CHAPTER I

Life’s Little Ironies

a set of tales

with some colloquial sketches

entitled

A FEW CRUSTED CHARACTERS

by Thomas Hardy

with a map of wessex

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1920

COPYRIGHT

_First Collected Edition_ 1894. _New Edition and reprints_ 1896-1900

_First published by Macmillan & Co._, _Crown_ 8_ov_, 1903. _Reprinted_

1910, 1915

_Pockets Edition_ 1907, 1910, 1913, 1916, 1919 (_twice_), 1920

_Wessex Edition_ 1912

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

The Fidler of the Reels

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-façades, 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 _débris_ 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 _désinvolture_ 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

_début_ 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 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

with dry indirectness. ‘But you’ll find that she will not be content to

live on here as you do, giving her whole mind to a young child.’

‘That’s just where we differ. Her very disqualification, that of being

a nobody, as you call it, is her recommendation in my eyes. Her lack of

influential connections limits her ambition. From what I know of her, a

life in this place is all that she would wish for. She would never care

to go outside the park-gates if it were necessary to stay within.’

‘Being in love with her, Albert, and meaning to marry her, you invent

your practical reasons to make the case respectable. Well, do as you

will; I have no authority over you, so why should you consult me? You

mean to propose on this very occasion, no doubt. Don’t you, now?’

‘By no means. I am merely revolving the idea in my mind. If on further

acquaintance she turns out to be as good as she has hitherto

seemed—well, I shall see. Admit, now, that you like her.’

‘I readily admit it. She is very captivating at first sight. But as a

stepmother to your child! You seem mighty anxious, Albert, to get rid

of me!’

‘Not at all. And I am not so reckless as you think. I don’t make up my

mind in a hurry. But the thought having occurred to me, I mention it to

you at once, mother. If you dislike it, say so.’

‘I don’t say anything. I will try to make the best of it if you are

determined. When does she come?’

‘To-morrow.’

All this time there were great preparations in train at the curate’s,

who was now a householder. Rosa, whose two or three weeks’ stay on two

occasions earlier in the year had so affected the squire, was coming

again, and at the same time her younger brother Cornelius, to make up a

family party. Rosa, who journeyed from the Midlands, could not arrive

till late in the evening, but Cornelius was to get there in the

afternoon, Joshua going out to meet him in his walk across the fields

from the railway.

Everything being ready in Joshua’s modest abode he started on his way,

his heart buoyant and thankful, if ever it was in his life. He was of

such good report himself that his brother’s path into holy orders

promised to be unexpectedly easy; and he longed to compare experiences

with him, even though there was on hand a more exciting matter still.

From his youth he had held that, in old-fashioned country places, the

Church conferred social prestige up to a certain point at a cheaper

price than any other profession or pursuit; and events seemed to be

proving him right.

He had walked about half an hour when he saw Cornelius coming along the

path; and in a few minutes the two brothers met. The experiences of

Cornelius had been less immediately interesting than those of Joshua,

but his personal position was satisfactory, and there was nothing to

account for the singularly subdued manner that he exhibited, which at

first Joshua set down to the fatigue of over-study; and he proceeded to

the subject of Rosa’s arrival in the evening, and the probable

consequences of this her third visit. ‘Before next Easter she’ll be his

wife, my boy,’ said Joshua with grave exultation.

Cornelius shook his head. ‘She comes too late!’ he returned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look here.’ He produced the Fountall paper, and placed his finger on a

paragraph, which Joshua read. It appeared under the report of Petty

Sessions, and was a commonplace case of disorderly conduct, in which a

man was sent to prison for seven days for breaking windows in that

town.

‘Well?’ said Joshua.

‘It happened during an evening that I was in the street; and the

offender is our father.’

‘Not—how—I sent him more money on his promising to stay in Canada?’

