‘ALAS! I HAVE NOR HOPE NOR HEALTH.’
BELLA SCRATCHELL, tripping to the Park one frosty morning, and entering
Mrs. Piper’s sitting-room, all beaming with smiles, like a small
edition of Aurora, found the invalid in tears, and sniffing feebly at a
bottle of aromatic vinegar.
‘Dear Mrs. Piper, have you had one of your bad headaches?’
‘No, my dear, it is not my bodily health, but my spiritual condition
that affects me. I feel as if I had been holding on by an anchor, and
somebody had taken the anchor away and left me tossing on a stormy sea.
I had such faith in him. He put things in a clearer light than Mr.
Mowler. The Reverend Josiah Mowler is a sainted creature--and I shall
always say so, but he is not equal to Mr. Culverhouse. He hasn’t the
inspiration. Oh, Bella, I am grateful to you for having brought that
good man here, but I feel it hard to lose him, just as I had pinned my
faith upon his teaching.’
Mrs. Piper wiped away her tears with the fine hem-stitched cambric that
befitted her wealth and position, and applied herself disconsolately to
her smelling-bottle.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Bella, all the pinkness fading out of her
cheeks.
‘Why, surely you have heard?’
‘I have heard nothing. Is it about Mr. Culverhouse?’
‘My dear, he has left us. He has gone to Bridford--a horrible place
in Lancashire, where they have small-pox every year. You might have
knocked me down with a feather when Ebenezer came in and told me about
it.’
Bella sat pale and speechless. Was it for this that she had schemed?
She had slandered her familiar friend, sold herself to Satan, in the
hope of winning this man; and behold! he was gone, and there was no
more chance of winning him than there had been before she perilled her
soul by this sin. For Bella knew that she had sinned. She was quite
capable of doing a wicked thing for her own advantage, or to gratify
her evil temper, but she knew that the act was wicked, and she had a
lurking idea that she would have to pay for it in some manner in the
future. Bella regarded sin as some people regard going into debt for
present gratification; a matter to be settled in a remote future, and
hardly worth thinking about while the day of reckoning is so far off.
‘Do you mean that he has really gone,’ she faltered presently, ‘for
ever?’
‘Yes, my dear, he has left us for a permanency. I suppose it is to
better himself; but I can’t fancy anybody bettering themselves at
Bridford, where the small-pox has been raging, on and off, ever since
I can remember, and where they have cholera worse than anywhere in the
kingdom.’
‘How did you hear of it?’ asked Bella, with the faint hope that this
piece of information might prove a fable.
‘From himself, dear. He wrote me the sweetest letter, full of comfort.
But I don’t know what I shall do without him. His visits buoyed me up.’
‘Other people will be sorry,’ said Bella, faintly.
‘Everybody must be sorry. He is a saintly young man.’
‘When did he leave?’
‘Yesterday morning.’
‘And I never heard of it,’ exclaimed Bella.
She was thinking how all things had looked the same, though he was
gone. There had been nothing in earth or sky to tell her that the light
had faded out of her life. The dull village street--with her mother’s
vagabond fowls pecking in the highway--had looked not a shade duller
than usual. She had passed Mrs. Pomfret’s trim garden, and had looked
tenderly at the square unpretending cottage, thinking that those walls
sheltered him; and he was far away. He was gone, and she had not known
it.
‘He might have called to wish me good-bye,’ she complained, ‘after my
working for his poor.’
‘It must have been very sudden at the last,’ suggested Mrs. Piper.
Bella went to the schoolroom to grapple with the unruly young Pipers,
sick at heart. All her misery was Mrs. Dulcimer’s fault, she thought,
not taking into consideration her own readiness to lend herself to Mrs.
Dulcimer’s plans.
There was only one ray of comfort, a lurid and unholy light, in the
dark gulf of her thoughts. If Cyril had gone away taking her hopes with
him, he had left Beatrix also hopeless. There was an end of the tie
between those two. If he had meant to marry Miss Harefield he would not
have left Little Yafford.
