It would be difficult to imagine a life more secluded, more shut in and isolated from the outer world, or a spot more remote from the drawbacks of civilisation; and yet this young couple, wandering in the lanes and over the commons, or gliding along sunlit waters in their picturesque skiff, with its striped red and white sail, and its gaily-coloured Oriental cushions, were the cynosure of several pairs p of eyes, which took heed of the smallest details in their behaviour or their surroundings, and the subject of several very active tongues, a subject which gave new zest to many a five-o’clock tea within driving distance of Lowcombe.
Placid and inoffensive as their lives were, the young people who were known as Mr and Mrs. Hanley had given umbrage to the whole neighbourhood by various omissions and commissions within the six weeks of their residence at the Rosary.
In the first place they had taken no trouble to conciliate the residents among whom they had descended suddenly, or, in the words of the jovial and facetious curate of an adjoining parish, “as if they had been dropped out of a balloon.” They had brought no letters of introduction. They had not explained themselves. They had planted themselves in the very midst of a select and immaculate little community without producing any evidence of their respectability.
“And yet no doubt they expect people to call upon them,” said Lady Isabel Glendower, the help-meet of an ancient Indian General who went to garden-parties in a bath chair, and whose wife and daughters had taken upon themselves a tone of authority in all social matters, based upon the lady’s rank as an earl’s daughter. “Mr. Muschatt actually was going to call. I met him last week riding that wretched old cob towards the Rosary, and was just in time to stop him. ‘Surely you are not going to compromise us by calling on these people,’ I said, ‘until we know more about them.’”
“The foolish old thing saw the young woman on the river the other day, and was so taken by her pretty face that he wanted to know more of her,” said Clara Glendower, who was young and skittish. “He raved to me about her transparent complexion and simple cotton frock. Old men are so silly.”
“I think, Lady Isabel, the less we say about these young people, the better,” said Miss Malcolm, with awful significance. “They are evidently not the kind of persons you would like your daughters to know. A young man, able to spend money as freely as this young man does, cannot be without a circle of friends; and yet I can answer for it that not a creature except the tradesmen’s youths has been to the Rosary for the last six weeks.”
“But if they are honeymooning they may wish to be alone,” suggested Cara.
“Honeymooning! nonsense, child,” retorted Lady Isabel, who prided herself on being outspoken. “I dare say that young woman, in spite of her simple cotton frock, has had as many honeymoons as there are signs in the Zodiac. The most notorious women in London are the women who wear cotton frocks and don’t paint their faces.”
“Mr and Mrs. Hanley have been six weeks at Lowcombe, and have never been to church. That stamps them,” said Mrs. Donovan, at whose luxurious tea-table the conversation took place. The Rector heard the fag end of the debate.
“I must see if I can persuade them to come to church,” he said, in his mild, kindly voice. “It is rather too much of a jump at conclusions to suppose that because they are not church-goers they are disreputable. Half the young men of the present generation are Agnostics and Darwinians, and a good many young women imitate the young men’s agnosticism just as eagerly as they imitate their collars and ties. I am old enough to know that one must make prodigious allowances for the erratic intellect of youth. Whether Muschatt calls on the Hanleys or not, I shall call and find out what manner of people they are. I am sorry I have put it off so long.” The Rector had a way of coming down with the heavy foot of benevolence upon the serpent’s head of village malignity, now and again, on which account he was generally spoken of as an eccentric, and a man who would have been better placed anywhere than in the Church of England; an elderly widower, living with a soft-hearted maiden sister, childless, irresponsible, altogether lax in his ideas of morality, a man who took pity upon fallen village girls, and gave himself infinite trouble to save them from further evil, and to help them to live down their disgrace; a man who had laboured valiantly in the work of female emigration, and to whom almost every mail from the new world brought ill-spelt letters of gratitude and loving remembrance. Such a man the élite of Lowcombe considered should have cast in his lot at the East End of London. In a small settlement of eminently correct people he was out of place. He was too good for the neighbourhood; and the neighbourhood was too good for him.
CHAPTER XX. “SOME DIM DERISION OF MYSTERIOUS LAUGHTER.”
WHILE Mr. Gilstone, the Rector of Lowcombe, whose worst vice was procrastination, was meditating a ceremonious call upon his new parishioners, accident anticipated his design, and brought him face to face with the young woman whose morals and cotton frocks had met with such drastic treatment at Mrs. Donovan’s Thursday tea-drinking.
Sauntering in the Rectory garden on Saturday afternoon Mr. Gilstone’s keen glance was attracted by a figure seated near an old, old tombstone in a corner of the churchyard where his garden wall, in all its wealth of foliage, made an angle with the willowy bank of the river. The sunlight on the white cambric frock gave that seated form and bent brown head an air of something supernal, as it were Dante’s divine lady in the light of Paradise. The Rector stepped upon a little knoll that was level with the top of the wall in order to look down upon the lady sitting by the tomb.
