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[Illustration]
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The Green Goddess
BY LOUISE JORDAN MILN
AUTHOR OF
_”Mr. Wu,” “The Feast of Lanterns,” “The Purple_
_Mask,” etc._
“And the Gods of the East made mouths at me.”
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company
Printed in U. S. A.
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_Copyright, 1922, by_
Frederick A. Stokes Company
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_All rights reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XLII
CHAPTER XLIII
CHAPTER XLIV
CHAPTER XLV
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“In men whom men proclaim divine,
I find so much of sin and blot,
In men whom men condemn as ill,
I find so much of goodness still;
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, where God has not.”
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THE GREEN GODDESS
CHAPTER I
The Vicar was suffering—almost as much as he had suffered the night
that Helen, his wife, had died—and _because_ he was suffering he
dressed his fine cameo-like face in its sunniest smile. That was his
way—part of his creed-of-daily-life, an intrinsic part of his self.
A godly man, in the sweetest and strongest senses of that overused word,
Philip Reynolds had a wholesome flair for the things of earth that both
mellow human life and give it a tang. He liked his dinner, and he liked
it good. He loved his roses, and he was vastly proud of his turnips. His
modest cellar was admirably stocked. He enjoyed the logs that burned and
glowed on his wide hearths. He was fond of his books—both inside and
out. If he found a newly purchased book (he subscribed to no library)
little worth reading, he discarded it. He gave it away, if he held it
harmless; if he thought it a hurtful volume, he burned it. But his taste
was broad, and his charity—to books as well as to people—was wide. He
played a good hand of bridge—though Lucilla, his girl, played even a
better. But he could beat the county at whist, and most of it at chess.
He still could give a crack tennis player a game, and he could ride neck
and neck with the next—and so could Lucilla.
But all these things were so much to him only because they that he loved
were so greatly more. There were four big human loves in his being and
keeping. Three whom he loved were out in the churchyard—only one,
Lucilla, still lived. But he loved the three as actively now as he had
when they had been here in the vicarage with him. And the creature
things he cared for and cultivated—wine, food, games, flowers,
books—he cared for and appreciated most because he associated them with
the beings of his strong living love: his mother, his wife, Jack, his
boy, and Lucilla, his daughter.
He had one great friendship, and two or three more moderate, but staunch
and warm. His great friendship was with God. It amounted to reverent
intimacy. He felt more quickly alive to God’s nearness than to that of
most human creatures. His friendship with God filled his life. But his
human loves filled his heart. Philip Reynolds loved his God, and obeyed
Him loyally and gladly. But he knew that his love for the three in the
churchyard, and the girl whom he was giving up to another to-morrow was
a more passionate thing than the devoted affection he gave to his Maker
and Master. And he dared to think this no offense to the Supreme. God
who had granted them to him understood and did not blame, he thought.
He had no doubt of God’s personal existence, and never had had. As a
little child he had believed implicitly because his mother did, and as
he grew older, and came to live—as we all, even the most heart-bound
and interknit with close human intimacies must—a life somewhat of his
own, all that he saw, experienced, and came to think added a strong and
vivid conviction, a reasoned and constantly augmented conviction, to
what had been just acceptance and credulity. Everything convinced him
that there was a God, a gracious, humane and intensely personal God, in
whose image all men were made. The marvelous, masterly plan of the
universe, the exquisite creation of flowers, the flight and the song of
birds, the fitness and interfitting of all natural and unspoiled things,
the unerring instincts of animal life and of the vegetable
world—instincts of reproduction and of self-defending; these and a
myriad other daily “miracles” convinced him of a Master Workman
omnipotent and very near; gave him a conviction which never could be
shaken or threatened—an invincible, glowing, grateful faith. And it was
his strength. But his human loves were his inspiration; they flowed
through his being like rare wine in his veins, they colored his life,
sparkled his thought, and perfumed his world. He _knew_ God, and
worshiped Him, and gave Him a beautiful friendship. But his love, as he
understood “love”—life’s earthly stimulant and elixir—was for the
three in the churchyard and for the girl their going had left with him
behind them.
A son never had loved a mother more than Philip Reynolds had loved his;
but she held the fourth place in his heart. Helen, his wife, had held
the first, and after her he had loved Jack, their boy. Jack had died
almost immediately after Helen’s death, and Reynolds, because he so
exquisitely and deeply loved Helen, rejoiced more than he grieved. He
was glad to have Jack forever safe in their Father-God’s keeping,
radiantly glad that Helen should have the boy’s companionship and
keeping in that near Heaven where she waited his coming. The
parishioners marveled at their Vicar’s sunny serenity close on the loss
of his only son; one or two questioned it, even, not too approvingly.
