FROM LESS TO MORE.
For two days Mrs. Stondon kept her room. She said she had a headache,
that she had caught cold, that she was too ill to see any one excepting
her husband, and yet she would not allow Captain Stondon to send for a
doctor. She was afraid a doctor might guess her malady to be more mental
than physical, and so she refused to do anything except lie on a sofa in
her dressing-room, while her maid bathed her forehead with
eau-de-cologne and water, and brought her up morning and night a cup of
tea.
On the evening of the second day Phemie went down stairs, lest her
husband’s anxiety, her husband’s tenderness, should kill her.
She had thought over the matter during those two days till she was
almost mad. She had loved a man not her husband—a man who loved another
woman. She had loved unsought, unwooed. She had planted without hope of
gathering. She had loved unasked, but, thank God, unknown.
Well, she could bury her own dead without the help of man; she could
destroy this curse which had come to her in the guise of a blessing; she
could hate Basil as she hated herself; she could leave him and Miss
Derno to settle their love affairs to their own liking. She could keep
her secret, her shameful, disgraceful secret, to herself, and mortal
should not wring it from her. It was known but to herself and her God,
and He would have pity.
Thinking all these good thoughts, having formed all these good
resolutions, Phemie left her room and rejoined the family circle, and
answered all inquiries about her health with a disagreeable politeness
which she had laid down for the rule of her future life.
Ill enough she looked to have satisfied any doubt that might have been
entertained about her sudden indisposition. She was pale, she was weak,
she was weary; she spoke as though it was a trouble to her to talk, and
though both Miss Derno and Basil Stondon saw she was trying her best to
keep up before her husband, they took private occasion of advising him
to send for a doctor whether she liked it or not.
“You seemed so well at dinner on Tuesday night,” said Miss Derno.
“But we had a long walk over Wildmoor, you remember,” remarked Basil,
“and Mrs. Stondon complained then of being tired. Do you not recollect
her sitting down to rest as we came back?”
Miss Derno did remember perfectly, and she remembered something else
which she had scarcely noticed at the time, namely, how concerned Basil
seemed about Mrs. Stondon’s weariness.
The coming of light is often felt before its actual advent. Miss Derno
had not arrived at putting two and two together yet, but she had begun
to perceive that somehow there was a two and two, and Basil’s anxiety
about Mrs. Stondon’s indisposition set her wondering. It was not
ordinary anxiety, it was not ordinary interest. To have heard Captain
Stondon, any one might have thought his wife sick to death with some
mortal malady, but to see Mr. Basil was more astonishing still.
Nothing would serve him but to mount his horse and ride off for a
doctor. He would trust no messenger, he would listen to no
remonstrances. After he once saw Phemie’s face, he never rested till he
got leave from Captain Stondon to fetch medical advice, and through the
twilight he galloped away to seek it.
“How very much Basil takes your illness to heart!” remarked Miss Derno
as he left the room; and Phemie, from among the sofa pillows answered,
“He is very kind.”
Very kind! he was indeed too kind; and Phemie, noticing it, felt that
her own love might not be the only battle she should have to fight—felt
dimly that she had not loved without return, that heart had answered but
to heart, and spirit to spirit.
Poor Phemie!—poor soul!—what could a doctor do for her? He could order
her back to her own room, and send her draughts, and prescribe quietness
and arrowroot; no fatigue, and beef tea; no excitement, and after a few
days a couple of glasses of Madeira; but the fever that was on Phemie he
could not conquer; the heat and the cold, the alterations and the
changes, he could neither see nor control.
She knew when he said she was better that he was mistaken. She felt that
from day to day the struggle must continue—the fight go on. She
confessed to her own heart, when she came down stairs for good, and
began to walk and drive and ride once more, that the old disease was
still unsubdued, that she was no stronger than ever she had been, but
weaker by far.
Day by day the battle grew worse; the more she absented herself from
Basil the more eagerly he welcomed her when she did come. Though she did
not now like Miss Derno, still she entreated her to stay rather than go
back to the old life—the sweet life that had been so full of pleasure
and of peril. She asked Miss Hurlford, Mrs. Hurlford; she filled the
house with company; she seemed never happy save in a crowd; she grew
restless, impatient, irritable; she answered Basil shortly, and, as Miss
Derno thought, sometimes not over civilly.
“I have it!” exclaimed that clever lady to herself one day; “Basil has
been simpleton enough to fall in love with Mrs. Stondon’s bright eyes,
and she thinks it necessary to assume the grand matron with him. Heaven
help the woman! If she knew as much of him as I do, she would not attach
much importance to it.”