Yes, it was Mrs. Hanley — that Mrs. Hanley of whose antecedents and present way of life Lowcombe spoke shudderingly. He could just distinguish the exquisite profile under the shady straw hat, he could see the delicate ear, transparent in the sunlight, the perfect curve of the throat rising from a loosely tied lace handkerchief, the graceful lines of the slender girlish figure in the plain white gown. No art bad been used to enhance that perfect beauty, and none was needed. The purity of the white gown, the simplicity of the Tuscan hat, were in harmony with that placid and ideal loveliness.
“Poor child, I hope with all my heart that all is well with her,” mused the Rector, as he stepped down from the grassy knoll, and strolled to the gate opening into the churchyard, and then with quiet step made his way to the tomb against which Hester was sitting, on a grassy ridge, over which periwinkle and St. John’s wort had been allowed to run riot, half covering the crumbling grey stones and clothing the cumbrous early Georgian sepulchre with fresh young beauty. This was a corner of God’s Acre in which the Rector permitted a careless profusion of foliage, a certain artistic neglect that was part of his plan.
The lady was reading, and on looking down at her book, Mr. Gilstone saw that she was reading Shelley’s “Alastor.”
She looked up at the sound of his footfall among the leaves, and then calmly resumed her reading. He drew nearer, hat in had.
“Allow me to introduce myself to you, Mrs. Hanley,” he said, in his pleasant voice. “I have been meaning to call upon you and Mr. Hanley for a long time, but indolence and procrastination are the vices of old men. Seeing you just now from my garden I thought I might snatch the opportunity of making friends with you here on my own ground.”
She had risen in confusion, blushing violently, with a scalding rush of crimson over brow and cheeks, and her heart beating with almost suffocating force. A criminal upon whose shoulder the law had just laid its iron hand could hardly have suffered more. In that one moment Hester Davenport realised what it was to be a social pariah. It was as if she had awakened suddenly from a dream of bliss to find herself alone in the cold workaday world, face to face with a judge who had power to denounce and punish.
“Pray, sit down,” said the old man, “and let us have a little chat.” He seated himself on the low boundary wall — lowest just at this part of the churchyard, where the fairy spleen-wort grew in every chink of the crumbling stones.
“You have been my neighbours for some time,” said th
e Rector, “and yet I have seen so little of you. I am sorry you don’t come to my church — but perhaps you are people who object to our simple village services, and you go further afield.”
“We do not go to any church,” Hester faltered. “It would be only hypocrisy if we were to join in services which have very little meaning for us. We honour and love the Gospel for all that is true and beautiful in it, but we cannot believe as you and your congregation believe, and so it is better to stop away from church.”
“You are very young to have joined the great army of unbelievers,” said the Rector, with no change in the gentleness of his tone, or the friendly light of his eyes. He had heard too many young people prattle of their agnosticism to be particularly shocked or startled at the words of unbelief from these girlish lips. “Were you brought up in a household of infidels — were your early teachers unbelievers?”
“Oh no. I was once a Christian,” she answered, with a stifled sob. “I once believed without questioning — believed in the divinity of Christ, believed that He could heal the sick and raise the dead, believed that He was near me at all hours of my life, nearest when I was in deepest sorrow.”
“And when did you cease to believe in His presence — when did you lose the assurance of a Saviour who could pity your sorrows and understand your temptations?”
“Doubt came gradually, with thought, and thinking over the thoughts of others far wiser than myself.”
“Mr. Hanley, your husband, is an agnostic, I take it?”
The drooping head bent a little lower; the hand on the open book turned a leaf or two with a restless movement.
“He does not believe in miracles,” she answered reluctantly.
“Nor in a life to come — nor in an Almighty God to whom we are all accountable for our actions. I know the creed of the youthful Freethinker — universal liberty; liberty to follow the bent of his own desires and his own passions wherever they may lead him; and for the rest the Gospel of Humanity, which means tall talk about the grandeur and wisdom of man in the abstract, combined with a comfortable indifference to the wants and sorrows of man in the concrete, man at Bethnal Green or Haggerstone. Oh, I know what young men are,” exclaimed the Rector, with indignant scorn; “how shallow, how arrogant, how ready to absorb the floating opinions of their day, and to take ready-made ideas for the results of original thought. Frankly, now, Mrs. Hanley, is it only since your marriage that you have been an infidel?”
Hester faltered a reluctant “Yes.”
And then, after a brief pause, she began to plead for the man she idolised.
“Indeed, he is not shallow or ignorant,” she said. “He has thought long and deeply upon the religions of the world, has brooded over those instincts which lead the hopes and desires of all of us to a life beyond — an unseen universe. He is not a strong man — he may never live to be old — indeed I sometimes fear he will not, and we have both talked often and long about that other world which we once believed in. We should be so much happier if we could believe — if we could hope that when death parts us it will not be for ever. But how can we hope for the impossible — how can we shut our eyes to the revelations of science — the fixed, immutable laws which hem us in on every side, and show us of what we are made and what must be our end?”
