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Title: Far above rubies (Vol. 1 of 3)
A novel
Author: J. H. Riddell
Release Date: July 4, 2023 [eBook #71112]
Language: English
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAR ABOVE RUBIES (VOL. 1 OF
3) ***
FAR ABOVE RUBIES.
A Novel.
BY
MRS. J. H. RIDDELL,
AUTHOR OF “GEORGE GEITH,” “CITY AND SUBURB,” “TOO MUCH ALONE,” “THE RACE
FOR WEALTH,” ETC., ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES._
VOL. I.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1867.
[_The Right of Translation and Reproduction reserved._]
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING
CROSS.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
QUITE IN THE COUNTRY 1
CHAPTER II.
SQUIRE DUDLEY 18
CHAPTER III.
THE FAMILY HISTORY 37
CHAPTER IV.
HEATHER 57
CHAPTER V.
AT SUPPER 89
CHAPTER VI.
BESSIE’S LETTER 119
CHAPTER VII.
MORE VISITORS 149
CHAPTER VIII.
IN HEATHER’S DRESSING-ROOM 172
CHAPTER IX.
A LITTLE BIOGRAPHY 202
CHAPTER X.
MR. BLACK GAINS HIS POINT 229
CHAPTER XI.
NELLIE 252
CHAPTER XII.
LIFE AT THE HOLLOW 284
FAR ABOVE RUBIES.
CHAPTER I.
QUITE IN THE COUNTRY.
The way to Berrie Down Hollow lay along a lane, winding and narrow: not
a prosaic lane, bounded to right and left by low-cropped, unromantic
hedges, and scanty banks covered with coarse wiry grass, where never a
wild flower would dream of blooming, but a delicious lane, bordered by
old elms and beech trees; where were smooth bits of turf, pleasantly
suggestive of a gallop over the sward; a lane by the sides whereof
trailed brambles and the dark-leaved ivy; a lane where the hawthorn in
the sweet May-time, when it opened its earliest buds, stretched its
white arms out across the grass, striving to touch the passer-by who
idly paused to inhale its fragrance; a lane where twined in picturesque
disorder wild bryony and traveller’s joy, dog-roses and honeysuckles,
the woody nightshade and the greater bindweed (old man’s nightcap as the
children irreverently call it); where the eye was refreshed by looking
on soft cushions of moss and ferns, graceful, and drooping, and cool;
where blossomed in their due season primroses and violets, the wild
hyacinth, the blue speedwell, delicious clumps of birds-foot trefoil,
the pink cranesbill, the wood strawberry and anemone, ground ivy, the
“hindering” knot grass, “everywhere humble and everywhere green;” St.
John’s Wort, that balm of the warrior wound; tufted vetch, the creeping
cinquefoil, with many another wild flower, which in the early days
little hands love to gather; which boyhood, and manhood, and middle age
pass by unnoticed, but which come back fresh and bright as ever to the
memory of the old man too feeble to totter away to the shady lane, to
the warm sunny bank where the buds are springing, and the flowers
blooming, and the lights and shadows flitting backwards and forwards,
coming and going, coming and going just as they did half a century
previously, when he was young and strong, and active like the best.
We all know such a lane: it may be in one county or it may be in
another; in the far-away shire where the happiest years of our lives
were spent, or within a walk of the great Babylon.
To the north of London there is still a perfect tangle of narrow country
lanes, in some of which Lamb assured Barton he “made most of his
tragicomedy.”
There are several not far from the churchyard where he sleeps so well.
Close to his old home they wander away from Chace Side, up hill and down
dale; they strike out of the Southgate Road; they wind in and out from
Angel Lane to Bury Street, and thence by devious routes to Winchmore
Hill and Enfield.
Some of the loveliest lanes on earth, perhaps, are those on the opposite
side of the Lea, leading from Higham Hill to Chingford and Woodford.
Utterly still! utterly quiet! There the bee hums and the wild roses
bloom, and there is heard no din or sound of that great city which lies
so near at hand.
But Berrie Down Lane, as the road leading to Berrie Down Hollow was
styled, wound on its pleasant way many and many a mile distant from
London; so completely in the country, so entirely out of the way of
strangers, or even ordinary traffic, that very few persons, excepting
the family resident at the Hollow, and their visitors (who, save of
their own kin), were far and few between, knew anything of the beauty of
that quiet walk, of that lonely approach, to a still more lonely house.
Do you mind sauntering along it with me—sauntering slowly and
lingeringly? It is in the bright summer noon-tide we follow its windings
for the first time; but you can fancy how it looks in the spring and the
autumn likewise; and the beauty of the lane grows upon you like the face
of a woman who is more lovely than handsome, till you come to understand
that even in mid-winter it will not look desolate; that even when the
buds of spring, and the flowers of summer, and the last leaves of autumn
have departed, there will still be something left for the snows and
frosts of winter to deck and crown right royally with diadems and jewels
that sparkle and glitter in the cold gleams of the December sun.
There are the banks where the earliest primrose is to be found; over
which the full luxuriance of the summer greenery spreads and twines in
lavish profusion of tendril, and branch, and drooping bough, and slender
spray; against which the brown leaves pile themselves when the storm
king rides abroad, and the October winds begin to strip the foliage off
the trees.
You can imagine now how the place looks in every season; when the holly
berries shine red and warm and glossy in the hedgerow; when their
branches, clad with polished green leaves, are torn down to welcome
Christmas in hall, and church, and cottage; when the birds begin to
build; when children part the boughs of the privet and the hawthorn in
order to look for the thrush and the linnet’s nest; when the hyacinths
come with the sweet mid-spring; when the dog-roses, perishable as
beautiful, open to the sun; when the May bursts into flower, and the
honeysuckle perfumes the air; when you can pass over the brook dry-shod;
when the August sun is pouring his beams on fields where the reapers are
at work; when the leaves first change their colour, and then commence to
fall; when autumn’s blasts whistle amongst the topmost branches of the
elms, and winter’s hail and snow descend upon the earth. You can fancy
how Berrie Down Lane must look under all these aspects; you know
hereafter you could sketch the place from memory, when you come to
recall its sweet tranquillity amidst the din and bustle of that great
Babylon where your lot is cast.
The nearest railway-station, Palinsbridge, is eight miles distant; the
nearest town, South Kemms, four; the nearest village, Fifield, more than
two; so that, although, as the crow flies, Berrie Down Hollow is not
actually above thirty miles from London, it might be a hundred or two in
point of accessibility.
“Quite in the country, Mr. Dudley,” enchanted towns-people were wont to
remark; whereupon, if the speaker chanced to be a man or one of his own
kin, Mr. Dudley would answer, “Confoundedly in the country;” from which
speech it will rightly be inferred that the owner of Berrie Down Hollow
did not appreciate the advantages of his rural residence quite so highly
as strangers had a way of doing.
And it was a pity, for a more picturesque spot could not have been found
had you searched the home counties through. It was a place which took
every one’s fancy. The great men, who came down from London to stay with
Lord Kemms when the season was over and the Row deserted, were wont to
draw rein and turn a little round in their saddles as they passed The
Hollow; after which they would ride slowly on, looking back often at the
dear old house planted on the side of a sloping hill.
But you shall not jump to the house in a minute after this fashion. You
shall walk with me under the elm-trees; you shall go gently down the
declivity whence you catch the first view of Arthur Dudley’s home; you
shall look over the fields lying on the south side of Berrie Down Lane,
where the corn, his corn, is ripening for the harvest; you shall pause
and see in the distance, meadows where the haymakers, his haymakers, are
at work; you shall watch the men, and the women, and the children mowing
and tossing that which in due time will be converted into money, to buy
bread for him and his; you shall descend the hill and cross the ford by
means of a narrow foot-bridge, and, as you do so, you shall see his cows
lying in the pasture lands chewing the cud, reflectively; you shall
ascend more leisurely, if possible, the steeper hill beyond the brook;
and, still pursuing your way onward, become conscious of hedges less
picturesque, only because kept trim and closely cropped; of banks where
the grass is smooth and even, by reason of constant cutting; where no
brambles are allowed to trail their length along the ground; where even
the honeysuckle has to submit to pruning and clipping; where the road is
free from ruts; and now you know that to right as well as left lies
Squire Dudley’s land, and that you are drawing close to his house, which
is to be reached through those gates not more than half-a-dozen paces
distant from where we stand.
One moment, however, ere entering. Do you notice how the grey pillars on
which the gates are hinged scarcely show through the branches of the two
trees of pyracantha that have grown around them?
Those shrubs are considered one of the great beauties of Berrie Down
House. They are all white in the early spring. They are covered with
green berries during the summer, which change into great masses of
bright scarlet during the pleasant autumn weather, retaining their rich
colour when the frost pinches the leaves of the evergreens, and the ice
is thick on the mill-pond, and the snow lying on the ground.
They have taken years and years to grow, and the Dudleys are as proud of
them as they are of their quaint home, of their broad acres, of their
rich pasture lands, of the Hollow (whence their place takes its name),
where the blackberries still grow, as they once grew over all the fields
around; where there is quite a tangled thicket of underwood and broom
and brambles, in which the children hide themselves, and tear their
frocks, and pass the long summer days; whence they emerge, when the
blackberrying season comes, with faces and hands dyed purple with the
rich, luscious juice.
As the great men from London are wont to admire Berrie Down Hollow, so
with all the strength of their souls the younger Dudleys love its every
tree, and shrub, and stick, and stone.
The domestic chronicles contain no record as to whether Arthur Dudley,
owner of the Hollow, had ever similarly cherished any such attachment.
Of one thing, however, the reader may be certain, which is, that in his
manhood he did not entertain the slightest affection for the place.
What was the old house, with its many gables—what were the fields, the
trees, the tangle of brambles, the bloom of the broom, the scent of the
hawthorn, the ripple of the brook to him?
Let us pass through the gates, and approach by means of a drive, hedged
almost with laurestina and laurel, Arthur Dudley’s home.
The house is built of brick with curious dark stone facings, and over
the doorway, carved in the same material, is the Dudley coat of arms;
for before Lord Kemms, or Kemms’ Park, was so much as thought of, the
Dudleys were great people in the county.
Their day had gone by, however, and their fortunes, when we make their
acquaintance, are like their coat of arms—a good deal the worse for
wear; for which reason, although the Hollow is a pretty place, it is not
a grand one. It is a sweet home, but not a great mansion; and the front,
which shows towards the road, is unpretentious in the extreme.
But there is another side—that which catches the last rays of the
setting sun—that which reveals itself to Lord Kemms’ visitors when they
have passed the gates flanked by pyracantha, and taken the turn leading
away towards Kemms’ Park.
The north front of the house is nothing: it is red brick and grey stone,
with two windows on each side the hall door, and five on the first
floor, and three dormant windows looking out from the roof like heads
thrust forth from among the slates to survey the world. It is masked a
good deal from the road by evergreens and great trees of arbor-vitæ; and
the dwelling-rooms in that part of the house are dark, and somewhat dull
in consequence.
To the west all is different; there the ground sweeps down from the
house to the Hollow, and the drawing-room windows look out on the rich
champaign country lying beyond, which is steeped and bathed every
evening in the golden beams of the setting sun. Over this west front
climb roses, and clematis, and honeysuckle. Here is a westeria, which
puts forth its purple blossoms long before the laburnums think of
blooming. Pleasanter bedchambers there are none in England than those on
the first floor, into the windows of which the earliest roses peep
blushingly.
The lawn is shaded by many a grand old tree; beyond the Hollow trickles
a stream, which runs through Mr. Dudley’s property, after supplying a
mill on the road leading to South Kemms. There are sheep browsing in the
fields beyond. There is a great peace in the quiet landscape; there is a
stillness which strikes Londoners as almost oppressive. No hermitage
could be more retired, no spot more perfect in its utterly homelike
repose.
In such a place as this Time glides by, leaving few marks upon the road
to show that his chariot has passed over it. Here the philosopher thinks
he could meditate in peace, and eliminate truths which the world would
not willingly let die. Here the clergyman deludes himself with the
belief that he could compose sermons which might stir the hearts of
thousands. Here, where the pace of life is slow, and the mental pulse
languid, the author fancies that alone with himself and nature he could
discourse eloquently about man. Here the musician imagines he might
discover that roc’s egg—a melody resembling no other melody; but no!
here indeed might the statesman rest, and the weary physician recruit
his own exhausted energies; here the great engineer might forget his
thousand schemes, and the speculator almost withdraw his mind from the
price of shares and the rise and fall of debentures;—here is Nature’s
temple, if you will, where men may come and hold communion with her;
here is her infirmary likewise, where she visits with sleep the heavy
eyelids, and recruits with wine and oil the body which has been worsted
in the world’s fight; here she lays her cool hand on burning foreheads,
and compels the overtaxed mind to lie fallow; here is the place for
rest, if you will; but it is not the place for work.
Out in the battle-field, where the city streets are full of eager
soldiers; out where the fray is fiercest, the fire strongest; out where
life is not a tranquil dream, but a mad struggle; where men go to their
long rest not rusted, but worn; where the night’s slumber is short, and
the day’s labour long; out where as iron sharpeneth iron, so doth the
face of a man his friend;—there is the only place for energies to be
aroused and genius developed, for profitable work to be accomplished,
for life’s best lessons to be learned.
Thus, at least a dozen times a day, Arthur Dudley, owner of “The
Hollow,” is in the habit of expressing himself; and yet you know, as you
look in his face, that he is a man whose energy is not to be depended
on, whose genius even to a stranger seems problematical; who has never
practically conjugated the word “work;” who could not be an apt pupil in
any of life’s many schools, no matter who were his teachers, no matter
what his opportunities.
A handsome man if you will, with his thick brown hair, with his soft,
silky moustache, with his kindly-blue eyes, with his regular
delicately-cut features, and yet many a plainer face might better, I
should imagine, win and retain a woman’s love.
His body, like his mind, lacks thews and sinews. He is not one of whom
you dare prophecy that God, giving him health and ordinary success, he
would climb high. Rather he is one of those of whom you might safely
predict, that if he attempted to climb at all, he would fall back
grievously worsted.
There are some people who seem to be mentally surefooted; and there are
others who find every step to fortune so slippery, that giving them time
enough, they are certain ultimately to get their necks broken in
attempting the ascent.
But, under the shelter of his own trees, what can Squire Dudley need
with strength beyond that wherewith nature has provided him? It is for
men to have their way to make that bone and muscle, an iron will, a
ready wit are needful; and all the fields you have surveyed, all the
broad meadows, all the rich pastures came to him, not because of the
strength of his own right hand, or because of the capacity of his own
brain, but simply because his father had owned Berrie Down Hollow before
him, and left it to his eldest son.
“What could any human being desire more?” friend and stranger, looking
over the property, were wont mentally to ask themselves; for the world
knew that Squire Dudley was a dissatisfied and discontented man.
He had youth, strength, health, a happy home, a devoted wife—what more
could any rational being ask of Heaven? What could the skeleton be which
walked with Arthur Dudley under the elms, and across the meadows, or
beside the brook? This was the question every person, who met the Squire
even for the first time, put to those who knew him best. His manifest
discontent inspired a certain curiosity in the mind of each individual
who looked in his handsome, effeminate face. He had a certain grace of
manner and lazy elegance of movement which attracted attention to him,
and caused many eyeglasses to be directed towards the good-looking
stranger in various assemblies in London to which he had the entrée. He
was not a bad man in any relation of life. He was a gentleman by birth,
education, and taste; and yet in his own neighbourhood Squire Dudley was
not popular. His skeleton was too apparent, and people rather disliked
one who had not mental strength enough to shake off the depressing
influence of such a companion.
“Have your closets full of bones and bodies at home, if you will,” says
society; “but for Heaven’s sake do not carry them about in the sunlight
on your back. Weep your tears an’ you like to do so; but get through the
ceremony in private. We have, every one of us, our troubles, yet we do
not proclaim them aloud from the house-tops. We demand that if, either
from choice or necessity, a man fast, he shall not appear in public with
a sad countenance, but that he shall ‘anoint his head and wash his
face,’ and bear his trouble bravely and with good courage.”
Virtually those were the words his neighbours addressed to Squire
Dudley. Not for his skeleton did the world forsake him, but only because
he had not courage to turn and grapple with it, and either lay the
ghost, or shut it up in one chamber at home.
And, after all, it was such a commonplace ghost! If your curiosity be at
all excited about the matter, in the next chapter you shall see its
face.
CHAPTER II.
SQUIRE DUDLEY.
Arthur Dudley, Esquire, of Berrie Down Hollow, in the parish of Fifield,
Hertfordshire, was in the habit of informing all those whom the
intelligence might, and a great number whom it might not concern, that
he had, to borrow his own expression, “missed his life.” And, as is
usual with men who employ such a phrase, he imagined the miss had been
in fortune, not in himself.
He had lost, he felt satisfied, not for want of skill in playing his
game, but because the game of life was an unfair one, in which the cards
were packed, and all the trumps dealt to one man, while all the low,
poor, insignificant, valueless bits of pasteboard were left for another,
in which from birth all the odds were against one player, while the
stakes were thrust, _nolens volens_, into his opponent’s hand.
It is a nice, contented, comforting, reassuring creed this for any human
being to hold. It makes a man utterly dissatisfied with his lot, while
it leaves him only too well satisfied with himself. He is, so he thinks,
as competent to take his leaps as the best in the land; and when in
succession he misses every one, he still believes it was only the fault
of the steed he rode, of the groom who did not girth his horse tight
enough, of the saddler who sent him in reins which broke in his fingers,
of the nature of the ground, of the labourer who staked the hedge, of
the proprietor who wire-fenced the field.
Other men go flying over every obstacle, and gallop past him to the goal
all are striving to reach, while he labours wearily after, or lies
maimed and shattered beside the first gate. Yet, mark you, this is never
his fault; it is his “cursed luck,” to quote Arthur Dudley over again.
Providence, in his inmost heart the Squire considered, had a spite
against him from his mother’s womb, and consequently, and by reason only
of this injustice on the part of Providence, he failed where others
succeeded.
In the world’s great workshop he was a very bad workman, and,
accordingly, he was eternally complaining of his tools. His fellows
moved up in the social scale, but he never rose a step higher. With a
rusty nail one picked the lock of Fortune’s treasure casket; but then,
as Arthur Dudley truly observed, _that_ rusty nail never came into his
hands. With sledge and hammer, and file and chisel, common drudges, as
they seemed to him, bought their estates and took rank in the country.
His schoolfellows—mere idiots he had thought some of them then—mere
idiots, indeed, he thought them still, had climbed great parts of the
steep hill of worldly success, and were talked of as rising men in the
pulpit, at the bar, in the hospitals, in literature, science, and art.
There was Holland, for instance, who went with him to Oxford. Well,
Holland had no brains, any more than most of the people Squire Dudley
knew, and yet he had somehow obtained a capital post under Government,
lived at the West End, and had married a beautiful young widow with,
rumour said, many thousands a year.
There was Morris, also, a man without a sixpence, without appearance,
connection, manner, friends, or father or mother to speak of, and yet
he, even he——. But it is useless to continue the catalogue.
Fate had helped every one, except Squire Dudley, on in the world, and
Squire Dudley did not in the least believe that every man’s Nemesis is
himself.
Berrie Down Hollow, however, bore no traces of belonging to a person who
held this peculiar doctrine regarding his own life. There was no
disorder, no neglect. When once the gates swung back, friend and
stranger alike beheld a place which was kept as well as Kemms’
Park:—where no weeds grew on the walks; where the grass was like a
bowling-green; where crocuses and snowdrops filled the flower-beds in
the early part of the year; where there was a blaze of scarlet
geraniums, and a brilliant decking of white, and red, and purple
verbena, of petunias and gladioli, lobelias, and all other plants that
make our beautiful English summer more beautiful still.
Never a litter of dead leaves was there about those walks; never a gate
hung loose for want of hinge or screw; never a thing was left undone
that willing hands could speedily put to rights; and yet there was an
indescribable look of shortness of money, both within and without the
dwelling, which those who were in the secrets of the family knew was
attributable to absolute pecuniary poverty; for, although Arthur Dudley
owned house and lands, stock and well-filled barns, he was poor as a
gentleman with such possessions could be.
And that was where the shoe pinched Squire Dudley. He had money’s worth,
but not money. He paid no rent; he killed his fatted calves and his
prime Southdowns; he brewed his own ale; his fowls were duly trussed for
his table; he ate of the produce of his own lands, and drank of the only
vintages English fields will yield; he had his goodly orchard, and his
fair flower-gardens; he had his horses in the stable, and his colts
running loose in the paddock; he had his broad meadows, and his rich
pastures; he had still a young wife, and two children; he had sinned no
grievous sin; he had no secret he feared being brought to light, yet he
had “missed his life.” So he said, so his friends said, and the reason
for this unusual unanimity of opinion chanced to be that he had no
money.
“Arthur was born to be a rich man,” said the elders among his kith and
kin; but, if Nature had intended any such beneficial arrangement in his
behalf, she frustrated her own design by permitting him to be born in
the wrong house, and amongst the wrong people, and with the wrong
temperament for much good fortune to befall him.
After all, Nature does make these little mistakes occasionally, and each
man and woman amongst the unsuccessful thinks he or she could have
managed matters infinitely better for himself or herself, if only the
disposition of affairs had been left in the hands of the person
interested.
Squire Dudley thought so, at any rate. He bore a grudge against Nature
for having spoiled his worldly chances, which grudge he paid with
interest to Nature’s representatives on earth—his fellow-creatures.
Had he been born at Kemms’ Park, with the typical silver spoon in his
mouth, he would, doubtless, have proved a very charming member of
society. As it was, he had fallen into the habit of quarrelling with the
bread and butter fate had provided for him, to such a degree that there
was not a labourer on his farm, a servant in his house, a friend he
possessed in the world, who would have borne with Arthur Dudley’s
dissatisfied temper, his discontent, and his complainings, had it not
been for the sake of his wife, who was the only person on earth who
thoroughly and devotedly, and believingly and disinterestedly, loved the
young Squire.
Matrimonially, luck had not been against him. If the chances of marriage
be but as one eel to a bagful of snakes, many a man, who thrust his
hands into that lottery after Arthur Dudley, must have had cause to
lament his evil fortune.
Matrimonially the Squire, who had otherwise “missed his life,” had done
well, so the world thought at least; but then this was one of the many
questions of which Arthur Dudley secretly joined issue with the world.
In the experiences of his earlier manhood there had been certain love
passages between himself and a handsome young heiress, whom it was the
wish of his aunt, Miss Alethea Hope, that he should marry.
Then visions of a life worth living, of a position worth having,
beatified the dreariness of the Squire’s prosaic existence. Like all men
who are utterly dissatisfied with their position, he permitted hope to
tell him many a flattering tale, which had not the slightest shadow of a
foundation in truth. Indeed, in the management of his farm, Arthur
Dudley was but as a reed shaken by the wind of whatever fancy whispered
to him over night; and it was natural enough that, when wandering about
the grounds of Copt Hall, with his first real love—worth five thousand a
year, and expectations—he should dream of a social position unenjoyed by
the Dudleys for many a year; of a town house; of Berrie Down Hollow
filled with grand company; of taking rank in the county; of, perhaps,
tacking M.P. to the end of his name.
The future, then, seemed as full of promise to him as the old gardens at
Copt Hall of roses. Can you wonder? Youth was at the helm and Pleasure
at the prow, and an heiress about to become a passenger for the voyage
of life; a handsome heiress too—graceful and accomplished, and much
sought after, by reason not merely of her wealth, but of her beauty.
Among the roses at Copt Hall she promised to marry Squire Dudley, and
yet before the roses were in bloom again she had consented to make
another “happy.”
That was the first serious accident which befell the young man’s
life-boat; and he retired to Berrie Down Hollow, feeling he had been
jilted, not merely by his lady-love, but by the jade Fortune.
It is true, I suppose, that, if the cause of the mental death or
paralysis of any man’s life be closely inquired into, a woman will prove
to have been at the bottom of the apparent mystery.
Directly or indirectly, white soft hands fill the cup, either with
strengthening wine, or pure water, or the drugged liquor, that steals
the strength away, and impairs the finest genius.
Those from whom we expected the greatest results go to their long sleep,
and leave no mark behind by which their fellows shall remember them; and
why? because, although they had the power to achieve much, some woman
prevented their doing anything.
The obstacle, which at one point or other threw them off the rails, wore
petticoats, be certain. Either they did not get the right women, or they
married the wrong ones. Somewhere there was a story in their lives; ay,
and it may be a tragedy too. Adam, one might have thought, considering
the circumstances of his marriage, had a fair chance of happiness; and
yet, see what a mess Eve made of his prospects. Since which time to the
present it may fairly be questioned whether any man has ever chosen the
proper helpmeet; whether in effect even the Adams of the nineteenth
century are not originally placed in a paradise, out of which, in due
time, some woman contrives to lead them. Whether or not his matrimonial
disappointment really was the cause of Squire Dudley’s ill success, one
thing is undeniable, viz., that he, in his heart, attributed much of his
subsequent bad fortune to it. Such natures are not, perhaps, capable of
any great degree of passionate attachment; and, however unromantic the
statement may sound, I am bound to confess it was never the woman he
regretted so much as the heiress.
Arabella’s raven tresses never appeared before his mental vision with
one-half the same frequency as did her gold. When he failed to dig
nuggets out of Berrie Down Hollow, he reflected sorrowfully on the
faithless fair’s five thousand a year.
Had he married another woman with money, there can be little doubt but
that then he would have thought disconsolately about Miss Laxton’s face,
Miss Laxton’s perfections; as it was, want of money being the one most
pressing evil in his life, Cupid folded his wings and perched on one of
the elm-trees, laughing to himself, no doubt, while Mammon walked with
Squire Dudley up and down the meadows and across the lea.
Passionately, perhaps, as he ever loved any woman, Arthur loved the
stately fair whom he had wooed in the old-fashioned gardens at Copt
Hall. She was his style of beauty; his ideal of feminine perfection;
haughty and queenlike; capricious and fanciful; strong-willed and
domineering; a woman to rule slaves—to govern so feeble and purposeless
a nature as his, despotically. Had all things gone well, she would, as
Miss Hope declared, have “ruled the roast” at Berrie Down; she would
have been mistress and master too; she would have led him a pleasant
life of it in the old Hertfordshire home; she would have taught him
meekness and submission, and it may be contentment also, for some men
are like children, better satisfied when a strong hand guides their
course. As it was, the years had gone by, leaving Squire Dudley
intensely dissatisfied with all mundane arrangements, particularly with
those arrangements which affected himself.
And yet any other person might have made a good thing out of his life.
There was the rub! The owner of Berrie Down Hollow wanted not to make
good things, but to have good things made for him; and it was for this
the world quarrelled with Arthur Dudley.
“Hang the man,” said Compton Raidsford, who was worth half a million of
money, and had worked for every sixpence of it. “A dissatisfied idiot.
Has not he got Berrie Down, the sweetest place in the county, and,
confound him, has he not got the sweetest wife, too?”
Which statements might be perfectly true, and yet hold no comfort for
the possessor of place or wife. What was the use of Berrie Down without
money to keep the estate properly; and what to such a man was the good
of having a wife with whom even he could find no fault, unless, indeed,
it might be, that she was a trifle too sweet—too perfect?
After all, it is scarcely pleasant to discover, when you have thought to
make a woman supremely happy, that the world will persist in thinking it
is the woman who is making you happy.
This was an idea hurtful to Arthur Dudley in the extreme, and those who
loved his wife best discovered in due time that the greatest kindness
any friend could do her was to refrain from speaking to her husband of
the blessing he possessed.
And yet Arthur Dudley was by no means either unamiable or ungenerous. He
was not a bad man; he was only that which oftentimes produces infinitely
worse results, a weak one; he was not cruel, nor wicked, nor wanton, nor
wasteful. He had no sins, but he had many grievous faults. He was a man
going to the dogs, as fast as bad management could take him, when he
married his wife; and when we enter the gates of Berrie Down Hollow he
is a man going to the dogs more slowly, but not less surely still.
Every one knew that his wife was the drag on the wheels of his descent.
Every person was fully aware that whatever of comfort and happiness, and
real respectability, his life had held, was due to her beneficent
influence; and under this knowledge Squire Dudley himself chafed
secretly. Had she been an ill-tempered shrew; had she been an idle,
flaunting, extravagant, wasteful woman; had she drank; had she been a
confirmed invalid; had she been a loud-talking, boastful, hard, managing
semi-man; had she been anything, indeed, but what she was, her husband
would have had a grievance and rested satisfied. As it was, he himself
could not have told what his feeling was towards her. He did not love
her much, and yet she loved him exceedingly. He did not consider her at
all, and yet, from sunrise to sunset, her first thought was how to
benefit and pleasure him.
She had set up an idol for herself, and fell down and worshipped it;
and, as is not unusual in such cases, the idol half despised her for her
pains.
At the bottom of his heart, his idea about her was the same as his idea
about Berrie Down Hollow.
No doubt the thing was very good; but let a thing be ever so good, if it
be not the thing you want—what then? Why, then you are apt to look with
a little disfavour and petulance upon it, even though it be perfect of
its kind—a diamond without speck or flaw.
And besides, his marriage had not quite answered his expectations; that
match, indeed, had needed to be made in a dozen heavens which would have
satisfied the expectations of Squire Dudley.
A good wife, a clever manager, a home-loving woman, she was to put all
crooked things straight, and to put all straight things straighter! The
Dudley millennium, a reign of utter order and of utter peace, was to
come to Berrie Down with the young wife. He told her all his
difficulties, and she promised hopefully to help him through them. He
announced to all his friends that, “once he was married,” he should get
on; and his friends, to a certain extent, believed him, for they knew a
mistress to be sorely needed at Berrie Down House, “where everything is
going to wreck and ruin,” he stated to his fiancée, who, in due time,
verified the truth of his assertion, and bravely put her shoulder to the
wheel, to prevent such a consummation.
“I have to clothe, educate, and maintain five brothers and sisters,” he
declared with that frankness concerning his grievances which was a
distinguishing feature of his character, and, although his future wife
looked a little horror-stricken at this revelation, yet she adventured
amongst those brothers and sisters cheerfully, and, without a murmur,
cast in her lot with theirs.
How much of her happiness, during the early years of her married
experience, she owed to that young life, Mrs. Dudley never stopped to
analyze; but there were those who knew that Berrie Down would have been
a terrible home for Arthur’s wife, had bright faces not grown brighter
at her approach, had strong willing hands not been stretched out to
smooth her way, to make her difficult path easy.
She would have found out all her husband’s faults in six months, had she
been thrown solely on his society during that period; as it was, she had
always something else to think about—something to step between her and
knowledge. She was sorry for him, and she was sorry for the “children,”
as she called them. It was hard for him, and it was hard for them; and
the dear hands were always laid entreatingly on some half-turned pettish
shoulder, and the dear voice was ever engaged in soothing the effect of
sharp and hasty words; for Heather Dudley was essentially a peace-maker,
a woman whose mission it seemed to turn away wrath, to bind up bleeding
wounds, to assuage with ointment the irritation of long-standing sores.
With Heather no man quarrelled, and no woman either. She was not a good
hater; she had never sounded the depths of a great sorrow, nor of a
great passion. Like many women who marry very young, even love had come
to her mildly. The disease taken in youth, is never so fierce as that
which attacks the patient in maturity; as is the strength, so is the
day; as are the years, so is the joy and the agony. She was wooed and
married! Smoother never ran the course of true love. On neither side was
there one to interpose an obstacle, or to prevent either following the
road inclination pointed out. She was a woman “without a story,” without
any previous attachment—without a wrong, a grief, a remorse, a regret.
Crime was to her an awful and abstract mystery, which existed only in
the police-reports, and as a secret, low-whispered in some unhappy
families. Of the world, she knew nothing: of its wickedness, of its
temptations, of its pleasures, of its sorrows, she was innocent as her
own children. She had plumbed the depth of no human joy or grief.
Through the meadows the rivulet of her life had flowed peacefully and
monotonously. Vaguely she understood that there were different
existences, that there were other lands, through which swept rivers,
broad and deep and dark, in the depths whereof lay wrecked hopes and
terrible memories; she had heard of existences lost on those great
streams, of corpses which the currents carried down to the vast ocean;
she vaguely comprehended that there were rapids and pools, contrary
currents, cruel storms to be encountered by some human ships, but it was
all vague to her—vague as the story in a book.
She had experienced trouble, but only such trouble as comes with the
morning, the clouds and mists whereof vanish under the beams of the
mid-day sun. Of that different sorrow which falls on humanity when the
darkness of evening is closing upon man’s onward course, when there is
no noonday to follow, and only the night left in which to travel darkly,
her life held no knowledge. She was like Berrie Down Hollow, sweet,
natural, unaffected; and Berrie Down would have seemed strange without
her, while she might, at a first introduction, scarcely have seemed so
entirely in keeping with any place away from Berrie Down.
She was the sun of that house, at any rate;—even Arthur knew things were
“never the same” when she went visiting; and, at the moment I ask you to
look out on the view from the drawing-room windows of Berrie Down
Hollow, you may see the Squire seated under the shade of a
chestnut-tree, reading the _Times_, and inwardly chafing over his wife’s
absence, and wondering whether, for certain, she will return from London
that evening, and bring Mrs. Ormson with her.
Mr. Dudley likes Mrs. Ormson, and he does not much like her daughter
Bessie, an exceedingly pretty girl, who sits on the turf at his feet,
spelling the other side of the sheet, resting her round cheek on her
hand the while.
All the young Dudleys, his brothers and sisters, his own son and his own
daughter, were harmless in comparison to Bessie Ormson, who had a will
of her own which she asserted, and opinions of her own which she stuck
to, and who was staying at Berrie Down for a couple of months, as
though, Squire Dudley remarked to his wife, “the house had not enough
people in it without her.”
CHAPTER III.
THE FAMILY HISTORY.
If Berrie Down “had enough people in it without Miss Ormson,” Squire
Dudley could scarcely in common justice lay the blame at any other door
than his own, considering that of his own free will he had at a
comparatively early period of his and their lives encumbered himself
with the maintenance of five half-brothers and sisters, which fact it
was impossible either for him or them to forget, seeing never a day
passed that he did not rehearse to some one how this charge had crippled
and kept him back in life.
“Other men,” he declared, “found it hard enough to maintain wife and
family of their own; but here was he, provided by his own father with a
family large enough to drag down any man.”
“It is a comfort your step-mother married, at all events, Arthur,”
observed Miss Ormson, “or you would have been in the workhouse long ago.
The last straw, is it not so? you dear grumbling old camel.”
And that was all the sympathy _he_ got. Can it be wondered at,
therefore, if Squire Dudley thought every man’s hand was raised against
him?
To explain Miss Ormson’s speech, it is, however, necessary to enter into
a slight history of the Dudley family, who had really owned Berrie Down
for more years than any person believed, and were stated by tradition to
have been great people at an indefinitely remote period, when the father
of the first Lord Kemms was a goldsmith in the City, lending money to
grateful princes, who, contrary to all Solomon’s experience, proved
themselves worthy of the trust.
From that time until the day when this story commences, the Dudleys had
been Dudleys of Berrie Down; but, unhappily, while the trading Baldwins
were making, the aristocratic Dudleys were spending, and thus it came to
pass that each successive owner of Berrie Down left not merely that
place, but also less money, to the man who came after him than his
predecessor had done.
Accordingly, in the course of many deceases and successions, the money
dwindled down to nothing.
