reproof. “What did he say?”
“He said I should.”
“I don’t see you can count that. I guess it wouldn’t be good manners
for him to tell you you wouldn’t.”
“He did mean it. He wasn’t particularly polite.”
“What did he do?”
“Oh, nothing actually rude. It was odd,” said Dolly, reflectively. “At
first he was—oh, Bernard, you know what I mean: turned out on a pattern
and polished, like all the other gentlemen we’ve seen. I _was_ rather
nervous; but I meant to go through with it. Then his manner seemed to
break in half. He was almost brutal. I must say I rather liked that; it
was raw nature. And quite at the end he apologised, and said that he’d
had sunstroke in Africa. Do you think that likely to be true?”
“I couldn’t say,” said Bernard. “I know he’s been in Africa.”
“What! out at the front? How painfully ordinary!”
“You do it very well,” said Bernard, with admiration. “That was just
like the woman in the black frills at Merton’s. You’d soon be as good
as they are. Farquhar wasn’t volunteering, though; he was up farther
north, where they get miasma.”
“Oh,” said Dolly, leaning her elbows on the bench and her chin on her
clasped hands. “Do you like him, Bernie?”
“Not if he was rude to you; though I guess swells generally are cads,
like in books.”
“He wasn’t exactly rude. He was primitive. I should say he was very
strong, and rather wicked, and subtle; not like us. We’re quite simple,
simplex, one-fold; we mean what we say and do what we mean, you and I.”
“I should hope so,” said Bernard, who was not troubled by uncertain
ethics.
“Noel Farquhar doesn’t, then; I’m sure of it. He is very strong. He
says he is stronger than you are.”
Bernard stretched out a brawny arm. “He’s six inches shorter, anyway.
At that rate he’d have to be a Hercules to lick me.”
“I’d like you to wrestle with him. I’d like to see him thrown.”
“Hullo, Dolly!”
“And I mean to meet him again.”
“I know that isn’t the proper thing. You ought to get introduced first.”
“I can take care of myself. He interests me.”
“You’ll be falling in love with him if you don’t look out.”
“That I never should do. But he might fall in love with me.”
“Shouldn’t think that was likely.”
“Why not? We Fanes are as good a family as any in England. And I’m
handsome: Bernard, you said I was.”
“Yes, but you aren’t like the woman in the black frills,” said Bernard,
measuring his sister by the only standard of taste he knew. “Besides,
I guess Merton’s morally sure you were out poaching last time with me,
and he and Farquhar are as thick as thieves. Girls oughtn’t to poach.”
“There are some people who don’t class that among the seven deadly
sins, and he’s one; I know it. He has wild blood, as we have.”
“But would you marry him if he wanted you to?”
“I’m not sure. I might. He could give me what I want—experience.”
“I don’t see why you aren’t contented here,” said Bernard, bending to
his work again.
“I dare say not,” retorted Dolly, pacing the shed. “You’re phlegmatic.
You’re content with the rind of life. Bitter or sweet, I mean to taste
the core.”
“I expect, you know, you’ll come to awful grief.”
“Perhaps. But so I’ve lived my life first, I’ll not complain.”
“Well,” said Bernard, “I never saw you in heroics before, and I guess I
don’t care if I never do again.”
Then he returned to his work, and drowned Dolly’s aspirations in the
harsh duet of squeaking saw and dissentient wood.
V
SHE GOES ON SUNDAY TO THE CHURCH
Eumenes Fane’s marriage had been both more respectable and more
romantic than his kind enemies believed: living in Paris, he had eloped
with a handsome, wilful French girl of noble family. Her relations
swallowed the match as a bitter pill, his did not exist; and the
married lovers lived in isolation far away in Brittany until death cut
short their long honeymoon. Eumenes returned to England embittered;
he had always been disagreeable. The relations between him and his
children were eccentric. He lived with them, he had taught them, yet
he lavished satire upon their boorishness and stupidity; he had been
devoted to the mother, yet for the children he had no feeling but
unamiable contempt. They, on their part, repaid him with indifference.
Bernard at eighteen, on his own initiative, took control of the farm
and made it pay; Dolly managed the dairy and the household. Their
lives were isolated equally from their father and from the world.