‘He is home, safe enough.’ Cornelius in the same gloomy tone gave the

remainder of his information. He had witnessed the scene, unobserved of

his father, and had heard him say that he was on his way to see his

daughter, who was going to marry a rich gentleman. The only good

fortune attending the untoward incident was that the millwright’s name

had been printed as Joshua Alborough.

‘Beaten! We are to be beaten on the eve of our expected victory!’ said

the elder brother. ‘How did he guess that Rosa was likely to marry?

Good Heaven Cornelius, you seem doomed to bring bad news always, do you

not!’

‘I do,’ said Cornelius. ‘Poor Rosa!’

It was almost in tears, so great was their heart-sickness and shame,

that the brothers walked the remainder of the way to Joshua’s dwelling.

In the evening they set out to meet Rosa, bringing her to the village

in a fly; and when she had come into the house, and was sitting down

with them, they almost forgot their secret anxiety in contemplating

her, who knew nothing about it.

Next day the Fellmers came, and the two or three days after that were a

lively time. That the squire was yielding to his impulses—making up his

mind—there could be no doubt. On Sunday Cornelius read the lessons, and

Joshua preached. Mrs. Fellmer was quite maternal towards Rosa, and it

appeared that she had decided to welcome the inevitable with a good

grace. The pretty girl was to spend yet another afternoon with the

elder lady, superintending some parish treat at the house in observance

of Christmas, and afterwards to stay on to dinner, her brothers to

fetch her in the evening. They were also invited to dine, but they

could not accept owing to an engagement.

The engagement was of a sombre sort. They were going to meet their

father, who would that day be released from Fountall Gaol, and try to

persuade him to keep away from Narrobourne. Every exertion was to be

made to get him back to Canada, to his old home in the

Midlands—anywhere, so that he would not impinge disastrously upon their

courses, and blast their sister’s prospects of the auspicious marriage

which was just then hanging in the balance.

As soon as Rosa had been fetched away by her friends at the manor-house

her brothers started on their expedition, without waiting for dinner or

tea. Cornelius, to whom the millwright always addressed his letters

when he wrote any, drew from his pocket and re-read as he walked the

curt note which had led to this journey being undertaken; it was

despatched by their father the night before, immediately upon his

liberation, and stated that he was setting out for Narrobourne at the

moment of writing; that having no money he would be obliged to walk all

the way; that he calculated on passing through the intervening town of

Ivell about six on the following day, where he should sup at the Castle

Inn, and where he hoped they would meet him with a carriage-and-pair,

or some other such conveyance, that he might not disgrace them by

arriving like a tramp.

‘That sounds as if he gave a thought to our position,’ said Cornelius.

Joshua knew the satire that lurked in the paternal words, and said

nothing. Silence prevailed during the greater part of their journey.

The lamps were lighted in Ivell when they entered the streets, and

Cornelius, who was quite unknown in this neighbourhood, and who,

moreover, was not in clerical attire, decided that he should be the one

to call at the Castle Inn. Here, in answer to his inquiry under the

darkness of the archway, they told him that such a man as he had

described left the house about a quarter of an hour earlier, after

making a meal in the kitchen-settle. He was rather the worse for

liquor.

‘Then,’ said Joshua, when Cornelius joined him outside with this

intelligence, ‘we must have met and passed him! And now that I think of

it, we did meet some one who was unsteady in his gait, under the trees

on the other side of Hendford Hill, where it was too dark to see him.’

They rapidly retraced their steps; but for a long stretch of the way

home could discern nobody. When, however, they had gone about

three-quarters of the distance, they became conscious of an irregular

footfall in front of them, and could see a whitish figure in the gloom.

They followed dubiously. The figure met another wayfarer—the single one

that had been encountered upon this lonely road—and they distinctly

heard him ask the way to Narrobourne. The stranger replied—what was

quite true—that the nearest way was by turning in at the stile by the

next bridge, and following the footpath which branched thence across

the meadows.