When there was not a shilling left beyond whatever amount the land might
produce to keep up the family dignity, Berrie Down descended to Major
Dudley, Arthur’s father, who, on the strength of his landed property,
half-pay, handsome face, and good address, married first, Janet, third
daughter of Arthur Hope, Esquire, of Copt Hall, Essex, who was possessed
of a moderate fortune, and a still more moderate show of good looks, and
who brought one son, the Arthur of my story, into the world; and
secondly, when Arthur had attained the age of seventeen, Laura, daughter
of Maddox Cuthbert, silk merchant, Manchester warehouseman and alderman
in the city of London.
Miss Cuthbert, it was supposed, would have money on her father’s death;
but that supposition proved so utterly incorrect, that the only dowry
the second Mrs. Dudley brought her husband resolved itself into a pretty
face and five children.
How many more arrows, male and female, might have been thrust into the
Dudley quiver, had Major Dudley not opportunely retired into the family
vault, situate in Fifield churchyard, was a question Arthur Dudley
declared only the Lord above could answer. As things fell out, however,
no more sons or daughters came to the Hollow, while to Arthur descended
the family estate and his mother’s small fortune, which latter barely
sufficed to pay the debts Major Dudley left behind him. On the other
hand, Mrs. Dudley No. 2 found, when her husband died, that she had
nothing to begin the world again upon excepting the dowry, afore
honourably mentioned, of good looks—somewhat the worse for wear—and five
children, whose ages ranged from nine years old downwards.
At this period Arthur Dudley was seven-and-twenty, and master of the
position.
He could have turned his step-mother and her family adrift on the world;
but, instead of doing so, he adopted his brothers and sisters and his
father’s widow, who, three years after old Squire Dudley’s death, made a
second very poor investment of her good looks, and married, greatly to
Arthur’s chagrin, a Doctor Marsden, possessed of a very small practice
in one of the London suburbs. This gentleman fancied Mrs. Dudley would
make him a good managing wife, and was also under the delusion that her
family—people known and respected within sound of Bow bells—might prove
useful to him and advance his prospects.
Those were the days in which the young Squire was spending much time at
Copt Hall, wooing his heiress. Those were the days in which he thought
“The Hollow” might be converted into a great place; in which he looked
at life through rose-tinted glass; in which he believed he could afford
to be both proud and generous—for all of which reasons, and also because
he did not choose that his father’s children should be beholden for
anything to a “trumpery apothecary,” he took upon himself the burden of
feeding, boarding, and educating five sturdy and rebellious juvenile
Dudleys.
For this act of liberality, society generally patted him on the back,
and said he was a fine fellow. Had he turned the children of his
father’s second marriage out of the gates of Berrie Down Hollow,
society, on the other hand, would have remembered that _he_ had got the
property, while the younger children were left penniless, and rated him
for his inhumanity accordingly; but, as matters stood, everyone in the
first blush of the affair forgot this fact, and pronounced Arthur to be
the most generous fellow in the universe.
And so, theoretically, perhaps he was; just one of those men who will
give an old horse the run of his paddock, but refuse to pay five
shillings a week for his run in the paddock of any other person.
Nevertheless, he shared with his brothers and sisters the produce of his
fields, the fat of his pastures, and for two years more they roamed wild
about Berrie Down—a troop of hardy young colts, unbroken, untrained,
uneducated, uncared-for.
The most enthusiastic American could have desired no more complete
democracy than the household at “The Hollow,” where, as is usual in all
democracies, the classes governed in other communities, were rulers of
the place.
At their own sweet wills, the servants went and came; by fits and starts
the labourers hedged and ditched, and ploughed and sowed. When it
pleased them to do so, the younger Dudleys assembled at the presumed
meal hours; when the fancy took them to do otherwise, they carried their
luncheon and dinner away to remote parts of the farm, or feasted in
kitchen and dairy on their return.
In vain, friends and even acquaintances entered remonstrances concerning
the manners, habits, and appearance, of the unkempt, untaught,
uncared-for, romping, impudent, mischievous young gipsies at “The
Hollow.” Even the two smallest of the band, a boy and girl, twins, only
seven years of age, were, so the Rector of Fifield assured Arthur, going
headlong to destruction. Robbing birds’-nests, pelting ducks, stealing
fruit, trampling down the ripe grain, climbing trees, wading in the
brook, setting terriers on cats, chasing sheep, jeering at the
passers-by, these children, the good man declared, in all such
occupations were not alone. Wherever they went, Satan accompanied them;
and having arrived at this pleasant conclusion, it was only natural he
should, even with tears in his eyes, entreat Arthur to stretch forth his
hand and save the little ones from being lost, body and soul.
The opinion of the Rector, modified to a certain extent, was the opinion
of the neighbourhood generally.
Since time began, such a lot of bright-eyed, fearless, active,
unmanageable young “limbs” had never, so the country-people declared,
been seen in Hertfordshire. They were at once the terror and admiration
of all who frequented the roads and lanes round Berrie Down. Keen of
tongue, swift of foot, careless of danger, the children roamed o’er
common and lea and field. They were to be met with in the woods that lay
westward of the Hollow, watching the squirrels, and almost emulating
their agility. As for the miller, he declared his heart was always in
his mouth, thinking some of them would be drowned. When the mowers were
at work, at the risk of their legs the children followed close, hoping
to rifle the corncrake’s nest; when the wheat-stacks were moved, the
five were always at hand to hiss on the terriers, to prevent either rat
or mouse effecting its escape. They stayed with the threshers in the
barn; they were here, there, everywhere; they chased the calves, they
milked the cows, they rode the horses; they were a herd of sunburnt,
freckled, hold, romping, cruel and yet tenderhearted boys and girls, who
made bitter lamentation over the death of a favourite rabbit, although
they robbed nests, and carried off young birds, and tormented cats, and
utterly detested vermin and all creeping reptiles; and scandalized at
the fact of five such natures “running to waste,”—so society phrased
it,—people urged upon their brother the desirability of some alteration
being effected in his establishment.
All in vain. Squire Dudley, the heiress’ hope having vanished, cursed
his luck audibly, but refused to attempt to mend it.
“Send them to school, indeed,” he said to Mrs. Ormson, the second Mrs.
Dudley’s eldest sister—“send them to school! I have trouble enough now
to make both ends meet, without, increasing my expenses.”
“Why do you not marry, then?” she asked; in reply to which inquiry
Arthur Dudley only shook his head. He had been disappointed in his
matrimonial schemes, and the world just then looked very black to him.
“Unless a wife brought something in her hand towards keeping herself,”
he observed at length, “I am afraid that remedy would prove worse than
the disease.”
“Nonsense!” retorted Mrs. Ormson, decidedly. “A wife would very soon set
things to rights, prevent waste, see that the people you employ did
their duty, and keep the children in order. You want a managing woman at
the head of your establishment. If my hands were not so tied, I would
remain and look after matters for you myself.”
“I wish you would,” sighed Arthur; and he was in earnest; for there were
two people on earth in whom he believed—one, Mrs. Ormson, “a most
superior woman,” and the other an old housekeeper who had lived at
Berrie Down Hollow in the better days, when Mrs. Dudley No. 1 was alive,
who had packed up and departed when the advent of Mrs. Dudley No. 2 was
announced, but who still came occasionally to see him, and lament over
“Master Arthur’s evil fortune in having all those owdacious boys and
girls cast like mites into the family treasury.”
“You are quite right, Piggott,” said Mrs. Ormson, to whom, in a moment
of forgetfulness, the woman once confided this opinion; “for the
children are indeed a widow’s mites. Your remark does credit alike to
your wit and to your scriptural knowledge.”
“I reads my Bible, mum,” observed Piggott, who had a secret distrust of
Mrs. Ormson.
“A very proper thing for a person in your station,” returned the lady.
“I always like servants who read their Bible. It teaches them honesty,
and prevents their striving to be equal with their masters and
mistresses. Reading the Scriptures has made you the invaluable woman you
are, Piggott. I only wish poor Mr. Arthur had some one like you to
manage his house for him. Do you think he could not make it worth your
while to——?”
“Thank you, mum,” interrupted Mrs. Piggott, hastily; “but I would rather
be excused. Master Arthur, mum, was good enough to wish me to come and
take the management, after his step-mamma’s marriage; but a parcel of
young children is a thing as I never was accustomed to.” And although
Mrs. Piggott was too polite to add anything in disparagement of Mrs.
Ormson’s nephews and nieces, still there was a look in her face which
that lady rightly interpreted to mean, “More especially such a set of
romping, mischievous, riotous, ill-conditioned young imps as there are
in this house.”
After that, Mrs. Ormson abandoned all idea of a housekeeper for Arthur.
“Your case is a hard one, Arthur, I fear,” she said, “when even Piggott
will not help you out of your scrape. Clearly you must marry—let me look
out a wife for you. I know so many nice girls, suitable in every
respect, and several with money too. You know you ought to marry a rich
woman, that is, if you can get one to marry you.”
“There’s the difficulty,” remarked Arthur, thinking of the faithless
heiress.
“Well, let me see what I can do,” implored Mrs. Ormson, who devoutly
believed the Almighty had sent her into the world to set right the
things He had unintentionally left wrong at the creation. “When are you
coming to London?”
“Next month; to stay a day or two with Dick Travers.”
“Then give me a few days at the same time, and, before the summer is
over, there will be a mistress at Berrie Down. Mark my words.”
Whether Squire Dudley marked her words may be doubted; but he verified
them, in a manner Mrs. Ormson little anticipated, by going to Dick
Travers’, by being persuaded to accompany that gentleman to visit his
aunt Mrs. Travers, “who has three pretty daughters, and a niece staying
with her; the finest girl I ever saw,” finished Mr. Richard Travers. “No
nonsense about her; up to everything—ready for anything. Can make a
dress, and dance in it afterwards; sit up all night with the old lady,
and come down to breakfast next morning fresh as a daisy. Just the girl
I’d marry, if I could scrape together money enough to buy the license;
but she is too poor for me, Dudley, or for you either, for that matter.
A wife with only a few hundreds is a luxury only to be indulged in by a
very rich man.”
“She comes of good people,” he went on,—“the Bells of Layford. They have
money among them, though, I am sorry to say, but little of it has fallen
to her share. More’s the pity! Daughter of the late Rector of
Layford—mother dead also—two sisters in heaven with father and
mother—not an incumbrance of any kind. Well, it is of no use; you cannot
afford it, I suppose, any more than I can.”
“I cannot,” agreed Arthur Dudley, as gravely as though Mr. Travers had
made some serious proposition to him; and then straight away he went and
did the very thing he had said in all earnestness he could not afford.
She struck his fancy—that pretty girl with the quaint name; sweet
Heather Bell, as Mr. Travers always called her.
“The name was a fancy of her godfather, an eccentric bachelor,” the lady
explained. “She was the youngest of three daughters, and the other two
were christened, respectively, ‘Lily’ and ‘Rose.’ ‘Call this one
“Heather,”’ said Mr. Stewart, who loved Scotland and her purple
mountains; ‘she will grow up like the heather, perhaps—strong, hardy, a
wild flower, worth a hundred of your garden rarities. Call her Heather,
and I will remember her name to her advantage.’ So she was christened
Heather,” went on Mrs. Travers, “and she lived and grew up as you see,
while the two other daughters drooped and died. Unhappily, soon after
her birth, Mr. Bell quarrelled with her godfather, who has since utterly
ignored Heather’s existence. It is a pretty name for a girl; don’t you
think so, Mr. Dudley?”
Mr. Dudley did, and thought, moreover, that Heather was considerably
prettier than her name, influenced by which opinion he went again and
again to London, and betook himself day after day to Mrs. Travers’
pleasant house, where he found order and competence, bright faces, and
always a cordial welcome.
After the riot and confusion at the Hollow, that well-arranged house
seemed to Arthur a sort of earthly heaven.
In comparison with the Travers’, Mrs. Ormson’s nice young ladies seemed
a little affected and self-conscious; and, therefore, during the course
of his frequent visits to London, he proved rather negligent of his
relative.
The Misses Travers were all engaged: one to a north country baronet,
another to a barrister, the third to a reverend gentleman, who was
subsequently appointed bishop somewhere at the world’s end. Miss Bell,
however, was heart-whole, and Mrs. Travers, who laboured in common with
many other people under a delusion with regard to Arthur Dudley’s
worldly means, never wearied of singing her niece’s praises in the ears
of the young Squire. What a daughter she had been—what a wife she would
make—what a treasure she had proved during the whole of her (Mrs.
Travers’) illness!
“When the dear girls were married,” Mrs. Travers went on to hope, “she
trusted Heather would be thrown into society where she would meet with a
husband worthy of her.”
All of which made the man to whom she spoke eager to win the girl for
himself; and accordingly, to cut a long story short, before the summer
was over Mrs. Ormson’s prediction was verified by Miss Bell and her poor
little fortune of six hundred pounds becoming the property of Arthur
Dudley, Esquire, of Berrie Down Hollow, to have and to hold for ever.
By degrees that gentleman had worked himself up into the belief that the
day of his wedding would prove the turning-point in his luck. What
benefits he expected fate would present him with on the occasion of his
marriage, it would be difficult to say; but certainly he thought there
were long arrears of forgotten gifts owing to him that might be
gracefully paid by Providence on so auspicious an occasion.
For some inscrutable reason, however, Providence decided on still
remaining Arthur Dudley’s debtor. His lands yielded no double crops; he
found it unnecessary to build larger barns for the produce of his
fields; his oxen were not stronger to labour, and his sheep did not
bring forth thousands and tens of thousands on the green slopes of
Berrie Down.
His life continued to be still a “miss,” money grew no more plentiful,
his stock failed to increase; indoors, indeed, there was comfort and
regularity; but what signified indoor comfort to a man who had hoped to
represent the county, and to stand on an equal footing with Lord Kemms?
No longer, certainly, were the younger Dudleys a terror to the
neighbourhood, a vision of very horror to cat, and bird, and beast; but
while they had to be clothed and maintained, where was there cause for
gratulation? Worst of all, no one, except Mrs. Ormson, sympathized with
him save Heather; and even Heather laboured under the delusion that she
was bound to sympathize with other people besides her husband.
After seven years of marriage, Squire Dudley gratefully decided, in his
inmost heart, that he ought to have remained single, and, leaving Berrie
Down, gone forth into the world to push his fortune.
What, perhaps, established him in this opinion was the contemplation of
Compton Raidsford’s great house on the road to South Kemms.
From the drawing-room windows of Berrie Down Hollow he could see that
bran new mansion staring him in the face. It stood on a slight hill,
beyond the mill, over the fields, across the road, and then over more
fields; but still he could see it, and, when the wind was from the west,
hear the sound of the gong which announced to all whom the intelligence
might interest that the Raidsfords were about to sit down to luncheon or
dinner, as the case might be.
If a man like Compton Raidsford, who had risen from the ranks, could
make money enough in London to build such a palace, and to keep it up
when built, what might not Arthur Dudley have achieved?
With all the veins of his heart the Squire hated the merchant who drove
off to Palinsbridge in his carriage and pair, and rode out with his
daughters, who sat their horses, so Arthur affirmed, with as much grace
and elegance as sacks of sand.
It was well known that Mr. Raidsford had started in life as boy in the
workshop of Messrs. Fairland and Wright, engineers, Stangate, at the
moderate salary of five shillings per week; and perhaps the only speech
Bessie Ormson ever made, which thoroughly met with Squire Dudley’s
approval, was the rather ill-natured one, that “most probably Mr.
Raidsford preferred a gong to a bell, on account of early associations
connected with the latter.”
“It would have been a fine thing for me, Bessie, if _I_ had sprung from
the gutter, with no absurd social conventionalities keeping _me_ back,”
he sighed; in answer to which remark, Bessie Ormson only shrugged her
shoulders and pulled a little grimace.
The man who could not achieve success at Berrie Down Hollow was not
likely, in Miss Ormson’s opinion, to have ever reared Mr. Raidsford’s
palace out of five shillings a week; and, as a rule, she was in no way
backward about expressing this conviction. For which reason—although she
was extremely pretty, and had higher spirits and more life about her
than any other guest who ever came to stay at Berrie Down—Mr. Dudley
could very well have dispensed with her presence.
More especially at the juncture when you, reader, are invited to walk
across the lawn, sloping away from the drawing-room windows to the
Hollow—for Heather had then been absent from home for nearly a
fortnight, staying with Mrs. Marsden, whose health was anything but
satisfactory—and during the whole of that time the house had been, in
Arthur’s opinion, at sixes and sevens, and Mr. Dudley’s personal
comforts somewhat neglected.
All of which formed a text from which Bessie preached a sermon—always
beginning, never-ending—on the difference of Berrie Down with and
without a mistress.
“I never believed the woman lived who could make me agree with Solomon,
till I met your wife, Arthur,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“That I am certain now of the truth of that which he never could have
known from his own experience, that a woman may be to her husband, ‘Far
Above Rubies.’”
“Humph!” ejaculated Squire Dudley; and he went out, disgusted with
Bessie, the wisest of men, and the world in general.
CHAPTER IV.
HEATHER.
Let me place the picture of Berrie Down before you once again, before
proceeding with my story.
In the stillness of the summer evening, look upon Arthur Dudley’s home,
as the few passers-by pause occasionally to gaze, so that you may stamp
the stage and its accessories on your memory ere the characters I would
group together come prominently forward, and commence acting the
unexciting story it is proposed to tell.
There is the house, with its many windows festooned by westeria and
clematis, roses and magnolia; the house, with its red-tiled roof, with
its grotesque chimneys, with its cheerful drawing-room, with its sunny
bedchambers. There is the lawn, smooth shaven and green, on which the
sunlight falls in broad, golden patches, sloping down sharply to the
Hollow, where the blackberry bushes, and the broom, and the low
underwood, form a mass of tangled wildness. Beyond there is the stream,
and a little to the left Mr. Scrotter’s modest flour-mill; then come
fields, where cows are lying and sheep browsing, and away in the
distance stands Mr. Raidsford’s mansion, with trees about it—trees that
are merged in, and seem to form a part of, the woods and plantations
surrounding Kemms’ Park.
The lawn at Berrie Down is studded with fine old timber. Through the air
pigeons are wheeling, on the ridge-tiles they are cooing; two or three
dogs are lying basking in the sun; at one of the open windows of the
drawing-room a cat is seated, gravely surveying the landscape, and
perhaps at the same time prospectively viewing supper, or
retrospectively thinking of her latest depredations in the dairy. There
is a great peace in the scene—a peace which it requires a person to have
been out in the hurry and turmoil of the world fully to comprehend.
There is a repose in the landscape: in the way the sunbeams fall and
rest upon the grass; in the monotonous cooing of the pigeons; in the
attitudes of the cattle; in the murmur of the stream; in the stillness
of the mill; in the faint rustling of the leaves; in the very perfume of
the flowers; in the soft fanning of the breeze; in the grouping of the
human figures in the landscape.
It would be a scene that for you, friend, and you, worn and weary with
the noise and rush and excitement of this great Babylon—where we are all
speeding so fast through life—to look upon with longing gaze, to
remember afterwards with aching hearts; but people in the country view
these things otherwise, and, accordingly, it was with far different
feelings to any you would experience at sight of such a sunset, that
Squire Dudley occasionally lifted his eyes to look towards the glowing
west, ere dropping them again on the _Times_, the news in which Miss
Ormson, seated on the ground at his feet, was kind enough to share with
him.
Over the grass were scattered five other Dudleys, ranging in age from
fifteen years upwards; one of whom, Alick, came up to his brother, and
interrupted his study of the price of shares with—
“I wonder what time mother will get home; have you really no idea by
which train she is coming?”
“Not the slightest,” said Arthur, laying down his paper, somewhat to the
discomfiture of the young lady, who had been interesting herself with an
“Extraordinary Elopement” paragraph; “and how often, Alick, am I to tell
you not to call Heather ‘mother.’ It is not enough that I have to
support you all, but you must persist in calling my wife, who is almost
as young as Agnes, ‘mother.’ Mother, indeed! I detest such
childishness!”
“If I had a mother like Heather, I should call her mother, and nothing
else,” interposed Bessie, from her lowly position on the grass. “Don’t
be silly, Arthur; let your brothers and sisters speak of your wife as
they have found her.”
“But it irritates me,” persisted the Squire; “while they were young, it
did not so much matter; now, however, when they are all growing up into
men and women, the name sounds absurd. Heather does not look a day older
than Agnes.”
“That is the beauty of the thing,” returned his opponent. “If Heather
looked fifty, or even as old as you do, the charm would be dispelled.”
“Thank you for the implied compliment,” he returned, reddening. It was a
sore point with him that his youth was gone, that his life had borne no
fruit; and, even had the world prospered with him, it is not a pleasant
thing for a man to be told he looks old by a pretty girl!
“Well, you know, Arthur,” said the same girl, frank as she was pretty,
“you never will look so young as your wife. In the first place, she is
ten years younger than you; and in the second, you ought to take a leaf
out of her book, and learn contentment. You ought to cease grumbling and
making yourself and other people wretched. You ought to think yourself
lucky you have got Berrie Down Hollow, instead of always wishing you
were Lord Chancellor, or Archbishop of Canterbury, or King of England,
or something of that kind.”
“What has all this got to do with my brothers and sisters calling my
wife their mother?” he asked. “They have got a mother of their own, and
one mother ought to be quite enough for any person.”
“Mine is one too many for me,” remarked Bessie, with a shrug and a pout;
evading at the same time the newspaper wherewith Arthur made believe to
deal her a rebuking blow. “It is the truth, and I tell her so a dozen
times a week. As for Mrs. Marsden, if you wanted Alick and the rest of
them to feel that devotion towards her which you seem to think I ought
to feel for my respected mother, why did you not let them go with her
when she left Berrie Down? That was your grand mistake, Arthur; if you
had given them so much a year and your blessing——”
“Bessie, I allow no one to interfere in my family concerns,” interrupted
Arthur with dignity.
“Yes, you do,” persisted the young lady, “you allow mamma to do so; and
as I know I shall not have a chance of speaking out my mind when once
she comes, I have been trying latterly to make the best of my
opportunities. Let me tell you all the benefits you would have derived
from such an arrangement.”
“I wish to goodness, Bessie, you would keep your opinions to yourself;
you are enough to drive a man mad.”
“And you are enough to drive a woman mad,” she returned, still looking
up at him with a provoking smile on her face. “Ah, well, you have got
your troubles, and I suppose I shall have mine, if I live long enough.
Now, Alick, what are you waiting to say?”
“That if Arthur wants me to give up calling Heather mother, I will do
so,” spoke the lad. “I know he has fed and clothed us, and——”
“Hang the boy,” interrupted Squire Dudley, pettishly, “call her what you
like, only let me hear no more about it;” and Arthur and his companion
resumed their study of the _Times_, while Alick, with his head bent a
little, walked slowly down the lawn in the direction of the Hollow.
Suddenly there rang a glad cry after him of, “Alick, Alick, she’s come,”
in answer to which the lad only waved his hand and ran on to the tangle
of broom and bramble bushes, from out of which he brought a little girl,
whom he bore in triumph on his shoulder up the hill.
It was a pretty scene, looking at it from the Hollow, on which the
evening sunbeams fell.
The house formed the background of the picture, and for foreground there
was the grassy slope, where were gathered around Mrs. Dudley and Mrs.
Ormson all those who had been awaiting their coming.
A bustle and stir succeeded the previous stillness; there was a rustle
of women’s dresses, a hum of women’s voices. There was much kissing and
rejoicing, much fondling over and welcoming of Heather, who, at length,
disengaging herself from the detaining group of loving hands, went
towards her husband, standing a little outside the circle, and said—
“They won’t let me speak a word to you, Arthur. How have you been all
this time? Have you missed me very much?” And as the others had greeted
her, so she now addressed him with a little tremor in her voice, with
tears of gladness at being home again standing in her eyes.
From a short distance, Bessie Ormson, who had duly presented her cheek
to Heather’s travelling companion, and received in return a maternal
kiss, contemplated this performance, and as she did so, stamped her foot
impatiently on the ground.
“Have you forgotten me, Heather?” she asked, coming forward and putting
her hand almost shyly in Mrs. Dudley’s. “There comes Lally,” she added,
pointing down the hill towards Alick, who advanced at a run, while the
child from her triumphant position clapped her little palms exultingly,
calling out—
“Faster! faster! mamma, mamma!”
Panting for breath, Alick Dudley put Lally into her mother’s arms. “Me
first, me first,” she cried, clinging to Heather, and debarring with
true feminine ingratitude the gallant knight, who had brought her safely
up the hill, from all benefits derivable from the meeting.
“You dreadful child—you bold, exacting little child,” exclaimed Bessie,
taking her away by force. “Do you think no one has any right to your
mamma but yourself? don’t you see I leave my mamma; why can’t you be as
good as I am? Oh! you naughty little puss. _I_ would not have red hair,
Lally; _I_ would not have shilling curls all over my head. I would sell
them if I had them, and wear a wig.”
Whereupon Lally in great glee declared her hair was not red, but
“dolden;” and that Bessie had ugly hair.
“I have what, chatterbox?” demanded Bessie. “Say that again—only say it,
and I will carry you down the hill and bury you among the blackberries.
I will shake you to pieces; I will kill you with kisses. Now, is not my
hair beautiful?”
“No, it is ugly,” persisted Lally; and then there ensued a fierce
contradiction between the two, which ended in Bessie first making
believe to smother the child, and then kissing her, as it may be
questioned whether Bessie Ormson had ever kissed any other creature in
her life.
“I love ’oo,” said Miss Lally, as a sequence to this performance,
putting two of her fingers in her mouth, and surveying society generally
with the profoundest composure.
“And don’t you love me, pet?” inquired Mrs. Ormson, venturing upon the
hazardous experiment of testing the strength of a child’s affections in
the presence of strangers,—“don’t you love me?”
“No, Lally don’t,” was the reply.
“Not if I have brought you something very nice from London?” persisted
Mrs. Ormson.
Lally stretched out her little hand for the bonbons, but declined to
compromise herself by expressing any attachment for the donor.
“Now, do you not love me?” asked Mrs. Ormson, persuasively.
Lally thought the matter over, and decided in the negative.
“If you do not love my mamma, you must give her the bonbons back,
Lally,” suggested Bessie; and she made a feint of taking the sweets
away, which drew forth such a wail from the child as attracted public
attention to the trio.
“Hush, hush, hush!” exclaimed Bessie. “I would not have believed you
could have been so naughty. There, kiss mamma, and make friends with
her. You are to give me half those bonbons, you know!”
To which arrangement Lally demurred; but, eventually, being greatly
under the dominion of Miss Ormson’s superior will, with much trouble of
mind she consented to this division; and under the cedar-tree she and
Bessie parted the spoil.
Such high matters are not, however, to be lightly settled; and they were
still engaged in deciding who was to have the odd sweetmeat, when,
looking up from her lap where the treasures were laid in two heaps,
Bessie saw Mrs. Dudley standing beside her.
“Come in, dear,” said Heather, “the dew is beginning to fall, you will
catch cold;” and as she spoke she laid her hand gently on Bessie’s
shoulder.
Bessie turned and pressed her lips to the white soft fingers; then she
tossed the two heaps into one, and saying to Lally, “You shall have them
all,” rose and faced Mrs. Dudley.
“I saw Gilbert yesterday,” observed the latter.
“Yes?”
The monosyllable Mrs. Dudley understood to be interrogative.
“And I asked him to come down here.”
“Thank you very much; he will be glad to do so.”
“I like him greatly.”
“He is greatly to be liked?” and Bessie, as she said this, slipped her
hand, which was cold as ice, into Mrs. Dudley’s.
“And devoted to you,” went on Heather.
“I wish I were more worthy his devotion,” answered Bessie.
“I wish I could understand you,” was Mrs. Dudley’s answer, after a
pause.
“I do not think there is much to understand,” said Bessie; but her heart
gave a great leap as she spoke, for she knew she was telling a truthful
woman a falsehood.
“I only meant that you strike me as being a little odd at times,”
remarked Heather, gently.
“Not more odd than you strike me as being,” was the reply. Then,
noticing that her companion seemed surprised, she went on, “Cannot you
comprehend? won’t you comprehend that to a girl brought up as I have
been, a woman such as you are is an enigma, a wonder, a never-ending,
always beginning puzzle?”
“What do you mean?” Heather paused in their walk back towards the house
as she asked this question; and I should like you to take your first
look at her as she stands thus intent and unconscious.
Hair of the mellowest, darkest auburn, out of which the original red
still gleamed in the sunlight; eyes brown, and deep and tender; the
fairest, softest, womanliest complexion; teeth white and regular; a full
and somewhat large mouth, parted as she waited for Bessie’s reply.
Altogether a firm face, and yet gentle—the face of a woman who had not
known much sorrow, and yet whom you instinctively felt could endure
patiently almost any amount of trouble which she might be called upon to
bear; the face of a woman who had from her earliest years thought of
others first, of herself last; the face of a woman whom, once married, a
man would know it was hopeless for him to love with a sinful passion,
but who would be a man’s good friend, his very right hand, in time of
need; a face in which there was “help;” a face, which no person who had
once seen it ever quite forgot, which you could not fancy changing and
altering like the countenances of much more beautiful women.
It was the inner loveliness of her nature, its purity, its
steadfastness, its pitiful tenderness which made her seem so exceeding
fair. It was the gentleness and the charity, the patience and the
unselfishness abiding in her, which shone in her eyes and drew people
towards her.
It was a calm, good, happy face at the first glance, and yet, when any
one with a right understanding of human faces came to look into it
closely, there was a sadness underlying the happiness—an expression of
which I should find it difficult to convey an idea, were it not that the
same half-sad, half-worn look is to be observed on the countenances of
those whose constitutions are being undermined by undeveloped disease,
_i.e._, by disease which unconsciously to themselves exists in their
bodies, and is insidiously sapping their health.
A man says he is well, and he feels well; and yet a doctor, looking in
his face, can tell that some part of the mortal machinery is out of
gear, and that ere long there will come a crash which shall reveal the
secret of where the mischief has been brewing; and in like manner, if
anything be wrong about a human being’s life, if utterly unknown to him
or herself, there is a want in it—a vacuum; a stream of affection
running to waste; twining tendrils involuntarily searching about for
something to cling to; if there be a mental hunger, which has not even
sufficient self-knowledge to cry aloud for food; if there be a thirsting
for love, which the poor draught presented fails to satisfy; if there
exist aspirations higher and holier, loftier and grander, than can be
fulfilled by the “daily round, the common task;” if there be an
undefined feeling that the best part of the nature, bestowed by the
Almighty, has never been comprehended, never called out—then, when the
face of that man or that woman is in repose, there will lie brooding
upon it a look of sadness, which sets the mind of an observer at work,
marvelling where the inner life is out of joint—what the mental disease
may be—which, unsuspected even by the patient, is eating the heart out
of the fruit, the wheat out of the ripe ear of grain.
And it was perhaps this second look in Heather Dudley’s face—the
unconscious pathos of her expression when her features were in repose,
which rendered her countenance so interesting.
After all, it is not when the sunlight is streaming over the landscape
that the scene appeals most to our hearts; it is the shadow lying across
the hillside, the cloud darkling on the water, the shades of evening
creeping stealthily down upon the bay, which gives that mournful,
melancholy pathetic look to the face of Nature, that touches us like a
minor chord in music, like the sound of a plaintive melody, and awakens
in our souls a powerful though often almost unconscious response.
In the twilight, when all harsh outlines are smoothed down, our dreams
and our realities can walk forth hand in hand together, and there is but
small discrepancy to be observed between them; and in like manner, when
the shadow of sorrow rests upon the face of a friend, our hearts travel
out to meet his. Before the wind comes and the rain descends, we can
behold the approaching presence of the storm walking upon the waters,
and involuntarily we stretch forth our hands towards the bark which is
sailing on, dreaming of no peril, unthinking of danger.
The sunshine in Heather Dudley’s face was always pleasant to look upon;
and yet Bessie felt it was the inevitable shadow which attracted her,
which made her cherish a love for this woman she had never felt for any
other woman on earth.
Well enough Miss Ormson knew Heather’s life was, according to the
teaching of this world’s lore, a wasted one. Well enough; for the girl,
though young, had lived in society, and had seen sufficient to teach her
that, in all respects—socially, domestically, conjugally,
pecuniarily—Heather might have done better; might have married a man who
could have set her up as an idol in his heart, and thanked God for every
misfortune, for every apparent mischance which had led him, by strange
and devious paths, to the point where he met, and wooed, and wed Heather
Bell.
And Heather herself had never discovered this fact. Though there would
come that terribly plaintive look over her sweet face, that anxious,
sorrowful, forecasting expression into her eyes, still she was a happy
woman.
All this swept vaguely through Bessie Ormson’s mind, even while she
replied, nervously—
“I cannot answer your question if you stand looking at me. Let us walk
on, and I will try to tell you. Between us there is a gulf placed, and I
stretch out my hands vainly trying to cross it. You are all candour and
truth; I am all reserve and deceit——”
“Do not say that,” interrupted Mrs. Dudley.
“But I will say it,” she persisted, passionately. “You shall not think
better of me than I deserve. You shall not imagine I am a girl like your
girls—that I am a woman such as you are. Sometimes, sitting on the grass
quietly by myself, I think about myself. Of course it is folly; but I do
it, and wonder what I should have been like had my lot been cast at
Berrie Down. I have seen nothing in my life but planning and scheming
and shamming—nothing till I came here. Amongst you all, I dream of a
different life to any I have ever known. I feel like a fallen angel on a
short visit to Paradise. How you look at me! How stupid it is to talk
about oneself! Shall we go in?”
“One moment,” Heather said. She had a clear, sweet voice, in which there
was a great virtue of leisure. It was the voice of a woman whose life
had not been hurried by anxiety, by passion, by excitement, or by
over-work. It was one the melody of which never seemed out of time,
never taken too fast. “One moment. Are you really unhappy, Bessie? Is
there anything I could do, to——”
“To help me, you mean,” broke in the other, rapidly. “No one can do
that. Am I unhappy? What cause have I for unhappiness? Am I not
engaged—almost settled?”
“But do you love Gilbert?” asked Mrs. Dudley.
“Love him! Yes, I do, as well as married people usually love—perhaps
better,” answered Bessie, and she laughed and dropped the bonbons; and
then Lally and she picked them up out of the grass, and while she kept
her face bent down, Bessie was thinking she could tell Mrs. Dudley one
or two things which it might not have been pleasant for that lady to
hear.
“Lally and I are great friends,” she said, irrelevantly. “I have put her
to bed every night since you went away, and sang her to sleep
afterwards. She is the only person who ever encored my music. Don’t you
love ‘Ritornella,’ Lally? Don’t you delight in ‘Her dark hair hung
loothe?’”
“Iss,” said Lally, readily.
“Agnes adopted Leonard in your absence, and has been really quite
affecting in her maternal solicitude about that young gentleman; but
Lally and I agreed nobody could comb out her hair so well as I—nobody
tell her one-half so many fairy tales. I fear we have not kept such good
hours as we ought; but she looks none the worse for it, does she?”
And Bessie, taking up the child, turned the little freckled face towards
the light, and putting her hand under Lally’s chin, waited for the
mother’s opinion on the appearance of her first-born.
Heather, however, never spoke; there was something the matter with her
she could not have put into words; there shot a pang through her heart
such as had never disturbed it before, and involuntarily almost she
stretched out her arms towards her little girl, who struggled into her
mother’s embrace in spite of Bessie’s teasing efforts to detain her.
