The young gentleman drew back, wounded. He said nothing more about
himself, but asked Mr. Battishill in a low voice for a lantern.
'The trunks and portmanteaus are lying with the broken chaise, and I
must see to their being placed under shelter and in security. Are there
men about the premises who can assist me?'
'There will be some difficulty about finding a man,' answered Mr.
Battishill. 'We do not keep one in the house, and the cottages are at a
distance. You will not find your way to them by night. Do not trouble
about the trunks; leave them till morning. No one will touch them.'
'I prefer removing them. When the post-boy returns from Okehampton with
the doctor, I will secure his assistance.'
Cicely had lighted a lantern whilst her father was speaking. She
offered it to John Herring. 'I will go for you to the cottages,' she
said; 'I will send some men to help you.' She accompanied him to the
door. 'It is quite right that the things should not be left out all
night on the moor. There are tramps on the Exeter road, and the
Cobbledicks are close by.' She opened the door, and the light fell on
Joyce.
'Why, Joyce, you here still? I thought you had gone back to the Giant's
Table.'
'If I were to go back to vaither, he'd kill me. I ha' lost he his old
barril, and him won't sleep under the table a'cos mother be there wi'
her playful ways, tormenting of he.'
'What do you mean, Joyce?'
'I means this, miss. His barril be rolled away down hill, and I dunnow
where her be rolled to. Where be vaither to sleep?'
'Under the Giant's Table.'
'That won't do, 'cos o' mother. Her be lively o' nights when vaither be
there. 'Tain't wickedness, it be her playful ways. Her leaves me alone
right enough. But vaither won't go there. Now if he might sleep i' one
o' your linnies,[1] he'd be right vast enough as a nail in a door.'
[1] Lean-to sheds.
'By all means let him sleep there, Joyce, at least for a while, till you
can recover the cask.'
'Then I can go back to he. If I hadn't that to say, he'd ha' killed me.
Now he'll go snuggle into the straw like a heckamall[2] in a rick.
That's beautiful!'
[2] A heckamall or heckanoddy is a tomtit.
'Joyce,' said Cicely, 'this gentleman is going to the broken carriage.
Perhaps you can assist him to remove some of the trunks. They must not
be left out where they are.'
'There be some scatt right abroad,'[3] answered Joyce; 'I seed mun, and
the things be coming out like.'
[3] Broken to pieces.
'More the reason why they should be collected and brought under cover.'
'I'll go right on end,' said Joyce. 'And vaither may sleep in the
linney?'
'Yes, he may.'
'Oh, rallaluley, he'll be glad!'
So Joyce led the way, followed by Herring, and Miss Cicely Battishill
went in quest of assistance.
When Herring and Joyce reached the scene of the accident, they
discovered Old Grizzly hopping about amidst the wreck, pulling the
pieces of the broken carriage apart. He had made some clearance in the
confusion, but not from disinterested motives. Everything in the shape
of cushion and cloak had disappeared, and the old wrecker was engaged in
collecting chips of the broken wood for firing.
John Herring did not notice particularly what he was about; it was too
dark to distinguish much. He went directly to the boxes.
Of his own goods there was little to take care of save one valise, and
that was safe. The rest of the trunks and portmanteaus belonged to Mr.
Strange and his daughter. The trunks lay, some still corded, on the top
of the chaise; others thrown off, one with its lock sprung. This box
had either been very much shaken by the fall, or Grizzly's arm had been
turning it over, for the lid would no longer close over the confused and
overflowing contents.
Grizzly Cobbledick decamped when he saw the lantern brought to bear on
the wreck. Joyce called after him, but he made no reply. Then she went
in pursuit to announce to him the glad news that he was to sleep in the
straw of the calves' linney at West Wyke.
'I wonder,' mused John Herring, 'whether that old rascal can have stolen
anything of value. If he has, there is no one to bring him to book.
The owner is dead, and the daughter probably knows nothing of the
contents of the boxes.'
If he had known!
*CHAPTER IV.*
*MIRELLE.*
It is aggravating to the reader to be asked to move backwards when he
has been well started in a story. He resents it, as he resents the
backing of a train when he has left the station where he took his
ticket, and is impatient to reach his destination.
