MRS. PIPER’S DAY.
‘I AM not surprised,’ said Miss Coyle, when she was informed that
Beatrix Harefield had gone away, and there was to be no wedding. ‘That
unhappy young woman’s guilty conscience has driven her away. A just
punishment for Sir Kenrick. Of course he was going to marry her for her
money. He knows, as well as I do, that she poisoned her father.’
The wedding was to have been strictly private--altogether different
from the imposing ceremonial that had made Bella Scratchell the second
Mrs. Piper. There were no guests to be put off at the last moment;
there was no confusion anywhere; but there was a great deal of talk in
Little Yafford when it became generally known, through Mrs. Pomfret,
the pew-opener, that Sir Kenrick’s marriage was not to be.
There were various theories as to Beatrix Harefield’s motive for her
extraordinary conduct. ‘Guilty conscience,’ said Miss Coyle and her
party. ‘A prior attachment,’ said the more charitably inclined. ‘The
girl must be wrong in her head,’ said the matter-of-fact matrons and
middle-aged husbands, who could not understand the fits and starts of
passion.
Perhaps in all the neighbourhood there was only one person, except
the rival cousins themselves, who guessed the real cause of Miss
Harefield’s flight. That person was Mrs. Piper. She knew how deeply
Beatrix had loved Cyril, and it hardly surprised her that, at the last
moment, she should refuse to consummate a loveless bond.
‘It might have been happier for me if I had run away,’ thought Bella,
looking round her apple-green dressing-room, with all the gewgaws Mr.
Piper’s generosity had heaped upon her, ‘yet any other life than this
would be almost unbearable now.’
Time went on. Kenrick returned to India, leaving his honour in Mr.
Dulcimer’s hands. Miss Harefield’s money was to be paid back, and
without loss of time. Kenrick’s lawyers and Mr. Dulcimer were to
arrange the matter between them somehow; Kenrick did not care how; but
the thing must be done. On that point Sir Kenrick was firmly resolved.
The lawyers were as slow as most of their craft, and saw no reason
why such a business as this should be precipitated. Mr. Dulcimer was
the last man to hasten the movements of the lawyers. Happy in his
world of shadows--now digging out the forgotten temples of Nineveh and
Babylon--anon wandering with the lost tribes of Israel--he was apt to
let the actual business of life slip out of his mind altogether. Mrs.
Dulcimer had to remind him of everything, to tell him what bills he
ought to pay, what people he ought to visit--all the details of his
quiet life. Now Mrs. Dulcimer was not disposed to remind her husband of
Kenrick’s desire to refund Miss Harefield’s fifty thousand pounds. She
hoped that Kenrick might, by fair means or foul, be made to keep the
money. He had been cruelly wronged. The least atonement that could be
made to him was the liberation of his estate from its old burdens. Thus
argued Mrs. Dulcimer, while Kenrick was busy fighting the Burmese.
Before the bleak winds of March had ceased to blow their keenest
across the wide waste of withered heather and sandy barrenness, before
the last of the daffodils had faded in Mrs. Pomfret’s neat garden,
Cyril Culverhouse had come back to his old place at Little Yafford.
He had done good work at Bridford, but the work had been too much for
him. He could not be content to do half the work wanted, and leave
the rest undone. Another man in his position would have been easy
in his conscience after doing a quarter of the good that Cyril had
done in that crowded lazar-house; but the knowledge of unconquerable
evils, of cures only half wrought, weighed upon Cyril’s spirits like
an ever-present nightmare. He could not sleep for the thought of the
evils round about him--the loathsome miseries--the rampant vices--the
selfishness of the rich--the godlessness of the poor. His health broke
down under the burden. This time it was no fierce attack of fever--no
brain sickness and delirium,--but his strength went down like the sand
in a glass when the hour is nearly done--appetite failed--the power of
sleep left him, and Dr. Bolling told him, in plainest terms, that if he
wished to go on living he must leave Bridford.
Brought face to face with this solemn question of life or death, Cyril
discovered that existence was not altogether worthless. He, who a
little time ago had courted death, had now no desire to die. There
were mysteries that he wanted to solve in this life, before he went to
investigate the awful mystery beyond it. He wanted to stand face to
face with Beatrix Harefield once more. He wanted to know whether it was
indeed for love of him she had at the last moment jilted his cousin.