“Well, Miss Lally, you’ll see whether I will shake down cherries for you
to-morrow! If any one had told me, I would not have believed you could
have deserted poor Bessie. You promised to be true to me for life. You
are a deceitful little monkey, and I won’t love you a bit.”
In answer to which Lally rejoicingly first slapped Bessie’s cheeks, and
then pulled her hair, and finally offered her mouth, so full of
sweetmeats that she experienced a difficulty in closing it, to the end
that they might kiss and be friends.
“No, I won’t kiss you, indeed,” said Bessie. “I won’t kiss an uncertain
little puss who is everybody’s Joe.” Whereupon Lally declared in a voice
choked with sentiment and sugar-plums, “Se isn’t bodies Joes.”
All this time Heather kept silence, holding the child tight as she could
to her heart.
The sun had set, and as their faces were turned from the west, it seemed
to her that they were walking out of the light into darkness.
She never said to the child, “Don’t you love me, are you not mamma’s
pet?” for she could not, at the moment, have borne to draw a comparison
between Lally’s attachment for Bessie and Lally’s attachment for
herself.
If Heather had a sin, it was inordinate affection for that child; if it
can ever be criminal for a mother to love her first-born too much, then
Heather was a grievous wrong-doer. She loved her son, but she loved
Lally more; loved the absurd little girl who, though christened Lily,
had grown up as unlike one as can possibly be imagined; so unlike that,
not to offend the unities, it had been unanimously decided, in family
conclave, that Lily should be changed to Lally.
“Lily, indeed!” sneered Mrs. Ormson; “an orange lily, perhaps.” But the
red hair, that would curl in “shilling curls,” as Bessie said, was
dearer to Heather than her boy’s darker locks, and she loved every inch
of the child’s body—the fair freckled face, the sunburnt arms, the plump
little neck, the restless feet—with a love which was terrible, as all
great affection is, in its intensity.
“It was sinful,” Mrs. Ormson declared, “the way in which Heather spoiled
that child!” But if this were so, there were other sinners in the house
besides Mrs. Dudley, for Lally was the pet and plaything of every man,
woman, and child about the place; unless, indeed, it might be her
father, who, reversing all ordinary rules, concentrated what affection
he had to spare for any one on his son, whom he made, as Bessie
unhesitatingly informed him, “a disagreeable little pest.”
Perhaps, however, it was not the father who made the child disagreeable
so much as nature. Very little of Heather’s generous unselfishness
seemed to have descended to her second-born. It appeared as though to
Lally had fallen most of her mother’s good qualities, while Leonard
inherited Mr. Dudley’s good looks; for Leonard was what is called a
“beautiful boy,” and all her best friends could say in favour of Lally
was that, very probably, she would grow up into a handsome woman yet.
There was no pride about Miss Lally; she was as ready to accept
affection from the odd man that cleaned the knives and boots, as from
stately Mrs. Piggott, who, having made overtures to Heather, soon after
that young lady’s marriage, had returned to her old dominions and
reigned supreme at Berrie Down, over kitchen, and dairy, and larder. To
Lally, nothing in the way of attention or amusement came amiss; from the
feeding of the chickens to the milking of the cows, from bull’s-eyes to
bonbons, from a tour round the premises, seated in a barrow wheeled by
Ned, the odd man previously mentioned, to a gallop undertaken on the
shoulders of that willing steed Alick, Lally was equally agreeable to,
and gratified with all. She was so utterly cosmopolitan in her ideas,
that Squire Dudley’s pride was daily offended by her utter want of
conservatism. She was so easily pleased, and she found so many people
willing to please her, that he came seriously to the conclusion there
must be something wrong in the child’s mental constitution—some want in
her brains, as he expressed it. “I saw her absolutely one day last
winter,” he told Mrs. Ormson, “with about two pounds of salt in her lap,
being wheeled round the walks by Ned, in search of birds; ‘because you
know, papa,’ she said, ‘if I can once put salt on their tails, we shall
be able to catch them.’”
Whereupon Mrs. Ormson lifted her hands and eyes to heaven, and declared,
“Heather will never stop till she has made that child a perfect idiot.”
“I sent Ned to his work and Lally into the house,” proceeded Arthur,
“but it is of no use _my_ speaking. Five minutes afterwards she was on
Alick’s shoulder, and he was carrying the salt for her in a bag tied
round his neck.”
“Poor Heather, she will find out her mistake some day,” sighed Mrs.
Ormson.
“But it is not Heather alone,” went on Mr. Dudley. “Everybody is the
same; everybody makes a perfect idol of Lally, while Leonard mopes about
alone. Where could you find a better child than he is? He will walk with
me from here to the mill and never say a word, while Lally’s tongue
never ceases from morning till night. Sometimes I think she is in fifty
places at once, for wherever I go I hear her.”
“It is very sad,” observed Mrs. Ormson, “the child will be perfectly
ruined.”
And there can be no doubt but that the lady believed she was speaking
the literal truth. She did, indeed, consider Lally an utter mistake—her
very existence an oversight on the part of Providence.
“A nice, quiet, pretty little girl, who would sit still in the nursery,
with her doll and her picturebook,” was Mrs. Ormson’s idea of the
correct style of thing in the scheme of creation; but a child with red
hair, with a face covered with freckles, exactly like a turkey’s egg,
with reddish-brown eyes, with legs that, in the course of the longest
summer-day, never grew weary of carrying her from parlour to kitchen,
from garden to Hollow, from Hollow to meadow; a child who had no “pretty
ways,” according to Mrs. Ormson’s reading of juvenile attractiveness;
who would not learn anything, nor keep her frocks clean; clearly the
Almighty had not consulted Mrs. Ormson before He sent Lally Dudley into
the world, or such a mistake never would have been committed, not even
to please Heather, to whom the little girl was sun, moon, stars, and
planets.
And because her heart was bound up in the child, Heather could not bear
that another should come in her place, and attract Lally towards her as
Bessie had done. With the “other children,” as Mrs. Dudley still
continued to call her husband’s brothers and sisters, it did not matter;
with the servants also it was of no consequence, for they were all of
the one household, all after a fashion members of one family; but here
was a stranger—daughter to a woman whom Heather did not much like—a girl
whom in her inmost heart Heather distrusted—making friendly overtures to
Lally, which Lally accepted with even more than her ordinary readiness,
with an increase of her wonted gracious affability.
Was what Bessie said true—was Lally everybody’s Joe? Did she not care
for her mother so very, very much, after all? For the first time in her
married life there came swelling up in Heather’s heart a spirit of
antagonism—a desire to quarrel; but, before she reached the house, she
conquered herself and said—
“Your mamma declares I spoil Lally. I wonder what she will think about
you.”
“She can think what she likes, as she usually does,” answered Bessie,
making a movement as if to take Lally from her mother. She had been in
the habit of carrying the child off to bed every night, and it came
natural to her now to do so, though Heather was at home once more.
She forgot she had been but at best a self-constituted viceroy, and that
the rightful queen had returned to take possession of her own again; but
the involuntary backward step with which Heather repulsed her intention
was like a revelation to Bessie. The woman she had regarded as perfect,
was but flesh and blood, after all. She could feel jealous, and she did,
and she meant to keep Lally all to herself for the future, and never to
permit a stranger’s hand to be laid, if she could help it, on the child.
But Bessie was not one to bear such a proceeding patiently. “Don’t
depose me,” she said, in a tone which was one-half of entreaty, half of
banter. “It won’t be for long. Am not I going to a home of my own, where
I shall have something else to do than sing lullabies to other people’s
children? Besides, it will do you good; you are a little inclined to be
jealous. Never fear, I won’t take Lally’s love from you; I could not do
it if I would, and I would not if I could. Let me sing her to sleep
still, please do. She won’t need much rocking to-night;” and she held
out her arms to Lally, who tumbled headlong into them, only sufficiently
awake to clutch at her mother’s sleeve and entreat her to “come too.”
“I will come up when you are in bed, pet,” said Mrs. Dudley, turning
aside into the dining-room, while the girl slowly ascended the broad
staircase, humming “Isabelle” while she carried her light burden step by
step up to that pleasant chamber with the snowy draperies, with the wide
prospect, with its windows half-covered with roses and greenery, which
came back to Bessie Ormson’s memory in dreams when she was far away both
from Hertfordshire and Heather.
After a little time Mrs. Dudley followed her, and kissed the children,
and then stood looking at them lingeringly till she said she must go
down to supper.
“Lally will be fast asleep in two minutes,” remarked Bessie, “then I
will follow you.” But the minutes passed, and still no Bessie put in her
appearance at the “old-fashioned meal,” as Mrs. Ormson styled supper.
“Shall I tell Bessie?” asked Agnes Dudley; and she was about leaving the
room when Heather stopped her.
“I will go, love,” she said, just touching the girl’s cheek with her
hand in passing.
She had tender, caressing ways, this woman, whose life was still all
before her. No one felt neglected when she entered. Her nature was to
consider the very dumb animals,—to leave nothing outside the circle
within which she stood; and feeling that she might have been a little
inconsiderate towards Bessie, she went to seek her, meaning to make
amends, to thank her for all her kindness to Lally.
Very softly she opened the door—softly as a mother does who fears to
wake her children; for a moment she looked in and hesitated; then, even
more softly than she had come, she closed the door and stole along the
corridor perplexed and sorrowful.
In the twilight she had seen Bessie kneeling on the floor beside Lally’s
bed. She held one of the little girl’s hands tight in hers, and her face
was buried in the counterpane. There was no need for singing then. Lally
was fast asleep: the busy feet were still, the tireless tongue silent,
the curly head quiet enough on the pillow, and Bessie, whom nobody ever
beheld depressed in spirits, who was always either laughing or jesting,
scolding or teasing, talking or devising some mischief, was sobbing in
the gathering darkness as though her very heart were breaking.
If Heather had ever thought any hard thoughts about her visitor, they
were swept out of her mind then; if she had ever felt doubts of the
girl, those doubts gave place to sympathy and pity; if she had ever felt
there was something in Bessie Ormson which she did not comprehend, which
she would rather not comprehend, that sensation of repulsion was changed
into an earnest desire to understand her thoroughly, into a conviction
that in places the stream was dark only because it ran deep.
Vaguely and instinctively all this came into Heather Dudley’s heart. As
she retraced her steps along the corridor, she could not have told any
one the reason of the great change which had come over her; but a great
change, nevertheless, had been effected during the moment she stood
looking at the kneeling figure, prostrated in a very abandonment of
grief.
From that hour, through good report and through evil, when appearances
were in her favour, and when appearances were all against her,
unconsciously almost to herself, Heather Dudley loved Bessie Ormson.
In her grief, in her agony of sorrow, in her clinging attachment to
Lally, in her passion of despair, of hopelessness, of loneliness, of
regret, of indecision, Heather’s heart clave to that of her guest, and
her soul was from thenceforth knit to Bessie, as was the soul of
Jonathan with the soul of David.
CHAPTER V.
AT SUPPER.
Although Mrs. Ormson, being in her own estimation a great lady, followed
the fashions and affected London hours, still, to do her justice, supper
was one of those ancient customs it delighted her to see kept up in her
nephew’s house.
“I only wish, my dear,” she said to Heather, “we could do as we liked in
town, and I would have supper every night of my life instead of that
late dinner, which is neither, as Mr. Ormson says, fish, flesh, nor
fowl. Now, what can be more cosy and comfortable than this?” and the
lady complacently surveyed the supper-table, whereon was spread a meal
that might indeed have caused one of Mr. Ormson’s late dinners to hide
its diminished head with a sense of grievous humiliation.
Thanks to the girls, the arrangement of the table was tasteful also;
there were freshly-gathered flowers peeping out from baskets filled with
moss; there were cool lettuces and crisp radishes, and little banks of
mustard and cress, all placed and grouped with a certain artistic
effect; there was home-made bread, not brown and sodden as home-made
bread usually is, but white and light as Mrs. Piggott’s hands could make
it; there were delicious pats of yellow butter, brought straight from
the dairy; there were late cherries and strawberries, and early
raspberries, gooseberries, and currants on the table; all daintily set
out with green leaves; all looking, to quote Bessie, “as though somebody
cared for them.” There was cream so rich that Mrs. Ormson declared it
made her feel inclined to forswear London for ever; while, for those who
desired substantial refreshment, Mrs. Piggott had sent up her usual
_pièce de resistance_—a round of spiced beef, together with fowls, a
ham, and a couple of veal pies, which latter were, she knew, considered
her speciality. Tarts also were there, and various “shapes;” for the
good lady declared Mrs. Ormson should not go back to town and say “she
never saw a meal fit for a Christian to sit down to in the house,
leastways she sha’n’t say it with truth,” finished Mrs. Piggott, as she
arranged a paper frill like a shroud round the knuckle end of the ham,
and garnished her beef with parsley.
Through the open windows the scent of many flowers came floating on the
night air into the room, and the light of the lamp fell on the quiet
faces of the young people gathered round the table.
“Where is Bessie?” inquired Mrs. Ormson, as Mrs. Dudley re-entered the
apartment.
“She will be here presently,” Heather answered, taking her seat; but
many minutes passed before Bessie made her appearance, and, shrinking
away from the light, drew a chair towards one of the windows, declaring
she did not want any supper, that she was tired and lazy, and thought
eating destructive to the romance of life.
“Don’t be absurd, Bessie,” said Mrs. Ormson.
“Nothing can be further from my intention,” was the reply.
“How did you come from the station, Heather?” asked Laura, the youngest
of the second generation of Dudleys. “I never heard the fly drive up to
the door.”
“We came back with Mr. Raidsford,” said Heather.
“You came with whom?” demanded Arthur Dudley, from the other end of the
table.
“With Mr. Raidsford. He travelled down in the same compartment, and
kindly offered to drive us home; but our luggage, at least a box of Mrs.
Ormson’s, we left at Palinsbridge. I suppose the pony-cart can go over
for it to-morrow?”
“Good heavens! mamma is going to take up her residence here,” whispered
Bessie to Alick, who was seated within earshot.
“Well, Heather, I really wonder at you,” said Squire Dudley, laying down
his knife and fork; “I did think you had more sense of what was due to
yourself and to me than to accept a favour at the hands of such an
arrant snob as Compton Raidsford, a man who looks down upon us all, who
thinks more of his hundreds of thousands than of having come of an
ancient family, of having good blood in one’s veins.”
“That’s right, Arthur; that’s what brings down the galleries,” remarked
Bessie. “Go on. In this money-loving age——”
“Oh! of course you stand up for trade,” retorted Arthur.
“Of course, I think so I ought, when every morsel I put in my lips,
every article of clothing I put on my back, is paid for by trade.”
“Bessie,” interposed Mrs. Ormson, “how often am I to tell you it is not
polite to speak of personal matters in general society?”
“If this be general society, I sit rebuked,” said Bessie, while Heather
pleaded—
“Without downright rudeness I could not have refused Mr. Raidsford’s
offer, Arthur. I could not, indeed. He was so very kind and pressing, so
cordial, in fact, that I felt it would be ungracious to decline. Would
it have been possible to refuse? Mrs. Ormson, do you think it would?”
“On the contrary, I consider it would have been the height, as you say,
of rudeness,” replied that lady, for once deciding against the Squire.
“And, for my part, I think Mr. Raidsford a most gentlemanly person,
quite above his origin. I can assure you, I never enjoyed a journey more
in my life, and the drive from Palinsbridge was delightful. And to see
how every one touched their hats to him,” finished Mrs. Ormson,
forgetting in her enthusiasm that such a person as Lindley Murray had
ever existed.
“Touch their hats, indeed!” repeated Arthur, with a muttered oath.
“Don’t be profane, sir,” said Bessie, tapping him on the arm. “A
Conservative ought never to object to see a great man respected by the
masses. When all is said and done, it is riches make the man, you know.
It is not birth, or virtue, or learning, but money, for money is power;
and what is the meaning of the word aristocracy, but the powerful
classes, I should like to know? Consider how many blankets, how many
soup tickets, how many donations to hospitals, how much employment Mr.
Compton Raidsford’s income represents, and be dumb. We are all
worshippers of some golden calf, so let his worshippers kneel down
before him, and rest content.”
“I wish to Heaven, Bessie, you were not so infernally clever,” remarked
the Squire.
“And I wish to gracious, Arthur, that in some respects you were not so
intolerably stupid,” returned the young lady, which observation elicited
a statement from Mrs. Ormson, that “she should be glad indeed when
Bessie was married, and had a husband to take care of her.”
“Ah! mamma, it is very well for you to talk,” replied Bessie; “but you
will be sorry when I am married.”
“I only wish you would give me the chance of being sorry,” observed Mrs.
Ormson, pretending not to notice that Arthur was helping her to a second
supply of spiced beef. Suddenly, however, becoming aware of the fact,
she exclaimed, “My dear boy, when do you think I ate last? You have
given me enough to dine a whole family.”
“Never mind, mamma, eat it for me,” said Bessie, from the open window;
whereupon Mrs. Ormson bridled, and wondered “what had come to Bessie,”
thought “she had been made too much of,” and remarked “she did not envy
Gilbert Harcourt.”
“Neither do I, mamma, so for once we are of the same opinion,” said
Bessie shortly, at which point Heather deemed it wise to turn the
conversation, not sorry on the whole, perhaps, that it had glided off
Mr. Raidsford, and Mr. Raidsford’s carriage, and Mr. Raidsford’s
considerate attentions to herself.
After a time, also, other tongues began to be heard: Alick had to tell
of the offer Lord Kemms had made for “Nellie,” their two-year-old colt.
“I was breaking her yesterday,” he said, “on that piece of ground beyond
the Hollow, when his Lordship, riding past, pulled up his horse, and
asked me if she was for sale. I told him I did not know, but could ask
my brother; and seeing he had taken a fancy to her, I added I did not
think he would part with her excepting for a long price.”
“And what do you call a long price, young gentleman?” he inquired,
laughing; “so I thought I might as well value her high enough. A hundred
guineas, my lord,” I answered.
“Make it pounds, and you shall have a cheque whenever you like to send
her over,” he said.
“Oh! what good fortune,” exclaimed Heather, “of course you sent her,
Alick;” but the lad’s countenance fell. “Arthur——” he began, at which
point Arthur took up his parable for himself.
“The filly will be worth three hundred next year,” he said; “Lord Kemms
shall not coin money out of me.”
For a minute there ensued a dead silence, then Heather, turning to
Agnes, said, “And how are the chickens going on, dear?”
“Oh! we have got five sets more out since you left,” was the reply;
“there are fifty of the sweetest little chucks you ever saw, just
pecking——”
“And two fresh calves, mother,” broke in Lucy Dudley.
“And pigeons without end,” added Cuthbert; “and I found in the pea-hen’s
nest four young ones; and, mother, the long meadow is all mowed, and we
shall have the grandest crop, Ridley says, ever came off it; and we have
painted the gates in honour of your coming back, and the garden is as
neat as neat, not a weed; and Alick and I rolled the grass and the drive
this morning, and nailed up the clematis that the wind tore down the
other night, and Aggy and Alick have covered your sofa, and Lucy has——”
“Hush, Cuthbert, don’t tell tales,” interposed Lucy, laughing; whereupon
Heather, with a smile to both, stretched her hand over towards the boy,
who took it in both of his.
“May I add my mite to the family news?” interposed Bessie at this
juncture. “I have trained Beauty to beg, and taught Muff to stand in a
corner; I have nearly broken my neck trying to learn to ride; I was
tumbled completely over attempting to milk Cowslip, an ill-conditioned
beast, who did not in the least appreciate my delicate attentions.”
“Oh, mother! it was such fun,” said Laura; “you should have seen Bessie
sprawling on the grass, and Cowslip looking at her; Alick held her
horns, and Cuthbert her tail, and Agnes showed Bessie how to milk, but
it was all of no use.”
“The quadruped was wiser than the biped,” remarked Bessie, “and declined
experiments. For the future, I intend to learn wisdom from a cow.”
“I wish you could learn wisdom from anything,” observed Mrs. Ormson.
“My beloved mother, that, I fear, is impossible, since I have failed to
acquire it from you,” said Bessie.
“You remember those letters you forwarded to me, Arthur,” broke in
Heather at this point; “one was from Miss Hope, to say she had returned
from Munich, and would like to come to us; and the other from Mrs.
Black, who had not heard I was in London, and wanted to know whether it
would be convenient for her and Mr. Black to pay us a visit now, instead
of later on in the year. Mr. Black has been ill, and it is his most
leisure time at present; so I called in Stanley Crescent and arranged
that they should bring Harry Marsden down with them next week. It really
is pitiable to see poor Mrs. Marsden with all those young children about
her, ill as she is.”
“Was there no one else, Heather, you could have asked while you were
about it?” he inquired. “We have a tolerably large barn, and plenty of
hay and straw, so that a score or two more would make little
difference.”
Heather bit her lip, but otherwise took no notice of her husband’s
remark. Heaven knew she had not gone out of her way to ask any of these
people, who were neither kith nor kin of hers, and whom, truth to say,
it would scarcely have grieved her had she never beheld in the flesh
again.
If the house were full of visitors during the summer season, as it
usually was, those visitors were none of her seeking, although on her
fell the burden of amusing and catering for them.
With one and another Arthur walked through the fields, or down the lane,
or across the meadows, towards the Hollow. To Mrs. Ormson he would
discourse concerning his grievances; he would quarrel with Mrs. Black
about the relative merits of town and country; while from Mr. Black he
culled such information anent the “way in which a man with push and a
few hundreds might get on in London,” that for months subsequently
Squire Dudley thought of nothing excepting how he might best contrive to
emigrate to this wonderful El Dorado, to those metropolitan gold-fields,
where nuggets were discovered, not in pits and creeks, but in dingy city
offices, or in great board-rooms, all shining with polished mahogany and
bright morocco leather.
As for Miss Hope, she was to Heather, saving by correspondence, an utter
stranger. Never in her life had the present mistress of Berrie Down
Hollow set eyes on the sister of the lady who had once reigned there
supreme. For more than seven years Miss Hope had wandered to and fro on
the earth. She had wintered here; she had summered there. She had been
returning every season to London; and every season she heard of some
fresh plan, or met with some fresh person, that induced her to defer her
intention of coming back to England.
Bohemianism is not confined to one sex or class in the community, and
there are numbers of forlorn spinsters and lonely widows, running loose
about the Continent, frequenting British watering-places and foreign
spas, picking up acquaintances in railway carriages and at table
d’hôtes, who would be greatly disgusted if they were assured that the
lives of the men they call Bohemians in London are infinitely more
useful, and quite as respectable, as theirs;—wandering women, who have
no care for the Lares and Penates of the ordinary English home, whose
talk is of art and of far-away cathedrals, of foreign cookery and Rhine
wines, who have got up to see the sun rise in every country except their
own, who go in for passports instead of Sunday-schools, who sit next
“our own correspondent” at dinner-parties on their return to London, and
converse with him concerning Rome and Vienna, when they mutually agree
that the Continent is the place to live, that the man, woman, or child,
who is content to reside in England, should be sent to the Asylum for
Idiots at once.
These are the people who ask young girls whether they have been abroad,
and, on receiving an answer in the negative, remark that they envy them.
If any one have the temerity to inquire why, they reply, “Because she
has never seen Paris, and the first sight of Paris is something worth
living for.” Beyond climate and cheapness, and being able to do as one
likes, these Bohemians never can give a reason for the faith that is in
them; but that they hold such faith sincerely is certain.
“Everything is so different,” they declare, if pressed on the subject;
“the cooking, for instance.”
“It is, and I detest messes,” says some plain-spoken John Bull;
whereupon the elderly Bohemian inquires, “whether the speaker has ever
dined at Zapoli’s?” implying thereby that he is utterly ignorant of the
subject about which he has been talking.
Such a woman was Miss Hope—a woman who went poking about foreign
galleries, and visiting artists’ studios; who had, if her own account
were to be believed, seen every modern statue in process of chiselling,
who had been to every opera which ever was performed, who
conscientiously believed she had exhausted Europe, who wrote home reams
of letters about the Carnival and the Pope, about festivals and
bull-fights, about Mont Blanc and German gaming-tables, and who, in
common with most English travellers, believing the Lord had made
mountains and lakes, kings, queens, popes, cardinals, musicians, actors,
actresses, and painters, on purpose to amuse and improve the people of
Great Britain, considered it only an act of common courtesy towards the
Almighty on the part of that nation to see as much of the great
Continental entertainment He had provided for the pleasure and
edification of his chosen race as possible.
All this and much more had Bessie Ormson heard concerning Miss Hope.
Many and various were the comments that had fallen upon her ear
concerning “that funny old woman,” as she mentally called Arthur
Dudley’s respected aunt. From Mrs. Piggott, who declared she hated Miss
Hope as she hated “pison,” to other persons higher in the social
scale—the name of one of whom, at all events, Bessie would not have
cared to mention, even to herself, in her bedchamber, lest a bird of the
air might carry it away—from Mrs. Piggott up, I repeat, the girl had
heard stories of Miss Hope, and her heart burned within her at the sound
of her name.
“I do trust I shall be at Berrie Down when your aunt arrives, Arthur,”
she said; and the speech was an opportune diversion at the moment. “It
has been a dream of my life to meet Miss Hope.”
“I do not imagine you would agree particularly well, if you did meet,”
answered Arthur, sulkily.
“We might for a little time,” said Bessie, laughing. “Heather, do be
polite, and ask me to remain until after Miss Hope’s arrival. I have
heard so much of her, she seems quite like an old acquaintance.”
“From whom have you heard much of her, Bessie?” inquired Mr. Ormson;
“not from me, I am confident.”
“My dearest mamma, other human beings besides yourself have been endowed
by Providence with the gift of speech,” replied Bessie; but she bent as
she spoke to stroke Muff—bent in order to conceal her face, though she
was sitting in the shade with the cool night air blowing right in upon
her.
“Don’t be pert, miss,” retorted Mrs. Ormson; “from whom have you heard
so much of Miss Hope?”
“From one and another,” answered Bessie, carelessly; “I am the rolling
stone which gathers moss, contrary to the words of the proverb; and,
wherever I go, I hear something to the advantage or disadvantage of
somebody. Concerning Miss Hope, the moss I have gathered is to the
effect that she dresses peculiarly badly abroad, and peculiarly well in
England; that foreigners regard her with awe and wonder, as an average
specimen of the British female; that she praises everything English in
foreign countries, and everything English when abroad; that she is to be
met with on the stairs leading to attic studios, and dines in the most
wonderful manner for threepence per diem; that she is considered mad by
the Parisians, and a great and good lady by the Germans; that she was
requested to leave Vienna; and that at Rome she is regarded with
distrust, because of the audible comments she is in the habit of making
during mass, concerning the mummery of the Catholic religion. For the
rest, I am told that, since her nephew has come of age and married, she
has vowed a vow never to set foot in Copt Hall, but will, when she
returns to England, take up her abode in a London boarding-house, where
she can discourse to her fellow-sufferers concerning French cookery and
George Sand, the gondolas of Venice, and the terrible designs and
wonderful genius of Napoleon the Third.”
“Who told you all this, Bessie?” demanded Squire Dudley, turning round
in his chair as he asked the question.
“What can it matter who told me?” she replied. “Is the record not true?”
“True or false, I should like to know the name of your informant,” he
said; “for I never knew but one person who talked in that way of my
aunt. Was it a man or a woman?” he persisted.
“You might be more polite, Arthur,” she replied; “a lady.”
“Was it Mrs. Aymescourt?” he asked.
“I did not know there was such a person upon earth,” she replied.
“Don’t tell stories, Bessie,” interposed Mrs. Ormson; “you must have
heard of her over and over again.”
“If I ever did, I have forgotten all about her,” answered Bessie; “at
any rate, it was not from any one of the name of Aymescourt I ever heard
a sentence concerning Miss Hope’s peculiarities.”
“And who is Mrs. Aymescourt?” inquired Heather.
“Oh! a friend of Miss Hope’s; at least, she used to be,” answered Mrs.
Ormson, vaguely; and then she looked at Arthur, who, pulling cherries
out of a basket lined with green leaves, refused either to meet her
glance, or to vouchsafe any further information on the subject.
“Did you know Mrs. Aymescourt, Arthur?” asked Heather, whose curiosity
was a little piqued.
“I—yes, to be sure; she used to be staying with my aunt at Copt Hall,
but I have not seen her these ten years.”
“Was not there something about Mr. Aymescourt having come into another
fine property?” inquired Mrs. Ormson.
“Marsden said he had,” returned the Squire; “likely enough, for we know
who takes care of his own; and certainly Aymescourt had luck beyond what
falls to the share of any honest man. He had a large income to begin
with, or else madam never would have married him; but I dare say they
were quite able to spend it all, so probably this other property fell in
none too soon.”
“Where do they live?” asked Heather.
“I have not the slightest idea,” Arthur answered; “my aunt keeps up some
kind of acquaintanceship, I understand, with them, as she does with
everybody, but I have seen nothing of them for years;” and as he spoke
Squire Dudley made another dive among the cherries, and pulled a fresh
handful from amidst the green leaves.
“Give me some, Arthur, before you eat them all,” entreated Bessie; “or,
stay, the moon must be up by this time; I can go into the garden and
gather some for myself. Will you come with me, Alick?”
And Bessie, who was not above flirting, even with a lad of eighteen,
when it suited her purpose to do so, drew Alick from the dining-room
across the hall, into the drawing-room, and so out on to the long
terrace-like walk which overlooked the Hollow, and all the pleasant
country stretching away towards the west.
“I did not want the cherries in the least,” she began, putting her hand
within Alick’s arm, and speaking in her usual don’t-careish tone; “I did
not want the cherries, but I wanted to get away from mamma—she does so
worry me, that I say things to her I feel sorry for afterwards. What a
pity it is we cannot choose our own mothers, or that we are not allowed
to exchange them after we come to years of discretion! Only to think,
that out of three sisters my mamma should be my mamma. Even Mrs. Black,
or your own mother, I think I could have got on with; but, as papa
wisely observes, these things are arranged for us.”
“But don’t you love your mother, Bessie?” asked the boy, with a vague
sense on him that the girl’s talk was wicked.
“Don’t I what?” she demanded.
“Don’t you love your mother?” he repeated, with the feeling growing
stronger upon him, that his view of the matter was correct, and Bessie’s
wrong; “of course, I know you disagree with her, and quarrel, and
contradict her, but still, for all that, don’t you love her in the
bottom of your heart?”
“Shall I tell you a secret?” she inquired, as they turned the end of the
house—the garden end.
“If you will be so kind,” Alick replied, thinking at the same time how
exceedingly beautiful Bessie looked in the moonlight. Perhaps she
guessed at his thought, for she sighed, wishing that some person whom
she liked much better than Alick Dudley were standing beside her at the
moment, and then she forgot what she had been going to say, and went a
long mental journey, while the youth waited patiently for her to speak.
“Will you be so kind?” he asked at last.
“So kind as what?” she repeated. “Oh! to tell you a secret. From the
bottom of my heart, Alick, I never loved but one woman on earth, and
that woman is your brother’s wife. If I had a mother like her now, or a
sister, or anything—” she went on, hurriedly, only to stop short and
leave her sentence unfinished.
“Heather would be a mother to you,” said the lad, softly.
“No, she wouldn’t,” was the reply; “she couldn’t, and it is not fit she
should. There is nobody like Heather could be mother, or sister, or
friend, or anything to me now. Heather does not like me, I know she does
not, and I cannot blame her for it, for I am cross and hateful.”
“Oh, Bessie! you are delightful, and _so_ pretty!”
“I wish I were not pretty, flatterer,” she said. “I should like to be as
ugly as Joan Harcourt, and as good. It must be nice to honour one’s
parents, let them be as disagreeable as they will, and to love one’s
neighbour, even though she keep a parrot, and lets her girls hammer at a
piano placed against the party-wall, and is altogether as great a
nuisance as Mrs. Riccarde, who lives next door to us. Oh, Alick, how
lovely and peaceful the country looks in the moonlight! Is not that the
house at Kemms Park I see, shining white among the trees? What a
delicious place! Do you know Lord Kemms’ family name?”
“Baldwin,” he replied.
“Baldwin!” repeated Miss Bessie, and there was just a shade of
disappointment in her voice. “Is he a good-looking man, Alick? I wish I
had been with you yesterday in the Croft when he passed. That is the
only taste which I have inherited from my mother; I do dearly love a
lord.”
“Bessie!” exclaimed Alick.
“It is a fact,” she persisted; “I do not in the least believe they are
made of the same flesh and blood as the commonalty. I delight in men who
have had ancestors; that is one reason why I like all of you, because on
one side of the house, at least, you come of good people.”
“I am not ashamed of my mother’s family,” answered the lad, a little
hastily.
“No, but you are not proud of it; Maddox Cuthbert, alderman, no doubt,
was a most charming-old institution, and highly respected in the City
but still, that is not like being in the peerage, is it, Alick, or
amongst the country gentry?”
“I do not think it matters much what one is, if one have no money,” he
replied. “Did you not yourself say at supper, riches make the man?”
“If there is one thing I object to more than another,” interrupted
Bessie, “it is to have my own conversational sins brought up as
witnesses against me. I was only jesting about lords, Alick. Don’t I
know the ancestors of Lord Kemms were something or other in the city,
not nearly so respectable as our grandfather? But, seriously, I should
like to see his lordship. I have a curiosity about him; was he alone, or
had he a groom?”
“He was quite alone,” said Alick Dudley, laughing, almost in spite of
himself, at her persistency, “and he spoke to me very much as anybody
else might have done. Do you not think it would be a good thing if there
were a kind of ‘Court Circular’ published at Kemms Park, telling us all
about the great folks there—what visitors they had, what time they ate
and drank?”
“Yes, and we might be the editors, and walk over every day to learn
particulars of their doings. I wish Lord Kemms would ask me to go and
stay there.”
“Perhaps he may, when Mr. Harcourt has made his fortune, and is created
an earl.”
“Then I shall be grey-haired,” she said, “and have rheumatism so bad,
that even Kemms Park will seem disagreeable. How beautiful those trees
do look, Alick! Is there not a village somewhere near Mr. Raidsford’s
place?”
“North Kemms you mean, I suppose,” replied her companion; “it is two
miles, I should say, beyond Mr. Raidsford’s, that is, two miles by the
road, but there is a path across the fields, which cuts off a great
corner. It is a pretty walk to North Kemms, and there is such an old,
old church there.”
“Where?” asked Heather, joining them at the moment.
“At North Kemms,” answered Bessie, promptly. “Alick is going to take me
to see it next Sunday afternoon, are you not, Alick?”
“If you do not think the walk too much,” he said; and then the rest of
the party came out to “see the moonlight,” and there was no more talk,
either about Lord Kemms or Kemms Park.
That same night, Bessie having shaken down her hair, Heather came into
her room, hoping Bessie would not be vexed if she asked her one little
favour.
“A hundred, if you like,” answered the girl.
“I should be glad if you would speak to your mamma with more, more——”
“Politeness,” suggested Bessie, finding Mrs. Dudley pause for want of a
suitable word.
“Not exactly politeness, but respect,” said Heather; “you know, dear,
she _is_ your mother, and you ought to——”
“Please, stop,” entreated Bessie. “I will strive to do what you ask for
_your_ sake; if I cannot be good for that, nothing can make me good. You
were very fond of your mother, I suppose—very tender towards her—very
dutiful, no doubt?”
“I hope I was,” Heather answered, in that low tone in which women talk
of the dead whom they have loved.
“And she was very fond of you?”
“My dear child, what a question! of course she was.”
