While the congregation in the little church at Eversfield was singing the last hymn of the morning service the October sun passed from behind an extensive bank of cloud, and its rays shot down through the plain glass window upon the figure of a young woman, whose sudden and surprising illumination instantly attracted many pairs of eyes to her. She looked, and knew it, like a little angel as she stood in this shaft of brilliance, hymn-book in hand, singing the well-known words in a voice which enhanced their ancient sweetness; and the vicar, from his place at the side of the small chancel, fixed his gaze upon her with an expression of such saintly beatitude upon his face as to be almost idiotic. Her name was Dorothy Darling; but her mother, who here stood beside her in the shadow under the wall, called her Dolly, and rightly congratulated herself upon having chosen for her only baby, twenty-three years ago, a name of which the diminutive was so appropriate to the now grown woman.
In the sunshine the girl’s soft, fair hair looked like a puff of gold, and her skin like coral; and the play of light and shade accentuated the pretty lines of her figure, so that they were by no means lost under the folds of her smart little frock. Her large, soft eyes were as innocent as they were blue,[74] and never a glance betrayed the fact that she was singing for the direct benefit of the new Squire, whose head and shoulders appeared above the carved wooden walls of the sort of loose-box which was his family pew.
The miniature church, though dating from the twelfth century, still retained the features by which it had been transformed and modernized in the obsequious days of Walpole and the first of the Georges. The pews for the “gentry” were boxed in, and each was fitted with its door; but the walls of Jim’s pew were higher than the others and its area bigger. At the back of the church there were the open seats for the villagers and persons of vulgar birth; but the woodwork here was not carved, save with the occasional initials of lads long since passed out of memory.
At the sides of the chancel were set the mural tablets which recorded the genealogical lustres of dead Tundering-Wests, back to the day when a certain Captain of Horse had obtained a grant of the manor from the Commonwealth, in lieu of his devastated estate in Devon, and, with admirable tact, had married the daughter of the exiled Royalist owner. Around the whitewashed walls of the small nave large wooden boards were hung, upon which were painted the arms and quarterings of the successive Squires and their spouses; and above the chancel arch the royal Georgian escutcheon was displayed in still vivid colours.
The church, indeed, was a tiny monument to all that glory of caste which its Divine Founder abhorred, and which the aforesaid Roundhead, misapprehending[75] the unalterable character of his fellow-countrymen, had apparently fought in his own day to suppress.
When the hymn was finished, the blessing spoken, and Mr. Glenning gone into the vestry behind the organ, this traditional distinction between the classes was emphasized by the behaviour of the little congregation. Nobody of the meaner sort moved towards the sunlit doorway until Jim, looking extraordinarily embarrassed, had marched down the aisle and had passed out into the autumnal scurry of falling leaves, followed closely by Mrs. and Miss Darling, Mr. Merrivall of Rose Cottage, Dr. and Mrs. Spooner, and old Miss Proudfoote of the Grange; and, when these were gone, way had still to be made for young Farmer Hopkins and his wife, Farmer Cartwright and his idiot son, and the other families of local standing.
Outside, in the keen October air, Jim paused under the ancient ilex-tree, and turned to bid good-morning to the Darlings. Dolly had interested and attracted him during these three months since he took up his residence at the manor; but he had been so much occupied in settling himself into his new home that he had not given her all the attention he felt was her due, now that the shaft of sunlight in the church had revealed her to him in the palpable charm of her maidenhood.
He greeted her, therefore, with cheery ardour, as though she were a new discovery, and walked beside her and her mother down the path which wound between the moss-covered gravestones, and out into the lane under the rustling elms. A great change[76] had come over him since he had returned to England: he had become in some ways more normal, and the quiet, simple life of an English village had, as it were, taken much of the exotic colour out of his thoughts. In the romantic East he had looked for romance, but here in the domestic West his mind had turned towards domesticity. His poetic imagination was temporarily blunted; and whereas in Alexandria he had responded eagerly to the enchantments of hour and place, in Eversfield he was readily satisfied with a more rational aspect of life.
He turned to the mother. “What a little picture your daughter looked, singing that hymn in the sunlight,” he remarked, with enthusiasm.
Mrs. Darling sighed. Twenty years ago she, too, had been a little picture; but, so she thought to herself, she had had more character in her face than Dolly, and less softness. Outwardly her little girl took after that scamp of a father of hers, whose innocent blue eyes and boyish face had won him more frequent successes than his continence could handle.
