“OF THE WEAK MY HEART IS WEAKEST.”
“You had better send cards to Mrs. Crowther, Isola,” said Martin
Disney, two days afterwards, when his wife was sitting at her Davenport
writing her family letters.
“Cards! Oh, Martin, she would think that so very formal. I can call
upon her. She is always at home on Thursday afternoons, and she likes
me to go.”
“I am sorry for that, since I had rather you should never enter her
house again.”
“Martin!”
“I have nothing to say against Mrs. Crowther, my dear Isola. But
the man is more detestable than I could have believed low birth and
unlimited money could make any man. Guileless and inexperienced as you
are, I think you must have felt that his manner to you the other night
was familiar to the point of being insulting.”
Isola had felt both embarrassed and distressed by her host’s
attentions--the insinuating inflections of his fat, pompous voice; his
air of being upon a confidential footing with her. It had seemed to
her on that evening as if for the first time in her life, before the
eyes of men and women, she drank the cup of shame. She had said no word
to her husband of Mr. Crowther’s oppressive familiarity, and she had
fondly hoped that the matter had escaped his notice.
She sat before him now, flushed and agitated, with lowered eyelids, and
one hand restlessly moving about the papers on her blotting-pad.
“My dearest, there is nothing in all this to distress you,” said
Disney, with infinite gentleness. “It is not your fault that the man is
a cad; but it would be my fault if I were to allow you or Allegra to go
to his house again.”
“He was not rude to Allegra.”
“No; it would be her turn next, perhaps. He did not mean to be rude to
you. He only wanted to be especially polite in his own odious fashion.
There are men in that class who cannot behave decently to a pretty
woman, or civilly to a plain one. He meant no doubt to gratify you by
his compliments. What a stress he laid upon Lostwithiel’s attention to
you at the ball. Were his attentions so very marked?”
“Oh no; not more to me than to others,” Isola answered quickly. “He
danced a good many times--twice or three times--with Belinda Crowther.
Everybody noticed them as the handsomest couple in the room; not that
he is handsome, of course--only tall and distinguished-looking.”
Allegra came running in from the garden, and broke the thread of
the conversation. Isola put the visiting-cards into an envelope and
addressed it to Mrs. Vansittart Crowther. She felt that the kindly
matron would be puzzled and vexed at this ceremony, from a young person
towards whom she had assumed so motherly a tone, urging her to run over
to Glenaveril at any hour of the day--asking her to lunch or to tea at
least once a week--wanting to take her for drives to Lostwithiel, or
railway jaunts to Plymouth.
Isola was not mistaken, for Mrs. Crowther called three or four days
afterwards and upbraided her for sending the cards.
“You might have all come to tea on Thursday, if you had been
good-natured,” she said. “Mr. Colfox read us a poem by Swinburne, out
of one of the new magazines--there are so many nowadays that I never
remember which is which. Belinda was delighted with it--but Alicia and
I can’t rise to her height. Mr. Colfox reads poetry beautifully. You
can’t judge of his powers by only hearing him read the lessons,” added
Mrs. Crowther, as if the English Bible were a poor thing.
She stopped an hour, praised Isola’s tea-making and the new cook’s
tea-cakes, asked a great many questions about Allegra’s ideas and
occupations, and was as hearty, and simple, and friendly, and natural
as if she had been a duchess.
It grieved Isola to be obliged to refuse an invitation to luncheon,
most cordially pressed upon her and Allegra.
“I would drive you both to Lostwithiel after lunch, and we could do our
little bit of shopping and then have a cup of tea at the Talbot while
the horses had their mouths washed out, and I’d show you the room where
your brother’s wife was so much admired last year, Miss Leland, and
where I hope you’ll have many a good dance next winter. Now the ice
is broken we mean to go on with our balls, I can tell you. Indeed, my
girls are thinking of trying to get up a tennis-club ball about the end
of September.”
This was the last time Mrs. Vansittart Crowther appeared in a
friendly manner at the Angler’s Nest, for after two or three further
invitations--to a picnic--to tea--to lunch--had been declined, in
most gracious little notes from Isola, that good lady perceived that
there was some kind of barrier to friendly intercourse between her and
Colonel Disney’s wife, and she told herself with some touch of honest
middle-class dignity that if Martin Disney was proud she could be proud
too, and that she would make no further offer of friendship which was
undesired.
