Mr Robins--Village Choirs--Edith--An Elopement--A Father's Sorrow--An
Unhappy Pair--The Wanderer's Return--Father!--A Daughter's
Entreater--No Favourable Answer--A Sleepless Pillow
The organist of Downside, Mr Robins, lived in a little house close to
the church.
Mr Clifford the vicar was accounted very lucky by the neighbouring
clergy for having such a man, and not being exposed to all the vagaries
of a young schoolmaster, or, perhaps, still worse, schoolmistress, with
all the latest musical fancies of the training colleges. Neither had
he to grapple with the tyranny of the leading bass nor the conceit and
touchiness that seems inseparable from the tenor voice, since Mr Robins
kept a firm and sensible hand on the reins, and drove that generally
unmanageable team, a village choir, with the greatest discretion.
But when Mr Clifford was complimented by his friends on the possession
of such a treasure, he accepted their remarks a little doubtfully,
being sometimes inclined to think that he would almost rather have had
a less excellent choir and have had some slight voice in the matter
himself.
Mr Robins imported a certain solemnity into the musical matters of
Downside, which of course was very desirable as far as the church
services were concerned; but when it came to penny-readings and village
concerts, Mr Clifford and some of the parishioners were disposed to
envy the pleasant ease of such festivities in other parishes, where,
though the music was very inferior, the enjoyment of both performers
and audience was far greater.
Mr Robins, for one thing, set his face steadily against comic songs;
and Mr Clifford in his inmost heart had an ungratified ambition to sing
a certain song, called 'The Three Little Pigs,' with which Mr Wilson in
the next parish simply brought down the house on several occasions;
though Mr Clifford felt he by no means did full justice to it,
especially in the part where the old mother 'waddled about, saying
"Umph! umph! umph!" while the little ones said "Wee! wee!"' To be sure
Mr Wilson suffered for months after these performances from outbursts
of grunting among his youthful parishioners at sight of him, and even
at the Sunday-school one audacious boy had given vent on one occasion
to an 'umph!' very true indeed to nature, but not conducive to good
behaviour in his class. But Mr Clifford did not know the after effects
of Mr Wilson's vocal success.
Likewise Mr Robins selected very simple music, and yet exacted an
amount of practising unheard of at Bilton or Stokeley, where, after one
or two attempts, they felt competent to face a crowded schoolroom, and
yell or growl out such choruses as 'The Heavens are telling' or 'The
Hallelujah Chorus,' with a lofty indifference to tune or time, and with
their respective schoolmasters banging away at the accompaniment,
within a bar or two of the singers, all feeling quite satisfied if they
finished up altogether on the concluding chord or thereabouts, flushed
and triumphant, with perspiration standing on their foreheads, and an
expression of honest pride on their faces, as much as to say, 'There's
for you. What do you think of that?'
If success is to be measured by applause, there is no doubt these
performances were most successful, far more so than the accurately
rendered 'Hardy Norseman' or 'Men of Harlech' at Downside, in which
lights and shades, _pianos_ and _fortes_ were carefully observed, and
any attempt on anyone's part, even the tenors, to distinguish
themselves above the others was instantly suppressed. The result, from
a musical point of view, was no doubt satisfactory; but the applause
was of a very moderate character, and never accompanied by those
vociferous 'angcores,' which are so truly gratifying to the soul of
musical artistes.
Mr Robins was a middle-aged man, looking older than he really was, as
his hair was quite white. He had some small independent means of his
own, which he supplemented by his small salary as organist, and by
giving a few music lessons in the neighbourhood. He had been in his
earlier years a vicar-choral at one of the cathedrals, and had come to
Downside twenty years ago, after the death of his wife, bringing with
him his little girl, in whom he was entirely wrapt up.
He spoilt her so persistently, and his housekeeper, Mrs Sands, was so
gentle and meek-spirited, that the effect on a naturally self-willed
child can easily be imagined; and, as she grew up, she became more and
more uncontrollable. She was a pretty, gypsy-looking girl, inheriting
her sweet looks from her mother, and her voice and musical taste from
her father. There was more than one young farmer in the neighbourhood
who cast admiring glances towards the corner of the church near the
organ, where the organist's pretty daughter sat, and slackened the pace
of his horse as he passed the clipped yew-hedge by the church, to catch
a glimpse of her in the bright little patch of garden, or to hear her
clear sweet voice singing over her work.
