HARBOROUGH OF BYBRIDGE.
Kit Harborough paced the lane restlessly. The rain had ceased but he
still wore his long mackintosh, and in one pocket the unsent telegram
was crushed forgotten. For a moment he stood, then walked his five
yard beat of wet road again. A church-bell sounded on the moist
air,--curfew, they still tolled curfew at Bymouth; it was eight o’clock
and nearly dark in the deep lane. On either hand rose high banks
luxuriant with unclipped nuts and dogwood and sharp-thorned sloes,
the late rain still dripping from every spray; the pleasant scent of
wet ferns filled the air, the pungent flavour of the fungus on some
tree-stump in the hedge mingling with the smell of the drenched grass
growing tall and rank beside the road. The fragrance of the refreshed
earth reached Kit but he hardly knew it, hardly heard the creak of the
hidden grasshoppers in the moist darkness of the banks, hardly saw the
wild flowers glimmering in the roadside grass.
He leaned against a gate and looked across the darkening land,
across the stubble-field whence the corn had been carried, over the
slope of the hill to the village in the hollow, a huddle of roofs
in the gathering gloom, the chimneys sharp against the sky and the
smoke-wreaths hanging low in the wet air. Lights were beginning to
twinkle here and there, one in the house at the corner, the little shop
where he had seen her.
He settled himself against the gate-post and watched. He was
two-and-twenty and had never looked consciously at a woman before.
Two and twenty, and now he had found, among the mouse-traps and
string-balls and miscellaneous gear of a village shop, a little brown
witch with the spell of a dead man’s charm in her eyes, the passion of
a dead woman’s love in her blood!
A partridge rose suddenly on the further side of the stubble-field;
there was a whirr of wings, and then silence again and the soft drip of
the wet trees. Then he heard a swift, light footfall, and saw a little
figure speeding up the lane, perhaps to reach the high ground near the
gate whence to look at the surrounding country in the beauty of this
tearful twilight.
Kit Harborough stepped out of the shadow by the gate to the centre of
the road: the girl stopped abruptly with a little cry.
“I knew you would come,” he said.
He did not know how he knew, or if he really knew; he did not stop to
consider and she did not ask him. “You!” was all she said, “You!”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Oh,” and it seemed almost as if she were distressed. “I--I wanted to
speak to you; I have something I must tell you.”
“Me? I am very glad.”
He was astonished at himself, being a curiously diffident boy in
some respects; so inexperienced, too, that had he stopped to think he
would never have known what to say. But he did not think, he spoke on
impulse, and the words came naturally enough; his only fear was lest
she should escape and he should lose her in the gloom, but even that
was not a real fear; he felt as if he could prevent her.
She was standing in the middle of the road now. “You are glad?” she
said. “That is because you do not know.”
She looked up at him as she spoke and he, because he could not help it,
or because he willed it, or for some other reason, or the want of one,
looked down at her.
Ah the smell of the rain-washed earth and the wood-smoke from the
cottage below the hill, the chirp of hidden grasshoppers, the drip,
drip, drip from the nut-boughs near the gate! Ah youth and ignorance
and the first sweet taste of love and life!
The partridge, disturbed by the girl’s coming, returned to rest
chuckling softly. Kit looked round but did not move; he was not very
close to her; it seemed almost as if he thought the place whereon she
stood was holy ground.
“Bill!”--Polly’s voice rang shrilly--“Bill! Are you up the lane? Come
in at once!” For an instant even the grasshoppers ceased, then--“Bill!
Bill!” came again, but no nearer, Polly did not wish to brave the mud
of the lane needlessly.
“I must go,” Bill said; “and oh,”--with sudden remorse for the lost
moments--“I have not told you!”
“Tell me to-morrow.” He was surprised at his own boldness. “I am
staying here, at the River House, and you--”
“We are staying at the shop--you know.” Bill grew rosy in the darkness.
“Yes, I know,” he answered very softly.
“We go away on Thursday, and I must tell you.”
“Thursday!”
