Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of
what he feared was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest
for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for
greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester;
Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw
herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna’s departure.
In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the
death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of
telepathy had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up
with Anna and be with her through the ceremony—‘to see the end of her,’
as her mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl
gratefully accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the
part of companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly
bridegroom, in such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made
an irremediable social blunder.
It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel
cab at the door of a registry-office in the S.W. district of London,
and carefully handed down Anna and her companion Mrs. Harnham. Anna
looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs.
Harnham had helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, an
innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the
wooden horse at Melchester Fair.
Mrs. Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young
man—a friend of Raye’s—having met them at the door, all four entered
the registry-office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had
never known the wine-merchant’s wife, except at that first casual
encounter, and in the flutter of the performance before them he had
little opportunity for more than a brief acquaintance. The contract of
marriage at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its
progress, Raye discovered a strange and secret gravitation between
himself and Anna’s friend.
The formalities of the wedding—or rather ratification of a previous
union—being concluded, the four went in one cab to Raye’s lodgings,
newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which
he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye
had bought at a pastrycook’s on his way home from Lincoln’s Inn the
night before. But she did not do much besides. Raye’s friend was
obliged to depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only
ones virtually present were Edith and Raye who exchanged ideas with
much animation. The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as
a domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed
startled in awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with
her inadequacy.
At last, more disappointed than he cared to own, he said, ‘Mrs.
Harnham, my darling is so flurried that she doesn’t know what she is
doing or saying. I see that after this event a little quietude will be
necessary before she gives tongue to that tender philosophy which she
used to treat me to in her letters.’
They had planned to start early that afternoon for Knollsea, to spend
the few opening days of their married life there, and as the hour for
departure was drawing near Raye asked his wife if she would go to the
writing-desk in the next room and scribble a little note to his sister,
who had been unable to attend through indisposition, informing her that
the ceremony was over, thanking her for her little present, and hoping
to know her well now that she was the writer’s sister as well as
Charles’s.
‘Say it in the pretty poetical way you know so well how to adopt,’ he
added, ‘for I want you particularly to win her, and both of you to be
dear friends.’
Anna looked uneasy, but departed to her task, Raye remaining to talk to
their guest. Anna was a long while absent, and her husband suddenly
rose and went to her.
He found her still bending over the writing-table, with tears brimming
up in her eyes; and he looked down upon the sheet of note-paper with
some interest, to discover with what tact she had expressed her
good-will in the delicate circumstances. To his surprise she had
progressed but a few lines, in the characters and spelling of a child
of eight, and with the ideas of a goose.
‘Anna,’ he said, staring; ‘what’s this?’
‘It only means—that I can’t do it any better!’ she answered, through
her tears.
‘Eh? Nonsense!’
‘I can’t!’ she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. ‘I—I—didn’t
write those letters, Charles! I only told _her_ what to write! And not
always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear husband! And
you’ll forgive me, won’t you, for not telling you before?’ She slid to
her knees, abjectly clasped his waist and laid her face against him.
He stood a few moments, raised her, abruptly turned, and shut the door
upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something
untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each
other.
‘Do I guess rightly?’ he asked, with wan quietude. ‘_You_ were her
scribe through all this?’
‘It was necessary,’ said Edith.
‘Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?’
‘Not every word.’
‘In fact, very little?’
‘Very little.’
‘You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own
conceptions, though in her name!’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you wrote many of the letters when you were alone, without
communication with her?’
‘I did.’
He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and
Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.
‘You have deceived me—ruined me!’ he murmured.
‘O, don’t say it!’ she cried in her anguish, jumping up and putting her
hand on his shoulder. ‘I can’t bear that!’
‘Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it—_why_ did you!’
‘I began doing it in kindness to her! How could I do otherwise than try
to save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it
for pleasure to myself.’
Raye looked up. ‘Why did it give you pleasure?’ he asked.
‘I must not tell,’ said she.
He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to
quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started
aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return
train: could a cab be called immediately?
But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. ‘Well, to think
of such a thing as this!’ he said. ‘Why, you and I are
friends—lovers—devoted lovers—by correspondence!’
‘Yes; I suppose.’
‘More.’
‘More?’
‘Plainly more. It is no use blinking that. Legally I have married
her—God help us both!—in soul and spirit I have married you, and no
other woman in the world!’
‘Hush!’
‘But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth,
when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me
that the bond is—not between me and her! Now I’ll say no more. But, O
my cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!’
She did not say what, and he drew her towards him, and bent over her.
‘If it was all pure invention in those letters,’ he said emphatically,
‘give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips.
It is for the first and last time, remember!’
She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. ‘You forgive me?’ she
said crying.
‘Yes.’
‘But you are ruined!’
‘What matter!’ he said shrugging his shoulders. ‘It serves me right!’
She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who
had not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the
letter. Raye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in
a hansom driving to the Waterloo station.
He went back to his wife. ‘Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day,’ he
said gently. ‘Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly.’
The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married,
showed her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the
disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were
a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for
the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to
his side.
Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face that showed the
very stupor of grief; her lips still tingling from the desperate
pressure of his kiss. The end of her impassioned dream had come. When
at dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to
meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not
see each other, and she went out of the station alone.
She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly. Entering, she
could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to
where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then
returned to the drawing-room, and not knowing what she did, crouched
down upon the floor.
‘I have ruined him!’ she kept repeating. ‘I have ruined him; because I
would not deal treacherously towards her!’
In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the
apartment.
‘Ah—who’s that?’ she said, starting up, for it was dark.
‘Your husband—who should it be?’ said the worthy merchant.
‘Ah—my husband!—I forgot I had a husband!’ she whispered to herself.
‘I missed you at the station,’ he continued. ‘Did you see Anna safely
tied up? I hope so, for ’twas time.’
‘Yes—Anna is married.’
Simultaneously with Edith’s journey home Anna and her husband were
sitting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped
along to Knollsea. In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets
closely written over. Unfolding them one after another he read them in
silence, and sighed.
‘What are you doing, dear Charles?’ she said timidly from the other
window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god.
‘Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed “Anna,”’ he replied
with dreary resignation.
_Autumn_ 1891.
TO PLEASE HIS WIFE
CHAPTER I
The interior of St. James’s Church, in Havenpool Town, was slowly
darkening under the close clouds of a winter afternoon. It was Sunday:
service had just ended, the face of the parson in the pulpit was buried
in his hands, and the congregation, with a cheerful sigh of release,
were rising from their knees to depart.
For the moment the stillness was so complete that the surging of the
sea could be heard outside the harbour-bar. Then it was broken by the
footsteps of the clerk going towards the west door to open it in the
usual manner for the exit of the assembly. Before, however, he had
reached the doorway, the latch was lifted from without, and the dark
figure of a man in a sailor’s garb appeared against the light.
The clerk stepped aside, the sailor closed the door gently behind him,
and advanced up the nave till he stood at the chancel-step. The parson
looked up from the private little prayer which, after so many for the
parish, he quite fairly took for himself; rose to his feet, and stared
at the intruder.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said the sailor, addressing the minister in a
voice distinctly audible to all the congregation. ‘I have come here to
offer thanks for my narrow escape from shipwreck. I am given to
understand that it is a proper thing to do, if you have no objection?’
The parson, after a moment’s pause, said hesitatingly, ‘I have no
objection; certainly. It is usual to mention any such wish before
service, so that the proper words may be used in the General
Thanksgiving. But, if you wish, we can read from the form for use after
a storm at sea.’
‘Ay, sure; I ain’t particular,’ said the sailor.
The clerk thereupon directed the sailor to the page in the prayer-book
where the collect of thanksgiving would be found, and the rector began
reading it, the sailor kneeling where he stood, and repeating it after
him word by word in a distinct voice. The people, who had remained
agape and motionless at the proceeding, mechanically knelt down
likewise; but they continued to regard the isolated form of the sailor
who, in the precise middle of the chancel-step, remained fixed on his
knees, facing the east, his hat beside him, his hands joined, and he
quite unconscious of his appearance in their regard.
When his thanksgiving had come to an end he rose; the people rose also,
and all went out of church together. As soon as the sailor emerged, so
that the remaining daylight fell upon his face, old inhabitants began
to recognize him as no other than Shadrach Jolliffe, a young man who
had not been seen at Havenpool for several years. A son of the town,
his parents had died when he was quite young, on which account he had
early gone to sea, in the Newfoundland trade.
He talked with this and that townsman as he walked, informing them
that, since leaving his native place years before, he had become
captain and owner of a small coasting-ketch, which had providentially
been saved from the gale as well as himself. Presently he drew near to
two girls who were going out of the churchyard in front of him; they
had been sitting in the nave at his entry, and had watched his doings
with deep interest, afterwards discussing him as they moved out of
church together. One was a slight and gentle creature, the other a
tall, large-framed, deliberative girl. Captain Jolliffe regarded the
loose curls of their hair, their backs and shoulders, down to their
heels, for some time.
