IN THE OWL’S NEST.
Arminell Inglett made the best of her was to the old quarry. She was
impatient to be alone, to enjoy the beautiful weather, the spring sights
and sound, to recover the elasticity of spirit of which she had been
robbed by Sunday-school.
But would she recover that elasticity after her conversation with the
young tutor? What he had said was true. He was a village lad of humble
antecedents who had been taken up by her father because he was
intelligent and pleasing, and commended by the schoolmaster, and
delicate. Lord and Lady Lamerton were ever ready to do a kindness to a
tenant or inhabitant of Orleigh. When any of the latter were sick, they
received jellies and soups and the best port wine from the park; and a
deserving child in school received recognition, and a steady youth was
sure of a helping hand into a good situation.
More than ordinary favor had been shown to this young man, son of
Stephen Saltren, captain of the manganese mine. He had been lifted out
of the station in which he had been born, and was promoted to be the
instructor of Giles. Arminell had always thought her father’s conduct
towards him extraordinarily kind, and now her eyes were open to see that
it had been a cruel kindness, filling the young man’s heart with a
bitterness that contended with his gratitude.
It would have been more judicious perhaps had Lord Lamerton sent young
Jingles elsewhere.
Jingles, it must be explained, was not the tutor’s Christian name. He
had been baptised out of compliment to his lordship, Giles Inglett, and
Giles Inglett Saltren was his complete name. But in the national school
his double Christian name had been condensed, not without a flavour of
spite, into Jingles, and at Orleigh he would never be known by any
other.
The old lime-quarry lay a mile from the park. It was a picturesque spot,
and would have been perfectly beautiful but for the heaps of rubbish
thrown out of it which took years to decay, and which till decayed were
unsightly. The process had, however, begun. Indeed, as the quarry had
been worked for a century prior to its abandonment, a good deal of the
“ramp,” as such rubbish heaps are locally called, was covered with grass
and pines.
Lord Lamerton had done his best to disguise the nakedness by plantations
of Scotch, larch and spruce, which took readily to the loose soil, the
creeping roots grasped the nodes of stone and crushed them as in a vice,
then sucked out of them the nutriment desired; the wild strawberry
rioted over the banks, and the blackberry brambles dropped their
trailers over the slopes, laden in autumn with luscious fruit, and
later, when flowers are scarce with frost-touched leaves, carmine,
primrose, amber and purple.
At the back of the quarry was an old wood, sloping to the south and
breaking off sharply at the precipice where the lime rock had been cut
away; this was a wood of oaks with an undergrowth of bracken and male
fern, and huge hollies. Here and there large venerable Scotch pines rose
above the rounded surface of the oak tops, in some places singly,
elsewhere in dark clumps.
The rock of the hill was slaty. The strata ran down and made a dip and
came to the surface again, and in the lap lay the limestone. When the
quarry-men had deserted the old workings, water came in and partly
filled it, to the depth of forty feet, with crystalline bottle-green
water. Lord Lamerton had put in trout, and the fish grew there to a
great size, but were too wary to be caught. The side of the quarry to
the south shelved rapidly into the water, and the fisherman standing on
the slope with his rod was visible to the trout. They were too cautious
to approach, and too well fed with the midges that hovered over the
water to care to bite.
The north face of the quarry—that is the face that looked to the sun—was
quite precipitous; it rose to the same height above the water that it
descended beneath it. Over the edge hung bushes of may that wreathed the
gray rocks in spring with snow as of the past winter, and in winter with
scarlet berries, reminiscences of the fire of lost summer. Where the
may-bushes did not monopolise the top, there the heath and heather hung
their wiry branches and grew to brakes, and the whortleberry—the
vaccinium—formed a fringe of glossy leafage in June and July rich with
purple berries, and in autumn dotted with fantastic scarlet, where a
capricious leaf had caught a touch of frost that had spared its fellows.
