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BY
only to gain in intensity from that circumstance, and in fantastic effect.
Among the dancers was one who danced with peculiar spirit and
brilliancy, and her little cry had a ring and a wildness that never failed
to set the others going with new inspiration.
She was a slight, dark-haired girl, with a pale, rather mysterious face,
and large eyes. Not a word was spoken, and the reel went on for nearly ten
minutes. At length the girl with the dark hair gave a final shout, and
broke away from the circle.
With her desertion the dance flagged, and presently came to an end. The
first breaking of the silence gave a slight shock, in spite of the subdued
tones of the speaker.
"It is no use trying to dance a reel without Hadria," said a
tall youth, evidently her brother, if one might judge from his almost
southern colouring and melancholy eyes. In build and feature he resembled
the elder sister, Algitha, who had all the characteristics of a fine
northern race.
"Old Maggie said the other day, that Hadria's dancing of the
reel was no 'right canny,'" Algitha observed, in the same
low tone that all the occupants of the garret instinctively adopted.
"Ah!" cried Fred, "old Maggie has always looked upon
Hadria as half bewitched since that night when she found her here 'a
wee bit bairn,' as she says, at this very window, in her nightshirt,
standing on tiptoe to see the moonlight."
"It frightened the poor old thing out of her wits, of
course," said Algitha, who was leaning with crossed arms, in a corner
of the deep-set window. The fine outlines of face and form were shewn in
the strange light, as in a boldly-executed sketch, without detail. Pride
and determination were the dominant qualities so indicated. Her sister
stood opposite, the moonshine making the smooth pallor of her face more
striking, and emphasizing its mysterious quality.
The whole group of young faces, crowded together by the
window, and lit up by the unsympathetic light, had something characteristic and unusual in its aspect, that might have excited curiosity.
"Tell us the story of the garret, Hadria," said Austin, the
youngest brother, a handsome boy of twelve, with curling brown hair and
blue eyes.
"Hadria has told it hundreds of times, and you know it as well as
she does."
"But I want to hear it again--about the attack upon the keep,
and the shouting of the men, while the lady was up here starving to
death."
But Algitha shook her head.
"We don't come up here to tell stories, we must get to
business."
"Will you have the candle, or can you see?" asked Fred, the
second brother, a couple of years younger than Hadria, whom he addressed.
His features were irregular; his short nose and twinkling grey eyes
suggesting a joyous and whimsical temperament.
"I think I had better have the candle; my notes are very
illegible."
Fred drew forth a candle-end from his pocket, stuck it into a
quaint-looking stand of antique steel, much eaten with rust, and set the
candle-end alight.
Algitha went into the next room and brought in a couple of chairs. Fred
followed her example till there were enough for the party. They all took
their places, and Hadria, who had been provided with a seat facing them,
and with a rickety wooden table that trembled responsively to her slightest
movement, laid down her notes and surveyed her audience. The faces stood
out strangely, in the lights and shadows of the garret.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she began; "on the last
occasion on which the Preposterous Society held its meeting, we had the
pleasure of listening to an able lecture on 'Character' by our
respected member Demogorgon" (the speaker bowed to
Ernest, and the audience applauded). "My address to-night on 'Fate' is designed to contribute further ideas to this fascinating subject, and to pursue the enquiry more curiously."
The audience murmured approval.
"We were left at loggerheads, at the end of the last debate. I
doubted Demogorgon's conclusion, while admiring his eloquence.
To-night, I will put before you the view exactly contrary to his. I do not
assert that I hold this contrary view, but I state it as well as I am able,
because I think that it has not been given due consideration."
"This will be warm," Fred was heard to murmur with a
chuckle, to an adjacent sister. The speaker looked at her notes.
"I will read," she said, "a passage from Emerson,
which states very strikingly the doctrine that I am going to
oppose."
Hadria her paper aslant towards the candle-end, which threw a murky
yellow light upon the background of the garret, contrasting oddly with the
thin, clear moonbeams.
"'But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for
the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to
ourselves for is always granted. The event is the print of your form. It
fits you like your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the
children of his mind and body.'"
Algitha leant forward. The members of the Preposterous Society settled
into attitudes of attention.
Hadria said that this was a question that could not fail to be of
peculiar interest to them all, who had their lives before them, to make or
mar. It was an extremely difficult question, for it admitted of no
experiment. One could never go back in life and try another plan. One could
never make sure, by such a test, how much circumstance and how much innate
ideas had to do with one's disposition. Emerson insisted that man
makes his circumstance, and history seemed to support that theory. How
untoward had been, in appearance, the surroundings of those who had made
all the great movements and done all the great deeds of the world. Let one
consider the poverty,
persecution, the incessant discouragement, and often the tragic end of our greatest benefactors. Christ was but one of the host of the crucified. In spite of the theory which the lecturer had undertaken to champion, she believed that it was generally those people who had difficult lives who did the beneficent deeds, and generally those people who were encouraged and comfortable who went to sleep, or actively dragged down what the thinkers and actors had piled up. In great things and in small, such was the order of life.
"Hear, hear," cried Ernest, "my particular
thunder!"
"Wait a minute," said the lecturer. "I am going to
annihilate you with your particular thunder." She paused for a
moment, and her eyes rested on the strange white landscape beyond the
little group of faces upturned towards her.
"Roughly, we may say that people are divided into two orders:
first, the organizers, the able, those who build, who create cohesion,
symmetry, reason, economy; and, secondly, the destroyers, those who come
wandering idly by, and unfasten, undo, relax, disintegrate all that has
been effected by the force and vigilance of their betters. This distinction
is carried into even the most trivial things of life. Yet without that
organization and coherence, the existence of the destroyers themselves
would become a chaos and a misery."
The oak table over which Hadria bent forward towards her audience,
appeared to be applauding this sentiment vigorously. It rocked to and fro
on the uneven floor with great clamour.
"Thus," the speaker went on, "these relaxed and
derivative people are living on the strength of the strong. He who is
strong must carry with him, as a perpetual burden, a mass of such
pensioners, who are scared and shocked at his rude individuality; and if he
should trip or stumble, if he should lose his way in the untrodden paths,
in seeking new truth and a broader foundation for the lives of men, then a
chorus of censure goes up from millions of little throats."
"Hear, hear!" cried Algitha and Fred, and the table rocked
enthusiastically.
"But when the good things are gained for which the upholders have
striven and perhaps given their lives, then there are no more greedy
absorbers of the bounty than these same innumerable little
throats."
The table led the chorus of assent.
"And now," said the lecturer slowly, "consider this in
relation to the point at issue. Emerson asserts that circumstance can
always be conquered. But is not circumstance, to a large extent, created by
these destroyers, as I have called them? Has not the strongest soul to
count with these, who weave the web of adverse conditions, whose dead
weight has to be carried, whose work of destruction has to be incessantly
repaired? Who can dare to say 'I am master of my fate,' when he
does not know how large may be the share of the general burden that will
fall to him to drag through life, how great may be the number of these
parasites who are living on the moral capital of their generation? Surely
circumstance consists largely in the inertia, the impenetrability of the
destroyers."
Ernest shewed signs of restiveness. He shuffled on his chair, made
muttered exclamations.
"Presently," said the lecturer reassuringly.
"Or put it in another way," she went on. "A man may
make a thing--circumstance included--but he is not a sort of
moral spider; he can't spin it out of his own inside. He wants
something to make it of. The formative force comes from within, but
he must have material, just as much as a sculptor must have his marble
before he can shape his statue. There is a subtle relation between
character and conditions, and it is this relation that
determines Fate. Fate is as the statue of the sculptor."
"That's where Hadria mainly differs from you," said
Fred, "you make the thing absolute; Hadria makes it a matter of
relation."
"Exactly," assented the lecturer, catching the remark.
"Difficulties need not be really obstructive to the best development of a character or a power, nor a smooth path always favourable. Obstacles may be of a kind to stimulate one person and to annihilate another. It is not a question of relative strength between character and circumstance, as people are so fond of asserting. That is mere gibberish. It means nothing. The two things cannot be compared, for they are not of the same nature. They can't be reduced to a common denominator."
Austin appreciated this illustration, being head of his class for
arithmetic.
"We shall never be able to take a reasonable view of this question
till we get rid of that ridiculous phrase, 'If the soul is
strong enough, it can overcome circumstance.' In a room filled
with carbonic acid instead of ordinary air, a giant would succumb as
quickly as a dwarf, and his strength would avail him nothing. Indeed, if
there is a difference, it is in favour of the dwarf."
Ernest frowned. This was all high treason against his favourite author.
He had given his sister a copy of Emerson's works last Christmas, in
the hope that her views might be enlightened, and this was the
disgraceful use she made of it!
"Finally," said Hadria, smiling defiantly at her brother,
"let us put the question shortly thus: Given (say) great artistic
power, given also a conscience and a strong will, is there any combination
of circumstances which might prevent the artistic power (assuming it to be
of the highest order and strength) from developing and displaying itself,
so as to meet with general recognition?"
"No," asserted Ernest, and there was a hesitating chorus on
his side.
"There seem to me to be a thousand chances against it,"
Hadria continued. "Artistic power, to begin with, is a sort of
weakness in relation to the everyday world, and so, in some respects, is a
nice conscience. I think Emerson is shockingly unjust. His beaming optimism
is a worship of success
disguised under lofty terms. There is nothing to prove that thousands have not been swamped by maladjustment of character to circumstance, and I would even go so far as to suggest that perhaps the very greatest of all are those whom the world has never known, because the present conditions are inharmonious with the very noblest and the very highest qualities."
No sooner was the last word uttered than the garret became the scene of
the stormiest debate that had ever been recorded in the annals of the
Preposterous Society, an institution that had lately celebrated its fifth
anniversary. Hadria, fired by opposition, declared that the success of
great people was due not simply to their greatness, but to some smaller and
commoner quality which brought them in touch with the majority, and so gave
their greatness a chance.
At this, there was such a howl of indignation that Algitha
remonstrated.
"We shall be heard, if you don't take care," she
warned.
"My dear Algitha, there are a dozen empty rooms between us and the
inhabited part of the house, not to mention the fact that we are a storey
above everyone except the ghosts, so I think you may compose
yourself."
However, the excited voices were hushed a little as the discussion
continued. One of the chief charms of the institution, in the eyes of the
members of the Society, was its secrecy. The family, though united by ties
of warm affection to their parents, did not look for encouragement from
them in this direction. Mr. Fullerton was too exclusively scientific in his
bent of thought, to sympathize with the kind of speculation in which his
children delighted, while their mother looked with mingled pride and alarm
at these outbreaks of individuality on the part of her daughters, for whom
she craved the honours of the social world. In this out-of-the-way
district, society smiled upon conformity, and glared vindictively at the
faintest sign of spontaneous thinking. Cleverness of execution, as in
music, tennis, drawing, was forgiven, even commended;
but originality, though of the mildest sort, created the same agonizing disturbance in the select circle, as the sight of a crucifix is wont to produce upon the father of Evil. Yet by some freak of fortune, the whole family at Dunaghee had shewn obstinate symptoms of individuality from their childhood, and, what was more distressing, the worst cases occurred in the girls.
In the debate just recorded, that took place on Algitha's
twenty-second birthday, Ernest had been Hadria's principal opponent,
but the others had also taken the field against her.
"You have the easier cause to champion," she said, when
there was a momentary lull, "for all your evidences can be pointed to
and counted whereas mine, poor things--pale hypotheses, nameless
peradventures--lie in forgotten church-yards--unthought of,
unthanked, untrumpeted, and all their tragedy is lost in the everlasting
silence."
"You will never make people believe in what might
have been," said Algitha.
"I don't expect to." Hadria was standing by the window
looking out over the glimmering fields and the shrouded white hills.
"Life is as white and as unsympathetic as this," she said
dreamily. "We just dance our reel in our garret, and then it is all
over; and whether we do the steps as our fancy would have them, or a little
otherwise, because of the uneven floor, or tired feet, or for lack of
chance to learn the steps--heavens and earth, what does it
matter?"
"Hadria!" exclaimed an astonished chorus.
The sentiment was so entirely unlike any that the ardent President of
the Society had ever been known to express before, that brothers and
sisters crowded up to enquire into the cause of the unusual mood.
"Oh, it is only the moonlight that has got into my head,"
she said, flinging back the cloudy black hair from her brow.
Algitha's firm, clear voice vibrated through the room.
"But I think it matters very much whether one's task is done
well or ill," she said, "and nobody has taught me to
wish to make solid use of my life so much as you have, Hadria. What possesses you to-night?"
"I tell you, the moonlight."
"And something else."
"Well, it struck me, as I stood there with my head full of what we
have been discussing, that the conditions of a girl's life of our own
class are pleasant enough, but they are stifling, absolutely
stifling; and not all the Emersons in the world will convince
me to the contrary. Emerson never was a girl!"
There was a laugh.
"No; but he was a great man," said Ernest.
"Then he must have had something of the girl in him!" cried
Hadria.
"I didn't mean that, but perhaps it is true."
"If he had been a girl, he would have known that conditions
do count hideously in one's life. I think that there are
more 'destroyers' to be carried about and pampered in this
department of existence than in any other (material conditions being
equal)."
"Do you mean that a girl would have more difficulty in bringing
her power to maturity and getting it recognized than a man would
have?" asked Fred.
"Yes; the odds are too heavy."
"A second-rate talent perhaps," Ernest admitted, "but
not a really big one."
"I should exactly reverse that statement," said Hadria.
"The greater the power and the finer its quality, the greater the
inharmony between the nature and the conditions; therefore the more
powerful the leverage against it. A small comfortable talent might hold its
own, where a larger one would succumb. That is where I think you make your
big mistake, in forgetting that the greatness of the power may serve to
make the greatness of the obstacles."
"So much the better for me then," said Algitha, with a touch
of satire; "for I have no idea of being beaten." She folded her
arms in a serene attitude of determination.
"Surely it only wants a little force of will to enable you to
occupy your life in the manner you think best," said Ernest.
"That is often impossible for a girl, because prejudice and custom
are against her."
"But she ought to despise prejudice and custom," cried the
brother, nobly.
"So she often would; but then she has to tear through so many
living ties that restrain her freedom."
Algitha drew herself up. "If one is unjustly restrained,"
she said, "it is perfectly right to brave the infliction of the sort
of pain that people feel only because they unfairly object to one's
liberty of action."
"But what a frightful piece of circumstance that is
to encounter," cried Hadria, "to have to buy the mere right to
one's liberty by cutting through prejudices that are twined in with
the very heart-strings of those one loves! Ah! that particular
obstacle has held many a woman helpless and suffering, like some wretched
insect pinned alive to a board throughout a miserable lifetime! What would
Emerson say to these cases? That 'Nature magically suits the man to
his fortunes by making these the fruit of his character'? Pooh! I
think Nature more often makes a man's fortunes a veritable shirt of
Nessus which burns and clings, and finally kills him with
anguish!"
The Tower of the Winds stood desolately, in the midst of a wide-eyed
agricultural country, and was approached only by a sort of farm track that
ran up hill and down dale, in a most erratic course, to the distant main
road.
The country was not mountainous, though it lay in a northern district of
Scotland; it was bleak and solitary, with vast bare fields of grass or
corn; and below in the valley, a river that rushed sweeping over its rough
bed, silent where it ran deep, but chattering busily in the shallows. Here
was verdure to one's heart's content; the whole country being a
singular mixture of bleakness on the heights, and woodland richness in the valleys; bitterly cold in the winter months, when the light deserted the uplands ridiculously early in the afternoon, leaving long mysterious hours that held the great silent stretches of field and hillside in shadow: a circumstance, which had, perhaps, not been without its influence in the forming of Hadria's character. She, more than the others, seemed to have absorbed the spirit of the northern twilights. It was her custom to wander alone over the broad spaces of the hills, watching the sun set behind them, the homeward flight of the birds, the approach of darkness and the rising of the stars. Every instinct that was born in her with her Celtic blood--which lurked still in the family to the confounding of its fortunes--was fostered by the mystery and wildness of her surroundings.
Dawn and sunset had peculiar attractions for her.
Although the Preposterous Society had not separated until unusually late
on the previous night, the President was up and abroad on this exquisite
morning, summoned by some "message of range and of
sweep--" to the flushing stretches of pasture and the windy
hillside.
In spite of the view that Hadria had expounded in her capacity of
lecturer, she had an inner sense that somehow, after all, the will
can perform astonishing feats in Fate's despite. Her
intellect, rather than her heart, had opposed the philosophy of Emerson.
Her sentiment recoiled from admitting the possibility of such tragedy as
her expressed belief implied. This morning, the wonder and the grandeur of
the dawn supplied arguments to faith. If the best in human nature were
always to be hunted down and extinguished, if the efforts to rise in the
scale of being, to bring gifts instead of merely absorbing benefits, were
only by a rare combination of chances to escape the doom of annihilation,
where was one to turn to for hope, or for a motive for effort? How could
one reconcile the marvellous beauty of the universe, the miracles of
colour, form, and, above all, of music, with such a chaotic
moral condition, and such unlovely laws in favour of dulness, cowardice, callousness, cruelty? One aspired to be an upholder and not a destroyer, but if it were a useless pain and a bootless venture--?
Hadria tried to find some proof of the happier philosophy that would
satisfy her intellect, but it refused to be comforted. Yet as she wandered
in the rosy light over the awakening fields, her heart sang within her. The
world was exquisite, life was a rapture!
She could take existence in her hands and form and fashion it at her
will, obviously, easily; her strength yearned for the task.
Yet all the time, the importunate intellect kept insisting that feeling
was deceptive, that health and youth and the freshness of the morning spoke
in her, and not reason or experience. Feeling was left untouched
nevertheless. It was impossible to stifle the voices that prophesied golden
things. Life was all before her she was full of vigour and longing and good
will; the world stretched forth as a fair territory, with magical pathways
leading up to dizzy mountain tops. With visions such as these, the members
of the Preposterous Society had fired their imaginations, and gained
impetus for their various efforts and their various ambitions.
Hadria had been among the most hopeful of the party, and had pointed to
the loftier visions, and the more impersonal aims. Circumstance must give
way, compromise was wrong; we had but a short time in this world, and mere
details and prejudices must not be allowed to interfere with one's
right to live to the utmost of one's scope. But it was easier to state
a law than to obey it; easier to inspire others with faith than to hold
fast to it oneself.
The time for taking matters in one's own hands had scarcely come. A
girl was so helpless, so tied by custom. One could engage, so far, only in
guerilla warfare with the enemy, who lurked everywhere in ambush, ready to
harass the wayfarers with incessant petty attack. But life
must have
something more to offer than this--life with its myriad interests, dramas, mysteries, arts, poetries, delights!
By the river, where it had worn for itself a narrow ravine, with steep
rocky sides or "clints," as they were called, several short
tunnels or passages had been cut in places where the rock projected as far
as the bank of the river, which was followed in its windings by a narrow
footway, leading to the farmstead of Craw Gill.
In one part, a series of such tunnels, with intervals of open pathway,
occurred in picturesque fashion, causing a singular effect of light and
shade.
As Hadria stood admiring the glow of the now fully-risen sun, upon the
wall of rock that rose beyond the opening of the tunnel which she had just
passed through, she heard footsteps advancing along the riverside path, and
guessed that Algitha and Ernest had come to fetch her, or to join in any
absurd project that she might have in view. Although Algitha was
two-and-twenty, and Hadria only a year younger, they were still guilty at
times of wild escapades, with the connivance of their brothers. Walks or
rides at sunrise were ordinary occurrences in the family, and in summer,
bathing in the river was a favourite amusement.
"I thought I recognised your footsteps," said Hadria, as the
two figures appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, the low rays of the sun
lighting them up, for a moment, as they turned the sharp bend of the narrow
path, before entering the shadow.
A quantity of brown dead leaves were strewn upon the floor of the
rock-passage, blown in by the wind from the pathway at each end, or perhaps
through the opening in the middle of the tunnel that looked out upon the
rushing river.
A willow-tree had found footing in the crevice of the rock just outside,
and its branches, thinly decked with pale yellow leaves, dipped into the
water just in front of the opening. When the wind blew off the river it
would sweep the leaves of the willow into the tunnel.
"Let's make a bonfire," suggested Ernest.
They collected the withered harvest of the winds upon the cavern floor,
in a big brown heap, and then Ernest struck a match and set light to it.
Algitha, in a large black cloak, stood over it with a hazel
stick--like a wand--stirring and heaping on the fuel, as the mass
began to smoulder and to send forth a thick white smoke that gradually
filled the cavern, curling up into the rocky roof and swirling round and
out by the square-cut mouth, to be caught there by the slight wind and
illumined by the sun, which poured down upon the soft coils of the smoke,
in so strange a fashion, as to call forth a cry of wonder from the
onlookers. Standing in the interval of open pathway between the two
rock-passages, and looking back at the fire-lit cavern, with its black
shadows and flickering flame-colours, Hadria was bewildered by what
appeared to her a veritable magic vision, beautiful beyond anything that
she had ever met in dream. She stood still to watch, with a real momentary
doubt as to whether she were awake.
The figures, stooping over the burning heap, moved occasionally across
the darkness, looking like a witch and her familiar spirit, who were
conjuring, by uncanny arts, a vision of life, on the strange, white,
clean-cut patch of smoke that was defined by the sunlit entrance to the
tunnel. The witch stirred, and her familiar added fuel, while behind them
the smoke, rising and curdling, formed the mysterious background of light:
opaque, and yet in a state of incessant movement, as of some white raging
fire, thinner and more deadly than any ordinary earthly element, that
seemed to sicken and flicker in the blast of a furnace, and then rushed
upwards, and coiled and rolled across the tunnel's mouth. Presently,
as a puff of wind swept away part of the smoke, a miraculous tinge of rosy
colour appeared, changing, as one caught it, into gold, and presently to a
milky blue, then liquid green, and a thousand intermediate tints
corresponding to the altering density of the smoke--and then! Hadria
caught her breath--the blue and the red and the gold melted and moved
and formed, under the incantation, into a marvellous
vision of distant lands, purple mountains, fair white cities, and wide kingdoms, so many, so great, that the imaginltion staggered at the vastness revealed, and offered, as it seemed, to him who could grasp and perceive it. Among those blue deeps and faint innumerable mountaintops, caught through a soft mist that continually moved and lifted, thinned and thickened, with changing tints, all the secrets, all the hopes, all the powers and splendours, of life lay hidden; and the beauty of the vision was as the essence of poetry and of music--of all that is lovely in the world of art, and in the world of the emotions. The question that had been debated so hotly and so often, as to the relation of the good and the beautiful, art and ethics, seemed to be answered by this bewildering revelation of sunlit smoke, playing across the face of a purple-tinted rock, and a few feet of grass-edged pathway.
"Come and see what visions you have conjured up, O witch!"
cried Hadria.
Algitha gave a startled exclamation, as the smoke thinned and revealed
that bewildering glimpse of distant lands, half seen, as through the
atmosphere of a dream. An exquisite city, with slender towers and temples,
flashed, for a moment, through the mist curtain.
"If life is like that," she said at length, drawing a long
breath, "nothing on this earth ought to persuade us to forgo it; no
one has the right to hold one back from its possession."
"No one," said Hadria; "but everyone will try!"
"Let them try," returned Algitha defiantly.
"I admit," said Ernest in response to some remark of one of
his sisters, "I admit that I should not like to stay here during all
the best years of my life, without prospect of widening my experience; only
as a matter of fact, the world is somewhat different from anything that you
imagine, and by no means would you find it all beer and skittles. Your
smoke and sun-vision is not to be trusted."
"But think of the pride and joy of being able to speak in that
tone of experience!" exclaimed Hadria mockingly.
"One has to pay for experience," said Ernest, shaking his
head and ignoring her taunt.
"I think one has to pay more heavily for
inexperience," she said.
"Not if one never comes in contact with the world. Girls are
protected from the realities of life so long as they remain at home, and
that is worth something after all."
Algitha snorted. "I don't know what you are pleased to call
realities, my dear Ernest, but I can assure you there are plenty of
unpleasant facts, in this protected life of ours."
"Nobody can expect to escape unpleasant facts," said
Ernest.
"Then for heaven's sake, let us purchase with them something
worth having!" Hadria cried.
"Hear, hear!" assented Algitha.
"Unpleasant facts being a foregone conclusion," Hadria
added, "the point to aim at obviously is interesting
facts--and plenty of them."
Ernest flicked a pebble off the parapet of the balustrade of the little
temple, and watched it fall, with a silent splash, into the river.
"I never met girls before, who wanted to come out of their
cotton-wool," he observed. "I thought girls loved cotton-wool.
They always seem to."
"Girls seem an astonishing number of things that they
are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man
might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to
learn the real thoughts and wishes of a girl."
"You two are exceptional, you see," said Ernest.
"Oh, everybody's exceptional, if you only knew
it!" exclaimed his sister. "Girls," she went on to
assert, "are stuffed with certain stereotyped sentiments from their
infancy, and when that painful process is completed, intelligent
philosophers come and smile upon the victims, and point to them as proofs
of the intentions of Nature regarding our sex, admirable examples of the
unvarying instincts of the feminine creature. In fact," Hadria added
with a laugh, "it's as if the trainer of that troop of
performing poodles that we saw, the other day, at Ballochcoil, were to
assure the spectators that the amiable animals were inspired, from birth,
by a heaven-implanted yearning to jump through hoops, and walk about on
their hind legs--"
"But there are such things as natural
instincts," said Ernest.
"There are such things as acquired tricks,"
returned Hadria.
A loud shout, accompanied by the barking of several dogs, announced the
approach of the two younger boys. Boys and dogs had been taking their
morning bath in the river.
"You have broken in upon a most interesting discourse," said
Ernest. "Hadria was really coming out."
This led to a general uproar.
When peace was restored, the conversation went on in desultory fashion.
Ernest and Hadria fell apart into a more serious talk. These two had always
been "chums," from the time when they used to play at building
houses of bricks on the nursery floor. There was deep and true affection
between them.
The day broke into splendour, and the warm rays, rounding the edge of
the eastward rock, poured straight into the little temple. Below and around
on the cliff-sides, the rich foliage of holly and dwarf oak, ivy, and rowan
with its burning berries, was transformed into a mass of warm colour and
shining surfaces.
"What always bewilders me," Hadria said, bending over the
balustrade among the ivy, "is the enormous gulf between what
might be and what is in human life. Look at the
world--life's most sumptuous stage--and look at life! The
one, splendid, exquisite, varied, generous, rich beyond description; the
other, poor, thin, dull, monotonous, niggard, distressful--is that
necessary?"
"But all lives are not like that," objected Fred.
"I speak only from my own narrow experience," said
Hadria.
"Oh, she is thinking, as usual, of that unfortunate Mrs.
Gordon!" cried Earnest.
"Of her, and the rest of the average, typical sort of people that
I know," Hadria admitted. "I wish to heaven I had a wider
knowledge to speak from."
"If one is to believe what one hears and reads," said
Algitha, "a life must be full of sorrow indeed."
"But putting aside the big sorrows," said her sister,
"the
ordinary every day existence that would be called prosperous, seems to me to be dull and stupid to a tragic extent."
"The Gordons of Drumgarran once more! I confess I can't see
anything particularly tragic there," observed Fred, whose memory
recalled troops of stalwart young persons in flannels, engaged for hours,
in sending a ball from one side of a net to the other.
"It is more than tragic; it is disgusting!" cried Hadria
with a shiver. Algitha drew herself together. She turned to her eldest
brother.
"Look here, Ernest; you said just now that girls were shielded
from the realities of life. Yet Mrs. Gordon was handed over by her
protectors, when she was little more than a school-girl, without knowledge,
without any sort of resource or power of facing destiny, to--well, to
the hateful realities of the life that she has led now for over twenty
years. There is nothing to win general sympathy in this case, for Mr.
Gordon is good and kind; but oh, think of the existence that a
'protected,' carefully brought-up girl may be launched into;
before she knows what she is pledged to, or what her ideas of life may be!
If that is what you call protection, for heaven's sake
let us remain defenceless."
Fred and Ernest accused their elder sister of having been converted by
Hadria. Algitha, honest and courageous in big things and in small, at once
acknowledged the source of her ideas. Not so long ago, Algitha had differed
from the daughters of the neighbouring houses, rather in force of character
than in sentiment.
She had followed the usual aims with unusual success, giving unalloyed
satisfaction to her proud mother. Algitha had taken it as a matter of
course that she would some day marry, and have a house of her own to reign
in. A home, not a husband, was the important matter, and Algitha had
trusted to her attractions to make a good marriage; that is, to obtain
extensive regions for her activities. She craved a roomy stage for her
drama, and obviously there was only one method of
obtaining it, and even that method was but dubious. But Hadria had undermined this matter of fact, take-things-as-you-find-them view, and set her sister's pride on the track. That master-passion once aroused in the new direction, Algitha was ready to defend her dignity as a woman, and as a human being, to the death. Hadria felt as a magician might feel, who has conjured up spirits henceforth beyond his control; for obviously, her sister's whole life would be altered by this change of sentiment, and, alas, her mother's hopes must be disappointed. The laird of Clarenoc--a fine property, of which Algitha might have been mistress--had received polite discouragement, much to his surprise and that of the neighbourhood. Even Ernest, who was by no means worldly, questioned the wisdom of his sister's decision; for the laird of Clarenoc was a good fellow, and after all, let them talk as they liked, what was to become of a girl unless she married? This morning's conversation therefore touched closely on burning topics.
"Mrs. Gordon's people meant it for the best, I
suppose," Ernest observed, "when they married her to a good man
with a fine property."
"That is just the ghastly part of it!" cried Hadria;
"from ferocious enemies a girl might defend herself, but what is she
to do against the united efforts of devoted friends?"
"I don't suppose Mrs. Gordon is aware that she is so
ill-used!"
"Another gruesome circumstance!" cried Hadria, with a half
laugh; "for that only proves that her life has dulled her
self-respect, and destroyed her pride."
"But, my dear, every woman is in the same predicament, if
predicament it be!"
"What a consolation!" Hadria exclaimed,
"all the foxes have lost their tails!"
"It may be illogical, but people generally are immensely comforted
by that circumstance."
The conversation waxed warmer and more personal. Fred
took a conservative view of the question. He thought that there were instincts implanted by Nature, which inspired Mrs. Gordon with a yearning for exactly the sort of existence that fate had assigned to her. Algitha, who had been the recipient of that lady's tragic confidences, broke into a shout of laughter.
"Well, Harold Wilkins says--"
This name was also greeted with a yell of derision.
"I don't see why you girls always scoff so at Harold
Wilkins," said Fred, slightly aggrieved, "he is generally
thought a lot of by girls. All Mrs. Gordon's sisters adore
him."
"He needs no further worshippers," said Hadria.
Fred was asked to repeat the words of Harold Wilkins, but to soften them
down if too severe.
"He laughs at your pet ideas," said Fred ruthlessly.
"Break it gently, Fred, gently."
"He thinks that a true woman esteems it her highest privilege
to--well, to be like Mrs. Gordon."
"Wise and learned youth!" cried Hadria, resting her chin on
her hand, and peering up into the blue sky, above the temple.
"Fool!" exclaimed Algitha.
"He says," continued Fred, determined not to spare those who
were so overbearing in their scorn, "he says that girls who have
ideas like yours will never get any fellow to marry them."
Laughter loud and long greeted this announcement.
"Laughter," observed Fred, when he could make himself heard,
"is among the simplest forms of argument. Does this merry outburst
imply that you don't care a button whether you are able to get some
one to marry you or not?"
"It does," said Algitha.
"Well, so I said to Wilkins, as a matter of fact, with my nose in
the air, on your behalf, and Wilkins replied, 'Oh, it's all very
well while girls are young and good-looking to be so
high and mighty, but some day, when they are left out in the cold, and all their friends married, they may sing a different tune.' Feeling there was something in this remark," Fred continued, "I raised my nose two inches higher, and adopted the argument that I also resort to in extremis. I laughed. 'Well, my dear fellow,' Wilkins observed calmly, 'I mean no offence, but what on earth is a girl to do with herself if she doesn't marry?'"
"What did you reply?" asked Ernest with curiosity.
"Oh, I said that was an unimportant detail, and changed the
subject."
Algitha was still scornful, but Hadria looked meditative.
"Harold Wilkins has a practical mind," she observed.
"After all, he is right, when you come to consider it."
"Hadria!" remonstrated her sister, in
dismay.
"We may as well be candid," said Hadria. "There
is uncommonly little that a girl can do (or rather that people
will let her do) unless she marries, and that is why she so often does
marry as a mere matter of business. But I wish Harold Wilkins would
remember that fact, instead of insisting that it is our inherent and
particular nature that urges us, one and all, to the career of Mrs.
Gordon."
Algitha was obviously growing more and more ruffled. Fred tried in vain
to soothe her feelings. He joked, but she refused to see the point. She
would not admit that Harold Wilkins had facts on his side.
"If one simply made up one's mind to walk through all the
hampering circumstances, who or what could stop one?" she asked.
"Algitha has evidently got some desperate plan in her head for
making mincemeat of circumstances," cried Fred, little guessing that
he had stated the exact truth.
"Do you remember that Mrs. Gordon herself waged a losing battle in
early days, incredible as it may appear?" asked Hadria.
Algitha nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on the ground.
"She did not originally set out with the idea of being a sort of
amiable cow. She once aspired to be quite human; she really did, poor
thing!"
"Then why didn't she do it?" asked Algitha
contemptuously.
"Instead of doing a thing, she had to be perpetually
struggling for the chance to do it, which she never achieved, and so she
was submerged. That seems to be the fatality in a woman's
life."
"Well, there is one thing I am very sure of," announced
Algitha, leaning majestically against a column of the temple, and looking
like a beautiful Greek maiden, in her simple gown, "I do not intend
to be a cow. I do not mean to fight a losing battle. I will not wait at
home meekly, till some fool holds out his sceptre to me."
All eyes turned to her, in astonishment.
"But what are you going to do?" asked a chorus of voices.
Hadria's was not among them, for she knew what was coming. The debate
of last night, and this morning's discussion, had evidently brought to
a climax a project that Algitha had long had in her mind, but had hesitated
to carry out, on account of the distress that it would cause to her mother.
Algitha's eyes glittered, and her colour rose.
"I am not going to be hawked about the county till I am disposed
of. It does not console me in the least, that all the foxes
are without tails," she went on, taking short cuts to her meaning, in
her excitement. "I am going to London with Mrs. Trevelyan, to help
her in her work."
"By Jove!" exclaimed Fred. Ernest whistled.
Austin stared, with open mouth.
Having recovered from the first shock of surprise, the family plied
their sister with questions. She said that she had long been thinking of
accepting the post offered her by Mrs. Trevelyan last year, and now she was
resolved. The work was really wise, useful work among the poor, which
Algitha felt she could do well. At home, there was nothing that she did
that the housekeeper could not do better. She felt herself
fretting and growing irritable, for mere want of some active employment. This was utterly absurd, in an overworked world. Hadria had her music and her study, at any rate, but Algitha had nothing that seemed worth doing; she did not care to paint indifferently on china; she was a mere encumbrance--a destroyer as Hadria put it--while there was so much, so very much, that waited to be done. The younger sister made no comment.
"Next time I meet Harold Wilkins," said Fred, drawing a long
breath, "I will tell him that if a girl does not marry, she can
devote herself to the poor."
"Or that she can remain to be the family consolation, eh, Hadria?
By Jove, what a row there will be!"
The notion of Hadria in the capacity of the family consolation, created
a shout of laughter. It had always been her function to upset foregone
conclusions, overturn orthodox views, and generally disturb the conformity
of the family attitude. Now the sedate and established qualities would be
expected of her. Hadria must be the stay and hope of the house!
Fred continued to chuckle, at intervals, over the idea.
"It does seem to indicate rather a broken-down
family!" said Ernest.
"I wish one of you boys would undertake the position instead of
laughing at me," exclaimed Hadria in mock resentment.
"I wish you would go to eternal tennis-parties, and pay
calls, and bills, and write notes, and do little useless necessary things,
more or less all day. I wish you had before you the choice
between that existence and the career of Mrs. Gordon, with the sole chance
of escape from either fate, in ruthlessly trampling upon the bleeding
hearts of two beloved parents!"
"Thank you kindly," said Fred, "but we infinitely
prefer to laugh at you."
"Man's eternal reply to woman, admirably paraphrased!"
commented Hadria.
Everyone was anxious to know when Algitha intended to go to London.
Nobody doubted for a moment that she would hold to her purpose; as Fred
said, she was so "beastly obstinate."
Algitha had not fixed any time. It would depend on her mother. She
wished to make things as little painful as possible. That it was her duty
to spare her pain altogether by remaining at home, Algitha refused to
admit. She and Hadria had thought out the question from all sides. The work
she was going to do was useful, but she did not justify herself on that
ground. She claimed the right to her life and her liberty, apart from what
she intended to do with either. She owed it to her own conscience alone to
make good use of her liberty. "I don't want to pose as a
philanthropist," she added, "though I honestly do desire to be
of service. I want to spread my wings. And why should I not? Nobody turns
pale when Ernest wants to spread his. How do I know what life
is like, or how best to use it, if I remain satisfied with my present
ignorance? How can I even appreciate what I possess, if I have nothing to
compare it with? Of course, the truly nice and womanly thing to do, is to
remain at home, waiting to be married. I have elected to be
unwomanly."
"I wonder how all this will turn out," said Ernest,
"whether you won't regret it some day when it is too
late."
"Don't people always regret what they
do--some day?" asked Hadria.
"Perhaps so, especially if they do it sooner than other
people."
"When are you going to make the announcement at head
quarters?" asked Fred.
There was a pause. The colour had left Algitha's cheeks. She
answered at length with an effort--
"I shall speak to mother to-day."
The owner of the house sat before a big writing-table, which was covered
with papers. His face was that of a hard thinker; the head was fine in
form, the forehead broad and high; the features regular, almost severe. The
severity was softened by a genial expression. Mrs. Fullerton, though also
obviously above the average of humanity, shewed signs of incomplete
development. The shape of the head and brow promised many faculties that
the expression of the face did not encourage one to expect. She was finely
built; and carried herself with dignity. When her daughters accompanied her
on a round of calls in the neighbourhood, they expressed a certain quality
in her appearance, in rough and ready terms: "Other married women
always look such fools beside mother!"
And they did.
Mrs. Fullerton wore her fine black hair brushed neatly over her
forehead; her eyes were large, and keen in expression. The mouth shewed
determination. It was easy to see that this lady had unbounded belief in
her husband's wisdom, except in social matters, for which he cared
nothing. On that point she had to keep her ambitions to herself. In
questions of philosophy, she had imbibed his tenets unmodified, and though
she went regularly every Sunday to the close little Scottish church at
Ballochcoil, she had no more respect than her husband had, for the
doctrines that were preached there.
"No doubt it is all superstition and nonsense," she used to
say, "but in this country, one can't afford to fly in the face
of prejudice. It would seriously tell against the girls."
"Well, have your own way," Mr. Fullerton would reply,
"but I can't see the use of always bothering about what people
will think. What more do the girls want than a good home and plenty of
lawn-tennis? They'll get husbands fast enough, without your
asphyxiating yourself every Sunday in their interests."
In her youth, Mrs. Fullerton had shewn signs of qualities which had
since been submerged. Her husband had influenced her development
profoundly, to the apparent stifling of every native tendency. A few
volumes of poetry, and other works of imagination, bore testimony to the
lost sides of her nature.
