Deadham Hard Part 9

For justice must take its course. Theresa must be saved from herself.

Still her implacable young saviour, in proportion as victory appeared a.s.sured, began to feel sad. For it grew increasingly plain that Theresa was not of the stuff of which warriors, any more than saints, are made.

Stand up to her and she collapsed like a p.r.i.c.ked bubble.--So little was left, a sc.u.m of colourless soap suds, in which very certainly there is no fight. Again she showed a pitiful being, inviting chivalrous forbearance.

"You are very hard," she lamented, "and you are always inclined to side with the servants against me. You seem to take pleasure in undermining my influence, while I am so ready and anxious to devote myself to you.

You know there is nothing, nothing I would not do for you and--and for Sir Charles."

Theresa choked, coughed, holding her handkerchief to her eyes.

"And what reward do I meet with?" she asked brokenly. "At every turn I am thwarted. But you must give way in this case, Damaris. Positively you must. I cannot allow myself to be publicly discredited through your self-will. I promised the horses for the extra brake. The offer was made and accepted--accepted, you understand, actually accepted. What will the vicar say if the arrangement is upset? What will every one think?"

Damaris pushed her chair back from the table and rose to her feet.--Forbearance wore threadbare under accusation and complaint. No, Theresa was not only a little too abject, but a little too disingenuous, thereby putting herself beyond the pale of rightful sympathy. Even while she protested devotion, self looked out seeking personal advantage. And that devotion, in itself, shocked Damaris' sense of fitness where it involved her father. It wasn't Theresa's place to talk of devotion towards him!

Moreover the young girl began to feel profoundly impatient of all this to do and bother. For wasn't the whole affair, very much of a storm in a teacup, petty, paltry, quite unworthy of prolonged discussion such as this? She certainly thought so, in her youthful fervour and inexperience; while--the push of awakening womanhood giving new colour and richness to her conception of life--nature cried out for a certain extravagance in heroism, in largeness of action of aspiration. She was athirst for n.o.ble horizons, in love with beauty, with the magnificence of things, seen and unseen alike. In love with superb objectives even if only to be reached through a measure of suffering, and--searching, arresting, though the thought was to her--possibly through peril of death.

In such moods there is small room for a Bilson regime and outlook. A flavour of scorn marked her tone as she answered at last:

"Oh, you can lay the blame on me--or rather tell the truth, which amounts to the same thing. Say that, my father being away, I refused my consent to the horses being taken out. Say you appealed to me but I was hopelessly obstinate. It is very simple."

CHAPTER III

A SAMPLING OF FREEDOM

When two persons, living under the same roof, have the misfortune to fall out a hundred and one small ways are ready to hand for the infliction of moral torment. The weak, it may be added, are not only far more addicted to such inflictings than the strong, but far more resourceful in their execution. Theresa Bilson's conduct may furnish a pertinent example.

From the moment of emerging from her bed-chamber, next morning, she adopted an att.i.tude which she maintained until she regained the chaste seclusion of that apartment at night. During no instant of the intervening hours did she lapse from studied speechlessness unless directly addressed, nor depart from an air of virtuous resignation to injustice and injury--quite exquisitely provoking to the onlooker. Twice during the morning Damaris, upon entering the schoolroom, discovered her in tears, which she proceeded to wipe away, furtively, with the greatest ostentation.--Dramatic effect, on the second occasion was, however, marred by the fact that she was engaged in retr.i.m.m.i.n.g a white chip hat, encircled by a garland of artificial dog-roses, blue gla.s.s grapes and a.s.sorted foliage--an occupation somewhat ill-adapted to tragedy. In addition to making her ex-pupil--against whom they were mainly directed--first miserable and then naughtily defiant by these manoeuvres, she alienated any sympathy which her red-rimmed eyelids and dolorous aspect might otherwise have engendered in the younger and less critical members of the establishment, by sending Alfred, the hall-boy, up to the vicarage with a note and instructions to wait for an answer, at the very moment when every domestic ordinance demanded his absorption in the cleaning of knives and of boots. Being but human, Alfred naturally embraced the heaven-sent chance of dawdling, pa.s.sing the time of day with various cronies, and rapturously a.s.sisting to hound a couple of wild, sweating and snorting steers along the dusty lane, behind the churchyard, to Butcher Cleave's slaughter-house: with the consequence that his menial duties devolved upon Laura and Lizzie, who, supported by the heads of their respective departments, combined to "give him the what for," in no measured terms upon his eventual and very tardy return.