Down a rocky cranny fell a dribbling stream, the drainage of the wood
above; in summer it was but a distillation, sufficient to moisten the
beds of moss and fern that rankly grew on the ledges beneath it, and in
winter never attaining sufficient volume to dislodge the vegetation it
nourished.
To the ledges thus moistened choice ferns had retreated as to cities of
refuge from the rapacity of collectors, who rive away these delicate
creatures regardless what damage is done them, indifferent whether they
kill in the process, considering only the packing of them off in hampers
for sale or barter, and in many places exterminating the rarest and most
graceful ferns; but here, with a gulf of deep water between themselves
and their pursuers, the parsley and maiden-hair ferns throve and tossed
their fronds in security and insolence.
It was marvellous to see how plants luxuriated in this old abandoned
quarry, how they seized on it, as squatters on no-man’s land, and
multiplied and grew wanton and revelled there; how the harts tongue grew
there to enormous size, and remained, unbrowned by frost, throughout the
winter; how the crane’s bill bloomed to Christmas, and scented the air
around, and the strawberry fruited out of season and reason.
By what fatality did the butterflies come there in such numbers? Was it
that they delighted in dancing over the placid mirror admiring
themselves therein? After a few gyrations they inevitably dipped their
wings and were lost; perhaps they mistook their gay reflections for
inviting flowers, or perhaps like Narcissus, they fell in love with
their own likenesses, and, stooping to kiss, were caught.
In summer butterflies were always to be found hovering over or floating
on the surface, but they hovered or floated only for a while, presently
a ring was formed in the glassy surface, a ring that widened and
multiplied itself—the butterfly was gone, and a trout the better for it.
About six feet of soil, in some places more, in others less, appeared in
sections above the quarry-edge, that is to say, above the rock. It was
quite possible to trace the primitive surface of the pre-historic earth,
much indented; but these indentations had been filled in by
accumulations of humus, so that the upper turf was almost of a level.
Where rock ended and soil began, the jackdaws had worked for themselves
caves and galleries in which they lived a communal life, and multiplied
prodigiously. A pair of hawks bred there as well, spared by express
order of Lord Lamerton, but viewed with bitter animosity by the keepers;
also a colony of white owls, all on tolerable terms, keeping their
distances, avoiding social intercourse, very much like the classes among
mankind. These owls also would have perished, nailed to the stable doors
or the keeper’s wall, had not his lordship extended protection to them
likewise. The kingfishers in the Ore were becoming fewer, the keepers
waged war on them also, because they interfered with the fish. Lord
Lamerton did not know this, or he would have held his protecting hand
over their amethystine heads.
The cliff was ribbed horizontally, the harder bands of stratification
standing forth as shelves on which lodged the crumbling of the more
friable beds, and the leaves that sailed down from the autumn trees
above. On these ledges a few bushes and a stunted Scotch pine grew. The
latter grappled with the rock, holding to it with its red-brown roots
like the legs of a gigantic spider.
At the west end, on a level with the topmost shelf of rock, just beneath
where the earth buried the surface of rock, was a cave artificially
constructed, at the time when the lime was worked, as a refuge for the
miners when blasting.
Formerly a path had existed leading to this cave, but now the path was
gone—scarce a trace survived. The owls, calculating on the
inaccessibility of the grot to man, had taken possession of it, and bred
there.
“I am glad I came here,” said Arminell. “In this lovely, lonely spot one
can worship God better than in a stuffy church, pervaded with the smell
of yellow-soap, of clean linen, and the bergamot of oiled heads, and the
peppermint the clerk sucks. Here one has the air full of the incense of
the woods, the pines exuding resin in the sun, the oak-leaves exhaling
their aroma, and the ferns, fragrant with a sea-like stimulating odour.