Mr. Fullerton thought imagination "all nonsense," and his
wife had no doubt he was right, though there was something to be said for
one or two of the poets. The buried impulses had broken out, like a
half-smothered flame, in her children, especially in her younger daughter.
Singularly enough, the mother regarded these qualities, partly inherited
from herself, as erratic and annoying. The memory of her own youth taught
her no sympathy.
It was a benumbed sort of life that she led, in her picturesque old
home, whose charm she perceived but dimly with the remnants of her lost
aptitudes.
"Picturesque!" Mr. Fullerton used to cry with a snort;
"why not say 'unhealthy' and be done with it?"
From these native elements of character, modified in so singular a
fashion in the mother's life, the children of this pair had drawn
certain of their peculiarities. The inborn strength and authenticity of the
parents had transmuted itself, in the younger generation, to a spirit of
free enquiry, and an audacity of thought which boded ill for Mrs.
Fullerton's ambitions. The talent in her daughters, from which she had
hoped so much, seemed likely to prove a most dangerous obstacle to their
success. Why was it that clever people were never sensible?
The gong sounded for luncheon. Austin put his head in at the door of the
study, to ask if his father would shew him a drop of ditch-water through
the microscope, in the afternoon.
"If you will provide the ditch-water, I will provide the
microscope," promised Mr. Fullerton genially.
Luncheon, usually a merry meal at Dunaghee, passed off silently. There
was a sense of oppression in the air. Algitha and her sister made spasmodic
remarks, and there were long pauses. The conversation was chiefly sustained
by the parents and the ever-talkative Fred.
The latter had some anecdotes to tell of the ravages made by wasps.
"If Buchanan would only adopt my plan of destroying them,"
said Mr. Fullerton, "we should soon get rid of the pest."
"It's some chemical, isn't it?" asked Mrs.
Fullerton.
"Oh, no; that's no use at all! Wasps positively enjoy
chemicals. What you do is this--." And then followed a long and
minute explanation of his plan, which had the merit of extreme
originality.
Mr. Fullerton had his own particular way of doing everything, a piece of
presumption which was naturally resented, with proper spirit, by his
neighbours. He found it an expensive luxury. In the management of the
estate, he had outraged the feelings of every landlord and land-agent
within
a radius of many miles, but he gained the affection of his tenants, and this he seemed to value more than the approval of his fellow-proprietors. In theory, he stuck out for his privileges; in practice, he was the friend and brother of the poorest on the estate. In his mode of farming he was as eccentric as in his method of management. He had taken Croachmore into his own hands, and this devoted farm had become the subject of a series of drastic scientific experiments, to the great grief and indignation of his bailiff.
Mrs. Fullerton believed implicitly in the value of these experiments,
and so long as her husband tried science only on the farm she had no
misgivings; but, alas, he had lately taken shares in some company, that was
to revolutionize agriculture through an ingenious contrivance for
collecting nitrogen from the atmosphere. Mr. Fullerton was confident that
the new method was to be a gigantic success. But on this point, his wife
uneasily shook her head. She had even tried to persuade Mr. Fullerton to
rid himself of his liability. It was so great, she argued, and why should
one be made anxious? But her husband assured her that she didn't
understand anything about it; women ought not to meddle in business
matters; it was a stupendous discovery, sure to make the fortunes of the
original shareholders.
"When once the prejudice against a new thing has been got
over," said the man of science, "you will see--the thing
will go like wild-fire."
Many years afterwards, these words were remembered by Mrs. Fullerton,
and she bitterly regretted that she had not urged the matter more
strenuously.
"Well, Algitha," said her father, wondering at her silence,
"how are the roses getting on? And I hope you have not forgotten the
sweet-brier that you promised to grow for me."
"Oh, no, father, the sweet-brier has been ordered," returned
Algitha, without her usual brightness of manner.
"Have you a headache?" enquired Mrs. Fullerton. "I
hope you have not all been sitting up talking in Hadria's
room, as you are too fond of doing. You have the whole day in which to express your ideas, and I think you might let the remainder wait over till morning."
"We were rather late last night," Algitha
confessed.
"Pressure of ideas overpowering," added Fred.
"When I was young, ideas would never have been
tolerated in young people for a moment," said Mrs. Fullerton,
"it would have been considered a mark of ill-breeding. You may think
yourselves lucky to be born at this end of the century, instead of the
other."
"Indeed we do!" exclaimed Ernest. "It's getting
jolly interesting!
"In some respects, no doubt we have advanced," observed his
mother, "but I confess I don't understand all your modern
notions. Everybody seems to be getting discontented. The poor want to be
rich, and the rich want to be millionaires; men want to do their
master's work, and women want to do men's; everything is
topsy-turvy!"
"The question is: What constitutes being right side up?"
said Ernest. "One can't exactly say what is topsy-turvy till one
knows that."
"When I was young we thought we did know," said
Mrs. Fullerton, "but no doubt we are old-fashioned."
When luncheon was over, Mr. Fullerton went to the garden with his
family, according to a time-honoured custom. His love of flowers sometimes
made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with certain
instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to develop.
Terrible was the tyranny of circumstance! What had Emerson been dreaming
of?
Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his button-hole, went off with the
boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the
sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between two
rows of gorgeous autumn flowers.
Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview.
Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she
was in the right.
"It can't be fair even for parents to order one's whole
life according to their pleasure," she said. "Other girls
submit, I know--"
"And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for
nothing. The average woman always seem to me to be
muffled--or morbid."
"That's what I should become if I pottered about
here much longer," said Algitha--"morbid; and if there is
one thing on the face of the earth that I loathe, it is
morbidness."
Both sisters were instinctively trying to buttress up Algitha's
courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments.
"Is it fair," Hadria asked, "to summon children into
the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why
should one not see the bearings of the matter?"
"In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort
when it comes to practice."
"Oh, seeing the bearings of things is always poor
comfort!" exclaimed the younger sister, with sudden vehemence.
"Upon my word, I think it is better, after all, to absorb
indiscriminately whatever idiotcy may happen to be around one, and go with
the crowd."
"Nonsense!" cried Algitha, who had no sympathy with these
passionate discouragements that alternated, in Hadria, with equally
passionate exaltations.
"When you have gone, I will ask Mrs. Gordon to teach me the spirit
of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games--bésique or
halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for
recalcitrant spirits in need of crushing discipline."
"I think I see you!" Algitha exclaimed with a dispirited
laugh.
"It will be a trial," Hadria admitted; "but it is said
that
suffering strengthens the character. You may look forward before long, to claiming as sister a creature of iron purpose."
"I wonder, I wonder," cried Algitha, bending her fine head;
"we owe everything to her."
"I know we do. It's of no use disguising the unpleasant side
of the matter. A mother disappointed in her children must be a desperately
unhappy woman. She has nothing left; for has she not resigned everything
for them? But is sacrifice for ever to follow on sacrifice? Is life to go
rolling after life, like the cheeses that the idiot in the fable sent
running downhill, the one to fetch the other back?"
"Yes, for ever," said Algitha, "until a few dare to
break through the tradition, and then everyone will wonder at its folly. If
only I could talk the matter over, in a friendly spirit, with mother, but
she won't let me. Ahl! if it were not that one is born with feelings
and energies and ambitions of one's own, parents might treat one as a
showman treats his marionettes, and we should all be charmed to lie prone
on our backs, or to dance as may be convenient to our creators. But, as it
is, the life of a marionette--how ever affectionate the
wire-pullers--does become monotonous after a time."
"As to that," said the younger sister, with a little raising
of the brows, as if half shrinking from what she meant to say, "I
think most parents regard their children with such favourable eyes, not so
much because they are they as because they are
theirs."
The sisters paced the length of the garden without speaking. Then Hadria
came to a standstill at the sun-dial, at the crossing of the paths, and
began absently to trace the figures of the hours, with the stalk of a
rose.
"After all," she said, "parents are presumably not
actuated by humanitarian motives in bringing one into this wild world. They
don't even profess to have felt an unselfish desire to see one
enjoying oneself at their expense (though, as a matter of fact, what
enjoyment one has generally is at their expense). People are
always enthusiastically congratulated on the arrival
of a new child, though it be the fourteenth, and the income two hundred a year! This seems to point to a pronounced taste for new children, regardless of the consequences!"
"Oh, of course," said Algitha, "it's one of the
canons! Women, above all, are expected to jubilate at all costs. And I
think most of them do, more or less sincerely."
"Very well then," cried Hadria, "it is universally
admitted that children are summoned into the world to gratify parental
instincts. Yet the parents throw all the onus of existence, after all, upon
the children, and make them pay for it, and apologise for it,
and justify it by a thousand sacrifices and an ever-flowing
gratitude."
"I am quite ready to give gratitude and sacrifice too," said
Algitha, "but I don't feel that I ought to sacrifice
everything to an idea that seems to me wrong. Surely a human
being has a right to his own life. If he has not that, what, in
heaven's name, has he?"
"Anything but that!" cried Hadria.
While the momentous interview was going on, Hadria walked restlessly up
and down the garden, feverishly waiting. The borders were brilliant with
vast sunflowers, white lilies, and blazing "red-hot pokers"
tangled together in splendid profusion, a very type of richness and glory
of life. Such was the sort of existence that Hadria claimed from Fate. Her
eyes turned to the bare, forlorn hills that even the August sunshine could
not conjure into sumptuousness, and there she saw the threatened
reality.
When at last Algitha's fine figure appeared at the further end of
the path, Hadria hastened forward and took her sister's arm.
"It was worse than I had feared," Algitha said, with a
quiver in her voice. "I know I am right, and yet it
seems almost more than I am equal for. When I told mother, she turned
deadly white, and I thought, for a moment, that she was going to faint.
Let's sit down on this seat."
"Oh, it was horrible, Hadria! Mother must have been cherishing
hopes about us, in a way that I don't think she quite knew herself.
After that first moment of wretchedness, she flew into a passion of
rage--that dreadful, tearing anger that people only feel when
something of themselves is being wrenched away from them. She said that her
children were all bad and unnatural; that she had spent her whole life in
their interests; that if it had not been for her, we should all of us have
grown up without education or accomplishments, or looks, or anything else;
that she watched over us incessantly when we were little children, denying
herself, spending her youth in devotion to us, when she might have gone
into the world, and had some brightness and pleasure. If we imagined that
she had never felt the dulness of her life, and never longed to go about
and see people and things, we were much mistaken. But she had renounced
everything she cared for, from her girlhood--she was scarcely older
than I when her sacrifices began--and now her children gave no
consideration to her; they were ready to scatter themselves hither and
thither without a thought of her, or her wishes. They even talked
scoffingly of the kind of life that she had led for
them--for them, she repeated
bitterly."
Hadria's face had clouded.
"Truly parents must have a bad time of it!" she exclaimed,
"but does it really console them that their children should have a
bad time of it too?"
Algitha was trembling and very pale.
"Mother says I shall ruin my life by this fad. What real good am I
going to do? She says it is absurd the way we talk of things we know
nothing about."
"But she won't let us know about things; one must talk about
something!" cried Hadria with a dispirited laugh.
"She says she has experience of life, and we are ignorant of it. I
reminded her that our ignorance was not exactly our fault."
"Ah! precisely. Parents thrown their children's ignorance
in their teeth, having taken precious good care to prevent their knowing anything. I can't understand parents; they must have been young themselves once. Yet they seem to have forgotten all about it. They keep us hoodwinked and infantile, and then launch us headlong into life, with all its problems to meet, and all momentous decisions made for us, past hope of undoing." Hadria rose restlessly in her excitement. "Surely no creature was ever dealt with so insanely as the well-brought-up girl! Surely no well-wisher so sincere as the average parent ever ill-treated his charge so preposterously."
Again there was a long silence, filled with painful thought. "One
begins to understand a little, why women do things that one despises, and
why the proudest of them so often submit to absolute indignity. You
remember when Mrs. Arbuthnot and--"
"Ah, don't!" cried Algitha, flushing.
"Nothing ought to induce a woman to endure
that."
"H'm--I suspect the world that we know nothing about,
Algitha, has ways and means of applying the pressure such as you and I
scarcely dream of." Hadria spoke with half-closed eyes that seemed to
see deep and far. "I have read and heard things that have almost
taken my breath away! I feel as if I could kill every man who
acquiesces in the present order of things. It is an insult to every woman
alive!"
In Hadria's room that night, Algitha finally decided to delay her
going for another six months, hoping by that time that her mother would
have grown used to the idea, and less opposed to it. Mr. Fullerton
dismissed it, as obviously absurd. But this high-handed treatment roused
all the determination that Algitha had inherited from her father. The six
months had to be extended, in order to procure funds. Algitha had a small
income of her own, left her by her godmother, Miss Fortescue. She put aside
this, for her purpose. Further delay, through Mrs. Trevelyan, brought the
season round again to autumn, before Algitha was able to make her final
preparations for departure.
"Do try and reconcile them to the idea," she said to her
sister, as they stood on the platform of Ballochcoil station, very white
and wretched-looking.
"It breaks my heart to see father look so fixed and angry, and
mother so miserable. I am not going away for ever. Dear me, a day's
journey will bring me back, at any time."
"I'll do my best," said Hadria, "here's your
train; what a clumsy instrument of fate it does look!"
There was not much time for farewells. In a few minutes the train was
steaming out of the station. A solitary figure stood on the platform,
watching the monster curving and diminishing along the line, with its white
smoke soaring merrily into the air, in great rolling masses, that melted,
as if by some incantation, from thick, snow-like whiteness to rapid
annihilation.
At the last meeting of the Preposterous Society, Ernest had repeated a
poem of his favourite Emerson, called Days, and the poem,
which was familiar to Hadria, sounded in her memory, as the pony trotted
merrily along the well-known homeward way.
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb, like
barefoot Dervishes,
And marching single in an endless
file,
Bring diadems and faggots in their hands.
To each they
offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that
holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the
pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and
apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too
late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."
In spite of Hadria's memorable lecture of a year ago, it was still
the orthodox creed of the Society, that Circumstance is the handmaid of the
Will; that one can demand of one's days "bread, kingdoms, stars,
or sky," and that the Days will obediently produce the objects
desired. If one has but the spirit that can soar high enough to really be
resolved upon stars, or the ambition sufficiently vaulting to be determined
on
kingdoms, then--so ran the dogma--stars and kingdoms would be forthcoming, though obstacles were never so determined. No member except Hadria had ever dreamt of insinuating that one might have a very pronounced taste for stars and kingdoms--nay, a taste so dominant that life would be worthless unless they were achieved--yet might be forced, by the might of events, to forego them. Hadria's own heresy had been of the head rather than of the heart. But to-day, feeling began to share the scepticism of the intellect.
What if one's stars and kingdoms lay on the further side of a crime
or a cruelty?
What then was left but to gather up one's herbs and apples, and
bear, as best one might, the scorn of the unjust Days?
Hadria cast about in her mind for a method of utilizing to the best
advantage possible, the means at her disposal: to force circumstance to
yield a harvest to her will. To be the family consolation meant no light
task, for Mrs. Fullerton was exacting by nature: she had given much, and
she expected much in return. Her logic was somewhat faulty, but that could
not be gracefully pointed out to her by her daughter. Having allowed her
own abilities to decay, Mrs. Fullerton had developed an extraordinary power
of interfering with the employment of the abilities of others. Hadria had
rather underrated than exaggerated this difficulty. Her mother would keep
her for hours, discussing a trivial point of domestic business, giving
elaborate directions about it, only to do it herself in the end. She spent
her whole life in trifles of this kind, or over social matters. Everything
was done cumbrously, with an incredible amount of toil and consideration,
and without any noticeable results. Hadria, fighting against a multitude of
harassing little difficulties, struggled to turn the long winter months to
some use. But Mrs. Fullerton broke the good serviceable time into jagged
fragments.
"I really can't see," said the mother, when the
daughter proposed to set apart certain hours for household duties, and to
have other portions of the day to herself, "I really
can't see why a girl's little occupations should be treated with so much consideration. However, I have no wish for grudging assistance."
Hadria's temper was far indeed from perfect, and painful scenes
often occurred. But as a rule, she would afterwards be seized with a fit of
remorse, knowing that her mother was suffering bitterly from her keen
disappointment about Algitha. The failure of a life-long hope must try the
endurance of the bravest. Mrs. Fullerton, seeing that Hadria was more
patient, quickly took advantage of the favourable moment, with a rapid
instinct that had often done her good service in the management of a
niggard destiny. The valuable mood must not be allowed to die fruitless.
The elder girl's defection thus became, to the mother, a sort of
investment, bearing interest of docility in the younger. Because the
heartless Algitha had left home, it seemed to Mrs. Fullerton that the very
least that Hadria could do, was to carry out her mother's lightest
wish.
And so the weeks went by, in dreary, troublous fashion, cut into a
hundred little barren segments. The mind had no space, or stretch, or
solitude. It was incessantly harassed, and its impetus was perpetually
checked. But Hadria hoped on. This could not last for ever. Some day,
doubtless, if she sank not in spirit, the stars and the kingdoms would
come.
Meanwhile, the position of affairs was decidedly ridiculous. She was
here as the family consolation, and nobody seemed to be consoled! Her
efforts had been sincere and even enthusiastic, but the boys only laughed
at her, in this rôle, and nobody was apparently in the least
gratified (except those imps of boys!).
For a long time, Mrs. Fullerton seemed to be oblivious of her
daughter's efforts, but one day, when they had been talking about
Algitha, the mother said: "Your father and I now look to you, Hadria.
I do think that you are beginning to feel a little what your duty is. If
you also were to turn deserter in our old age, I think it
would kill us."
Hadria felt a thrill of horror. The network of Fate seemed to be fast
closing round her. The temporary was to become fixed. She must act all her
days according to the conviction of others, or her parents would die of
grief!
When she went to the hills that afternoon, she felt as if she must walk
on and on into the dreamy distance, away from all these toils and claims,
away into the unknown world and never return. But, alas! the night
descended and return she must. These wild impulses could never be
followed.
The day had been peculiarly harassing and cut up; some neighbours had
been to afternoon tea and tennis, and the sight of their faces and the
sound of their talk had caused, in Hadria, an unutterable depression. The
light, conventional phrases rang in her ears still, the expression of the
faces haunted her, and into her heart crept a chill that benumbed every
wish and hope and faith that she had ever cherished.
She sat up late into the night. Since freedom and solitude could not be
had by day, the nights were often her sole opportunity. At such times she
would work out her musical ideas, which in the dead silence of the house
were brought forth plentifully. These, from her point of view, were the
fruitful hours of the twenty-four. Thoughts would throng the darkness like
swarms of living things.
Hadria's mood found expression to-night in a singular and most
melancholy composition. She called it Futility.
It was unlike anything that she had ever done before, and she felt that
it shewed an access of musical power.
She dreamt an absurd dream: That she was herself one of those girls with
the high pattering accents, playing tennis without ceasing and with
apparent cheerfulness; talking just as they had talked, and about just the
same things; and all the time, a vast circle of shadowy forms stood
watching, beckoning, and exhorting and warning, and turning away, at last,
in sorrowful contempt, because she preferred to spend her youth eternally
in futilities. And then they all slowly drifted by with sad eyes fixed on
her, and she was still left playing,
playing. And it seemed as if whole weeks passed in that way, and she grew mortally tired, but some power prevented her from resting. The evil spell held her enthralled. Always cheerful, always polite and agreeable, she continued her task, finding herself growing accustomed to it at last, and duly resigned to the necessity, wearisome though it was. Then all hope that the game would ever cease went away, and she played on, mechanically, but always with that same polite cheerfulness, as of afternoon calls. She would not for the world admit that she was tired. But she was so tired that existence became a torture to her, and her heart seemed about to break with the intolerable strain--when she woke up with a start, and found herself lying in a constrained attitude, half-choked by the bed-clothes.
She did not see the comic side of the dream till next morning, when she
told it at breakfast for the benefit of the family.
As Hadria was an ardent tennis-player, it struck her brethren as a
particularly inappropriate form of nightmare.
Hadria, at this time, went frequently with her father on his farming
walks, as he liked to have one or more of the family with him. She enjoyed
these walks, for Mr. Fullerton would talk about philosophy and science,
often of the most abstruse and entrancing kind. His children were devoted
to him. During these expeditions, they always vied with one another to
ferret out the most absurd story to tell him, he being held as conqueror
who made their father laugh most heartily. Sometimes they all went in a
body, armed with wild stories; and occasionally, across the open fields, a
row of eccentric-looking figures might be seen, struggling in the grip of
hilarious paroxysms; Mr. Fullerton doubled up in the middle of a
turnip-field, perhaps, with his family in contortions round him. The air of
the hills seemed to run to their heads, like wine. Roulades of laughter,
hearty guffaws, might have been heard for surprising distances, much to the
astonishment of the sober labourers bending over their toil.
Ernest had to go back to college; Fred and Austin to school. The house
seemed very quiet and sad after the boys left, and Hadria missed her sister
more and more, as time went on.
Algitha wrote most happily.
"With all its drawbacks, this existence of hard work (yet not too
hard) suits me exactly. It uses up my energies; yet, in spite of the really
busy life I lead, I literally have more leisure than I used to have at
home, where all through the day, there was some little detail to be
attended to, some call to make, some convention to offer incense to, some
prejudice to respect. Here, once my day's work is over, it
is over, and I have good solid hours of leisure. I feel that I
have earned those hours when they come; also that I have earned a right to
my keep, as Wilfred Burton, the socialist, puts it somewhat crudely. When I
go to bed at night, I can say: 'Because of me, this day, heavy hearts
have been made a little lighter.' I hear all sorts of opinions, and
see all sorts of people. I never was so happy in my life."
It was Hadria's habit still to take solitary rambles over the
country. A passionate lover of Nature, she found endless pleasure in its
ever-changing aspects. Yet of late, a new feeling had begun to mutter
angrily within her: a resentment against these familiar sights and sounds,
because they were the boundaries of her horizon. She hated the line of the
round breezy hills where the row of fir-trees stood against the sky,
because that was the edge of her world, and she wanted to see what was
beyond. She must and would see what was beyond, some day. Her hope was
always vague; for if she dared to wonder how the curtain of life was to be
lifted, she had to face the fact that there was no reasonable prospect of
such a lifting. Still, the utter horror of living on always, in this
fashion, seemed to prove it impossible.
On one dim afternoon, when the sun was descending, Hadria's
solitary figure was noticed by a white-haired lady, presumably a tourist,
who had stopped to ask a question of some farm labourers, working in a
field. She ceased
to listen to the information, on the subject of Dunaghee, that was given to her in a broad Scottish dialect. The whole scene, which an instant before had impressed her as one of beauty and peace, suddenly focussed itself round the dark figure, and grew sinister in its aspect. At that moment, nothing would have persuaded the onlooker that the hastening figure was not hastening towards misfortune.
A woman of impulse, she set off in purposeless pursuit. Hadria's
pace was very rapid; she was trying to outrun thought. It was impossible to
live without hope, yet hope, in this forlorn land, was growing faint and
tired.
Her pursuer was a remarkable-looking woman, no longer young, with her
prematurely white hair drawn up from her brow with a proud sweep that
suited well her sharply defined features and her air of defiance. She was
carelessly dressed after the prevailing fashion, and gave the impression of
not having her life successfully in hand, but rather of being driven by it,
as by a blustering wind, against her inclination.
The impression which had seized her, a moment ago, deepened as she went.
Something in the scene and the hastening figure roused a sense of dread.
With her, an impression was like a spark to gunpowder. Her imagination
blazed up. Life, in its most tragic aspect, seemed before her in the lonely
scene, with the lonely figure, moving, as if in pursuit of a lost hope,
towards the setting sun.
If Hadria had not paused on the brow of the hill, it is unlikely that
she would have been overtaken, but that pause decided the matter. The
stranger seemed suddenly to hesitate, wondering, apparently, what she had
done this eccentric thing for.
Hadria, feeling a presence behind her, turned nervously round and gave a
slight start.
It was so rare to meet anybody on these lonely hills, that the
apparition of a striking-looking woman with white hair, dark eyes, and a
strange exalted sort of expression, gave a shock of surprise.
As the lady had stopped short, Hadria supposed that she had lost her
way, and wished to make some enquiries.
"Can I direct you, or give you any assistance?" she asked,
after a second's pause.
"Oh, thank you, you are very kind. I have come over from
Ballochcoil to explore the country. I have been trying to find out the
history of the old houses of the district. Could you tell me, by the way,
anything about that house with the square tower at the end; I have been
loitering round it half the afternoon. And I would have given anything to
know its history, and what it is like inside."
"Well, I can help you there, for that old house is my home. If you
have time to come with me now, I will show you all over it," said
Hadria, impulsively.
"That is too tempting an offer. And yet I really don't like
to intrude in this way. I am a perfect stranger to you and--your
parents I suppose?"
"They will be delighted," Hadria assured her new
acquaintance, somewhat imprudently.
"Well, I can't resist the temptation," said the latter,
and they walked on together.
Hadria related what she knew about the history of the house. Very scanty
records had survived. It had obviously been one of the old Scottish
strongholds, built in the lawless days when the country was plunged in
feuds and chieftains lived on plunder. A few traditions lingered about it:
among them that of a chief who had carried off, by force, the daughter of
his bitterest enemy, in revenge for some deed of treachery. He had tortured
her with insolent courtship, and then starved her to death in a garret in
the tower, while her father and his followers assaulted its thick walls in
vain.
"The tradition is, that on stormy nights one can still hear the
sound of the attack, the shouts of the men and the father's
imprecations."
"A horrible story!"
"When people say the world has not progressed, I always think of
that story, and remember that such crimes were common in those days,"
Hadria remarked.
"I doubt if we are really less ferocious to-day," the other
said; "our ferocity is directed against the weakest, now as then, but
there are happily not so many weak, so we get the credit of being juster,
without expense. As a matter of fact, our opportunities are less, and so we
make a virtue of necessity--with a vengeance!"
Hadria looked at her companion with startled interest. "Will you
tell me to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?" the lady asked.
"My name is Fullerton--Hadria Fullerton."
"Thank you. And here is my card, at least I think it is. Oh, no,
that is a friend's card! How very tiresome! I am reduced to
pronouncing my own name--Miss Du Prel, Valeria Du Prel; you may know
it."
Hadria came to a sudden standstill. She might know it! she might indeed.
Valeria Du Prel had long been to her a name to swear by.
"Miss Du Prel! Is that--are you--may I ask, are you the
writer of those wonderful books?"
Miss Du Prel gave a gratified smile. "I am glad they please
you."
"Ah! if you could guess how I have longed to know you. I simply
can't believe it."
"And so my work has really given you pleasure?"
"Pleasure! It has given me hope, it has given me courage, it has
given me faith in all that is worth living for. It was an epoch in my life
when I first read your Parthena."
Miss Du Prel seemed so genuinely pleased by this enthusiasm that Hadria
was surprised.
"I have plenty of compliments, but very seldom a word that makes
me feel that I have spoken to the heart. I feel as if I had called in the
darkness and had no response, or like one who has cried from the house-tops
to a city of the dead."
"And I so often thought of writing to you, but did not like to
intrude," cried Hadria.
"Ah! if you only had written to me!" Miss Du
Prel exclaimed.
Hadria gazed incredulously at the familiar scene, as they approached the
back of the house, with its round tower and its confusion of picturesque,
lichen-covered roofs. An irregular circle of stately trees stood as
sentinels round the stronghold.
After all, something did happen, once in a while, in this remote corner
of the universe, whose name, Hadria used to think, had been erased from the
book of Destiny. She was perhaps vaguely disappointed to find that the
author of Parthena wore ordinary human serge, and a cape cut
after the fashion of any other person's cape. Still, she had no idea
what supersensuous material she could reasonably have demanded of her
heroine (unless it were the mythic "bombazine" that Ernest used
to talk about, in his ignorant efforts to describe female apparel), or what
transcendental form of cape would have satisfied her imagination.
"You have a lovely home," said Valeria Du Prel, "you
must be very happy here."
"Would you be happy here?"
"Well, of course that would depend. I am, I fear, too roving by
nature to care to stay long in one place. Still I envy girls their
home-life in the country; it is so healthy and free."
Hadria, without answering, led her companion round the flank of the
tower, and up to the front door. It was situated in the angle of the wings,
a sheltered nook, hospitably careful of the guest, whom the winds of the
uplands were disposed to treat but roughly.
Hadria and her companion entered a little panelled hall, whence a flight
of broad stairs with stout wooden balusters, of quaint design, led to the
first floor.
The visitor was charmed with the quiet old rooms, especially with
Hadria's bedroom in the tower, whose windows were so deep-set that
they had to be approached through a little tunnel cut out of the thickness
of the wall. The windows
looked on to the orchard at the back, and in front over the hills. Miss Du Prel was taken to see the scene of the tragedy, and the meeting-room of the Preposterous Society.
"You must see the drawing-room," said Hadria.
She opened a door as she spoke, and ushered her visitor into a large,
finely-proportioned room with three tall windows of stately form, divided
into oblong panes, against which vagrant sprays of ivy were gently
tapping.
This room was also panelled with painted wood; its character was quiet
and stately and reposeful. Yet one felt that many human lives had been
lived in it. It was full of the sentiment of the past, from the old prints
and portraits on the walls, to the delicate outlines of the wooden
mantel-piece, with its finely wrought urns and garlands.
Before this mantel-piece, with the firelight flickering in her face, sat
Mrs. Fullerton, working at a large piece of embroidery.
For the first time, Hadria hesitated. "Mother," she said,
"this is Miss Du Prel. We met out on the hills this afternoon, and I
have brought her home to see the house, which she admires very
much."
Mrs. Fullerton had looked up in astonishment, at this incursion into her
very sanctuary, of a stranger met at haphazard on the hills. Hadria wheeled
up an easy-chair for the visitor.
"I fear Miss Du Prel will not find much to see in the old
house," said Mrs. Fullerton, whose manner had grown rigid, partly
because she was shy, partly because she was annoyed with Hadria for her
impulsive conduct, and largely because she disliked the idea of a literary
acquaintance for her daughter, who was quite extraordinary enough as it
was.
"We have been all over the house," said Hadria hastily, with
an anxious glance at Miss Du Prel, whom she half expected to rise and walk
out of the room. It must surely be the first time in her life that her
presence had not been received as an honour!"
"It is all very old and shabby," said Mrs. Fullerton.
"I
hope you will take some tea; if you have walked far to-day, you must be cold and in need of something to eat."
"Oh no, no, thank you," returned the visitor; "I ought
to be getting back to Ballochcoil to-night."
"To Ballochcoil!" exclaimed mother and daughter in
simultaneous dismay. "But it is nearly seven miles off, and the sun
is down. You can't get back to-night on foot."
"Dear me, can I not? I suppose I forgot all about getting back, in
the interest of the scenery."
"What an extraordinary person!" thought Mrs. Fullerton.
Miss Du Prel glanced helplessly at Hadria; rising then and looking out
of the window at the dusk, which had come on so rapidly. "Dear me,
how dark it has grown! Still I think I can walk it, or perhaps I can get a
fly at some inn on the way."
"Can we offer you a carriage?" asked Mrs. Fullerton.
"Oh no, thank you; that is quite unnecessary. I have already
intruded far too long; I shall wend my way back, or what might perhaps be
better, I could get a lodging at the farmhouse down the road. I am told
that they put travellers up sometimes."
Miss Du Prel hurried off, evidently chilled by Mrs. Fullerton's
freezing courtesy. Hadria, disregarding her mother's glance of
admonition, accompanied the visitor to the farm of Craw Gill, having first
given directions to old Maggie to put together a few things that Miss Du
Prel would require for the night. Hadria's popularity at the farm,
secured her new friend a welcome. Mrs. McEwen was a fine example of the
best type of Scottish character; warm of heart, honest of purpose, and full
of a certain unconscious poetry, and a dignity that lingers still in
districts where the railway whistle is not too often heard. Miss Du Prel
seemed to nestle up to the good woman, as a child to its mother after some
scaring adventure. Mrs. McEwen was recommending a hot water-bottle and
gruel in case of a chill, when Hadria wended her way homeward to brave her
mother's wrath.
"Valeria Du Prel has been heard of throughout the English-speaking
world," said Hadria rhetorically.
"So much the worse," retorted Mrs. Fullerton. "No
nicely brought up woman is ever heard of outside her own circle."
Hadria recalled a similar sentiment among the ancient Greeks, and
thought how hard an old idea dies.
"She might have been some awful person, some unprincipled
adventuress, and that I believe is what she is. What was she prowling about
the back of our house for, I should like to know?"
"I suspect she wanted to steal chickens or something,"
Hadria was goaded into suggesting, and the interview ended painfully.
When Hadria went to Craw Gill, next morning, to enquire for Miss Du
Prel, Mrs. McEwen said that the visitor had breakfasted in bed. The
farmer's wife also informed Miss Fullerton that the lady had decided
to stay on at Craw Gill, for some time. She had been looking out for a
retreat of the kind.
"She seems a nice-like body," said Mrs. McEwen, "and I
see no objection to the arrangement."
Hadria's heart beat faster. Could it be possible that Valeria Du
Prel was to be a near neighbour? It seemed too good to be true!
When Miss Du Prel came down in her walking garments,
she greeted Hadria with a certain absence of mind, which smote chill upon the girl's eagerness.
"I wanted to know if you were comfortable, if I could do anything
for you." Miss Du Prel woke up.
"Oh no, thank you; you are very kind. I am most
comfortable--at least--it is very strange, but I have lost my
keys and my umbrella and my hand-bag-I can't think what I can have
done with them. Oh, and my purse is gone too"
Thereupon Mrs. McEwen in dismay, Mr. McEwen (who then appeared), the
maid, and Hadria, hunted high and low for the missing properties, which
were brought to light, one by one, in places where their owner had already
thoroughly searched," and about which she had long since abandoned
hope.
She received them with mingled joy and amazement, and having responded
to Mrs. McEwen's questions as to what she would like for dinner, she
proposed to Hadria that they should take a walk together.
Hadria beamed. Miss Du Prel seemed both amused and gratified by her
companion's worship, and the talk ran on, in a light and pleasant
vein, differing from the talk of the ordinary mortal, Hadria considered, as
champagne differs from ditch-water.
In recording it for Algitha's benefit that evening, Hadria found
that she could not reproduce the exhilarating quality, or describe the
influence of Miss Du Prel's personality. It was as if, literally, a
private and particular atmosphere had encompassed her. She was "alive
all round," as her disciple asserted. Her love of Nature was intense.
Hadria had never before realized that she had been without full sympathy in
this direction. She awoke to a strange retrospective sense of solitude,
feeling a new pity for the eager little child of years ago, who had
wandered up to the garret, late at night, to watch the moonlight spread its
white shroud over the hills.
With every moment spent in the society of Valeria Du Prel, new and
clearer light seemed to Hadria, to be thrown upon all the problems of
existence; not by any means only through
what Miss Du Prel directly said, but by what she implied, by what she took for granted, by what she omitted to say.
"It seems like a home-coming from long exile," Hadria wrote
to her sister. "I have been looking through a sort of mist, or as one
looks at one's surroundings before quite waking. Now everything stands
out sharp and cut, as objects do in the clear air of the South. Ah me, the
South! Miss Du Prel has spent much of her life there, and my inborn
smouldering passion for it, is set flaming by her descriptions! You
remember that brief little fortnight that we spent with mother and father
in Italy? I seem now to be again under the spell of the languorous airs,
the cloudless blue, the white palaces, the grey olive groves, and the art,
the art! Oh, Algitha, I must go to the South soon, soon, or I shall die of
home sickness! Miss Du Prel says that this is only one side of me breaking
out: that I am northern at heart. I think it is true, but meanwhile the
thought of the South possesses me. I confess I think mother had some cause
to be alarmed when she saw Miss Du Prel, if she wants to keep us in a
chastened mood, at home. It seems as if all of me were in high carnival.
Life is raised to a higher power. I feel nearly omnipotent. Epics and
operas are child's play to me! It is true I have produced
comparatively few; but, oh, those that are to come! I feel fit for
anything, from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. I think of the two, I rather
lean to the manslaughter. Oh, I don't mean it in the facetious sense!
that would be a terrible downfall from my present altitudes. To such
devices the usual wretched girl, who has never drawn rebellious breath, or
listened to the discourses of Valeria Du Prel, has to turn for a living, or
to keep
ennui at bay. But I, no, the
inimical sex may possess their souls in peace, as far as I am concerned.
They might retort that they never had felt nervous, but a
letter has the same advantage as the pulpit: the adversary can never get up
and contradict.
"That ridiculous adversary, Harold Wilkins, is staying again at
Drumgarren, and I hear from Mrs. Gordon that he thinks
it very strange that I should see so much of so extraordinary a person as Miss Du Prel! Opinions differ of course; I think it very strange that the Gordons should see so much of so ordinary a person as Mr. Wilkins. Everybody makes much of him here, and, alas! all the girls run after him, and even fall in love with him; why, I can't conceive. For if driven by dire compulsion of fate, to bend one's thoughts upon some prosaic example of that prosaic sex, why not choose one of the many far more attractive candidates available--the Gordons, the McKenzies, and so forth? When I go to tennis parties with mother--they are still playing upon the asphalte courts--and see the little dramas that go on, the jealousies and excitements, and general much-ado-about-nothing, I can scarcely believe that Miss Du Prel really belongs to the same planet as ours. But I don't feel so contemptuous as I did; it is so pitiful. Out of my great wealth I can afford to be more generous.
"And when I see those wretched girls fluttering round Mr. Wilkins,
I no longer turn up my 'aughty nose' (as old Mrs. Brooks used
to say). I only think to myself, 'Heavens and earth! what an aching,
empty life those young women must lead, if they are actually reduced for
interest and amusement to the utterances of Mr. Wilkins!' They would
have the pull of one though, if the utterances of Mr. Wilkins were the only
utterances to be heard! Perish the thought of such beggary!"
The talks with Valeria Du Prel grew more intimate, and more deeply
interesting to Hadria, every day.
Miss Du Prel used often to look at her companion in amazement.
"Where did you come from?" she exclaimed on one
occasion. "One would suppose you had lived several lives; you seem to
know things in such a subtle, intimate fashion!"
She used to ponder over the problem, wondering what Professor Fortescue
would say to it. There appeared to be more here than mere heredity could
account for. But science had never solved this problem; originality seemed
always to enter upon its career, uncaused and unaccountable. It was ever a
miraculous phenomenon. The Professor had always said
so. Still the heritage was rich enough, in this case. Heredity might have some discoverable part in the apparent marvel. Each member of the Fullerton family had unusual ability of some kind. Their knowledge of science, and their familiarity with the problems of philosophy, had often astonished Miss Du Prel. Hadria's accounts of the Preposterous Society made her laugh and exclaim at the same moment. She gave an envious sigh at the picture of the eager little group, with their warmth of affection for one another, and their vivid interests. Miss Du Prel, with all her sadness, was youthful in spirit. Hadria found her far younger than many girls of her own age. This set her thinking. She observed how rigid most people become in a few years, and how the personality grows wooden, in the daily repetition of the same actions and the same ideas. This stiffening process had been attributed to the malice of Time; but now Hadria began to believe that narrow and ungenerous thought lay at the root of the calamity. The entire life of the little world in which she had grown up, on all its sides, in all its ideals and sentiments, stood before her, as if some great painter had made a picture of it. She had never before been able to stand so completely apart from the surroundings of her childhood. And she was able to do so now, not because Miss Du Prel discoursed about it, but because Hadria's point of view had shifted sympathetically to the point of view of her companion, through the instinctive desire to see how these familiar things would look to alien eyes. That which had seemed merely prosaic and dreary, became characteristic; the very things which she had taken most for granted were exactly those which turned out to be the significant and idiomatic facts.
