LOVERS' SAINT RUTH'S
And Three Other Tales
BY
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
[Illustration]
BOSTON
COPELAND AND DAY
M DCCC XCV
COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY 1895
TO CLARENCE J. BLAKE AND FRANCES
H. BLAKE, A BOOK FINISHED ON THEIR
OWN WILD ACRES OF THE MAINE COAST.
October, 1894.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
THE contents of this book have, hitherto, never been printed nor
published. One chapter among them, _The Provider_, is based very
literally on a tragic thing which happened, some years ago, in Dublin,
and which, figuring as a cable despatch of some ten lines in a Boston
daily newspaper, fell under my eye, to be remembered, and afterwards
cast into its present form. In the September (1895) number of _Harpers'
Magazine_, little Father Time and his adopted brother, in _Hearts
Insurgent_, end their innocent lives from Hughey's strange motive,
though not in his manner. It is perhaps worth while to state that my
story was finished and laid by, prior to the appearance of the novel in
its serial form, lest I should seem fain to melt my waxen wings in the
fire of the Wessex sun. It is possible that the actual incident had
come to Mr. Hardy's notice also, and with a keen and pitiful interest
for so expert a student of human nature. A curious circumstance in
his relation of it is that the elder child, in order that there may
be more room in a hard world for the persons he loves, disposes not
only of himself, but presumably of the younger child as well; and in
the original version of my story Hughey jumped into the river with his
sister Nora in his arms. But a friend of mine, who read the manuscript
in 1894, a writer of great insight whose opinion I value in the
extreme, so wrought with me to change the cruel ending, that I did so
then and there, after some argument, and sent the boy of "long, long
thoughts" uncompanied to his fate. The point of all this is, of course,
that I now perceive my small invention had dared, unconsciously, to
keep yet closer pace than would appear with Mr. Hardy's; for the
suicide of real life was the suicide of one child alone.
The other three sketches here are more imaginative; and the first of
them, which bears the earliest date, was, from end to end, a dream,
and is somewhat reluctantly included. They stand for apprentice-work in
fiction, and are my only attempts of that kind.
L. I. G.
LONDON, September 6th, 1895.
Contents
Lovers' Saint Ruth's Page 1
Our Lady of the Union 29
An Event on the River 63
The Provider 93
LOVERS' SAINT RUTH'S.
THOUGH his curate was away, the incumbent of Orrinleigh, my kind Cyril
Nasmith, had thrown aside his everlasting scrolls and folios, and spent
the whole morning out-of-doors with me. We had been over the castle
park and gallery, and even into the dairy, and thence up the path
by a trout-stream to the site of a Saxon city; and Nasmith had been
enthusiastically educating me all the way. I knew that there was little
enough for him to do meanwhile. His village sheep were very tame and
white; and his other sheep, at the manor, all wild and black: theology
seemed to fall rather flat between them. So, by the dispensation of
Providence, in his work-day leisure he had relapsed into the one
intellectual passion of his life, archæology: a wise, worshipping sort
of man, and the prince of Anglican antiquaries. As for me, he loved
me better than ever when he found what genuine interest I took in his
quiet hidden corner of ----shire, whither I came from London to pass a
memorable night and day with him, after a sixteen years' separation;
for his boyhood had been spent in my own Maryland, his mother's
family being Americans. It was a little sober, pastoral place, this
Orrinleigh, with its straw-browed cottages bosomed in roses, sitting
all in a row upon the overshaded lane, and, from the height where we
stood, looking like so many sepia-tinted mushrooms in the broad green
world. Just beyond us, in the near neighborhood of Orrinleigh House,
the gray sham-Grecian porch of his ritualistic Tudor church skulked in
the faint May sun. "What do you call that?" I said. "It is the one ugly
thing hereabouts." He smiled. "Of course it is ugly, structurally," he
answered in an apologetic tone; "Saint Ruth's was built in King James
the First's time; I do not pride myself on that. But you should see
the ruin, Holden! a darling bit of Early Decorated. Walk over there
now with me. We have the time to give; and it is only a couple of
miles away." And off he started at his brisk bachelor pace, fixing his
shovel-hat well on his forehead, for we were in the teeth of the inland
breeze. "This enormity," I remarked, casting a sportive thumb over my
shoulder, "has an odd name: Saint Ruth's." He corrected me in his most
amiable fashion. "The title is not unique; and it has every precedent,
pre-Christian as it is. Have you never heard, good sceptic, of Saint
Joachim? nay, of Saint Michael, another person who might have proved an
_alibi_ if he ever came up for Roman canonization? Besides, the name
has ancient local sanction. This Saint Ruth's-on-the-Hill continues the
dedication of the other to which we are going: Lovers' Saint Ruth's."
"Lovers' Saint Ruth's?" I exclaimed, keen at the scent. "Come now,
Nasmith, there's some legend back of that; you know there is. Let us
have it." And that is how I heard the story.
He told it not without reluctance, as if it were a precious thing he
could not easily part with, even to an old friend. All along the road,
as we went between the pleasant farm-lands, stepping over golden pools
of primroses between the wheel-tracks, little silences broke into his
talk. Nasmith's heart is truly in the past; and humbly happy indeed it
keeps him. We had been through the gallery before breakfast, and he
reminded me of it, by way of prelude. "Do you remember how pleased you
were with the great Vandyck on the east wall?" The grouped portrait of
a blonde man, a blonde woman, and a child unlike either; how beautiful
it was! the two unforgettable melancholy faces contrasting oddly with
the ruddy dark-eyed boy in a yellow doublet, playing with his dog
before them on the floor.
