TORDALE.
It was so seldom that the Vicar of Tordale met with any man able and
willing to talk about the outside world in which he had once played his
part, that he felt loth to lose his new acquaintance, and insisted on
Captain Stondon accompanying him home, and accepting of such hospitality
as a widower’s _ménage_ could afford.
Finding the prospect of rest and refreshment by no means disagreeable,
the officer availed himself of the invitation, and before the afternoon
was ended, very friendly relations were established between himself and
his host.
Both were lonely men; but there all similarity between themselves or
their antecedents stopped. The one had lost; the other had never
possessed. The one had hoped much, and yet the low-ceiled parlour of a
country vicarage, which a stranger rarely entered, to which there came
few new books, no excitement, no change, sufficed him now; the other had
started in life with his way to make, with no apparent future save what
his own right arm should win for him, and yet at forty-five he came back
from India to enter into possession of Marshland Manor and four thousand
a year.
The vicar had married young, and been the father of many children; the
officer had never married, and at fifty-six had no nearer relative than
Montague Stondon, barrister-at-law, who was some fifteenth cousin of the
owner of Marshlands, and next heir to that desirable property and the
rents appertaining thereto.
Captain Stondon had done his best for his relative; he had invited him
to Marshlands; he sent him up presents of game and fruit and—money; he
paid for the education of Montague Stondon’s only son; and the thanks he
got for all his kindness was a morning and evening aspiration which the
barrister never failed to utter for his speedy translation to a better
world.
Montague Stondon would have driven his relative into matrimony years
before, had it not been for that little romantic corner of his heart,
wherein he had placed his young ideal of what marriage should be—an
ideal from which the world and its ways had never estranged him; and so
it was quite a settled matter with everybody who knew anything about the
property that Captain Stondon would never have chick nor child, and that
if Montague Stondon outlived his cousin, he might confidently expect to
enter into possession of the Norfolk estates, which were, by the way,
strictly entailed.
Without domestic ties, without household treasures, it was natural that
Captain Stondon should reside but little in Norfolk—that he should
remain indeed only for a very short period in any place.
During the ten years that had elapsed since his return from India he had
visited many countries, seen many and many a foreign town. His passports
would have bound up into quite a bulky volume; and whenever he started
on a fresh pilgrimage, Montague Stondon offered up his little litany for
him to be brought back to England a corpse.
It might be excusable, and very probably was excessively natural; but
still nobody could say it was pleasant for a man to know, as Captain
Stondon knew perfectly well, that his cousin, limping with bleeding feet
along the flinty road to ruin, was cursing him for wearing good shoes
and declining to take them off for his benefit.
Wherever he went, Captain Stondon felt that he had his cousin’s best
wishes for some misadventure to befall him; and as he sat opposite to
the clergyman, and listened to his tale of how this boy had been
drowned, of how that one had studied too hard to pass his examination,
and died three weeks afterwards of brain-fever; of how his only daughter
had married happily, only to be laid a twelvemonth afterwards in her
coffin with her baby on her breast—he thought that after all it might be
better to have these memories than none at all—to have loved and lost,
rather than never to have had anything on earth to take home and love
and entreat the Lord to spare.
For these children were with the vicar still; their memories were green
in his heart, and would remain there till he went to join them; and it
seemed preferable to endure much misery rather than know no happiness;
to bear partings on earth, to the end that some friends might be waiting
to greet the wayfarer when he reached the eternal shores.
To the vicar his children were not dead—they slept; they were not
lost—merely gone before.
“He had one boy in India,” he said; and Captain Stondon at once inquired
in what part.
“Benares—he is buried there,” explained the clergyman, and he covered
his face with his hands for a moment, before he went on to tell how his
son had gone out to India full of youth, and hope, and life—to die.
