FATED TO BE FREE
A Novel
By JEAN INGELOW
Author of "Off The Skelligs," "Studies for Stories,"
"Mopsa the Fairy," Etc.
1875
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
When authors attempt to explain such of their works as should explain
themselves, it makes the case no better that they can say they do it on
express invitation. And yet, though I think so, I am about to give some
little account of two stories of mine which are connected
together,--"Off the Skelligs," and "Fated to be Free."
I am told that they are peculiar; and I feel that they must be so, for
most stories of human life are, or at least aim at being, works of
art,--selections of interesting portions of life, and fitting incidents,
put together and presented as a picture is; and I have not aimed at
producing a work of art at all, but a piece of nature. I have attempted
to beguile my readers into something like a sense of reality; to make
them fancy that they were reading the unskillful chronicle of things
that really occurred, rather than some invented story as interesting as
I knew how to make it.
It seemed to me difficult to write, at least in prose, an artistic
story; but easy to come nearer to life than most stories do.
Thus, after presenting a remarkable child, it seemed proper to let him
(through the force of circumstance) fall away into a very commonplace
man. It seemed proper indeed to crowd the pages with children, for in
real life they run all over; the world is covered thickly with the
prints of their little footsteps, though, as a rule, books written for
grown-up people are kept almost clear of them. It seemed proper also to
make the more important and interesting events of life fall at rather a
later age than is commonly chosen, and also to make the more important
and interesting persons not extremely young; for, in fact, almost all
the noblest and finest men and the loveliest and sweetest women of real
life are considerably older than the vast majority of heroes and
heroines in the world of fiction.
I have also let some of the same characters play a part in both stories,
though the last opens long before the first, and runs on after it is
finished. It is by this latter device that I have chiefly hoped to give
to each the air of a family history, and thus excite curiosity and
invite investigation; the small portion known to a young girl being told
by her from her own point of view and mingled into her own life and
love, and the larger narrative taking a different point of view and
giving both events and motives.
But in general, while describing the actions and setting down the words,
I have left the reader to judge my people; for I think many writers must
feel as I do, that, if characters are at all true to life, there is just
as much uncertainty as to how far they are to blame in any course that
they may have taken as there is in the case of our actual living
contemporaries.
But why then, you may ask, do I write this preface, which must, if
nothing else had done so, destroy any such sense of truth and reality?
Why, my American friends, because I am told that a great many of you
are pleased to wish for some explanation. I am sure you more than
deserve of me some efforts to please you. I seldom have an opportunity
of saying how truly I think so; and besides, even if I had declined to
give it, I know very well that for all my pains you would still have
never been beguiled into the least faith as to the reality of these two
stories!
London, June, 1875.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A WATCHER OF LILIES
II. THE LESSON
III. GOLD, THE INCORRUPTIBLE WITNESS
IV. SWARMS OF CHILDREN
V. OF A FINE MAN AND SOME FOOLISH WOMEN
VI. THE SHADOW OF A SHADE
VII. AN OLD MAN DIGS A WELL
VIII. THEY MEET AN AUTHOR
IX. SIGNED "DANIEL MORTIMER."--CANADA
X. CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
XI. WANTED A DESERT ISLAND
XII. VALENTINE
XIII. VENERABLE ANCIENTRY
XIV. EMILY
XV. THE AMERICAN GUEST
XVI. WEARING THE WILLOW
XVII. AN EASY DISMISSAL
XVIII. A MORNING CALL
XIX. MR. MORTIMER GOES THROUGH THE TURNPIKE
XX. THE RIVER
XXI. THE DEAD FATHER ENTREATS
XXII. SOPHISTRY
XXIII. DANTE AND OTHERS
XXIV. SELF-WONDER AND SELF-SCORN
XXV. THAT RAINY SUNDAY
XXVI. MRS. BRANDON ASKS A QUESTION
XVII. THE PLEASURES OF MEMORY
XXVIII. MELCOMBE
XXIX. UNHEARD-OF LIBERTIES
XXX. A CHAPTER OF TROUBLES
XXXI. A WOMAN'S SYMPATHY
XXII. MR. BRANDON IS MADE THE SUBJECT OF AN
HONOURABLE COMPARISON
XXXIII. THE TRUE GHOST STORY
XXXIV. VALENTINE AND LAURA
XXXV. A VISIT TO MELCOMBE
XXVI. A PRIVATE CONSULTATION
XXXVII. HIS VISITOR
CHAPTER I.
