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The Rector's Daughter

Page 10

by F. M. Mayor


  DORA REDLAND.

  P.S. – I shall not say again that the best women don’t marry!

  This letter encouraged Mary’s hopes. Was she wise?

  Canon Jocelyn was away for the night preaching when the letter came. Mary had the whole day alone to rejoice in. She called at a distant farm. She was past walking; she danced through the fields. There were some children there, idealized by her. She loved children passionately, she had sometimes thought it was better not to be with them too much; they roused a longing which turned her against ordinary life. She did not shrink from them today.

  When she got back she lit a lamp and went into the disused nursery. The Rectory was too large for them now; they shut some of the rooms up. She opened the dolls’ house and took out her favourite dolls. Thought moves so fast, she had pictures crowding before her of her babies, and boys and girls, and their different likenesses to him. She peopled the empty room. ‘Miss Mary,’ said Cook crossly, after knocking at the door unnoticed, ‘didn’t you hear the dinner-bell? Emma went to look for you down the road, we got so anxious, and then I saw the light under the door.’

  It was half-past seven, and she had imagined it was five o’clock.

  She was restless during dinner, wandering about under the plea to herself that she was looking for a book to read. After dinner she dashed off three sheets of exuberance to Dora. Of ecstatic personal happiness she had hitherto had none; it went to her head.

  She came to her ordinary senses next morning. She could not remember last night’s letter clearly, but there was a sentence, ‘When he opens his eyes wide they transport me.’ She went to the post-office and asked for the letter back. In vain it was explained it was against the regulations.

  ‘I must have it,’ said she. When Miss Jocelyn spoke in that tone it was difficult to resist her. She knew the village would not rest till they had probed the mystery; today that was a trifle. She was too late; the letter reached Dora. It was incomprehensible to her that Mary could have written it. The second following it immediately did not entirely obliterate the impression.

  ‘Will you burn that letter? I have not had a mood like that since I was sixteen. I have a very unbalanced side, I am thankful to Father for checking it. I have been reading Bacon’s Essays this morning. I think he and his contemporaries took a very hard view of human nature,’ etc. The rest of the letter was all Bacon.

  Mr Herbert wrote almost as soon as he reached Buxton, a friend’s letter, with no word of anything else, but it satisfied Mary perfectly. She answered it at once; then there was an interval. When she got the awaited letter she was disappointed. It was enclosed in a bulky, promising envelope. But it was short, almost entirely about the photographs of surrounding scenery accompanying it, and, yes – it was dull. This time she did not answer it at once. Then there was a still longer interval.

  One morning when they were at breakfast the third letter came. It filled only half a sheet. She read the opening sentence. ‘We have known one another only a few months, yet I feel you are an old and dear friend.’ She glanced at another sentence lower down in a kind of fever. ‘You will laugh at me when I tell you the first moment I set eyes on you –’ She could not read further for a moment. Rapture, certainty, uncertainty, a little fear, and particularly that it was too much and she could not bear it all struggled within her. She read some other letters – Aunt Lottie’s meanderings. She could come, couldn’t come, ‘but it is all as you and your father think best.’ She went back to Mr Herbert, and she saw a half-sentence, ‘Kathy, as they all call her,’ and then somewhere else ‘she’ and ‘her.’ She looked more closely, and read some lines without their meaning anything. The idea that her brain was going made her turn cold. She drank some coffee; she could do that at any rate, and understand what she was doing. She took the letter again; she found she could understand it now, and read it all through.

  My Dear Miss Jocelyn – We have known one another only a few months, but I feel you are an old and dear friend, to whom I must confide my wonderful happiness. I am engaged to be married to Miss Kathleen Hollings – Kathy, as they all call her. You remember we both met her at the Merytons. I only got to know her six weeks ago, and you will laugh at me when I tell you that the first moment I set eyes on her I had decided what I wanted (it was ‘her,’ not ‘you’; Mary had mistaken the pronouns), and have been simply pumping up my courage to tell her ever since. The necessary pitch was attained yesterday. I am returning to Lanchester on Wednesday, and shall hope to call on you and your father as soon as I get back. – Yours most sincerely,

  R. HERBERT.

  ‘Father,’ said Mary, ‘here is a very interesting letter you must see.’