These had made permanent inroads into the mind and character. It was
with these that Hadria would have to reckon all her days, under whatever
conditions she might hereafter be placed. Daily surroundings were not
merely pleasant or unpleasant facts, otherwise of no importance; they were
the very material and substance of character; the push and impetus, or the
let and hindrance; the guardians or the assassins of the soul.
Hadria was in high spirits, as they trundled along the white roads with
the wind in their faces, the hills and the blue sky spread out before them,
the pleasant sound of the wheels and the trotting of the pony setting their
thoughts to rhythm.
The trees were all shedding their last yellow leaves, and the air was
full of those faded memories of better days, whirling in wild companies
across the road, rushing upward on the breast of some vagabond gust,
drifting, spinning, shuddering along the roadside, to lie there at last,
quiet, among a host of brothers, with little passing tremors, as if (said
Valeria) they were silently sobbing because of their banishment from their
kingdom of the air.
Miss Du Prel, though she enjoyed the beauty of the day and the scenery,
seemed sad of mood. "This weather recalls so many autumns," she
said. "It reminds me too vividly of wonderful days, whose like I
shall never see again, and friends, many of whom are dead, and many lost
sight of in this inexorable coming and going of people and things, this
inexorable change that goes on for ever. I feel as if I should go mad at
times, because it will not stop, either in myself or others."
"Ah, that is a dreadful thought!"
"It comes to me so insistently, perhaps, because of my roving
life," she said.
She paused for a moment, and then she fell into one of her
exalted moods, when she seemed to lose consciousness of the ordinary conditions around her, or rather to pierce deeper into their significance and beauty. Her speech would, at such times, become rhythmic and picturesque; she evidently saw vivid images before her, in which her ideas embodied themselves.
"Most people who live always in one place see the changes creeping
on so gradually that they scarcely feel them, but with me this universal
flux displays itself pitilessly, I cannot escape. Go where I will, there is
something to measure the changes by. A shoal of yellow leaves whispers to
me of seasons long ago, and the old past days, with their own intimate
character that nothing ever repeats, flash before me again with the
vividness of yesterday; and a flight of birds--ah! if I could express
what they recall! The dead years pass again in a great procession, a motley
company--some like emperors, crowned and richly dowered, with the
sound of trumpets and the tramping of many obsequious feet; and others like
beggars, despoiled and hungry, trudging along a dusty high road, or like
grey pilgrims bound, with bleeding feet, for a far-off shrine."
They entered a little beech-wood, whose leaves made a light of their
own, strange and mystical.
"Yours must have been a wonderful life!" said Hadria.
"Yes, I have seen and felt many things," answered Miss Du
Prel, stirred by the intoxication of the motion and the wind and the
sunlight, "life has been to me a series of intense emotions, as it
will be to you, I fear--"
"You fear?" said Hadria.
"Yes; for that means suffering. If you feel, you are at the mercy
of all things. Every wind that blows uses you as an Æolian
harp."
"That must be charming, at least for those who live in your
neighbourhood," said Hadria.
"No; for often the harp rings false. Its strings get loosened; one
hangs slack and jars, and where then is your harmony?"
"One would run the risk of many things rather than let one's
strings lie dumb," said Hadria.
"What a dangerous temperament you have!" cried Valeria,
looking round at the glowing face beside her.
"I must take my risks," said Hadria.
"I doubt if you know what risks there are."
"Then I must find out," she answered.
"One plays with fire so recklessly before one has been
burnt."
Hadria was silent. The words sounded ominous.
"Will can do so much," she said at length. "Do you
believe in the power of the human will to break the back of
circumstance?"
"Oh, yes; but the effort expended in breaking its back sometimes
leaves one prone, with a victory that arrives ironically too late. However
I don't wish to discourage you. There is no doubt that human will has
triumphed over everything--but death."
Again the sound of the pony's hoofs sounded through the silence, in
a cheerful trot upon the white roads. They were traversing an open, breezy
country, chequered with wooded hollows, where generally a village sought
shelter from the winds. And these patches of foliage were golden and red in
the meditative autumn sunshine, which seemed as if it were a little sad at
the thought of parting with the old earth for the coming winter.
"I think the impossible lesson to learn would be
renouncement," said Hadria. "I cannot conceive how anyone could
say to himself, while he had longings and life still in him, 'I will
give up this that I might have learnt; I will stop short here where I might
press forward; I will allow this or that to curtail me and rob me of my
possible experience.'"
"Well, I confess that has been my feeling too, though I admire the
spirit that can renounce."
"Admire? Oh, yes, perhaps; though I am not so sure
that the submissive nature has not been too much glorified--in theory. Nobody pays much attention to it in practice, by the way."
Miss Du Prel laughed. "What an observant young woman you
are."
"Renunciation is always preached to girls, you know," said
Hadria--"preached to them when as yet they have nothing more
than a rattle and a rag-doll to renounce. And later, when they set about
the business of their life, and resign their liberty, their talents, their
health, their opportunity, their beauty (if they have it), then people
gradually fall away from the despoiled and obedient being, and flock round
the still unchastened creature who retains what the gods have given her,
and asks for more."
"I fear you are indeed a still unchastened creature!"
"Certainly; there is no encouragement to chasten oneself. People
don't stand by the docile members of Society. They commend their
saints, but they drink to their sinners."
Miss Du Prel smiled.
"It is true," she admitted. "A woman must not renounce
too much if she desires to retain her influence."
"Pas trop de zèle,"
Hadria quoted.
"There is something truly unmanageable about you, my dear!"
cried Valeria, much amused. "Well, I too have had just that sort of
instinct, just that imperious demand, just that impatience of restraint. I
too regarded myself and my powers as mine to use as I would, responsible
only to my own conscience. I decided to have freedom though the heavens
should fall. I was unfitted by temperament to face the world, but I was
equally unfitted to pay the price for protection--the blackmail that
society levies on a woman: surrender of body and of soul. What could one
expect, in such a case, but disaster? I often envy now the simple-minded
woman who pays her price and has her reward--such as it is."
"Ah! such as it is!" echoed Hadria.
"Who was it said, the other day, that she thought a wise
woman always took things as they were, and made the best of them?"
"Some dull spirit."
"And yet a practical spirit."
"I am quite sure," said Hadria, "that the stokers of
hell are practical spirits."
"Your mother must have had her work cut out for her when she
undertook to bring you up," exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
"So she always insinuates," replied Hadria demurely.
They were spinning down hill now, into a warm bit of country watered by
the river, and Hadria drew rein. The spot was so pleasant that they
alighted, tied the pony to a tree, and wandered over the grass to the
river's edge. Hadria picked her way from stone to slippery stone, into
the middle of the river, where there was comparatively safe standing room.
Here she was suddenly inspired to execute the steps of a reel, while
Valeria stood dismayed on the bank, expecting every moment, to see the
dance end in the realms of the trout.
But Hadria kept her footing, and continued to step it with much
solemnity. Meanwhile, two young men on horseback were coming down the road;
but as a group of trees hid it from the river at this point, they were not
noticed. The horsemen stopped suddenly when they cleared the group of
trees. The figure of a young woman in mid-stream, dancing a reel with
extreme energy and correctness, and without a smile, was sufficiently
surprising to arrest them.
"As I thought," exclaimed Hadria, "it is Harold
Wilkins!"
"I shall be glad to see this conquering hero," said
Valeria.
Hadria, who had known the young man since her childhood, waited calmly
as he turned his horse's head towards the river, and advanced across
the grass, raising his hat. "Good morning, Miss Fullerton."
"Good morning," Hadria returned, from her rock.
"You seem to be having rather an agreeable time of it."
"Very. Are you fond of dancing?"
Mr. Wilkins was noted, far and wide, for his dancing, and the question
was wounding.
He was tall and loosely built, with brown expressionless eyes, dark
hair, a pink complexion, shelving forehead, and a weak yet obstinate mouth.
His companion also was tall and dark, but his face was pale, his forehead
broad and high, and a black moustache covered his upper lip. He had raised
his hat gracefully on finding that the dancer in mid-stream was an
acquaintance of his companion, and he shewed great self-possession in
appearing to regard the dancing of reels in these circumstances, as an
incident that might naturally be expected. Not a sign of surprise betrayed
itself in the face, not even a glimmer of curiosity. Hadria was so tickled
by this finished behaviour under difficulties, that she took her cue from
it, and decided to treat the matter in the same polished spirit. She too
would take it all decorously for granted.
Mr. Wilkins introduced his friend: Mr. Hubert Temperley. Hadria bowed
gracefully in reply to Mr. Temperley's salute.
"Don't you feel a little cramped out there?" asked Mr.
Wilkins.
"Dear me, no," cried Hadria in mock surprise. "What
could induce you to suppose I would come out here if I felt
cramped?"
"Are you--are you thinking of coming on shore? Can I help
you?"
"Thank you," replied Hadria. "This is a merely
temporary resting-place. We ought to be getting on; we have some miles yet
to drive," and she hurried her friend away. They were conducted to
the pony-cart by the cavaliers, who raised their hats, as the ladies drove
off at a merry pace, bowing their farewells.
"The eternal riddle!" Temperley exclaimed, as they turned
the corner of the road.
"What is the eternal riddle?" Harold Wilkins enquired.
"Woman, woman!" Temperley replied, a little impatiently. He
had not found young Wilkins quick to catch his meaning
during the two hours' ride, and it occurred to him that Miss Fullerton would have been a more interesting companion.
He made a good many enquiries about her and her family, on the way back
to Drumgarren.
"We are inviited to tennis at their house, for next
Tuesday," said Harold, "so you will have a chance of pursuing
the acquaintance. For my part, I don't admire that sort of
girl."
"Don't you? I am attracted by originality. I like a woman to
have something in her."
"Depends on what it is. I hate a girl to have a lot of silly
ideas."
"Perhaps you prefer her to have but one," said Temperley,
"that one being that Mr. Harold Wilkins is a charming
fellow."
"Nothing of the kind," cried Harold. "I can't
help it if girls run after me; it's a great bore."
Temperley laughed. "You, like Achilles, are pursued by ten
thousand girls. I deeply sympathize, though it is not an inconvenience that
has troubled me, even in my palmiest days."
"Why, how old are you? Surely you are not going to talk as if
those days were over?"
"Oh, I am moderately palmly still!" Temperley admitted.
"Still, the hour approaches when the assaults of time will become
more disastrous."
"You and Hadria Fullerton ought to get on well together, for she
is very musical," said Harold Wilkins.
"Ah!" cried Temperley with new interest. "I could have
almost told that from her face. Does she play well?"
"Well, I suppose so. She plays things without any tune that bore
one to death, but I daresay you would admire it. She composes too, I am
told."
"Really? Dear me, I must make a point of having a talk with her,
on the earliest opportunity."
Meanwhile, the occupants of the pony-cart had arrived at
Darachanarvan, where they were to put up the pony and have luncheon. It was a prosaic little Scottish town, with only a beautiful survival, here and there, from the past.
After luncheon, they wandered down to the banks of the river, and
watched the trout and the running water. Hadria had long been wishing to
find out what her oracle thought about certain burning questions on which
the sisters held such strong, and such unpopular sentiments, but just
because the feeling was so keen, it was difficult to broach the
subject.
An opportunity came when Miss Du Prel spoke of her past. Hadria was able
to read between the lines. When a mere girl, Miss Du Prel had been thrown
on the world--brilliant, handsome, impulsive, generous--to pass
through a fiery ordeal, and to emerge with aspirations as high as ever, but
with her radiant hopes burnt out. But she did not dwell on this side of the
picture; she emphasized rather, the possibility of holding on through storm
and stress to the truth that is born in one; to belief in "the
noblest and wildest hopes (if you like to call them so) that ever thrilled
generous hearts."
But she gave no encouragement to certain of her companion's most
vehement sentiments. She seemed to yearn for exactly that side of life from
which the younger shrank with so much horror. She saw it under an entirely
different aspect. Hadria felt thrown back on herself, lonely once more.
"You have seen Mrs. Gordon," she said at length, "what
do you think of her?"
"Nothing; she does not inspire thought."
"Yet once she was a person, not a thing."
",If a woman can't keep her head above water in Mrs.
Gordon's position, she must be a feeble sort of person."
"I should not dare to say that, until I had been put through the
mill myself, and come out unpulverised."
Miss Du Prel failed to see what there was so very dreadful in Mrs.
Gordon's lot. She had, perhaps, rather more children than was
necessary, but otherwise--
"Oh, Miss Du Prel," cried Hadria, "you might be a mere
man! That is just what my brothers say."
"I don't understand what you mean," said Miss Du Prel.
"Do explain."
"Do you actually--you of all people--not
recognize and hate the idea that lies so obviously at the root of all the
life that is swarming round us--?"
Valeria studied her companion's excited face.
"Are you in revolt against the very basis of existence?" she
asked curiously.
"No: at least ... but this is not what I am driving at
exactly," replied Hadria, turning uneasily away from the close
scrutiny. "Don't you know--oh, don't you see--how
many women secretly hate, and shrink from this brutal domestic idea that
fashions their fate for them?"
Miss Du Prel's interest quickened.
"Nothing strikes me so much as the tamely acquiescent spirit of
the average woman, and I doubt if you would find another woman in England
to describe the domestic existence as you do."
"Perhaps not; tradition prevents them from using bad language, but
they feel, they feel."
"Young girls perhaps, brought up very ignorantly, find life a
little scaring at first, but they soon settle down into happy wives and
mothers."
"As the fibre grows coarser," assented Hadria.
"No; as the affections awaken, and the instincts that hold society
together, come into play. I have revolted myself from the conditions of
life, but it is a hopeless business--beating one's wings against
the bars."
"The bars are, half of them, of human construction," said
Hadria, "and against those one may surely be allowed to
beat."
"Of human construction?"
"I mean that prejudice, rather than instinct, has built up the
system that Mrs. Gordon so amiably represents."
"Prejudice has perhaps taken advantage of instinct to
establish a somewhat tyrannical tradition," Miss Du Prel admitted, "but instinct is at the bottom of it. There is, of course, in our society, no latitude for variety of type; that is the fault of so many institutions."
"The ordinary domestic idea may have been suitable when women were
emerging from the condition of simple animals," said Hadria,
"but now it seems to me to be out of date."
"It can never be entirely out of date, dear Hadria. Nature has
asked of women a great and hard service, but she has given them the
maternal instinct and its joys, in compensation for the burden of this
task, which would otherwise be intolerable and impossible. It can only be
undertaken at the instigation of some stupendous impetus, that blinds the
victim to the nature of her mission. It must be a sort of obsession; an
intense personal instinct, amounting to madness. Nature, being determined
to be well served in this direction, has supplied the necessary monomania,
and the domestic idea, as you call it, grows up round this central
fact."
Hadria moved restlessly to and fro by the river bank. "One
presumes to look upon oneself, at first--in one's earliest
youth," she said, "as undoubtedly human, with human needs and
rights and dignities. But this turns out to be an illusion. It is as an
animal that one has to play the really important part in life;
it is by submitting to the demands of society, in this respect, that one
wins rewards and commendation. Of course, if one likes to throw in a few
ornamental extras, so much the better; it keeps up appearances and the
aspect of refined sentiment--but the main point--"
"You are extravagant!" cried Miss Du Prel.
"That is not the right way to look at it."
"It is certainly not the convenient way to look at it. It is
doubtless wise to weave as many garlands as you can, to deck yourself for
the sacrifice. By that means, you don't quite see which way you are
going, because of the masses of elegant vegetation."
"Ah! Hadria, you exaggerate, you distort; you forget so
many things--the sentiments, the affections, the thousand details that hallow that crude foundation which you see only bare and unsoftened."
"A repulsive object tastefully decorated, is to me only the more
repulsive," returned Hadria, with suppressed passion.
"There will come a day when you will feel very differently,"
prophesied Miss Du Prel.
"Perhaps. Why should I, more than the others, remain uninfluenced
by the usual processes of blunting, and grinding down, and stupefying, till
one grows accustomed to one's function, one's
intolerable function?"
"My dear, my dear!"
"I am sorry if I shock you, but that is how I feel. I have seen
this sort of traditional existence and nothing else, all my life, and I
have been brought up to it, with the rest--prepared and decked out
like some animal for market--all in the most refined and graceful
manner possible; but how can one help seeing through the disguise; how can
one be blind to the real nature of the transaction, and to the fate that
awaits one--awaits one as inexorably as death, unless by some force of
one's own, with all the world--friends and enemies--in
opposition, one can avert it?"
Miss Du Prel remained silent.
"You can avert it," she said at last;
"but at what cost?"
"Miss Du Prel, I would rather sweep a crossing, I would rather beg
in the streets, than submit to the indignity of such a life!"
"Then what do you intend to do instead?"
"Ah! there's the difficulty. What can one do
instead, without breaking somebody's heart? Nothing, except breaking
one's own. And even putting that difficulty aside, it seems as if
everyone's hand were against a woman who refuses the path that has
been marked out for her."
"No, no, it is not so bad as that. There are many openings now for
women."
"But," said Hadria, "as far as I can gather, ordinary
ability is not sufficient to enable them to make a scanty living. The talent that would take a man to the top of the tree is required to keep a woman in a meagre supply of bread and butter."
"Allowing for exaggeration, that is more or less the case,"
Miss Du Prel admitted.
"I have revolted against the common lot," she went on after
a pause, "and you see what comes of it; I am alone in the world. One
does not think of that when one is quite young."
"Would you rather be in Mrs. Gordon's position than in your
own?"
"I doubt not that she is happier."
"But would you change with her, surrendering all that she has
surrendered?"
"Yes, if I were of her temperament."
"Ah! you always evade the question. Remaining yourself, would you
change with her?"
"I would never have allowed my life to grow like hers."
"No," said Hadria, laughing, "you would probably have
run away or killed yourself or somebody, long before this."
Miss Du Prel could not honestly deny this possibility. After a pause she
said:
"A woman cannot afford to despise the dictates of Nature. She may
escape certain troubles in that way; but Nature is not to be cheated, she
makes her victim pay her debt in another fashion. There is no escape. The
centuries are behind one, with all their weight of heredity and habit; the
order of society adds its pressure--one's own emotional needs.
Ah, no! it does not answer to pit oneself against one's race, to bid
defiance to the fundamental laws of life."
"Such then are the alternatives," said Hadria, moving close
to the river's brink, and casting two big stones into the current.
"There stand the devil and the deep sea."
"You are too young to have come to that sad conclusion,"
said Miss Du Prel.
"But I haven't," cried Hadria. "I still believe
in revolt."
The other shook her head.
"And what about love? Are you going through life without the one
thing that makes it bearable?
"I would not purchase it at such a cost. If I can't have it
without despoiling myself of everything that is worth possessing, I prefer
to go without."
"You don't know what you say!" exclaimed Miss Du
Prel.
"But why? Love would be ruined and desecrated. I understand by it
a sympathy so perfect, and a reverence so complete, that the conditions of
ordinary domestic existence would be impossible, unthinkable, in connection
with it."
"So do I understand love. But it comes, perhaps, once in a
century, and if one is too fastidious, it passes by and leaves one forlorn:
at best, it comes only to open the gates of Paradise, for a moment, and to
close them again, and leave one in outer darkness."
"Always?"
"I believe always," answered Miss Du Prel.
The running of the river sounded peacefully in the pause that
followed.
"Well," cried Hadria at length, raising her head with a long
sigh, "one cannot do better than follow one's own instinct and
thought of the moment. Regret may come, do what one may. One cannot escape
from one's own temperament."
"One can modify it."
"I cannot even wish to modify mine, so that I should become
amenable to these social demands. I stand in hopeless opposition to the
scheme of life that I have grown up amongst, to the universal scheme of
life indeed, as understood by the world up to this day. Audacious, is it
not?"
"I like audacity," returned Miss Du Prel. "As I
understand you, you require an altogether new dispensation!"
Hadria gave a half smile, conscious of her stupendous demand. Then she
said, with a peculiar movement of the head, as if throwing off a heavy
weight, and looking before her steadily: "Yes, I require a new
dispensation."
Hadria was in a happy mood, for her mother had so far overcome her
prejudice against Miss Du Prel, as to ask her to join the party.
The festivity had, therefore, lost its usual quality of melancholy.
It was a warm afternoon, and every one seemed cheerful "and almost
intelligent," Hadria commented. The first words that Mr. Temperley
uttered, made her turn to him, in surprise. She was so unaccustomed to be
interested in what the people about here had to say. Even intelligent
visitors usually adopted the tone of the inhabitants. Hubert
Temperley's manner was very polished. His accent denoted mental
cultivation. He spoke with eloquence of literature, and praised
enthusiastically most great names dating securely from the hallowed past.
Of modern literature he was a stern critic; of music he spoke with
ardour.
"I hear that you not only perform but compose, Miss
Fullerton," he said. "As soon as I heard that, I felt that I
must make your acquaintance. My friends, the Gordons, are very charming,
but they don't understand a note of music, and I am badly off for a
kindred spirit."
"My composing is a very mild affair," Hadria answered.
"I suppose you are more fortunate."
"Not much. I am pretty busy you see. I have my
pro-
fession. I play a good deal--the piano and the 'cello are my instruments. But my difficulty is to find someone to accompany me. My sister does when she can, but of course with a house and family to look after--I am sometimes selfish enough to wish she had not married. We used to be such good friends."
"Is that all over?"
"It is different. She always manages to be busy now," said
Temperley in a slightly ironical tone.
He plunged once more, into a musical discussion.
Hadria had reluctantly to cut it short, in order to arrange
tennis-matches. This task was performed as usual, somewhat recklessly.
Polite and amiable in indiscriminate fashion, Hadria ignored the secret
jealousies and heart-burnings of the neighbourhood, only to recognise and
repent her mistakes when too late. To-day she was even more unchastened
than usual in her dealings with inflammable social material.
"Hadria!" cried Mrs. Fullerton, taking her aside, "How
could you ask Cecilia Gordon to play with young McKenzie? You
know their families are not on speaking terms!"
Everyone, except the culprit, had remarked the haughty manner in which
Cecilia wielded her racket, and the gloomy silence in which the set was
played.
Hadria, though not impenitent, laughed. "How does Miss Gordon
manage to be energetic and chilling at the same time!" she
exclaimed.
The Gordons and the McKenzies, like hostile armies, looked on grimly.
Everyone felt awkward, and to feel awkward was nothing less than tragic, in
the eyes of the assembly.
"Oh, Hadria, how could you?" cried Mrs. Gordon,
coming up in her elaborate toilette, which expressed almost as much of the
character of its wearer as was indicated by her thin, chattering tones, and
unreposeful manner. Her mode of dress was rich and florid--very
obvious in its effects, very naïf. She was
built on a large scale, and might have been graceful, had
not her mental constitution refused to permit, or to inspire, that which physical construction seemed to intend. She distributed smiles on all hands, of no particular meaning. Though still a young woman, she looked worn and wearied. However, her rôle was cheerfulness, and she smiled on industriously.
"I am so sorry," said Hadria, "the quarrel went clean
out of my head. They are so well matched. But your sister-in-law will never
forgive me."
"Oh, well, never mind, my dear; it is your way, I know. Only of
course it is awkward."
"What can be done? Shall I run in and separate them?"
"Oh, Hadria, you are ridiculous!"
"I was not meant for society," she said, in a depressed
tone.
"Oh, you will soon get into the way of it," cried Mrs.
Gordon encouragingly.
"I am afraid I shall."
Mrs. Gordon stared. "Mr. Temperley, I can never make out what Miss
Fullerton really means. Do see if you can."
"How could I expect to succeed where you have failed?"
"Oh, you men are so much cleverer than we poor women," cried
the lady archly. Temperley was obviously of the same opinion. But he found
some appropriate Chesterfieldian reply, while Hadria, to his annoyance,
hurried off to her duties, full of good resolutions.
Having introduced a couple of sisters to their brother, she grew
desperate. A set had just ended, and the sisters were asked to play. This
time, no mistake had been made in the selection of partners, so far as the
question of sentiment was concerned, but they were fatally ill-assorted as
to strength. However, Hadria said with a sigh, if their emotions were
satisfied, it was really all they could expect. Considering the number of
family feuds, she did not see her way to arranging both points, to
everyone's satisfaction.
Hadria was surrounded by a small group, among whom
were Temperley, Harold Wilkins, and Mr. Hawkesley, the brother who had been introduced to his sisters.
"How very handsome Hadria is looking this afternoon," said
Mrs. Gordon, "and how becoming that dark green gown is."
Mrs. Fullerton smiled. "Yes, she does look her best to-day. I
think she has been improving, of late, in her looks."
"That's just what we have all noticed. There is so much
animation in her face; she is such a sweet girl."
Miss Du Prel, who was not of the stuff that martyrs are made of,
muttered something incoherent and deserted her neighbour. She came up to
the group that had gathered round Hadria.
"Ah, Miss Du Prel," cried the latter, "I am so glad to
see you at large again. I was afraid you were getting bored."
"I was," said Miss Du Prel frankly, "so I came
away."
The young men laughed. "If only everybody could go away when he
was bored," cried Hadria, "how peaceful it would be, and what
small tennis-parties one would have!"
"Always excepting tennis-parties at this
house," said Hubert Temperley.
"I don't think any house would survive," said Miss Du
Prel. "If people do not meet to exchange ideas, I can't see the
object of their meeting at all."
"What a revolutionary sentiment!" cried Temperley, laughing.
"Where would society be, on that principle?"
Hadria was called away, at that moment, and the group politely wavered
between duty and inclination. Temperley and Miss Du Prel strolled off
together, his vast height bent deferentially towards her. This air of
deference proved somewhat superficial. Miss Du Prel found that his opinions
were of an immovable order, with very defined edges. In some indescribable
fashion, those opinions partook of the general elegance of his being. Not
for worlds would he have harboured an exaggerated or immoderate idea. In
politics he was conservative, but he did not abuse his opponents. He smiled
at them: he saw no reason for supposing that they did
not mean quite as well as he did, possibly better. What he did see reason to doubt, was their judgment. His tolerance was urbane and superior. On all questions, however, whether he knew much about them or little, his judgment was final and absolute. He swept away whole systems of thought that had shaken the world, with a confident phrase. Miss Du Prel looked at him with increasing amazement. He seemed unaccustomed to opposition.
"A vast deal of nonsense is talked in the name of
philosophy," he observed, in a tone of gay self-confidence peculiar
to him, and more indicative of character than even what he said.
"People seem to think that they have only to quote Spencer or Huxley,
or take an interest in heredity, to justify themselves in throwing off all
the trammels, as they would regard them, of duty and common
sense."
"I have not observed that tendency," said Miss Du Prel.
"Really. I regret to say that I notice everywhere a disposition to
evade responsibilities which, in former days, would have been honestly and
contentedly accepted."
"Our standards are all changing," said Miss Du Prel.
"It does not follow that they are changing for the worse."
"It seems to me that they are not so much changing, as
disappearing altogether," said Temperley cheerfully,
"especially among women. We hear a great deal about rights, but we
hear nothing about duties."
"We are perhaps, a little tired of hearing about duties,"
said Miss Du Prel.
"You admit then what I say," he returned placidly.
"Every woman wants to be Mary, and no one will be Martha."
"I make just the opposite complaint," cried Miss Du
Prel.
"Dear me, quite a different way of looking at it. I confess I have
scant patience with these interfering women, who want to turn everything
upside down, instead of quietly minding their duties at home."
"I know it is difficult to make people understand," said
Miss Du Prel, with malice.
"I should esteem it a favour to be enlightened," returned
Temperley.
"You were just now condemning socialism, Mr. Temperley, because
you say that it attempts to ignore the principle of the division of labour.
Now, when you lose patience with the few women who are refusing to be
Marthas, you ignore that principle yourself. You want all women to do
exactly the same sort of work, irrespective of their ability or their bent
of mind. May I ask why?"
"Because I consider that is the kind of work for which they are
best fitted," replied Temperley serenely.
"Then you are to be judge and jury in the case;
your opinion, not theirs, is to decide the matter. Supposing
I were to take upon myself to judge what you were
best fitted for, and were to claim, therefore, to decide for you what sort
of life you should live, and what sort of work you should
undertake--?"
"I should feel every confidence in resigning myself to your able
judgment," said Temperley, with a low bow. Miss Du Prel laughed.
"Ah," she said, "you are at present, on the conquering
side, and can afford to jest on the subject."
"It is no joke to jest with an able woman," he
returned. "Seriously, I have considerable sympathy with
your view, and no wish to treat it flippantly. But if I am to treat it
seriously, I must admit frankly that I think you forget that, after all,
Nature has something to say in this matter."
Engrossed in their conversation, they had, without thinking what they
were doing, passed through the open gate at the end of the avenue, and
walked on along the high road.
Swarms of small birds flew out of the hedges, with a whirring sound, to
settle further on, while an incessant chatter was kept up on each side.
"I often think that modern women might take example from these
little creatures," said Temperley, who, in common with many
self-sufficient persons, was fond of recommending humility to others.
"They never attempt to shirk their lowly tasks on
the plea of higher vocations. Not one turns from the path marked out by our great Mother, who also teaches her human children the same lesson of patient duty; but, alas! by them is less faithfully obeyed."
"If our great Mother wanted instinct she should not have bestowed
reason," said Miss Du Prel impatiently.
Temperley had fallen into the dulcet strains of one who feels, not only
that he stands as the champion of true wisdom and virtue, but that he is
sure of support from the vast majority of his fellows. Miss Du Prel's
brusqueness seemed to suit her less admirable
rôle.
Temperley was tolerant and regretful. If Miss Du Prel would think for a
moment, she could not fail to see that Nature ... and so forth, in the same
strain of "pious devotion to other people's duties" as his
companion afterwards described it. She chafed at the exhortation to
"think for a moment."
At that instant, the solitude was broken by the apparition of a dusty
wayfarer in knickerbockers and soft felt hat, coming towards them up the
road. He was a man of middle height and rather slim. He appeared about
five-and-thirty years of age. He had fair hair, and a strange, whimsical
face, irregular of feature, with a small moustache covering the upper
lip.
Miss Du Prel looked startled, as she caught sight of the travel-stained
figure. She flushed deeply, and her expression changed to one of
bewilderment and uncertainty, then to one of incredulous joy. She hastened
forward, at length, and arrested the wayfarer.
"Professor Fortescue, don't you remember me?" she cried
excitedly.
He gazed at her for a second, and then a look of amazement came into his
kind eyes, as he held out his hand.
"Miss Du Prel! This is incredible!"
They stood, with hand locked in hand, staring at one another. "By
what happy misunderstanding am I thus favoured by the gods?"
exclaimed the Professor.
Miss Du Prel explained her presence.
"Prodigious!" cried Professor Fortescue. "Fate must
have some strange plots in the making, unless indeed we fall to the
discouraging supposition that she deigns to jest."
He said that he was on a walking tour, studying the geology of the
district, and that he had written to announce his coming to his old
friends, Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton, and to ask them to put him up. He supposed
that they were expecting him.
Miss Du Prel was greatly excited. It was so long since they had met, and
it was so delightful to meet again. She had a hundred enquiries to make
about common friends, and about the Professor's own doings.
She forgot Temperley's name, and her introduction was vague. The
Professor held out his hand cordially. Temperley was not allowed to feel an
intrusive third. This was in consequence of the new-comer's kindliness
of manner, and not at all because of Miss Du Prel, who had forgotten
Temperley's elegant existence. She had a look of surprise when he
joined in the conversation.
"I can scarcely believe that it is ten years since I was
here," cried the Professor, pausing to look over a gate at the
stretch of country.
"I used to visit my friends at Dunaghee every autumn, and now if
some one were to assure me that I had been to sleep and dreamt a ten
years' dream, I should be disposed to credit it. Every detail the
same; the very cattle, the very birds--surely just those identical
sparrows used to fly before me along the hedgerows, in the good old times,
ten years ago! Ah! yes, it is only the human element that
changes."
"One is often so thankful for a change in that," Temperley
remarked, with an urbane sort of cynicism.
"True," said Miss Du Prel; "but what is so
discouraging is that so often the charm goes, like the bloom of a peach,
and only the qualities that one regrets remain and prosper."
"I think people improve with time, as often as they fall
off," said the Professor.
The others shook their heads.
"To him that hath shall be given, but to him that hath
not--" The Professor smiled a little sadly, in quoting the
significant words. "Well, well," he said, turning to Miss Du
Prel, "I can't say how happy I am to see you again. I have not
yet got over my surprise. And so you have made the acquaintance of the
family at Dunaghee. I have the warmest respect and affection for those dear
folks. Mrs. Fullerton has the qualities of a heroine, kind hostess as she
is! And of what fine Scottish stuff the old man is made--and a mind
like crystal! What arguments we used to have in that old study of his! I
can see him now. And how genial! A man could never forget it, who had once
received his welcome."
Such was Miss Du Prel's impression, when ten minutes later the
meeting took place between the Professor and his old friend.
It would indeed have been hard to be anything but genial to the
Professor. Hadria remembered him and his kindness to her and the rest of
the children, in the old days; the stories he used to tell when he took
them for walks, stories full of natural lore more marvellous than any fairy
tale, though he could tell fairy tales too, by the dozen. He had seemed to
them like some wonderful and benevolent magician, and they adored him, one
and all. And what friends he used to be with Ruffian, the brown retriever,
and with every living creature on the place!
The tennis-party began to break up, shortly after the Professor's
arrival. Temperley lingered to the last.
"Is that a son of the celebrated Judge Temperley?" asked one
of the bystanders.
"His eldest son," answered Mr. Gordon; "a man who
ought to make his mark, for he has splendid chances and good
ability."
"I have scarcely had a word with you, the whole afternoon,"
Temperley said to Hadria, who had sunk upon a seat, tired with making
herself agreeable, as she observed.
"That is very sad; but when one has social gatherings, one never
does have a word with anybody. I think that must be the object of
them--to accustom people to do without human sympathy."
Temperley tried to start a conversation, taking a place beside her, on
the seat, and setting himself to draw her out. It was obvious that he found
her interesting, either as a study or in a less impersonal sense. Hadria,
feeling that her character was being analysed, did what many people do
without realizing it: she instinctively arranged its lights and shades with
a view to artistic effect. It was not till late that night, when the events
of the day passed before her in procession, that she recognized what she
had done, and laughed at herself. She had not attempted to appear in a
better light than she deserved; quite as often as not, she submitted to
appear in a worse light; her effort had been to satisfy some innate sense
of proportion or form. The instinct puzzled her.
Also she became aware that she was interested in Hubert Temperley. Or
was it that she was interested in his interest in her? She could not be
certain. She thought it was direct interest. She felt eager to know more of
him; above all, to hear him play.
On returning to the house, after Temperley had, at last, felt compelled
to depart, Hadria found her father and mother and their guest, gathered
together before the cheery fire in the study. Hearing his daughter's
step, her father opened the door and called her in. Till now, the Professor
had not seen her, having been hurried into the house, to change his clothes
and have something to eat.
As she entered, rather shyly, he rose and gave a gasp of
astonishment.
"You mean to tell me that this is the little girl who used to
take me for walks, and who had such an inordinate appetite for stories! Good heavens, it is incredible!"
He held out a thin, finely-formed hand, with a kind smile.
"They change so much at that age, in a short time," said
Mrs. Fullerton, with a glance of pride; for her daughter was looking
brilliantly handsome, as she stood before them, with flushed cheeks and a
soft expression, which the mere tones of the Professor's voice had
power to summon in most human faces. He looked at her thoughtfully, and
then rousing himself, he brought up a chair for her, and the group settled
again before the fire.
"Do you know," said the Professor, "I was turning into
a French sweet-shop the other day, to buy my usual tribute for the
children, when I suddenly remembered that they would no longer be children,
and had to march out again, crestfallen, musing on the march of time and
the mutability of things human--especially children."
"It's ridiculous," cried Mr. Fullerton. "I am
always lecturing them about it, but they go on growing just the
same."
"And how they make you feel an old fogey before you know where you
are! And I thought I was quite a gay young fellow, upon my word!"
"You, my dear Chantrey! why you'd be a gay young fellow at
ninety!" said Mr. Fullerton.
The Professor laughed and shook his head.
"And so this is really my little playfellow!" he exclaimed,
nodding meditatively. "I remember her so well; a queer, fantastic
little being in those days, with hair like a black cloud, and eyes that
seemed to peer out of the cloud, with a perfect passion of enquiry. She
used to bewilder me, I remember, with her strange, wise little sayings! I
always prophesied great things from her! Ernest, too, I remember: a fine
little chap with curly, dark hair--rather like a young Italian, but
with features less broadly cast; drawn together and calmed by his northern
blood. Yes, yes; it seems but
yesterday," he said, with a smile and a sigh; "and now my little Italian is at college, with a bored manner and a high collar."
"Oh, no; Ernest's a dear boy still," cried Hadria.
"Oxford hasn't spoilt him a bit. I do wish he was at home for
you to see him."
"Ah! you mustn't hint at anything against Ernest in
Hadria's presence!" cried Mr. Fullerton, with an approving
laugh.
"Not for the world!" rejoined the Professor. "I was
only recalling one or two of my young Oxford acquaintances. I might have
known that a Fullerton had too much stuff in him to make an idiot of
himself in that way."
"The boy has distinguished himself too," said Mr.
Fullerton.
"Everyone says he will do splendidly," added the mother;
"and you can't think how modest he is about himself, and how
anxious to do well, and to please us by his success."
"Ah! that's good."
The Professor was full of sympathy. Hadria was astonished to see how
animated her mother had become under his influence.
They fell again to recalling old times; little trivial incidents which
had seemed so unimportant at the moment, but now carried a whole epoch with
them, bringing back, with a rush, the genial memories. Hadria remembered
that soon after his last visit, the Professor had married a beautiful wife,
and that about a year or so later, the wife had died. It was said that she
had killed herself. This set Hadria speculating.
The visitor reminded his companions of various absurd incidents of the
past, sending Mr. Fullerton into paroxysms of laughter that made the whole
party laugh in sympathy. Mrs. Fullerton too was already wiping her
streaming eyes as the Professor talked on in his old vein, with just that
particular little humorous manner of his that won its way so surely to the
hearts of his listeners. For a moment, in the midst of the bright talk and
the mirth that he had created, the Professor
lost the thread, and his face, as he stared into the glowing centre of the fire, had a desolate look; but it was so quick to pass away that one might have thought oneself the victim of a fancy. His was the next chuckle, and "Do you remember that day when--?" and so forth, Mr. Fullerton's healthy roar following avalanche-like, upon the reminiscence.
"We thought him a good and kind magician when we were
children," was Hadria's thought, "and now one is grown up,
there is no disillusion. He is a good and kind magician still."
He seemed indeed to have the power to conjure forth from their
hiding-places, the finer qualities of mind and temperament, which had lain
dormant, perhaps for years, buried beneath daily accumulations of little
cares and little habits. The creature that had once looked forth on the
world, fresh and vital, was summoned again, to his own surprise, with all
his ancient laughter and his tears.
"This man," Hadria said to herself, drawing a long, relieved
breath, "is the best and the most generous human being I have ever
met."
She went to sleep, that night, with a sweet sense of rest and security,
and an undefined new hope. If such natures were in existence, then there
must be a great source of goodness and tenderness somewhere in heaven or
earth, and the battle of life must be worth the fighting.
Hadria was amazed to see how the new-comer might express any idea he
pleased, however heterodox, and her mother only applauded.
His manner to her was exquisitely courteous. He seemed to understand all
that she had lost in her life, all its disappointments and sacrifices.
