to
give any reasons for so doing.  There was now less chance of yielding
than ever; he was reserved and self-respectful, and his manner towards
women distinctly announced to them that he knew what he was and that he
had no claims whatever upon them.  He was something of a philosopher,
too; he accepted, therefore, as well as he could, without complaint, the
inevitable order of nature, and he tried to acquire, although often he
failed, that blessed art of taking up lightly and even with a smile
whatever he was compelled to handle.  ‘It is possible,’ he said once, ‘to
consider death too seriously.’  He was naturally more than half a Jew;
his features were Jewish, his thinking was Jewish, and he believed after
a fashion in the Jewish sacred books, or, at anyrate, read them
continuously, although he had added to his armoury defensive weapons of
another type.  In nothing was he more Jewish than in a tendency to dwell
upon the One, or what he called God, clinging still to the expression of
his forefathers although departing so widely from them.  In his ethics
and system of life, as well as in his religion, there was the same
intolerance of a multiplicity which was not reducible to unity.  He
seldom explained his theory, but everybody who knew him recognised the
difference which it wrought between him and other men.  There was a
certain concord in everything he said and did, as if it were directed by
some enthroned but secret principle.

He had encountered no particular trouble since his wife’s death, but his
life had been unhappy.  He had no friends, much as he longed for
friendship, and he could not give any reasons for his failure.  He saw
other persons more successful, but he remained solitary.  Their needs
were not so great as his, for it is not those who have the least but
those who have the most to give who most want sympathy.  He had often
made advances; people had called on him and had appeared interested in
him, but they had dropped away.  The cause was chiefly to be found in his
nationality.  The ordinary Englishman disliked him simply as a Jew, and
the better sort were repelled by a lack of geniality and by his inability
to manifest a healthy interest in personal details.  Partly also the
cause was that those who care to speak about what is nearest to them are
very rare, and most persons find conversation easy in proportion to the
remoteness of its topics from them.  Whatever the reasons may have been,
Baruch now, no matter what the pressure from within might be, generally
kept himself to himself.  It was a mistake and he ought not to have
retreated so far upon repulse.  A word will sometimes, when least
expected, unlock a heart, a soul is gained for ever, and at once there is
much more than a recompense for the indifference of years.

After the death of his wife, Baruch’s affection spent itself upon his son
Benjamin, whom he had apprenticed to a firm of optical instrument makers
in York.  The boy was not very much like his father.  He was indifferent
to that religion by which his father lived, but he inherited an aptitude
for mathematics, which was very necessary in his trade.  Benjamin also
possessed his father’s rectitude, trusted him, and looked to him for
advice to such a degree that even Baruch, at last, thought it would be
better to send him away from home in order that he might become a little
more self-reliant and independent.  It was the sorest of trials to part
with him, and, for some time after he left, Baruch’s loneliness was
intolerable.  It was, however, relieved by a visit to York perhaps once
in four or five months, for whenever business could be alleged as an
excuse for going north, he managed, as he said, ‘to take York on his
way.’

The day after he met Clara he started for Birmingham, and although York
was certainly not ‘on his way,’ he pushed forward to the city and reached
it on a Saturday evening.  He was to spend Sunday there, and on Sunday
morning he proposed that they should hear the cathedral service, and go
for a walk in the afternoon.  To this suggestion Benjamin partially
assented.  He wished to go to the cathedral in the morning, but thought
his father had better rest after dinner.  Baruch somewhat resented the
insinuation of possible fatigue consequent on advancing years.

‘What do you mean?’ he said; ‘you know well enough I enjoy a walk in the
afternoon; besides, I shall not see much of you, and do not want to lose
what little time I have.’

About three, therefore, they started, and presently a girl met them, who
was introduced simply as ‘Miss Masters.’

‘We are going to your side of the water,’ said the son; ‘you may as well
cross with us.’