"Well, you saw there the Lord Richard, and his wife, the Lady Eleanor.
He was the third Earl's only son, born in the year 1606. The house
of Orrinleigh was founded by his grand-uncle, on murder and fraud.
Richard, almost the only Langham with a conscience, had it in too
great a degree, and grew up, one knows not why, with a diseased
sense of impending retribution; and, therefore, when misfortune for
a while overwhelmed him and his, it found him not unprepared. His
mother was a Neville; he had great prospects and possessions. Lady
Eleanor was a sweet lass of honorable blood, a good squire's daughter,
and the youngest of a family of eight. She belonged over there in
Frambleworth, where you see the twin spires. From boyhood and girlhood
these two clung to each other. I wonder if one ever sees such fast
love now-a-days: so simple, so deep, so long-suffering, all made of
rapture and grief! They were betrothed early, with a kiss given under
the shadow of the king yew in the old church-yard; they both cherished
the place to the end, and there lies their dust. You see, the original
Saint Ruth's was a monastic chapel; and it was stripped, and left to
fall to pieces, by the greed of the rascally Reformers, (excuse me;
that's what I must call them!" muttered my filial High Churchman),
"and it was nearly as much of a ruin in Lord Richard's youth as it is
to-day. For a whole generation, Orrinleigh had no Christian services
at all, and dropped into less than paganism; for which nobody seemed
to care, until the architectural hodge-podge on the hill was raised
by the old Earl, and the people were gradually gathered in to learn
all about a new code of moral beauty from the nakedest, dullest, and
vulgarest object in the three kingdoms. As I was saying, the two young
people made their tryst by the priory wall, secretly, as it had to be;
for the Earl would not hear of penniless Eleanor Thurlocke for his
heir's bride; and the squire, a staunch Elizabethan Protestant, favored
young Kit Brimblecombe, or his cousin Austin, for her suitor, and held
aloof from the Lord Richard, whom he suspected of having reclaimed his
ancestors' faith and become a Papist, while at Oxford. That, as it
happened, was true enough; and, moreover, the girl herself had followed
her lover back into the old religion: so that there were disadvantage
and danger of all kinds, in those days, behind them and before. The
little church meant much to them both, the pathetic ghost of what had
been so famous and fair. There they used to meet, when luck served, for
what great comfort they could still reap out of their narrowing lives,
shedding tears on each other's breasts over that outlook which seemed
so cruelly hopeless. But a terrible tragedy broke up and changed their
youth, and it was at Lovers' Saint Ruth's that it happened.
"Eleanor was barely past eighteen, and Richard not one-and-twenty. It
was spring twilight, when he rode down alone to the valley, galloping,
because, for once, he was a little late to meet his maid. She also had
started on foot, across the dewy field-path from Frambleworth, having
for company part of the way an old market-woman and her goodman, who
would not have betrayed the object of her journey for worlds. They
left her at the lonely cross-roads, whence she gayly took her way
west, with Orrinleigh Church, as it was still called, almost in sight.
The next morning their bodies were found, not fifty rods away; and it
is clear to me, that, hearing Eleanor's first stifled call, they had
turned back to her rescue, and so perished at the hands of the wicked.
With whom the guilt lay, none ever knew; the blame was laid upon the
gypsies, I think unjustly, and three of them were hanged on these very
downs. It was a wild time; and desperate men, singly, or in bands,
mad for food and plunder, and reeling drunk from cellar to cellar,
were over this peaceful county. The squire's ewe lamb, whom, in his
senses, a devil might have spared with a blessing on her sweet looks,
was foully waylaid, and worse than murdered. In the face of agony and
humiliation, her spirit fainted away. Hours later, when all was still,
and the dazzling moon was up over the sycamores, Eleanor Thurlocke
awoke, and, with her last spasmodical strength, dragged herself to the
end of the lane, and on to the hollow stone step of the church, to die.
It was past midnight. Who should be within those crumbling walls, even
then, but her own Richard, kneeling in his satin dress, with a lighted
hand-lamp by his side, his brow raised to Heaven? He had missed her;
and he knew not what to think for disappointment and anxious love;
and, sleep being far from him, there had he waited until now before
the fallen altar-stone where they had so often prayed together. As
dejectedly he swung back the outer door, he saw his dear, her thick
gold locks unbound, her vesture in disorder, her hands chilled and
bleeding from the stony travel and the briers. Without a question, for
he was ever a ready courageous lad, he put out the lantern, and cast
it under a bush; and, gathering Eleanor into his strong arms, first
making the sign of the cross upon her brow, he climbed the hill slowly,
steadily, and bore her straight into Orrinleigh House, and into his
dead mother's chamber. He made no sound; but he left her long enough
to get restoratives, and then hurried back, and laid her tenderly in
the high-canopied bed there, radiant in the moonshine; and, keeping
his own heart smothered, so that it could utter no least cry, placed
the door ajar, and began to pace, soft as a tiger, to and fro, to and
fro, to and fro, outside. When the white of dawn appeared, he crept in
and crouched low beside the pillows. She opened her eyes, and, with
his haggard cheek close to hers, stammered to him, piteously, as best
she could, her knowledge of what had befallen. He did not speak nor
move for a long while, partly because he feared so for her jarred mind.