On hearing that Miss Du Prel was among the Professor's oldest
friends, Mrs. Fullerton became suddenly cordial to that lady, and could not
show her enough attention. The evenings were often spent in music,
Temperley being sometimes of the party. He was the only person not
obviously among the Professor's admirers.
"However cultivated or charming a person may be," Temperley
said to Hadria, "I never feel that I have found a kindred spirit,
unless the musical instinct is strong."
"Nor I."
"Professor Fortescue has just that one weak point."
"Oh, but he is musical, though his technical knowledge is
small."
But Temperley smiled dubiously.
The Professor, freed from his customary hard work, was like a schoolboy.
His delight in the open air, in the freshness of
the hills, in the peace of the mellow autumn, was never-ending.
He loved to take a walk before breakfast, so as to enjoy the first
sweetness of the morning; to bathe in some clear pool of the river to come
into healthy contact with Nature. Never was there a brighter or a
wholesomer spirit. Yet the more Hadria studied this clear, and vigorous,
and tender nature, the more she felt, in him, the absence of that
particular personal hold on life which so few human beings are without, a
grip usually so hard to loosten, that only the severest experience, and the
deepest sorrow have power to destroy it.
Hadria's letters to her sister, at this time, were full of
enthusiasm. "You cannot imagine what it is, or perhaps you
can imagine what it is to have the society of three such
people as I now see almost every day.
"You say I represent them as impossible angels, such as earth
never beheld, but you are wrong. I represent them as they are. I suppose
the Professor has faults--though he does not show them to
us--they must be of the generous kind, at any rate. Father says that
he never could keep a farthing; he would always give it away to undeserving
people. Miss Du Prel, I find on closer acquaintance, is not without certain
jealousies and weaknesses, but these things just seem to float about as
gossamer on a mountain-side, and one counts them in relation to herself, in
about the same proportion. Mr. Temperley--I don't know quite what
to say about him. He is a tiny bit too precise and finished perhaps--a
little wanting in élan--but he
seems very enlightened and full of polite information; and ah, his music!
When he is playing I am completely carried away. If he said then,
'Miss Fullerton, may I have the pleasure of your society in the
infernal regions?' I should arise and take his arm and reply,
'Delighted,' and off we would march. But what am I saying? Mr.
Temperley would never ask anything so absurd.
"You would have thought that when Miss Du Prel and
Professor Fortescue arrived on the scene, I had about enough privileges; but no, Destiny, waking up at last to her duties, remembers that I have a maniacal passion for music, and that this has been starved. So she hastens to provide for me a fellow maniac, a brother in Beethoven, who comes and fills my world with music and my soul with-- But I must not rave. The music is still in my veins; I am not in a fit state to write reasonable letters. Here comes Mr. Temperley for our practice. No more for the present."
Temperley would often talk to Hadria of his early life, and about his
mother and sister. Of his mother he spoke with great respect and affection,
the respect perhaps somewhat conventional, and allowing one to see, through
its meshes, the simple fact that she was looked up to as a good and dutiful
parent, who had worshipped her son from his birth, and perfectly fulfilled
his ideas of feminine excellency. From her he had learnt the lesser
Catechism and the Lord's Prayer, since discarded, but useful in their
proper season. Although he had ceased to be an orthodox Christian, he felt
that he was the better for having been trained in that creed. He had a
perfect faith in the system which had produced himself.
"I think you would like my mother," said Temperley.
Hadria could scarcely dispute this.
"And I am sure she would like you."
"On that point I cannot offer an opinion."
"Don't you ever come to town?" he asked.
"We go to Edinburgh occasionally," she replied with malice,
knowing that he meant London.
He set her right.
"No; my father hates London, and mother never goes away without
him."
"What a pity! But do you never visit friends in town?"
"Yes; my sister and I have spent one or two seasons in Park Lane,
with some cousins."
"Why, don't you come this next season? You ought to hear some
good music."
The tête-a-tête was interrupted
by the Professor. Temperley looked annoyed. It struck Hadria that Professor
Fortescue had a very sad expression when he was not speaking. He seemed to
her lonely, and in need of the sort of comfort that he brought so liberally
to others.
Although he had talked to Hadria about a thousand topics in which they
were both interested, there had been nothing personal in their
conversation. He was disposed, at times, to treat her in a spirit of
affectionate banter.
"To think that I should ever have dared to offer this young lady
acidulated drops!" he exclaimed on one occasion, when Hadria was
looking flushed and perturbed.
"Ah! shall I ever forget those acidulated drops!" she cried,
brightening.
"You don't mean to say that you would stoop to them
now?"
"It is not one's oldest friends who always know one
best," she replied demurely.
"I shall test you," he said.
And on that same day, he walked into Ballochcoil, and when he returned,
he offered her, with a solemn twinkle in his eye, a good-sized paper bag of
the seductive sweetmeat; taking up his position on the top of a low dyke,
and watching her, while she proceeded to make of that plump white bag, a
lank and emaciated bag, surprising to behold. He sat and looked on,
enjoying his idleness with the zest of a hard worker. The twinkle of
amusement faded gradually from his face, and the sadness that Hadria had
noticed the day before, returned to his eyes. She was leaning against the
dyke, pensively enjoying her festive meal. The dark fresh blue of her gown,
and the unwonted tinge of colour in her cheeks, gave a vigorous and
healthful impression, in harmony with the weather-beaten stones and the
windy breadth of the northern landscape.
The Professor studied the face with a puzzled frown. He flattered
himself that he was a subtle physiognomist, but
in this case, he would not have dared to pronounce judgment. Danger and difficulty might have been predicted, for it was a moving face, one that could not be looked upon quite coldly. And the Professor had come to the conclusion, from his experience of life, that the instinct of the average human being whom another has stirred to strong emotion, is to fasten upon and overwhelm that luckless person, to burden him with responsibilities, to claim as much of time, and energy, and existence, as can in any way be wrung from him, careless of the cost to the giver.
Professor Fortescue noticed, as Hadria looked down, a peculiar
dreaminess of expression, and something indefinable, which suggested a
profoundly emotional nature. At present, the expression was softened. That
this softness was not altogether trustworthy, however, the Professor felt
sure, for he had seen, at moments, when something had deeply stirred her,
expressions anything but soft come into her face. He thought her capable of
many things of which the well-brought-up young Englishwoman is not supposed
to dream. It seemed to him, that she had at least two distinct natures that
were at war with one another: the one greedy and pleasure-loving, careless
and even reckless; the other deep-seeing and aspiring. But which of these
two tendencies would experience probably foster?
"I wonder what you like best, next to acidulated drops," he
said at length, with one of his half-bantering smiles.
"There are few things in this wide world that can be mentioned in
the same breath with them, but toffy also has its potency upon the
spirit."
"I like not this mocking tone."
"Then I will not mock," she said.
"Yes, Hadria," he went on meditatively, "you have
grown up, if an old friend may make such remarks, very much as I expected,
from the promise of your childhood. You used to puzzle me even
then."
"Do I puzzle you now?" she asked.
"Inexpressibly!"
"How amusing! But how?"
"One can generally see at a glance, or pretty soon, the general
trend of a character. But not with you. Nothing that I might hear of you in
the future, would very much surprise me. I should say to myself,
'Yes, the germ was there.'"
Hadria paled a little. "Either good or bad you mean?"
"Well--"
"Yes, I understand." She drew herself together, crossing her
arms, and looking over the hills, with eyes that burned with a sort of fear
and defiance mingled. It was a singular expression, which the Professor
noted with a sense of discomfort.
Hadria slowly withdrew her eyes from the horizon, and bent them on the
ground.
"You must have read some of my thoughts," she said. "I
often wonder how it is, that the world can drill women into goodness at
all." She raised her head, and went on in a low, bitter tone:
"I often wonder why it is, that they don't, one and all, fling
up their rôles and revenge themselves to
the best of their ability--intentionally, I mean--upon the world
that makes them live under a permanent insult. I think, at times, that I
should thoroughly enjoy spending my life in sheer, unmitigated vengeance,
and if I did"--she clenched her hands, and her eyes
blazed--"if I did, I would not do my work by halves!"
"I am sure you would not," said the Professor dryly.
"But I shall not do anything of the kind," she added in a
different tone; "women don't. They always try to be good,
always, always--the more fools they! And the more they
are good, the worse things get."
"Ah! I thought there was some heterodox sentiment lurking here at
high pressure!" exclaimed the Professor.
Hadria sighed. "I have just been receiving good advice from Mrs.
Gordon," she said, flushing at the remembrance, "and I think if
you knew the sort of counsel it was, that you would understand one's
feeling a little fierce and bitter. Oh,
not with her, poor woman! She meant it in kindness. But the most cutting thing of all is, that what she said is true!"
"That is exactly the worst thing," said the
Professor, who seemed to have divined the nature of Mrs. Gordon's
advice.
Hadria coloured. It hurt as well as astonished her, that he should guess
what had been said.
"Ah! a woman ought to be born without pride, or not at all! I wish
to heaven that our fatal sex could be utterly stamped out!"
The Professor smiled, a little sadly, at her vehemence.
"We are accused of being at the bottom of every evil under
heaven," she added, "and I think it is true. That
is some consolation, at any rate!"
In spite of her immense reverence for the Professor, she seemed to have
grown reckless as to his opinion.
The next few days went strangely, and not altogether comprehensibly.
There was a silent warfare between Professor Fortescue and Hubert
Temperley.
"I have never in my life before ventured to interfere in such
matters," the Professor said to Miss Du Prel; "but if that
fellow marries Hadria, one or both will live to rue it."
"I think it's the best thing that could happen to her,"
Miss Du Prel declared.
"But they are not suited to one another," said the
Professor.
"Men and women seldom are!"
"Then why --?" the Professor began.
"He is about as near as she will get," Valeria interrupted.
"I will never stand in the way of a girl's marrying a good,
honest man. There is not one chance in ten thousand that Hadria will happen
to meet exactly the right person. I have made a mistake in my life. I shall
do all in my power to urge her to avoid following in my
footsteps."
It was useless for the Professor to remonstrate.
"I pity Mr. Temperley, though I am so fond of Hadria," said
Miss Du Prel. "If he shatters her illusions, she will
certainly shatter his."
The event that they had been expecting, took place. During one of the
afternoon practices, when, for a few minutes, Mrs. Fullerton had left the
room, Temperley startled Hadria by an extremely elegant proposal of
marriage. He did not seem surprised at her refusal, though he pleaded his
cause with no little eloquence. Hadria found it a painful ordeal. She
shrank from the ungracious necessity to disappoint what appeared to be a
very ardent hope. Happily, the interview was cut short by the entrance of
Mr. Fullerton. The old man was not remarkable for
finesse. He gave a dismayed "Oh!"
He coughed, suppressed a smile, and murmuring some lame enquiry as to the
progress of the music, turned and marched out of the room. The sound of
laughter was presently heard from the dining-room below.
"Father is really too absurd!" cried Hadria, "there is
no tragedy that he is incapable of roaring at!"
"I fear his daughter takes after him," said Temperley with a
tragi-comic smile.
When Hadria next met her father, he asked, with perfect but suspicious
gravity, about the music that they had been practising that afternoon. He
could not speak too highly of music as a pastime. He regretted having
rushed in as he did--it must have been so disturbing to the music. Why
not have a notice put up outside the door on these occasions:
"Engaged"? Then the meanest intelligence would understand, and
the meanest intelligence was really a thing one had to count with, in this
blundering world!
"That foolish girl has refused him!" exclaimed Valeria, when
she heard of it.
"Thank heaven!" ejaculated Professor Fortescue.
Valeria's brow clouded. "Why are you so anxious about the
matter?"
"Because I know that a marriage between those two would end in
misery."
Valeria spoke very seriously to Hadria on the subject of marriage,
urging the importance of it, and the wretchedness of growing old in
solitude.
"Better even that, than to grow old in uncongenial company,"
said Hadria.
Valeria shrugged her shoulders. "One could go away when it became
oppressive," she suggested, at which Hadria laughed.
"What an ideal existence!"
"Are you still dreaming of an ideal existence?"
"Why not?"
"Well, dream while you may," said Miss Du Prel. "My
time of dreaming was the happiest of all."
On one occasion, when Hadria and the Professor went to call at Craw
Gill, they found Miss Du Prel in the gloomiest of moods. Affection,
love?--the very blood and bones of tragedy. Solitude,
indifference?--its heart. And if for men the world was a delusion, for
women it was a torture-chamber. Nature was dead against them.
"Why do you say that?" asked Hadria.
"Because of the blundering, merciless way she has made us; because
of the needs that she has put into our hearts, and the preposterous payment
that she demands for their fulfilment; because of the equally preposterous
payment she exacts, if we elect to do without that which she teaches us to
yearn for."
Professor Fortescue, admitting the dilemma, laid the blame on the
stupidity of mankind.
The discussion was excited, for Valeria would not allow the guilt to be
thus shifted. In vain the Professor urged that Nature offers a large choice
to humanity, for the developing, balancing, annulling of its various forces
of good and evil, and that it is only when the choice is made that heredity
steps in and fixes it. This process simulates Necessity, or what we call
Nature. "Heredity may be a powerful friend, or a bitter enemy,
according as we treat her," he said.
"Then our sex must have treated her very badly!" cried Miss
Du Prel.
"Or our sex must have obliged yours to treat her
badly, which comes to the same thing," said the Professor.
They had agreed to take a walk by the river, towards Ballochcoil. It was
hoped that the fresh air and sunshine would cheer Miss Du Prel. The
Professor led the conversation to her favourite topic: ancient Greek
literature, but this only inspired her to quote the discouraging opinion of
the Medea of Euripedes.
The Professor laughed. "I see it is a really bad attack," he
said. "I sympathize. I have these inconsolable moods myself,
sometimes."
They came upon the Greek temple on the cliff-side, and paused there to
rest, for a few minutes. It was too cold to linger long under the slender
columns. They walked on, till they came in sight of the bare little church
of Ballochcoil.
The Professor instinctively turned to compare the two buildings.
"The contrast between them is so extraordinary," he
exclaimed.
Nothing could have been more eloquent of the difference in the modes of
thought which they respectively represented.
"If only, they had not made such fools of their women, I should
like to have lived at Athens in the time of Pericles!" exclaimed
Hadria.
"I," said Valeria, "would choose rather the Middle
Ages, with their mysticism and their romance."
The discussion on this point continued till the church was reached. A
psalm was being sung, in a harsh but devout fashion, by the congregation.
The sound managed to find its way to the sweet outer air, though the ugly
rectangular windows were all jealously closed against its beneficence.
The sky had become overcast, and a few drops of rain having given
warning of a shower, it was thought advisable to take shelter in the porch,
till it was over. The psalm was ground out slowly, and with apparent
fervour, to the end.
Then the voice of the minister was heard wrestling in prayer.
The Professor looked grave and sad, as he stood listening. It was
possible to hear almost all the prayer through the red baize door, and the
words, hackneyed though they were, and almost absurd in their pious
sing-song, had a naïf impressiveness and, to the listener, an intense
pathos.
The minister prayed for help and comfort for his congregation. There had
been much sickness in the village during the summer, and many were in
trouble. The good man put forth his petition to the merciful and mighty
Father, that strength might be given to the sufferers to bear all that was
sent in chastisement, for they knew that nothing would be given beyond
their ability to endure. He assured the great and mighty Lord that He had
power to succour, and that His love was without end; he prayed that as His
might and His glory were limitless, so might His mercy be to the miserable
sinners who had offended Him.
Age after age, this same prayer, in different forms, had besieged the
throne of heaven. Age after age, the spirit of
man had sought for help, and mercy, and inspiration, in the Power that was felt, or imagined, behind the veil of mystery.
From the village at the foot of the hill, vague sounds floated up, and
presently, among them and above them, could be heard the yelping and
howling of a dog.
The minister, at the moment, was glorifying his Creator and his race at
the same time, by addressing Him as "Thou who hast given unto us, Thy
servants, dominion over the beasts of the field and over every living
thing, that they may serve us and minister unto us--rdquo;
Again, and more loudly, came the cry of distress.
"I must go and see what is the matter," exclaimed the
Professor. At the moment, the howling suddenly ceased, and he paused. The
minister was still appealing to his God for mercy. "Out of the deep
have I cried unto Thee, O Lord --," and then there was a general
prayer, in which the voices of the congregation joined. Some more singing
and praying took place, before the sound of a sudden rush and movement
announced the conclusion of the service.
"We had better go," said Miss Du Prel.
They had no more than time to leave the porch, before the doors burst
open, and the people streamed forth. A whiff of evil-smelling air issued
from the building, at the same time. The dog was howling more piteously
than ever. Someone complained of the disturbance that had been caused by
the creature's cries, during worship. The congregation continued to
pour out, dividing into little groups to discuss the sermon or something of
more mundane interest. An appearance of superhuman respectability pervaded
the whole body. The important people, some of whom had their carriages
waiting to drive them home, lingered a few moments, to exchange greetings,
and to discuss sporting prospects or achievements. Meanwhile, one of the
creatures over whom God had given them dominion, was wailing in vain
appeal.
"I can't stand this," cried the Professor, and he
started off.
"I will come too," Hadria announced. Miss Du Prel said
that she could not endure the sight of suffering, and would await their return.
And then occurred the incident that made this afternoon memorable to
Hadria. In her last letter to her sister, she had said that she could not
imagine the Professor contemptuous or angry. She had reason now to change
her mind. His face was at once scornful and sad. For a moment, Hadria
thought that he was displeased with her.
"I sometimes feel," he said, with a scornful bitterness that
she had not suspected in him, "I sometimes feel that this precious
humanity of ours that we are eternally worshipping and exalting, is but a
mean, miserable thing, after all, not worth a moment's care or effort.
One's sympathy is wasted. Look at these good people whining to their
heavenly Father about their own hurts, craving for a pity of which they
have not a spark themselves!--puffed up with their little lordship
over the poor beasts that they do not hesitate to tear, and hurt, and
torture, for their own pleasure, or their own benefit,--to whom they,
in their turn, love to play the God. Cowards! And having used their Godhead
for purposes of cruelty, they fling themselves howling on their knees
before their Almighty Deity and beg for mercy, which He too knows how to
refuse!"
"Thank heaven!" exclaimed Hadria. She drew a deep sigh of
relief. Without precisely realizing the fact, she had been gradually
sinking into an unformulated conviction that human beings are, at heart,
ruthless and hard, as soon as they are brought beyond the range of familiar
moral claims, which have to be respected on pain of popular censure.
Self-initiated pity was nowhere to be found. The merciless coldness of many
excellent people (kind and tender, perhaps, within these accepted limits)
had often chilled her to the heart, and prompted a miserable doubt of the
eventual victory of good over evil in the world, which her father always
insisted was ruled by mere brute force, and would be so ruled to the end of
time. She had tried to find a wider, more generous,
and less conventional standard in her oracle, Miss Du Prel, but to her bitter disappointment, that lady had shrugged her shoulders a little callously, as soon as she was asked to extend her sympathy outside the circle of chartered candidates for her merciful consideration. Hadria's hero-worship had suffered a severe rebuff. Now, as the Professor spoke, it was as if a voice from heaven had bidden her believe and hope fearlessly in her race, and in its destiny.
"I had almost come to shrink a little from people," she
said, "as from something cruel and savage, at heart, without a grain
of real, untaught pity."
"There is only just enough to swear by," said the Professor
sadly. "We are a lot of half-tamed savages, after all, but we may be
thankful that a capacity for almost infinite development is within
us."
"I wish to heaven we could get on a little faster,"
exclaimed Hadria.
The incident proved, in the end, a fortunate one for the homeless, and
almost starving terrier, of plebeian lineage, whose wail of distress had
summoned two friends to the rescue. The creature had been ill-treated by
some boys, who found Sunday afternoon hang heavy on their hands. The
Professor carried the injured animal across the fields and through the
woods, to Dunaghee.
Here the wounds were dressed, and here the grateful creature found a new
and blissful home. His devotion to the Professor was unbounded; he followed
him everywhere.
Hadria's reverence and admiration rose to the highest pitch of
enthusiasm. Her father laughed at her. "Just as if any decent fellow
would not have done as much for a wounded brute!"
"There must have been a strange dearth of decent fellows in church
that morning then."
It was not merely the action, but the feeling revealed by the
Professor's words on that occasion, that had turned Hadria's
sentiment towards him, into one of worship.
Algitha warned her that even the Professor was human.
Hadria said she did not believe it, or rather she believed that he was
inordinately, tenderly, superlatively human, and that he had gone many
steps farther in that direction than the rest of his generation. He was
dowered with instincts and perceptions belonging to some kinder, nobler
race than ours.
Miss Du Prel looked grave. She took occasion to mention that the
Professor had never ceased to grieve for his wife, to whom he had been
passionately attached, and that he, almost alone among men, would never
love any other woman.
"I admire him only the more for that," said Hadria.
"Don't let yourself care too much for him."
"Too much!"
"Don't fall in love with him, if I must be frank."
Hadria was silent. "If one were to fall in love at
all, I don't see how it would be possible to avoid his being the
man," she pronounced at last. "I defy any creature with the
least vestige of a heart to remain indifferent to him." (Valeria
coloured.) "Why there isn't a man, woman, child, or animal about
the place who doesn't adore him and what can I
do?"
With the shortening of the days, and the sweeping away of great shoals
of leaves, in the frequent gales, Miss Du Prel's mood grew more and
more sombre. At last she announced that she could stand the gloom of this
wild North no longer. She had made arrangements to return to London, on the
morrow. As suddenly as she had appeared on the scene, she vanished, leaving
but one day to grieve at the prospect of parting.
It was through an accidental turn in the conversation, on this last day,
that the difference between her creed and the Professor's was brought
to light, accounting to Hadria for many things, and increasing, if
possible, her admiration for the unconscious Professor.
As for her own private and personal justification for hope, Valeria
asserted that she had none. Not even the thought of her work--usually
a talisman against depression--had any power to comfort. Who cared for
her work, unless she perjured herself, and told the lies that the public
loved to hear?
"What should we all do," asked Hadria, "if there were
not a few people like you and Professor Fortescue, in the world, to keep us
true to our best selves, and to point to something infinitely better than
that best?"
Miss Du Prel brightened for a moment.
"What does it matter if you do not provide mental food for
the crowd, seeking nourishment for their vulgarity? Let them go starve."
"But they don't; they go and gorge elsewhere. Besides, the
question of starvation faces me rather than them."
Miss Du Prel was still disposed to find fault with the general scheme of
things, which she regarded as responsible for her own woes, great and
little. Survival of the fittest! What was that but another name for the
torture and massacre of the unfit? Nature's favourite instruments were
war, slaughter, famine, misery (mental and physical), sacrifice and
brutality in every form, with a special malignity in her treatment of the
most highly developed and the noblest of the race.
The Professor in vain pointed out that Valeria's own revolt against
the brutality of Nature, was proof of some higher law in Nature, now in
course of development.
"The horror that is inspired in human beings by that brutality is
just as much a part of Nature as the brutality itself," he said, and
he insisted that the supreme business of man, was to evolve a scheme of
life on a higher plane, wherein the weak shall not be forced to agonize for
the strong, so far as mankind can intervene to prevent it. Let man follow
the dictates of pity and generosity in his own soul. They would never lead
him astray. While Miss Du Prel laid the whole blame upon natural law, the
Professor impeached humanity. Men, he declared, cry out against the order
of things, which they, in a large measure, have themselves created.
"But, good heavens! the whole plan of life is one of rapine.
We did not fashion the spider to prey upon the fly, or the cat
to play with the wounded mouse. We did not ordain that the
strong should fall upon the weak, and tear and torture them for their own
benefit. Surely we are not responsible for the brutalities of the animal
creation."
"No, but we are responsible when we imitate
them," said the Professor.
Miss Du Prel somewhat inconsequently attempted to defend such imitation,
on the ground that sacrifice is a law of life, a
law of which she had just been bitterly complaining. But at this, the Professor would only laugh. His opponent indignantly cited scientific authority of the most solemn and weighty kind; the Professor shook his head. Familiarity with weighty scientific authorities had bred contempt.
"Vicarious sacrifice!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outbreak
of the scorn and impatience that Hadria had seen in him on one other
occasion, "I never heard a doctrine more insane, more immoral, or
more suicidal!"
Miss Du Prel hugged herself in the thought of her long list of scouted
authorities. They had assured her that our care of the weak, by interfering
with the survival of the fittest, is injuring the race.
"Go down into the slums of our great cities, or to the
pestilential East, and there observe the survival of the fittest,
undisturbed by human knowledge or human pity," recommended the
Professor.
Miss Du Prel failed to see how this proved anything more than bad
general conditions.
"It proves that however bad general conditions may be,
some wretches will always survive; the 'fittest,'
of course, to endure filth and misery. Selection goes on without ceasing;
but if the conditions are bad, the surviving type will be miserable. Mere
unaided natural selection obviously cannot be trusted to produce a fine
race."
Nothing would convince Miss Du Prel that the preservation of weakly
persons was not injurious to the community. To this the Professor replied,
that what is lost by their salvation is more than paid back by the better
conditions that secured it. The strong, he said, were strengthened and
enabled to retain their strength by that which saves the lives of the
weak.
"Besides, do you suppose a race could gain, in the long run, by
defiance of its best instincts? Never! If the laws of health in body and in
mind were at variance, leaving us a hard choice between physical and moral
disease, then indeed no despair could be too black. But all experience and
all insight testify to the
exact opposite. Heavens, how short-sighted people are! It is not the protection of the weak, but the evil and stupid deeds that have made them so, that we have to thank for the miseries of disease. And for our redemption--powers of the universe! it is not to the cowardly sacrifice of the unfortunate that we must trust, but to a more brotherly spirit of loyalty, a more generous treatment of all who are defenceless, a more faithful holding together among ourselves--weak and strong, favoured and luckless."
Miss Du Prel was silent for a moment. Her sympathy but not her hope had
been roused.
"I wish I could believe in your scheme of redemption," she
said; "but, alas! sacrifice has been the means of progress from the
beginning of all things, and so I fear it will be to the end."
"I don't know what it will be at the end," said the
Professor, dryly; "for the present, I oppose with the whole strength
of my belief and my conscience, the cowardly idea of surrendering
individuals to the ferocity of a jealous and angry power, in the hope of
currying favour for the rest. We might just as well set up national altars
and sacrifice victims, after the franker fashion of the ancients. Morally,
the principles are precisely the same."
"Scarcely; for our object is to benefit
humanity."
"And theirs. Poor humanity!" cried the Professor.
"What crimes are we not ready to commit in thy name!"
"That cannot be a crime which benefits mankind," argued Miss
Du Prel.
"It is very certain that it cannot eventually benefit mankind, if
it be a crime," he retorted.
"This sequence of ideas makes one dizzy!" exclaimed
Hadria.
The Professor smiled. "Moreover," he added, "we know
that society has formed the conditions of existence for each of her
members; the whole material of his misfortune, if he be ill-born and
ill-conditioned. Is society then to turn and
rend her unlucky child whose misery was her own birthday gift? Shall we, who are only too ready, as it is, to trample upon others, in our haste and greed--shall we be encouraged in this savage selfishness by what dares to call itself science, to play one another false, instead of standing, with united front, to the powers of darkness, and scorning to betray our fellows, human or animal, in the contemptible hope of gaining by the treachery? Ah! you may quote authorities, wise and good, till you are hoarse!" cried the Professor, with a burst of energy; "but they will not convince me that black is white. I care not who may uphold the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice; it is monstrous, it is dastardly, it is damnable!"
There are some sentences and some incidents that fix themselves, once
for all, in the memory, often without apparent reason, to remain as an
influence throughout life. In this fashion, the afternoon's discussion
registered itself in the memory of the silent member of the trio.
In her dreams that night, those three concluding and energetic
adjectives played strange pranks, as, in dreams, words and phrases often
will. Her deep regret at Miss Du Prel's departure, her dread of her
own future, her growing sense of the torment, and horror, and sacrifice
that form so large a part of the order of the world, all appeared to be
united fantastically in malignant and threatening form, in the final words
of the Professor: "It is monstrous, it is dastardly, it is
damnable!" The agony of the whole earth seemed to hang over the
sleeper, hovering and black and intolerable, crushing her with a sense of
hopeless pity and fatigue.
And on waking, though the absurd masquerading of words and thoughts had
ceased, she was still weighed down with the horror of the dream, which she
knew had a corresponding reality still more awful. And there was no
adversary to all this anguish; everybody acquiesced, nay, everybody threw
on yet another log to the martyr's pile, and coolly watched the hungry
flames at their work, for "Nature," they all agreed, demanded
sacrifice.
It was in vain to turn for relief to the wise and good; the
"wise" insisted on keeping up the altar fires that they might
appease the blood-thirsty goddess by a continuous supply of victims (for
the noble purpose of saving the others); the "good" trusted to
the decision of the wise; they were humbly content to allow others to judge
for them for by this means would they not secure some of the spoils?
No, no; there was no help anywhere on earth, no help, no help. So ran
Hadria's thoughts, in the moments of vivid sensation, between sleeping
and waking. "Suffering, sacrifice, oppression: there is nothing else
under the sun, under the sun."
Perhaps a brilliant beam that had found its way, like a message of
mercy, through the blind, and shone straight on to the pillow, had
suggested the form of the last thought.
Hadria moved her hand into the ray, that she might feel the warmth and
"the illusion of kindness."
There was one person, and at the moment, only one, whose existence was
comforting to remember. The hundreds of kind and good people, who were
merely kind and good where popular sentiment expected or commended such
conduct, gave no re-assurance; on the contrary, they proved the desperation
of our plight, since wisdom and goodness themselves were busy at the savage
work.
When the party met at breakfast, an hour later, the Professor caused
universal consternation, by announcing that he would be obliged to return
to London on that very day, having received a letter, by the morning's
post, which left him no choice. The very butler paused, for a perceptible
period, while handing ham and eggs to the guest. Forks and knives were laid
down; letters remained unopened.
"It's no use your attempting to go, my dear Chantrey,"
said Mr. Fullerton, "we have grown accustomed to the luxury of your
society, and we can't get on without it."
But the Professor explained that his departure was inevitable, and that
he must go by the morning train.
He and Hadria had time for a short walk to the river, by the pathway of
the tunnels.
"What are your plans for the winter?" the Professor asked.
"I hope that you will find time to develop your musical gift. It
ought to be used and not wasted, or worse than wasted, as all forces are,
unless they find their legitimate outlet. Don't be persuaded to do
fancy embroidery, as a better mode of employing energy. You have peculiar
advantages of a hereditary kind, if only you can get a reasonable chance to
use them. I have unbounded faith in the Fullerton stock. It has all the
elements that ought to produce powers of the highest order. You know I have
always cherished a warm affection for your parents, but ten years more of
experience have taught me better how to value that sterling sincerity and
honour in your father, united with so much kindliness, not to mention his
qualities of brain; and then your mother's strong sense of duty, her
ability, her native love of art, and her wonderful devotion. These are
qualities that one does not meet with every day, and the children of such
parents start in life with splendid material to fashion into character and
power."
"Algitha will be worthy of our parents, I think," said
Hadria, "though she has commenced her career by disobeying
them."
"And you too must turn your power to account."
"You can't conceive how difficult it is."
"I can very easily. I see that the sacrifice of her own
development, which your mother has made for your sakes, is taking its
inevitable revenge upon her, and upon you all. One can't doom
one's best powers to decay, however excellent the motive, without
bringing punishment upon oneself and one's children, in some form or
other. You will have to fight against that penalty. I know you will not
have a smooth time of it; but who has, except cowards and weakliings? Your
safeguard will be in your work."
"And my difficulty," said Hadria. "In the world that I
was born into (for my sins), when one tries to do something that other people don't do, it is like trying to get up early in a house where the breakfast-hour is late. Nothing fits in with one's eccentric custom; everything conspires to discourage it."
"I wish I could give you a helping hand," said the Professor
wistfully; "but one is so powerless. Each of us has to fight the real
battle of life alone. Nobody can see with our eyes, or feel with our
nerves. The crux of the difficulty each bears for himself. But friendship
can help us to believe the struggle worth while; it can sustain our courage
and it can offer sympathy in victory,--but still more faithfully in
defeat."
If Hadria yielded the point on any particular occasion, her mood and her
work were destroyed: if she resisted, they were equally destroyed, through
the nervous disturbance and the intense depression which followed the
winning of a liberty too dearly bought. The incessant rising and quelling
of her impulse and her courage--like the ebb and flow of
tides--represented a vast amount of force not merely wasted, but
expended in producing a dangerous wear and tear upon the system. The
process told upon her health, and was the beginning of the weakening and
unbalancing of the splendid constitution which Hadria, in common with every
member of the family, enjoyed as a birthright. The injury was insidious but
serious. Hadria, unable to command any certain part of the day, began to
sit up at night. This led to a direct clash of wills. Mr. Fullerton said
that the girl was doing
her best to ruin her health for life; Mrs. Fullerton wished to know why Hadria, who had all the day at her disposal, could not spend the night rationally.
"But I haven't all the day, or any part of it, for
certain," said Hadria.
"If you grudge the little services you do for me, pray abandon
them," said the mother, genuinely hurt.
Hadria entered her room, one evening, tired out and profoundly
depressed. A table, covered with books, stood beside the fire. She gave the
top-heavy pile an impatient thrust and the mass fell, with a great crash,
to the floor. A heap of manuscript--her musical achievement for the
past year--was involved in the fall. She contemplated the wreck
gravely.
"Yes, it is I who am weak, not circumstance that is strong. If I
could keep my mind unmoved by the irritations; if I could quarrel with
mother, and displease father, and offend all the world without a qualm, or
without losing the delicate balance of thought and mood necessary for
composition, then I should, to some extent, triumph over my circumstances;
I should not lose so much time in this wretched unstringing. Only were I so
immovably constituted, is it probable that I should be able to compose at
all?"
She drew the score towards her. "People are surprised that women
have never done anything noteworthy in music. People are so
intelligent!" She turned over the pages critically. If only this
instinct were not so overwhelmingly strong! Hadria wondered how many other
women, from the beginning of history, had cursed the impulse to create!
Fortunately, it was sometimes extinguished altogether, as to-night, for
instance, when every impression, every desire was swept clean out of her,
and her mind presented a creditable blank, such as really ought to satisfy
the most exacting social mentor. In such a state, a woman might be induced
to accept anything!
Hadria brought out two letters from her pocket; one from the Professor,
the other from Miss Du Prel. The latter had
been writing frequently of late, pointing out the danger of Hadria's exaggerated ideas, and the probability of their ruining her happiness in life. Valeria had suffered herself from "ideas," and knew how fatal they were. Life could not be exactly as one would have it, and it was absolutely necessary, in order to avoid misery for oneself and others, to consent to take things more or less as they were; to make up one's mind to bend a little, rather than have to break, in the end. Things were never quite so shocking as they seemed to one's youthful imagination. The world was made up of compromises. Good was mixed with evil everywhere. The domestic idea, as Hadria called it, might be, in its present phase, somewhat offensive, but it could be redeemed in its application, in the details and "extenuating circumstances." Valeria could not warn Hadria too earnestly against falling into the mistake that Valeria herself had made. She had repudiated the notion of anything short of an ideal union; a perfect comradeship, without the shadow of restraint or bondage in the relationship; and not having found it, she had refused the tie altogether. She could not bring herself to accept the lesser thing, having conceived the possibility of the greater. She now saw her error, and repented it. She was reaping the penalty in a lonely and unsatisfied life. For a long time her work had seemed to suffice, but she felt now that she had been trusting to a broken reed. She was terrified at her solitude. She could not face the thought of old age, without a single close tie, without a home, without a hold upon her race.
She ended by entreating Hadria not to refuse marriage merely because she
could not find a man to agree with her in everything, or capable of
entering into the spirit of the relationship that perhaps would unite the
men and women of the future. It was a pity that Hadria had not been born a
generation later, but since she had come into the world at this time of
transition, she must try to avoid the tragedy that threatens all spirits
who are pointing towards the
new order, while the old is still working out its unexhausted impetus.
This reiterated advice had begun to trouble Hadria. It did not convince
her, but Valeria's words were incessantly repeating themselves in her
mind working as a ferment among her thoughts.
The letters from Miss Du Prel and the Professor were to her, a source of
great pleasure and of great pain. In her depressed moods, they would often
rather increase her despondency, because the writers used to take for
granted so many achievements that she had not been able to accomplish.
"They think I am living and progressing as they are; they do not
know that the riot and stir of intellectual life has ceased. I am like a
creature struggling in a quicksand."
On the Professor's letter, the comments were of a different
character.
He had recommended her to read certain books, and reminded her that no
possessor of good books could lack the privilege of spiritual
sanctuary.
"Ah! yes, I know few pleasures so great as that of finding
one's own idea, or hope, or longing, finely expressed, half-born
thoughts alive and of stately stature; and then the exquisite touches of
art upon quick nerves, the enlarging of the realms of imagination,
knowledge, the heightening of perceptions, intuitions; finally the blessed
power of escaping from oneself, with the paradoxical reward of greater
self-realization! But, ah, Professor, to me there is a 'but'
even here. I am oppressed by a sense of the discrepancy between the world
that books disclose to me, and the world that I myself inhabit. In books,
the impossibilities are all left out. They give you no sense
of the sordid Inevitable that looms so large on the grey horizon. Another
more personal quarrel that I have with books is on account of their
attacking all my pet prejudices, and sneering at the type of woman that I
have the misfortune to belong to. I am always exhorted to cure myself of
being myself. Nothing less would suffice. Now this is wounding. All my
particular feelings, my strongest beliefs, are condemned, directly or by inference. I could almost believe that there is a literary conspiracy to reform me. The "true women" of literature infallibly think and feel precisely as I do not think and feel, while the sentiments that I detest--woe is me--are lauded to the skies. Truly, if we women don't know exactly what we ought to think and feel, it is not for want of telling. Yet you say, Professor, in this very letter, that the sense of having a peculiar experience is always an illusion, that every feeling of ours has been felt before, if not in our own day, then in the crowded past, with its throngs of forgotten lives and unrecorded experiences. I wish to heaven I could meet those who have had exactly mine!"
Hadria did not keep up an active correspondence with Miss Du Prel or
with the Professor. She had no idea of adding to the burden of their busy
lives, by wails for sympathy. It seemed to her feeble, and contemptible, to
ask to be dragged up by their strength, instead of exerting her own. If
that were insufficient, why then let her go down, as thousands had gone
down before her. As a miser telling his gold, she would read and re-read
those occasional letters, written amidst the stress of life at high
pressure, and bearing evidence of that life of thought and work, in their
tense, full-packed phrases. With what a throb of longing and envy Hadria
used to feel the vibration through her own nerves! It was only when
completely exhausted and harassed that the response was lacking. To-night
everything seemed to be obliterated. Her hope, her interest were, for the
moment, tired out. Her friends would be disappointed in her, but there was
no help for it.
She picked up the score of her music, and stood, with a handful of the
once precious offspring of her brain held out towards the flames. Then she
drew it back, and half closed her eyes in self-scrutinizing thought.
