NOT AT HOME
Mrs. Hockin, however, had not the pleasure promised her by the facetious
Major of seeing me “make up to my grandmamma.” For although we set off
at once to catch the strange woman who had roused so much curiosity,
and though, as we passed the door of Bruntlands, we saw her still at her
post in the valley, like Major Hockin's new letter-box, for some reason
best known to herself we could not see any more of her. For, hurry as he
might upon other occasions, nothing would make the Major cut a corner of
his winding “drive” when descending it with a visitor. He enjoyed every
yard of its length, because it was his own at every step, and he counted
his paces in an under-tone, to be sure of the length, for perhaps the
thousandth time. It was long enough in a straight line, one would have
thought, but he was not the one who thought so; and therefore he had
doubled it by judicious windings, as if for the purpose of breaking the
descent.
“Three hundred and twenty-one,” he said, as he came to a post, where he
meant to have a lodge as soon as his wife would let him; “now the old
woman stands fifty-five yards on, at a spot where I mean to have an
ornamental bridge, because our fine saline element runs up there when
the new moon is perigee. My dear, I am a little out of breath, which
affects my sight for the moment. Doubtless that is why I do not see
her.”
“If I may offer an opinion,” I said, “in my ignorance of all the changes
you have made, the reason why we do not see her may be that she is gone
out of sight.”
“Impossible!” Major Hockin cried--“simply impossible, Erema! She never
moves for an hour and a half. And she was not come, was she, when you
came by?”
“I will not be certain,” I answered; “but I think that I must have seen
her if she had been there, because I was looking about particularly at
all your works as we came by.”
“Then she must be there still; let us tackle her.”
This was easier said than done, for we found no sign of any body at the
place where she certainly had been standing less than five minutes ago.
We stood at the very end and last corner of the ancient river trough,
where a little seam went inland from it, as if some trifle of a brook
had stolen down while it found a good river to welcome it. But now there
was only a little oozy gloss from the gleam of the sun upon some lees of
marshy brine left among the rushes by the last high tide.
“You see my new road and the key to my intentions?” said the Major,
forgetting all about his witch, and flourishing his geological hammer,
while standing thus at his “nucleus.” “To understand all, you have only
to stand here. You see those leveling posts, adjusted with scientific
accuracy. You see all those angles, calculated with micrometric
precision. You see how the curves are radiated--”
“It is very beautiful, I have no doubt; but you can not have Uncle Sam's
gift of machinery. And do you understand every bit of it yourself?”
“Erema, not a jot of it. I like to talk about it freely when I can,
because I see all its beauties. But as to understanding it, my dear, you
might set to, if you were an educated female, and deliver me a lecture
upon my own plan. Intellect is, in such matters, a bubble. I know good
bricks, good mortar, and good foundations.”
“With your great ability, you must do that,” I answered, very gently,
being touched with his humility and allowance of my opinion; “you will
make a noble town of it. But when is the railway coming?”
“Not yet. We have first to get our Act; and a miserable-minded wretch,
who owns nothing but a rabbit-warren, means to oppose it. Don't let us
talk of him. It puts one out of patience when a man can not see his
own interest. But come and see our assembly-rooms, literary institute,
baths, etc., etc.--that is what we are urging forward now.”
“But may I not go first and look for my strange namesake? Would it be
wrong of me to call upon her?”
“No harm whatever,” replied my companion; “likewise no good. Call fifty
times, but you will get no answer. However, it is not a very great
round, and you will understand my plans more clearly. Step out, my dear,
as if you had got a troop of Mexicans after you. Ah, what a fine turn
for that lot now!” He was thinking of the war which had broken out, and
the battle of Bull's Run.
Without any such headlong speed, we soon came to the dwelling-place of
the stranger, and really for once the good Major had not much overdone
his description. Truly it was almost tumbling down, though massively
built, and a good house long ago; and it looked the more miserable now
from being placed in a hollow of the ground, whose slopes were tufted
with rushes and thistles and ragwort. The lower windows were blocked up
from within, the upper were shattered and crumbling and dangerous,
with blocks of cracked stone jutting over them; and the last surviving
chimney gave less smoke than a workman's homeward whiff of his pipe to
comfort and relieve the air.
The only door that we could see was of heavy black oak, without any
knocker; but I clinched my hand, having thick gloves on, and made what
I thought a very creditable knock, while the Major stood by, with his
blue-lights up, and keenly gazed and gently smiled.
“Knock again, my dear,” he said; “you don't knock half hard enough.”
I knocked again with all my might, and got a bruised hand for a
fortnight, but there was not even the momentary content produced by an
active echo. The door was as dead as every thing else.