“Well, supposing she had not been fond of you, nor you of her, perhaps
even you might not have found it in the least degree easier to be
dutiful and tender than I do?”
“But you must be fond of her,” Heather asserted.
“I do not see any _must_ in the matter; I never asked her to bring me
into the world. If she had consulted me, I should decidedly have
preferred being left out of it. Well, then, since to please herself she
did bring me into the world, what has she done for me? My brothers have
had all her care and attention; she married young, as you know, and to
some women it does not seem a very agreeable thing to have a great girl
treading on their heels, and calling them mother. She dressed me as a
child long after I was a girl;—when she could not help herself, and had
to acknowledge that I was growing up, she sent me from the nursery to
school, and kept me there till the state of the domestic finances
compelled my return; since which time, the one object, aim, and end of
her life has been to drive me to marry somebody—to get rid of a child
she never liked.”
“Bessie!” remonstrated Heather.
“It is true,” the girl persisted, passionately; “she never liked me—she
never wanted to have a daughter—she has told me so over and over again.
Suppose you acted towards Lally as she has acted towards me. Suppose you
kept the child shut up in a London nursery, and never spoke to her,
unless it was to find fault with or punish her. Suppose you were out
from morning till night, following your own pleasure (my father was rich
in those days, and she could visit, and dress, and spend as much as she
chose), and left Lally to the mercy of strangers, to the kindness and
attention of a cheap nurse. Suppose you grudged your child the money
necessary to give her a good education, and sent her to a school where
there was not enough to eat, nor sufficient clothing to keep her warm at
night. Suppose Arthur gave you money to pay for an expensive school, and
that you pocketed the difference——”
“Ah! stop—stop, Bessie! I won’t believe it—I cannot believe any woman,
any mother, capable of such wickedness!” entreated Heather; but Bessie
relentlessly continued:
“Then when Lally grew to woman’s estate, should you expect her to honour
a mother who had acted such a part by her? and what I have told you is
not the worst, Heather, is not the worst!”
“And what is worst—dear?”
“That I must keep to myself,” replied the girl, rising as she spoke, and
flinging her hair back from her face. “I have often thought, since I
came down here this time, that such people as we are have neither right
nor title to mix among such as you; and yet I do not know—whatever of
good I have learned, whatever faith in virtue and honesty I possess, I
have learned and I have acquired from you. Oh, Heather!—oh, Heather!——”
and she clasped her hands high above her head. Then, in a moment, the
fit was over, and the speaker fell into her usual tone. “I will try to
do what you ask,” she said, “and treat my respected parent with the
deference you desire. Kiss me for that—kiss me once, kiss me twice—kiss
me as though you meant it. If I had been a man, I should have married
you, Heather; if I had been a duke, I should have laid my rank and
wealth at your feet, and prayed you take them—take everything, if you
would only take me as well. If you tell me to do it this minute, I will
stay with you all my life, and never marry any one.”
“What a strange girl you are!” said Heather, tossing over the soft hair,
twining and curling it round her hand.
“Ay! all puzzles seem strange till you hold the key,” answered Bessie.
“Let me light you along the passage, and do not lie awake thinking of
me.”
CHAPTER VI.
BESSIE’S LETTER.
The summer days ran on. They flowed by smooth and pleasant—so Bessie
Ormson said in one of her sentimental moods—like a swift river among
lovely green fields.
“Look at that stream,” she remarked to Alick, as they stood, on the
Sunday following Heather’s return, side by side, leaning over the
parapet of a little bridge which spanned the Kemm; “do you know what it
puts me in mind of?”
“No,” answered the boy, to whom sometimes the talk of his companion was
as the talk of a creature from another world; “I cannot know what
anything puts you in mind of, for you are like no other person I ever
met in all my life before.”
“So much the better for you,” she replied. “Do I not often inform you I
am one of the daughters of Cain, come on a short visit to Adam and Eve
in the garden of Eden? and that brings me back to the river: it runs
by—like existence at Berrie Down—with scarcely a ripple on its surface.
I should like to be the Kemm,” she added in a lower tone, “murmuring on
over the pebbles, never singing a more passionate strain than that—never
fretting or fuming—never forcing my way through rocks and stones—never
brawling—never uncertain as to my future course—but stealing quietly and
peacefully to the great sea;” and as she spoke, Bessie dropped her arms
over the parapet of the little bridge, and looked into the stream sadly
and dreamily.
Let me sketch her for you—Herbert Ormson’s only daughter, Gilbert
Harcourt’s affianced wife—or rather let me make the attempt, for it is
not easy to give in pen and ink an idea of the personal appearance of a
girl like Bessie Ormson, whose mood was shifting as the sunbeams, whose
beauty was changeful as the shadows flitting over the grass in the
golden summer-time:
Scarcely of the middle height, figure slight and delicately rounded, she
was not destitute of dignity, though lithe and lissom as a child: she
had a small head, which she could rear, on occasions, almost defiantly;
a mass of dark brown hair, smoothly braided on her cheeks, and then
rolled up at the back of her neck in coil after coil; eyes of the
darkest, deepest, divinest blue, shaded by long black lashes, that gave
to her face, when in repose, an almost pathetic expression; a complexion
which neither sun nor wind seemed able to spoil; she had lips like
coral, and teeth like pearls; and a short, provoking, piquant, saucy
upper lip. Was it any wonder, think you, that Alick Dudley should
consider her the perfection of beauty?—that almost unconsciously the
fancies and loves of his future life were shaped and moulded by this his
earliest ideal of feminine loveliness?
And yet it was no mere beauty of feature that caused Bessie Ormson to
seem so irresistibly charming: it was that ever-varying expression of
which I have spoken—that shifting look, now sad, now gay, now earnest,
now provoking, now coquettish, now soft and womanly, and again almost
sarcastic in its keen perception of human folly and human weakness—which
gave variety to her face.
Always changing—never for two minutes the same—always filling the
beholder with a vague wonder as to what strangely-varied mental book
such a face could be the index.
It was wistful, it was saucy, it was sorrowful, it was joyous. There was
a shadow lying across her eyes one moment; they were sparkling with
mirth the next. She would look at Heather as though she were gazing into
the depths of a clear stream, with a strange dreamy glance, and before
you could fix that expression on your mind it was gone.
See her with Lally, and her face was the face of a child; leave her to
herself for an instant, and there came an anxious, troubled look on her
countenance. She was all things—mischievous, tender, high-spirited,
quiet, loving, cross, full of bitter repartee, of premature worldly
knowledge.
She had eaten of the tree too soon; and, if that fruit set her mental
teeth on edge, who may say the fault lay with Bessie?
She was clever, as Arthur Dudley had truly observed; that is, she was
not clever in accomplishments, nor as regarded solid learning, but
rather socially and conversationally.
She was no linguist, not much of a musician, nothing of an artist; she
had not read much, but she could guess what people were thinking of; she
could piece this and that together, and tell what motives influenced
them, what were their purposes, by what considerations they were swayed.
For this reason, many persons had an objection to very intimate
association with the girl; she never rested content with words—she went
straight back to the thoughts words concealed.
The young folks at Berrie Down Hollow, however, who had no secrets and
no plans, found her capital company. Even Lally was not more tireless
than she. Ever ready to go out to walk, to inspect the poultry-yard, to
try her hand at butter-making, to gather flowers and group them into
bouquets, to shake the cherry-trees, to carry Lally into the Hollow and
hide her among the blackberry bushes, to smother the child in armfuls of
freshly-mown grass, to lead the way, fleet of foot, to the meadows,
where the haymakers were at work, to don with demurest air a snowy
apron, and help Mrs. Piggott whisk eggs, or prepare her fruit for
preserving!
Even Mrs. Piggott, who entertained a most cordial dislike for Bessie’s
maternal parent, brightened up when she saw that pretty roguish face
peeping in at the door of kitchen, larder, and dairy.
Of severe, not to say despotic, principles, inclined to resent
intrusions into her domains as acts of revolt against a
legally-constituted authority, Mrs. Piggott, nevertheless, not merely
tolerated Bessie’s visits, but rejoiced in them, and few things
delighted the beauty more than a forenoon with “that delightfully
respectable old wonder,” as she called the housekeeper.
It was a sight to see Mrs. Piggott and Bessie employed in making
red-currant jelly—Mrs. Piggott arrayed in a clean cotton gown, and a cap
with many borders, looking sharply after her assistant to see that she
religiously removed every stem, while Lally, perched on the table,
superintended the work, and ate whole handsful of the fruit, in gleeful
defiance of Bessie’s threats of executing condign punishment upon her.
“Dear, dear Miss,” observed Mrs. Piggott on one occasion, surveying
Bessie over her spectacles, “who would ever think you were your mamma’s
daughter?”
“No one, Mrs. Piggott,” was the young lady’s prompt reply. “Don’t you
think it a pity mothers so seldom take after their children?” which
inversion of the usual proposition so utterly astonished Mrs. Piggott’s
understanding, that she was glad to direct Bessie’s attention to “that
blessed child who has eaten a quart of picked fruit, Miss, if she has
eaten a currant;” whereupon Bessie placed Lally on the dresser, where,
in the midst of plates and dishes, the little girl sat as if on a
throne, exchanging saucy speeches with Miss Ormson, till it pleased that
young lady to lift her down from her perch and take her away to the
hay-field, or out into the croft, to see Alick breaking-in Nellie.
It was wonderful to observe the way in which Bessie and the child
agreed; more wonderful still, perhaps, to notice the manner in which the
former wound all the household round her finger.
It was Bessie this, and Bessie that. She retrimmed the girls’ bonnets;
she taught them the latest mode of dressing hair; she could change old
garments into new by some dexterous sleight-of-hand. Ribbons and laces,
deemed useless before her arrival, and cast aside, as tossed and torn,
reappeared after her advent in forms that delighted the hearts of Arthur
Dudley’s sisters.
She was “good for everything,” the boys declared. Pretty and coquettish
herself, she liked to see other girls pretty and coquettish too; and
during her visit the Misses Dudley went about with wild flowers in their
hair, with dainty bouquets in their belts, with dresses guiltless of a
crease, “making much of themselves,” as Bessie phrased it.
How she revelled in that house! How she, so constantly a prisoner among
bricks and mortar, loved the freedom and the liberty of that country
life! How she stood drinking in the pure, undefiled air, that came
floating over the fields and the hedgerows to her! Much as the young
Dudleys loved their home, they had not that appreciation of every flower
and leaf, of every effect of light and shade, which astonished them in
their guest.
Her love of the country was keen and sharp, like the relish of a
half-starved man for food.
Here, at last, was a life to be desired—a life idly busy, sinlessly
sensuous;—here was a lotus land of indolent industry, bright with
sunshine, where the air was full of all delicious perfumes—where the
days were happy and the nights calm—where the morning dawned upon a
peaceful household—where the moon looked down, not upon a turbulent sea
of human woes, sorrows, sins, passions, disappointments, but on the
pleasant fields where the grass was springing, and the sheep lay dotted
about on the soft green slopes.
The birds in the hedges, the ferns in the dells, the soft cushions of
moss, which she would caress with her little hand and touch with her
lips, as though such delicious greenery must be conscious of her
caresses; the branches waving in the breeze, the whirling of the pigeons
in the air, the hundred sounds of the country,—all these things had
charms for Bessie which made the Dudleys find her a most appreciative
and delightful companion.
Never was there such a girl for a walk, Alick Dudley thought, as Bessie
Ormson. If she went out in the early morning, before the sun had risen
high enough to have much power, Bessie would stop to look at the cobwebs
glittering with dew-drops, at the drooping blades of wet grass, at the
tears on the leaves of the dog-roses. Were it later in the day, she
revelled in the luxurious warmth; in the far-away tiled roofs peeping
red from amongst sheltering trees; in the quiet cattle; in the hush of
the noon-tide; and when the afternoon stole on, and the evening shadows
began to fall, she delighted in the solemn darkness of the distant
woods, in the flow of beck and stream, in the figures of the labourers
hieing them, home across the field-paths, in the children grouped about
the cottage doors.
“It is peace,” she was wont to say—“perfect peace. I wonder if heaven
will be like this!”
There are poets who cannot write a line of verse; there are artists who
yet lack the power to reproduce that which fills their souls with
pleasure almost amounting to pain. The understanding mind and the
skilful hand are not necessarily sent into the world together. The power
of appreciating things lovely and beautiful is often divorced from the
capacity to create or portray the lovely and the beautiful, or, rather,
is not always mated with such capacity; and, although Bessie Ormson
possessed no creative or imitative genius, she was yet endowed with that
diviner genius—the ability to luxuriate in the thousand works of the
great Creator.
And it was this faculty of perception and appreciativeness which, added
to her quickness and vivacity, made Bessie such good company that no one
in the length of a summer’s day could weary of her. Nothing escaped
her—not a flower growing by the wayside, not a cloud fleeting across the
sky, not a change of expression on a man’s face, not an unusual cadence
in a familiar voice.
With all her sarcasm and frivolity, the girl’s human sympathy was
intense; and, perhaps, when the secret of most popularity is exhausted,
it will be found only to exist in the fact that the man or the woman
popular can enter into and understand the moods and feelings of other
men and women.
It was so with Bessie, at all events. She loved Berrie Down Hollow with
a love almost amounting to passion. To her, that place was the
realization of peace, happiness, home, beauty, contentment; and yet she
could comprehend the natural desire of the lad who stood beside her to
leave Hertfordshire and go forth to push his way in the world.
It was of that desire they had been talking as they sauntered across the
fields towards North Kemms.
The hush of the first day in the week was around them and above; but
still their discourse had been of the world, its prizes, its blanks, its
successes, its disappointments, and the boy’s cheek flushed as he spoke
of how he should like to win a name and a position for himself in the
great city, where the greatest part of Bessie Ormson’s life had been
spent.
“Of course I shall be sorry to go away from the old place,” he went on,
“to leave it and Heather; but I should feel proud to make a fortune, and
bring it back to her. I should not stay away from Berrie Down for ever.”
“Yes, you would,” Bessie answered. Then, seeing him look surprised, she
went on: “You, that is, the Alick Dudley who is talking to me now, would
go away, and never return. I know it is well for you to go; but still,
do not think you could ever return. You will leave here a boy with a
face as smooth as my own, and you will come back a man, never to hear
the song of the birds with quite the same ears—never to look out over
the fields and the woods with quite the same eyes—never to listen to the
trees and the winds whispering quite the same words. You will go
out”—from the height of her twenty-three years she looked down and told
him this—“and you may come back, but the noise of the world will mingle
with the old familiar sounds, and never let those sounds fall in perfect
harmony on your soul more.”
And it was then they came to the Kemm, where Bessie paused to look into
the stream.
“I wonder, Bessie, where you have learned all you know,” said Alick,
after a pause.
“Not out of books,” she replied, laughing; “the truth is I know very
little, except that I am very happy at Berrie Down, and shall be very
sorry to leave it.”
“Do you not expect to be happy when you leave Berrie Down?” he asked.
“That is not a question to be rashly answered,” she said. “I may be—I
may not be. Don’t you remember that game Lally plays at—blowing
dandelion-down away to tell the hour? Whatever number she has arrived
at, when the last feather floats off, is the time. My future depends on
much such a chance; but whether it turn out happy or unhappy, be certain
I shall not sit down and bemoan myself.”
“But surely you hope to be happy in your marriage?” the lad suggested,
hesitatingly, and yet with a degree of restrained eagerness which made
Bessie smile.
“I hope to be so, Alick,” she answered, however, gravely; “but hopes are
poor houses to live in. Fact is,” she added, in a gayer tone, “I know as
little about my future life as you know about yours. When we are old man
and old woman, we will sit down by the fireside together, and compare
notes; we will tell one another about the roads we have travelled, and
the countries they led to.”
And Bessie lifted her eyes as she spoke, and looked away to the woods
surrounding Mr. Raidsford’s house, which mingled with those of Kemms
Park.
In the after-days, the pair stood in the same spot again on just such
another afternoon, and thought of that talk on their way to Kemms
church.
“We shall be very late,” Bessie said at length; and then they turned and
pursued their way in the delicious stillness across the fields to North
Kemms. It had been a freak of Bessie’s, this Sunday ramble alone with
Alick to a far-away church; but then Bessie was given to freaks, and no
one paid any particular attention to them.
Mrs. Ormson declared such a walk in the heat of the day “was absurd;”
even Heather looked surprised when she and Alick announced their
intention of starting directly after dinner. Lally had implored “me
too,” for once vainly, and an offer of companionship from the remainder
of the Dudleys had met with no better success.
“I want to go alone with you, Alick,” she declared. “I want to talk to
you quietly;” and of course Alick was delighted.
Like most girls, Bessie conceived all the wisdom of Solomon had come
down to her. In the ways of this world the young lady believed she was a
thorough adept; but she had not that reticence in talking about the ways
of the world and the wickedness of the people in it, which is, perhaps,
the first sign of thorough knowledge.
The wise man is modest. The man who thinks himself wise lacks sense to
hold his tongue; the saint is eloquent about sin; the sinner is not
given to speak of the flavour of that strange meat whereof he has
partaken; for all of which reasons Bessie, who was but a very novice in
that lore wherein she aspired to instruct others, was assiduous in her
endeavours to teach Alick that the world where he had been placed was a
mistake, the hope of happiness in it a delusion and a snare.
This young woman, who delighted in every country sight and sound, who
loved Lally and adored Heather Dudley, who luxuriated in pleasant sights
and in all sweet sounds, who had her life all before her, who could take
fun out of most things, and was not above confessing to a weakness for
strawberries and cream, would nevertheless talk on a fine summer
afternoon as I have taken the liberty of transcribing her conversation.
She thought she was original, perhaps, in her remarks; she thought also
possibly—and this thought chanced to be perfectly true—that Alick Dudley
delighted in her observations; and yet her talk was but as the talk of
other girls of her own age and temperament throughout the length and
breadth of England.
It was the nought is everything and everything is nought creed of our
own girls at the present hour; of those who, whether they take refuge
from their own luxuriously sad thoughts in earnestness or frivolity, in
balls or soup-kitchens, in fashionable follies or house-to-house
visitings, are yet agreed on one point, viz., their conviction that the
round world and all that therein is cannot be considered otherwise than
hollow and unsatisfactory.
They believe fully, not only that it is all a fleeting show, but that it
was “for man’s illusion given,” and they smile compassionately on the
poor souls who are deluded with such a transparent mockery, and go about
raving in a fine melancholy about the sins and sorrows, the snares and
the pitfalls, of our very imperfect earth.
Did the girls who read Evelina and Cecilia share this doctrine, or were
they, less sceptical, gulled, sweet simpletons, into believing the
Almighty intended them for happiness instead of misery?
It would have been a clever person who could have persuaded Bessie
Ormson into such a faith, at all events; and as, for most young people,
talk of the kind to which I have referred—melancholy, dreamy, romantic,
unsatisfying talk—has a singular charm, she might, with her
conversation, have done Alick Dudley a considerable amount of mischief,
had it not been for a little circumstance that occurred on the very same
Sunday afternoon of which I am speaking, and set the lad thinking about
a much more possible calamity than had been contained in any of Bessie’s
imaginative sentences.
On, over the fields they walked; they left the Kemm and Mr. Raidsford’s
property far behind; they strolled leisurely through the pleasant
Hertfordshire meadows, and stood here and there to watch the sheep
scuttling away from them, or to notice the placid contentment of the
cattle lying on the smooth grass whence the hay had just been carried.
On, past cottage and homestead; on, to where more woods met their sight;
on, through the little hamlet of North Kemms, and then by a short lane
to the church surrounded by a graveyard, where the mounds were many, and
the headstones few.
The service was half over by the time they stood within the porch, but
the sexton experienced no difficulty in providing the new comers with
seats. There were more empty than full in that church, so he ushered the
pair into a great family pew near the pulpit, and shut the door
carefully after them.
Only to open it, however, again next instant, and give admittance to a
tall handsome man, who might have belonged to the same party, so quickly
did he follow on their heels.
A very handsome man—when the stranger took his face out of his hat,
where he held it for the orthodox period; Alick Dudley was quite
satisfied on this point, and glanced curiously round to ascertain
whether Bessie chanced to be of the same opinion; but Bessie’s eyes were
fastened on her prayer-book, and so Alick turned again to the new comer
to discover what effect Bessie had produced on him.
Apparently, none whatever; he looked at the girl carelessly, looked her
over from head to foot; then examined Alick in the same supercilious and
critical style, after which he surveyed the congregation at large, the
clergyman, and the clerk. Then, having apparently exhausted North Kemms
as Bessie had exhausted the world, he caressed his moustache, and
retired into his own contemplations.
All of which proceedings piqued, not to say angered, Alick Dudley; and
this anger was the more unreasonable, because, if the stranger had
seemed struck by Bessie’s beauty, the lad would have been out of temper
still.
But that any one should remain indifferent to Miss Ormson’s perfections
appeared to Alick little less than a miracle. Even the rector, an old,
white-haired man, was to be detected stealing furtive looks at the
demure young lady who had come so late to church; and what right had
this “great swell,” so Alick mentally styled the stranger, to give
himself airs, and never bestow a second glance on a girl who was
undeniably beautiful?
“He may meet hundreds of fine ladies before he sees anything like her,”
decided Master Alick; but the offending gentleman evidently did not
share in this opinion. Wherever his thoughts might be, clearly they were
not wandering in the direction of Bessie Ormson, who, on her side, never
lifted her eyes to look at him, but kept them fixed resolutely on her
little prayer-book, the rector, or the east window; a piece of propriety
which, considering the girl’s proclivities for lords and grandees of all
kinds, was somewhat astonishing.
But then, if Bessie were a trifle coquettish, she was not bold; a maiden
less likely to take the initiative in a love affair could not have been
found in the length and breadth of Hertfordshire.
Which fact made it, perhaps, all the more extraordinary that the
stranger took no heed of so strange a mixture of modesty and vivacity
and beauty.
A handsome man, and yet not altogether of prepossessing appearance.
Sitting opposite to, and staring at him with all his eyes, Alick felt he
did not much like him. What had he come to church for? He sat there
absorbed in his own thoughts, whatever they might be, hearing the sermon
possibly, but unheeding it certainly. Vaguely, as in a dreamy kind of
way, Alick conjectured the world, of which Bessie had been talking as
they crossed the fields, might have some share in their companion’s
reverie.
The lad was gifted with sufficient sense to understand that a man like
this was much more likely to know all the ins and outs of a wicked world
than Miss Bessie Ormson; and, while the rector droned through his
sermon, an impression, undefined and intangible, it is true, came into
Alick’s mind, that, all through her wise conversation with him, Bessie
had been arguing out some mental question with herself; forecasting what
the years might bring to her, wondering with what ears she should listen
to the sweet home sounds again, with what eyes she should look over the
green Hertfordshire fields in the future which was uncertainly
stretching forth before them both.
The thoughts of youth are generally as unformed as the features of
childhood; and thus, though Alick was conscious of some curious enigma
perplexing him, he yet would have been surprised had any one placed the
puzzle he was considering before his mental vision, perfect in form and
clothed with words.
At length it was all over—the sermon, the service, the reverie—and, with
a sense of relief, the lad opened the pew door, and stood in the aisle
while his companion passed out. In order to allow her to take precedence
of him, the stranger had stepped a little back into the pew, and this
slight courtesy Bessie acknowledged by the merest inclination of her
pretty head. Then Alick saw the gentleman look at her, for an instant
only—next moment his dark eyes were roaming over the church, scanning
the monuments, glancing up at the organ-loft.
When they were half way down the aisle, Alick turned to see what the
stranger was doing, and found him, not following Bessie with his eyes,
but still scrutinising the church as though he were a member of the
Archæological Society. There he stood in the pew just as they had left
him, indolently surveying roof and walls, tombs and windows. As they
passed through the porch, Alick looked back once more, but the object of
his curiosity had not moved.
“Waiting for the rector, perhaps,” thought the lad; and he hurried after
Bessie, who by this time was half way across the graveyard.
“What a dear old church!” she said, as they reached the gate. “I like it
much better than Fifield.”
“Excuse me, but I believe this is your prayer-book,” said a voice close
beside her at this juncture, and the interruption was so sudden that
both Alick and his companion started to find the stranger close beside
them.
“Thank you, I am sorry to have given you so much trouble; yes, it is
mine,” Bessie stammered, her face covered with blushes as she received
the book, which she put in her pocket; while the stranger raised his hat
and turned back across the churchyard in the direction of the Rectory.
“Now, was not that stupid of me?” asked Bessie. In his heart, perhaps
Alick thought it was, but he did not express this opinion, he only
offered to carry the book for her.
“No, thank you, it is so small, I always keep it in my pocket,” she
answered. “If there be one thing more than another I dislike, it is to
see people parading church-services and Bibles about on a Sunday as
though they want to let all the world know they have been praying;” and
thus Bessie rattled on while they retraced their way across the fields,
and over the Kemm, and past the woods, and so to Berrie Down, which
place they reached about the time when Mrs. Ormson, awaking from her
afternoon siesta like a giant refreshed, proposed that society generally
should take a turn on the lawn.
To this proposal society, nothing loth, agreed; and thus it chanced that
Bessie and Alick were descried entering the croft and rounding the
Hollow, and ascending the hill leading to the house.
Once amongst the family group, it was needful to pause and give full
particulars of their walk, of North Kemms church, of the congregation,
of the music, of the sermon, and of various other matters which the
younger Dudleys were pleased to regard in the light of news.
By a singular coincidence, however, neither Alick nor Bessie made any
mention of the strange gentleman who had turned aside towards the
Rectory. The young lady, indeed, talked so much and so fast that it
would have been difficult for her companion to have edged in much
information on the subject, even had he felt inclined to do so.
But he did not feel inclined; he could do little except watch Bessie,
and wonder what had come to put her in such astonishing spirits, and to
make her so much gayer than when they started—so utterly absorbed in
giving a full and detailed account of the appearance of the rector, the
prosiness of his sermon, the beauty of the walk, and the horrible
discord of the choir, that she had not a moment’s attention to spare for
Lally, who revenged herself by coolly thrusting her little hand into the
depths of Bessie’s pocket, in search of those sweetmeats which her
friend usually kept there for the child’s special delectation and
benefit.
“Not a sing,” exclaimed Lally at length, prayer-book in hand, and sorrow
written on every feature in her face.
Then Bessie, breaking off in the middle of a sentence, turned and
snatched the book from Lally, with a look of such blank terror, that for
a second it seemed to Alick Dudley almost as though the sun had gone
behind a cloud.
“Nossing for me,” remarked Lally reproachfully, and in a tone of mild
expostulation against a state of society in which such things as pockets
destitute of sweetmeats could be—“nossing for me?”
“You naughty child,” began Miss Ormson, sharply; but next moment she
relented, and, catching Lally up in her arms, told her she would see
whether “Bessie had anything in her drawers for her bold little girl.”
After which, exit Bessie with Lally, the latter contemplating the family
group, as she departed, over Bessie’s shoulder, and staying her appetite
by thrusting three of her fingers as far down her throat as was
compatible with personal safety.
Once in her own room, Bessie, after finding the sweetmeats, turned them
and Lally out of the apartment, locked her door, and then eagerly opened
her prayer-book.
Had Heather Dudley been on the threshold, she might well have marvelled
what calamity had happened to the girl. She shook the book, she
fluttered over the leaves; she turned her pocket inside out, she lifted
her handkerchief, she inspected the carpet, she examined the prayer-book
again, then she walked to the door, unlocked and opened it, to meet
Alick Dudley on the threshold.
“Is this yours?” he asked, giving her a sealed note. “It dropped from
the prayer-book when Lally pulled it out of your pocket. I picked it up,
but I did not like to give it to you on the lawn.”
“You dear, good boy,” she said; but Alick never smiled at this praise.
His face was as pale as Bessie’s was red, his tone as quiet as hers was
hurried.
For a moment the pair looked at each other, then she said:
“Alick, may I trust that you will not tell Heather?”
“I will tell nothing,” he answered. She put her hand into his, but he
never clasped the little soft fingers. Involuntarily almost she put her
lips to his and kissed him, but still the lad made no sign.
Then she broke out passionately, “Don’t judge me hardly, Alick; don’t
judge me till you know all.”
“I do not judge you, Bessie;” he replied, “but I am very sorry;” and
there came a mist before his eyes, through which he could not see her
distinctly, and he turned and walked away along the corridor, feeling he
had that day got his first real lesson in deceit and hypocrisy.
He had believed in Bessie; he had listened to her talk; with delight and
wonder she had seemed to him walking in the golden sunlight like
something too good for the every-day, common, work-a-day world, and,
behold! she was but a hypocrite playing in Heather’s house a double
game.
Yes, he knew now the world she had come from must be a wicked place,
when such things as this were possible in it. He had been deceived, and
straight away he thought of Delilah and Sampson, putting up his hand to
his mouth the while to feel if those were really the lips Bessie had
kissed.
In her fear and humiliation she had offered him this bribe; when he
thought of that, his anger melted away into a great flood of shame and
pity, and then the lad whom this girl, his senior by nearly five years,
was teaching so rapidly to be a man, turned into his own room, where,
covering his face with his hands, he cried like a child.
After all, he was very young and very inexperienced, and he found it
hard to see the dream-castle he had built on so frail a foundation as a
woman’s truth and purity levelled to the ground.
There comes a time when such knowledge, as had been vouchsafed to Alick
Dudley that day, provokes smiles rather than tears.
When a man has arrived at the conclusion that all women are weak, that
all women are frail, it is rather gratifying to his penetration than
otherwise when beauty confirms this view of the question; but Alick
Dudley had not commenced travelling along the road which leads to this
pleasant opinion, and it was very grievous to him to find his idol had
feet of clay, that she had been making a cat’s-paw of him, that the
stranger and she knew more of each other than was well for either, that
she had fallen in a moment so low as not to be above bribing him with a
kiss.
And at that point the lad grew dizzy and confused. There was a great
mystery being developed in his heart at the moment. He could not have
put that mystery into words; but I may for him. The ideal he had
idolized lay at his feet, broken and shattered, marred, ruined, and
defaced; but the reality which occupied its place—a weak, deceitful,
unhappy girl—he loved.
CHAPTER VII.
MORE VISITORS.
And still the summer days ran on. They rippled by, scarcely murmuring as
they passed; and life at Berrie Down flowed smoothly along, leaving no
mark or trace behind.
The flowers faded, and fresh flowers bloomed; the cherries were all
shaken down; the haymaking was over; the blackberries in the Hollow were
forming so rapidly that Lally’s little fingers had to be forbidden
plucking the unripe fruit; the noontides were hot and sultry; every
blossom was gone from the chestnuts; the shade in Berrie Down Lane was
sweet and pleasant, and both pedestrians and equestrians loved to linger
there under the trees, on the soft grass by the roadside. There was the
purple haze on the distant woods, and in the nearer valleys; the leaves
had lost their fresh greenness, and looked in want of rain; the Kemm was
reduced to a mere thread of a stream; and the rivulet which meandered
through the fields beyond the Hollow was utterly dried up.
Arthur Dudley was beginning to complain loudly of the drought. He spoke
of impending loss of cattle; of the probability of the after-grass being
all scorched up; of failure in the turnips; but no one paid much
attention to his forebodings excepting Heather and Mrs. Ormson.
There was this difference, however, between the two women, that, while
the latter condoled with him, the former endeavoured to make him believe
matters would not turn out so badly as he feared.
Comforters are not generally so much liked as sympathizers, and it was
therefore with Mrs. Ormson Arthur walked around the fields, bemoaning
his usual ill-luck as they paced along.
“It was like my fortune to have so many cattle in such a season,” he
grumbled. “Any other year it would not have mattered; but this”—and so
the Squire wandered on, while Mrs. Ormson said it was “dreadful,” and
gently hinted that the arrangement of the weather, like the arrangement
of many other things, was not so perfect as it might be.
“Now, what do we want with rain in London?” she inquired; “and yet you
know it is always pouring there. How much better it would be if you
could have the rain instead! I dare say, if the truth were known, it is
coming down there in torrents at this very moment.”
But in this supposition Mrs. Ormson chanced to be wrong, as successive
visitors from London arrived in due time to testify.
“How delightful to get into the country out of those suffocating
streets!” remarked Mrs. Black, a woman of the utterly feeble, limp,
languid, and mildly pretty school. “Oh, Arthur, how I _envy_ you this
sweet spot!”
In answer to which speech Arthur declared that, if she knew all, perhaps
she would find less cause for envy than she imagined. Whereupon Mr.
Black, a stout, middle-aged, light-haired, florid, good-looking,
self-satisfied individual, observed:
“Yes, that is what I always say, Dudley—my very words, almost. Nobody
knows where the shoe pinches but the man who has to walk through life in
it. And, after all, though the country is very nice, and Berrie Down a
refreshing change from the city in such melting weather, still we all
know it is not London. No,” repeated Mr. Black, striking the sod with
the heel of his boot, and looking over the landscape as though daring
the fields and the trees to contradict him, “it is not London.”
“And a very good thing too it is not,” added Bessie; in answer to which
addendum Mr. Black stated his belief that she was just the same as ever,
and inquired how, if she disliked town so much, she expected to be able
to spend her life in it.
“As I have done hitherto,” she replied, “under protest.”
“Persuade Gilbert when he comes down to turn farmer,” suggested Mrs.
Black, sentimentally. “I only wish my lot had been cast among these
peaceful scenes.”
The only comment this remark elicited being a muttered sentence from Mr.
Black, in which Bessie thought she heard something about “peaceful
devils,” the conversation might have been considered ended, but for a
voluntary statement from Master Marsden, a young gentleman in
knickerbockers, to the effect that he hated London, but that the country
was jolly. He had been down in Surrey in the spring, he went on to
inform the assembled company in a shrill alto, where he robbed fifty—oh!
a hundred—birds’ nests, and wasn’t it prime!
“Then you were wicked boy,” said Miss Lally, with that charming
promptitude of judgment which is a peculiarity of her sex.
“Why? don’t you rob nests?” asked the new arrival, in answer to which
question Lally shook her comical little head gravely.
“Well, you must be a muff; but then, to be sure, you are a girl,” said
Master Marsden, in a tone which was at once contemptuous and
explanatory.
“She is not a great ill-mannered boy like you, Harry, at any rate,”
observed Bessie, whose fault certainly was not reticence in expressing
her sentiments.
“I don’t want you to talk to me, I don’t,” said the boy, turning upon
her in a manner which spoke of former passages of arms between them.
“Well, it is not every one who gets more than he wants,” she replied; at
which juncture Mr. Black called the young lady to order, declaring the
way she talked to the boy too bad—“just like breaking a thingumderry
upon a whatever’s its name.”
“If you mean a butterfly upon a wheel, I beg to remark that Harry is as
unlike a butterfly as anything I can imagine,” answered Miss Bessie.
“We don’t expect little boys to be butterflies,” said that general
peace-maker, Mrs. Black.
“No, it is great girls who are that,” struck in Mr. Black; and he
laughed at his own wit so long and loudly, that Lally stood looking at
him in astonishment.
“Well, little one, and what are you staring at?” inquired Mr. Black, at
length noticing that Lally had opened not merely her eyes but also her
mouth as wide as possible.
“Oo,” was the immediate reply.
“Oh! indeed; and what do you think of me now you have stared?” he asked.
“I think ’oo like Doe Cole,” replied Lally, nothing abashed at public
attention being directed to her.
“And who may Joe Cole be?” persisted Mr. Black; but no one seemed
disposed to afford him the information he desired.