When the brothers reached the stile they also entered the path, but did

not overtake the subject of their worry till they had crossed two or

three meads, and the lights from Narrobourne manor-house were visible

before them through the trees. Their father was no longer walking; he

was seated against the wet bank of an adjoining hedge. Observing their

forms he shouted, ‘I’m going to Narrobourne; who may you be?’

They went up to him, and revealed themselves, reminding him of the plan

which he had himself proposed in his note, that they should meet him at

Ivell.

‘By Jerry, I’d forgot it!’ he said. ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’

His tone was distinctly quarrelsome.

A long conversation followed, which became embittered at the first hint

from them that he should not come to the village. The millwright drew a

quart bottle from his pocket, and challenged them to drink if they

meant friendly and called themselves men. Neither of the two had

touched alcohol for years, but for once they thought it best to accept,

so as not to needlessly provoke him.

‘What’s in it?’ said Joshua.

‘A drop of weak gin-and-water. It won’t hurt ye. Drin’ from the

bottle.’ Joshua did so, and his father pushed up the bottom of the

vessel so as to make him swallow a good deal in spite of himself. It

went down into his stomach like molten lead.

‘Ha, ha, that’s right!’ said old Halborough. ‘But ’twas raw spirit—ha,

ha!’

‘Why should you take me in so!’ said Joshua, losing his self-command,

try as he would to keep calm.

‘Because you took me in, my lad, in banishing me to that cursed country

under pretence that it was for my good. You were a pair of hypocrites

to say so. It was done to get rid of me—no more nor less. But, by

Jerry, I’m a match for ye now! I’ll spoil your souls for preaching. My

daughter is going to be married to the squire here. I’ve heard the

news—I saw it in a paper!’

‘It is premature—’

‘I know it is true; and I’m her father, and I shall give her away, or

there’ll be a hell of a row, I can assure ye! Is that where the

gennleman lives?’

Joshua Halborough writhed in impotent despair. Fellmer had not yet

positively declared himself, his mother was hardly won round; a scene

with their father in the parish would demolish as fair a palace of

hopes as was ever builded. The millwright rose. ‘If that’s where the

squire lives I’m going to call. Just arrived from Canady with her

fortune—ha, ha! I wish no harm to the gennleman, and the gennleman will

wish no harm to me. But I like to take my place in the family, and

stand upon my rights, and lower people’s pride!’

‘You’ve succeeded already! Where’s that woman you took with you—’

‘Woman! She was my wife as lawful as the Constitution—a sight more

lawful than your mother was till some time after you were born!’

Joshua had for many years before heard whispers that his father had

cajoled his mother in their early acquaintance, and had made somewhat

tardy amends; but never from his father’s lips till now. It was the

last stroke, and he could not bear it. He sank back against the hedge.

‘It is over!’ he said. ‘He ruins us all!’

The millwright moved on, waving his stick triumphantly, and the two

brothers stood still. They could see his drab figure stalking along the

path, and over his head the lights from the conservatory of Narrobourne

House, inside which Albert Fellmer might possibly be sitting with Rosa

at that moment, holding her hand, and asking her to share his home with

him.

The staggering whitey-brown form, advancing to put a blot on all this,

had been diminishing in the shade; and now suddenly disappeared beside

a weir. There was the noise of a flounce in the water.

‘He has fallen in!’ said Cornelius, starting forward to run for the

place at which his father had vanished.

Joshua, awaking from the stupefied reverie into which he had sunk,

rushed to the other’s side before he had taken ten steps. ‘Stop, stop,

what are you thinking of?’ he whispered hoarsely, grasping Cornelius’s

arm.

‘Pulling him out!’

‘Yes, yes—so am I. But—wait a moment—’

‘But, Joshua!’

‘Her life and happiness, you know—Cornelius—and your reputation and

mine—and our chance of rising together, all three—’

He clutched his brother’s arm to the bone; and as they stood breathless

the splashing and floundering in the weir continued; over it they saw

the hopeful lights from the manor-house conservatory winking through

the trees as their bare branches waved to and fro.