They came to a point where a boat was moored, and a man was in it.  There
was no regular ferry, but on Sundays he earned a trifle by taking people
to the opposite meadow, and thus enabling them to vary their return
journey to the city.  When they were about two-thirds of the way over,
Benjamin observed that if they stood up they could see the Minster.  They
all three rose, and without an instant’s warning—they could not tell
afterwards how it happened—the boat half capsized, and they were in eight
or nine feet of water.  Baruch could not swim and went down at once, but
on coming up close to the gunwale he caught at it and held fast.  Looking
round, he saw that Benjamin, who could swim well, had made for Miss
Masters, and, having caught her by the back of the neck, was taking her
ashore.  The boatman, who could also swim, called out to Baruch to hold
on, gave the boat three or four vigorous strokes from the stern, and
Baruch felt the ground under his feet.  The boatman’s little cottage was
not far off, and, when the party reached it, Benjamin earnestly desired
Miss Masters to take off her wet clothes and occupy the bed which was
offered her.  He himself would run home—it was not half-a-mile—and, after
having changed, would go to her house and send her sister with what was
wanted.  He was just off when it suddenly struck him that his father
might need some attention.

‘Oh, father—’ he began, but the boatman’s wife interposed.

‘He can’t be left like that, and he can’t go home; he’ll catch his death
o’ cold, and there isn’t but one more bed in the house, and that isn’t
quite fit to put a gentleman in.  Howsomever, he must turn in there, and
my husband, he can go into the back-kitchen and rub himself down.  You
won’t do yourself no good, Mr Cohen,’ addressing the son, whom she knew,
‘by going back; you’d better stay here and get into bed with your
father.’

In a few minutes the boatman would have gone on the errand, but Benjamin
could not lose the opportunity of sacrificing himself for Miss Masters.
He rushed off, and in three-quarters of an hour had returned with the
sister.  Having learned, after anxious inquiry, that Miss Masters, so far
as could be discovered, had not caught a chill, he went to his father.

‘Well, father, I hope you are none the worse for the ducking,’ he said
gaily.  ‘The next time you come to York you’d better bring another suit
of clothes with you.’

Baruch turned round uneasily and did not answer immediately.  He had had
a narrow escape from drowning.

‘Nothing of much consequence.  Is your friend all right?’

‘Oh, yes; I was anxious about her, for she is not very strong, but I do
not think she will come to much harm.  I made them light a fire in her
room.’

‘Are they drying my clothes?’

‘I’ll go and see.’

He went away and encountered the elder Miss Masters, who told him that
her sister, feeling no ill effects from the plunge, had determined to go
home at once, and in fact was nearly ready.  Benjamin waited, and
presently she came downstairs, smiling.

‘Nothing the matter.  I owe it to you, however, that I am not now in
another world.’

Benjamin was in an ecstasy, and considered himself bound to accompany her
to her door.

Meanwhile, Baruch lay upstairs alone in no very happy temper.  He heard
the conversation below, and knew that his son had gone.  In all genuine
love there is something of ferocious selfishness.  The perfectly divine
nature knows how to keep it in check, and is even capable—supposing it to
be a woman’s nature—of contentment if the loved one is happy, no matter
with what or with whom; but the nature only a little less than divine
cannot, without pain, endure the thought that it no longer owns privately
and exclusively that which it loves, even when it loves a child, and
Baruch was particularly excusable, considering his solitude.
Nevertheless, he had learned a little wisdom, and, what was of much
greater importance, had learned how to use it when he needed it.  It had
been forced upon him; it was an adjustment to circumstances, the wisest
wisdom.  It was not something without any particular connection with him;
it was rather the external protection built up from within to shield him
where he was vulnerable; it was the answer to questions which had been
put to _him_, and not to those which had been put to other people.  So it
came to pass that, when he said bitterly to himself that, if he were at
that moment lying dead at the bottom of the river, Benjamin would have
found consolation very near at hand, he was able to reflect upon the
folly of self-laceration, and to rebuke himself for a complaint against
what was simply the order of Nature, and not a personal failure.