It is not too much to say that, by luncheon time Theresa--whether wilfully or not--had succeeded in setting the entire household by the ears; while any inclinations towards peace-making, with which Damaris might have begun the day, were effectively dissipated, leaving her strengthened and confirmed in revolt. Around the stables, and the proposed indignity put upon Patch and the horses, this wretched quarrel centred so--as at once a vote of confidence and declaration of independence--to the stables Damaris finally went and ordered the dog-cart at three o'clock. For she would drive, and drive, throughout the course of this gilded September afternoon. Drive far away from foolishly officious and disingenuous Theresa, far from Deadham, so tiresome just now in its irruption of tea-parties and treats. She would behold peaceful inland horizons, taste the freedom of spirit and the content which the long, smooth buff-coloured roads, leading to unknown towns and unvisited country-side, so deliciously give.

She stood at the front door, in blue linen gown, white knitted jersey and white sailor hat, b.u.t.toning her tan doeskin driving-gloves, a gallant, gravely valiant young creature, beautifully unbroken as yet by any real a.s.sent to the manifold foulness of life--her faith in the n.o.bility of human nature and human destiny still finely intact. And that was just where her revolt against poor Theresa Bilson came in. For Theresa broke the accepted law, being ign.o.ble; and thereby spoiled the fair pattern, showed as a blot.--Not that she meant to trouble any more about Theresa just now. She was out simply to enjoy, to see and feel, rather than reason, a.n.a.lyse or think. So she settled herself on the sloping high-cus.h.i.+oned seat, bracing her feet against the driving iron, while Mary, reaching up, tucked the dust-rug neatly about her skirts.

Patch--whose looks and figure unmistakably declared his calling--short-legged and stocky, inclining to corpulence yet nimble on his feet, clean shaven, Napoleonic of countenance, pa.s.sed reins and whip into her hands as Tolling, the groom, let go the horse's head.

The girl squared her shoulders a little, and the soft colour deepened in her cheeks, as she swung the dog-cart down the drive and out of the entrance gate into the road--here a green-roofed tunnel, branches meeting overhead, thickly carpeted with dry sand blown inward from the beach--and on past the whitewashed cottages, red brick and grey stone houses of Deadham village, their gardens pleasant with flowers, and with apple and pear trees weighted down by fruit. Past the vicarage and church, standing apart on a little gra.s.s-grown monticule, backed by a row of elms, which amid their dark foliage showed here and there a single bough of verdigris-green or lemon-yellow--first harbingers of autumn. Into the open now, small rough fields dotted with thorn bushes and bramble-brakes on the one side; and on the other the s.h.i.+ning waters of the Haven.

Through the hamlet of Lampit, the rear of whose dilapidated sheds and dwellings abut on reed-beds and stretches of unsightly slime and ooze. A desolate spot, bleak and wind-swept in winter, and even under blue skies, as to-day basking in suns.h.i.+ne, degraded by poverty and dirt.

Some half-mile further is h.o.r.n.y Cross where, as the name indicates, four roads meet. That from Deadham to the edge of the forest runs north; the other, from Beaupres-on-Sea to Marychurch, Stourmouth and Barryport, due west. Damaris, having a fancy to keep the coast-line out of sight, chose the former, following the valley of the Arne, between great flat meadows where herds of dairy cows, of red Devons and black Welsh runts, feed in the rich deep gra.s.s. In one place a curve of the river brings it, for three hundred yards or more, close under the hanging woods, only the width of the roadway between the broad stream and living wall of trees.

Here transparent bluish shadow haunted the undergrowth, and the air grew delicately chill, charged with the scent of fern, of moist earth, leaf mould, and moss.

Such traffic as held the road was leisurely, native to the scene and therefore pleasing to the sight.--For the age of self-moving machines on land had barely dawned yet; while the sky was still wholly inviolate.--A white tilted miller's wagon, a brewer's dray, each drawn by well-favoured teams with jingling bells and bra.s.s-mounted harness, rumbling farm carts, a gypsy van painted in crude yellow, blue, and red and its accompanying rabble of children, donkeys and dogs, a farmer's high-hung, curtseying gig, were in turn met or pa.s.sed. For the black horse, Damaris driving it, gave place to none, covering the mounting tale of miles handsomely at an even, swinging trot.

