The last week of September found Charles back at Stoke Moreton to
receive the "friends" of whom Mrs. Alwynn spoke. People whose partridges
he had helped to kill were now to be gathered from the east and from the
west to help to kill his. From the north also guests were coming, were
leaving their mountains to--But the remainder of the line is invidious.
The Hope-Actons had written to offer a visit at Stoke Moreton on the
strength of an old promise to Charles, a promise so old that he had
forgotten it, until reminded, that next time they were passing they
would take his house on their way. They had offered their visit exactly
at the same time for which he had just invited the Alwynns and Ruth.
Charles felt that they were not quite the people whom he would have
arranged to meet each other, but, as Fate had so decreed it, he
acquiesced calmly enough.
But when Lady Mary also wrote tenderly from Scarborough, to ask if she
could be of any use helping to entertain his guests, he felt it
imperative to draw the line, and wrote a grateful effusion to his aunt,
saying that he could not think of asking her to leave a place where he
felt sure she was deriving spiritual and temporal benefit, in order to
assist at so unprofitable a festivity as a shooting-party. He mentioned
casually that Lady Grace Lawrence, Miss Deyncourt, and Miss Wyndham were
to be of the party, which details he imagined might have an interest for
her amid her graver reflections.
The subject of Ruth's coming certainly had a prominent place in his own
graver reflections. For the last fortnight, as he went from house to
house, he had been wondering how he could meet her again, and, when Mr.
Alwynn's letter concerning the charters was forwarded to him, a sudden
inspiration made him then and there send the invitation which had
arrived at Slumberleigh Rectory a few days before. He groaned in spirit
as he wrote it, at the thought of Mrs. Alwynn disporting herself,
dressed in the brightest colors, among his other guests; and it was with
a feeling of thankfulness that he found Ruth and Mr. Alwynn were coming
without her.
He had felt very little interest so far in the party, which, with the
exception of the Hope-Actons, had been long arranged, but now he found
himself looking forward to it with actual impatience, and he returned
home a day before the time, instead of an hour or two before his guests
were expected, as was his wont.
The Wyndhams and Hope-Actons, with Lady Grace in tow, were the first to
appear upon the scene. Mr. Alwynn and Ruth arrived a few hours later,
amid a dropping fire of young men and gun-cases, who kept on turning up
at intervals during the afternoon, and, according to the mysterious
nocturnal habits of their kind, till late into the night.
If ever a man appears to advantage it is on his native hearth, and as
Charles stood on his in the long hall, where it was the habit of the
house to assemble before dinner, Ruth found that her attempts at
conversation were rather thrown away upon Lady Grace, with whom she had
been renewing an old acquaintance, and whose interest, for the time
being, entirely centred in the carved coats of arms and heraldic designs
with which the towering white stone chimney-piece was covered.
Lady Grace was one of those pretty, delicate creatures who remind one of
a very elaborate rose-bud. There was an appearance of ultra-refinement
about her, a look of that refinement which is in itself a weakness, a
poverty of blood, so to speak, the opposite and more pleasing but
equally unhealthy extreme of coarseness. She looked very pretty as,
having left Ruth, she stood by Charles, passing her little pink hand
over the lowest carvings, dim and worn with the heat of many generations
of fires, and listened with rapt attention to his answers to her
questions.
"And the Hall is so beautiful," she said, looking round with childlike
curiosity at the walls covered with weapons, and with a long array of
armor, and at the massive pillars of carved white stone which rose up
out of the polished floor to meet the raftered ceiling. "It is so--so
uncommon."
Whatever Charles's other failings may have been, he was an admirable
host. The weather was fine. What can be finer than September when she is
in a good-humor? The two first days of Ruth's visit were unalloyed
enjoyment. It seemed like a sudden return to the old life with Lady
Deyncourt, when the round of country visits regularly succeeded the
season in London. Of Mr. Alwynn she saw little or nothing. He was buried
in the newly discovered charters. Of Charles she saw a good deal, more
than at the time she was quite aware of, for he seemed to see a great
deal of everybody, from Lady Grace to the shy man of the party, who at
Stoke Moreton first conceived the idea that he was an acquisition to
society. But, whether Charles made the opportunities or not which came
so ready to his hand, still he found time, amid the pressure of his
shooting arrangements and his duties as host, to talk to Ruth.
