FALSE PERSPECTIVE.
As this story concerns that child which received the name of
Mehetabel, it has been necessary to begin _de novo_ with her as
a babe, and to relate how she came by her name--that is her
Christian name--and how it was that she had no surname at all.
Also, how it was that she came to be an inmate of the Ship, and
how that her fortunes were linked at the very outset of her career,
on the one hand with Iver, who baptized her, and on the other
hand with the Broom-Squire, whose roof--that at least of his
shed--had sheltered her when every door of the squatter settlement
in the Punch-Bowl, was resolutely closed against her.
But although this story begins with Mehetabel before she could
speak, before she could assimilate anything more substantial than
milk, yet the author has no intention of inflicting on the reader
the record of her early days, of her acquisition of the power of
speech, and capacity for consuming solid food. Neither is it his
purpose to develop at large the growth of her mental powers, and
to describe the evolution of her features. Suffice it then to say
that Mehetabel grew up in the Ship Inn, almost as a child of the
hostess and of her husband, with Iver as her playmate, and somewhat
consequential patron.
By the parish at large, whether that of Witley or of its subdivision
Thursley, she was coldly regarded. She was but a charity girl, and
kind as Mrs. Verstage was, the hostess never forgot that.
Iver was fourteen years older than Mehetabel, and, above all, was
a boy, whereas Mehetabel was a waif, and only a girl.
Iver, moreover, regarded the child with gracious condescension. Had
he not baptized her? Did she not owe her name to him? Had he not
manufactured her first feeding-bottle?
As Mehetabel grew up, it is not surprising that she should regard
Iver with admiration and affection, that she cherished every
kindness he showed her, and in every way sought to deserve his
notice.
The child had an affectionate, a clinging nature, and she threw
the tendrils of her heart around the handsome boy, who was both
patron and playmate.
It is a matter wholly immaterial whether Mehetabel underwent the
ordeal of the customary childish maladies, measles, chicken-pox,
whooping-cough for certainty, and scarlet fever and smallpox as
possibilities, for none of them cut short the thread of her life,
nor spoiled her good looks; either of which eventualities would
have prevented this story proceeding beyond the sixth chapter. In
the one case, there would have been no one about whom to write,
in the other, had she been marked by smallpox or deafened by
scarlatina, the interest of the reader could not have been claimed
for her--so exacting is the reader of fiction. A heroine must be
good-looking, or she will not be read about.
Indeed, it is more than probable, that had the author announced his
story to be one of a very plain woman, he might have looked in
vain for a publisher to undertake the issue of the story.
Before proceeding further it will be well to assure the reader
that, from an early age, promise of beauty was given, and not of
beauty only, but of intelligence and robust health.
Mehetabel was sent by Mrs. Verstage not only to a day school, kept
by a widow, in Thursley, but also on the Lord's Day to the Vicar's
Sunday-school at Witley. The Vicar was an excellent man, kindly
disposed, earnest in his desire to do good, so long as the good was
to be done in a novel fashion, absolutely untried. Sunday-schools
were but a recent introduction, and he seized on the expedient with
avidity. Hitherto the children had been catechised in Church after
the second lesson in the afternoon, before their parents and the
entire congregation. But as this was an usage of the past the Vicar
rejected it in favor of the new system. According to the traditional
custom the children had been instructed in the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. But this did not please the
innovating Vicar, who cast these out of his curriculum to make way
for a knowledge of the geography of Palestine, and an accurate
acquaintance with the genealogies that are to be found scattered
here and there in the pages of Holy Writ, The teaching of doctrine,
according to the Vicar, lay at the bottom of the divisions of
Christendom, but there could be no controversy over the latitude
and longitude of the sites mentioned in Scripture.
The landlord, proprietor of the Ship and of Mrs. Susanna Verstage,
was a dull, obstinate man, slow of thought and of speech, withal
kindly. Like many another dull man, if he did a stupid thing he
stuck to it; and the stupider the thing done, the greater the
tenacity with which he held to the consequences. His mind was
chiefly occupied with a small farm acquired out of the sand waste,
hedged about, dressed and cultivated, and increasing annually in
value. In this was his interest and pride; he cared nothing for
the tavern, save as an adjunct to the farm. All his energies were
devoted to the latter, and he allowed his wife to rule supreme in
the inn. Simon Verstage was a well-to-do man. He must have managed
very ill had he not made a farm answer for which he paid no rent,
save an acknowledgment of 6d. an acre to the lord of the manor. He
held the land on a head rent upon the lives of himself, his wife,
and his son. The public-house, well frequented by wayfarers, and
in good repute among the villagers, supplemented the profits made
out of the farm in good years, and made up for deficit in such
years as rain and deficiency in sun made bad agriculturally.
The inn stood at a junction of roads, or rather where two lanes
fell into the main London and Portsmouth road. It sometimes went
in consequence by the name of The Lane End Inn. In situation it
was fairly sheltered, a hillock of sand rock sheltered it on the
east from the bitter winds that swept the waste between Milford
and Thursley, and a growth of huge hollies was its protection
against the equally cold blasts from the north.
So long as Iver was a small boy, his father employed him about
the farm, to assist him in ploughing, to hoe potatoes, and wield
the muck-fork in the cow-house, or, to use the local term, the
cow-stall. He kept the lad hard at work from morning rise till set
of day.
Iver endured this, not entering with interest and pleasure into
the work of the farm. He had no perception of the points of a
bullock, and he had a prejudice in favor of ragged hedges.
