by Thomas Hardy
She was not listening; his previous observation still detained her thoughts.
‘Louis,’ she said, ‘in the case of a woman marrying a man much younger than herself, does he get to dislike her, even if there has been a social advantage to him in the union?’
‘Yes, — not a whit less. Ask any person of experience. But what of that? Let’s talk of our own affairs. You say you have no thought of the Bishop. And yet if he had stayed here another day or two he would have proposed to you straight off.’
‘Seriously, Louis, I could not accept him.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t love him.’
‘Oh, oh, I like those words!’ cried Louis, throwing himself back in his chair and looking at the ceiling in satirical enjoyment. ‘A woman who at two-and-twenty married for convenience, at thirty talks of not marrying without love; the rule of inverse, that is, in which more requires less, and less requires more. As your only brother, older than yourself, and more experienced, I insist that you encourage the Bishop.’
‘Don’t quarrel with me, Louis!’ she said piteously. ‘We don’t know that he thinks anything of me, — we only guess.’
‘I know it, — and you shall hear how I know. I am of a curious and conjectural nature, as you are aware. Last night, when everybody had gone to bed, I stepped out for a five minutes’ smoke on the lawn, and walked down to where you get near the vicarage windows. While I was there in the dark one of them opened, and Bishop Helmsdale leant out. The illuminated oblong of your window shone him full in the face between the trees, and presently your shadow crossed it. He waved his hand, and murmured some tender words, though what they were exactly I could not hear.’
‘What a vague, imaginary story, — as if he could know my shadow! Besides, a man of the Bishop’s dignity wouldn’t have done such a thing. When I knew him as a younger man he was not at all romantic, and he’s not likely to have grown so now.’
‘That’s just what he is likely to have done. No lover is so extreme a specimen of the species as an old lover. Come, Viviette, no more of this fencing. I have entered into the project heart and soul — so much that I have postponed my departure till the matter is well under way.’
‘Louis — my dear Louis — you will bring me into some disagreeable position!’ said she, clasping her hands. ‘I do entreat you not to interfere or do anything rash about me. The step is impossible. I have something to tell you some day. I must live on, and endure — ’
‘Everything except this penury,’ replied Louis, unmoved. ‘Come, I have begun the campaign by inviting Bishop Helmsdale, and I’ll take the responsibility of carrying it on. All I ask of you is not to make a ninny of yourself. Come, give me your promise!’
‘No, I cannot, — I don’t know how to! I only know one thing, — that I am in no hurry — ’
‘“No hurry” be hanged! Agree, like a good sister, to charm the Bishop.’
‘I must consider!’ she replied, with perturbed evasiveness.
It being a fine evening Louis went out of the house to enjoy his cigar in the shrubbery. On reaching his favourite seat he found he had left his cigar-case behind him; he immediately returned for it. When he approached the window by which he had emerged he saw Swithin St. Cleeve standing there in the dusk, talking to Viviette inside.
St. Cleeve’s back was towards Louis, but, whether at a signal from her or by accident, he quickly turned and recognized Glanville; whereupon raising his hat to Lady Constantine the young man passed along the terrace-walk and out by the churchyard door.
Louis rejoined his sister. ‘I didn’t know you allowed your lawn to be a public thoroughfare for the parish,’ he said.
‘I am not exclusive, especially since I have been so poor,’ replied she.
‘Then do you let everybody pass this way, or only that illustrious youth because he is so good-looking?’
‘I have no strict rule in the case. Mr. St. Cleeve is an acquaintance of mine, and he can certainly come here if he chooses.’ Her colour rose somewhat, and she spoke warmly.
Louis was too cautious a bird to reveal to her what had suddenly dawned upon his mind — that his sister, in common with the (to his thinking) unhappy Tabitha Lark, had been foolish enough to get interested in this phenomenon of the parish, this scientific Adonis. But he resolved to cure at once her tender feeling, if it existed, by letting out a secret which would inflame her dignity against the weakness.