One day there was cub-hunting in the gray of the early morning, to which
she and Miss Wyndham went with Charles and others of the party who could
bear to get up betimes. Losing sight of the others after a time, Ruth
and Charles rode back alone together, when the sun was high, walking
their tired horses along the black-berried lanes, and down the long
green rides cut in the yellowing bracken of the park.
"And so you are going to winter in Rome?" said Charles, who had the
previous day, contrary to his wont, accepted an invitation to
Slumberleigh Hall for the middle of October. "I sometimes go to Rome
for a few weeks when the shooting is over. And are you glad or sorry at
the prospect of leaving your Cranford?"
"Very sorry."
"Why?"
"I have seen an entirely new phase of life at Slumberleigh."
"I think I can guess what you mean," said Charles, gravely. "One does
not often meet any one like Mr. Alwynn."
"No. I was thinking of him. Until I came to Slumberleigh the lines had
not fallen to me in very clerical places, so my experience is limited;
but he seems to me to be the only clergyman I have known who does not
force on one a form of religion that has been dead and buried for
years."
"The clergy have much to answer for on that head," said Charles with
bitterness. "I sometimes like and respect them as individuals, but I do
not love them as a class. One ought to make allowance for the fact that
they are tied and bound by the chain of their Thirty-nine Articles; that
at three-and-twenty they shut the doors deliberately on any new and
possibly unorthodox idea; and it is consequently unreasonable to expect
from them any genuine freedom or originality of thought. I can forgive
them their assumption of superiority, their inability to meet honest
scepticism with anything like fairness, their continual bickering among
themselves; but I cannot forgive them the harm they are doing to
religion, the discredit they are bringing upon it by their bigoted views
and obsolete ideas. They busy themselves doing good--that is the worst
of it; they mean well, but they do not see that, in the mean while,
their Church is being left unto them desolate; though perhaps, after
all, the Church having come to be what it is, that is the best thing
that can happen."
"There are men among the clergy who will not come under that sweeping
accusation," said Ruth. "Look at some of the London churches. Are they
desolate? Goodness and earnestness will be a power to the end of time,
however narrow the accompanying creed may be."
"That is true, but we have heads as well as hearts. Goodness and
earnestness appeal to the heart alone. The intellect is left out in the
cold. However good and earnest, and eloquent one of these great
preachers may be, the reason we go to hear him is not only because of
that, but because he appears to be thinking in a straight line, because
he seems to recognize the long-resisted claim of the intellect, and we
hope he will have a word to say to us. He promises well, but listen to
him a little longer, follow his thought, and you will begin to see that
he will only look for truth within a certain area, that his steps are
describing an arc, that he is tethered. Give him time enough, and you
will see him tread out the complete circle in which he and his brethren
are equally bound to walk."
"You forget," said Ruth, "that you are regarding the Church from the
stand-point of the cultivated and intellectual class, for whom the
Church has ceased to represent religion; but there are lots of people
neither cultivated nor intellectual--women even of our own class are not
so as a rule--to whom the Church, with its ritual and dogma, is a real
help and comfort. If, as you say, it does not suit the more highly
educated, I think you have no right to demand that it _should_ suit what
is, after all, a very small minority. It would be most unfair if it
did."
Charles did not answer. He had been looking at her, and thinking how few
women could have disagreed with him as quietly and resolutely as this
young girl riding at his side, carefully avoiding chance rabbit-holes as
she spoke.
"There is, and there always will be, a certain number of people, not
only among the clergy," she went on, "who, as somebody says, 'put the
church clock back,' and are unable to see that they cannot alter the
time of day for all that; only they can and do prevent many
well-intentioned people from trusting to it any longer. But there are
others here and there whom a dogmatic form of religion has been quite
unable to spoil, whose more simple turn of mind draws out of the very
system that appears to you so lifeless and effete, a real faith, a
personal possession, which no one can take from them."
Her eyes sparkled as she spoke, and Charles saw that she was thinking of
Mr. Alwynn.
"He has got it," he said, slowly, "this something which we all want, and
for the greater part never find. He has got it. To see and recognize it
early is a great thing," he continued, earnestly. "To disbelieve in it
in early life, and cavil at all the caricatures and imitations, and only
come to find out its reality comparatively later on, is a great
misfortune--a great misfortune."
She felt that he was speaking of himself, and they rode on in silence,
each grave with a sense of mutual understanding and companionship. They
forded the stream, and trotted up the little village street, the
cottagers gazing admiringly after them till they disappeared within the
great arched gate-way. And Charles looked at his old house as they
paced up the wide drive, and wondered whether it were indeed possible
that the lonely years he had spent in it had come to an end at last--at
last.