‘Who may them two maids be?’ he whispered to his neighbour.
‘The little one is Emily Hanning; the tall one Joanna Phippard.’
‘Ah! I recollect ’em now, to be sure.’
He advanced to their elbow, and genially stole a gaze at them.
‘Emily, you don’t know me?’ said the sailor, turning his beaming brown
eyes on her.
‘I think I do, Mr. Jolliffe,’ said Emily shyly.
The other girl looked straight at him with her dark eyes.
‘The face of Miss Joanna I don’t call to mind so well,’ he continued.
‘But I know her beginnings and kindred.’
They walked and talked together, Jolliffe narrating particulars of his
late narrow escape, till they reached the corner of Sloop Lane, in
which Emily Hanning dwelt, when, with a nod and smile, she left them.
Soon the sailor parted also from Joanna, and, having no especial errand
or appointment, turned back towards Emily’s house. She lived with her
father, who called himself an accountant, the daughter, however,
keeping a little stationery-shop as a supplemental provision for the
gaps of his somewhat uncertain business. On entering Jolliffe found
father and daughter about to begin tea.
‘O, I didn’t know it was tea-time,’ he said. ‘Ay, I’ll have a cup with
much pleasure.’
He remained to tea and long afterwards, telling more tales of his
seafaring life. Several neighbours called to listen, and were asked to
come in. Somehow Emily Hanning lost her heart to the sailor that Sunday
night, and in the course of a week or two there was a tender
understanding between them.
One moonlight evening in the next month Shadrach was ascending out of
the town by the long straight road eastward, to an elevated suburb
where the more fashionable houses stood—if anything near this ancient
port could be called fashionable—when he saw a figure before him whom,
from her manner of glancing back, he took to be Emily. But, on coming
up, he found she was Joanna Phippard. He gave a gallant greeting, and
walked beside her.
‘Go along,’ she said, ‘or Emily will be jealous!’
He seemed not to like the suggestion, and remained. What was said and
what was done on that walk never could be clearly recollected by
Shadrach; but in some way or other Joanna contrived to wean him away
from her gentler and younger rival. From that week onwards, Jolliffe
was seen more and more in the wake of Joanna Phippard and less in the
company of Emily; and it was soon rumoured about the quay that old
Jolliffe’s son, who had come home from sea, was going to be married to
the former young woman, to the great disappointment of the latter.
Just after this report had gone about, Joanna dressed herself for a
walk one morning, and started for Emily’s house in the little
cross-street. Intelligence of the deep sorrow of her friend on account
of the loss of Shadrach had reached her ears also, and her conscience
reproached her for winning him away.
Joanna was not altogether satisfied with the sailor. She liked his
attentions, and she coveted the dignity of matrimony; but she had never
been deeply in love with Jolliffe. For one thing, she was ambitious,
and socially his position was hardly so good as her own, and there was
always the chance of an attractive woman mating considerably above her.
It had long been in her mind that she would not strongly object to give
him back again to Emily if her friend felt so very badly about him. To
this end she had written a letter of renunciation to Shadrach, which
letter she carried in her hand, intending to send it if personal
observation of Emily convinced her that her friend was suffering.
Joanna entered Sloop Lane and stepped down into the stationery-shop,
which was below the pavement level. Emily’s father was never at home at
this hour of the day, and it seemed as though Emily were not at home
either, for the visitor could make nobody hear. Customers came so
seldom hither that a five minutes’ absence of the proprietor counted
for little. Joanna waited in the little shop, where Emily had
tastefully set out—as women can—articles in themselves of slight value,
so as to obscure the meagreness of the stock-in-trade; till she saw a
figure pausing without the window apparently absorbed in the
contemplation of the sixpenny books, packets of paper, and prints hung
on a string. It was Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, peering in to ascertain
if Emily were there alone. Moved by an impulse of reluctance to meet
him in a spot which breathed of Emily, Joanna slipped through the door
that communicated with the parlour at the back. She had frequently done
so before, for in her friendship with Emily she had the freedom of the
house without ceremony.
Jolliffe entered the shop. Through the thin blind which screened the
glass partition she could see that he was disappointed at not finding
Emily there. He was about to go out again, when Emily’s form darkened
the doorway, hastening home from some errand. At sight of Jolliffe she
started back as if she would have gone out again.
‘Don’t run away, Emily; don’t!’ said he. ‘What can make ye afraid?’
‘I’m not afraid, Captain Jolliffe. Only—only I saw you all of a sudden,
and—it made me jump!’ Her voice showed that her heart had jumped even
more than the rest of her.
‘I just called as I was passing,’ he said.
‘For some paper?’ She hastened behind the counter.
‘No, no, Emily; why do ye get behind there? Why not stay by me? You
seem to hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you. How can I?’
‘Then come out, so that we can talk like Christians.’
Emily obeyed with a fitful laugh, till she stood again beside him in
the open part of the shop.
‘There’s a dear,’ he said.
‘You mustn’t say that, Captain Jolliffe; because the words belong to
somebody else.’
‘Ah! I know what you mean. But, Emily, upon my life I didn’t know till
this morning that you cared one bit about me, or I should not have done
as I have done. I have the best of feelings for Joanna, but I know that
from the beginning she hasn’t cared for me more than in a friendly way;
and I see now the one I ought to have asked to be my wife. You know,
Emily, when a man comes home from sea after a long voyage he’s as blind
as a bat—he can’t see who’s who in women. They are all alike to him,
beautiful creatures, and he takes the first that comes easy, without
thinking if she loves him, or if he might not soon love another better
than her. From the first I inclined to you most, but you were so
backward and shy that I thought you didn’t want me to bother ’ee, and
so I went to Joanna.’
‘Don’t say any more, Mr. Jolliffe, don’t!’ said she, choking. ‘You are
going to marry Joanna next month, and it is wrong to—to—’
‘O, Emily, my darling!’ he cried, and clasped her little figure in his
arms before she was aware.
Joanna, behind the curtain, turned pale, tried to withdraw her eyes,
but could not.
‘It is only you I love as a man ought to love the woman he is going to
marry; and I know this from what Joanna has said, that she will
willingly let me off! She wants to marry higher I know, and only said
“Yes” to me out of kindness. A fine, tall girl like her isn’t the sort
for a plain sailor’s wife: you be the best suited for that.’
He kissed her and kissed her again, her flexible form quivering in the
agitation of his embrace.
‘I wonder—are you sure—Joanna is going to break off with you? O, are
you sure? Because—’
‘I know she would not wish to make us miserable. She will release me.’
‘O, I hope—I hope she will! Don’t stay any longer, Captain Jolliffe!’
He lingered, however, till a customer came for a penny stick of
sealing-wax, and then he withdrew.
Green envy had overspread Joanna at the scene. She looked about for a
way of escape. To get out without Emily’s knowledge of her visit was
indispensable. She crept from the parlour into the passage, and thence
to the front door of the house, where she let herself noiselessly into
the street.
The sight of that caress had reversed all her resolutions. She could
not let Shadrach go. Reaching home she burnt the letter, and told her
mother that if Captain Jolliffe called she was too unwell to see him.
Shadrach, however, did not call. He sent her a note expressing in
simple language the state of his feelings; and asked to be allowed to
take advantage of the hints she had given him that her affection, too,
was little more than friendly, by cancelling the engagement.
Looking out upon the harbour and the island beyond he waited and waited
in his lodgings for an answer that did not come. The suspense grew to
be so intolerable that after dark he went up the High Street. He could
not resist calling at Joanna’s to learn his fate.
Her mother said her daughter was too unwell to see him, and to his
questioning admitted that it was in consequence of a letter received
from himself; which had distressed her deeply.
‘You know what it was about, perhaps, Mrs. Phippard?’ he said.
Mrs. Phippard owned that she did, adding that it put them in a very
painful position. Thereupon Shadrach, fearing that he had been guilty
of an enormity, explained that if his letter had pained Joanna it must
be owing to a misunderstanding, since he had thought it would be a
relief to her. If otherwise, he would hold himself bound by his word,
and she was to think of the letter as never having been written.
Next morning he received an oral message from the young woman, asking
him to fetch her home from a meeting that evening. This he did, and
while walking from the Town Hall to her door, with her hand in his arm,
she said:
‘It is all the same as before between us, isn’t it, Shadrach? Your
letter was sent in mistake?’
‘It is all the same as before,’ he answered, ‘if you say it must be.’
‘I wish it to be,’ she murmured, with hard lineaments, as she thought
of Emily.
Shadrach was a religious and scrupulous man, who respected his word as
his life. Shortly afterwards the wedding took place, Jolliffe having
conveyed to Emily as gently as possible the error he had fallen into
when estimating Joanna’s mood as one of indifference.