A WATCHER OF LILIES.
"Unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no
secrets are hid."--_Collect, English Communion Service._
In one of the south-western counties of England, some years ago, and in
a deep, well-wooded valley where men made perry and cider, wandered
little and read less, there was a hamlet with neither farm nor cottage
in it, that had not stood two hundred and fifty years, and just beyond
there was a church nearly double that age, and there were the mighty
wrecks of two great oak-trees, said to be more ancient still.
Between them, winding like a long red rut, went the narrow road, and was
so deeply cut into the soil that a horseman passing down it could see
nothing of its bordering fields; but about fifty yards from the first
great oak the land suddenly dipped, and showed on the left a steep
cup-like glen, choked with trees, and only divided from the road by a
few dilapidated stakes and palings, and a wooden gate, orange with the
rust of lichens, and held together with ropes and bands.
A carriage-drive was visible on the other side of the gate, but its
boundaries were half obliterated by the grass and weeds that had grown
over it, and as it wound down into the glen it was lost among the trees.
Nature, before it has been touched by man, is almost always beautiful,
strong, and cheerful in man's eyes; but nature, when he has once given
it his culture and then forsaken it, has usually an air of sorrow and
helplessness. He has made it live the more by laying his hand upon it,
and touching it with his life. It has come to relish of his humanity,
and it is so flavoured with his thoughts, and ordered and permeated by
his spirit, that if the stimulus of his presence is withdrawn it cannot
for a long while do without him, and live for itself as fully and as
well as it did before.
There was nothing to prevent a stranger from entering this place, and if
he did so, its meaning very soon took hold of him; he perceived that he
had walked into the world of some who were courting oblivion, steeping
themselves in solitude, tempting their very woods to encroach upon them,
and so swathe them as in a mantle of secrecy which might cover their
misfortunes, and win forgetfulness both for their faults and for their
decline.
The glen was about three hundred yards across, and the trees which
crowded it, and overflowed its steep side encroaching over the flat
ground beyond, were chiefly maples and sycamores. Every sunbeam that
shot in served to show its desolation. The place was encumbered with
fallen branches, tangled brushwood, dead ferns; and wherever the little
stream had spread itself there was a boggy hollow, rank with bulrushes,
and glorious with the starry marsh marigold. But here and there dead
trees stood upright, gaunt and white in their places, great swathes of
bark hanging loose from their limbs, while crowds of young saplings,
sickly for want of space and light, thrust up their heads towards the
sunshine, and were tied together and cumbered in their struggle by
climbing ropes of ivy, and long banners of the wild black vine.
The ring of woodland was not deep, the domain was soon traversed, and
then stepping out into a space covered with rank meadow grass, one might
see the house which should have been its heart.
It was a wide, old, red brick mansion, with many irregular windows, no
pane in which was more than two inches square. One end of it was deeply
embedded in an orchard of pear and apple trees, but its front was
exposed, and over the door might be seen the date of its building. The
roof was high and sloping, and in its centre rose a high stack of brick
chimneys, which had almost the effect of a tower, while under the eaves,
at regular intervals, were thrust out grotesque heads, with short spouts
protruding from their mouths. Some of these had fallen on the
paving-flags below, and no one had taken them up. No one ever looked out
of those front windows, or appeared to notice how fast the fruit-trees
by the house, and the forest-trees from the glen, were reaching out
their arms and sending forth their young saplings towards it, as if to
close it in and swallow it up.
So still it looked with its closed shutters, that what slight evidence
there was of its really being inhabited appeared only to make it yet
more strange and alone; for these were a gaunt, feeble, old dog, who
paced up and down the flags as if keeping guard, and a brass handle on
the oaken door, which was so highly polished that it glittered and shone
in the light.
But there was a great deal of life and company up aloft, for a tribe of
blue pigeons had their home among those eaves and chimneys, and they
walked daintily up the steep roof with their small red feet while they
uttered their plaintive call to their young.
