Transcriber's Notes.
Differences in hyphenation of specific words and missing punctuation
have been rectified where applicable.
Other changes made are noted at the end of the book.
MARGARET MALIPHANT
A Novel
BY
MRS. COMYNS CARR
AUTHOR OF "PAUL CREW'S STORY" ETC.
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1889
PROLOGUE.
It is twilight upon the marsh: the land at the foot of the hill lies
a level of dim monotony, and even the sea beyond is lost in mystery.
In the middle of the plain one solitary homestead, with its clump of
trees, stands out just a little darker than anything else, and from
afar there comes to me the sound of the sea, sweetly lulling, as it has
come to me ever since I was a little child. A chill breeze creeps up
among the aspens on the cliff, and for a moment there steals over me
the sense of loneliness of ten years ago, and I seem to see once more
a tall, dark figure thread his way down among the trees, and disappear
forever onto the wide plain. But this is only for a moment; for as
I look, the past lies stretched, as the plain is stretched, before
me--vivid, yet distant as a dream. The white mill detaches itself upon
the dark hill-side, the cattle rest upon the quiet marsh; and still
the sound of the sea comes to me, tenderly murmuring, as it did when I
was a happy child, and tells me of a present that is wide and fair as,
above the lonely land, the coming night is blue and vast.
CHAPTER I.
My sister Joyce is older than I am. At the time of which I am thinking
she was twenty-one, and I was barely nineteen. We were the only
children of Farmer Maliphant of Knellestone Grange, in the county
of Sussex. The Maliphants were an old family. Their names were on
the oldest tombstones in the graveyard of the abbey, whose choir and
ruined transepts were all that was left standing of a splendid church
that had been the mother of a great monastery, and of many other
churches in the popish days, when our town was a feature in English
history. I am not sure that our family dated as far back as that. I
had read of knights in helmets and coats of mail skirmishing beneath
the city wall, of which there were still fragments standing, and
of gallant captains bringing the King's galleys to port in the bay
that had become marsh-land, and I hoped that there might have been
Maliphants too, riding up and down the hill under the gate-ways that
were now ivy-grown; but I am afraid that, even if the family had been
in existence at the time, they would only have been archers, shooting
their arrows from behind the turrets on the hill.
At all events--to leave romancing alone--Maliphants had owned or rented
land upon the Udimore hills and the downs of Brede for more than three
hundred years, and it must have been nearly as long as that that they
had lived in the old stone house overlooking the Romney Marsh. For
almost all our land had been a manor of the old abbey, and had been
granted to my father's family at the dissolution of the monasteries
in 1540, and it was not much more than a century since the Maliphants
had been obliged to sell most of it to the ancestors of him who was
now squire at the big house. But they had never left the old home,
renting the land that they had once owned, and tilling the soil that
they had once been lords of. Our house was the oldest house in the
place, antiquaries testifying to the fact that it was built of the same
foreign stone that fashioned the walls of the old abbey; and our name
was the oldest name, a fact which my father, democrat as he was, never
really forgot. But we were not so well-to-do as we had once been, even
in the memory of living folk.
Family portraits of ladies in scanty gowns and high waists, and of
gallants in ruffled shirts, made pleasant pictures in my fancy,
and there were whispered stories of kegs of spirits stored at dead
of night in the old cellars beneath the house in my grandfather's
time, and of mother's old Mechlin lace having been brought, at the
risk of bold lives, in the merry little fishing-smacks that defied
the revenue-cutters. But smuggling was a dead art in our time, and
respectable folk would have been ashamed to buy smuggled goods. We
lived the uneventful life of our neighbors, and were no longer the
great people that we had been even in my grandfather's time; for
farming was not now so lucrative.
My sister Joyce was very handsome. I have not seen much of the world,
but I am sure that any one would have said so. She was tall, taller
than I am, and I am not short, and she was slight, and fair as a rose.
There was a sort of gentle Quaker-like dignity about Joyce which I have
never seen in one so young. She had it of our mother. Both women were
very tall, and both bore their height bravely. Sometimes, it is true,
when Joyce walked along the dark passages of the old Grange, her arms
full of sweet-scented linen, and bending her little head to pass under
the low door-ways, or when she made the jam in the kitchen, or pats
of butter in the dairy, she stooped just a little over her work; but
when--of a June evening--she would come across the lawn with her hands
full of guelder-roses and peonies for the parlor, no one could have
said that she was too tall, so erect and gracefully did she seem to
flit across the earth.
Of course I did not consciously notice these things when I was
nineteen; but as I think of her again now, I can see that it was not
at all to be wondered at that the country-folk used to talk of Joyce
Maliphant as a poor slip of a thing, not fit to be a countryman's
wife. There was an over-sensitiveness about her--a sort of tremulous
reserve--that marked her as belonging to a different order of beings.