His self-conquest, however, was not very permanent.  When he left York
the next morning, he fancied his son was not particularly grieved, and he
was passive under the thought that an epoch in his life had come, that
the milestones now began to show the distance to the place to which he
travelled, and, still worse, that the boy who had been so close to him,
and upon whom he had so much depended, had gone from him.

There is no remedy for our troubles which is uniformly and progressively
efficacious.  All that we have a right to expect from our religion is
that gradually, very gradually, it will assist us to a real victory.
After each apparent defeat, if we are bravely in earnest, we gain
something on our former position.  Baruch was two days on his journey
back to town, and as he came nearer home, he recovered himself a little.
Suddenly he remembered the bookshop and the book for which he had to
call, and that he had intended to ask Marshall something about the
bookseller’s new assistant.




CHAPTER XX


MADGE was a puzzle to Mrs Caffyn.  Mrs Caffyn loved her, and when she was
ill had behaved like a mother to her.  The newly-born child, a healthy
girl, was treated by Mrs Caffyn as if it were her own granddaughter, and
many little luxuries were bought which never appeared in Mrs Marshall’s
weekly bill.  Naturally, Mrs Caffyn’s affection moved a response from
Madge, and Mrs Caffyn by degrees heard the greater part of her history;
but why she had separated herself from her lover without any apparent
reason remained a mystery, and all the greater was the mystery because
Mrs Caffyn believed that there were no other facts to be known than those
she knew.  She longed to bring about a reconciliation.  It was dreadful
to her that Madge should be condemned to poverty, and that her infant
should be fatherless, although there was a gentleman waiting to take them
both and make them happy.

‘The hair won’t be dark like yours, my love,’ she said one afternoon,
soon after Madge had come downstairs and was lying on the sofa.  ‘The
hair do darken a lot, but hers will never be black.  It’s my opinion as
it’ll be fair.’

Madge did not speak, and Mrs Caffyn, who was sitting at the head of the
couch, put her work and her spectacles on the table.  It was growing
dusk; she took Madge’s hand, which hung down by her side, and gently
lifted it up.  Such a delicate hand, Mrs Caffyn thought.  She was proud
that she had for a friend the owner of such a hand, who behaved to her as
an equal.  It was delightful to be kissed—no mere formal salutations—by a
lady fit to go into the finest drawing-room in London, but it was a
greater delight that Madge’s talk suited her better than any she had
heard at Great Oakhurst.  It was natural she should rejoice when she
discovered, unconsciously that she had a soul, to which the speech of the
stars, though somewhat strange, was not an utterly foreign tongue.

She retained her hold on Madge’s hand.

‘May be,’ she continued, ‘it’ll be like its father’s.  In our family all
the gals take after the father, and all the boys after the mother.  I
suppose as _he_ has lightish hair?’

Still Madge said nothing.

‘It isn’t easy to believe as the father of that blessed dear could have
been a bad lot.  I’m sure he isn’t, and yet there’s that Polesden gal at
the farm, she as went wrong with Jim, a great ugly brute, and she herself
warnt up to much, well, as I say, her child was the delicatest little
angel as I ever saw.  It’s my belief as God-a-mighty mixes Hisself up in
it more nor we think.  But there _was_ nothing amiss with him, was there,
my sweet?’

Mrs Caffyn inclined her head towards Madge.

‘Oh, no!  Nothing, nothing.’

‘Don’t you think, my dear, if there’s nothing atwixt you, as it was a
flyin’ in the face of Providence to turn him off?  You were reglarly
engaged to him, and I have heard you say he was very fond of you.  I
suppose there were some high words about something, and a kind of a
quarrel like, and so you parted, but that’s nothing.  It might all be
made up now, and it ought to be made up.  What was it about?’

‘There was no quarrel.’

‘Well, of course, if you don’t like to say anything more to me, I won’t
ask you.  I don’t want to hear any secrets as I shouldn’t hear.  I speak
only because I can’t abear to see you here when I believe as everything
might be put right, and you might have a house of your own, and a good
husband, and be happy for the rest of your days.  It isn’t too late for
that now.  I know what I know, and as how he’d marry you at once.’