Which only shows how greatly deceived even the wisest women may be.
Could Basil have married Phemie, he might not have cared for her; had
she been eligible, he might have found his love damped by considerations
of ways and means—of the butcher, baker, and grocer; but as it was—as
Phemie was perfectly unattainable—Basil lost his senses about her. God
help any woman who being loved by such a one loves him back! There are
times in a woman’s life when it is better to fall into the hands of the
wicked rather than of the foolish. I think Phemie would have known what
to do with a villain, but she did not know what to do with Basil, who
was not sinner enough to think of bringing misery to her, who was not
man enough to leave her, who had not sense enough to see what the end
might be, but who, torturing himself by Phemie’s change of manner, by
Phemie’s pale face and fretful answers, stayed on, tormenting her with
his presence, with anxious inquiries about her health, about her
spirits, about her varying moods.
“I am ill,” she said one day, when he had persistently followed her
about till she could keep her temper no longer. “I am ill—cannot you see
that for yourself? I want to be alone—I want rest—I want quietness——”
“And yet you fill your house with visitors. That is a strange way of
compassing the desired end,” he answered.
“If Captain Stondon be satisfied, I suppose it cannot signify to you
what I do,” she retorted.
“Anything signifies to me that affects your health or happiness,” he
replied, a little tenderly.
“I am surely the best judge of what does affect my health and
happiness,” answered Phemie.
“You say you want rest,” he began.
“So I do,” she interrupted; “rest from being asked perpetually how I
am.”
“You say you are ill, as any one, indeed, may see for himself. Why do
you not have some advice?”
“I have had advice, but found it did me no good.”
“Why not go to town with Captain Stondon, and consult some first-rate
physician? We are thinking of running up to London for a few days next
week.”
“I know you are,” answered Phemie.
“Well, will you consider the matter, and come with us?”
She stood silent for a minute or two, and then answered,
“Any physician who knew exactly what was the matter with me would order
rest and change. I may think about that while you are away, but I will
not go to London.”
“Perhaps, however,” urged Basil, “you do not know what is the matter
with you?”
“Perhaps not,” answered Phemie, shortly; “but I believe I do.”
This was the way he followed her about; before strangers he kept at a
distance; even when Miss Derno chanced to be present he had learned to
be prudent; but for all that he pursued Phemie like her shadow; he was
always pleading and praying that she would take care of her health; he
was always telling her how, for his sake, for Captain Stondon’s sake,
for the sake of all her friends, she should give up so much company, and
live quietly, and keep early hours, “as we used to do,” finished Basil,
who longed with a terrible longing for the days to come back again—that
could never come back more.
“We cannot live to-day as we lived yesterday,” was Phemie’s answer.
“What was pleasant in the past might kill one in the present.”
“Would that quiet home-life which we enjoyed so thoroughly until just
lately kill you if it could come again?” he asked.
“It would,” replied Mrs. Stondon. “I could not bear it now. It was all
very well while it lasted, but I could not go back to it for all that.”
And then knowing that leaving those days against the monotony of which
she was inveighing, had been to her like leaving heaven for earth,
Phemie went off to her own room and cried—cried till her head was aching
and her heart weary.
“If he would but leave me alone,” she thought. But when he did leave her
alone, as he sometimes did—for Basil occasionally grew angry at her
answers and left her in a rage—matters were no better.
Phemie would watch him talking to other women, smiling his smiles for
them, speaking his tenderest, looking his handsomest, until she grew
sick with jealousy, until she went almost mad to think how she must
always keep him at a distance—how it ought to be her greatest happiness
to see him angry with her, indifferent to her, fond of some one else.
She could not help speculating as to whether he cared for her. The one
battle of her own love she might have fought, but the many battles of
her own love and his doubtful love, of his tender care, of her own
overpowering jealousy, of her own despairing remorse, made Phemie little
better than a rudderless boat on a turbulent sea.
“O’er billows of temptation” the poor child tossed day by day in safety;
but she felt the struggle was an unequal one; that the day must come
when Basil would know her coldness, her indifference was all put
on—unless he went away, or she went away—unless they were separated
altogether.
While he and Captain Stondon were in London, she had nothing to contend
against save her own sad loneliness and her constant desire to hear his
voice, to see his face, to feel his presence in the house.
It was so easy to be good away from him that Phemie took her resolution.
She would leave Marshlands; she would flee to the mountains, and stay
there till she grew strong again, till she had conquered herself, till
he, perhaps, had got something to do, or decided on marrying Miss Derno.