He wanted to find some stronger proof of her innocence than the sudden
conviction that had flashed into his mind when he looked into her
steadfast eyes, and saw scorn of his weak doubts, and fondest love for
himself, at war in her soul. While he lived there was always a chance,
however remote, of his discovering the truth. While he lived there was
always the possibility that Beatrix and he might meet. She was not his
cousin’s wife. Fate had spared him that last bitterness. He could think
of her without sin.
So he came back to Little Yafford, to his old rooms, his old friends,
his old ways, and the old quietly busy life which seemed so easy after
his vain endeavour to cleanse that Augean stable, an overcrowded
manufacturing town.
‘I never feel as if I had too much work to do, so long as it is work
that can be done,’ he said to the gentle Vicar. ‘To grapple with
impossibilities and feel one’s self being daily worsted! That is the
trial.’
There were two of his parishioners at Bridford whom Cyril could not be
content to leave behind him. Those were Emmanuel Joyce and his mother.
Emmanuel’s gratitude for the man who had risked his life to save him
had done what argument and teaching might never have accomplished.
Emmanuel was now a conscientious conforming Christian. He believed,
as the leper believed, because he had been saved. The conduct of one
Christian man opened his heart to receive the sublime mystery of a
Redeemer who was more than man. He went to the altar without one
lurking doubt. He made himself like a little child, and confessed that
all the learning he had been so proud of was nothing, when weighed
against his friend and teacher’s one act of Christian self-abnegation.
‘What was I that you should sacrifice yourself for me?’ he said. ‘When
man can be so generous I will no longer refuse to believe that God can
suffer and die for sinners.’
‘I would have you believe upon better grounds than any friendly act of
mine,’ said Cyril.
‘I have been face to face with death,’ answered Joyce. ‘Men learn
strange things on their deathbeds. A death-bed repentance may be a poor
thing, but a death-bed revelation may accomplish what a life of study
could not do.’
And then Emmanuel, being by nature an enthusiast, talked wildly of the
visions of his bed of pain--the cloud-curtain that had been lifted from
the invisible world--the wonders that he had seen and heard in that
mysterious border-land between life and death.
Cyril asked no more than a simple unquestioning belief.
It was with a thrill of joy that he saw Emmanuel kneeling before
the altar rails, meekly lifting up his hands to receive the sacred
symbols of Divine love. Could he leave his convert behind him in the
fever-tainted alley, where the sweet summertide was ever the harbinger
of death? No. He made up his mind that Emmanuel and his mother should
go with him.
‘I am doubtful if you would be able to live at Little Yafford by
shoe-mending,’ he said, when he discussed the question with Joyce
and the widow, ‘but, if I could get the schoolmaster a better berth
somewhere else, I am sure you could manage the school, with a little
help from me at the beginning.’
‘Oh, sir, it would be the very thing for him,’ cried Mrs. Joyce. ‘His
father began life as a parish schoolmaster, and he gave Emmanuel a good
plain education. He was very severe with the poor lad, but that was
partly in his anxiety to make him a thorough scholar. I don’t think
there’s any one could beat my boy in arithmetic or Bible history. I’m
sure he could teach. You’d like to teach, wouldn’t you, Emmanuel?’
‘John Milton was a schoolmaster,’ said Joyce, with his face all aglow.
‘I should like it of all things, if you think I could do it, Mr.
Culverhouse.’
‘As for book learning,’ cried the widow, ‘I don’t think there’s one in
a thousand--no, not even among the gentlefolks--has read as much as my
Emmanuel.’
‘A wide range of reading would hardly be required, though every teacher
must be the better for it,’ said Cyril, smiling. ‘But I know that
Emmanuel has been well grounded in a plain English education, and that
he now thinks rightly upon religious questions, so I fancy he might
teach well in our parish school. Of course, the first thing to be
done is to get a better place for the present man, who is a very good
master.’
Cyril did not add, as he might have done, that the present
schoolmaster’s merits were chiefly his work. He had taken infinite
pains to teach the teacher as well as the pupils.