CHAPTER II
A month after the marriage Joanna’s mother died, and the couple were
obliged to turn their attention to very practical matters. Now that she
was left without a parent, Joanna could not bear the notion of her
husband going to sea again, but the question was, What could he do at
home? They finally decided to take on a grocer’s shop in High Street,
the goodwill and stock of which were waiting to be disposed of at that
time. Shadrach knew nothing of shopkeeping, and Joanna very little, but
they hoped to learn.
To the management of this grocery business they now devoted all their
energies, and continued to conduct it for many succeeding years,
without great success. Two sons were born to them, whom their mother
loved to idolatry, although she had never passionately loved her
husband; and she lavished upon them all her forethought and care. But
the shop did not thrive, and the large dreams she had entertained of
her sons’ education and career became attenuated in the face of
realities. Their schooling was of the plainest, but, being by the sea,
they grew alert in all such nautical arts and enterprises as were
attractive to their age.
The great interest of the Jolliffes’ married life, outside their own
immediate household, had lain in the marriage of Emily. By one of those
odd chances which lead those that lurk in unexpected corners to be
discovered, while the obvious are passed by, the gentle girl had been
seen and loved by a thriving merchant of the town, a widower, some
years older than herself, though still in the prime of life. At first
Emily had declared that she never, never could marry any one; but Mr.
Lester had quietly persevered, and had at last won her reluctant
assent. Two children also were the fruits of this union, and, as they
grew and prospered, Emily declared that she had never supposed that she
could live to be so happy.
The worthy merchant’s home, one of those large, substantial brick
mansions frequently jammed up in old-fashioned towns, faced directly on
the High Street, nearly opposite to the grocery shop of the Jolliffes,
and it now became the pain of Joanna to behold the woman whose place
she had usurped out of pure covetousness, looking down from her
position of comparative wealth upon the humble shop-window with its
dusty sugar-loaves, heaps of raisins, and canisters of tea, over which
it was her own lot to preside. The business having so dwindled, Joanna
was obliged to serve in the shop herself; and it galled and mortified
her that Emily Lester, sitting in her large drawing-room over the way,
could witness her own dancings up and down behind the counter at the
beck and call of wretched twopenny customers, whose patronage she was
driven to welcome gladly: persons to whom she was compelled to be civil
in the street, while Emily was bounding along with her children and her
governess, and conversing with the genteelest people of the town and
neighbourhood. This was what she had gained by not letting Shadrach
Jolliffe, whom she had so faintly loved, carry his affection elsewhere.
Shadrach was a good and honest man, and he had been faithful to her in
heart and in deed. Time had clipped the wings of his love for Emily in
his devotion to the mother of his boys: he had quite lived down that
impulsive earlier fancy, and Emily had become in his regard nothing
more than a friend. It was the same with Emily’s feelings for him.
Possibly, had she found the least cause for jealousy, Joanna would
almost have been better satisfied. It was in the absolute acquiescence
of Emily and Shadrach in the results she herself had contrived that her
discontent found nourishment.
Shadrach was not endowed with the narrow shrewdness necessary for
developing a retail business in the face of many competitors. Did a
customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the wondrous
substitute for eggs which a persevering bagman had forced into his
stock, he would answer that ‘when you did not put eggs into a pudding
it was difficult to taste them there’; and when he was asked if his
‘real Mocha coffee’ was real Mocha, he would say grimly, ‘as understood
in small shops.’
One summer day, when the big brick house opposite was reflecting the
oppressive sun’s heat into the shop, and nobody was present but husband
and wife, Joanna looked across at Emily’s door, where a wealthy
visitor’s carriage had drawn up. Traces of patronage had been visible
in Emily’s manner of late.
‘Shadrach, the truth is, you are not a business-man,’ his wife sadly
murmured. ‘You were not brought up to shopkeeping, and it is impossible
for a man to make a fortune at an occupation he has jumped into, as you
did into this.’
Jolliffe agreed with her, in this as in everything else.
‘Not that I care a rope’s end about making a fortune,’ he said
cheerfully. ‘I am happy enough, and we can rub on somehow.’
She looked again at the great house through the screen of bottled
pickles.
‘Rub on—yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘But see how well off Emmy Lester is,
who used to be so poor! Her boys will go to College, no doubt; and
think of yours—obliged to go to the Parish School!’
Shadrach’s thoughts had flown to Emily.
‘Nobody,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘ever did Emily a better turn than
you did, Joanna, when you warned her off me and put an end to that
little simpering nonsense between us, so as to leave it in her power to
say “Aye” to Lester when he came along.’ This almost maddened her.
‘Don’t speak of bygones!’ she implored, in stern sadness. ‘But think,
for the boys’ and my sake, if not for your own, what are we to do to
get richer?’
‘Well,’ he said, becoming serious, ‘to tell the truth, I have always
felt myself unfit for this business, though I’ve never liked to say so.
I seem to want more room for sprawling; a more open space to strike out
in than here among friends and neighbours. I could get rich as well as
any man, if I tried my own way.’
‘I wish you would! What is your way?’
‘To go to sea again.’
She had been the very one to keep him at home, hating the semi-widowed
existence of sailors’ wives. But her ambition checked her instincts
now, and she said: ‘Do you think success really lies that way?’
‘I am sure it lies in no other.’
‘Do you want to go, Shadrach?’
‘Not for the pleasure of it, I can tell ’ee. There’s no such pleasure
at sea, Joanna, as I can find in my back parlour here. To speak honest,
I have no love for the brine. I never had much. But if it comes to a
question of a fortune for you and the lads, it is another thing. That’s
the only way to it for one born and bred a seafarer as I.’
‘Would it take long to earn?’
‘Well, that depends; perhaps not.’
The next morning Shadrach pulled from a chest of drawers the nautical
jacket he had worn during the first months of his return, brushed out
the moths, donned it, and walked down to the quay. The port still did a
fair business in the Newfoundland trade, though not so much as
formerly.
It was not long after this that he invested all he possessed in
purchasing a part-ownership in a brig, of which he was appointed
captain. A few months were passed in coast-trading, during which
interval Shadrach wore off the land-rust that had accumulated upon him
in his grocery phase; and in the spring the brig sailed for
Newfoundland.
Joanna lived on at home with her sons, who were now growing up into
strong lads, and occupying themselves in various ways about the harbour
and quay.
‘Never mind, let them work a little,’ their fond mother said to
herself. ‘Our necessities compel it now, but when Shadrach comes home
they will be only seventeen and eighteen, and they shall be removed
from the port, and their education thoroughly taken in hand by a tutor;
and with the money they’ll have they will perhaps be as near to
gentlemen as Emmy Lester’s precious two, with their algebra and their
Latin!’
The date for Shadrach’s return drew near and arrived, and he did not
appear. Joanna was assured that there was no cause for anxiety,
sailing-ships being so uncertain in their coming; which assurance
proved to be well grounded, for late one wet evening, about a month
after the calculated time, the ship was announced as at hand, and
presently the slip-slop step of Shadrach as the sailor sounded in the
passage, and he entered. The boys had gone out and had missed him, and
Joanna was sitting alone.
As soon as the first emotion of reunion between the couple had passed,
Jolliffe explained the delay as owing to a small speculative contract,
which had produced good results.
‘I was determined not to disappoint ’ee,’ he said; ‘and I think you’ll
own that I haven’t!’
With this he pulled out an enormous canvas bag, full and rotund as the
money-bag of the giant whom Jack slew, untied it, and shook the
contents out into her lap as she sat in her low chair by the fire. A
mass of sovereigns and guineas (there were guineas on the earth in
those days) fell into her lap with a sudden thud, weighing down her
gown to the floor.
‘There!’ said Shadrach complacently. ‘I told ’ee, dear, I’d do it; and
have I done it or no?’
Somehow her face, after the first excitement of possession, did not
retain its glory.
‘It is a lot of gold, indeed,’ she said. ‘And—is this _all_?’
‘All? Why, dear Joanna, do you know you can count to three hundred in
that heap? It is a fortune!’
‘Yes—yes. A fortune—judged by sea; but judged by land—’
However, she banished considerations of the money for the nonce. Soon
the boys came in, and next Sunday Shadrach returned thanks to God—this
time by the more ordinary channel of the italics in the General
Thanksgiving. But a few days after, when the question of investing the
money arose, he remarked that she did not seem so satisfied as he had
hoped.
‘Well you see, Shadrach,’ she answered, ‘_we_ count by hundreds; _they_
count by thousands’ (nodding towards the other side of the Street).
‘They have set up a carriage and pair since you left.’
‘O, have they?’
‘My dear Shadrach, you don’t know how the world moves. However, we’ll
do the best we can with it. But they are rich, and we are poor still!’
The greater part of a year was desultorily spent. She moved sadly about
the house and shop, and the boys were still occupying themselves in and
around the harbour.