‘A good-looking young man,’ he said, with his eyes where Swithin had vanished. ‘But not so good as he looks. In fact a regular young sinner.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, only a little feature I discovered in St. Cleeve’s history. But I suppose he has a right to sow his wild oats as well as other young men.’
‘Tell me what you allude to, — do, Louis.’
‘It is hardly fit that I should. However, the case is amusing enough. I was sitting in the arbour to-day, and was an unwilling listener to the oddest interview I ever heard of. Our friend the Bishop discovered, when we visited the observatory last night, that our astronomer was not alone in his seclusion. A lady shared his romantic cabin with him; and finding this, the Bishop naturally enough felt that the ordinance of confirmation had been profaned. So his lordship sent for Master Swithin this morning, and meeting him in the churchyard read him such an excommunicating lecture as I warrant he won’t forget in his lifetime. Ha-ha-ha! ‘Twas very good, — very.’
He watched her face narrowly while he spoke with such seeming carelessness. Instead of the agitation of jealousy that he had expected to be aroused by this hint of another woman in the case, there was a curious expression, more like embarrassment than anything else which might have been fairly attributed to the subject. ‘Can it be that I am mistaken?’ he asked himself.
The possibility that he might be mistaken restored Louis to good-humour, and lights having been brought he sat with his sister for some time, talking with purpose of Swithin’s low rank on one side, and the sordid struggles that might be in store for him. St. Cleeve being in the unhappy case of deriving his existence through two channels of society, it resulted that he seemed to belong to either this or that according to the altitude of the beholder. Louis threw the light entirely on Swithin’s agricultural side, bringing out old Mrs. Martin and her connections and her ways of life with luminous distinctness, till Lady Constantine became greatly depressed. She, in her hopefulness, had almost forgotten, latterly, that the bucolic element, so incisively represented by Messrs. Hezzy Biles, Haymoss Fry, Sammy Blore, and the rest entered into his condition at all; to her he had been the son of his academic father alone.
But she would not reveal the depression to which she had been subjected by this resuscitation of the homely half of poor Swithin, presently putting an end to the subject by walking hither and thither about the room.
‘What have you lost?’ said Louis, observing her movements.
‘Nothing of consequence, — a bracelet.’
‘Coral?’ he inquired calmly.
‘Yes. How did you know it was coral? You have never seen it, have you?’
He was about to make answer; but the amazed enlightenment which her announcement had produced in him through knowing where the Bishop had found such an article, led him to reconsider himself. Then, like an astute man, by no means sure of the dimensions of the intrigue he might be uncovering, he said carelessly, ‘I found such a one in the churchyard to-day. But I thought it appeared to be of no great rarity, and I gave it to one of the village girls who was passing by.’
‘Did she take it? Who was she?’ said the unsuspecting Viviette.
‘Really, I don’t remember. I suppose it is of no consequence?’
‘O no; its value is nothing, comparatively. It was only one of a pair such as young girls wear.’ Lady Constantine could not add that, in spite of this, she herself valued it as being Swithin’s present, and the best he could afford.
Panic-struck by his ruminations, although re
vealing nothing by his manner, Louis soon after went up to his room, professedly to write letters. He gave vent to a low whistle when he was out of hearing. He of course remembered perfectly well to whom he had given the corals, and resolved to seek out Tabitha the next morning to ascertain whether she could possibly have owned such a trinket as well as his sister, — which at present he very greatly doubted, though fervently hoping that she might.
CHAPTER XXIX
The effect upon Swithin of the interview with the Bishop had been a very marked one. He felt that he had good ground for resenting that dignitary’s tone in haughtily assuming that all must be sinful which at the first blush appeared to be so, and in narrowly refusing a young man the benefit of a single doubt. Swithin’s assurance that he would be able to explain all some day had been taken in contemptuous incredulity.
