The Rector's Daughter

by F. M. Mayor

  The little girl looked as if she might grow into such another as her mother, but when Dora saw her and the baby boy at tea in the old nursery, she felt, although the Rectory had been, as far as possible, turned into a morsel of Brixton, Mary would be content.

  Dora’s affection urged her to do something with Mary’s writings. She wrote to Brynhilda, who still saw Ella from time to time. After hearing from Brynhilda, she sent the packet. Among the papers, unnoticed by Dora, was the envelope containing Mr Herbert’s love-letter; with it was Mary’s translation from the Spanish. They struck awe into Brynhilda. She felt Mr Herbert and Mary were in a region she never had entered, she never could enter. She showed the poem and letter to Dermott. He read them and threw them into the fire.

  ‘You have shown me what should have been as sacred as a confession.’ said he as they watched them burn, ‘but I believe I’ve said before you have no conception what friendship means.’

  ‘One moment,’ said Brynhilda musingly, ‘I suppose that was all. She had a life so shrivelled it became absurd. She ought to have been married to that man and been happy. People one knows marry, and divorce, and have children, and are bored the whole time. How crazy it all is, and how tragic.’

  ‘Yes, you have all the sentimentality of an atheist,’ said Dermott.

  ‘Mary had a pull over us in a way,’ said Brynhilda. ‘She cared, and we can’t care, not much, and never for long, not even for big things, and after a time they aren’t big, but quite, quite small.’

  ‘I shan’t try and get her things published,’ said Dermott. ‘I was wrong about them. The average is just the Anglican spinster warbling, but something emerges occasionally – an odd cry from the heart, or whatever there is beyond the heart, and one feels she’s curiously complete.’

  29

  When Mary died Kathy was very sorry. She had too robust a nature to feel remorse that she had not seen more of her; besides it never occurred to her that people would care sufficiently to be disappointed if they did not see her.

  Mr Herbert had been asked to take the funeral service.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Crab,’ said Kathy, ‘not to the house, of course – they won’t want me – but just to the church. I should like to be there. She was rather mad, but awfully nice, almost the nicest woman I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she was.’ His thoughts were elsewhere. Presently he went on, ‘Kathy, do you mind not coming?’

  ‘All right. Why?’

  ‘I would rather not tell you today; I will later.’

  ‘You feel it awfully, don’t you?’ she said, laying her hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry. You liked the old man so much too.’

  He nodded his head and went out of the room. He was very sad and silent for weeks afterwards, but when he was depressed – and he was a man given to fits of dejection – his wife never probed him, but left him to find his way back to cheerfulness. She liked his reserve. With her he was reserved; he would not have been with Mary. Kathy would have felt him rather namby-pamby if he had often opened his heart to her.

  One afternoon he came to her and said, ‘Dearest, I want to tell you something.’

  He spoke so solemnly that she looked at him in astonishment. Then, with much hesitation and difficulty, he stammered out to her what he had felt for Mary. During their engagement he had told her that he had a passing fancy for another woman. He had never mentioned the name. Kathy could not believe him.

  ‘You loved Mary, Mary Jocelyn,’ she kept repeating, ‘and she loved you. Well, I should have thought, after me, you could have found some one not quite so –’ ‘awfully plain,’ she was going to say, but stopped herself.

  He was not listening to her.

  ‘You kissed her only once; you are sure it was only once? When was it?’

  ‘It was when you were abroad on the Riviera.’

  ‘I see. Well, you know I don’t look back on that time with any satisfaction.’

  ‘At any rate, you can look back on it with more satisfaction than I can. I don’t forgive myself –’ He broke off. ‘I can’t talk of it.’ This made her laugh.

  ‘But you did care for me when we first married?’

  ‘You know I did.’

  ‘Yes, I know you did. Still, it’s a bit confusing. First of all you loved her, and then you loved me, and then you loved her, and then you loved me – a Box and Cox kind of arrangement.* Not very complimentary for either of us.’

  He frowned in misery.

  Another thought struck her.

  ‘Then it was pity, just beastly pity, that evening I came back, and you were trying to be kind to me.’

  ‘No,’ said he, ‘it wasn’t; you’re wrong; it wasn’t pity.’

  ‘Honour bright?’ she smiled. ‘Well, I’ll believe you. Anyhow, it’s no use worrying over it now.’

  ‘I had Stocky and you had Mary.’ She was going to say this, then felt the comparison did not quite suit.

  ‘Never mind, cheer up,’ said she, and laughed again. Her mind turned from herself to Mary. ‘And she only had one kiss, poor, dear Mary,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘I wanted to be alone with her this half-hour of her funeral,’ he said.

  She flushed with jealousy, but she mastered it, and said in a gentler voice than was usual with her, ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘We never met again,’ said Mr Herbert, ‘till she came to see you when you were ill, and by that time – long before that time, in fact, immediately after I spoke to her, I believe – it was over with her. I have often thought how she must have despised me for what I did.’