The author is aware that he is trying the patience of the reader when he
asks him to turn into a side alley which bends in the same direction as
his starting point. He would avoid asking him to turn if it were
possible to do so. But it is not always possible. To a drama, to the
farce of half an hour, is prefixed the list of characters. In taking up
one of Lacy's acting copies, the reader learns at a glance that Box is a
journeyman printer, and Cox a journeyman hatter, and that Mrs. Bouncer
is a lodging-house keeper. He learns a great deal about them before he
comes to a word of dialogue. He is informed that Box wears 'small
swallow-tailed black coat, short buff waistcoat, light drab trousers
(short, turned up at the bottom), black stockings, white canvas boots
with black tips, cotton neckcloth, and shabby black hat;' further, that
Cox is apparelled in 'brown Newmarket coat, long white waistcoat, black
plaid trousers, boots, white hat, black stock;' that Mrs. Bouncer is
costumed in 'coloured cotton gown, apron, cap, &c.' He feels at once
that he knows all about these characters. He reads their past in their
costume, they wear their souls on their limbs. Note that 'turned up at
the bottom'--the words illumine the abysses of the character of Box, and
make them clear to us.
But the novelist is debarred what is allowed the dramatist. He must
haul up his curtain on a situation without an introductory word, and
then, when the reader is puzzled as to the characters, antecedents, and
purposes of the _dramatis personae_, he is obliged to step forward,
stick in hand, as in a wax-work, point out the several personages and
describe them. This is the way of novelists. It is a bad way, it is
inartistic, but it is exacted by the reader.
Now, in describing the characters of a novel it is not sufficient to
give minute accounts of the costume--in the case of the Cobbledicks this
is done in a word; the author is required to give his readers a key to
the inner mechanism of his puppets, to show why they walk or pirouette,
and what may be expected to be the limits of their powers. He can rarely
do this without retrogression.
That Mirelle may be understood and not be judged with undue severity, we
must step back to a period before her birth; but we shall be as rapid in
our survey as we can, and shall resume the thread of our story after a
very short divagation.
The Countess Garcia de Cantalejo was a poor Spanish lady sent out to
Brazil by her relatives, who were by no means near, to be got rid of by
marriage, malaria, or mosquitoes, as might be, but anyhow to be got rid
of.
She was handsome, but, like the milkmaid in the ballad, 'her face was
her fortune.' Now in Spain pretty women abound, and ugly women are
exceptional. Marriageable men look out more for money, which is scarce,
than for beauty, which is a drug. Money, moreover, they know, in
prudent hands will wax; beauty they know, however well conserved, will
wane.
In Brazil she was seen and admired by Mr. Strange, a diamond merchant,
and she consented to give him her cold hand, intending at the earliest
opportunity to supplement it with the cold shoulder. She married him
because no one else would have her, and because he was well off. She
was proud of her family, and it was a condescension on her part--like
that of the sun which stoops to kiss the puddle--for her to link the
proud name of Garcia with that of Strange, and Cantalejo--which was
territorial, with a blank, for the Stranges had never owned any more
ground than the six foot allotted them as graves, and that only till
they had mouldered. They had made, but not coined, their money,
certainly never had hung men on their own gallows.
Mr. Strange, and the Countess Garcia de Cantalejo lived together for a
few years like oil and water. At length the Countess became the mother
of a daughter, who was baptized Mirelle at the font in the Cathedral of
Bahia, by the Cardinal Archbishop himself. After this Donna Garcia
informed her husband that their separation was inevitable. The child
could not be decently suckled, weaned, and educated in a colony,
certainly not in a city so mean as Bahia. The child, the heiress of the
coronet and of the name with its territorial tail, must go to Europe.
The Countess did not purpose returning to Spain; there were
circumstances attending her departure from her native country which had
embittered her against her relatives there. No! she would go to Paris,
the centre of the civilised world.