“Now for my hammer,” my companion cried. “This house, in all sound law,
is my own. I will have a 'John Doe and Richard Roe'--a fine action of
ejectment. Shall I be barred out upon my own manor?”
With hot indignation he swung his hammer, but nothing came of it except
more noise. Then the Major grew warm and angry.
“My charter contains the right of burning witches or drowning them,
according to their color. The execution is specially imposed upon the
bailiff of this ancient town, and he is my own pickled-pork man. His
name is Hopkins, and I will have him out with his seal and stick and all
the rest. Am I to be laughed at in this way?”
For we thought we heard a little screech of laughter from the loneliness
of the deep dark place, but no other answer came, and perhaps it was
only our own imagining.
“Is there no other door--perhaps one at the back?” I asked, as the lord
of the manor stamped.
“No, that has been walled up long ago. The villain has defied me from
the very first. Well, we shall see. This is all very fine. You witness
that they deny the owner entrance?”
“Undoubtedly I can depose to that. But we must not waste your valuable
time.”
“After all, the poor ruin is worthless,” he went on, calming down as we
retired. “It must be leveled, and that hole filled up. It is quite an
eye-sore to our new parade. And no doubt it belongs to me--no doubt it
does. The fellow who claims it was turned out of the law. Fancy any man
turned out of the law! Erema, in all your far West experience, did you
ever see a man bad enough to be turned out of the law?”
“Major Hockin, how can I tell? But I fear that their practice was very,
very sad--they very nearly always used to hang them.”
“The best use--the best use a rogue can be put to. Some big thief has
put it the opposite way, because he was afraid of his own turn. The
constitution must be upheld, and, by the Lord! it shall be--at any rate,
in East Bruntsea. West Bruntsea is all a small-pox warren out of my
control, and a skewer in my flesh. And some of my tenants have gone
across the line to snap their dirty hands at me.”
Being once in this cue, Major Hockin went on, not talking to me much,
but rather to himself, though expecting me now and then to say “yes;”
and this I did when necessary, for his principles of action were beyond
all challenge, and the only question was how he carried them out.
He took me to his rampart, which was sure to stop the sea, and at the
same time to afford the finest place in all Great Britain for a view of
it. Even an invalid might sit here in perfect shelter from the heaviest
gale, and watch such billows as were not to be seen except upon the
Major's property.
“The reason of that is quite simple,” he said, “and a child may see the
force of it. In no other part of the kingdom can you find so steep a
beach fronting the southwest winds, which are ten to one of all other
winds, without any break of sand or rock outside. Hence we have what you
can not have on a shallow shore--grand rollers: straight from the very
Atlantic, Erema; you and I have seen them. You may see by the map that
they all end here, with the wind in the proper quarter.”
“Oh, please not to talk of such horrors,” I said. “Why, your ramparts
would go like pie crust.”
The Major smiled a superior smile, and after more talk we went home to
dinner.
From something more than mere curiosity, I waited at Bruntsea for a day
or two, hoping to see that strange namesake of mine who had shown so
much inhospitality. For she must have been at home when we made that
pressing call, inasmuch as there was no other place to hide her within
the needful distance of the spot where she had stood. But the longer
I waited, the less would she come out--to borrow the good Irishman's
expression--and the Major's pillar-box, her favorite resort, was left in
conspicuous solitude. And when a letter came from Sir Montague Hockin,
asking leave to be at Bruntlands on the following evening, I packed
up my goods with all haste, and set off, not an hour too soon, for
Shoxford.
But before taking leave of these kind friends, I begged them to do for
me one little thing, without asking me to explain my reason, which,
indeed, was more than I could do. I begged them, not of course to watch
Sir Montague, for that they could not well do to a guest, but simply to
keep their eyes open and prepared for any sign of intercourse, if such
there were, between this gentleman and that strange interloper. Major
Hockin stared, and his wife looked at me as if my poor mind must
have gone astray, and even to myself my own thought appeared absurd.
Remembering, however, what Sir Montague had said, and other little
things as well, I did not laugh as they did. But perhaps one part of my
conduct was not right, though the wrong (if any) had been done before
that--to wit, I had faithfully promised Mrs. Price not to say a word
at Bruntlands about their visitor's low and sinful treachery toward my
cousin. To give such a promise had perhaps been wrong, but still without
it I should have heard nothing of matters that concerned me nearly. And
now it seemed almost worse to keep than to break such a pledge, when I
thought of a pious, pure-minded, and holy-hearted woman, like my dear
“Aunt Mary,” unwittingly brought into friendly contact with a man of the
lowest nature. And as for the Major, instead of sitting down with such
a man to dinner, what would he have done but drive him straightway from
the door, and chase him to the utmost verge of his manor with the peak
end of his “geological hammer?”
