“Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap.”
For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after
dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first,
two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V. Towards
the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small.
On the brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour,
stood the church which was to be the scene of his operations. The
lonely edifice was black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the
very tip of the hill. It had a square mouldering tower, owning neither
battlement nor pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one
substance with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round
the church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was
the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape
with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the
sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial
stones. Not a tree could exist up there: nothing but the monotonous
gray-green grass.
Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was empty,
and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.
At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which on his
first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very blooming boy he
looked, after that mysterious morning scamper. His mouth was a triumph
of its class. It was the cleanly-cut, piquantly pursed-up mouth of
William Pitt, as represented in the well or little known bust by
Nollekens—a mouth which is in itself a young man’s fortune, if properly
exercised. His round chin, where its upper part turned inward, still
continued its perfect and full curve, seeming to press in to a point
the bottom of his nether lip at their place of junction.
Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the lawn in
a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy’s velocity,
superadded to a girl’s lightness, after a tame rabbit she was
endeavouring to capture, her strategic intonations of coaxing words
alternating with desperate rushes so much out of keeping with them,
that the hollowness of such expressions was but too evident to her pet,
who darted and dodged in carefully timed counterpart.
The scene down there was altogether different from that of the hills. A
thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot from the
wilderness without; even at this time of the year the grass was
luxuriant there. No wind blew inside the protecting belt of evergreens,
wasting its force upon the higher and stronger trees forming the outer
margin of the grove.
Then he heard a heavy person shuffling about in slippers, and calling
“Mr. Smith!” Smith proceeded to the study, and found Mr. Swancourt. The
young man expressed his gladness to see his host downstairs.
“Oh yes; I knew I should soon be right again. I have not made the
acquaintance of gout for more than two years, and it generally goes off
the second night. Well, where have you been this morning? I saw you
come in just now, I think!”
“Yes; I have been for a walk.”
“Start early?”
“Yes.”
“Very early, I think?”
“Yes, it was rather early.”
“Which way did you go? To the sea, I suppose. Everybody goes seaward.”
“No; I followed up the river as far as the park wall.”
“You are different from your kind. Well, I suppose such a wild place is
a novelty, and so tempted you out of bed?”
“Not altogether a novelty. I like it.”
The youth seemed averse to explanation.
“You must, you must; to go cock-watching the morning after a journey of
fourteen or sixteen hours. But there’s no accounting for tastes, and I
am glad to see that yours are no meaner. After breakfast, but not
before, I shall be good for a ten miles’ walk, Master Smith.”
Certainly there seemed nothing exaggerated in that assertion. Mr.
Swancourt by daylight showed himself to be a man who, in common with
the other two people under his roof, had really strong claims to be
considered handsome,—handsome, that is, in the sense in which the moon
is bright: the ravines and valleys which, on a close inspection, are
seen to diversify its surface being left out of the argument. His face
was of a tint that never deepened upon his cheeks nor lightened upon
his forehead, but remained uniform throughout; the usual neutral
salmon-colour of a man who feeds well—not to say too well—and does not
think hard; every pore being in visible working order. His tout
ensemble was that of a highly improved class of farmer, dressed up in
the wrong clothes; that of a firm-standing perpendicular man, whose
fall would have been backwards in direction if he had ever lost his
balance.
The vicar’s background was at present what a vicar’s background should
be, his study. Here the consistency ends. All along the chimneypiece
were ranged bottles of horse, pig, and cow medicines, and against the
wall was a high table, made up of the fragments of an old oak Iychgate.
Upon this stood stuffed specimens of owls, divers, and gulls, and over
them bunches of wheat and barley ears, labelled with the date of the
year that produced them. Some cases and shelves, more or less laden
with books, the prominent titles of which were Dr. Brown’s “Notes on
the Romans,” Dr. Smith’s “Notes on the Corinthians,” and Dr. Robinson’s
“Notes on the Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,” just saved the
character of the place, in spite of a girl’s doll’s-house standing
above them, a marine aquarium in the window, and Elfride’s hat hanging
on its corner.
“Business, business!” said Mr. Swancourt after breakfast. He began to
find it necessary to act the part of a fly-wheel towards the somewhat
irregular forces of his visitor.