“Bill!” Polly could not make up her mind whether Bill was in the lane
or not.
But the culprit, who was thinking solely of the news she had to tell
Kit Harborough, did not heed Polly. “I must tell you,” she said, “you
must hear, it is so unfair! But when? How?--oh, it is hard!”
“Hard?”
“Bi-ill!”
“I must go!”
“Yes, but first, when shall I see you? When will you tell me?”
“To-morrow early.” Bill instinctively fixed her clandestine affairs
for the time when the less energetic cousins were not awake to their
responsibilities or her proceedings. “Early,--I’ll bathe before
breakfast.”
“So will I; I often go for a swim first thing, and afterwards--”
“I will meet you,”--she finished for him--“about seven; I will tell you
then.”
“Bill! I can hear you talking! You are in the lane!”
“Yes, Polly, and I am going back across the field so I shall be home
before you.” And she was over the gate and down the field almost before
Kit realised she was gone.
Polly turned round and went home; she had never ventured further than
the mouth of the lane, neither was she certain that she heard Bill’s
voice in conversation, but she was exceedingly annoyed with Bill
for having kept her standing there so long in the damp. She was also
slightly annoyed with herself for being kept. “As if it mattered what
Bill did!” Only, as she was out (Bella had a romantic idea that she
wanted to look at the sea by night) she thought she might as well see
what Bill was doing. She had an instinctive feeling, based on her
general distrust of humanity, that Bill was sure to be doing something
wrong.
For the sake of her own satisfaction--Polly not possessing the
disposition which “rejoiceth not in iniquity”--it is a pity she did
not penetrate a little way up the lane, for she certainly would have
seen Kit Harborough had she done so. He stood where he was for a full
minute after Bill had left him, absolutely still in the middle of the
road. It did not matter; he was already so hopelessly late for dinner
at the River House that a minute either way could make no difference.
If he changed very quickly there was a chance that he would be in time
for the cheese; earlier than that he could not expect to appear. Dinner
and such mundane matters did not occur to him till after Bill had gone,
and when they did he wondered what excuse he was to give to his host.
On this subject he need not have troubled himself, for his elaborate
explanations were thrown away, Mr. Briant not being deceived by them
for a moment.
“Petticoat,” he observed briefly in answer to all Kit had to say. He
was a man of some experience, and there was something in the boy’s
manner, in his very indifference to dinner, which betrayed him to his
elders.
He flushed hotly; it was desecration even to think of Bill and the
meeting in the lane here.
“Hullo! It seems a serious case,” some one observed, and a man at Kit’s
elbow inquired: “First, isn’t it, Harborough? Lucky young dog, he’s
never met a divinity before; he has got it all to come.”
Kit’s eyes flashed. “You are entirely mistaken,” he said coldly.
“All right,” his host said with great good-humour. “Did you send my
telegram?”
Until that moment he had not thought of it; “I--I forgot it,” he was
obliged to answer confusedly.
“What a deuce of a time she kept you!”
“She did not! She did no such thing.”
There was a roar of laughter, and Kit, realising his blunder, had the
good sense to leave it and apologise for the neglect of the telegram.
This being of but slight importance was forgotten by the party far more
quickly than his unfortunate admission.
In the meantime Bill was also taking the consequences of her wanderings
in the lane. Polly was severely reprimanding her for going out after
dark, for keeping other people waiting about in the damp, and for
gossiping with farm-labourers and other persons. To all of which Bill
listened with the tolerant indifference with which she often treated
Polly’s harangues. “Let’s have supper,” she said at last. “I have told
you I went out because I felt as if--as if I should burst if I stopped
in any longer. I had to go out, to get away; it was a pure accident
that I met any one.”
Polly said, “Oh, I dare say,” and repeated several of her previous
remarks with variations. Then they had supper, Polly still a little
difficult in temper; the drawing-room lodgers had had steak and onions
for tea, and she being one who dearly loved what she called “a relish
with her tea,” had not yet got over the appetising odour which had not
served as a relish to her own bread and jam.