She dragged herself through the lesson, somehow, beating time to
Elizabeth Fry’s performance of the classic melody of Trab, Trab, with
somebody’s variations--the variations of an ancient and stereotyped
order, first triplets, then little stunted runs, then octaves, then a
dismal minor, all in chords, and then a general banging and flare-up
for a finale. The piece was hideous, and Elizabeth Fry’s playing was a
degree worse than the piece. Bella’s head ached woefully by the time
her pupil had pounded through the brilliant finale, but she bore up
heroically, and heard Horne Tooke read about William the Conqueror
in a drawling voice--with a nasal _ad libitum_ accompaniment. These
children never seemed to get beyond William the Conqueror and his
immediate posterity. Their historical ideas were strictly feudal, and
it must have appeared to them only yesterday when the curfew was heard
from every church tower, and Peter the Hermit was kindling the souls of
Christians with his war-cry of _Deus vult_.
Bella stopped to see the little Pipers safely through their early
dinner, the table of these juveniles being as much a scene of strife
and contention as any battle-field in history. It was a hard matter to
preserve some semblance of peace, still harder to inculcate anything
approaching good manners, the young Pipers having entered the world
with an incapacity for using spoons, forks, knives, or other implements
of civilized life in a decent manner. The battle-field was generally
flooded before dinner was over--not with the gore of the combatants,
but with Brougham’s stout, or with Elizabeth’s regulation glass of
old port, or a sauce boat that had capsized in a struggle to get it
‘first,’ or a mustard-pot turned over in a free fight. Bella had a
little more influence over these barbarians than the servants, who,
coming and going like the wind, were of no authority; but to-day Bella
sat at the head of the table looking straight before her, and allowed
the young Pipers to squabble, snatch, push, and kick one another to
their heart’s content.
She was thinking of that ideal vicarage which might have been hers in
the future if Cyril Culverhouse had only cared for her.
‘He might have chosen me if his heart had been free,’ she reflected.
‘Everybody tells me I am pretty; even Mr. Piper, coarse and common as
he is, always compliments me about my looks. Why should not Cyril have
liked me?’
It seemed a hard thing to Bella that this gift of prettiness should
be such a barren boon, that it should not bring her exactly what she
wanted. She shed some sullen tears on her way home across the windy
Park, along the bleak high road. There was no one to see her tears
or to pity her. She was angry with fate, angry with life, in which
all things were so unequally meted out. Beatrix was miserable too, no
doubt, in her handsome house yonder, the house whose dulness Bella had
found a shade worse than poverty.
Bella changed her dress and bonnet, and went to make an afternoon call
upon Mrs. Dulcimer, certain of hearing all about Cyril’s departure
from that loquacious lady. The twilight shadows were falling already,
and the half-dozen dingy little shops in the village street were dimly
illuminated with oil or tallow, but an hour or so before tea was always
the best time for finding Mrs. Dulcimer.
‘Well, my dear, you have heard the news, I suppose?’ said the Vicar’s
wife, dispensing with the usual ‘how do d’ye do,’ in her eagerness.
‘I have, dear Mrs. Dulcimer, and I am so surprised.’
‘So is everybody, my dear, Mr. Dulcimer most of all. Such a sudden
desertion--an old pupil too, whom we looked upon almost as a son. I
think it positively unkind. He wants a wider sphere for his work. Such
nonsense. Little Yafford has been wide enough for Mr. Dulcimer for the
last twenty years. But the young men of the present day are so restless
and ambitious. I suppose he thinks Little Yafford is not the shortest
way to a bishopric. And he has taken a charge at Bridford--a horrible
town in Lancashire, where there are nothing but chemical works, and
where the river runs sulphur and asafœtida.’
‘Rather a perverted taste,’ said Bella. ‘I wonder he did not stay here
and try to marry Miss Harefield. She would be a splendid match for him.
And now her father is dead she is free to marry any one she likes.’
Mrs. Dulcimer shook her head with a dismal air, and gave a prolonged
sigh.
‘Ah, my dear, it is very sad. Those reports!’
Bella echoed the sigh.
‘I was very fond of her--once,’ she said.
‘So was I, Bella. And, even now, I should be the last to condemn her.
