THE CHURCH NEAR CAMELOT.
Celia opened her eyes to their widest extent a fortnight later, when
Mrs. Treverton informed her that she was going to meet her husband, and
that, after a few weeks’ holiday, they were coming home together for
good.
‘For good,’ repeated Celia, drily, after which her eyes slowly resumed
their normal state, and her lips drew themselves tightly together. ‘I
am glad to hear that your existence as a married woman is about to
assume a reasonable shape. Up to this time you have been as insoluble a
mystery as that horrid creature, the Man in the Iron Mask; and, pray,
may I be permitted to ask, without being considered offensive, where
you are to meet the returning wanderer?’
‘At Plymouth,’ said Laura, who had received minute instructions from
John as to what she was to say.
‘Why blush at the mention of Plymouth?’ asked Celia. ‘There is nothing
improper in the name of Plymouth; nothing unfit for publication. I
presume that, as Mr. Treverton arrives at Plymouth, he comes from some
distant portion of the globe?’
‘He is coming from Buenos Ayres, where he had business that absolutely
required his personal attention.’
‘What an extraordinary girl you are, Laura!’ ejaculated Celia, her eyes
again widening.
‘Why extraordinary?’
‘Because you must have been perfectly aware that I, and I think I
may go so far as to say all the inhabitants of Hazlehurst, have been
bursting with curiosity about your husband for the last six months, and
yet you could not have the good grace to enlighten us. If you had said
he had gone to Buenos Ayres on business, we should have been satisfied.’
‘I told you he had affairs that detained him abroad.’
‘But why not have given his affairs a local habitation and a name?’
‘My husband did not wish me to talk about him.’
‘Well, you are altogether the oddest couple. However, I am very glad
things are going to be different. Would it be too much to ask if Mr.
Treverton will remain at the Manor House, or if he is going to reappear
only in his usual meteoric fashion?’
‘I hope he will stay at Hazlehurst all his life.’
‘Poor fellow!’ sighed Celia. ‘If he does I’m sure I shall pity him.’
‘You need not be so absurdly literal. Of course we shall go far afield
sometimes and see the world, and all that is interesting and beautiful
in it.’
‘How glibly you talk about what “we” are going to do. A week ago you
could not be induced to mention your husband’s name. And how happy you
look; I never saw such a change.’
‘It is all because I am going to see him again. I hope you do not
begrudge me my happiness?’
‘No, but I rather envy you. I only wish some benevolent old party would
leave me a splendid estate on condition I married a handsome young
man. You would see how willingly I would obey him. There should be no
mystery about my conduct, I assure you. I should not make an iron mask
of myself.’
Celia wrote next day to her brother to tell him how that most
incomprehensible of husbands, John Treverton, was expected home from
Buenos Ayres, and how his wife was going to Plymouth to meet him. ‘And
I never saw any human creature look so happy in my life,’ wrote Celia.
‘I have seen dogs look like it when one has given them biscuits, and
cats when they sit blinking at the fire, and young pigs lying on a bank
in the sunshine. Yes, I have seen those dumb things appear the image
of perfect, unreasoning, unquestioning happiness, which looks neither
behind nor before; but such an expression is rarely to be seen in
humanity.’
A nice letter for Edward Clare to get--disappointed, more or less out
at elbows, with a growing sense of failure upon him, sick to death of
his London lodging, sick of the few literary men whose acquaintance he
had contrived to make, and with whom he did not amalgamate as well as
he had anticipated. He tore his sister’s lively epistle into morsels
and sent them flying over Waterloo Bridge, upon the light summer wind,
and felt as if he would like to have gone over with them.
‘Yet once I thought she loved me,’ he said to himself, ‘and so she
did, before that plausible scoundrel came in her way. But I ought to
remember how much she gains by loving him. If the old man had happened
to leave me his estate, perhaps she might have looked unutterably happy
at the idea of my return after a long absence. Only God, who made
women, knows what hypocrites they are;’ and then Mr. Clare went home
to his shabby lodging, and sat down in bitterest mood, and dipped his
pen in the ink, and wrung out of himself a passionate page of verse for
one of the magazines--not without labour and the sweat of his brow--and
then took his poem and sold it, and dined luxuriously on the proceeds,
hugging his wrongs and nursing his wrath to keep it warm, as he sat in
a corner of the bright little French restaurant he liked best, slowly
sipping his modest half-bottle of Pomard.
That which Celia had told him was perfectly true. There never was a
happier woman than Laura, after that interview by the river. During the
last week before her departure she was full of business, preparing for
her husband’s return.
