THE GLOVES AGAIN.
Anthony remained at Willsworthy. He had behaved exceedingly badly, had
wounded the good lady of the house where most susceptible to pain, and
so acutely that she had fallen into unconsciousness; yet he remained on.
He was accustomed to consult his own wishes, not those of others, and to
put on one side all considerations of expediency and good feeling, where
his own caprice was concerned.
Urith and the servant wench had carried Madame Malvine to her room, and
Solomon Gibbs had dashed off to the stables to get his horse, so as to
summon the surgeon from Tavistock.
Anthony was alone in the little hall, and he leaned his elbows on the
window-sill and looked out. There was nothing for him to see; nothing to
interest him in the barn wall opposite, which was all that was commanded
by the window; so he turned his eyes on a peacock butterfly that had
hybernated in the hall, and now, with return of spring, shook off sleep
and fluttered against the leaded panes, bruising its wings in its
efforts to escape into the outer air. There were no flowers in the
window; nothing at all save some dead flies and a pair of lady's
riding-gloves folded together.
Anthony looked round the hall. It was low, not above seven feet high,
unceiled, with black oak unmoulded rafters. There was a large granite
fireplace, no sculptured oak mantelpiece over it; nothing save a plain
shelf; and above it some arms, a couple of pistols, a sword, a pike or
two, and a crossbow. The walls were not panelled save only by the
window, where was the table, and where the family dined. The walls
elsewhere were plainly white-washed, and had not even that decoration
that was affected at the tavern--ballads with quaint woodcuts pasted
against them. There was no deer park attached to the house; there never
had been even a paddock for deer, consequently there were no antlers in
the hall.
Near the window was a recess in the wall over a granite pan or bowl
partly built into the wall. At first sight it might be taken as a basin
in which to wash the hands; but it had no pipe from it to convey the
fouled water away. Such pans are found in many old western farmhouses
and manor halls, and their purport is almost forgotten. They were
formerly employed for the scalding of the milk and the making of clouted
cream. Red-hot charcoal was placed in these basins, and the pans of milk
planted on the cinders. The pans remained there, the coals being fanned
by the kitchen maid, till the cream was formed on the surface, and in
this cream-coat the ring of the bottom of the pan indicated itself on
the surface. This was the token that the milk had yielded up all its
quotient of fatty matter. Thereupon the pan was removed to the cool
dairy. The presence of the granite cream-producer showed that the hall
served a double purpose: it was not only a sitting- and dining-room, but
one in which some of the dairy processes were carried on. Moreover, near
the entrance-door was what was called the "well-room," entered from the
hall. This was a small lean-to apartment on one side of the porch, paved
with cobble-stones, in which was a stone trough always brimming with
crystal moorland water, conducted into it from outside, and, running
off, was carried away outside again. As this was the sole source whence
all the water-supply required for the house was obtained--for dairy, for
kitchen, and for table--it may be imagined that the hall was a
passage-room, traversed all day long by the servant-wenches with pails,
and pans, and jugs.
Such an arrangement was suitable enough in the time before the Wars of
the Roses, when Willsworthy was built; but its inconvenience became
apparent with the improved social conditions of the Tudor reigns, and in
the time of Elizabeth an addition had been made to the house, so that it
now possessed two small parlours looking into the garden at the back;
but these Anthony had not seen. In these some attempt was made at
ornament. A manor house before the Tudor epoch rarely consisted of more
than a hall, a lady's bower, kitchen, and cellars, on the ground-floor;
Willsworthy had been enlarged by the addition of a second parlour, with
the object of abandoning the Hall, to become a sort of second kitchen.
But the family had been poor, and continued in its ancestral mode of
life. The second parlour had its shutters shut, and was never used, and
Madame Malvine sat, as had her husband, and the owners of Willsworthy
before them, in the Hall, and endured the traffic through it, and the
slops on the stone floor from the overflowing pails.