“I suppose he thinks because he comes of a good old family, while we
have made our money in trade, that we are not quite good enough to
associate with his wife and sister,” she said to her daughters. “I
thought he was too much of a gentleman to have such a petty feeling.”
“How innocent you are, mother,” cried Alicia, contemptuously; “can’t
you see that they are all bursting with envy? That was what made the
colonel so gloomy and disagreeable the night of our little dinner. He
was vexed to see things done with as good taste as in a nobleman’s
house. It cuts these poor gentilities to the quick to see that.
They don’t much mind our being rich, if we will only be vulgar and
uneducated. But when we have the impertinence to be as well up in the
ways of good society as they are themselves, they can’t forgive us.
Good taste in a parvenu is the unforgivable sin.”
“Well, I don’t know,” mused Mrs. Crowther, sadly. “I’m sure there’s
neither pride nor envy in Isola, and Miss Leland looks a frank,
straightforward girl, above all foolish nonsense; so it must be the
colonel’s fault that they’ve cut us.”
“Cut us!” echoed Belinda; “the Angler’s Nest cutting Glenaveril is
rather too absurd an idea.”
“My dear, you don’t know the importance Cornish people attach to old
family--and the Disneys are a very old family--and no one can deny that
he is a gentleman, though we don’t like him.”
“Oh, no doubt he considers that he belongs to the landed gentry. He has
bought Rowe’s farm, two hundred and sixty acres. He had forty to begin
with, so he is now lord of three hundred acres, just half our home
farm.”
“His cousin, Sir Luke Disney, has a large estate near Marazion,” said
Mrs. Crowther, meekly.
“Yes, but we don’t reckon a man’s importance by his cousin’s estate.
Colonel Disney is only a squatter in this part of the country.”
Alicia pronounced the word with gusto. It had been whispered
to her that the squire of Fowey had spoken of her father--who
counted his acres by thousands--as a squatter. That unimpeachable
importance, founded upon the established respectability of bygone
centuries--centuries in which men wore armour and women breakfasted on
beef and ale--was not to be bought with gold and silver, and the want
of it often made the Miss Crowthers angry. Diamonds they could have,
and land, art, and beauty, even the ways and manners of good society,
but they could not buy themselves a history. Everybody knew that their
splendours had all come out of a cloth mill, that their ingots had been
in some part transmuted from pestiferous woollen rags gathered in the
Jewish quarters of far-off cities, ground into shoddy, and anon issued
to the world as sleek superfine cloth. The more shoddy the higher
interest upon capital; and Vansittart Crowther’s daughters knew too
many of the secrets of the mills to be proud of the source of their
prosperity.
Mrs. Crowther was sorry to lose Isola as a friend and _protégée_. Her
daughters were furious at the slight implied in this gradual dropping
away. They passed Mrs. Disney and her sister-in-law with their noses
in the air, as they went from the church-porch to their carriage. They
cut them ostentatiously if they met on the quiet country roads. Mrs.
Crowther would still stop to speak and shake hands, albeit she urged no
further invitations.
And while the gulf widened between the great house and the small one
the glorious Cornish summer waned, and slowly, slowly, melted away,
lingering very late in that fair western land, which was full of
flowers even when the home counties were being withered and blackened
by the first frosts. At last came winter, and the gradual turn of the
year; short days slowly lengthening out by leisurely sunsets; pale
snowdrops glimmering in the borders; and then the gold of crocuses and
the bright blue of the Siberian bell-flower in patches of vivid colour;
and then hyacinths and tulips, primroses on every bank, narcissus and
jonquil in every garden; and by-and-by the full glory of bluebell and
hawthorn blossom. And anon in the middle of May came an event in which
all the interests of Colonel Disney’s life seemed to culminate. In that
balmy Maytime Isola’s firstborn son came into the world, and Isola’s
young life hovered at the gate of death, in so terrible an uncertainty
that Martin Disney’s hair grew grey while he awaited the issue of the
contest between youth and weakness.
For more than a week after the birth of her baby Isola’s condition had
satisfied the trained nurse and the kindly doctor. She was very white
and weak, and she showed less interest in her baby than most young
mothers--a fact which Mr. Baynham ascribed to over-education.
“The young women of the present day aren’t half such good mothers as
those I used to attend when I began practice,” he said discontentedly.