‘Your master will be here in a few weeks,’ she said to the old
housekeeper, with infinite pride, ‘and we must have everything ready
for him.’
‘So we will, ma’am, spick and span,’ answered Mrs. Trimmer. ‘It will
be happiness to have him settle down among us. It must have been a
sore trial to you both, to be parted so, just at the beginning of your
married life, too. It would have come more nat’ral afterwards.’
‘It was a sore trial, Trimmer,’ Mrs. Treverton answered, full of
confidential friendliness. ‘But it’s all over now. I could hardly have
borne to speak about it before.’
‘No, ma’am, I noticed as you was close and silent like, and I knew my
place too well to say anything. Troubles take hold of people different.
If there’s anything on my mind I must out with it, if it was but to
Ginger, the tortoiseshell cat; but some folks can keep their worrits
screwed up inside ’em. It hurts ’em to speak.’
‘That was my case, Trimmer. It hurt me to speak my husband’s name, or
to hear it spoken, while he was forced to be far away from me. But now
it’s all different. You cannot talk of him too much to please me. I
hope you will be as fond of him as you were of the dear old man who is
gone.’...
Mr. Treverton must have a sitting-room of his own, of course; a den
where he might write his letters, and see his bailiff, where he could
smoke and meditate at his leisure, study if he ever cared to study,
read novels even, were he disposed to be lazy; and where his happy
wife could only come on sufferance, deeming it a vast indulgence to be
allowed to sit at his feet sometimes, or even to fill his pipe for him,
or, in rough winter weather, to kneel down before the blazing fire and
warm his slippers, when he had come in from a cold ride round his land,
doing good wherever he went, like a benevolent fairy in the modern form
of an enlightened landlord.
After much debate and perplexity, Laura decided upon giving her
husband, for his own particular sanctum, that very room in which
they two had met for the first time, on the snowy winter night when
John Treverton came to see his dying kinsman. It was a good old
room, not large, but pleasant, oak-panelled, with a fireplace in the
corner, which gave a quaintness to the room; an oak mantelpiece with
half-a-dozen narrow shelves running in a pyramid above it, and on these
shelves an arrangement of old blue Nankin cups and saucers, crowned at
the apex with the most delightful thing in teapots. There was an old
cabinet in the room, so full of secret drawers, and mysterious boxes
and recesses at the back of the drawers, that it was in itself the
study of a lifetime.
‘Never hide anything in it, my dear,’ Jasper Treverton had said to his
adopted daughter, ‘for be sure if you do you won’t be able to find it.’
To this room Laura brought other treasures; the most comfortable easy
chairs in the house, the best of the small Dutch pictures, the softest
of the Turkey carpets, the richest tapestry curtains, two or three
fine bronzes, a lovely little Chippendale book-case. This last she
filled with all her own favourite books, robbing the book-room below
ruthlessly, in the delight of enriching her husband’s study, as this
room was henceforth to be called.
‘He shall know and feel that he is welcome,’ she said to herself,
softly, as she lingered in the room, touching everything, re-arranging,
polishing, whisking away invisible grains of dust with a dainty feather
brush, caressing the things that were so soon to belong to the man she
loved.
The adjoining room--the room in which Jasper Treverton had died--was to
be her own bedchamber. It was a spacious room with three long windows
and deep window seats, a fireplace at which an ox, or at all events
a baron of beef, might have been roasted--a tall four-post bed, with
twisted columns richly carved; curtains of Utrecht velvet, crimson
and amber, lined with white silk, all somewhat faded, but splendid in
decay--a noble room altogether, yet Laura had rather a horror of it,
dearly as she had loved him whose generous spirit seemed to haunt the
chamber.
But Mrs. Trimmer told her that, as the mistress of Hazlehurst Manor,
she ought to occupy this room. It always had been the Squire’s
bedchamber, and it ought to be so still.
‘Nothing like old ways,’ said Mrs. Trimmer, decisively.
The room opened into John Treverton’s study. That was a reason why
Laura should like it.
If he were to sit up late at night reading or writing, she would be
near him. She might see the face she loved, through the open door,
bending over his papers in the lamplight.
‘We are going to be a regular Darby and Joan, Mrs. Trimmer,’ she said
to the housekeeper, as she made all her small domestic arrangements.
In such trivial work she contrived to get rid of the third week, and
then came the lovely summer noontide when she started on her journey,
with the faithful Mary in attendance.
‘Mary,’ she had said, the night before, ‘I am going to trust you with a
great secret, because I believe you are staunch and true.’