It was not that she was weak either in mind or in body. Joyce would
often surprise one by her sudden purposes; and as for fatigue, that
slender figure could work all day without being tired, and though the
cheek was as dainty as the petal of a flower, it had nothing frail
about it: it told of health, just as did the clearness of the blue eye
and the wealth of the rippling auburn hair.
Joyce kept her complexion, partly because she was less out-of-doors
than I was; but if I had known that I could have had her lovely
skin instead of my own freckled face, I do not believe that I would
have changed with her. No doubt mother was right, and I might have
kept that--my one good point--if I had cared to. Red-haired people
generally do have fresh skins, and my hair is just about the color
of Virginia-creeper leaves in autumn, or of the copper kettle in the
sunlight. I was very much ashamed of it in those days.
Luckily, I gave little heed to my appearance. I was quite content
to leave the monopoly of the family beauty to my sister, if I might
have freedom to scour the marsh-land with Taff, the big St. Bernard;
and so long as my father treated me like a boy, and let me help him
superintend the farm, he might banter as much as he liked about
"Margaret's gray eyes that looked a different color every day," and
even rail at me for heavy eyelids that didn't look a bit as if I led a
healthy out-door life. But I did: when there was neither washing nor
baking nor butter-making to help with, I was out-of-doors from morning
to night. When I was a child it was with Reuben Ruck the shepherd, and
his black collie Luck, who was the best sheep-dog in the country.
Reuben taught me many things--where to find the forms of the hares upon
the marsh-land, the nests of the butcher-birds and yellow-hammers and
wheat-ears that were all peculiar to our home; he taught me to surprise
the purple herons upon the sands or by the dikes at eventide, to find
the pewits' eggs upon the shingle, to tame the squirrels in the Manor
woods, to catch gray mullet in the Channel, to spear eels in the dikes,
to know when every bird's brood came forth, to welcome the various
arrivals of the swifts and martins and swallows.
At the time of which I write, Reuben had had to give up his shepherd's
duties, owing to ill health, and used to do odd jobs about the house
and garden; but he had bred the love of the country in me, and now it
was useless for mother to bemoan my wandering habits, or even for our
old nurse, Deborah, to take me to task for not caring more about the
home pursuits in which my sister so brilliantly excelled. Whatever
related to a bird or a beast I would attend to with alacrity; but as
for household duties, I only got them over as quickly as I could, that
I might the sooner be out in the air. I knew every hill's crest inland,
every headland out to sea, every shepherd's track across the marsh,
every plank across the channels. The shepherds and the coast-guards
were all my friends alike, and I think there was not one of them
who would not have braved danger rather than I should come to harm,
although I do not suppose that I ever exchanged more than six words'
conversation with any of them in all my life. Words were not necessary
between us.
"Farmer Maliphant's little miss" had always been a favorite, and
"Farmer Maliphant's little miss" was always his youngest daughter. I
like to remember the title now; I like to remember that if Joyce was
mother's right hand in the house, I was father's companion in the
fields. I was very fond of father; I was very fond of any praise of
his. I did not get on so well with mother. I suppose daughters often do
not get on so well with their mothers. For though Joyce was a fresh,
neat, deft girl, just after mother's own heart, and I know that she
thought there was none to equal her, they never got on well together.
I was always fighting her battles. She was too gentle, or too proud--I
was never sure which--to fight them for herself. A cross word, only
spoken in the excitement of a domestic crisis--which meant worlds to a
woman to whom house-keeping was an art--would shut Joyce up in an armor
of reserve for days, and I often laughed at her even while I fought for
her.
As for me, I used to think I could manage mother. I wish I had the dear
old days back again! It's little managing I would care to do. It came
to very little good. I believe that every quarrel I had for Joyce only
did her harm with mother; I was such a headstrong girl that it took a
deal to set me down, and I am afraid that she got some of the thrusts
that were meant for me in consequence.
One of the special, though tacit, subjects of difference between
mother and myself was upon the choice of a husband for my sister. I
quite agreed with the country-folk, that she was not suited to be a
countryman's wife, but I did not agree with mother's idea of a suitable
husband for her.
Mother was a very ambitious woman. She wanted us to rise in the world;
she wanted us to hold once more something of the position she knew the
family had once held. She was not a highly educated woman herself, but
she was a shrewd woman. She had had us educated to the best of her
abilities, a little better than other farmers' daughters; if she had
had her way, she would have sent me, as the cleverer, to school in
London. But father would have none of it. He never denied her a whim
for herself, but he did not hold with boarding-school learning.