“Their heads are stuffed with poetry, and such-like. They’re nervous
and fanciful--and the upshot of it all is that babies have to be
wet-nursed or brought up by hand. If I had the government of a model
state I wouldn’t allow any married woman the run of a library until she
had reared the last of her babies. What does a young married woman want
with book-learning? She ought to have enough to do to look after her
husband and her nursery.”
Before the baby son was a fortnight old, fever supervened, and Isola’s
state gave poor Mr. Baynham the keenest anxiety. A hospital nurse was
sent for to assist the established custodian; and a great authority was
brought over from Plymouth to approve the village doctor’s treatment,
and to make a trifling alteration in a prescription, substituting
bromide of sodium for bromide of potassium.
Many days and nights of delirium followed the physician’s visit, a
period in which the patient was watched at every hour of the day and
night; and one of the most constant watchers through all that dreary
time was Martin Disney. It was in vain that Allegra and the nurses
urged him to consider his own health. He would consent only to leave
the sick-room for briefest intervals of rest. Day after day, night
after night, he sat in the same chair--an old-fashioned armchair, with
projecting sides, which almost hid him from the patient--beside the
bed. He was never in the way of the nurse. He was always helpful when
a man’s help was needed. He was so quiet that it was impossible to
object to his presence. He sat there like a statue of patience. No moan
escaped his pallid lips; no tear stole down his haggard cheek. He sat
and watched and waited for the issue, which was to make him happy, or
desolate for ever.
All his future was involved in that issue. He looked with a faint
smile upon the pink little baby face, when they brought his son to
him. No one would have dared to suggest that he should take care of
himself and be comforted for that little one’s sake. They all knew
that his firstborn was as nothing to him. All his hopes and all his
fears were centred in the wife who lay upon yonder bed, with glassy
eyes and babbling lips, a wanderer in a world full of torturing
images--fountains of bubbling water which she longed to drink--great
black serpents, which came crawling in at the window, and creeping
nearer, nearer to her bed--wriggling, hideous forms that hemmed her
in on every side--giant staircases that she was always trying to
climb--mammoth caves in which she lost herself, fifty times bigger and
more awful than those serpentine caverns near the Lizard, which she and
Allegra had explored in the previous autumn--steeper, stonier than the
tall cliffs and pinnacled rocks above Bedruthan sands.
Day after day, night after night, Martin Disney sat in his place and
listened to those ravings of a mind distraught. He could not keep
himself from trying to follow her in that labyrinth of disconnected
fancies--visions of shapeless horror, trouble, confusion--a wild
babbling of numbers, prattling of millions, billions, trillions--as
if her days of health and sense had been spent in the calculations of
a Rothschild, she who could scarcely reckon the simplest account in a
tradesman’s book.
What had she to do with this torturing recital of thousands and
millions, this everlasting heaping up of figures?
Then at another period of that long struggle between life and death,
reason and unreason, she had a ghastly vision of two children,
squatting on each side of her bed, one living, the other dead, a grisly
child with throat cut from ear to ear. Again and again she implored
them to take away those babies--the dead child whose horrid aspect
froze her blood--the living child that grinned and made faces at her.
Once and once only during that season of delirium the elder of her
nurses carried the baby to her bedside, the tiny form in snowy
cambric and lace, a little roseate face, on which the first glimmer
of intelligence was already dawning, sweet blue eyes that smiled at
the light, rosebud lips that invited kisses. The nurse took the infant
to the side of the bed, and asked the young mother to look at him.
Those fever-bright eyes stared at the sweet small face with a gaze of
ever-growing horror, and then with a wild shriek Isola clasped her
hands before her eyes, and drew herself cowering to the further side of
the bed.
“The dead child!” she cried. “Why do you show me that dead child? Don’t
you see his throat streaming with blood?”
* * * * *
It was a case in which the nurses had no easy duty by day or night; and
there were times when Disney insisted that the night-nurse should have
extra rest, while he kept guard.
“But if she should be very bad, sir, you might not be able to manage.”
“Oh yes, I should. My sister is a very light sleeper. She would come to
me in a moment, and she has a great deal of influence with my wife.”
This was true. From the beginning of evil Allegra’s presence had
exercised a soothing power. She had been able to lull the patient
to sleep sometimes, when opiates had failed to produce even fitful
slumber. Isola was calmer and less restless when her sister-in-law was
by her side.
