I
Richard Jeffray thrust back his chair from Sir Peter Hardacre’s
dining-table, and stood stiff and ill at ease, like a man but half sure
of his own dignity. The Dutch clock had struck three, and the winter
sunlight was still flooding through the tall windows upon the polished
floor. A log-fire blazed on the irons; decanters and glasses glistened
on the table about a great china punch-bowl covered with green dragons
and blue mandarins.
It was early in the afternoon, and yet Parson Jessel’s great wig was
flapping forward with an unsaintly tilt over the pastor’s left eye. Sir
Peter, a fat and tuberose-nosed aristocrat, in a blue coat and a
brocaded waistcoat, sprawled in his arm-chair at the end of the table,
his paunch abutting against the board, his full-bottomed wig flowing in
slovenly profusion about his blotchy face. On the far side of the table,
with his back to the fire, sat Mr. Lot Hardacre, a heavy-shouldered
gentleman in a scarlet hunting-coat and buckskin breeches, whose culture
was half that of a jockey, half that of a card-sharper. A long clay pipe
drooped from the angle of Mr. Lot Hardacre’s mouth, and his coarse,
chapped hands were stuffed into the pockets of his breeches.
Richard Jeffray bowed to these three gentlemen as though he was not
wholly at his ease. Sir Peter Hardacre’s ungainly torpor suggested that
he had fed largely and too well.
“You will pardon me, Sir Peter,” he said, with a glance at Mr. Lot’s
sodden and impudent face, “the days are short, and I must be in the
saddle. You will make excuses for me to the ladies.”
The baronet puffed out his lips and elevated his eyebrows sleepily.
Parson Jessel had already begun to snore. Mr. Lancelot alone appeared to
retain the sparklings of intelligence in his protuberant blue eyes. He
removed his pipe from his mouth, and winked at Richard Jeffray with an
air of benignant patronage.
“Sister Jilian’s above, cousin,” he said, “strumming on the harpsichord.
We’re coarse devils, Dick, eh? Jil is a gentle creature, and don’t
swear—at least, not often.”
The baronet, bulging like a Silenus, nodded his head, and fumbling for
his snuff-box spilled half the contents over his waistcoat.
“Going, Dick?” he quavered. “Gad, boy, it’s damned early; we shall be
with the ladies in the turn of a box. Sit down, lad. Son Lot will tell
’ee how he won fifty guineas from that card-clipping Captain Carteret
last week—sapped the soldier fairly. Egad, Lot has marrow in him.
Parson, pass the punch.”
A loud snore from the ecclesiastic and a thick laugh from Mr. Lancelot
betrayed how fate had dealt with the fuddled shepherd of the Hardacre
souls. Sir Peter thrust out his lower lip, and swore.
“Damme,” he said, “what a dull dog it is! Dick, lad, I’ll match his
sermons against the heaviest brew in Sussex. Kick him, Lot; kick his
shins, boy; the bowl ain’t empty yet.”
The interlude was opportune. Richard Jeffray bowed once more to the
baronet, mumbled an excuse, and leaving Mr. Lot to the breaking of the
cleric’s shins and slumber, stepped nimbly towards the door. Sir Peter
gazed after him with an expression of fat and over-fed pity. “The lad
was a nice lad, but, damn it, he couldn’t drink, and, God help him, he
wouldn’t swear!” The baronet shook his wig and took snuff with some
asperity. Meanwhile, Mr. Lot was amusing himself by holding the bowl of
his pipe under the parson’s nose. Richard, as he closed the door, heard
a mighty and portentous sneeze herald the awakening of that saintly
soul.
Richard Jeffray rode out through Hardacre Park with a look of melancholy
reflection on his face. He turned, when he had ridden two hundred yards
or more, and gazed back at the old house, with its stately red turrets
and high gables clear-cut against the thin blue of a winter sky. A great
beechwood rose on the slope of the hill behind the place, while around
it lay the terraced walks and trim lawns of the garden. Closely clipped
hollies and yews rose above the still water of the moat. The warm, red
brick, mellow in the slanting light of the sun, the ivied buttresses,
the lichened stone, seemed to tone rarely with the purple gloom of the
wood beyond. And this betowered, tall-chimneyed, hundred-windowed house,
this rare casket memorable with all the stateliness of a stately past,
held for its jewels a bevy of boozing, fox-hunting bullies whose oaths
and lewd badinage seemed fit only for a tavern.
Richard Jeffray whipped his black mare out of Hardacre Chase, leaving
the gaunt trees, the dew-drenched grass and rotting bracken for the
muddy road that curled up towards the moors. He was a slim yet wiry
youth, with a sallow face and a pair of sparkling Spanish eyes. A
sensitive intelligence showed in every fibre. He wore his own black hair
unpowdered, and though nature appeared to have intended him for a
macaroni, he boasted more scholarly slovenliness than fashionable
elegance in his clothes. Cousin Lot thought him a pretty fellow enough,
but too damned womanish to be of any use in the world. The local squires
respected his wealth and his breeding, did not hesitate to set their
daughters at his service, and chose to despise him over their
punch-bowls as a milksop and a fool.