But he knew the house would be stirring with the day, and events lay
in his hands. It was a strange, inconsistent thing, but entirely in
harmony with the Lord Richard's fatalistic character, that neither
then, nor ever after, would he proclaim the true fact. To save her
from certain slander, to wall her in with reparation on every side,
was his one passionate impulse. He knew that having carried her by
night to Orrinleigh, he must bear the burden of his own deed. He made
his resolve to explain nothing, for her sake, and to act as became the
overmastering affection he had for her. He breathed quickly and firmly
in her ear: 'Nell!' She smiled faintly at him. 'Nell, darling, this
must be our bridal-morn.' A low groan, such as made him shiver like
the air around a fire, was her only answer; such a heart-rending groan
of pure unreasoning horror as his ears had never heard. But he could
not flinch now; the morn was breaking, fresh and undelayed, over his
altered world. With the still force which was in him, and which, from
his boyhood, could compel every one he knew, the Lord Richard said:
'Yes.' 'Yes!' she echoed, after a while, as if in a weary dream, and
fell unconscious again. Then he rose, and called old Stephen Bowles,
the servant whom he could best trust, and despatched him, on his own
horse, ere the sun was up, for a priest eleven miles away. And there,
in his dead mother's chamber, with one only witness, and in such
wretchedness, the two were hastily wed, Eleanor lying quietly, since
they dared not raise her, and the hope of Orrinleigh kneeling with his
curly bronze head buried in her white little hands. When the others had
gone, for he had set himself much to do, he sought his father. Sealing
his lips thenceforward against the mystery which had hurried his
action, he spoke out, and told him he had married Eleanor Thurlocke,
and that he hoped he might be forgiven if he had seemed undutiful; and
before the old Earl, who was dressing, could show his rage, quietly
walked away, and rode over to Frambleworth, and made almost the same
speech, in Eleanor's behalf, to the squire. Such wrath, and curiosity,
and excitement, and upbraiding were never in this neighborhood before;
for the two young people lived in the eyes of many who wished them
well, and who looked for a great wedding, with masques, and dancing,
and holiday arches, and public largesses of drink and money, such as
had not been in mid-England for a generation. Wonderful as it seemed,
the turmoil soon passed; and the two, never stirring from the very
heart of the disturbance and opposition, somehow lived on, and were not
parted, and slowly established a peace with their angry kindred. Malice
itself could not hold out long against the Lord Richard's winning ways;
and ever, as he grew older, he became sadder and gentler, and more to
be honored by all men. But the Lady Eleanor lost the merry laughter she
once had, and shrank, in great mistrust, even from her own family, so
that it was plain at times that her reason was shaken. None on earth,
meanwhile, save the lovers themselves, held the clew to their blighted
lives. He never left her; he never travelled, nor went to court, as
became his station, but sat patiently awaiting, at home, the crowning
distress which he now knew must come upon them. Gossip broke out again,
ere long, as much as it dared, in the village taverns; and there was
a lifting of willing eyebrows among the gentry dwelling near, when, in
the autumn, the incarnate disaster, the child in the Vandyck picture,
was born. They rang the joy-bells from the church-tower, and the
tenantry came under the eaves and cheered until faithful old Stephen
threatened them with his blunderbuss, and drove them away. The Earl was
sitting at his cards, with his bad foot on a stool before him, when the
Lord Richard came in, with a silken parcel in his arms, followed only
by a couple of his sniffing hounds. 'Well, what hast thou there, Dick?'
cried the big blustering man, not unkindly. 'Father,' said the young
stricken Lord Richard, in his impassioned fidelity, holding the parcel
forth, 'I have my son.' And thereupon such a mortal paleness came upon
him, and his knees shook so under him, for the deceit, that he scarce
could stand. Seeing him quake, the old Earl, a rough jolly creature in
his better moods, laughed long and loud.
"And so it seemed to the only ones who sat tongue-tied amid the great
rejoicing, as if the divine wrath had indeed spent itself upon their
house; the doom of the iniquity of the forefathers, as the Lord Richard
would say to himself. What fresh and mistaken thinking there was to do,
the miserable lad, being sane, did for both, believing that a curse
was upon them, and that they must endure it, and accept the torture of
that alien child's presence for some purpose hidden from human eyes.
Their pact and horrible habit of silence weighed upon their hearts;
and had not one constrained the other, she was very fain at times to
confess, and go, if needs be, into disgrace for the lie. They would
wander sometimes on the terrace, hand-in-hand, without speech, looking
like brother and sister under a common ban. It seems impossible to
understand this deliberate choice of a wrong attitude towards life,
except in the light of that mysticism,
'With shuddering, meek, submitted thought,'
which ruled the Lord Richard's nature. Meanwhile the infant changed to
a noisy, bounding rogue with black eyes, whom his young mother hated.
They called him Ralph, a name not borne before by any of the Langham
race. From his cradle, the poor waif clung to the Lord Richard, as
to his only friend; and that saintly soul, as one might take sweetly
a bitter penance, reared him in right ways, and encouraged or chided
him at need, and won from him an awe and gratitude affecting to see.