It was a strange fancy that prompted the cleaning of this door-handle.
"I mun keep it bright," the old woman would say who did it, "in case
anybody should come to call." No one but herself ever opened the door,
nobody within cared that she should bestow this trouble. Nobody, for
more than fifty years, ever had "come to call," and yet, partly because
the feigning of such a possibility seemed to connect her still with her
fellows of the work-a-day world, and partly because the young master,
her foster-brother, whom she deeply loved, had last been seen by her
with this door-handle in his hand, she faithfully continued every day to
begin her light tasks by rubbing it, and while so doing she would often
call to mind the early spring twilight she had opened her eyes in so
long ago, and heard creaking footsteps passing down the stairs; and then
how she had heard the great bolt of the door withdrawn, and had sprung
out of bed, and peering through her casement had seen him close it after
him, and with his young brother steal away among the ghostly white
pear-trees, never to return.
"And I didn't give it a thought that they could be after aught worse
than rook-shooting," she would murmur, "for all I heard a sort of a
sobbing on the stairs. It was hard on poor old Madam though, never to
take any leave of her; but all her life has been hard for that matter,
poor innocent old critter. Well, well, I hope it's not a sin to wish 'em
happy, spite of that bad action; and as for her, she's had her troubles
in this world, as all the parish is ready to testify, and no doubt but
what that will be considered to her in the world to come."
All the parish was always ready to testify that poor old Madam had had a
sight o' troubles. All the parish took a certain awful pleasure in
relating them; it was a sort of distinction to have among them such an
unfortunate woman and mother, so that the very shepherds' and ditchers'
wives plumed themselves upon it over those in the next parish, where the
old Squire and his wife had never lost one of their many children, or
had any trouble "to speak of." "For there was no call to count his
eldest son's running off with a dairymaid, it being well beknown," they
would observe with severity, "that his mother never would let e'er a one
of the young madams as were suitable to marry him come nigh the house."
The dairymaid belonged to their parish, and so afforded them another
ground of triumph over their rivals. "Besides," they would say, "wasn't
their own church parson--old parson Green that everybody swore
by--wasn't he distinctly heard to say to the young man's father, 'that
he might ha' been expected to do wus'? They didn't see, for their parts,
that aught but good had come of it neither; but as for poor old Madam,
anybody might see that no good ever came nigh her. We must submit
ourselves to the Almighty's will," they would add with reverence. They
couldn't tell why He had afflicted her, but they prayed Him to be
merciful to her in her latter end.
It was in old parson Green's time, the man they all swore by, that they
talked thus; but when parson Craik came, they learned some new words,
and instead of accepting trouble with the religious acquiescence of the
ignorant, they began to wonder and doubt, and presently to offend their
rivals by their fine language. "Mysterious, indeed," they would say, "is
the ways of Providence."
In the meantime the poor old woman who for so many years was the object
of their speculations and their sympathy, lived in all quietness and
humbleness at one end of her long house, and on fine Sundays edified the
congregation by coming to church. Not, however, on foot; her great age
made that too much an exertion for her. She was drawn by her one old
man-servant in a chair on wheels, her granddaughter and her grandson's
widow walking beside her, and her little great-grandson, Peter, who was
supposed to be her heir, bringing up the rear.
Old Madam Melcombe, as the villagers called her. She had a large frame,
but it was a good deal bowed down; her face was wrinkled, and her blue
eyes had the peculiar dimness of extreme old age, yet those who noticed
her closely might detect a remarkable shrewdness in her face; her
faculties were not only perfect, but she loved to save money, and still
retained a high value for, and a firm grip of, her possessions. The land
she left waste was, notwithstanding, precious to her. She had tied up
her gate that her old friends might understand, after her eldest son's
death, that she could not be tortured by their presence and their
sympathy; but she was known sometimes by her grand-daughters to enlarge
on the goodness of the land thereabouts, and to express a hope that when
Peter's guardians came into power, they would bring it under the plough
again. She went to church by a little footpath, and always conducted
herself with great decorum, though, twice or thrice during the reading
of the lessons, she had startled the congregation by standing up with a
scared expression of countenance, and looking about her while she leaned
on her high staff as if she thought some one had called her; but she was
in her ninety-fifth year, and this circumstance, together with the love
and pity felt for her, would easily have excused far greater
eccentricities.