The floundering and splashing grew weaker, and they could hear gurgling

words: ‘Help—I’m drownded! Rosie—Rosie!’

‘We’ll go—we must save him. O Joshua!’

‘Yes, yes! we must!’

Still they did not move, but waited, holding each other, each thinking

the same thought. Weights of lead seemed to be affixed to their feet,

which would no longer obey their wills. The mead became silent. Over it

they fancied they could see figures moving in the conservatory. The air

up there seemed to emit gentle kisses.

Cornelius started forward at last, and Joshua almost simultaneously.

Two or three minutes brought them to the brink of the stream. At first

they could see nothing in the water, though it was not so deep nor the

night so dark but that their father’s light kerseymere coat would have

been visible if he had lain at the bottom. Joshua looked this way and

that.

‘He has drifted into the culvert,’ he said.

Below the foot-bridge of the weir the stream suddenly narrowed to half

its width, to pass under a barrel arch or culvert constructed for

waggons to cross into the middle of the mead in haymaking time. It

being at present the season of high water the arch was full to the

crown, against which the ripples clucked every now and then. At this

point he had just caught sight of a pale object slipping under. In a

moment it was gone.

They went to the lower end, but nothing emerged. For a long time they

tried at both ends to effect some communication with the interior, but

to no purpose.

‘We ought to have come sooner!’ said the conscience-stricken Cornelius,

when they were quite exhausted, and dripping wet.

‘I suppose we ought,’ replied Joshua heavily. He perceived his father’s

walking-stick on the bank; hastily picking it up he stuck it into the

mud among the sedge. Then they went on.

‘Shall we—say anything about this accident?’ whispered Cornelius as

they approached the door of Joshua’s house.

‘What’s the use? It can do no good. We must wait until he is found.’

They went indoors and changed their clothes; after which they started

for the manor-house, reaching it about ten o’clock. Besides their

sister there were only three guests; an adjoining landowner and his

wife, and the infirm old rector.

Rosa, although she had parted from them so recently, grasped their

hands in an ecstatic, brimming, joyful manner, as if she had not seen

them for years. ‘You look pale,’ she said.

The brothers answered that they had had a long walk, and were somewhat

tired. Everybody in the room seemed charged full with some sort of

interesting knowledge: the squire’s neighbour and his wife looked

wisely around; and Fellmer himself played the part of host with a

preoccupied bearing which approached fervour. They left at eleven, not

accepting the carriage offered, the distance being so short and the

roads dry. The squire came rather farther into the dark with them than

he need have done, and wished Rosa good-night in a mysterious manner,

slightly apart from the rest.

When they were walking along Joshua said, with desperate attempt at

joviality, ‘Rosa, what’s going on?’

‘O, I—’ she began between a gasp and a bound. ‘He—’

‘Never mind—if it disturbs you.’

She was so excited that she could not speak connectedly at first, the

practised air which she had brought home with her having disappeared.

Calming herself she added, ‘I am not disturbed, and nothing has

happened. Only he said he wanted to ask me _something_, some day; and I

said never mind that now. He hasn’t asked yet, and is coming to speak

to you about it. He would have done so to-night, only I asked him not

to be in a hurry. But he will come to-morrow, I am sure!’

CHAPTER V

It was summer-time, six months later, and mowers and haymakers were at

work in the meads. The manor-house, being opposite them, frequently

formed a peg for conversation during these operations; and the doings

of the squire, and the squire’s young wife, the curate’s sister—who was

at present the admired of most of them, and the interest of all—met

with their due amount of criticism.

Rosa was happy, if ever woman could be said to be so. She had not

learnt the fate of her father, and sometimes wondered—perhaps with a

sense of relief—why he did not write to her from his supposed home in

Canada. Her brother Joshua had been presented to a living in a small

town, shortly after her marriage, and Cornelius had thereupon succeeded

to the vacant curacy of Narrobourne.