She would leave—and Mrs. Stondon straightway ventured on the first
decided step she had ever taken in her life; and, without consulting
Captain Stondon on the subject, started for Carlisle, accompanied by her
maid and a man servant, in whose care she sent back Miss Jennings to
Marshlands.
At Carlisle her uncle met her; and after years—after long years of
travel and success and happiness—Phemie returned to the dear old valley,
to the sweet beauty of the familiar landscape, a delicate, unhappy
woman.
“Why did your husband not accompany you?” asked Mr. Aggland, who was
uneasy lest something had happened.
“I thought I told you in my letter,” she answered, listlessly. “He was
in London and I at Marshlands. The notion took hold of me that I should
like to sleep in my old bed, to look at the waterfall, to walk over the
heather once again; and when the fit came on I could not rest, I could
not wait. I felt I must get away from those trees, from those fields,
from those trim gardens, or die. And I am so ill, uncle, I am so ill.”
“Ought you not to have gone to London for advice?” said Mr. Aggland.
“No, I ought to have come here,” she answered; “I want the mountain air
and the mountain scenery and rest and quiet—rest and quiet.” And she
closed her eyes as she spoke, and leaned back in the carriage which her
uncle had provided.
Mr. Aggland looked at her; he did not understand the cause of this
sudden freak, and he was just the man to dislike whatever he could not
understand.
“Phemie,” he said, “I suppose I need not ask you whether there is
anything amiss at home? Captain Stondon would not, I am certain, be
unkind——”
“Unkind!” she burst out, “unkind! He is far too good and kind. You do
not know, I never could tell you, how good he is, how tender, how
devoted. It is not that, uncle; it is only that I am ill; bear with me
as he has done. Let me be at peace for a while, let me go as I like,
come as I like, and if I am cross and irritable and out of spirits,
think I shall be different soon.” And she put out her hand and stroked
his face with an imploring gentleness which made Mr. Aggland feel
sorrowful.
This was not the Phemie of the Hill Farm—this was not the Phemie of
Marshlands—this was a beseeching, dependent, exhausted Phemie, who
might, for aught he could tell to the contrary, have come home from the
midst of all her wealth and luxury to the old place to die.
He thought of her mother, he thought of those terrible illnesses abroad,
when she had fought for her life, fought so hard to keep it! What if
this passion for the hills and the mountains was but a morbid sickness
to see earth’s best-remembered places ere passing away from earth for
ever?
He took the poor hand—now so thin—and felt her pulse. He prided himself
on being half a doctor, and said,
“Irritable and weak; you will require wine, Phemie; I must send down and
ask Mr. Conbyr to let me have some old port out of his cellar.” But
Phemie answered—
“I want no wine except the wine of the mountain air—the bouquet of the
wild thyme and the heather. Have not I come, uncle,” she said, “from a
place where everything money can buy has been able to do nothing for me?
It is not eating or drinking that can make me well, but the sight of the
dear old hills—of the sky as we see it reflected in Strammer Tarn (I
have never seen such a sky since)—of Scotland from the top of
Skillanscar—if I ever get strong enough to climb it or Helbeck. I have
grown weary of the Lowlands,” she added, with a sigh, “and I have come
to the Highlands for you to make me well.” And the soft hand stroked his
cheek once more, and Mr. Aggland could have wept because of her words
and manner.
“She must be going as her mother went,” he thought; “I will send Johnny
over for Mr. Fagg in the morning. He may not be very first-rate, but he
will be able to tell me that.”
Now “that,” in Mr. Aggland’s vocabulary, meant, were Phemie’s lungs
sound—was she in a consumption? And he sat pondering on what could be
the matter with her, if it were not consumption, while his niece lay
back in the carriage, watching for the old familiar faces of the
hills—watching, with her uncle’s hand clasped tight in hers, with a
terrible sorrow tearing at her heart, with a sickening remorse
oppressing her conscience.
“There they are! there are the dear old mountains!” she exclaimed at
last; and then she burst into a passion of tears, which frightened her
uncle, who could not understand what was the matter with her.
“You will make yourself worse, Phemie,” he remonstrated; but it was all
the same to Phemie.
Whether tears made her worse or better, she could not help remembering
what she had been when she left those hills—what she was now.
“If he but knew,” thought Phemie, “it would break his heart too!” And I
fancy Phemie was right, and that had Mr. Aggland suspected what was
really the matter with his niece, he would sooner have seen her in her
grave than coming back burdened with such a secret to the place where
she had dwelt in innocence and purity for so long.
And yet never a sweeter, gentler creature trod those lonely hills, those
mountain fastnesses, than Phemie Stondon, who revisited each
well-remembered haunt—each tarn and stream, and crag, sorrowing.