She had felt very keenly the desertion of her second and her fourth
sons, who had run away from home when the elder was barely eighteen, and
without previous quarrel or unkindness so far as was known; nor was it
believed that they had ever come to see her since, or sought her
forgiveness. Her eldest son, while still in the flower of his age, had
died by his own hand; her youngest son had died in the West Indies, of
fever; and the third, the only one who remained with her, had never been
either a comfort or a credit to his family: he had but lately died,
leaving a son and a daughter. Of these, the daughter was with her
grandmother, and the son was just dead, having left an only child, his
heir.
At one end of the house, as had been said, was an orchard, at the other
was a large garden. If the desolate appearance of the house was likely
to raise oppressive feelings in a stranger's mind, how much more this
garden! It was a large oblong piece of ground, the walls of which
enclosed the western end of the house completely. One of them ran
parallel with the front, and a massive oaken door somewhat relieved its
flat monotony; but this door afforded no ingress, it was bolted and
barred from within.
The garden was that special portion of her inheritance on which the
ancient owner rested her eyes; morning, noon, and evening she would sit
gazing on its green fishpond, all overgrown with duckweed, on the lawn
now fast being encroached on by shrubbery, and on the bed of lilies
which from year to year spread and flourished.
But she never entered it, nor did any one else.
That end of the house had but four windows on the ground floor, and
these were all strongly barred with iron, the places they lighted
consisting of kitchen, offices, and a cider store-room. Above these on
the first-floor were three pleasant rooms overlooking the garden, and
opening on to a wooden gallery or verandah, at each end of which was an
alcove of an old-fashioned and substantial description.
The gallery was roofed above, had a heavy oaken balustrade, and being
fully ten feet wide afforded a convenient place in which the lonely old
lady could take exercise, for, excepting on Sunday, she was scarcely
ever known to leave her own premises. There also her little
great-grandson Peter first learned to walk, and as she slowly passed
from one alcove to the other, resting in each when she reached it, he
would take hold of her high staff and totter beside her, always
bestowing on her as much as he could of his company, and early showing a
preference for her over his aunt and even over his mother.
Up and down the gallery this strange pair would move together, and as
she went she gazed frequently over the gay wilderness below, and if she
sat long in one of the alcoves, she would peer out at its little window
always on the same scene; a scene in the winter of hopeless neglect and
desolation. Dead leaves, dead dry stalks of foxgloves and mullens.
broken branches, and an arbour with trellised roof, borne down by the
weight of the vine.
But in spring and summer the place was gorgeous in parts with a confused
tangle of plants and shrubs in flower. Persian lilacs, syringas,
labernums made thickets here and there and covered their heads with
bloom. Passion flowers trailed their long tendrils all over the gallery,
and masses of snow-white clematis towered in many of the trees.
All distinction between pathway and border had long since been
obliterated, the eyes wandered over a carpet of starred and spangled
greenery. Tall white gladiolas shot up above it, and spires of foxgloves
and rockets, while all about them and among the rose-trees, climbed the
morning glory and the briony vine.
Stretching in front of the ruined arbour was a lawn, and along one edge
of it under the wall, grew a bed of lilies, lilies of the valley, so
sweet in their season, that sometimes the old lady's grand-daughters
would affirm that a waft of their breath had reached them as they sat up
in the gallery at work.
It was towards this spot that Madam Melcombe looked. Here her unquiet
face was frequently turned, from her first early entrance into the
gallery, till sunset, when she would sit in one of the alcoves in hot
weather. She gave no reason for this watch, but a kindly and reverent
reserve protected her from questions. It was felt that the place was
sacred to some recollection of her youth, when her young children were
about her, before the cruel desertion of two, the ceaseless quarrels of
other two, and the tragic death of one of them, had darkened her days.
The one door in the wall being fastened, and the ground-floor at that
end of the house having none but barred windows, it follows that the
only entrance to the garden was now from this gallery. There was,
indeed, a flight of steps leading down from it, but there was a gate at
the top of them, and this gate was locked.