"Come now," she said to herself, "are you sincere in your
intention of giving up? Are you pot doing this in a fit of spite against
destiny? as if destiny cared two straws. Heavens! what a poor little
piece of melodrama. And to think that you should have actually taken yourself in it by it. One acts so badly with only oneself for audience. You know perfectly well that you are not going to give in, you are not going to attempt to stifle that which is the centre of your life: you have not courage for such slow suicide. Don't add insincerity to the other faults that are laid to your account--" She mused over the little self-administered lecture. And probing down into her consciousness, she realized that she could not face the thought of surrender. She meant to fight on. The notion of giving in had been seized instinctively, for a moment of rest. Nothing should really make her cease the struggle, until the power itself had been destroyed. She was sure of it, in her heart, in spite of failures and miserably inadequate expressions of it. Suddenly, as a shaft of light through parting clouds, came bursting forth, radiant, rejoicing, that sense of power, large, resistless, genial as morning sunshine. Yes, yes, let them say what they might, discourage, smile, or frown as they would, the faculty was given to her, and she would fight for opportunity to use it while she had breath.
Often, in the dim afternoon, she would sit by the window and watch the
rain sweeping across the country, longing then for Temperley's music,
which used to make the wild scene so unspeakably beautiful. Now there was
no music, no music anywhere, only this fierce and mournful rush of the
wind, which seemed as if it were trying to utter some universal grief. At
sunset, braving the cold, she would mount the creaking staircase, pass
along the silent upper corridors, and on through the empty rooms to the
garret in the tower. The solitude was a relief; the strangeness of the
scene appealed to some wild instinct, and to the intense melancholy that
lurks in the Celtic nature.
Even at night, she did not shrink from braving the glooms and silences
of the deserted upper floor, nor the solitude of the garret, which appeared
the deeper, from the many memories of happy evenings that it evoked. She
wished Ernest would come home. It was so long since she had seen her
favourite brother. She could not bear the thought of his drifting away from
her. What talks they had had in this old garret!
These nights in the tower, among the winds, soothed the trouble of her
spirit as nothing else had power to do. The mystery of life, the thrill of
existence, touched her with a strange joy that ran perilously near to pain.
What vast dim possibilities lurked out there, in the hollows of the hills!
What inspiration thundered in the voice of the prophet wind!
Once, she had gone downstairs and out, alone, in a tearing storm, to
wander across the bleak pastures, wrapt round by the wind as by a flame; at
one with the desperate elemental thing.
The wanderer felt herself caught into the heart of some vast unknown
power, of which the wind was but a thrall, until she became, for a moment,
consciously part of that which was universal. Her personality grew dim she
stood, as it seemed, face to face with Nature, divided from the ultimate
truth by only a thin veil, to temper the splendour and the terror. Then the
tension of personal feeling was loosened. She saw how entirely vain and
futile were the things of life that we grieve and struggle over.
It was not a side, an aspect of existence, but the whole of it that
seemed to storm round her, in the darkness. No wonder, when the wind was
let loose among the mountains, that the old Highland people thought that
their dead were about them. All night long, after Hadria returned to her
room in the keep, the wind kept up its cannonade against the walls, hooting
in the chimneys with derisive voices, and flinging itself, in mad revolt,
against the old-established hills and the stable earth, which changed its
forms only in slow obedience to the persuadings of the elements, in the
passing of centuries. It cared nothing for the passion of a single
storm.
And then came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production
of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalculæ that
her father had so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water;
yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous processes
of life had at last created a widening consciousness, a mind which could
perceive the bewildering vastness of Nature and its own smallness, which
could, in some measure, get outside its own particular ditch, and the
strife and struggle of it, groping upwards for larger realities--
"Over us stars and under us graves."
To go down next morning to breakfast; to meet the usual homely events,
was bewildering after such a night.
Which was dream: this or that? So solid and convincing seemed, at times, the interests and objects of every day, that Hadria would veer round to a sudden conviction that these things, or what they symbolized, were indeed the solid facts of human life, and that all other impressions arose from the disorderly working of overcharged brain-cells. It was a little ailment of youth and would pass off. Had it been possible to describe to her father the impressions made upon her by the world and Nature, as they had presented themselves to her imagination from her childhood, he would have prescribed change of air and gymnastics. Perhaps that was the really rational view of the matter. But what if these hygienic measures cured her of the haunting consciousness of mystery and vastness; what if she became convinced of the essential importance of the Gordon pedigree, or of the amount of social consideration due to the family who had taken Clarenoc? Would that alter the bewildring truths of which she would have ceased to think?
No; it would only mean that the animalcule had returned to the
occupations of its ditch, while the worlds and the peoples went spinning to
their destiny.
"Do the duty that lies nearest thee," counselled everybody:
people of all kinds, books of all kinds. "Cheap, well-sounding
advice," thought Hadria, "sure of popularity! Continue to
wriggle industriously, O animalcule, in that particular ditch wherein it
has pleased heaven to place thee; seek not the flowing stream and the salt
ocean; and if, some clear night, a star finds room to mirror itself in thy
little stagnant world, shining through the fat weeds and slime that almost
shut out the heavens, pray be careful not to pay too much heed to the
high-born luminary. Look to your wriggling; that is your proper business.
An animalcule that does not wriggle must be morbid or peculiar. All will
tender, in different forms of varying elegance, the safe and simple
admonition: 'Wriggle and be damned to you!'"
It was at this somewhat fevered moment, that Hubert Temperley appeared,
once more, upon the scene. Hadria was with her mother, taking tea at
Drumgarren, when Mrs. Gordon, catching the sounds of carriage wheels,
announced that she was expecting Hubert and his sister for a visit. In
another second, the travellers were in the drawing-room.
Hubert's self-possession was equal to the occasion. He introduced
his sister to Mrs. Fullerton and Hadria. Miss Temperley was his junior by a
year; a slight, neatly-built young woman, with a sort of tact that went on
brilliantly up to a certain point, and then suddenly collapsed altogether.
She had her brother's self-complacency, and an air of encouragement
which Mrs. Gordon seemed to find most gratifying.
She dressed perfectly, in quiet Parisian fashion. Hadria saw that her
brother had taken her into his confidence, or she concluded so from
something in Miss Temperley's manner. The latter treated Hadria with a
certain familiarity, as if she had known her for some time, and she had a
way of seeming to take her apart, when addressing her, as if there were a
sort of understanding between them. It was here that her instinct failed
her; for she seemed unaware that this assumption of an intimacy that did
not exist was liable to be resented, and that it might be unpleasant to be
expected to catch special remarks sent over the heads of the others,
although ostensibly for the common weal.
Hadria thought that she had never seen so strange a contrast as this
young woman's behaviour, within and without the circle of her
perceptions. It was the more remarkable, since her mind was bent upon the
details and niceties of conduct, and the
nuances of existence.
"I shall come and see you as soon as I can," she promised,
when Mrs. Fullerton rose to leave.
Miss Temperley kept her word. She was charmed with the old house,
praising authoritatively.
"This is an excellent piece of carving; far superior to the one in
the dining-room. Ah, yes, that is charming; so well
arranged. You ought to have a touch of blue there to make it perfect."
Hubert shewed good taste in keeping away from Dunaghee, except to pay
his call on Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton.
"Hadria," said his sister, "I am going to call you by
your pretty Christian name, and I want you to call me Henriette. I feel I
have known you much longer than ten days, because Hubert has told me so
much about you, and your music. You play charmingly. So much native talent.
You want good training, of course; but you really might become a brilliant
performer. Hubert is quite distressed that you should not enjoy more
advantages. I should like so much if you could come and stay with us in
town, and have some good lessons. Do think of it."
Hadria flushed. "Oh, thank you, I could not do
that--I--"
"I understand you, dear Hadria," said Henriette, drawing her
chair closer to the fire. "You know, Hubert can never keep anything
of great importance from me." She looked arch.
Hadria muttered something that might have discouraged a less persistent
spirit, but Miss Temperley paid no attention.
"Poor Hubert! I have had to be a ministering angel to him during
these last months."
"Why do you open up this subject, Miss Temperley?"
"Henriette, if you please," cried that young
woman, with the air of a playful potentate who has requested a favoured
courtier to drop the ceremonious "Your Majesty" in private
conversation.
"It was I who made him accept Mrs. Gordon's invitation. He
very nearly refused it. He feared that it would be unpleasant for you. But
I insisted on his coming. Why should he not? He would like so much to come
here more often, but again he fears to displease you. He is not a Temperley
for nothing. They are not of the race of fools who rush in where angels
fear to tread."
"Are they not?" asked Hadria absently.
"We both see your difficulty," Miss Temperley went on.
"Hubert would not so misunderstand you--the dear fellow is full
of delicacy--and I should dearly love to hear him play to your
accompaniment; he used to enjoy those practices so much. Would you think
him intrusive if he brought his 'cello
some afternoon?"
Hadria, not without an uneasy qualm, agreed to the suggestion, though by
no means cordially.
Accordingly brother and sister arrived, one afternoon, for the practice.
Henriette took the leadership, visibly employed tact and judgment, talked a
great deal, and was surprisingly delicate, as beseemed a Temperley. Hadria
found the occasion somewhat trying nevertheless, and Hubert stumbled, at
first, in his playing. In a few minutes, however, both musicians became
possessed by the music, and then all went well. Henriette sat in an easy
chair and listened critically. Now and then she would call out
"bravo," or "admirable," and when the performance
was over, she was warm in her congratulations.
Hadria was flushed with the effort and pleasure of the performance.
"I never heard Hubert's playing to such advantage,"
said his sister. "I seem to hear it for the first time. You really
ought to practise together often." Another afternoon was appointed;
Henriette left Hadria almost no choice.
After the next meeting, the constraint had a little worn off, and the
temptation to continue the practising was very strong. Henriette's
presence was reassuring. And then Hubert seemed so reasonable, and had
apparently put the past out of his mind altogether.
After the practice, brother and sister would linger a little in the
drawing-room, chatting. Hubert appeared to advantage in his sister's
society. She had a way of striking his best vein. Her own talent ran with
his, appealed to it, and created the conditions for its display. Her
presence and
inspiration seemed to produce, on his ability, a sort of cumulative effect. Henriette set all the familiar machinery in motion; pressed the right button, and her brother became brilliant.
A slight touch of diffidence in his manner softened the effect of his
usual complacency. Hadria liked him better than she had liked him on his
previous visit. His innate refinement appealed to her powerfully. Moreover,
he was cultivated and well-read, and his society was agreeable. Oh, why did
this everlasting, matrimonial idea come in and spoil everything? Why could
not men and women have interests in common, without wishing instantly to
plunge into a condition of things which hampered and crippled them so
miserably?
Hadria was disposed to under-rate all defects, and to make the most of
all virtues in Hubert, at the present moment. He had come at just the right
time to make a favourable impression upon her; for the loneliness of her
life had begun to leave its mark, and to render her extremely sensitive to
influence.
She was an alien among the people of her circle; and she felt vaguely
guilty in failing to share their ideas and ambitions. Their glances, their
silences, conveyed a world of cold surprise and condemnation.
Hubert was tolerance itself compared with the majority of her
associates. She felt almost as if he had done her a personal kindness when
he omitted to look astonished at her remarks, or to ignore them as
"awkward."
Yet she felt uneasy about this renewal of the practices, and tried to
avoid them as often as possible, though sorely against her inclination.
They were so great a relief and enjoyment. Her inexperience, and her
carelessness of conventional standards, put her somewhat off her guard.
Hubert showed no signs of even remembering the interview of last year, that
had been cut short by her father's entrance. Why should
she insist on keeping it in mind? It was foolish. Moreover she
had been expressly given to understand, in a most pointed manner, that her conduct would not be misinterpreted if she allowed him to come occasionally.
From several remarks that Temperley made, she saw that he too regarded
the ordinary domestic existence with distaste. It offended his
fastidiousness. He was fastidious to his finger-tips. It amused Hadria to
note the contrast between him and Mr. Gordon, who was a typical father of a
family; limited in his interests to that circle; an amiable ruler of a
tiny, somewhat absurd little world, pompous and important and inconceivably
dull.
The bourgeois side of this life was
evidently displeasing to Hubert. Good taste was his fetish. From his
remarks about women, Hadria was led to observe how subtly critical he was
with regard to feminine qualities, and wondered if his preference for
herself ought to be regarded as a great compliment.
Henriette congratulated her on having been admired by the fastidious
Hubert.
"Let us hope it speaks well for me," Hadria replied with a
cynical smile, "but I have so often noticed that men who are very
difficult to please, choose for the domestic hearth the most dreary and
unattractive woman of their acquaintance! I sometimes doubt if men ever do
marry the women they most admire."
"They do, when they can win them," said Henriette.
"I have chosen for my subject to-night," said the lecturer,
"one that is beginning to occupy public attention very largely: I
mean the sphere of woman in society."
The audience, among whom Hubert had been admitted at his sister's
earnest request, drew themselves together, and a little murmur of battle
ran along the line. Henriette's figure, in her well-fitting Parisian
gown, looked singularly out of place in the garret, with the crazy old
candle-holder beside her, the yellow flame of the candle flinging fantastic
shadows on the vaulted roof, preposterously distorting her neat form, as if
in wicked mockery. The moonlight streamed in, as usual on the nights chosen
by the Society for their meetings.
Henriette's paper was neatly expressed, and its sentiments were
admirable. She maintained a perfect balance between the bigotry of the past
and the violence of the present. Her
phrases seemed to rock, like a pair of scales, from excess to excess, on either side. She came to rest in the exact middle. This led to the Johnsonian structure, or, as Hadria afterwards said, to the style of a Times leading article: "While we remember on the one hand, we must not forget on the other--"
At the end of the lecture, the audience found themselves invited to
sympathize cautiously and circumspectly with the advancement of women, but
led, at the same time, to conclude that good taste and good feeling forbade
any really nice woman from moving a little finger to attain, or to help
others to attain, the smallest fraction more of freedom, or an inch more of
spiritual territory, than was now enjoyed by her sex. When, at some future
time, wider privileges should have been conquered by the exertions of
someone else, then the really nice woman could saunter in and enjoy the
booty. But till then, let her leave boisterous agitation to others, and
endear herself to all around her by her patience and her loving
self-sacrifice.
"That pays better for the present," Hadria was heard to
mutter to an adjacent member.
The lecturer, in her concluding remarks, gave a smile of ineffable
sweetness, sadly marred, however, by the grotesque effect of the flickering
shadows that were cast on her face by the candle. After all,
duty not right was the really important matter,
and the lecturer thought that it would be better if one heard the former
word rather oftener in connection with the woman's question, and the
latter word rather more seldom. Then, with new sweetness, and in a tone not
to be described, she went on to speak of the natural responsibilities and
joys of her sex, drawing a moving, if somewhat familiar picture of those
avocations, than which she was sure there could be nothing higher or
holier.
For some not easily explained cause, the construction of this sentence
gave it a peculiar unctuous force: "than which," as Fred
afterwards remarked, "would have bowled over any but the most
hardened sinner."
For weeks after this memorable lecture, if any very lofty
altitude had to be ascended in conversational excursions, the aspirant invariably smiled with ineffable tenderness and lightly scaled the height, murmuring "than which" to a vanquished audience.
The lecture was followed by a discussion that rather took the stiffness
out of Miss Temperley's phrases. The whole party was roused. Algitha
had to whisper a remonstrance to the boys, for their solemn questions were
becoming too preposterous. The lecture was discussed with much warmth.
There was a tendency to adopt the form "than which" with some
frequency. Bursts of laughter startled a company of rats in the
wainscoting, and there was a lively scamper behind the walls. No obvious
opposition was offered. Miss Temperley's views were examined with
gravity, and indeed in a manner almost pompous. But by the end of that
trying process, they had a sadly bedraggled and plucked appearance, much to
their parent's bewilderment. She endeavoured to explain further, and
was met by guilelessly intelligent questions, which had the effect of
depriving the luckless objects of their solitary remaining feather. The
members of the society continued to pine for information, and Miss
Temperley endeavoured to provide it, till late into the night. The
discussion finally drifted on to dangerous ground. Algitha declared that
she considered that no man had any just right to ask a woman to pledge
herself to love him and live with him for the rest of her life. How
could she? Hubert suggested that the woman made the same claim
on the man.
"Which is equally absurd," said Algitha. "Just as if
any two people, when they are beginning to form their characters, could
possibly be sure of their sentiments for the rest of their days. They have
no business to marry at such an age. They are bound to alter."
"But they must regard it as their duty not to alter with regard to
one another," said Henriette.
"Quite so; just as they ought to regard it as their duty among
other things, not to grow old," suggested Fred.
"Then, Algitha, do you mean that they may fall in love
elsewhere?" Ernest inquired.
"They very likely will do so, if they make such an
absurd start," Algitha declared.
"And if they do?"
"Then, if the sentiment stands test and trial, and proves genuine,
and not a silly freak, the fact ought to be frankly faced. Husband and wife
have no business to go on keeping up a bond that has become false and
irksome."
Miss Temperley broke into protest. "But surely you don't mean
to defend such faithlessness."
Algitha would not admit that it was faithlessness. She said
it was mere honesty. She could see nothing inherently wrong in falling in
love genuinely after one arrived at years of discretion. She thought it
inherently idiotic, and worse, to make a choice that ought to be for life,
at years of indiscretion. Still, people were
idiotic, and that must be considered, as well as all the other facts, such
as the difficulty of really knowing each other before marriage, owing to
social arrangements, and also owing to the training, which made men and
women always pose so ridiculously towards one another, pretending to be
something that they were not.
"Well done, Algitha," cried Ernest, laughing; "I like
to hear you speak out. Now tell me frankly: supposing you married quite
young, before you had had much experience; supposing you afterwards found
that you and your husband had both been deceiving yourselves and each
other, unconsciously perhaps; and suppose, when more fully awakened and
developed, you met another fellow and fell in love with him genuinely, what
would you do?"
"Oh, she would just mention it to her husband casually,"
Fred interposed with a chuckle, "and disappear."
"I should certainly not go through terrific emotions and
self-accusations, and think the end of the world had come," said
Algitha serenely. "I should calmly face the situation."
"Calmly! She by supposition being madly in love!" ejaculated
Fred, with a chuckle.
"Calmly," repeated Algitha. "And I should consider
carefully what would be best for all concerned. If I decided, after mature
consideration and self-testing, that I ought to leave my husband, I should
leave him, as I should hope he would leave me, in similar circumstances.
That is my idea of right."
"And is this also your idea of right, Miss Fullerton?" asked
Temperley, turning, in some trepidation, to Hadria.
"That seems to me right in the abstract. One can't pronounce
for particular cases where circumstances are entangled."
Hubert sank back in his chair, and ran his hand over his brow. He seemed
about to speak, but he checked himself.
"Where did you get such extraordinary ideas from?" cried
Miss Temperley.
"They were like Topsy; they growed," said Fred.
"We have been in the habit of speculating freely on all
subjects," said Ernest, "ever since we could talk. This is the
blessed result!"
"I am not quite so sure now, that the Preposterous Society meets
with my approval," observed Miss Temperley.
"If you had been brought up in the bosom of this Society, Miss
Temperley, you too, perhaps, would have come to this. Think of
it!"
"Does your mother know what sort of subjects you
discuss?"
There was a shout of laughter. "Mother used often to come into the
nursery and surprise us in hot discussion on the origin of evil,"
said Hadria.
"Don't you believe what she says, Miss Temperley,"
cried Fred; "mother never could teach Hadria the most rudimentary
notions of accuracy."
"Her failure with my brothers, was in the department of
manners," Hadria observed.
"Then she does not know what you talk about?"
persisted Henriette.
"You ask her," prompted Fred, with undisguised glee.
"She never attends our meetings," said Algitha.
"Well, well, I cannot understand it!" cried Miss Temperley.
"However, you don't quite know what you are talking about, and
one mustn't blame you."
"No, don't," urged Fred; "we are a sensitive
family."
"Shut up!" cried Ernest with a warning frown.
"Oh, you are a coarse-grained exception; I speak of the family
average," Fred answered with serenity.
Henriette felt that nothing more could be done with this strange
audience. Her business was really with the President of the Society. The
girl was bent on ruining her life with these wild notions. Miss Temperley
decided that it would be better to talk to Hadria quietly in her own room,
away from the influence of these eccentric brothers and that extraordinary
sister. After all, it was Algitha who had originated the shocking view, not
Hadria, who had merely agreed, doubtless out of a desire to support her
sister.
"I have not known you for seven years, but I am going to poke your
fire," said Henriette, when they were established in Hadria's
room.
"I never thought you would wait so long as that," was
Hadria's ambiguous reply.
Then Henriette opened her batteries. She talked without interruption,
her companion listening, agreeing occasionally with her adversary, in a
disconcerting manner; then falling into silence.
"It seems to me that you are making a very terrible mistake in
your life, Hadria. You have taken up a fixed idea about domestic duties and
all that, and are going to throw away your chances of forming a happy home
of your own, out of a mere prejudice. You may not admire Mrs. Gordon's
existence; for my part I think she leads a very good, useful life, but
there is no reason why all married lives should be like hers."
"Why are they, then?"
"I don't see that they are."
"It is the prevailing type. It shows the why the domestic wind
blows. Fancy having to be always resisting such a wind. What an oblique,
shorn-looking object one would be after a few years!"
Henriette grew eloquent. She recalled instances of women who had
fulfilled all their home duties, and been successful in other walks as
well; she drew pictures in attractive colours of Hadria in a home of her
own, with far more liberty than was possible under her parents' roof:
and then she drew another picture of Hadria fifteen years hence at
Dunaghee.
Hadria covered her face with her hands. "You who uphold all these
social arrangements, how do you feel when you find yourself obliged to urge
me to marry, not for the sake of the positive joys of domestic existence,
but for the merely negative advantage of avoiding a hapless and forlorn
state? You propose it as a pis-aller. Does
that argue that all is sound in the state of
Denmark?"
"If you had not this unreasonable objection to what is really a
woman's natural destiny, the difficulty would not exist."
"Have women no pride?"
Henriette did not answer.
"Have they no sense of dignity? If one marries (accepting things
on the usual basis, of course) one gives to another person rights and
powers over one's life that are practically boundless. To retain
one's self-direction in case of dispute would be possible only on pain
of social ruin. I have little enough freedom now, heaven knows; but if I
married, why my very thoughts would become the property of another.
Thought, emotion, love itself, must pass under the yoke! There would be no
nook or corner entirely and indisputably my own."
"I should not regard that as a hardship," said Henriette,
"if I loved my husband."
"I should consider it not only a hardship, but beyond
endurance."
"But, my dear, you are impracticable."
"That is what I think domestic life is!" Hadria's quiet
tone was suddenly changed to one of scorn. "You talk of love; what
has love worthy of the name to do with this preposterous interference with
the freedom of another person? If that is what love
means--the craving to possess and restrain and demand and hamper and
absorb, and generally make mince-meat of the beloved object, then preserve
me from the master-passion."
Henriette was baffled. "I don't know how to make you see this
in a truer light," she said. "There is something to my mind so
beautiful in the close union of two human beings, who pledge themselves to
love and honour one another, to face life hand in hand, to share every
thought, every hope, to renounce each his own wishes for the sake of the
other."
"That sounds very elevating; in practice it breeds Mr. and Mrs.
Gordon."
"Do you mean to tell me you will never marry on this
account?"
"I would never marry anyone who would exact the usual submissions
and renunciations, or even desire them, which I suppose amounts almost to
saying that I shall never marry at all. What man would endure a wife who
demanded to retain her absolute freedom, as in the case of a close
friendship? The man is not born!"
"You seem to forget, dear Hadria, in objecting to place yourself
under the yoke, as you call it, that your husband would also be obliged to
resign part of his independence to you. The prospect of loss
of liberty in marriage often prevents a man from marrying ("Wise
man!" ejaculated Hadria), so you see the disadvantage is not all on
one side, if so you choose to consider it."
"Good heavens! do you think that the opportunity to interfere with
another person would console me for being interfered with myself? I
don't want my share of the constraining power. I would as soon accept
the lash of a
slave-driver. This moral lash is almost more odious than the other, for its thongs are made of the affections and the domestic 'virtues,' than which there can be nothing sneakier or more detestable!"
Henriette heaved a discouraged sigh. "You are wrong, my dear
Hadria," she said emphatically; "you are wrong, wrong,
wrong."
"How? why?"
"One can't have everything in this life. You must be willing
to resign part of your privileges for the sake of the far greater
privileges that you acquire."
"I can imagine nothing that would compensate for the loss of
freedom, the right to oneself."
"What about love?" murmured Henriette.
"Love!" echoed Hadria scornfully. "Do you suppose I
could ever love a man who had the paltry, ungenerous instinct to enchain
me?"
"Why use such extreme terms? Love does not enchain."
"Exactly what I contend," interrupted Hadria.
"But naturally husband and wife have claims."
"Naturally. I have just been objecting to them in what you
describe as extreme terms."
"But I mean, when people care for one another, it is a joy to them
to acknowledge ties and obligations of affection."
"Ah! one knows what that euphemism means!"
"Pray what does it mean?"
"That the one serious endeavour in the life of married people is
to be able to call each other's souls their own."
Henriette stared.
"My language may not be limpid."
"Oh, I see what you mean. I was only wondering who can have taught
you all these strange ideas."
Hadria at length gave way to a laugh that had been threatening for some
time.
"My mother," she observed simply.
Henriette gave it up.
Algitha shook her head. "It is a mad world," she said.
"Week after week goes by, and there seems no lifting of the awful
darkness in which the lives of these millions are passed. We want workers
by the thousand. Yet, as if in mockery, the Devil keeps these well-fed
thousands eating their hearts out in idleness or artificial occupations
till they become diseased merely for want of something to do. Then,"
added Algitha, "His Majesty marries them, and sets them to work to
create another houseful of idle creatures, who have to be supported by the
deathly toil of those who labour too much."
"The devil is full of resources!" said Hadria.
Miss Temperley had been asked to stay at Dunaghee for
the New Year. Algitha conceived for her a sentiment almost vindictive. Hadria and the boys enjoyed nothing better than to watch Miss Temperley giving forth her opinions, while Algitha's figure gradually stiffened and her neck drew out, as Fred said, in truly telescopic fashion, like that of Alice in Wonderland. The boys constructed a figure of cushions, stuffed into one of Algitha's old gowns, the neck being a padded broom-handle, made to work up and down at pleasure; and with this counterfeit presentment of their sister, they used to act the scene amidst shouts of applause, Miss Temperley entering, on one occasion, when the improvised cocoa-nut head had reached its culminating point of high disdain, somewhere about the level of the curtain-poles.
On New-Year's-eve, Dunaghee was full of guests. There was to be a
children's party, to which however most of the grown-up neighbours
were also invited.
"What a charming sight!" cried Henriette, standing with her
neat foot on the fender in the hall, where the children were playing blind
man's buff.
Mrs. Fullerton sat watching them with a dreamy smile. The scene recalled
many an old memory. Mr. Fullerton was playing with the children.
Everyone remarked how well the two girls looked in their new evening
gowns. They had made them themselves, in consequence of a wager with Fred,
who had challenged them to combine pink and green satisfactorily.
"The gowns are perfect!" Temperley ventured to remark.
"So much distinction!"
"All my doing," cried Fred. "I chose the
colours."
"Distinction comes from within," said Temperley. "I
should like to see what sort of gown in pink and green Mrs. --."
He stopped short abruptly.
Fred gave a chuckle. Indiscreet eyes wandered towards Mrs. Gordon's
brocade and silver.
Later in the evening, that lady played dance music in a florid manner,
resembling her taste in dress. The younger children had gone home, and the
hall was filled with spinning couples.
"I hope we are to have some national dances," said Miss
Temperley. "My brother and I are both looking forward to seeing a
true reel danced by natives of the country."
"Oh, certainly!" said Mr. Fullerton. "My daughters are
rather celebrated for their reels, especially Hadria." Mr. Fullerton
executed a step or two with great agility.
"The girl gets quite out of herself when she is dancing,"
said Mrs. Fullerton. "She won't be scolded about it, for she
says she takes after her father!"
"That's the time to get round her," observed Fred.
"If we want to set her up to some real fun, we always play a reel and
wait till she's well into the spirit of the thing, and then, I'll
wager, she would stick at nothing."
"It's a fact," added Ernest. "It really seems to
half mesmerise her."
"How very curious!" cried Miss Temperley.
She and her brother found themselves watching the dancing a little apart
from the others.
"I would try again to-night, Hubert," she said in a low
voice.
He was silent for a moment, twirling the tassel of the curtain.
"There is nothing to be really alarmed at in her ideas, regretable
as they are. She is young. That sort of thing will soon wear off after she
is married."
Temperley flung away the tassel.
"She doesn't know what she is talking about. These high-flown
lectures and discussions have filled all their heads with nonsense. It will
have to be rooted out when they come to face the world. No use to oppose
her now. Nothing but experience will teach her. She must just be humoured
for the present. They have all run a little wild in their
notions. Time will cure that."
"I am sure of it," said Hubert tolerantly. "They
don't know the real import of what they say." He hugged this
sentence with satisfaction.
"They are like the young Russians one reads about in
Turgenieff's novels," said Henriette--"all ideas, no
commonsense."
"And you really believe--?"
Henriette's hand was laid comfortingly on her brother's
arm.
"Dear Hubert, I know something of my sex. After a year of married
life, a woman has too many cares and responsibilities to trouble about
ideas of this kind, or of any other."
"She strikes me as being somewhat persistent by nature,"
said Hubert, choosing a gentler word than obstinate to
describe the quality in the lady of his affections.
"Let her be as persistent as she may, it is not possible for any
woman to resist the laws and beliefs of Society. What can she do against
all the world? She can't escape from the conditions of her epoch. Oh!
she may talk boldly now, for she does not understand; she is a mere infant
as regards knowledge of the world, but once a wife--"
Henriette smiled and shook her head, by way of finish to her sentence.
Hubert mused silently for some minutes.
"I could not endure that there should be any disturbance--any
eccentricity--in our life--"
"My dear boy, if you don't trust to the teaching of
experience to cure Hadria of these fantastic notions, rely upon the
resistless persuasions of our social facts and laws. Nothing can stand
against them--certainly not the fretful heresies of an inexperienced
girl, who, remember, is really good and kind at heart."
"Ah! yes," cried Hubert; "a fine nature, full of good
instincts, and womanly to her finger-tips."
"Oh! if she were not that, I would never encourage
you to think of her," cried Henriette with a shudder. "It is on
this essential goodness of heart that I rely. She would never be able, try
as she might, to act in a manner that would really distress those who were
dear to her. You may count upon that securely."
"Yes; I am sure of it," said Hubert, "but
unluckily" (he shook his head and sighed) "I am not among those
who are dear to her."
He rose abruptly, and Henriette followed him.
"Try to win her to-night," she murmured, "and be sure
to express no opposition to her ideas, however wild they may be. Ignore
them, humour her, plead your cause once more on this auspicious
day--the last of the old year. Something tells me that the new year
will begin joyously for you. Go now, and good luck to you."
"Ah! here you are," cried Mr. Fullerton, "we were
wondering what had become of you. You said you wished to see a reel. Mrs.
McPherson is so good as to play for us."
The kindly old Scottish dame had come, with two nieces, from a distance
of ten miles.
A thrill ran through the company when the strange old tune began.
Everyone rushed for a partner, and two long rows of figures stood facing
one another, eager to start. Temperley asked Hadria to dance with him.
Algitha had Harold Wilkins for a partner. The two long rows were soon
stepping and twirling with zest and agility. A new and wilder spirit began
to possess the whole party. The northern blood took fire and transfigured
the dancers. The Temperleys seemed to be fashioned of different clay; they
were able to keep their heads. Several elderly people had joined in the
dance, performing their steps with a conscientious dexterity that put some
of their juniors to shame. Mr. Fullerton stood by, looking on and
applauding.
"How your father seems to enjoy the sight!" said Temperley,
as he met his partner for a moment.
"He likes nothing so well, and his daughters take after
him."
Hadria's reels were celebrated, not without reason. Some mad spirit
seemed to possess her. It would appear almost as if she had passed into a
different phase of character. She lost caution and care and the sense of
external events.
When the dance was ended, Hubert led her from the hall. She went as if
in a dream. She would not allow herself to be taken beyond the sound of the
grotesque old dance music that was still going on, but otherwise she was
unresisting.
He sat down beside her in a corner of the dining-room.
Now and then he glanced at his companion, and seemed about to speak. "You seem fond of your national music," he at last remarked.
"It fills me with bewildering memories," she said in a
dreamy tone. "It seems to recall--it eludes
description--some wild, primitive experiences--mountains,
mists--I can't express what northern mysteries. It seems almost
as if I had lived before, among some ancient Celtic people, and now, when I
hear their music--or sometimes when I hear the sound of wind among the
pines--whiffs and gusts of something intensely familiar return to me,
and I cannot grasp it. It is very bewildering."
"The only thing that happens to me of the kind is that curious
sense of having done a thing before. Strange to say, I feel it now. This
moment is not new to me."
Hadria gave a startled glance at her companion, and shuddered.
"I suppose it is all pre-ordained," she said. He was
puzzled, but more hopeful than usual. Hadria might almost have accepted him
in sheer absence of mind. He put the thought in different terms. He began
to speak more boldly. He gave his view of life and happiness, his
philosophy and religion. Hadria lazily agreed. She lay under a singular
spell. The bizarre old music smote still upon the ear. She felt as if she
were in the thrall of some dream whose events followed one another, as the
scenes of a moving panorama unfold themselves before the spectators.
Temperley began to plead his cause. Hadria, with a startled look in her
eyes, tried to check him. But her will refused to issue a vigorous command.
Even had he been hateful to her, which he certainly was not, she felt that
she would have been unable to wake out of the nightmare, and resume the
conduct of affairs. The sense of the importance of personal events had
entirely disappeared. What did it all matter? "Over us stars and
under us graves." The graves would put it all right some day. As for
attempting to direct one's fate, and struggle out of the highways of
the
world--midsummer madness! It was not only the Mrs. Gordons, but the Valeria Du Prel who told one so. Everybody said (but in discreeter terms), "Disguise from yourself the solitude by setting up little screens of affections, and little pompous affairs about which you must go busily, and with all the solemnity that you can muster."
The savage builds his mud hut to shelter him from the wind and the rain
and the terror of the beyond. Outside is the wilderness ready to engulf
him. Rather than be left alone at the mercy of elemental things, with no
little hut, warm and dark and stuffy, to shelter one, a woman will
sacrifice everything--liberty, ambition, health, power, her very
dignity. There was a letter in Hadria's pocket at this moment,
eloquently protesting in favour of the mud hut.
Hadria must have been appearing to listen favourably to Temperley's
pleading, for he said eagerly, "Then I have not spoken this time
quite in vain. I may hope that perhaps some day--"
"Some day," repeated Hadria, passing her hand across her
eyes. "It doesn't really matter. I mean we make too much fuss
about these trifles; don't you think so?" She spoke dreamily.
The music was jigging on with strange merriment.
"To me it matters very much indeed. I don't consider it a
trifle," said Temperley, in some bewilderment.
"Oh, not to ourselves. But of what importance are we?"
"None at all, in a certain sense," Temperley admitted;
"but in another sense we are all important. I cannot help being
intensely personal at this moment. I can't help grasping at the hope
of happiness. Hadria, it lies in your hand. Won't you be
generous?"
She gave a distressed gesture, and seemed to make some vain effort, as
when the victim of a nightmare struggles to overcome the paralysis that
holds him.
"Then I may hope a little, Hadria--I must
hope."
Still the trance seemed to hold her enthralled. The music was
diabolically merry. She could fancy evil spirits tripping
to it in swarms around her. They seemed to point at her, and wave their arms around her, and from them came an influence, magnetic in its quality, that forbade her to resist. All had been pre-arranged. Nothing could avert it. She seemed to be waiting rather than acting. Against her inner judgment, she had allowed those accursed practices to go on. Against her instinct, she had permitted Henriette to become intimate at Dunaghee; indeed it would have been hard to avoid it, for Miss Temperley was not easy to discourage. Why had she assured Hadria so pointedly that Hubert would not misinterpret her consent to renew the practices? Was it not a sort of treachery? Had not Henriette, with her larger knowledge of the world, been perfectly well aware that whatever might be said, the renewal of the meetings would be regarded as encouragement? Did she not know that Hadria herself would feel implicated by the concession?
Temperley's long silence had been misleading. The danger had crept
up insidiously. And had she not been treacherous to herself? She had longed
for companionship, for music, for something to break the strain of her
wild, lonely life. Knowing, or rather half-divining the risk, she had
allowed herself to accept the chance of relief when it came. Lack of
experience had played a large part in the making of to-night's
dilemma. Hadria's own strange mood was another ally to her lover, and
for that, old Mrs. McPherson and her reels were chiefly responsible. Of
such flimsy trifles is the human fate often woven.
"Tell me, did you ask your sister to --?"
"No, no," Hubert interposed. "My sister knows of my
hopes, and is anxious that I should succeed."
"I thought that she was helping you."
"She would take any legitimate means to help me," said
Hubert. "You cannot resent that. Ah, Hadria, why will you not listen
to me?" He bent forward, covering his face with his hands in deep
dejection. His hope had begun to wane.
"You know what I think," said Hadria. "You know how
I should act if I married. Surely that ought to cure you of all--."
He seized her hand.
"No, no, nothing that you may think could cure me of the hope of
making you my wife. I care for what you are, not for what you
think. You know how little I cling to the popular version of
the domestic story. I have told you over and over again that it offends me
in a thousand ways. I hate the bourgeois
element in it. What have we really to disagree about?"
He managed to be very convincing. He shewed that for a woman, life in
her father's house is far less free than in her own home; that
existence could be moulded to any shape she pleased. If Hadria hesitated
only on this account her last reason was gone. It was not fair to him. He
had been patient. He had kept silence for many months. But he could endure
the suspense no longer. He took her hand. Then suddenly she rose.
"No, no. I can't, I can't," she cried
desperately.
"I will not listen to denial," he said following her.
"I cannot stand a second disappointment. You have allowed me to
hope."
"How? When? Never!" she exclaimed.
"Ah, yes, Hadria. I am older than you and I have more experience.
Do you think a man will cease to hope while he continues to see the woman
he loves?"
Hadria turned very pale.
"You seemed to have forgotten--your sister assured
me--Ah, it was treacherous, it was cruel. She took advantage of my
ignorance, my craving for companionship."
"No, it is you who are cruel, Hadria, to make such accusations. I
do not claim the slightest consideration because you permitted those
practices. But you cannot suppose that my feeling has not been confirmed
and strengthened since I have seen you again. Why should you turn from me?
Why may I not hope to win you? If you have no repugnance to me, why should
not I have a chance? Hadria, Hadria,
answer me, for heaven's sake. Oh, if I could only understand what is in your mind!"
She would have found it a hard task to enlighten him. He had succeeded,
to some extent, in lulling her fears, not in banishing them, for a sinister
dread still muttered its warning beneath the surface thoughts.
The strength of Temperley's emotion had stirred her. The magic of
personal influence had begun to tell upon her. It was so hard not to
believe when some one insisted with such certainty, with such obvious
sincerity, that everything would be right. He seemed so confident that she
could make him happy, strange as it appeared. Perhaps after all--? And
what a release from the present difficulties. But could one trust? A
confused mass of feeling struggled together. A temptation to give the
answer that would cause pleasure was very strong, and beneath all lurked a
trembling hope that perhaps this was the way of escape. In apparent
contradiction to this, or to any other hope, lay a sense of fatality, a sad
indifference, interrupted at moments by flashes of very desperate caring,
when suddenly the love of life, the desire for happiness and experience,
for the exercise of her power, for its use in the service of her
generation, became intense, and then faded away again, as obstacles
presented their formidable array before the mind. In the midst of the
confusion the thought of the Professor hovered vaguely, with a dim
distressing sense of something wrong, of something within her lost and
wretched and forlorn.