Bernard was not much of a reader, and never strayed far from his
Shakespeare and his farming journals, with excursions into Tennyson;
but Dolly was insatiable. She had read and digested every book in
their heterogeneous library. Unfortunately, the collection was not
representative; the modern French novelists were there arranged in
full tale, and fresh volumes were added as they appeared, but it had
no single work of English fiction later than the date of the admirable
_Sir Charles Grandison_. Both Bernard and Dolly could read and speak
French as easily as English, though they did not know the worth of
their accomplishment; and from their study of fin-de-siècle literature
they had gained an innocently lurid knowledge of the world which
hardly fitted in with the conditions of English country life, and was
particularly inappropriate as applied to the blameless households at
the vicarage, the surgery, or The Lilacs. When young Merton of The Hall
brought home a pretty bride, Dolly seriously looked for the appearance
of Tertium Quid. He delayed his coming for a year, and then arrived in
the cradle. Dolly was surprised; but she ascribed this breach of custom
to the fact that Merton senior’s money was made in soap. Only the true
aristocrats indulge in a friend of the house.
After Farquhar’s visit Dolly made a dress for herself. It was then the
fashion to wear a bodice opening at the sleeves and in front to show
a lighter under-dress, which also appeared beneath the skirt, as the
corolla of a flower beneath the calyx. Dolly’s gown of dark chestnut
matched her hair; the colour of the vest was white. She was more
skilful in the dairy than with her needle, but she gave her mind to
this, and in the end her work was crowned with fair success.
“I guess that colour, what they call, suits you,” said Bernard, whom
she called in to assist at the full-dress rehearsal.
“I expect it does,” assented Dolly, bending back her swan’s-neck to
catch a glimpse of her supple young waist in the spotty mirror. “It
fits rather badly; any one can see it is homemade, but that can’t be
helped. I am going to wear it to church on Christmas Day.”
“Father’ll be awfully angry if you go to church.”
“Of course, but that doesn’t matter. No one except small shopkeepers
and mill-girls goes to chapel now. Besides, the minister drops his h’s
and mixes his metaphors and talks the silliest nonsense: I wouldn’t
listen to him even if it were the fashion. Shall you come with me?”
“I guess I’d better. Have you seen that Farquhar chap again?”
“I have,” Dolly answered, composedly.
“You’ll get yourself into a mess if you don’t look out.”
“Oh no. He may get into a mess, but I shall not.”
“Then I don’t think you are playing fair.”
“Yes, I am. He knows why I spoke to him.”
“Why did you?”
“To know how ladies behave.”
“I suppose you’ll go your own way,” said Bernard, after a pause; “but
people’ll talk if you go on meeting him.”
“Let them. I don’t mean to stay down here.”
“I do,” said Bernard.
Dolly perceived the force of this objection. She valued Farquhar’s
advice; but where her own aims clashed with Bernard’s well-being, she
rarely hesitated.
“Very well; I won’t meet him again,” she said. “But, Bernard, if he
speaks to you, do you respond. Ask him here; no one can find fault if I
see him in my own house. Or I don’t think they can; do you?”
She was reassured by Bernard’s hearty assent, backed by a special
instance. “For,” said he, “when Maude had his sister staying here,
Farquhar went and saw them; and I guess if he goes to Maude’s house he
can come to us.” And the point was thus settled.
Two days before Christmas the wind blew softly from the south, the snow
melted from the earth and the clouds from the sky, the robins broke out
into their pure celestial strains, and it was spring in all but name.
Farquhar’s invalid began to pester his doctor for permission to go out,
and Dolly got a white hat to go with her chestnut gown.
Christmas Day itself was a flash of summer. Dolly came down dressed
for church at half-past ten, and found her brother ready in a Norfolk
jacket, knickerbockers, and a cap. An inward monitor told her that this
attire was incorrect, and she said so; but as Bernard had nothing else
to wear, the question _solvitur ambulando_.
Neither of them had ever been to church. In early days Bernard had been
sent to a chapel with a damnatory creed, and he took his sister with
him till she developed opinions of her own: an epoch early in Dolly’s
history. She rebelled: Bernard, who was bored by the service, outraged
by the music, and submissive only from indifference, supported her: and
Mr. Fane’s graceless children took their own way, and henceforth spent
the Sabbath hours in reading, prefaced always by a chapter of the Bible.
They arrived late, having lingered in the woods because Dolly said,
and Bernard agreed, that Mrs. Merton and the lady in the black frills
had never entered the church till after the bells stopped ringing.