In those long night watches, sometimes in solitude, Martin Disney had
ample leisure in which to ponder upon his wedded life, and to consider
how far the hopes with which he had entered upon that life had been
realized. The retrospect left him melancholy, and with a latent sense
of loss and disappointment; and yet he told himself again and again
that he did ill to be dissatisfied, that Providence had dealt kindly
with him.
At five and forty years of age, he, Martin Disney, of modest fortune
and social status, and of no especial claim to be admired, intellectual
or physical, had won the hand of a lovely and interesting girl. He had
been so bewildered and overcome by the delight of his conquest, that
he had entered upon no laborious process of self-examination before he
took to himself this fair and winning partner. It had been enough for
him that she came to him willingly, lovingly, in all truth and girlish
simplicity, loyal as she was pure. He had never asked himself could
such an attachment last--on her side? It had been enough for him that
the love existed. It would be his duty and his delight to strengthen
the bond, to draw that fair spirit into closer union with his own. He
had felt no shadow of fear for the future. Once having won her, it must
be easy to keep his treasure--easy for him who would so faithfully
guard and cherish this priceless gift of a benign Providence. He was
a man of deep religious feeling--a man who recognized in good and
evil, in joy and in sorrow, the dealings of an Almighty God with
His short-sighted creatures. He accepted his happiness in fear and
trembling, knowing the instability of all mortal joys; but he had never
feared the loss of Isola’s love.
Yet now, sitting in the deep of night beside that bed which might be
the bed of death, he told himself that his wife’s love was lost to him,
had been lost from the hour of his return to Trelasco, when he went
back to her with all the enthusiasm of a lover, forgetful of his mature
years, of his long experience of life--hard fighting, hard knocks of
all kinds in the great life-battle.
He had gone back to her as Leander to Hero, a boy in heart and
hopefulness; and what had he found in her? A placid, obedient wife,
gentle almost to apathy, but with a strain of melancholy underlying all
their relations which his devoted love could not conquer.
To all his interrogations her answer had been the same. She was not
unhappy. She had everything in life that she desired. There was
nothing that he could give her, no possible change in their existence
which could add to her content. All this should mean domestic peace,
a heart at ease; yet all this was unsatisfying to Martin Disney; for
his instinct told him that his wife was not happy--that the element of
gladness was, for some inscrutable reason, banished from her life.
She had seemed happier, or at least the little home had been brighter
and gayer after Allegra’s coming; but as the time wore on it became
clear to him that the life and gaiety were all in Allegra herself,
and that Isola was spiritless and depressed. It was as if the spring
of her life had snapped suddenly, and left her nerveless and joyless,
a submissive, unhopeful creature. That sense of disappointment and
loss which he had dimly felt, even when his home-coming had been a new
thing, had grown and deepened with the passage of time. He had bought
his land; he had added to the space and comfort of his house; he had
enlarged the stables, and bought a couple of hunters, and a cob for
harness; and while these things had been doing, the activity of his
days, the fuss and labour of arrangement and supervision, had occupied
his mind so pleasantly as to stifle those growing doubts for the time
being. But when all was done; when the vine and the figtree had been
planted, and he sat down to take his ease in their shade, then he began
to feel very keenly that his wife’s part in all that he had done was
the part of submission only. She liked this or that because he liked
it. She was content, and that was all. And the line between contentment
and resignation is so faint a demarcation that it seemed to him
sometimes as if she were only resigned, as if she suffered life rather
than lived--suffered life as holy women suffer some slow, wasting
disease, in meek subjection to a mysterious decree.
He sat beside her bed, while she battled with all the demons of
delirium; and he wondered whether--when she had been at her best, when
her mind had been brightest and clearest--she had been any nearer to
him than she was now in her madness; whether he had known any more of
her inner self--the mystery of her heart and conscience--than he knew
now, while those wild eyes stared at him without sight or knowledge.
One summer morning, as he sat alone in his watch in that dull interval
between darkness and dawn, the visions of the wandering mind took a
more consecutive form than usual. She fancied herself in a storm at
sea. The waves were rolling mountains high--were bearing down upon her
with threatenings of instant death. She feared, and yet she courted
the danger. In one minute she was recoiling from the wild rush of
waters, clinging distractedly to the brass rail at the head of her bed,
crouching against the wall as if to save herself from an advancing
wave; and in the next minute she sprang out of bed, and rushed to the
open window, wanting to throw herself out of it. Disney was only just
quick enough to seize her in his arms, and carry her back to bed. He
held her there, battling with him in a vehement effort to escape from
his restraining arms.