God forbid that I should judge anybody. I hope I know the gospel too
well for that. But I confess that I cannot feel the same as I used
about Beatrix Harefield. I can’t get over the strangeness of her having
bought that laudanum in ever so many different shops. There seems such
a low cunning in it--it is like the act of a criminal,’ continued Mrs.
Dulcimer, warming as she went on, and forgetting her protest against
judging others. ‘And I am sorry to say,’ she continued, with increasing
solemnity, ‘Rebecca thinks as I do.’
‘And Mr. Dulcimer?’ inquired Bella.
‘Oh, Mr. Dulcimer is a very curious man in that respect. He never
thinks the same as other people. He is convinced of Beatrix’s
innocence, and says the Little Yafford people are a set of venomous
idiots for condemning her. But say what he will, he cannot stem the
tide of public opinion. The coroner’s verdict was so unsatisfactory.’
‘What does Sir Kenrick think?’ asked Bella.
‘Oh, he and Mr. Dulcimer are of the same opinion.’
‘Beatrix is too handsome to be condemned by gentlemen,’ said Bella,
with unconscious venom.
‘Oh, my dear, that consideration would not affect Mr. Dulcimer, however
it might influence Kenrick. The best thing she could do would be to
marry Kenrick,’ pursued Mrs. Dulcimer, thoughtfully, ‘but I could
never take the same interest in the match that I should have done a few
months ago. In fact, I would rather not have act or part in it. If they
were to marry, and Kenrick were to die suddenly--or under mysterious
circumstances, and I had been the means of bringing about the marriage,
I should feel myself a murderer.’
Mr. Dulcimer came in from his afternoon round at this moment. He
nodded to Bella, and sank down with a fatigued air in the comfortable
arm-chair that always stood ready for him in the snuggest corner of the
hearth.
‘I have been to the Water House,’ he said, as if taking up the thread
of his wife’s discourse. ‘Beatrix is very ill.’
‘I am sorry to hear that.’
‘I am more than sorry. These wretches will contrive to kill her before
they have done. Namby says that her illness is entirely the result of
mental disturbance. That monster Scales has gone off at a moment’s
notice--after eating Harefield’s bread for fifteen years--and left that
poor child to face this foul-mouthed world alone. She is ill--and
with no one but servants about her. You ought to go and nurse her,
Bella. She has been very good to you. I hope you are not a fair-weather
friend, like the old man in the weather-glass, who only comes out when
the sun is shining.’
‘Oh, Mr. Dulcimer, how can you think so badly of me?’ remonstrated
Bella.
‘I don’t wish to think badly about you. But you have rather deserted
Beatrix lately, I have noticed.’
‘Mrs. Piper is so exacting, and such an invalid.’
‘Well, Beatrix is also an invalid now, and Mrs. Piper must give way a
little. She has her husband and children to take care of her. Beatrix
has no one. As soon as she is well enough to be moved I shall have her
brought here.’
‘Oh, Clement!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, with a troubled look.
‘What do you mean by “Oh, Clement”? We have plenty of spare bedrooms.
Providence, in denying us children, has balanced matters by giving us
spare bedrooms.’
‘Don’t you think people will talk if we have her here?’
‘People will talk whether or no. The business in life of one half
of the world is to criticise and misjudge the conduct of the other
half. But have you ever reflected how little difference all this evil
speaking makes in life? It cannot change a single element in nature.
It can worry us into untimely graves, if we are foolish enough to be
worried by it--it can divide man and wife, or father and son, if man or
wife, or father or son, is idiotic enough to be influenced by the evil
tongues of indifferent lookers on--but scandal cannot, of itself, make
the slightest difference in us or in the world we inhabit. It cannot
shorten our days or prevent the summer sun from shining upon us.’
‘I am sure I don’t know what Miss Coyle will say,’ murmured Mrs.
Dulcimer, plaintively.
‘Miss Coyle is not my bishop,’ retorted her husband, ‘and if she were I
should not consult her as to my choice of guests.’
Bella went to the Water House next day. She found Beatrix prostrate
with some kind of low fever, and light-headed. It was altogether a
piteous spectacle, this lonely sick bed. Mr. Namby came in three times
in the course of the day and evening, and was full of anxiety about
his patient. He found Bella sitting quietly by the bedside, ready
to assist the faithful maid-servant in nursing her mistress. Mrs.