I am weary of that hum-drum which constitutes to mamma the law and aim
of life. We may be all—as Jingles says—steeped in syrup, but it is the
syrup of hum-drum that crystallizes about us, after having extracted
from us and dismissed all individual flavour, like the candied fruit in
a box, where currants, greengage, apricot, pear—all taste alike. We are
so saturated with the same syrup that we all lead the same saccharine
existences, have the same sweet thoughts, utter the same sugary words,
and have not an individualizing smack and aroma among us. Mamma is the
very incarnation of routine. She talks to her guests on what she thinks
will interest them, got up for the occasion out of magazines and
reviews. These magazines save her and the like of her a world of
trouble. The aristocrats of the moon, according to Jingles, sent their
heads forth in pursuit of knowledge; we have other peculiar heads sent
to us stuffed with the forced meat of knowledge, and wrapped in the
covers of magazines. So much for my mother. As for my father, he neither
takes in nor gives vent to ideas. He presents prizes at schools, opens
institutes, attends committees, sits on boards, presides at banquets;
occasionally votes, but never speaks in the House; his whole circle of
interests is made up of highways, asylums and county bridges. In olden
times, witches drew circles and set about them skulls and daggers,
toads, and braziers, and within these circles wrought necromancy. My
father’s circle is that of hum-drum, set round with county and parochial
institutions, with the sanitary arrangements carefully considered, and
without the magic circle he works—nothing.”
She was standing at the west end of the quarry, looking along the edge
of the precipice, on her left.
“I wonder,” she mused, “whether it would be feasible to reach the owls.”
Filled with this new ambition, she thought no more of the shortcomings
of her father and step-mother.
“It would be possible, by keeping a cool head,” she said.
“I should like to see what an owl’s nest is like, and in that cave I can
pay my Sunday devotions.”
The shelf was not broad enough to allow of any one walking on it
unsupported, even with a cool head.
In places, indeed, it broadened, and there lay a cushion of grass, but
immediately it narrowed to a mere indication. The distance was not
great, from whence Arminell stood, to the cave, some twenty-five feet,
and a slip would entail a fall into the water beneath.
As the girl stood considering the possibilities and the difficulties,
she noticed that streamers of ivy hung over the edge from the surface of
the soil. She could not reach these, however, from where she stood. Were
she to lay hold of them, she might be able to sustain herself whilst
stepping along the ledge, just as if she were supported by a pendent
rope.
“I believe it is contrivable,” she said,“I see where the ivy springs at
the root of an elder tree. I can find or cut a crooked stick, and thus
draw the strands to me. How angry and indignant mamma would be, were she
to see what I am about.”
She speedily discovered a suitable stick, and with its assistance drew
the pendent branches towards her. Then, laying hold of them, she essayed
an advance on the shelf. The ivy-ropes were tough, and tenacious in
their rooting into the ground. She dragged at them, jerked them, and
they did not yield. She grasped them in her left hand, and cautiously
stepped forward.
At first she had a ledge of four inches in width to rest her feet on,
but the rock, though narrow, was solid, and by leaning her weight well
on the ivy, and advancing on the tips of her feet, she succeeded, not
without a flutter of heart, in passing to a broad patch of turf, where
she was comparatively safe, and where, still clinging to the ivy, she
drew a long breath.
The water, looked down on from above, immediately beneath her was blue;
only in the shadows, where it did not reflect the light, was it
bottle-green.
There was not a ripple on it. She had not dislodged a stone. She turned
her eyes up the bank. She had no fear of the ropes failing her; they
would not be sawn through, because they swung over friable earth, not
jagged rock.
“Allons, avançons,” said Arminell, with a laugh. She was excited,
pleased with herself—she had broken out of the circle of humdrum.
The ledge was wide, where she stood, and she held to the rope to keep
her from giddiness, rather than to sustain her weight.
After a few further steps, she paused. The shelf failed altogether for
three feet, but beyond the gap was a terrace matted with cistus and
ablaze with flower. Arminell’s first impulse was to abandon her
enterprise as hazardous beyond reason, but her second was to dare the
further danger, and make a spring to the firm ground.
“This is the difference between me and my lady,” said Arminell. “She—and
my lord likewise—will not risk a leap—moral, social, or religious.”