“Who is this Joe Cole that I resemble?” repeated Mr. Black, looking
round the circle, and especially at Bessie, who had her face buried in
her pocket-handkerchief.
Round the circle, too, looked Lally. “He’s a fool,” she explained,
evidently desirous of enlightening Mr. Black’s ignorance. Alick had
raised a warning finger too late; out came the sentence in the middle of
a dead silence; and then Bessie burst into a perfect scream of laughter;
while Arthur, in angry tones, exclaimed, “Take that child away,
somebody. She’s not fit to be among civilised people.”
“Ought to be whipped, and sent to bed,” volunteered Mrs. Ormson.
“Poor little thing traced some fancied resemblance,” urged Mrs. Black,
as an extenuating circumstance.
“She is completely ruined,” said her father; and as the child passed
him, led off the field by Bessie, he struck her, for the first time in
his life, a smart blow, which caused Lally to break forth into a perfect
paroxysm of grief.
In one moment Bessie had her in her arms, and faced round on the Squire.
“I never had a greater mind to do anything than box your ears, Arthur,”
she remarked. “I shall say you are like Joe Cole next;” and with that
Miss Ormson swept away from the group, followed by some of the younger
Dudleys, who were unanimously of opinion the matter was to be kept from
Heather.
“I am so sorry, Bessie—oh! I am so sorry,” said Agnes Dudley.
“And so am I that all these people are here,” Bessie answered. “They
will spoil Arthur among them, not that, goodness knows, there is much to
spoil about him.”
“It is always the same whenever Mr. Black comes,” continued Agnes. “I
can remember how we used to dread the very sight of him or your mother
entering the gates. I suppose I ought not to say it, Bessie, as she is
your mother; but she always made things worse for us here, at least we
thought she did.”
“Don’t let the fact of her being my mother prevent your expressing your
opinions,” said Bessie, who, seated on the floor in the nursery, was
engaged in striving to comfort Lally. Most sincerely she hoped and
believed Heather was, at that moment, closeted with Mrs. Piggott; but
Heather happened to be in an adjoining room, and, hearing the sound of
Lally’s exceeding bitter grief, came in to see what could be the cause
of it.
“Why, what is the matter with my pet?” she asked.
Agnes looked at Bessie, who promptly answered, “Lally has been very
naughty.”
“No, Lally not been naughty,” broke in the child, stretching out her
arms towards her mother. “Lally only said that fat man was like Doe
Cole—and pa hit her—pa did;” and Lally buried her head in her mother’s
breast, and wept abundantly.
“Arthur did not mean to hurt her,” Agnes explained.
“And Lally was very naughty, for she said Joe Cole was a fool,” added
Bessie; but, unheeding both the girls’ statements, Heather passed from
the room, carrying Lally with her, and appeared no more until supper
time, when Bessie noticed that she had been crying.
“I wish you would keep that child of yours out of the way of strangers
till she has learnt how to behave herself,” Arthur remarked from the
foot of the table, with his customary tact and consideration.
“She shall not annoy any one again,” said Heather, who had intended to
take a private opportunity of apologising to Mr. Black for Lally’s
seeming rudeness.
“Oh! she did not annoy me, ma’am,” returned that gentleman. “Considered
it rather a compliment than otherwise, I assure you. You know the
saying, I dare say, that it takes a wise man to act the fool; and I
rather think any one who tried to get the better of me would find he had
no fool to deal with, Mrs. Dudley.”
“When I was at school, uncle, we had a copy text to the effect that
‘Self-praise was no recommendation,’” remarked Bessie; at which speech
some of the younger Dudleys tittered audibly—a proceeding that caused
Arthur to declare he did not know what the house was coming to.
“It is a very charming house,” interposed Mrs. Black, who really,
Heather felt, was a perfect blessing to society. “I do not know a house
like it anywhere. Every one amongst my friends has heard of Berrie Down
Hollow. I always say it seems to me the very abode of peace,—the true
cottage of contentment.”
“I would very gladly exchange it for your house in town,” answered
Arthur.
“Or for the same acreage in town,” added Mr. Black. “By Jove, if a man
had only one of your fields anywhere about Threadneedle Street or
Cornhill, he might snap his fingers at the world.”
“Yes; because in that case he would be so rich he could afford to live
anywhere,” ventured Heather, to whom such remarks were by no means new;
“but, as the land is not in London, why need we think about
impossibilities? It is a choice with us between a small income in town
and a small income in the country; and you know, Mr. Black, how much
farther a small income goes in the country than in town.”
“Now that is just the point on which you are so much deceived,” replied
Mr. Black. “There is no place on earth where a small income can be made
go so far as in London. Do you want meat? You can have what you want,
cut as you like, sent home on the instant. Now here, I suppose, your
butcher lives five miles off; everything is at least five miles off in
the country. For rich and poor alike, London is the place. What is there
a man can’t get there?”
“Green fields,” answered Mrs. Black.
“Green fields! nonsense,” returned her husband. “Have not you the parks?
What can a human being desire better than St. James’s Park, or Regent’s
Park, or even Victoria? Is not there grass enough in them to content
you? Is Hampstead Heath not big enough for you to walk over? Have not
you the squares? Have not you trees? Even in the City there is not a
street but you may see a tree in it. Do you want amusement? There is not
a night but you may go to a dozen places of amusement, if you like. Do
you want society? You can have as much as you please. Do you want books?
They lie ready to your hand. Everything is next door in London. We have
not to send a dozen miles for a lemon there, ma’am, as Mr.
What-ever-you-may-call-him, that parson fellow, said he had to do. From
grapes at thirty shillings a pound to a farthing’s worth of tea-dust,
you can be accommodated in London. There is no place like it on earth,
Mrs. Dudley, take my word.”
Poor Mrs. Dudley sighed, and answered “that, for her part, she liked the
pure country air.”
“There never was a more mistaken idea than that,” said Mr. Black.
“Country air is not pure. How should it be, with its decomposing
vegetation, with its damp fields, with its ditches filled with grass and
dead leaves, with its arable land covered with natural and artificial
manures, with its imperfect drainage, with its impure water? Read the
Registrar-General’s returns, and you will soon change your opinion about
the healthfulness of the country.”
“That is what I often say,” remarked Mrs. Ormson.
“But still there are some most unpleasant smells in London,” observed
Mrs. Black, feebly.
“In Bermondsey, for instance,” added Bessie.
“All healthy,” persisted Mr. Black. “Now, in the country, people breathe
poison without knowing what they are swallowing. What is called pure air
is very like sparkling water; it seems so because it is full of the
seeds of disease, because it is literally laden with decomposition
and——”
“The eight o’clock express stops at Palinsbridge, uncle,” suggested
Bessie at this point. “You might catch it if you were to sit up all
night, and start away from here, say, at five o’clock in the morning. I
should not stay another day in the country, if I were you.”
“Well put in, Bessie; but I won’t take your advice for all that,” said
Mr. Black, good humouredly. “I have come down here meaning to enjoy
myself, and to make a complete holiday of it.”
“I should have thought you might have compassed both ends, by spending a
day at the British Museum,” remarked Miss Ormson.
“How sharp you have got, Bessie, my dear,” ventured Mrs. Black. “Is it
anything in the air, I wonder?”
“If it be, it is to be hoped you will take it,” observed her husband. At
which speech Mr. Black laughed and Mrs. Ormson laughed, while Heather
looked at her guests, blankly wondering how she was to preserve peace
amongst them.
“Gilbert will soon be down to keep Bessie in order,” remarked Mrs.
Ormson.
“I am glad to hear it—he is a very nice young fellow,” affirmed Mr.
Black.
“I have never seen him,” said Arthur Dudley.
“Then you will be pleased when you do see him,” answered the oracle; “a
very intelligent, modest, well-mannered, pushing young man as any I
know.”
“And handsome too,” added Mrs. Black, glad to find some smooth water
where she could safely launch her little conversational boat again
without fear of breakers. “And handsome too; and oh! so good to his
mother and sisters.”
“I liked him greatly,” said Heather, from her end of the table; and, as
she spoke, almost involuntarily she glanced at Bessie, who, with her
head turned aside, was looking out into the semidarkness of the summer’s
night.
Alick had his eyes fixed on Bessie also. Perhaps he was trying to
reconcile the fact of Gilbert Harcourt with the existence of the
stranger they had met in North Kemms church. Anyhow, he felt curious,
and, though Heather knew nothing about the North Kemms stranger, she had
grown curious also.
In due time Mr. Harcourt arrived, as did also Miss Hope, and then,
indeed, the house was full—so full that Bessie privately likened it to a
Noah’s Ark, and wondered how the patriarch managed to keep his animals
in order.
“It is more than poor Heather can do,” sighed Alick.
“What makes her have them?” asked Bessie.
“Do you think Arthur would be satisfied if she had not?” inquired the
lad. “It is just the same every year, only, unhappily, this year they
have all elected to come together.”
“I am one of the ‘all’ Alick, remember,” she said, laughing.
There had been a time when Alick would indignantly have denied this
assertion; but he remembered North Kemms church, and held his peace.
“You are angry with me,” she went on, noticing his hesitation. “Perhaps,
if you knew everything, you would be sorry.” And, with that, Bessie
turned and walked into the house, leaving Alick, who certainly did not
know everything, in a state of wonderment.
Why should he be sorry for Bessie? For himself he might feel sorry that
two men stood between him and the prize he had vaguely began to covet;
but where was the need of pitying her? If she did not like Gilbert, why
had she accepted him? If she did like him, why had she gone to North
Kemms to meet another lover?
But was he a lover? Alick had read a sufficient number of old romances
obtained from Miss Carfort, who kept a very small circulating library in
South Kemms, to be well aware that the walk across the fields, the
evidently pre-arranged meeting, the note secreted between the leaves of
Bessie’s prayer-book, did not of themselves justify him in the
conclusion that Miss Ormson was carrying on a clandestine love affair.
The man might have some hold on her. He might have known her before her
engagement to Gilbert; he might have some power over her father; he
might be in possession of some secret of the family: so the lad argued;
but still the conviction remained strong within him that Bessie was
playing a double game; though how she contrived to do so puzzled him
beyond measure.
No more walks across the fields; no lonely excursions to Fifield
post-office; no solitary rambles, even within the limits of the farm.
It might not perhaps be generous on his part to do so, but he watched
the young lady as a cat might watch a mouse, and the more he watched the
more mystified he grew.
If she were carrying on a secret correspondence with any one, it was
impossible she could treat Gilbert Harcourt as she did. From morning
till night the pair were together “like a pair of dear turtle-doves,” as
Mrs. Black sentimentally declared. Never a cross word did Bessie bestow
on her betrothed; never a saucy speech did she address to him. Let who
else would, feel the sharpness of her tongue—and it was sharp at times,
as a serpent’s tooth, according to Mrs. Ormson; and a wasp’s sting, to
quote Mr. Black—Mr. Harcourt always escaped scot-free.
Not even to Heather was Bessie so uniformly agreeable as to Mr.
Harcourt; and another strange thing Alick noticed came to pass about the
same time—Bessie ceased in her conversation to be either sententious or
melancholy.
In Mr. Harcourt’s presence she never spoke about desiring to ripple by,
like the Kemm; she never talked concerning the world’s barrenness; about
the dreariness of human life.
The lover had come, and Mariana no longer cried, “I am a-weary.” The
lover had come, and she discoursed before him much after the fashion of
other people. If the later fashion seemed to Alick less attractive than
that formerly adopted by her, who can say the fashion was not a better
one—more fitted for every-day wear?
But Alick was young, and liked sentiment. As our mothers, when girls,
used to luxuriate in Mrs. Hemans’ poetry, so Alick had revelled in
Bessie’s talk, concerning the world and life, and the arid dreariness of
both.
To Mr. Harcourt, however, who hoped for some small share of happiness in
existence, whose career had not been a smooth one, who loved rather to
hear of the bright sunshine than of winter’s clouds, Bessie’s poetical
reveries would have been utterly distasteful; and as the young lady
anxiously laid herself out to please him in other matters, so she
anxiously selected her talk to suit his tastes. No one on earth could
have proved a more submissive mistress than Bessie Ormson; to those who
were learned in the ways of women she might have seemed a trifle too
submissive for everything in the engagement to be right.
As for Heather, she delighted in seeing matters progress so smoothly.
With a half-jealous feeling gnawing at her heart, she watched, during
her rare moments of leisure, Gilbert’s devotion to the lady of his
choice. What a lover he appeared in Heather’s eyes! with what an
ever-increasing pain she saw him follow Bessie about; fearful lest the
very winds of heaven should touch her too roughly. How tender he was;
how thoughtful; how mindful of her lightest wish; how his face
brightened when she entered the room; with what looks of pride and
affection he followed her about!
It was all a wonderful revelation to the woman who had never experienced
such devotion; who was becoming conscious that in the book of her own
existence some of the sweetest pages of most lives had never been
penned; who had never known, till she beheld love showered upon another,
that such love had never been proffered to her. It was so wonderful a
revelation, in fact, that she could not help remarking one day to Miss
Hope:—
“How very fond Mr. Harcourt must be of Bessie!”
“Yes,” answered that lady, who was surveying the pair through her
eye-glass,—“he seems to like her well enough; more than she is worth, in
my opinion. He is fonder of her than she is of him. She is only marrying
him for a home, my dear.”
“For a home!” repeated Heather, in amazement.
“Yes—or to get away from home, if you prefer that way of putting it. The
match will not turn out well. Remember, I said so;” and Miss Hope took
another look at the engaged couple, while Heather’s thoughts flew back
to the words Bessie had spoken as they stood together side by side on
the grassy slope with their backs turned towards the west: “I wish I
were more worthy his devotion;” and of that other more vehement sentence
spoken later on during the course of the same evening, when the girl
said: “If you tell me to do it this minute, I will stay with you all my
life and never marry any one.”
At this juncture Miss Hope dropped her eye-glass once again, and,
turning to Heather, said: “Yes, my dear, it is clear as noonday (noonday
anywhere out of England), that on the young lady’s part it is a marriage
of convenience. How shocked you look! Where have your eyes been not to
find out the real state of matters for yourself? I suspected it at the
first glance; but then, you and I are two very different people; you are
the stupidest, simplest goose I ever had the happiness of meeting.”
And the old lady laid her hand on her niece’s shoulder with a not
unkindly gesture.
Wise old ladies occasionally take fancies to such stupid, simple young
geese as Heather Dudley; and Miss Hope, who knew Arthur better, perhaps,
than anybody in the world, felt sorry for the wife, whose lot, it was
impossible for her to avoid seeing, had not been cast in pleasant
places.
But what, you may ask, did that matter, if Heather herself were
unconscious of the fact?
My reader, do you think the blind man, born blind, can yet remain
ignorant for ever that others are able to look on the blue heavens and
the green earth? Do you think the mute comes in due time to have no
comprehension that his fellows enjoy a gift withheld from him? Do you
imagine the deaf have no understanding of all which has been denied to
them? Do you suppose the childless never listen for the sound of little
feet that God has decreed shall patter across no floor towards their
arms outstretched to greet them? Do you believe the spinster never
considers what her lot might have been, when she looks around and sees
other women happily married, and sitting by no lonely fires, as she is
doomed to do, through the years, the long, solitary, uneventful years?
Do you not understand that in due time the eye must behold, and the
heart long—that the fruit eaten so many thousand years ago by our common
mother, _must_ be tasted sooner or later in its bitterness by all who
are born of woman, and who would attain to the full stature of man?
On the branches of the tree still hangs that which gives knowledge of
good and evil; and till the hand have grasped, and the mind received, no
life can be called perfect, no human being become as a god,
comprehending, not merely the mystery of good and evil, but also all the
joy and all the sorrow which that mystery involves.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN HEATHER’S DRESSING-ROOM.
Taken as a whole, the incongruous ingredients brought together at Berrie
Down Hollow did not form a peculiarly agreeable social dish. In one
respect it might have been called a kind of haggis, but the result
proved that what may be made palatable in cookery, cannot always be
tried domestically.
The oatmeal and the vegetables, the mincemeat and the savoury stuffing,
refused to amalgamate at the daily dinner-table, and, as is usual in
such cases, each guest thought the absence of his neighbours the only
thing needed to ensure perfect comfort and happiness at the board.
It is a way people have—this of thinking all God’s creatures bores
excepting themselves—of imagining, certain pleasant places on earth were
made for their especial delectation, and that every other man, woman, or
child, who sets foot within the enclosure, should be ousted out, and
prosecuted for trespass.
There are common lands on which the majority of mankind may browse if
they will, but they must leave the sunny green slopes, the sweet
clover-fields, the well-fenced paddock, for the gratification and
comfort of the elect; and perhaps the most curious social problem of the
day is to notice how, amongst saints and sinners alike, one common idea
prevails,—the former believing they have a right to heaven, the latter
that they have a right to earth.
Each saint thinks that other saints have no right or title to be pushing
themselves forward into the heavenly kingdom; each sinner thinks his
fellow-sinner should remain at home, and not strive to gain an entrance
where he is most decidedly _de trop_.
Any one who has noticed the disgust of this world’s elect at the sight
of any one whom they do not chance to like, seated opposite to them at
dinner, will have no difficulty in understanding how hard it would be to
get into heaven, if man had any power in the matter of rejection or
selection. Easier a thousand times for a camel to pass through the
needle’s eye, than for him who was judged by his fellow to obtain
ingress there.
It is not profane to argue from analogy, even on sacred subjects, and
when we see how man would deal with man in life, it is not difficult to
guess how man would deal, if he could, with man after death.
“Me—me—place for me! make room for me! you surely care for me! you will
certainly be glad to see me!” is the cry here; and is it too much to
assume that in the secret souls of men it is the cry for hereafter?
I am certain it was so at all events with Heather’s guests: if they
could have kept each other, not merely out of Berrie Down, but out of
heaven, they would have done it.
To say that Miss Hope hated the entire of the Cuthbert connection would
be to use too mild a word. To say that Mr. and Mrs. Black, Mrs. Ormson,
and Miss Ormson, stank in her nostrils, and that the younger Dudleys
stank likewise, though with a lesser offensiveness, would fail to convey
an idea of the state of the lady’s real feelings on the subject of her
brother-in-law’s second marriage; whilst by Mrs. Black, Mrs. Ormson,
Bessie, and the younger Dudleys, Miss Hope’s dislike was returned with
ample interest—honestly paid in kind.
But not here did the dislikes end. With all her heart Mrs. Black wished
her sister, Mrs. Ormson, at the antipodes; while with all Mrs. Ormson’s
heart she wished, not merely Mrs. Black, but also her own husband, Mr.
Ormson, at New Zealand. If the gods had known much about human
nature—which, judging from results, we may conclude they do not—they
would have mated Mr. Black with Mrs. Ormson, Mr. Ormson with Mrs. Black.
“There would have been the wife for me,” Mr. Black stated one day, in
strict confidence, to Heather, “but she was secured, ma’am—snapped up.”
How badly off Heather thought mankind must have been for wives, when two
of the sex considered Mrs. Ormson a desirable helpmeet, she did not deem
it needful to state. One virtue of Arthur Dudley’s wife was, that she
knew when to hold her tongue,—an incalculable advantage in a woman, when
such silence does not arise from indifference or stupidity: Heather was
neither indifferent nor stupid, but she possessed that one great gift of
discretion, without which, as Solomon says (and we may safely consider
him an authority), “beauty is to a woman but as a jewel in a swine’s
snout.”
And Heaven knows there was need both for discretion and patience, in
those days, at Berrie Down!
There are some people with whom everybody can agree, and Heather,
unhappily for herself, chanced to be of that exceptional number.
If Mrs. Ormson did not like her—and she did not, for the simple and
explicit reason, as she informed all whom it might concern, that Mrs.
Dudley “was not one of her sort”—still she was quite unable to resist
taking her into her confidence, and telling her all Mr. Ormson’s
shortcomings, all Bessie’s delinquencies, all her maternal anxieties,
all Mrs. Black’s follies, all the young Marsden’s sins, all the
indignities which Miss Hope had heaped upon the devoted head of the late
Squire Dudley’s second wife.
“Just as she would treat you, if you had not a spirit of your own,”
finished Mrs. Ormson, which speech was the more amusing, as Heather,
unhappily, had not a spirit of her own, but let the whole party trample
over her at their own sweet wills.
Then Mrs. Black would, in her weak, limp way, intrude on Heather’s only
really quiet hour, by knocking at her dressing-room door, and asking if
she might come in for a comfortable chat, “for really everything seems
so peaceful when I am here with you alone, that I could stay upstairs
for ever;” an arrangement, the very mention of which filled Heather’s
heart with a terrible despair.
After a time Bessie would, much to Mrs. Black’s chagrin, appear on the
stage, and offer to dress Mrs. Dudley’s hair,—an offer Heather always
gladly accepted, since Bessie’s chatter seemed infinitely preferable to
Mrs. Black’s inane repinings.
“Lord bless me, aunt,” Miss Ormson was wont to say, with a vehemence of
expression which afforded a strong contrast to the sentimental
discourses concerning her own life and lives in general that had
delighted Alick Dudley, “what do you want that you have not got? If I
had your money,” with a strong emphasis on the personal pronouns, “and
no children” (this fact was very fennel in the cup of Mrs. Black’s
existence), “I would enjoy myself, see if I would not.”
“Ah, Bessie!” Mrs. Black was wont to reply, “money is all very well
while it lasts, and it does not last long, you know, but sympathy is
better.”
“Oh, bother sympathy!” Bessie replied—if she had been a man she would
have said something a great deal stronger—“what good is it, and what do
you want people to sympathize about?”
“When you are married, child, perhaps you will know,” answered Mrs.
Black, vaguely; whereupon Bessie asserted:
“If any husband bullied me, aunt, as uncle bullies you, I would soon let
him know the difference. He would not care to try the experiment with me
twice.”
“It is easy for you to talk,” said Mrs. Black, feebly.
“Not in the least easier than it would be for me to act,” answered
Bessie, strong in her youth and health, giving various pulls to
Heather’s hair during the course of the conversation, which might be
considered as special marks of admiration, put in to attract Mrs.
Dudley’s notice. “I’d like to see my mother submit to the one-half you
bear. Believe me, aunt, Griseldas are not thought much of by modern
husbands. If any Griselda of the present day went home ‘smockless,’ that
is,—if such a thing would be tolerated by our ‘intelligent’ police,—she
might stay smockless all the days of her life afterwards, whilst her
liege lord committed bigamy, or flaunted about with some other woman
clothed in velvets and satins.”
“I do not know what you are talking about, Bessie,” Mrs. Black would
make answer.
“About a certain Griselda, who was, as Lally says, ‘a fool,’ and lived
in verse—how many centuries ago, Heather?”
“How should I tell?” asked Mrs. Dudley.
“Say eight or ten, that is near enough,” went on Bessie. “She was a
woman, and her husband a man. Like many women, she was, as I have said,
a fool, and he, like many men, was a brute. There you have the whole
story, aunt; it reads a trifle like your own.”
“But, my dear Bessie, your uncle is not a brute,” ventured Mrs. Black.
“I am delighted to hear it,” Bessie answered.
“He is a little rough, to be sure,” Mrs. Black went on, “and has no
appreciation, no sympathy, as I said before; but, while he has money, if
he could clothe me in cloth of gold, he would do it.”
“You may be very glad he cannot,” answered Bessie, “for cloth of gold
would be not merely very expensive, but also very unbecoming.”
“How you talk, child!”
“Good gracious, aunt! what do you think my tongue was given to me for,
except to talk?” asked the young lady. And so on, and so on, till
Heather, sometimes amused, but far oftener wearied, would entreat Mrs.
Black to take Bessie away with her, to which little _ruse_ Bessie lent
herself, not unwillingly, throwing back a look at Mrs. Dudley, which
said, as plainly as a look could say, “You would let me stay, if it were
not to get rid of her.”
“How can you think of allowing those people to pester you as they do?”
this was Miss Hope; “you are far too amiable; if I were mistress here,
you would see whether they should torment me. I would make use of them
instead. Each of the aunts should have one of the girls constantly with
her on a visit, and Mr. Black and Mr. Ormson should take the two boys
into their respective offices. The boys do not wish to be with their
uncles, is that what you say? Well, Heather, I really do wonder at your
weakness. What have the boys’ wishes to do in the matter? Is Arthur to
keep them for ever? Are they never to go out into the world, and try to
earn an honest living? Are you to have your house full of another
woman’s children all your life, and be worried to death with them?”
“Please not to talk like that, Miss Hope,” Heather said, piteously; “the
children must go some day, I know, but without them Berrie Down will
never seem the same Berrie Down to me.”
“Do you mean to say you like having them here?” Miss Hope inquired, with
a gradual crescendo.
“You do not know what they have been to me,” Heather answered, the
colour coming up into her face, as it always did when she was either
excited or distressed. “They have been assistants, comforters,
companions, friends! As for Alick”—here the sweet, low voice
faltered—“he has been my very right hand; he has thought for me, worked
for me. I have had but to wish a thing, and if Alick heard, and it were
possible to accomplish, I never wished vainly. He is going: it is right
he should. I have striven for him to go; but I shall feel lost without
him. Already it is to me as though some one in the house were dying.”
Miss Hope solaced herself with a chocolate cream at this point. As some
people take snuff, so Arthur Dudley’s aunt took chocolate. Apparently it
stimulated her thoughts, for she said:
“You are an original, if ever there were one.”
“Do you think I do not mean what I say?” asked Heather, uncertain what
the observation implied. “Do you think I do not love my husband’s
brothers and sisters? Do you imagine any woman ever found such brothers
and sisters before—such bright, willing helpers—such unselfish, loving,
cheerful boys and girls?”
“I think, my dear, any person who could not be happy with you could not
be happy with any one. You certainly are a very sweet creature—don’t
blush, or, yes, rather do, it is becoming to you. I saw a face exactly
like yours in a studio at Rome last year. Did you ever know an artist of
the name of Whiteman? No?—ah! then he could not have fallen in love with
you in years gone by, and he making money out of your beauty now. What
did that murmur mean?—that you are not beautiful? Stuff! Excuse me, but
it is stuff! I suppose you will allow that I know a pretty face when I
see it? and I declare you are beautiful—twenty times more so than that
Bessie Ormson, whom I should not have in the house an hour, if I were in
your shoes.”
“I like Bessie greatly,” Heather remarked.
“Of course you do—you like every one—a flirty, flighty miss, who would
take up with your favourite Alick if there were no other man in the way,
or with Arthur, or——”
“Why, Arthur and she never speak a civil word to each other,” Mrs.
Dudley objected.
“That is the way with all those kind of people—they begin with
quarrelling and end by loving. Of course, you know your own business
best; but I would not have her here. I am sure I have heard of such
things, and Arthur is such a weak simpleton!”
“Miss Hope!”
“Don’t be indignant, my dear. Before ever you knew Arthur I knew him,
and what I say is true. He is even so weak that he has not the remotest
idea what a treasure of a wife fate sent him. Arthur is amiable enough,
and headstrong enough, in some things; but still I would not trust him
too far. Look how Mrs. Ormson winds him round her finger! Well, if
Bessie were to change her tactics, and humour him, she might——”
“It is not right of you,” interrupted Heather. “Indeed, Miss Hope, it is
not right; you should not say such things of my husband and your nephew;
and as for that poor innocent girl——”
“Innocent!” interposed Miss Hope, in her turn. “An innocent that could
buy and sell you, and me too—ay, and make money out of both of us! I
would have none of her. Not but what the girl is an amusing enough
companion, and clever too; and if she had loved this man—this Gilbert
Harcourt—and settled down, she might have become, in her station, a
respectable enough member of society; but she does not care for
him—there’s the misery.”
“I cannot imagine what makes you think Bessie does not care for him,”
persisted Heather.
“I imagine what my eyes tell me to be the truth, and nothing more,”
answered Miss Hope. “She is too anxious to please him, far too careful
of what she says, much too ready to do what he asks her, keeps that
sweet temper of hers too much under—is, in fact, much too good and
saintlike for a happy young woman. Why, my dear, they ought to have
tiffs and sulking fits, quarrels and reconciliations—to part eternally
one hour, and be kissing like a couple of stupids the next. But why do I
talk like this to you, who have gone through it all yourself?”
Heather made no answer, but, turning a little towards the window,
removed her face from Miss Hope’s observation. Had she gone through it;
had she ever held such a power over Arthur as this indicated; had she
herself even ever gone through the heat and the cold, the crater and the
snowdrift; had she ever smiled those smiles, and wept those tears, which
a woman only smiles and weeps when she is dreaming her love-dreams; was
this mystery, which she had been groping about after blindly for years,
going to be revealed to her at last; was what Miss Hope said true; was
the love-play that she saw acted out every hour before her eyes, true
but as regarded one of the performers in it? If it were so, what then
had that play been which decided the fate of her own life—a farce, a
tragedy—which? Was light, after the blessed darkness of years, only
breaking to reveal to her this? Were other human lives but mirrors
reflecting back the sad, pitiful face of her own married experience?
What had come to her—what was coming to her? Knowledge! and, with an
undefined dread of what knowledge might bring with it, Heather, standing
by the open window, looking adown the smooth green slope, and so away to
the far still country lying off in the distance, silently prayed that
she might hear and understand no more—that as knowledge had come so
late, it might never come at all.
It was growing upon her that Arthur did not love her—had never loved
her. Everybody said he did not guess how good a wife had fallen to his
share; and little as, in her modesty, she believed there was to call
“good” about her, still Heather thought that if Arthur really cared for
her he would overrate rather than underrate her better qualities, and
try to be satisfied with her endeavours to please him.
Instead of which, let her do what she would, Arthur found fault; before
strangers, too, who took her part, and thus drove the nail home.
“I cannot think what has changed him so much,” the poor wife thought,
her eyes filled with tears that prevented her seeing any object
distinctly. “He used to be so different;” which was true to this extent,
namely, that the writing on Arthur Dudley’s mind had remained almost
undistinguishable till it came to be passed through the social fire,
which made every character traced on it clear even to eyes that would
rather not have read there any word, likely in the future to affect
injuriously Heather’s happiness or Heather’s peace.
“And another thing,”—it was Miss Hope again speaking, which brought
Heather back from a long vague journey to the realities of life—“I would
not have that Mr. Black staying here; of course, as I said before, you
know your own business best, but I know how it will all end. That man
and Mrs. Ormson, between them, will make Arthur dissatisfied.”
“He has long been so,” remarked Heather.
“Let me finish my sentence, if you please,” proceeded Miss Hope—“will
make Arthur dissatisfied and induce him to join in some senseless
project, which will ruin him. Ruin him,” repeated the lady. “You know
what that means, I suppose; and when that day comes, remember, I am not
going to help him. You can tell him what I say.”
“I would much rather not,” Mrs. Dudley observed.
“But I beg that you will, should opportunity offer. Tell him I have sunk
all my money in an annuity, and that I shall not have a sixpence to
leave or give to anybody.”
“Dear Miss Hope, I trust you do not think that we——”
“I think nothing ill of _you_,” interrupted the old lady. “And, for that
matter, I do not think Arthur mercenary, either. He could have packed
all those children off with their mother years ago, had he not been
generous as well as foolish; but he is just the man first to get rid of
all his own money, and then to think he can get rid of all mine too, so
disabuse his mind of that idea, will you, like a dear sweet soul?”
“As I am confident such an idea never entered his mind, there can be no
necessity for me to disabuse him of it,” said Heather, a little stiffly.
“Well, when it does enter it, do not depend on me for help. What,
cross?” added Miss Hope. “Frowning is not at all becoming to you,
Heather; and I did not think your eyes could have held so dark a look as
I see in them now.”
“Because everything seems to be going wrong,” Mrs. Dudley said
passionately; “because one comes to me with advice, and another with a
caution, till I am sick and tired of both; because no person seems to
like any other person; because, for peace sake, I have even to keep my
children constantly out of sight; because there are dreadful things
said, and dreadful things thought; because I am miserable, and everybody
tries, I do believe, to make me more miserable still.”
“Sit down,” said Miss Hope; and when Heather seemed inclined to rebel,
the old lady pushed her with gentle force into the nearest chair. “Mrs.
Dudley, I am going to talk to you;” she proceeded, but then she paused,
and involuntarily, as it seemed, put another chocolate into her mouth.
“Take one?” she said, handing the box to Heather.
“Not any, thank you;” the brown eyes looked very defiant at the moment,
and Heather’s tone was defiant also.
“You do not like chocolate?”
“I detest it,” was the explicit answer.
“It is an acquired taste, and you have acquired very few tastes as yet,
I fancy,” said Miss Hope; “you have much to learn.”
“I am not bound to learn, I suppose,” was Mrs. Dudley’s reply.
“There is a school, my dear, in which it does not much matter whether
the pupils be apt or not—willing or unwilling, they cannot help but
learn. I should rather like to keep you out of that school; it is a very
absurd thing for an old woman who has no heart and no sympathy to say;
but it is true, for all that. I am very fond of you, Heather Dudley.”
“You are very kind, Miss Hope.”
“You are not in a mood to think so at this moment,” said Arthur’s aunt;
“but wait a little. I have known your husband longer than you have; I am
slightly better acquainted with the world, and the men and women in it,
than you are; and I want to tell you, that if Arthur and Mr. Black are
much together, my nephew will make ducks and drakes of Berrie Down, and
you and he and the children won’t have sixpence a year.”
It was not a pleasant picture to contemplate. Let a woman be as little
sordid as she please, still the interest on sixpence paid quarterly must
seem an insufficient income; and Heather sat silent for a minute
considering Miss Hope’s words. She was a wise wife, though a loyal; and
though her companion had hurt and irritated her, still she would not let
the bark containing Arthur Dudley’s fortune go down, if timely knowledge
could prevent its doing so.
“What is the danger?” she asked at length; “what is the precise danger
you think an intimacy with Mr. Black involves?”
“His drawing Arthur into some of his schemes,” was the reply. “You know,
of course, Mr. Black is a man who has always lived by his wits.”
“No, I do not,” answered Heather. “I should have thought they would have
yielded him an insufficient income.”
“On the contrary, they have yielded him a very good income,” said Miss
Hope; “and for this reason, that he cannot be put down. His impudence
and, I may add, his energy, are inexhaustible. He is like a cork—he will
float where much more valuable people founder. Now, if Arthur go with
him, Arthur will founder.”
“How do you mean, go with him?” asked Heather.
“Join him, embark in any of his numerous speculations. Wait a moment; I
have got a letter concerning our friend in my pocket. Let me turn the
key in your door first, to keep out some of those irrepressible people
whom I hear coming in search of you. I am not going to show you that
letter, but I will read you a few paragraphs out of it. There, I told
you—knock away—who’s there?—what do you want?”
“May I come in?” asked Mrs. Ormson, vainly trying to open the door. “Is
Heather to be seen?”
“No,” almost screamed Miss Hope; “she is lying down with a very bad
headache, and must not be disturbed.”
“May I not speak to her for a moment?”
“Certainly not; I will come downstairs presently and hear all you have
got to say.”
“That you won’t,” thought Mrs. Ormson.
“Now, do go away, please Mrs. Ormson, and tell your daughter not to come
worrying. There, that’s a good riddance; how frightened you look,
child!”
“She will be so angry—so offended.”
“Let her be offended. Is the house not your own? Have you no right to
ten minutes’ quiet in the day? Are you to be at the beck and call of a
parcel of people who would like you to slave for their amusement? I’m
out of patience with it. And, besides, your head _is_ aching. Don’t
contradict me; I know better.”