“Yes,” she replied, evasively, “that is Dolly’s favourite hymn.... She has a nice little voice.”
“Delightful!” said Jim. “I didn’t know hymns could sound so beautiful!”
Dolly looked at him as our great-grandmothers must have looked when they said, “Fie!”
“Aren’t you a regular church-goer?” she asked, gazing up at him with childlike eyes.
“Can’t say I am,” he answered, with a quick laugh. “I’m new to all this, you know. I’ve knocked about all over the world since I left school.[77] But, I say!—that family pew, and the respectful villagers!—they give me the hump!”
“Oh, I think it is charming, perfectly charming,” said Mrs. Darling.
“Well,” he replied, “I expect I’ll get used to it. I suppose this sort of life grows on one: in some ways I’m beginning to have a sort of settled feeling already.”
They were walking away from the gates of the Manor, which rose opposite the ivy-covered church, and were approaching the picturesque little cottage where the Darlings lived. Jim paused, and as he did so Dolly experienced a sudden sense of disappointment. She had hoped that he would accompany them to their door, and she had intended then to entice him through it, and to show him over their pretty rooms and round the flower-garden and the orchard. Until now they had only occasionally met, and their exchanges of conversational trivialities had been carried on in the lane, or at the door of the church, or outside the cottage which served as the post-office. He seemed to be a difficult man to take hold of; and during the last few weeks, since her mind had begun to be so disastrously full of the thought of him, she had felt ridiculously frustrated in her attempts to develop their friendship. Frustration, of course, is woman’s destiny, which meets her at every turn; but in youth it sometimes serves as her incentive.
“Won’t you come in and see our little home?” she asked. “It’s rather a treasure.”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t,” he replied. “I promised to go round my place with the[78] gardener this morning. He’ll be waiting for me now. But, I say, what about dinner to-night? Won’t you both dine with me?” He was feeling reckless.
Dolly’s heart leapt, and, in a flash, she had selected the dress she would put on, and had considered whether she should wear the little diamond pendant or the sham pearls.
“We shall be delighted,” murmured Mrs. Darling. “Eh, Dolly?”
The girl looked doubtful. “I don’t know that we ought to to-night,” she answered. “We had half promised to drive over to a sort of sacred concert affair in Oxford.”
“Oh, don’t disappoint me,” said Jim. “I’ve got the house almost shipshape now; I’d like you to see it.”
Dolly did not require really to be pressed; and soon the young man was striding homewards down the lane, wondering why it had taken him three months to realize that this girl was perfectly adorable; while she, on her part, was pinching Mrs. Darling’s arm and saying: “Oh, mother dear, doesn’t he look delightfully wicked!”
“Yes, he seems a nice, sardonic fellow,” her mother remarked grimly, as they entered their house. “Why did you begin by saying we were engaged to-night? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
Dolly smiled. “Oh, I made that up, because I thought you were too prompt in accepting. He’ll want us all the more if we are stand-offish. Men are like that.”
Mrs. Darling sniffed. She was a lazy, plump,[79] and rather languid little woman; and sometimes she grew impatient at her daughter’s ingenious method of dealing with these sorts of situations. She herself had grown more direct in her Yea and Nay: perhaps at the age of forty-five she was a little tired of dissimulation. The world had treated her scurvily; and, having a settled grievance, she was inclined now to take whatever pleasant things were to be had for the asking, without any subtle man?uvering for position.
Her husband had left her when Dolly was five years old, and, so far as she knew, he was now dead. For several years she had bravely maintained herself in a tiny Kensington flat by writing social and theatrical articles for pretentious papers. She had been a purveyor of gossip, a tattle-monger, a dealer in bibble-babble; and she had carried on her trade with an increasing inclination to yawn over it, and a growing consciousness of her daughter’s contempt, until the editors who had supported her became aware that her heart was not in her work, and five years ago gave her her congé.
Then, with a temporary display of energy, she had followed Dolly’s cultured advice, and had established a little business off Sloane Square, which she called “The Purple Shop.” Here she sold purple cushions and lamp-shades, poppy-heads dipped in purple paint, poetry-books in purple covers, sketches by Bakst in purple frames, lengths of purple damask, and so forth. But purple went out of fashion, and her once very considerable profits sank to the vanishing point. She introduced other colours, and softer shades of mauve and lilac. She sold a doll[80] which had mauve hair and naughty black eyes; she took in a stock of bottled new potatoes tinged with a harmless purple liquid, and presented them to the jaded world of fashion as Pommes de terre pourpres de Tyr; she even sold brilliant bath-robes for bored bachelors, with coloured soap to match.