Then with a rush of impetuosity and impatience, she swung herself across
the gap, and landed safely on the bed of cistus.
“Would Giles ever be permitted the unconventional?” asked Arminell.
“What a petit-maître he will turn out.”
The Hon. Giles Inglett, her half-brother, aged ten, was, as already
said, the only son of Lord Lamerton and heir-apparent to the barony.
From the cistus patch she crept, still clinging to the ivy, along the
ledge that now bore indications of the path once formed on it, and
presently, with a sense of defiance of danger, allowed herself to look
down into the still water.
“After all, if I did go down, it would not be very dreadful—it is a
reversed heaven. I would spoil my gown, but what of that? I have my
allowance, and can spoil as many gowns as I choose within my margin. I
wonder—would a fall from my social terrace be as easy as one from
this—and lead to such trifling and reparable consequences?”
Then she reached the platform of the cave, let go the ivy-streamers, and
entered the grotto.
The entrance was just high enough for Arminell to pass in without
stooping. The depth of the cave was not great, ten feet. The sun shone
in, making the nook cheerful and warm. Again Arminell looked down at the
pond.
“How different the water seems according to the position from which we
look at it. Seen from one point it blazes with reflected light, and
laughs with brilliance; seen from another it is infinitely sombre,
light-absorbing, not light-reflecting. It is so perhaps with the world,
and poor Jingles contemplates it from an unhappy point.”
She seated herself on the floor at the mouth of the cave, and leaned her
back against the side, dangling one foot over the edge of the precipice.
“The best of churches, the most inspiring shrine for holy thoughts—O,
how lucky, I have in my pocket Gaboriau’s ‘Gilded Clique!’”
She wore a pretty pink dress with dark crimson velvet trimmings, but the
brightest point of colour about Arminell was the blood-coloured cover of
the English version of the French romance of rascality and crime.
Arminell had lost her mother at an age at which she could not remember
her. The girl had been badly brought up, by governesses unequal to the
task of forming the mind and directing the conscience of a self-willed
intelligent girl.
She had changed her governesses often, and not invariably for the
better. One indulged and flattered her, and set her cap at Lord
Lamerton. She had to be dismissed. Then came a methodical creature,
eminently conscientious, so completely a piece of animated clockwork, so
incapable of acting or even thinking out of a set routine, that she
drove Arminell into sullen revolt. After her departure, a young lady
from Girton arrived, who walked with long strides, wore a pince-nez, was
primed with slang, and held her nose on high to keep her pince-nez in
place. She was dismissed because she whistled, but not before her
influence, the most mischievous of all, had left its abiding impress on
the character of the pupil.
This governess laughed at conventionalities, such as are the safeguards
of social life, and sneered at the pruderies of feminine modesty. Her
tone was sarcastic and sceptical.
Then came a young lady of good manners, but of an infinitely feeble
mind, who wore a large fringe to conceal a forehead as retreating as
that of the Neanderthal man. Arminell found her a person of infinite
promise and no achievement. She undertook to teach Greek, algebra, and
comparative anatomy, but could not spell “rhododendron.”
When Lord Lamerton had married again, the new wife shrank from
exercising authority over the wayward girl, and sought to draw her to
her by kindness. But Arminell speedily gauged the abilities of her
stepmother, and became not actively hostile, but indifferent to her.
Lady Lamerton was not a person to provoke hostility.
Thus the girl had grown up with mind unformed, judgment undisciplined,
feelings impetuous and under no constraint, and with very confused
notions of right and wrong. She possessed by nature a strong will, and
this had been toughened by resistance where it should have been yielded
to, and non-resistance where it ought to have been firmly opposed.
She had taken a class that Sunday in the school, as well as on the
preceding Sunday, only at Lady Lamerton’s urgent request, because the
school-mistress was absent on a holiday.
And now Arminell, who had come to the Owl’s Nest to pay her devotions to
heaven, performed them by reading Gaboriau’s “Gilded Clique.”