These two had awaited in deep suspense the discovery of their father’s

body; and yet the discovery had not been made. Every day they expected

a man or a boy to run up from the meads with the intelligence; but he

had never come. Days had accumulated to weeks and months; the wedding

had come and gone: Joshua had tolled and read himself in at his new

parish; and never a shout of amazement over the millwright’s remains.

But now, in June, when they were mowing the meads, the hatches had to

be drawn and the water let out of its channels for the convenience of

the mowers. It was thus that the discovery was made. A man, stooping

low with his scythe, caught a view of the culvert lengthwise, and saw

something entangled in the recently bared weeds of its bed. A day or

two after there was an inquest; but the body was unrecognizable. Fish

and flood had been busy with the millwright; he had no watch or marked

article which could be identified; and a verdict of the accidental

drowning of a person unknown settled the matter.

As the body was found in Narrobourne parish, there it had to be buried.

Cornelius wrote to Joshua, begging him to come and read the service, or

to send some one; he himself could not do it. Rather than let in a

stranger Joshua came, and silently scanned the coroner’s order handed

him by the undertaker:—

‘I, Henry Giles, Coroner for the Mid-Division of Outer Wessex, do

hereby order the Burial of the Body now shown to the Inquest Jury as

the Body of an Adult Male Person Unknown . . . ,’ etc.

Joshua Halborough got through the service in some way, and rejoined his

brother Cornelius at his house. Neither accepted an invitation to lunch

at their sister’s; they wished to discuss parish matters together. In

the afternoon she came down, though they had already called on her, and

had not expected to see her again. Her bright eyes, brown hair, flowery

bonnet, lemon-coloured gloves, and flush beauty, were like an

irradiation into the apartment, which they in their gloom could hardly

bear.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said, ‘of a curious thing which happened to

me a month or two before my marriage—something which I have thought may

have had a connection with the accident to the poor man you have buried

to-day. It was on that evening I was at the manor-house waiting for you

to fetch me; I was in the winter-garden with Albert, and we were

sitting silent together, when we fancied we heard a cry. We opened the

door, and while Albert ran to fetch his hat, leaving me standing there,

the cry was repeated, and my excited senses made me think I heard my

own name. When Albert came back all was silent, and we decided that it

was only a drunken shout, and not a cry for help. We both forgot the

incident, and it never has occurred to me till since the funeral to-day

that it might have been this stranger’s cry. The name of course was

only fancy, or he might have had a wife or child with a name something

like mine, poor man!’

When she was gone the brothers were silent till Cornelius said, ‘Now

mark this, Joshua. Sooner or later she’ll know.’

‘How?’

‘From one of us. Do you think human hearts are iron-cased safes, that

you suppose we can keep this secret for ever?’

‘Yes, I think they are, sometimes,’ said Joshua.

‘No. It will out. We shall tell.’

‘What, and ruin her—kill her? Disgrace her children, and pull down the

whole auspicious house of Fellmer about our ears? No! May I—drown where

he was drowned before I do it! Never, never. Surely you can say the

same, Cornelius!’

Cornelius seemed fortified, and no more was said. For a long time after

that day he did not see Joshua, and before the next year was out a son

and heir was born to the Fellmers. The villagers rang the three bells

every evening for a week and more, and were made merry by Mr. Fellmer’s

ale; and when the christening came on Joshua paid Narrobourne another

visit.

Among all the people who assembled on that day the brother clergymen

were the least interested. Their minds were haunted by a spirit in

kerseymere in the evening they walked together in the fields.

‘She’s all right,’ said Joshua. ‘But here are you doing journey-work,

Cornelius, and likely to continue at it till the end of the day, as far

as I can see. I, too, with my petty living—what am I after all? . . .