‘If you could find another young woman in my capacity, mum, that would
be stauncherer or truerer, I’ll undertake to eat her without a grain of
salt,’ protested Mary, sacrificing grammar to intensity.
The train from Beechampton took them across a stretch of wild moorland,
where the granite cropped up in scattered boulders, as if Titans had
been pelting one another, to Didford Junction. At Didford they found
John Treverton waiting for them, and here they got on to another
line of railway, and into a more pastoral landscape, and so on to
Lyonstown--pronounced Linson--where they mounted the stage-coach which
was to take them across the moor to Camelot. It was about four o’clock
in the afternoon by this time, and it would be evening before they
reached the little town among the Cornish hills. Oh, what a happy drive
it was across the free open moorland, in the mild afternoon light,
a thousand feet above the sea-level, above the smoke and turmoil of
cities, far away from all mankind, in a lonely world of heather and
granite. The dark brown hills, twin brothers, rose between them and the
western sun, now blending into one dark mass of mountain, now standing
far apart, as some new turn of the narrow moorland road seemed to
alter their position in the landscape. It was like a new world even to
Laura, though she came from the sister county, and had lived the best
part of her life under the edge of Dartmoor.
‘I really think I should like to spend my life on these hills,’ said
Laura, as she and John Treverton sat side by side behind the sturdy
little coachman, whose quaintly comical face might have made the
fortune of a low comedian. ‘It seems such a beautiful world, even in
its wildness and solitude, so pure and fair, and free from the taint of
sin.’
The sunlight behind the big brown tors was fading, and the air
growing crisp and cool, keenly biting even, at odd times, though it
was midsummer. John drew a soft woollen shawl round his companion’s
shoulders, and even in this little action his heart thrilled at the
thought that henceforward it was his duty to protect her from all the
ills of life. And so through the deepening gloom they came to Camelot,
a narrow street on the slant of a hill, folded in gray twilight as in a
mantle.
The inn where Laura and her maid were to put up for the night was
commonplace and commercial--a house that had evidently seen better
days, but which had plucked up its spirits and furbished up its rickety
old furniture since the establishment of the North Cornwall coach, a
blessed institution, linking a wild and solitary district with railways
and civilization.
Here Laura rested comfortably enough through the short summer night,
while John Treverton endured the discomforts of a second-rate tavern
over against the market-place. At eight o’clock next morning he
presented himself at the hotel where Laura and her maid were waiting
for him, and then the three went on foot to the outlying church where
John Treverton was to take this woman, Laura, for his wife for the
second time within six months.
‘I could not have been happier in my choice of a locality than I was
in fixing upon Camelot,’ said John, as they walked side by side along
the country lane, between tall banks of brier and fern, in the sweet
morning air, with the faithful Mary strolling discreetly in the rear.
‘I found the most accommodating old parson, who quite entered into
my views when I told him that for certain reasons which I need not
explain, I wished my marriage to be kept altogether quiet. “I shall not
speak of it to a creature,” replied the good old soul. “No man would
come to Camelot to be married who did not wish to hide himself from the
eye of the world. I shall respect your secret, and I’ll take care that
my clerk does the same.”’
The old church smelt rather like a vault when they went in out of the
breezy summer day, but it was a cleanly whitewashed vault, and the
sun was shining full upon the faded crimson velvet of the communion
table, above which appeared the ten commandments and the royal arms
in the good old style. Steeped in that sunshine stood the bride and
bridegroom, gravely, earnestly repeating the solemn words of the
service; no witnesses of the act save the gray-headed clerk and the
girl Mary, who seemed to think it incumbent upon somebody to be moved
to tears, and who therefore gently sniffed and faintly sobbed in the
background. Never had Laura looked lovelier than when she stood beside
her husband in the little closet of a vestry, signing her name in the
mouldy old register; never had she felt happier than when they walked
away from the lonely old church, after a friendly leave-taking of the
good vicar, who blessed them and gave them God speed as heartily as
if they had been born and bred in his parish. The coach was to pick
them up at the cross-roads about half a mile from the church, having
previously picked up their luggage in Camelot, and they were to go back
across the moor to Lyonstown, and from Lyonstown by rail to the extreme
west, and thence to the Scilly Isles.
‘Can nothing happen now to part us, John?’ Laura asked, while they were
sitting on a ferny bank waiting for the coach. ‘Are our lives secure
from all evil in the future?’
‘Who can be armed against all misfortune, love?’ he asked. ‘Of one
thing I am certain. You are my wife. Against the validity of our
marriage of to-day no living creature can say a word.’
‘And the legality of our previous marriage might have been questioned?’
‘Yes, dearest, there would have always been that hazard.’