A financial crash followed, and, after a few months spent in dodging her creditors, she heard of this little cottage at Eversfield, and fled to it with her daughter, leaving no address. She was in receipt of a small annual allowance from the estate of a deceased brother, and this she supplemented by writing the monthly fashion article in one of the journals devoted to the world, the flesh and the devil. She wrote under the nom-de-plume of “Countess X”; and her material was obtained by a monthly visit to London and a tour of the leading modistes.
For eighteen months now she had lain low in this nook of the Midlands where Time stood still, and gradually she had ceased to dread the visit of the postman, and had begun to take a languid interest in the cottage. The colour purple no longer set her fat knees knocking together, and lately she had been able even to look up some of her old friends in London and to greet them with the sad, brave smile of a wronged woman.
To Dolly, however, the enforced seclusion had been a sore trial, and there were times when her pretty eyes were red with weeping. She had been utterly bored by the purposeless existence she was called upon to lead; but now the arrival of the new Squire at the manor, which had hardly seen its previous owner during the last year of his life,[81] had aroused her from her sorrows and had set her heart in a flutter. She liked his strange, swarthy face and his moody eyes, and thought he looked artistic and even intellectual; and she liked his obvious embarrassment at the deference paid to him in this little kingdom which he had inherited.
She spent the afternoon, therefore, in a condition of pleasurable excitement, stitching at the dress she was going to wear and making certain alterations to the shape of the neck.
While she plied her needle, Mrs. Darling sat at the low window overlooking the orchard, and scribbled her monthly article upon a writing-pad resting on her knee. “Here is a charming little conceit I chanced upon in Bond Street t’other day,” she wrote. “It is really a tub-time frock; but its success in the drawing-room is likely to be immediate. Organdy ruchings of moonlight blue, and a soup?on of jet cabochons on the corsage. It is named ‘Hopes in turmoil.’” And again, “I noticed, too, a crisp little trotteur frock, with a nipped-in waist-line hesitating behind a moyenage girdle of beige velours delaine. They have called it ‘Cupid’s Teeth.’ Oh, very snappy, I assure you, my dears!”
She smiled lazily as she wrote, but once she sighed so heavily that her daughter asked her if anything were amiss.
“No,” she replied. “I was only just wondering whether anybody in their senses could understand the nonsense I am writing. The editor’s orders are to make the thing sound French: I should lose my job if I wrote in plain English.”
[82]
“Oh dear,” sighed Dolly, “how tedious all that sort of thing seems! I wonder that you can bother with it.”
“I’ve got to,” her mother answered, with irritation. “I shan’t be able to give it up till you are married and off my hands.”
“Yes, so you are always telling me,” said Dolly; and therewith their silence was renewed.
Night had fallen when they set out for the manor, and the lane was intensely dark. They were guided, however, by the light in the window of the lodge at the gates; and from here to their destination they were accompanied by the gardener, who carried a lantern which flung their shadows, like great black monsters, across the high box-hedges flanking the main approach. From the outside the timbered house looked ghostly and forbidding; and by contrast, the front hall which they entered seemed wonderfully well-lit, though only lamps and candles and the flames of the log-fire served for illumination.
Here Jim came to them as they were removing their wraps, and Dolly could see by the expression on his face that her dress had his hearty approval. He led them into the library, where his late uncle’s books, arranged upon the high shelves, and the rather heavy furniture, presented a picture of solid dignity; and presently they were ushered into the panelled dining-room, where they sat down at a warmly lit table, under the silent scrutiny of a gallery of dead Tundering-Wests and that of a gaping village housemaid who appeared to be more or less moribund.
The food provided by Jim’s thoroughly incompetent[83] cook was not a success, and when some rather tough mutton chops had followed a dish of under-boiled cod, which had been preceded by a huge silver tureen of lukewarm soup, their host felt that some words of apology were due to his guests.
“You must try to bear with the menu,” he laughed. “This is my cook’s first situation. She was recommended to me by Mr. Glenning, the vicar, as a girl who was willing to learn; but it only occurred to me afterwards that that was not much good when there was nobody to teach her.”
