Henriette had secured Mrs. Fullerton for an ally, from the beginning.
When Hadria's parents visited the Red House, Miss Temperley was asked to
meet them, by special request. Henriette employed tact on a grand scale,
and achieved results in proportion. She was sorry that dear Hadria did
not more quickly recover her strength. Her health was not what it ought
to be. Mrs. Fullerton sighed. She was ready to play into Miss
Temperley's hands on every occasion.
The latter had less success in her dealings with Miss Du Prel. She tried
to discover Hadria's more intimate feelings by talking her over with
Valeria, ignoring the snubs that were copiously administered by that
indignant lady. Valeria spoke with sublime scorn of this attempt.
"To try and pump information out of a friend! Why not listen at the
key-hole, and be done with it!"
Henriette's neat hair would have stood on end, had she heard Miss Du
Prel fit adjectives to her conduct.
"I have learnt not to expect a nice sense of honour from superior
persons with unimpeachable sentiments," said Hadria.
"You are certainly a good hater!" cried Valeria, with a laugh.
"Oh, I don't hate Henriette; I only hate unimpeachable sentiments."
The sentiments that Henriette represented had become, to Hadria, as the
walls of a prison from which she could see no means of escape.
She had found that life took no heed either of her ambitions or of her
revolts. "And so I growl," she said. She might hate and chafe in secret
to her heart's content; external conformity was the one thing needful.
"Hadria will be so different when she has children," everyone had said.
And so she was; but the difference was alarmingly in the wrong
direction. Throughout history, she reflected, children had been the
unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. Who could
stand against them? They had been able to force the most rebellious to
their knees. An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the
hardiest spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so trumpeted
and exalted! Women might harbour dreams and plan insurrections; but
their children--little ambassadors of the established and expected--were
argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics. Their
helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt than regiments of
armed soldiers.
Such were the thoughts that wandered through Hadria's mind as she bent
her steps towards the cottage near Craddock Church, where, according to
the gravedigger's account, the baby of the unhappy schoolmistress was
being looked after by Mrs. Gullick.
It would have puzzled the keenest observer to detect the unorthodox
nature of Mrs. Temperley's reflections, as she leant over the child, and
made enquiries as to its health and temperament.
Mrs. Gullick seemed more disposed to indulge in remarks on its mother's
conduct than to give the desired information; but she finally admitted
that Ellen Jervis had an aunt at Southampton who was sending a little
money for the support of the child. Ellen Jervis had stayed with the
aunt during the summer holidays. Mrs. Gullick did not know what was to
be done. She had a large family of her own, and the cottage was small.
Mrs. Temperley asked for the address of the aunt.
"I suppose no one knows who the father is? He has not acknowledged the
child!"
No; that was a mystery still.
About a week later, Craddock Dene was amazed by the news that Mrs.
Temperley had taken the child of Ellen Jervis under her protection. A
cottage had been secured on the road to Craddock, a trustworthy nurse
engaged, and here the babe was established, with the consent and
blessing of the aunt.
"You are the most inconsistent woman I ever met!" exclaimed Miss Du
Prel.
"Why inconsistent?"
"You say that children have been the means, from time immemorial, of
enslaving women, and here you go and adopt one of your enslavers!"
"But this child is not legitimate."
Valeria stared.
"Whatever the wrongs of Ellen Jervis, at least there were no laws
written, and unwritten, which demanded of her as a duty that she should
become the mother of this child. In that respect she escapes the
ignominy reserved for the married mother who produces children that are
not even hers."
"You do manage to ferret out the unpleasant aspects of our position!"
Miss Du Prel exclaimed. "But I want to know why you do this, Hadria. It
is good of you, but totally unlike you."
"You are very polite!" cried Hadria. "Why should I not lay up store for
myself in heaven, as well as Mrs. Walker and the rest?"
"You were not thinking of heaven when you did this deed, Hadria."
"No; I was thinking of the other place."
"And do you hope to get any satisfaction out of your _protégée_?"
Hadria shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know. The child is the result of great sorrow and suffering; it
is the price of a woman's life; a woman who offended the world, having
lived for nearly forty weary obedient years, in circumstances dreary
enough to have turned twenty saints into as many sinners. No; I am no
Lady Bountiful. I feel in defending this child--a sorry defence I
know--that I am, in so far, opposing the world and the system of things
that I hate----. Ah! _how_ I hate it!"
"Is it then hatred that prompts the deed?"
Hadria looked thoughtfully towards the church tower, in whose shadow the
mother of the babe lay sleeping.