On the day of her eldest son's funeral, his stricken mother had locked
it. Perhaps she scarcely knew at first that the time would never come
when she should find courage again to open it; but she took away the key
to satisfy some present distressful fancy, and those about her respected
her desire that the place should not be entered. They did not doubt that
there was some pathetic reason for this desire, but none was evident,
for her son had gone down to his death in a secluded and now all but
inaccessible part of the glen, where, turning from its first direction,
it sunk deeper still, and was divided by red rocks from its more shallow
opening.
A useless watch at best was hers, still of the terrace, and the arbour,
and the bed of lilies; but as she got yet deeper down into the vale of
years, those about her sometimes hoped that she had forgotten the
sorrowful reason, whatever it might be, that drew her eyes incessantly
towards them. She began even to express a kind of pleasure in the
gradual encroachments of the lovely plants. Once she had said, "It is my
hope, when I am gone, as none of you will ever disturb them."
Whatever visions of a happy youth, whatever mournful recollections of
the sports of her own children, might belong to them, those now with her
knew not of them, but they thought that her long and pathetic watch had
at last become more a habit with her than any conscious recalling of the
past, and they hoped it might be so.
The one sitting-room used by the family opened into the gallery, and was
a good deal darkened by its roof. On one side of it was Peter's nursery,
on the other his great-grandmother's chamber, and no other part of the
house was open excepting some kitchen offices, and two or three bedrooms
in the roof. The servants consisted of a nurse (herself an old woman),
who sat nearly all day in the parlour, because her far more aged
mistress required much attendance, a grey-headed housemaid, a cook, and
a man, the husband of this last. His chief business was to groom the one
horse of the establishment, and ride on it to the nearest town for meat,
grocery, and other marketings.
The floor of the parlour was oak, which had once been polished; all the
furniture was to the last degree quaint and old fashioned; the two large
windows opened like double doors upon the gallery, and were shaded by
curtains of Madras chintz. The chairs, which were inconveniently heavy,
were also covered with chintz; it was frilled round them like a
petticoat, and was just short enough to show their hideous club-feet.
Over the chimney-piece was a frame, and something in it said to be a
picture. Peter, when a very little child, used to call it "a picture of
the dark," for it seemed to be nothing but an expanse of deep brown,
with a spot of some lighter hue in one corner. He wished, he said, that
they had put a piece of moon in to show how dark that country was. The
old nurse, however, had her theories about this patch; she would have it
that it was somewhat in the shape of a jacket; she thought it likely
that the picture represented a hunt, and said she supposed the foremost
horseman in his red coat was watering his horse in a pond. Peter and the
nurse had argued together on this subject many times before the old lady
was appealed to, but when they once chanced to ask her about the
picture, she affirmed that the patch was a lobster, and that a sort of
ring which seemed faintly to encircle it was the edge of a plate. In
short, she declared that this was a Dutch picture of still life, and
that in Peter's time, when he came to have it cleaned, it would prove to
be worth money.
"And when will it be my time?" asked little Peter innocently.
"Hold your tongue, child!" whispered his mother; "it won't be your time
till your poor dear grandmother's in heaven."
"I don't want her to go to heaven yet," said Peter in a plaintive tone
(for he regarded her as much the best possession he had), and, raising
his voice, he complained to her as to one threatening to injure him,
"Grandmother, you don't want to go to heaven just yet, do you?"
"Lor bless the child!" exclaimed old Madam Melcombe, a good deal
startled.
"No, don't," continued Peter in a persuasive tone; "stop here, but let
me clean the picture, because I want to see that lobster."
"Now I tell you what," answered his great-grandmother rather sharply,
"if you was to go and play in the gallery, it would be a deal better
than arguing with me." So Peter departed to his play, and forgot the
lobster for a little while.
But Peter was not destined that evening to please his great-grandmother,
for he had no sooner got well into the spirit of his play in the gallery
than he began to sing. "I'm a coward at songs," she would sometimes say;
"and if it wasn't for the dear birds; I could wish there was no music in
the world."
