never got any sensible conversation with anybody.’ And she sighed gently as she put her head on one side to take a good view of her sketchy little picture. Lady Hilda’s profile was certainly very handsome, and she showed it to excellent advantage when she put her head on one side. Ernest looked at her and thought so to himself; and Lady Hilda’s quick eye, glancing sideways for a second from the paper, noted immediately that he thought so.
‘Mr. Le Breton,’ she began again, more confidentially than ever, ‘one thing I’ve quite made up my mind to; I won’t be tied for life to a stick like Lord Connemara. In fact, I won’t marry a man in that position at all. I shall choose for myself, and marry a man for the worth that’s in him, I assure you it’s a positive fact, I’ve been proposed to by no fewer than six assorted Algies and Berties and Monties in a single season; besides which some of them follow me even down here to Dunbude. Papa and mamma are dreadfully angry because I won’t have any of them: but I won’t. I mean to wait, and marry whoever I choose, as soon as I find a man I can really love and honour.’
She paused and looked hard at Ernest. ‘I can’t speak much plainer than that,’ she thought to herself, ‘and really he must be stupider than the Algies and the Monties themselves if he doesn’t see I want him to propose to me. I suppose all women would say it’s awfully unwomanly of me to lead up to his cards in this way–throwing myself at his head they’d call it; but what does that matter? I WON’T marry a fool, and I WILL marry a man of some originality. That’s the only thing in the world worth troubling one’s head about. Why on earth doesn’t he take my hand, I wonder? What further can he be waiting for?’ Lady Hilda was perfectly accustomed to the usual preliminaries of a declaration, and only awaited Ernest’s first step to proceed in due order to the second. Strange to say, her heart was actually beating a little by anticipation. It never even occurred to her–the belle of three seasons–that possibly Ernest mightn’t wish to marry her. So she sat looking pensively at her picture, and sighed again quietly.
But Ernest, wholly unsuspicious, only answered, ‘You will do quite right, Lady Hilda, to marry the man of your own choice, irrespective of wealth or station.’
Hilda glanced up at him curiously, with a half-disdainful smile, and was just on the point of saying, ‘But suppose the man of my own choice won’t propose to me?’ However, as the words rose to her lips, she felt there was a point at which even she should yield to convention: and there were plenty of opportunities still before her, without displaying her whole hand too boldly and immediately. So she merely turned with another sigh, this time a genuine one, to her half-sketched outline. ‘I shall bring him round in time,’ she said to herself, blushing a little at her unexpected discomfiture. ‘I shall bring him round in time; I shall make him propose to me! I don’t care if I have to live in a lodging with him, and wash up my own tea-things; I shall marry him; that I’m resolved upon. He’s as mad as a March hare about his Communism and his theories and things; but I don’t care for that; I could live with him in comfort, and I couldn’t live in comfort with the Algies and Monties. In fact, I believe–in a sort of way–I believe I’m almost in love with him. I have a kind of jumpy feeling in my heart when I’m talking with him that I never feel when I’m talking with other young men, even the nicest of them. He’s not nice; he’s a bear; and yet, somehow, I should like to marry him.’
‘Mr. Le Breton,’ she said aloud, ‘the sun’s all wrong for sketching to-day, and besides it’s too chilly. I must run about a bit among the rocks.’ (‘At least I shall take his hand to help me,’ she thought, blushing.) ‘Come and walk with me? It’s no use trying to draw with one’s hands freezing.’ And she crumpled up the unfinished sketch hastily between her fingers. Ernest jumped up to follow her; and they spent the next hour scrambling up and down the Clatter, and talking on less dangerous subjects than Lady Hilda’s matrimonial aspirations.
‘Still I shall make him ask me yet,’ Lady Hilda thought to herself, as she parted from him to go up and dress for dinner. ‘I shall manage to marry him, somehow; or if I don’t marry him, at any rate I’ll marry somebody like him.’ For it was really the principle, not the person, that Lady Hilda specially insisted upon.
CHAPTER X.
THE DAUGHTERS OF CANAAN.
May, beautiful May, had brought the golden flowers, and the trees in the valley behind the sleepy old town of Calcombe Pomeroy were decking themselves in the first wan green of their early spring foliage. The ragged robins were hanging out, pinky red, from the hedgerows; the cuckoo was calling from the copse beside the mill stream; and the merry wee hedge-warblers were singing lustily from the topmost sprays of hawthorn, with their full throats bursting tremulously in the broad sunshine. And Ernest Le Breton, too, filled with the season, had come down from Dunbude for a fortnight’s holiday, on his premised visit to his friend Oswald, or, to say the truth more plainly, to Oswald’s pretty little sister Edie. For Ernest had fully made up his mind by this time what it was he had come for, and he took the earliest possible opportunity of taking a walk with Edie alone, through the tiny glen behind the town, where the wee stream tumbles lazily upon the big slow-turning vanes of the overshot mill-wheel.
‘Let us sit down a bit on the bank here, Miss Oswald,’ he said to his airy little companion, as they reached the old stone bridge that crosses the stream just below the mill-house; ‘it’s such a lovely day one feels loath to miss any of it, and the scenery here looks so bright and cheerful after the endless brown heather and russet bracken about Dunbude. Not that Exmoor isn’t beautiful in its way, too–all Devonshire is beautiful alike for that matter; but then it’s more sombre and woody in the north, and much less spring-like than this lovely quiet South Devon country.’
‘I’m so glad you like Calcombe,’ Edie said, with one of her unfailing blushes at the indirect flattery to herself implied in praise of her native county; ‘and you think it prettier than Dunbude, then, do you?’
‘Prettier in its own way, yes, though not so grand of course; everything here is on a smaller scale. Dunbude, you know, is almost mountainous.’
‘And the Castle?’ Edie asked, bringing round the conversation to her own quarter, ‘is that very fine? At all like Warwick, or our dear old Arlingford?’
‘Oh, it isn’t a castle at all, really,’ Ernest answered; ‘only a very big and ugly house. As architecture it’s atrocious, though it’s comfortable enough inside for a place of the sort.’
‘And the Exmoors, are they nice people? What kind of girl is Lady Hilda, now?’ Poor little Edie? she asked the question shyly, but with a certain deep beating in her heart, for she had often canvassed with herself the vague possibility that Ernest might actually fall in love with Lady Hilda. Had he fallen in love with her already, or had he not? She knew she would be able to guess the truth by his voice and manner the moment he answered her. No man can hide that secret from a woman who loves him. Yet it was not without a thrill and a flutter that she asked him, for she thought to herself, what must she seem to him after all the grand people he had been mixing with so lately at Dunbude? Was it possible he could see anything in her, a little country village girl, coming to her fresh from the great ladies of that unknown and vaguely terrible society?
‘Lady Hilda!’ Ernest answered, laughing–and as he said the words Edie knew in her heart that her question was answered, and blushed once more in her bewitching fashion. ‘Lady Hilda! Oh, she’s a very queer girl, indeed; she’s not at all clever, really, but she has the one virtue of girls of her class–their perfect frankness. She’s frank all over–no reserve or reticence at all about her. Whatever she thinks she says, without the slightest idea that you’ll see anything to laugh at or to find fault with in it. In matters of knowledge, she’s frankly ignorant. In matters of taste, she’s frankly barbaric. In matters of religion, she’s frankly heathen. And in matters of ethics, she’s frankly immoral–or rather extra-moral,’ he added, quickly correcting himself for the misleading expression.
‘I shouldn’t think from your description she can be a very nice person,’ Edie said, greatly relieved, and pulling a few tall grasses at her side by way of hiding her interest in the subject. ‘She can’t be a really nice girl if she’s extra-moral, as you call it.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean she’d cut one’s throat or pick one’s pocket, you know,’ Ernest went on quickly, with a gentle smile. ‘She’s got a due respect for the ordinary conventional moralities like other people, no doubt; but in her case they’re only social prejudices, not genuine ethical principles. I don’t suppose she ever seriously asked herself whether anything was right or wrong or not in her whole lifetime. In fact, I’m sure she never did; and if anybody else were to do so, she’d be immensely surprised and delighted at the startling originality and novelty of thought displayed in such a view of the question.’
‘But she’s very handsome, isn’t she?’ Edie asked, following up her inquiry with due diligence.
‘Handsome? oh, yes, in a bold sort of actress fashion. Very handsome, but not, to me at least, pleasing. I believe most men admire her a great deal; but she lacks a feminine touch dreadfully. She dashes away through everything as if she was hunting; and she DOES hunt too, which I think bad enough in anybody, and horrible in a woman.’
‘Then you haven’t fallen in love with her, Mr. Le Breton? I half imagined you would, you know, as I’m told she’s so very attractive.’
‘Fallen in love with HER, Miss Oswald! Fallen in love with Hilda Tregellis! What an absurd notion! Heaven forbid it!’
‘Why so, please?’
‘Why, in the first place, what would be the use of it? Fancy Lady Exmoor’s horror at the bare idea of her son’s tutor falling in love with Lady Hilda! I assure you, Miss Oswald, she would evaporate at the very mention of such an unheard-of enormity. A man must be, if not an earl, at least a baronet with five thousand a year, before he dare face the inexpressible indignation of Lady Exmoor with an offer of marriage for Lady Hilda.’
‘But people don’t always fall in love by tables of precedence,’ Edie put in simply. ‘It’s quite possible, I suppose, for a man who isn’t a duke himself to fall in love with a duke’s daughter, even though the duke her papa mayn’t personally happen to approve of the match. However, you don’t seem to think Lady Hilda herself a pleasant girl, even apart from the question of Lady Exmoor’s requirements?’
‘Miss Oswald,’ Ernest said, looking at her suddenly, as she sat half hiding her face with her parasol, and twitching more violently than ever at the tall grasses; ‘Miss Oswald, to tell you the truth, I haven’t been thinking much about Hilda Tregellis or any of the other girls I’ve met at Dunbude, and for a very sufficient reason, because I’ve had my mind too much preoccupied by somebody else elsewhere.’
Edie blushed even more prettily than before, and held her peace, half raising her eyes for a second in an enquiring glance at his, and then dropping them hastily as they met, in modest trepidation. At that moment Ernest had never seen anything so beautiful or so engaging as Edie Oswald.
‘Edie,’ he said, beginning again more boldly, and taking her little gloved hand almost unresistingly in his; ‘Edie, you know my secret. I love you. Can you love me?’
Edie looked up at him shyly, the tears glistening and trembling a little in the corner of her big bright eyes, and for a moment she answered nothing. Then she drew away her hand hastily and said with a sigh, ‘Mr. Le Breton, we oughtn’t to be talking so. We mustn’t. Don’t let us. Take me home, please, at once, and don’t say anything more about it.’ But her heart beat within her bosom with a violence that was not all unpleasing, and her looks half belied her words to Ernest’s keen glance even as she spoke them.
‘Why not, Edie?’ he said, drawing her down again gently by her little hand as she tried to rise hesitatingly. ‘Why not? tell me. I’ve looked into your face, and though I can hardly dare to hope it or believe it, I do believe I read in it that you really might love me.’
‘Oh, Mr. Le Breton,’ Edie answered, a tear now quivering visibly on either eyelash, ‘don’t ask me, please don’t ask me. I wish you wouldn’t. Take me home, won’t you?’
Ernest dropped her hand quietly, with a little show of despondency that was hardly quite genuine, for his eyes had already told him better. ‘Then you can’t love me, Miss Oswald,’ he said, looking at her closely. ‘I’m sorry for it, very sorry for it; but I’m grieved if I have seemed presumptuous in asking you.’
This time the two tears trickled slowly down Edie’s cheek–not very sad tears either–and she answered hurriedly, ‘Oh, I don’t mean that, Mr. Le Breton, I don’t mean that. You misunderstand me, I’m sure you misunderstand me.’
Ernest caught up the trembling little hand again. ‘Then you CAN love me, Edie?’ he said eagerly, ‘you can love me?’
Edie answered never a word, but bowed her head and cried a little, silently. Ernest took the dainty wee gloved hand between his own two hands and pressed it tenderly. He felt in return a faint pressure.