Mrs. Fullerton passed through the room on the arm of Mr. Gordon. How
delighted her mother would be if she were to give up this desperate attempt
to hold out against her appointed fate. What if her mother and Mrs. Gordon
and all the world were perfectly right and far-seeing and wise? Did it not
seem more likely, on the face of it, that they should be
right, considering the enormous majority of those who would agree with
them, than that she, Hadria, a solitary girl, unsupported by knowledge of
life or by fellow-believers, should
have chanced upon the truth? Had only Valeria been on her side, she would have felt secure, but Valeria was dead against her.
"We are not really at variance, believe me," Temperley
pleaded. "You state things rather more strongly than I do--a man
used to knocking about the world--but I don't believe there is
any radical difference between us." He worked himself up into the
belief that there never were two human beings so essentially at one, on all
points, as he and Hadria.
"Do you remember the debate that evening in the garret? Do you
remember the sentiments that scared your sister so much?" she
asked.
Temperley remembered.
"Well, I don't hold those sentiments merely for amusement and
recreation. I mean them. I should not hesitate a moment to act upon them.
If things grew intolerable, according to my view of things, I should simply
go away, though twenty marriage-services had been read over my head.
Neither Algitha nor I have any of the notions that restrain women in these
matters. We would brook no such bonds. The usual claims and demands we
would neither make nor submit to. You heard Algitha speak very plainly on
the matter. So you see, we are entirely unsuitable as wives, except to the
impossible men who might share our rebellion. Please let us go back to the
hall. They are just beginning to dance another reel."
"I cannot let you go back. Oh, Hadria, you can't be so unjust
as to force me to break off in this state of uncertainty. Just give me a
word of hope, however slight, and I will be satisfied."
Hadria looked astonished. "Have you really taken in what I have
just said?"
"Every word of it."
"And you realise that I mean it, mean it, with every
fibre of me."
"I understand; and I repeat that I shall not be happy until
you are my wife. Have what ideas you please, only be my wife."
She gazed at him in puzzled scrutiny. "You don't think I am
really in earnest. Let us go."
"I know you are in earnest," he cried, eagerly following
her, "and still I --"
At that moment Harold Wilkins came up to claim Hadria for a promised
dance. Temperley gave a gesture of impatience. But Harold insisted, and
Hadria walked with her partner into the hall where Mrs. Gordon was now
playing a sentimental waltz, with considerable poetic license as to time.
As everyone said: Mrs. Gordon played with so much expression.
Temperley stood about in corners watching Hadria. She was flushed and
silent, dancing with a still gliding movement under the skilful guidance of
her partner.
Temperley tried to win a glance as she passed round, but her eyes were
resolutely fixed on the floor.
Algitha followed her sister's movements uneasily. She had noticed
her absence during the last reel, and observed that Temperley also was not
to be seen. She felt anxious. She knew Hadria's emotional
susceptibility. She knew Temperley's convincing faculty, and also
Hadria's uneasy feeling that she had done wrong in allowing the
practices to be resumed.
Henriette had not failed to notice the signs of the times, and she
annoyed Algitha beyond endurance by her obviously sisterly manner of
addressing the family. She had taken to calling the boys by their first
names.
Fred shared his sister's dislike to Henriette. "Tact!"
he cried with a snort, "why a Temperley rushes in where a bull in a
china-shop would fear to tread!"
Algitha saw that Hubert was again by Hadria's side before the
evening was out. The latter looked white, and she avoided her sister's
glance. This last symptom seemed to Algitha the worst.
"What's the matter with Hadria?" asked Fred, "she
will scarcely speak to me. I was just telling her the best joke I've
heard this year, and, will you believe me, she didn't see
the point! Yes, you may well stare! I tried again and she gave a nervous giggle I am relating to you the exact truth. Do any of the epidemics come on like that?"
"Yes, one of the worst," said Algitha gloomily. Fred glared
enquiry.
"I am afraid she has been led into accepting Hubert
Temperley."
Fred opened his mouth and breathed deep. "Stuff! Hadria would as
soon think of selling her soul to the devil."
"Oh, she is quite capable of that too," said Algitha,
shaking her head.
"Well, I'm blowed," cried Fred.
Not long after this, the guests began to disperse. Mrs. Gordon and her
party were among the last to leave, having a shorter distance to go.
Hubert Temperley was quiet and self-possessed, but Algitha felt sure
that she detected a look of suppressed exultation in his demeanour, and
something odiously brotherly in his mode of bidding them all good
night.
When everyone had left, and the family were alone, they gathered round
the hall fire for a final chat, before dispersing for the night.
"What a delightful evening we have had, Mrs. Fullerton,"
said Miss Temperley. "It was most picturesque and characteristic. I
shall always remember the charm and kindliness of Scottish
hospitality."
"And I," said Ernest, sotto voce
to Algitha, "shall always remember the calm and thoroughness of
English cheek!"
"Why, we had almost forgotten that the New Year is just upon
us," exclaimed Mr. Fullerton. The first stroke of twelve began to
sound almost as he spoke. He threw up the window and disclosed a night
brilliant with stars. ("And under us graves," said Hadria to
herself.)
They all crowded up, keeping silence as the slow strokes of the clock
told the hour.
"A Happy New Year to all!" cried Mr. Fullerton heartily.
The road led gradually upward through a country blazing with red and
orange for rolling miles, till the horizon closed in with the far-off blue
of English hills.
The old man slowly turned to watch the wayfarer, whose quick step and
the look in her eyes of being fixed on objects beyond their owner's
immediate ken, might have suggested to the observant, inward perturbation.
The lissom, swiftly moving figure was almost out of sight before the old
man slowly wheeled round and continued on his way towards the hamlet of
Craddock Dene, that lay in the valley about a mile further on. Meanwhile
the young woman was speeding towards the village of Craddock on the summit
of the gentle slope before her. A row of broad-tiled cottages came in
sight, and on the hill-side the vicarage among trees, and a grey stone
church which had seen many changes since its tower first looked out from
the hill-top over the southern counties.
The little village seemed as if it had forgotten to change with the rest
of the country, for at least a hundred years. The
spirit of the last century lingered in its quiet cottages, in the little ale-house with half-obliterated sign, in its air of absolute repose and leisure. There was no evidence of contest anywhere--except perhaps in a few mouldy advertisements of a circus and of a remarkable kind of soap, that were half peeling off a moss-covered wall. There were not even many indications of life in the place. The sunshine seemed to have the village street to itself. A couple of women stood gossiping over the gate of one of the cottages. They paused in their talk as a quick step sounded on the road.
"There be Mrs. Temperley again!" one matron exclaimed.
"Why this is the second time this week, as she's come and sat in
the churchyard along o' the dead. Don't seem nat'ral to my
thinking."
Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Gullick continued to discuss this gloomy habit with
exhaustive minuteness, involving themselves in side issues regarding the
general conduct of life on the part of Mrs. Temperley, that promised solid
material for conversation for the next week. It appeared from the
observations of Mrs. Gullick, whose husband worked on Lord Engleton's
model farm, that about five years ago Mr. Temperley had rented the Red
House at Craddock Dene, and had brought his new wife to live there. The Red
House belonged to Professor Fortescue, who also owned the Priory, which had
stood empty, said Mrs. Gullick, since that poor Mrs. Fortescue killed
herself in the old drawing-room. Mr. Temperley went every day to town to
attend to his legal business, and returned by the evening train to the
bosom of his family. That family now consisted in his wife and two small
boys; pretty little fellows, added Mrs. Dodge, the pride of their
parents' hearts; at least, so she had heard Mr. Joseph Fleming say,
and he was intimate at the Red House. Mrs. Gullick did not exactly approve
of Mrs. Temperley. The Red House was not, it would seem, an everflowing
fount of sustaining port wine and spiritually nourishing literature. The
moral evolution of the village had proceeded on those lines. The prevailing
feeling was vaguely
hostile; neither Mrs. Gullick nor Mrs. Dodge exactly knew why. Mrs. Dodge said that her husband (who was the sexton and gravedigger) had found Mrs. Temperley always ready for a chat. He spoke well of her. But Dodge was not one of many. Mrs. Temperley was perhaps too sensitively respectful of the feelings of her poorer neighbours to be very popular among them. At any rate, her habits of seclusion did not seem to village philosophy to be justifiable in the eyes of God or man. Her apparent fondness for the society of the dead also caused displeasure. Why she went to the churchyard could not be imagined: one would think she had a family buried there, she who was, "as one might say, a stranger to the place," and could not be supposed to have any interest in the graves, which held for her nor kith nor kin!
Mrs. Temperley, however, appeared to be able to dispense with this
element of attraction in the "grassy barrows." She and a
company of youthful Cochin-China fowls remained for hours among them, on
this cheerful morning, and no observer could have determined whether it was
the graves or the fowls that riveted her attention. She had perched herself
on the stile that led from the churchyard to the fields: a slender figure
in serviceable russet and irresponsible-looking hat, autumn-tinted too, in
sympathy with the splendid season. In her ungloved left hand, which was at
once sensitive and firm, she carried a book, keeping a forefinger between
the pages to mark a passage.
Her face bore signs of suffering, and at this moment, a look of baffled
and restless longing, as if life had been for her a festival whose sounds
came from a hopeless distance. Yet there was something in the expression of
the mouth, that suggested a consistent standing aloof from herself and her
desires. The lines of the face could never have been drawn by mere
diffusive, emotional habits. Thought had left as many traces as feeling in
the firm drawing. The quality of the face was of that indefinable kind that
gives to all characteristic things their peculiar power over the
imagination.
The more powerful the quality, the less can it be rendered into terms. It is the one marvellous, remaining, musical fact not to he defined that makes the Parthenon, or some other masterpiece of art, translate us to a new plane of existence, and inspire, for the time being, the pessimist with hope and the sceptic with religion.
The Cochin-Chinas pecked about with a contented mien among the long
grass, finding odds and ends of nourishment, and here and there eking out
their livelihood with a dart at a passing fly. Their long, comic, tufted
legs, which seemed to form a sort of monumental pedestal whereon the bird
itself was elevated, stalked and scratched about with an air of industrious
serenity.
There were few mornings in the year which left unstirred the grass which
grew long over the graves, but this was one of the few. Each blade stood up
still and straight, bearing its string of dewdrops. There were one or two
village sounds that came subdued through the sunshine. The winds that
usually haunted the high spot had fallen asleep, or were lying somewhere in
ambush among the woodlands beyond.
The look of strain had faded from the face of Mrs. Temperley, leaving
only an expression of sadness. The removal of all necessity for concealing
thought allowed her story to write itself on her face. The speculative
would have felt some curiosity as to the cause of a sadness in one
seemingly so well treated by destiny. Neither poverty nor the cares of
great wealth could have weighed upon her spirit; she had beauty, and a
quality more attractive than beauty, which must have placed many things at
her command; she had evident talent--her very attitude proclaimed
it--and the power over Fortune that talent ought to give. Possibly,
the observer might reflect, the gift was of that kind which lays the
possessor peculiarly open to her outrageous slings and arrows. Had Mrs.
Temperley shown any morbid signs of self-indulgent emotionalism the problem
would have been simple enough but this was not the case.
The solitude was presently broken by the approach of an old man laden
with pickaxe and shovel. He remarked upon the fineness of the day, and took
up his position at a short distance from the stile, where the turf had been
cleared away in a long-shaped patch. Here, with great deliberation he began
his task. The sound of his steady strokes fell on the stillness. Presently,
the clock from the grey tower gave forth its announcement--eleven. One
by one, the slow hammer sent the waves of air rolling away, almost visibly,
through the sunshine, their sound alternating with the thud of the pickaxe,
so as to produce an effect of intentional rhythm. One might have fancied
that clock and pickaxe iterated in turn, "Time, Death! Time, Death!
Time, Death!" till the clock had come to the end of its tale, and
then the pickaxe went on alone in the stillness--"Death! Death!
Death! Death!"
A smile, not easy to be accounted for, flitted across the face of Mrs.
Temperley.
The old gravedigger paused at last in his toil, leaning on his pickaxe,
and bringing a red cotton handkerchief out of his hat to wipe his brow.
"That seems rather hard work, Dodge," remarked the onlooker,
leaning her book upright on her knee and her chin on her hand.
"Ay, that it be, mum; this clay's that stiff! Lord! folks is
almost as much trouble to them as buries as to them as bears 'em;
it's all trouble together, to my thinkin'."
She assented with a musing nod.
"And when a man's not a troublin' o' some other
body, he's a troublin' of hisself," added the
philosopher.
"You are cursed with a clear-sightedness that must make life a
burden to you," said Mrs. Temperley.
"Well, mum, I do sort o' see the bearin's o' things
better nor most," Dodge modestly admitted. The lady knew, and liked
to gratify, the gravedigger's love of long-worded discourse.
"Some people," she said, "are born contemplative,
while others never reflect at all, whatever the provocation."
"Yes'm, that's just it; folks goes on as if they was to
live for ever, without no thought o' dyin'. As you was a
sayin' jus' now, mum, there's them as contemflecs natural
like, and there's them as is born without
provocation--"
"Everlastingly!" assented Mrs. Temperley with a sudden
laugh. "You evidently, Dodge, are one of those who strive to read the
riddle of this painful earth. Tell me what you think it is all
about."
Gratified by this appeal to his judgment, Dodge scratched his head, and
leant both brawny arms upon his pickaxe.
"Well, mum," he said, "I s'pose it's the
will o' th' Almighty as we is brought into the world, and I
don't say nothin' agin it --'t isn't my
place--but it do come over me powerful at times, wen I sees all the
vexin' as folks has to go through, as God A'mighty might 'a
found somethin' better to do with His time; not as I wants to find no
fault with His ways, which is past finding out," added the
gravedigger, falling to work again.
A silence of some minutes was broken by Mrs. Temperley's enquiry as
to how long Dodge had followed this profession.
"Nigh on twenty year, mum, come Michaelmas," replied Dodge.
"I've lain my couple o' hundred under the sod, easy; and a
fine lot o' corpses they was too, take 'em one with
another." Dodge was evidently prepared to stand up for the average
corpse of the Craddock district against all competitors.
"This is a very healthy neighbourhood, I suppose," observed
Mrs. Temperley, seemingly by way of supplying an explanation of the proud
fact.
"Lord bless you, as healthy as any place in the kingdom. There
wasn't one in ten as was ill when he died, as one may say."
"But that scarcely seems an unmixed blessing," commented the
lady musingly, "to go off suddenly in the full flush of health and
spirits; it would be so discouraging."
"Most was chills, took sudden," Dodge explained;
"chills is wot chokes up yer churchyards for yer. If we has another
hard winter this year, we shall have a job to find room in here. There's one or two in the village already, as I has my eye on, wot--"
"Was this one a chill?" interrupted Mrs. Temperley, with a
nod towards the new grave.
"Wot, this here? Lord bless you, no, mum. This here's our
schoolmarm. Didn't you never hear tell about her?"
This damning proof of his companion's aloofness from village gossip
seemed to paralyse the gravedigger.
"Why everybody's been a talkin' about it. Over varty,
she war, and ought to 'a knowed better."
"But, with advancing years, it is rare that people do
get to know better--about dying," Mrs. Temperley suggested, in
defence of the deceased schoolmistress.
"I means about her conduc'," Dodge explained;
"scand'lous thing. Why, she's been in Craddock school since
she war a little chit o' sixteen."
"That seems to me a trifle dull, but scarcely scandalous,"
Mrs. Temperley murmured.
"...And as steady and respectable a young woman as you'd wish
to see ... pupil teacher she was, and she rose to be schoolmarm,"
Dodge went on.
"It strikes me as a most blameless career," said his
companion. "Perhaps, as you say, considering her years, she ought to
have known better, but--"
"She sort o' belongs to the place, as one may say,"
Dodge proceeded, evidently quite unaware that he had omitted to give the
clue to the situation. "She's lived here all her
life."
"Then much may be forgiven her," muttered Mrs.
Temperley.
"And everybody respected of her, and the parson he thought a deal
o' her, he did, and used to hold her up as a sample to the other young
women, and nobody dreamt as she'd go and bring this here scandal on
the place; nobody knows who the man was, but it is said as
there's someone not twenty miles from here as knows more
about it nor he didn't ought to,"
Dodge added with sinister meaning. This dark hint conveyed absolutely no enlightenment to the mind of Mrs. Temperley, from sheer lack of familiarity, on her part, with the rumours of the district. Dodge applied himself with a spurt to his work.
"When she had her baby, she was like one out of her mind,"
he continued; "she couldn't stand the disgrace and the
neighbours talkin', and that. Mrs. Walker she went and saw her, and
brought her nourishin' things, and kep' on a-telling her how she
must try and make up for what she had done, and repent and all that; but
she never got up her heart again like, and the poor soul took fever from
grievin', the doctor says, and raved on dreadful, accusin' of
somebody, and sayin' he'd sent her to hell; and then Wensday
morning, ten o'clock, she died. Didn't you hear the passing bell
a-tolling, mum?"
"Yes, the wind brought it down the valley; but I did not know whom
it was tolling for."
"That's who it was," said Dodge.
"This is an awfully sad story," cried Mrs. Temperley.
Dodge ran his fingers through his hair judicially. "I don't
hold with them sort o' goings on for young women," he
observed.
"Do you hold with them for young men?"
Dodge puckered up his face into an odd expression of mingled reflection
and worldly wisdom. "You can't prevent young fellers bein'
young fellers," he at length observed.
"It seems almost a pity that being young fellows should also mean
being blackguards," observed Mrs. Temperley calmly.
"Well, there's somethin' to be said for that way o'
lookin' at it," Dodge was startled into agreeing.
"I suppose she gets all the blame of the
thing," the lady went on, with quiet exasperation. Dodge seemed
thrown off his bearings.
"Everybody in Craddock was a-talking about it, as was only to be
expected," said the gravedigger. "Well, well, we're all
sinners. Don't do to be too hard on folks. 'Pears sad like after
keepin' 'spectable for all them years too--sort o'
waste."
Mrs. Temperley gave a little laugh, which seemed to Dodge rather
eccentric.
"Who is looking after the baby??" she asked.
"One of the neighbours, name o' Gullick, as her husband works
for Lord Engleton, which she takes in washing," Dodge comprehensively
explained.
"Had its mother no relatives?"
"Well, she had an aunt down at Southampton, I've heard tell,
but she didn't take much notice of her, not she
didn't. Her mother only died last year, took off sudden before her
daughter could get to her."
"Your schoolmistress has known trouble," observed Mrs.
Temperley. "Had she no one, no sister, no friend, during all this
time that she could turn to for help or counsel?"
"Not as I knows of," Dodge replied.
There was a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon
the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless
immobility.
"She ain't got no more to suffer now," Dodge remarked,
nodding with an aspect of half apology towards the grave. "They
sleeps soft as sleeps here."
"Good heavens, I hope so!" Mrs. Temperley exclaimed.
The grave had made considerable progress before she descended from the
stile and prepared to take her homeward way. On leaving, she made Dodge
come with her to the gate, and point out the red-roofed cottage covered
with monthly roses and flaming creeper, where the schoolmistress had passed
so many years, and where she now lay with her work and her days all over,
in the tiny upper room, at whose latticed window the sun used to wake her
on summer mornings, or the winter rain pattered dreary prophecies of the
tears that she would one day shed.
"Without," replied Mrs. Temperley automatically.
The maid waited for more discreet directions. She had given a
month's notice that very morning, because she found Craddock Dene too
dull.
"Thank goodness, that barbarian is going!" Hubert had
exclaimed.
"We shall but exchange a Goth for a Vandal," his wife
replied.
Mrs. Temperley gazed intently at her maid, the light of intelligence
gradually dawning in her countenance. "Is there anything else in the
house, Sapph--Sophia?"
"No, ma'am," replied Sophia.
"Oh, tell the cook to make it into a fricassee, and be sure it is
well flavoured." The maid hesitated, but seeing from the wandering
expression of her employer's eye that her intellect was again clouded
over, she retired to give the message to the cook--with comments.
The library at the Red House was the only room that had been radically
altered since the days of the former tenants, whose taste had leant towards
the florid rather than the classic. The general effect had been toned down,
but it was impossible to disguise the leading motive; or what Mrs.
Temperley passionately described as its brutal vulgarity. The library alone
had been subjected to peine forte et dure. Mrs.
Temperley said that it had been purified by suffering. By dint of tearing
down and dragging out offending objects ("such a pity!" cried
the neighbours) its prosperous and complacent
absurdity had been humbled. Mrs. Temperley retired to this refuge after her encounter with Sophia. That perennially aggrieved young person entered almost immediately afterwards and announced a visitor, with an air that implied--"She'll stay to lunch; see if she don't, and what'll you do then? Yah!"
The pronunciation of the visitor's name was such, that, for the
moment, Mrs. Temperley did not recognize it as that of Miss Valeria Du
Prel.
She jumped up joyfully. "Ah, Valeria, this is
delightful!"
The visit was explained after a characteristic fashion. Miss Du Prel
realized that over two years had passed since she had seen Hadria, and
moreover she had been seized with an overwhelming longing for a sight of
country fields and a whiff of country air, so she had put a few things
together in a handbag, which she had left at Craddock station by accident,
and come down. Was there anyone who could go and fetch her handbag? It was
such a nuisance; she laid it down for a moment to get at her
ticket--she never could find her pocket, dressmakers always hid them
in such an absurd way; could Hadria recommend any dressmaker who did not
hide pockets? Wasn't it tiresome? She had no time-table, and so she
had gone to the station that morning and waited till a Craddock train
started, and by this arrangement it had come to pass that she had spent an
hour and a half on the platform: she did not think she ever had such an
unpleasant time; why didn't they have trains oftener? They did to
Putney.
Mrs. Temperley sat down and laughed. Whereupon the other's face
lightened and she joined in the laugh at her own expense, settling into the
easy chair that her hostess had prepared for her, with a gesture of
helplessness and comfort.
"Well, in spite of that time at the station, I'm glad I came.
It seems so long since I have seen you, dear Hadria, and the last time you
know you were very unhappy, almost mad--"
"Yes, yes; never mind about that," interposed Mrs. Temperley
hastily, setting her teeth together.
"You take things too hard, too hard," said Miss Du Prel.
"I used to think I was bad in that way, but I am
phlegmatic compared with you. One would suppose that--"
"Valeria, don't, don't, don't," cried Mrs.
Temperley. "I can't stand it." Her teeth were still set
tight and hard, her hands were clenched.
"Very well, very well. Tell me what you have been making of this
ridiculous old world, where everything goes wrong and everybody is stupid
or wicked, or both."
Mrs. Temperley's face relaxed a little, though the signs of some
strong emotion were still visible.
"Well, to answer the general by the particular, I have spent the
morning, accompanied by a nice young brood of Cochin-China fowls, in
Craddock churchyard."
"Oh, I hate a churchyard," exclaimed Miss Du Prel, with a
shudder. "It makes one think of the hideous mockery of life, and the
more one would like to die, the worse seems the brutality of death and his
hideous accompaniments. It is such a savage denial of all human aspirations
and affections and hopes. Ah, it is horrible!" The sharply-outlined
face grew haggard and white, as its owner crouched over the fire.
"Heaven knows! but it was very serene and very lovely up there
this morning."
"Ah!" exclaimed Valeria with a burst of strange enthusiasm
and sadness, that revealed all the fire and yearning and power that had
raised her above her fellows in the scale of consciousness, with the
penalty of a life of solitude and of sorrow.
"Surely it is not without meaning that the places of the dead are
the serenest spots on earth," said Mrs. Temperley. "If I could
keep myself in the mood that the place induces, I think I should not mind
anything very much any more. The sunshine seems to rest more tenderly there
than elsewhere, and the winds have a reverence for the graves, as if they
felt it time that the dead were left in peace--the 'happier
dead,' as poor immortal Tithonius calls them, who has not the gift of
death. And the grey old tower and the weather stains on
the stones; there is a conspiracy of beauty in the place, that holds one as one is held by music."
"Ah! I know the magic of these things; it tempts one to believe at
times that Nature is not all blind and unpitying. But that is
a delusion: if there were any pity in Nature, the human spirit would not be
dowered with such infinite and terrible longings and such capacities and
dreams and prayers and then--then insulted with the mockery of death
and annihilation."
"If there should be no Beyond," muttered Mrs. Temperley.
"That to me is inconceivable. When we die we fall into an eternal
sleep. Moreover, I can see no creed that does not add the fear of future
torments to the certainties of these."
Mrs. Temperley was seized with a bitter mood. "You should
cultivate faith," she said; "it acts the part of the heading
'Sundries omitted' in one's weekly accounts; one can put
down under it everything that can't be understood--but you
don't keep weekly accounts, so it's no use pointing out to you
the peace that comes of that device."
The entrance of Sophia with firewood turned the current of conversation.
"Good heavens! I don't think we have anything for lunch!"
Mrs. Temperley exclaimed. "Are you very hungry? What is to be done?
It was the faithlessness of our butcher that disturbed the serenity of my
mood this morning. Perhaps the poor beast whose carcase we were intending
to devour will feel serene instead of me: but, alas! I fear he has been
slaughtered quand même. That is one of
the unsatisfactory things about life: that all its worst miseries bring
good to no one. One may deny oneself, but not a living thing is necessarily
the better for it--generally many are the worse. The wheels of pain go
turning day by day, and the gods stand aloof--they will not help us,
nor will they stay the 'wild world' in its course. No,
no," added Mrs. Temperley with a laugh, "I am not tired of
life, but I am tired with it; it won't give me what I
want. That is perhaps because I want so much."
The sound of male footsteps in the hall broke up the colloquy.
"Good heavens! Hubert has brought home a crowd of people to
lunch," exclaimed Hadria, "a thing he scarcely ever does. What
fatality can have induced him to choose to-day of all others for this orgy
of hospitality?"
"Does the day matter?" enquired Valeria, astonished at so
much emotion.
"Does the day matter! Oh irresponsible question of
the unwedded! When I tell you the butcher has not sent the meat."
"Oh ... can't one eat fish?" suggested Miss Du
Prel.
Hadria laughed and opened the door.
"My dear, I have brought Fleming home to lunch."
"Thank heaven, only one!"
Temperley stared.
"I could not conveniently have brought home several," he
said.
"I thought you would be at least seven," cried the mistress
of the house, "and with all the pertinacity of Wordsworth's
little girl."
"What do you mean, if one may ask for simple
English?"
"Merely that that intolerable Sanders has broken his
word--hinc illæ
lacrimæ."
Hubert Temperley turned away in annoyance. He used to be amused by his
wife's flippancy before her marriage, but he had long since grown to
dislike it. He retired to get out some wine, while Hadria went forward to
welcome the guest, who now came in from the garden, where he had lingered
to talk to the children.
"I am delighted to see you, Mr. Fleming; but I am grieved to say
that we have unluckily only a wretched luncheon to give you, and after your
long walk over the fields too! I am so sorry. The fact is we
are left, this morning, with a gaping larder, at the mercy of a haughty and
inconstant butcher, who grinds down his helpless dependents without mercy,
over-
bearing creature that he is. We must ask you to be very tolerant."
"Oh! please don't trouble about that; it doesn't matter
in the least," cried Mr. Fleming, pulling at his yellowish whiskers.
He was a man of about five-and-thirty, of medium height, dressed in
knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket that had seen some service.
"What is the difficulty?" asked Hubert.
"I was explaining to Mr. Fleming how inhospitably we are forced to
treat him, on account of that traitor Sanders."
Hubert gave a gesture of annoyance.
"I suppose there is something cold in the house."
"Pudding, perhaps," said his wife hopelessly. "It is
most unlucky."
"My dear, surely there must be something cold that isn't
pudding."
"I fear, very little; but I will go and see the cook, though,
alas! she is not easy to inspire as regards her particular business. She is
extremely entertaining as a conversationalist, but I think she was meant
for society rather than the kitchen. I am sure society would be more
diverting if she were in it."
Hadria was just turning to seek this misplaced genius, when she paused
in the doorway.
"By the way, I suppose Sapphira has--"
"Do try and cure yourself of the habit of calling the girl by that
absurd name, Hadria."
"Oh, yes; but the name is so descriptive. She has told you of Miss
Du Prel's arrival?"
"She has told me nothing of the sort."
Temperley did not look overjoyed. There had never been much cordiality
between him and Valeria since the afternoon when they had met at Dunaghee,
and found their sentiments in hopeless opposition.
Miss Du Prel took no interest in Hubert, though she admired his
character. She had every wish to make herself agreeable to him, but her
efforts in that direction were some-
what neutralized by an incurable absence of mind. If she was not interested, as Hadria said, she was seldom affable.
Possibly Hubert's request to her, years ago at Dunaghee, to
"think for a moment" had not been forgiven.
"Where is she? Oh!--"
The exclamation was in consequence of Miss Du Prel's appearing at
the door of the library, whence she surveyed the group with absent-minded
intentness.
Valeria woke up with a start, and responded to Hubert's greeting in
an erratic fashion, replying tragically, to a casual enquiry as to her
health, that she had been frightfully ill.
"I thought I was dying. But one never dies," she added in a
disgusted tone, whereat Hadria heartlessly laughed, and hurried the visitor
upstairs to help her to unpack.
"Valeria," said Mrs. Temperley, while that lady was
confusedly trying to disentangle hat and hair, hat-pin and head, without
involving the entire system in a common ruin--"Valeria, we are
not a remarkable people at Craddock Dene. We may be worthy, we may have our
good points, but we are not brilliant (except the cook). Should Mr. Fleming
fail to impress you as a person of striking personality, I ask you, as a
favour, not to emblazon that impression on every feature:
should he address to you a remark that you do not find interesting, and it
is quite conceivable that he may--do not glare at him scornfully for a
moment, and--"
Hadria was not allowed to finish the sentence.
"As if I ever did any such thing--and people are
so dull," said Miss Du Prel.
A few "curried details," as the hostess dejectedly described
the fare, had been supplemented with vegetables, fruit, and impromptu
preparations of eggs, and the luncheon was pronounced excellent and
ample.
Miss Du Prel said that she hoped the butcher would always forget to send
the meat. She liked these imaginative meals.
Temperley purposely misunderstood her to say "imaginary
meals," and hoped that next time she came, Hadria would not have an oratorio in course of composition. Miss Du Prel expressed a fiery interest in the oratorio.
"I judge the presence of oratorio by the absence of food,"
Temperley explained suavely.
Hadria watched the encounter with a mingled sense of amusement and
discomfort.
Valeria was in no danger. To be morally crushed by an adversary, it is
necessary that one should be at least aware that the adversary is engaged
in crushing one: a consciousness that was plainly denied to Miss Du Prel.
Many a man far less able than Hubert had power to interest her, while he
could not even hold her attention. She used to complain to Professor
Fortescue that Temperley's ideas never seemed to have originated in
his own brain: they had been imported ready-made. Hubert was among the many
who shrink and harden into mental furrows as time passes. What he had
thought at twenty, at thirty-five had acquired sanctity and certainty, from
having been the opinion of Hubert Temperley for all those favoured years.
He had no suspicion that the views which he cherished in so dainty and
scholarly a fashion were simply an edition de
luxe of the views of everybody else. But his wife had made that
discovery long ago. He smiled at the views of everybody else: his own were
put forth as something choice and superior. He had the happy knack of being
bourgeois with the air of an artist. If one
could picture one's grocer weighing out sugar in a Spanish cloak and
brigand's hat, it would afford an excellent symbol of his spiritual
estate. To be perfectly commonplace in a brilliantly original way, is to be
notable after all.
Mr. Fleming seemed puzzled by Miss Du Prel, at whom he glanced uneasily
from time to time, wondering what she would say next. At Craddock Dene,
ladies usually listened with a more or less breathless deference when
Temperley spoke. This new-comer seemed recklessly independent.
Mrs. Temperley endeavoured to lead the conversation in
ways of peace, but Valeria was evidently on the war-path. Temperley was polite and ironical, with undermeanings for Hadria's benefit.
"If one asks impossible things of life, one is apt to be
disappointed, I fear," he said serenely. "Ask for the possible
and natural harvest of a woman's career, and see if you don't get
it."
"Let a canary plead for its cage, in short, and its commendable
prayer will be answered!"
"If you like to put it thus ungraciously. I should say that one
who makes the most of his opportunities, as they stand, fares better than
he who sighs for other worlds to conquer."
"I suppose that is what his relatives said to Columbus,"
observed Miss Du Prel.
"And how do you know they were not right?" he retorted.
Mrs. Temperley gave the signal to rise. "Let's go for a
walk," she suggested, "the afternoon invites us. Look at
it."
The brilliant sunshine and the exercise brought about a more genial
mood. Only once was there anything approaching friction, and then it was
Hadria herself who caused it.
"Yes, we all flatter ourselves that we are observing life, when we
are merely noting the occasions when some musty old notion of ours happens,
by chance, to get fulfilled."
Hubert Temperley at once roused Miss Du Prel's interest by the
large stores of information that he had to pour forth on the history of the
district, from its earliest times to the present. He recalled the days when
these lands that looked so smooth and tended had been mere wastes of marsh
and forest.
How quickly these great changes were accomplished! Valeria stood on the
brow of a wide corn-field, looking out over the sleeping country. A
century, after all, was not much more than one person's lifetime, yet
in scarcely nine of these--nine little troubled lifetimes--what
incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come
about?
"Not assuredly," Valeria remarked with sudden malice,
"by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before my eyes at this moment?"
"You would not have been here to see," said Hadria, lazily
rolling stones down the hill with her foot. "We should all of us have
been dancing round some huge log-fire on the borders of a primeval forest,
and instead of browsing on salads, as we did to-day, we should be
sustaining ourselves on the unholy nourishment of boiled parent or grilled
aunt."
Mr. Temperley's refined appearance and manner seemed to raise an
incarnate protest against this revolting picture. For some occult reason,
the imagination of all was at work especially and exclusively on the figure
of that polished gentleman in war-paint and feathers, sporting round the
cauldron that contained the boiled earthly remains of his relations.
Mr. Fleming betrayed the common thought by remarking that it would be
very becoming to him.
"Ah! I wish we were all savages in feathers and
war-paint, dancing on the edge of some wild forest, with nothing but the
sea and the sky for limits!"
Miss Du Prel surprised her audience by this earnest aspiration.
"Do you feel inclined to revert?" Hadria enquired.
"Because if so, I shall be glad to join you."
"I think there is a slight touch of the savage about
Mrs. Temperley," observed Fleming pensively. "I mean,
don't you know--of course--."
"You are quite right!" cried Valeria. "I have often
noticed a sort of wildness that crops up now and then through a very smooth
surface. Hadria may sigh for the woodlands, yet--!"
Fred was equally emphatic. For a long time he had regarded it all as a
joke. He shook his head knowingly, and said that sort of thing
wouldn't go down. When he was at length convinced, he danced with
rage. He became cynical. He had no patience with girls. They talked for
talking's sake. It meant nothing.
Algitha understood, better than her brothers could understand, how
Hadria's emotional nature had been caught in some strange mood, how
the eloquent assurances of her lover might have half convinced her.
Algitha's own experience of proposals set her on the track of the
mystery.
"It is most misleading," she pointed out, to her scoffing
brothers. "One would suppose that marrying was the simplest thing in
the world--nothing perilous, nothing to object to
about it. A man proposes to you as if he were asking you for the sixth waltz, only his manner is perfervid. And my belief is that half the girls who accept don't realize that they are agreeing to anything much more serious."
"The more fools they!"
"True; but it really is most bewildering. Claims, obligations, all
the ugly sides of the affair are hidden away; the man is at his best, full
of refinement and courtesy and unselfishness. And if he persuades the girl
that he really does care for her, how can she suppose that she cannot trust
her future to him--if he loves her? And yet she can't!"
"How can a man suppose that one girl is going to be different from
every other girl?" asked Fred.
"Different, you mean, from what he supposes every
other girl to be," Algitha corrected. "It's his own
look-out if he's such a fool."
"I believe Hadria married because she was sick of being the family
consolation," said Ernest.
"Well, of course, the hope of escape was very tempting. You boys
don't know what she went through. We all regret her marriage to Hubert
Temperley--though between ourselves, not more than he
regrets it, if I am not much mistaken--but it is very certain that she
could not have gone on living at home much longer, as things
were."
Fred said that she ought to have broken out after Algitha's
fashion, if it was so bad as all that.
"I think mother would have died if she had," said the
sister.
"Hadria was awkwardly placed," Fred
admitted.
"Do you remember that evening in the garret when we all told her
what we thought?" asked Ernest.
Nobody had forgotten that painful occasion.
"She said then that if the worst came to the worst, she would
simply run away. What could prevent her?"
"That wretched sister of his!" cried Algitha. "If it
hadn't been for her, the marriage would never have taken
place. She got the ear of mother after the engagement, and I am certain it was through her influence that mother hurried the wedding on so. If only there had been a little more time, it could have been prevented. And Henriette knew that. She is as knowing--"
"I wish we had strangled her."
"I shall never forget," Algitha went on, "that night
when Hadria was taken with a fit of terror--it was nothing
less--and wrote to break off the engagement, and that woman undertook
to deliver the letter and lost it, on purpose I am always
convinced, and then the favourable moment was over."
"What made her so anxious for the marriage beats me," cried
Ernest. "It was not a particularly good match from a mercenary point
of view."
"She thought us an interesting family to marry into,"
suggested Fred, "which is undeniable."
"Then she must be greatly disappointed at seeing so little of
us!" cried Ernest.
In the early days, Miss Temperley had stayed frequently at the Red
House, and Hadria had been cut off from her own family, who detested
Henriette.
For a year or more, there had been a fair promise of a successful
adjustment of the two incongruous natures in the new conditions. They both
tried to keep off dangerous ground and to avoid collisions of will. They
made the most of their one common interest, although even here they soon
found themselves out of sympathy. Hubert's instincts were scholastic
and lawful, Hadria was disposed to daring innovation. Her bizarre
compositions shocked him painfully. The two jarred on one another, in great
things and in small. The halcyon period was short-lived. The dream, such as
it was, came to an end. Hubert turned to his sister, in his bewilderment
and disappointment. They had both counted so securely on the effect of
experience and the pressure of events to teach Hadria the desirable lesson,
and they were dismayed
to find that, unlike other women, she had failed to learn it. Henriette was in despair. It was she who had brought about the ill-starred union. How could she ever forgive herself? How repair the error she had made? Only by devoting herself to her brother, and trying patiently to bring his wife to a wiser frame of mind.
A considerable time had elapsed, during which Hadria saw her brothers
and sister only at long intervals. Ernest had become estranged from her, to
her great grief. He was as courteous and tender in his manner to her as of
yore, but there was a change, not to be mistaken. She had lost the brother
of her girlhood for ever. While it bitterly grieved, it did not surprise
her. She acknowledged in dismay the inconsistency of her conduct. She must
have been mad! The universal similarity in the behaviour of girls, herself
included, alarmed her. Was there some external will that drove them all, in
hordes, to their fate? Were all the intricacies of event and circumstance,
of their very emotion, merely the workings of that ruthless cosmic will by
which the individual was hypnotised and ruled?
As usual at critical moments, Hadria had been solitary in her encounter
with the elements of Fate. There were conflicts that even her sister knew
nothing about, the bewilderments and temptations of a nature hampered in
its action by its own voluminous qualities and its caprice.
Her brothers supposed that in a short time Hadria would be
"wearing bonnets and a card-case, and going the rounds with an
elegant expression like the rest of them."
How different were the little local facts of life--the little
chopped-up life that accumulates in odds and ends from moment to
moment--from the sun-and-smoke vision of early irresponsible days!
