AN ELEGY.
Bryda had just reached the cross roads where she had met the Squire when
a heavy lumbering cart came slowly in sight, which she recognised as Mrs
Henderson's. If Jack was driving it, she would at once tell him what had
happened; but Jack was not likely to be driving at that snail pace.
It was Jack, however, indulging in a slumber as the old horse, who knew
his way in the district as well or better than his master, plodded
soberly along to his destination.
'Oh! it is Jack!' Bryda exclaimed. 'Jack, Jack, do stop!'
Jack Henderson opened his sleepy eyes and called 'Wo, wo!' to the horse.
'Oh, Jack, will you take me up, I am so tired and so--'
Jack brought his huge frame down into the dirty road with a mighty thud,
and said,--
'Why, Bryda, what's up? What are you doing here? Lor'! don't take on
like this,' for poor Bryda's self-possession suddenly forsook her, and
she began to cry helplessly, like a tired and frightened child.
'There, get up,' Jack said, 'and I'll take you home, but for mercy's
sake don't cry.'
Bryda climbed up the steps of the waggon, and Flick, looking highly
satisfied with the arrangement, rubbed his nose against Jack's leg, and
whined as if to say, 'I know she will be safe now,' waited with his red
tongue lolling out of his big mouth, panting hard after the manner of
dogs on a hot day, till Jack gathered the slack reins in his hand and
mounted to the seat by Bryda's side.
'Well,' he said, 'I was amazed to see you. Why, you are six miles from
Dundry. Come along home with me, and--'
'No, no; I must get back. If you will wait I will tell you
everything--and, Jack, I want to go to Bristol, to Madam Lambert's. That
will be a help. I am no use at the farm, Aunt Dolly is always telling me
so; and now, now they will have a hard fight to get through at all.
Grandfather has got to sell up all the stock to pay a debt.'
'Nonsense, get along, I don't believe it,' Jack said. 'What do you
mean?'
'What I say.'
And then Bryda poured the whole story into Jack's sympathetic ears,
which he received with sundry ejaculations, which were anything but
complimentary to Squire Bayfield.
But Jack, however sympathetic, had only one thing to advise.
'Don't pay the money to the young scoundrel, don't you do it, and go to
Bristol and get out of all the bother.'
'It is not that I want to get out of the bother, Jack,' Bryda said. 'How
can you think so? I want to help by going away. Why, yesterday, I wanted
to go for my own pleasure, now I _must_ go to try and help. Perhaps
Madam Lambert will give me wages in time, then I can be a real help, and
send Bet some money, and get comforts for poor grandfather.'
'You must get comforts for yourself first,' Jack said.
He was so pleased that his favourite scheme of getting Bryda to Bristol
was to be carried out that he forgot everything else.
'I am going back Monday,' he said, 'and you can come along with me.'
'No,' Bryda said decidedly, as Jack drew a little nearer to her. 'No,
Jack, I shall go before Monday. I shall try to make Madam Lambert take
me. She is a sort of relation, you know; and if she won't, well, I must
try to get into a haberdasher's shop--or be a servant--or--'
'You stop that,' Jack said. 'I'll never see you a servant while I'm
alive. You are too good and too beautiful to be a servant.'
Jack laid emphasis on the last word, with a sharp slap of the whip on
the drowsy old horse's fat back. Not that Jack Henderson wished to
hasten on his way, he would have been content to jog along thus with
Bryda at his side for days. To this simple-hearted young man whom Nature
had designed for a farmer, but whose ambitious mother had willed that he
should be a silversmith and jeweller, in the fond hope that he might
succeed his childless uncle in his Bristol business, Bryda was an idol
at whose shrine he worshipped, and whose smile sent him on his way
rejoicing, while her frown, or a sharp word from her, made him
miserable, and conscious that he was too dull and stupid and clumsy ever
to win her as his wife.
Jack's education had been of the scantiest. It had been begun at a
village dame school, and finished at the Wells Grammar School. It is to
be doubted if any school could have raised Jack Henderson above the
ordinary type of the Somersetshire farmer's son. He had shut his Latin
primer and his English grammar when he left Wells, and had never opened
a book since, except his prayer book on Sundays, and then he could
scarcely spell out the verse of the psalms, and shouted Tate and Brady
to the accompaniment of scraping fiddle and trombone in the gallery of
the church, with a refreshing disregard of words, though he supplied
deficiencies by mystic utterances which filled in doubtful passages and
could be interpreted according to the wishes of the hearer.