  He read it twice, being slower than she was in taking in a new fact. He handed it back, and said, ‘I am sorry he is marrying a girl of twenty-two. It is a mistake; the distance is too great.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Mary. ‘It sounds blissful.’

  She hoped her voice sounded interested to the exact pitch of cordial friendship. After breakfast, besides Cook, there were several village people coming to see her for help, advice, chit-chat, and, with some children whose mother was ill, games and fun. These duties were a support. It was the leisure of afternoon she dreaded. She determined to tell Cook in the middle of the orders. The news came in well, following naturally on Cook’s announcement of a niece’s engagement.

  Cook answered suitably. ‘Well there, that’s what he was after all the time.’ Mary hoped to slip away from the subject, but Cook did not keep the suitability up; she suddenly burst into tears. ‘Oh, my own Miss Mary,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought it was going to be you; we all did, every one of us.’

  Mary threw her arms round her. ‘Cook, darling, you mustn’t,’ said she. She bit her lips and tried to keep calm; she felt her own tears coming. She longed to get Cook’s sympathy. It was a relief to hear it had not all been a foolish spinster’s fancy. Yet she writhed at the intrusion on her confidence.

  ‘It’s an entire mistake,’ she said. ‘If there were nothing else you know, I couldn’t leave home.’ She considered truth all-important, but when it came to the point, the pride of a lady was her first consideration. She found comfort in hugging Cook’s skinny shoulder, but she recovered herself quickly, and hurried on to the mothers’ tea.

  Her business over, she went to her own room, and when she re-read the letter her tears flowed fast. Hardly had they begun, before Emma was after her, ostensibly to ask her a question, really to sympathize. Mary dismissed her fractiously, and wished for the first and last time in her life she lived in London, where sympathy was not so omnipresent.

  ‘Poor thing, she does take on, Cook,’ cried Emma, flying to the kitchen.

  Nature failed Mary at this pinch. The days just then were dashing and magnificent, large white clouds, brilliant ultramarine sky, all colours standing out vividly from sunshine and recent rain. Everything looked arrogantly happy.

  Cook told inquirers that Mary had refused Mr Herbert and that he had become engaged out of pique, but the village preferred the truth.

  Was it another case of ‘the fraud of man was ever so’? Mary did not think so. She in her inexperience had imagined what had never been.

  Alas for her, Mr Herbert had found the beautiful Miss Hollings staying at his hotel with her aunt and uncle. One beaming smile, and the mischief was done. He was frantic with devotion. The feeling for Mary seemed only to have prepared his heart. Now he could allow his natural desire to expand, he was extremely susceptible. When he thought of Mary he did not feel he was deserting her. What he had imagined for a short time to be love was on both sides nothing more than friendship. Thus Cupid deluded him. A man who knew more of women might have perceived that Mary was in love with him. He remembered he had thought there might be hope for him; he was sure he had been mistaken. He wrote without any arrière pensée. There was no notion of waiting now. He was in a desperate hurry, only terrified by his own audacity. If he had not been distinguished-looking and re
served, his passion might almost have been silly.

  The neighbourhood had, of course, already given Mary in marriage to Mr Herbert, but in joyous excitement at an engagement it at once threw Mary over and applauded Kathy. Still, all could not forget that Mary was left in the lurch. Some showed their sympathy by special squeezes when they shook hands. Mary was glad to find she could assume unconsciousness, and start the topic of the engagement herself.

  The recollection of her bubbling-over letter made her shrink from Dora. She wrote the fact with no comments. The rest of the letter was filled with ordinary news.

  ‘Is there anything wrong, dear?’ said Mrs Redland as Dora read the letter at breakfast. ‘You look so flushed.’