Such is the force of bad example. Bernard held the door open for his
sister, and followed her in, according to instructions which he had
received from her, and she from Noel Farquhar. The aisles were crossed
by dim sunbeams swimming with drowsy motes, the people were sleepy, the
priest was monotoning monotonously out of tune; and Dolly’s entrance,
in company with a beam of pure sunshine and a gust of wind which set
the Christmas wreaths rustling all round the church, electrified
everybody. Heads turned to stare; the choristers, ever the devotees of
inattention, nudged and whispered. Up the aisle came Dolly, a glowing
piece of colour in her rich dress and richer hair, with the immaculate
whiteness of her brow and the deepening carmine of her cheeks, her eyes
shining like brown diamonds. She walked steadily, carrying her head
high, up to the big square pew assigned by tradition to the house of
Fanes, unlatched the door, and took her seat. Bernard followed, his
height and his patent unconcern making his figure quite as imposing as
hers.
For a space Dolly knelt, as she saw others doing, and hid her hot face;
but when the time came she rose, and pinched Bernard, who had sat down
and stayed there. He got up slowly, plunged his hands into his pockets,
and looked round him. Dolly was convinced that his behaviour was
improper; she also looked round her, but without moving her head, and
found her exemplar in the person of Noel Farquhar, who was attentively
following the service in a large prayer-book. Three volumes lay on
the shelf of their pew; Dolly opened one and handed another to her
brother, signing to him to do his duty. He looked into it helplessly;
it was a copy of _Hymns Ancient and Modern_, and it is not surprising
that he could not find the place. Dolly was no better off, but she
had a model to imitate; she turned over the pages as though they were
perfectly familiar, found her place near the beginning of the volume,
and devoutly studied the evening hymns while the choristers chanted the
Venite.
The recollection of that morning always brought a smile to Dolly’s
lips. Occupied by her culte of deportment, and still more by her
culte of Bernard’s deportment, she missed the humours at the moment,
but found them all the more amusing under the enchantment lent by
distance. Bernard, who was not thinking about himself, was not amused.
Music at chapel had been bad enough, but this, more ambitious, was
really horrible. The choir sang neither better nor worse than most
village performers; there was a preponderance of trebles out of tune
and raucous, an absence of altos, two tenors who sang wrong, and three
basses who sang treble. When they should have monotoned they climbed
unevenly and one by one in linked sweetness long drawn out down a
chromatic scale, until Bernard suddenly launched the true note at them
in a voice of startling richness and power, which would have made
his fortune had he taken it to market in town. It had the true bass
quality, but an unusually extensive compass, ranging from the C below
the bass clef up to the octave of middle C.
After he began to sing, most of the curious eyes were diverted from
Dolly to him, and she regained her composure. Farquhar had not looked
at her; it was not his cue to let his eye wander during service. But
Dolly was sure, from the dark flush which overspread his face, that he
had seen her enter. She designed this meeting as a test. If he refused
to acknowledge her before his friends, Dolly vowed that she would never
speak to him again. Her pride of birth was keen; she went to the
length of thinking her brother the only gentleman present, inasmuch
as he alone, so far as she knew, had the right to bear arms. She took
little part in the religious ceremonies. Dolly had her creed, and held
to it in practice, but at this time she was too intent on this world to
think much of the next.
She got up with alacrity after the benediction, and marshalled out
Bernard, glad to go. The organist was now playing music soft and slow,
and tenderly touching the pedals with boots so large that he frequently
put down two notes at once by accident. Music was really the only
subject about which Bernard was sensitive; as a false quantity to a
Latinist, as a curse to a Quaker, as a red rag to a bull, so was a
wrong note to Bernard Fane.
Outside shone the sun and breathed the wind and danced the grasses over
the graves of women as young and beautiful as Dolly; but she was not
thinking of them. The stream of people began to condense into groups of
two and three, who gave each other the accustomed greetings and echoed
cheerful wishes at cross purpose in a babel of inanity. Farquhar was
shaking hands with Mrs. Merton, a fragile little lady with dark eyes,
_frileuse_, as Dolly christened her, who dressed very well and talked
plaintive nonsense in an erratic fashion. Dolly knew by instinct that
they were speaking of her. She went on at an even pace. Farquhar broke
from his friends and followed, and Dolly, with true Christmas good-will
in her heart, found herself shaking his hand in the overhand style,
according to the custom of the lady in black frills.
“I wish I could walk home your way; I’ve a hundred things to say
about that Burnt House business, and one never has a chance of seeing
Mr. Fane. But I’ve an invalid at home who’s to take his first airing
to-day, and I know he’ll go too far if I don’t look after him.”
“Is that the chap you picked up on the road?” asked Bernard, who had
heard the story from the men, with romantic embellishments.