"Can you ever quite unravel your own motives, Valeria? Hatred? Yes;
there is a large ingredient of hatred. Without it, probably this poor
infant would have been left to struggle through life alone, with a
mill-stone round its neck, and a miserable constitution into the
bargain. I hope to rescue its constitution. But that poor woman's story
touched me closely. It is so hard, so outrageous! The emptiness of her
existence; the lack of outlet for her affections; the endless monotony;
and then the sudden new interest and food for the starved emotions; the
hero-worship that is latent in us all; and then--good heavens!--for a
touch of poetry, of romance in her life, she would have been ready to
believe in the professions of the devil himself--and this man was a very
good understudy for the devil! Ah! If ever I should meet him!"
"What would you do?" Valeria asked curiously.
"Avenge her," said Hadria with set lips.
"Easier said than done, my dear!"
Gossip asserted that the father of the child was a man of some standing,
the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was
conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened to it.
Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized with Mrs. Temperley's
ill-advised charity. Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman's
wife as another of society's victims. She placed side by side the
schoolmistress in her sorrow and disgrace, and the careworn woman at the
Vicarage, with her eleven children, and her shrivelled nature, poor and
dead as an autumn leaf that shivers before the wind. They had both
suffered--so Mrs. Temperley dared to assert--in the same cause. They
were both victims of the same creed. It was a terrible cultus, a savage
idol that had devoured them both, as cruel and insatiable as the brazen
god of old, with his internal fires, which the faithful fed devoutly,
with shrinking girls and screaming children.
"I still fail to understand why you adopt this child," said Valeria. "My
_Caterina_ would never have done it."
"The little creature interests me," said Hadria. "It is a tiny field for
the exercise of the creative forces. Every one has some form of active
amusement. Some like golf, others flirtation. I prefer this sort of
diversion."
"But you have your own children to interest you, surely far more than
this one."
Hadria's face grew set and defiant.
"They represent to me the insult of society--my own private and
particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through
them that I am to be subdued and humbled. Just once in a way, however,
the thing does not quite 'come off.'"
"What has set you on edge so, I wonder."
"People, traditions, unimpeachable sentiments."
"_Yours_ are not unimpeachable at any rate!" Valeria cried laughing.
"_Caterina_ is an angel compared with you, and yet my publisher has his
doubts about her."
"_Caterina_ would do as I do, I know," said Hadria. "Those who are
looked at askance by the world appeal to my instincts. I shall be able
to teach this child, perhaps, to strike a blow at the system which sent
her mother to a dishonoured grave, while it leaves the man for whose
sake she risked all this, in peace and the odour of sanctity."
Time seemed to be marked, in the sleepy village, by the baby's growth.
Valeria, who thought she was fond of babies, used to accompany Hadria on
her visits to the cottage, but she treated the infant so much as if it
had been a guinea-pig or a rabbit that the nurse was indignant.
The weeks passed in rapid monotony, filled with detail and leaving no
mark behind them, no sign of movement or progress. The cares of the
house, the children, left only limited time for walking, reading,
correspondence, and such music as could be wrung out of a crowded day.
An effort on Hadria's part, to make serious use of her musical talent
had been frustrated. But a pathetic, unquenchable hope always survived
that presently, when this or that corner had been turned, this or that
difficulty overcome, conditions would be conquered and opportunity
arrive. Not yet had she resigned her belief that the most harassing and
wearying and unceasing business that a human being can undertake, is
compatible with the stupendous labour and the unbounded claims of an
artist's career. The details of practical life and petty duties sprouted
up at every step. If they were put aside, even for a moment, the wheels
of daily existence became clogged and then all opportunity was over.
Hope had begun to alternate with a fear lest that evasive corner should
never be turned, that little crop of interruptions never cease to turn
up. And yet it was so foolish. Each obstacle in itself was paltry. It
was their number that overcame one, as the tiny arrows of the Lilliputs
overcame Gulliver.
One of Hadria's best friends in Craddock Dene was Joseph Fleming, who
had become very intimate at the Red House during the last year or two.
Hadria used to tire of the necessity to be apparently rational (such was
her own version), and found it a relief to talk nonsense, just as she
pleased, to Joseph Fleming, who never objected or took offence, if he
occasionally looked surprised. Other men might have thought she was
laughing at them, but Joseph made no such mistake when Mrs. Temperley
broke out, as she did now and then, in fantastic fashion.
She was standing, one morning, on the little bridge over the stream that
ran at a distance of a few hundred yards from the Red House. The two
boys were bespattering themselves in the meadow below, by the water's
verge. They called up at intervals to their mother the announcement of
some new discovery of flower or insect.
Watching the stream sweeping through the bridge, she seemed the centre
of a charming domestic scene to Joseph Fleming, who chanced to pass by
with his dogs. He addressed himself to her maternal feelings by
remarking what handsome and clever boys they were.
"Handsome and clever?" she repeated. "Is _that_ all you can say, Mr.
Fleming? When you set about it, I think you might provide a little
better food for one's parental sentiment. I suppose you will go and tell
Mrs. Walker that _her_ dozen and a half are all handsome and clever
too!"
"Not so handsome and clever as yours," replied Mr. Fleming, a little
aghast at this ravenous maternal vanity.
