Eliot ruled his little household well, because he ruled himself. No
one, from the tri-weekly gardener to the rough half-breed Westerner who
managed the modest stable, felt the least desire to trifle with him.
Even Mrs. Coove, in the brief morning visits to his study, did not care
about asking him to repeat some sentence that she had not quite caught
or understood. Yet, in a sense, as with all such men, it was the woman
who really managed him. ‘Mrs.’ Coove, big, motherly, spinster, divined
the child beneath the grim exterior, and simply played with him. She
it was who really ‘ran’ the household, relieving him of all domestic
worries, and she it was, had he fallen ill--which, even for a day,
he never did--who would have nursed him into health again with such
tactfully concealed devotion that, while loving the nursing, he would
never have guessed the devotion.
So it was largely upon Mrs. Coove that he secretly relied to welcome,
manage, and look after his little orphaned niece, while, of course,
pretending that he did it all himself.
‘She’ll want a companion, sir, of sorts--if I may make so bold--some
one to play with,’ she told him when he had mentioned that later, of
course, he would provide a ‘governess or something’ when he had first
‘sized up’ the child.
He looked hard at her for a moment. He realised her meaning, that the
hostile neighbourhood could be relied on to supply nothing of that kind.
‘Of course,’ he said, as though he had thought of it himself.
‘She’ll love the pony, sir, if she ain’t one of the booky sort, which
I seem to remember she ain’t,’ added Mrs. Coove, looking as usual as
though just about to burst into tears. For her motherly face wore a
lachrymose expression that was utterly deceptive. Her contempt for
books, too, and writing folk was never quite successfully concealed.
In silence he watched the old woman wipe her moist hands upon a black
apron, and the perplexities of his new duties grew visibly before his
eyes. She had little notion that secretly her master stood a little in
awe of her superior domestic knowledge.
‘The pony and the woods,’ he suggested briefly.
‘A puppy or a kitten, sir, would help a bit--for indoors, if I may make
so bold,’ the housekeeper ventured, with a passing gulp at her own
audacity; ‘and out of doors, sir, as you say, maybe she’ll be ’appy
enough. Her pore mother taught----’
The long breath she had taken for this sentence she meant to use to the
last gasp if possible. But her master cut her short.
‘Miss Mánya arrives at six,’ he said, turning to his books and papers.
‘The dog-cart, with you in it, to meet her--please.’ The ‘please’
was added because he knew her vivid dislike of being too high from
the ground, while judging correctly that the pleasure would more
than compensate her for this risk of elevation. It was also intended
to convey that he appreciated her help, but deplored her wordiness.
Laconic even to surliness himself, he disliked long phrases. It was a
perpetual wonder to him why even lazy people who detested effort would
always use a dozen words where two were more effective.
So Mrs. Coove, accustomed to his ways, departed, with a curtsey that
more than anything else resembled a sudden collapse of the knees
beneath more than they could carry comfortably.
‘Thank you, sir; I’ll see to it all right,’ she said, obedient to his
glance, beginning the sentence in the room but finishing it in the
passage. She looked as though she would weep hopelessly once outside,
whereas really she felt beaming pleasure. The compliment of being sent
to meet Miss Mánya made her forget her dread of the elevated, swaying
dog-cart, as also of the silent half-breed groom who drove it. Full of
importance she went off to make preparations.
And later, when Mrs. Coove was on her way to the station five miles
off, dangerously perched, as it seemed to her, in mid-air, he made his
way out slowly into the woods, a vague feeling in him that there was
something he must say good-bye to. The Place henceforth, with Mánya in
it, would be--not quite the same. What change would come he could not
say, but something of the secrecy, the long-loved tender privacy and
wonder would depart. Another would share it with him, a trespasser, in
a sense an outsider. And, as he roamed the little pine-grown vales,
the mossy coverts, and the knee-high bracken, there stole into him
this queer sensation that it all was part of a living Something that
constituted almost a distinct entity. His wife inspired it, but, also,
the Place had a personality of its own, apart from the qualities he
had read into it. He realised, for the first time, that it too might
take an attitude towards the new arrival. Everywhere, it seemed, there
was an air of expectant readiness. It was aware.... It might possibly
resent it.