“Oh, I didn’t pick him up; don’t think it; he was planted on me by
Providence. I say, Fane, if you’ve nothing better to do, I wish you’d
come in to-night and have a knock-up at billiards. It would be a
Christian act, for I’ve not a soul in the house except the invalid, who
toddles off to bye-bye at seven.”
“I can’t play billiards,” was Bernard’s reply, rather proudly spoken.
“Right; I’ll teach you. There’s nothing I like better; is there, Mrs.
Merton?”
“Don’t ask me; I never pretend to fathom you,” said Mrs. Merton,
plaintively, shaking her head. And she put out a very small hand to
Dolly. “Please don’t snub me, Miss Fane; I’d so like to come and call,
if you’ll let me. I was told you were a dreadful person, who dropped
the h and divided the hoof—skirt, I mean; besides, it was your turn to
call first on me. But you aren’t dreadful, are you? So may I come?”
Had there been any patronage in Mrs. Merton’s manner, Dolly would have
been delighted to snub her; but there was none. The formula of gracious
acceptance was less easy than a refusal, but Dolly let no one guess
her difficulties. An interesting general discussion of the weather
followed, during which one remarked that it gave the doctors quite a
holiday, a second that it was muggy and unwholesome and why didn’t we
have a nice healthy frost, a third that it was excellent for the crops,
and a fourth that the harvest would be certainly ruined by wireworms,
and each agreed with all the rest. Bernard, standing still, thought
fashionable people talked like imbeciles. Dolly, shy, though no one saw
it, was in a glow of triumph.
Their way home led through woods. So much rain had fallen that the
mossy bridle-path was scored with deep ruts full of water, and Dolly
had to hold her skirt away from the black leaf-mould. Rain-drops held
in crumpled copper leaves shone gemlike, smooth young stems glistened;
only the grey boles of the forest trees looked warm and dry. Dolly,
herself like a russet leaf, harmonised with the woodland scenery, which
seemed a frame made for her.
Farther on down the path, resignedly sitting on a bundle of fagots,
and beginning to grow chilly, Lucian de Saumarez was waiting for some
one to pass. He had set out with the virtuous intention of returning
home in half an hour precisely, but had been lured on by a shrew-mouse,
a squirrel, and the enchanting sun, till the end of his strength put
a period to his walk; his legs gave way under him. Then he sat down
and whistled “Just Break the News to Mother,” very cheerfully. It was
fortunate that in Bernard’s hearing he did not attempt to sing, for
his voice can only be described by the adjective squawky. He looked
like a tramp who had stolen a coat, for over his own he wore one of
Farquhar’s, which was truly a giant’s robe to him. At first glimpse of
Dolly he whipped off his cap, and stood up bareheaded and recklessly
polite.
“Excuse me—” he began.
“If you want relief, you’d better go to Alresworth workhouse; they’ll
take you in there,” interrupted Bernard, who would never give to
tramps.
“Be quiet, Bernard. Is there anything we can do for you?” asked Dolly,
in her gentlest voice.
“Candidly, I only ask an arm, and not an alms,” said Lucian, laughing
in Bernard’s face. “Fact is, I’ve walked up from The Lilacs and just
petered out. Your woods are such a very remarkably long way through.”
“Then your name is De Saumarez. Bernard, give Mr. de Saumarez your arm.
You must come home with us and rest; afterwards you can go back. You
ought not to be sitting down out-of-doors this weather,” said Dolly,
fixing her imperious young eyes upon him, between pity and severity.
“No, I’m an abomination, I confess it,” answered the culprit, meekly.
“You must be feeling very tired.”
“I’m feeling more like boned goose than anything else, especially in
the legs. By-the-way, I wonder if Farquhar will leave his to look for
the strayed lamb?”
“Let him; it won’t do him any harm.”
Lucian’s eyes opened wide; Farquhar had described the ladies of
Monkswell in picture-making phrases, and he was trying to fit this
vivid young beauty into some one of the frames provided, which all
seemed too strait. “Am I speaking to Miss Maude?” he asked at a
venture, choosing the likeliest.
“Oh no. I am Mirabelle Fane, and this is my brother Bernard.”
“The dickens you are!” said Lucian to himself; for Farquhar, in
relating the adventure of Mr. Fane and the copper, had not mentioned
Miss Fane. Her foreign name and intonation caught Lucian’s ear, and he
asked if she were French.