Such was Jack Henderson, with his true Somersetshire dialect, where 'Z
was, and is still preferred before 'S, making the speech of the good
people on the Mendips somewhat difficult to understand.
But beneath Jack Henderson's rough exterior beat a true and honest
heart. He was upright in word and deed. Shams were hateful to him, and
he would not try to seem other than he was for all the gold and silver
in his uncle's shop in Corn Street.
He set Bryda down close by the entrance to Bishop's Farm, and said,--
'Look ye here, Bryda, I'll jog off to Bristol to-morrow, and take your
letter myself to Madam Lambert. You put it under the loose stone in yon
wall, and I'll be here at daybreak and trudge off. I'll bring an answer
back in the evening. Come, will this suit you--eh?'
Bryda had already jumped down into the road, and Jack was standing, with
the reins in his hand, anxiously peering into her face.
'Eh, Bryda, will that suit you?'
'Thank you, Jack. Yes, I will have the letter ready. But will your
mother be angry?'
'Lor'! why should she? But if she is, it's no odds to me. I say, Bryda,
give me--'
But before Jack could finish his sentence Bryda was gone.
She found things at the farm going on much as usual.
The butter was made, the noonday dinner cleared away, Dorothy 'cleaned
up' for the afternoon, and seated at the table cutting up some bits of
old printed calico for a patchwork quilt.
When she caught sight of Bryda at the open door she called out,--
'Where have you been to? Dinner is done an hour ago. P'r'aps you have
had yours at Mistress Henderson's?' This with a sniff of contempt. 'You
are mighty partial to these Hendersons, I know I can't abide them.'
Instead of taking any notice of these remarks, Bryda asked,--
'Where's grandfather?'
'At his business, of course. Another lamb is dead, and another ewe past
hope. Everything is gone crooked. The last brood of chicks are dying
fast as they can. It's all along with Goody Fenton's evil eye. I said so
when she sat in the porch Lady-day. I told you you was feeding a bad old
woman, and I was right.'
Bryda gave a little incredulous laugh.
'I should feed her again,' she said, 'if she came this way, poor
miserable old creature!'
'Wicked old wretch, she'll end in the ducking stool, and serve her
right. I'd like to be by and see it, that's all.'
Bryda's imaginative nature had a vein of superstition in it. She was not
altogether sure that witchcraft had died out of the land, and she rather
liked to hear the stories of elves and fairies, good spirits which made
those dark rings on the turf by their dances, when all the rest of the
world were asleep.
There was a fascination for her in the notion of a world of little
mysterious fairies, who cradled themselves in the deep blue bells of the
campanules, and lay in the heart of the tall white lilies, powdering
their airy garments with gold, and flying through the air of the still
summer nights on the backs of the shy, spotted moths which blundered
over the moor, when none were there to see, in chase of a
will-of-the-wisp, whose lantern, darting hither and thither, lured them
on. She stood thinking for a moment over all the run of ill luck to
which Dorothy referred, and then her thoughts went back to the cause of
all this trouble, a crime of which she had never known before--her
father's sin.
'The sins of the fathers are visited on the children.' Was it to be so
in her case and Betty's--Betty, whose wailing cry struck her
grandfather's ear when he returned from his sad errand at Bristol, and
had parted from his only son for ever?
Then there came over Bryda that strange regret for the ignorance of
yesterday, as bliss when compared with the bitter knowledge of to-day.
But with the knowledge came tender regret, the longing to remedy the
evil and efface the stain of disgrace from the name she bore.
She said no more to Dorothy, whose huge scissors clipped the square of
gay stuff lying before her as if to make the gaudy quilt was the one
object of her life, but she ran upstairs to the bedroom she shared with
Betty, and found her there, as she expected, exchanging her working
gown, with its large apron, for what was called an afternoon frock, with
a dainty kerchief and white apron.
'I have seen him,' Bryda exclaimed.
'Seen who?' Bet asked.
'The Squire. He is as hard as nails. He will have the money.'
'Why, Bryda, how did you get to the house?'
'I'll tell you, Bet; but,' she said, 'do get me a bit of something to
eat and drink. I am so famished.'
'I wondered what had become of you, but I kept you a currant dumpling in
the oven, and a bit of hash. I'll go and fetch it.'
'Yes, I would rather have it here.'
However distressed the young are, and however perplexed, they do not
lose their appetite.
Bryda ate everything Betty brought her with keen relish, and drank a cup
of cider. Then she said,--'I feel fit for anything now, and now I will
tell you the whole story, and what I have resolved to do.'