‘Then why won’t you let me love you, Edie?’ he asked, looking at the blushing girl once more.
‘Oh, Mr. Le Breton,’ Edie said, rising and moving away from the path a little under the shade of the big elm-tree, ‘it’s very wrong of me to let you talk so. I mustn’t think of marrying you, and you mustn’t think of marrying me. Consider the difference in our positions.’
‘Is that all?’ Ernest answered gaily. ‘Oh, Edie, if that’s all, it isn’t a very difficult matter to settle. My position’s exactly nothing, for I’ve got no money and no prospects; and if I ask you to marry me, it must be in the most strictly speculative fashion, with no date and no certainty. The only question is, will you consent to wait for me till I’m able to offer you a home to live in? It’s asking you a great deal, I know; and you’ve made me only too happy and too grateful already; but if you’ll wait for me till we can marry, I shall live all my life through to repay you for your sacrifice.’
‘But, Mr. Le Breton,’ Edie said, turning towards the path and drying her eyes quickly, ‘I really don’t think you ought to marry me. The difference in station is so great–even Harry would allow the difference in station. Your father was a great man, and a general and a knight, you know; and though my dear father is the best and kindest of men, he isn’t anything of that sort, of course.’
A slight shade of pain passed across Ernest’s face. ‘Edie,’ he said, ‘please don’t talk about that–please don’t. My father was a just and good man, whom I loved and honoured deeply; if there’s anything good in any of us boys, it comes to us from my dear father. But please don’t speak to me about his profession. It’s one of the griefs and troubles of my life. He was a soldier, and an Indian soldier too; and if there’s anything more certain to me than the principle that all fighting is very wrong and indefensible, it’s the principle that our rule in India is utterly unjust and wicked. So instead of being proud of my father’s profession, much as I respected him, I’m profoundly ashamed of it; and it has been a great question to me always how far I was justified at all in living upon the pension given me for his Indian services.’
Edie looked at him half surprised and half puzzled. It was to her such an odd and unexpected point of view. But she felt instinctively that Ernest really and deeply meant what he said, and she knew she must not allude to the subject again. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said simply, ‘if I’ve put it wrong; yet you know I can’t help feeling the great disparity in our two situations.’
‘Edie,’ said Ernest, looking at her again with all his eyes–‘I’m going to call you “Edie” always now, so that’s understood between us. Well, I shall tell you exactly how I feel about this matter. From the first moment I saw you I felt drawn towards you, I felt that I couldn’t help admiring you and sympathising with you and loving you. If I dared I would have spoken to you that day at Iffley; but I said to myself “She will not care for me; and besides, it would be wrong of me to ask her just yet.” I had nothing to live upon, and I oughtn’t to ask you to wait for me–you who are so pretty, and sweet and good, and clever–I ought to leave you free to your natural prospect of marrying some better man, who would make you happier than I can ever hope to do. So I tried to put the impulse aside; I waited, saying to myself that if you really cared for me a little bit, you would still care for me when I came to Calcombe Pomeroy. But then my natural selfishness overcame me–you can forgive me for it, Edie; how could I help it when I had once seen you? I began to be afraid some other man would be beforehand with you; and I liked you so much I couldn’t bear to think of the chance that you might be taken away from me before I asked you. All day long, as I’ve been walking alone on those high grey moors at Dunbude, I’ve been thinking of you; and at last I made up my mind that I MUST come and ask you to be my wife–some time–whenever we could afford to marry. I know I’m asking you to make a great sacrifice for me; it’s more than I have any right to ask you; I’m ashamed of myself for asking it; I can only make you a poor man’s wife, and how long I may have to wait even for that I can’t say; but if you’ll only consent to wait for me, Edie, I’ll do the best that lies in me to make you as happy and to love you as well as any man on earth could ever do.’
Edie turned her face towards his, and said softly, ‘Mr. Le Breton, I will wait for you as long as ever you wish; and I’m so happy, oh so happy.’
There was a pause for a few moments, and then, as they walked homeward down the green glen, Edie said, with something more of her usual archness, ‘So after all you haven’t fallen in love with Lady Hilda! Do you know, Mr. Le Breton, I rather fancied at Oxford you liked me just a little tiny bit; but when I heard you were going to Dunbude I said to myself, “Ah, now he’ll never care for a quiet country girl like me!” And when I knew you were coming down here to Calcombe, straight from all those grand ladies at Dunbude, I felt sure you’d be disenchanted as soon as you saw me, and never think anything more about me.’
‘Then you liked me, Edie?’ Ernest asked eagerly. ‘You wanted me really to come to Calcombe to see you?’
‘Of course I did, Mr. Le Breton. I’ve liked you from the first moment I saw you.’
‘I’m so glad,’ Ernest went on quickly. ‘I believe all real love is love at first sight. I wouldn’t care myself to be loved in any other way. And you thought I might fall in love with Lady Hilda?’
‘Well, you know, she is sure to be so handsome, and so accomplished, and to have had so many advantages that I have never had. I was afraid I should seem so very simple to you after Lady Hilda.’
‘Oh, Edie!’ cried Ernest, stopping a moment, and gazing at the little light airy figure. ‘I only wish you could know the difference. Coming from Dunbude to Calcombe is like coming from darkness into light. Up there one meets with nobody but essentially vulgar-minded selfish people–people whose whole life is passed in thinking and talking about nothing but dogs, and horses, and partridges, and salmon; racing, and hunting, and billiards, and wines; amusements, amusements, amusements, all of them coarse and most of them cruel, all day long. Their talk is just like the talk of grooms and gamekeepers in a public-house parlour, only a little improved by better English and more money. Will So-and-so win the Derby? What a splendid run we had with the West Somerset on Wednesday! Were you in at the death of that big fox at Coulson’s Corner? Ought the new vintages of Madeira to be bottled direct or sent round the Cape like the old ones? Capital burlesque at the Gaiety, but very slow at the Lyceum. Who will go to the Duchess of Dorsetshire’s dance on the twentieth:–and so forth for ever. Their own petty round of selfish pleasures from week’s end to week’s end–no thought of anybody else, no thought of the world at large, no thought even of any higher interest in their own personalities. Their politics are just a selfish calculation of their own prospects–land, Church, capital, privilege. Their religion (when they have any) is just a selfish regard for their own personal future welfare. From the time I went to Dunbude to this day, I’ve never heard a single word about any higher thought of any sort–I don’t mean only about the troubles or the aspirations of other people, but even about books, about science, about art, about natural beauty. They live in a world of amusing oneself and of amusing oneself in vulgar fashions–as a born clown would do if he came suddenly into a large fortune. The women are just as bad as the men, only in a different way–not always even that; for most of them think only of the Four-in-hand Club and the pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham–things to sicken one. Now, I’ve known selfish people before, but not selfish people utterly without any tincture of culture. I come away from Dunbude, and come down here to Calcombe: and the difference in the atmosphere makes one’s very breath come and go freer. And I look at you, Edie, and think of you beside Lady Hilda Tregellis, and I laugh in my heart at the difference that artificial rules have made between you. I wish you knew how immeasurably her superior you are in every way. The fact is, it’s a comfort to escape from Dunbude for a while and get down here to feel oneself once more, in the only true sense of the word, in a little good society.’
While these things were happening in the Bourne Close, palsied old Miss Luttrell, mumbling and grumbling inarticulately to herself, was slowly tottering down the steep High Street of Calcombe Pomeroy, on her way to the village grocer’s. She shambled in tremulously to Mrs. Oswald’s counter, and seating herself on a high stool, as was her wont, laid herself out distinctly for a list of purchases and a good deliberate ill-natured gossip.
‘Two pounds of coffee, if you please, Mrs. Oswald,’ she began with a quaver; ‘coffee, mind, I say, not chicory; your stuff always has the smallest possible amount of flavour in it, it seems to me, for the largest possible amount of quantity; all chicory, all chicory–no decent coffee to be had now in Calcombe Pomeroy. So your son’s at home this week, is he? Out of work, I suppose? I saw him lounging about on the beach, idling away his time, yesterday; pity he wasn’t at some decent trade, instead of hanging about and doing nothing, as if he was a gentleman. Five pounds of lump sugar, too; good lump sugar, though I expect I shall get nothing but beetroot; it’s all beetroot now, my brother tells me; they’ve ruined the West Indies with their emancipation fads and their differential duties and the Lord knows what–we had estates in the West Indies ourselves, all given up to our negroes nowadays–and now I believe they have to pay the French a bounty or something of the sort to induce them to make sugar out of beetroot, because the negroes won’t work without whipping, so I understand; that’s what comes in the end of your Radical fal-lal notions. Well, five pounds of lump, and five pounds of moist, though the one’s as bad as the other, really. A great pity about your son. I hope he’ll get a place again soon. It must be a trial to you to have him so idle!’
‘Well, no, ma’am, it’s not,’ Mrs. Oswald answered, with such self-restraint as she could command. ‘It’s not much of a trial to his father and me, for we’re glad to let him have a little rest after working so hard at Oxford. He works too hard, ma’am, but he gets compensation for it, don’t ‘ee see, Miss Luttrell, for he’s just been made a Fellow of the Royal Society–“for his mathematical eminence,” the “Times” says–a Fellow of the Royal Society.’
Even this staggering blow did not completely crush old Miss Luttrell. ‘Fellow of the Royal Society,’ she muttered feebly through her remaining teeth. ‘Must be some mistake somewhere, Mrs. Oswald–quite impossible. A very meritorious young man, your son, doubtless; but a National schoolmaster’s hardly likely to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Oh, I remember you told me he’s not a National schoolmaster, but has something to do at one of the Oxford colleges. Yes, yes; I see what it is–Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. You subscribe a guinea, and get made a Fellow by subscription, just for the sake of writing F.R.G.S. after your name; it gives a young man a look of importance.’
‘No, Miss Luttrell, it isn’t that; it’s THE Royal Society; and if you’ll wait a moment, ma’am, I’ll fetch you the president’s letter, and the diploma, to let you see it.’
‘Oh, no occasion to trouble yourself, Mrs. Oswald!’ the old lady put in, almost with alacrity, for she had herself seen the announcement of Harry Oswald’s election in the ‘Times’ a few days before. ‘No occasion to trouble yourself, I’m sure; I daresay you may be right, and at any rate it’s no business of mine, thank heaven. I never want to poke my nose into anybody else’s business. Well, talking of Oxford, Mrs. Oswald, there’s a very nice young man down here at present; I wonder if you know where he’s lodging? I want to ask him to dinner. He’s a young Mr. Le Breton–one of the Cheshire Le Bretons, you know. His father was Sir Owen Le Breton, a general in the Indian army–brother officer of Major Standish Luttrell’s and very nice people in every way. Lady Le Breton’s a great friend of the Archdeacon’s, so I should like to show her son some little attention. He’s had a very distinguished career at Oxford–your boy may have heard his name, perhaps–and now he’s acting as tutor to Lord Lynmouth, the eldest son of Lord Exmoor, you know; Lady Exmoor was a second cousin of my brother’s wife; very nice people, all of them. The Le Bretons are a really good family, you see; and the Archdeacon’s exceedingly fond of them. So I thought if you could tell me where this young man is lodging–you shop-people pick up all the gossip in the place, always–I’d ask him to dinner to meet the Rector and Colonel Turnbull and my nephew, who would probably be able to offer him a little shooting.’
‘There’s no partridges about in May, Miss Luttrell,’ said Mrs. Oswald, quietly smiling to herself at the fancy picture of Ernest seated in congenial converse with the Rector, Colonel Turnbull, and young Luttrell; ‘but as to Mr. Le Breton, I DO happen to know where he’s stopping, though it’s not often that I know any Calcombe gossip, save and except what you’re good enough to tell me when you drop in, ma’am; for Mr. Le Breton’s stopping here, in this house, with us, ma’am, this very minute.’
