MOTH AND RUST
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
RED POTTAGE.
DIANA TEMPEST.
SIR CHARLES DANVERS.
A DEVOTEE.
THE DANVERS' JEWELS.
MOTH AND RUST
TOGETHER WITH GEOFFREY'S
WIFE AND THE PITFALL
BY MARY CHOLMONDELEY,
AUTHOR OF "RED POTTAGE."
"Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array."
--CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1902
TO
ESSEX.
Not chance of birth or place has made us friends.
PREFACE
My best thanks are due to the Editor of
_The Graphic_ for his kind permission to
republish "Geoffrey's Wife," which appeared
originally in _The Graphic_.
MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
CONTENTS
PAGE
MOTH AND RUST 1
GEOFFREY'S WIFE 241
THE PITFALL 267
* * * * *
MOTH AND RUST
CHAPTER I
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."
The Vicar gave out the text, and proceeded to expound it. The little
congregation settled down peacefully to listen. Except four of their
number, the "quality" in the carved Easthope pew, none of them had much
treasure on earth. Their treasure for the greater part consisted of a
pig, that was certainly being "laid up" to meet the rent at Christmas.
But there would hardly be time for moth and rust to get into it before
its secluded life should migrate into flitches and pork pies. Not that
the poorest of Mr Long's parishioners had any fear of such an event, for
they never associated his sermons with anything to do with themselves,
except on one occasion when the good man had preached earnestly against
drunkenness, and a respectable widow had ceased to attend divine service
in consequence, because, as she observed, she was not going to be spoken
against like that by any one, be they who they may, after all the years
she had been "on the teetotal."
Perhaps the two farmers who had driven over resplendent wives in
dog-carts had treasure on earth. They certainly had money in the bank at
Mudbury, for they were to be seen striding in in gaiters on market-day
to draw it out. But then it was well known that thieves did not break
through into banks and steal. Banks sometimes broke of themselves, but
not often.
On the whole, the congregation was at its ease. It felt that the text
was well chosen, and that it applied exclusively to the four occupants
of "the Squire's" pew.
The hard-worked Vicar certainly had no treasure on earth, if you
excepted his principal possessions, namely, his pale wife and little
flock of rosy children, and these, of course, were only encumbrances.
Had they not proved to be so? For his cousin had promised him the family
living, and would certainly have kept that promise when it became
vacant, if the wife he had married in the interval had not held such
strong views as to a celibate clergy.
The Vicar was a conscientious man, and the conscientious are seldom
concise.
"He held with all his tedious might,
The mirror to the mind of God."
There was no doubt he was tedious, and it was to be hoped that the
portion of the Divine mind not reflected in the clerical mirror would
compensate somewhat for His more gloomy attributes as shown therein.
Mrs Trefusis, "Squire's" mother, an old woman with a thin, knotted face
like worn-out elastic, sat erect throughout the service. She had the
tight-lipped, bitter look of one who has coldly appropriated as her due
all the good things of life, who has fiercely rebelled against every
untoward event, and who now in old age offers a passive, impotent
resistance to anything that suggests a change. She had had an easy,
comfortable existence, but her life had gone hard with her, and her face
showed it.
Near her were the two guests who were staying at Easthope. The villagers
looked at the two girls with deep interest. They had made up their minds
that "the old lady had got 'em in to see if Squire could fancy one of
'em."
Lady Anne Varney, who sat next to Mrs Trefusis, was a graceful,
small-headed woman of seven-and-twenty, delicately featured, pale,
exquisitely dressed, with the indefinable air of a finished woman of the
world, and with the reserved, disciplined manner of a woman accustomed
to conceal her feelings from a world in which she has lived too much, in
which she has been knocked about too much, and which has not gone too
well with her. If Anne attended to the sermon--and she appeared to do
so--she was the only person in the Easthope pew who did.
No; the other girl, Janet Black, was listening too now and then,
catching disjointed sentences with no sense in them, as one hears a few
shouted words in a high wind.
Ah me! Janet was beautiful. Even Mrs Trefusis was obliged to own it,
though she did so grudgingly, and added bitterly that the girl had no
breeding. It was true. Janet had none. But beauty rested upon her as it
rests on a dove's neck, varying with every movement, every turn of the
head. She was quite motionless now, her rather large, ill-gloved hands
in her lap. Janet was a still woman. She had no nervous movements. She
did not twine her muff-chain round her fingers as Anne did. Anne looked
at her now and then, and wondered whether she--Anne--would have been
more successful in life if she had entered the arena armed with such
beauty as Janet's.
There was a portrait of Janet in the Academy several years later, which
has made her beauty known to the world. We have all seen that celebrated
picture of the calm Madonna face, with the mark of suffering so plainly
stamped upon the white brow and in the unfathomable eyes. But the young
girl sitting in the Easthope pew hardly resembled, except in feature,
the portrait that, later on, took the artistic world by storm. Janet was
perhaps even more beautiful in this her first youth than her picture
proved her afterwards to be; but the beauty was expressionless, opaque.
The soul had not yet illumined the fair face. She looked what she was--a
little dull, without a grain of imagination. Was it the dulness of want
of ability, or only the dulness of an uneducated mind, of powers unused,
still dormant?
Without her transcendent beauty she would have appeared uninteresting
and commonplace.
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth."
The Vicar had a habit of repeating his text several times in the course
of his sermon. Janet heard it the third time, and it forced the entrance
of her mind.
Her treasure was certainly on earth. It consisted of the heavy,
sleek-haired young man with the sunburnt complexion and the reddish
moustache at the end of the pew--in short, "the Squire."
After a short and ardent courtship she had accepted him, and then she
herself had been accepted, not without groans, by his family. The groans
had not been audible, but she was vaguely aware that she was not
received with enthusiasm by the family of her hero, her wonderful fairy
prince who had ridden into her life on a golden chestnut. George
Trefusis was heavily built, but in Janet's eyes he was slender. His
taciturn dulness was in her eyes a most dignified and becoming reserve.
His inveterate unsociability proved to her--not that it needed
proving--his mental superiority. She could not be surprised at the
coldness of her reception as his betrothed, for she acutely felt her own
great unworthiness of being the consort of this resplendent personage,
who could have married any one. Why had he honoured her among all
women?
The answer was sufficiently obvious to every one except herself. The
fairy prince had fallen heavily in love with her beauty; so heavily
that, after a secret but stubborn resistance, he had been vanquished by
it. Marry her he must and would, whatever his mother might say. And she
had said a good deal. She had not kept silence.
And now Janet was staying for the first time at Easthope, which was one
day to be her home--the old Tudor house standing among its terraced
gardens, which had belonged to a Trefusis since a Trefusis built it in
Henry the Seventh's time.