  ‘No,’ said Dora. ‘Oh no, Mother dear, only Mary Jocelyn seems rather poorly. I was wondering if I could get to Dedmayne for a night or two.’

  ‘Does she, poor child? Yes, she was always an anaemic little thing. Ask her to come here for a little change if she would like it,’

  ‘To think that Mr Herbert should have become engaged to that disagreeable Miss Hollings,’ wrote Dora. ‘I do not even think she is so very good-looking as you do. Her mouth is too large. I am afraid it is not likely to be a success. Dearest Mary, if Miss Hollings is the kind of girl he cares for, you need not regret him.’

  Mary declined Dora’s proposal to visit Dedmayne.

  ‘Thank you very much for thinking of it,’ she wrote, ‘but the day after tomorrow is the confirmation, which always gives extra work, and as Cook has had a rheumatic turn, I want her to be doing as little as possible until she is better. She has been making fig and ginger jam from such a nice recipe Mrs Davis gave her. Cook has never tried it before. Emma is taking the letters to Barkham, so I will not say more, as I want you to get this at once.’

  There was no word of Kathy or Mr Herbert.

  But Mary’s pride broke down; a moan followed. ‘I was not ungrateful to you, no one ever had a better friend, but for the present I would rather be alone. I tried not to love him, but it overwhelmed me like a flood. I am sure he is right about Miss Hollings, and that she is everything he thinks her.’ She would not face the possibility of Mr Herbert’s being unhappy in his love.

  Dora tried her best to understand Mary’s feeling for Mr Herbert. In vain. She thought of her old days. Her love for Will, her strongest emotion, had been but a faint shadow of Mary’s.

  Life passed as usual at Dedmayne. Canon Jocelyn was writing his sermon for the Cathedral, so that he was rather particularly immersed in his own thoughts. One evening at dinner Mary sat without saying a word. Tonight she felt that if she spoke she would rail. ‘And he would not care if I railed or if I were dead.’

  After dinner she did not go as usual into the drawing-room. She rushed to the nursery. A large yellow moon was shining in. She could see the furniture quite well: the children’s little chairs, nurse’s low chair, the dolls’-house, and her dear rocking-horse – all looking like ghosts. It seemed a room of the dead. She remembered her last visit there, full of baseless hopes that the room might be itself again. Now it and all it contained were in their graves for ever. ‘And Mother is dead,’ she thought, ‘and Ruth, and old nurse, and the children that used to play here are more dead than the real dead – the boys are quite lost to me, and Father, the father who used to carry me on his shoulder, is deadest of all, for he never, never shows what he used to be.’ She cried out: ‘I am thirty-six, and I may go on fifty years. I take after father’s family; they all drag on to ninety.’

  ‘If there were children,’ she thought, ‘they would make everything happy, including the grown-up people. But a house without children has nothing, and is nothing, and the grown-up people in it are dead, even if they have to wait fifty years to be buried.’ She sat on till she heard the bell ring for prayers.

  But her father was not as indifferent as she thought.

  After prayers, when he was bidding goodnight, he laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I think we are letting ourselves get too silent. I have been missing your laugh at dinner. Shall we ask Dora to come and cheer us up? No one knows better than I do that I am a dull companion for a young thing like you. She who made it bright for us all is gone.’

  She kissed him, hoping that the tears which rushed to her eyes would not fall on his cheek. She could tell him nothing. She had been having toothache, she said. ‘That has made me stupid. But I will ask Dora. Thank you for suggesting it.’ She felt he would think her cold and ungrateful, but for once he understood her. He had observed the growing attachment of his daughter and Mr Herbert. In old age’s procrastinating way – for old age often thinks there is immeasurable time for important things though hurry for trifles – he had contemplated a possible engagement at some distant date. He grieved for her, but doing as he would be done by, he let fall no word of sympathy. He had some fear of a scene. He remembered her as a schoolgirl, effusive and given to repentant outbursts. After the disastrous fashion of his generation, he would not trouble himself to see that time had passed and she had grown out of that stage years ago.

