That same evening while Bess sat bound in Dan’s cottage in the deeps of
Pevensel, there was much weighing of words in the dining-room at
Hardacre.
Dr. Jessel, rector and chaplain, sat at the polished table, with paper,
ink, and pouncet-box before him, and a much-nibbled quill in his fist.
For years he had acted as the confidential scribe and scholarly
supervisor of letters to the household of Hardacre, and he had been
called in that morning to prepare a certain epistle, guided by the
baronet’s personal discretion. Sir Peter faced the parson across the
table, and advised him magisterially as to the contents of the letter.
Mr. Lancelot was pacing the room behind his father’s chair, cocking his
sword under his coat-tails, expanding his chest and swinging his
shoulders with an air of exuberant self-satisfaction. He appeared to
feel no little contempt for Parson Jessel and the baronet as they
squabbled and argued over the phrasing of this momentous letter. The
parson’s classic and elegant style was not flexible and fierce enough to
adapt itself to Sir Peter’s temper. The chaplain was a diplomat and a
literary sycophant by nature. His Ciceronian taste revolted from Sir
Peter’s blunt and brutal methods of expression.
The baronet leaned back at last with his thumbs in his
waistcoat-pockets, hiccoughed, and regarded Jessel with evident
irritation.
“Put it down, Jessel,” he said; “put it down—I say. I ain’t going to
draw my ale mild for fear of scalding the young scoundrel’s stomach.
Call a blackguard a blackguard, sir, when he deserves it. You’re too
damned polite, Jessel. Give it him hot on the last page. I’m right
there, ain’t I, Lot?”
Mr. Lancelot came to a halt behind his father’s chair, fixed his eyes on
the parson’s face, and upheld Sir Peter.
“Put in plenty of brimstone, Jessel,” he said. “Rub it in, man—rub it
in.”
“That’s the tune, Lot,” said the baronet, warmly. “I’m dry to the lungs
with haggling with ye. Confound this scholarly niceness, I say! Call a
cur a cur, sir, and have done with it.”
The chaplain screwed up his mouth with a whimsical expression of
resignation, shook his wig, and put pen to paper. He scratched away for
a minute or so to the baronet’s dictation, finished with a flourish,
shook the pouncet-box over the page, and leaned back in his chair with
the letter in his hand.
“Shall I read the epistle to you, gentlemen?” he asked, clearing his
throat.
“Ay, fire away,” quoth Sir Peter; “it ought to be as good as swearing at
the young devil in person.”
Dr. Jessel proceeded to the reading of the letter with full nasal
unction, striving to crush its literary crudities beneath an episcopalic
diction. Sir Peter twinkled and beamed, gurgling and patting his stomach
suggestively when some very palatable sentence tickled his native sense
of humor. Mr. Lot leaned his elbows on the back of his father’s chair,
and joined heartily in the old gentleman’s enjoyment of the word-feast.
At the conclusion of Dr. Jessel’s essay in declamation the baronet
exploded with characteristic gusto.
“Deuce take it, sir, that ought to make the young devil shake in his
shoes. He’ll feel a bit liverish after our brimstone, Jessel, eh? Seal
it up, man. And may a good lifter on the rump go with it.”
The chaplain sealed up the letter gracefully, and delivered it with a
bow to Mr. Lot.
“May you shine, sir,” he said, “as the noble Achilles shone before
Troy.”
Mr. Lot swaggered to the sideboard, poured himself out a glass of wine,
and tossed it down with an emphatic tilt of the elbow.
“You’ll do, Lot—you’ll do,” said the baronet.
Mr. Hardacre appeared troubled by no doubts as to the triumph of his
cause.
“The lad will just crawl, sir,” he said; “he ain’t fit for anything but
scribbling verses.”
Love and hate being thus romantically mingled, Bess’s woodland
tenderness and Jilian’s sickly spite, Providence, that cup-bearer to
kings and peasants, prepared to deliver the goblet into Jeffray’s hands.
Nor was there a league between the two influences as they approached the
man that day; Bess skipping brown-footed over the heather, the Hardacre
coach rolling with its heroic burden over the rough and dusty road.
Richard Jeffray, abandoning Wilson to Butler’s “Hudibras” and a pipe of
Virginia in the library, had turned out to wander in the park. He was to
meet Bess at Holy Cross that evening, and the vexed riddle with him was
the riddle of the future. The thunder-cloud that he knew must be
gathering at Hardacre loomed to his imagination across the northern sky.
He would see the lightnings of the Sussex Zeus flashing vengeance out of
the heavens. Lot Hardacre was not the demigod to remain idle for lack of
bluster. He would descend upon Rodenham, strut and swagger, ruffle it
like any scoundrel modelled upon the manhood of old White Friars.
The Hardacre problem was plain enough to him; its solution rested on a
frank flouting of Mr. Lancelot’s tyranny. With Bess, however, Jeffray’s
thoughts found themselves groping through twilight towards a distant
dawn. The play had opened with all the fair inevitableness that makes
for tragedy. How was it to be developed? Above all, how was it to end?
Three alternatives met Jeffray at the moment. Renunciation, mere
intrigue, and a grand defying of the gods.