“Why do you stop me?” she cried, looking at him fiercely with her
distracted eyes. “What else is there for me? What other refuge? what
other hope? Let me go! let me go! Cruel! cruel! cruel! Let me throw
myself into the sea! Don’t you understand? Oh, cruel! cruel! Cold and
wicked, shameless and cruel! There is nothing else--only that refuge
left! Let me hide myself in death! let me hide--hide!”
Her voice rose to a shriek; and both the nurse and Allegra came
hurrying in. The faint white dawn shone upon her livid face and on the
scarlet spot upon each hollow cheek. Her eyes stared wildly, starting
from their sockets in that paroxysm of her madness.
Only a few days after that night of terror Isola was lying calm as
a child. The fever had gone down--the enfeebled constitution had at
last answered to the influence of medicine; and gradually, like the
slow lifting of the darkness after a long night of cloud and fog,
consciousness and reason came back. Sleep soothed the strained and
weary nerves, and the exhausted frame, which a few days before had
seemed endowed with a superhuman strength, lay like a log upon the bed
of sickness.
Recovery was slow, but there was no relapse. Slow as the dawning of day
to the tired watcher, after the long, blank night, there came the dawn
of maternal love. The young mother began to take delight in her child;
and it was rapture to Martin Disney to see her sitting opposite him
under the tulip-tree, in the low Madeira chair, with her baby in her
lap. Allegra vied with her in her devotion to that over-praised infant;
while the Shah and Tim, of the same opinion for the first time in their
lives, were almost rabid with jealousy.
They all lived in the garden in that happy summer season, as they had
done the year before, when Allegra first came among them. It was in the
garden they received their visitors, and it was there that Mr. Colfox
came at least thrice a week, upon the flimsiest pretexts of parish
business, to drink tea poured out for him by Allegra’s helpful hands,
while Isola sat quietly by, listening to their talk, and watching every
change in her child’s face; from smiles to frowns, from slumber to
waking.
Allegra had taken kindly to parish work, and, in Mr. Colfox’s own
phraseology, was a tower of strength to him in his labours among the
poor of Trelasco. She had started a series of mothers’ meetings in
the winter afternoons, and had read to the women and girls while they
worked, helping them a good deal with their work into the bargain.
She had done wonders at penny readings, singing, reciting, drawing
lightning caricatures of local celebrities with bits of coloured chalk
on rough white paper. Her portrait of Vansittart Crowther had been
applauded to the echo, although it was not a flattering portrait. She
had visited the sick; she had taught in the night school. The curate
had been enthusiastic in his appreciation of her, and his praises had
been listened to contemptuously by the two Miss Crowthers, each of whom
at different periods had taken up these good works, only to drop them
again after the briefest effort.
“She will get tired as soon as we did,” said Alicia, “when she finds
out how impossible these creatures are--unless she has an ulterior
motive.”
“What ulterior motive should she have?” asked Colfox, bluntly.
“Who can tell? She may want to get herself talked about. As Miss
Leland, of the Angler’s Nest, a sort of useful companion to her
brother’s wife, she is a nobody. If she can get a reputation for piety
and philanthropy, that will be better than nothing. Or she may be only
angling for a husband.”
“If you knew her as well as I do you would know that she is above all
trivial and selfish motives, and that she is good to these people
because her heart has gone out to them.”
“Ah, but you see we don’t know her. Her brother has chosen to hold
himself aloof from Glenaveril; and I must say I am very glad he has
taken that line--for more than one reason.”
“If any of your reasons concern Miss Leland you are very much mistaken
in under-rating her. You could not have had a more delightful
companion,” said Mr. Colfox, with some warmth.
“Oh, we all know that you have exalted her into a heroine--a St. John’s
Wood St. Helena. But she is a little too unconventional for my taste;
though I certainly would rather be intimate with her than with her
sister-in-law.”
“Surely you have no fault to find with that most gentle creature?”
“She is just a little too gentle for my taste,” replied Alicia, who
usually took upon herself all expression of opinion, while Belinda
fanned herself languidly, in an æsthetic attitude, feeling that her
chief mission in this life was to sit still and look like _la belle
dame sans merci_. “She is just as much too quiet as Miss Leland is too
boisterous. I have no liking for pensive young women who cast down
their eyelids at the slightest provocation, and are only animated when
they are flirting.”