‘He may be as virtuous as his prototype Timothy; but he’s an opinionated old fogey all the same,’ said St. Cleeve petulantly.
Yet, on the other hand, Swithin’s nature was so fresh and ingenuous, notwithstanding that recent affairs had somewhat denaturalised him, that for a man in the Bishop’s position to think him immoral was almost as overwhelming as if he had actually been so, and at moments he could scarcely bear existence under so gross a suspicion. What was his union with Lady Constantine worth to him when, by reason of it, he was thought a reprobate by almost the only man who had professed to take an interest in him?
Certainly, by contrast with his air-built image of himself as a worthy astronomer, received by all the world, and the envied husband of Viviette, the present imputation was humiliating. The glorious light of this tender and refined passion seemed to have become debased to burlesque hues by pure accident, and his æsthetic no less than his ethic taste was offended by such an anti-climax. He who had soared amid the remotest grandeurs of nature had been taken to task on a rudimentary question of morals, which had never been a question with him at all. This was what the exigencies of an awkward attachment had brought him to; but he blamed the circumstances, and not for one moment Lady Constantine.
Having now set his heart against a longer concealment he was disposed to think that an excellent way of beginning a revelation of their marriage would be by writing a confidential letter to the Bishop, detailing the whole case. But it was impossible to do this on his own responsibility. He still recognized the understanding entered into with Viviette, before the marriage, to be as binding as ever, — that the initiative in disclosing their union should come from her. Yet he hardly doubted that she would take that initiative when he told her of his extraordinary reprimand in the churchyard.
This was what he had come to do when Louis saw him standing at the window. But before he had said half-a-dozen words to Viviette she motioned him to go on, which he mechanically did, ere he could sufficiently collect his thoughts on its advisability or otherwise. He did not, however, go far. While Louis and his sister were discussing him in the drawing-room he lingered musing in the churchyard, hoping that she might be able to escape and join him in the consultation he so earnestly desired.
She at last found opportunity to do this. As soon as Louis had left the room and shut himself in upstairs she ran out by the window in the direction Swithin had taken. When her footsteps began crunching on the gravel he came forward from the churchyard door.
They embraced each other in haste, and then, in a few short panting words, she explained to him that her brother had heard and witnessed the interview on that spot between himself and the Bishop, and had told her the substance of the Bishop’s accusation, not knowing she was the woman in the cabin.
‘And what I cannot understand is this,’ she added; ‘how did the Bishop discover that the person behind the bed-curtains was a woman and not a man?’
Swithin explained that the Bishop had found the bracelet on the bed, and had brought it to him in the churchyard.
‘O Swithin, what do you say? Found the coral bracelet? What did you do with it?’
Swithin clapped his hand to his pocket.
‘Dear me! I recollect — I left it where it lay on Reuben Heath’s tombstone.’
‘Oh, my dear, dear Swithin!’ she cried miserably. ‘You have compromised me by your forgetfulness. I have claimed the article as mine. My brother did not tell me that the Bishop brought it from the cabin. What can I, can I do, that neither the Bishop nor my brother may conclude I was the woman there?’
‘But if we announce our marriage — ’
‘Even as your wife, the position was too undignified — too I don’t know what — for me ever to admit that I was there! Right or wrong, I must declare the bracelet was not mine. Such an escapade — why, it would make me ridiculous in the county; and anything rather than that!’
‘I was in hope that you would agree to let our marriage be known,’ said Swithin, with some disappointment. ‘I thought that these circumstances would make the reason for doing so doubly strong.’
‘Yes. But there are, alas, reasons against it still stronger! Let me have my way.’
‘Certainly, dearest. I promised that before you agreed to be mine. My reputation — what is it! Perhaps I shall be dead and forgotten before the next transit of Venus!’
She soothed him tenderly, but could not tell him why she felt the reasons against any announcement as yet to be stronger than those in favour of it. How could she, when her feeling had been cautiously fed and developed by her brother Louis’s unvarnished exhibition of Swithin’s material position in the eyes of the world? — that of a young man, the scion of a family of farmers recently her tenants, living at the homestead with his grandmother, Mrs. Martin.