“My mother was Comtesse de Beaufort,” Dolly told him, and her naïve
pride was quaint and pretty. Lucian mentioned Paris, and she fastened
upon him with a string of eager questions, but put him to silence
before half were answered, by declaring that he had talked too much.
“I’ve been off the silent list this fortnight past,” Lucian pleaded.
“But you are already overtired. You ought to lie down directly you get
in, and take a dose of cod-liver oil.”
“I take cod-liver oil three times a day,” Lucian assured her, with
equal gravity.
“How? In port wine?”
“I should consider that a sacrilege. No; I will describe the
operation,” said Lucian, warming to his subject, which in any of his
many conversations with pretty girls he had never discussed before.
“I squeeze half a lemon into a wineglass, so; then I pour the oil in
on it; next I squeeze the juice of the other half-lemon into another
wineglass; and finally I swallow first the lemon plus oil and then the
lemon solus. It is a process which requires great nicety and precision.
Farquhar is not so careful as I could wish. Of course, it is nothing to
him if I suffer.”
“Port wine would be far more nourishing than lemon-juice,” Dolly
asseverated, knitting her brows. “Or milk would be better. Have you
ever tried goat’s milk?”
“I have not; is it a sovereign specific?”
“I have known it work wonderful cures on emaciated people. How much do
you weigh?”
“Six stone eleven, I believe.”
“That is far too little. You should test your weight every day—are you
laughing at me?”
“I’m awfully sorry!” said Lucian, who certainly was. “But, Miss Fane,
what a nurse you would make! I was expecting you to feel my pulse, and
take my temperature, and look at my tongue.”
“So I was intending to do; I have a clinical thermometer at home,”
Dolly proudly answered. “I do not know how to behave. I have never
learned any manners.”
“Say you’ve never learned customs; manners come by nature.”
Lucian’s smile was irresistible.
“Mine come very badly, then,” said Dolly, smiling back at him; “for
when we get in you will certainly have to lie down; and, what’s more, I
_shall_ give you a glass of goat’s milk.”
VI
HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY
A royal stag, whose many-branched and palmate antlers showed that
he had seen at least ten springs, looked down upon the mantel-piece
of Noel Farquhar’s library; a huge elk fronted him across the room.
This style of decoration, which took its origin in the simple skull
palisades of primitive Britain and latter-day Africa, which was
handed down by the traditions of Tower Hill, and which is rampant in
the modern hall, had in Noel Farquhar a devotee. The walls of his
smoking-room bristled with the heads of digested enemies. Thither the
two men repaired after dinner on Christmas night, taking with them a
decanter of mid-century port, cigars of indubitable excellence, and a
dish of nuts for Lucian, who took a childlike interest in extracting
and peeling walnuts without breaking the kernel. Farquhar was inclined
to be silent, in which mood Lucian, the student of the abnormal, found
him specially interesting.
“Queer chap you are Farquhar,” he suddenly remarked. “Why didn’t you
ever tell me about the fascinating Fanes?”
“Didn’t I? I thought I had.” Farquhar did not think any such thing, and
Lucian knew it. “The day I went there Miss Dolly Fane stopped me in the
hall, and would know whether I thought she’d make an actress. An odd
girl.”
“Well, and what did you say to her?”
“Said she would. I couldn’t do otherwise, could I?”
“My immaculate friend, I’m afraid the charms of Miss Fane have
persuaded you into a statement which is very remarkably near to a L, I,
E, lie. At the least, you were disingenuous, decidedly.”
“Who says I am immaculate? Not I. You thrust virtues upon me and then
cry out when I don’t come up to your notions of an archangel.”
“And your church-going and your alms-giving and your brand-new coppers
and general holiness? Eh, sonny?”
“I’ve a creed, as four-fifths of the men down here are supposed to
have; but whereas they deny in their acts what they repeat with their
tongues, I prefer to perform what I profess. There’s a fine lack of
logic about the way men regard their faith; each time they repeat
their Credo they’re self-condemned fools. Well, I don’t relish making a
fool of myself. Either I’ll be an infidel, and thus set myself free, or
else I’ll act up to what I say. For that you praise me. Now, the only
virtue to which I do lay claim is patience, of which I think I possess
an extraordinary store.”
Lucian peeled a walnut with painstaking earnestness, and ate it with
salt and pepper. The shell he flicked across at Farquhar, who had
fallen into a brown study and was looking very grim. He looked up with
a quick, involuntary smile.
“Did you shoot all these horned beasties yourself?” Lucian inquired,
introducing the elk and the stag with a wave of the hand.