And, for moments here and there, as he wandered, rose other ideas in
him as well, brought for the first time into existence by the thought
of the new arrival. This element, like a sudden shaft of sunlight on
a landscape, discovered to him a new aspect of the mental picture.
It was vague; yet perplexed him not a little. And it was this: that
the thing he loved in all this little property, thinking it always as
his own, was in reality what _she_ had loved in it, the thing that
_she_ had made him see through the lens of her own more wild, poetic
vision. What he was now saying good-bye to, the thing that the expected
intruder might change, or even oust, was after all but a phantom
memory--the aspect she had built into it. This curious, painful doubt
assailed him for the first time. Was his love and worship of the Place
really an individual possession of his own, or had it been all these
years but her interpretation of it that he enjoyed vicariously? The
thought of Mánya’s presence here etched this possibility in sharp
relief. Unwelcome, and instantly dismissed, the thought yet obtruded
itself--that his feelings had not been quite genuine, quite sincere,
and that it was her memory, her so vital vision of the Place he loved
rather than the Place itself at first hand.
For the idea that another was on the way to share it stirred the
unconscious query: What precisely was it she would share?
And behind it came a still more subtle questioning that he put away
almost before it was clearly born: Was he really _quite_ content
with this unambitious guardianship of the dream-estate, and was the
grievance of his exile so completely dead that he would, under all
possible conditions, keep its loveliness inviolate and free from
spoliation?
The coming of the child, with the new duties involved, and the probable
later claims upon his meagre purse, introduced a worldly element that
for so long had slept in him. He wondered. The ghosts all walked.
But beside them walked other ghosts as well. And this new, strange
pain of uncertainty came with them--sinister though exceedingly faint
suggestion that he had been worshipping a phantom fastened into his
heart by a mind more vigorous than his own.
Ambition, action, practical achievement stirred a little in their sleep.
* * * * *
And on his way back he picked some bits of heather and bracken, a few
larch twigs with little cones upon them, and several sprays of pine.
These he carried into the house and up into the child’s bedroom, where
he stuck them about in pots and vases. The flowers Mrs. Coove had
arranged he tossed away. For flowers in a room, or in a house at all,
he never liked; they looked unnatural, artificial. Flowers and food
together on a table seemed to him as dreadful as the sickly smelling
wreaths people loved to put on coffins. But leaves were different; and
earth was best of all. In his own room he had two wide, deep boxes of
plain earth, watered daily, renewed from time to time, and more sweetly
scented than any flowers in the world.
Opening the windows to let in all the sun and air there was, he glanced
round him with critical approval. To most the room must have seemed
bare enough, yet he had put extra chairs and tables in it, a sofa too,
because he thought the child would like them. Personally, he preferred
space about him; his own quarters looked positively unfurnished; rooms
were cramped enough as it was, and useless upholstery gave him a
feeling of oppression. He still clung to essentials; and an empty room,
like earth and sky, was fine and dignified.
But Mánya, he well knew, might feel differently, and he sought to
anticipate her wishes as best he might. For Mánya came from a big house
where the idea was to conceal every inch of empty space with something
valuable and useless; and her playground had been gardens smothered
among formal flower-beds--triangles, crescents, circles, anything that
parodied Nature--paths cut cleanly to neat patterns, and plants that
acknowledged their shame by growing all exactly alike without a trace
of individuality.
He moved to the open window, gazing out across the stretch of hill and
heathery valley, thick with stately pines. The wind sighed softly past
his ears. He heard the murmur of the droning mill-wheel, the drum and
tinkle of falling water mingling with it. And the years that had passed
since last he stood and looked forth from this window came up close
and peered across his shoulder. The Past rose silently beside him and
looked out too.... He saw it all through other eyes that once had so
large a share in fashioning it.