However, away I went without a word against that contemptible and base
man, toward whom--though he never had injured me--I cherished, for my
poor cousin's sake, the implacable hatred of virtuous youth. And a wild
idea had occurred to me (as many wild ideas did now in the crowd of
things gathering round me) that this strange woman, concealed from the
world, yet keenly watching some members of it, might be that fallen and
miserable creature who had fled from a good man with a bad one, because
he was more like herself--Flittamore, Lady Castlewood. Not that she
could be an “old woman” yet, but she might look old, either by disguise,
or through her own wickedness; and every body knows how suddenly those
southern beauties fall off, alike in face and figure. Mrs. Price had not
told me what became of her, or even whether she was dead or alive, but
merely said, with a meaning look, that she was “punished” for her sin,
and I had not ventured to inquire how, the subject being so distasteful.
To my great surprise, and uneasiness as well, I had found at Bruntlands
no letter whatever, either to the Major or myself, from Uncle Sam or any
other person at the saw-mills. There had not been time for any answer
to my letter of some two months back, yet being alarmed by the Sawyer's
last tidings, I longed, with some terror, for later news. And all the
United Kingdom was now watching with tender interest the dismemberment,
as it almost appeared, of the other mighty Union. Not with malice, or
snug satisfaction, as the men of the North in their agony said, but
certainly without any proper anguish yet, and rather as a genial
and sprightly spectator, whose love of fair play perhaps kindles his
applause of the spirit and skill of the weaker side. “'Tis a good
fight--let them fight it out!” seemed to be the general sentiment; but
in spite of some American vaunt and menace (which of late years had been
galling) every true Englishman deeply would have mourned the humiliation
of his kindred.
In this anxiety for news I begged that my letters might be forwarded
under cover to the postmistress at Shoxford, and bearing my initials.
For now I had made up my mind to let Mrs. Busk know whatever I could
tell her. I had found her a cross and well-educated woman, far above her
neighbors, and determined to remain so. Gossip, that universal leveler,
theoretically she despised; and she had that magnificent esteem for
rank which works so beautifully in England. And now when my good nurse
reasonably said that, much as she loved to be with me, her business
would allow that delight no longer, and it also came home to my own mind
that money would be running short again, and small hope left in this
dreadful civil war of our nugget escaping pillage (which made me shudder
horribly at internal discord), I just did this--I dismissed Betsy, or
rather I let her dismiss herself, which she might not have altogether
meant to do, although she threatened it so often. For here she had
nothing to do but live well, and protest against tricks of her own
profession which she practiced as necessary laws at home; and so, with
much affection, for the time we parted.
Mrs. Busk was delighted at her departure, for she never had liked to be
criticised so keenly while she was doing her very best. And as soon as
the wheels of Betsy's fly had shown their last spoke at the corner, she
told me, with a smile, that her mind had been made up to give us notice
that very evening to seek for better lodgings. But she could not wish
for a quieter, pleasanter, or more easily pleased young lady than I was
without any mischief-maker; and so, on the spur of the moment, I took
her into my own room, while her little girl minded the shop, and there
and then I told her who I was, and what I wanted.
And now she behaved most admirably. Instead of expressing surprise, she
assured me that all along she had felt there was something, and that
I must be somebody. Lovely as my paintings were (which I never heard,
before or since, from any impartial censor), she had known that it could
not be that alone which had kept me so long in their happy valley. And
now she did hope I would do her the honor to stay beneath her humble
roof, though entitled to one so different. And was the fairy ring in the
church-yard made of all my family?
I replied that too surely this was so, and that nothing would please me
better than to find, according to my stature, room to sleep inside it
as soon as ever I should have solved the mystery of its origin. At the
moment this was no exaggeration, so depressing was the sense of fighting
against the unknown so long, with scarcely any one to stand by me, or
avenge me if I fell. And Betsy's departure, though I tried to take it
mildly, had left me with a readiness to catch my breath.
But to dwell upon sadness no more than need be (a need as sure as
hunger), it was manifest now to my wondering mind that once more I had
chanced upon a good, and warm, and steadfast heart. Every body is said
to be born, whether that happens by night or day, with a certain little
widowed star, which has lost its previous mortal, concentrating from a
billion billion of miles, or leagues, or larger measure, intense, but
generally invisible, radiance upon him or her; and to take for the
moment this old fable as of serious meaning, my star was to find bad
facts at a glance, but no bad folk without long gaze.