Mr. Strange raised no objections. He was weary of association with a
woman full of caprice, of fading charms, and of intolerable pride. He
was a reserved and a disappointed man. To every bird comes its time of
song; to the swan only at death, to the nightingale in balmy spring
while mating; it is only the chatterers that chatter ever. The song
time, the flowering time, the moment when the dullest life breaks into
poetry, is the moment of love. Mr. Strange had gone through this and
had been disenchanted, and thenceforth his life became dull, prosaic,
without melody and colour, unimpassioned. His heart had flamed, and his
wife had extinguished its fires with ice.
Mr. Strange had no love for babies. Babies are to men objects as
offensive as naked infant rabbits. A doe eats her young rather than
expose them to the strange eye before their fur is grown. If women were
as wise as does they would never exhibit the contents of their nursery
till the children could talk and run about.
Mr. Strange heard a squalling in the house; the object his wife had
produced was thrust under his eyes and nose with indecent haste. It
dribbled when teething, erupted with the thrush, and had a difficulty in
keeping down its milk. Consequently, when the Countess proposed to
remove the babe to Paris, Mr. Strange gave a cheerful consent, and this
consent was made doubly cheerful by the certainty that the mother would
accompany her child.
If Mr. Strange acted in a somewhat callous manner in granting this
separation between himself and his wife and child, he was in other
particulars generous. He made the Countess an allowance which, for his
circumstances, was handsome, and as the child grew, and greater demands
were made on his purse, he met these demands without remonstrance.
Arrived in Paris, the Countess Garcia had not long to swim before her
feet touched ground. She had a perfectly legitimate right to her title,
her pedigree was unassailable, her manners were polished. She appeared
at the balls of the Spanish ambassador, and associated with the best
French and Spanish families belonging to the old noblesse. It was well
known that she had married a moneyed Englishman, of no birth, nor
station, nor religion. It was known that she had married for money. No
one spoke of Mr. Strange. The great people among whom she moved would
as soon have inquired about a boil that troubled her as about the
husband whom 'for her sins' she had saddled on her. No persons of
breeding invite their friends to introduce them to the family skeleton.
Mirelle was brought up by the Countess to think of her father as a man
who had taken a mean advantage of her mother's poverty. He was her
father by sufferance; _de facto_, alas, not _de jure_. She had
inherited her mother's complexion, eyes, and hair; the blood in her
veins was her mother's, Spanish and aristocratic; her sentiments were
her mother's, as also her prejudices and her faith. It was hard to say
what she derived from her father except her living and schooling for
which he paid. For that she owed him nothing. He was fulfilling his
duty, and a privilege he ought to value. What was he, to be the husband
of a Garcia and the father of a Garcia? He was English, he was a
heretic, worst of all he was bourgeois.
The Countess bought herself silks with Mr. Strange's money, wore the
diamonds he sent her, hired good rooms in an aristocratic quarter, and
paid for them from his remittances. She had nothing whatever of her
own. She owed him everything, to her handkerchiefs and her shoestrings.
She knew this perfectly, and writhed under the knowledge. The greater
the debt she owed him, the deeper the detestation with which she
regarded him. Each present he sent her was repaid by instilling a drop
of bitterness into the heart of his child towards him.
One stipulation with regard to his daughter's education Mr. Strange had
made. He insisted that she should have an English nurse, and that when
she grew older she should have English playmates and English
governesses. When old enough to go to school her mother sent her to
English nuns, because Mr. Strange refused to allow her to go to any
other convent than one of English sisters. Thus it was that Mirelle
grew up to speak English fluently and well, and to thoroughly understand
the tongue. But of English ways of thinking and of feeling she had not
the faintest conception. Proud, cold, selfish, and bigoted her mother
had been, and the ambition of Mirelle was to model herself on her
mother. Thus she, too, became proud, cold, selfish, and bigoted. It
was not her fault--the fault lay in her training.
The Countess was a woman of the world, who combined religious zeal with
worldly self-seeking. She was a vain woman, and though she did her
utmost to conserve her beauty it withered, and the child blooming into
lovely maidenhood at her side made the contrast distressing, because
noticeable. This was the reason why she placed Mirelle in a convent in
her fourteenth year. She saw the girl often, but never, if she could
help it, was seen in her company.