Before Cyril had been at Little Yafford a month he contrived to get the
schoolmaster transferred to a more profitable situation forty miles
away, and to get Emmanuel Joyce accepted as master upon probation.
He was to do the work for a quarter without remuneration; and if he
succeeded in pleasing the Vicar and churchwardens, was to be engaged at
the end of that time at the handsome stipend of five-and-thirty pounds
a year, with a cottage adjoining the school, and an allowance of coals
and candles. This, in Yorkshire twenty years ago was to be passing
rich.
It is hardly possible to conceive greater happiness than that of Mrs.
Joyce and her son when they came to take possession of their cottage
at Little Yafford. The rustic beauty of the village, the grandeur of
the moor, the blue river winding capriciously through the valley, the
dark pine branches gently swaying in the April breeze, the gardens
bright with spring flowers, the silvery blackthorn in the hedges, the
primroses and dog-violets, the scattered houses, all more or less
picturesque of aspect, the sloping meadows, and orchards full of pear
blossom--all these things, to people who had lived in one of the most
loathsome corners of a manufacturing town, were as a revelation of an
earthly paradise. Could heaven itself be sweeter or fairer? Could death
ever enter here? Mrs. Joyce wondered. Was there any coffin-maker in
that peaceful village? The thread of life, spun gently in this fair
tranquillity, must surely run on for ever. What should snap it?
The four-roomed cottage seemed to the Joyces the most luxurious
mansion. Four rooms! What could they two possibly do with such a
world of space? There would be room enough for ghosts in the unused
chambers. And then Mrs. Joyce reminded her son how, before illness
crippled his father, and brought poverty and trouble, they had lived in
a four-roomed house just like this, with a scullery at the back of the
kitchen, which might be accounted a fifth room, and a little yard where
they were able to grow scarlet runners.
‘It is like old times, Emmanuel, when your father was earning his
five-and-thirty shillings a week,’ said Mrs. Joyce, ‘and my house was
the neatest and brightest in Saville’s Buildings.’
‘Wherever you lived, mother, the place would be neat and bright,’ said
her son, admiringly.
They went out to explore the garden, enraptured with everything. It
was quite an extensive garden, nearly a quarter of an acre. There were
potatoes, and apple trees, and gooseberry and currant bushes, and roses
in abundance. And there was room for scarlet runners, as Mrs. Joyce
exclaimed delightedly.
The scarlet runner is the chief of vegetables in the estimation of the
poor. That homely, useful bean will grow anywhere, and is a thing of
beauty wherever it grows.
‘We might even try some vegetable marrows, Emmanuel,’ said the widow.
‘They would look so pretty behind the rose bushes in summer-time.’
Emmanuel began his work next day, after a long conversation with Mr.
Culverhouse overnight. Cyril was going to allow him ten shillings a
week during his time of probation. It was very little, perhaps, but the
frugal widow could manage to make it serve, and it was a great deal for
Cyril to give out of his small means.
Before a week was ended everybody concerned was agreed that Emmanuel
would do. The children liked their new master. There was something in
his quiet manner which won both liking and respect. It was thought
that he knew a great deal. He had taken the trouble to explain things
to his pupils. He had enlarged upon the meagre history of England, in
which the kings and heroes, politicians and Churchmen, were the merest
shadows, and had told the boys of the greatness and power that had been
in their native land since Alfred the Saxon, warrior and poet, kindled
the light of letters amongst a barbarous people. The more intelligent
of the boys were delighted with him--even the stupid ones brightened
under his tuition. He was so keenly interested in his work. The pupils
could hardly find their lessons a burden, when the master took so much
pleasure in them.
On Sunday he sat at the end of the church, with his pupils ranged
before him on a row of benches beside the organ.
He kept them in wonderful order, and the occasional dropping of marbles
and attacks of spasmodic coughing which had been apt to disturb the
congregation under the rule of Emmanuel’s predecessor were no longer
heard.
Cyril was delighted at the success of his scheme. The Vicar and
churchwardens did not wait for the three months of probation to come
to an end, before they expressed their satisfaction. At midsummer,
Emmanuel Joyce was formally appointed schoolmaster, and his salary
began from that time. The school-house was beautifully kept by Mrs.