‘Oh, my dear Mrs Caffyn, I have no secret from you, who have been so good
to me: I can only say I could not love him—not as I ought.’

‘If you can’t love a man, that’s to say if you can’t _abear_ him, it’s
wrong to have him, but if there’s a child that does make a difference,
for one has to think of the child and of being respectable.  There’s
something in being respectable; although, for that matter, I’ve see’d
respectable people at Great Oakhurst as were ten times worse than those
as aren’t.  Still, a-speaking for myself, I’d put up with a goodish bit
to marry the man whose child wor mine.’

‘For myself I could, but it wouldn’t be just to him.’

‘I don’t see what you mean.’

‘I mean that I could sacrifice myself if I believed it to be my duty, but
I should wrong him cruelly if I were to accept him and did not love him
with all my heart.’

‘My dear, you take my word for it, he isn’t so particklar as you are.  A
man isn’t so particklar as a woman.  He goes about his work, and has all
sorts of things in his head, and if a woman makes him comfortable when he
comes home, he’s all right.  I won’t say as one woman is much the same as
another to a man—leastways to all men—but still they are _not_
particklar.  Maybe, though, it isn’t quite the same with gentlefolk like
yourself,—but there’s that blessed baby a-cryin’.’

Mrs Caffyn hastened upstairs, leaving Madge to her reflections.  Once
more the old dialectic reappeared.  ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘it is, as
Clara said, a question of degree.  There are not a thousand husbands and
wives in this great city whose relationship comes near perfection.  If I
felt aversion my course would be clear, but there is no aversion; on the
contrary, our affection for one another is sufficient for a decent
household and decent existence undisturbed by catastrophes.  No brighter
sunlight is obtained by others far better than myself.  Ought I to expect
a refinement of relationship to which I have no right?  Our claims are
always beyond our deserts, and we are disappointed if our poor, mean,
defective natures do not obtain the homage which belongs to those of
ethereal texture.  It will be a life with no enthusiasms nor romance,
perhaps, but it will be tolerable, and what may be called happy, and my
child will be protected and educated.  My child! what is there which I
ought to put in the balance against her?  If our sympathy is not
complete, I have my own little oratory: I can keep the candles alight,
close the door, and worship there alone.’

So she mused, and her foes again ranged themselves over against her.
There was nothing to support her but something veiled, which would not
altogether disclose or explain itself.  Nevertheless, in a few minutes,
her enemies had vanished, like a mist before a sudden wind, and she was
once more victorious.  Precious and rare are those divine souls, to whom
that which is aërial is substantial, the only true substance; those for
whom a pale vision possesses an authority they are forced unconditionally
to obey.




CHAPTER XXI


MRS CAFFYN was unhappy, and made up her mind that she would talk to Frank
herself.  She had learned enough about him from the two sisters,
especially from Clara, to make her believe that, with a very little
management, she could bring him back to Madge.  The difficulty was to see
him without his father’s knowledge.  At last she determined to write to
him, and she made her son-in-law address the envelope and mark it
private.  This is what she said:—

    ‘DEAR SIR,—Although unbeknown to you, I take the liberty of telling
    you as M. H. is alivin’ here with me, and somebody else as I think
    you ought to see, but perhaps I’d better have a word or two with you
    myself, if not quite ill-convenient to you, and maybe you’ll be kind
    enough to say how that’s to be done to your obedient, humble servant,

                                                             ‘MRS CAFFYN.’