This separation from her mother was of advantage to Mirelle. It
preserved her simplicity. There was no craft in her; she was absolutely
guileless, distressingly frank, and innocent of the trickery as well as
of the wickedness of the social world. She was cold, because the spring
had not yet come to her frozen heart. She loved her mother, but without
passion, for her mother was too selfish to awaken passionate love. Her
nurses and governesses had changed so often that she could not count
them. Among the cold sisters, lilies of virtue, the exhibition of
emotion was, if not sinful, yet smacking of imperfection. Natural
affections were weaknesses of the moral spine, to be conquered by
wearing a perpetual back-board.
Suddenly the Countess died--died in her chair before the looking-glass,
reciting the Litany of Loreto, whilst her face was being enamelled. The
beautifier entreated Madame la Comtesse not to draw her mouth down on
one side, it was cracking the enamel before it was dry---just when she
had arrived at the 'tower of ivory.' Then Madame la Comtesse gave a
gasp and the enamel came off, washed away from her brow by the sweat of
death, and running in a milky river down her nose and cheeks, and
dripping on the peignoir under her chin. The beautifier rang the bell,
and said, 'Sacre mille diables! To whom shall I send in the bill?
Madame is no more in condition to pay.'
When Mr. Strange heard of his wife's death, he settled his affairs in
Brazil. He was a strictly conscientious man, and he felt that now it
was his duty to look after the child. He had no idea that the child had
sprung up into maidenhood, and was a tall, lovely girl, lovelier than
her mother had ever been. His wife had not taken the trouble to send
him a miniature of his daughter. Miniatures are expensive, and the
Countess wanted all the money she received for herself. She did,
indeed, once send him a bit of her hair, tied with blue silk; but then,
that cost nothing. Mr. Strange thought of his child as a limp piece of
mortality in a long white garment, with a frill round the red head like
that put round a ham-bone--a thing of squeals, that in its squealing
showed a pair of toothless gums, a quivering red tongue, and a crinkled
white palate. He could hardly believe his eyes when introduced to his
daughter. She received him with perfect self-possession, without
raising her eyes from the ground to look at him, for the sisters had
taught her the custody of the eyes. According to S. Paul, there is but
one Man of Sin, and he is in the future; to the religious all men are
men of sin, and in the present.
Mirelle curtsied gracefully. She spoke the best copy-book sentiments of
filial respect, and assured him (out of the Catechism) of the obligation
to filial duty under which she lay.
Then he took her away from the nuns of the Sacred Heart, and carried her
about Paris, sight-seeing, in the hope of making her unbend.
The decorator sent in a bill for two thousand francs, his charge for
beautifying madame, hoping to get fifty, and ready to accept five. Mr.
Strange tore the bill, and lit his cigar with it.
An old woman who had laid madame out asked five francs for her pains.
Then timidly produced a lock of hair she had cut off madame's head as
she laid her in the coffin. The hair was beautiful still! and, oh!
madame had looked so sweet, so peaceful, like a holy angel, actually
young again. Then Mr. Strange took the lock reverently, turned his face
away, and did not speak. Something in his throat troubled him. He
thought of twenty years ago--of the time when his heart bounded, of the
singing of the nightingale, of the flowering of the wheat, of the short
dream of poetry. Then he recovered himself, and put something in the old
woman's hand. The old woman went chuckling away. When she reached the
street she said, 'That was a brave invention. Madame's complexion was
that of a toad's belly. She was hideous as a monkey. I could not pick
the paint off her skin. Some adhered, the rest flaked away. That lock
of hair was part of her false front. Mon Dieu! how soft men's hearts
are!' Mr. Strange speedily discovered that he and his daughter had
about as many subjects in common as an Esquimaux has with a native of
equatorial Africa. She was above all things a Catholic, he a
Protestant. She was religious, and, because religious, somewhat
conscientious. He conscientious, and, because conscientious, somewhat
religious. His religion was to his life what stockings are to a
traveller's portmanteau, something to fill corners with where nothing
else will go. With Mirelle religion was the chief packing of her life,
and this was a condition incomprehensible to her father. She had
artistic instincts; she loved pictures and music. Now, pictures and
music happen to be two things not to be got in Brazil, except in such an
execrable state of degradation as to be unendurable. But he liked the
theatre, and to attend the theatre Mirelle considered wicked. Mirelle
had learned history from the sisters of the Sacre Coeur--that is, she
had learned that every modern political idea is positively evil, that
absolutism is ideal perfection, that the mediaeval times were the only
times in which it was worth living, for then the popes gave and withdrew
crowns, kings kissed their feet, and emperors held their stirrups. She
had been taught geography out of French manuals, and had learned that
France is to the rest of the European powers as the sun to the planets;
from it they derive their light, and about it they rotate.