Peters, the fat housekeeper, came in every half-hour, and was miserable
because her beef tea and calves’ foot jelly were not appreciated by the
fever-parched invalid.
Cyril’s name came more than once from those dry pale lips, while Bella
sat by and listened. His desertion was evidently the blow that had
struck home.
‘I’m afraid she’s heard some of the unkind gossip that’s been
about, and that it has preyed upon her mind,’ said Mr. Namby, in a
confidential chat with Miss Scratchell. ‘I can’t account for her
illness in any other way. It’s all the mind. Mr. Dulcimer promises
to carry her off to the Vicarage directly she is well enough to be
moved. That will be a very good thing. Change--change of scene and
surroundings will do a great deal.’
To Mr. Namby, whose horizon had for the last five-and-thirty years been
bounded by the sulky ridge of the moor that shut in Little Yafford,
a change from the Water House to the Vicarage seemed a grand thing.
And if in the summer his patient could be taken to Scarborough or
Harrogate, the cure ought to be complete. Mr. Namby never thought of
prescribing the Tyrol or the Engadine. Those places had for him little
more than a traditionary or geographical existence, and were only
present in his mind as certain wavy lines upon the map. The days of
Cook and Gaze, when even such persons as Mr. Namby may be personally
conducted over the face of the Continent, were yet to come.
Beatrix mended slowly under Mr. Namby’s care, and with plenty of
nursing from Mrs. Peters, Mary the housemaid, Bella, and Mrs. Dulcimer;
the Vicar’s wife being incapable of remaining long in a state of even
tacit opposition to her dear Clement. She was not quite comfortable
in her own mind about Beatrix, but she tried to be convinced, and she
told herself that such a clever man as Clement, whose opinions were
supported by the finest library of reference that ever a country
parson collected, must be wiser than Miss Coyle.
So one afternoon in windy March, Beatrix was put into the old-fashioned
carriage in which her mother had driven during her brief wedded life,
and was conveyed to the Vicarage, there to remain till she should be
strong enough to travel. She felt a sensation nearer akin to happiness
than she had known for a long time when she found herself seated in
the Vicar’s firelit library, with a little old-fashioned tea-table
by her side, and Rebecca waiting upon her with a cup of strong tea.
Rebecca had been talked to seriously by the Vicar, and had seceded in a
scandalously abrupt manner from the Coyle faction.
‘Now, Beatrix, this is to be your home as long as you can make yourself
happy in it,’ said the Vicar. ‘The Water House is a very fine old
place, but it is damp and dismal, and I don’t at all wonder that it
made you ill. You are to call this home, and you are to think of me as
your father.’
‘And you do not believe--’ faltered Beatrix, and then burst into tears.
‘I believe you are a good and noble girl,’ said the Vicar, cheerily,
‘and that a happy and honourable life lies before you.’
‘And after all,’ he reflected, ‘though I detest match-making, it would
be no bad thing for that dog Kenrick if he could win this splendid girl
for his wife.’
That dog Kenrick was still staying, off and on, at the Vicarage. His
leave did not expire till the end of April. He had about six weeks
before him.
He came in presently while Beatrix was sitting in the dimly lighted
room sipping her tea. Mr. Dulcimer had been called out into the hall to
see a parishioner. There was no one else in the room.
‘I am so glad to see you better,’ said Kenrick, heartily, planting
himself in a chair near Miss Harefield.
By that doubtful light he was wonderfully like Cyril. The shock of his
entrance--something in the likeness, as he sat beside her with the
fire-glow flickering upon his face, moved Beatrix painfully. She could
hardly answer him.
‘Thank you. I am much better,’ she murmured, faintly.
‘But far from well, I am afraid,’ he said. ‘You seem very weak.’
In the next instant her head fell back upon the cushion of the easy
chair. She had fainted. Kenrick rang the bell violently for Rebecca.
He was not a coxcomb, but he had a very good opinion of himself, and
this fainting fit of Beatrix’s affected himself curiously. He made up
his mind that it was he whom she loved, and not Cyril; and he made up
his mind that he would win her for his wife.