“Dust we are, and to dust we must return,” said the Rector, “but do you think there is nothing outside the dust — nothing that will survive and ripen to more perfect life when this poor clay is under the sod. Do you think that the innate belief of all human kind carries no moral weight against the narrow laws of existence under the conditions and restrictions in which we know it; conditions and restrictions which may be changed in a moment by the fiat of Omnipotence, as the earth is changed by an earthquake or the ocean by a storm? Who, looking at the placid, smiling sea could conceive the fury and the force of a tempest if he had never seen one? You would find it as difficult to believe in that level water lifted mountains high, or in the racing surf, as to believe in the survival of intellect and identity, the passage from a known life here to an unknown life hereafter. The philosophers of these latter days call the unknown the unknowable, or the unthinkable, and suppose they have settled and made an end of everything which they cannot understand. But I am not going to preach sermons out of church, Mrs. Hanley. I am much more interested in you than in your opinions. At your age opinions change, and change again — but the personality remains pretty much the same. Even if you and your husband don’t come to church you are my parishioners, and I want to know more of you. I hope you both like Lowcombe?”
“Oh, it is far more than liking. We both love the place.”
“And you mean to live among us? You will not grow tired of the river, even when winter sheds a gentle greyness over all that is now so brilliant? There are people who say they are fond of the country — in summer. Take my word for it, the souls of those people are never far from Oxford Street. To love the country one must know and admire every phase and every subtle change of every season. Awakening from a long sleep one should be able to say at the first glance across the woods and hills—’ this is mid-October or this is March.’ One should know the season almost to a week. You are not one of those who only care for a midsummer landscape, I hope?”
“No, indeed! I love the country always — and I hate London.” The shudder with which the last words were spoken gave earnestness to the avowal.
“You have not been happy in London,” said the Rector, his quick ear catching a deeper meaning than the words expressed.
“I have been very unhappy there.”
“And here you are quite happy. As a girl you had troubles; your surroundings were not all you could wish; but your wedded life is perfectly happy, is it not?”
“Utterly happy.”
“Come to church, then, my dear Mrs. Hanley. Come and kneel in our village church — the old, old church, where so many have knelt, and given thanks in joy, and been comforted in affliction. Come and give thanks to God for your happiness. It is not for you, who scarcely know what mathematics mean, to refuse to believe in a God because His existence cannot be mathematically demonstrated. Your own heart must tell you that you have need of God, that you have need of a conscience outside your own conscience, a wisdom above your own wisdom. Come and kneel among us, and give God thanks that your lines have been set in pleasant places — and, since I am told you are rich, come and work among our poor. It is good for the young and prosperous to interest themselves in the old and needy. I f you go among our cottagers at first as a duty, and perhaps thinking it au unpleasant duty, you will soon come to love the work for its own sake. There is sweetness in your face that tells me your heart will open to the unhappy.”
“I love visiting the poor,” Hester answered, brightening a little at this suggestion. “I have been poor, and know what poverty means. I should like to go about among your cottagers — if — if my husband” — she faltered at the word, in spite of all those broader ideas which Gerard had taught her—” if my husband will let me.”
“He could hardly refuse you the happiness of making others a little happier — you who possess all the material elements of happiness in superabundance. I feel assured Mr. Hanley will consent to your devoting a few of your leisure hours to my cottagers. I will only send you to wholesome cottages, and really deserving people. But, as they are all good churchmen, I want you to come to church first. They are sure to talk to you about the church services, and you will be embarrassed, and they will be shocked if you have to say that you never go to church. I can’t tell you what that means to simple people, for whom church is the ante-chamber of heaven. To them it is anathema maranatha, the abomination of desolation.”
“I cannot go to church,” said Hester, with averted face.
“Not even to thank God for your happy life, for your marriage with the man you love?”
“No, no, no!”
“Then my dear young lady, you lead me to think that thi3 seemingly happy union is one fo
r which you dare not thank God; or in plain speech that you are not Mr. Hanley’s wife.”
Her sobs were her only answer. All those grand theories of universal liberty, of virtue that knew not law, which she had taken to her heart of late, all she had learned at second-hand from Gerard, and at first-hand from Shelley, vanished out of her mind, and she sat by the Rector’s side crushed by the weight of her sin, as deeply convinced of her own shame and worthlessness as she who knelt amidst the accusing Pharisees and waited for the punishment of the old law, unexpectant of the new law of pardon.
“I am sorry for you, my dear young lady, deeply and truly sorry. You were not born for a life of degradation.”
“There is no degradation,” protested Hester, through her tears; “my love for him and his for me is too complete and true ever to mean degradation. He has read much and thought much, and has got beyond old codes and worn-out institutions. I am as much and as truly his wife as if we had been married in your church yonder.”
“But you are not his lawful wife, and other wives, down to the humblest peasant woman in this village, will think badly of you, and all Christian women will think you a sinner — a sinner to be pitied and loved perhaps, but a sinner all the same. Why should that be? There is no other tie, I hope? Mr. Hanley is not a married man?”
“Oh no, no!”
“Thank God! Then he must marry you. It will be my duty to put the matter before him in the right light.”
“Oh, pray do not interfere,” exclaimed Hester. “He would think I had come to you to complain — he would love me less, perhaps — would think me designing, selfish, caring only for myself. There is nothing in life I care for but his happiness, and he is perfectly happy now. He knows that I am devoted to him, that I would give my life for him—”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 917