But people said Mr Robins thought no one good enough for her, and
though he himself had come of humble parentage, and in no way regarded
himself, nor expected to be regarded as a gentleman, it was generally
understood that no suitor except a gentleman would be acceptable for
Edith.
And so it took every one by surprise, and no one more so than her
father, when the girl took up with Martin Blake, the son of the
blacksmith in the next village, who might be seen most days with a
smutty face and leathern apron hammering away at the glowing red metal
on the anvil. It would have been well for him if he had only been seen
thus, with the marks of honest toil about him; but Martin Blake was too
often to be seen at the 'Crown,' and often in a state that anyone who
loved him would have grieved to see; and he was always to be found at
any race meetings and steeplechases and fairs in the neighbourhood,
and, report said, was by no means choice in his company.
To be sure he was good-looking and pleasant-mannered, and had a sort of
rollicking, light-hearted way with him, which was very attractive; but
still it seemed little short of infatuation on the part of Edith Robins
to take up with a man whose character was so well known, and who was in
every way her inferior in position and education.
No doubt Mr Robins was very injudicious in his treatment of her when he
found out what was going on, and as this was the first time in her life
that Edith's wishes had been crossed, it was not likely that she would
yield without a struggle. The mere fact of opposition seemed to deepen
what was at first merely an ordinary liking into an absorbing passion.
It was perfectly useless to reason with her; she disbelieved all the
stories to his discredit, which were abundant, and treated those who
repeated them as prejudiced and ill-natured.
It was in vain that Mr Robins by turns entreated and commanded her to
give him up, her father's distress or anger alike seemed indifferent to
her; and when he forbade Martin to come near the place, and kept her as
much as possible under his eye to prevent meetings between them, it
only roused in her a more obstinate determination to have her own way
in spite of him. She was missing one morning from the little bedroom
which Mrs Sands loved to keep as dainty and pretty as a lady's, and
from the garden where the roses and geraniums did such credit to her
care, and from her place in the little church where her prayer-book
still lay on the desk as she had left it the day before.
She had gone off with Martin Blake to London, without a word of sorrow
or farewell to the father who had been so foolishly fond of her, or to
the home where her happy petted childhood had passed. It nearly broke
her father's heart; it made an old man of him and turned his hair
white, and it seemed to freeze or petrify all his kindliness and human
sympathy.
He was a proud, reserved man, and could not bear the pity that every
one felt for him, or endure the well-meant but injudicious condolences,
mixed with 'I told you so,' and 'I 've thought for a long time,' which
the neighbours were so liberal with. Even Mr Clifford's attempts at
consolation he could hardly bring himself to listen to courteously, and
Jane Sands' tearful eyes and quivering voice irritated him beyond all
endurance. If there had been anyone to whom he could have talked
unrestrainedly and let out all the pent-up disappointment and wounded
love and tortured pride that surged and boiled within him, he might
have got through it better, or rather it might have raised him, as
rightly borne troubles do, above his poor, little, pitiful self, and
nearer to God; but this was just what he could not do.
He came nearest it sometimes in those long evenings of organ playing,
of the length of which poor little Jack Davis, the blower, so bitterly
complained, when the long sad notes wailed and sobbed through the
little church like the voice of a weary, sick soul making its
complaint. But even so he could not tell it all to God, though he had
been given that power of expression in music, which must make it easier
to those so gifted to cry unto the Lord.
But the music wailed itself into silence, and Jack in his corner by the
bellows waited terror-struck at the 'unked' sounds and the darkening
church, till he ventured at last to ask: 'Be I to blow, mister? I 'm
kinder skeered like.'
So the organist's trouble turned him bitter and hard, and changed his
love for his daughter into cold resentment; he would not have her name
mentioned in his presence, and he refused to open a letter she sent him
a few weeks after her marriage, and bid Jane Sands send it back if she
knew the address of the person who sent it.
On her side, Edith was quite as obstinate and resentful. She had no
idea of humbling herself and asking pardon. She thought she had quite
a right to do as she liked, and she believed her father would be too
unhappy without her to bear the separation long. She very soon found
out the mistake she had made--indeed, even in the midst of her
infatuation about Martin Blake, I think there lurked a certain distrust
of him, and they had not been married many weeks--I might almost say
days--before this distrust was more than realised.