At Lady's Oak, a n.o.ble tree marking some ancient forest boundary and consequently spared when the needs of the British Navy, during the French wars of the early years of the century, condemned so many of its fellows to the axe--the flattened burnished dome of which glinted back the sunlight above a maze of spreading branches and ma.s.sive powder-grey trunk--the main road forks. Damaris turned to the left, across the single-arch stone bridge spanning the Arne, and drove on up the long winding ascent from the valley to the moorland and fir plantations which range inland behind Stourmouth. This const.i.tuted the goal of her journey, for once the high-lying plateau reached, leagues of country open out far as the eye carries to the fine, bare outline of the Wilts.h.i.+re downs.

She checked the horse, letting it walk, while she took stock of her surroundings.

It may be a.s.serted that there are two ways of holding converse with Nature. The one is egotistic and sentimental, an imposing of personal tastes and emotions which betrays the latent categoric belief that the existence of external things is limited to man's apprehension of them--a vilely conceited if not actually blasphemous doctrine! The other is that of the seeker and the seer, who, approaching in all reverence, asks no more than leave to listen to the voice of external things--recognizing their independent existence, knowing them to be as real as he is, as wonderful, in their own order as permanent, possibly as potent even for good and evil as himself. And it was, happily, according to this latter reading of the position, instinctively, by the natural bent of her mind, that Damaris attempted converse with the world without.

The glory of the heather had pa.s.sed, the bloom now showing only as silver-pink froth upon an ocean of warm brown. But the colouring was restful, the air here on the dry gravel soil light and eager, and the sense of height and s.p.a.ce exhilarating. A fringe of harebells, of orange hawkweed and dwarf red sorrel bordered the road. Every small oasis of turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil.

Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning note. A big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to a farm in the valley. The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. This the young girl welcomed. It washed her imagination free of the curious questionings, involuntary doubts and suspicions, which the house and garden at The Hard, steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, past pa.s.sions, were p.r.o.ne to breed in her. No reek off the mud-flats, any more than over luscious garden scents, tainted the atmosphere. It was virgin as the soil of the moorland--a soil as yet untamed and unfertilized by the labour of man. And this effect of virginity, even though a trifle _farouche_, harsh, and barren in the perfection of its purity, appealed to Damaris'

present mood. Her spirit leapt to meet it in proud fellows.h.i.+p. For it routed forebodings. Discounted introspective broodings. Discounted even the apparently inevitable--since n.o.body and nothing, so the young girl told herself with a rush of gladly resolute conviction, is really inevitable unless you permit or choose to have them so.--Gallant this, and the mother of brave doings; though--as Damaris was to discover later, to the increase both of wisdom and of sorrow--a half-truth only. For man is never actually master of people or of things; but master, at most, of his own att.i.tude towards them. In this alone can he claim or exercise free-will.

Then--because general ideas, however inspiriting, are rather heavy diet for the young, immature minds growing quickly tired in the efforts to digest them--Damaris, having reached this happy, if partially erroneous, climax of emanc.i.p.ation, ceased to philosophize either consciously or unconsciously. The russet moorland and s.p.a.cious landscape shut the door on her, had no more to tell her, no more to say. Or, to be strictly accurate, was it not rather perhaps that her power of response, power to interpret their speech and a.s.similate their message had reached its term?

All her life the maturity of her brain had inclined--rather fatiguingly--to outrun the maturity of her body, so that she failed "to continue in one stay" and trivial hours trod close on the heels of hours of exaltation and of insight.

With a sigh and a sense of loss--as though n.o.ble companions had withdrawn themselves from her--she gathered up the reins and sent the horse forward. She fell into comfortable friendly conversation with the Napoleonic-countenanced Patch, moreover, consulting him as to the shortest way, through the purlieus of Stourmouth, into the Marychurch high road and so home to Deadham Hard. For, to tell the truth, she became aware she was hungry and very badly in want of her tea.

Theresa Bilson, setting out the next morning in solitary state, contrived to maintain the adopted att.i.tude until the front gates were safely pa.s.sed. Then she relaxed and looked out of the brougham windows with a fussy brightness more consonant to the joys of impending union with the Miss Minetts and the day's impending trip. She made no further effort to secure Damaris' partic.i.p.ation in the social and educational advantages which it promised. On the contrary she left the young lady severely alone and at home, as one administering well-merited punishment. Thus effectively demonstrating, as she wished to believe, her personal authority; and suiting, as she would have stoutly denied, her personal convenience. For Damaris on a string, plus the extra brake and carriage horses, was one story; Damaris on her own, minus those animals and much-debated vehicle, quite another. Unless the presence of her ex-pupil could be made to redound to her own glory, Theresa much preferred reserving representation of The Hard and its distinguished proprietor wholly and solely to herself. So in the spirit of pretence and of make-believe did she go forth; to find, on her return, that spirit prove but a lying and treacherous ally--and for more reasons than one.