“I had no intention of contradicting you,” Heather answered. “Now about
the letter, Miss Hope—that is, if you think it quite right for me to
hear it.”
In reply to which last clause, Arthur’s aunt told Heather not to be
absurd, but to listen attentively.
“Respecting Mr. Black, I should recommend great caution. He is a person
who has had almost every known iron in the fire, and burnt other men’s
fingers with all of them. He has made a composition with his creditors
three times a—(composition means, that if you owe a person a hundred
pounds, you pay him ten shillings, and the debt is done with.” This,
Miss Hope.) “Passed through the Insolvent Court thrice, and been
bankrupt twice—(bankruptcies, and insolvencies, and compositions all
pretty nearly come to the same thing.” Miss Hope in explanation again.)
“He has embarked in almost every trade which can be commenced without
either knowledge or capital. He is suspected of having been connected
with several of the shilling swindles—(that is, send twelve stamps, and
by return——”) Enlightened Miss Hope!
“I know about that,” said Heather, proud at last of being acquainted
with some of the world’s wickedness; “for I sent the twelve stamps, and
got back a reply advising me to sell baked potatoes.”
“Very probably Mr. Black wrote it,” suggested Miss Hope; “but to go on.
Several of the shilling swindles, and particularly with one, which was
carried on very successfully in the City, and which realised a very
large sum to the persons engaged in it. I know about that,” confided
Miss Hope, repeating Heather’s words. “The shares were five shillings
each, and I took fifty, lost my twelve pounds ten, and think I bought my
wisdom cheap. Mr. Black is at present engaged in promoting and carrying
through four or five different companies. For one of these, a very large
undertaking, he is looking up directors, and has, I am told, got some
good names—amongst others, that of Mr. Allan Stewart. What makes you
look so astonished, child?”
“Allan Stewart was the name of my godfather,” explained Heather. “He had
property near Layford.”
“This Mr. Stewart is old, rich, and cross,” said Miss Hope.
“And our Mr. Stewart was rich and cross likewise,” Heather answered;
whereupon Miss Hope laid down her letter, and wondered if the two could
by any possibility be one and the same.
“Did you ever happen to hear him speak of a nephew called Douglas
Aymescourt?” inquired Miss Hope.
“I never heard him speak about any one,” was Heather’s reply; “for,
before I could speak myself, he and my father had some little difference
in opinion, which finally swelled into such a quarrel that all visiting
ceased. But who is Mr. Aymescourt? I have heard of him, though not from
Mr. Stewart.”
“What have you heard about him?” Miss Hope asked.
“Nothing, excepting that you knew him.”
“And who told you I knew him?”
“Arthur; at least, he and Mrs. Ormson were talking here one evening, and
there was something said about your knowing him and his wife. Who are
they?”
“Well, Mr. Aymescourt is Mr. Stewart’s nephew, and Mrs. Aymescourt is
Mrs. Aymescourt,” answered Miss Hope, shortly.
“But who was she?” persisted Heather.
“She was a Miss Laxton in the days when I knew anything about her,” said
Miss Hope; “a handsome girl, with a detestable temper and a fine
fortune. They say she and her husband live like cat and dog; but all
this has nothing to do with my friend’s letter. Listen to it, please;”
and Miss Hope proceeded: “There can be no doubt but that, were this
company once formed, Mr. Black, and probably many others, would make a
good thing of it; but the difficulty in carrying it through appears to
be want of capital for advertising and various other expenses. Mr.
Stewart, as you are aware, is not a person likely to give away his name
uselessly. I have no doubt he is to be liberally paid for allowing it to
appear on the Direction.”
“Paid for his name? What is the translation of that?” inquired Heather.
“The translation of that is, Mr. Stewart will be either paid in shares
or money for allowing his name to appear on the Direction,” said Miss
Hope, who, for a woman that had bought her experience for twelve pounds
ten, seemed wonderfully at home in the intricacies of City matters; “and
if the gentleman in whom you are interested,” proceeded Arthur’s aunt,
once again reading from the letter, “be, as you seem to imply, not
merely a person inexperienced in business, but also speculative, there
can be no doubt Mr. Black’s purpose is to obtain money from him in order
to float his company.”
Here Miss Hope folded up her manuscript, and looked at Heather.
“But we have no money,” said the latter, answering Miss Hope’s look.
“No, but you have Berrie Down.”
“And you think Arthur would be so mad——?” began Heather.
“I am sure he will be so mad, if some one do not put a stop to these
private walks and talks—these wanderings over the fields—these
confidential whisperings.”
“Shall you read him that letter, Miss Hope?” ventured the poor wife,
timidly.
“Do you think I am mad, too, Heather Dudley?” asked Miss Hope; “do you
think I want every word in it to be repeated to Mr. Black? No; you must
meet influence with influence; you must checkmate stratagem by
stratagem. For Arthur’s sake and for the sake of your children, you must
avert this great evil which is coming upon you. This man must go, and
Mrs. Ormson also, and Arthur must not follow them to London. Berrie Down
is not gone yet; but Berrie Down will go, if you do not exert yourself
to save it.”
For a moment Heather bent her head on her hands before she replied;
then, “Berrie Down is not mine, to keep or to lose?” she said.
“No; but you can prevent Arthur losing it.”
“How?” Heather lifted her eyes, and looked straight into Miss Hope’s
face as she asked this question.
“How?” repeated her companion; “why, you must talk to Arthur, find out
what he is thinking of joining; and, if it be as we imagine, prevent his
doing anything so utterly suicidal.”
“And you think I could prevent him?”
“If you have any influence at all over him, and I suppose no other human
being has so much, and like to exert it, I should think you might.”
“Miss Hope, I have no influence.”
Many a time afterwards, Heather marvelled how she came to utter that
sentence,—utter it as calmly as though no bitterness lurked in the
words. She marvelled how everything grew clear to her in a moment, as it
seemed; how, for the time, she appeared to be another person looking
calmly and dispassionately at her own position, and forming a conclusion
concerning that position. The years came and stood before her then—the
years during which she had loved and laboured in vain, in which she had
spent her strength for nought, in which she had been happy and
unsuspecting, in which she had never been other than vaguely conscious
of a want in which, though her life had always lacked the principal
ingredient all lives require before they can be pronounced happy, she
had yet believed herself so—believed that hers was a lot to be desired.
The years came and stood before her, and each had the same story to
tell,—that during its course she had grown no more necessary to her
husband, no nearer to his confidence, no dearer to his heart, no more
appreciated by him.
At last, the question which had long been tormenting her was put in a
tangible form, the enigma that had puzzled her was solved in a single
sentence spoken by her own lips,—
“I have no influence.”
Miss Hope did not immediately answer. She sat looking in the sad, lovely
face before her, till at last she arrived at a perfect conviction of the
truth conveyed in Heather’s words. In all her life before she had never
met a woman who possessed no power either to lead or drive, to coax, to
flatter, to delude or to bully a husband; and, although she saw Arthur
did not appreciate Heather, she had not dreamed of his wife having not
the slightest influence over him.
“So that is the way of it,” she said, after a long pause.
“That is the way of it,” Heather answered, rising as she spoke.
Next moment she dropped back into her chair. “It is nothing. I am not
going to faint,” she said, detaining Miss Hope, who was darting off for
water. “Only this talk has tried me. Don’t you understand?”
Miss Hope was not much given to such demonstrations, but she knelt down
on the floor beside Heather, and twined her arms round her nephew’s
wife.
“Lay your head on my shoulder, dear,” she whispered; and Heather drooped
it wearily as she was desired.
She did not cry. She did not make any lamentation; but she sat with her
head drooped, thinking out her trouble, vaguely wondering through it
all, whether—when Mrs. Ormson said, as she was often kind enough to do,
“Arthur ought to have married a rich wife,” and when Miss Hope, kneeling
on the ground, murmured “You are too good for Arthur; he ought to have
married a virago,”—they had mutually in their minds’ eyes Mrs.
Aymescourt, _née_ Laxton.
CHAPTER IX.
A LITTLE BIOGRAPHY.
It is a curious question to consider how very frequently the same matter
is being discussed at the same time by different people; to notice how a
similar idea is germinated in utterly dissimilar minds, and becomes for
a period the subject of animated discussion between various pairs and
groups of people. There is no reason, so far as we can tell, why two men
should talk on any given topic at any given time; but, supposing that
two men do so converse, we may be morally certain that two other people,
and many other twos besides, either have got, or immediately will get,
hold of the theme also, and commence tearing it to rags straight away.
Various questions go the round of families, little communities, large
masses, the bulk of the population, the inhabitants of countries, all
about the same time. Different subjects seem to come in the air like
influenza, cholera, the cattle plague, without rhyme or reason; they
affect the whole of society to a greater or less extent; and when they
are exhausted, another idea, like another epidemic, takes the place of
its predecessor.
There is no accounting for these things, no accounting for the fact that
often, when you are thinking or talking of a friend long absent, he
walks into your chambers, or stops you in the street; no accounting for
the very disagreeable fact, that if you find a creditor straying into
your mind, if you begin wondering why he has given you peace for so
long, the next post is almost certain to bring a little reminder from
him; no accounting for the ill-fortune which if, Jones, shall we say,
take to writing a memoir of Fair Rosamond, sets all the Browns, Smiths,
and Robinsons writing books about that frail beauty also.
Once upon a time, two people, unknown to each other, resident as far
apart as Northumberland and Cornwall, shall we say, composed two
melodies, and, behold, when a common friend heard the twain, they were
identical. It is the same with works of imagination: a dozen people,
writing novels in one year, are almost certain to handle identical
subjects with a difference.
People cannot be original either, even in their travels. Imagine that
Jones, exhausted with his literary propping-up of Fair Rosamond’s
reputation, says secretly to his own soul, “I will eschew my kind, and
take holiday where the heart of man never dreamed of taking holiday
before, in the smallest county in England.” He thinks he has conceived a
new thing, yet Smith is on the station when he gets to King’s Cross,
with travelling-bag labelled “Oakham,” also. It is a marvel the pair do
not kill each other; but, instead of that, they exchange cigars, and the
newspapers, and stop at the same hotel.
It is a law of nature, we may conclude, this rotatory cropping-up of
ideas, this constant evidence that nothing we do, or say, or think, is
in itself perfectly new or original; and, however unpleasant many
natural laws may be, still we cannot get rid of them, nor escape from
their control.
And, indeed—though we always are—why should we even be astonished at
these coincidences? When we see one primrose on a bank, we may feel
pretty certain there are other primroses not far off. They come in their
season like the thoughts of men; they dot the hedgerows, and spring
amongst the woods; they show their faces boldly by the roadside, and
they hide them shyly amid the grass; they are sold in the market-place,
and the children gather them for posies; they bloom; they are sought
after; they are taken to grace lordly rooms; they remain unseen; they
wither; they pass away; they are forgotten; like the thoughts of the
best men, they but serve their purpose and depart, to make way for fresh
flowers, and for fresh thinkers; for there is nothing new under the sun.
All of which may help to explain the fact, that although Mr. Black’s
latest financial undertaking resembled the root of a primrose as little
as any two things on the face of the earth could do by possibility,
still his scheme bore many flowers of speech in Berrie Down Hollow.
On the day when Miss Hope broke ground in Heather’s dressing-room, many
other people broke up the same ground, though with different intentions,
and in different language.
Gilbert told Bessie how Mr. Black had offered him the business of a
“large company” (Mr. Harcourt was a young solicitor); at least, said he
would try to get it for him, whereupon Bessie remarked she hoped it
would turn out a good company, for she thought, during the course of his
life, her uncle had often got into very questionable society.
Likewise, lying on the drawing-room sofa, Mrs. Ormson discoursed to her
sister about business, and supposed she would soon be riding in her
carriage now, and grow too proud to find her way to Guildford Street at
all!
Speaking of his new prospects to Alick, Mr. Ormson, an utterly
inoffensive individual, remarked, he hoped the lad “would not let
himself be led away by Mr. Black, or made dissatisfied with his small
salary, for, whatever some people might imagine, fortunes were not to be
picked up out of the gutter; at least, not with clean hands,” added Mr.
Ormson, after a pause;—while riding side by side with Lord Kemms along
Berrie Down Lane, Mr. Compton Raidsford, beholding Arthur Dudley and Mr.
Black walking together up and down one of the broad green meadows,
shaded by a pleasant hedgerow, remarked to his companion:—
“I hope Dudley won’t suffer that fellow to drag him into any of his
rotten companies. If he do, Berrie Down Hollow will soon be in the
market.”
“In which case I shall buy it,” said his lordship.
“I do not think you will, excepting at something considerably beyond its
value, for I have set my heart upon it too,” observed Mr. Raidsford;
whereupon the pair laughed, and Lord Kemms, reverting to Mr. Black,
informed his companion “he had been asking him to allow his name to
appear on the Direction.”
“Which Direction?” inquired Mr. Raidsford. “He is floating, or rather
trying to float, several companies. For which of them does he solicit
the honour of Lord Kemms’ name?”
“For the ‘Protector Bread and Flour Company,’” answered his lordship.
“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Raidsford. Then, after a moment’s silence, he asked,
“And what terms does he offer? I suppose there is no secret about the
matter?”
“None that I am aware of,” was the reply; “at least, he made no mention
of secrecy to me. He offered two hundred paid-up shares, and he showed
me names he had got, that, I confess, made me hesitate about refusing.
In fact, I meant to ask your advice. You know, every one goes in for
these kind of things now-a-days, and some people must make money out of
them.”
“Yes, but not people who are associated with Mr. Black,” replied Compton
Raidsford.
“And yet he has got the name of one man who is considered unusually wary
in his investments, Mr. Allan Stewart.”
“Allan Stewart,” repeated Mr. Raidsford; “now you do surprise me.” And
he rode on for a while, turning the matter over in his mind.
“And he expects to get Douglas Croft.”
“The deuce he does!”
“So you see it is all in the family, at least in one branch of it,”
continued his lordship.
“Ay, and if I were Lord Kemms, it might stay in one branch of it for
me,” was the quick reply.
“But still money is made out of these kind of things,” said Lord Kemms,
harking back to the point from which he had started.
“And lost,” added Mr. Raidsford, quietly.
“But I could not lose money.”
“No, but you might be the cause of making others lose it,” Mr. Raidsford
observed.
“I did not think of that,” said Lord Kemms.
“Every person should think of that before lending, giving, or selling
his name,” answered Mr. Raidsford, a little bitterly. “Do you not know,”
went on this man, who had made every sixpence of his money for himself
honestly, “do you not know that you, and such as you, are used by
adventurers like Mr. Black for decoy ducks? Could they afford to pay you
the sums they do for the sake of mere ornament? No, they use you. They
do not use your money, which you will not give them; nor your business
capabilities, which you do not possess; nor your influence, which you
would not be troubled employing in their behalf; but they use your
names. When a halfcolumn advertisement appears in the _Times_, with my
Lord This, and Sir Something That, General So and So, and a few
esquires, living at Parks, Courts, and the rest of it, on the Direction,
the British public comes up for shares like sheep to the slaughter. It
does not matter to you when the bubble bursts, but it matters to widows
and orphans, to country clergymen, to governesses, to all the poor
deluded creatures, in fact, who have invested money in the undertaking.”
“That is supposing the thing fail, Mr. Raidsford,” remarked Lord Kemms.
“I cannot suppose anything likely to succeed, my lord, in which Mr.
Black acts as fugleman,” was the reply.
“Do you know much of Mr. Black?”
“Yes, I have known _about_ him all my life—in fact, at one time, I did
business with him—for he was town-traveller for a house which supplied
us with tools. He was always a clever, pushing fellow, possessed of a
tongue that would have persuaded a man almost to buy old castings for
steel (here Lord Kemms smiled as though he understood the meaning of the
illustration), and I think he might have done well, if he could have
been but content; however, he could not. His employers found out he was
doing a little business for himself, and making a connexion while
receiving a salary from them; so they turned him adrift, and then he
started on his own account. If he had been honest, he might still have
succeeded; but he fell into a bad habit of supplying extraordinarily bad
goods, while selling at ordinary prices. He had a small warehouse in
Clerkenwell in those days, and certainly never was above his business, I
will say that for him—am I wearying you, my lord?”
“No, the biography is interesting.”
“After a time, things began to go badly with him—” proceeded Mr.
Raidsford; but here he suddenly paused—“They are crossing the field so
as to meet us,” he said; “suppose I finish my story afterwards.”
“No, they are not coming to meet us,” said Lord Kemms, “they only turned
so as to make sure of who we were—excuse me for a moment, but I want to
speak to Mr. Dudley;” and his lordship shouted out a greeting to the
Squire, who, standing on his dignity, only raised his hat in
acknowledgment, and resumed his conversation with Mr. Black.
But Lord Kemms was not a man to be so easily diverted from his purpose.
Backing his horse to the other side of the road, he put him at the
ditch, and next moment was cantering across the field towards his
neighbour.
“Don’t bring an action for trespass against me, Mr. Dudley,” he said,
laughing; “you are so hard to catch, I could not resist the opportunity
of speaking to you about that filly your brother was training. Do you
really wish to keep her? she is exactly what I want for my niece.”
With his hands buried in his pockets, Squire Dudley stood silent,
looking at the mane of Lord Kemms’ Black Knight.
Truth was, brought face to face with this would-be purchaser, he did not
know exactly what answer to make.
“If you really mean to keep her,” proceeded Lord Kemms, growing a little
hot and uncomfortable, “of course I can only apologise for my mistake;
but the fact is, I heard you were going to sell her, and—and—being
neighbours, and so forth, I thought you might as well sell her to me as
to anybody else.”
Still Arthur did not speak—and there is no knowing when he would have
spoken to the purpose, had not Mr. Black rushed in with—
“I suppose it resolves itself into a money question, my lord—of course I
know nothing about the horse or the offer, but my experience is that
everything _is_ a money question now-a-days.”
“If that be the case—” began Lord Kemms, good humouredly—but Arthur cut
across his sentence:
“It is not so with me,” he said, deliberately turning his back on Mr.
Black, so as to cut him out of the conversation; “it is not so with me.
For the sake of a few pounds, I would not haggle and bargain with any
man—more especially your lordship. I did intend to keep the filly—not
exactly for my own riding, but because I thought, and think still, she
would be worth three times over what you offered me in another twelve
months; but I have changed my mind about the matter, and, if you like to
have her on the terms you offered before, I will send her over to the
Park to-night. She is fit for any light weight to ride; my brother can
break a horse better than anyone I know.”
Arthur spoke rapidly: there was a look in his face, and a decision about
his manner, Lord Kemms had never noticed before; but then, to be sure,
his opportunities of witnessing the Squire’s moods had been few and far
between.
From the Squire it was natural Lord Kemms’ glance should wander to Mr.
Black, and written on that gentleman’s expressive countenance, the peer
read such intense disgust at Arthur’s folly, that he could scarcely
refrain from laughing.
“Thank you, Mr. Dudley,” he said, gathering up his reins and stroking
the Black Knight’s neck as he spoke; “thank you very much. I shall be
very proud of Nellie, and think her a great addition to my stud—she is a
perfect beauty!”
“I would not sell her to you, if I did not believe her to be every bit
as good as she looks,” answered the Squire.
“Of _that_ I am certain,” was the reply; and Lord Kemms held out his
hand to Arthur,—a courtesy which he did not think it necessary to extend
to Mr. Black.
“Then you will send her over this evening?” were his last words, as,
with a farewell nod to Mr. Black, he galloped across the field to rejoin
Mr. Raidsford, whose horse had been regaling itself at the expense of
Mr. Dudley’s thorn-hedge during the time occupied by the preceding
conversation.
“Well, it is no wonder you are a poor man, Dudley,” remarked Mr. Black,
the moment Lord Kemms was out of earshot; “he would have given you fifty
guineas more for that Nellie creature, as easily as fifty pence.”
“I am not a horse-dealer,” returned the Squire, coldly. “And have you
not secured what you wanted? You said a hundred pounds would be
sufficient to commence your advertising; you have got your hundred
pounds, and Nellie is gone.”
“You speak as if you regretted her,” said Mr. Black.
“Whether I do or not is my concern,” was the reply.
“Of course; only, if you do regret her, say the word, and I will go to
Runcorn. He would take it up, pretty sharp, I can tell you; only, as I
explained, those fellows always want the biggest share for themselves.”
“I have sold the mare, and there’s an end of it,” answered Arthur,
resuming his walk up and down the meadow.
“There’s the beginning of it,” was Mr. Raidsford’s somewhat different
comment when Lord Kemms told him the result of the interview. “Your
cheque will be passed through Mr. Black’s bank before the week is over.
Well, I am heartily sorry for Dudley. Even from this simple transaction
it is easy to see what the result will prove. A man like that stands no
chance with Mr. Peter Black.”
“You were telling me Mr. Black’s history,” suggested Lord Kemms. “We
left him in Clerkenwell, on his own account, and not above his
business.”
“Your lordship must kindly excuse my City slang,” answered Mr.
Raidsford.
“On the contrary—excuse me—or rather let me assure you my quotations
were intended as complimentary, not satirical. Your story interests me
immensely. I wish I could relate a man’s biography as well.”
“Although he stuck to his business,” proceeded Mr. Raidsford, without
directly replying to his companion’s gracious remark, “he fell into
difficulties; perhaps, because he did not stick to it solely, but served
himself precisely as he had served his employers. Speculated; tried to
attend to two things at once, and, as is usual in such cases, neither
answered. Then he failed, and passed through the Court.”
“The Bankruptcy Court, do you mean?” inquired Lord Kemms.
“No, the Insolvent,” was the reply. He has been through them both more
than once. I was in with him the first time for about a couple of
hundreds, and I remember the estate paid a shilling in the pound. I have
never lost much by him since, however.
“After this whitewashing, he began the world again as clerk to a
wine-merchant, in Devonshire Square. While he was in that employment, he
met with some man who had a few hundreds, and the pair went into
partnership. For a time everything progressed swimmingly, but at last
they failed and passed through the Bankruptcy Court, creditably enough,
if I recollect rightly.
“Mr. Black next turned up in an alley off Cornhill, as agent for Messrs.
Murphy and Hatchford’s celebrated Epping ales. You might think a man who
was merely an agent could not well contract business debts; but Mr.
Black proved the contrary, and although Messrs. Murphy and Hatchford
paid, as it afterwards turned out, rent, taxes, wages, and advertising
expenses, Mr. Black made a thorough smash, and was whitewashed again.
“After that, things went very badly with him for a long time. Sometimes
he used to do me the favour of calling at my office and borrowing small
sums of money; and, indeed, I did feel sorry for the fellow in those
days, for it seemed as though luck and he had bidden good-bye for ever.
He wanted me to give him a berth, but I did not think he was exactly the
kind of person I required, and told him so as delicately as I could.
“‘If you would only take me for a month,’ he said; ‘I could get a
situation from you.’
“Instead of doing that I gave him a sovereign, and heard no more of his
prospects for a considerable time. Occasionally I saw him in the street,
looking very seedy and ill-fed, but he never came to my place of
business. During that lull I have reason to believe he travelled for a
lead-pencil manufacturer, held a situation in a tract repository, was
collector to some charitable institution, started a suburban newspaper
(all the original matter in which he wrote himself), and had a
commission from some glass-house on all the orders he could bring in.
Suddenly he fell out of my observation altogether, and for full two
years I never even met him in the street. I thought he was dead, in
fact, when one day, happening to call about some business at an office
in Alderman’s Walk, I met Mr. Black on the staircase, well-dressed,
plump as a partridge, fluent and self-sufficient as ever. He was kind
enough to stop and speak to me,” went on Mr. Raidsford, with an amused
smile, “and to tell me he was doing well, remarkably well, indeed. He
added, also, he was glad to hear I had got some good contracts, and
assured me I possessed his best wishes for my welfare. He said he had
fallen into a capital concern, and was managing partner for Hume, Holme,
Draycott, and Co.
“Further, without the slightest solicitation on my part,—indeed, without
the slightest desire for the information,—he confided to me the fact
that he was going to be married to a daughter of Alderman Cuthbert.
“‘Good City connection,’ he added, with a wink, ‘and likelihood of
money. If you are ever passing my way, come in and smoke a cigar, will
you?’ I never inquired which way his might be, but I said I would, and
so we parted. I had a curiosity to know who Hume, Holme, Draycott, and
Co. were, and accordingly I discovered that there was no Hume in the
firm, and no Holme; no Draycott, and no Company, except Mr. Black, who
was, indeed, managing and principal partner, and everything, in the
concern.
“Then I lost sight of him again; but it is a curious fact about London,
at least, about the City, that in it one never is able to lose sight of
any person for ever. A man new to London might feel inclined to doubt
this fact, but it is perfectly true, I assure you. People seem to move
in circles which always bring them back to some given spot. Even the
re-appearance of comets like Mr. Black, that one might imagine were
governed by no certain law, may safely be predicted, and accordingly I
heard of him again. His name came to me in the ordinary way of trade as
acceptor of a bill that was offered to me in payment of an account,
which bill I refused. Where Hume, Holme, and Draycott had vanished to I
never could ascertain; but on that bill he came to me in his own proper
identity.
“Soon afterwards he failed once more. I declare when I talk of Peter
Black it seems to me he must have been fifty men instead of one.
“Before long, I discovered him managing a small house property for a man
in the City, who was in the habit of purchasing on short repairing
leases.
“I will not trouble your lordship with the roguery Mr. Black became
acquainted with in that employment. The school was a very bad one, and
Mr. Black a very apt pupil.
“‘It is not what I like, you know,’ he said to me, ‘but it is a
stepping-stone,’ which opinion proved to be correct, for he stepped from
that into the office of a man who had made a fortune by speculating in
railway shares. There he would have acquired great experience; but his
principal falling into difficulties, Mr. Black was adrift once more.”
“I never heard such a history,” remarked Lord Kemms; “what indomitable
energy the man must have had!”
“True,” was the reply; “and yet I do not know whether the man who works
hard in some one business day after day, week after week, year after
year, have not a greater share of what I should call indomitable energy
than Mr. Black. I am not thinking of myself now,” added Mr. Raidsford,
noticing his companion smile, “because, of course, there was plenty of
variety in my life, and, though I stuck close to one trade, plenty of
variety too; but I was thinking of lots of hard-working men I know who
come into the City every day, and see the same people, and do the same
work, and go the same rounds, and cheerfully, and by dint of very
perseverance, finally conquer fortune; or, at least, earn a competence,”
which last clause came apparently as an after-thought. “In a life like
Mr. Black’s, the excitement of the game is almost recompense enough for
a man. It is not legitimate work, you know; it is commercial pitch and
toss; it is Cockney _rouge et noir_; it is gambling of the worst
kind—gambling when the player has everything to gain and nothing to
risk. It is the old story, ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’ That is Mr.
Black’s system of betting, at all events.”
Lord Kemms laughed. “And yet,” he said, “even if a man be riding a
borrowed horse, we cannot help a certain admiration in seeing him take
dangerous leaps. Of course, the life of a trader, who goes round and
round on a business treadmill, is more useful, and decidedly more
monotonous; but you cannot expect him to command our interest, however
much he may deserve our respect. As for Mr. Black, I own I am charmed
with him. If I am not unreasonable, I should like to hear more.”
“Once again,” resumed Mr. Raidsford, thus entreated, “there is a blank
in my knowledge of his history. He referred two or three people to me
for his character, and for his means of paying house-rent, which I
considered a liberty, but still, unwilling to injure the man, said what
I could in his favour. He never came near me himself, however; and I
subsequently discovered that he used one of the offices, which my
representation enabled him to enter, for one of the many shilling
swindles, with which, I fear, he was afterwards connected. Of course I
got into trouble through my recommendation, and since that time I have
dropped all acquaintance with Mr. Peter Black.”
“I do not quite understand what you mean by shilling swindles,” said
Lord Kemms.
“You must have seen those advertisements to ‘ladies of reduced incomes,’
to ‘persons in search of employment,’ to ‘persons of limited incomes,’
how to ‘secure a fortune,’ ‘for twelve postage-stamps a certain income
may be secured!’ To that—to common trickery—Mr. Black descended; but not
alone, remember, my lord. He was connected with one of the cleverest and
most, plausible swindles that I can remember ever having been attempted
on a small scale, and his partners in it were men in your own rank of
life—noblemen and gentlemen—or, at least, honourables and baronets.
These highly-principled individuals were not above taking the money of
foolish women and inexperienced men; they sold their names, and, when
written to on the subject, said they believed the secretary to be a man
of the highest standing and principle.
“Doubtless they were but the black sheep of your order; but, when there
are black sheep in that order, it behoves you, and such as you, my lord,
to be careful.”
“What was this swindle?” asked the owner of Kemms Park.
“It was one in which all the tickets sold were to draw prizes,” was the
reply; “in which shares were regularly issued, and prospectuses
carefully drawn up and freely forwarded; in which samples of goods were
sent to agents on deposit of two pounds; in which the hopes of fortune
held out were so great, that money poured in from the provinces like
water, and would have continued to pour in but for a smashing article on
the subject, which appeared in a respectable journal. That proved a
death-blow to the scheme, and the reputable little lot had to close
their concern, and adopt some other means of subsistence. What the
others did I am unable to say: one appeared in the Bankruptcy Court, but
that was some time afterwards.
“To Mr. Peter Black, however, ‘Limited Liability,’ in which the concern
I have mentioned was his first venture, appeared in the very nick of
time.
“He had tried his hand at most other trades; why not at the promotion of
large companies?
“The shilling swindles, the wonderful City fraud, were but introductions
to this mightier arena, and the first time, after years, when I met Mr.
Black again, was when I saw him in splendid offices in Cannon Street,
sipping Madeira, and issuing his orders as though poverty and he had
never been even on speaking terms. I am not easily surprised, but I
confess those offices and Mr. Peter Black himself astonished me.
“There was not a thing under heaven in those days that could not be
formed into a company, and accordingly Mr. Black was secretary to a
Limited Liability for supplying England and the world with
hermetically-sealed soups made from the flesh of South American oxen.”
Here Lord Kemms laughed outright.
“There was nothing impossible about the matter,” said Mr. Raidsford,
quietly. “I’ll be bound, if any man liked to go in single-handed for a
project of the kind to-morrow, he could compass it—ay, and make money
out of it too; but what a man may do, a company cannot do, and
accordingly the soup never came from South America, and the bullocks Mr.
Black represented in his reports as slain and in the English market may,
for aught I know, be still roaming over the prairies.”
“And after that company collapsed?” inquired his lordship.
“Why, since that, Mr. Black has been sometimes up and sometimes
down—sometimes living in retirement with his banking account drawn down
to two and three half-pence; and again, giving grand dinners and living
utterly regardless of expense. He is in the latter state at present—has
a house in Stanley Crescent, servants in livery; dinners from Gunter’s;
Mrs. Black “receives” on Tuesdays; Mr. Black asks great people to dinner
any day in the week that suits his purpose. He has three separate
banking accounts—he is promoting four different companies; he has
offices in Cannon Street, Broad Street, and George Street, Westminster.
He has an efficient staff of clerks—he has got, it is said, a couple of
first-rate backers; he has all his past experience to guide him safely
through the quagmires of limited liability; and, in short, if Mr. Black
do not now make his fortune, he never will. My own opinion is, he never
will; but that, of necessity, is merely an opinion.”
“And suppose Squire Dudley embark with him?” asked Lord Kemms.
“Squire Dudley will never come back to land,” was the significant reply;
after which the pair rode on in silence.
At Mr. Raidsford’s gates they parted company.
“I shall see you again this evening, you know,” said my lord, waving his
hand as he struck his horse’s flank and galloped off.
Mr. Raidsford looked after the retreating figure of his companion for a
minute before entering his own gates, then he passed into his domain and
rode slowly up the avenue, thinking as he rode.
“I wonder how he will decide?” was the burden of his mental discourse;
“but I shall learn this evening.”
Now the reason he said so was, that Lord Kemms had promised to come over
and dine with him _tête-à-tête_—the ladies of Mr. Raidsford’s family
being absent.
CHAPTER X.
MR. BLACK GAINS HIS POINT.
Without in the least intending to do so, Lord Kemms had put a trump card
into Mr. Black’s hand—_the_ trump card, in fact, which enabled him to
win his little game; and the way this undesirable result came about was
as follows:
For days, Mr. Black had been dangling the speculative coral and bells
before Squire Dudley’s eyes, amusing and interesting that grown-up child
thereby. For days, the man who knew London off by heart, every turn in
its dirty streets, every trick and move the dwellers in that great
Babylon were up to, had been leading on towards the point he desired to
reach, viz., that of enlisting Arthur in his company, of bribing him
with his delusive shilling to serve the great King Mammon for ever and
for aye!
To do Mr. Black justice, however, he had not the slightest idea of
ruining his kinsman.
That blood is thicker than water, even though the blood be only
consanguineous by reason of many and far-out marriages, was a creed of
the promoter’s—the only one he held, so far as I know, and for this
reason he would not have drawn Arthur into anything doubtful; doubtful,
that is, as he understood the meaning of the word.
Decidedly not; he wanted to help himself on in the world, and, if Arthur
would only aid him with money, Squire Dudley too.
In the distance, Mr. Black prophetically beheld Arthur rich, happy,
prosperous. He saw him, not a tiller of the ground, but a coiner of
gold. If Mr. Black believed implicitly in anything excepting himself, it
was in the vast capabilities of the PROTECTOR BREAD AND FLOUR COMPANY,
LIMITED.
It was his ship; let him but once launch the scheme and the world should
see. It should plough the ocean and bring back cargoes of gold; it
should place Mr. Black beyond the frowns of fortune; it should make a
man of Arthur Dudley; it should place him in that pecuniary harbour
where the world’s storms are unheeded, in which to the gallant vessel,
riding safely at anchor, the waves of the great sea signify as little as
ripples on the stream.
What Mr. Black had always wanted was, according to his own statement,
capital—given to him at any stage of his career (depending somewhat,
however, on the stage he had reached), one hundred, five hundred, one
thousand pounds, and Mr. Black saw his way clear to fortune.
All his life he had been racing after this phantom, which as constantly
eluded his grasp, for what seemed capital to him one day was not capital
the next. Suppose, for instance, this week one hundred pounds bounded
the horizon of his desires, next week he discovered two were needed to
accomplish his object. Truth was, his appetite grew by what it fed on,
and the meal which one day he fancied would prove a feast, he turned
from the following, as unfit to satisfy even a beggar.
To have heard Mr. Black discourse about a residence, for instance,
concerning the accommodation he considered necessary, the worldly
position he regarded as essential to happiness, the servants such an
establishment required, no one would have imagined he had ever been
reduced to lodgings in Hoxton, where he was served by the dirtiest of
slipshod maids, and had his beer—when he could pay for it—from “round
the corner.”
Living in Stanley Crescent, which would once have seemed a flight too
great for even his imagination to achieve, within a stone’s throw of
Hyde Park, with his rooms upholstered in velvet and satin, with curtains
such as the imagination of Mr. Peter Black had never previously
conceived could be manufactured, with carpets such as the feet of Mr.
Black had never before trodden upon, surrounded by mirrors and gilding,
by pictures and statuettes, waited upon by silent human automatons, his
wants almost anticipated, his orders obeyed to the letter, his commands
remembered, his word law, the promoter’s fancy pourtrayed for him yet
greater things to come. Even in the matter of personal gratification it
would seem that there is such a thing necessary as education—the
education of what to desire; and this instruction Mr. Black’s youth had
lacked; consequently, as the sailor’s desires were for “an ocean of
rum,” and then “as much tobacco as he could chew,” and then “more rum,”
so Mr. Black’s ignorant soul craved only for more luxury, a larger
house, and a still better situation; more rooms to be upholstered in a
still more magnificent style; costlier pictures, older china, softer
carpets; a larger number of servants, equipages in which to drive round
the Park; and money, money, money with which to keep up the show, and
maintain still grander appearances.