By degrees, when he had exhausted the tale of his troubles, Mr. Conbyr
grew quite cheerful, and talked at large of his parishioners, their
peculiarities, their prejudices, their attachments. Like all clergymen,
he had his little budget of petty annoyances to open and explain—how
there was a strong element of Dissent in Tordale; how Methodists from
Grassenfel held house-to-house meetings; how the service was not
conducted exactly to his liking; how he wanted a new collection of
psalms, and his congregation would have none of it; how the choir was
poor, and required an organ to back it; how sorely Tordale stood in need
of a squire and squire’s family to take a high hand in the parish; and
how, in fact, Tordale required but being altered in every particular to
become a model valley—a valley for all England to hear of and envy.
Then he retraced his steps, and praised his people, their sturdy
independence, their rough-and-ready kindness, their thorough devotion,
their willingness to help one another; and how long he would have gone
on lauding their virtues it is impossible to say, had Captain Stondon,
seizing his opportunity, not inquired,—
“Pray what is the name of that young person who was in the same pew with
me to-day—a girl with auburn hair, and a magnificent voice?”
“Oh! you remarked her voice, did you? That is the cousin, or niece, or
niece by marriage, or something, of the very singular individual who
plays the violin in church. She is called Phemie Keller—sings sweetly, I
consider, and is pretty, too. Do you not think so?”
“Sings sweetly! What can the man be made of,” thought Captain Stondon,
“to use such an expression about the matter? Sings sweetly! If the
nightingale came outside his bedroom window and trilled to him all the
night long, he would get up in the morning and say he had heard a nice
bird whistling. Pretty, too!” Straightway the officer fell to wondering
what manner of woman the deceased Mrs. Conbyr had been—whether she had
black hair as coarse as a horse’s mane, and a Roman nose, high
cheekbones, and hard eyes; or whether she was a washed-out looking
creature, with the pink of her face running into the white, and
sandy-coloured corkscrew curls, and an anxious, frightened expression of
countenance.
He thought a person who called Miss Keller only pretty must have very
benighted ideas on the subject of beauty; and yet the fact was, Mr.
Conbyr had married quite a belle, a sparkling brunette, whose friends
all thought she threw herself away when she accepted a curate with only
a prospective living for his fortune.
Mrs. Conbyr had been a toast, a flirt, a very captivating, winning
little creature, and perhaps it was no wonder that now she was dead, her
husband held to her memory as to his beau-ideal of all which was most
lovely and charming in woman. Nevertheless even he admitted that Miss
Keller was pretty.
“And intelligent, too,” he added; “if she wouldn’t giggle so much, and
hadn’t such stuck-up ideas, and would dress herself more like a farmer’s
niece, she might grow into a superior woman. But vanity is the besetting
sin of the whole household. Aggland himself tells you candidly he
considers he understands the violin better than any man in the country,
and he calls his brother farmers, openly, fools and prejudiced donkeys.
As for me, he thinks me perfectly ignorant of theology. He has a curious
smattering of learning; can talk French a little, German a little, and
quote some Latin passages. He draws likewise, and formerly used to play
on the guitar. He has begun to build himself an organ, which he offered
to present to the church when completed, if I would give him the sole
management of the choir. He had laid himself out to have none but the
members of his own family in it, and depended on Phemie to lead; but she
refused, and saved me the trouble and annoyance of declining. ‘Ah, there
is the cloven foot peeping out,’ he said, as if delivering an oration;
‘the taint of aristocracy, which hates to do anything for the democracy,
appearing.’”
“And what the deuce did he mean?” asked Captain Stondon, bewildered.
“Why, he meant, I suppose, that she didn’t care to sing, and that there
was good blood in her veins. I fancy she is illegitimate. He is always
raving against the better classes—quite a character, I assure you.”
“Do your mountains grow many such?” asked his guest.
“He is not a home product,” was the reply. “Erratic genius of that
description is not indigenous to the Cumberland soil. He is from
Hereford, and his present wife is Lancashire, and his niece Scotch. His
first wife was Scotch also, I fancy, and he has a tribe of young
Agglands, sturdy, independent children of the hills. It is a strange
household altogether, and one that, could I persuade you to stay with
me, I should take you to see.”