Turning back at last towards the house, whose tall chimney-stacks and
gables glimmered between the chestnuts and the cedars of the park,
Jeffray followed a path that led by a rough bridge over a brook into a
short stretch of woodland on the side of the hill. It appeared to be a
fragment of the old forest of the weald that had escaped through the
centuries from the iron-founder’s furnaces. The oaks stood at a noble
distance from one another, the short and mighty boles breaking into the
giant grandeur of their knotted limbs. The sweeping canopies of foliage
rolled and met from tree to tree. Beneath them bracken grew. Beyond,
panels of blue sky and silvery landscape closed in this sylvan temple of
old Time.
As Jeffray idled through the wood he heard a voice calling him suddenly
by name. The cry startled him as though it had echoed the voices of his
inmost thoughts. He started back, looked, and saw a woman’s figure
moving towards him under the trees. She came on swiftly, a kind of tired
endurance on her face, her eyes turned steadily towards him, like the
eyes of one straining towards sanctuary. It was Bess.
Jeffray felt the hot blood streaming to his face. He went forward to
meet her, the green-wood filling for him with a double mystery. Bess
held out a hand towards him. He saw that she looked white and tired, her
eyes shining in her pale face with the fever of some strong emotion. He
marked her bruised lips, the strip of blood-stained linen round her
wrist. The girl’s face told him that something grim had happened.
She came straight to him with no hesitating look, came to him as though
he were the one man on earth whom she could trust. Her strength seemed
to fail her when she was within reach of Jeffray’s hands. She tottered
and caught her breath. In a moment the man’s arms were holding her. The
impulse justified him, as did the tired head that drooped towards his
shoulder.
“What has happened, Bess? Tell me everything.”
Jeffray’s eyes had lost all the shadows of indecision. The girl was
leaning on him, trusting her womanhood within his arms.
“Bess.”
“Ah—!”
It was a great sigh of contentment that escaped her. Jeffray’s arms drew
yet closer. He would not have loosed her at that moment had twenty Lots
set their swords at his throat.
“Tell me, Bess, what has happened.”
He spoke with the quiet tenderness of a man sure of his own strength.
She turned up her face and looked at him wearily, yet with a shimmer of
mystery in her eyes.
“I have half-discovered a secret.”
“The brooch?”
“I cannot tell the meaning of it yet. They caught me, Dan and Isaac,
watching them uncovering money in the woods. It was last night, and I
had followed Dan, and Isaac tried to shoot me, but Dan saved me then.”
“Yes, yes.”
“They brought me back to the cottage, and left me tied to a chair.
Ursula came and cut the rope while they were away, and so—I escaped and
came to you.”
She hung with a kind of happy languor in the man’s arms now that her
heart could unburden itself of all bitterness. The mouth had softened
and was no longer petulant. Their eyes held each other in one long,
steady look. Neither desired to have it otherwise.
“Bess.”
She thrilled a little, and colored under her brown skin.
“You are safe with me.”
“You will not send me away? You will not send me away?”
Jeffray drew a deep breath, and knew in his heart that the riddle was
solving itself as he had prayed.
“How can I send you away from me?” he said.
“Mr. Jeffray!”
“Do you not know? My God, I ought not to speak to you like this! And
yet—I cannot help myself.”
She turned suddenly in his arms, red to the bosom.
“It is the dream,” she said. “We cannot help it; no, we cannot kill the
truth.”
“The dream?”
“The dream I had on the saint’s night of you at Holy Cross. It has come
true, in spite of Dan. I would not change it for all the gold in the
wide world.”
Suddenly she put Jeffray’s arms gently away from her, and drew apart
with a simple dignity that preserved her womanhood from any air of
wantonness. Jeffray felt the subtle change in her, and respected her the
more for it.
He took his inspiration from her on the instant.
“Bess,” he said, “do with me what you will. My honor is yours. You will
trust me?”
She smiled at him, a soft light of pride and joy shining in her eyes.
“I will do all that you tell me,” she answered, with a sense of
dependence.
“You are tired.”
“No, not now.”
So engrossed were they with each other that neither Bess nor Jeffray had
heard the distant sound of wheels as the Hardacre coach rolled up from
the lodge-gates towards the priory. The road was hidden from the two in
the oak-wood. Only the gables and the tall chimneys showed between the
trunks of the trees.
Jeffray took the path that led through beech-thickets to the north wall
of the great garden. Bess set herself at his side as though this
slightly built man held the threads of her fate firmly in his delicate
yet sinewy hands. They walked together under the trees with the sunlight
splashing through the fresh, green foliage, Bess telling Jeffray of her
night’s adventure in Pevensel, and of the perils she had dared thereby.
They crossed the wooded hollow of the park, and entered the garden by a
little gate in the red brick wall. To Jeffray the whole passage seemed a
dream—strange, tragic, yet infinitely sweet. His hand touched Bess’s as
they walked side by side amid the rose-trees. His fingers closed on hers
for one swift moment, tightened as his eyes met hers, and then relaxed
with pure regret. They approached the stairway leading to the terrace,
holding a little apart, yet very conscious of each other’s nearness.
On the top step of the stair Jeffray halted suddenly. A coach was
standing on the gravel drive before the house. On the terrace, not
twenty paces away, and walking towards them, came Lot Hardacre with Mr.
Robert Beaty at his side. Jeffray turned to Bess, but realized in an
instant that all hope of concealment had gone. He pointed her to a stone
seat at the end of the terrace, and, gathering his dignity, walked on to
meet Lot Hardacre.