‘Joanna,’ he said, one day, ‘I see by your movements that it is not
enough.’
‘It is not enough,’ said she. ‘My boys will have to live by steering
the ships that the Lesters own; and I was once above her!’
Jolliffe was not an argumentative man, and he only murmured that he
thought he would make another voyage.
He meditated for several days, and coming home from the quay one
afternoon said suddenly:
‘I could do it for ’ee, dear, in one more trip, for certain, if—if—’
‘Do what, Shadrach?’
‘Enable ’ee to count by thousands instead of hundreds.’
‘If what?’
‘If I might take the boys.’
She turned pale.
‘Don’t say that, Shadrach,’ she answered hastily.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t like to hear it! There’s danger at sea. I want them to be
something genteel, and no danger to them. I couldn’t let them risk
their lives at sea. O, I couldn’t ever, ever!’
‘Very well, dear, it shan’t be done.’
Next day, after a silence, she asked a question:
‘If they were to go with you it would make a great deal of difference,
I suppose, to the profit?’
‘’Twould treble what I should get from the venture single-handed. Under
my eye they would be as good as two more of myself.’
Later on she said: ‘Tell me more about this.’
‘Well, the boys are almost as clever as master-mariners in handling a
craft, upon my life! There isn’t a more cranky place in the Northern
Seas than about the sandbanks of this harbour, and they’ve practised
here from their infancy. And they are so steady. I couldn’t get their
steadiness and their trustworthiness in half a dozen men twice their
age.’
‘And is it _very_ dangerous at sea; now, too, there are rumours of
war?’ she asked uneasily.
‘O, well, there be risks. Still . . . ’
The idea grew and magnified, and the mother’s heart was crushed and
stifled by it. Emmy was growing _too_ patronizing; it could not be
borne. Shadrach’s wife could not help nagging him about their
comparative poverty. The young men, amiable as their father, when
spoken to on the subject of a voyage of enterprise, were quite willing
to embark; and though they, like their father, had no great love for
the sea, they became quite enthusiastic when the proposal was detailed.
Everything now hung upon their mother’s assent. She withheld it long,
but at last gave the word: the young men might accompany their father.
Shadrach was unusually cheerful about it: Heaven had preserved him
hitherto, and he had uttered his thanks. God would not forsake those
who were faithful to him.
All that the Jolliffes possessed in the world was put into the
enterprise. The grocery stock was pared down to the least that possibly
could afford a bare sustenance to Joanna during the absence, which was
to last through the usual ‘New-f’nland spell.’ How she would endure the
weary time she hardly knew, for the boys had been with her formerly;
but she nerved herself for the trial.
The ship was laden with boots and shoes, ready-made clothing,
fishing-tackle, butter, cheese, cordage, sailcloth, and many other
commodities; and was to bring back oil, furs, skins, fish, cranberries,
and what else came to hand. But much trading to other ports was to be
undertaken between the voyages out and homeward, and thereby much money
made.
CHAPTER III
The brig sailed on a Monday morning in spring; but Joanna did not
witness its departure. She could not bear the sight that she had been
the means of bringing about. Knowing this, her husband told her
overnight that they were to sail some time before noon next day hence
when, awakening at five the next morning, she heard them bustling about
downstairs, she did not hasten to descend, but lay trying to nerve
herself for the parting, imagining they would leave about nine, as her
husband had done on his previous voyage. When she did descend she
beheld words chalked upon the sloping face of the bureau; but no
husband or sons. In the hastily-scrawled lines Shadrach said they had
gone off thus not to pain her by a leave-taking; and the sons had
chalked under his words: ‘Good-bye, mother!’
She rushed to the quay, and looked down the harbour towards the blue
rim of the sea, but she could only see the masts and bulging sails of
the _Joanna_; no human figures. ‘’Tis I have sent them!’ she said
wildly, and burst into tears. In the house the chalked ‘Good-bye’
nearly broke her heart. But when she had re-entered the front room, and
looked across at Emily’s, a gleam of triumph lit her thin face at her
anticipated release from the thraldom of subservience.
To do Emily Lester justice, her assumption of superiority was mainly a
figment of Joanna’s brain. That the circumstances of the merchant’s
wife were more luxurious than Joanna’s, the former could not conceal;
though whenever the two met, which was not very often now, Emily
endeavoured to subdue the difference by every means in her power.
The first summer lapsed away; and Joanna meagrely maintained herself by
the shop, which now consisted of little more than a window and a
counter. Emily was, in truth, her only large customer; and Mrs.
Lester’s kindly readiness to buy anything and everything without
questioning the quality had a sting of bitterness in it, for it was the
uncritical attitude of a patron, and almost of a donor. The long dreary
winter moved on; the face of the bureau had been turned to the wall to
protect the chalked words of farewell, for Joanna could never bring
herself to rub them out; and she often glanced at them with wet eyes.
Emily’s handsome boys came home for the Christmas holidays; the
University was talked of for them; and still Joanna subsisted as it
were with held breath, like a person submerged. Only one summer more,
and the ‘spell’ would end. Towards the close of the time Emily called
on her quondam friend. She had heard that Joanna began to feel anxious;
she had received no letter from husband or sons for some months.
Emily’s silks rustled arrogantly when, in response to Joanna’s almost
dumb invitation, she squeezed through the opening of the counter and
into the parlour behind the shop.
‘_You_ are all success, and _I_ am all the other way!’ said Joanna.
‘But why do you think so?’ said Emily. ‘They are to bring back a
fortune, I hear.’
‘Ah! will they come? The doubt is more than a woman can bear. All three
in one ship—think of that! And I have not heard of them for months!’
‘But the time is not up. You should not meet misfortune half-way.’
‘Nothing will repay me for the grief of their absence!’
‘Then why did you let them go? You were doing fairly well.’
‘I made them go!’ she said, turning vehemently upon Emily. ‘And I’ll
tell you why! I could not bear that we should be only muddling on, and
you so rich and thriving! Now I have told you, and you may hate me if
you will!’
‘I shall never hate you, Joanna.’
And she proved the truth of her words afterwards. The end of autumn
came, and the brig should have been in port; but nothing like the
_Joanna_ appeared in the channel between the sands. It was now really
time to be uneasy. Joanna Jolliffe sat by the fire, and every gust of
wind caused her a cold thrill. She had always feared and detested the
sea; to her it was a treacherous, restless, slimy creature, glorying in
the griefs of women. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘they _must_ come!’
She recalled to her mind that Shadrach had said before starting that if
they returned safe and sound, with success crowning their enterprise,
he would go as he had gone after his shipwreck, and kneel with his sons
in the church, and offer sincere thanks for their deliverance. She went
to church regularly morning and afternoon, and sat in the most forward
pew, nearest the chancel-step. Her eyes were mostly fixed on that step,
where Shadrach had knelt in the bloom of his young manhood: she knew to
an inch the spot which his knees had pressed twenty winters before; his
outline as he had knelt, his hat on the step beside him. God was good.
Surely her husband must kneel there again: a son on each side as he had
said; George just here, Jim just there. By long watching the spot as
she worshipped it became as if she saw the three returned ones there
kneeling; the two slim outlines of her boys, the more bulky form
between them; their hands clasped, their heads shaped against the
eastern wall. The fancy grew almost to an hallucination: she could
never turn her worn eyes to the step without seeing them there.
Nevertheless they did not come. Heaven was merciful, but it was not yet
pleased to relieve her soul. This was her purgation for the sin of
making them the slaves of her ambition. But it became more than
purgation soon, and her mood approached despair. Months had passed
since the brig had been due, but it had not returned.
Joanna was always hearing or seeing evidences of their arrival. When on
the hill behind the port, whence a view of the open Channel could be
obtained, she felt sure that a little speck on the horizon, breaking
the eternally level waste of waters southward, was the truck of the
_Joana’s_ mainmast. Or when indoors, a shout or excitement of any kind
at the corner of the Town Cellar, where the High Street joined the
Quay, caused her to spring to her feet and cry: ‘’Tis they!’
But it was not. The visionary forms knelt every Sunday afternoon on the
chancel-step, but not the real. Her shop had, as it were, eaten itself
hollow. In the apathy which had resulted from her loneliness and grief
she had ceased to take in the smallest supplies, and thus had sent away
her last customer.
In this strait Emily Lester tried by every means in her power to aid
the afflicted woman; but she met with constant repulses.
‘I don’t like you! I can’t bear to see you!’ Joanna would whisper
hoarsely when Emily came to her and made advances.
‘But I want to help and soothe you, Joanna,’ Emily would say.
‘You are a lady, with a rich husband and fine sons! What can you want
with a bereaved crone like me!’
‘Joanna, I want this: I want you to come and live in my house, and not
stay alone in this dismal place any longer.’
‘And suppose they come and don’t find me at home? You wish to separate
me and mine! No, I’ll stay here. I don’t like you, and I can’t thank
you, whatever kindness you do me!’