A change that, from the retirement of Whitecross Street; from the shabby
bed-room with use of sitting-room in Hoxton; from even more wretched
lodgings into which he had been glad to creep at so much a night! In
those weary days he envied Johnson driving the stout wife of his bosom
out in the cart which, on week-days, delivered shoulders of mutton and
sirloins of beef at the house of the said Johnson’s customers; he
grudged the good fortune of every man he saw with a decent coat on his
back. He would gladly have changed places with young Tomkins, who could
afford apple tart and Stilton cheese after his steak in a quiet
eating-house situate in Pope’s Head Alley. When a man, seated opposite
to him in an omnibus, pulled out a handful of silver in order to look
through it for a fourpenny or threepenny piece, Mr. Black felt that
individual had wronged him.
After all, it was natural enough. When the starved ragged little beggar
who has stood with his nose flattened against the pastrycook’s window,
sees Master Tommy come forth, crammed to repletion with tarts and
cheesecakes, his pockets full of sweets, and his hands of suggestive
paper parcels, do you think the dirty, hungry imp likes the over-fed
child, and never grudges him the contents of every one of those tempting
paper bags?
And it is precisely the same with adults. The man, lacking even dry
bread, cannot be supposed to gaze with unenvying idolatry at the man who
has his six or eight courses for dinner; and, therefore, and for all
these reasons, there had been a time when Mr. Black regarded the man who
could pay his way with a pardonable feeling of antagonism.
But all that was changed. On Mr. Johnson and his kind, on the poor
creatures who were content to drone away at the business task, Mr. Black
looked with ill-concealed contempt.
That any man should walk while others drove in their carriages—walk
without lifting a hand to better themselves—filled the promoter’s mind
with profound astonishment. Of necessity he knew there must be rich and
poor; labourers and employers; workers and idlers; but that any person
should be poor, and not cry aloud; that any human being should labour,
and be satisfied; that any person should work, and accept such work as
his portion thankfully, was a step beyond Mr. Black’s philosophy.
Not to comprehend such a state of mental obtuseness had his talents been
given to him, but rather that he might raise himself to a prominent
position, where it would be possible for him to stand in a public place,
high above his fellows, and thank God that he was not as other men; but,
rather, Peter Black, Esquire, worth hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of pounds.
And very earnestly Mr. Peter Black believed he was at last on the high
road to fortune. If he broke down by the way, he knew it would be for
want of capital—not for lack of geographical information.
Unfortunately when, in a moment of sudden inspiration, he struck out the
idea of “The Protector Bread and Flour Company!” he was up to the neck
in three other companies, which were but as dross beside this mine of
virgin gold.
“And it is a good thing, Dudley. By Jove, if old Stewart knew how hard I
was pressed, he’d take it up himself, and cut me out of it, and make his
fortune over again, the miserly old scamp! I’m in two minds to take the
whole scheme to Runcorn, the advertising agent, and sell it to him—but
there! I’ll pull it through somehow. I’ll find somebody to advance the
needful, though this is the very worst time of the year for raising the
wind.” Which was a perfectly true statement, it may here be remarked;
though Arthur Dudley, not being a commercial man, could scarcely be
expected to know how true.
“It is the best thing I ever had to do with,” went on Mr. Black, “and I
have done some tidy little strokes of business in my time. Why, it is
only nine months since I netted five hundred in one day, without
spending a farthing, either, beyond fifty pounds deposit. There was a
business for sale in the City, old established; man’s health was bad;
wife had grown genteel, perhaps; daughters were settled; sons in
professions; good business, but latterly neglected; heard of it by
chance—bought it, and paid a deposit. Mentioned it casually to Venney,
whose fingers were itching for something of the sort. Venney went
straight away to Paul, the member of Parliament who does in those kind
of affairs, you know. Paul looked over his names, and, seeing he could
form a company, sent Venney back to me with the cheque for five hundred
pounds for my bargain. What do you think of that? and yet, if I had only
held on for another fortnight, I might have doubled the five hundred. It
is better than farming, that, is not it, Squire? You might plough up a
good many acres of land before you would come on a find like that.”
“Ah! London is the place,” sighed Arthur Dudley.
“To be sure it is, for man, woman, and child,” replied Mr. Black. “It is
the place to make money, and to spend it when you have made it. What
good has a man of his life who resides continually in the country? I
often wonder, Dudley, you don’t come up to town for a few months in
every year.”
“Where should I get the money, Mr. Black, to do so?” questioned the
younger man. “As you justly remarked, a few minutes since, my land is
not rich enough to grow five hundred pound Bank of England notes.”
“Good that—devilish good,” chuckled Mr. Black.
“It is easy for a man like you to talk,” went on Arthur, pleased with
this flattering acknowledgment of his wit, “for a man with lots of
money——”
“My dear fellow, that is the very thing I stand in need of at this
moment,” interrupted Mr. Black.
“Well, with money’s worth, then,” continued Arthur. But Mr. Black cut
across his sentence again.
“Not with more money’s worth than you have, Squire. If I had your
property, it would not be long before I began to dig nuggets out of it.
If I had your stock, I would make five hundred pounds a piece out of
every head of cattle on your land. If I were a man of substance like
you, I would never spend my life dragging after a lot of stupid yokels.
I might keep my farm, but it would be for pleasure, for turning myself
out to grass on, so to speak, after the fatigue of a London season. Be
hanged if I would go on year after year seeing money made without having
a try at the cards myself.”
“It is all very well for men who have been brought up to it,” remarked
Arthur.
“Brought up to it! What do you mean?” asked Mr. Black. “Do you think I
was brought up to all the trades I have made money by? What do you think
I started in the world with? A plain commercial education, a mother and
a lame sister to keep, and twenty pounds. I never served my time; I
never had the chance of learning a business like Raidsford; I was always
dragged back by having those two poor useless women to keep; and yet,
still, see what I have done!”
“But you began early?” suggested Arthur.
“If I had not begun early, I should have begun late,” was the reply.
“And then I am tied to this place.”
“No, you are not,” was the reply. “But you are like all men possessed of
a small income—afraid of losing it. A man who begins with nothing has a
far better chance of success than his neighbour, who starts on five or
six hundred.”
“Besides, I ought to have begun long ago,” persisted Arthur.
“Better late than never,” quoted Mr. Black. “I tell you what it is now,
Dudley, as long as we have got on this subject, let us talk about it.
You want to make money, don’t you?”
“The question is scarcely necessary,” answered Squire Dudley, with a
faint smile. “Do you chance to know any man who does not?”
“Yes,” was the ready reply. “I know several who think themselves so
deucedly safe, and comfortable, and secure, and all the rest of it, that
they would not take a share in Rothschild’s, if it were offered to them
for an old song. There is your friend Raidsford, for instance.”
“Oh! he’s no friend of mine,” corrected Arthur.
“Well, he is a case in point, at any rate. Lord Kemms does not consider
our new company beneath his consideration, at any rate, and what is
worth his attention ought not to be below that of a twopenny-halfpenny
contractor, though that contractor may think there is nobody like
Compton Raidsford, Esquire, in the world.”
“You do not mean to say there is a likelihood of Lord Kemms going into
your company?” said Arthur, eagerly.
“A likelihood? there is a certainty,” was the repay. “I have set my
heart on getting him, and I will get him, no matter what it costs me to
do so. But if I were to go to Compton Raidsford——”
“You will not go, though,” interrupted Squire Dudley.
“Trust me,” answered the promoter. “I was only instancing him as one of
the men who do not want to make money. He is so puffed up with his park,
and his deer, and his carriages, and his riding horses, and the infernal
fuss that is made about him, it would be, ‘No, thank you, Mr. Black. I
have one business, and that is enough for me. I find it as much as I can
manage. _Good_ morning!’ But you are differently situated, Dudley. You,
like Lord Kemms, could do with a larger balance at your banker’s.”
“You amaze me about Lord Kemms,” said Arthur, thoughtfully.
“And I believe I should amaze you still more if I showed you the list of
names I expect to get on the Direction. Allan Stewart will bring them up
like a huntsman the hounds; but he cost me dear. Would you believe I had
to give him five hundred pounds in hard cash—not bills, mind you—before
he would even listen to me?”
“Dear me! I should not have supposed any man’s name was worth so much,”
observed the Squire.
“Worth it! he could be worth five thousand, if one only had had the
money to give him, but just now I found even the five hundred a pull.
You know he stands between the nobility and the commercial men. He is
good to bring both, and he promises me to get his nephew.”
“You don’t mean Aymescourt?”
“Yes, Aymescourt, only his name is Croft now, you know; he came into
such a switching property when old Croft died. Of course I am telling
you all this in strict confidence, Dudley. Not a soul knows about these
things except yourself.”
“Of course,” Arthur agreed. Believing implicitly in Mr. Black’s
statement, he felt flattered accordingly.
“By Jove,” proceeded Mr. Black, invoking his favourite god, “won’t some
of the City people stare when they see our prospectus in the _Times_!
Won’t some of them wish they had thought of such a scheme! Rather,”
finished Mr. Black with a chuckle, “ra—a—ther.” And Mr. Black took off
his hat and wiped his forehead, and the pair had another turn on the
grass under the trees in silence.
“I only wish,” began Mr. Black again, “I could begin advertising, for
the great thing in all such matters is to make hay while the sun
shines—a leaf out of your book, Dudley; but, till some of my other small
fish are fried, I don’t see my way, unless I go to Runcorn, and then he
gets the flesh, and leaves the bones to me. It is that advertising! it
is the devil, it is cash on the nail—money down, or else no
advertisement appears; and, good gracious! think of how a few
quarter-column advertisements in the _Times_ run up; why, it is like
printing in gold.”
Still Arthur made no comment.
“Offices, furniture, printing, even clerks, can be got on credit,”
continued Mr. Black, after allowing Arthur full time for the observation
he did not make; “and credit gives one time to turn round and get the
shares in, but the expense of advertising has nipped many a promising
scheme in the bud. Does not somebody say something about there being a
tide in the affairs of men? I am not a very good hand at remembering any
quotation except prices,” added Mr. Black, with the laugh which had
excited Lally’s uncomplimentary comparison; “but I dare say you do, and
I know there is a tide in my affairs now, which would float my ship, if
I could only take advantage of it. However, I’ll go back to town on
Monday and see what can be done.”
“How much money do you want?” asked Arthur; perhaps he was thinking,
too, that a tide had come in his affairs, across which he might be able
to steer his course to fortune.
“How much? Oh! I am sure I could not say,” was the reply. “In some cases
ready money goes so far, can be so well worked, that I might, perhaps,
be able to do with very little. If I went to a capitalist, of course I
should ask him for a good round sum; but if I can find a friend, I shall
only just borrow enough to keep me going from hand to mouth. In any
event I must make it worth _somebody’s_ while to help me; but I don’t
mind that, if I am only left what I consider a fair share of the
profit.”
“What do you call a fair share?”
“Well, that depends. I should not mind giving any one a third who helped
me through the matter. Nor even a half, if the help were really
serviceable; but I should object to taking a tenth, or anything of that
kind, after all the worry I have had in the affair.”
“Do you know any one who you think would go into it with you on what you
consider equal terms?” was the Squire’s next question.
“He’s nibbling,” thought Mr. Black; so he let the line float loose for a
moment, while he answered, “Yes, I think I do; that man I spoke of just
now, Vanney, would, if he is in London, but I am afraid he is off to
Scotland, and won’t be back for some weeks; that is the way just at this
time of the year, everybody is off, or starting off. Certainly I might
go to Scotland after him.”
“I wish I had ready money,” said Arthur; “I should not mind risking a
little on it myself.”
“Oh yes, you would,” answered Mr. Black; “if you had been inclined for
any mischief of that kind, you would not have kept your hands out of it
so long.”
“How the deuce is a man to mix up in anything of the kind, if
opportunity never offer?” Arthur demanded.
“But opportunity does offer; opportunities are always lying under
people’s feet, only some are too proud, or too cautious, or too lazy, to
stoop and pick them up. No, no, Squire, you had better stick to your
farming; you must be making a lot of money here, and your wife would not
like you to go into business.”
“My wife would wish me to do whatever was best for all our interests,”
said Arthur, sharply.
“Perhaps so; but, if she would, she differs wonderfully from mine,” was
the reply, “Lord knows I have often been thankful I never cared twopence
about her, or she would have kept me a go-by-the-ground all my life.
When a man is fond of his wife, naturally he does not like to cross her.
I can quite understand what has kept you back, Dudley; you ought, as
Mrs. Ormson says, to have married a rich wife, and then you could have
afforded to humour her.”
“No man ever had a better wife than I have, Mr. Black.”
“Is not that what I have just said? and naturally she influences you. I
think it is a pity, you know, because women do not know what is best
either for their husbands or themselves; but it is very greatly to your
credit. I dare say, if I had married differently, I should feel like
you. After looking at Mrs. Dudley, I think what a pity it is to see her
wasting her life at Berrie Down. By Jove! if I had a wife like her, it
would be worth a thousand a year to me. Don’t she set off the head of a
man’s table! Wouldn’t she be the one to entertain the great people I
want to make useful! And your sisters, Dudley. It’s a sin to see them
buried here—girls who might marry well to-morrow. Mrs. Ormson and I
often talk it over; but we have agreed it is of no use fretting about
the business, which is just one of those matters we were not sent into
the world to right.”
In which last portion of his sentence, had Mr. Black omitted the “not,”
he would much more truthfully have stated his own and Mrs. Ormson’s
opinions. At all events, if the pair had not sufficient reliance on
Providence to believe they were sent to right the matter, they thought
they ought to have been, and were not slow about asserting their
conviction, which comes to nearly the same thing.
“Supposing your scheme turned out well, how soon should you expect to
make money by it?” inquired Arthur, apparently a little irrelevantly.
“How soon? Oh! within a twelvemonth. I shall have my shares, of
course—paid-up shares, mind you—and I shall have my profit on the sale
of the mills and plant. I don’t take all that trouble and risk for
nothing; and then there will be various pickings. Altogether, to begin
with, I shall not clear less than ten thousand pounds, and then my
shares ought to be worth twenty thousand pounds more, at least.”
“And how much of that would you give to a person who saw you through
your present difficulty?” asked Arthur, desperately.
“If _you_ saw me through, one-half,” was the quick reply. “Look here,
Dudley,” went on the promoter, “if you are thinking of joining me, make
up your mind at once, and let us talk the matter over. This is Saturday.
I must do something in it on Monday. Don’t beat about the bush, man. If
you want information, I will give it to you; if you wish to make a push
for fortune, don’t be backward about saying so; if you fancy this
venture might suit you, inquire into it fully. If you don’t like it
after inquiring, why, there is no harm done. I could not ask you to go
into it as I might a commercial man—being a relation and so forth
naturally ties my tongue—only I will say this much, it is the best thing
I have ever had to do with, and there is no reason I can see why you
should not make your fortune out of it too. Keep the money in the
family, eh, Squire?” and Mr. Black looked sharply at Arthur from under
his eyelids—looked round at him without moving his head to see how his
companion was taking it.
Squire Dudley’s flood was at its tide then, he fancied; and yet he felt
nervous about launching his boat upon it. He was longing to make money,
hungering and thirsting for a chance of bettering his position, and yet
he stood irresolute waiting for some chance to decide his purpose, for
some hand beside his own to unloose his barque, and set it floating over
the weaves of success, to the shores of fortune.
“How much money would be sufficient in the first instance?” he inquired
for the second time during that interview.
“Oh! a hundred would start the advertising,” said Mr. Black; “that
hundred would bring in some of the shares; but between you and me,
Dudley, what with clerks and one devilment and another in the other
companies, even a hundred pounds is a sum I could not at the instant
command. I had to pay, as I tell you, five hundred cash to Stewart, and
a similar sum to Crossenham. Well, you know, a few hundreds here and a
few hundreds there make a hole in a man’s banking account, if he be not
as rich as Miss Coutts. Then I have given a lot of bills falling due at
different dates for Crossenham’s lease; and, although I think my other
ventures may give me money enough to meet those before they are
presented, still I must be prepared for the worst. Altogether—but who
are those riding up the lane? Raidsford and Lord Kemms, as I live!
Raidsford, no doubt, trying to put my lord against the company. Ah! it
is no use, my boy; you won’t checkmate me so easily as all that comes
to. Now, what the deuce is his lordship coming to say?” and then ensued
the interview at which the reader has already been present.
“I am in with you now, Black,” said Arthur Dudley, when, their talk
finished, they retraced their steps towards the house.
“Only so far as Nellie goes,” answered Mr. Black, reassuringly; “even
that shall be but a loan, if you like;” but Mr. Black knew better than
this. He knew Arthur had, as he mentally phrased it, “tasted blood,” and
that, having done so, he would never recede from the undertaking to
which he had put his hand.
CHAPTER XI.
NELLIE.
It was after dinner in Mr. Compton Raidsford’s house. Host and guest had
finished their wine, and sat with coffee before them, silent.
Lord Kemms was thinking about Mr. Black and that gentleman’s proposals;
Mr. Compton Raidsford was thinking, not merely about Mr. Black, but also
about Lord Kemms, and wondering how that nobleman would decide.
If there were one thing the owner of Moorlands conceived ought to be put
down with a strong hand and a stretched-out arm, that thing was bubble
companies.
Even legitimate companies he disliked and distrusted.
A self-made man, he naturally regarded with suspicion the growth of any
commercial system likely to render success dependent more upon capital
than individual ability and exertion.
A business man, who had for his order much the same _esprit de corps_ as
an artist or a poet may be supposed to possess, he noted jealously the
increasing tendency of the age to keep small capitalists or
non-capitalists in the position of clerks and managers, to concentrate
all manufactures in a few hands, and sweep modest master tradesmen off
the face of the earth; to do away, in fact, with a business middle class
at all, and to reduce the whole system to that of millionnaire and
servant.
A thoughtful man, he foresaw that if the great incentive to labour, the
prospect of independence, were withdrawn, the employed classes would
soon become mere eye-servants, that it would be difficult to procure
thoroughly trustworthy clerks and efficient managers.
Right well he knew that the best servant is he who hopes some day to
become a master, that the man who obeys orders most implicitly is he who
expects at a future period to have to give orders.
High wages and large salaries might be all very well; but Mr. Raidsford
declared no salary which a company was justified in giving could
compensate a man for the prospect of being some day on his “own
account.”
“These companies will ruin our legitimate commerce, lead to jobbery of
all sorts, and utterly ruin our working men. I consider limited
liability, which is, after all, only the climax of concentration of
capital, the greatest curse that ever fell upon England. It is all very
well to talk of the rate of discount acting as a beneficial check. The
rate of discount which only winds up a few companies, simply means ruin
to hundreds and thousands of small traders. In fact, in these days, I do
not see how, unless a man have a large capital or be a swindler, he is
to get on at all.”
Holding these cheerful views, even concerning legitimate companies, it
may readily be imagined how sternly Mr. Raidsford set his face against
all ventures which would not, to use his own word, “wash;” how
thoroughly he detested the whole system of “getting up” a board; with
what rancour he would have pursued “promoters,” even through the
purgatory of Basinghall Street.
As for lords and honourables, for generals and colonels, for baronets
and “swells” of all kinds, Mr. Raidsford would have had them keep to
their own rank and their own pursuits exclusively. That, individually
and collectively, they despised business—honest work, he called it—the
self-made man believed, and for this belief he had perhaps sufficient
grounds.
If they despised it, why did they meddle with it? Could not they keep to
their end of the town, and cease troubling the City, which they scoffed
at with their presence? Not so did their forefathers. This was a good
peg for Mr. Raidsford to hang a host of disparaging remarks upon! The
men who were first of their name, who left titles to be borne by their
descendants, and money to support those titles, worked in the City,
lived in it, would have thought shame to sell their honest names in
order to lead honest men and women into trouble. If the aristocracy
wanted some of the City gold, let them come and help coin it first.
Such and much more was the burden of Mr. Raidsford’s song, and it was
pleasant to hear him going through that recitative with bold sonorous
voice to lord or lady, to capitalist or adventurer, whenever chance
offered. Pleasant to hear him, a successful man, speak thus in the home
his industry and his abilities had won for him, while he was still, not
young, it is true, but yet sufficiently far removed from old age to hope
for many years in which to enjoy his good fortune.
His ideas might not be correct. How far they were so, only another
generation can tell; but they were his own earnest convictions, and he
did not hesitate to express them openly.
“If I had to begin my life again now,” he said, “I could never hope to
accomplish what I have done.” And seeing what he had done, caused his
opinions to carry much weight to the men and women he frequently
addressed.
Success has a wonderfully convincing power of argument, and it would
have been hard for any one to look at Moorlands, and not believe
(knowing his history) that its owner had a right to speak with
authority.
Mr. Raidsford perhaps might be aware of this fact, for he was never so
eloquent on the subject of private enterprise as in his own London
office, which commanded a view of his extensive premises filled with
busy workmen, or down in Hertfordshire, where everybody was well aware
how he had earned enough to buy it all “his-self.”
To the poorest labourer, Compton Raidsford was a standing miracle; from
Lord Kemms downward every person in the community marvelled at his
success.
The brand new palace to which Arthur Dudley took such grievous
exception, was a matter of necessity rather than choice. If Mr.
Raidsford could have purchased Berrie Down Hollow, Moorlands House would
never have been erected. As it was, the rich man had found it
impossible, with all his wealth, to purchase an old residence in the
situation he desired. As a rule, people who have desirable properties
like to keep them. Once in a dozen years or so, there is “just the
place” a man wants put up for sale; but so surely as this happens, that
man has not the means to make it his own.
What you like in every respect is difficult to meet with, residentially
as well as matrimonially, for which sufficient reason Mr. Raidsford
bought Moorlands without a house, and built the edifice that affronted
Arthur Dudley, on it.
Before the great building (like a factory, the Squire said) was thought
of, Moorlands had been a picturesque stretch of poor ground, pleasant
for strolling in the summer’s evenings, pleasant for picnics, pleasant
to ride across, without leave asked or granted.
It was bare, meagre land, which had not been turned up for years and
years, the grass of which was nibbled close down by the sheep that could
scarcely get a scanty living off it. There the daisies grew in the
summer-time, there the children could gather enough to make chains for a
whole village, there in the low parts the rushes sprang likewise in
sufficient quantities to provide butterfly cages, swords, helmets, and
umbrellas for the juvenile population of North Kemms and its vicinity.
There was a wood where nuts grew abundantly, a little coppice wood on
the side of a sloping hill, at the base of which the Kemm flowed on its
way rejoicingly. In the Kemm were silver-backed trout and tench and
perch. Many a time Arthur had angled in it, and there was a pleasant old
lane, wide and grassy, almost like a forest glade, bordered by fine old
timber, and entered by a gate swinging on one hinge, which led away not
merely to the coppice, but to a little piece of rising ground where
tradition said there had once been a mansion belonging to a certain
wicked Sir Giles, whose heirs were now in foreign parts, and whose bones
had been mouldering for a hundred years or more in the vaults underneath
North Kemms church.
Certainly the lane led straight up to the hillock, on which some remains
of walls, some traces of a former building, were to be found; but there
was nothing much to confirm the idea of a mansion ever having occupied
the site, though the gossips affirmed Sir Giles’ had once been a great
house, which was razed to the ground on account of the wickedness
enacted within it. Rather hard on the house, certainly, considering Sir
Giles, the perpetrator of so much wickedness, lay in consecrated ground,
snugly incased in lead and oak; but none the less likely to be true on
that account, perhaps.
A few rose-trees grew in what tradition said had once been Sir Giles’
pleasure garden; and there was a goodly bush of sweet briar, to say
nothing of a few evergreens and flowers, such as London pride,
Canterbury bells, Solomon’s seal, double daisies, and such like,
scattered about in beds that had apparently been laid out in the Dutch
style. But still there was no trace of winding walks, or sweeping drive,
of yew hedges, courtyard or pleasaunce; nothing left to tell of a great
man’s residence ever having occupied the site where Mr. Raidsford’s
palace was afterwards erected.
Lord Kemms’ idea of the matter was, perhaps, more correct than the
popular one. He thought it most probable Sir Giles’ house had been
elsewhere, and this smaller abode but a mere country cottage, in which
the baronet might have drunk, and gambled, and sinned, and fought, as
was averred. It was known that this same wicked Sir Giles, the last
baronet, had a fine mansion in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there was a
report of his having been possessed of some broad manors in the North;
but the awful stories which were told of his wild life always had for
their scene Moorlands, where there was scarcely one stone left upon
another, where the daisies sprang and the rushes grew, where the nuts
ripened on the hazel bushes, and the birds built in the hedgerows and
laurels, spring after spring.
This place Mr. Raidsford saw, liked, purchased cheap, and spoiled—so
Arthur Dudley said. Perhaps the Squire was right. No doubt the grassy
lane, with its gate hanging on one hinge, with the branches of its
overhanging trees almost touching any pedestrian who passed beneath
them, was more picturesque than Mr. Raidsford’s gravelled drive and wide
sweeping entrance, than the lodges, than all the new-cut stone and fresh
mortar.
Doubtless, the daisies were more lovely to the eyes than fields of corn
and mangold-wurzel. Without question, the spot where the rushes and the
yellow lilies grew, did not gain anything in artistic effect when
drain-tiles and labourers had done their work, and the place, “dry as a
bone,” produced crops of barley better than any Squire Dudley could
show. It was not to be disputed that the scattered stones, the desolate
flowers, the neglected garden, the tangled little corner of wilderness,
were more suggestive than Mr. Raidsford’s bran new mansion; nor that the
wood had been more enjoyable in its former neglected condition than it
seemed when paths were made through it, and a summer-house perched above
the Kemm; but still, people must live somewhere, and the tents they
dwell in must be new at some time. Even Berrie Down Hollow had been
built once; it did not come into existence with the Creation—brambles
had been cleared away for it, the turf had been turned up in the fields
which were now Arthur’s, the picturesque common had been divided into
meadows and corn-fields, into pastures and arable land.
For all of which reasons, Squire Dudley should not have complained when
the lane at Moorlands was metamorphosed into a drive; when the ground
which barely yielded pasturage for a few sheep, was ploughed and
ploughed again, and finally laid down in grass for a deer park; when
wheat sprang up where the daisies had grown; when a new house showed its
face amongst the trees; when gardens were laid out, and conservatories
erected, and stables built, and employment given; and a new neighbour,
not such an one as the old wicked Sir Giles, who, it was stated, cared
neither for God nor devil, came to dwell at Moorlands, which he had
sense enough not to re-christen.
A different man from Mr. Dudley would have held out the right hand of
fellowship to the stranger, walked over and called upon him, and been
cordially welcomed in return; for if Arthur were poor, he was of gentle
blood, and if Mr. Raidsford had risen, he was none the less, indeed
perhaps all the more, friendly disposed towards one better born than
himself; but the Squire did nothing of the kind. Rather he stood on the
lawn at Berrie Down and cursed his day, lamenting that Compton
Raidsford—a mushroom, an upstart, a snob—should be so much, while he,
Arthur Dudley, was nothing.
Had Arthur been possessed of ten thousand a year, he would never have
said a word against Compton Raidsford, or the alterations at Moorlands;
he would have proffered him the hospitalities of Berrie Down, and shed
the light of his countenance on the new comer; but then, Arthur had not
ten thousand a year, which made all the difference.
There are many children in the world, grown as well as little boys and
girls, who, though willing enough to share a toy if it chance to belong
to them, will yet refuse to play with a companion who owns the toy
instead of them. They can be generous and patronizing; but when the
tables are reversed, they go into a corner and sulk.
That was precisely Arthur Dudley’s case; the world’s toys were in other
hands, and he would neither look at nor use them. If he could not have
them of his own, he would have none of them; if he could not have silver
dishes on his own table, he would not eat out of them at another man’s.
A nice, amiable trait to have to record; and yet many a very agreeable
fellow, owner of all the pleasant things Fortune reserves for her
especial favourites, might not be one whit more agreeable, or contented,
or genial than Arthur Dudley, if luck took a notion some fine morning of
leaving him out at elbows. Only people cannot exactly comprehend this
truth; and, as a consequence, Arthur’s neighbours had long been sick of
his airs and tempers, as they styled his resolution to keep himself to
himself. Lord Kemms, for instance, would once have been glad enough to
see him at the Park; but Arthur rejected all that nobleman’s
well-intended civilities; and thus, as the years went by, the Squire was
reduced to that most uncomfortable of all positions, viz., having a mere
speaking acquaintance with his neighbours, whom he could not avoid
meeting occasionally, and who really came in time to feel, as Compton
Raidsford said, “out of patience with the fellow.”
And yet, looking at Berrie Down, which stood on its sunny hill,
smilingly nestling amid trees and plantations with rich green pastures
intervening between it and Moorlands, both Lord Kemms and Mr. Raidsford
were thinking pityingly of the owner, and wishing Arthur had been like
anybody else.
It was impossible for them to have talked about Mr. Black, and Mr.
Black’s scheme, without bringing Squire Dudley’s name into the
discussion also; indeed, Mr. Raidsford had instanced him as one of the
men most likely to be led into trouble on the strength of Lord Kemms’
name; “for, although he may be too proud to visit at Kemms Park, my
lord,” finished the owner of Moorlands, “he will not be too proud to
follow your lead, if he believe you are taking the road to fortune.”
After which followed a pause, a thoughtful pause, that lasted long
enough to give Lord Kemms ample leisure to frame his ideas into some
sort of definite shape, if they ever were to be got into shape at all.
And yet when he broke silence, it was not directly of Mr. Black’s scheme
he spoke.
“I cannot help thinking,” he said, “about Dudley’s manner when he sold
that mare to me to-day. I never saw him resemble a human being so much
before. The way in which he put down Black was splendid; I could like
the fellow, if he would get down off his stilts, and be a little
natural.”
“There is good in him, I believe,” was Mr. Raidsford’s reply; “and as
for his wife, she is charming; I hope he won’t bring her and the little
ones to grief. Have you ever seen his eldest child—the girl, I mean?”
“Yes;—will make a pretty woman, like her mother. A strange child; not in
the least shy,” added his lordship, with a smile.
He was thinking of one day in the early summer, when he had overtaken
Heather and Lally in Berrie Down Lane, and dismounting, lifted the
little girl and placed her on the Black Knight’s back, while he walked
beside, talking to Mrs. Dudley. Which proceeding had so much endeared
him to Lally, that she was in the habit of talking about him as “her
friend,” and declaring he had “lovely hair, like Lally’s own;” an
observation which might not have proved flattering to Lord Kemms’ vanity
had he heard it.
“I wish to Heaven I saw my way clear:” it was the owner of Kemms Park
who uttered this by no means uncommon desire. “What shall I do,
Raidsford, toss up which it is to be, or take your advice?”
“Your lordship must use your own judgment in the matter,” was the reply.
“Now, that is what provokes me about people,” remarked Lord Kemms,
pettishly. “They say all manner of things to set one against a pet
project, and then at the last moment declare a man must exercise his own
judgment, as if he could do so under the circumstances. Don’t you know,
a man cannot judge his own case? Since you have been counsel and
adviser, why should you object to decide the question? Here is the way
it stands,—you say the project cannot succeed; my respectable kinsman,
Allan Stewart, says it not only can but shall. You have convinced me Mr.
Black is no more honest than he can afford to be, or rather, you have
confirmed a suspicion I previously entertained to that effect; but then
here is a good thing, about which it may pay him to be honest at last;
and—and—to finish the matter, I had a fancy to go into this venture,
since I have sworn never again to ‘make a book.’ I think I’ll toss up,
Raidsford, or draw lots; you shall hold them.”
“No, my lord, I will not; you ought not to let chance decide this
question for you. It is one you ought to think out seriously, and——”
“Good heavens! I have been thinking about it for a week past,”
interrupted Lord Kemms, pettishly.
“Then think of it for a week more; and think at the same time betting on
horses is an honest and respectable way of amusing yourself, in
comparison with selling your name to companies. In the one case you only
ruin yourself, in the latter——”
“Hold, my Mentor,” once again interposed Lord Kemms, “we have gone over
all that ground before;” and he balanced his spoon on the top of his
coffee cup, and thoughtfully contemplated this feat of skill as he
spoke.
“So, though you have taken the responsibility of advising, you decline
that of deciding,” he went on. “Decide, and your words shall be to me as
the laws of the Medes and Persians.”
“If your lordship really wish me to do so,” began Mr. Raidsford;—but at
this juncture Lord Kemms pushed back his chair from the table, and
walked over towards one of the windows.
“No, no,” he said; “I won’t ask you to do that; it would not be fair;
besides, I am old enough to make up my own mind, and bear the
consequence of my own acts. I will not be one of Mr. Black’s decoy
ducks, as you are kind enough to style his directors. I will write to
him on Monday, and——”
“Mr. Alexander Dudley wishes to speak to your lordship,” said a servant,
entering the room at this juncture.
“Wishes to speak to me?” repeated Lord Kemms; “where is he?”
“In the library, my lord;” and forthwith “my lord” walked across the
hall into the room where Alick stood waiting for him.
The lad had not sat down. He stood beside the library table with his hat
in his hand; and even when Lord Kemms motioned him to a chair, he
declined the proffered courtesy.
“My brother was to have sent you Nellie this evening, my lord,” he
began. “I have been to the Park, but finding you were here, came on. I
hope you will excuse my doing so. I thought it was better for me to see
you.”
“Does your brother want to be off his bargain?” asked his lordship,
sharply. “If that be what you have to say, of course I shall not hold
him to it.”
“That is not what I have to say,” answered Alick, boldly. He had felt
nervous and fluttered at first, but Lord Kemms’ manner braced up his
courage in an instant. He had felt a discrepancy between himself, his
prospects, his dress, his position, and the grand house into which he
had been permitted to enter, almost under protest (so it seemed to him),
of a servant who evidently thought he had no business at Moorlands; but
that was all now forgotten.
Lord Kemms had made a great mistake, and having made it, Alick could
strike him under the fifth rib. His irritation had thrown him off his
guard, and now Alick could deliver his message with effect.
“My brother sold Nellie to you, believing her to be sound. We are not
quite certain that she is sound; and, not being certain, my lord, we
would not send her to you.”
For a moment Lord Kemms’ face flushed scarlet; then he said,—
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Dudley, for my hasty speech. The fact is—I—I—had
set my heart on having her; and—really this is most provoking—I wanted
her so particularly.”
“And my brother wanted the money particularly, my lord,” answered the
lad; “at least, so he said,” added Alick, with a terrible remembrance of
Arthur’s wrath when he first heard there was anything amiss with Nellie.
“What the devil is wrong with her?” asked Lord Kemms, irritably. “Sit
down, can’t you, and tell me all about it.”
“I am afraid she has got something the matter with her sight,” was the
reply. “When you first spoke to me on the subject, that day in the
paddock, my lord,” added the lad, “I thought there was not a blemish
about her, but this last week I have felt uneasy. Of course it is not
easy to tell whether it is so or not; only, having been with her all her
life, I notice what another person might not. I did not want to vex my
brother unless I felt certain, so he knew nothing about the matter till
he told me she was to be sent over to the Park.”
“And then?” inquired Lord Kemms.