Ruth had noticed that he had lost no opportunity of talking to her, and
when she heard him conversing with Lady Grace, or plunging into
fashionable slang with Miss Wyndham, found herself admiring the facility
with which he adapted himself to different people.
The following afternoon, as she was writing in the library, she was
amused to see that he found it incumbent on him to write too, even going
so far as to produce a letter from Molly, whose correspondence he said
he invariably answered by return.
"You seem very fond of giving Molly pleasure," said Ruth.
"I am glad to see, Miss Deyncourt, that you are beginning to estimate me
at my true worth."
"You have it in your power just now to give a great pleasure," said
Ruth, earnestly, laying down the pen which she had taken up.
"How?"
"It seems so absurd when it is put into words, but--by asking Mrs.
Alwynn some time to stay here. She has always longed to see Stoke
Moreton, because--well, because Mrs. Thursby has; and real, positive,
actual tears were shed that she could not come when you asked us."
"Is it possible?" said Charles. "It is the first time that any letter of
mine has caused emotion of that description."
"Ah! you don't know how important the smallest things appear if one
lives in a little corner of the world where nothing ever happens. If
Mrs. Alwynn had been able to come, her visit would have been an event
which she would have remembered for years. I assure you, I myself, from
having lived at Slumberleigh eight months, became quite excited at the
prospect of so much dissipation."
And Ruth leaned back in her chair with a little laugh.
Charles looked narrowly at her and his face fell.
"I am glad you told me," he said, after a moment's pause. "People
generally mention these things about ten years afterwards; when there is
probably no possibility of doing anything. Thank you."
Ruth was disconcerted by the sudden gravity of his tone, and almost
regretted the impulse that had made her speak. She forgot it, however,
in the _tableaux vivants_ which they were preparing for the evening, in
which she and Charles illustrated the syllable _nun_ to enthusiastic
applause. Ruth represented the nun, engaged in conversation, over the
lowest imaginable convent wall, with Charles, in all the glory of his
cocked hat and deputy-lieutenant's uniform, who, while he held the nun's
hand in one of his, pointed persuasively with the other towards an
elaborately caparisoned war-horse, trembling beneath the joint weight of
a yeomanry saddle and a side-saddle attached behind it, which
considerably overlapped the charger's impromptu fur boa tail.
After the _tableaux_ there was dancing in acting costume, at which the
two men, who acted the war-horse between them were the only persons to
protest, Lady Grace being beautiful as an improvised Anne Boleyn, and
the shy man resplendent in a fancy dress of Charles's.
When the third morning came, Ruth gave a genuine sigh at the thought
that it was the last day. Lady Grace, who was also leaving the following
morning, may be presumed to have echoed it with far more sorrow. The
Wyndhams were going that day, and disappeared down the drive, waving
handkerchiefs, and carriage-rugs, and hats on sticks, out of the
carriage-windows, as is the custom of really amusing people when taking
leave.
In the afternoon, Lady Grace and Charles went off for a ride alone
together, to see some ruin in which Lady Grace had manifested a sudden
interest, the third horse, which had been brought round for another of
the men, being sent back to the stables, his destined rider having
decided, at the eleventh hour, to join the rest of the party in a little
desultory rabbit shooting in the park, which he proceeded to do with
much chuckling over his extraordinary penetration and tact.
The elder ladies went out driving, looking, as seen from an upper
window, like four poached eggs on a dish; and the coast being clear,
Ruth, who had no love of driving, escaped with her paint-box to the
garden, where she was making a sketch of Stoke Moreton.
Some houses, like people, have dignity. Stoke Moreton, with ivy creeping
up its mellow sandstone, and peeping into its long lines of mullioned
windows, stood solemn and stately amid its level gardens; the low sun,
bringing out every line of carved stone frieze and quaint architrave,
firing all the western windows, and touching the tall heads of the
hollyhocks and sunflowers, that stood in ordered regiments within their
high walls of clipped box. And Ruth dabbed and looked, and dabbed again,
until she suddenly found that if she put another stroke she would spoil
all, and also that her hands were stiff with cold. After a few admiring
glances at her work, she set off on a desultory journey round the
gardens to get warm, and finally, seeing an oak door in the garden-wall
open, wandered through it into the church-yard. The church door was
open, too, and Ruth, after reading some of the epitaphs on the
tombstones, went in.