‘In this house, Mrs. Oswald!’ the old lady cried with a start, wagging her unsteady old head this time in genuine surprise; ‘why, I didn’t know you let lodgings. I thought you and your daughter were too much of fine ladies for THAT, really. I’m glad to hear it. I’ll leave a note for him.’
‘No, Miss Luttrell, we don’t let lodgings, ma’am, and we don’t need to,’ Mrs. Oswald answered, proudly. ‘Mr. Le Breton’s stopping here as my son’s guest. They were friends at Oxford together: and now that Mr. Le Breton has got his holiday, like, Harry’s asked him down to spend a fortnight at Calcombe Pomeroy. And if you’ll leave a note I’ll be very happy to give it to him as soon as he comes in, for he’s out walking now with Harry and Edith.’
Old Miss Luttrell sat for half a minute in unwonted silence, revolving in her poor puzzled head what line of tactics she ought to adopt under such a very singular and annoying combination of circumstances. Stopping at the village grocer’s!–this was really too atrocious! The Le Bretons were all as mad as hatters, that she knew well; all except the mother, who was a sensible person, and quite rational. But old Sir Owen was a man with the most absurd religious fancies–took an interest in the souls of the soldiers; quite right and proper, of course, in a chaplain, but really too ridiculous in a regular field officer. No doubt Ernest Le Breton had taken up some equally extraordinary notions–liberty, equality, fraternity, and a general massacre, probably; and he had picked up Harry Oswald as a suitable companion in his revolutionary schemes and fancies. There was no knowing what stone wall one of those mad Le Bretons might choose to run his head against. Still, the practical difficulty remained–how could she extricate herself from this awkward dilemma in such a way as to cover herself with glory, and inflict another bitter humiliation on poor Mrs. Oswald? If only she had known sooner that Ernest was stopping at the Oswalds, she wouldn’t have been so loud in praise of the Le Breton family; she would in that case have dexterously insinuated that Lady Le Breton was only a half-pay officer’s widow, living on her pension; and that her boys had got promotion at Oxford as poor scholars, through the Archdeacon’s benevolent influence. It was too late now, however, to adopt that line of defence; and she fell back accordingly upon the secondary position afforded her by the chance of taking down Mrs. Oswald’s intolerable insolence in another fashion.
‘Oh, he’s out walking with your daughter, is he?’ she said, maliciously. ‘Out walking with your daughter, Mrs. Oswald, NOT with your son. I saw her passing down the meadows half an hour ago with a strange young man; and her brother stopped behind near the millpond. A strange young man; yes, I noticed particularly that he looked like a gentleman, and I was quite surprised that you should let her walk out with him in that extraordinary manner. Depend upon it, Mrs. Oswald, when young gentlemen in Mr. Le Breton’s position go out walking with young women in your daughter’s position, they mean no good by it–they mean no good by it. Take my advice, Mrs. Oswald, and don’t permit it. Mr. Le Breton’s a very nice young man, and well brought up no doubt–I know his mother’s a woman of principle–still, young men will be young men; and if your son goes bringing down his fine Oxford acquaintances to Calcombe Pomeroy, and you and your husband go flinging Miss Jemima–her name’s Jemima, I think–at the young men’s heads, why, then, of course, you must take the consequences–you must take the consequences!’ And with this telling Parthian shot discharged carefully from the shadow of the doorway, accompanied by a running comment of shrugs, nods, and facial distortions, old Miss Luttrell successfully shuffled herself out of the shop, her list unfinished, leaving poor Mrs. Oswald alone and absolutely speechless with indignation. Ernest Le Breton never got a note of invitation from the Squire’s sister: but before nightfall all that was visitable in Calcombe Pomeroy had heard at full length of the horrid conspiracy by which those pushing upstart Oswalds had inveigled a son of poor Lady Le Breton’s down to stop with them, and were now trying to ruin his prospects by getting him to marry their brazen-faced hussey, Jemima Edith.
When Edie returned from her walk that afternoon, Mrs. Oswald went up into her bedroom to see her daughter. She knew at once from Edie’s radiant blushing face and moist eyes what had taken place, and she kissed the pretty shrinking girl tenderly on her forehead. ‘Edie darling, I hope you will be happy,’ she whispered significantly.
‘Then you guess it all, mother dear?’ asked Edie, relieved that she need not tell her story in set words.
‘Yes, darling,’ said the mother, kissing her again. ‘And you said “yes.”‘
Edie coloured once more. ‘I said “yes,” mother, for I love him dearly.’
‘He’s a dear fellow,’ the mother answered gently; ‘and I’m sure he’ll do his best to make you happy.’
Later on in the day, Harry came up and knocked at Edie’s door. His mother had told him all about it, and so had Ernest. ‘Popsy,’ he said, kissing her also, ‘I congratulate you. I’m so glad about it. Le Breton’s the best fellow I know, and I couldn’t wish you a better or a kinder husband. You’ll have to wait for him, but he’s worth waiting for. He’s a good fellow and a clever fellow, and an affectionate fellow; and his family are everything that could be desired. It’ll be a splendid thing for you to be able to talk in future about “my mother-in law, Lady Le Breton.” Depend upon it, Edie dear, that always counts for something in society.’
Edie blushed again, but this time with a certain tinge of shame and disappointment. She had never thought of that herself, and she was hurt that Harry should think and speak of it at such a moment. She felt with a sigh it was unworthy of him and unworthy of the occasion. Truly the iron of Pi and its evaluations had entered deeply into his soul!
CHAPTER XI.
CULTURE AND CULTURE.
‘I wonder, Berkeley,’ said Herbert Le Breton, examining a coin curiously, ‘what on earth can ever have induced you, with your ideas and feelings, to become a parson!’
‘My dear Le Breton, your taste, like good wine, improves with age,’ answered Berkeley, coldly. ‘There are many reasons, any one of which may easily induce a sensible man to go into the Church. For example, he may feel a disinterested desire to minister to the souls of his poorer neighbours; or he may be first cousin to a bishop; or he may be attracted by an ancient and honourable national institution; or he may possess a marked inclination for albs and chasubles; or he may reflect upon the distinct social advantages of a good living; or he may have nothing else in particular to do; or he may simply desire to rouse the impertinent curiosity of all the indolent quidnuncs of his acquaintance, without the remotest intention of ever gratifying their underbred Paul Pry proclivities.’
Herbert Le Breton winced a little–he felt he had fairly laid himself open to this unmitigated rebuff–but he did not retire immediately from his untenable position. ‘I suppose,’ he said quietly, ‘there are still people who really do take a practical interest in other people’s souls–my brother Ronald does for one–but the idea is positively too ridiculous. Whenever I read any argument upon immortality it always seems to me remarkably cogent, if the souls in question were your soul and my soul; but just consider the transparent absurdity of supposing that every Hodge Chawbacon, and every rheumatic old Betty Martin, has got a soul, too, that must go on enduring for all eternity! The notion’s absolutely ludicrous. What an infinite monotony of existence for the poor old creatures to endure for ever–being bored by their own inane personalities for a million aeons! It’s simply appalling to think of!’
But Berkeley wasn’t going to be drawn into a theological discussion–that was a field which he always sedulously and successfully avoided. ‘The immortality of the soul,’ he said quietly, ‘is a Platonic dogma too frequently confounded, even by moderately instructed persons like yourself, Le Breton, with the Church’s very different doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Upon this latter subject, my dear fellow, about which you don’t seem to be quite clear or perfectly sound in your views, you’ll find some excellent remarks in Bishop Pearson on the Creed–a valuable work which I had the pleasure of studying intimately for my ordination examination.’
‘Really, Berkeley, you’re the most incomprehensible and mysterious person I ever met in my whole lifetime!’ said Herbert, dryly. ‘I believe you take a positive delight in deceiving and mystifying one. Do you seriously mean to tell me you feel any interest at the present time of day in books written by bishops?’
‘A modern bishop,’ Berkeley answered calmly, ‘is an unpicturesque but otherwise estimable member of a very distinguished ecclesiastical order, who ought not lightly to be brought into ridicule by lewd or lay persons. On that ground, I have always been in favour myself of gradually reforming his hat, his apron, and even his gaiters, which doubtless serve to render him at least conspicuous if not positively absurd in the irreverent eyes of a ribald generation. But as to criticising his literary or theological productions, my dear fellow, that would be conduct eminently unbecoming in a simple curate, and savouring of insubordination even in the person of an elderly archdeacon. I decline, therefore, to discuss the subject, especially with a layman on whose orthodoxy I have painful doubts.–Where’s Oswald? Is he up yet?’
‘No; he’s down in Devonshire, my brother Ernest writes me.’
‘What, at Dunbude? What’s Oswald doing there?’
‘Oh dear no; not at Dunbude: the peerage hasn’t yet adopted him–at a place called Calcombe Pomeroy, where it seems he lives. Ernest has gone down there from Exmoor for a fortnight’s holiday. You remember, Oswald has a pretty sister–I met her here in your rooms last October, in fact–and I apprehend she may possibly form a measurable portion of the local attractions. A pretty face goes a long way with some people.’
Berkeley drew a deep breath, and looked uneasily out of the window. This was dangerous news, indeed! What, little Miss Butterfly, has the boy with the gauze net caught sight of you already? Will he trap you and imprison you so soon in his little gilded matrimonial cage, enticing you thereinto with soft words and, sugared compliments to suit your dainty, delicate palate? and must I, who have meant to chase you for the chief ornament of my own small cabinet, be only in time to see you pinioned and cabined in your white lace veils and other pretty disguised entanglements, for his special and particular delectation? This must be looked into, Miss Butterfly; this must be prevented. Off to Calcombe Pomeroy, then, or other parts unknown, this very next to-morrow; and let us fight out the possession of little Miss Butterfly with our two gauze nets in opposition–mine tricked as prettily as I can trick it with tags and ends of art-allurements and hummed to in a delicate tune–before this interloping anticipating Le Breton has had time to secure you absolutely for himself. Too austere for you, little Miss Butterfly; good in his way, and kindly meaning, but too austere. Better come and sun yourself in the modest wee palace of art that I mean to build myself some day in some green, sunny, sloping valley, where your flittings will not be rudely disturbed by breath of poverty, nor your pretty feathery wings ruthlessly clipped with a pair of doctrinaire, ethico-socialistic scissors. To Calcombe, then, to Calcombe–and not a day’s delay before I get there. So much of thought, in his own quaint indefinite fashion, flitted like lightning through Arthur Berkeley’s perturbed mind, as he stood gazing wistfully for one second out of his pretty latticed creeper-clad window. Then he remembered himself quickly with a short little sigh, and turned to answer Herbert Le Breton’s last half-sneering innuendo.
‘Something more than a pretty face merely,’ he said, surveying Herbert coldly from head to foot; ‘a heart too, and a mind, for all her flitting, not wholly unfurnished with good, sensible, solid mahogany English furniture. You may be sure Harry Oswald’s sister isn’t likely to be wanting in wits, at any rate.’
‘Oswald’s a curious fellow,’ Herbert went on, changing the venue, as he always did when he saw Berkeley was really in earnest; ‘he’s very clever, certainly, but he can never outlive his bourgeois origin. The smell of tea sticks about him somehow to the end of the chapter. Don’t you know, Berkeley, there are some fellows whose clothes seem to have been born with them, they fit so perfectly and impede their movement so little; while there are other fellows whose clothes look at once as if they’d been made for them by a highly respectable but imperfectly successful tailor. That’s just what I always think about Harry Oswald in the matter of culture. He’s got a great deal of culture, the very best culture, from the very best shop–Oxford, in fact–dressed himself up in the finest suit of clothes from the most fashionable mental tailor; but it doesn’t seem to fit him naturally. He moves about in it uneasily, like a man unaccustomed to be clothed by a good workman. He looks in his mental upholstery like a greengrocer in evening dress. Now there’s all the difference in the world between that sort of put-on culture and culture in the grain, isn’t there? You may train up a grocer’s son to read Dante, and to play Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and to admire Fra Angelico; but you can’t train him up to wear these things lightly and gracefully upon him as you and I do, who come by them naturally. WE are born to the sphere; HE rises to it.’