Never before in her life had Bill so longed to be alone--to be
absolutely by herself, if it were only for half an hour. But it was
out of the question; even when they went to bed the only solitude
possible was the compromise of companionship offered when the cousins
were asleep. She thought once of stealing softly down to the darkened
sitting-room to spend an hour there in the starlight, but the bedroom
door rattled so terribly that she was certain in opening it to awaken
Bella if not Polly. She was afraid of facing their curious inquiries,
she who so seldom had been afraid before, who never knew when her
conduct was strange or worthy to invite inquiry until the fact was
plainly shown her; there was some subtle change in her.
She lay still on the outer edge of the wide low bed she shared with
Polly, and tried to think. The room was very dark and quiet, yet she
could not think. There was neither Kit nor Gilchrist in her mind,
neither past, present, nor future; it was all a whirl, with for
paramount feeling the thought of that unmade claim to the Harborough
estates.
“It is not fair,” she thought. “He shall know; they shall fight fairly;
I will tell, whether it makes a difference or not.” Then the picture
of Wood Hall came into her mind, the stately house in the autumn of
its days, the great hall, the solemn rooms, “Theo’s, all Theo’s! Theo
there, Theo and the boarders!” She laughed softly, half hysterically,
at the idea. “He thought I meant it,” she said.
Polly muttered indistinctly in her sleep. Wood Hall and the gardens,
the tangled rose-walk and the lawns, how green the grass would be
now! The wood on the slope of the hill--there would be yellow leaves
here and there, and the bracken would be golden--how very beautiful
it all would be! September suited the place, but October would suit
it even better, the long west front in the afternoon glow, the great
arched doorway, all of it. And so on and on, a hundred vague ideas, a
tangle of emotions, but never Kit; she never once faced the thought of
him. At last she slept and dreamed--our dreams are our own; we are not
accountable for them. In the morning things looked clearer and emotions
fainter. Sleep blots out some of the fancies and brings facts into a
better working perspective. When in the morning Bill rose early to keep
her appointment she had a distinct notion of what she was going to do.
She got up and dressed quietly: for the first time in her life she was
troubled because her gown was shabby; but she did not know why, for she
had not consciously considered the question of Kit Harborough at all.
She was going to meet him, it is true, but that was solely to warn him
of the danger which threatened him. Still she was sorry her frock was
shabby, and her old straw hat a little the worse for the plum turnovers
and a good deal the worse for wear.
But she did not trouble herself much. By the time she had finished
her bath she had forgotten about appearances; also to a certain
extent she had forgotten her troubles, washed them away in the kindly
sea or evaporated them in the sunny air: there was not, up to the
present, anything so very much amiss in her world that still September
morning. She was whistling softly when Kit found her, wringing her wet
bathing-dress the while.
“Let me do that for you,” he said.
She held the dress a moment. “You had better not,” she said, “it will
make your hands blue; the dye comes out like anything. The first time
it got wet I was like an ancient Briton; it is not so bad now, but it
still makes one a bit stripy.”
Kit protested that he did not mind the dye and took the dress while
she gathered up her towels and hung them in festoons about the tent,
whistling when she was on the far side.
“Is that you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she admitted, wondering if he thought it unladylike.
He did not; he seemed to think it clever. “What a mimic you are!” he
said. “It was just like a chaffinch.”
“I can imitate some things,--birds.” Bill forgot her mockery of her
fellow-men; she forgot all those things, for there was a curious holy
feeling about her just then.
Kit had finished wringing the dress and was carrying it now as they
walked slowly along the shore. “Not all birds?” he was saying; “not a
lark!”
“No, not a lark, I have never tried to do that; I don’t think I could.
I don’t think there is anything quite like a lark’s song; it is so
completely, absolutely happy; I don’t believe anyone could imitate
that.”
He agreed with her and then asked if she knew Shelley’s Ode to the
Skylark. They were not approaching the business of their interview very
rapidly.
Bill shook her head. “I don’t know any of his poetry,” she said,
“except a piece about the moon which we had to analyse in our
grammar-class last Christmas. It was beautiful poetry, though I never
could find the principal sentence.”