It was a common little church enough, with a large mortuary chapel,
where all the Danvers family reposed; ancient Danvers lying in armor,
with their mailed hands joined, beside their wives; more modern Danvers
kneeling in bass-relief in colored plaster and execrable taste in
recesses. The last generations were there also; some of them
anticipating the resurrection and feathered wings, but for the most part
still asleep. Charles's mother was there, lying in white marble among
her husband's people, with the child upon her arm which she had taken
away with her.
And in the middle of the chapel was the last Sir Charles Danvers, whom
his brother, Sir George, the father of the present owner, had succeeded.
The evening sun shone full on the kneeling soldier figure, leaning on
its sword, and on the grave, clear-cut face, which had a look of
Charles. The long, beautifully modelled hands, clasped over the battered
steel sword-hilt, were like Charles's too. Ruth read the inscription on
the low marble pedestal, relating how he had fallen in the taking of the
Redan, and then looked again. And gradually a great feeling of pity rose
in her heart for the family which had lived here for so many
generations, and which seemed now so likely to die out. Providence does
not seem to care much for old families, or to value long descent. Rather
it seems to favor the new race--the Browns, and the Joneses, and the
Robinsons, who yesterday were not, and who to-day elbow the old county
families from the place which has known them from time immemorial.
"I suppose Molly will some day marry a Smith," said Ruth to herself,
"and then it will be all over. I don't think I will come and see her
here when she is married."
With which reflection she returned to the house, and, after disturbing
Mr. Alwynn, who was deep in a catalogue of the Danvers manuscripts, in
which it was his firm conviction that he should find some mention of the
charters, she went into the library, and wondered which of the several
thousands of books would interest her till the others came in.
The library was a large room, the walls of which were lined with books
from the floor to the ceiling. In order to place the higher shelves
within reach, a light balcony of polished oak ran round the four walls,
about equidistant from the floor and the ceiling. Ruth went up the tiny
corkscrew staircase in the wall, which led to the balcony, and settling
herself comfortably in the low, wide window-seat, took out one volume
after another of those that came within her reach. These shelves by the
window where she was sitting had somehow a different look to the rest.
Old books and new, white vellum and card-board, were herded together
without any apparent order, and with no respect of bindings. Here a
splendid morocco "Novum Organum" was pushed in beside a cheap and much
worn edition of Marcus Aurelius; there Emerson and Plato and Shakespeare
jostled each other on the same shelf, while, just below, "Don Quixote"
was pressed into the uncongenial society of Carlyle on one side and
Confucius on the other. As she pulled out one book after another, she
noticed that the greater part of them had Charles's name in them. Ruth's
curiosity was at once aroused. No doubt this was the little corner in
his great house in which he chose to read, and these were his favorite
books which he had arranged so close to his hand. If we can judge our
fellow-creatures at all, which is doubtful, it is by the books they
read, and by those which, having read, they read again. She looked at
the various volumes in the window-seat beside her with new interest, and
opened the first one she took up. It was a collection of translations
from the Persian poets, gentlemen of the name of Jemshíd, Sádi, and
Hafiz, of whom she had never heard. As she turned over the pages, she
heard the ringing of horses' hoofs, and, looking out from her point of
observation, saw Charles and Lady Grace cantering up the short wide
approach, and clattering out of sight again behind the great stone
archway. She turned back to her book, and was reading an ode here and
there, wondering to see how the same thoughts that work within us to-day
had lived with man so many hundred years ago, when her eye was caught by
some writing on the margin of a page as she turned it over. A single
sentence on the page was strongly underlined:
_"True self-knowledge is knowledge of God."_
Jemshíd was a wise man, Ruth thought, if he had found out that; and then
she read, in Charles's clear handwriting in the margin:
_"With this compare 'Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it
will ever bubble up if thou wilt ever dig.'--Marcus Aurelius."_
At this moment Charles came into the library, and looked up to where she
was sitting, half hidden from below by the thickness of the wall.
"What, studying?" he called, gayly. "I saw you sitting in the window as
I rode up. I might have known that if you were lost sight of for half
an hour you would be found improving yourself in some exasperating way."
And he ran up the little stairs and came round the balcony towards her.
"My own special books, I see--Eve, as usual, surreptitiously craving for
a knowledge of good and evil. What have you got hold of?"