I was left to finish my education by living my life. But mother was
none the less ambitious for us, and being an old-fashioned woman, her
ambition aspired to good marriages for us. And I--foolish girl that I
was--chose to think that the particular man whom she hoped that Joyce's
beauty would secure was a very commonplace lover, and not at all worthy
of her. In the first place, he occupied a better position in the world
than she did, and would probably consider that he was raising her by
the marriage, which my pride resented. For, after all, it was only
what the world considered a better position; he owned the land that we
worked. But the land had only been bought by his ancestors; whereas our
forefathers had owned it for more than two hundred years before that,
so that we considered that we were of the finer stock.
As I set this down now in black and white I smile to myself; it
represents so very badly the real relations that existed between our
two families, for the man of whom I speak has always been to us the
best and stanchest of friends, and even at that time there was hearty
simple intercourse between us that was quite uninfluenced by difference
of rank or party-spirit. But the words express a certain side of our
feelings, especially a certain side of my own particular feelings, and
therefore they shall stand.
The man whom mother hoped Joyce might marry was Squire Broderick. Ever
since we girls could remember, he had been squire at the big house, for
his father had died when he was scarcely twenty-one, and from that time
he had been master of the thousand rooks that used to fly across the
marsh at even, to their homes in the beeches and elms that sheltered
the Manor from the sea-gales.
I remember thinking when I was a child that it was very strange the
rooks should always fly to Squire Broderick's trees rather than to
ours. For we had trees too, although not so many nor so big, and our
house only stood at the other end of the hill, that sloped down on both
sides into the marsh. His house was large and square and regular--a red
brick Elizabethan house--and had a great many more windows and chimneys
than ours had, and a great many more flower-beds on the lawn that
looked out across the marsh to the sea.
But although the Grange had been often added to in the course of its
history, and was therefore irregular in shape and varied in color,
according to the time that the stone had stood the weather, or to the
mosses and ivy that clung to its gray walls, I am sure that it was just
as fine an old structure in its way, with its high-pitched tiled roof
and the lattice-windows, that only looked like eyes in the empty spaces
of solid stone.
We certainly had a better view than the squire. From the low windows
of the front parlor we could see the red-roofed town rise, like a
sentry-tower out of the plain, some three miles away; and, beyond
the ruin of the round stone fortress, lying like a giant asleep in
the tawny marsh-land, we looked across the wide stretch of flat
pasture-land to the storms and the blue of the sea in the distance.
I do not suppose that I was conscious of the strange beauty of this
marsh-land as I am conscious of it now; but I know that I loved
it--though people do say that country-folk have no admiration of
nature--and I know that I was glad that we saw more of it than they did
from the Manor, where a belt of trees had been allowed to grow up and
shut out the view. But the rooks loved that lordly belt of trees, and I
think that, as a child, I envied the squire the rooks. If I did, it was
the only thing I ever did envy him.
As the child of the squire's tenant, and proud of my family pride, it
was born in me rather to dislike him than otherwise for his fine old
house and his many acres. But this was only when something occurred to
remind me of these sentiments--to wit, mother's desire for a marriage
between my sister and the village big-wig. Otherwise I did not think of
him in this light at all, but rather as the provider of the only treats
that ever came our way in that quiet life; for it was he who would make
up a party to take us to the travelling shows in the little town when
they came by, or even sometimes to the larger seaport ten miles off. I
can still remember the school feasts at the Manor when we were little
girls, and the squire had but just come into his own; and how, when the
village tea and cake had been handed round, he would take us two all
over the grounds alone, and give us lovely posies of hot-house flowers
to take back to the Grange parlor.
I can even recollect a ride on his back round the field when I tried
to catch the pony, and how wildly I laughed all the time, making the
meadows ring with my merriment; but that must have been when I was
scarcely more than five years old. Since then he had been a husband and
a father, and now he was a widower, and in my eyes quite an old man;
although, I suppose, he can have been little more than five-and-thirty.
I do not remember Mrs. Broderick. I asked mother about her once, and
she told me that she had died when I was scarcely ten years old. And
from our old servant, Deborah, I had further gleaned that it was in
giving birth to a little son, who had died a year after her, and that
mother could not bear to speak of it, because it was just at the same
time that we lost our little brother John. Both children had died of
scarlet-fever, and mother had nursed the squire's motherless boy before
her own. I suppose that was why the squire was always so tender and
reverential to her.
I know I was sorry for the squire; for it seemed hard he should have no
heir to all his acres, and should have to live in that big house all
alone. But he did not seem to mind it much: he was always cheery; his
fair, fresh face always with a smile on it; his frank, blue eyes always
bright. It did one good to see him; it was like a breath of fresh air.