She thought this very diplomatic, inasmuch as nobody but Frank could
possibly suspect what the letter meant.  It went to Stoke Newington, but,
alas! he was in Germany, and poor Mrs Caffyn had to wait a week before
she received a reply.  Frank of course understood it.  Although he had
thought about Madge continually, he had become calmer.  He saw, it is
true, that there was no stability in his position, and that he could not
possibly remain where he was.  Had Madge been the commonest of the
common, and his relationship to her the commonest of the common, he could
not permit her to cast herself loose from him for ever and take upon
herself the whole burden of his misdeed.  But he did not know what to do,
and, as successive considerations and reconsiderations ended in nothing,
and the distractions of a foreign country were so numerous, Madge had for
a time been put aside, like a huge bill which we cannot pay, and which
staggers us.  We therefore docket it, and hide it in the desk, and we
imagine we have done something.  Once again, however, the flame leapt up
out of the ashes, vivid as ever.  Once again the thought that he had been
so close to Madge, and that she had yielded to him, touched him with
peculiar tenderness, and it seemed impossible to part himself from her.
To a man with any of the nobler qualities of man it is not only a sense
of honour which binds him to a woman who has given him all she has to
give.  Separation seems unnatural, monstrous, a divorce from himself; it
is not she alone, but it is himself whom he abandons.  Frank’s duty, too,
pointed imperiously to the path he ought to take, duty to the child as
well as to the mother.  He determined to go home, secretly; Mrs Caffyn
would not have written if she had not seen good reason for believing that
Madge still belonged to him.  He made up his mind to start the next day,
but when the next day came, instructions to go immediately to Hamburg
arrived from his father.  There were rumours of the insolvency of a house
with which Mr Palmer dealt; inquiries were necessary which could better
be made personally, and if these rumours were correct, as Mr Palmer
believed them to be, his agency must be transferred to some other firm.
There was now no possibility of a journey to England.  For a moment he
debated whether, when he was at Hamburg, he could not slip over to
London, but it would be dangerous.  Further orders might come from his
father, and the failure to acknowledge them would lead to evasion, and
perhaps to discovery.  He must, therefore, content himself with a written
explanation to Mrs Caffyn why he could not meet her, and there should be
one more effort to make atonement to Madge.  This was what went to Mrs
Caffyn, and to her lodger:—

    ‘DEAR MADAM,—Your note has reached me here.  I am very sorry that my
    engagements are so pressing that I cannot leave Germany at present.
    I have written to Miss Hopgood.  There is one subject which I cannot
    mention to her—I cannot speak to her about money.  Will you please
    give me full information?  I enclose £20, and I must trust to your
    discretion.  I thank you heartily for all your kindness.—Truly yours,

                                                           ‘FRANK PALMER.’

    ‘MY DEAREST MADGE,—I cannot help saying one more word to you,
    although, when I last saw you, you told me that it was useless for me
    to hope.  I know, however, that there is now another bond between us,
    the child is mine as well as yours, and if I am not all that you
    deserve, ought you to prevent me from doing my duty to it as well as
    to you?  It is true that if we were to marry I could never right you,
    and perhaps my father would have nothing to do with us, but in time
    he might relent, and I will come over at once, or, at least, the
    moment I have settled some business here, and you shall be my wife.
    Do, my dearest Madge, consent.’

When he came to this point his pen stopped.  What he had written was very
smooth, but very tame and cold.  However, nothing better presented
itself; he changed his position, sat back in his chair, and searched
himself, but could find nothing.  It was not always so.  Some months ago
there would have been no difficulty, and he would not have known when to
come to an end.  The same thing would have been said a dozen times,
perhaps, but it would not have seemed the same to him, and each
succeeding repetition would have been felt with the force of novelty.  He
took a scrap of paper and tried to draft two or three sentences, altered
them several times and made them worse.  He then re-read the letter; it
was too short; but after all it contained what was necessary, and it must
go as it stood.  She knew how he felt towards her.  So he signed it after
giving his address at Hamburg, and it was posted.

Three or four days afterwards Mrs Marshall, in accordance with her usual
custom, went to see Madge before she was up.  The child lay peacefully by
its mother’s side and Frank’s letter was upon the counterpane.  The
resolution that no letter from him should be opened had been broken.  The
two women had become great friends and, within the last few weeks, Madge
had compelled Mrs Marshall to call her by her Christian name.

‘You’ve had a letter from Mr Palmer; I was sure it was his handwriting
when it came late last night.’