But the Lady Eleanor would never have him so much as touch her gown,
which the maids about the manor laid to her troubled wits, and felt
sorry for, without more ado. The old Earl, who liked the boy's health
and pluck, had the portrait painted for the gallery; and even there
you will notice that Ralph is far away from her, and at her husband's
feet. Years of dereliction, therefore, these were to the Lord Richard,
having no child of his own, and watching his intruding heir gaining
daily some virtue and seemly knowledge, and coming, either by nature
or by his careful breeding, fully to deserve those things to which he
had no right before God and the king. And the boy grew, and was worthy
to be loved, so brave he was, and so truth-speaking, and so tractable,
despite his fits of temper. When he had passed his tenth birthday, he
was sent to Meldom School; and his first absence lifted, as it were,
the black load from his mother's spirit; and the beginning of her
recovery, after all that she had endured, was from that day. There came
soon to her and the Lord Richard an unexpected happiness; for the year
1636 saw the birth of their own little Vivian. You may believe that
his father, perplexed by the fresh aspect of the problem before him,
tried to solve it by prayer and patience; the good heart, chastened
ever with much sorrow, and melted away with thinking, thinking. His
wife, free of his morbid scruples, cried out at last irresistibly for
the vindication of her little one. But the Lord Richard was visited by
a prophetic dream, and was wrung with misgivings, less like a man's
than a woman's, in searching to divine his duty. For he foresaw, of a
surety, in his sleep, what a poor vicious thing his son was to be. All
the estates, being entailed, were to pass to the acknowledged eldest,
passing, therefore, by unjust consent, in this case, to an interloper,
to the detriment of the true inheritor; and to maintain Ralph's
right would be a legal crime. On the other hand, the great power and
responsibility of which he promised to make such fair use,--what if
these should become, in the hands of that other to whom they would be
intrusted, engines for havoc in the world, since then to disown Ralph
were a moral crime? Lord Richard wrestled hard with his demon of doubt,
to no avail. In good time, alas, as it was ordained, when Vivian was a
bonny babe in his third summer, the unforeseen deliverance came. Ralph
Langham was thrown from his pony at Long Meldom Cross, and brought
home for dead. He never spoke a word, but passed to eternity with his
fingers clasped tight on the Lord Richard's compassionate hand, and a
great tear rolling down his round brown cheek. His short career had
been like a cheerful cloud swimming in the sun, and itself casting damp
and darkness on the hills below. The strangest thing of all was the
ungoverned joy which came, at the news, upon the Lady Eleanor, a joy
dreadful, at that time, to those about; but when it faded away, all
the evil else linked with it seemed to fade too, and very shortly she
was wholly restored, and became her own comely, gracious self again,
even as she was when first the beardless Lord Richard had told her his
love. So that the liberty of those hunted young spirits was established
in the grave of him whom heraldry yet names as their first-born. They
laid him yonder, in Lovers' Saint Ruth's. Where else but there? as if
in unuttered thanksgiving that mercy had reached them at last upon its
fatal threshold. There is the tower, Holden, and the broken top mullion
(is it not graceful?) of the great west window."
We swung into the prettiest open space imaginable, close to a glassy
lake, and found the fourteenth-century church, with its yews and
leaning stones, before us. I went silently in at Nasmith's heels. The
flooring was the perfect plush of English grass; the roof of the nave
was living boughs. For a single huge ash-tree had rooted itself there
generations ago, and grown much larger round than our four arms could
span, and lifted its spread of leaves nearer heaven than the level
of the walls. Ivy hung on the chancel arch, and many bright-colored
wildflowers, whose seeds had lodged in the crevices and in the blank
windows, filled the whole enclosure, bay after bay, with a riot of
color and fragrance. Soft green daylight everywhere caressed the eye.
The chancel roof, of exquisitely groined limestone, was still unfallen,
though it had a rift or two; and on either side, where the monks'
stalls must have stood a dozen deep, there were crumbling tombs, with
effigies in alabaster. I went directly up one step to a plain small
brass over against the piscina, and pushed the weeds aside. Nasmith
knew I should not be able to decipher the inscription, on which the
rain of three hundred summers had been sifted in. Leaning his head
against one of the piers, a good distance down, he looked over at me,
and began to recite, in an agreeable monotone: "'Here lieth Ralph,
thirteen years old, heir while he lived to Orrinleigh and Gaynes; whom
do thou, O Lord! receive among the innocent.
For Time still tries
The truth from lies,
And God makes open what the world doth blind.
A. D. 1639.' Do you recognize the verse? Robert Greene's. The choice
of it was so significant it must have been the Lord Richard's doing.
You will notice that the epitaph is sensitively worded; it is pure
fact, and nothing else; and it has, too, an affectionate sound which
has always been a sort of satisfaction to me." "How immensely dramatic
the upshot might have been if he had lived!" I said. "The poor
little fellow, _infelix natu, felicior morte_." I was astonished to
find a slight mist over my eyes. "Tell me of these others next him,
Nasmith: a knight and his lady side by side, recumbent, and therefore
pre-Reformation." Nasmith's slow, radiant, indulgent smile was upon me,
as he moved forward from the light to where I stood. "No," he said.
"Look at the armor and the fashion of the dress, not at the attitude,
which is unusual, of course, for the Caroline period. Those are the
blessed twain of whom I have been telling you. See!" He pointed to the
discolored raised Latin text which ran around the wide slabs beneath.