Again came this singular impression--that, while he waited, the whole
Place waited too. It knew that she was coming. Another pair of feet
would run upon its face and surface, another voice wake all its little
echoes, another mind seek to read its secret and share the mystery of
its being.
‘If Mánya doesn’t like it----!’ struck with real pain across his heart.
But the thought did not complete itself. Only, into the strong face
came a momentary expression of helplessness that sat strangely there.
Whether the child would like himself or not seemed a consideration of
quite minor importance.
A sound of wheels upon the gravel at the front of the house disturbed
his deep reflections, and, shutting the door carefully behind him,
he gave one last look round to see that all was right, and then went
downstairs to meet her. The sigh that floated through his mind was not
allowed to reach the lips; but another expression came up into his
face. His lips became compressed, and resolution passed into his eyes.
It was the look--and how he would have laughed, perhaps, could he have
divined it!--the look of set determination that years ago he wore when
in some lonely encampment among the Bad Lands something of danger was
reported near.
With a sinking heart he went downstairs to meet his duty.
But in the hall, scattering his formal phrases to the winds, a boyish
figure, yet with loose flying hair, ran up against him, then stepped
sharply back. There was a moment’s pitiless examination.
‘Uncle Dick!’ he heard, cried softly. ‘Is _that_ what you’re like? But
how wonderful!’ And he was aware that a pair of penetrating eyes, set
wide apart in a grave but eager face, were mercilessly taking him in.
It was he who was being ‘sized up.’ No redskin ever made a more rapid
and thorough examination, nor, probably, a more accurate one.
‘Oh! I _never_ thought you would look so kind and splendid!’
‘Me!’ he gasped, forgetting every single thing he had planned to say in
front of this swift-moving creature who attacked him.
She came close up to him, her voice breathless still but if possible
softer, eyes shining like two little lamps.
‘I expected--from what Mother said--you’d be--just Uncle Richard! And
instead it’s only Uncle--Uncle Dick!’
Here was unaffected sincerity indeed. He had dreaded--he hardly knew
why--some simpering sentence of formality, or even tears at being
lonely in a strange house. And, in place of either came this sort of
cowboy verdict, straight as a blow from the shoulder. It took his
breath away. In his heart something turned very soft and yearning. And
yet he--winced.
‘Nice drive?’ he heard his gruff voice asking. For the life of him he
could think of nothing else to say. And the answer came with a little
peal of breathless laughter, increasing his amazement and confusion.
‘I drove all the way. I made the blackie let me. And the mothery person
held on behind like a bolster. It was glorious.’
At the same moment two strong, quick arms, thin as a lariat, were
round his neck. And he was being kissed--once only, though it felt all
over his face. She stood on tiptoe to reach him, pulling his head down
towards her lips.
‘How are you, Uncle, please?’
‘Thanks, Mánya,’ he said shortly, straightening up in an effort to keep
his balance, ‘all right. Glad you are, too. Mrs. Coove, your “mothery
person who held on like a bolster,” will take you upstairs and wash
you. Then food--soon as you like.’
He had not indulged in such a long sentence for years. It increased his
bewilderment to hear it. Something ill-regulated had broken loose.
Mrs. Coove, who had watched the scene from the background and doubtless
heard the flattering description of herself, moved forward with a
mountainous air of possession. Her face as usual seemed to threaten
tears, but there was a gleam in her eyes which could only come from
the joy of absolute approval. With a movement of her arm that seemed
to gather the child in, she went laboriously upstairs. The back of her
alone proved to any seeing eye that she had already passed willingly
into the state of abject slavery that all instinctive mothers love.
‘We shan’t be barely five minutes, sir,’ she called respectfully when
halfway up; and the way she glanced down upon her grim master, who
stood still with feet wide apart watching them, spoke further her
opinion--and her joy at it--that he too was caught within her toils.