Betty was a sympathetic listener, but she did not quite see why Bryda
should go to Bristol.
'No one wants me here.'
'_I_ want you,' Betty said, 'and if trouble is coming, and the stock
sold, and that dreadful young Squire comes here, I shall be frightened
without you.'
'He won't come here any more, Bet; he has made up his mind, and he will
stick to it, and I want to hear what Mr Lambert says about it all. I
suppose it is lawful, if the paper was signed by grandfather, but I
should like to tell the whole story to a man who knows about such
things. Now, I am going to write my letter to Madam Lambert, and I shall
be off to Bristol before the end of the week.'
There was in Bryda's determination a dash of romance as well as of keen
desire to do something to help her grandfather in his sore strait.
Of course it may be questioned whether Betty, pursuing the even tenor of
her way, and letting nothing interfere with her household work, was not
more in the line of duty than her beautiful sister. But the two sisters
were, as often happens, so entirely different in character that one
cannot be judged by the same rules as the other. The impulsive
enthusiast and the matter-of-fact, practical labourer in the field see
things from a different standpoint.
In this case there was no division of heart between the two.
Betty believed in Bryda, and had for the whole of her short life looked
on her as superior to herself, and to any of the few acquaintances of
their own age whom the sisters knew, and she was quite content to take
the subordinate place and sit at the feet of her beautiful sister.
Betty fetched an inkhorn and two quills from a cupboard by their bed,
and placed them on a somewhat rickety table, where Bryda's few books
lay--books well worn and studied, books which fed her romance--two
volumes of the _Rambler_ and _Spectator_, Pope's verses, and last, but
not least, Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_.
On the style of these English classics Bryda had formed hers, and thus
her expressions were somewhat quaint, and yet she was free from the
stilted and flowery mannerism of the women of her time who had received
a superficial education.
Bryda might be said to be self-educated. Her schooling had been of the
narrow type afforded by a 'decayed gentlewoman' in a neighbouring large
village, who had undertaken to instruct her pupils in reading, writing,
and arithmetic, with fine needlework and the rudiments of French.
These rudiments seldom advanced beyond the auxiliary verbs and the
pronouns, but Miss Darcy still kept school at Pensford, and spoke with
pride of her late talented pupil Miss Palmer.
Bryda wrote her letter on a sheet of blue Bath post, and folding it,
sealed it with a pink wafer, and addressed it to 'Mrs Lambert, Dowry
Square, Bristol,' and wrote in the corner, 'By the hand of Mr J.
Henderson.'
In the evening, when everyone was going or gone to bed, Bryda stepped
out and placed the letter under the loose coping-stone of the wall, and
then with a sense of relief went through the dewy orchard and out on the
moor, where the purple hues of evening had gathered, and indulged in
those castles in the air which were so dear to her.
'Perhaps I shall find ways in Bristol to make myself known. If that
strange boy gets his verses printed in _Felix Farley's Journal_ I may as
well try to get mine there. Then people will ask who is Beta--for I
shall call myself Beta. I know that is the Greek for B--and it sounds
pretty. I have many verses in my old school book. Miss Darcy said they
were elegant--at least the one I called "Farewell to Miss Darcy."
'I am sure I could write some verses about the dead lamb. Let me try, so
many words which are appropriate would rhyme.
'Dear little lambkin lying on the grass
So stiff and cold while strangers careless pass,
Never again to frisk amongst the flowers,
Never again to skip in vernal bowers.
Oh, little lambkin, death is hard for thee,
Though many a weary wight would gladly flee
From all the trouble of this mortal life,
And bid Farewell to grief, and pain, and strife.
'Yet what is Death? We get no sure reply
As cold and stiff like thee our dear ones lie.
Say, whither does the spirit seek its home
When all the battle's o'er, the victory won?
Ah! whither are they flown?'
Bryda came to a full stop.
A soft breeze wandering through the orchard gently caressed her hair,
making its own soft music as it whispered to the flowers and buds that
the day was done and that all things must end.
'I must go in now,' the girl said, starting up. 'I will write those
lines to-morrow, and take them with me to Bristol. I hope Jack will not
forget to come for the letter. But I know he won't. Poor old Jack, he is
kind and good, if he is stupid. But everyone can't be clever. The young
Squire looked as if he knew a good deal; and he was very handsome.
Though I hate him, I can't help seeing he is handsome, but cruel and
hard--yes, hard as nails, as poor grandfather said. I might as well try
to soften that big bit of rock.'
Then Bryda let the gate of the orchard close behind her, and went
towards the house.