However, as time went on Joanna could not afford to pay the rent of the
shop and house without an income. She was assured that all hope of the
return of Shadrach and his sons was vain, and she reluctantly consented
to accept the asylum of the Lesters’ house. Here she was allotted a
room of her own on the second floor, and went and came as she chose,
without contact with the family. Her hair greyed and whitened, deep
lines channeled her forehead, and her form grew gaunt and stooping. But
she still expected the lost ones, and when she met Emily on the
staircase she would say morosely: ‘I know why you’ve got me here!
They’ll come, and be disappointed at not finding me at home, and
perhaps go away again; and then you’ll be revenged for my taking
Shadrach away from ’ee!’
Emily Lester bore these reproaches from the grief-stricken soul. She
was sure—all the people of Havenpool were sure—that Shadrach and his
sons could not return. For years the vessel had been given up as lost.
Nevertheless, when awakened at night by any noise, Joanna would rise
from bed and glance at the shop opposite by the light from the
flickering lamp, to make sure it was not they.
It was a damp and dark December night, six years after the departure of
the brig _Joanna_. The wind was from the sea, and brought up a fishy
mist which mopped the face like moist flannel. Joanna had prayed her
usual prayer for the absent ones with more fervour and confidence than
she had felt for months, and had fallen asleep about eleven. It must
have been between one and two when she suddenly started up. She had
certainly heard steps in the street, and the voices of Shadrach and her
sons calling at the door of the grocery shop. She sprang out of bed,
and, hardly knowing what clothing she dragged on herself; hastened down
Emily’s large and carpeted staircase, put the candle on the hall-table,
unfastened the bolts and chain, and stepped into the street. The mist,
blowing up the street from the Quay, hindered her seeing the shop,
although it was so near; but she had crossed to it in a moment. How was
it? Nobody stood there. The wretched woman walked wildly up and down
with her bare feet—there was not a soul. She returned and knocked with
all her might at the door which had once been her own—they might have
been admitted for the night, unwilling to disturb her till the morning.
It was not till several minutes had elapsed that the young man who now
kept the shop looked out of an upper window, and saw the skeleton of
something human standing below half-dressed.
‘Has anybody come?’ asked the form.
‘O, Mrs. Jolliffe, I didn’t know it was you,’ said the young man
kindly, for he was aware how her baseless expectations moved her. ‘No;
nobody has come.’
_June_ 1891.
THE MELANCHOLY HUSSAR OF THE GERMAN LEGION
CHAPTER I
Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged
since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and
the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp;
here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the
cavalry, and spots where the midden-heaps lay are still to be observed.
At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to
avoid hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and
thistles, the old trumpet and bugle calls, the rattle of the halters;
to help seeing rows of spectral tents and the _impedimenta_ of the
soldiery. From within the canvases come guttural syllables of foreign
tongues, and broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly
regiments of the King’s German Legion that slept round the tent-poles
hereabout at that time.
It was nearly ninety years ago. The British uniform of the period, with
its immense epaulettes, queer cocked-hat, breeches, gaiters, ponderous
cartridge-box, buckled shoes, and what not, would look strange and
barbarous now. Ideas have changed; invention has followed invention.
Soldiers were monumental objects then. A divinity still hedged kings
here and there; and war was considered a glorious thing.
Secluded old manor-houses and hamlets lie in the ravines and hollows
among these hills, where a stranger had hardly ever been seen till the
King chose to take the baths yearly at the sea-side watering-place a
few miles to the south; as a consequence of which battalions descended
in a cloud upon the open country around. Is it necessary to add that
the echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque
time, still linger about here in more or less fragmentary form, to be
caught by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them
I have forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never
forget.
Phyllis told me the story with her own lips. She was then an old lady
of seventy-five, and her auditor a lad of fifteen. She enjoined silence
as to her share in the incident, till she should be ‘dead, buried, and
forgotten.’ Her life was prolonged twelve years after the day of her
narration, and she has now been dead nearly twenty. The oblivion which
in her modesty and humility she courted for herself has only partially
fallen on her, with the unfortunate result of inflicting an injustice
upon her memory; since such fragments of her story as got abroad at the
time, and have been kept alive ever since, are precisely those which
are most unfavourable to her character.
It all began with the arrival of the York Hussars, one of the foreign
regiments above alluded to. Before that day scarcely a soul had been
seen near her father’s house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing
skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a
scudding leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was
her father grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his
favourite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A
sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at
sea; and what looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush
cut into a quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in
country places now as there was in those old days.
Yet all the while King George and his court were at his favourite
sea-side resort, not more than five miles off.
The daughter’s seclusion was great, but beyond the seclusion of the
girl lay the seclusion of the father. If her social condition was
twilight, his was darkness. Yet he enjoyed his darkness, while her
twilight oppressed her. Dr. Grove had been a professional man whose
taste for lonely meditation over metaphysical questions had diminished
his practice till it no longer paid him to keep it going; after which
he had relinquished it and hired at a nominal rent the small,
dilapidated, half farm half manor-house of this obscure inland nook, to
make a sufficiency of an income which in a town would have been
inadequate for their maintenance. He stayed in his garden the greater
part of the day, growing more and more irritable with the lapse of
time, and the increasing perception that he had wasted his life in the
pursuit of illusions. He saw his friends less and less frequently.
Phyllis became so shy that if she met a stranger anywhere in her short
rambles she felt ashamed at his gaze, walked awkwardly, and blushed to
her shoulders.
Yet Phyllis was discovered even here by an admirer, and her hand most
unexpectedly asked in marriage.
The King, as aforesaid, was at the neighbouring town, where he had
taken up his abode at Gloucester Lodge and his presence in the town
naturally brought many county people thither. Among these idlers—many
of whom professed to have connections and interests with the Court—was
one Humphrey Gould, a bachelor; a personage neither young nor old;
neither good-looking nor positively plain. Too steady-going to be ‘a
buck’ (as fast and unmarried men were then called), he was an
approximately fashionable man of a mild type. This bachelor of thirty
found his way to the village on the down: beheld Phyllis; made her
father’s acquaintance in order to make hers; and by some means or other
she sufficiently inflamed his heart to lead him in that direction
almost daily; till he became engaged to marry her.
As he was of an old local family, some of whose members were held in
respect in the county, Phyllis, in bringing him to her feet, had
accomplished what was considered a brilliant move for one in her
constrained position. How she had done it was not quite known to
Phyllis herself. In those days unequal marriages were regarded rather
as a violation of the laws of nature than as a mere infringement of
convention, the more modern view, and hence when Phyllis, of the
watering-place bourgeoisie, was chosen by such a gentlemanly fellow, it
was as if she were going to be taken to heaven, though perhaps the
uninformed would have seen no great difference in the respective
positions of the pair, the said Gould being as poor as a crow.
This pecuniary condition was his excuse—probably a true one—for
postponing their union, and as the winter drew nearer, and the King
departed for the season, Mr. Humphrey Gould set out for Bath, promising
to return to Phyllis in a few weeks. The winter arrived, the date of
his promise passed, yet Gould postponed his coming, on the ground that
he could not very easily leave his father in the city of their sojourn,
the elder having no other relative near him. Phyllis, though lonely in
the extreme, was content. The man who had asked her in marriage was a
desirable husband for her in many ways; her father highly approved of
his suit; but this neglect of her was awkward, if not painful, for
Phyllis. Love him in the true sense of the word she assured me she
never did, but she had a genuine regard for him; admired a certain
methodical and dogged way in which he sometimes took his pleasure;
valued his knowledge of what the Court was doing, had done, or was
about to do; and she was not without a feeling of pride that he had
chosen her when he might have exercised a more ambitious choice.
But he did not come; and the spring developed. His letters were regular
though formal; and it is not to be wondered that the uncertainty of her
position, linked with the fact that there was not much passion in her
thoughts of Humphrey, bred an indescribable dreariness in the heart of
Phyllis Grove. The spring was soon summer, and the summer brought the
King; but still no Humphrey Gould. All this while the engagement by
letter was maintained intact.
At this point of time a golden radiance flashed in upon the lives of
people here, and charged all youthful thought with emotional interest.
This radiance was the aforesaid York Hussars.
CHAPTER II
The present generation has probably but a very dim notion of the
celebrated York Hussars of ninety years ago. They were one of the
regiments of the King’s German Legion, and (though they somewhat
degenerated later on) their brilliant uniform, their splendid horses,
and above all, their foreign air and mustachios (rare appendages then),
drew crowds of admirers of both sexes wherever they went. These with
other regiments had come to encamp on the downs and pastures, because
of the presence of the King in the neighbouring town.
The spot was high and airy, and the view extensive, commanding the Isle
of Portland in front, and reaching to St. Aldhelm’s Head eastward, and
almost to the Start on the west.