"What wretched poverty of expression!" Hadria complained. "I ask for
bread, and truly you give me a stone."
Joseph Fleming eyed his companion askance. "I--I admire your boys
immensely, as you know," he said.
"Not enough, not enough."
"What can I say more?"
"A mother has to find in her children all that she can hope to find in
life, and she naturally desires to make the most of them, don't you
see?"
"Ah! yes, quite so," said Joseph dubiously.
"Nobody, I suppose, likes to be commonplace all round; one must have
some poetry somewhere--so most women idealize their children, and if
other people won't help them in the effort, don't you see? it is most
discouraging."
"Are you chaffing, or what?" Joseph enquired.
"No, indeed; I am perilously serious."
"I can well understand how a mother must get absorbed in her children,"
said Joseph. "I suppose it's a sort of natural provision."
"Think of Mrs. Allan with her outrageous eight--all making mud-pies!"
cried Hadria; "a magnificent 'natural provision!' A small income, a
small house, with those pervasive eight. You know the stampede when one
goes to call; the aroma of bread and butter (there are few things more
inspiring); the cook always about to leave; Mrs. Allan with a racking
headache. It is indeed not difficult to understand how a mother would
get absorbed in her children. Why, their pinafores alone would become
absorbing."
"Quite so," said Mr. Fleming. Then a little anxious to change the
subject: "Oh, by the way, have you heard that the Priory is really to
be inhabited at last? Professor Theobald has almost decided to take it."
"Really? that will be exciting for Craddock Dene. We shall have another
household to dissect and denounce. Providence watches over us all, I
verily believe."
"I hope so," Joseph replied gravely.
"Truly I hope so too," Hadria said, no less seriously, "for indeed we
need it."
Joseph was too simple to be greatly surprised at anything that Mrs.
Temperley might say. He had decided that she was a little eccentric, and
that explained everything; just as he explained instances of
extraordinary reasoning power in a dog by calling it "instinct."
Whatever Mrs. Temperley might do was slightly eccentric, and had she
suddenly taken it into her head to dance a fandango on the public road,
it would have merely put a little extra strain on that word.
By dint of not understanding her, Joseph Fleming had grown to feel
towards Mrs. Temperley a genuine liking, conscious, in his vague way,
that she was kind at heart, however bitter or strange she might
sometimes be in her speech. Moreover, she was not always eccentric or
unexpected. There would come periods when she would say and do very much
as her neighbours said and did; looking then pale and lifeless, but
absolutely beyond the reach of hostile criticism, as her champion would
suggest to carping neighbours.
Not the most respected of the ladies who turned up their disapproving
noses, was more dull or more depressing than Hadria could be, on
occasion, as she had herself pointed out; and would not _this_ soften
stony hearts?
When she discovered that her kindly neighbour had been fighting her
battles for her, she was touched; but she asked him not to expend his
strength on her behalf. She tried in vain to convince him that she did
not care to be invited too often to submit to the devitalizing processes
of social intercourse, to which the families of the district shrank not
from subjecting themselves. If Joseph Fleming chanced to call at the Red
House after her return from one of these entertainments, he was sure to
find Mrs. Temperley in one of her least comprehensible moods. But
whatever she might say, he stood up for her among the neighbours with
persistent loyalty. He decked her with virtues that she did not possess,
and represented her to the sceptical district, radiant in domestic
glory. Hadria thus found herself in an awkwardly uncertain position;
either she was looked at askance, as eccentric, or she found herself
called upon to make good expectations of saintliness, such as never were
on land or sea.
Saintly? Hadria shook her head. She could imagine no one further from
such a condition than she was at present, and she felt it in her, to
swing down and down to the very opposite pole from that serene altitude.
She admitted that, from a utilitarian point of view, she was making a
vast mistake. As things were, Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Allan, laboriously
spinning their ponderous families on their own axes, in a reverent
spirit, had chosen the better part. But Hadria did not care. She would
_not_ settle down to make the best of things, as even Algitha now
recommended, "since there she was, and there was no helping it."
"I will _never_ make the best of things," she said. "I know nothing that
gives such opportunities to the Devil."
Hadria had characteristically left the paradox unjustified.
"What do you mean?" asked Algitha. "Surely the enemy of good has most
hold over the discontented spirit."
Hadria likened the contented to stagnant pools, wherein corruptions grow
apace. "It is only the discontented ocean that remains, for all its
storms, fresh and sane to the end."
But though she said this, for opposition's sake perhaps, she had her
doubts about her own theory. Discontent was certainly the initiator of
all movement; but there was a kind of sullen discontent that stagnated
and ate inwards, like a disease. Better a cheerful sin or two than allow
_that_ to take hold!
"But then there is this sickly feminine conscience to deal with!" she
exclaimed. "It clings to the worst of us still, and prevents the
wholesome big catastrophes that might bring salvation."