“What a shame to give you Shelley for that!”
Bill thought it was too, and then Kit told her he believed she would
like the Ode to the Skylark.
“Tell me some,” she said.
He obeyed and repeated the greater part. Business was receding even
further into the distance.
His was somewhat of a studious nature, and he had, moreover, the
musician’s ear for harmonious sound and the unspoiled heart to delight
in beautiful thought. She was a greedy listener, her mind an empty well
in its ignorance, in its insatiable desire to be filled; she, too, had
the love of melody, though never till that moment had she felt the
need of the universe and of her own soul to be expressed in rhythm.
But now the whole world somehow became one pulsing harmony, and they
two wandered along the lonely shore in that dream which comes twice to
no man. The air around them was delicate and crisp, fresh yet tenderly
soft, the sunlight chastened and mild, threading with sloping bars the
mist on the land, gleaming bright and pale on the wet sand and the
incoming tide and the great white gulls that played in the creeping
waves.
Business and the purpose of their meeting receded further and further;
indeed, it might almost have been forgotten entirely had it not been
reached by a most circuitous route through Byron and Heine. They had
been speaking of the sea’s place in poetry and concluded with the
opinion that none of the poets had quite expressed their sentiments on
the subject.
“They don’t seem to get at the sort of mother-feeling,” Bill said at
last; “at least none of those we know do. I mean the kind of feeling
of going home that you get when you come near the sea--you know what
I mean? It seems sometimes as if it stretched out its arms to you and
called you,--don’t you hear?”
She listened and he listened too, for of course he understood what she
was trying to say for both. He had felt it as she had, and neither had
said it before, and both were certain of an understanding now, wherein
lay the delight and the danger.
“Once,” Bill said, “I saw four lines which were a little about the
feeling I mean; do you know them?
‘Hail to thee, oh thou Ocean eterne!
Like voices of home thy waters are rushing,
Like visions of childhood saw I a glimmering
Over thy heaving billowy realm.’”
Kit said he did not know the lines and asked whose they were; but she
could only tell him that she had found them quoted in a book of Mr.
Dane’s. “I’ll ask him,” she said; “I dare say he will know, and he
is sure to tell me. He is my great friend, you know, the rector of
Ashelton.”
“Ashelton!” Kit exclaimed. “Do you know Ashelton?”
“Yes,” and then Bill remembered, and the mutual acquaintance with
Ashelton and the surrounding district, which seemed so very delightful
to her companion, wore quite another aspect to her. “I had almost
forgotten,” she went on; “I mean, forgotten what I had come to say; but
I must tell you, I will tell you about it.”
And forgetting the poets and the seductive calling of the sea she told
him all,--of the Australian and his claim, of its strength, and of his
decision to be silent until after old Mr. Harborough’s death; she told
him exactly how it stood, and how she thought it unfair he should not
know what threatened him. He listened quietly as she talked, coldly,
unconsciously demonstrating to her one good gift that an old family
bestows upon its children, the power to receive a blow unmoved, to
hear with the silence of pride and to speak with the indifference of
studied self-control. Kit Harborough had not much for which to thank
his ancestors; the dead hand of the past was heavy upon him and the
weight of tradition but little in his favour; nevertheless his birth
and breeding helped him to receive Bill’s blow with a proud composure,
almost an indifference which roused her deepest admiration, though at
the same time it touched her curiously.
She talked on fast to hide her own feelings. “They seem to think,” she
said, though she had said it before and the whole case was painfully
clear now, “they seem to think that if Mr. Harborough is left to
himself he will not make a will; I don’t know why.”
“Because he does not like me,” Kit told her.
“He wishes me to have the property simply on account of the name. I am
called Harborough because of the property, and I am,--was to have had
it because of the name; but he wishes it so little that since he is
sure I should have it, he would not set it down.”
“But if he knew of Theo--of the other one?”
“He still would not make a will, or if he did it would not be in
my favour; the other man is a Harborough and so fulfils his only
condition. I have told you he dislikes me.”