“Then I mentioned my fear to him, and he said you ought to be informed
of it. We knew, my lord, or, at least, we thought, you would not have
her examined by a veterinary surgeon, coming from us; indeed, I doubt if
any stranger could detect a thing wrong about her _now_.”
“But you think there is?”
For a moment Alick remained silent; he felt the hundred pounds Arthur
wanted so badly might be had, if he only appeared doubtful; and Arthur,
he knew, was fuming and fretting at home over his disappointment. The
youth loved his brother, and was grateful to him; further, he was afraid
of his temper; but still, right was right, and honour honour.
“My lord, I know there is, though my brother does not believe it.”
“Still you might have passed her off as sound upon me, even subject to a
veterinary opinion?”
“No, my lord; a jobber might, but _we_ could not,” amended Alick,
looking every inch a Dudley as he spoke.
“I stand corrected,” said Lord Kemms, with a laugh. “I quite see; the
thing might be possible, but not to you. Now, what does your brother
propose?”
“To consider the bargain off,” was the prompt reply.
“Nothing else?” inquired his lordship.
“Or otherwise,” answered Alick, “to let you have her, giving an
undertaking that if within six months my idea prove to have been
correct, he will take her back and return your money.”
“Evidently he is not of your opinion?”
“No, my lord.”
“Do you think you know more about horses than he?”
“I think I know more about Nellie.”
For a moment Lord Kemms looked hard in Alick Dudley’s face, which was
frank, and young, and pleasant. He had not Arthur’s delicately-cut
features,—he was cast altogether in a larger and a rougher mould; but he
was the making of a finer man, the owner of Kemms Park decided. Looking
at Alick’s face, he saw reflected as in a mirror the scene which had
taken place at Berrie Down, and, perhaps, it was this which made him
say, suddenly,—
“Your brother was not very well pleased when you expressed your opinion
to him, I suppose—blamed you, probably?”
“When people are vexed, they usually blame the person nearest them at
the time,” was Alick’s philosophic reply.
“You suspected nothing of this when I spoke to you in the paddock. If I
had bought her then, that is, if your brother had taken my offer then,
you could have sent her to me with a clear conscience.”
“Yes, my lord. There was certainly nothing wrong with her then; at
least, nothing that I could see,” Alick answered.
“And there is nothing your brother can see the matter now?”
“Nothing.”
“Then I will take her,” said his lordship; and Alick breathed a sigh of
intense relief.
“You shall have her the first thing on Monday morning,” he said, rising,
“and the letter, too.”
“What letter?”
“My brother’s undertaking to return you the money, in case she prove
unsound.”
“No, I won’t have it,” was the reply. “I’ll run the chance of her.”
“No, my lord, pray do not do that!” Alick entreated. “I am as sure as I
can be of anything her sight is affected. If you will take her for the
six months, and pay my brother for her now, as he really wants the
money, I shall be very grateful; but I would rather repay you myself
than think hereafter you had bought a useless animal from us.”
“And pray, how the deuce should you propose to repay me yourself?”
inquired Lord Kemms. But the words had scarcely passed his lips before
he repented having uttered them.
“I hope not to remain a burden on my brother _all_ my life,” answered
the lad in a low tone, with his cheeks aflame, but with eyes boldly
looking his questioner in the face.
“My boy,” said the nobleman, kindly laying his hand on Alick’s shoulder,
“that is three times in one interview you have rebuked me. I am sorry to
have pained you, and I beg your pardon for my thoughtlessness. Tell your
brother he could not have chosen a better messenger. I will take Nellie,
and, when you have made your fortune, we can talk about repayment, if
she turn out badly.”
“Thank you, my lord.” The boy’s heart was very full, and he could not
say another word.
Silently he moved towards the door, Lord Kemms following him.
“What are you going to be?” inquired the nobleman, as they stood
together on the threshold.
“A merchant, if I am fortunate enough ever to rise higher than a clerk.”
“Do you think you will like business better than farming?”
“I mean to try and like anything which offers me a chance of getting on
in the world,” was the reply.
“Then I hope you may get on, and that I shall some day see you rich and
prosperous, a millionnaire. It is possible; in this house, it is
scarcely needful for me to tell you, all things are, humanly speaking,
possible.” And with that Lord Kemms held out his hand, which Alick could
have kissed for very gratitude.
“I will call at Berrie Down on Monday,” said his lordship, when Alick
had passed through the open hall door. Having announced which intention,
he returned to the dining-room, where he reported the gist of the
conversation to Mr. Raidsford.
“The greatest kindness you could have done Squire Dudley would have been
to take him at his word,” was Mr. Raidsford’s practical comment on the
affair.
“Perhaps so; but I could not afford to be less honest and honourable
than they,” Lord Kemms answered.
“Ay, that is the misery of it,” said his host. “Honest and honourable
falling among thieves!”
Some similar thought to this it had been, perhaps, which suggested to
Lord Kemms the idea of calling at Berrie Down. Some vague fancy of
saving Arthur—of rescuing him from the Philistines! But when once he
found himself seated in Squire Dudley’s drawing-room, he felt how futile
was any such hope, how utterly vain it would be for him to proffer
advice, or counsel caution to his neighbour.
Already the poison had begun to work; already he had dreamed his dreams,
and beheld his visions; already he had made his thousands, and spent
them in imagination; already the glory of the future flung a brightness
across his path, and made him look on life more cheerfully, on his
fellow-men more kindly.
Let success bring what it would, it could not bring more than Arthur
already saw advancing towards him. Prophetically, out of the great City
he beheld riches, and honours, and glories, travelling northward to
Berrie Down. The dust of the approaching caravan was clear to his mental
vision as the turf stretching down to the Hollow.
If for a moment he was taken aback, it was when Lord Kemms told Mr.
Black, in his presence, he had decided to decline his obliging offer.
But Mr. Black so coolly pooh-poohed what he called his lordship’s hasty
rejection,—so resolutely refused to take “no” for an answer,—so
determinedly, and yet pleasantly, said they “could talk the matter over
at some future time, there was no hurry about it,”—so utterly ignored
the fact of Lord Kemms having assured him his mind was made up, he would
have nothing whatever to do with the company,—that Arthur was reassured,
and believed Mr. Black, when that gentleman subsequently informed him
Lord Kemms had only been a little set against the affair by “that
meddling upstart, Raidsford.”
“He’ll be all right enough by the time we want him,” finished the
promoter, confidently; while his lordship was walking down the drive,
feeling he had made nothing by his move, rather, on the contrary, given
the advantage to a much cleverer and more ready man than himself.
“Hang the fellow!” he thought, “and his confounded self-sufficiency. Ah!
my little friend,” he added out loud, as Lally parted the boughs of an
evergreen oak, and looked out at him from among the greenery, “won’t you
come and speak to me; won’t you tell me how you have been this long
time?”
Not from any shyness, but from precisely the same feeling as that which
makes a kitten bound off when a hand is stretched out coaxingly towards
it, Lally allowed the branches to spring back and the foliage hide her.
“Don’t be rude, Lally; go and speak to Lord Kemms when he asks you,”
said a voice from behind the shrubs, while two very white hands parted
the branches above Lally’s head, while a very pretty face, half
concealed by leaves, met the nobleman’s delighted eyes.
In a moment a sweet jingle of verse seemed ringing through the air.
That pleasant and goodly thing, a woman’s beauty—ever old, yet ever
new—old as the world, yet new as the dawning day—chased all disagreeable
thoughts out of Lord Kemms’ mind, while Dr. Mackay’s lines took their
place:—
“And now and then I’ll see thy face,
Mid boughs and branches peeping.”
He had never known how beautiful a woman’s face could look till he
beheld Bessie’s through that tracery of leaf, and twig, and stem.
More than ever now he desired to renew his acquaintance with Lally, who
came forth from her hiding-place, and, in reply to his tender inquiries,
informed him she was quite well,—that mamma was quite well; after which
conversational effort, Lally—a surprised mass of muslin, hair, and
freckles—stood, her lap full of flowers, looking at Lord Kemms.
“What lovely flowers!” he said.
“Bessie’s!” explained Lally, nodding in the direction of the pretty
face, the owner of which now, with the assistance of Lord Kemms, emerged
from amid the hedge of evergreens, and stood before his lordship,
laughing and blushing, a vision of loveliness worth contemplating.
“We were gathering flowers,” she said, in elucidation of Lally’s
statement.
“A very appropriate occupation,” remarked his lordship, gallantly.
He would have liked nothing better than ten minutes’ conversation with
this young lady, who had appeared so unexpectedly before him; but Miss
Ormson was not inclined to gratify this innocent desire, and made her
disinclination so prettily apparent, that his lordship had no resource
left but to bid Lally farewell, which he did most affectionately.
“Good-bye, dear.”
“Dood-bye!” and Lally confided to him one of her little brown hands.
“Will you give me a kiss?”
“Iss;” and Lally made up her mouth, and went through the ceremony with
laudable readiness and composure.
“Remember, you promised to marry me. I’m to wait for you, you know.”
“Iss.” Lally was perfectly agreeable.
“You will not promise so readily fifteen years hence, little one,” he
said; but this being a step beyond Lally’s understanding, she kept
silence with a wisdom which might not have belonged to her fifteen years
hence, either.
And, indeed, no answer was required from her, Bessie and Lord Kemms
having settled the matter with a mutual smile, after which, as the
leave-taking had been already unduly prolonged, the visitor lifted his
hat in adieu to Bessie, and departed.
“Why didn’t he tiss ’oo?” Lally inquired, quite loud enough for Lord
Kemms to hear.
“You naughty child!” exclaimed Bessie; “hush! hush! hush!” and then the
pair broke their way through the evergreen hedge again, and returned,
ostensibly, to their former employment of gathering flowers.
But, in reality, both Lally and her companion were looking after Lord
Kemms’ retreating figure. From the grass-plot where they stood, a
glimpse was to be obtained at intervals of the road, and at last Bessie
relinquished her sham occupation, and stood gazing, with a sad, sad look
in her face, after the owner of Kemms Park.
All at once the object of so much attention turned round, and caught her
in the very act.
Bessie never professed to be more than human, and accordingly she said
to Lally, angrily—
“How can you be so bold, child, as to stare after gentlemen like that?”
“’Oo ’taring too!” retorted Lally, indignantly; and, as she could not
deny the truth of this statement, Bessie covered her confusion by a
vigorous onslaught among the flowers.
After a few seconds, however, she lifted her head again, and looked
along the road once more, and as she looked she sighed; but that sigh
was not breathed for the nobleman whose hair was like “Lally’s own!”
CHAPTER XII.
LIFE AT THE HOLLOW.
Although, in the course of his conversation with Arthur Dudley, Mr.
Black had intimated his intention of running up to town on the Monday
following, and probably remaining there, he did not carry that desirable
project into practice, but rather announced his intention of favouring
Hertfordshire with his presence for some time longer.
“That is to say, if Mrs. Dudley be not quite weary of us,” he added;
which, of course, left Heather no resource but to entreat a prolongation
of Mr. and Mrs. Black’s stay, which she did so kindly, that Mr. Black
thanked her for her invitation.
“Just as if you had given her a chance of not inviting you,” remarked
Miss Hope, with a sneer.
“True; I forgot I was not speaking to Miss Hope, whose frankness is
notorious,” retorted Mr. Black; having given the lady which tit, for her
tat, he strolled out, in excellent temper, on to the lawn.
Spite of his dislike to the country—a dislike that was, perhaps, as
genuine as anything about him (his vanity and selfishness excepted), he
liked Berrie Down Hollow. It was an establishment which, notwithstanding
some blemishes, in most respects met his views.
On an income of a few hundreds a year, which had to be dragged out of
the land, it is scarcely needful to say, Mr. Dudley, of Berrie Down,
could not “do things” in the same style as Mr. Black, of Stanley
Crescent, who reckoned his returns loosely by thousands.
From cellar to garret, the house in Stanley Crescent proclaimed the
existence either of unlimited means, or unlimited credit.
From the hall to the farthest bedchamber, Berrie Down Hollow told its
tale of shortness of money and of utter honesty.
No bills were run in that pleasant Hertfordshire home; no duns ever came
clamouring for payment through the gates flanked by pyracantha.
Let post-time bring what ill news it might, such ill news never arrived
in the shape of an intimation that any tradesman was weary of waiting
for a settlement of his “little account;” that, if a remittance for the
amount of his bill (inclosed) were not immediately forwarded, the writer
would place the matter forthwith in the hands of his solicitor.
Honest and honourable, as Lord Kemms had said, were these poor
incompetent Dudleys. Senselessly honest, Mr. Black decided.
To live beyond their means—to owe money, the payment of which was in the
least uncertain or problematical, would have seemed to them the depth of
humiliation.
A horror of debt, a dread of incurring expenses which their income did
not fully warrant, a proud spirit of independence, a resolute
determination to spend no more than they could well afford to pay—these
were the traits in his country relations which filled Mr. Black with a
vague amazement, with an almost contemptuous pity.
That any man—and, more especially, any woman—should hesitate about
refurnishing a house, when upholsterers existed ready to send in goods
on credit, was a want of courage which, though perhaps not unnatural,
was simply unintelligible to Mr. Black. That a family should refrain
from luxuries, remain quietly at home, dress plainly, and strive, by a
prudent economy, to make both ends meet, seemed to him the very acme of
folly.
To “cut a dash” on nothing—to take a house with no certain prospect of
ever paying rent for it—to furnish that house throughout on credit—to
run bills for every article under heaven for which bills could by
possibility be run—to trust to luck for meeting the Christmas
accounts—to look on every tradesman as a mere speculator, who took his
risk of ever receiving sixpence, to whom customers were as uncertain
forms of profit as Lim. Lia. Co.s to Mr. Black, or else as “knowing
cards,” who made the substantial householders carry them safe through
the midnight flittings of a dozen less honest neighbours—these were a
few of the articles to be found in the only confession of faith to which
Mr. Black heartily subscribed.
From his youth upward, no delicate scruples concerning wronging his
fellows had troubled the conscience of Mr. Black; and it seemed quite as
strange to him to witness the remarkable honesty which obtained at
Berrie Down, as it would to a pickpocket to behold a purse found in the
street restored forthwith to its rightful owner.
No doubt the theory of honesty was an excellent, a beautiful science;
but to carry that theory into every-day practice, appeared to Mr. Black
absurd. According to his gospel, it was foolish to do without anything
which could be procured for the ordering.
“Any fool,” he opined, “could buy with money; but it required some
cleverness to buy without money. If I had been one of that sort, afraid
of this, and that, and ’tother, I should have stayed on servant to
somebody all my life. Success is just like a woman—faint heart won’t win
her; and see what I have done—just look at me.”
This was the fashion in which he addressed Alick Dudley, or any other
individual on whom he hoped the sight of his exalted position might
produce a beneficial effect. From the way in which he talked of his
successes, it was only fair to presume his achievements had astonished
no one more than himself. Perpetually he seemed trying to lay his hand
on his good fortune, in order to realise it; failing in this attempt, he
desired to see his neighbour’s hand touch the glittering heap, so as to
make sure it was no deception—no sham.
All his life he had been used to making believe. In the days when he
lodged at Hoxton, he was wont to entertain his landlady with accounts of
the great people he knew, who were going to do something for him; and
shabby, out at elbows, patchy about the feet, and much dinged as
regarded his head-gear, he still, meeting former acquaintances in the
street, would ignore Hoxton, and ask them, the first time they were out
Clapham way, to give him a call.
He had been a liar from the beginning, and even in prosperity lying
forsook him not; but like as the wicked, of whom King David makes
mention, were clothed with cursing, so falsehood was to Mr. Black as the
garment which covered him, and as the girdle wherewith he was girded
continually.
His life had been a shifting scene of unfair dealing; of false
pretences; of uncertain climbing; of incessant struggle either to
retain, or to regain, a desirable position; and because his memory
retained nothing but a confused recollection of excusing, inventing,
distorting, misrepresenting, scheming, cheating, planning, the
atmosphere at Berrie Down almost took away his breath by its rarity.
To the advantage, however, of being associated with a man like Arthur
Dudley—against whose honour and integrity even slander could not make an
accusation—who really had broad acres and fair lands—something tangible
in the way of property—Mr. Black was by no means blind.
Society, he knew, had a foolish confidence in such individuals; and now,
when, perhaps, for the first time in his life he was striving to make
his fortune honestly and legitimately, he could not help feeling that
the accession of such an ally gave him greater confidence even in
himself.
Walking over the soft green turf at Berrie Down, he began to imagine he
had done with tacking and veering, and hoisting false colours for ever;
at last, it was going to pay him to be straightforward. If there were
some things concerning the Protector Bread and Flour Company, Limited,
which he deemed it wiser to keep in the background, still there was no
necessity for beating about the bush. There was the Company—a good
scheme, a tangible scheme, with no humbug about it; but rather, on the
contrary, containing in itself almost every element necessary to insure
success.
Very different was this venture to any with which he had ever previously
been associated. Hitherto, he had looked for nothing beyond what he
could make by merely promoting a company. He had assisted to usher
dozens of ill-conditioned, unhealthy, rickety commercial infants into
the world, and when he had pocketed his midwife’s fee for his services
there was an end of the matter. As a rule, these infants had either
scarcely survived their birth, or else had grown up into disreputable
swindles; and Mr. Black, having sense enough to know this kind of
practice could scarcely continue to pay him for ever, most earnestly
desired to get hold of something which really had, in its own nature,
some fair chance of existence; and working it up thoroughly, make that a
stepping-stone to future successes, up which he could safely climb to
the very summit of the hill of Fortune.
He was weary, not of the dishonesty of his previous career, but of its
anxieties, its uncertainties, its never-ending, always beginning work.
Though a strong and hearty man to look at, he felt the years spent in
planning and scheming—in “raising the wind,” in getting “paper melted,”
in running about praying for bills to be renewed, in staving off
bankruptcy, in softening the hearts of obdurate creditors—had told, and
were telling, on his constitution. He knew, if no one else did, how
often he had climbed and fallen; how often he had touched Fortune, and
been spurned by her; how continually luck had travelled with him to a
certain point, and then, suddenly taken herself off in a huff, leaving
her former favourite to retrace his steps, or fight his way onward, as
best he could. How he had lain through the long nights planning; how he
had thought in the darkness of ways and means; how he had racked his
brains, marvelling whence help was to be obtained; how he had walked the
City streets in rain, in snow, in frost, in the broiling summer weather,
in the winter, when the cruel east winds were careering up Cheapside;
how he had got soaked to the skin, and how his clothes had dried again
on him; how he had turned into taverns, and drank brandy till he felt
strong enough to go out again and face the worst,—all these miseries
were fresh in Mr. Black’s mind; to all of them, he hoped, with all his
heart and soul, he had said farewell for ever!
The pace at which he had been travelling, he felt, must tell at last;
over the stones, over the stones! backward and forward, in all weathers,
with all sorts of anxieties dogging his steps; up and down hundreds of
thousands of stairs; across the thresh-holds of scores and scores of
offices;—how all this had wearied his mind and worn his body, he fully
understood only when he stood under the trees at Berrie Down, resting
idly at last.
There was no sham about Mr. Black’s affection for London; but there was
equally no question that he felt a short stay in the country might do
his health much good; might clear his head, as he expressed it, and
enable him on his return to town to resume work with greater energy than
ever.
“Talk about a change to Hastings or Brighton,” he said to Arthur Dudley,
“why, it’s nothing to this. To walk along the shore in either place, is
simply walking down Regent Street, nothing else! Upon my soul, I would
quite as soon take a day’s holiday in one as the other; and as for
quiet, could the traffic in the City make more noise any time than that
precious old sea? No; give me this solitude, this stillness, this
perfect freedom, and I am content to leave watering-places to fast young
women and idle men.”
And no doubt Mr. Black was sincere in this statement. Though the
appointments at Berrie Down were not on that scale of magnificence which
Mr. Black would have liked to see his kinsman affect, still the very
absence of this magnificence tended to make the house a comfortable one
at which to visit.
The furniture might be old-fashioned and the draperies faded; yet to Mr.
Black there was a certain novelty in sitting down on a chair which was
undoubtedly paid for, that counterbalanced, to some extent, the effect
of well-worn carpets, ancient sofas, spider-legged tables, and a square
six-octave piano.
Besides, the mere fact of seeing people able to do without luxuries,
able to resist the lust of the eye and the pride of life, produced a
salutary though vague impression on the mind of a man who had been
brought up amongst a class which believes almost exclusively in
externals, and pins its faith to goods and chattels, to fine feathers,
to unlimited gilding, to many servants, and big houses filled with much
French polish and varnish in profusion, with silk curtains and soft
carpets, and pictures in heavy, costly frames.
If Arthur Dudley could afford to live in such poor style without losing
caste, then what might Arthur Dudley not achieve if he were able to live
in better style? A desirable connection certainly Mr. Black held that
man to be, who, without any adventitious aid whatsoever, could remain a
gentleman amid surroundings that “would settle me,” mentally finished
the promoter.
That there was something in birth, beyond a father leaving personal and
freehold property to his son—that there was something also in rank over
and above houses and lands—money and more money—Mr. Black began to
believe; and in the pleasant summer-time, amongst the green
Hertfordshire fields, under the drooping trees, the promoter came
gradually to understand something else, namely, that a woman who, like
Heather, could manage to make herself and others happy, on an utterly
inadequate income, might, mated to a different husband, have proved a
treasure beyond all price.
Even Mrs. Ormson, he knew, could never have shed so sweet a content over
any home as Heather Dudley. “I believe,” thought Mr. Black, “she would
even have made that dog-kennel in Hoxton something worth looking forward
to coming home to at night. She is not clever—that is, she could never
fight her way in the world, nor go out into it like many women—but she
is worth a barge-load of any I ever knew, for all that. By Jove! married
to a clever man, would not she have made a home for him?” And then Mr.
Black went on to consider, in a mournful kind of way, that let him climb
to what worldly height he would, domestic comfort was a thing the future
could not hold for him; that, though he might have servants and
carriages, a house as fine as Lord Kemms, money at his banker’s, and an
income large enough to satisfy even his most extravagant desires, he
could never expect to pass through any door which might afford him
admission to such a paradise as that, in and out of which Arthur Dudley
passed at his own sweet pleasure, all unconscious of the blessings he
enjoyed.
Never before had Mr. Black remained long enough at Berne Down to
appreciate the quiet beauty of that calm home life. A hurried visit from
Saturday till Monday, a scramble for trains, a hot walk to church,
pressing anxieties which made the still monotony of the country almost
maddening to a man whose brain was in a constant whirl of excitement; a
day or two, perhaps occasionally, through the week—when picnics were
planned and excursions undertaken—had formerly been Mr. Black’s
experience of Berrie Down.
Most people know how wearisome and unendurable the stillness of night is
when sleep refuses to close the tired eyelids, when either from pain of
body, or distress of mind, the hours are passed in restlessness instead
of rest. The silence of the country, its inaction, its dead-aliveness
had been hitherto to Mr. Black precisely what sleepless nights prove to
many a sufferer. He could not take repose out of it; and as day, with
its work and its turmoil, seems preferable to the long, drawn-out
darkness, through every hour of which ascends the moaning prayer, “Would
to God it were morning!” so even the noise and tumult of town appeared
to Mr. Black sounds to be desired in preference to the awful and fearful
quiet of that still life at Berrie Down.
But now the Hollow was to him as a calm summer’s night, when refreshing
sleep steals down upon the worn and the weary, giving them rest after
toil, strength to rise and meet the trouble of the coming day.
The silence did not irritate him now, the utter repose of the life did
not chafe his temper. He wanted to think, and he found time to do it.
There was nothing pressing which required his return to town. He could
let the express from Palinsbridge speed away to London, and leave him
still behind at Berrie Down; he could lounge about the fields and build
castles in the air at his leisure; he could stand and listen to the
rustling of the wind among the trees without a thought of how time was
going; he could lie on the grass, and plan his plans, and scheme his
schemes, without ever a passing footfall to disturb him.
Further, he liked the liberty of the house. He could go and come, he
could be alone or with the family, just as pleased him best.
There was no fuss about dress, no strict adherence to hours. If he went
out for a quiet walk, dinner did not wait for him, and still he was not
expected to starve the whole day, in consequence.
Mrs. Dudley had no black looks for guests who lounged in late to
breakfast. There was always sunshine at Berrie Down; there was always
some one to give that soft answer that turneth away wrath; there was no
squabbling, no jealousy, no selfishness. In that house, it was not who
should retain, but who should give up. Boys and girls alike, it was the
same, who could do most for each other; and, beyond all, who could do
most for Heather.
Naturally a shrewd man, Mr. Black could not choose but notice all these
peculiarities of the household at Berrie Down; and as he began to take a
personal interest in the members composing that household, so, in the
ordinary course of, things, he necessarily looked deeper than he had
ever done before, only to see more and more in Heather to admire.
She was his antagonist, he felt, and yet he would have given much to
have had her on his side. She would be averse to leaving Berrie Down,
and yet it was she, more than any other member of the family, he desired
to have in town.
“By Jove! she is a woman,” he remarked in confidence to Mrs. Ormson; but
finding his enthusiasm failed to kindle a corresponding flame in that
lady’s bosom, he pursued the subject no further.
Even the very animals about Berrie Down seemed to Mr. Black different to
the animals he had seen elsewhere: chickens that flew on Agnes’ shoulder
the moment she appeared in the poultry-yard; dogs that relieved each
other at the gate, and sat looking up and down Berrie Down Lane the
whole day long, like sentries on duty; a terrier that let Lally’s pet
kitten make a pillow of him; a cat which was turned into the
pigeon-house every night to prevent the rats doing mischief, and allowed
the pigeons to roost on her back without entering the slightest protest
against such a proceeding; horses that ate apples and plums in any
quantity—that would search Alick’s pockets for bread, and pick the
flowers out of Agnes’ belt daintily and lightly; a goat which ruled
supreme in yard and paddock, which reduced even a huge Newfoundland to a
state of abject terror, which played such antics as Mr. Black had never
previously imagined could be gone through by an animal—which would get
into the dog-kennel and keep its rightful occupant at bay—which would
stand guard over the kennel and prevent Nero coming out—which would then
be off chasing the smaller dogs about—butting at the colts, and causing
them to rear and paw, and then scamper off round the fields, followed
full flight by Jinny, who was fleeter of foot than any of them. She was
a disreputable goat, of low tastes; who drank ale and ate tobacco; who
preferred sour apples to wholesome grass; who had an objection to
letting herself be milked, and who, when she became the mother of a kid,
seemed to think the creature had been sent into the world to be rolled
over and butted, and hunted and teazed, from morning till night.
A shocking thief was Jinny also, who would make her way into the larder
and eat up bread and pies with an appreciative appetite which ought to
have proved eminently gratifying to Mrs. Piggott; who might be found
standing on her hind legs, sharing the horses’ corn; who was discovered
one day, on the top of a little rustic summer-house, munching with
infinite relish the earliest pears that grew on the sunniest wall of the
garden. Every day Arthur vowed vengeance against that goat; and yet
every succeeding morrow discovered Jinny at fresh tricks, engaged in
carrying out some new mischief.
Then the pigeons! the ridiculous fantails and the consequential
pouters,—the pouters so irresistibly like a parish clerk, the fantails
so vain that, in walking backwards to exhibit their outspread feathers,
they often fell head over heels, to the intense delight of Lally. Lovely
pigeons! that would flutter down at sound of Heather’s voice, and settle
on head and hand, soft balls of white, smooth feathers, waiting to be
fed.
It might, according to Mr. Black’s idea, be a useless life; but, for all
that, it was very tranquil and very sweet, and pleasant also from
sunrise to sunset—a succession of summer days without a cloud.
Further, if, in the midst of so many romantic and countrified sights and
sounds, it be not prosaic to make mention of such common matters as
eating and drinking, I may add that the edible arrangements at Berrie
Down met with Mr. Black’s unqualified approval.
To a man who had been content for years and years with chops and steaks,
a pennyworth, daily, of potatoes, and a like value of bread, partaken of
after the manner of those modern Israelites, City people in haste, and
washed down by a pint or half a pint of bitter, it may readily be
believed that the orthodox dinners which he deemed it the correct thing
to partake of in Stanley Crescent were rather unappreciated luxuries.
What did he care for white soups and lobster patties—for entrées and
Italian creams? The human being who had ever thought himself lucky to
sit down to a pound of thinly-sliced beef or ham which he brought in
with him wrapped up in a piece of newspaper; who had purchased American
cheese, and supped on that delicacy in his Hoxton retirement; who had
eaten shrimps at Gravesend, and partaken of Delafield and Co.’s entire
as supplied after due adulteration by the landlord of the “Jolly
Sandboys,” was not likely to contract a passion in his later years for
Anglo-Gallic cookery, for réchauffés and made dishes, for disguised
vegetables and non-comprehensible meats; for sour wines and fashionable
sweets. On such subjects he and Miss Hope stood at opposite poles; and
it was the funniest thing imaginable to hear the two wrangling over the
different opinions which they held. To have heard them talk, any
outsider might have supposed a new religion had been introduced, and
that while the one held there was no safety out of the old faith, the
other believed that to like a good-sized joint was a remnant of
barbarism, a superstition only prevalent amongst the very lowest classes
in the community.
For Miss Hope likewise, Berrie Down was liberty hall; and therefore,
while Mr. Black breakfasted off ham and fowl, eggs, and sirloins of
beef, thick slices of bread and butter, and tea in quantity, the
spinster, seated opposite to him, regaled herself with claret, fruits,
and what Mr. Black vaguely called “green meat”—which meant lettuces,
mustard and cress, and other delicacies of the same primitive nature.
Often Mr. Black openly declared his wonder that “all the trash she eat
did not kill her;” while Miss Hope was eloquent on the subject of
English gluttony, and declared with more candour and politeness that she
had never eaten a dinner in England fit for a civilized human being to
partake of.
“Not,” she added, turning apologetically to Mrs. Dudley, “but that I
consider Mrs. Piggott for England an admirable cook, and if she would
only allow me to give her a few hints, I think you would find a change
for the better, both in your expenditure and in your table.”
Ever ready to meet the views of her husband’s relations, Heather
requested Miss Hope to extend to Mrs. Piggott the benefit of her
experience; only to find, however, that such benefit had been previously
offered and unceremoniously declined in words following—
“If I cooked well enough for your sister, Mr. Arthur’s mamma—Miss Hope,
mum—and if I please Mrs. Dudley, mum, I don’t want no instructions from
you, mum. No offence, I hope; if offence, I humbly beg pardon. I’m too
old to learn new tricks.”
To the truth of which last clause Miss Hope assented with such
unnecessary readiness, that Mrs. Piggott’s temper was excited instead of
mollified; and when the lady in the kindest manner possible subsequently
suggested “going into the kitchen to prepare a few dishes,” Mrs. Piggott
locked herself up in the store-room with a huge Bible and her
spectacles, and sat there till Bessie came to say the performances were
over, and the messes ready for sending to table.
“And messes they be, miss,” declared Mrs. Piggott, after due inspection.
“If Mr. Arthur or Mrs. Dudley either likes that trash, I shall be
greatly astonished; but lor, miss! them old maids is all alike. If it’s
not cats, it’s dogs; and if it’s not dogs, it’s meddling in other
folkses business, and going about from house to house carrying their
nasty prying ways about with them among their luggage. Who ever heard of
boiling lettuce-leaves afore, or of putting onions, and sugar, and eggs
among green pease, spiling the flavour of them? It’s not Christian,
that’s what I say; and you tell me she fried them potatoes in oil; and
that soup—why, it is thick with grease—butter, is it, miss? I wonder how
much she has used! And a quart of cream, do you tell me? Well, if that
is ’conomical cooking, I don’t know what ’conomy is. I hope master will
like his dinner, that is all—I only hope he may.”
Which was about as great a fib as Mrs. Piggott ever uttered; for most
devoutly did she hope the good things Miss Hope had prepared might come
out untasted.
“Poking about, indeed!—messing in the kitchen. I wonder how she would
like me to go into the drawing-room this evening, and offer to play the
pianner to her? Talk about servants knowing their places! It would be
well if ladies learnt theirs, I’m thinking. Her sister would never have
dreamt of doing such a thing; and as for Mr. Arthur’s wife, she is too
soft and easy; she ought to know better than allow such goings on.”
Thus Mrs. Piggott—who, after refusing to take service with the second
Mrs. Dudley, or in the republic which succeeded that lady’s marriage to
Dr. Marsden—had come over to Berrie Down some twelve months after
Heather’s arrival there, and stated that, “having heard a good report of
Mr. Arthur’s wife, she had no objection to serve her, if she were in
want of a cook.”
With which offer Heather closing, Mrs. Piggott a week later entered the
gates of Berrie Down, and virtually resumed possession of all her old
authority. Amongst her goods and chattels were a Bible, a cookery book,
a tea-caddy (with a key), a pair of spectacles, a work-box, and her
marriage lines—all articles without which Mrs. Piggott never travelled.
A staunch Protestant, Mrs. Piggott read her Bible diligently on Sundays,
and on what she called particular occasions—such, for instance, as the
death of a relative, the news of some frightful railway accident,
shipwreck, or colliery explosion, the sickness of any member of the
Berrie Down household, the birth of a child, or in times of special
aggravation.
But if she perused the sacred volume occasionally, she pored over her
cookery book daily. From the valuable receipts it contained she had
culled fragrant flowers in the shape of savoury dishes, curious
puddings, wonderful sweetmeats, and a method of making puff-paste, in
which even the housekeeper at Moorlands had not disdained to request
instruction.
And after that, for Miss Hope to come with “her foreign notions, her
garlic, her shalots, her tarragon, her basil, her clear soups (like
dish-water), her meat done to rags, her vegetables cooked till all
flavour was boiled out of them; her fruit breakfasts, her messy salads,
her pinches of flavouring, her newfangled sauces, her endless dishes,
with not a good mouthful on each.”
If Mrs. Piggott had not, at this trying period, found a sympathizing
listener in Bessie Ormson, for want of vent her indignation must have
killed her; as it was, Bessie took the keen edge off the knife that
stabbed the cook, made fun of Miss Hope and Miss Hope’s stew-pans, and
told poor Mrs. Piggott that the result of the French dinner had been a
failure. “We all unaccountably lost our appetites,” said the young lady,
slyly; “the dishes were capital, no doubt, but then, if one be not
hungry, you know,” and then Miss Ormson looked archly at Mrs. Piggott,
and the pair laughed wickedly.
“I hope you have plenty of cold meat in the larder,” Bessie went on,
“for we shall all be starving by supper time;” and these words proving
prophetic, Mrs. Piggott’s anger was appeased; and next day she unbent so
far as to inform Miss Hope she would not mind watching how she made
“that there sauce,” for she thought it very good indeed.
The conqueror can always afford to be a little generous, and in this
instance Bessie held that Mrs. Piggott acquitted herself with
considerable credit.
“Far be it from me to say the things were in their own nature
detestable,” remarked Miss Ormson to her uncle; “under the
circumstances, I do not think we can tell anything about them. We don’t
jump to the conclusion that an air is unmusical because an utterly
incompetent person attempts to play it, and clearly, Miss Hope knows as
much concerning cookery as I do.”
“There may be something in that,” agreed Mr. Black; “talking about
music, why don’t you play and sing, like your cousins?”
“My brain never would bear the harass and excitement of the sharps and
flats,” answered Bessie, plaintively; and with that reply the promoter,
who had lately taken it into his head every member of the family ought
to do something well, and contribute to the success of the general
social “rising” about to take place, was fain to rest satisfied.
END OF VOL. I.
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