  ‘For kissing her? Oh, I don’t think that’s likely,’ said Kathy sharply and dryly, partly jealous of Mary, partly ruffling up that any one so plain should dare to despise her husband.

  ‘Don’t –’ he began.

  ‘All right,’ said she, and was silent.

  Afterwards she said, ‘Crab, I should like to know –’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps I’d better not ask you.’

  ‘Ask anything,’ he said; ‘I want you to know it all.’

  ‘You loved her with real love, not a sort of heavenly thing up in the sky?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘You did. No, I won’t say anything against her. She was good to me when I hated everybody else and was altogether rotten. However, that’s all over now.’ She waited a moment, thinking; her brain always moved slowly. At last she said, ‘You don’t wish now you’d married her?’

  ‘No, no, that feeling died long ago.’

  ‘And when did you stop loving her?’

  ‘Never,’ he said. ‘I feel exactly the same to her now.’ The lady at the Broadstairs boarding-house was right. It had been Mary’s lot to meet the exceptional man in whom she could inspire deep and lasting love. ‘But that doesn’t make me love you the less, darling,’ Mr Herbert went on, trying to take her hand, but she I withdrew it.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I thought only Mohammedans were supposed to have two wives at the same time.’

  ‘How can you talk in that way?’ he said, flushing.

  ‘How else am I to talk when a respectable parson is in love with two people at once? That’s quite a different thing from one after another, you know. Which was the chief wife?’

  ‘Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, speak like that.’ She was startled at his vehemence. ‘We owe it to her we found one another again.’

  ‘Now you’re making matters distinctly worse.’

  ‘It would have been better never to have spoken of it,’ he exclaimed bitterly.

  ‘I don’t know, only it’s rather amusing that when you were welcoming me back as a lost lamb you were just as lost yourself. Of course that cat was never let out of the bag. It was I who did all the going down on my knees. I say, what a cad I am, when it was you who really did go down on your knees.’

  Another thought struck her, and she laughed disagreeably.

  ‘After all, when I supposed I don’t know what all about you, you were just
like all the other men. How quaint! There was a cynicism in her tone which he had never heard when she spoke to him, only when she spoke to Lesbia.

  ‘I can’t speak for other men,’ he said, ‘but I had never flattered myself that I was no worse than other people. On the contrary, when I–’

  ‘Don’t.’ She interrupted him roughly. ‘Don’t gas about it. It’s no good talking any more. I shall only say cattish things about Mary. If you go for a walk in one direction, I’ll go for a walk in another. I should think it would be better for all parties. We may both feel better and brighter when we meet again.’

  She strode along the fields, banging at some thistles with her stick. She, young and beautiful, had been ousted by a plain, middle-aged woman. It was to the plain, middle-aged woman she owed her restored happiness.

  ‘If one is going to be chucked, I’d rather he’d do it with professionals. That’s playing the game, and at any rate they’re smart.’

  She said this two or three times out of spite, knowing how repelled her husband was when she relapsed into aristocratic coarseness. The thought of old Mrs Herbert’s anguish at such a speech added a zest. But her mind was not cheered for long; waves of jealousy kept rushing over her and made her grind her teeth.

  She suddenly recollected how she had chaffed Mary because she had had no admirers. Her face became scarlet.

  ‘What a damned fool I made of myself,’ she cried. ‘How she must have chuckled. No, she wouldn’t do that, though; poor old Towzer, she could never chuckle.’

  The friendly thought gave way to a bitter one. ‘Now one understands why she was always rooting about Lanchester. She had to go and have a scene with him after fluffing round me.’

  This she knew to be an unfair charge. Mary’s face came before her. She broke into an indignant laugh, but it brought back the hours of nervous misery when Mary had comforted her. She remembered how Mary had at first refused to come. ‘I suppose she hated me really.’ She remembered, too, asking whether Mr Herbert loved her from pity, and Mary’s answer, ‘I am sure it was never pity; I am absolutely certain of it.’ ‘And she knew all the time,’ thought Kathy. Then she recollected how Mary had cried when they kissed. She sighed impatiently. ‘It’s beyond me.’ But the memory of those tears made her whisper, ‘Poor old Mary,’ not that she realized all Mary had suffered.

  She was not of a jealous nature – she had so little vanity – and her thick-skinned wholesomeness of disposition stood her in good stead. It was easier for her to be reconciled to Mary than for Mary to be reconciled to her. ‘Only, why couldn’t he have let well alone?’ she thought as she made her way home. ‘Any other husband would have kept dark about it; still, of course, he’s not any other husband. That’s where I was wrong; he’s not like all the other men.’ She smiled; she murmured tenderly, ‘He’s such a baby, just three and a half.’

  Mr Herbert wandered miserably about the lanes. To him there had been anguish in the confession. Her levity over it had scorched him up. He was distracted by her outburst, as if some disturbance of Nature had occurred; she was usually so easy and equable. She was able to talk in an ordinary way at dinner, while he was in a nervous paroxysm of remorse and agonizing irritation.