“You must let me give her a few lessons,” said Dolly, at which her mother stared in astonishment, knowing that her daughter understood about as much of cooking as a dumb-waiter.
Yet the girl was not conscious of deception, nor was she aware that she was acting a part, and acting it mainly for her own edification. She pictured herself just now as a splendid little housewife, and she would have been gravely insulted if her mother had told her that her dream was devoid of reality. In her mind she saw herself as the lady of the manor, quietly, unobtrusively, yet all-wisely, directing its affairs; a sweet smiling Bunty pulling the strings; a little ray of sunshine in the great, grey old house; a source of comfort to her lord which he would not appreciate until she should go away to stay with her mother, whereon he would write to her telling her that since her departure everything had gone wrong.
Throughout her life she had played such parts to herself, her r?les varying according to circumstances. At the Purple Shop she had been the dreamy little artist, destined for higher things, but forced[84] by cruel poverty to act as assistant saleswoman to a soulless mother, and to smile bravely at the world, though her artist’s heart was breaking. When first she had come to Eversfield and had fallen under the spell of the green woods, she had had a severe bout of “Merrie England.” She had tripped through the fields in a sun-bonnet, and had begged her mother to buy a harpsichord. She had joined a society of ladies in Oxford who were attempting to revive folk-dancing, and she had footed it nimbly on the sward while the curate played “Hey-diddle-diddle” to them on his flute.
Later she had gone through the nymph-and-fairy phase, and, in the depth of the woods, had let her hair down so that it looked in the sunlight, she supposed, like woven gold. She had danced her way barefooted from tree to tree, sipping the dew from the dog-roses, and singing snatches of strange, wild songs about the “little people,” and talking to the birds; and when Farmer Cartwright had caught her at it, she had looked at him, she believed, like a startled fawn.
But now, since the new Squire, with his background of rich lands and ancient tenure, had come into her life, she had played the little helpmate, the goodwife in her dairy, the mistress in her kitchen with whole-hearted enthusiasm. She thought of beginning to collect a book of Simples, in which there would be much mention of Marjoram, Rosemary, Rue and Thyme; soveraign Balsames for Woundes, and Cordiall Tinctures for ye Collicke; receipts for the making of Quince-Wine, or Syllabubs of Apricocks; and so forth. Phrases such as “The little[85] mistress of the big house,” “My lady in her pleasaunce,” or “—in her herbal garden,” had been drifting through her head for some time past; and hence her offer to set Jim’s cuisine to rights fell naturally from her lips.
Nor was this the only show of interest she displayed in his domestic affairs. After the meal was finished and they were sitting around the fire in the library, she asked Jim to show her the drawing-room, which was not yet in use; and when he was about to lead her to it she made peremptory signs to her mother to refrain from accompanying them.
As she tiptoed down the passage and across the hall at Jim’s side, she laid her hand upon his proffered arm, and he was surprised at the lightness of the touch of her fingers. He did not, perhaps, compare it actually to thistledown, which, at the moment, was the description her own mind was fondly giving it; but her painstaking effort to defeat the Newtonian law resulted, as she desired, in an increased consciousness on his part that she was a very fairy-like creature.
The drawing-room was in darkness, and as they entered it she uttered a little squeak of nervousness which went, as it was intended, straight to his manly heart. He put his disengaged hand on her fingers and felt their response: they seemed to be seeking his protection, and his senses were thrilled at the contact. He could have kissed her as she stood.
“Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll light the candles.”
“No, don’t,” she answered. “It looks so ghostly and wonderful.”
She crept forward into the room, into which only[86] the reflected light from the hall penetrated, and presently she came to a stand upon the hearth-rug. He followed her, and stood close at her side; one might have harkened to both their hearts beating. Then, boldly, he put his arm in hers and took hold of her hand. It was trembling.
“Why,” he said, in surprise, “you’re shaking with fright.”
“No, it isn’t fright,” she stammered....
The voice of worldly wisdom whispered to him: “Look out!—this is getting precious close to the danger zone”; and, with a saner impulse, he removed his hand from hers, struck a match, and lit the candle.
“Oh, now you’ve spoilt it!” she exclaimed, not without irritation, and then added quickly: “The ghosts have vanished.”
He held the candle up, and told her to look round the room; but as she did so his own eyes were fixed upon her averted face, and had she turned she would have realized at once that her triumph was nigh.