I traced it out. "Pray for the souls of Richard Esme Vivian Langham,
Viscount Gaynes, and of Eleanor his adored wife, neither of them ripe
in years, who together, in this venerable sanctuary, suffered calamity,
and sought repose in Christ." There were no dates. I waited for Nasmith
to go on. He did so, in that tone of grave personal interest which he
reserves for these "old, unhappy, far-off things."
"They had to lead very private lives, on account of their proscribed
creed; a constraint which to them was not unwelcome. Their good works,
however, were known over the whole countryside, which is loyal to their
memory. She was the first to die, in 1640, contracting a fever, and
fading gradually away. There were two young children to remember her
and take pattern after her, (would that they had done so!) Vivian and
Joan. When the civil wars began, the old Earl was feeble and near his
end; and the Lord Richard, whose principles and natural sympathies
were all for King Charles, joined the unanimous Catholic gentry, and
sought with eagerness the only use that seemed left to him. His
bright beloved presence graced the camp but a little while, for in his
thirty-seventh year he was killed at the second battle of Newbury,
while carrying the royal standard. They brought him back to the old
chapel where he wished to be buried, and where none of his house have
been buried since. Both these figures were made under his own eye,
when his wife's dust was laid below. Are they not nobly and delicately
wrought, and full of rest? His hand holds hers; he had always said they
should lie so, as his namesake king and Anne of Bohemia, long ago,
lay in the Abbey at Westminster. The ruin has taken its traditional
distinctive name of Lovers' Saint Ruth's from them. All my parish
maids steal in on Hallowe'en to kiss these joined hands, and wish
themselves good fortune, and hundreds of ----shire sweethearts have
plighted their troth here, under the stars. It has always been a place
of pilgrimage, though its full history is not even guessed at. Saint
Ruth's-on-the-Hill, my friend, can never buy or borrow such a charm as
this."
As he paused, we heard the plaintive interruptive note of a pair of
wood-doves in the ash. He looked at me again. "I forgot to say that
they were content to die, my martyr hero and heroine of Orrinleigh,
for they had won four years, at the end, of absolute unbroken bliss.
They used to come down here every evening for a talk, or a hymn to
Our Lady, arm in arm, and happy as children all the way. Their day
of storms was brief, and it had a lovely sunset." "Ah, Nasmith," I
exclaimed, like a sentimental girl, "I am glad of that. How did you
know?" He drew his foot idly through the soft sward as he spoke. "I
had the whole story in the Lord Richard's own hand. He wrote it out
during the last night he spent at the manor, with his spurs and sword
lying by him ready for the morrow: the whole tender, tragic story,
with his curious mental struggles laid bare. He thought the truth due
to his father, and to his dead stainless Eleanor, to clear her memory
from erring rumor which had early got abroad. The manuscript was put
away under a seal; and as soon as his son's will was opened, the Earl
knew where to find it; I have seen it all scorched and stained with
the old man's tears. No eye, from his to mine, has read it since.
You see, the next and fourth Earl, Vivian, grew up a graceless cynic
reprobate in London, never visited his estates, and cared nothing for
his lineage. His sister was little better. I ought to spare her and
her second husband any vituperations, since they did me the courtesy
of becoming my great-great-great-great-grandparents! Did I never tell
you? The Langhams, bad enough in the beginning, have been a worse crew
than before, since the Lord Richard's time. Almost 'every inch that is
not fool is rogue,' as Dryden says of his giant. Francis, the ninth
of the line, lately dead, and his Countess, being my very distant
relatives, and impressed with my virtues, which were then being wasted
on the desert air, offered me the benefice. The first thing I did,
after setting Saint Ruth's in order, was to look about for materials
for a history of the parish from a period before the Conquest. During
the summer, they put a world of papers, grants, charters, registries,
and so on, into my way, which had been heaped in some old chests in
the tool-house. One of these papers was that letter, a pearl in
sea-kelp. I took it promptly over to Orrinleigh. The Earl was in his
hunting-coat, swearing, over his glasses, at some excellent Liberal
news in his morning journal. 'Read this,' I said; 'it is one of your
ancestral romances, and ought to be reverently preserved.' He laid it
by. A few days afterwards, while I was gathering fruit and vines for
a Harvest Sunday, he pulled it from his pocket, and threw it at me
over the garden wall, remarking that as my reverend appetite was for
musty parchments, he did not know but what I had best have this one,
especially as his wife and niece, having glanced at it, would not give
it house-room! So I had the keepership of that mournful secret of the
Lord Richard's wonderful love and patience, which came near altering
the local annals I was to write. It was like the unburied dead; it
tormented me. Not one of those vulgarians to whom it really belonged
was fit to touch it, much less understand it; and I did not wish to add
it to any collection, mine or another's. I hesitated a good bit, and
then I stole off, on a chilly Martinmas eve, and piously burned it here
in Lovers' Saint Ruth's, on this tomb, and scattered the ashes into the
grass." A gust of wind came into the choir, and the clock half a mile
away struck one. At the sound, we reached for our hats, which we had
instinctively laid aside, and crossed the little transept to the door,
Nasmith first, I following, as we had entered. Once more, as we left
the porch, dark with ivy and weather-stains, we heard the wood-doves,
over our heads in the nave, utter a slow musical moan, one to the
other. "Their souls," I whispered suddenly. "Peace to all such, after
pain," said poetic Cyril. "_Amen_," I answered. We both smiled. How we
two were enjoying our renewed society, back in a bygone England!