The paving of the Hall was of granite blocks, rudely fitted together,
and was strewn with dry brown bracken. We marvel at the discomfort of
ancient chairs, because the seats are so high from the ground. We forget
that the footstool was an attendant inseparable from the chair, when
ladies sat in these stone-floored halls. They were necessary adjuncts,
holding their feet out of the draught, and off the stone.
Small and mean as the manor house would appear in one's eyes now, yet it
was of sufficient consequence in early days to have its chapel, a
privilege only accorded to the greater houses, and wealthiest gentry.
The chapel was now in ruins. It had not been used since the Reformation.
Anthony became impatient of waiting. He would not leave, and he was
vexed, because he was kept loitering at the window without some one to
speak to.
He was tired of looking at the butterfly battering its wings to pieces,
so he took up the gloves and unrolled them--a pretty pair of fine
leather ladies' gloves, reaching to the elbow, and laced with silk
ribbon and silver tags. Elegant gloves; more handsome, Anthony thought,
than suited the usual style of Urith's dress. He had nothing else to do
but turn them inside out, unfold, and refold them.
As he was thus engaged, he thought over an interview he had had that
morning with his father. With all his faults, and they were many, the
young man was open and direct, and he had told his father what he had
done the night before.
To his surprise, directly old Cleverdon heard that he had pulled up
Richard Malvine's head-post, and thrown it on the tavern table before
the topers, he burst into an exultant laugh, and rubbed his hands
together gleefully.
When, moreover, Anthony expressed his intention of going to Willsworthy
to offer an apology, the old man had vehemently and boisterously
dissuaded him from so doing.
"What are the Malvines?" he had said; "a raggle-taggle, beggarly crew. I
won't have it said that a son of mine veiled his bonnet to them. That
was a fair estate once, but first one portion and then another portion
has been sold away, and now there is but enough to starve on left.
Pshaw! let them endure and pocket the affront. If they try to resent it,
and prosecute you in court of law, I will throw in my money-bag against
their moleskin purse, and see which cause then has most weight in the
scales of justice."
The intemperance of his father's conduct and words had on young Anthony
precisely the opposite effect to that intended. It opened the young
man's eyes to the gravity of his conduct. Without answering his father
he went to Willsworthy, leaving the old man satisfied that he had
overborne his son's resolution to make amend for his offence. Whether
this would have happened had not Urith produced so strong an impression
on his heart the previous day, and enlisted him on her side, may well be
questioned; for the visit of apology involved an acknowledgment of
wrong-doing which was not readily made by Anthony. He was thinking over,
and wondering at, his father's conduct, when Urith entered the hall, and
expressed surprise at seeing him.
"I tarried," said he, "to know how it fared with your mother."
Urith replied, somewhat stiffly, "The shock of hearing what you have
done has given her a fit."
"She has had them before."
"Oh, yes. She cannot endure violent emotion, and your behaviour----"
"I have said I am sorry; what can I do more? Tell me, and I will do it.
The stake was rotten, and broke off. If you will, I will have a stone
slab placed on the grave at my own cost."
Urith flushed dark.
"That I refuse in my mother's name and in mine. We will not be beholden
to you--to any stranger--in such a matter; and after what has been done,
certainly not to you."
Anthony stamped with impatience.
"I have told you I am sorry. I never made an apology to any one in my
life before. I supposed that an apology offered was at once frankly
accepted. I have told you it was all a mistake. I intended no ill. It
was a pitch-black night--I could not see what I laid hold of. My act
was, if you will, an act of folly--but have you never committed acts of
folly? You ran away from home yesterday. Did not that trouble your
mother, and occasion greater perturbation of feeling?"
Urith looked down. "Yes," she said, "one foolery followed another. First
came mine, then yours. The two combined were too much for my mother to
endure."
"We are a couple of fools; be it so," said Anthony. "Now that is
settled. Young folks' brains are not ripened, but are like the pith in
early hazel nuts. It is not their fault if they act foolishly. That is
settled. You believed my account. I never lie, though I be a fool."