His feelings towards her, too, had been mere flattered vanity at being
preferred by such a superior sort of girl than any deeper feeling, and
vanity is not a sufficiently lasting foundation for married happiness,
especially when the cold winds of poverty blow on the edifice, and when
the superior sort of girl has not been brought up to anything useful,
and cannot cook the dinner, or iron a shirt, or keep the house tidy.
When his father, the old blacksmith at Bilton, died six months after
they were married, Martin wished to come back and take up the work
there, more especially as work was hard to get in London and living
dear; but Edith would not hear of it, and opposed it so violently that
she got her way, though Martin afterwards maintained that this decision
was the ruin of him, occasionally dating his ruin six months earlier,
from his wedding. Perhaps he was right, and he might have settled down
steadily in the old home and among the old neighbours in spite of his
fine-lady wife; but when he said so, Edith was quick to remember and
cast up at him the stories which she had disbelieved and ignored
before, to prove in their constant wranglings that place and
neighbourhood had nothing to do with his idleness and unsteadiness. No
one ever heard much of these five years in London, for Edith wrote no
more after that letter was returned.
Those five years made little difference at Downside, except in Mr
Robins' white hair and set lined face; the little house behind the
yew-hedge looked just the same, and Jane Sands' kind, placid face was
still as kind and placid. Some of the girls had left school and gone
to service; some of the lads had developed into hobbledehoys and came
to church with walking-sticks and well-oiled hair; one or two of the
old folks had died; one or two more white-headed babies crawled about
the cottage floors; but otherwise Downside was just the same as it had
been five years before, when, one June morning, a self-willed girl had
softly opened the door under the honeysuckle porch and stepped out into
the dewy garden, where the birds were calling such a glad good-morning
as she passed to join her lover in the lane.
But the flame of life burns quicker and fiercer in London than at
Downside, for that same girl, coming back after only five years in
London, was so changed and aged and altered that--though, to be sure,
she came in the dusk and was muffled up in a big shawl--no one
recognised her, or thought for a moment of pretty, coquettish,
well-dressed Edith Robins, when the weary, shabby-looking woman passed
them by. She had lingered a minute or two by the churchyard gate,
though tramps, for such her worn-out boots and muddy skirts proclaimed
her, do not, as a rule, care for such music as sounded out from the
church door, where Mr Robins was consoling himself for the irritation
of choir-practice by ten minutes' playing. It was soon over, and Jack
Davis, still blower, and not much taller than he was five years before,
charged out in the rebound from the tension of long blowing, and nearly
knocked over the woman standing by the churchyard gate in the shadow of
the yew-tree, and made the baby she held in her arms give a feeble cry.
'Now then, out of the way!' he shouted in that unnecessarily loud voice
boys assume after church, perhaps to try if their lungs are still
capable of producing such a noise after enforced silence.
The woman made no answer, but after the boy had run off, went in and
waited in the porch till the sound of turning keys announced that the
organist was closing the organ and church for the night. But as his
footsteps drew near on the stone pavement she started and trembled as
if she had been afraid, and when he came out into the porch she shrank
away into the shadow as if she wished to be unobserved. He might
easily have passed her, for it was nearly dark from the yew-tree and
the row of elms that shut out, the western sky, where the sunset was
just dying away. His mind, too, was occupied with other things, and he
was humming over the verse of a hymn the boys had been singing--'Far
from my heavenly home.' There was no drilling into them the proper
rendering of the last pathetic words--
O guide me through the desert here,
And bring me home at last.
He quite started when a hand was laid upon his arm, and a voice,
changed indeed, and weak, but still the voice that in old days--not so
very old either--was the one voice for him in all the world, said:
'Father!'
I think just for one minute his impulse was to take her in his arms and
forget the ingratitude and desertion and deceit, like the father in the
parable whose heart went out to the poor prodigal while he was yet a
long way off; but the next moment the cold, bitter, resentful feelings
quenched the gentler impulse, and he drew away his arm from her
detaining hold, and passed on along the flagged path as if he were
unconscious of her presence, and this on the very threshold of His
house, who so pitifully forgives the debts of His servants, forasmuch
as they have not to pay.
But he had not reached the churchyard gate before she was at his side
again.