‘You can read it; there is nothing private in it.’

She turned round to the child and Mrs Marshall sat down and read.  When
she had finished she laid the letter on the bed again and was silent.

‘Well?’ said Madge.  ‘Would you say “No?”’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘For your own sake, as well as for his?’

Mrs Marshall took up the letter and read half of it again.

‘Yes, you had better say “No.”  You will find it dull, especially if you
have to live in London.’

‘Did you find London dull when you came to live in it?’

‘Rather; Marshall is away all day long.’

‘But scarcely any woman in London expects to marry a man who is not away
all day.’

‘They ought then to have heaps of work, or they ought to have a lot of
children to look after; but, perhaps, being born and bred in the country,
I do not know what people in London are.  Recollect you were country born
and bred yourself, or, at anyrate, you have lived in the country for the
most of your life.’

‘Dull! we must all expect to be dull.’

‘There’s nothing worse.  I’ve had rheumatic fever, and I say, give me the
fever rather than what comes over me at times here.  If Marshall had not
been so good to me, I do not know what I should have done with myself.’

Madge turned round and looked Mrs Marshall straight in the face, but she
did not flinch.

‘Marshall is very good to me, but I was glad when mother and you and your
sister came to keep me company when he is not at home.  It tired me to
have my meals alone: it is bad for the digestion; at least, so he says,
and he believes that it was indigestion that was the matter with me.  I
should be sorry for myself if you were to go away; not that I want to put
that forward.  Maybe I should never see much more of you: he is rich: you
might come here sometimes, but he would not like to have Marshall and
mother and me at his house.’

Not a word was spoken for at least a minute.

Suddenly Mrs Marshall took Madge’s hand in her own hands, leaned over
her, and in that kind of whisper with which we wake a sleeper who is to
be aroused to escape from sudden peril, she said in her ear,—

‘Madge, Madge: for God’s sake leave him!’

‘I have left him.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite.’

‘For ever?’

‘For ever!’

Mrs Marshall let go Madge’s hand, turned her eyes towards her intently
for a moment, and again bent over her as if she were about to embrace
her.  A knock, however, came at the door, and Mrs Caffyn entered with the
cup of coffee which she always insisted on bringing before Madge rose.
After she and her daughter had left, Madge read the letter once more.
There was nothing new in it, but formally it was something, like the
tolling of the bell when we know that our friend is dead.  There was a
little sobbing, and then she kissed her child with such eagerness that it
began to cry.

‘You’ll answer that letter, I suppose?’ said Mrs Caffyn, when they were
alone.

‘No.’

‘I’m rather glad.  It would worrit you, and there’s nothing worse for a
baby than worritin’ when it’s mother’s a-feedin it.’

Mr Caffyn wrote as follows:—

    ‘DEAR SIR,—I was sorry as you couldn’t come; but I believe now as it
    was better as you didn’t.  I am no scollard, and so no more from your
    obedient, humble servant,

                                                              ‘MRS CAFFYN.

    ‘_P.S._—I return the money, having no use for the same.




CHAPTER XXII


BARUCH did not obtain any very definite information from Marshall about
Clara.  He was told that she had a sister; that they were both of them
gentlewomen; that their mother and father were dead; that they were great
readers, and that they did not go to church nor chapel, but that they
both went sometimes to hear a certain Mr A. J. Scott lecture.  He was
once assistant minister to Irving, but was now heretical, and had a
congregation of his own creating at Woolwich.

Baruch called at the shop and found Clara once more alone.  The book was
packed up and had being lying ready for him for two or three days.  He
wanted to speak, but hardly knew how to begin.  He looked idly round the
shelves, taking down one volume after another, and at last he said,—

‘I suppose nobody but myself has ever asked for a copy of Robinson?’

‘Not since I have been here.’

‘I do not wonder at it; he printed only two hundred and fifty; he gave
away five-and-twenty, and I am sure nearly two hundred were sold as
wastepaper.’

‘He is a friend of yours?’