Phyllis, though not precisely a girl of the village, was as interested
as any of them in this military investment. Her father’s home stood
somewhat apart, and on the highest point of ground to which the lane
ascended, so that it was almost level with the top of the church tower
in the lower part of the parish. Immediately from the outside of the
garden-wall the grass spread away to a great distance, and it was
crossed by a path which came close to the wall. Ever since her
childhood it had been Phyllis’s pleasure to clamber up this fence and
sit on the top—a feat not so difficult as it may seem, the walls in
this district being built of rubble, without mortar, so that there were
plenty of crevices for small toes.
She was sitting up here one day, listlessly surveying the pasture
without, when her attention was arrested by a solitary figure walking
along the path. It was one of the renowned German Hussars, and he moved
onward with his eyes on the ground, and with the manner of one who
wished to escape company. His head would probably have been bent like
his eyes but for his stiff neck-gear. On nearer view she perceived that
his face was marked with deep sadness. Without observing her, he
advanced by the footpath till it brought him almost immediately under
the wall.
Phyllis was much surprised to see a fine, tall soldier in such a mood
as this. Her theory of the military, and of the York Hussars in
particular (derived entirely from hearsay, for she had never talked to
a soldier in her life), was that their hearts were as gay as their
accoutrements.
At this moment the Hussar lifted his eyes and noticed her on her perch,
the white muslin neckerchief which covered her shoulders and neck where
left bare by her low gown, and her white raiment in general, showing
conspicuously in the bright sunlight of this summer day. He blushed a
little at the suddenness of the encounter, and without halting a moment
from his pace passed on.
All that day the foreigner’s face haunted Phyllis; its aspect was so
striking, so handsome, and his eyes were so blue, and sad, and
abstracted. It was perhaps only natural that on some following day at
the same hour she should look over that wall again, and wait till he
had passed a second time. On this occasion he was reading a letter, and
at the sight of her his manner was that of one who had half expected or
hoped to discover her. He almost stopped, smiled, and made a courteous
salute. The end of the meeting was that they exchanged a few words. She
asked him what he was reading, and he readily informed her that he was
re-perusing letters from his mother in Germany; he did not get them
often, he said, and was forced to read the old ones a great many times.
This was all that passed at the present interview, but others of the
same kind followed.
Phyllis used to say that his English, though not good, was quite
intelligible to her, so that their acquaintance was never hindered by
difficulties of speech. Whenever the subject became too delicate,
subtle, or tender, for such words of English as were at his command,
the eyes no doubt helped out the tongue, and—though this was later
on—the lips helped out the eyes. In short this acquaintance,
unguardedly made, and rash enough on her part, developed and ripened.
Like Desdemona, she pitied him, and learnt his history.
His name was Matthäus Tina, and Saarbrück his native town, where his
mother was still living. His age was twenty-two, and he had already
risen to the grade of corporal, though he had not long been in the
army. Phyllis used to assert that no such refined or well-educated
young man could have been found in the ranks of the purely English
regiments, some of these foreign soldiers having rather the graceful
manner and presence of our native officers than of our rank and file.
She by degrees learnt from her foreign friend a circumstance about
himself and his comrades which Phyllis would least have expected of the
York Hussars. So far from being as gay as its uniform, the regiment was
pervaded by a dreadful melancholy, a chronic home-sickness, which
depressed many of the men to such an extent that they could hardly
attend to their drill. The worst sufferers were the younger soldiers
who had not been over here long. They hated England and English life;
they took no interest whatever in King George and his island kingdom,
and they only wished to be out of it and never to see it any more.
Their bodies were here, but their hearts and minds were always far away
in their dear fatherland, of which—brave men and stoical as they were
in many ways—they would speak with tears in their eyes. One of the
worst of the sufferers from this home-woe, as he called it in his own
tongue, was Matthäus Tina, whose dreamy musing nature felt the gloom of
exile still more intensely from the fact that he had left a lonely
mother at home with nobody to cheer her.
Though Phyllis, touched by all this, and interested in his history, did
not disdain her soldier’s acquaintance, she declined (according to her
own account, at least) to permit the young man to overstep the line of
mere friendship for a long while—as long, indeed, as she considered
herself likely to become the possession of another; though it is
probable that she had lost her heart to Matthäus before she was herself
aware. The stone wall of necessity made anything like intimacy
difficult; and he had never ventured to come, or to ask to come, inside
the garden, so that all their conversation had been overtly conducted
across this boundary.
CHAPTER III
But news reached the village from a friend of Phyllis’s father
concerning Mr. Humphrey Gould, her remarkably cool and patient
betrothed. This gentleman had been heard to say in Bath that he
considered his overtures to Miss Phyllis Grove to have reached only the
stage of a half-understanding; and in view of his enforced absence on
his father’s account, who was too great an invalid now to attend to his
affairs, he thought it best that there should be no definite promise as
yet on either side. He was not sure, indeed, that he might not cast his
eyes elsewhere.
This account—though only a piece of hearsay, and as such entitled to no
absolute credit—tallied so well with the infrequency of his letters and
their lack of warmth, that Phyllis did not doubt its truth for one
moment; and from that hour she felt herself free to bestow her heart as
she should choose. Not so her father; he declared the whole story to be
a fabrication. He had known Mr. Gould’s family from his boyhood; and if
there was one proverb which expressed the matrimonial aspect of that
family well, it was ‘Love me little, love me long.’ Humphrey was an
honourable man, who would not think of treating his engagement so
lightly. ‘Do you wait in patience,’ he said; ‘all will be right enough
in time.’
From these words Phyllis at first imagined that her father was in
correspondence with Mr. Gould; and her heart sank within her; for in
spite of her original intentions she had been relieved to hear that her
engagement had come to nothing. But she presently learnt that her
father had heard no more of Humphrey Gould than she herself had done;
while he would not write and address her affianced directly on the
subject, lest it should be deemed an imputation on that bachelor’s
honour.
‘You want an excuse for encouraging one or other of those foreign
fellows to flatter you with his unmeaning attentions,’ her father
exclaimed, his mood having of late been a very unkind one towards her.
‘I see more than I say. Don’t you ever set foot outside that
garden-fence without my permission. If you want to see the camp I’ll
take you myself some Sunday afternoon.’
Phyllis had not the smallest intention of disobeying him in her
actions, but she assumed herself to be independent with respect to her
feelings. She no longer checked her fancy for the Hussar, though she
was far from regarding him as her lover in the serious sense in which
an Englishman might have been regarded as such. The young foreign
soldier was almost an ideal being to her, with none of the
appurtenances of an ordinary house-dweller; one who had descended she
knew not whence, and would disappear she knew not whither; the subject
of a fascinating dream—no more.
They met continually now—mostly at dusk—during the brief interval
between the going down of the sun and the minute at which the last
trumpet-call summoned him to his tent. Perhaps her manner had become
less restrained latterly; at any rate that of the Hussar was so; he had
grown more tender every day, and at parting after these hurried
interviews she reached down her hand from the top of the wall that he
might press it. One evening he held it so long that she exclaimed, ‘The
wall is white, and somebody in the field may see your shape against
it!’
He lingered so long that night that it was with the greatest difficulty
that he could run across the intervening stretch of ground and enter
the camp in time. On the next occasion of his awaiting her she did not
appear in her usual place at the usual hour. His disappointment was
unspeakably keen; he remained staring blankly at the spot, like a man
in a trance. The trumpets and tattoo sounded, and still he did not go.
She had been delayed purely by an accident. When she arrived she was
anxious because of the lateness of the hour, having heard as well as he
the sounds denoting the closing of the camp. She implored him to leave
immediately.
‘No,’ he said gloomily. ‘I shall not go in yet—the moment you come—I
have thought of your coming all day.’
‘But you may be disgraced at being after time?’
‘I don’t mind that. I should have disappeared from the world some time
ago if it had not been for two persons—my beloved, here, and my mother
in Saarbrück. I hate the army. I care more for a minute of your company
than for all the promotion in the world.’
Thus he stayed and talked to her, and told her interesting details of
his native place, and incidents of his childhood, till she was in a
simmer of distress at his recklessness in remaining. It was only
because she insisted on bidding him good-night and leaving the wall
that he returned to his quarters.
The next time that she saw him he was without the stripes that had
adorned his sleeve. He had been broken to the level of private for his
lateness that night; and as Phyllis considered herself to be the cause
of his disgrace her sorrow was great. But the position was now
reversed; it was his turn to cheer her.
‘Don’t grieve, meine Liebliche!’ he said. ‘I have got a remedy for
whatever comes. First, even supposing I regain my stripes, would your
father allow you to marry a non-commissioned officer in the York
Hussars?’
She flushed. This practical step had not been in her mind in relation
to such an unrealistic person as he was; and a moment’s reflection was
enough for it. ‘My father would not—certainly would not,’ she answered
unflinchingly. ‘It cannot be thought of! My dear friend, please do
forget me: I fear I am ruining you and your prospects!’