‘You think so, Le Breton?’ asked the curate with a quiet and suppressed smile, as he thought silently of the placid old shoemaker.
‘Think so! my dear fellow, I’m sure of it. I can spot a man of birth from a man of mere exterior polish any day, anywhere. Talk as much nonsense as you like about all men being born free and equal–they’re not. They’re born with natural inequalities in their very nerve and muscle. When I was an undergraduate, I startled one of the tutors of that time by beginning my English essay once, “All men are by nature born free and unequal.” I stick to it still; it’s the truth. They say it takes three generations to make a gentleman; nonsense utterly; it takes at least a dozen. You can’t work out the common fibre in such a ridiculous hurry. That results as a simple piece of deductive reasoning from all modern theories of heredity and variation.’
‘I agree with you in part, Le Breton,’ the parson said, eyeing him closely; ‘in part but not altogether. What you say about Oswald’s very largely true. His culture sits upon him like a suit made to order, not like a skin in which he was born. But don’t you think that’s due more to the individual man than to the class he happens to belong to? It seems to me there are other men who come from the same class as Oswald, or even from lower classes, but whose culture is just as much ingrained as, say, my dear fellow, yours is. They were born, no doubt, of naturally cultivated parents. And that’s how your rule about the dozen generations that go to make a gentleman comes really true. I believe myself it takes a good many generations; but then none of them need have been gentlemen, in the ordinary sense of the word, before him. A gentleman, if I’m to use the expression as implying the good qualities conventionally supposed to be associated with it, a gentleman may be the final outcome and efflorescence of many past generations of quiet, unobtrusive, working-man culture–don’t you think so?’
Herbert Le Breton smiled incredulously. ‘I don’t know that I do, quite,’ he answered languidly. ‘I confess I attach more importance than you do to the mere question of race and family. A thoroughbred differs from a cart-horse, and a greyhound from a vulgar mongrel, in mind and character as well as in body. Oswald seems to me in all essentials a bourgeois at heart even now.’
‘But remember,’ Berkeley said, rather warmly for him, ‘the bourgeois class in England is just the class which must necessarily find it hardest to throw off the ingrained traces of its early origin. It has intermarried for a long time–long enough to have produced a distinct racial type like those you speak of among dogs and horses–the Philistine type, in fact–and when it tries to emerge, it must necessarily fight hard against the innate Philistinism of which it is conscious in its own constitution. No class has had its inequality with others, its natural inferiority, so constantly and cruelly thrust in its face; certainly the working-man has not. The working-man who makes efforts to improve himself is encouraged; the working-man who rises is taken by the hand; the working-man, whatever he does, is never sneered at. But it’s very different with the shopkeeper. Naturally a little prone to servility–that comes from the very necessities of the situation–and laudably anxious to attain the level of those he considers his superiors, he gets laughed at on every hand. Being the next class below society, society is always engaged in trying to keep him out and keep him down. On the other hand, he naturally forms his ideal of what is fine and worth imitating from the example of the class above him; and therefore, considering what that class is, he has unworthy aims and snobbish desires. Either in his own person, or in the persons of his near relations, the wholesale merchant and the manufacturer–all bourgeois alike–he supplies the mass of nouveaux riches who are the pet laughing-stock of all our playwrights, and novelists, and comic papers. So the bourgeois who really knows he has something in him, like Harry Oswald, feels from the beginning painfully conscious of the instability of his position, and of the fact that men like you are cutting jokes behind his back about the smell of tea that still clings to him. That’s a horrible drag to hold a man back–the sense that he must always be criticised as one of his own class–and that a class with many recognised failings. It makes him self-conscious, and I believe self-consciousness is really at the root of that slight social awkwardness you think you notice in Harry Oswald. A working-man’s son need never feel that. I feel sure there are working-men’s sons who go through the world as gentlemen mixing with gentlemen, and never give the matter of their birth one moment’s serious consideration. Their position never troubles them, and it never need trouble them. Put it to yourself, now, Le Breton. Suppose I were to tell you my father was a working shoemaker, for example, or a working carpenter, you’d never think anything more about it; but if I were to tell you he was a grocer, or a baker, or a confectioner, or an ironmonger, you’d feel a certain indefinable class barrier set up between us two immediately and ever after. Isn’t it so, now?’
‘Perhaps it is,’ Herbert answered dubitatively. ‘But as he’s probably neither the one nor the other, the hypothesis isn’t worth seriously discussing. I must go off now; I’ve got a lecture at twelve. Good-bye. Don’t forget the tickets for Thursday’s concert.’
Arthur Berkeley looked after him with a contemptuous smile. ‘The outcome of a race himself,’ he thought, ‘and not the best side of that race either. I was half tempted, in the heat of argument, to blurt out to him the whole truth about the dear gentle old Progenitor; but I’m glad I didn’t now. After all, it’s no use to cast your pearls before swine. For Herbert’s essentially a pig–a selfish self-centred pig; no doubt a very refined and cultivated specimen of pigdom–the best breed; but still a most emphatic and consummate pig for all that. Not the same stuff in him that there is in Ernest–a fibre or two wanting somewhere. But I mustn’t praise Ernest–a rival! a rival! It’s war to the death between us two now, and no quarter. He’s a good fellow, and I like him dearly; but all’s fair in love and war; and I must go down to Calcombe to-morrow morning and forestall him immediately. Dear little Miss Butterfly, ’tis for your sake; you shall not be pinched and cramped to suit the Procrustean measure of Ernest Le Breton’s communistic fancies. You shall fly free in the open air, and flash your bright silken wings, decked out bravely in scales of many hues, not toned down to too sober and quaker-like a suit of drab and dove-colour. You were meant by nature for the sunshine and the summer; you shall not be worried and chilled and killed with doses of heterodox political economy and controversial ethics. Better even a country rectory (though with a bad Late Perpendicular church), and flowers, and picnics, and lawn-tennis, and village small-talk, and the squire’s dinner-parties, than bread and cheese and virtuous poverty in a London lodging with Ernest Le Breton. Romance lives again. The beautiful maiden is about to be devoured by a goggle-eyed monster, labelled on the back “Experimental Socialism”; the red cross knight flies to her aid, and drives away the monster by his magic music. Lance in rest! lyre at side! third class railway ticket in pocket! A Berkeley to the rescue! and there you have it.’ And as he spoke, he tilted with his pen at an imaginary dragon supposed to be seated in the crimson rocking-chair by the wainscotted fireplace.
‘Yes, I must certainly go down to Calcombe. No use putting it off any longer. I’ve arranged to go next summer to London, to keep house for the dear old Progenitor; the music is getting asked for, two requests for more this very morning; trade is looking up. I shall throw the curacy business overboard (what chance for modest merit that ISN’T first cousin to a Bishop in the Church as at present constituted?) and take to composing entirely for a livelihood. I wouldn’t ask Miss Butterfly before, because I didn’t wish to tie her pretty wings prematurely; but a rival! that’s quite a different matter. What right has he to go poaching on my preserves, I should like to know, and trying to catch the little gold fish I want to entice for my own private and particular fish-pond! An interloper, to be turned out unmercifully. So off to Calcombe, and that quickly.’
He sat down to his desk, and taking out some sheets of blank music-paper, began writing down the score of a little song at which he had been working. So he continued till lunch-time, and then, turning to the table when the scout called him, took his solitary lunch of bread and butter, with a volume of Petrarch set open before him as he eat. He was lazily Englishing the soft lines of the original into such verse as suited his fastidious ear, when the scout came in suddenly once more, bringing in his hand the mid-day letters. One of them bore the Calcombe postmark. ‘Strange,’ Berkeley said to himself; ‘at the very moment when I was thinking of going there. An invitation perhaps; the age of miracles is not yet past–don’t they see spirits in a conjuror’s room in Regent Street?–from Oswald, too; by Jove, it must be an invitation.’ And he ran his eye down the page rapidly, to see if there was any mention of little Miss Butterfly. Yes; there was her name on the second sheet; what could her brother have to say to him about her?
‘We have Ernest Le Breton down here now,’ Oswald wrote, ‘on a holiday from the Exmoors’, and you may be surprised to hear that I shall probably have him sooner or later for a brother-in-law. He has proposed to and been accepted by my sister Edith; and though it is likely, as things stand at present, to be a rather long engagement (for Le Breton has nothing to marry upon), we are all very much pleased about it here at Calcombe. He is just the exact man I should wish my sister to marry; so pleasant and good and clever, and so very well connected. Felicitate us, my dear Berkeley!’
Arthur Berkeley laid the letter down with a quiet sigh, and folded his hands despondently before him. He hadn’t seen very much of Edie, yet the disappointment was to him a very bitter one. It had been a pleasant day-dream, truly, and he was both to part with it so unexpectedly. ‘Poor little Miss Butterfly,’ he said to himself, tenderly and compassionately; ‘poor, airy, flitting, bright-eyed little Miss Butterfly. I must give you up, must I, and Ernest Le Breton must take you for better, for worse, must he? La reyne le veult, it seems, and her word is law. I’m afraid he’s hardly the man to make you happy, little lady; kind-hearted, well-meaning, but too much in earnest, too much absorbed in his ideas of right for a world where right’s impossible, and every man for himself is the wretched sordid rule of existence. He will overshadow and darken your bright little life, I fear me; not intentionally–he couldn’t do that–but by his Quixotic fads and fancies; good fads, honest fads, but fads wholly impracticable in this jarring universe of clashing interests, where he who would swim must keep his own head steadily above water, and he who minds his neighbour must sink like lead to the unfathomable bottom. He will sink, I doubt not, poor little Miss Butterfly; he will sink inevitably, and drag you down with him, down, down, down to immeasurable depths of poverty and despair. Oh, my poor little butterfly, I’m sorry for you, and sorry for myself. It was a pretty dream, and I loved it dearly. I had made you a queen in my fancy, and throned you in my heart, and now I have to dethrone you again, me miserable, and have my poor lonely heart bare and queenless!’
The piano was open, and he went over to it instinctively, strumming a few wild bars out of his own head, made up hastily on the spur of the moment. ‘No, not dethrone you,’ he went on, leaning back on the music-stool, and letting his hand wander aimlessly over the keys; ‘not dethrone you; I shall never, never be able to do that. Little Miss Butterfly, your image is stamped there too deep for dethronement, stamped there for ever, indelibly, ineffaceably, not to be washed out by tears or laughter. Ernest Le Breton may take you and keep you; you are his; you have chosen him, and you have chosen in most things not unwisely, for he’s a good fellow and true (let me be generous in the hour of disappointment even to the rival, the goggle-eyed impracticable dragon monstrosity), but you are mine, too, for I won’t give you up; I can’t give you up; I must live for you still, even if you know it not. Little woman, I will work for you and I will watch over you; I will be your earthly Providence; I will try to extricate you from the quagmires into which the well-meaning, short-sighted dragon will infallibly lead you. Dear little bright soul, my heart aches for you; I know the trouble you are bringing upon yourself; but la reyne le veult, and it is not your humble servitor’s business to interfere with your royal pleasure. Still, you are mine, for I am yours; yours, body and soul; what else have I to live for? The dear old Progenitor can’t be with us many years longer; and when he is gone there will be nothing left me but to watch over little Miss Butterfly and her Don Quixote of a future husband. A man can’t work and slave and compose sonatas for himself alone–the idea’s disgusting, piggish, worthy only of Herbert Le Breton; I must do what I can for the little queen, and for her balloon-navigating Utopian Ernest. Thank heaven, no law prevents you from loving in your own heart the one woman whom you have once loved, no matter who may chance to marry her. Go, day-dream, fly, vanish, evaporate; the solid core remains still–my heart, and little Miss Butterfly. I have loved her once, and I shall love her, I shall love her for ever!’