“Thank you,” said Captain Stondon; “but I must leave Cumberland
to-morrow. I am going first to Norfolk, and then abroad. I shall always
think pleasantly,” he added, after a pause, “of the valley of Tordale;
always retain a memory of the happy Sunday afternoon I have spent with
you.” And with that, as it was now getting on towards the hour for
evening service, and as he had far to walk before he could reach
Grassenfel and his inn together, the officer rose to go, but his
intention was overruled by his host.
“I will not ask you,” he said, “to come to church, because, if you must
return to Grassenfel to-night, it would throw you too late on the road;
but walk back with me to the waterfall, and then I will show you a path
which runs right along the side of Helbeck for a couple of miles at
least. You can form no idea of the beauty and grandeur of the defile
till you have seen it from above, and the path, an easy one, leads down
to the road you came by before you reach the Broken Stone bridge. The
view from the top is worth seeing. I only wish this was Monday instead
of Sunday, so that I could go with you myself.”
Having made which frank confession the clergyman took out his sermon,
put on his hat, took his stick, and announced his readiness to depart.
“I can accompany you a little way up the path,” he said; and accordingly
the pair sallied out again together, and sauntered through the green
vale side by side.
If Tordale had looked lovely in the noon time, it was more beautiful
still in the soft evening light. It wanted then nearly an hour to
sunset, but the western sky was already like molten gold. Down the
hill-sides long shadows were lying; still, sad, and stern looked the
mountain peaks, with each jagged projection—each sharp outline—clearly
reflected against the evening sky. A cloud frowned over Helbeck, which
betokened a storm, the clergyman thought.
“But it is scarcely warm enough for thunder,” he added; “and unless the
wind dies away we shall not have any rain before morning. Is not our
valley lovely, Captain Stondon? When you are abroad—when you are looking
at what is considered far more magnificent scenery,—will you ever think,
I wonder, of our little nook hidden away among the Cumberland hills?”
“I shall never forget Tordale,” answered the officer, truthfully enough;
but little knowing how truthfully, for all that.
In the after days of joy and of sorrow which he was then walking on, to
pass through to reach the end, he forgot the name of many a town—he
forgot the road by which he had travelled to many a city; mountain
passes, smiling lakes, the weariness of Indian marches, gorgeous Eastern
palaces, the brilliancy of Eastern flowers—these things were forgotten,
or remembered only as a man remembers dreams. The Hindoo standing by his
sacred river, the Arabs in the desert, the long line of foam that alone
broke the eternity of waters as the outward-bound ship cleft her way to
the Cape, the tramp of the sailors as they paced the deck, the faces of
his old comrades faded, as the years stole on out of sight and out of
mind; but clear and distinct, like the memory of his mother’s face—like
the recollection of his boyhood’s home—Tordale stood out a picture hung
on the walls of his heart for ever.
He was never to forget it—never to forget the glory of its noontide, the
murmur of its waterfall, the calm of its lonely graveyard, the ivy, the
ferns, the foxglove and the broom. In the loneliness and solitude of
night he was to feel the calm of that scene soothe his spirit once
again. He had but to close his eyes, and he could hear the dull plash of
the waterfall, the rustling of the leaves, the mourning farewell of the
rivulet. He could look at the long wet blades of grass bending ever and
always into the water, and turning down the stream as though wanting to
be pulled from their roots, that they might float away and away with the
brook, first to the river and then to the sea. He could hear the water
trickling among the stones; he could touch the moss with his powerless
fingers; he could feel the cool drops touching his parched lips; he
could remember how he had drained a deep draught from the basin in the
rock; and then he would think likewise, if he hasted not to exorcise the
evil thought, of his unavailing petition, of the prayer which had been
granted to the letter, not in the spirit, to add to his troubles rather
than to increase his joy.