With her long dress trailing among the heather, she walked slowly over
the moors day after day, thinking thoughts such as had never passed
through her mind before. She would sit beside the trickling waterfall,
where the ferns and the grass bent down the stream just as they used to
do, and with her hand leaning upon some mossy stone, would weep tears
that, had she shed them before marriage instead of after, might have
made her life more useful and more happy.
She had a kind word and a sweet smile for every one; she was vain and
fanciful no more; she was subdued, and quiet and humble to such a
degree, that the farmers and the farmers’ wives looked after her in
amazement, and marvelled among themselves whether that could be the
Phemie Keller, the saucy, flighty, conceited Phemie who had gone away to
be made a grand lady of all at once.
“She does not think as much of her silks and satins now as she used to
do of her old muslin gowns,” said one.
“And is she not homely like and kind?” added another.
“She took the baby in her arms the other day,” remarked a farmer’s wife,
“and the tears came into her eyes when she told me she had never a
living one of her own.”
“And oh! my bairn, my bairn!” mourned Peggy M‘Nab, “what hae ye dune wi’
the heartsome life that was in ye? and whaur hae ye gotten that mournfu’
luik that it gars me greet till see? Yer mither had the same when she
came back hame amang us; but——”
“But I have no reason for looking like what she did, is that what you
mean, Peggy?” asked Mrs. Stondon. “Perhaps it is only because I am ill
that I am mournful, as you call it.”
“But ye’re no _that_ ill,” remarked Peggy.
“I may feel as ill,” answered Phemie, who was only too glad in those
days to make her health appear as bad as possible. She laid all sins,
all shortcomings, to sickness; and she was ill enough to make Mr.
Aggland seriously uneasy, to urge him to grave discourse with Mr.
Fagg—now a married man and the father of three children.
“I cannot tell what is the matter with her,” said that gentleman,
frankly, “unless it be, as she declares—exhaustion. You see,” went on
Mr. Fagg, “Mrs. Stondon is one of those women who keep up for a long
time and then drop all at once. She would scarcely feel she was
overtaxing her strength till the stock was completely gone. You must
have known yourself many a man who never felt fatigue while walking, and
yet who gave way in a moment when the distance was accomplished. His
spirit kept him up, and then, when the motive for exertion was over, the
reaction came on. Now that is what it seems to me is the matter with
Mrs. Stondon—reaction, and perhaps her longing for the hills. Her
passion for this solitude is probably nothing more nor less than
nature’s voice telling us what will cure her. One thing I know,”
finished Mr. Fagg, “that I can do nothing for her, and I do not believe
any man in England could.”
Mr. Fagg was right; the fever that was on Phemie was beyond the power of
man to cure, and it was beyond the power of nature either. Beside the
waterfall among the heather, pacing the valley with Davie—now old and
sedate—following the mistress he loved so well, Phemie came to
understand all she had pledged away in the church among the mountains.
She knew now why she had wept that night when the wind blew and the rain
beat against the windows, when, through the wind and the rain, Captain
Stondon came up from the vicarage to hear her decision.
She had forgotten that night until lately—forgotten her tears, her
doubts, her hesitation; but, as at the day of judgment the scroll of our
lives will be unfolded before us, so even in this world there are times
when part of the history is remembered by us, when the thoughts and the
resolutions of the long ago, appear before us like unwelcome ghosts.
Her life had been her own then, but it was too late now—too late—too
late!
And among the broom and the ferns, and the thyme and the heather, Phemie
would take out her husband’s letters—the long loving letters he sent her
each day from London, and read them till she forgot her own misery in
thinking of the misery knowledge of her fault would bring to him.
Could there have been anything worse for such a woman than solitude?
when she never knew peace day or night for thinking of Basil, and for
reproaching herself for thinking of him.
She was sitting one afternoon by Strammer Tarn, on the very spot where
she had been wont to twine wreaths and garlands for her hair in the old
days departed—sitting looking at the dark waters, at the frowning rocks,
at the expanse of moor and mountain.
It was the glory of the summer time, it was the noon of the year, and
she had walked slowly over from the Hill Farm, drinking in the full
beauty of the season, the perfection of the scenery, with a strange sad
thirst. There was not a thing during the progress of that walk she
overlooked—the moss growing upon the stones, the heather budding into
flower, the wild thyme blooming upon sunny spots, the trailing brambles,
the chirp of the grasshopper, the humming of the bees, the great grey
boulders lying on the grass, the springing of the turf beneath her feet,
the little pools of water in which Davie slaked his thirst, the very
insects that winged their way past her—all these things Phemie noticed
and remembered afterwards.