"Yes, I have accepted your account, and I, in part, forgive you."
"In part! By Heaven, that is a motley forgiveness--a fool's forgiveness.
I must have a complete one. Come here. Come to this window. Why should I
shout across the hall to you, and you stand with your back turned to me,
as though we were on opposite sides of the Cleave?" He spoke with as
much imperiousness as if he were in his own house, commanded her as
though he expected of her as ready submission as was accorded him by his
sister.
"What do you want with me? I do not care to go near a man subject to
such outbreaks of folly."
"You are one to declaim!" said Anthony, scornfully. "You who run away,
and bite your knuckles till they are raw."
Urith's brow darkened. "You might have spared me that taunt," she said;
"you would have done so had you been generous."
"Come over here," commanded Anthony. "How can I measure my words when I
have to throw them at you from a furlong off? It is like a game of
quoits when one has not strid the distance, and knows not what force to
employ."
Urith without further demur came to him. This was a new experience to
her to be addressed in tones of command; her mother scolded and found
fault, and gave, indeed, orders which she countermanded next moment, so
that Urith had grown up with the habit of following her own desires, and
disregarding the contradictory or impossible injunctions laid on her.
"Come here, Urith," said Anthony; "I do not see why we have been such
strangers heretofore. Why do you never come to Hall?"
"Because Hall has never come to Willsworthy."
"But my sister; you would like Bessie--I am sure of that."
"I like her now."
"Then you will come and see her at Hall?"
"When she has first been to see me, and has asked me to return the
visit."
"She shall do that at once."
"She has promised to come here. She was very kind to me last night."
"She is a good creature," said Anthony, condescendingly.
"And no fool," threw in Urith.
"I don't say she is clever, but what brains she has are full ripe. She
is considerably older than I am."
To this Urith made no response.
Then Anthony took up the gloves, drew them out, and passed them under
the ribbon of his hat.
"I was your true knight yesterday, achieving your deliverance, and every
true knight must wear either his lady's colours or some pledge to show
that she has accepted him as her knight. That, I have heard say, is how
some crests were given or taken. Now I have assumed mine--your gloves. I
take them as my right, and shall wear them in your name."
"They are not mine," said Urith; "you will do me a favour if you will
take them for me to her to whom they of right belong, and say that I
return them to her. She lost them last night, and I found them. I never
go near Kilworthy--never have an opportunity of seeing her--and her
brother I am not likely to see. Therefore I beseech you to convey them
to her from me."
"To whom? Not Julian?"
"Yes, to Julian."
Anthony muttered an oath.
"I will take them from my hat and throw them under foot," he said,
angrily. "I did not ask for a favour of Julian Crymes, but for something
of yours, Urith."
"You did not ask any one for a favour," she replied, gravely. "You took
the gloves unasked."
He pulled them from his hat, and was about to cast them back on the
window-sill, when Urith arrested his hand.
"No," she said; "I asked you a favour, and you will not be so
discourteous a knight as to refuse it me."
"You take me as your knight!" exclaimed Anthony, with a flash of
pleasure from his eyes that met hers, and before which hers fell.
"My errand boy," she said, with a smile, "my foot-page to carry messages
from me. You will take the gloves to Julian Crymes."
"Not in my hat, but in my belt--thus," said Anthony, passing them under
his girdle. Then, after a pause, he said, "You have given me nothing."
"Yes, I have."
"What? Only another maid's gloves?"
"Something else. My forgiveness."
"Full?"
"Yes--full. Go now, and take the gloves."
"I shall return another day for something of your own."
Still he loitered; then suddenly looked up, with a laugh. "Mistress!
What is your livery? What is your colour?"
"My colour! Yellow--yellow as the marigold, for I am jealous."
"Then, here is my hat. You shall put your badge in it."
"Not till I admit your service."
"You have--you have given me a commission."
Urith laughed. "Very well. There are marsh marigolds in the brook. You
shall have them."