The remainder of the window-seat was full of books; so, to obtain a
better view of what she was reading, he knelt down by her, and looked at
the open book on her knee.
Ruth did not attempt to close it. She felt guilty, she hardly knew of
what. After a moment's pause she said:
"I plead guilty. I was curious. I saw these were your own particular
shelves; but I never can resist looking at the books people read."
"Will you be pleased to remember in future that, in contemplating my
character, Miss Deyncourt--a subject not unworthy of your attention--you
are on private property. You are requested to keep on the gravel paths,
and to look at the grounds I am disposed to show you. If, as is very
possible, admiration seizes you, you are at liberty to express it. But
there must be no going round to the back premises, no prying into
corners, no trespassing where I have written up, 'No road.'"
Ruth smiled, and there was a gleam in her eyes which Charles well knew
heralded a retort, when suddenly through the half-open door a silken
rustle came, and Lady Hope-Acton slowly entered the room, as if about to
pass through it on her way to the hall.
Now, kneeling is by no means an attitude to be despised. In church, or
in the moment of presentation to majesty, it is appropriate, even
essential; but it is dependent, like most things, upon circumstances and
environment. No attitude, for instance, could be more suitable and
natural to any one wishing to read the page on which a sitting
fellow-creature was engaged. Charles had found it so. But, as Lady
Hope-Acton sailed into the room, he felt that, however conducive to
study, it was not the attitude in which he would at that moment have
chosen to be found. Ruth felt the same. It had seemed so natural a
moment before, it was so hideously suggestive now.
Perhaps Lady Hope-Acton would pass on through the other door, so widely,
so invitingly open. Neither stirred, in the hope that she might do so.
But in the centre of the room she stopped and sighed--the slow,
crackling sigh of a stout woman in a too well-fitting silk gown.
Charles suddenly felt as if his muddy boots and cords were trying to
catch her eye, as if every book on the shelves were calling to her to
look up.
For a second Ruth and Charles gazed down upon the top of Lady
Hope-Acton's head, the bald place on which showed dimly through her
semi-transparent cap. She moved slightly, as if to go; but no, another
step was drawing near. In another moment Lady Grace came in through the
opposite door in her riding-habit.
Ruth felt that it was now or never for a warning cough; but, as she
glanced at Charles kneeling beside her, she could not give it. Surely
they would pass out in another second. The thought of the two pairs of
eyes which would be raised, and the expression in them was intolerable.
"Grace," said Lady Hope-Acton, with dreadful distinctness, advancing to
meet her daughter, "has he spoken?"
"No," said Lady Grace, with a little sob; "and,"--with a sudden burst of
tears--"oh, mamma, I don't think he ever will."
Oh, to have coughed, to have sneezed, to have choked a moment earlier!
Anything would have been better than this.
"Run up-stairs this moment, then, and change your habit and bathe your
eyes," said Lady Hope-Acton, sharply. "You need not come down till
dinner-time. I will say you are tired."
And then, to the overwhelming relief of those two miserable spectators,
the mother and daughter left the door.
But to the momentary sensation of relief in Ruth's mind a rush of pity
succeeded for the childlike grief and tears; and with and behind it,
like one hurrying wave overtopping and bearing down its predecessor,
came a burning indignation against the cause of that picturesque
emotion.
It is indeed a lamentable peculiarity of our fallen nature that the
moment of relief from the smart of anxiety is seldom marked by so
complete a mental calmness and moderation as could be wished.
Ruth rose slowly, with the book still in her hand, and Charles got off
his knees as best he could, and stood with one hand on the railing of
the balcony, as if to steady himself. His usually pale face was crimson.
Ruth closed the book in silence, and with a dreadful precision put it
back in its accustomed place. Then she turned and faced him, with the
western light full upon her stern face, and another light of contempt
and indignation burning in her direct eyes.
"Poor little girl," she said, in a low distinct voice. "What a triumph
to have succeeded in making her unhappy. She is very young, and she did
not understand the rules of the game. Poor, foolish little girl!"
If he had been red before, he was pale enough now. He drew himself up,
and met her direct gaze without flinching. He did not speak, and she
left him standing in the window, and went slowly along the balcony and
down the little staircase into the room below.
As she was about to leave the room he moved forward suddenly, and said,
"Miss Deyncourt!"
Involuntarily she stopped short, in obedience to the stern authority of
the tone.
"You are unjust."
She did not answer and left the room.