Hardly had we gained the road, when a carriage rolled by, with a
single figure on horseback clattering alongside. A black-bonneted
girl in mourning, handsome, if furtive, under her parasol, and both
her companions, the younger of whom sat beside her, saluted Nasmith
in what I thought to be a cold, perfunctory manner. I guessed
something, for his honest cheek flushed. "I fear these are the great
folk of Orrinleigh," I remarked. "The men have selfish, stupid faces,
more's the pity." "Yes," he replied; "you have seen some of the Lord
Richard's degenerate descendants. I once meant to give his manuscript
to Audrey--to the young lady in the carriage. I hoped she might value
it. But, as I said, I destroyed it instead. You are the only person to
whom I ever repeated the tale, and almost in the original words. Go put
it in a book, if you like, Holden; make what you can of it; develop
and proportion it; I trust your handling." I thanked him. "No. Your
chivalrous Cavalier is too complex a subject for me," was my frank
reply; "I feel safer with a history than with a mystery." I was a
hardened republican novelist even then, and his senior, and not blind
to the "human document," neither of the seventeenth century, nor of the
nineteenth. "Nasmith," I began cunningly, "you were in love with the
Honorable Audrey, and she refused you. How fortunate for you! Yours was
the neatest and most spiritual revenge I ever heard of: to keep from
her what might have helped transform her woman's nature, stifled in an
ill atmosphere,--the knowledge that she was of the blood of the saints,
'Tho' fallen on evil days,
On evil days tho' fallen, and evil tongues.'"
He gave my hand a half-humorous pressure, his head turning neither to
right nor to left, dear old Nasmith! He must be past forty now, and
they tell me, moreover, that he is a Benedictine monk at Downside: he
will care nothing what I say of him. And thus we climbed the balmy
downs, back to our lunch at the vicarage, without another word.
OUR LADY OF THE UNION.
THE Surgeon and the Chaplain had been bidden to roast beef and mashed
potatoes in the great tent; and the former, leaving its pleasant
firelight, had come out through the night air a little before taps, to
spread himself and his triumphs in the eyes of the officers' mess. The
Surgeon was a widower in his early prime, and tenderly condescending
to the known ways of women. He talked much of the two who in that camp
represented all inscrutable womankind, Miss Cecily Carter and Mrs.
Willoughby. They had come from New York on a visit, Braleton being just
then in profound quiet. The Surgeon adored Miss Cecily, in which mood
he was by no means alone; but he had his own opinion of her sister,
the Colonel's wife. "The Sultan has hinges in him, and can unbend,"
he would say; "but the Sultana--O Jerusalem, my Happy Home!" He had
also discovered that the train of trunks at the sutler's, objects of
deep and incessant objurgation, were hall-marked "A. W.," and that Miss
Cecily came to the war with one hand-bag. His auditors sat long astride
their chairs, each in his hood of good government tobacco-smoke.
The Adjutant's silver-coated hound was asleep on the boards, still
as a little mountain-tarn among thunder-clouds. The gusts of genial
mirth were suddenly interrupted from without by the even voice of the
orderly: "Sergeant Blanchard is wanted at the Colonel's quarters."
A young man playing chess in the corner arose at once, and followed.
All along the company streets, the lamp-light streamed through the
chinks in the tents; charming tenors and basses, at the far end,
were laying them down and deeing for Annie Laurie; and from the long
sheds nigh, in the grove, came the subdued pawing and tossing of the
horses. Robert Blanchard saluted, and stood outside in the dark, for
the Colonel was in his doorway. "They have sent another commission
for you," he said shortly. "You deserve it; your behavior has been
admirable, a source of immense pride to me, and to all my men." The
Sergeant looked at him with a visible gladness. "I thank you. You know
I prefer not to be promoted." "I have humored you no fewer than three
times before," resumed the Colonel, in an altered tone; "I can't do it
always. You are known; the General has complimented you. The rise of a
man of your stamp can't be prevented, even by himself. You are meant,
if you live, to move rapidly, and go high. This second-lieutenantship
is the lowest step; mount it, in Heaven's name, and don't maunder."
The other hesitated, silent. Then he said: "May I have my condition,
if I accept,--may I remain color-bearer?" "I can promise nothing of
the kind. I fear it would be unusual, to say the least; it has no
precedent in any service that I ever heard of. Don't ask me that
again." Blanchard, in sober fashion, brought his hand to his cap.
"Good-evening, Colonel." The superior officer was exasperated. "Bob,"
he exclaimed discursively, "you're a fool. God bless you!"
The drums began, quick and light; it was nine o'clock. The Sergeant
went back, cheerful as Cincinnatus refusing empery. Before he confided
himself to his blanket, lumped on boughs, he made sure that a fold of
old bunting on a provisionary stick was slanted securely against the
canvas; for he had a sentimental passion for the flag. When it was
hauled down at sunset, it went into his hands until daybreak. He had
borne it in the van since his first bloody day at Little Bethel; it
had been riddled, stained, smoke-blackened, snapped from its support;
but he had never dropped it, not when a minie-ball fizzed through
his shoulder, not when, fresh from the hospital, he had fallen face
downward from his dying horse, in Beauregard's plunging fire of shell.
