"Don't go on making foolish excuses, Hester, which deceive no one; and you, Minna, don't criticise Hester's clothes. It is the Bishop's own fault for not writing his notes himself. He might have known that Miss West would have written to Hester instead of to me. I can't say I think Hester behaved kindly towards us in acting as she did, but I won't hear any more argument about it. I desire the subject should now drop."
The last words were uttered in the same tone in which Mr. Gresley closed morning service, and were felt to be final. He was not in reality greatly chagrined at missing the Bishop, whom he regarded with some of the suspicious distrust with which a certain class of mind ever regards that which is superior to it. Hester left the room, closing the door gently behind her.
"James," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at her priest with tears of admiration in her eyes, "I shall never be good like you, so you need not expect it. How you can be so generous and patient with her I don't know. It passes me."
"We must learn to make allowances for each other," said Mr. Gresley, in his most affectionate cornet, drawing his tired, tearful little wife down beside him on the sofa. And he made some fresh tea for her, and waited on her, and she told him about the children's boots and the sole, and he told her about a remarkable speech he had made at the chapter meeting, and a feeling that had been borne in on him on the way home that he should shortly write something striking about Apostolic Succession. And they were happy together; for though he sometimes reproved her as a priest if she allowed herself to dwell on the probability of his being made a Bishop, he was very kind to her as a husband.
Chapter XV
*
"Beware of a silent dog and still water."
If you are travelling across Middleshire on the local line between Southminster and Westhope, after you have passed Wilderleigh with its gray gables and park wall, close at hand you will perceive to nestle (at least, Mr. Gresley said it nestled) Warpington Vicarage; and perhaps, if you know where to look, you will catch a glimpse of Hester's narrow bedroom window under the roof. Half a mile farther on Warpington Towers, the gorgeous residence of the Pratts, bursts into view, with flag on turret flying, and two tightly bitted rustic bridges leaping high over the Drone. You cannot see all the lodges of Warpington Towers from the line, which is a source of some regret to Mr. Pratt; but if he happens to be travelling with you he will point out two of them, chaste stucco Gothic erections with church windows, and inform you that the three others are on the northern and eastern sides, vaguely indicating the directions of Scotland and Ireland.
And the Drone, kept in order on your left by the low line of the Slumberleigh hills, will follow you and leave you, leave you and return all the way to Westhope. You are getting out at Westhope, of course, if you are a Middleshire man; for Westhope is on the verge of Middleshire, and the train does not go any farther—at least, it only goes into one of the insignificant counties which jostle each other to hold on to Middleshire, unknown Saharas, where passengers who oversleep themselves wake to find themselves cast away.
Westhope Abbey stands in its long, low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep cobbled streets.
Down the great central aisle you may walk on mossy stones between the high shafts of broken pillars under the sky. God's stars look down once more where the piety of man had for a time shut them out. Through the slender tracery of what was once the east window, instead of glazed saint and crucifix, you may see the little town clasping its hill.
The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer. The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches. The soft, contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer. A thin wind-whipped grass holds the summit of the broken walls against all corners. The fallen stones, quaintly carved with angel and griffin, are going slowly back year by year, helped by the rain and hindered by the frost, slowly back through the sod to the generations of human hands that held and hewed them, and fell to dust below them hundreds of years ago. The spirit returns to the God who gave it, and the stone to the hand that fashioned it.
The adjoining monastery had been turned into a dwelling-house, without altering it externally, and it was here that Lord Newhaven loved to pass the summer months. Into its one long upper passage all the many rooms opened, up white stone steps through arched doors, rooms which had once been monks' dormitories, abbots' cells, where Lady Newhaven and her guests now crimped their hair and slept under down quilts till noon.
It was this long passage, with its interminable row of low latticed windows, that Lord Newhaven was turning into a depository for the old English weapons which he was slowly collecting. He was standing now gazing lovingly at them, drawing one finger slowly along an inlaid arquebus, when a yell from the garden made him turn and look out.
It was not a yell of anguish, and Lord Newhaven remained at the window leaning on his elbows and watching at his ease the little scene which was taking place below him.
On his bicycle on the smooth-shaven lawn was Dick, wheeling slowly in and out among the stone-edged flower-beds, an apricot in each broad palm, while he discoursed in a dispassionate manner to the two excited little boys who were making futile rushes for the apricots. The governess and Rachel were looking on. Rachel had arrived at Westhope the day before from Southminster. "Take your time, my son," said Dick, just eluding by a hair's-breadth a charge through a geranium-bed on the part of the eldest boy. "If you are such jolly little fools as to crack your little skulls on the sun-dial, I shall eat them both myself. Miss Turner says you may have them, so you've only got to take them. I can't keep on offering them all day long. My time"—(Dick ran his bicycle up a terrace, and, as soon as the boys were up, glided down again)—"my time is valuable. You don't want them?" A shrill disclaimer and a fresh onslaught. "Miss Turner, they thank you very much, but they don't care for apricots."