‘Not at all!’ said he. ‘You are giving this country of yours just
sufficient interest to me to make me care to keep alive in it. If my
dear land were here also, and my old parent, with you, I could be happy
as I am, and would do my best as a soldier. But it is not so. And now
listen. This is my plan. That you go with me to my own country, and be
my wife there, and live there with my mother and me. I am not a
Hanoverian, as you know, though I entered the army as such; my country
is by the Saar, and is at peace with France, and if I were once in it I
should be free.’
‘But how get there?’ she asked. Phyllis had been rather amazed than
shocked at his proposition. Her position in her father’s house was
growing irksome and painful in the extreme; his parental affection
seemed to be quite dried up. She was not a native of the village, like
all the joyous girls around her; and in some way Matthäus Tina had
infected her with his own passionate longing for his country, and
mother, and home.
‘But how?’ she repeated, finding that he did not answer. ‘Will you buy
your discharge?’
‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘That’s impossible in these times. No; I came here
against my will; why should I not escape? Now is the time, as we shall
soon be striking camp, and I might see you no more. This is my scheme.
I will ask you to meet me on the highway two miles off; on some calm
night next week that may be appointed. There will be nothing unbecoming
in it, or to cause you shame; you will not fly alone with me, for I
will bring with me my devoted young friend Christoph, an Alsatian, who
has lately joined the regiment, and who has agreed to assist in this
enterprise. We shall have come from yonder harbour, where we shall have
examined the boats, and found one suited to our purpose. Christoph has
already a chart of the Channel, and we will then go to the harbour, and
at midnight cut the boat from her moorings, and row away round the
point out of sight; and by the next morning we are on the coast of
France, near Cherbourg. The rest is easy, for I have saved money for
the land journey, and can get a change of clothes. I will write to my
mother, who will meet us on the way.’
He added details in reply to her inquiries, which left no doubt in
Phyllis’s mind of the feasibility of the undertaking. But its magnitude
almost appalled her; and it is questionable if she would ever have gone
further in the wild adventure if, on entering the house that night, her
father had not accosted her in the most significant terms.
‘How about the York Hussars?’ he said.
‘They are still at the camp; but they are soon going away, I believe.’
‘It is useless for you to attempt to cloak your actions in that way.
You have been meeting one of those fellows; you have been seen walking
with him—foreign barbarians, not much better than the French
themselves! I have made up my mind—don’t speak a word till I have done,
please!—I have made up my mind that you shall stay here no longer while
they are on the spot. You shall go to your aunt’s.’
It was useless for her to protest that she had never taken a walk with
any soldier or man under the sun except himself. Her protestations were
feeble, too, for though he was not literally correct in his assertion,
he was virtually only half in error.
The house of her father’s sister was a prison to Phyllis. She had quite
recently undergone experience of its gloom; and when her father went on
to direct her to pack what would be necessary for her to take, her
heart died within her. In after years she never attempted to excuse her
conduct during this week of agitation; but the result of her
self-communing was that she decided to join in the scheme of her lover
and his friend, and fly to the country which he had coloured with such
lovely hues in her imagination. She always said that the one feature in
his proposal which overcame her hesitation was the obvious purity and
straightforwardness of his intentions. He showed himself to be so
virtuous and kind; he treated her with a respect to which she had never
before been accustomed; and she was braced to the obvious risks of the
voyage by her confidence in him.
CHAPTER IV
It was on a soft, dark evening of the following week that they engaged
in the adventure. Tina was to meet her at a point in the highway at
which the lane to the village branched off. Christoph was to go ahead
of them to the harbour where the boat lay, row it round the Nothe—or
Look-out as it was called in those days—and pick them up on the other
side of the promontory, which they were to reach by crossing the
harbour-bridge on foot, and climbing over the Look-out hill.
As soon as her father had ascended to his room she left the house, and,
bundle in hand, proceeded at a trot along the lane. At such an hour not
a soul was afoot anywhere in the village, and she reached the junction
of the lane with the highway unobserved. Here she took up her position
in the obscurity formed by the angle of a fence, whence she could
discern every one who approached along the turnpike-road, without being
herself seen.
She had not remained thus waiting for her lover longer than a
minute—though from the tension of her nerves the lapse of even that
short time was trying—when, instead of the expected footsteps, the
stage-coach could be heard descending the hill. She knew that Tina
would not show himself till the road was clear, and waited impatiently
for the coach to pass. Nearing the corner where she was it slackened
speed, and, instead of going by as usual, drew up within a few yards of
her. A passenger alighted, and she heard his voice. It was Humphrey
Gould’s.
He had brought a friend with him, and luggage. The luggage was
deposited on the grass, and the coach went on its route to the royal
watering-place.
‘I wonder where that young man is with the horse and trap?’ said her
former admirer to his companion. ‘I hope we shan’t have to wait here
long. I told him half-past nine o’clock precisely.’
‘Have you got her present safe?’
‘Phyllis’s? O, yes. It is in this trunk. I hope it will please her.’
‘Of course it will. What woman would not be pleased with such a
handsome peace-offering?’
‘Well—she deserves it. I’ve treated her rather badly. But she has been
in my mind these last two days much more than I should care to confess
to everybody. Ah, well; I’ll say no more about that. It cannot be that
she is so bad as they make out. I am quite sure that a girl of her good
wit would know better than to get entangled with any of those
Hanoverian soldiers. I won’t believe it of her, and there’s an end
on’t.’
More words in the same strain were casually dropped as the two men
waited; words which revealed to her, as by a sudden illumination, the
enormity of her conduct. The conversation was at length cut off by the
arrival of the man with the vehicle. The luggage was placed in it, and
they mounted, and were driven on in the direction from which she had
just come.
Phyllis was so conscience-stricken that she was at first inclined to
follow them; but a moment’s reflection led her to feel that it would
only be bare justice to Matthäus to wait till he arrived, and explain
candidly that she had changed her mind—difficult as the struggle would
be when she stood face to face with him. She bitterly reproached
herself for having believed reports which represented Humphrey Gould as
false to his engagement, when, from what she now heard from his own
lips, she gathered that he had been living full of trust in her. But
she knew well enough who had won her love. Without him her life seemed
a dreary prospect, yet the more she looked at his proposal the more she
feared to accept it—so wild as it was, so vague, so venturesome. She
had promised Humphrey Gould, and it was only his assumed faithlessness
which had led her to treat that promise as nought. His solicitude in
bringing her these gifts touched her; her promise must be kept, and
esteem must take the place of love. She would preserve her
self-respect. She would stay at home, and marry him, and suffer.
Phyllis had thus braced herself to an exceptional fortitude when, a few
minutes later, the outline of Matthäus Tina appeared behind a
field-gate, over which he lightly leapt as she stepped forward. There
was no evading it, he pressed her to his breast.
‘It is the first and last time!’ she wildly thought as she stood
encircled by his arms.
How Phyllis got through the terrible ordeal of that night she could
never clearly recollect. She always attributed her success in carrying
out her resolve to her lover’s honour, for as soon as she declared to
him in feeble words that she had changed her mind, and felt that she
could not, dared not, fly with him, he forbore to urge her, grieved as
he was at her decision. Unscrupulous pressure on his part, seeing how
romantically she had become attached to him, would no doubt have turned
the balance in his favour. But he did nothing to tempt her unduly or
unfairly.
On her side, fearing for his safety, she begged him to remain. This, he
declared, could not be. ‘I cannot break faith with my friend,’ said he.
Had he stood alone he would have abandoned his plan. But Christoph,
with the boat and compass and chart, was waiting on the shore; the tide
would soon turn; his mother had been warned of his coming; go he must.
Many precious minutes were lost while he tarried, unable to tear
himself away. Phyllis held to her resolve, though it cost her many a
bitter pang. At last they parted, and he went down the hill. Before his
footsteps had quite died away she felt a desire to behold at least his
outline once more, and running noiselessly after him regained view of
his diminishing figure. For one moment she was sufficiently excited to
be on the point of rushing forward and linking her fate with his. But
she could not. The courage which at the critical instant failed
Cleopatra of Egypt could scarcely be expected of Phyllis Grove.
A dark shape, similar to his own, joined him in the highway. It was
Christoph, his friend. She could see no more; they had hastened on in
the direction of the town and harbour, four miles ahead. With a feeling
akin to despair she turned and slowly pursued her way homeward.
Tattoo sounded in the camp; but there was no camp for her now. It was
as dead as the camp of the Assyrians after the passage of the
Destroying Angel.
She noiselessly entered the house, seeing nobody, and went to bed.
Grief, which kept her awake at first, ultimately wrapped her in a heavy
sleep. The next morning her father met her at the foot of the stairs.
‘Mr. Gould is come!’ he said triumphantly.