To tell the truth, the Church is a poor forlorn hope for people without

influence, particularly when their enthusiasm begins to flag. A social

regenerator has a better chance outside, where he is unhampered by

dogma and tradition. As for me, I would rather have gone on mending

mills, with my crust of bread and liberty.’

Almost automatically they had bent their steps along the margin of the

river; they now paused. They were standing on the brink of the

well-known weir. There were the hatches, there was the culvert; they

could see the pebbly bed of the stream through the pellucid water. The

notes of the church-bells were audible, still jangled by the

enthusiastic villagers.

‘Why see—it was there I hid his walking-stick!’ said Joshua, looking

towards the sedge. The next moment, during a passing breeze, something

flashed white on the spot to which the attention of Cornelius was

drawn.

From the sedge rose a straight little silver-poplar, and it was the

leaves of this sapling which caused the flicker of whiteness.

‘His walking-stick has grown!’ Joshua added. ‘It was a rough one—cut

from the hedge, I remember.’

At every puff of wind the tree turned white, till they could not bear

to look at it; and they walked away.

‘I see him every night,’ Cornelius murmured . . . ‘Ah, we read our

_Hebrews_ to little account, Jos! Υπέμεινε σταυρον, αισχυνης

καταφρονησας. To have endured the cross, despising the shame—there lay

greatness! But now I often feel that I should like to put an end to

trouble here in this self-same spot.’

‘I have thought of it myself,’ said Joshua.

‘Perhaps we shall, some day,’ murmured his brother. ‘Perhaps,’ said

Joshua moodily.

With that contingency to consider in the silence of their nights and

days they bent their steps homewards.

_December_ 1888.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT

CHAPTER I

The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet lives hereafter

depicted—no great man, in any sense, by the way—first had knowledge of

them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been

standing in the Close, vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a

glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediæval architecture in

England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward in

front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was

revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but

they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a

street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building,

was flung back upon him.

He postponed till the morrow his attempt to examine the deserted

edifice, and turned his attention to the noise. It was compounded of

steam barrel-organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells,

the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men. A lurid

light hung in the air in the direction of the tumult. Thitherward he

went, passing under the arched gateway, along a straight street, and

into the square.

He might have searched Europe over for a greater contrast between

juxtaposed scenes. The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the

Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the

Homeric heaven. A smoky glare, of the complexion of brass-filings,

ascended from the fiery tongues of innumerable naphtha lamps affixed to

booths, stalls, and other temporary erections which crowded the

spacious market-square. In front of this irradiation scores of human

figures, more or less in profile, were darting athwart and across, up,

down, and around, like gnats against a sunset.

Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by

machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery

indeed; the figures being those of the patrons of swings, see-saws,

flying-leaps, above all of the three steam roundabouts which occupied

the centre of the position. It was from the latter that the din of

steam-organs came.

Throbbing humanity in full light was, on second thoughts, better than

architecture in the dark. The young man, lighting a short pipe, and

putting his hat on one side and one hand in his pocket, to throw

himself into harmony with his new environment, drew near to the largest

and most patronized of the steam circuses, as the roundabouts were

called by their owners. This was one of brilliant finish, and it was

now in full revolution. The musical instrument around which and to

whose tones the riders revolved, directed its trumpet-mouths of brass

upon the young man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles,

which revolved with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and

hobby horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes.

It could now be seen that he was unlike the majority of the crowd. A

gentlemanly young fellow, one of the species found in large towns only,

and London particularly, built on delicate lines, well, though not

fashionably dressed, he appeared to belong to the professional class;

he had nothing square or practical about his look, much that was

curvilinear and sensuous. Indeed, some would have called him a man not

altogether typical of the middle-class male of a century wherein sordid

ambition is the master-passion that seems to be taking the

time-honoured place of love.