“He would dislike Theo a good deal more if he knew him,” Bill said
warmly; “he is going to cut down the wood if he gets the estate, and
plough the land, and grow turnips in the park.”
“I don’t think you could make my uncle believe that.” Kit’s composure
belied his feelings. “And if one could, if one could induce him to make
a will, I don’t believe I should care to do it, and, besides, you know,
it might not make much difference after all. Thank you, thank you very
much for telling me,”--the composure was not nearly so marked; stoicism
is not perfect at two-and-twenty; “it was very good of you to do it.
I’m glad to know; it’s much easier when one knows what’s coming, but I
can’t exactly take advantage of it; you didn’t really mean me to, you
know.”
“But the house,” Bill pleaded, “the beautiful, beautiful house! Think
of it, the long west front with the sunset on it,--the great hall with
the dragons on the mantelpiece--the rooms where all your people were
born and died!”
“I know.”
They were sitting on a pebbly ridge now; Kit ground his stick into the
shingles and answered in a muffled voice, not looking at her. “But the
thing is not settled yet,” he went on after a pause. “He will have to
fight for it whether there is a will or not; he may not win, and,--and
if he does, they are his people too; he is more really Harborough than
I am.”
“He does not care for them,” Bill said; “he despises old families and
he does not care for tradition; he would like the position but he does
not really care for anything else; he would not love nor understand the
place a little bit. He would save money, I dare say, perhaps make it,
and in time build up a new family on the old foundation. He is just
fitted to found a new family; he would do it splendidly, he has the
right kind of brains and opinions; but he is not in the least fitted to
carry on an old name,--he has not been bred up to it or educated for
it. You don’t know him or else you would understand.”
“I understand very well indeed. But what is the use? Why do you talk
about it?”
“Because,” Bill answered vehemently, “the place is what it is; because
of the house and the wood--think of cutting down the wood! Because it
seems so likely he will get it, and if it were mine I would never let
it go. If it had belonged to my people, as it has to yours, I would do
anything--I should not care what--to get it and keep it.”
The shingles rattled sharply against one another as Kit moved. “Do
you think I don’t care?” he asked almost savagely. “But if it is that
business of the will you mean, I can’t do it. I don’t suppose it would
make a difference, and anyhow I can’t do it; you know I can’t.”
“Then I will,” Bill said. “I will see Mr. Harborough and explain. I
will get him to make a will; I believe I could.”
“No,” Kit exclaimed, “no, you must not do that. It would be no better
than if I did; it would be taking an unfair advantage of the other
man,--promise me you will not do it.”
Bill hesitated. “I have taken an advantage of him already in telling
you,” she said.
“That is different; it was only warning, preparing me for what is to
come; you were not using your knowledge against the other man; you
would not do that.”
Bill was not so sure; though, true to her reflective nature, she felt
at the moment that perhaps he was right. “Then you will give it up,”
she said at last, “you will let a man who does not understand have the
house and everything?”
“Not unless I am compelled.”
“And will you be compelled? What do you think?”
“I don’t know; it sounds pretty bad as you have told it, of course. It
may not be; I can’t tell.”
Bill looked hopelessly out to sea. “It is my fault,” she said, more to
herself than to him, “all my fault.”
“Your fault?” he asked. “How? What have you to do with it?”
“It was through me that Theo knew of his claim, through the mass in the
Harborough chapel, and it was I who got the mass to be read. Yes, you
have heard about it, of course, but you did not know it was my doing;
nobody does except one person, but it was, all the same. Mr. Harborough
had it said to please me, or at least because I suggested it; it was my
idea, and it was all through that service that Theo heard of his claim
to Wood Hall. A man, an antiquary, one of those interfering people who
are always digging in ancestral dust-heaps and finding things which had
much better not be found, heard about the service and came to enquire
into it. He came and he inquired, and poked about, and found out a lot
about the chapel and the Harboroughs; then he met Theo, and talked to
him, and found out all about him too. Before that nobody knew anything
of Theo, and he did not know anything of the claim; he never troubled
about his relationship to you other Harboroughs; but between them he
and Mr. Wagnall pieced it all out, and there you are; that is how he
found out he had a claim. If it had not been for that mass bringing Mr.
