THE JARRING ELEMENT
"She was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can
raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the
world who could like them well enough to marry them."--JANE AUSTEN.
The first idea suggested by Mrs. Cooper to the mind of the beholder
was almost inevitably the above. How could any man ever have liked
her well enough to marry her?
Mr. Chetwynd-Cooper was among those unfortunates who are sent into
the world without a sense of humour. He thus fell a victim to the
same error of judgment which poor well-meaning King George the Third
had committed before him: that of mistaking a dull, pretentious prig
for a really good woman. Perhaps no queen in history, of whatever
moral character, ever made a greater fiasco as the bringer-up of a
large family than did Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. But in this
respect Mrs. Cooper vied with her, and for the same reason. Each was
so secure in her own belief in herself as possessed of all the
domestic virtues, that to her the possibility of making a mistake
never presented itself.
Such women are beyond the reach of argument. Mrs. Cooper had
decided, quite early in life--on what grounds is not known--that to
be such a woman as she was, ought to be the goal of all female
endeavour. Hence, nothing could shake the complacency of her own
content. She never tired of the pose of the perfect wife and mother,
the parochial guardian angel; and this, although her nursery had been
the epitome of untidiness and mismanagement, and her husband was
obliged to keep her accounts, and in other ways to step into the
breach continually to supply her glaring deficiencies. Neither was
she discomposed by the fact that all her own children had found her
out at an early age. If her husband ever broke through his habitual
reserve, and remonstrated with her, she met him with the patient
smile of the saint who is misunderstood.
Very soon after marriage he had found out the iron hand beneath her
velvet glove. He had discovered that his own influence was nil, that
argument could not move her, that opposition merely stiffened her
smiling obstinacy. He had sunk into that life which is the most
terrible form of solitude: complete isolation from those nearest to
him. The worst of it was that, though he had no effect upon his
wife, she had a gradual and insidious effect upon him. Continual
contact with a dwarfed intelligence was causing inevitable
deterioration, of which he was not aware.
Had the dalesmen known his daily martyrdom, he might have gained
them; but his pride and his loyalty pushed him back behind barred
doors. And what nobody yet had ever divined, this new niece of his
knew before she had been twenty-four hours under his roof.
It made him hate her. The first time her grave, tranquil eyes rested
upon her aunt, he felt that she understood and despised her. Then
that same limpid gaze--direct, keen, pure--travelled to him, the man
who was the life-companion of such a woman. He could feel her
thought probing him, wondering at him, pitying him. He had not at
first thought her like his sister, the dead Melicent to whom he had
been sincerely attached. But when he encountered that wonderful
glance, he saw the likeness so strongly that he afterwards never
forgot it--was never able to look at the younger Melicent without
thinking of her more beautiful, radiant mother, who had followed the
man she loved into the wilderness.
But the very likeness embittered him. He had always nursed a grudge
against his wilful sister--a half-contemptuous grudge, as against one
who had stepped outside the pale of conventions held so sacred by his
own wife. Was her young daughter to come from the wilds to sit in
judgment upon this exemplary pair, who found the straitest paths of
domestic dulness wide enough for them to walk in? He almost wished
that Melicent would do something that should justify him in his
dislike of her.
He was brooding over it alone in his study, where he wrote with much
care his cold, dry, unreal sermons, when his wife's head appeared
round the door, with her usual coy smile.
"_Quite_ unsuccessful, my darling boy," she said. "She defies me
openly; and yet I flatter myself I was _most_ diplomatic."
Like many essentially cold-hearted people, Mrs. Cooper was prodigal
of endearing epithets. Her husband, on principle, never used any.
"A direct command would, I imagine, have met the case better than
diplomacy," he said, in his cold, collected tones. "What did she
say? Was she rude?"
"Well, not exactly. She said it would be a breach of confidence to
show her letter, but that she would see that the young man wrote no
more. She also said that she insists upon her right to correspond
with her guardian without the letters being overlooked. Rather a
_shocking_ way to talk to me, wasn't it? But we must be very
forgiving at first, I see that, and make very big _allowances_ for
the poor darling! The guardian himself seems to be quite young, and
unmarried. Why did not poor Arnold appoint you guardian? As it is,
she evidently thinks we have no authority."
He sat, with a mind oddly divided between dislike for the girl who
defied him, and a sneaking satisfaction that Minna had been routed
for once--by his sister's child!
"However," said his wife, secure as ever in her own infallibility,
"we shall manage her all right in the end. The example of our girls
will be _invaluable_. It is best to put the matter aside for the
present, and let her settle down."
"Will she settle down, do you think?" asked the vicar.
There was a tolerant, complacent smile. "My darling boy, I have
trained five, and why not a sixth?"
The vicar did not contradict her; he merely asked:
"Did she tell you what her letter contained?"
"She said she had not opened it yet, which I fear must have been
a--a--_tarradidle_"--Mrs. Cooper went, through certain evolutions of
lips and eyes, intended as a mute apology for her use of a word so
shocking--"but she said she felt sure it was only to say that, if she
is not happy here, the writer had a home waiting for her."
"Preposterous nonsense! She is a child, and the man probably a
savage," said the vicar, with some bitterness. "Picture Maddie or
Gwen receiving a note of the kind!"
But when Millie did open Bert's letter, the contents were of a wholly
different nature from what she had expected.
It merely contained a brief announcement of the fact that he had
enlisted in that regiment of scouts which later was known to fame as
Lacy's Lions.