She remembered when she sat by Strammer Tarn—how Davie lay stretched at
her feet—how with her face resting on her hand she had been looking for
ever and ever so long into the dark deep waters, when suddenly Davie
sprang up, and with all his short bristly hair standing on end, growled
at one who came brushing his way through the heather towards her.
It was Basil! She had barely time to rise from her seat, and with breath
coming quick and short, and colour deepening and fading, make sure it
was he, ere he was beside her—ere he held her hands in his—ere he was
pouring out almost unintelligible words of joy.
Why had she run away and left him to come home to a desert? Did she
think he could exist away from her? Did she think he knew peace, or
rest, or comfort where she was not? Ah, Heaven! did he not see in the
woman’s face all she thought, all she had suffered? Had he not noticed
the red and the white, the blush and the pallor? All alone there, could
he not tell her the tale of his love at last—tell her, sure that his
love was returned—that she had fled less from him than from herself?
He had not come there to tell her his story, he had only come craving to
see her—to speak to her—to be near her once again. But—well—well—love,
holy or unholy, finds a vent for itself sometime: and it was among the
lonely mountains, under the summer sky, that Basil yielded to the
temptation and spoke of his.
And Phemie. Ah! reader, be pitiful, be merciful, if you have ever known
what it is to have the man you love best on earth tell you that you are
all the world to him—be lenient to this poor sinner whose dream-hero had
come to her beside the tarn—too late—too late!
She could not help it: she had never felt before what it is to love—to
be beloved: her heart gave a great leap of triumph, and then it stood
still with agony.
She went mad with happiness, and then the misery of her position made
her sane.
She tore herself out of his arms and fell to the ground and wept; she
lay with her face buried in the turf, sobbing till her heart was fit to
break. In the stillness of that mountain solitude, the voice of
lamentation seemed to rise through the air and float away and away,
while the bee hummed, and the rocks frowned, and the flowers sprang,
unmindful of passion, unsympathetic with woe.
Her beauty, her accomplishments, her wealth—everything of which she had
been proud, of which she had been ambitious—had brought her to this.
Then she rose up and bade him go: with his kisses on her lips, with the
tears streaming down her cheeks, she reminded him of her position and of
his.
She told him how, so long as the sun rose and set, she could never be
anything to him; she told him she honoured her husband beyond all men on
earth, and that sooner than hurt him or disgrace him, she would die a
hundred times over.
She felt strong now, stronger than she had ever been; she spoke of all
her husband had done for her—of how he had taken her from poverty and
given her wealth—of how he had fulfilled his part of the compact—of how
he had loved and trusted her always.
“And he has been kind and good to you, and this is how you repay him!”
she went on. “God give me strength to despise you as I ought.”
He stood silent till she had done—till, having panted out her last
reproach, she ceased to speak—then he said,
“Oh! if _I_ had but met you then—if _I_ had come here instead of him——”
“You would have left me here,” she retorted.
“I would not! I could never have seen you and not loved you.”
At which Phemie laughed scornfully.
“You see me a lady now,” she said; “but I was only a poor country girl
then. You would have been much too fine a gentleman to have looked at
such as I was, or if you had looked, it would not have been with honest
eyes like his. I did not know the world in those days, but I have seen
enough of it since; and what I have seen has taught me that there is not
one man in ten thousand—not one man in a million—who would have married
me as he did.”
“I would,” said Basil.
“You would not,” answered Phemie, and she turned away; but Basil stopped
her.
“Phemie,” he began—it was the first time he had called her by her name,
and it sounded strangely sweet in her ears—“Phemie, can we never be
anything to one another? I will wait years—I will wait till my hair is
grey—only say you love me.”
“Basil Stondon,” said Phemie, facing round, “I know what you mean—I know
what you would say; but put that out of your mind once and for ever. I
will never step across a grave to happiness. I have made my bed, I will
lie in it. If I am ever a widow, if I should have the misfortune to
outlive my husband, I will outlive him single. When I pledged my troth
to him among these hills, I did so for better or worse—the worse has
come to me, but that cannot alter our position. We can never be anything
to one another—for I chose my life before I ever saw you. Never.”
Never! He was a poorer creature even than Phemie thought him, for as he
walked up and down Tordale valley that night, recalling to his memory
her every word, her every gesture, he vowed to himself that she should
be something to him—that he would be something to her.
He was in for the race and he must strive for the winning-post. He had
loved this woman, and he could love no other woman in the future like
Phemie, his kinsman’s wife.