Other priests held it his very great “grace.” But they were wrong, for
it was no saintship, but simply the supreme sincerity of his love of his
wife, making him _glad_ to give to her what he most of all things would
have wished to keep for himself: the daily and constant companionship of
Jack. And yet—were they wrong after all? Surely to love as this man
loved _is_ “grace,” a grace unto the grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.
His wife, his son, and his mother were as much an active part of his
daily life to-day as they ever had been; and Jack, the last to be laid
there, had lain in the old Surrey churchyard a full score of years. Each
day he went to their graves which no hand but his ever tended—it was
not far to go; only across the narrow country road—saw that their
flowers were fresh, and the bleakest winter’s day they had their
flowers, and passed on in to pray in the church where his mother and he
and Jack had been christened, and where his mother and Helen and he had
been married—then back to his home and his people, his tireless, gentle
ministering to good and to sinful, his sipping of good wine, his reading
of books, his games and his writing, and his care of Lucilla.
He could not remember his father; for the father had “gone down with his
ship” when Philip had been but a baby; and Lucilla could remember
neither her mother nor brother; for they had died when she was not
three.
Helen Reynolds was still remembered in the parish for her pretty face,
and her soft kind ways—remembered as “a nice little thing” with the
best heart in the world, but no special strength of mind or of will.
But that had not been so. Few women have ever had a stronger will, and
even fewer a more capable mind. Her intense gentleness had been a
dignity, not weakness. An entirely happy life had left her will
unruffled, and her really fine mind had been homekeeping, a trifle
proud, and more than a trifle scornful of the mental equipments—outside
of the vicarage itself—about her. A great many rich and leisured
people—quite a few of them with minor titles—had smart country
establishments in the purlieus of her husband’s parish, but they were
not intellectuals, they read more novels than quarterlies, attended more
race-meetings than academic lectures, were more steeped in fashions than
in philosophies, and the village folk were true to type, self-seeking,
self-absorbed, gossipy, curious, ordinary. They read the Surrey
_Comet_—some of them sometimes—abused the weather, asked alms directly
or indirectly, but industriously, of Vicar and Squire, and took a keen
rather than gracious interest in each other’s births and marriages, ups
and downs, debts and earnings, shortcomings and Sunday dinners. They had
not interested Helen Reynolds; which was not altogether to their
disadvantage. For the Vicar’s wife had a shrewder gift of analysis than
the Vicar had. He saw chiefly the good in every one. She saw the bad, as
quickly and surely as she did the good; and her sense of justice leaned
to severity rather than to mercy. She had been as devoted to Philip as
he to her. But he had deserved it. A faulty husband would have had short
shrift with Helen Reynolds, whose “sweetly pretty” face and soft,
rippling, girlish hair enhoused a relentless judgment, an exigeant taste
and unwavering determination. But she had a sweet, sunny spirit and a
quick, bubbling sense of humor. She rarely smiled, but she laughed
fairly often. And her wit was both pretty and trenchant.
The Vicar never made a joke in his life, and never failed to see
one—and, if it really was good, never failed to enjoy it greatly.
There was more lion, more indomitability, in wife than in husband, but
they were excellently matched in tastes, culture and breeding; and their
comradeship had been “perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” And death
did not separate them.
The daughter of such parents and of such a marriage came into life with
fine equipment. She had her mother’s mind, the good taste of the two, a
person less “pretty,” more distinguished than her mother’s. She had her
mother’s cool, clear head, her father’s big, loyal heart, her mother’s
sharp eyes, her father’s fine, firm hand on bridle or reins. She had his
genial liking of people, his love of fun, her mother’s resentment of all
that offended her taste, the tireless limbs of them both, the flair of
adventure and travel that they had shared almost equally. She was
fearless and exquisitely bred.
Philip Reynolds had traveled much in his younger days, and he still
roamed the world—in his study and in the easy chair by the drawing-room
fire. But since his wife’s death he had not spent a night out of the
sleeping-room that had also been hers. He still loved to travel—with
the book on his knee; but not for all the wonder-spots of earth would he
have foregone even once his daily tryst at the graves in the churchyard.
Lucilla Reynolds always had longed to travel, but had done it but
little. For her own sake her father had been unwilling to spare her—for
they had few relatives, and none to whom he cared to entrust his girl
often. But he was relinquishing her now. And she was going to travel
far. For Captain Crespin’s regiment was stationed in India. And they
were to be married to-morrow, Antony Crespin and Lucilla Reynolds.