Mrs. Fullerton was pleased with the marriage, not merely because
Hubert's father, Judge Temperley, could secure for his son a
prosperous career, but because she was so thankful to see a strange,
unaccountable girl like Hadria settling
quietly down, with a couple of children to keep her out of mischief.
That was what it had come to! Perhaps they calculated a little too
surely. Possibly even two children might not keep her entirely out of
mischief. Out of what impulse of malice had Fate pitched upon the most
essentially mutinous and erratic of the whole brood, for the sedatest
rôle? But perhaps Fate, too, had
calculated unscientifically. Mischief was always possible, if one gave
one's mind to it. Or was she growing too old to have the spirit for
thorough-going devilry? Youth seemed rather an affair of mental outlook
than of years. She felt twenty years older since her marriage. She wondered
why it was that marriage did not make all women wicked,--openly and
actively so. If ever there was an arrangement by which every evil instinct
and every spark of the devil was likely to be aroused and infuriated,
surely the customs and traditions that clustered round this estate
constituted that dangerous combination! Hardship, difficulty, tragedy could
be faced, but not the humiliating, the degrading, the contemptible. Hadria
had her own particular ideas as to what ought to be set down under these
headings. Most women, she found, ranked certain elements very differently,
with lavish use of halos and gilding in their honour, feeling perhaps, she
hinted, the dire need of such external decoration.
Good heavens! Did no other woman realize the insult of it all? Hadria
knew so few women intimately; none intimately enough to be convinced that
no such revolt lay smouldering beneath their smiles. She had a lonely
assurance that she had never met the sister-soul (for such there must be by
the score, as silent as she), who shared her rage and her detestations.
Valeria, with all her native pride, regarded these as proof of a big flaw
in an otherwise sound nature. Yet how deep, how passionately strong, these
feelings were, how gigantic the flaw!
What possessed people that they did not see what was so
brutally clear? As young girls led forth unconscious into the battle, with a bandage over their eyes, and cotton-wool in their ears--yes, then it was inevitable that the! should see and hear nothing. Had they been newly imported from the moon they could scarcely have less acquaintance with terrestrial conditions; but afterwards, when ruthlessly, with the grinning assistance of the onlookers, the facts of the social scheme were cynically revealed, and the rôle imperiously allotted--with much admonition and moving appeals to conscience and religion, and all the other aides-de-camp at command--after all that, how in the name of heaven could they continue to "babble of green fields"? Was it conceivable that among the thousands of women to whom year after year the facts were disclosed, not one understood and not one--hated?
A flame sprang up in Hadria's eyes. There must be other women
somewhere at this very moment, whose whole being was burning up with this
bitter, this sickening and futile hatred! But how few, how few! How vast
was the meek majority, fattening on indignity, proud of their humiliation!
Yet how wise they were after all. It hurt so to hate--to hate like
this. Submission was an affair of temperament, a gift of birth. Nature
endowed with a serviceable meekness those whom she designed for insult. Yet
it might not be meekness so much as mere brutal necessity that held them
all in thrall--the inexorable logic of conditions. Fate knew better
than to assail the victim point blank, and so put her on her guard. No; she
lured her on gently, cunningly, closing behind her, one by one, the doors
of escape, persuading her, forcing her to fasten on her own tethers,
appealing to a thousand qualities, good and bad; now to a moment's
weakness or pity, now to her eternal fear of grieving others
(that was a well-worked vein!), now to her instinct of
self-sacrifice, now to grim necessity itself, profiting too by the
increasing discouragements, the vain efforts, the physical pain and
horrible weariness, the crowding of little difficulties, harassments, the
troubles of others--ah! how infinite were these! so that there was no
interval for breathing, and scarcely time or space to cope with the legions of the moment; the horizon was black with their advancing hosts!
And this assuredly was no unique experience. Hadria remembered how she
had once said that if the worst came to the worst, it would be easy to run
away. To her inexperience desperate remedies had seemed so simple, so
feasible--the factors of life so few and unentwined. She had not
understood how prolific are our deeds, how an act brings with it a large
and unexpected progeny, which surround us with new influences and force
upon us unforeseen conditions. Yet frequent had been the impulse to adopt
that girlish solution of the difficulty. She had no picturesque grievances
of the kind that would excite sympathy. On the contrary, popular feeling
would set dead against her; she would be acting on an idea that nobody
shared, not even her most intimate friend.
Miss Du Prel had arrived at the conclusion that she did not understand
Hadria. She had attributed many of her peculiarities to her unique
education and her inexperience. Hadria had indeed changed greatly since her
marriage, but not in the manner that might have been expected. On the
contrary, a closer intimacy with popular social ideals had fired her with a
more angry spirit of rebellion. Miss Du Prel had met examples of every kind
of eccentricity, but she had never before come upon so marked an instance
of this particular type. Hadria's attitude towards life had suggested
to Miss Du Prel the idea of her heroine, Caterina. She
remonstrated with Hadria, assuring her that no insult towards women was
intended in the general scheme of society, and that it was a mistake to
regard it in so resentful a spirit.
"But that is just the most insulting thing about it," Hadria
exclaimed. "Insult is so much a matter of course that people are
surprised if one takes umbrage at it. Read this passage from Aristotle that
I came upon the other day. He is perfectly calm and amiable, entirely
unconscious of offence, when he says that 'a wife ought to shew
herself even more
obedient to the rein than if she entered the house as a purchased slave. For she has been bought at a high price, for the sake of sharing life and bearing children, than which no higher or holier tie can possibly exist.' (Henriette to the very life!)"
Miss Du Prel laughed, and re-read the passage from the
Politics, in some surprise.
"Do you suppose insult is deliberately intended in that graceful
sentiment?" asked Hadria. "Obviously not. If any woman of that
time had blazed up in anger at the well-meant speech, she would have
astonished and grieved her contemporaries. Aristotle doubtless professed a
high respect for women who followed his precepts--as men do now when
we are obedient."
"Of course, our society in this particular has not wandered far
from the Greek idea," Miss Du Prel observed pensively.
Hadria pronounced the paradox, "The sharpness of the insult lies
in its not being intended."
Miss Du Prel could not prevail upon her to modify the assertion. Hadria
pointed out that the Greeks also meant no offence in regarding their
respectable women as simple reproductive agents of inferior human
quality.
"And though our well-brought-up girls shrink from the frank
speech, they do not appear to shrink from the ideas of the old Greeks. They
don't mind playing the part of cows so long as one doesn't
mention it."
About eighteen months ago, the village had been full of talk and
excitement in consequence of the birth of an heir to the house of Engleton,
Lady Engleton's mission in life being frankly regarded as unfulfilled
during the previous three or four years, when she had disappointed the
hopes of the family. Hadria listened scornfully. In her eyes, the crowning
indignity of the whole affair was Lady Engleton's own smiling
acceptance of the position, and her complacent eagerness to produce the
tardy inheritor of the property and honours. This expression of sentiment
had, by some means, reached the Vicarage and created much
consternation.
Mrs. Walker asserted that it was right and Christian of the lady to
desire that which gave every one so much pleasure. "A climax of
feminine abjectness!" Hadria had exclaimed in Henriette's
presence.
Miss Temperley, after endeavouring to goad her sister-in-law into the
expression of jubilant congratulations, was met by the passionate
declaration that she felt more disposed to weep than to rejoice, and more
disposed to curse than to weep.
Obviously, Miss Temperley had reason to be uneasy about her part in
bringing about her brother's marriage.
These sudden overflows of exasperated feeling had become less frequent
as time went on, but the neighbours looked askance at Mrs. Temperley.
Though a powder-magazine may not always blow up, one passes it with a grave
consciousness of vast stores of inflammable material lying somewhere
within, and who knows what spark might set the thing spouting to the
skies?
When the occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down
to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded
general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It
reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the
low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into
minor ups and downs of no character, but with all the trouble of a mountain
district in its complexities of slope and hollow. Hadria suffered from a
gnawing home-sickness; a longing for the rougher, bleaker scenery of the
North.
The tired spirit translated the homely English country, so deeply
reposeful in its spirit, into an image of dull unrest. If only those
broken, stupid lines could have been smoothed out into the grandeur of a
plain, Hadria thought that it would have comforted her, as if a song had
moved across it with the long-stretching winds. As it was, to look from her
window only meant to find repeated the trivialities of life, more
picturesque indeed, but still trivialities. It was the estimable and
domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves:
Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood--Mother earth submissive to the dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her body and her soul abandoned supine to his caprice. The sight had an exasperating effect upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. It was, perhaps, the same in kind as the far stronger sensation of disgust that she felt when she first saw Lady Engleton with her new-born child, full of pride and exultation. It was as much as she could do to shake hands with the happy mother.
When Valeria expressed dismay at so strange a feeling Hadria had refused
to be treated as a solitary sinner. There were plenty of fellow-culprits,
she said, only they did not dare to speak out. Let Valeria study girls and
judge for herself.
Hadria was challenged to name a girl.
Well, Algitha for one. Hadria also suspected Marion Jordan, well-drilled
though she was by her dragoon of a mother.
Valeria would not hear of it. Marion Jordan! the gentlest, timidest,
most typical of young English girls! Impossible!
"I am almost sure of it, nevertheless," said Hadria.
"Oh, believe me, it is common enough! Few grasp it intellectually
perhaps, but thousands feel the insult; of that I am morally
certain."
"What leads you to think so in Marion's case?"
"Some look, or tone, or word; something slight, but to my mind
conclusive. Fellow-sinners detect one another, you know."
"Well, I don't understand what the world is coming to!"
exclaimed Miss Du Prel. "Where are the natural instincts?"
"Sprouting up for the first time perhaps," Hadria
suggested.
"They seem to be disappearing, if what you say has the slightest
foundation."
"Oh, you are speaking of only one kind of instinct.
The others have all been suppressed. Perhaps women are not altogether
animals after all. The thought is startling, I know. Try to face
it."
"I never supposed they were," cried Valeria, a little
annoyed.
"But you never made allowance for the suppressed instincts,"
said Hadria.
"I don't believe they can be
suppressed."
"I believe they can be not merely suppressed, but killed past hope
of recovery. And I also believe that there may be, that there
must be, ideas and emotions fermenting in people's
brains, quite different from those that they are supposed and ordered to
cherish, and that these heresies go on working in secret for years before
they become even suspected, and then suddenly the population exchange
confessions."
"After that the Deluge!" exclaimed Miss Du Prel. "You
describe the features of a great revolution."
"So much the better," said Hadria; "and when the
waters sink again, a nice fresh clean world!"
Hubert Temperley had again brought his friend Joseph Fleming, in the
forlorn hope, he said, of being able to give him something to eat and
drink. Ernest and Algitha and Fred were of the party. They had come down
from Saturday till Monday. Ernest was studying for the Bar. Fred had
entered a merchant's office in the city, and hated his work cordially.
Miss Du Prel was still at the Red House.
Lady Engleton had called by chance this afternoon, and Mrs. Walker, the
vicar's wife, with two of her countless daughters, had come by
invitation. Mrs. Walker was a middle-aged, careworn, rather prim-looking
woman. Lady Engleton was handsome. Bright auburn hair waved back in
picturesque fashion from a piquant face, and constituted more than half her
claim to beauty. The brown eyes were bright and vivacious. The mouth was
seldom quite shut. It scarcely seemed worth while, the loquacious lady had
confessed. She showed a delicate taste in dress. Shades of brown and russet
made a fine harmony with her auburn hair, and the ivory white and fresh red
of her skin.
She and Temperley always enjoyed a sprightly interchange of epigrams.
Lady Engleton had the qualities that Hubert had admired in Hadria before
their marriage, and she was
entirely free from the other characteristics that had exasperated him so desperately since that hideous mistake that he had made. Lady Engleton had originality and brilliancy, but she knew how to combine these qualities with perfect obedience to the necessary conventions of life. She had the sparkle of champagne, without the troublesome tendency of that delicate beverage to break bounds, and brim over in iridescent, swelling, joyous foam, the discreet edges of such goblets as custom might decree for the sunny vintage. Lady Engleton sparkled, glowed, nipped even at times, was of excellent dry quality, but she never frothed over. She always knew where to stop; she had the genius of moderation. She stood to Hadria as a correct rendering of a cherished idea stands to a faulty one. She made Hubert acutely feel his misfortune, and shewed him his lost hope, his shattered ideal.
"Is the picture finished?" he enquired, as he handed Lady
Engleton her tea.
"What, the view from your field? Not quite. I was working at it
when Claude Moreton and Mrs. Jordan and Marion arrived, and I have been
rather interrupted. That's the worst of visitors. One's little
immortal works do get put aside, poor things."
Lady Engleton broke into the light laugh that had become almost
mechanical with her.
"Your friends grudge the hours you spend in your studio,"
said Temperley.
"Oh, they don't mind, so long as I give them as much time as
they want," she said. "I have to apologise and compromise,
don't you know, but, with a little management, one can get on. Of
course, society does ask a good deal of attention, doesn't it? and one
has to be so careful."
"Just a little tact and thought," said Temperley with a
sigh.
Lady Engleton admired Algitha, who was standing with Ernest a little
apart from the group.
"She is like your wife, and yet there is a singular difference in
the expression."
Lady Engleton was too discreet to say that Mrs. Temperley lacked the
look of contentment and serenity that was so marked in her sister's
face.
"Algitha is a thoroughly sensible girl," said the
brother-in-law.
"I hear you have not long returned from a visit to Mr.
Fullerton's place in Scotland, Mr. Temperley," observed the
vicar's wife when her host turned to address her.
"Yes," he said, "we have been there half the summer.
The boys thoroughly enjoyed the freedom and the novelty. The river, of
course, was a source of great joy to them, and of hideous anxiety to the
rest of us."
"Of course, of course," assented Mrs. Walker. "Ah,
there are the dear little boys. Won't you come and give me a kiss,
darling?"
"Darling" did what was required in a business-like manner,
and stood by, while the lady discovered in him a speaking likeness to his
parents, to his Aunt Algitha and his Uncle Fred, not to mention the
portrait of his great-grandfather, the Solicitor-General, that hung in the
dining-room. The child seemed thoroughly accustomed to be thought the
living image of various relations, and he waited indifferently till the
list was ended.
"Do you know, we are half hoping that Professor Fortescue may be
able to come to us for a week or ten days?" said Lady Engleton.
"We are so looking forward to it."
"Professor Fortescue is always a favourite," remarked Mrs.
Walker. "It is such a pity he does not return to the Priory, is it
not?--a great house like that standing empty. Of course it is very
natural after the dreadful event that happened there"--Mrs.
Walker lowered her voice discreetly--"but it seems a sin to
leave the place untenanted."
Lady Engleton explained that there was some prospect of the house being
let at last to a friend and colleague of the
Professor. Mrs. Walker doubtless would remember Professor Theobald, who used to come and stay at Craddock Place rather frequently some years ago, a big man with beard and moustache, very learned and very amusing.
Mrs. Walker remembered him perfectly. Her husband had been so much
interested in his descriptions of a tour in Palestine, all through the
scenes of the New Testament. He was a great archæologist. Was he
really coming to the Priory? How very delightful. John would be so glad to
hear it.
"Oh, it is not settled yet, but the two Professors are coming to
us some time soon, I believe, and Professor Theobald will look over the
house and see if he thinks it would be too unmanageably big for himself and
his old mother and sister. I hope he will take the place. He would bring a
new and interesting element into the village. What do you think of it, Mrs.
Temperley?"
"Oh, I hope the learned and amusing Professor will come,"
she said. "The worst of it is, from my point of view, that I shall
have to give up my practices there. Professor Fortescue allows me to wake
the old piano from its long slumbers in the drawing-room."
"Oh, of course. Marion Jordan was telling me that she was quite
startled the other day, in crossing the Priory garden, to hear music
stealing out of the apparently deserted house. She had heard the country
people say that the ghost of poor Mrs. Fortescue walks along the terrace in
the twilight, and Marion looked quite scared when she came in, for the
music seemed to come from the drawing-room, where its mistress used to play
so much after she was first married. I almost wonder you can sit alone
there in the dusk, considering the dreadful associations of the
place."
"I am used to it now," Mrs. Temperley replied, "and it
is so nice and quiet in the empty house. One knows one can't be
interrupted--unless by ghosts."
"Well, that is certainly a blessing," cried Lady Engleton.
"I think I shall ask Professor Fortescue to allow me also to go to the Priory to pursue my art in peace and quietness; a truly hyperborean state, beyond the region of visitors!"
"There would be plenty of room for a dozen unsociable monomaniacs
like ourselves," said Mrs. Temperley.
"I imagine you are a God-send to poor Mrs. Williams, the
caretaker," said Joseph Fleming. "She is my gamekeeper's
sister, and I hear that she finds the solitude in that vast house almost
more than she can stand."
"Poor woman!" said Lady Engleton. "Well, Mr. Fleming,
what are the sporting prospects this autumn?"
He pulled himself together, and his face lighted up. On that subject he
could speak for hours.
Of Joseph Fleming his friends all said: The best fellow in the world. A
kinder heart had no man. He lived on his little property from year's
end to year's end, for the sole and single end of depriving the
pheasants and partridges which he bred upon the estate, of their existence.
He was a confirmed bachelor, living quietly, and taking the world as he
found it (seeing that there was a sufficiency of partridges in good
seasons); trusting that there was a God above who would not let the supply
run short, if one honestly tried to do one's duty and lived an upright
life, harming no man, and women only so much as was strictly honourable and
necessary. He spoke ill of no one. He was diffident of his own powers,
except about sport, wherein he knew himself princely, and cherished that
sort of respect for woman, thoroughly sincere, which assigns to her a
pedestal in a sheltered niche, and offers her homage on condition of her
staying where she is put, even though she starve there, solitary and
esteemed.
"Do tell me, Mr. Fleming, if you know, who is that very handsome
woman with the white hair?" said Lady Engleton. "She is talking
to Mrs. Walker. I seem to know the face."
"Oh, that is Miss Valeria Du Prel, the authoress of those books
that Mrs. Walker is so shocked at."
"Oh, of course; how stupid of me. I should like to have some
conversation with her."
"That's easily managed. I don't think she and Mrs.
Walker quite appreciate each other."
Lady Engleton laughed.
Mrs. Walker was anxiously watching her daughters, and endeavouring to
keep them at a distance from Miss Du Prel, who looked tragically bored.
Joseph Fleming found means to release her, and Lady Engleton's
desire was gratified. "I admire your books so much, Miss Du Prel, and
I have so often wished to see more of you; but you have been abroad for the
last two years, I hear."
Lady Engleton, after asking the authoress to explain exactly what she
meant by her last book, enquired if she had the latest news of Professor
Fortescue. Lady Engleton had heard, with regret, that he had been greatly
worried about that troublesome nephew whom he had educated and sent to
Oxford.
"The young fellow had been behaving very badly," Miss Du
Prel said.
"Ungrateful creature," cried Lady Engleton. "Running
into debt I suppose."
Miss Du Prel feared that the Professor was suffering in health. He had
been working very hard.
"Oh, yes; what was that about some method of killing animals
instantaneously to avoid the horrors of the slaughter-house? Professor
Theobald has been saying what a pity it is that a man so able should waste
his time over these fads. It would never bring him fame or profit, only
ridicule. Every man had his little weakness, but this idea of saving pain
to animals, Professor Theobald said, was becoming a sort of mania with poor
Fortescue, and one feared that it might injure his career. He was greatly
looked up to in the scientific world, but this sort of thing of
course--"
"Though it is nice of him in a way," added Lady
Engleton.
"His weaknesses are nobler than most people's virtues,"
said Miss Du Prel.
"Then you number this among his weaknesses?"
Algitha, who had joined the group, put this question.
"I would rather see him working in the cause of humanity,"
Miss Du Prel answered.
Ernest surprised everyone by suggesting that possibly humanity was well
served, in the long run, by reminding it of the responsibility that goes
with power, and by giving it an object lesson in the decent treatment of
those who can't defend themselves.
"You must have sat at the Professor's feet," cried Miss
Du Prel, raising her eyebrows.
"I have," said Ernest, with a little gesture of pride.
Lady Engleton shook her head. "I fear he flies too high for
ordinary mortals," she said; "and I doubt if even he can be
quite consistent at that altitude."
"Better perhaps fly fairly high, and come down now and again to
rest, if one must, than grovel consistently and always," observed
Ernest.
Lady Engleton gave a little scream. "Mrs. Temperley, come to the
rescue. Your brother is calling us names. He says we grovel consistently
and always."
Ernest laughed, and protested. Lady Engleton pretended to be mortally
offended. Mrs. Temperley was sorry she could give no redress. She had
suffered from Ernest's painful frankness from her youth upwards.
The conversation grew discursive. Lady Engleton enjoyed the pastime of
lightly touching the edges of what she called "advanced"
thought. She sought the society of people like the two Professors and Miss
Du Prel, in order to hear what dreadful and delightful things they really
would say. She read all the new books, and went to the courageous plays
that Mrs. Walker wouldn't mention.
"Your last book, Caterina, is a mine of suggestion,
Miss Du Prel," she said. "It raises one most interesting point
that
has puzzled me greatly. I don't know if you have all read the book? The heroine finds herself differing in her view of life from everyone round her. She is married, but she has made no secret of her scorn for the old ideals, and has announced that she has no intention of being bound by them."
Mrs. Temperley glanced uneasily at Miss Du Prel.
"Accordingly she does even as she had said," continued Lady
Engleton. "She will not brook that interference with her liberty
which marriage among us old-fashioned people generally implies. She refuses
to submit to the attempt that is of course made (in spite of a pre-nuptial
understanding) to bring her under the yoke, and so off she goes and lives
independently, leaving husband and relatives lamenting."
The vicar's wife said she thought she must be going home. Her
husband would be expecting her.
"Oh, won't you wait a little, Mrs. Walker? Your daughters
would perhaps like a game of tennis with my brothers presently."
Mrs. Walker yielded uneasily.
"But before Caterina takes the law into her own
hands, in this way," Lady Engleton continued, "she is troubled
with doubts. She sometimes wonders whether she ought not, after all, to
respect the popular standards (notwithstanding the compact), instead of
disturbing everybody by clinging to her own. Now was it strength of
character or obstinate egotism that induced her to stick to her original
colours, come what might? That is the question which the book has stated
but left unanswered."
Miss Du Prel said that the book showed, if it showed anything, that one
must be true to one's own standard, and not attempt to respect an
ideal in practice that one despises in theory. We are bound, she asserted,
to produce that which is most individual within us; to be ourselves, and
not a poor imitation of someone else; to dare even apparent wrong-doing,
rather than submit to live a life of devotion to that which we cannot
believe.
Mrs. Walker suggested to her daughters that they might go and have a
look at the rose-garden, but the daughters preferred to listen to the
conversation.
"In real life," said the practical Algitha,
"Caterina would not have been able to follow her idea so
simply. Supposing she had had children and complicated circumstances, what
could she have done?"
Miss Du Prel thought that a compromise might have been made.
"A compromise by which she could act according to two opposite
standards?"
Valeria was impatient of difficulties. It was not necessary that a woman
should leave her home in order to be true to her conscience. It was the
best method in Caterina's case, but not in all.
Miss Du Prel did not explain very clearly what she meant. Women made too
much of difficulties, she thought. Somehow people had managed
to overcome obstacles. Look at--and then followed a list of shining
examples.
"I believe you would blame a modern woman who imitated
them," said Mrs. Temperley. "These women have the inestimable
advantage of being dead."
"Ah, yes," Lady Engleton agreed, with a laugh, "we
women may be anything we like--in the last century."
"The tides of a hundred years or so sweeping over one's
audacious deed, soften the raw edges. Then it is tolerated in the
landscape; indeed, it grows mossy and picturesque." Mrs. Temperley
made this comparison.
"And then think how useful it becomes to prove that a daring deed
can be done, given only the necessary stuff in brain and
heart."
Mrs. Walker looked at Algitha in dismay.
"One can throw it in the teeth of one's
contemporaries," added Algitha, "if they fail to produce a
dramatic climax of the same kind."
Only," said Mrs. Temperley, "if they do venture
upon
their own dreadful deed--the deed demanded by their particular modern predicament--then we all shriek vigorously."
"Oh, we shriek less than we used to," said Lady Engleton.
"It is quite a relief to be able to retain one's respectability
on easier terms."
"In such a case as Miss Du Prel depicts? I doubt it.
Caterina, in real life, would have a lively story to tell. How
selfish we should think her! How we should point to the festoons of
bleeding hearts that she had wounded--a dripping cordon round the
deserted home! No; I believe Miss Du Prel herself would be horrified at her
own Caterina if she came upon her unexpectedly in
somebody's drawing-room."
There was a laugh.
"Of course, a great deal is to be said for the popular way of
looking at the matter," Lady Engleton observed. "This
fascinating heroine must have caused a great deal of real sorrow, or at
least she would have caused it, were it not that her creator
had considerably removed all relatives, except a devoted couple of
unorthodox parents, who are charmed at her decision to scandalize society,
and wonder why she doesn't do it sooner. Parents like that don't
grow on every bush."
Mrs. Walker glanced nervously at her astonished girls.
Lady Engleton pointed out that had Caterina been situated
in a more ordinary manner, she would have certainly broken her
parents' hearts and embittered their last years, to say nothing of the
husband and perhaps the children, who would have suffered for want of a
mother's care.
"But why should the husband suffer?" asked Algitha.
"Caterina's husband cordially detested
her."
"It is customary to regard the occasion as one proper for
suffering," said Mrs. Temperley, "and every well-regulated
husband would suffer accordingly."
"Clearly," assented Lady Engleton. "When the world
congratulates us we rejoice, when it condoles with us we weep."
"That at least, would not affect the children," said
Algitha. "I don't see why of necessity they should
suffer."
"Their share of the woe would be least of all, I think,"
Mrs. Temperley observed. "What ogre is going to ill-treat them? And
since few of us know how to bring up so much as an earth-worm reasonably, I
can't see that it matters so very much which particular woman looks
after the children. Any average fool would do."
Mrs. Walker was stiffening in every limb.
"The children would have the usual chances of their class; neither
more nor less, as it seems to me, for lack of a maternal
burnt-offering."
Mrs. Walker rose, gathered her daughters about her, and came forward to
say good-bye. She was sure her husband would be annoyed if she did not
return. She retired with nervous precipitation.
"Really you will depopulate this village, Mrs. Temperley,"
cried Lady Engleton with a laugh; "it is quite dangerous to bring up
a family within your reach. There will be a general exodus. I must be going
myself, or I shan't have an orthodox sentiment left."
The latter had less success in her dealings with Miss Du Prel. She tried
to discover Hadria's more intimate feelings by talking her over with
Valeria, ignoring the snubs that were copiously administered by that
indignant lady. Valeria spoke with sublime scorn of this attempt.
"To try and pump information out of a friend! Why not listen at
the key-hole, and be done with it!"
Henriette's neat hair would have stood on end, had she heard Miss
Du Prel fit adjectives to her conduct.
"I have learnt not to expect a nice sense of honour from superior
persons with unimpeachable sentiments," said Hadria.
"You are certainly a good hater!" cried Valeria, with a
laugh.
"Oh, I don't hate Henriette; I only hate unimpeachable
sentiments."
The sentiments that Henriette represented had become, to Hadria, as the
walls of a prison from which she could see no means of escape.
She had found that life took no heed either of her ambitions or of her
revolts. "And so I growl," she said. She might hate and chafe
in secret to her heart's content; external conformity was the one
thing needful.
"Hadria will be so different when she has children,"
everyone had said. And so she was; but the difference was alarmingly in the
wrong direction. Throughout history, she reflected, children had been the
unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. Who could stand
against them? They had been able to force the most rebellious to their
knees. An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit
of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so trumpeted and exalted! Women
might harbour dreams and plan insurrections; but their
children--little ambassadors of the established and
expected--were argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics.
Their helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt than regiments of
armed soldiers.
Such were the thoughts that wandered through Hadria's mind as she
bent her steps towards the cottage near Craddock Church, where, according
to the gravedigger's account, the baby of the unhappy schoolmistress
was being looked after by Mrs. Gullick.
It would have puzzled the keenest observer to detect the unorthodox
nature of Mrs. Temperley's reflections, as she leant over the child,
and made enquiries as to its health and temperament.
Mrs. Gullick seemed more disposed to indulge in remarks on its
mother's conduct than to give the desired information; but she finally
admitted that Ellen Jervis had an aunt at Southampton who was sending a
little money for the support of the child. Ellen Jervis had stayed with the
aunt during the summer holidays. Mrs. Gullick did not know what was to be
done. She had a large family of her own, and the cottage was small.
Mrs. Temperley asked for the address of the aunt.
"I suppose no one knows who the father is? He has not acknowledged
the child!"
No; that was a mystery still.
About a week later, Craddock Dene was amazed by the news that Mrs.
Temperley had taken the child of Ellen Jervis
under her protection. A cottage had been secured on the road to Craddock, a trustworthy nurse engaged, and here the babe was established, with the consent and blessing of the aunt.
"You are the most inconsistent woman I ever met!" exclaimed
Miss Du Prel.
"Why inconsistent?"
"You say that children have been the means, from time immemorial,
of enslaving women, and here you go and adopt one of your
enslavers!"
"But this child is not legitimate."
Valeria stared.
"Whatever the wrongs of Ellen Jervis, at least there were no laws
written, and unwritten, which demanded of her as a duty that she should
become the mother of this child. In that respect she escapes the ignominy
reserved for the married mother who produces children that are not even
hers."
"You do manage to ferret out the unpleasant aspects of our
position!" Miss Du Prel exclaimed. "But I want to know why you
do this, Hadria. It is good of you, but totally unlike you."
"You are very polite!" cried Hadria. "Why should I not
lay up store for myself in heaven, as well as Mrs. Walker and the
rest?"
"You were not thinking of heaven when you did this deed,
Hadria."
"No; I was thinking of the other place."
"And do you hope to get any satisfaction out of your
protégée?"
Hadria shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know. The child is the result of great sorrow and
suffering; it is the price of a woman's life; a woman who offended the
world, having lived for nearly forty weary obedient years, in circumstances
dreary enough to have turned twenty saints into as many sinners. No; I am
no Lady Bountiful. I feel in defending this child--a sorry defence I
know--that I am, in so far, opposing the world and the system of
things that I hate--. Ah! how I hate it!"
"Is it then hatred that prompts the deed?"
Hadria looked thoughtfully towards the church tower, in whose shadow the
mother of the babe lay sleeping.
"Can you ever quite unravel your own motives, Valeria? Hatred?
Yes; there is a large ingredient of hatred. Without it, probably this poor
infant would have been left to struggle through life alone, with a
mill-stone round its neck, and a miserable constitution into the bargain. I
hope to rescue its constitution. But that poor woman's story touched
me closely. It is so hard, so outrageous! The emptiness of her existence;
the lack of outlet for her affections; the endless monotony; and then the
sudden new interest and food for the starved emotions; the hero-worship
that is latent in us all; and then--good heavens!--for a touch of
poetry, of romance in her life, she would have been ready to believe in the
professions of the devil himself--and this man was a very good
understudy for the devil! Ah! If ever I should meet him!"
"What would you do?" Valeria asked curiously.
"Avenge her," said Hadria with set lips.
"Easier said than done, my dear!"
Gossip asserted that the father of the child was a man of some standing,
the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was
conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened to it.
Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized with Mrs. Temperley's
ill-advised charity. Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman's
wife as another of society's victims. She placed side by side the
schoolmistress in her sorrow and disgrace, and the careworn woman at the
Vicarage, with her eleven children, and her shrivelled nature, poor and
dead as an autumn leaf that shivers before the wind. They had both
suffered--so Mrs. Temperley dared to assert--in the same cause.
They were both victims of the same creed. It was a terrible cultus, a
savage idol that had devoured them both, as cruel and insatiable as the
brazen god of old, with his internal fires, which the faithful fed
devoutly, with shrinking girls and screaming children.
"I still fail to understand why you adopt this child," said
Valeria. "My Caterina would never have done
it."
"The little creature interests me," said Hadria. "It
is a tiny field for the exercise of the creative forces. Every one has some
form of active amusement. Some like golf, others flirtation. I prefer this
sort of diversion."
"But you have your own children to interest you, surely far more
than this one."
Hadria's face grew set and defiant.
"They represent to me the insult of society--my own private
and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through
them that I am to be subdued and humbled. Just once in a way, however, the
thing does not quite 'come off.'"
"What has set you on edge so, I wonder."
"People, traditions, unimpeachable sentiments."
"Yours are not unimpeachable at any rate!"
Valeria cried laughing. "Caterina is an angel compared
with you, and yet my publisher has his doubts about her."
"Caterina would do as I do, I know," said
Hadria. "Those who are looked at askance by the world appeal to my
instincts. I shall be able to teach this child, perhaps, to strike a blow
at the system which sent her mother to a dishonoured grave, while it leaves
the man for whose sake she risked all this, in peace and the odour of
sanctity."
Time seemed to be marked, in the sleepy village, by the baby's
growth. Valeria, who thought she was fond of babies, used to accompany
Hadria on her visits to the cottage, but she treated the infant so much as
if it had been a guinea-pig or a rabbit that the nurse was indignant.
The weeks passed in rapid monotony, filled with detail and leaving no
mark behind them, no sign of movement or progress. The cares of the house,
the children, left only limited time for walking, reading, correspondence,
and such music as could be wrung out of a crowded day. An effort on
Hadria's part, to make serious use of her musical talent had been
frustrated. But a pathetic, unquenchable hope always survived that
presently, when this or that corner had been turned, this or that difficulty overcome, conditions would be conquered and opportunity arrive. Not yet had she resigned her belief that the most harassing and wearying and unceasing business that a human being can undertake, is compatible with the stupendous labour and the unbounded claims of an artist's career. The details of practical life and petty duties sprouted up at every step. If they were put aside, even for a moment, the wheels of daily existence became clogged and then all opportunity was over. Hope had begun to alternate with a fear lest that evasive corner should never be turned, that little crop of interruptions never cease to turn up. And yet it was so foolish. Each obstacle in itself was paltry. It was their number that overcame one, as the tiny arrows of the Lilliputs overcame Gulliver.
One of Hadria's best friends in Craddock Dene was Joseph Fleming,
who had become very intimate at the Red House during the last year or two.
Hadria used to tire of the necessity to be apparently rational (such was
her own version), and found it a relief to talk nonsense, just as she
pleased, to Joseph Fleming, who never objected or took offence, if he
occasionally looked surprised. Other men might have thought she was
laughing at them, but Joseph made no such mistake when Mrs. Temperley broke
out, as she did now and then, in fantastic fashion.
She was standing, one morning, on the little bridge over the stream that
ran at a distance of a few hundred yards from the Red House. The two boys
were bespattering themselves in the meadow below, by the water's
verge. They called up at intervals to their mother the announcement of some
new discovery of flower or insect.
Watching the stream sweeping through the bridge, she seemed the centre
of a charming domestic scene to Joseph Fleming, who chanced to pass by with
his dogs. He addressed himself to her maternal feelings by remarking what
handsome and clever boys they were.
"Handsome and clever?" she repeated. "Is
that all you can say, Mr. Fleming? When you set about it, I
think you might provide a little better food for one's parental
sentiment. I suppose you will go and tell Mrs. Walker that her
dozen and a half are all handsome and clever too!"
"Not so handsome and clever as yours," replied Mr. Fleming,
a little aghast at this ravenous maternal vanity.
"What wretched poverty of expression!" Hadria complained.
"I ask for bread, and truly you give me a stone."
Joseph Fleming eyed his companion askance. "I--I admire your
boys immensely, as you know," he said.
"Not enough, not enough."
"What can I say more?"
"A mother has to find in her children all that she can hope to
find in life, and she naturally desires to make the most of them,
don't you see?"
"Ah! yes, quite so," said Joseph dubiously.
"Nobody, I suppose, likes to be commonplace all round; one must
have some poetry somewhere--so most women idealize their children, and
if other people won't help them in the effort, don't you see? it
is most discouraging."
"Are you chaffing, or what?" Joseph enquired.
"No, indeed; I am perilously serious."
"I can well understand how a mother must get absorbed in her
children," said Joseph. "I suppose it's a sort of natural
provision."
"Think of Mrs. Allan with her outrageous eight--all making
mud-pies!" cried Hadria; "a magnificent 'natural
provision!' A small income, a small house, with those pervasive
eight. You know the stampede when one goes to call; the aroma of bread and
butter (there are few things more inspiring); the cook always about to
leave; Mrs. Allan with a racking headache. It is indeed not difficult to
understand how a mother would get absorbed in her children. Why, their
pinafores alone would become absorbing."
"Quite so," said Mr. Fleming. Then a little anxious to
change the subject: "Oh, by the way, have you heard that
the Priory is really to be inhabited at last? Professor Theobald has almost decided to take it."
"Really? that will be exciting for Craddock Dene. We shall have
another household to dissect and denounce. Providence watches over us all,
I verily believe."
"I hope so," Joseph replied gravely.
"Truly I hope so too," Hadria said, no less seriously,
"for indeed we need it."
Joseph was too simple to be greatly surprised at anything that Mrs.
Temperley might say. He had decided that she was a little eccentric, and
that explained everything; just as he explained instances of extraordinary
reasoning power in a dog by calling it "instinct." Whatever
Mrs. Temperley might do was slightly eccentric, and had she suddenly taken
it into her head to dance a fandango on the public road, it would have
merely put a little extra strain on that word.
By dint of not understanding her, Joseph Fleming had grown to feel
towards Mrs. Temperley a genuine liking, conscious, in his vague way, that
she was kind at heart, however bitter or strange she might sometimes be in
her speech. Moreover, she was not always eccentric or unexpected. There
would come periods when she would say and do very much as her neighbours
said and did; looking then pale and lifeless, but absolutely beyond the
reach of hostile criticism, as her champion would suggest to carping
neighbours.
Not the most respected of the ladies who turned up their disapproving
noses, was more dull or more depressing than Hadria could be, on occasion,
as she had herself pointed out; and would not this soften
stony hearts?
When she discovered that her kindly neighbour had been fighting her
battles for her, she was touched; but she asked him not to expend his
strength on her behalf. She tried in vain to convince him that she did not
care to be invited too often to submit to the devitalizing processes of
social intercourse, to which the families of the district shrank not from
subjecting themselves. If Joseph Fleming chanced to call at the Red House
after her return from one of these
entertainments, he was sure to find Mrs. Temperley in one of her least comprehensible moods. But whatever she might say, he stood up for her among the neighbours with persistent loyalty. He decked her with virtues that she did not possess, and represented her to the sceptical district, radiant in domestic glory. Hadria thus found herself in an awkwardly uncertain position; either she was looked at askance, as eccentric, or she found herself called upon to make good expectations of saintliness, such as never were on land or sea.
Saintly? Hadria shook her head. She could imagine no one further from
such a condition than she was at present, and she felt it in her, to swing
down and down to the very opposite pole from that serene altitude. She
admitted that, from a utilitarian point of view, she was making a vast
mistake. As things were, Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Allan, laboriously spinning
their ponderous families on their own axes, in a reverent spirit, had
chosen the better part. But Hadria did not care. She would not
settle down to make the best of things, as even Algitha now recommended,
"since there she was, and there was no helping it."
"I will never make the best of things," she
said. "I know nothing that gives such opportunities to the
Devil."
Hadria had characteristically left the paradox unjustified.
"What do you mean?" asked Algitha. "Surely the enemy
of good has most hold over the discontented spirit."
Hadria likened the contented to stagnant pools, wherein corruptions grow
apace. "It is only the discontented ocean that remains, for all its
storms, fresh and sane to the end."