He crumpled the letter up in his fingers, and flung it half angrily into the waste-paper basket, as though it were the embodied day-dream he was mentally apostrophising. It was sermon-day, and he had to write his discourse that very afternoon. A quaint idea seized him. ‘Aha,’ he said, almost gaily, in his volatile irresponsible fashion, ‘I have my text ready; the hour brings it to me unsought; a quip, a quip! I shall preach on the Pool of Bethesda: “While I am coming, another steppeth down before me.” The verse seems as if it were made on purpose for me; what a pity nobody else will understand it!’ And he smiled quietly at the conceit, as he got the scented sheets of sermon-paper out of his little sandalwood davenport. For Arthur Berkeley was one of those curiously compounded natures which can hardly ever be perfectly serious, and which can enjoy a quaintness or a neat literary allusion even at a moment of the bitterest personal disappointment. He could solace himself for a minute for the loss of Edie by choosing a text for his Sunday’s sermon with a prettily-turned epigram on his own position.
CHAPTER XII.
THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.
At the very top of the winding footpath cut deeply into the sandstone side of the East Cliff Hill at Hastings, a wooden seat, set a little back from the road, invites the panting climber to rest for five minutes after his steep ascent from the primitive fisher village of Old Hastings, which nestles warmly in the narrow sun-smitten gulley at his feet. On this seat, one bright July morning, Herbert Le Breton lay at half length, basking in the brilliant open sunshine and evidently waiting for somebody whom he expected to arrive by the side path from the All Saints’ Valley. Even the old coastguardsman, plodding his daily round over to Ecclesbourne, noticed the obvious expectation implied in his attentive attitude, and ventured to remark, in his cheery familiar fashion, ‘She won’t be long a-comin’ now, sir, you may depend upon it: the gals is sure to be out early of a fine mornin’ like this ‘ere.’ Herbert stuck his double eye-glass gingerly upon the tip of his nose, and surveyed the bluff old sailor through it with a stony British stare of mingled surprise and indignation, which drove the poor man hastily off, with a few muttered observations about some people being so confounded stuck up that they didn’t even understand the point of a little good-natured seafarin’ banter.
As the coastguardsman disappeared round the corner of the flagstaff, a young girl came suddenly into sight by the jutting edge of sandstone bluff near the High Wickham; and Herbert, jumping up at once from his reclining posture, raised his bat to her with stately politeness, and moved forward in his courtly graceful manner to meet her as she approached. ‘Well, Selah,’ he said, taking her hand a little warmly (judged at least by Herbert Le Breton’s usual standard), ‘so you’ve come at last! I’ve been waiting here for you for fully half an hour. You see, I’ve come down to Hastings again as I promised, the very first moment I could possibly get away from my pressing duties at Oxford.’
The girl withdrew her hand from his, blushing deeply, but looking into his face with evident pleasure and admiration. She was tall and handsome, with a certain dashing air of queenliness about her, too; and she was dressed in a brave, outspoken sort of finery, which, though cheap enough in its way, was neither common nor wholly wanting in a touch of native good taste and even bold refinement of contrast and harmony. ‘It’s very kind of you to come, Mr. Walters,’ she answered in a firm but delicate voice. ‘I’m so sorry I’ve kept you waiting. I got your letter, and tried to come in time; but father he’s been more aggravating than usual, almost, this morning, and kept saying he’d like to know what on earth a young woman could want to go out walking for, instead of stopping at home at her work and minding her Bible like a proper Christian. In HIS time young women usen’t to be allowed to go walking except on Sundays, and then only to chapel or Bible class. So I’ve not been able to get away till this very minute, with all this bundle of tracts, too, to give to the excursionists on the way. Father feels a most incomprehensible interest, somehow, in the future happiness of the Sunday excursionists.’
‘I wish he’d feel a little more interest in the present happiness of his own daughter,’ Herbert said smiling. ‘But it hasn’t mattered your keeping me waiting here, Selah. Of course I’d have enjoyed it all far better in your society–I don’t think I need tell you that now, dear–but the sunshine, and the sea breeze, and the song of the larks, and the plash of the waves below, and the shouts of the fishermen down there on the beach mending their nets and putting out their smacks, have all been so delightful after our humdrum round of daily life at Oxford, that I only wanted your presence here to make it all into a perfect paradise.–Why, Selah, how pretty you look in that sweet print! It suits your complexion admirably. I never saw you wear anything before so perfectly becoming.’
Selah drew herself up with the conscious pride of an unaffected pretty girl. ‘I’m so glad you think so, Mr. Walters,’ she said, playing nervously with the handle of her dark-blue parasol. ‘You always say such very flattering things.’
‘No, not flattering,’ Herbert answered, smiling; ‘not flattering, Selah, simply truthful. You always extort the truth from me with your sweet face, Selah. Nobody can look at it and not forget the stupid conventions of ordinary society. But please, dear, don’t call me Mr. Walters. Call me Herbert. You always do, you know, when you write to me.’
‘But it’s so much harder to do it to your face, Mr. Walters,’ Selah said, again blushing. ‘Every time you go away I say to myself, “I shall call him Herbert as soon as ever he comes back again;” and every time you come back, I feel too much afraid of you, the moment I see you, ever to do it. And yet of course I ought to, you know, for when we’re married, why, naturally, then I shall have to learn to call you Herbert, shan’t I?’
‘You will, I suppose,’ Herbert answered, rather chillily: ‘but that subject is one upon which we shall be able to form a better opinion when the time comes for actually deciding it. Meanwhile, I want you to call me Herbert, if you please, as a personal favour and a mark of confidence. Suppose I were to go on calling you Miss Briggs all the time! a pretty sort of thing that would be! what inference would you draw as to the depth of my affection? Well, now, Selah, how have these dreadful home authorities of yours been treating you, my dear girl, all the time since I last saw you?’
‘Much the same as usual, Mr. Walters–Herbert, I mean,’ Selah answered, hastily correcting herself. ‘The regular round. Prayers; clean the shop; breakfast, with a chapter; serve in the shop all morning; dinner, with a chapter; serve in the shop all afternoon; tea, with a chapter; prayer meeting in the evening; supper, with a chapter; exhortation; and go to bed, sick of it all, to get up next morning and repeat the entire performance da capo, as they always say in the music to the hymn-books. Occasional relaxations,–Sunday at chapel three times, and Wednesday evening Bible class; mothers’ assembly, Dorcas society, missionary meeting, lecture on the Holy Land, dissolving views of Jerusalem, and Primitive Methodist district conference in the Mahanaim Jubilee meeting hall. Salvation privileges every day and all the year round, till I’m ready to drop with it, and begin to wish I’d only been lucky enough to have been born one of those happy benighted little pagans in a heathen land where they don’t know the value of the precious Sabbath, and haven’t yet been taught to build Primitive Methodist district chapels for crushing the lives out of their sons and daughters!’
Herbert smiled a gentle smile of calm superiority at this vehement outburst of natural irreligion. ‘You must certainly be bored to death with it all, Selah,’ he said, laughingly. ‘What a funny sort of creed it really is, after all, for rational beings! Who on earth could believe that the religion these people use to render your life so absolutely miserable is meant for the same thing as the one that makes my poor dear brother Ronald so perfectly and inexpressibly serene and happy? The formalism of lower natures, like your father’s, has turned it into a machine for crushing all the spontaneity out of your existence. What a régime for a high-spirited girl like you to be compelled to live under, Selah!’
‘It is, it is!’ Selah answered, vehemently. ‘I wish you could only see the way father goes on at me all the time about chapel, and so on, Mr. Wal–Herbert, I mean. You wouldn’t wonder, if you were to hear him, at my being anxious for the time to come when you can leave Oxford and we can get comfortably married. What between the drudgery of the shop and the drudgery of the chapel my life’s positively getting almost worn out of me.’
Herbert took her hand in his, quietly. It was not a very small hand, but it was prettily, though cheaply, gloved, and the plain silver bracelet that encircled the wrist, though simple and inexpensive, was not wanting in rough tastefulness. ‘You’re a bad philosopher, Selah,’ he said, turning with her along the path towards Ecclesbourne; ‘you’re always anxious to hurry on too fast the lagging wheels of an unknown future. After all, how do you know whether we should be any the happier if we were really and truly married? Don’t you know what Swinburne says, in “Dolores”–you’ve read it in the Poems and Ballads I gave you–
Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives,
And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives?’
‘I’ve read it,’ Selah answered, carelessly, ‘and I thought it all very pretty. Of course Swinburne always is very pretty: but I’m sure I never try to discover what on earth he means by it. I suppose father would say I don’t read him tearfully and prayerfully–at any rate, I’m quite sure I never understand what he’s driving at.’
‘And yet he’s worth understanding,’ Herbert answered in his clear musical voice–‘well worth understanding, Selah, especially for you, dearest. If, in imitation of obsolete fashions, you wished to read a few verses of some improving volume every night and morning, as a sort of becoming religious exercise in the elements of self-culture, I don’t know that I could recommend you a better book to begin upon than the Poems and Ballads. Don’t you see the moral of those four lines I’ve just quoted to you? Why should we wish to change from anything so free and delightful and poetical as lovers into anything so fettered, and commonplace, and prosaic, and BANAL, as wives and husbands? Why should we wish to give up the fanciful paradise of fluttering hope and expectation for the dreary reality of housekeeping and cold mutton on Mondays? Why should we not be satisfied with the real pleasure of the passing moment, without for ever torturing our souls about the imaginary but delusive pleasure of the unrealisable, impossible future?’
‘But we MUST get married some time or other, Herbert,’ Selah said, turning her big eyes full upon him with a doubtful look of interrogation. ‘We can’t go on courting in this way for ever and ever, without coming to any definite conclusion. We MUST get married by-and-by, now mustn’t we?’
‘Je n’en vois pas la nécessité, moi,’ Herbert answered with just a trace of cynicism in his curling lip. ‘I don’t see any MUST about it, that is to say, in English, Selah. The fact is, you see, I’m above all things a philosopher; you’re a philosopher, too, but only an instinctive one, and I want to make your instinctive philosophy assume a rather more rational and extrinsic shape. Why should we really be in any hurry to go and get married? Do the actual married people of our acquaintance, as a matter of fact, seem so very much more ethereally happy–with their eight children to be washed and dressed and schooled daily, for example–than the lovers, like you and me, who walk arm-in-arm out here in the sunshine, and haven’t yet got over their delicious first illusions? Depend upon it, the longer you can keep your illusions the better. You haven’t read Aristotle in all probability; but as Aristotle would put it, it isn’t the end that is anything in love-making, it’s the energy, the active pursuit, the momentary enjoyment of it. I suppose we shall have to get married some day, Selah, though I don’t know when; but I confess to you I don’t look forward to the day quite so rapturously as you do. Shall we feel more the thrill of possession, do you think, than I feel it now when I hold your hand in mine, so, and catch the beating of your pulse in your veins, even through the fingers of your pretty little glove? Shall we look deeper into one another’s eyes and hearts than I look now into the very inmost depths of yours? Shall we drink in more fully the essence of love than when I touch your lips here–one moment, Selah, the gorse is very deep here–now don’t be foolish–ah, there, what’s the use of philosophising, tell me, by the side of that? Come over here to the bench, Selah, by the edge of the cliff; look down yonder into Ecclesbourne glen; hear the waves dashing on the shore below, and your own heart beating against your bosom within–and then ask yourself what’s the good of living in any moment, in any moment but the present.’
Selah turned her great eyes admiringly upon him once more. ‘Oh, Herbert,’ she said, looking at him with a clever uneducated girl’s unfeigned and undisguised admiration for any cultivated gentleman who takes the trouble to draw out her higher self. ‘Oh, Herbert, how can you talk so beautifully to me, and then ask me why it is I’m longing for the day to come when I can be really and truly married to you? Do you think I don’t feel the difference between spending my life with such a man as you, and spending it for years and years together with a ranting, canting Primitive Methodist?’
Herbert smiled to himself a quiet, unobtrusive, self-satisfied smile. ‘She appreciates me,’ he thought silently in his own heart, ‘she appreciates me at my true worth; and, after all, that’s a great thing. Well, Selah,’ he went on aloud, toying unreproved with her pretty little silver bracelet, ‘let us be practical. You belong to a business family and you know the necessity for being practical. There’s a great deal to be said in favour of my hanging on at Oxford a little longer. I must get a situation somewhere else as soon as possible, in which I can get married; but I can’t give up my fellowship without having found something else to do which would enable me to put my wife in the position I should like her to occupy.’