In this lad of twenty-two there burned a formal loyalty so intense,
so rooted in every fibre of his grave character, that his comrades,
for whom military routine had lost much of its glamour, loved him for
it, envied him, and consistently nagged the life out of him with the
nickname of Our Colored Brother, and other nicknames based on other
puns more or less felicitous. Because in New York, they had several
dear friends in common, the Colonel, on the morning of the ladies'
arrival at Braleton, had asked him to lunch with them. "My Sergeant,
Adela," so James Willoughby, in his eagles, presented him to the wife
of his bosom, "my Sergeant; and such a Sergeant!" For he read in her
tacticianary social eye that a Sergeant was a minnow indeed for a
Colonel's friend and guest, even if he were a gentleman, a cousin of
the Windhursts, and the hero of his corps. And she wondered at him the
more that he should be a mere color-bearer; a spirited able-bodied
creature two years in the army, with nothing to show for it! He had
no explanation to give her, but he had an unaccountable hunger, from
the first, to confide his secret to Cecily. He had seen her from a
distance, and his heart stood still there in the grass; when he came
nearer, it gave him, for a certain reason, the veriest wrench in all
his life, such as True Thomas may have felt when the sweet yet awful
call came to him at last in the market-place, that it was time to say
good-bye to earth, and go back to fairyland; to leave for the things
which can never be the things that are. He often found her sewing on a
silken tri-color, and working its correct number of stars in a pattern.
She had begun it in her father's house, for her brother-in-law's
regiment, and none too soon, for the flag in use was aging fast. Robert
Blanchard never saw her head bent over that bright glory, filling her
lap and falling around her feet, without a tightening of the throat.
And when she nodded to him going by, with that candid, affectionate
grace which never changed, it reminded him inevitably of something
which made him happy and unhappy. He could not remember, he said to
himself, when he had not loved her, and yet they had never met until
this Virginian winter of 1863.
Cecily had taken up her abode in a wee log-house built for her as an
ell from the Colonel's tent, delighting much in its frugalities and
small hardships. She was becoming attached to the sights and sounds
of camp-life: the tags and tassels, the shining accoutrements, and
the endless scouring and brushing thereof; the rosy drummer-boy; the
company drills in the rain; the hollow pyramids of the stacked short
bayonets; the muddy wells on the bluish and reddish lowlands; the loud
sing-song of the little bearded Corporal interruptedly reading _David
Copperfield_ to a ring of enraptured privates; the welcome drone of
the cook announcing his menu; the arrival of despatches, with the
thundering and jingling of the cavalry heard a mile away; even the
occasional alarms. The long inactions under McClellan, hateful to her
mettlesome brother-in-law and to his men, proved pleasant enough to
Cecily; she never lacked entertainment. While Adela was at her accurate
toilets, and the Colonel, a severe disciplinarian, busy with his
troops, she, active and curiously adventurous, walked or rode about
alone.
The nine-hundred-acred Brale house topped the hill not far away; the
owner, a fine old planter, lived there with the survivors of his
family. Six months before, an infantry regiment had bivouacked on the
place. A lieutenant, sent on the reasonable suspicion that a number of
escaped Confederates were harbored on the premises, clattered up, with
an escort, to demand them. The eldest son, with true sullen Confederate
pluck, refused him admission. After no long parley, the infantry
lieutenant, losing control of himself, shot him dead: a proceeding,
which, when it came to the ears of the authorities, cost the bully
his commission. The two other sons, Julian and Stephen, were then in
the Southern army; the younger had since perished from fever. To this
doomed and outraged household, shut in from the world, hopelessly
embittered against the Government in whose name murder and devastation
stalked, Colonel Willoughby appeared as a new and strange being. He
made it his business to see that there were no trespassings, and
that the Brales lived not only in peace, but in comfort. He rode out
repeatedly to the picket-lines, where a goodly quantity of commissary
supplies, spirits, flour, tobacco, tea, and coffee, and divers other
necessaries difficult to obtain, were handed over to the slaves in
exchange for the chickens, milk, and eggs. On several occasions, he
had ridden as far as the door, once to give the married daughter her
pass through the lines; once to bring her little girl, who was ill,
some delicacies sent in a hamper from his own home. These things broke
the proud Brale hearts. They barely thanked him; his Federal uniform
was like a dagger in their eyes. But a while ago, when they heard
that his wife and his sister were coming to Braleton from the north,
the stately old squire had sent him a royal gift, with a short letter
in the style of the last century. The gift was Molly, the beautiful
black, famous all over the country for her strength and speed; and
on her back was a saddle of magnificent workmanship, with a movable
pommel, which might be adjusted to suit the ladies. While these were
in camp, therefore, the Colonel rode Messenger, his stocky sorrel, and
Adela or Cecily sat majestically enthroned upon the majestic Molly.
The former was a horsewoman of experience, erect, neat, orthodox,
approved of connoisseurs everywhere. But the regiment was in this, as
in other things, all for the favorite; and when she came in sight,
(with the dare-devil mare going it, six leaps to a mile,) lying flat
forward, like her own cavalrymen, with breathless, laughing face, and
hair shaken loose along Molly's mane like the sun on a torrent,--such
a cheer as would go up from the distracted Eleventh! Cecily and Molly,
in the tingling pine-odorous Braleton air, made a familiar and joyful
spectacle.