Iver's neglect of duties, and forgetfulness of what was told him,
called forth reprimand and provoked chastisement. They were not
due to wilfulness or frivolity, but to preoccupation of the mind.
The boy had no natural taste for the labors of the field. He
disliked them; for everything else he had eyes, save for that
which pertained to the tasks imposed on him.
Throughout early boyhood this lack of interest and inattention had
caused much friction, and this friction became aggravated as he
grew older, and his natural bent became more marked.
It would be hard to find in one family two persons so utterly
dissimilar as Iver and his father. They seemed to have diverse
faculties seated in their several organs. They neither saw, heard,
nor smelt in the same manner, or rather saw, heard, and smelt so
differently as to feel in distinct fashion. What pleased the one
was distasteful to the other.
It was not possible for Iver to open his mind to his father,
because his father could not understand and appreciate his thoughts.
But if his heart was sealed to Simon Verstage, it was open to his
mother, who loved and spoiled him, and took his part invariably,
whether the boy were in the right or wrong. In every way possible
she humored his fancies; and she, unwisely, condoled with him on
what she was pleased to consider as his father's injustice. At
length there ensued a rupture so wide, so aggravated by mutual
recrimination, that Mrs. Verstage doubted her ability to bridge
it over.
This breach was occasioned by Iver one morning climbing to the
sign-board and repainting the stern of the vessel, which had long
irritated his eye because, whereas the ship was represented sideways,
the stern was painted without any attempt at fore-shortening; in
fact, full front, if such a term can be applied to a stern.
The laws of perspective were outraged in the original painting; of
such laws Iver knew nothing. What he did know was that the picture
was wrong. His eye, his natural instinct told him so. The matter
had been for long one of controversy between himself and his
father. The latter had been unable to understand that if the
portholes at the side were visible, the entire stern could not
possibly be viewed in full.
"She's got a stern, ain't she?" asked the old man. "If she has,
then wot's we to deny it her?"
At length Iver cut the controversy short, and brought the quarrel
to a crisis by climbing a ladder with a brush and some paints
obtained from the village carpenter, during the temporary absence
of his father, and putting the foreshortening to rights to the
best of his ability.
When the old man was aware what his son had done on his return
from Godalming, whither he had betaken himself to a fair, then he
was furious. He stormed at Iver for daring to disfigure the
sign-board, and at his wife for suffering him to do it unreproved.
Iver turned stubborn and sulky. He muttered an answer, lacking in
that respect due to a parent. The old man became abusive.
Mrs. Verstage intervened ineffectually; and when night arrived the
youth made a bundle of his clothes and left the house, with the
resolve not to return to it so long as his father lived.
Whither he had gone, for a long time was unknown. His mother wept,
so did Mehetabel. The old man put on an assumption of indifference,
was short and ungracious to his wife. He was constrained to engage
a man to do the farm work hitherto imposed upon Iver, and this
further tended to embitter him against his rebellious son. He
resented having to expend money when for so long he had enjoyed
the work of Iver free of cost.
The boy's pride prevented him from writing home till he had secured
himself a position in which he could maintain himself. When he did
communicate with Thursley, it was through Mehetabel, because Simon
had forbidden any allusion to the truant boy, and Mrs. Verstage was
not herself much of a scholar, and did not desire unnecessarily to
anger her husband by having letters in his handwriting come to her
by the post.
Years passed, during which the landlady's heart ached for her son:
and as she might not speak of him to Simon, she made a confidant
of Mehetabel.
Thus, the old woman and the girl were drawn closer together, and
Mehetabel glowed with the thought that she was loved by the hostess
as though she were her own daughter.
To talk about the absent one was the great solace of Susanna
Verstage's life. There ever gnawed at her heart the worm of
bereavement from the child in whom her best affections, her
highest pride, her sole ambitions were placed. It may be questioned
whether, without the sympathetic ear and heart of Mehetabel into
which to pour her troubles and to which to confide her hopes, the
woman would not have deteriorated into a hard-hearted virago.
Her love to Simon, never very hot, had dried up. He had wounded
her to the quick in unpardonable fashion in driving her only child
out of the house, and all for the sake of a two-penny-ha'penny
signboard.
Throughout her work she schemed, she thought for Iver; she toiled
and endured in the tavern only to amass a competence for him. She
clung to the place only because she trusted some day he would
return to it, and because every corner was sweet with recollections
of him.
When not at work she dreamed, waking or sleeping, and all her
dreams were of him. She built castles in the air--all occupied
by him. She had but one hope: to meet her son again. All her
activities, all her thoughts, all her aspirations, all her prayers
were so many lines focussing on one point, and that her son. To
Mehetabel she told her mind, and Mehetabel shared all her hopes;
the heart of the girl beat in entire sympathy with that of the
hostess. Iver's letters were read and re-read, commented on, and
a thousand things read into them by the love of the mother that
were not, and could not be there. These letters were ever in the
girl's bosom, kept there to be out of reach of old Simon, and to
be accessible at all moments to the hungering mother. They heard
that Iver had taken to painting, and that he was progressing in his
profession; that he gave lessons and sold pictures.
What musings this gave rise to! what imaginations! What expectations!
Mrs. Verstage never wearied of talking of Iver to Mehetabel, and
it never wearied the girl to speak with the mother about him.
The girl felt that she was indispensable to the old woman; but that
she was only indispensable to her so long as Iver was away never
entered into her imagination.
There is a love that is selfish as well as a love that is wholly
self-annihilating, and an inexperienced child is incapable of
distinguishing one from the other.
There is false perspective in the human heart as well as upon
signboards.