'Stop,' she said; 'you must hear me. It's not for my own sake, it's
the child. It's a little girl; the others were boys, and I didn't mind
so much; if they 'd grown up, they might have got on somehow--but
there! they 're safe anyhow--both of them in one week,' wailed the
mother's voice, protesting against her own words that she did not mind
about them. 'But this is a girl, and not a bit like him. She 's like
me, and you used to say I was like mother. She's like mother, I 'm
sure she is. There, just look at her. It's so dark, but you can see
even by this light that she's not like the Blakes.' She was fumbling
to draw back the shawl from the baby's head with her disengaged hand,
while with the other she still held a grip on his arm that was almost
painful in its pressure; but he stood doggedly with his head turned
away, and gave no sign of hearing what she said.
'He left me six months ago,' she went on, 'and I 've struggled along
somehow. I don't want ever to see him again. They say he's gone to
America, but I don't care. I don't mind starving myself, but it's the
little girl--Oh! I 've not come to ask you to take me in, though it
wouldn't be for long,' and a wretched, hollow cough that had
interrupted her words once or twice before, broke in now as if to
confirm what she said; 'if you'd just take the child. She's a dear
little thing, and not old enough at two months to have learnt any harm,
and Jane Sands would be good to her, I know she would, for the sake of
old times. And I'll go away and never come near to trouble you
again--I 'll promise it. Oh! just look at her! If it wasn't so dark
you'd see she was like mother. Why, you can feel the likeness if you
just put your hand on her little face; often in the night I 've felt
it, and I never did with the boys. She's very good, and she's too
little to fret after me, bless her!--and she 'll never know anything
about me, and needn't even know she has a father, and he 's not ever
likely to trouble himself about her.'
Her voice grew more and more pleading and entreating as she went on,
for there was not the slightest response or movement in the still
figure before her, less movement even than in the old yew-tree behind,
whose smaller branches, black against the sky where the orange of the
sunset was darkening into dull crimson, stirred a little in the evening
air.
'Oh! you can't refuse to take her! See, I'll carry her as far as the
door so that Jane can take her, and then I 'll go clear away and never
come near her again. You 'll have her christened, won't you? I 've
been thinking all the weary way what she should be called, and I
thought, unless you had a fancy for any other name' (a little stifled
sigh at the thought of how dear one name used to be to him), 'I should
like her to be Zoe. Just when she was born, and I was thinking,
thinking of you and home and everything, that song of yours kept
ringing in my head, "Maid of Athens," and the last line of every verse
beginning with Zoe. I can't remember the other words, but I know you
said they meant "My life, I love you;" and Zoe was life, and I thought
when I'm gone my little girl would live my life over again, my happy
old life with you, and make up to you for all the trouble her mother's
been to you.'
She stopped for want of breath and for the cough that shook her from
head to foot, and at last he turned; but even in that dim light she
could see his face plainly enough to know that there was no favourable
answer coming from those hard set lips and from those cold steady eyes,
and her hand dropped from his arm even before he spoke.
'You should have thought of this five years ago,' he said. 'I do not
see that I am called upon to support Martin Blake's family. I must
trouble you to let me pass.'
She fell back against the trunk of the yew-tree as if he had struck
her, and the movement caused the baby to wake and cry, and the sound of
its little wailing voice followed him as he walked down the path and
out into the road, and he could hear it still when he reached his own
garden gate, where through the open door the light shone out from the
lamp that Jane Sands was just carrying into his room, where his supper
was spread and his armchair and slippers awaited him.
In after days, remembering that evening, he fancied he had heard
'Father' once more mingling with the baby's cry; but he went in and
shut the door and drew the bolt and went into the cheerful, pleasant
room, leaving outside the night and the child's cry and the black
shadow of the church and the yew-tree.
It was only the beginning of the annoyance, he told himself; he must
expect a continued course of persecution, and he listened, while he
made a pretence of eating his supper, for the steps outside and the
knock at the door, which would surely renew the unwarrantable attempt
to saddle him with the charge of the child. He listened too, as he sat
after supper, holding up the newspaper in front of his unobservant
eyes; and he listened most of the night as he tossed on his sleepless
pillow--listened to the wind that had risen and moaned and sobbed round
the house like a living thing in pain--listened to the pitiless rain
that followed, pelting down on the ivy outside and on the tiles above
his head, as if bent on finding its way in to the warm comfortable bed
where he lay.