To soften her refusal she said in declaring it, ‘One concession, Swithin, I certainly will make. I will see you oftener. I will come to the cabin and tower frequently; and will contrive, too, that you come to the house occasionally. During the last winter we passed whole weeks without meeting; don’t let us allow that to happen again.’
‘Very well, dearest,’ said Swithin good-humouredly. ‘I don’t care so terribly much for the old man’s opinion of me, after all. For the present, then, let things be as they are.’
Nevertheless, the youth felt her refusal more than he owned; but the unequal temperament of Swithin’s age, so soon depressed on his own account, was also soon to recover on hers, and it was with almost a child’s forgetfulness of the past that he took her view of the case.
When he was gone she hastily re-entered the house. Her brother had not reappeared from upstairs; but she was informed that Tabitha Lark was waiting to see her, if her ladyship would pardon the said Tabitha for coming so late. Lady Constantine made no objection, and saw the young girl at once.
When Lady Constantine entered the waiting-room behold, in Tabitha’s outstretched hand lay the coral ornament which had been causing Viviette so much anxiety.
‘I guessed, on second thoughts, that it was yours, my lady,’ said Tabitha, with rather a frightened face; ‘and so I have brought it back.’
‘But how did you come by it, Tabitha?’
‘Mr. Glanville gave it to me; he must have thought it was mine. I took it, fancying at the moment that he handed it to me because I happened to come by first after he had found it.’
Lady Constantine saw how the situation might be improved so as to effect her deliverance from this troublesome little web of evidence.
‘Oh, you can keep it,’ she said brightly. ‘It was very good of you to bring it back. But keep it for your very own. Take Mr. Glanville at his word, and don’t explain. And, Tabitha, divide the strands into two bracelets; there are enough of them to make a pair.’
The next morning, in pursuance of his resolution, Louis wandered round the grounds till he saw the girl for whom he was waiting enter the church. He accosted her over the wall. But, puzzling to view, a coral bracelet blushed on each of her young arms, for she had promptly carried out the suggestion of Lady Constantine.
‘You are wearing it, I see, Tabitha, with the other,’ he murmur
ed. ‘Then you mean to keep it?’
‘Yes, I mean to keep it.’
‘You are sure it is not Lady Constantine’s? I find she has one like it.’
‘Quite sure. But you had better take it to her, sir, and ask her,’ said the saucy girl.
‘Oh, no; that’s not necessary,’ replied Louis, considerably shaken in his convictions.
When Louis met his sister, a short time after, he did not catch her, as he had intended to do, by saying suddenly, ‘I have found your bracelet. I know who has got it.’
‘You cannot have found it,’ she replied quietly, ‘for I have discovered that it was never lost,’ and stretching out both her hands she revealed one on each, Viviette having performed the same operation with her remaining bracelet that she had advised Tabitha to do with the other.
Louis was mystified, but by no means convinced. In spite of this attempt to hoodwink him his mind returned to the subject every hour of the day. There was no doubt that either Tabitha or Viviette had been with Swithin in the cabin. He recapitulated every case that had occurred during his visit to Welland in which his sister’s manner had been of a colour to justify the suspicion that it was she. There was that strange incident in the corridor, when she had screamed at what she described to be a shadowy resemblance to her late husband; how very improbable that this fancy should have been the only cause of her agitation! Then he had noticed, during Swithin’s confirmation, a blush upon her cheek when he passed her on his way to the Bishop, and the fervour in her glance during the few moments of the imposition of hands. Then he suddenly recalled the night at the railway station, when the accident with the whip took place, and how, when he reached Welland House an hour later, he had found no Viviette there. Running thus from incident to incident he increased his suspicions without being able to cull from the circumstances anything amounting to evidence; but evidence he now determined to acquire without saying a word to any one.