‘She’ll manage you, sir, if I may make so bold,’ was certainly the
thought her words did not express.
They vanished round the corner--the heavy tread and the light,
pattering step. And he still stood on there, waiting in the hall.
A mist rose just before his eyes; he did not see quite clearly. In
his heart a surge of strong, deep feeling struggled upwards, but was
instantly suppressed. Mánya had said another thing that moved him far
more than her childish appreciation of himself, something that stirred
him to the depths most strangely.
For, when he asked her how she enjoyed the drive, the girl had replied
with undeniable sincerity, looking straight into his eyes:
‘The last bit was like a fairy-tale. Uncle, _how_ awfully this place
must love you!’
She did not say, ‘How you must love the place!’ And--she loathed the
‘dirty’ country all about.
Then, the first rush of excitement over, a sort of shyness, curiously
becoming, had settled down all over her like a cloud. It settled down
upon himself as well. But--she had said the perfect thing. And his
doubts all vanished. It _was_--yes, surely--the Place she loved.
And yet, when all was over, there passed through him an unpleasant
afterthought--as though Mánya had applied a test by which already
something in himself was found gravely wanting.
V
With its sharp, pine-grown declivities, its tumbling streams, stretches
of open heather, and its miniature forests of bracken, the dream-estate
was like a liliputian Scotland compressed into a few hundred acres. All
was in exquisite proportion.
The old house of rough grey stone, set in one corner, looked out upon
a wild, untidy garden that melted unobserved into woods of mystery
beyond, and farther off rose sharp against the sky a series of peaked
knolls and ridges that in certain lights looked like big hills many
miles away. There were diminutive fairy valleys you could cross in
twenty minutes; and several rivulets, wandering from the moorlands
higher up, formed the single stream that once had worked the Mill.
But the Mill, standing a stone’s-throw from the study windows, so that
he heard the water singing and gurgling almost among his book-shelves,
had for a century ground nothing more substantial than sunshine,
air, and shadow. For the gold-dust of the stars is too fine for
grinding. But it ground as well the dreams of the lonely occupant of
the grey-toned house. And he let it stand there, falling gradually
into complete decay, because beneath those crumbling wooden walls--he
remembered it as of yesterday--the sudden stroke had come that in a
moment, dropping as it seemed out of eternity, had robbed him of his
chief possession--fashioner of the greatest dream of all. The splash
and murmur of the water, the drone of the creaking wheel in flood
time, the white weed that gathered thickly over the pond formed by the
ancient dam, and the red-brown tint of walls and rotting roof,--all
were like the colour of the water’s singing, the colour of her memory,
and the colour of his thinking too, made sweetly visible.
Indeed, despite his best control, _she_ still lurked everywhere,
so that he could not recall a single experience of the past years
without at the same time some vivid aspect of the scenery, as she
saw it, rising up clearly to accompany it. In every corner stood the
ghost of a still recoverable mood. Here he had suffered, fought, and
prayed; here he had loved and hated; here he had lost and found. All
the kaleidoscope aspects of growing older, of hopes and fears and
disappointments, were visualised for him in terms of the Place where
he had met and dealt with them for his soul’s good or ill. But behind
them always stood that Figure in Chief; it was she who directed the
ghostly band; and she it was who coaxed the romantic scenery thus into
the support of all his personal moods, and continued to do so with even
greater power after she was gone.
His respect for the Place seemed, therefore, involved with his respect
for himself and her. That tumbling stream had an inalienable right
of way; that mill of golden-brown claimed ancient lights as truly as
any mental palace of thoughts within his mind; and the little dips
and rises in the woods were as sacred--so he had always felt--as were
those twists and turns of character that he called his views of life
and his beliefs. This blending of himself with the Place and her had
been very carefully reared. The notion that its foundations were not
impregnable for ever was a most disturbing one. That the mere arrival
of an intruder could shake it, possibly shatter it, touched sacrilege.