‘A very small income would do for me, with you, Herbert,’ Selah put in eagerly. ‘You see, I’ve been brought up economically enough, heaven knows, and I could live extremely well on very little.’
‘But _I_ could not, Selah,’ Herbert answered, in his colder tone. ‘Pardon me, but I could not. I’ve been accustomed to a certain amount of comfort, not to say luxury, which I couldn’t readily do without. And then, you know, dear,’ he added, seeing a certain cloud gathering dimly on Selah’s forehead, ‘I want to make my wife a real lady.’
Selah looked at him tenderly, and gave the hand she hold in hers a faint pressure. And then Herbert began to talk about the waves, and the cliffs, and the sun, and the great red sails, and to quote Shelley and Swinburne; and the conversation glided off into more ordinary everyday topics.
They sat for a couple of hours together on the edge of the cliff, talking to one another about such and other subjects, till, at last, Selah asked the time, hurriedly, and declared she must go off at once, or father’d be in a tearing passion. Herbert walked back with her through the green lanes in the golden mass of gorse, till he reached the brow of the hill by the fisher village. Then Selah said lightly, ‘Not any nearer, Herbert–you see I can say Herbert quite naturally now–the neighbours will go talking about it if they see me standing here with a strange gentleman. Good-bye, good-bye, till Friday.’ Herbert held her face up to his in his hands, and kissed her twice over in spite of a faint resistance. Then they each went their own way, Selah to the little green-grocer’s shop in a back street of the red-brick fisher village, and Herbert to his big fashionable hotel on the Marine Parade in the noisy stuccoed modern watering place.
‘It’s an awkward sort of muddle to have got oneself into.’ he thought to himself as he walked along the asphalte pavement in front of the sea-wall: ‘a most confoundedly awkward fix to have got oneself into with a pretty girl of the lower classes. She’s beautiful certainly; that there’s no denying; the handsomest woman on the whole I ever remember to have seen at any time anywhere; and when I’m actually by her side–though it’s a weakness to confess it–I’m really not quite sure that I’m not positively quite in love with her! She’d make a grand sort of Messalina, without a doubt, a model for a painter, with her frank imperious face, and her splendid voluptuous figure; a Faustina, a Catherine of Russia, an Ann Boleyn–to be fitly painted only by a Rubens or a Gustave Courbet. Yet how I can ever have been such a particular fool as to go and get myself entangled with her I can’t imagine. Heredity, heredity; it must run in the family, for certain. There’s Ernest has gone and handed himself over bodily to this grocer person somewhere down in Devonshire; and I myself, who perfectly see the folly of his absurd proceeding, have independently put myself into this very similar awkward fix with Selah Briggs here. Selah Briggs, indeed! The very name reeks with commingled dissent, vulgarity, and greengrocery. Her father’s deacon of his chapel, and goes out at night when there’s no missionary meeting on, to wait at serious dinner parties! Or rather, I suppose he’d desert the most enticing missionary to earn a casual half-crown at even an ungodly champagne-drinking dinner! Then that’s the difference between me and Ernest. Ernest’s selfish, incurably and radically selfish. Because this Oswald girl happens to take his passing fancy, and to fit in with his impossible Schurzian notions, he’ll actually go and marry her. Not only will he have no consideration for mother–who really is a very decent sort of body in her own fashion, if you don’t rub her up the wrong way or expect too much from her–but he’ll also interfere, without a thought, with MY prospects and my advancement. Now, THAT I call really selfish; and selfishness is a vulgar piggish vice that I thoroughly abominate. I don’t deny that I’m a trifle selfish myself, of course, in a refined and cultivated manner–I flatter myself, in fact, that introspective analysis is one of my strong points; and I don’t conceal my own failings from my own consciousness with any weak girlish prevarications. But after all, as Hobbes very well showed (though our shallow modern philosophers pretend to laugh at him), selfishness in one form or another is at the very base of all human motives; the difference really is between sympathetic and unsympathetic selfishness–between piggishness and cultivated feelings. Now _I_ will NOT give way to the foolish and selfish impulses which would lead me to marry Selah Briggs. I will put a curb upon my inclinations, and do what is really best in the end for all the persons concerned–and for myself especially.’
He strolled down on to the beach, and began throwing pebbles carelessly into the plashing water. ‘Yes,’ he went on in his internal colloquy, ‘I can only account for my incredible stupidity in this matter by supposing that it depends somehow upon some incomprehensible hereditary leaning in the Le Breton family idiosyncrasy. It’s awfully unlike me, I will do myself the justice to say, to have got myself into such a silly dilemma all for nothing. It was all very well a few years ago, when I first met Selah. I was an undergraduate in those days, and even if somebody had caught me walking with a young lady of unknown antecedents and doubtful aspirates on the East Cliff at Hastings, it really wouldn’t have much mattered. She was beautiful even then–though not so beautiful as now, for she grows handsomer every day; and it was natural enough I should have taken to going harmless walks about the place with her. She attracted me by her social rebelliousness–another family trait, in me passive not active, contemplative not personal; but she certainly attracted me. She attracts me still. A man must have some outlet for the natural and instinctive emotions of our common humanity; and if a monastic Oxford community imposes celibacy upon one with mediaeval absurdity–why, Selah Briggs is, for the time being, the only possible sort of outlet. One needn’t marry her in the end; but for the moment it is certainly very excellent fooling. Not unsentimental either–for my part I could never care for mere coarse, commonplace, venal wretches. Indeed, when I spoke to her just now about my wishing to make my wife a lady, upon my word, at the time, I almost think I was just then quite in earnest. The idea flitted across my mind vaguely–“Why not send her for a year or two to be polished up at Paris or somewhere, and really marry her afterwards for good and always?” But on second thoughts, it won’t hold water. She’s magnificent, she’s undeniable, she’s admirable, but she isn’t possible. The name alone’s enough to condemn her. Fancy marrying somebody with a Christian name out of the hundred and somethingth psalm! It’s too atrocious! I really couldn’t inflict her for a moment on poor suffering innocent society.’
He paused awhile, watching the great russet sails of the fishing vessels flapping idly in the breeze as the men raised them to catch the faint breath of wind, and then he thought once more, ‘But how to get rid of her, that’s the question. Every time I come here now she goes on more and more about the necessity of our getting soon married–and I don’t wonder at it either, for she has a perfect purgatory of a life with that snivelling Methodistical father of hers, one may be sure of it. It would be awfully awkward if any Oxford people were to catch me here walking with her on the cliff over yonder–some sniggering fellow of Jesus or Worcester, for example, or, worse than all, some prying young Pecksniff of a third-year undergraduate! Somehow, she seems to fascinate me, and I can’t get away from her; but I must really do it and be done with it. It’s no use going on this way much longer. I must stop here for a few days more only, and then tell her that I’m called away on important college business, say to Yorkshire or Worcestershire, or somewhere. I needn’t tell her in person, face to face: I can write hastily at the last moment to the usual name at the Post Office–to be left till called for. And as a matter of fact I won’t go to Yorkshire either–very awkward and undignified, though, these petty prevarications; when a man once begins lowering himself by making love to a girl in an inferior position, he lets himself in for all kinds of disagreeable necessities afterwards;–I shall go to Switzerland. Yes, no place better after the bother of running away like a coward from Selah: in the Alps, one would forget all petty human degradations; I shall go to Switzerland. Of course I won’t break off with her altogether–that would be cruel; and I really like her; upon my word, even when she isn’t by, up to her own level, I really like her; but I’ll let the thing die a natural death of inanition. As they always put it in the newspapers, with their stereotyped phraseology, a gradual coldness shall intervene between us. That’ll be the best and only way out of it.
‘And if I go to Switzerland, why not ask Oswald of Oriel to go with me? That, I fancy, wouldn’t be a bad stroke of social policy. Ernest WILL marry this Oswald girl; unfortunately he’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile; and as he’s going to drag her inevitably into the family, I may as well put the best possible face upon the disagreeable matter. Let’s make a virtue of necessity. The father and mother are old: they’ll die soon, and be gathered to their fathers (if they had any), and the world will straightway forget all about them. But Oswald will always be there en évidence, and the safest thing to do will be to take him as much as possible into the world, and let the sister rest upon HIS reputation for her place in society. It’s quite one thing to say that Ernest has married the daughter of a country grocer down in Devonshire, and quite another thing to say that he has married the sister of Oswald of Oriel, the distinguished mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. How beautifully that warm brown sail stands out in a curve against the cold grey line of the horizon–a bulging curve just like the swell of Selah’s neck, when she throws her head back, so, and lets you see the contour of her throat, her beautiful rounded throat–ah, that’s not giving her up now, is it?–What a confounded fool I am, to be sure! Anybody would say, if they could only have read my thoughts that moment, that I was really in love with this girl Selah!’
CHAPTER XIII.
YE MOUNTAINS OF GILBOA!
The old Englischer Hof at Pontresina looked decidedly sleepy and misty at five o’clock on an August morning, when two sturdy British holiday-seekers, in knickerbockers and regular Alpine climbing rig, sat drinking their parting cup of coffee in the salle-à-manger, before starting to make the ascent of the Piz Margatsch, one of the tallest and by far the most difficult among the peaks of the Bernina range. There are few prettier villages in the Engadine than Pontresina, and few better hotels in all Switzerland than the old ivy-covered Englischer Hof. Yet on this particular morning, and at that particular hour, it certainly did look just a trifle cold and cheerless. ‘He never makes very warm in the Engadine,’ Carlo the waiter observed with a shudder, in his best English, to one of the two early risers: ‘and he makes colder on an August morning here than he makes at Nice in full December.’ For poor Carlo was one of those cosmopolitan waiters who follow the cosmopolitan tourist clientèle round all the spas, health resorts, kurs and winter quarters of fashionable Europe. In January he and his brother, as Charles and Henri, handed round absinthes and cigarettes at the Cercle Nautique at Nice; in April, as Carlo and Enrico, they turned up again with water ices and wafer cakes in the Caffè Manzoni at Milan; and in August, the observant traveller might recognise them once more under the disguise of Karl and Heinrich, laying the table d’hôte in the long and narrow old-fashioned dining-room of the Englischer Hof at Pontresina. Though their native tongue was the patois of the Canton Ticino, they spoke all the civilised languages of the world, ‘and also German,’ with perfect fluency, and without the slightest attempt at either grammar or idiomatic accuracy. And they both profoundly believed in their hearts that the rank, wealth, youth, beauty and fashion of all other nations were wisely ordained by the inscrutable designs of Providence for a single purpose, to enrich and reward the active, intelligent, and industrious natives of the Canton Ticino.
‘Are the guides come yet?’ asked Harry Oswald of the waiter in somewhat feeble and hesitating German. He made it a point to speak German to the waiters, because he regarded it as the only proper and national language of the universal Teutonic Swiss people.
‘They await the gentlemans in the corridor,’ answered Carlo, in his own peculiar and racy English; for he on his side resented the imputation that any traveller need ever converse with him in any but that traveller’s own tongue, provided only it was one of the recognised and civilised languages of the world, or even German. They are a barbarous and disgusting race, those Tedeschi, look you well, Signor; they address you as though you were the dust in the piazza; yet even from them a polite and attentive person may confidently look for a modest, a very modest, but still a welcome trink-geld.
‘Then we’d better hurry up, Oswald,’ said Herbert Le Breton, ‘for guides are the most tyrannical set of people on the entire face of this planet. I shall have another cup of coffee before I go, though, if the guides swear at me roundly in the best Roumansch for it, anyhow.’
‘Your acquaintance with the Roumansch dialect being probably limited,’ Harry Oswald answered, ‘the difference between their swearing and their blessing would doubtless be reduced to a vanishing point. Though I’ve noticed that swearing is really a form of human speech everywhere readily understanded of the people in spite of all differences of race or language. One touch of nature, you see; and swearing, after all, is extremely natural.’