Wagnall to Wrugglesby it would never have been discovered; it is all
my fault.”
Kit did not share this opinion. “It is not your fault,” he said
decidedly; “not a bit in the world; you never knew what would come of
it.”
“I did it, all the same.”
“But you are not to blame; you are not responsible because the truth,
if it is the truth, has been found out, and no one would blame you for
it if you were. I don’t think you to blame, and I am the person most
concerned, after this Theo.”
“Oh, he doesn’t think I have had anything to do with it,” Bill said,
smiling a little at the idea.
“Very well then, that is settled,” Kit said more lightly; “you are
not to blame; nobody thinks so, neither you, nor I, nor Theo. By the
way, you seem to be very intimate with Theo,--great friends or great
enemies, which is it?”
“Both,” said Bill smiling; “I am going to marry him.”
Then suddenly the smile died out of her eyes, out of her heart, out
of sea and sky and world, and for the first time in her life she was
afraid to think.
Kit turned and looked at her full, his well-bred, stoical face
expressing nothing, only his grave eyes very grave as he said slowly:
“You are going to marry him?”
She nodded, meeting his eyes for a minute; and then she looked out to
sea, driving her palms deep among the small pebbles as she sat, one
hand on either side, staring rigidly before her.
The gulls dipped down to the breaking waves and circled above in the
pale-toned sky; sea and sky alike were as tinted silver, the whole day
delicate, tender-hued, like the colours found in a pearl. A great
peace, a great silence everywhere; no sound but the ripple of the waves
that crept up the sand, crept till they reached the shingle where the
girl sat, and broke with tiny spray almost at her feet.
“We had better move; the tide is coming up.”
The voice of the man beside her aroused her. He suddenly seemed a man
to her, a boy no longer: it seemed too as though there was a great gulf
between them. She rose automatically and they walked along the shore in
the direction of the village. He was very kind and polite; there was an
indefinable difference between his manners and those of the people she
usually met, but it only made her the more conscious of the difference
between herself and him. He talked as they went, easily and well, on
indifferent topics, the cliffs, the shore, the places of interest
about, the peculiarity of the stones on the beach. Once he picked one
up, dark grey and heavy, a flint sea-urchin, he told her it was, rather
an uncommon fossil, he said, as he gave it to her. She took it, and
talked about it and a dozen other things, in spite of her consciousness
of the gulf, as easy and as self-possessed as he. Why not? Was she not
Bill, the mimic, the player’s child? She was sure just then that he had
been a player, a strolling mummer, a singer ever on tour, perhaps even
the circus-clown Polly called him. And she,--she was a clown too, a
buffoon, a fool, for all that she wore no motley, to make old men laugh
with her songs and quips, to charm young men for a moment with her
hundred changes,--“all things by turn and nothing long”--nothing except
the little gipsy creature that was under all and that was miles and
miles away from Kit Harborough of Bybridge, from him and the women of
his class. She knew those women, tall, fair, white-skinned, serenely
unconscious. She was a long way from them, from everyone in the
universe, farthest of all from this boy with his considerate courtesy,
his polite speech, his accurate clothes. She was painfully conscious
of his clothes and even more so of her own, of her work-stained hands,
her too rapid movements. She was conscious of it all, but more than all
of a passionate desire to run away and hide with the wild things which
were her kin, to run away not from him alone but from all her world, to
run right away into the woods and hide even from herself, if it could
be.
But she did not run away, as she would have done some months earlier;
pride held her back and crushed the wild nature down, helping her to
politeness and teaching her to give her little brown hand at parting
much as Kit Harborough did. So with some formality they said good-bye,
and parted at the top of the cliff-path, he to the left to the River
House, she to the right to the little shop where Bella was waiting
breakfast and Polly finishing a belated toilet.