And for long he suppressed the outrageous notion so successfully that
he almost entirely forgot about it.
* * * * *
This strip of vivid land whereon he dwelt acquired, moreover, a
heightened charm from the character of the odious land surrounding it.
For on all sides was that type of country best described as over-fed
and over-lived-upon. The scenery was choked and smothered unto death;
it breathed, if at all, the breath of a fading life pumped through it
artificially and with labour. Heavily beneath the skies it lay--acres
of inert soil.
There were, indeed, people who admired it, calling it typical of
something or other in the south of England; but for him these people,
like the land itself, were bourgeois, dull, insipid, and phlegmatic as
the back of a sheep. Like rooms in a big club, it was over-furnished
with too solid upholstery--thick, fat hedges, formal oak woods,
lifeless copses stuck upon slopes from which successful crops had
sucked long ago the last vestiges of spontaneous life; and spotted with
self-satisfied modern cottages, ‘improved’ beyond redemption, that
made him think with laughter of some scattered group of city aldermen.
‘They’re pompous City magnates,’ he used to tell his wife, ‘strayed
from the safety of Cornhill, and a little frightened by the wind and
rain.’
Everywhere, amid bushy trees that looked so pampered they were almost
sham, stood ‘country houses,’ whole crops of them, dozing after heavy
meals among gardens of sleek tulip and geraniums. They plastered
themselves, with the atmosphere of small Crystal Palaces, upon every
available opening, comfortably settled down and weighted with every
conceivable modern appliance, and in ‘Parks’ all cut to measure like
children’s wooden toys. They stood there, heavy and respectable,
living close to the ground, and in them, almost without exception,
dwelt successful business men who owned a ‘country seat.’ From his
uncivilised, wild-country point of view, they epitomised the soul
of the entire scenery about them--something gross and sluggish that
involved stagnation. They brooded with an air of vulgar luxury that was
too stupid even to be active. Here ‘resided,’ in a word, the wealthy.
When he walked or drove through the five miles of opulent ugliness
that lay between Mill House and the station, it seemed like crossing
an inert stretch of adipose tissue, then lighting suddenly upon a
pulsating nerve-centre. To step back into the fresh and hungry beauty
of his pine valley, with its tumbling waters and its fragrance of wild
loveliness, was an experience he never ceased to take delight in. The
air at once turned keen, the trees gave out sharp perfumes, waters
rustled, foliage sang. Oh! here was life, activity, and movement.
Vital currents flowed through and over it. The grey house among the
fir-trees, beckoning to the Mill beyond, was a place where things might
happen and pass swiftly. Here was no stagnation possible. Thrills of
beauty, denied by that grosser landscape, returned electrically upon
the heart. With every breath he drew in wonder and enchantment.
And all this, for some years now, he had enjoyed alone. Rather than
diminishing with his middle age, the spell had increased. Then came
this sudden question of another’s intrusion upon his dream-estate, and
he had dreaded painful alteration. The presence of another, most likely
stupid, and certainly unsympathetic, must cause a desolating change.
Alteration there was bound to be, or at the best a readjustment of
values that would steal away the wild and accustomed flavour. He had
dreaded the child’s arrival unspeakably. It had turned him abruptly
timid, and this timidity betrayed the sweetness of the treasure that he
guarded. For it came close to fear--the fear men know when they realise
an attack they cannot, by any means within their power, hope to defeat.
And alteration, as he apprehended, came; yet not the alteration he had
dreaded. Mánya’s arrival had been a surprise that was pure joy. Its
wonder almost woke suspicion. And the surprise, he found, grew into a
series of surprises that at first took his breath away. The alchemy
that her little shining presence brought persisted, grew from day
to day, till it operated with such augmenting power that it changed
himself as well. No stranger fairy-tale was ever written.