Life's Little Ironies and a Few Crusted Characters
by
Thomas Hardy

Part 1 out of 5







LIFE'S LITTLE IRONIES




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




THE SON'S VETO




CHAPTER I



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'HAS, dear mother--not HAVE!' exclaimed the public-school boy, with
an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. 'Surely you know
that by this time!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And why?' said the parson.

'Sam Hobson has asked me to marry him, sir.'

'Well--do you want to marry?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER II



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Sam!' cried she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'O no! Not in one of these wretched holes! At a public school--one
of the most distinguished in England.'

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

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



CHAPTER III



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I don't mind that! It's more independent.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Say no more--perhaps I am wrong! I will struggle against it!' she
cried miserably.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 1891.




FOR CONSCIENCE' SAKE




CHAPTER I



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The old story.'

The other nodded.

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

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

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

'Did the child live?' asked the doctor.

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

'And the mother--was she a decent, worthy young woman?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER II



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Your daughter--and mine.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Does she know--anything about me?'

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

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

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

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

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

'Yes; I don't mind,' she said reluctantly.

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

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

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

'Who is he?' said Mr. Millborne.

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

'Why shouldn't it?'

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

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

'Do you think it would?'

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

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

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



CHAPTER III



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Your father spoils all!' murmured Mrs. Millborne.

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

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


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

'F. M.'


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

'Thank God!' said the gentleman.

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

March 1891.




A TRAGEDY OF TWO AMBITIONS




CHAPTER I



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

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

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

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

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

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

'Did Rosa see him?'

'No.'

'Nor anybody?'

'No.'

'What have you done with him?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER II



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The younger replied: 'Half-past five.'

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

'I am afraid I have.'

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

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

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

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

'But where is the money to come from, Joshua?'

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

'But about paying him?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Last week.'

'How did he get here--so many miles?'

'Came by railway. He came to ask for money.'

'Ah!'

'He says he will call on you.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER III



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Well done! Then off we go at seven.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV



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

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

'If you adore her, I suppose you must have her!' replied his mother


 


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