Humphrey was staying at the inn, and had already called to inquire for
her. He had brought her a present of a very handsome looking-glass in a
frame of _repoussé_ silverwork, which her father held in his hand. He
had promised to call again in the course of an hour, to ask Phyllis to
walk with him.
Pretty mirrors were rarer in country-houses at that day than they are
now, and the one before her won Phyllis’s admiration. She looked into
it, saw how heavy her eyes were, and endeavoured to brighten them. She
was in that wretched state of mind which leads a woman to move
mechanically onward in what she conceives to be her allotted path. Mr.
Humphrey had, in his undemonstrative way, been adhering all along to
the old understanding; it was for her to do the same, and to say not a
word of her own lapse. She put on her bonnet and tippet, and when he
arrived at the hour named she was at the door awaiting him.
CHAPTER V
Phyllis thanked him for his beautiful gift; but the talking was soon
entirely on Humphrey’s side as they walked along. He told her of the
latest movements of the world of fashion—a subject which she willingly
discussed to the exclusion of anything more personal—and his measured
language helped to still her disquieted heart and brain. Had not her
own sadness been what it was she must have observed his embarrassment.
At last he abruptly changed the subject.
‘I am glad you are pleased with my little present,’ he said. ‘The truth
is that I brought it to propitiate ’ee, and to get you to help me out
of a mighty difficulty.’
It was inconceivable to Phyllis that this independent bachelor—whom she
admired in some respects—could have a difficulty.
‘Phyllis—I’ll tell you my secret at once; for I have a monstrous secret
to confide before I can ask your counsel. The case is, then, that I am
married: yes, I have privately married a dear young belle; and if you
knew her, and I hope you will, you would say everything in her praise.
But she is not quite the one that my father would have chose for me—you
know the paternal idea as well as I—and I have kept it secret. There
will be a terrible noise, no doubt; but I think that with your help I
may get over it. If you would only do me this good turn—when I have
told my father, I mean—say that you never could have married me, you
know, or something of that sort—’pon my life it will help to smooth the
way vastly. I am so anxious to win him round to my point of view, and
not to cause any estrangement.’
What Phyllis replied she scarcely knew, or how she counselled him as to
his unexpected situation. Yet the relief that his announcement brought
her was perceptible. To have confided her trouble in return was what
her aching heart longed to do; and had Humphrey been a woman she would
instantly have poured out her tale. But to him she feared to confess;
and there was a real reason for silence, till a sufficient time had
elapsed to allow her lover and his comrade to get out of harm’s way.
As soon as she reached home again she sought a solitary place, and
spent the time in half regretting that she had not gone away, and in
dreaming over the meetings with Matthäus Tina from their beginning to
their end. In his own country, amongst his own countrywomen, he would
possibly soon forget her, even to her very name.
Her listlessness was such that she did not go out of the house for
several days. There came a morning which broke in fog and mist, behind
which the dawn could be discerned in greenish grey; and the outlines of
the tents, and the rows of horses at the ropes. The smoke from the
canteen fires drooped heavily.
The spot at the bottom of the garden where she had been accustomed to
climb the wall to meet Matthäus, was the only inch of English ground in
which she took any interest; and in spite of the disagreeable haze
prevailing she walked out there till she reached the well-known corner.
Every blade of grass was weighted with little liquid globes, and slugs
and snails had crept out upon the plots. She could hear the usual faint
noises from the camp, and in the other direction the trot of farmers on
the road to the town, for it was market-day. She observed that her
frequent visits to this corner had quite trodden down the grass in the
angle of the wall, and left marks of garden soil on the stepping-stones
by which she had mounted to look over the top. Seldom having gone there
till dusk, she had not considered that her traces might be visible by
day. Perhaps it was these which had revealed her trysts to her father.
While she paused in melancholy regard, she fancied that the customary
sounds from the tents were changing their character. Indifferent as
Phyllis was to camp doings now, she mounted by the steps to the old
place. What she beheld at first awed and perplexed her; then she stood
rigid, her fingers hooked to the wall, her eyes staring out of her
head, and her face as if hardened to stone.
On the open green stretching before her all the regiments in the camp
were drawn up in line, in the mid-front of which two empty coffins lay
on the ground. The unwonted sounds which she had noticed came from an
advancing procession. It consisted of the band of the York Hussars
playing a dead march; next two soldiers of that regiment in a mourning
coach, guarded on each side, and accompanied by two priests. Behind
came a crowd of rustics who had been attracted by the event. The
melancholy procession marched along the front of the line, returned to
the centre, and halted beside the coffins, where the two condemned men
were blindfolded, and each placed kneeling on his coffin; a few minutes
pause was now given, while they prayed.
A firing-party of twenty-four men stood ready with levelled carbines.
The commanding officer, who had his sword drawn, waved it through some
cuts of the sword-exercise till he reached the downward stroke, whereat
the firing-party discharged their volley. The two victims fell, one
upon his face across his coffin, the other backwards.
As the volley resounded there arose a shriek from the wall of Dr.
Grove’s garden, and some one fell down inside; but nobody among the
spectators without noticed it at the time. The two executed Hussars
were Matthäus Tina and his friend Christoph. The soldiers on guard
placed the bodies in the coffins almost instantly; but the colonel of
the regiment, an Englishman, rode up and exclaimed in a stern voice:
‘Turn them out—as an example to the men!’
The coffins were lifted endwise, and the dead Germans flung out upon
their faces on the grass. Then all the regiments wheeled in sections,
and marched past the spot in slow time. When the survey was over the
corpses were again coffined, and borne away.
Meanwhile Dr. Grove, attracted by the noise of the volley, had rushed
out into his garden, where he saw his wretched daughter lying
motionless against the wall. She was taken indoors, but it was long
before she recovered consciousness; and for weeks they despaired of her
reason.
It transpired that the luckless deserters from the York Hussars had cut
the boat from her moorings in the adjacent harbour, according to their
plan, and, with two other comrades who were smarting under
ill-treatment from their colonel, had sailed in safety across the
Channel. But mistaking their bearings they steered into Jersey,
thinking that island the French coast. Here they were perceived to be
deserters, and delivered up to the authorities. Matthäus and Christoph
interceded for the other two at the court-martial, saying that it was
entirely by the former’s representations that these were induced to go.
Their sentence was accordingly commuted to flogging, the death
punishment being reserved for their leaders.
The visitor to the well-known old Georgian watering-place, who may care
to ramble to the neighbouring village under the hills, and examine the
register of burials, will there find two entries in these words:—
‘Matth:—Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty’s Regmt. of York Hussars, and Shot
for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born in the
town of Sarrbruk, Germany.
‘Christoph Bless, belonging to His Majesty’s Regmt. of York Hussars,
who was Shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.
Born at Lothaargen, Alsatia.’
Their graves were dug at the back of the little church, near the wall.
There is no memorial to mark the spot, but Phyllis pointed it out to
me. While she lived she used to keep their mounds neat; but now they
are overgrown with nettles, and sunk nearly flat. The older villagers,
however, who know of the episode from their parents, still recollect
the place where the soldiers lie. Phyllis lies near.
_October_ 1889.
THE FIDDLER OF THE REELS
‘Talking of Exhibitions, World’s Fairs, and what not,’ said the old
gentleman, ‘I would not go round the corner to see a dozen of them
nowadays. The only exhibition that ever made, or ever will make, any
impression upon my imagination was the first of the series, the parent
of them all, and now a thing of old times—the Great Exhibition of 1851,
in Hyde Park, London. None of the younger generation can realize the
sense of novelty it produced in us who were then in our prime. A noun
substantive went so far as to become an adjective in honour of the
occasion. It was “exhibition” hat, “exhibition” razor-strop,
“exhibition” watch; nay, even “exhibition” weather, “exhibition”
spirits, sweethearts, babies, wives—for the time.
‘For South Wessex, the year formed in many ways an extraordinary
chronological frontier or transit-line, at which there occurred what
one might call a precipice in Time. As in a geological “fault,” we had
presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute
contact, such as probably in no other single year since the Conquest
was ever witnessed in this part of the country.’
These observations led us onward to talk of the different personages,
gentle and simple, who lived and moved within our narrow and peaceful
horizon at that time; and of three people in particular, whose queer
little history was oddly touched at points by the Exhibition, more
concerned with it than that of anybody else who dwelt in those outlying
shades of the world, Stickleford, Mellstock, and Egdon. First in
prominence among these three came Wat Ollamoor—if that were his real
name—whom the seniors in our party had known well.
He was a woman’s man, they said,—supremely so—externally little else.
To men he was not attractive; perhaps a little repulsive at times.
Musician, dandy, and company-man in practice; veterinary surgeon in
theory, he lodged awhile in Mellstock village, coming from nobody knew
where; though some said his first appearance in this neighbourhood had
been as fiddle-player in a show at Greenhill Fair.