  After dinner she came and sat by him in the study. ‘My dear old boy,’ said she, ‘it’s beastly forgiving and that kind of thing, so let’s both settle we’ve done all that. Don’t brood about the Mohammedans and the other rotten things I said any more. I’m glad now you told me; I’d rather know. It’s no good denying that I did mind, and I do still, and I’m jealous of Mary, which is horrid. I think I shall be pleased in the end that she had anybody like you to love her, and even that you go on loving her. If I am to owe you to anybody, I’d rather it was to Mary, because she was so sweet. You were both awfully good to me, much too good.’ She was now in his arms.

  ‘Lesbia said one day she was the sort you ought to have married, and I see now she was right. I wish for you I had died when I came back, and then you could have married Mary. She was better than me.’

  ‘Don’t, don’t,’ he said, shuddering and clasping her tightly.

  ‘Now you’ve got me, you must put up with me,’ she said, partly laughing, partly sobbing. He did not answer her, because he could not speak. When he could, he said, ‘It isn’t necessary for us to begin to say what we are to one another at this time of day. You’re everything in the world to me, but, dearest, there is in special place in my heart for Mary, and there always will be.’

  ‘All right, old Crab,’ said she. ‘Go into your Bluebeard’s cupboard and lock the door when you like, only don’t stay long, because, remember, I can’t do without you.’

  She asked him if he possessed any memento of Mary. He said nothing but one short note. Before his marriage he had thrown Mary’s letters away in the general tidying up for the bride. He showed her solemnly the note with the few words, ‘Thursday is the day that will suit us best,’ which had cost so much to write. Kathy had a schoolboy impulse to laugh at any one cherishing ‘Thursday is the day that will suit us best’ as a love-letter, but second thoughts made its meaning clearer. She had sometimes chaffed Mary about Thursday and the Infirmary, and she said seriously and almost solemnly, ‘I think Mary was a trump.’

  ‘Have you got a photograph of her?’ she asked. She wanted, and she did not want, to look a moment on her rival’s face.

  ‘No,’ said he, rather shyly. ‘I never wanted one.’

  ‘No, I remember; she came out almost a freak in a photograph,’ said Kathy sympathetically.

  But that was not quite the reason, for no photograph, no speaking portrait, could have captured what he loved so much in her – that depth and intensity of feeling which rarely showed itself in her face, or even in her words. He could find it in his county’s winds, which she had relished in every part of her. When these winds came, whether the great equinoctial blasts of autumn, or the rough, blustering gales of March, or the hurricanes of August, roaring through the branches bowed down by the heavy late-summer leafage, then Mary came also. She seemed quite close to him, walking by his side again in the garden at Lanchester, where he first began to love her.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  Monthly Packets: Magazine associated with the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its first editor was the novelist Charlotte Yonge, who is referred to elsewhere in the novel.

  Alcaics: Verses in the style of the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus.

  tippets: ‘A long narrow piece of cloth formerly attached to a hood or sleeve, or worn loose around the neck’ (SOED) as worn by members of New College, Oxford.

  Poll degree: An ordinary (pass) degree.

  Eppure si muove: ‘And yet it moves.’

  retricked her beams: Regained her happiness.

  a cup of Benger’s: A popular health drink made with milk.

  Jorrocks, Pickwick, and The Adventures of an Irish R.M.: The Jorrocks series of sporting novels written by R.S. Surtees (1805–64); The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens; Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. by Somerville and Ross.

  Walham Green Station: Now Fulham Broadway underground station.

  a cumberer of the ground: An ineffectual person.

  Jeremy Taylor: Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), bishop and devotional writer.

  Modern Side: Division of a (public) school in which the classics are not taught.

  prunes and prisms: Suggestive of ‘prim, mincing affectation’ (SOED) – derived from a saying by Mrs General in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.

  ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’: One of the three stories in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, the others being ‘The Sad Fortunes of Reverend Amos Barton’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance’.

  Refrain tonight . . . abstinence: From Hamlet, Act III Scene 4.

  The First Violin: A popular romantic novel by Jessie Fothergill (1851–91).

  Mrs Humphrey Ward: Pen name of author Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920) whose novels reflected her strong r
eligious beliefs and Victorian values.

  the Cotillon: A ball.

  coupé lit: A French train carriage reserved for passengers who are ill.

  Guy Mannering: A novel by Walter Scott, published in 1815.

  Mignon’s Requiem: Composed by Robert Schumann in 1849, based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.

  a Box and Cox kind of arrangement: ‘an arrangement in which two persons take turns in sustaining a part’ (OED) – derived from the nineteenth-century farce Box and Cox by John Maddison Morton.

  LINKS TO FURTHER READING

  F.M. Mayor biographical notes

  F.M. Mayor on Wikipedia