Joyce; the cottage and garden were a picture of neatness, unsurpassed
by any house or garden in Little Yafford. Cyril had the deep delight of
knowing that he had made two people happy.
His own life went on very quietly all this time. He was certainly
happier at Little Yafford than he ever could have been at Bridford.
He had plenty to do, and his work was successful. He saw the church
crowded on a Sunday evening, and knew that people came from far and
wide to hear him preach. Had he been vain of his power as a preacher
his vanity might have been fully satisfied. The week-day services
were well attended. The people led better lives than when he had
first come among them. There was less drunkenness, there were fewer
brawls. Over the young people his influence was powerful. He gave a
more intellectual tone to their lives. He had opened a reading-room,
which was now a self-supporting and self-governing institution, but its
committee always looked to him for advice in the choice of books.
He saw a good deal of the Dulcimers, in his occasional leisure hours,
and with the kind and genial Vicar he was always happy. The keenest
pang that he felt in all his sad memories of the past was when he
passed the Water House, and saw its darkened windows, and remembered
that she who should have reigned there as a centre of light and
happiness was a wanderer none knew where, her fair fame clouded, her
youth blighted.
He called once in a way on Mrs. Piper of the Park; not often, for the
thought of Bella had never been entirely agreeable to him after that
conversation with Mrs. Dulcimer, in which he had, in a manner, found
himself accused of having misled the young lady--or at any rate the
young lady’s friends--as to his intentions. Now that she was married he
had certainly no need to be uneasy on that score; but the recollection
was an uncomfortable one, and he had a feeling about Mrs. Piper much
too near dislike to be altogether Christian.
Bella, in all the fulness of her new powers, was not a person to be
easily kept at a distance. She wanted captives at her chariot wheels,
to make her triumph complete, and she was particularly anxious that
Cyril Culverhouse--who, according to her own idea, had scorned her
in her poverty--should see and wonder at her splendour and elegance.
She pestered him with invitations, all of which he found it impossible
to decline without marked discourtesy, more especially as Mr. and
Mrs. Piper were regular worshippers at the parish church, and liberal
subscribers to all local charities.
Bella had taken it into her head to receive her friends upon one
particular day of the week. It was quite a new thing in Little
Yafford--except for such a person as Lady Jane Gowry, who was a
privileged eccentric--and had rather a foreign flavour. At the
beginning of this institution visitors were slow to arrive, and Bella
found it rather a dull business to sit waiting for them, looking her
loveliest, in a dress just arrived from Paris, but with nobody but Mr.
Piper to admire her.
‘You look uncommon pretty, my dear,’ said that devoted husband, walking
up and down his blue and gold drawing-room, as restlessly as a polar
bear in his cage, ‘but I can’t say that I hold with this new style of
visiting. If you was to ask people to a jolly good dinner they’d be
sure to come; if you asked them to a friendly tea, I dare say they’d
come, though they might think it low. But you send ’em your pasteboard
with “Mrs. Piper, Thursdays, At home from four to six,” and I’ll lay
they don’t know what to make of it.’
‘It’s quite the right thing, Mr. Piper. In London everybody of any
importance does it. And here, where the distances people have to come
are so much longer, it is still more convenient.’
‘Then I suppose you’re not of any importance, my dear,’ said the
provoking Mr. Piper, ‘for you see nobody comes.’
‘How can you say so, Mr. Piper,’ cried Bella, reddening with anger at
this obnoxious truth. ‘Miss Coyle came last Thursday.’
‘Yes, and the Thursday before that, and the Thursday before that again.
That old lady will come anywhere for the sake of a dish of scandal and
a cup of strong tea.’
‘And Mrs. Dulcimer comes.’
‘Yes, I believe she has been once,’ said Mr. Piper, and then, anxious
to chase the thunder-cloud from his young wife’s stormy brow, he added
hastily, ‘Never mind, my lass. You’ll have a visitor this afternoon. I
met Chumney this morning when I was in Great Yafford, and I asked him
to drop in at five and pay his respects to you, and eat his chop with
me at seven.’
‘What!’ cried Bella, ‘you have invited that vulgarian, your old
cashier! Mr. Piper, I am ashamed of you. You have not a particle of
self-respect.’