“The tongue is a little member,” quoted Mr. Colfox, taking up his hat,
and holding out his hand in adieu.
He was very unceremonious to these fair parishioners of his, and talked
to them as freely as if he had been an old French Abbé in a country
village. It is needless to say that they valued his opinion so much the
more because he was entirely unaffected by their wealth or their good
looks. They were naturally aggrieved at his marked admiration for Miss
Leland.
Those ripe months of harvest and vintage, July, August, and September,
passed like a blissful dream for Martin Disney. He had snatched his
darling from the jaws of death. He had her once more--fair to look
upon, with sweet, smiling mouth and pensive eyes; and she was so tender
and so loving to him, in fond gratitude for his devotion during her
illness, so seemingly happy in their mutual love for their child, that
he forgot all those aching fears which had gnawed his heart while he
sat by her pillow through the long anxious nights--forgot that he had
ever doubted her, or remembered his doubts only to scorn himself as a
morbid, jealous fool. Could he doubt her, who was candour and innocence
personified? Could he think for an instant that all those sweet, loving
ways and looks of hers which beautified his commonplace existence, were
so much acting--and that her heart was not his? No! True love has an
unmistakable language; and true love spoke to him in every word and
tone of his wife’s.
The child made so close a bond between them. Both lives were seemingly
bound and entwined about this fragile life of Isola’s firstborn. Mr.
Baynham had no reason now to complain of his patient’s want of the
maternal instinct. He had rather to restrain her in her devotion to
the child. He had to reprove her for her sleepless nights and morbid
anxieties.
“Do you think your baby will grow any the faster or stronger for your
lying awake half the night worrying yourself about him?” said the
doctor, with his cheery bluntness. “He has a capital nurse--one of
those excellent cow-women, who are specially created to rear other
people’s babies; and he has a doctor who is not quite a fool about
infant maladies. Read your novels, Mrs. Disney, and keep up your good
looks; or else twenty years hence you will see your son blushing when
he hears his mother mistaken for his grandmother.”
After giving his patient this advice, Mr. Baynham told his wife, in
confidence, that were anything to happen to the little one, Isola
Disney would go off her head.
“I’m afraid she is sadly hysterical,” replied Mrs. Baynham. “I am very
fond of her, you know, Tom; but I have never been able to understand
her. I can’t make out a young woman who has a pretty house and an
indulgent husband, and who never seems quite happy.”
“Every woman can’t have your genial disposition, Belle,” answered the
doctor, admiringly. “Perpetual sunshine is the rarest thing in Nature.”
* * * * *
The early western harvest had been gathered in. Upland and valley in
that undulating land were clothed with the tawny hue of the stubble.
Here and there the plough horses were moving slowly along the red
ridges on the steep hillside. No touch of frost had dulled the rich
hues of the autumnal flowers, and the red carnations still glowed in
every cottage garden, while the pale pink trusses of hydrangea filled
all the shrubberies with beauty. A keener breath came up at eventide
from the salt sea beyond Point Neptune, and wilder winds crept across
the inland valleys with the on-coming of night. Summer and the swallows
were gone. October, a balmy season for the most part, was at hand;
and there were no more tea-drinkings and afternoon gossipings in the
garden at the Angler’s Nest. The lamps were lighted before dinner. The
evenings were spent in the old library and the new drawing-room, the
new room communicating with the old one by a curtained archway, so that
of a night the curtains could be drawn back and Martin Disney could
sit among his books by the fireplace in the library, and yet be within
conversational reach of Isola and Allegra in the drawing-room, where
they had piano and table-easel, work-baskets, and occupations of all
kinds.
Mr. Colfox sometimes dropped in of an evening, on parish business of
course, took a cup of coffee, listened while Allegra played one of
Mozart’s sonatas or sang a song by Gluck or Haydn or Handel. Mr. Colfox
was not one of the advanced people who despise Mozart or Handel. Nor
did he look down upon Haydn. Indeed, he sat and stroked his thin legs
with a sheepish appreciation, wrinkling up his loose trousers, and
showing a large amount of stocking, while Allegra sang “My mother bids
me bind my hair,” in her clear, strong mezzo-soprano, which was of
infinite use to him in his choir.