The revolving figures passed before his eyes with an unexpected and

quiet grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest

gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was

imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which was really the

triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness—a galloping rise and

fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring

while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by

these equine undulations in this most delightful holiday-game of our

times. There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years,

with every age between. At first it was difficult to catch a

personality, but by and by the observer’s eyes centred on the prettiest

girl out of the several pretty ones revolving.

It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been

at first attracted by; no, it was the one with the black cape, grey

skirt, light gloves and—no, not even she, but the one behind her; she

with the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves.

Unmistakably that was the prettiest girl.

Having finally selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as

he was able during each of her brief transits across his visual field.

She was absolutely unconscious of everything save the act of riding:

her features were rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess; for the moment she

did not know her age or her history or her lineaments, much less her

troubles. He himself was full of vague latter-day glooms and popular

melancholies, and it was a refreshing sensation to behold this young

thing then and there, absolutely as happy as if she were in a Paradise.

Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind

the glittering rococo-work, should decide that this set of riders had

had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine,

horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and

silence, he waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently

over the intervening forms, including the two plainer girls, the old

woman and child, the two youngsters, the newly-married couple, the old

man with a clay pipe, the sparkish youth with a ring, the young ladies

in the chariot, the pair of journeyman-carpenters, and others, till his

select country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen

a fairer product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark in

his sentiments. The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders

were audible.

He moved round to the place at which he reckoned she would alight; but

she retained her seat. The empty saddles began to refill, and she

plainly was deciding to have another turn. The young man drew up to the

side of her steed, and pleasantly asked her if she had enjoyed her

ride.

‘O yes!’ she said, with dancing eyes. ‘It has been quite unlike

anything I have ever felt in my life before!’

It was not difficult to fall into conversation with her. Unreserved—too

unreserved—by nature, she was not experienced enough to be reserved by

art, and after a little coaxing she answered his remarks readily. She

had come to live in Melchester from a village on the Great Plain, and

this was the first time that she had ever seen a steam-circus; she

could not understand how such wonderful machines were made. She had

come to the city on the invitation of Mrs. Harnham, who had taken her

into her household to train her as a servant, if she showed any

aptitude. Mrs. Harnham was a young lady who before she married had been

Miss Edith White, living in the country near the speaker’s cottage; she

was now very kind to her through knowing her in childhood so well. She

was even taking the trouble to educate her. Mrs. Harnham was the only

friend she had in the world, and being without children had wished to

have her near her in preference to anybody else, though she had only

lately come; allowed her to do almost as she liked, and to have a

holiday whenever she asked for it. The husband of this kind young lady

was a rich wine-merchant of the town, but Mrs. Harnham did not care

much about him. In the daytime you could see the house from where they

were talking. She, the speaker, liked Melchester better than the lonely

country, and she was going to have a new hat for next Sunday that was

to cost fifteen and ninepence.

Then she inquired of her acquaintance where he lived, and he told her

in London, that ancient and smoky city, where everybody lived who lived

at all, and died because they could not live there. He came into Wessex

two or three times a year for professional reasons; he had arrived from

Wintoncester yesterday, and was going on into the next county in a day

or two. For one thing he did like the country better than the town, and

it was because it contained such girls as herself.

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted

girl, the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its

lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began

moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her

right hand, she being as it were the fixed point in an undulating,

dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of

all the form of her late interlocutor. Each time that she approached

the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other

with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so

little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache,

union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content,

resignation, despair.

When the horses slowed anew he stepped to her side and proposed another

heat. ‘Hang the expense for once,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay!’

She laughed till the tears came.

‘Why do you laugh, dear?’ said he.

‘Because—you are so genteel that you must have plenty of money, and

only say that for fun!’ she returned.

‘Ha-ha!’ laughed the young man in unison, and gallantly producing his

money she was enabled to whirl on again.

As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his

hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and wideawake that he had put on

for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford

Raye, Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the

Bar at Lincoln’s-Inn, now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in

Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to

the next county-town?