‘Are you ready?’ asked Herbert, having tossed off his coffee. ‘Yes? Then come along at once. I can feel the guides frowning at us through the partition.’
They turned out into the street, with its green-shuttered windows all still closed in the pale grey of early morning, and walked along with the three guides by the high road which leads through rocks and fir-trees up to the beginning of the steep path to the Piz Margatsch. Passing the clear emerald-green waterfall that rushes from under the lower melting end of the Morteratsch glacier, they took at once to the narrow track by the moraine along the edge of the ice, and then to the glacier itself, which is easy enough climbing, as glaciers go, for a good pedestrian. Herbert Le Breton, the older mountaineer of the two, got over the big blocks readily enough; but Harry, less accustomed to Swiss expeditions, lagged and loitered behind a little, and required more assistance from the guides every now and again than his sturdy companion.
‘I’m getting rather blown at starting,’ Harry called out at last to Herbert, some yards in front of him. ‘Do you think the despotic guide would let us sit down and rest a bit if we asked him very prettily?’
‘Offer him a cigar first,’ Herbert shouted back, ‘and then after a short and decent interval, prefer your request humbly in your politest French. The savage potentate always expects to be propitiated by gifts, as a preliminary to answering the petitions of his humble subjects.’
‘I see,’ Harry said, laughing. ‘Supply before grievances, not grievances before supply.’ And he halted a moment to light a cigar, and to offer one to each of the two guides who were helping him along on either side.
Thus mollified, the senior guide grudgingly allowed ten minutes’ halt and a drink of water at the bend by the corner of the glacier. They sat down upon the great translucent sea-green blocks and began talking with the taciturn chief guide.
‘Is this glacier dangerous?’ Harry asked.
‘Dangerous, monsieur? Oh no, not as one counts glaciers. It is very safe. There are seldom accidents.’
‘But there have been some?’
‘Some, naturally. You don’t climb mountains always without accidents. There was one the first time anyone ever made the ascent of the Piz Margatsch. That was fifty years ago. My uncle was killed in it.’
‘Killed in it?’ Harry echoed. ‘How did it all happen, and where?’
‘Yonder, monsieur, in a crevasse that was then situated near the bend at the corner, just where the great crevasse you see before you now stands. That was fifty years ago; since then the glacier has moved much. Its substance, in effect, has changed entirely.’
‘Tell us all about it,’ Herbert put in carelessly. He knew the guide wouldn’t go on again till he had finished his whole story.
‘It’s a strange tale,’ the guide answered, taking a puff or two at his cigar pensively and then removing it altogether for his set narrative–he had told the tale before a hundred times, and he had the very words of it now regularly by heart. ‘It was the first time anyone ever tried to climb the Piz Margatsch. At that time, nobody in the valley knew the best path; it is my father who afterwards discovered it. Two English gentlemen came to Pontresina one morning; one might say you two gentlemen; but in those days there were not many tourists in the Engadine; the exploitation of the tourist had not yet begun to be developed. My father and my uncle were then the only two guides at Pontresina. The English gentlemen asked them to try with them the scaling of the Piz Margatsch. My uncle was afraid of it, but my father laughed down his fears. So they started. My uncle was dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, and a pair of brown velvet breeches. Ah, heaven, I can see him yet, his white corpse in the blue coat and the brown velvet breeches!’
‘But you can’t be fifty yourself,’ Harry said, looking at the tall long-limbed man attentively; ‘no, nor forty, nor thirty either.’
‘No, monsieur, I am twenty-seven,’ the chief guide answered, taking another puff at his cigar very deliberately; ‘and this was fifty years ago: yet I have seen his corpse just as the accident happened. You shall hear all about it. It is a tale from the dead; it is worth hearing.’
‘This begins to grow mysterious,’ said Herbert in English, hammering impatiently at the ice with the shod end of his alpenstock. ‘Sounds for all the world just like the introduction to a Christmas number.’
‘A young girl in the village loved my uncle,’ the guide went on imperturhably; ‘and she begged him not to go on this expedition. She was betrothed to him. But he wouldn’t listen: and they all started together for the top of the Piz Margatsch. After many trials, my father and my uncle and the two tourists reached the summit. “So you see, Andreas,” said my father, “your fears were all folly.” “Half-way through the forest,” said my uncle, “one is not yet safe from the wolf.” Then they began to descend again. They got down past all the dangerous places, and on to this glacier, so well known, so familiar. And then my uncle began indeed to get careless. He laughed at his own fears; “Cathrein was all wrong,” he said to my father, “we shall get down again safely, with Our Lady’s assistance.” So they reached at last the great crevasse. My father and one of the Englishmen got over without difficulty; but the other Englishman slipped; his footing failed him; and he was sinking, sinking, down, down, down, slipping quickly into the deep dark green abyss below. My uncle stretched out his hand over the edge: the Englishman caught it; and then my uncle missed his foothold, they both fell together and were lost to sight at once completely, in the invisible depths of the great glacier!’
‘Well,’ Herbert Le Breton said, as the man paused a moment. ‘Is that all?’
‘No,’ the guide answered, with a tone of deep solemnity. ‘That is not all. The glacier went on moving, moving, slowly, slowly, but always downward, for years and years. Yet no one ever heard anything more of the two lost bodies. At last one day, when I was seven years old, I went out playing with my brother, among the pine-woods, near the waterfall that rushes below there, from under the glacier. We saw something lying in the ice-cold water, just beneath the bottom of the ice-sheet. We climbed over the moraine; and there, oh heaven! we could see two dead bodies. They were drowned, just drowned, we thought: it might have been yesterday. One of them was short and thick-set, with the face of an Englishman: he was close-shaven, and, what seemed odd to us, he had on clothes which, though we were but children, we knew at once for the clothes of a long past fashion–in fact, a suit of the Louis dix-huit style. Tha other was a tall and handsome man, dressed in the unchangeable blue coat and brown velvet breeches of our own canton, of the Graubunden. We were very frightened about it, and so we ran away trembling and told an old woman who lived close by; her name was Cathrein, and her grandchildren used to play with us, though she herself was about the age of my father, for my father married very late. Old Cathrein came out with us to look; and the moment she saw the bodies, she cried out with a great cry, “It is he! It is Andreas! It is my betrothed, who was lost on the very day week when I was to be married. I should know him at once among ten thousand. It is many, many years now, but I have not forgotten his face–ah, my God, that face; I know it well!” And she took his hand in hers, that fair white young hand in her own old brown withered one, and kissed it gently. “And yet,” she said, “he is five years older than me, this fair young man here; five years older than me!” We were frightened to hear her talk so, for we said to ourselves, “She must be mad;” so we ran home and brought our father. He looked at the dead bodies and at old Cathrein, and he said, “It is indeed true. He is my brother.” Ah, monsieur, you would not have forgotten it if you had seen those two old people standing there beside the fresh corpses they had not seen for all those winters! They themselves had meanwhile grown old and grey and wrinkled; but the ice of the glacier had kept those others young, and fresh, and fair, and beautiful as on the day they were first engulfed in it. It was terrible to look at!’
‘A most ghastly story, indeed,’ Herbert Le Breton said, yawning; ‘and now I think we’d better be getting under way again, hadn’t we, Oswald?’
Harry Oswald rose from his seat on the block of ice unwillingly, and proceeded on his road up the mountain with a distinct and decided feeling of nervousness. Was it the guide’s story that made his knees tremble slightly? was it his own inexperience in climbing? or was it the cold and the fatigue of the first ascent of the season to a man not yet in full pedestrian Alpine training? He did not feel at all sure about it in his own mind: but this much he knew with perfect certainty, that his footing was not nearly so secure under him as it had been during the earlier part of the climb over the lower end of the glacier.
By-and-by they reached the long sheer snowy slope near the Three Brothers. This slope is liable to slip, and requires careful walking, so the guides began roping them together. ‘The stout monsieur in front, next after me,’ said the chief guide, knotting the rope soundly round Herbert Le Breton: ‘then Kaspar; then you, monsieur,’ to Harry Oswald, ‘and finally Paolo, to bring up the rear. The thin monsieur is nervous, I think; it’s best to place him most in the middle.’
‘If you really ARE nervous, Oswald,’ Herbert said, not unkindly, ‘you’d better stop behind, I think, and let me go on with two of the guides. The really hard work, you know, has scarcely begun yet.’
‘Oh dear, no,’ Harry answered lightly (he didn’t care to confess his timidity before Herbert Le Breton of all men in the world): ‘I do feel just a little groggy about the knees, I admit; but it’s not nervousness, it’s only want of training. I haven’t got accustomed to glacier-work yet, and the best way to overcome it is by constant practice. “Solvitur ambulando,” you know, as Aldrich says about Achilles and the tortoise.’
‘Very good,’ Herbert answered drily; ‘only mind, whatever you do, for Heaven’s sake don’t go and stumble and pull ME down on the top of you. It’s the clear duty of a good citizen to respect the lives of the other men who are roped together with him on the side of a mountain.’
They set to work again, in single file, with cautious steps planted firmly on the treacherous snow, to scale the great white slope that stretched so temptingly before them. Harry felt his knees becoming at every step more and more ungovernable, while Herbert didn’t improve matters by calling out to him from time to time, ‘Now, then, look out for a hard bit here,’ or ‘Mind that loose piece of ice there,’ or ‘Be very careful how you put your foot down by the yielding edge yonder,’ and so forth. At last, they had almost reached the top of the slope, and were just above the bare gulley on the side, when Harry’s insecure footing on a stray scrap of ice gave way suddenly, and he begain to slip rapidly down the sheer slope of the mountain. In a second he had knocked against Paolo, and Paolo had begun to slip too, so that both were pulling with all their weight against Kaspar and the others in front. ‘For Heaven’s sake, man,’ Herbert cried hastily, ‘dig your alpenstock deep into the snow.’ At the same instant, the chief guide shouted in Roumansch to the same effect to Kaspar. But even as they spoke, Kaspar, pushing his feet hard against the snow, began to give way too; and the whole party seemed about to slip together down over the sheer rocky precipice of the great gulley on the right. It was a moment of supreme anxiety; but Herbert Le Breton, looking back with blood almost unstirred and calmly observant eye, saw at once the full scope of the threatening danger. ‘There’s only one chance,’ he said to himself quietly. ‘Oswald is lost already! Unless the rope breaks, we are all lost together!’ At that very second, Harry Oswald, throwing his arms up wildly, had reached the edge of the terrible precipice; he went over with a piercing cry into the abyss, with the last guide beside him, and Kaspar following him close in mute terror. Then Herbert Le Breton felt the rope straining, straining, straining, upon the sharp frozen edge of the rock; for an inappreciable point of time it strained and crackled: one loud snap, and it was gone for ever. Herbert and the chief guide, almost upset by the sudden release from the heavy pull that was steadily dragging them over, threw themselves flat on their faces in the drifted snow, and checked their fall by a powerful muscular effort. The rope was broken and their lives were saved, but what had become of the three others?
They crept cautiously on hands and knees to the most practicable spot at the edge of the precipice, and the guide peered over into the great white blank below with eager eyes of horrid premonition. As he did so, he recoiled with awe, and made a rapid gesture with his hands, half prayer, half speechless terror. ‘What do you see?’ asked Herbert, not daring himself to look down upon the blank beneath him, lest he should be tempted to throw himself over in a giddy moment.
‘Jesu, Maria,’ cried the guide, crossing himself instinctively over and over again, ‘they have all fallen to the very foot of the second precipice! They are lying, all three, huddled together on the ledge there just above the great glacier. They are dead, quite dead, dead before they reached the ground even. Great God, it is too terrible!’
Herbert Le Breton looked at the white-faced guide with just the faintest suspicion of a sneering curl upon his handsome features. The excitement of the danger was over now, and he had at once recovered his usual philosophic equanimity. ‘Quite dead,’ he said, in French, ‘quite dead, are they? Then we can’t be of any further use to them. But I suppose we must go down again at once to help recover the dead bodies!’