It happened thus. Supported by the two brindled tabby house cats, Geraldine and Mustapha--descendants of the numerous tribe honoured, during the last half-century of his long life, by Thomas Clarkson Verity's politely affectionate patronage--Damaris spent the greater part of the morning in the long writing room.

She had judged and condemned Theresa pretty roundly it is true, nevertheless she felt a little hurt and sore at the latter's treatment of her. Theresa need not have kept up the quarrel till the very last so acridly. After all, as she was going out purely for own pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt, she might have found something nice and civil to say at parting. And then the mere fact of being left behind, of being out of it, however limited the charms of a party, has a certain small stab to it somehow--as most persons, probing youthful experiences, can testify.

It is never quite pleasant to be the one who doesn't go!--The house, moreover, when her father was absent, always reminded Damaris of an empty shrine, a place which had lost its meaning and purpose. To-day, though windows and doors were wide open letting in a wealth of suns.h.i.+ne, it appeared startlingly lifeless and void. The maids seemed unusually quiet. She heard no movement on the staircase or in the rooms above.

Neither gardener nor garden-boy was visible. She would have hailed the whirr of the mowing machine or swish of a broom on the lawn.--Oh! if only her poor dear Nannie were still alive, safe upstairs, there in the old nursery!

And at that the child Damaris felt a lump rise in her throat. But the girl, the soon-to-be woman, Damaris choked it down bravely. For n.o.body, nothing--so she a.s.sured herself, going back to the lesson learned yesterday upon the open moorland--is really inevitable unless you suffer or will it so to be. Wherefore she stiffened herself against recognition of loneliness, stiffened herself against inclination to mourning, refused to acquiesce in or be subjugated by either and, to the better forgetting of them, sought consolation among her great-great uncle's books.

For at this period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form of literature and every description of knowledge--whether clearly comprehended or not--which the beloved printed page has to give. An eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions with Theresa, and at this particular juncture all the more agreeable to gratify on that very account. For Theresa would have had her walk only in the narrow, sheltered, neatly bordered paths of history and fiction designed, for the greater preservation of female innocence, by such authors as Miss Sewell, Miss Strickland, and Miss Yonge. Upon Damaris, however, perambulation of those paths palled too soon. Her intellect and heart alike demanded wider fields of drama, of religion and of science, above all wider and less conventional converse with average human nature, than this triumvirate of Victorian sibyls was willing or capable to supply. It is undeniable that, although words and phrases, whole episodes indeed, were obscure even unintelligible to her, she found the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini and Saint Simon more interesting than the "Lives of the Queens of England; Vathek," more to her taste than "Amy Herbert"; and, if the truth must be told, "The Decameron," and "Tristram Shandy" more satisfying to her imagination than "The Heir of Redcliffe" or "The Daisy Chain." To Damaris it seemed, just now, that a book the meaning of which was quite clear to her and could be grasped at sight, hardly repaid the trouble of reading, since it afforded no sense of adventure, no excitement of challenge or of pursuit, no mirage of wonder, no delightful provocation of matters outside her experience and not understood. About these latter she abstained from asking questions, having much faith in the illuminating power of the future. Given patience, all in good time she would understand everything worth understanding.--That there are things in life best not understood, or understood only at your peril, she already in some sort divined.--Hence her reading although of the order obnoxious to pedants, as lacking in method and accurate scholars.h.i.+p, went to produce a mental atmosphere in which honest love of letters and of art, along with generous instincts of humanity quicken and thrive.

On this particular morning Damaris elected to explore to the Near East, in the vehicle of Eothen's virile and luminous prose. She sat in one of the solid wide seated arm-chairs at the fire-place end of a long room, near a rounded window, the lower sash, of which she raised to its full height. Outside the row of geranium beds glowed scarlet and crimson in the calm light. Beyond them the turf of the lawn was overspread by trailing gossamers, and delicate cart-wheel spider's webs upon which the dew still glittered. In the shrubberies robins sang; and above the river great companies of swallows swept to and fro, with sharp twitterings, restlessly gathering for their final southern flight.