Her feeling was the same which has been beautifully described by
Gassendi, who, writing in Latin, expresses himself thus:--
"He preferred also the music of birds to the human voice or to musical
instruments, not because he derived no pleasure from these last, but
because, after hearing music from the human voice, there remained a
certain sustained agitation, disturbing attention and sleep; while the
risings and fallings, the tones and changes and sounds and concords,
pass and repass through the fancy; whereas nothing of the sort can be
left after the warbling of birds, who, as they are not open to our
imitation, cannot move the faculty of imagination within us." (Gassendi,
in _Vita Peireskii_.)
In the garden was plenty of music of the sort that Madam Melcombe still
loved. Peter could not shout in his play without disturbing the storm
cock as he sat up aloft singing a love-song to his wife. As for the
little birds, blackcaps haunted almost every bush, and the timid
white-throat brooded there in peace over her half-transparent eggs.
So no one ever sang in old Madam Melcombe's presence unless Peter forgot
himself, and vexed his mother by chanting out snatches of songs that he
had caught up from the village children. Mrs. Peter Melcombe formed for
herself few theories; she was a woman dull of feeling and slow of
thought; she knew as a fact that her aged relative could not bear music.
So, as a matter of duty and self-interest, she stopped her child's
little voice when she could, and if he asked, "Why does grandmother cry
when I sing?" she would answer, "Nobody knows," for she had not
reflected how those to whom music is always welcome must have neither an
empty heart nor a remorseful conscience, nor keen recollections, nor a
foreboding soul.
Peter was a good little boy enough; he was tolerably well tamed by the
constant presence of old age and, with the restraints it brought upon
him, and having less imagination than falls to the lot of most children,
he was the more affected by his position. When he strayed into a field
of wheat, and there was waving and whispering above his head, it was not
all one to him, as if he had been lost in some old-world forest, where
uncouth creatures dwelt, and castles and caverns might be encountered
before the stile. He could not see the great world out of the parlour
window, and understand and almost inherit another world beyond the
hills; as to the moon, the child's silver heaven, he never saw something
marvellous and mild sitting up there and smiling to him to come.
But he was happy, and instead of the wide-open eyes of a child fed to
the full with the wonders about him and within him, his eyes were shaded
constantly by their light lashes; he enjoyed his play, but he blinked
when day was at the full; and all his observations concerned realities.
Some story had reached him about a ghost which had been seen in that
immediate neighbourhood.
"Who cooks his dinner for him?" inquired the child.
"He has no dinner," answered the old housemaid.
"I don't want to see him, then," said the little winking, blinking
philosopher; "he might ask me for some of mine."
But that was a height of prudence that he could not reach often, and he
several times annoyed his mother and alarmed his aunt by asking
questions about this ghost.
Laura Melcombe, Peter's aunt, acted as his governess, and took a certain
pride and pleasure in his young intelligence. It was well that she had
something real to interest her, for her character was in strong contrast
to her nephew's. She lived mainly in an ideal world, and her life was
fed by what she fetched up from the clod or down from the clouds.
Chiefly by the former. She was "of imagination all compact;" but that is
a very unlucky case where there is weak judgment, little or no keenness
of observation, a treacherous memory, and a boundless longing for the
good things of life. Of all gifts, imagination, being the greatest, is
least worth having, unless it is well backed either by moral culture or
by other intellectual qualities. It is the crown of all thoughts and
powers; but you cannot wear a crown becomingly if you have no head
(worth mentioning) to put it on.
Miss Laura Melcombe thought most of the young farmers in the
neighbourhood were in love with her. Accordingly, at church or at the
market-town, where she occasionally went on shopping expeditions, she
gave herself such airs as she considered suitable for a lady who must
gently, though graciously, repel all hopeless aspirations. She was one
of those people to whom a compliment is absolute poison. The first man
who casually chanced to say something to her in her early youth, which
announced to her that he thought her lovely, changed her thoughts about
herself for ever after. First, she accepted his compliment as his
sincere and fervent conviction. Secondly, she never doubted that he
expressed his continuous belief, not his feeling of the moment. Thirdly,
she regarded beauty in her case as thenceforward an established fact,
and not this one man's opinion. Fourthly, she spent some restless months
in persuading herself that to admire must needs be to love, and she
longed in vain to see him "come forward." Then some other casual
acquaintance paid her a compliment, and she went through the same
experience on his account, persuading herself that her first admirer
could not afford to marry; and this state of things had now gone on for
several years.