The guide gazed at him blankly with simple open-mouthed undisguised amazement. ‘Naturally,’ he said, in a very quiet voice of utter disgust and loathing. ‘You wouldn’t leave them lying there alone on the cold snow, would you?’
‘This is really most annoying,’ thought Herbert Le Breton to himself, in his rational philosophic fashion: ‘here we are, almost at the summit, and now we shall have to turn back again from the very threshold of our goal, without having seen the view for which we’ve climbed up, and risked our lives too–all for a purely sentimental reason, because we won’t leave those three dead men alone on the snow for an hour or two longer! it’s a very short climb to the top now, and I could manage it by myself in twenty minutes. If only the chief guide had slid over with the others, I should have gone on alone, and had the view at least for my trouble. I could have pretended the accident happened on the way down again. As it is, I shall have to turn back ingloriously, re infecta. The guide will tell everybody at Pontresina that I went on, in spite of the accident; and then it would get into the English papers, and all the world would say that I was so dreadfully cruel and heartless. People are always so irrational in their ethical judgments. Oswald’s quite dead, that’s certain; nobody could fall over such a precipice as that without being killed a dozen times over before he even reached the bottom. A very painless and easy death too; I couldn’t myself wish for a better one. We can’t do them the slightest good by picking up their lifeless bodies, and yet a foolishly sentimental public opinion positively compels one to do it. Poor Oswald! Upon my soul I’m sorry for him, and for that pretty little sister of his too; but what’s the use of bothering about it? The thing’s done, and nothing that I can do or say will ever make it any better.’
So they turned once more in single file down by the great glacier, and retraced their way to Pontresina without exchanging another word. To say the truth, the chief guide felt appalled and frightened by the presence of this impassive, unemotional British traveller, and did not even care to conceal his feelings. But then he wasn’t an educated philosopher and man of culture like Herbert Le Breton.
Late that evening a party of twelve villagers brought back three stiff and mangled corpses on loose cattle hurdles into the village of Pontresina. Two of them were the bodies of two local Swiss guides, and the third, with its delicate face unscathed by the fall, and turned calmly upwards to the clear moonlight, was the body of Harry Oswald. Alas, alas, Gilboa! The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places.
CHAPTER XIV.
‘WHAT DO THESE HEBREWS HERE?’
From Calcombe Pomeroy Ernest had returned, not to Dunbude, but to meet the Exmoor party in London. There he had managed somehow–he hardly knew how himself–to live through a whole season without an explosion in his employer’s family. That an explosion must come, sooner or later, he felt pretty sure in his own mind for several reasons: his whole existence there was a mistake and an anomaly, and he could no more mix in the end with the Exmoor family than oil can mix with vinegar, or vice versâ. The round of dances and dinners to which he had to accompany his pupil was utterly distasteful to him. Lynmouth never learnt anything; so Ernest felt his own function in the household a perfectly useless one; and he was always on the eve of a declaration that he couldn’t any longer put up with this, that, or the other ‘gross immorality’ in which Lynmouth was actively or passively encouraged by his father and mother. Still, there were two things which indefinitely postponed the smouldering outbreak. In the first place, Ernest wrote to, and heard from, Edie every day; and he believed he ought for Edie’s sake to give the situation a fair trial, as long as he was able, or at least till he saw some other opening, which might make it possible within some reasonable period to marry her. In the second place, Lady Hilda had perceived with her intuitive quickness the probability that a cause of dispute might arise between her father and Ernest, and had made up her mind as far as in her lay to prevent its ever coming to a head. She didn’t wish Ernest to leave his post in the household–so much originality was hardly again to be secured in a hurry–and therefore she laid herself out with all her ingenuity to smooth over all the possible openings for a difference of opinion whenever they occurred. If Ernest’s scruples were getting the upper hand of his calmer judgment, Lady Hilda read the change in his face at once, and managed dexterously to draw off Lynmouth, or to talk over her mother quietly to acquiesce in Ernest’s view of the question. If Lord Exmoor was beginning to think that this young man’s confounded fads were really getting quite unbearable, Lady Hilda interposed some casual remark about how much better Lynmouth was kept out of the way now than he used to be in Mr. Walsh’s time. Ernest himself never even suspected this unobtrusive diplomatist and peacemaker; but as a matter of fact it was mainly owing to Lady Hilda’s constant interposition that he contrived to stop in Wilton Place through all that dreary and penitential London season.
At last, to Ernest’s intense joy, the season began to show premonitory symptoms of collapsing from inanition. The twelfth of August was drawing nigh, and the coming-of-age of grouse, that most important of annual events in the orthodox British social calendar, would soon set free Lord Exmoor and his brother hereditary legislators from their arduous duty of acting as constitutional drag on the general advance of a great, tolerant, and easy-going nation. Soon the family would be off again to Dunbude, or away to its other moors in Scotland; and among the rocks and the heather Ernest felt he could endure Lord Exmoor and Lord Lynmouth a little more resignedly than among the reiterated polite platitudes and monotonous gaieties of the vacuous London drawing-rooms.
Lady Hilda, too, was longing in her own way for the season to be over. She had gone through another of them, thank goodness, she said to herself at times with a rare tinge of pensiveness, only to discover that the Hughs, and the Guys, and the Algies, and the Montys were just as fatuously inane as ever; and were just as anxious as before to make her share their fatuous inanity for a whole lifetime. Only fancy living with an unadulterated Monty from the time you were twenty to the time you were seventy-five–at which latter date he, being doubtless some five years older than one-self to begin with, would probably drop off quietly with suppressed gout, and leave you a mourning widow to deplore his untimely and lamented extinction for the rest of your existence! Why, long before that time you would have got to know his very thoughts by heart (if he had any, poor fellow!) and would be able to finish all his sentences and eke out all his stories for him, the moment he began them. Much better marry a respectable pork-butcher outright, and have at least the healthful exercise of chopping sausage-meat to fill up the stray gaps in the conversation. In that condition of life, they say, people are at any rate perfectly safe from the terrors of ennui. However, the season was over at last, thank Heaven; and in a week or so more they would be at dear old ugly Dunbude again for the whole winter. There Hilda would go sketching once more on the moorland, and if this time she didn’t make that stupid fellow Ernest see what she was driving at, why, then her name certainly wasn’t Hilda Tregellis.
A day or two before the legal period fixed for the beginning of the general grouse-slaughter, Ernest was sitting reading in the breakfast room at Wilton Place, when Lynmouth burst unexpectedly into the room in his usual boisterous fashion.
‘Oh, I say, Mr. Le Breton,’ he began, holding the door in his hand like one in a hurry, ‘I want leave to miss work this morning. Gerald Talfourd has called for me in his dog-cart, and wants me to go out with him now immediately.’
‘Not to-day, Lynmouth,’ Ernest answered quietly. ‘You were out twice last week, you know, and you hardly ever get your full hours for work at all since we came to London.’
‘Oh, but look here, you know, Mr. Le Breton; I really MUST go to-day, because Talfourd has made an appointment for me. It’s awful fun–he’s going to have some pigeon-shooting.’
Ernest’s countenance fell a little, and he answered in a graver voice than before, ‘If that’s what you want to go for, Lynmouth, I certainly can’t let you go. You shall never have leave from me to go pigeon-shooting.’
‘Why not?’ Lynmouth asked, still holding the door-handle at the most significant angle.
‘Because it’s a cruel and brutal sport,’ Ernest replied, looking him in the face steadily; ‘and as long as you’re under my charge I can’t allow you to take part in it.’
‘Oh, you can’t,’ said Lynmouth mischievously, with a gentle touch of satire in his tone. ‘You can’t, can’t you! Very well, then, never mind about it.’ And he shut the door after him with a bang, and ran off upstairs without further remonstrance.
‘It’s time for study, Lynmouth,’ Ernest called out, opening the door and speaking to him as he retreated. ‘Come down again at once, please, will you?’
But Lynmouth made no answer, and went straight off upstairs to the drawing-room. In a few minutes more he came back, and said in a tone of suppressed triumph, ‘Well, Mr. Le Breton, I’m going with Talfourd. I’ve been up to papa, and he says I may “if I like to.”‘
Ernest bit his lip in a moment’s hesitation. If it had been any ordinary question, he would have pocketed the contradiction of his authority–after all, if it didn’t matter to them, it didn’t matter to him–and let Lynmouth go wherever they allowed him. But the pigeon-shooting was a question of principle. As long as the boy was still nominally his pupil, he couldn’t allow him to take any part in any such wicked and brutal amusement, as he thought it. So he answered back quietly, ‘No, Lynmouth, you are not to go. I don’t think your father can have understood that I had forbidden you.’
‘Oh!’ Lynmouth said again, without a word of remonstrance, and went up a second time to the drawing-room.
In a few minutes a servant came down and spoke to Ernest. ‘My lord would like to see you upstairs for a few minutes, if you please, sir.’
Ernest followed the man up with a vague foreboding that the deferred explosion was at last about to take place. Lord Exmoor was sitting on the sofa. ‘Oh, I say, Le Breton,’ he began in his good-humoured way, ‘what’s this that Lynmouth’s been telling me about the pigeon-shooting? He says you won’t let him go out with Gerald Talfourd.’
‘Yes,’ Ernest answered; ‘he wanted to miss his morning’s work, and I told him I couldn’t allow him to do so.’
‘But I said he might if he liked, Le Breton. Young Talfourd has called for him to go pigeon-shooting. And now Lynmouth tells me you refuse to let him go, after I’ve given him leave. Is that so?’
‘Certainly,’ said Ernest. ‘I said he couldn’t go, because before he asked you I had refused him permission, and I supposed you didn’t know he was asking you to reverse my decision.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Lord Exmoor answered, for he was not an unreasonable man after his lights. ‘You’re quite right, Le Breton, quite right, certainly. Discipline’s discipline, we all know, and must be kept up under any circumstances. You should have told me, Lynmouth, that Mr. Le Breton had forbidden you to go. However, as young Talfourd has made the engagement, I suppose you don’t mind letting him have a holiday now, at my request, Le Breton, do you?’
Here was a dilemma indeed for Ernest. He hardly knew what to answer. He looked by chance at Lady Hilda, seated on the ottoman in the corner; and Lady Hilda, catching his eye, pursed up her lips visibly into the one word, ‘Do.’ But Ernest was inexorable. If he could possibly prevent it, he would not let those innocent pigeons be mangled and slaughtered for a lazy boy’s cruel gratification. That was the one clear duty before him; and whether he offended Lord Exmoor or not, he had no choice save to pursue it.
‘No, Lord Exmoor,’ he said resolutely, after a long pause. ‘I should have no objection to giving him a holiday, but I can’t allow him to go pigeon-shooting.’
‘Why not?’ asked Lord Exmoor warmly.
Ernest did not answer.
‘He says it’s a cruel, brutal sport, papa,’ Lynmouth put in parenthetically, in spite of an angry glance from Hilda; ‘and he won’t let me go while I’m his pupil.’
Lord Exmoor’s face grew very red indeed, and he rose from the sofa angrily. ‘So that’s it, Mr. Le Breton!’ he said, in a short sharp fashion. ‘You think pigeon-shooting cruel and brutal, do you? Will you have the goodness to tell me, sir, do you know that I myself am in the habit of shooting pigeons at matches?’
‘Yes,’ Ernest answered, without flinching a muscle.
‘Yes!’ cried Lord Exmoor, growing redder and redder. ‘You knew that, Mr. Le Breton, and yet you told my son you considered the practice brutal and cruel! Is that the way you teach him to honour his parents? Who are you, sir, that you dare set yourself up as a judge of me and my conduct? How dare you speak to him of his father in that manner? How dare you stir him up to disobedience and insubordination against his elders? How dare you, sir; how dare you?’
Ernest’s face began to get red in return, and he answered with unwonted heat, ‘How dare you address me so, yourself, Lord Exmoor? How dare you speak to me in that imperious manner? You’re forgetting yourself, I think, and I had better leave you for the present, till you remember how to be more careful in your language. But Lynmouth