‘Why, what’s amiss with Chumney? The most faithful servant a man ever
had. Why should I cast him off because I’ve got a pretty young wife?
The first Mrs. P. never made any objection to Chumney. She never said a
word about the difference in the butcher’s bill, let me bring him home
as often as I might. Why should you object to him?’
‘I don’t object to him, as a faithful servant, but let him be kept in a
servant’s place. Why bring him home here--a man who eats peas with his
knife, and bites his bread, and is always talking of the time when you
were in trade. Can’t you see that I am trying to raise the tone of your
surroundings----’
‘The tone be blowed,’ muttered Mr. Piper.
‘That I want to get you recognised by the county people; that I want
to force you into the best society in the neighbourhood. You must know
this, and yet you bring Chumney to spoil everything. He was at our last
dinner party.’
‘Well, he did no harm,’ growled Mr. Piper, waxing savage.
‘He was an eyesore. He was a blot upon the whole thing. Do you think I
shall ever rise above your Wigzells and your Porkmans, while you weigh
me down with Mr. Chumney?’
‘My Wigzells and my Porkmans are a deal pleasanter than the stuck-up
lot _you’ve_ contrived to bring about me,’ retorted Mr. Piper, ‘A
pack of shabby-genteel lawyers and parsons and half-pay captains,
that eat up my substance and stare me out of countenance, as if I
was waxwork--and never offer me bite nor sup in return. I despise
such half-and-half gentry. I’d as soon put electro-plated goods on my
table as set them down to it. And as for the county,’ cried Mr. Piper,
snapping his fingers derisively, ‘the county won’t have cut, shuffle,
or deal with us, and wouldn’t, no, not if you were to put your eyes out
upon sticks.’
This horrible expression, which Mr. Piper sometimes used when he was in
a passion, overcame Bella. She began to cry, and murmured meekly that
she wouldn’t so much mind Mr. Chumney coming if it was not her ‘day.’
‘Your day!’ cried Mr. Piper, growing bold in his scorn. ‘Your day,
be hanged! Nobody comes on your day. You might as well call it Queen
Elizabeth’s day, or Nebuchadnezzar’s day. You’ve laid yourself out
to know a parcel of arrogant people that don’t want to know you, and
you’ve turned up your nose at people that give three hundred guineas
for a pair of horses, and live in handsome houses of their own
building, and brag about the money they have earned with their own
industry, instead of bragging about their great-grandfathers. You want
to keep company with the Tudors and the Plantagenets. Nothing less than
that will satisfy you. But they won’t have you, and if you want any one
to admire your fine clothes and eat your fine dinners you’d better be
content with my friends.’
Mr. Chumney’s arrival brought the conversation to an abrupt finish.
He was a long lean man, with iron-gray hair and whiskers, thick black
eyebrows, and an intelligent expression which atoned in some measure
for his gaunt ugliness.
He loved Ebenezer Piper with the affection of a faithful dog that has
never known but one master, and with regard to all the rest of the
world he was strictly misanthropic. He was not a scandalmonger like
Miss Coyle. He generally thought the worst of people, but he always
kept his thoughts to himself. He believed every business man, except
Mr. Piper, to be an innate rogue, and on the verge of insolvency, but
he gave no expression to his doubts. He was not a lively companion, so
far as conversation goes, but he was an accomplished listener; he had
the art of looking ineffably wise, and of appearing to be able to give
an immense deal of information, if he had not preferred to withhold it.
He was like the great Lord Thurlow. Nobody ever could have been so wise
as Samuel Chumney looked.
From the hour she became acquainted with Mr. Chumney Bella had hated
him. She did not know why. It might have been his eyebrows, it might
have been his vulgarity. For some undiscovered reason he was more
obnoxious to her than any creature she had ever met. She thought him
clever, and she had a lurking idea that he was able to read her as
easily as he could read a book. She fancied that he knew everything
that was passing in her mind--that he was perfectly familiar with her
motive for marrying his old employer--that he had weighed and measured
her till he was master of her most secret thoughts. She lectured her
husband for his cultivation of Chumney; but she was wonderfully polite
to Mr. Chumney himself. She feared him too much to be discourteous to
him.