Half a second more and Dick skilfully parted from his bicycle and was charged by his two admirers and severely pummelled as high as they could reach. When they had been led away by Miss Turner, each biting an apricot and casting longing backward looks at their friend, Rachel and Dick wandered to the north side of the abbey and sat down there in the shade.
Lord Newhaven could still see them, could still note her amused face under her wide white hat. He was doing his best for Dick, and Dick was certainly having his chance, and making the most of it according to his lights.
"But, all the same, I don't think he has a chance," said Lord Newhaven to himself. "That woman, in spite of her frank manner and her self-possession, is afraid of men; not of being married for her money, but of man himself. And whatever else he may not be, Dick is a man. It's the best chance she will ever get, so it is probable she won't take it."
Lord Newhaven sauntered back down the narrow black oak staircase to his own room on the ground-floor. He sat down at his writing-table and took out of his pocket a letter which he had evidently read before. He now read it slowly once more.
"Your last letter to me had been opened," wrote his brother from India, "or else it had not been properly closed. As you wrote on business, I wish you would be more careful."
"I will," said Lord Newhaven, and he wrote a short letter in his small, upright hand, closed the envelope, addressed and stamped it, and sauntered out through the low-arched door into the garden.
Dick was sitting alone on the high-carved stone edge of the round pool where the monks used to wash, and where gold-fish now lived cloistered lives. A moment of depression seemed to have overtaken that cheerful personage.
"Come as far as the post-office," said Lord Newhaven.
Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.
"You millionaires are all the same," he said. "Because you have a house crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to the post-office to buy a penny stamp. It's like keeping a dog and bar
king yourself."
"I don't fancy I bark much," said Lord Newhaven.
"No, and you don't bite often, but when you do you take out the piece. Do you remember that colored chap at Broken Hill?"
"He deserved it," said Lord Newhaven.
"He richly deserved it. But you took him in, poor devil, all the same. You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he thought he could play you any dog's trick, and that you would never turn on him."
"It's a way worms have."
"Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I saw him just before I left Adelaide. He's been lame ever since."
"He'd have done for me if he could."
"Of course he would. His blood was up. He meant to break your back. I saw him break a chap's back once, and it did not take so very long either. I heard it snap. But why did you let him go so far to start with before you pulled him up? That's what I've never been able to understand about you. If you behaved different to start with they would behave different to you. They would know they'd have to."
"I have not your art," said Lord Newhaven, tranquilly, "of letting a man know when he's getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will be a row, and he'll be in it. I'm not made like that."
"It works well," said Dick. "It's a sort of peaceful way of rubbing along and keeping friends. If you let those poor bullies know what to expect they aren't, as a rule, over-anxious to toe the mark. But you never do let them know."
"No," said Lord Newhaven, as he shot his letter into the brass mouth in the cottage wall, just below a window of "bulls'-eyes" and peppermints, "I never do. I don't defend it. But—"
"But what?"
Lord Newhaven's face underwent some subtle change. His eyes fixed themselves on a bottle of heart-shaped peppermints, and then met Dick's suddenly, with the clear, frank glance of a schoolboy.
"But somehow, for the life of me, until things get serious—I can't."
Dick, whose perceptions were rather of a colossal than an acute order, nevertheless perceived that he had received a confidence, and changed the subject.
"Aren't you going to buy some stamps?" he asked, perfectly aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.
Lord Newhaven, who was being watched with affectionate interest from behind the counter by the grocer postmaster, went in, hit his head against a pendent ham, and presently emerged with brine in his hair and a shilling's worth of stamps in his hand.
Later in the day, when he and Dick were riding up the little street, with a view to having a look at the moor—for Middleshire actually has a grouse moor, although it is in the Midlands—the grocer in his white apron rushed out and waylaid them.
"Very sorry about the letter, my lord," he repeated volubly, touching his forelock. "Hope her la'ship told you as I could not get it out again, or I'm sure I would have done to oblige your lordship, and her la'ship calling on purpose. But the post-office is that mean and distrustful as it don't leave me the key, and once hanything is in, in it is."
"Ah!" said Lord Newhaven, slowly. "Well, Jones, it's not your fault. I ought not to have changed my mind. I suppose her ladyship gave you my message that I wanted it back?"
"Yes, my lord, and her la'ship come herself, not ten minutes after you was gone. But I've no more power over that there receptacle than a hunlaid hegg, and that's the long and short of it. I've allus said, and I say it again, 'Them as have charge of the post-office should have the key.'"
"When I am made postmaster-general you shall have it," said Lord Newhaven, smiling. "It is the first reform that I shall bring about." And he nodded to the smiling, apologetic man and trotted on, Dick beside him, who was apparently absorbed in the action of his roan cob.
But Dick's mind had sustained a severe shock. That Lady Newhaven, "that jolly little woman," the fond mother of those two "jolly little chaps," should have been guilty of an underhand trick, was astonishing to him.