He told everybody that Martin Disney’s was an ideal household--a home
into which it was a privilege to be admitted.
“I feel as if I never knew the beauty of domestic life till I knew the
Angler’s Nest,” he said one evening after dinner at Glenaveril, when
he and the village doctor had accepted one of Mr. Crowther’s pressing
invitations to what he called “pot-luck,” the pot-luck of the man whose
spirit burns within him at the thought of his hundred-guinea cook, and
whose pride is most intolerable when it apes humility.
“Really, now,” said Mr. Crowther, “you surprise me, for I have always
fancied there was a screw loose there.”
“What does that expression imply, Mr. Crowther?” asked the curate,
coldly.
“Oh, I don’t know! Nothing specific: only one’s notion of an ideal home
doesn’t generally take the shape of a beautiful girl of twenty married
to a man of forty-five. The disparity is just twice as much as it ought
to be.”
“Upon my soul,” cried the curate, “I don’t believe that wedded love is
affected by any difference of years. Desdemona loved Othello, who was a
man of mature age----”
“And black,” interrupted Mr. Crowther, with a coarse laugh. “Well, let
us be thankful that Colonel Disney is not a nigger; and that there is
so much the less danger of a burst-up at the Angler’s Nest. And now,
Baynham, with regard to this footpath across the wood, who the deuce
will be injured if I shut it up?”
“A good many people, and the people I think you would least like to
injure,” answered the doctor, sturdily. “Old people, and feeble, ailing
people, who find the walk to church quite far enough even with the help
of that short cut.”
“Short cut be hanged!” cried Mr. Crowther, helping himself to a bumper
of port, and passing on the decanter with hospitable emphasis. “It
can’t make a difference of a hundred yards.”
“It does make a difference of over a quarter of a mile--and the proof
is that everybody uses it, and that it goes by the name of the Church
path. I wouldn’t try to stop it, if I were you, Mr. Crowther. You are
a popular man in the parish, for you--well, you have spent a heap of
money in this place, and you subscribe liberally to all our charities
and what not; but, I don’t mind telling you, if you were to try and
shut off that old footpath across your wood, you’d be about the most
unpopular man within a radius of ten miles.”
“Don’t talk about trying to shut it off, man,” said Mr. Crowther,
arrogantly. “If I choose to lock the gates to-morrow, I shall do it,
and ask nobody’s leave. The wood is my wood, and there’s no clause in
my title-deeds as to any right of way through it; and I don’t see why I
am to have my hazel bushes pulled about, and my chestnut trees damaged
by a pack of idle boys, under the pretence of church-going. There’s the
Queen’s highway for ’em, d--n ’em!” cried Mr. Crowther, growing more
insolent, as he gulped his fifth glass of Sandemann. “If that ain’t
good enough, let ’em go to the Ranters’ Chapel at the other end of the
village.”
“I thought you were a staunch Conservative, Mr. Crowther, and an
upholder of Church and State,” said Mr. Colfox. “Am I to believe my
ears when I hear you advocating the Ranters’ Chapel?”
“It’s good enough for such rabble as that, sir. What does it matter
where they go?”
“Prosecute the boys for trespass, if you like,” said the doctor;
“though I doubt if you’ll get a magistrate to impose more than a
nominal fine for the offence of taking a handful of nuts in a wood that
has been open ever since I began to walk, and heaven knows how many
years before; but let the old gaffers and goodies creep to church by
the shortest path that can take them there. They’ll have to travel by
the Queen’s highway later, when they go to the churchyard--but then
they’ll be carried. Don’t interfere with the privileges of the poor,
Mr. Crowther. No one ever did that yet and went scot free. There’s
always somebody to take up the cudgels for them.”
“I don’t care a doit for anybody’s cudgels, Baynham. I shall have a
look at my title-deeds to-morrow; and if there’s no stipulation about
the right of way, you’ll find the gates locked next Sunday morning.”
Sunday morning came, and the gates at each end of the old footpath
were still open, and nothing had come of Mr. Crowther’s threat. The
gates had stood open so long, and were so old and rotten, their lower
timbers so embedded in the soft, oozy soil, so entangled and overgrown
with foxglove and fern, so encrusted with moss and lichen, that it
is doubtful if anybody could have closed them. They seemed as much
rooted in the ground as the great brown fir trunks which rose in rugged
majesty beside them.