Richard topped the heath, and reined in to scan the shadowy slopes of
the wilds of Pevensel. In the far south, huge, hog-backed hills brooded
over the sea, purple under a passing cloud, or glistening in the
slanting sun. South, east, and west rolled the forest land, hill on hill
and valley on valley, mist-wrapped, splashed with light or smirched with
shadow, a region of gloom, or of mysterious delight.
Richard Jeffray sat in the saddle and stared about him like a man
refreshed. His pale face colored, his eyes brightened. This forest land,
called Pevensel of old, and voted “a damned rubbish heap” by the Baronet
Peter, appealed to the sentimentalist as a wild delicacy snatched from
the material maw of Mammon. Here were no cropped hedges and sullen
fields, no sour and unclean villages, no cabbage gardens, no frowsy and
rubbish-ridden farms. Nature had her sway in Pevensel. Even the wild
things were clean, sleek, and fair of limb, beautiful according to the
idea upon which each had been created. The falcon glimmering under the
clouds; the hare scampering amid the heather. These were preferable to
clumsy, bandy-legged oafs, and to women whose tongues were as unclean as
their garments.
Richard rode on again down the sandy road that ran like a gray streak
through the waste of green. Had six months passed since he had posted
back from Italy with the news of his father’s death big in his heart?
Had he not left England as a boy, and returned to it something of a man,
intoxicated with many delightful superstitions, and fired with a belief
in the stately grandeur of the English nation. Sir Peter and his Sussex
squires had tumbled Mr. Richard’s amiable theories down into their
native mire. Cousin Lot had laughed and sneered at him. The Lady Letitia
had assailed his soul with such worldly wisdoms as disregarded sentiment
and honor. Richard had ruled his own house at Rodenham six months, built
his dead father’s tomb, and attempted to ingratiate himself with the
boors who crowded Rodenham village. He had rattled his poetical notions
against the skulls of his Sussex peers, and half-fooled himself into
imagining that he was in love with gray-eyed Mistress Jilian, his
cousin, who wore flaming petticoats and preposterous hoops, and rouged
and ogled like the veteran of thirty that she was. Richard Jeffray
confessed himself a fool as he rode down that day through the wilds of
Pevensel and cogitated upon the beauties of a rustic life. The landscape
was certainly not at fault, and the man of sentiment believed himself in
sympathy with nature. The human element was the poison in the pot. He
supposed that these Wealden folk became, like the clay they lived upon,
heavy and sodden, dedicated to the producing of wheat at sixty shillings
a quarter.
The sky seemed prophetic of snow, a canopy of purple clouds pressing
from the north like some fate-bearing vapor of the Norse legends. The
west was a great cavern of fire, with ruddy veins of glowing ore
tonguing scarlet and gold across the sky. The wild, fir-spired wastes of
Pevensel loomed strange and mysterious under the slanting light. There
were tall thickets bannered with crimson on the hills, stretches of
rusty heather and dark-green gorse, covered as with a web of gold. Now
and again a vague wind would start up out of the silence, and come
roaring and moaning amid the swaying trees.
From Beacon Rock the road plunged suddenly into a broad valley. A tawny,
iron-stained stream trickled on one side of the highway; on the other a
beechwood rose towards the west, its round pillars and bronze carpeting
of leaves streaked and splashed by the setting sun. A thousand
intertwining branches netted the red and angry splendor of the sky.
There was a sudden scuffling in the wood as Jeffray rode by, a score of
black pigs running squeaking and grunting amid the dead leaves and
bracken. Close to the road, under the shadow of a great beech, sat an
old woman with her chin near her knees, her nose a red hook above her
lipless mouth. Behind the crone, and leaning against the trunk of the
tree, stood a girl in a green gown and scarlet stays laced up over her
full yet girlish bust, her short gown displaying a pair of buckled shoes
and neat, gray-stockinged ankles. She wore also a red cloak, the hood,
lined with rabbit-skin, turned back upon her shoulders.
Jeffray glanced at the pair as he reined in to avoid riding down a
couple of pigs that were grunting and scurrying about the road. The girl
in the red cloak was a tall wench with coal-black hair, petulant, full
lips, cheeks tanned a rich red, a color that would have made the ladies
of St. James’s appear pale and dim. Her eyes were of a hard and crude
blue, looking almost fierce under their straight black brows. There was
a haughty and intractable air about her. The sensuous curve of her
strong figure seemed to suggest the agility and strength of a beautiful
savage.
The old woman had clambered up and was laying her stick across the backs
of the pigs with a verve that did her hardihood credit. The girl by the
tree stood motionless, as though in no mood for playing under-swine-herd
to the old lady. She was staring boldly at Jeffray, with no play of
emotion upon her face, no softening of her large and petulant mouth. She
looked, indeed, like a child of the wild woods, taught to rely solely
upon her senses, and those primitive instincts that the forest life had
developed.
The old woman dropped a courtesy to Jeffray as he rode on, but the girl
by the tree favored him only with her barbaric stare. The storm wind was
rising. It came crying through the wood like the massed trumpet-blasts
of some black-bannered host. Jeffray drew his cloak about him, whipped
up his horse, and held on for Rodenham. He still saw the hard blue eyes,
the full, petulant lips, the black hair falling desirously about the
ill-tempered and glowing face. He thought of Miss Jilian Hardacre’s
rouged cheeks and simpering gray eyes. Surely the baronet’s daughter
needed more blood under her delicate skin when even this forest wench
made her seem thin and old.