In the schoolroom, the knowledge that Melicent had stood firm
communicated an electrical excitement to the atmosphere. The idea of
possible revolt opened prospects of which nobody had as yet dared to
think. Unconsciously to themselves, her cousins already regarded her
as a strike-leader--a Moses who should lead them out of the house of
bondage.
And yet no creature could have been less anxious for revolt than this
girl. Her one desire was to fall upon knowledge and devour it. She
was ready to become the slave of anyone who would teach her.
But one day in the schoolroom was enough to quench hope from that
quarter. The education bestowed on her by her father had been
partial; but what she knew, she knew thoroughly. Her Latin and
arithmetic and Euclid were all good; her knowledge of geography and
English history made Tommy feel quite faint. Of French and German
she was wholly ignorant, and could not pick out the notes on the
piano.
But in all respects she knew enough to know that Tommy knew nothing.
All the morning the governess was experiencing the annoyance which
Mr. Cooper had known, feeling the clear eyes upon her full of
judgment.
The leading point in the education of Mr. Cooper's girls was that
they should have no judgment. They were always to be content to
accept what they were told. When they came in contact with actual
life, their only standard would be that such and such a thing was
according to, or differed from, what they were used to.
"I am a great believer in the power of habit," the vicar was wont to
say. Poor soul! Habit had moulded him with a vengeance; he might be
excused for thinking highly of its powers over the human intelligence.
Melicent was a problem to her cousins. They were fascinated by her,
as the weak must always be by the strong; but they resented her
aloofness. And they were simply bewildered by her tastes.
Tommy was--_sub rosâ_, of course--reading aloud to them a thrilling
serial from the _Daily Looking-glass_. It was called "Phyllis and
the Duke," and was a story of the pure love of that gallant nobleman,
the Duke of Mendip, for his sister's governess, the lovely Phyllis de
Forester; of the machinations of his envious cousin, Captain the
Honourable Percy Blagdon; and of how Phyllis turned out to be the
unacknowledged daughter of an Earl, and the true owner of the
Honourable Percy's estates. They had reached a thrilling chapter, in
which the trembling young governess went to interview a clairvoyante,
in a mystic kind of house in St. John's Wood, to ascertain what had
become of her chivalrous lover. Tommy was uneasy when the story took
this turn. She did not like the sound of a mysterious house in St.
John's Wood, and began to reflect, with resentment, that nowadays you
could not trust even the _feuilleton_ of a halfpenny journal to be
wholly inoffensive. But the writer was perfectly equal to the
occasion, and knew his public to a nicety--or might we say, to a
nastiness? The clairvoyante turned out to be Phyllis's deeply
injured mamma, a young lady who would on no account have gone without
the indispensable marriage ceremony; and the gentleman who exploited
her, and "ran" the mysterious house, was her own brother, Phyllis's
uncle, who long had sought his beloved niece in vain.
"I can't think why you don't like it," sighed Gwen, whose eyes were
kindled, her cheeks aglow.
"It is so unreal and so silly," said her cousin calmly. "People
don't go on like that. I like a story that makes you forget that
it's not true."
"Such as what?" they asked her.
After reflection--"Such as 'Silas Marner,'" she said.
They had never heard of "Silas Marner."
The glorious autumn weather continued, and two or three days after
Millie's arrival they took her for a long walk, out of the Dale,
along Radlem Rigg, to look at the curious old prehistoric relic
locally known as Tod's Trush.
The loveliness of her surroundings was again borne in upon Millie.
The same up-soaring of spirit which she had experienced when her
uncle drove her from the station once more exhilarated her. She
could not analyse what it was that she found so different here from
the land of her birth. She came from a country of clear air and vast
spaces, of solitude and immeasurable distance. These dales were
small in comparison with the endless rippling veldt she knew. But
here there confronted her an element which she was quick to feel,
though as yet too young to define--the element of mystery.
Strange it is that a few atmospheric effects should have power to
lift the soul into new realms, into the brooding heart of a tender,
tinted secret, which haunts the uplands and the valleys of
Cleveshire, making a promised land of every peak that emerges,
suggestive, from its golden, shimmering veil. The primal truth which
underlay the power of the Veiled Isis was here; but in the North the
magic is stronger, because to its mystery it adds the crowning note
of austerity.
There is a loneliness which is the result, not of distance, but of
inaccessibility. The dwellers in two valleys, perhaps five miles
apart, divided by a high mountain, a dangerous pass, are separated
far more thoroughly than those who dwell with fifty miles of plain
between them, which the train will traverse in an hour. These dales
give the impression of something remote, inviolable--something stern
and shy, yet with a heart of glowing colour, of infinite tenderness,
for those who can understand.
The Trush itself, when they reached it, was an old barrow, or
tumulus, the earth covering of which had been entirely removed
centuries ago. It was a square kist of stones, the top of which had
fallen in. The coffin, or coffins, which it must once have
contained, had vanished so long ago that a persistent local tradition
maintained that there had never been any; but that the little house
had been the abode of a being of supernatural origin, called Tod,
concerning whom antiquarians cudgelled their brains in vain. Two
upright slabs still stood like the jambs of a tiny doorway, with a
lintel across; the whole surrounded by a circular wreath of large
stones, which probably defined the original size of the mound.
To Melicent, who had never seen anything of the kind before, the
vacant and lonely sepulchre was fraught with great pathos. Her
thoughts took wing, and wandered to the times when human hands had
erected this monument, and wondered whether it then stood in such
unbroken solitude as it did now.
They had brought cakes with them, and a bottle of milk, and they all
sat down among the heather and harebells, and refreshed themselves,
while Tommy read a fresh instalment of "Phyllis and the Duke."