They prepared to go to the church; the vicar, on second thoughts,
mounting his coal-black mare to avoid exerting his foot too much at
starting. Stephen said he should want a man to assist him. “Worm!” the
vicar shouted.
A minute or two after a voice was heard round the corner of the
building, mumbling, “Ah, I used to be strong enough, but ’tis altered
now! Well, there, I’m as independent as one here and there, even if
they do write “squire after their names.”
“What’s the matter?” said the vicar, as William Worm appeared; when the
remarks were repeated to him.
“Worm says some very true things sometimes,” Mr. Swancourt said,
turning to Stephen. “Now, as regards that word ‘esquire.’ Why, Mr.
Smith, that word ‘esquire’ is gone to the dogs,—used on the letters of
every jackanapes who has a black coat. Anything else, Worm?”
“Ay, the folk have begun frying again!”
“Dear me! I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes,” Worm said groaningly to Stephen, “I’ve got such a noise in my
head that there’s no living night nor day. ’Tis just for all the world
like people frying fish: fry, fry, fry, all day long in my poor head,
till I don’t know whe’r I’m here or yonder. There, God A’mighty will
find it out sooner or later, I hope, and relieve me.”
“Now, my deafness,” said Mr. Swancourt impressively, “is a dead
silence; but William Worm’s is that of people frying fish in his head.
Very remarkable, isn’t it?”
“I can hear the frying-pan a-fizzing as naterel as life,” said Worm
corroboratively.
“Yes, it is remarkable,” said Mr. Smith.
“Very peculiar, very peculiar,” echoed the vicar; and they all then
followed the path up the hill, bounded on each side by a little stone
wall, from which gleamed fragments of quartz and blood-red marbles,
apparently of inestimable value, in their setting of brown alluvium.
Stephen walked with the dignity of a man close to the horse’s head,
Worm stumbled along a stone’s throw in the rear, and Elfride was
nowhere in particular, yet everywhere; sometimes in front, sometimes
behind, sometimes at the sides, hovering about the procession like a
butterfly; not definitely engaged in travelling, yet somehow chiming in
at points with the general progress.
The vicar explained things as he went on: “The fact is, Mr. Smith, I
didn’t want this bother of church restoration at all, but it was
necessary to do something in self-defence, on account of those
d——dissenters: I use the word in its scriptural meaning, of course, not
as an expletive.”
“How very odd!” said Stephen, with the concern demanded of serious
friendliness.
“Odd? That’s nothing to how it is in the parish of Twinkley. Both the
churchwardens are——; there, I won’t say what they are; and the clerk
and the sexton as well.”
“How very strange!” said Stephen.
“Strange? My dear sir, that’s nothing to how it is in the parish of
Sinnerton. However, as to our own parish, I hope we shall make some
progress soon.”
“You must trust to circumstances.”
“There are no circumstances to trust to. We may as well trust in
Providence if we trust at all. But here we are. A wild place, isn’t it?
But I like it on such days as these.”
The churchyard was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which
having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not
being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open
freedom. A delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight
can accompany a man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was
nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds
bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than
whisper rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people
in new black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or
wheel-marks, which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or
cypress-bushes, which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and
bones lying behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our
graves. No; nothing but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the
forms of the mounds it covered,—themselves irregularly shaped, with no
eye to effect; the impressive presence of the old mountain that all
this was a part of being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside
were similar slopes and similar grass; and then the serene impassive
sea, visible to a width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with
the effect of a vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel.
Detached rocks stood upright afar, a collar of foam girding their
bases, and repeating in its whiteness the plumage of a countless
multitude of gulls that restlessly hovered about.
“Now, Worm!” said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an
attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself
were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the
afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen
running up the hill without a bonnet.
Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in
the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during
dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came
into the old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by
“the purple light” in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by
sending him to measure the height of the tower.
What could she do but come close—so close that a minute arc of her
skirt touched his foot—and asked him how he was getting on with his
sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical
mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the
pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a
preacher.
Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.
“Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?”
she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.
“Oh no, that I won’t,” said he, staring up.
“Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them
better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and
to me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and forgets that I wrote
it for him. Isn’t it absurd?”
“How clever you must be!” said Stephen. “I couldn’t write a sermon for
the world.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough,” she said, descending from the pulpit and coming
close to him to explain more vividly. “You do it like this. Did you
ever play a game of forfeits called ‘When is it? where is it? what is
it?’”