No sooner had Damaris fairly settled down with her book, than Mustapha jumped upon her knees; and after, preliminary b.u.t.tings and tramplings, curled himself round in gross comfort, his soft lithe body growing warmer and heavier, on her lap, as his sleep deepened. Where a bar of suns.h.i.+ne crossed the leather inset of the writing-table, just beside her in the window, Geraldine--his counterpart as to markings and colouring, but finer made, more slender of barrel and of limb--fitted herself into the narrow s.p.a.ce between a silver inkstand and a stack of folded newspapers, her fore-paws tucked neatly under her chest, furry elbows outward. Her muzzle showed black, as did the rims of her eyelids which enhanced the brightness and size of her clear, yellow-green eyes. Her alert, observant little head was raised, as, with gently las.h.i.+ng tail, she watched an imprisoned honey-bee buzzing angrily up and down between the window-sashes.

An elfin creature, Geraldine,--repaying liberal study. Scornfully secure of the potency of her own charms where mankind, or Tomcat-kind, might be concerned, royally devoid of morals, past-mistress in all sprightly, graceful, feline devilries, she was yet a fond mother, solicitous to the point of actual selflessness regarding the safety and well-being of her successive and frequently recurrent litters. She suckled, washed, played with and educated those of her kittens who escaped the rigours of stable-bucket and broom, until such time as they were three to four months old. After which she sent them flying, amid cuffings and spittings extraordinary, whenever they attempted to approach her; and, oblivious of their orphaned and wistful existence, yielded herself with bewitching vivacity, to fresh intrigues and amours new.

The long quiet morning indoors, with cats and books for company, at once soothed Damaris and made her restless. After luncheon she put on hat, gloves, and walking shoes, and went down across the lawn to the sea-wall.

Waylaying her in the hall, Mary had essayed to learn her programme, and anchor her as to time and place by enquiring when and where tea should be served. But Damaris put the kindly woman off.--She couldn't say exactly--yet--would ring and let Mary know when she came in. If any one called, she was not at home.

In truth her active young body asked for movement and exercise, while scenes and phrases from the pages of Eothen still filled her mind. She longed for travel. Not via Marychurch to Harchester, well understood, shepherded by Theresa Bilson, the members of the Deadham Church choir and their supporters; but for travel upon the grand scale, with all its romance and enlargement of experience, its possible dangers and certain hards.h.i.+ps, as the author of Eothen had known it and her father, for that matter, had known it in earlier days too. She suffered the spell of the East--always haunting the chambers of her memory and ready to be stirred in active ascendency, as by her morning's reading to-day--suffered the spell not of its mysterious cities and civilizations alone, but of its vast solitudes and silences, desert winds and desert sands.

And hence it came about that, as her mood of yesterday sent her inland to pacify her imagination by gazing at the peaceful English country-side, so her present mood sent her down to the sh.o.r.e to satisfy, or rather further stimulate, her nostalgia for the East by gazing out to sea.

The cause in both cases was the same, namely, the inward tumult of her awakening womanhood, and still more, perhaps, the tumult of awakening talent which had not as yet found its appointed means of expression. She was driven hither and thither by the push of her individuality to disengage itself from advent.i.tious surroundings and circ.u.mstances, and realize its independent existence.--A somewhat perilous crisis of development, fruitful of escapades and unruly impulses which may leave their mark, and that a disfiguring one, upon the whole of a woman's subsequent career.

Immediately, however, Damaris' disposition to defy established convention and routine took the mildest and apparently most innocuous form--merely the making, by herself, of a little expedition which, accompanied by others, she had made a hundred times before. From the terrace she went down the flight of steps, built into the width of the sea-wall, whence a tall wrought-iron gate opens direct upon the foresh.o.r.e. Closing it behind her, she followed the coastguard-path, at the base of the river-bank--here a miniature sand cliff capped with gravel, from eight to ten feet high--which leads to the warren and the ferry. For she would take s.h.i.+p, with foxy-faced William Jennifer as captain and as crew, cross to the broken-down wooden jetty and, landing there, climb the crown of the Bar and look south-east, over the Channel highway, towards far distant countries of the desert and the dawn.

CHAPTER IV

OUT ON THE BAR

All which was duly accomplished though with a difference. For on reaching the head of the shallow sandy gully opening on the tide, where the flat-bottomed ferry-boat lay, Damaris found not Jennifer but the withered and doubtfully clean old lobster-catcher, Timothy Proud, in possession.

This disconcerted her somewhat. His appearance, indeed--as he stood amongst a miscellaneous a.s.sortment of sun-bleached and weather-stained foresh.o.r.e lumber, leaning the ragged elbows of his blue jersey upon the top of an empty petroleum barrel and smoking a dirty clay pipe--was so far from inviting, that the young girl felt tempted to relinquish her enterprise and go back by the way she had come.