‘He was a friend; he is dead; he was an usher in a private school,
although you might have supposed, from the title selected, that he was a
clerk.  I told him it was useless to publish, and his publishers told him
the same thing.’

‘I should have thought that some notice would have been taken of him; he
is so evidently worth it.’

‘Yes, but although he was original and reflective, he had no particular
talent.  His excellence lay in criticism and observation, often profound,
on what came to him every day, and he was valueless in the literary
market.  A talent of some kind is necessary to genius if it is to be
heard.  So he died utterly unrecognised, save by one or two personal
friends who loved him dearly.  He was peculiar in the depth and intimacy
of his friendships.  Few men understand the meaning of the word
friendship.  They consort with certain companions and perhaps very
earnestly admire them, because they possess intellectual gifts, but of
friendship, such as we two, Morris and I (for that was his real name)
understood it, they know nothing.’

‘Do you believe, that the good does not necessarily survive?’

‘Yes and no; I believe that power every moment, so far as our eyes can
follow it, is utterly lost.  I have had one or two friends whom the world
has never known and never will know, who have more in them than is to be
found in many an English classic.  I could take you to a little
dissenting chapel not very far from Holborn where you would hear a young
Welshman, with no education beyond that provided by a Welsh
denominational college, who is a perfect orator and whose depth of
insight is hardly to be matched, save by Thomas À Kempis, whom he much
resembles.  When he dies he will be forgotten in a dozen years.  Besides,
it is surely plain enough to everybody that there are thousands of men
and women within a mile of us, apathetic and obscure, who, if, an object
worthy of them had been presented to them, would have shown themselves
capable of enthusiasm and heroism.  Huge volumes of human energy are
apparently annihilated.’

‘It is very shocking, worse to me than the thought of the earthquake or
the pestilence.’

‘I said “yes and no” and there is another side.  The universe is so
wonderful, so intricate, that it is impossible to trace the
transformation of its forces, and when they seem to disappear the
disappearance may be an illusion.  Moreover, “waste” is a word which is
applicable only to finite resources.  If the resources are infinite it
has no meaning.’

Two customers came in and Baruch was obliged to leave.  When he came to
reflect, he was surprised to find not only how much he had said, but what
he had said.  He was usually reserved, and with strangers he adhered to
the weather or to passing events.  He had spoken, however, to this young
woman as if they had been acquainted for years.  Clara, too, was
surprised.  She always cut short attempts at conversation in the shop.
Frequently she answered questions and receipted and returned bills
without looking in the faces of the people who spoke to her or offered
her the money.  But to this foreigner, or Jew, she had disclosed
something she felt.  She was rather abashed, but presently her employer,
Mr Barnes, returned and somewhat relieved her.

‘The gentleman who bought _After Office Hours_ came for it while you were
out?’

‘Oh! what, Cohen?  Good fellow Cohen is; he it was who recommended you to
me.  He is brother-in-law to your landlord.’  Clara was comforted; he was
not a mere ‘casual,’ as Mr Barnes called his chance customers.




CHAPTER XXIII


ABOUT a fortnight afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, Cohen went to the
Marshalls’.  He had called there once or twice since his mother-in-law
came to London, but had seen nothing of the lodgers.  It was just about
tea-time, but unfortunately Marshall and his wife had gone out.  Mrs
Caffyn insisted that Cohen should stay, but Madge could not be persuaded
to come downstairs, and Baruch, Mrs Caffyn and Clara had tea by
themselves.  Baruch asked Mrs Caffyn if she could endure London after
living for so long in the country.

‘Ah! my dear boy, I have to like it.’

‘No, you haven’t; what you mean is that, whether you like it, or whether
you do not, you have to put up with it.’

‘No, I don’t mean that.  Miss Hopgood, Cohen and me, we are the best of
friends, but whenever he comes here, he allus begins to argue with me.
Howsomever, arguing isn’t everything, is it, my dear?  There’s some
things, after all, as I can do and he can’t, but he’s just wrong here in
his arguing that wasn’t what I meant.  I meant what I said, as I had to
like it.’