But though she said this, for opposition's sake perhaps, she had
her doubts about her own theory. Discontent was certainly the initiator of
all movement; but there was a kind of sullen discontent that stagnated and
ate inwards, like a disease. Better a cheerful sin or two than allow
that to take hold!
"But then there is this sickly feminine conscience to deal
with!" she exclaimed. "It clings to the worst of us still, and
prevents the wholesome big catastrophes that might bring
salvation."
The boys and Algitha had come to spend Saturday and Sunday at the Red
House. Hadria hunted out a stupendous card-case (a wedding gift from Mrs.
Gordon), erected on her head a majestic bonnet, and announced to the
company that she was going for a round of visits.
There was a yell of laughter. Hadria advanced across the lawn with quiet
dignity, bearing her card-case as one who takes part in a solemn
ceremony.
"Where did you fall in with that casket?" enquired Fred.
"And who was the architect of the cathedral?" asked
Ernest.
"This casket, as you call it, was presented to me by Mrs. Gordon.
The cathedral I designed myself."
They all crowded round to examine the structure. There were many
derisive comments.
"Gothic," said Ernest, "pure Gothic."
"I should have described it as 'Early
Perpendicular,'" objected Fred.
"Don't display your neglected education; it's beyond all
question Gothic. Look at the steeple and the gargoyles and the handsome
vegetation. Ruskin would revel in it!"
"Are you really going about in that thing?" asked
Algitha.
Hadria wished to know what was the use of designing a Gothic cathedral
if one couldn't go about in it.
The bonnet was, in truth, a daring caricature of the prevailing fashion,
just sufficiently serious in expression to be wearable.
"Well, I never before met a woman who would deliberately flout her
neighbours by wearing preposterous millinery!" Ernest exclaimed.
Hadria went her round of calls, and all eyes fixed themselves on her
bonnet. Mrs. Allan, who had small opportunity of seeing the fashions,
seemed impressed if slightly puzzled by it. Mrs. Jordan evidently thought
it "loud." Mrs. Walker supposed it fashionable, but regretted
that this sort of thing was going to be worn this season. She hoped the
girls would modify the style in adopting it.
Mrs. Walker had heard that the two Professors had arrived at Craddock
Place yesterday afternoon, and the Engletons expected them to make a visit
of some weeks. Hadria's face brightened.
"And so at last we may hope that the Priory will be
inhabited," said the vicar's wife.
"Of course you know," she added in the pained voice that she
always reserved for anecdotes of local ill-doing, "that Mrs.
Fortescue committed suicide there."
Madame Bertaux, the English wife of a French official, had chanced to
call, and Mrs. Walker gave the details of the story for the benefit of the
new-comer.
Madame Bertaux was a brisk, clever, good-looking woman, with a profound
knowledge of the world and a corresponding contempt for it.
It appeared that the Professor's wife, whom Madame Bertaux had
happened to meet in Paris, was a young, beautiful, and self-willed girl,
passionately devoted to her husband. She was piqued at his lack of
jealousy, and doubted or pretended to doubt his love for her. In order to
put him to the test, she determined to rouse his jealousy by violent and
systematic
flirtation. This led to an entanglement, and finally, in a fit of reckless anger, to an elopement with a Captain Bolton who was staying at the Priory at the time. Seized with remorse, she had returned home to kill herself. This was the tragedy that had kept the old house for so many years tenantless. Hadria's music was the only sound that had disturbed its silence, since the day when the dead body of its mistress was found in the drawing-room, which she was supposed to have entered unknown to anyone, by the window that gave on to the terrace.
Valeria Du Prel was able to throw more light on the strange story. She
had difficulty in speaking without rancour of the woman who had thrown away
the love of such a man. She admitted that the girl was extremely
fascinating, and had seemed to Valeria to have the faults of an impetuous
rather than of a bad nature. She cherished that singular desire of many
strong-willed women, to be ruled and mastered by the man she loved, and she
had entirely failed to understand her husband's attitude towards her.
She resented it as a sign of indifference. She was like the Chinese wives,
who complain bitterly of a husband's neglect when he omits to beat
them. She taunted the Professor for failing to assert his
"rights."
"Morally, I have no rights, except such as you choose to give me
of your own free will," he replied. "I am not your
gaoler."
"And even that did not penetrate to her better nature till it was
too late," Valeria continued. "But after the mischief was done,
that phrase seems to have stung her to torment. Her training had blinded
her, as one is blinded in coming out of darkness into a bright light. She
was used to narrower hearts and smaller brains. Her last letter--a
terrible record of the miseries of remorse--shews that she recognized
at last what sort of a man he was whose heart she had broken. But even in
her repentance, she was unable to conquer her egotism. She could not face
the horrors of self-accusation; she preferred to kill herself."
"What a shocking story!" cried Hadria.
"And all the more so because the Professor clings to her memory so
faithfully. He blames himself for everything. He ought, he says, to have
realized better the influence of her training; he ought to have made her
understand that he could not assert what she called his
'rights' without insulting her and himself."
"Whenever one hears anything new about the Professor, it is always
something that makes one admire and love him more than ever!" cried
Hadria.
Her first meeting with him was in the old Yew Avenue in the Priory
garden. He was on his way to call at the Red House. She stood on a patch of
grass by a rustic seat commanding the vista of yews, and above them, a
wilderness of lilacs and laburnums, in full flower. It looked to her like a
pathway that led to some exquisite fairy palace of one's
childhood.
Almost with the first word that the Professor uttered, Hadria felt a
sense of relief and hope. The very air seemed to grow lighter, the scent of
the swaying flowers sweeter. She always afterwards associated this moment
of meeting with the image of that avenue of mourning yews, crowned with the
sunlit magnificence of an upper world of blossom.
What had she been thinking of to run so close to despair during these
years? A word, a smile, and the dead weight swerved, swung into balance,
and life lifted up its head once more. She remembered now, not her
limitations, but the good things of her lot; the cruelties that Fate had
spared her, the miseries that the ruthless goddess had apportioned to
others. But the Professor's presence did not banish, but rather
emphasized, the craving to take part in the enriching of that general life
which was so poor and sad. He strengthened her disposition to revolt
against the further impoverishment of it, through the starving of her own
nature. He would not blame her simply on account of difference from others.
She felt sure of that. He would not be shocked if she had not
answered to the stimulus of surroundings as faithfully as most women seemed to answer to them. Circumstance had done its usual utmost to excite her instinct to beat down the claims of her other self, but for once, circumstance had failed. It was a solitary failure among a creditable multitude of victories. But if instinct had not responded to the imperious summons, the other self had been suffering the terrors of a siege, and the garrison had grown starved and weakly. What would be the end of it? And the little cynical imp that peeped among her thoughts, as a monkey among forest boughs, gibbered his customary "What matters it? One woman's destiny is but a small affair. If I were you I would make less fuss about it." The Professor would understand that she did not wish to make a fuss. He would not be hard upon any human being. He knew that existence was not such an easy affair to manage. She wished that she could tell him everything in her life--its struggle, its desperate longing and ambition, its hatred, its love: only he would understand all the contradictions and all the pain. She would not mind his blame, because he would understand, and the blame would be just.
They walked together down the avenue towards the beautiful old Tudor
house, which stood on the further side of a broad lawn.
The Professor looked worn and thin. He owned to being very tired of the
hurry and struggle of town. He was sick of the conflict of jealousies and
ambitions. It seemed so little worth while, this din of voices that would
so soon be silenced.
"I starve for the sight of a true and simple face, for the grasp
of a brotherly hand."
"You?" exclaimed Hadria.
"There are so few, so very few, where the throng is thick and the
battle fierce. It saddens me to see good fellows trampling one another
down, growing hard and ungenerous. And then the vulgarity, the irreverence:
they are almost identical, I think. One grows very sick and sorry at times
amidst the cruelty and the baseness that threaten to destroy
one's courage and one's hope. I know that human nature has in it a germ of nobility that will save it, in the long run, but meanwhile things seem sadly out of joint."
"Is that the order of the universe?" asked Hadria.
"No, I think it is rather the disorder of man's
nature," he replied.
Hadria asked if he would return to tea at the Red House. The Professor
said he would like to call and see Hubert, but proposed a rest on the
terrace, as it was still early in the afternoon.
"I used to avoid the place," he said, "but I made a
mistake. I have resolved to face the memories: it is better."
It was the first time that he had ever referred, in Hadria's
presence, to the tragedy of the Priory.
"I have often wished to speak to you about my wife," he said
slowly, as they sat down on the old seat, on the terrace. "I have
felt that you would understand the whole sad story, and I hoped that some
day you would know it." He paused and then added, "It has often
been a comfort to me to remember that you were in the world, for it made me
feel less lonely. I felt in you some new--what can I call it?
instinct, impulse, inspiration, which ran you straight against all the
hardest stone walls that intersect the pathways of this ridiculous old
world. And, strange to say, it is the very element in you that sets you at
loggerheads with others, that enabled me to understand you."
Hadria looked bewildered.
"To tell you the truth, I have always wondered why women have
never felt as I am sure you feel towards life. You remember that day at
Dunaghee when you were so annoyed at my guessing your thoughts. They were
unmistakeable to one who shared them. Your sex has always been a riddle to
me; there seemed to be something abject in their nature, even among the
noblest of them. But you are no riddle. While I think you are the least
simple woman I ever met, you are to me the easiest to
understand."
"And yet I remember your telling me the exact contrary,"
said Hadria.
"That was before I had caught the connecting thread. Had I been a
woman, I believe that life and my place in it would have affected me
exactly as it affects you."
Hadria coloured over cheek and brow. It was so strange, so startling, so
delicious to find, for the first time in her life, this intimate
sympathy.
"I wish my wife had possessed your friendship," he said.
"I believe you would have saved us." He passed his hands over
his brow, looking round at the closed windows of the drawing-room. "I
almost feel as if she were near us now on this old terrace that she loved
so. She planted these roses herself--how they have grown!" They
were white cluster roses and yellow banksias, which had strayed far along
the balustrade, clambering among the stone pillars.
"You doubtless know the bare facts of her life, but nothing is so
misleading as bare fact. My wife was one of the positive natures, capable
of great nobility, but liable to glaring error and sin! She held ideas
passionately. She had the old barbaric notion that a husband was a sort of
master, and must assert his authority and rights. It was the result of her
training. I saw that a great development was before her. I pleased myself
with the thought of watching and helping it. She was built on a grand
scale. To set her free from prejudice, from her injustice to herself, from
her dependence on me to teach her to breathe deep with those big lungs of
hers and think bravely with that capacious brain: that was my dream. I
hoped to hear her say to me some day, what I fear no woman has yet been
able to say to her husband, 'The day of our marriage was the birthday
of my freedom.'"
Hadria drew a long breath. It seemed to overwhelm her that a man, even
the Professor, could utter such a sentiment. All the old hereditary
instincts of conquest and ownership appeared to be utterly dead in him.
No wonder he had found life a lonely pilgrimage! He lived before his
time. His wife had taunted him because he
would not treat her as his legal property, or rule her through the claims and opportunities that popular sentiment assigned to him.
When a woman as generous as himself, as just, as gentle-hearted, had
appeared on the horizon of the world, the advent of a nobler social order
might be hoped for. The two were necessary for the new era.
Then, not only imagination, but cold reason herself grew eloquent with
promises.
"It was in there, in the old drawing-room, where we had sat
together evening after evening, that they found her dead, the very type of
all that is brilliant and exquisite and living. To me she was everything.
All my personal happiness was centred in her. I cared for nothing so long
as she was in the same world as myself, and I might love her. In the
darkness that followed, I was brought face to face with the most terrible
problems of human fate. I had troubled myself but little about the question
of the survival of the personality after death; I had been pre-occupied
with life. Now I realized out of what human longings and what human
desperation our religions are built. For one gleam of hope that we should
meet again--what would I not have given? But it never came. The trend
of my thought made all such hopes impossible. I have grown charier of the
word 'impossible' now. We know so infinitesimally little. I had
to learn to live on comfortless. All that was strongly personal in me died.
All care about myself went out suddenly, as in other cases I think it goes
out slowly, beaten down by the continued buffetings of life. I gave myself
to my work, and then a curious decentralizing process took place. I ceased
to be the point round which the world revolved, in my own consciousness. We
all start our career as pivots, if I am not mistaken. The world span, and
I, in my capacity of atomic part, span with it. I mean that this was a
continuous, not an occasional state of consciousness. After that came an
unexpected peace."
"You have travelled a long and hard road to find it!" cried
Hadria.
"Not a unique fate," he said with a smile.
"It must be a terrible process that quite kills the personal in
one, it is so strong. With me the element is clamorous."
"It has its part to play."
"Surely the gods must be jealous of human beings. Why did they
destroy the germ of such happiness as you might have had?"
"The stern old law holds for ever; wrong and error have to be
expiated."
The Professor traced the history of his wife's family, shewing the
gradual gathering of Fate to its culmination in the tragedy of her short
life. Her father and grandfather had both been men of violent and
tyrannical temper, and tradition gave the same character to their
forefathers. Eleanor's mother was one of the meek and saintly women
who almost invariably fall to the lot of overbearing men. She had made a
virtue of submitting to tyranny, and even to downright cruelty, thus almost
repeating the story of her equally meek predecessor, of whose ill-treatment
stories were still current in the district.
"When death put an end to their wretchedness, one would suppose
that the evil of their lives was worked out and over, but it was not so.
The Erinnys were still unsatisfied. My poor wife became the victim of their
fury. And every new light that science throws upon human life shews that
this must be so. The old Greeks saw that unconscious
evil-doing is punished as well as that which is conscious. These poor
unselfish women, piling up their own supposed merit, at the expense of the
character of their tyrants, laid up a store of misery for their descendant,
my unhappy wife. Imagine the sort of training and tradition that she had to
contend with; her mother ignorant and supine, her father violent, bigoted,
almost brutal. Eleanor's nature was obscured and distorted by it.
Having inherited the finer and stronger qualities of her father's
race, with much of its violence, she was going through a struggle at the time of our marriage: training, native vigour and nobility all embroiled in a desperate civil war. It was too much. There is no doubt as to the ultimate issue, but the struggle killed her. It is a common story: a character militant which meets destruction in the struggle for life. The past evil pursues and throttles the present good."
"This takes away the last consolation from women who have been
forced to submit to evil conditions," said Hadria.
"It is the truth," said the Professor. "The Erinnys
are no mere fancy of the Greek mind. They are symbols of an awful fact of
life that no one can afford to ignore."
"What insensate fools we all are!" Hadria exclaimed.
"I mean women."
The Professor made no polite objection to the statement.
As they were wending their way towards the Red House, the Professor
reminded his companion of the old friendship that had existed between them,
ever since Hadria was a little girl. He had always cherished towards her
that sentiment of affectionate good-fellowship. She must check him if he
seemed to presume upon it, in seeking sympathy or offering it. He watched
her career with the deepest interest and anxiety. He always believed that
she would give some good gift to the world. And he still believed it. Like
the rest of us, she needed sympathy at the right moment.
"We need to feel that there is someone who believes in us, in our
good faith, in our good will, one who will not judge according to outward
success or failure. Remember," he said, "that I have that
unbounded faith in you. Nothing can move it. Whatever happens and wherever
you may be led by the strange chances of life, don't forget the
existence of one old friend, or imagine that anything can shake his
friendship or his desire to be of service."
Hadria laughed. "Until you discovered this by personal
inconvenience, you always scolded me for my disposition to jeer at the
domestic scheme."
"It is a little geometrical," Valeria
admitted.
"Geometrical! It is like a gigantic ordnance map palmed off on one
instead of a real landscape."
"Come now, to be just, say an Italian garden."
"That flatters it, but the simile will do. The eye sees to the end
of every path, and knows that it leads to nothing."
"Ah! dear Hadria, but all the pathways of the world have that very
same goal."
"At least some of them have the good taste to wind a little, and
thus disguise the fact. And think of the wild flowers one may gather by the
wayside in some forest track, or among the mountain passes; but in these
prim alleys what natural thing can one know? Brain and heart grow tame and
clipped to match the hedges, or take on grotesque shapes--"
"That one must guard against."
"Oh, I am sick of guarding against things. To be always warding
off evil, is an evil in itself. Better let it come."
Valeria looked at her companion anxiously.
"One knows how twirling round in a circle makes one giddy, or
following the same path stupifies. How does the
polar bear feel, I wonder, after he has walked up and down in his cage for years and years?"
"Used to it, I imagine," said Valeria.
"But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it
is all so confusing--"
Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had
a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the
morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long sprays
of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn had left a
mark of blood upon her hand.
Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.
"I don't want to allow emotion to get the better of me,
Valeria. I don't want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I
dread the accumulation of emotion--emotion that has never had a good
explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no
one shouts or says 'damn.'"
"Ah! you naturally feel out of your element."
Hadria laughed. "It's all very well to take that superior
tone. You don't reside on an ordnance map."
There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.
"It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance
of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?"
Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English
village would drive her out of her mind in a week. "And yet, Valeria,
you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place
in life--as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same
thing!"
"It is well that you do not mean all you say."
"Or say all I mean."
Valeria laid her hand on Hadria's with wistful tenderness.
"I don't think anyone will ever quite understand you,
Hadria."
"Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when
it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people's characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might."
Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.
"I see that you are incongruously situated, but don't you
think that you may be wrong yourself? Don't you think you may be
making a mistake?"
Hadria was emphatic in assent.
"Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don't see
how--unless by pure chance--I can be anything else. For I
can't discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by
this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their
eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling
their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining
their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know
that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can't
see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow
little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly
involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex
is concerned."
"Why? Because the standards are changing," asserted Miss Du
Prel.
"Because--look, Valeria, our present relation to life is
in itself an injury, an insult--you have never seriously
denied that--and how can one make for oneself a moral code that has to
lay its foundation-stone in that very injury? And if one lays one's
foundation-stone in open ground beyond, then one's code is out of
touch with present fact, and one's morality consists in sheer revolt
all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept
Mrs. Walker's and Mrs. Gordon's view of the case, plainly and
simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder into
quicksands."
"Then what happens?"
"That's just what I don't know. That's just why I
say that I am probably wrong, because, in this transition period, there
seems to be no clear right."
"To cease to believe in right and wrong would be to founder
morally, altogether," Valeria warned.
"I know, and yet I begin to realize how true it is that there is
no such thing as absolute right or wrong. It is related to the case and the
moment."
"This leads up to some desperate deed or other, Hadria,"
cried her friend, "I have feared it, or hoped it, I scarcely know
which, for some time. But you alarm me to-day."
"If I believed in the efficacy of a desperate deed, Valeria, I
should not chafe as I do, against the conditions of the present scheme of
things. If individuals could find a remedy for themselves, with a little
courage and will, there would be less occasion to growl."
"But can they not?"
"Can they?" asked Hadria. "A woman without means of
livelihood, breaks away from her moorings--well, it is as if a child
were to fall into the midst of some gigantic machinery that is going at
full speed. Let her try the feat, and the cracking of her bones by the big
wheels will attest its hopelessness. And yet I long to try!" Hadria
added beneath her breath.
Miss Du Prel admitted that success was rare in the present delirious
state of competition. Individuals here and there pulled through.
"I told you years ago that Nature had chosen our sex for
ill-usage. Try what we may, defeat and suffering await us, in one form or
another. You are dissatisfied with your form of suffering, I with mine. A
creature in pain always thinks it would be more bearable if only it were on
the other side."
"Ah, I know you won't admit it," said Hadria,
"but some day we shall all see that this is the result of human
cruelty
and ignorance, and that it is no more 'intended' or inherently necessary than that children should be born with curvature of the spine, or rickets. Some day it will be as clear as noon, that heartless 'some day' which can never help you or me, or any of us who live now. It is we, I suppose, who are required to help the 'some day.' Only how, when we are ourselves in extremis?"
"The poor are helpers of the poor," said Valeria.
"But if they grow too poor, to starvation point, then they can
help no more; they can only perish slowly."
"I hoped," said Valeria, "that Professor Fortescue
would have poured oil upon the troubled waters."
"He does in one sense. But in another, he makes me feel more than
ever what I am missing."
Miss Du Prel's impulsive instincts could be kept at bay no
longer.
"There is really nothing for it, but some deed of daring,"
she cried. "I believe, if only your husband could get over his horror
of the scandal and talk, that a separation would be best for you both. It
is not as if he cared for you. One can see he does not. You are such a
strange, inconsequent being, Hadria, that I believe you would feel the
parting far more than he would (conventions apart)."
"No question of it," said Hadria. "Our disharmony,
radical and hopeless as it is, does not prevent my having a strong regard
for Hubert. I can't help seeing the admirable sides of his character.
He is too irritated and aggrieved to feel anything but rancour against me.
It is natural. I understand."
"Ah, it will only end in some disaster, if you try to reconcile
the irreconcilable. Of course I think it is a great pity that you have not
more of the instincts on which homes are founded, but since you have
not--"
Hadria turned sharply round. "Do you really regret that just for
once the old, old game has been played unsuccessfully? Therein I can't
agree with you, though I am the loser
by it." Hadria grasped a swaying spray that the wind blew towards her, and clasped it hard in her hand, regardless of the thorns. "It gives me a keen, fierce pleasure to know that for all their training and constraining and incitement and starvation, I have not developed masses of treacly instinct in which mind and will and every human faculty struggle, in vain, to move leg or wing, like some poor fly doomed to a sweet and sticky death. At least the powers of the world shall not prevail with me by that old device. Mind and will and every human faculty may die, but they shall not drown, in the usual applauded fashion, in seas of tepid, bubbling, up-swelling instinct. I will dare anything rather than endure that. They must take the trouble to provide instruments of death from without; they must lay siege and starve me; they must attack in soldierly fashion; I will not save them the exertion by developing the means of destruction from within. There I stand at bay. They shall knock down the citadel of my mind and will, stone by stone."
"That is a terrible challenge!" exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
A light laugh sounded across the lawn.
The afternoon sunshine threw four long shadows over the grass: of a
slightly-built woman, of a very tall man, and of two smaller men.
The figures themselves were hidden by a group of shrubs, and only the
shadows were visible. They paused, for a moment, as if in consultation; the
lady standing, with her weight half leaning on her parasol. The tall man
seemed to be talking to her vivaciously. His long, shadow-arms shot across
the grass, his head wagged.
"The shadows of Fate!" cried Valeria fantastically.
Then they moved into sight, advancing towards the terrace.
"Who are they I wonder? Oh, Professor Fortescue, for
one!"
"Lady Engleton and Joseph Fleming. The other I don't
know."
He was very broad and tall, having a slight stoop, and a curious way of
carrying his head, craned forward. The attitude suggested a keen observer.
He was attired in knickerbockers and rough tweed Norfolk jacket, and he
looked robust and powerful, almost to excess. The chin and mouth were
concealed by the thick growth of dark hair, but one suspected unpleasant
things of the latter. As far as one could judge his age, he seemed a man of
about five-and-thirty, with vigour enough to last for another fifty
years.
"That," said Valeria, "must be Professor Theobald. He
has probably come to see the house."
"I am sure I shall hate that man," exclaimed Hadria.
"He is not to be trusted; what nonsense he is talking to Lady
Engleton!"
"You can't hear, can you?"
"No; I can see. And she laughs and smiles and bandies words with
him. He is amusing certainly; there is that excuse for her; but I wonder
how she can do it."
"What an extraordinary creature you are! To take a prejudice
against a man before you have spoken to him."
"He is cruel, he is cruel!" exclaimed Hadria in a low,
excited voice. "He is like some cunning wild animal. Look at
Professor Fortescue! his opposite pole--why it is all clearer, at this
distance, than if we were under the confusing influence of their speech.
See the contrast between that quiet, firm walk, and the insinuating,
conceited tread of the other man. Joseph Fleming comes out well too, honest
soul!"
"He is carrying a fishing-rod. They have been fishing," said
Valeria.
"Not Professor Fortescue, I am certain. He does not
find his pleasure in causing pain."
"This hero-worship blinds you. Depend upon it, he is not without
the primitive instinct to kill."
"There are individual exceptions to all savage instincts, or the
world would never move."
"Instinct rules the world," said Miss Du Prel. "At
least it is obviously neither reason nor the moral sense that rules
it."
"Then why does it produce a Professor Fortescue now and
then?"
"Possibly as a corrective."
"Or perhaps for fun," said Hadria.
"I can never resist fascinations, Lady Engleton."
"Do you ever try?"
"My life is spent in the endeavour."
"How foolish!" Whether this applied to the endeavour or to
the remark, did not quite appear. Lady Engleton's graceful figure
leant over the parapet.
"Do you know, Mrs. Temperley," she said in her incessantly
vivacious manner, "I have scarcely heard a serious word since our two
Professors came to us. Isn't it disgraceful? I naturally expected to
be improved and enlightened, but they are both so frivolous, I can't
keep them for a moment to any important subject. They refuse to be
profound. It is I who have to be profound."
"While we endeavour to be charming," said
Professor Theobald.
"You may think that flattering, but I confess it seems to me a
beggarly compliment (as men's to women usually are)."
"You expect too much of finite intelligence, Lady
Engleton."
"This is how I am always put off! If it were not that you are both
such old friends--you are a sort of cousin I think, Professor
Fortescue--I should really feel aggrieved. One has to endure so much
more from relations. No, but really; I appeal to Mrs. Temperley. When one
is hungering for erudition, to be offered compliments! Not that I can
accuse Professor Fortescue of compliments," she added with a laugh; "wild horses would not drag one from him. I angle vainly. But he is so ridiculously young. He enjoys things as if he were a schoolboy. Does one look for that in one's Professors? He talks of the country as if it were Paradise Regained."
"So it is to me," he said with a smile.
"But that is not your rôle. You
have to think, not to enjoy."
"Then you must not invite us to Craddock Place," Professor
Theobald stipulated.
"As usual, a halting compliment."
"To take you seriously, Lady Engleton," said Professor
Fortescue, "(though I know it is a dangerous practice) one of the
great advantages of an occasional think is to enable one to relish the joys
of mental vacuity, just as the pleasure of idleness is never fully known
till one has worked."
"Ah," sighed Lady Engleton, "I know I don't
extract the full flavour out of that!"
"It is a neglected art," said the Professor. "After
worrying himself with the problems of existence, as the human being is
prone to do, as soon as existence is more or less secure and peaceful, a
man can experience few things more enjoyable than to leave aside all
problems and go out into the fields, into the sun, to feel the life in his
veins, the world at the threshold of his five senses."
"All, now you really are profound at last, Professor!"
"I thought it was risky to take you seriously."
"No, no, I am delighted. The world at the threshold of one's
five senses. One has but to look and to listen and the beauty of things
displays itself for our benefit. Yes, but that is what the artists say, not
the Professors."
"Even a Professor is human," pleaded Theobald.
Valeria quoted some lines that she said expressed Professor
Fortescue's idea.
"Carry me out into the wind and the
sunshine,
Into the beautiful world!"
Lady Engleton's artistic instinct seemed to occupy itself less with
the interpretation of Nature than with the appreciation of the handiwork of
man. The lines did not stir her. Professor Theobald shared her indifference
for the poetic expression, but not for the reality expressed.
"I quarrel with you about art," said Lady Engleton.
"Art is art, and nature is nature, both charming in their way, though
I prefer art."
"Our old quarrel!" said the Professor.
"Because a wild glade is beautiful in its quality of wild glade,
you can't see the beauty in a trim bit of garden, with its delightful
suggestion of human thought and care."
"I object to stiffness," said Professor Theobald.
His proposals to improve the stately old gardens at the Priory by adding
what Lady Engleton called "fatuous wriggles to all the walks, for
mere wrigglings' sake," had led to hot discussions on the
principles of art and the relation of symmetry to the sensibilities of
mankind. Lady Engleton thought the Professor crude in taste, and shallow in
knowledge, on this point.
"And yet you appreciate so keenly my old enamels, and your eye
seeks out, in a minute, a picturesque roof or gable."
"Perhaps Theobald leans to the picturesque and does not care for
the classic," suggested his colleague; "a fundamental
distinction in mental bias."
"Then why does he enjoy so much of the
Renaissance work on caskets and goblets? He was
raving about them last night in the choicest English."
Lady Engleton crossed over to speak to Miss Du Prel. Professor Theobald
approached Mrs. Temperley and Joseph Fleming. Hadria knew by some instinct
that the Professor had been waiting for an opportunity to speak to her. As
he drew near, a feeling of intense enmity arose within her, which reached
its highest pitch when he addressed her in a fine, low-toned voice of
peculiarly fascinating quality. Every instinct rose up as if in warning. He
sat down beside her, and began
to talk about the Priory and its history. His ability was obvious, even in his choice of words and his selection of incidents. He had the power of making dry archæological facts almost dramatic. His speech differed from that of most men, in the indefinable manner wherein excellence differs from mediocrity. Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was difficult to say.
Sometimes his words allowed two possible interpretations to be put upon
a sentence. He was a master of the ambiguous. Obviously it was not lack of
skill that produced the double-faced phrases.
He did not leave his listeners long in doubt as to his personal history.
He enjoyed talking about himself. He was a Professor of archæology,
and had written various learned books on the subject. But his studies had
by no means been confined to the one theme. History had also interested him
profoundly. He had published a work on the old houses of England. The
Priory figured among them. It was not difficult to discover from the
conversation of this singular man, whose subtle and secretive instincts
were contradicted, at times, by a strange inconsequent frankness, that his
genuine feeling for the picturesque was accompanied by an equally strong
predilection for the appurtenances of wealth and splendour; his love of
great names and estates being almost of the calibre of the housemaid's
passion for lofty personages in her penny periodical. He seemed to be a man
of keen and cunning ability, who studied and played upon the passions and
weaknesses of his fellows, possibly for their good, but always as a
magician might deal with the beings subject to his power.
By what strange lapse did he thus naïvely lay himself open to their smiles?
Hadria was amused at his occasional impulse of egotistic frankness (or
what appeared to be such), when he would solemnly analyse his own
character, admitting his instinct to deceive with an engaging and scholarly
candour.
His penetrating eyes kept a watch upon his audience. His very simplicity
seemed to be guarded by his keenness.
Hadria chafed under his persistent effort to attract and interest her.
She gave a little inward shiver on finding that there was a vague,
unaccountable, and unpleasant fascination in the personality of the
man.
It was not charm, it was nothing that inspired admiration; it rather
inspired curiosity and stirred the spirit of research, a spirit which
evidently animated himself. She felt that, in order to investigate the
workings of her mind and her heart, the Professor would have coolly pursued
the most ruthless psychical experiments, no matter at what cost of anguish
to herself. In the interests of science and humanity, the learned Professor
would certainly not hesitate to make one wretched individual agonize.
His appeal to the intellect was stimulatingly strong; it was like a
stinging wind, that made one walk at a reckless pace, and brought the blood
tingling through every vein. That intellectual force could alone explain
the fact of his being counted by Professor Fortescue as a friend. Even then
it was a puzzling friendship. Could it be that to Professor Fortescue, he
shewed only his best side? His manner was more respectful towards his
colleague than towards other men, but even with him he was irreverent in
his heart, as towards mankind in general.
To Hadria he spoke of Professor Fortescue with enthusiasm--praising
his great power, his generosity, his genial qualities, and his uprightness;
then he laughed at him as a modern Don Quixote, and sneered at his efforts
to save animal suffering when he might have made a name that would
never be forgotten, if he pursued a more fruitful branch of research.
Hadria remarked that Professor Theobald's last sentence had added
the crowning dignity to his eulogium.
He glanced at her, as if taking her measure.
"Fortescue," he called out, "I envy you your champion.
You point, Mrs. Temperley, to lofty altitudes. I, as a mere man, cannot
pretend to scale them."
Then he proceeded to bring down feminine loftiness with virile
reason.
"In this world, where there are so many other evils to combat, one
feels that it is more rational to attack the more important
first."
"Ah! there is nothing like an evil to bolster up an evil,"
cried Professor Fortescue; "the argument never fails. Every abuse may
find shelter behind it. The slave trade, for instance; have we not white
slavery in our midst? How inconsistent to trouble about negroes till our
own people are truly free! Wife-beating? Sad; but then children are often
shamefully ill-used. Wait till they are fully protected before
fussing about wives. Protect children? Foolish knight-errant, when you
ought to know that drunkenness is at the root of these crimes! Sweep away
this curse, before thinking of the children. As for animals,
how can any rational person consider their sufferings, when
there are men, women, and children with wrongs to be redressed?"
Professor Theobald laughed.
"My dear Fortescue, I knew you would have some ingenious excuse
for your amiable weaknesses."
"It is easier to find epithets than answers, Theobald," said
the Professor with a smile. "I confess I wonder at a man of your
logical power being taken in with this cheap argument, if argument it can
be called."
"It is my attachment to logic that makes me crave for
consistency," said Theobald, not over pleased at his friend's
attack.
Professor Fortescue stared in surprise.
"But do you really mean to tell me that you think it logical to
excuse one abuse by pointing to another?"
"I think that while there are ill-used women and children, it is
certainly inconsistent to consider animals," said Theobald.
"It does not occur to you that the spirit in man that permits
abuse of power over animals is precisely the same devil-inspired spirit
that expresses itself in cruelty towards children. Ah," continued
Professor Fortescue, shaking his head, "then you really are one of
the many who help wrong to breed wrong, and suffering to foster suffering,
all the world over. It is you and those who reason as you reason, who give
to our miseries their terrible vitality. What arguments has evil ever given
to evil! What shelter and succour cruelty offers eternally to
cruelty!"
I can't attempt to combat this hobby of yours,
Fortescue."
"Again a be-littling epithet in place of an argument! But I know
of old that on this subject your intellectual acumen deserts you, as it
deserts nearly all men. You sink suddenly to lower spiritual rank, and
employ reasoning that you would laugh to scorn in connection with every
other topic."
"You seem bent on crushing me," exclaimed Theobald.
"And Mrs. Temperley enjoys seeing me mangled. Talk about cruelty to
animals! I call this cold-blooded devilry! Mrs. Temperley, come to my
rescue!"
"So long as other forms of cruelty can be instanced, Professor
Theobald, I don't see how, on your own shewing, you can expect any
consistent person to raise a finger to help you," Hadria returned.
Theobald laughed.
"But I consider myself too important and valuable to be made the
subject of this harsh treatment."
"That is for others to decide. If it affords us amusement to
torment you, and amusement benefits our nerves and digestion, how can you
justly object? We must consider the greatest good of the greatest number;
and we are twice as numerous as you."
"You are delicious!" he exclaimed. Mrs. Temperley's
manner stiffened.
Acute as the Professor was in many directions, he did not appear to
notice the change.
His own manner was not above criticism.
"It is strange," said Lady Engleton, in speaking of him
afterwards to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not
come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance
over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish
allurements the good man might have trodden a quiet and inoffensive
way."
The only means of procuring the indispensable afternoon tea was to go on
to the Red House, which Mrs. Temperley proposed that they should all
do.
"And is there no shaking your decision about the Priory, Professor
Theobald?" Lady Engleton asked as they descended the steps.
The Professor's quick glance sought Mrs. Temperley's before he
answered. "I confess to feeling less heroic this
afternoon."
"Oh, good! We may perhaps have you for a neighbour after
all."
She chafed fiercely against the loss of that blessed sense of well-being
and overflowing health, that she used to have, in the old days. She
resented the nerve-weariness, the fatigue that she was now more conscious
of than ever, with the coming of the spring. The impulse of creative energy
broke forth in her. The pearly mornings and the birds' songs stirred
every instinct of expression. The outburst did not receive its usual check.
The influences of disenchantment were counteracted by Professor
Fortescue's presence. His sympathy was marvellous in its penetration,
brimming the cold
hollows of her spirit, as a flooded river fills the tiniest chinks and corners about its arid banks. He called forth all her natural buoyancy and her exulting sense of life, which was precisely the element which charged her sadness with such a fierce electric quality, when she became possessed by it, as a cloud by storm.
Valeria too was roused by the season.
"What a parable it all is, as old as the earth, and as fresh, each
new year, as if a messenger-angel had come straight from heaven, in his
home-spun of young green, to tell us that all is well."
If Hadria met Professor Theobald in her rambles, she always cut short
her intended walk. She and Valeria with Professor Fortescue wandered
together, far and wide. They watched the daily budding greenery, the gleams
of daffodils among their sword-blades of leaves, the pushing of sheaths and
heads through the teeming soil, the bursts of sunshine and the absurd
childish little gushes of rain, skimming the green country like a
frown.
"Truly a time for joy and idleness."
"If only," said Hadria, when Professor Theobald thus grew
enthusiastic on the subject, "if only my cook had not given a
month's notice."
She would not second his mood, be it what it might. Each day, as they
passed along the lanes, the pale green had spread, like fire, on the
hedges, caught the chestnuts, with their fat buds shining in the sun, which
already was releasing the close-packed leaflets.
Hadria (apparently out of sheer devilry, said Professor Theobald) kept
up a running commentary on the season, and on her hapless position, bound
to be off on the chase for a cook at this moment of festival. Nor was this
all. Crockery, pots and pans, clothes for the children, clothes for
herself, were urgently needed, and no experienced person, she declared,
could afford to regard the matter as simple because it was trivial.
"One of the ghastliest mistakes in this trivial and laborious
world."
Valeria thought that cooks had simply to be advertised for, and they
came.
"What naïveté!"
exclaimed Hadria. "Helen was persuaded to cross the seas from her
Spartan home to set Troy ablaze, and tarnish her fair fame, but it would
take twenty sons of Priam to induce a damsel to come over dry land to
Craddock Dene, to cook our dinners and retain her character."
"You would almost imply that women don't so very much care
about their characters," said Valeria.
"Oh, they do! but sometimes the dulness that an intelligent
society has ordained as the classic accompaniment to social smiles, gets
the better of a select few--Helen par
exemple."
It frequently happened that Hadria and Miss Du Prel came across Lady
Engleton and her guests, in the Priory garden. From being accidental, the
meetings had become intentional.
"I like to fancy we are fugitives--like Boccaccio's
merry company--from the plague of our daily prose, to this garden of
sweet poetry!" cried Miss Du Prel.
They all kindled at the idea. Valeria made some fanciful laws that she
said were to govern the little realm. Everyone might express himself
freely, and all that he said would be held as sacred, as if it were in
confidence. To speak ill or slightingly of anyone, was forbidden. All local
and practical topics were to be dropped, as soon as the moss-grown griffins
who guarded the Garden of Forgetfulness were passed.
Hadria was incorrigibly flippant about the banishment of important local
subjects. She said that the kitchen-boiler was out of order, and yet she
had to take part in these highly-cultivated conversations and smile, as she
complained, with that kitchen-boiler gnawing at her vitals. She claimed to
be set on a level with the Spartan boy, if not above him.
Valeria might scoff, as those proverbially did who never felt a wound. Hadria found a certain lack of tender feeling among the happy few who had no such tragic burdens to sustain.
Not only were these prosaic subjects banished from within the cincture
of the gentle griffins, but also the suspicions, spites, petty jealousies,
vulgar curiosities, and all the indefinable little darts and daggers that
fly in the social air, destroying human sympathy and good-will. Each mind
could expand freely, no longer on the defensive against the rain of small
stabs. There grew up a delicate, and chivalrous code among the little group
who met within the griffins' territory.
"It is not for us to say that, individually, we transcend the
average of educated mortals," said Professor Theobald, "but I
do assert that collectively we soar high above that depressing
standard."
Professor Fortescue observed that whatever might be said about their own
little band