Poor Dick had started life with a religious reverence for woman; had carried out his brittle possession to bush-life in Australia, from thence through two A.D.C.-ships, and, after many vicissitudes, had brought it safely back with a large consignment of his own Burgundy to his native land. It was still sufficiently intact—save for a chip or two—to make a pretty wedding-present to his future wife. But it had had a knock since he mounted the roan cob. For, unfortunately, the kind of man who has what are called "illusions" about women is too often the man whose discrimination lies in other directions, in fields where little high-heeled shoes are not admitted.
Rachel had the doubtful advantage of knowing that, in spite of Dick's shrewdness respecting shades of difference in muscatels, she and Lady Newhaven were nevertheless ranged on the same pedestal in Dick's mind as flawless twins of equal moral beauty. But after this particular day she observed that Lady Newhaven had somehow slipped off the pedestal, and that she, Rachel, had the honor of occupying it alone.
Chapter XVI
*
"Une grande passion malheureaux est un grand moyen de sagesse."
Rachel had left London precipitately after she had been the unwilling confidante of Lady Newhaven's secret, and had taken refuge with that friend of all perplexed souls, the Bishop of Southminster. She felt unable to meet Hugh again without an interval of breathing-time. She knew that if she saw much more of him he would confide in her, and she shrank from receiving a confidence the ugliest fact of which she already knew. Perhaps she involuntarily shrank also from fear lest he should lower himself in her eyes by only telling her half the truth. Sad confessions were often poured into Rachel's ears which she had known for years. She never alluded to that knowledge, never corrected the half-lie which accompanies so many whispered self—accusations. Confidences and confessions are too often a means of evasion of justice—a laying of the case for the plaintiff before a judge without allowing the defendant to be present or to call a witness. Rachel, by dint of long experience, which did slowly for her the work of imagination, had ceased to wonder at the faithfully chronicled harsh words and deeds of generous souls. She knew or guessed at the unchronicled treachery or deceit which had brought about that seemingly harsh word or deed.
She had not the exalted ideas about her fellow-creatures which Hester had, but she possessed the rare gift of reticence. She exemplified the text—"Whether it be to friend or foe, talk not of other men's lives." And in Rachel's quiet soul a vast love and pity dwelt for these same fellow-creatures. She had lived and worked for years among those whose bodies were half starved, half clothed, degraded. When she found money at her command she had spent sums (as her lawyer told her) out of all proportion on that poor human body, stumbling between vice and starvation. But now, during the last year, when her great wealth had thrown her violently into society, she had met, until her strong heart flinched before it, the other side of life—the starved soul in the delicately nurtured, richly clad body, the atrophied spiritual life in hideous contrast with the physical ease and luxury which were choking it. The second experience was harder to bear than the first. And just as in the old days she had shared her bread and cheese with those hungrier than herself, and had taken but little thought for those who had bread and to spare, so now she felt but transient interest in those among her new associates who were successfully struggling against the blackmail of luxury, the leprosy of worldliness, the selfishness that at last coffins the soul it clothes. Her heart yearned instead towards the spiritually starving, the tempted, the fallen in that great little world, whose names are written in the book, not of life, but of Burke—the little world which is called "Society."
She longed to comfort them, to raise them up, to wipe from their hands and garments the muddy gold stains of the
gutter into which they had fallen, to smooth away the lines of mean care from their faces. But it had been far simpler in her previous life to share her hard-earned bread with those who needed it than it was now to share her equally hard-earned thoughts and slow gleanings of spiritual knowledge, to share the things which belonged to her peace.
Rachel had not yet wholly recovered from the overwhelming passion of love which, admitted without fear a few years ago, had devastated the little city of her heart, as by fire and sword, involving its hospitable dwellings, its temples, and its palaces in one common ruin. Out of that desolation she was unconsciously rebuilding her city, but it was still rather gaunt and bare, the trees had not had time to grow in the streets, and there was an ugly fortification round it of defaced, fire-seared stones, which had once stood aloft in minaret and tower, and which now served only as a defence against all corners.
If Dick had been in trouble, or rather if she had known the troubles he had been through, and which had made his crooked mouth shut so firmly, Rachel might possibly have been able to give him something more valuable than the paper money of her friendship. But Dick was obviously independent. He could do without her, while Hugh had a claim upon her. Rachel's thoughts turned to Hugh again and ever again. Did he see his conduct as she saw it? A haunting fear was upon her that he did not. And she longed with an intensity that outbalanced for the time every other feeling that he should confess his sin fully, entirely—see it in all its ugliness, and gather himself together into a deep repentance before he went down into silence, or before he made a fresh start in life. She would have given her right hand to achieve that.
And in a lesser degree she was drawn towards Lady Newhaven. Lady Newhaven was conscious of the tender compassion which Rachel felt for her, and used it to the uttermost; but unfortunately she mistook it for admiration of her character, mixed with sympathetic sorrow for her broken heart. If she had seen herself as Rachel saw her, she would have conceived, not for herself, but for Rachel, some of the aversion which was gradually distilling, bitter drop by drop, into her mind for her husband. She would not have killed him. She would have thought herself incapable of an action so criminal, so monstrous. But if part of the ruin in the garden were visibly trembling to its fall, she would not have warned him if he had been sitting beneath it, nor would her conscience have ever reproached her afterwards.
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