South from the mansion lay an Episcopal chapel, now dismantled, with a
squat, broad, mossy roof pulled down over its eaves like a garden-hat;
and around it spread the small old churchyard, with its stones
neck-deep in freshening grass and clover. From this point there was a
most lovely view over the melancholy landscape, silvered midway with
a winding stream. Hither Cecily loved to climb, tying Molly in the
copse below, to lie upon the shaded escutcheoned tomb of one Reginald
Brale, "borne in Salop in olde Ingland," and to muse long and happily,
forgetful of battles, on
"The great good limpid world, so still, so still!"
She and Robert Blanchard had had much constant companionship; it was
natural that these musings should turn much, and indeed more and
more, upon him. Surely, he was like no one else; and his presence gave
Cecily a sense of infinite rest. She, too, had her obedient energies
and controlled fervors. A great crisis like this, holding great
issues, brought the two so sensitive to it very near together. She
felt under her, even as he did, the tide-wave of patriotic emotion,
sweeping the more generous spirits from all our cities out upon
its fatal crest. She had seen the companies marching to the front
through awe-stricken crowds, watched for the bulletins, worked for
the hospitals, heard the triumphal never-to-be-forgotten eloquence
and music sacred to the returning dead at home, and felt to the full
the heartache and enthusiasm of all the early war. These things had
formed her, pervaded her, projected her out of herself, and brought
her, lingeringly a child, into thought and womanhood. Before she knew
herself for an abolitionist, the day of Sumter swept over her like
a flood, and diverted all the little idle streams of her being. Her
brothers found her against the old tree in the garden, the newspaper
in her hand, like one entranced; and one of them, soon to devote
his youth to the cause of Michael against Lucifer, forbade her being
teased to account for her mood. Unlike Robert, Cecily came of a soldier
race, and from swords drawn, each in its generation, at Naseby, at
Brandywine, at Monterey. That fortune seemed good to her which had led
her to Virginia, a ground balancing in the scales of fate, and rich
already with hallowed graves. To the living men about her, she was
as march-music never out of their ears, to hold them to their vows.
Subdued from common cares, Cecily was in the current of the national
peril, inspiring and inspired, and open to every warmth and chill of it
as if it were indeed her own.
She was on the hills, reading, in balmy February weather, when she
became aware of a low whinny at her ear. The Brale paddocks were on the
other side of the fence. A young colt was there, startled and timid,
stretching towards her; then another came as near, and another, and the
heads of the older horses, confiding, appealing, crowded over these.
She patted their tremulous nostrils, divining instantly that something
had occurred to alarm them. She raised herself from Reginald Brale's
venerable slab, and listened; the sharp ping! ping! of blank cartridges
struck the oak-leaves on her left. Standing, and peering down the
steeper side of the incline, she saw the familiar moving glitter
of gold braid, far below; and, stripping a bough, and knotting her
handkerchief, she made a signal of distress, and waved it vigorously.
The shout that followed told her that danger was over, both for the
gentle intelligent creatures in the enclosure, and for her; the reports
ceased. A moment after, a man sprang over the churchyard wall from the
road. It was the Sergeant, more excited than he dared show.
"Miss Carter!" His heart-thuds made it hard for him to be punctilious.
"Are you hurt? Idiots that we were to choose this place! We might have
known. Tell me you're not hurt, Miss Carter." "I am not hurt at all,"
she answered gayly, "nor even frightened. It was these dear four-legged
'rebs' who were frightened." She slipped her book in her pocket, and
took up her gloves and the dainty whip which Molly had never felt,
save when it flicked a fly from her ear. "You are a brave soul!" the
Sergeant said. Cecily took refuge in the significant flippancy of
gamins: "You're another!" which was so apposite that they both laughed.
As they descended the rough foot-path, the Sergeant longed to offer his
arm; but he knew her stoicisms, her natural physical _savoir-faire_,
and he chivalrously refrained. How nimble and graceful, how fawn-like
she was! He noted the wide lace collar and the brooch at her chin;
the sober Gordon plaid gown, not too long; the firm little wrist; the
beautiful hair parted, and looped low.
"What were you doing just now?"
"A party of us were enjoying ourselves, shooting."
"Birds?" in a cold, regretful tone.
"Birds! No. A soldier, unless he is spoiling with garrison idleness,
won't waste his genius for killing on innocent birds and their like.
Besides, the artillery fellows over yonder have scared them away from
the whole neighborhood. We were target-shooting with pistols. Oh, if
you knew the hot coals and icicles I had to swallow when I recognized
you up there!" He looked ahead, and saw with joy that his companions
had departed. "Here is Molly, and my bay is behind the rock. May I ride
home with you?" He helped her to mount, and sprang into his own saddle.
The lonely, lovely earth and sky were theirs together; they went
slowly, slowly down to the ford. Molly was thirsty, or else perverse;
for she paused, lowered her aristocratic little head, and began to
drink. Presently Saladin, the bay, standing by her on the brink, did
the same; and the two riders sat, perforce, conscious of their like
silent sympathy and society. An impulse rushed on each to lean over
towards the other also, to lay cheek to happy cheek over the shallow
water, in their youth, in the sun. The Sergeant stiffened himself with
an effort.
"Although it is a holiday," he said, scanning the distance, "and
although there's no end of jollity afoot, greased poles, football,
leap-frog, hurdle-races, and all that--and did you know that Mrs.
Willoughby, escorted by the Colonel and the Adjutant, had gone for the
day? There are to be charming diversions at the infantry camp, and a
ball to wind up with. You were asked, too, I hear; but you missed it,
straying off to your hermitage."
"I am glad I did! Please finish your sentence."