I think everybody felt the same thing about him. It was not only that
he was generous, a just landlord, "always as good as his word"--there
was something more in it than that; there was something that made
everybody love him, apart from anything that he did. And as I look back
now to the past, I can see that the squire can have had no easy time of
it among the people. He had a thorn in the flesh, and that thorn was my
father.
The squire was an ardent Conservative, and father was--well,
whatever he was, he was opposed to the squire; and as he was one of
those people who have the rare gift of imparting their convictions
and their enthusiasms to others, he had great influence among the
working-classes, and his influence was not favorable to the squire's
party. And yet father was no politician. I knew nothing about shades
in these matters at that time, and because father was not a Tory
I imagined that he must be a Liberal. But he was not a Liberal,
still less was he a Radical, in the party sense of the word. As I
have said, he belonged to no party. The reforms that he wanted were
social reforms, and they could only be won by the patient struggles
of the people who required them. That was what he used to say, and I
suppose that was why he devoted all his strength to encouraging the
working-classes, and cared so little for their existing rulers. But I
did not understand this at the time; it was not till long afterwards
that I appreciated all that my father was. Then it occurred to me to
wonder how he had come by such advanced ideas living in a quiet country
village, and I remembered of a sudden some words that he had said to me
one day when I had asked him about a little crayon sketch that always
hung above the writing-table in his business-room. It was the portrait
of a young man with a firm square chin, a sensitive mouth, liquid,
fiery eyes. He wore his hair brushed back off his broad forehead, and
had altogether a foreign air. It was a fascinating face.
"That, Meg," he had said, "was a great man--a man who made war against
the strong, who helped the poor and down-trodden, and fought for the
laws of justice and liberty. He gave his affections, his goods, his
brains, and his life to the service of others. He died poor, but was
rich. He was a real Christian. His name was Camille Lambert."
He said no more, and I never liked to broach the subject again; for
mother had told me afterwards that he had had a romantic friendship
for the young Frenchman shortly after her engagement to him, and that
he could never bear to speak of him after the time when he laid him to
rest under the shadows of the old abbey church.
Mother could tell me little about him beyond the fact that he was some
years older than father, and that his parents had belonged to the
remnants of that colony of French refugees who had inhabited our town
during the last century, and still left their names to many existing
houses. Indeed, I thought no more of it at the time; but when long
afterwards I remembered the matter, I hunted up a little manuscript
pamphlet in father's handwriting, telling the story of his friend's
life.
Camille Lambert was a disciple of St. Simon, who had died when my
father was yet but a lad. Of an eager and romantic temperament, his
enthusiasm had been early fired by those exalted doctrines, and he had
given all his substance to the great "school," which had just opened
its branch houses in the provinces.
In all the works connected with it, Camille Lambert had taken an active
part; and when financial troubles and dissensions between the leaders
led popular ardor to cool and the scheme to be declared unpractical,
he broke his heart over the failure of his hopes, and came home to the
little English village to die.
As I read those pages in after years, I felt that it was no wonder that
such an enthusiasm should have kindled a kindred flame in the heart of
a man so just and so tender as I knew my dear father to be. I love to
think of that friendship now; it explains a great deal to me which has
sometimes been a puzzle, when I have looked at my father's character
with the more mature eyes of my present years. But in those days I did
not think deeply enough for anything to be a puzzle. I was proud of my
father's influence among the country-folk; I liked to hear the shouts
of applause with which he was greeted when he stood up to speak at
winter evening assemblies in the old town-hall. I knew that the crusade
he preached was that of the poor against the rich; and a confusion had
arisen in my mind as to our attitude towards the squire. I fancied I
noticed a restive feeling in father towards the man to whom he paid the
rent of his land; and when I guessed at that secret hope in mother's
heart, I began to class the squire with "the rich" against whom he
waged war in theory, and forgot the many occasions in which they were
one at heart in the performance of kindly and generous actions.
My mood did not last long, for the old habit of a lifetime was stronger
than a mood, and the squire was our friend, but for the moment that
was my mood. The squire belonged to an antagonistic class; perhaps,
even worse than that in my eyes, he was a middle-aged man, and Joyce
must not marry him. Mother never spoke of her hopes to me. It was old
Deborah who sometimes discussed them; she always did discuss the family
concerns far more freely than any one else in the house. She was with
us when Joyce was born, and it was natural she should talk most of what
mattered to those whom she loved most in the world. But Deborah could
not be expected to enter into the delicacy of such a situation, and I
felt sure that on me fell the duty of fighting to the death before my
beautiful sister should be sacrificed to commonplace affluence, instead
of shining in the world of romance that I loved to fancy for her.