Mirelle had her acquaintances, the Princess L'Amoureuse, Prince
Punchkin, Countesses, Baronesses by the score, the mothers and aunts of
her schoolfellows and friends of her mother. Not one of these was known
to Mr. Strange even by name, and when she spoke of them she might have
been, for aught he cared, reciting the list of European lepidoptera.
Even in their eating their tastes were opposed. Mr. Strange was fond of
pickles, Mirelle loved sweets. Chillies tickled his palate, chocolate
soothed hers; crystallised angelica carried her into heaven, and plunged
him into purgatory, for he had a hollow tooth. Mr. Strange endeavoured
to talk to Mirelle of her mother. Now that the Countess was dead some
of the old romance that had surrounded his wooing reappeared, and his
heart softened to the memory of the woman. Mirelle was ready enough to
speak of her, but she had nothing to say that vibrated a chord in his
heart. She spoke of her mother as a fashionable lady, living in
society, dressing for balls, driving in the Bois de Boulogne, or holding
a plate at the door of the Madeleine--not of her as a woman feeling,
loving, suffering.
This condition of affairs was becoming intolerable. How was Mr. Strange
to live with a young lady with whom he was utterly out of sympathy,
whose head was where his feet stood, and her feet at his head? They saw
different worlds, they breathed different air.
The first thing to be done was to get her away from France. That was a
plain necessity. On English soil common interests might spring up.
Mr. Strange had a friend of former times living at Avranches, a friend
of whom he had lost sight for many years. He knew his address, and he
knew also that he was married to a French lady.
Mr. Strange's nearest relative, a cousin, had lived formerly at
Falmouth, and, he supposed, lived there still. Mr. Strange resolved to
visit his old friend at Avranches, and go on in the packet from St. Malo
to Falmouth. He would consult both on what was to be done with Mirelle.
He had other reasons, which will appear in the sequel.
So he hurried away from Paris, and went to Avranches. His old friend
was delighted to see him, shook hands--both hands, with the utmost
cordiality, asked half a dozen times after his wife and children, and
forgot as frequently when told that his wife was dead, and that there
was but one child, a daughter. He insisted on carrying his dear friend
Strange with him to the cafe, and on his drinking with him a glass of
_eau sucree_ flavoured with syrup of orange, and eating with him sponge
biscuits. Would he further, in recollection of old times, favour him
with a game of dominoes? The Frenchified Englishman did not introduce
Mr. Strange to his wife, or ask him to bring Mirelle from the hotel to
his house, and finally, looking at his watch, remembered he was due to
take his wife a drive, shook hands with his dear old friend with
effusion, and begged, if he were again passing through Avranches on his
way to or from Brazil, not to omit to call and drink again with him
sugar and water and eat a sponge cake.
Mr. Strange departed, his grave face looking graver. After a rough
passage, in which Mirelle suffered extremely, and her father smoked and
looked at the waves unconcernedly, they arrived at Falmouth. Cato, when
at sea, jumped overboard, saying he would rather die than endure another
half-hour of sickness. Cato was a stoic philosopher, Mirelle was
neither a philosopher nor a stoic. She was profoundly wretched, and
looked ghastly when she landed in a drizzle at Falmouth. Thus her first
arrival in England was not encouraging. Mr. Strange inquired for his
cousin, and learned that he was no longer at Falmouth; he had removed to
Launceston. Mr. Strange heard such an unsatisfactory account of his
cousin that he was greatly disconcerted. His cousin's name was
Trampleasure. He found a universal consensus of opinion at Falmouth
that Mr. Trampleasure was a man unprincipled and unscrupulous, and that
he had moved to Launceston only because he had made Falmouth too hot for
him.