‘How can you like it if you don’t?’

‘How can I?  That shows you’re a man and not a woman.  Jess like you men.
_You’d_ do what you didn’t like, I know, for you’re a good sort—and
everybody would know you didn’t like it—but what would be the use of me
a-livin’ in a house if I didn’t like it?—with my daughter and these dear,
young women?  If it comes to livin’, you’d ten thousand times better say
at once as you hate bein’ where you are than go about all day long, as if
you was a blessed saint and put upon.’

Mrs Caffyn twitched at her gown and pulled it down over her knees and
brushed the crumbs off with energy.  She continued, ‘I can’t abide people
who everlastin’ make believe they are put upon.  Suppose I were allus
a-hankering every foggy day after Great Oakhurst, and yet a-tellin’ my
daughter as I knew my place was here; if I was she, I should wish my
mother at Jericho.’

‘Then you really prefer London to Great Oakhurst?’ said Clara.

‘Why, my dear, of course I do.  Don’t you think it’s pleasanter being
here with you and your sister and that precious little creature, and my
daughter, than down in that dead-alive place?  Not that I don’t miss my
walk sometimes into Darkin; you remember that way as I took you once,
Baruch, across the hill, and we went over Ranmore Common and I showed you
Camilla Lacy, and you said as you knew a woman who wrote books who once
lived there?  You remember them beech-woods?  Ah, it was one October!
Weren’t they a colour—weren’t they lovely?’

Baruch remembered them well enough.  Who that had ever seen them could
forget them?

‘And it was I as took you!  You wouldn’t think it, my dear, though he’s
always a-arguin’, I do believe he’d love to go that walk again, even with
an old woman, and see them heavenly beeches.  But, Lord, how I do talk,
and you’ve neither of you got any tea.’

‘Have you lived long in London, Miss Hopgood?’ inquired Baruch.

‘Not very long.’

‘Do you feel the change?’

‘I cannot say I do not.’

‘I suppose, however, you have brought yourself to believe in Mrs Caffyn’s
philosophy?’

‘I cannot say that, but I may say that I am scarcely strong enough for
mere endurance, and I therefore always endeavour to find something
agreeable in circumstances from which there is no escape.’

The recognition of the One in the Many had as great a charm for Baruch as
it had for Socrates, and Clara spoke with the ease of a person whose
habit it was to deal with principles and generalisations.

‘Yes, and mere toleration, to say nothing of opposition, at least so far
as persons are concerned, is seldom necessary.  It is generally thought
that what is called dramatic power is a poetic gift, but it is really an
indispensable virtue to all of us if we are to be happy.’

Mrs Caffyn did not take much interest in abstract statements.  ‘You
remember,’ she said, turning to Baruch, ‘that man Chorley as has the big
farm on the left-hand side just afore you come to the common?  He wasn’t
a Surrey man: he came out of the shires.’

‘Very well.’

‘He’s married that Skelton girl; married her the week afore I left.
There isn’t no love lost there, but the girl’s father said he’d murder
him if he didn’t, and so it come off.  How she ever brought herself to it
gets over me.  She has that big farm-house, and he’s made a fine
drawing-room out of the livin’ room on the left-hand side as you go in,
and put a new grate in the kitchen and turned that into the livin’ room,
and they does the cooking in the back kitchen, but for all that, if I’d
been her, I’d never have seen his face no more, and I’d have packed off
to Australia.’

‘Does anybody go near them?’

‘Near them! of course they do, and, as true as I’m a-sittin’ here, our
parson, who married them, went to the breakfast.  It isn’t Chorley as I
blame so much; he’s a poor, snivellin’ creature, and he was frightened,
but it’s the girl.  She doesn’t care for him no more than me, and then
again, although, as I tell you, he’s such a poor creature, he’s awful
cruel and mean, and she knows it.  But what was I a-goin’ to say?  Never
shall I forget that wedding.  You know as it’s a short cut to 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/5986