“No, never.”
“Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing
that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so
on. You put that down under ‘Generally.’ Then you proceed to the First,
Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys—says they are all my
eye. Then you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being
put in great black brackets, writing opposite, ‘LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE
FARMERS ARE FALLING ASLEEP.’ Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few
Words And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of
each page, ‘KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN’—I mean,” she added, correcting
herself, “that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he
gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up
a-field. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!”
Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as
if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had
outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.
Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught
by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had
the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the
self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two
with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the
church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it
freshens the glow of a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched
Elfride down the hill with a smile.
“You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,” he said, and turned to
Stephen. “But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as
you; and that you are steady I see from your diligence here.”
“I think Miss Swancourt very clever,” Stephen observed.
“Yes, she is; certainly, she is,” said papa, turning his voice as much
as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. “Now,
Smith, I’ll tell you something; but she mustn’t know it for the
world—not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead
secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a very good job
she makes of them!”
“She can do anything.”
“She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade.
But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!”
“Not a word,” said Smith.
“Look there,” said Mr. Swancourt. “What do you think of my roofing?” He
pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof,
“Did you do that, sir?”
“Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I
pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens,
slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We
worked like slaves, didn’t we, Worm?”
“Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there—hee, hee!” said
William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. “Like slaves, ’a b’lieve—hee,
hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go
straight? Mighty I! There, ’tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to
cuss and let it out, is it, sir?”
“Well—why?”
“Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to
cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.”
“I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.”
“Oh, doan’t I, sir—hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir,
and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there.
Doan’t ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the
candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the
chancel?”
“Yes; what of that?”
“I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ’twas only
a dog or cat—maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.”
“Ah, I remember.”
“No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ’A was very well to look at; but,
Lord!——”
“Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?”
“—’A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow.
’Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat
down upon the chair. ‘Get up, Worm,’ says you, when you seed the chair
go all a-sway wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and
brimstone to t’other end of your shop—all in a passion. ‘Damn the
chair!’ says I. ‘Just what I was thinking,’ says you, sir. ‘I could see
it in your face, sir,’ says I, ‘and I hope you and God will forgi’e me
for saying what you wouldn’t.’ To save your life you couldn’t help
laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay,
I’m as wise as one here and there.”
“I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the church
and tower with you,” Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the following
morning, “so I got Lord Luxellian’s permission to send for a man when
you came. I told him to be there at ten o’clock. He’s a very
intelligent man, and he will tell you all you want to know about the
state of the walls. His name is John Smith.”
Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. “I
will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,” she said
laughingly. “I shall see your figure against the sky.”
“And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss
Swancourt,” said Stephen. “In twelve minutes from this present moment,”
he added, looking at his watch, “I’ll be at the summit and look out for
you.”
She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch
him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church
stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot—a mason in his
working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.
To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they
both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and
remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine
of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of
moving. More minutes passed—she grew cold with waiting, and shivered.
It was not till the end of a quarter of an hour that they began to
slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s pace.
“Rude and unmannerly!” she said to herself, colouring with pique.
“Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of
with——”
The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.
She returned to the porch.
“Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?”
she inquired of her father.
“No,” he said surprised; “quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s
master-mason, John Smith.”
“Oh,” said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak
station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all—a
childish thing—looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But
her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect
of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to
its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being
wounded that little hits struck her hard.
It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen
above the parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns on a
ruined mosque. Even then Stephen was not true enough to perform what he
was so courteous to promise, and he vanished without making a sign.
He returned at midday. Elfride looked vexed when unconscious that his
eyes were upon her; when conscious, severe. However, her attitude of
coldness had long outlived the coldness itself, and she could no longer
utter feigned words of indifference.
“Ah, you weren’t kind to keep me waiting in the cold, and break your
promise,” she said at last reproachfully, in tones too low for her
father’s powers of hearing.
“Forgive, forgive me!” said Stephen with dismay. “I had forgotten—quite
forgotten! Something prevented my remembering.”
“Any further explanation?” said Miss Capricious, pouting.
He was silent for a few minutes, and looked askance.
“None,” he said, with the accent of one who concealed a sin.