  She walked to the door. Then she felt she must not miss the chance. She turned back and said, ‘I don’t mind loneliness, I shouldn’t mind anything if I thought you cared.’

  If he had repelled her she would not have been heart-broken, but she could not have helped despising him. At last he let his real feeling out. He said, stammering with the unusual effort, ‘I do care – I care very much.’

  She wanted no more. She said, ‘Do you, Father? Thank you,’ and went upstairs.

  To think that her laughs were noticed. They were sometimes hard work; they had to be loud for her father to hear, and not too loud lest they should appear ‘unrestrained.’ She smiled that she, oppressively middle-aged as she felt herself, was a laughing young thing. He very rarely mentioned Mrs Jocelyn. Mary would have liked to hear and talk of her. He, after a bygone habit of mind, thought the dead too sacred to mention.

  At that moment, in tenderness for her father, Mary could feel content that Mr Herbert had not loved her. This feeling was intensified by a letter she had just then from Lucille, her American sister-in-law, the wife of her eldest brother Hugh. He had lately married in middle life. He had been in the United States for twenty years, and had seldom revisited Dedmayne. ‘I want you to read some of Hugh’s letters,’ Lucille wrote, ‘just to show you a little how dear and lovely he is to me.’

  Mary thought that Lucille must have sent one letter by mistake when she read the following passage:

  ‘My own best and dearest, if you knew how I am throwing myself at your feet in gratitude at your love. I have never imagined any one could love me, and you – I have had an utterly loveless life; partly my own fault, I know. Since my mother’s death – her loss was unspeakable for all of us – we never had any tenderness at home. My aunt was a worthy woman, I suppose, and my father did his best to inculcate in us his own high principles. For this I am grateful, and I respect him, nothing more. You have literally opened paradise to me.’

  It was an incredible letter from the cool, fastidious Hugh, never much excited about anything or anybody.

  Mary’s sympathy should have been for Hugh. She did not think of him. She flung the letter down; she cried out, ‘Oh, Father, my darling father.’

  She would have felt more sorry still if she had seen into Canon Jocelyn’s mind.

  An old clerical friend came to see Canon Jocelyn one afternoon.

  ‘So you say all your sons are out of England, Jocelyn,’ said he. ‘That often has to be, but I should be very thankful that I have my two close by. They have livings a few miles off, and are constantly over. We talk over everything and help one another. When one is old it’s a great thing to have sons to turn to. We lost our little daughter, but we often say how good God has been to give us such sons.’

  And the mild, affectionate old man went on prattling till the visit was over.

  Canon Jocelyn did not listen with much show of interest, Mary supposed be
cause he disliked any mention of God in common talk. But it was not that. He was cut to the heart with envy. ‘We talk over everything and help one another.’

  ‘I am nothing to my sons,’ he thought, ‘and never have been.’ He could not understand why he had failed. He had not had a natural tenderness and delight in children and boys and girls. Without it, it is difficult to become intimate all at once with grown-up sons and daughters. Yet at the birth of his eldest son he had expected much. He could remember an evening walk alone, when he had been transported from his somewhat cold self with hopes of what that son might be to him. None had been realized. His mind turned to his daughter, and he was comforted. Mary was not what a son would have been to him; in certain respects she may have been more. He would like to have shown his grateful tenderness. Shyness stopped him. If it had been Mr Herbert, he might have found words. He did not know what to say. If he had known, would he have said it? Sometimes that generation seemed to use language chiefly to hide its thoughts. He could only go to the cellar. Mary heard him fumbling and stumbling. Soon he was back again, with a bottle in his hands. She knew he disliked questions, and said nothing. It was the Madeira he kept for clergy of the right sort.

  ‘Let me induce you, Mary,’ he said at dinner, ‘to try a glass of this Madeira. It’s an excellent wine, and’ (in the warmth of his feeling he said ‘and,’ not ‘but’) ‘it is particularly well suited to ladies.’

 

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