Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution Part 13

"It mattered a lot. I like this place. It's mine. I've got duties up here.

I'm a magistrate and all that."

Chevenix was now very hot. "Magistrate be d.a.m.ned. Do you mean to tell me that you profess to love a woman, and turn her into a servant because you want to try poachers? And you talk about the sun in her hair! And then-- upon my soul, Ingram, you sicken me."

"You fool," said Ingram. "I tell you it was her own idea. She loves the place. She loves it a lot more than she does me. It's been a continual joy to her. Why, where would she have been while I was in India--all that year--if she hadn't had all this in her hands? You don't know what you're talking about."

His voice rang down his scorn. Chevenix began to stammer.

"You're hopeless, Nevile, utterly hopeless. Every word you say gives up your case. What's it to do with you whether she likes it or not? I'm not talking of her, but of you. You silly a.s.s, don't you see where you are?

You fall in love with a woman and make her your head housemaid. Then you say, Oh, but she likes it. It's not what she likes we're talking about; it's what you can bring yourself to do with her. Wait a bit now. There's more to it. You play about here, there, and all over the shop. Off you go for three months at a time, sky-larking, shooting antelope, pigeon- shooting, polo, and whatever. She sits here and minds the gardeners--she whom you saw with the sun in her hair! Year in, year out it goes on. Now here you are back from India. Good. You leave her for a year, and write to her twice--then you say, Why, where would she have been if she hadn't had something to do? The sun in her hair, hey? Love, my good chap! You don't know how to spell the word. You ought not to touch her shoe-string. You're not fit. By Gad, sir, and now I remember something! And it's the truth, it's the bitter, naked, grinning truth." He did remember something. He saw her curled-back lip--he saw her fierce resentful eyes. He heard her say it: "I think he is like a beast. He wants to ravage me--like a beast."

"You've been judged, Nevile," he said. "You've done for yourself. And now I'll go to bed."

Ingram's face was very cloudy. He looked for a moment like quarrelling.

"Do you mean to leave me like this?" he asked.

"Yes," said Chevenix, "I do. I don't want to stop and hear you protest that you intend to marry her. Marry her! Why, man, if you'd meant to marry her, you'd have posted home express from Ma.r.s.eilles the moment you heard that you could do it. But no! You've got her there--in cap and ap.r.o.n-- she'll keep. You know she's here--you have your fling. And you stop three days in Paris, and drop it to her casually, when you please, that you're a free man. Yes, by George, I do mean to leave you like this. You're best alone, by George. Good-night to you."

He went smartly away; but he had worked himself into a shaking fit, could not have slept to save his life. A cigar at the open window was inevitable.

He leaned far into the night. It was densely dark, and had been raining.

Soft scud drifted over his face; clouds in loose solution drenched the earth. He smoked fiercely, inhaling great draughts and driving them out into the fog. Being no thinker, his sensations took no body, but he broke out now and again with pishes and pshaws, or scornfully--"Old Nevile-- hungry devil, what? Stalking about like a beast. Oh, she was right, she was right. Pis.h.!.+ And there's an end of it."

He was aware of softly moving feet below--a measured tread. He listened and heard them beyond dispute. "Nevile!" he said, "like a beast, padding about his place." He listened on, grimly amused. Let him pad and rage.

But he was to be startled. A voice hailed him, not Ingram's. "Beg your pardon, sir."

"Hulloa!" he cried. "Who are you, my man?"

"Glyde, sir. Is all well?"

"What do you mean, Glyde? What are you doing?"

"I was pa.s.sing, sir, to my houses. I heard voices, and I wondered--"

"Oh!" he laughed. "You thought there was a sc.r.a.p, did you? It's all right, Glyde. I and the master were having a talk. Nothing for you to worry about. I shared his lonely meal. Don't you be disturbed."

"No, no, sir. Thank you, sir."

Chevenix called to him when he was at some distance. "I say, Glyde."

"Yes, sir?"

"You can go to bed. It's all right."

"Thank you, sir. Good-night."

He chuckled as he undressed. "Rum fish, Glyde. Watch and ward, what?

Watching his s.h.i.+eld. Bless her, she's got friends, then." He considered for a while, flicking the glowing end of his cigar. "That chap--Senhouse-- Jack Senhouse. I wonder what's become of him."

VIII

The discrepancies of an unfortunate party caused no disturbance to the staff of Wanless Hall. Sanchia, whatever her private cares--and they seemed less than those of other people on her account--suffered nothing to interfere with her housekeeping. Ingram might rage for her in vain, Chevenix agonise, or quarrel with his host and friend, Mrs. Devereux disapprove to the point of keeping her room; but Sanchia, with front serene, moved from office-table to kitchen, to the garden, to the home- farm, interviewed Mrs. Benson, consulted with the stockman, pored--her head close to Clyde's--over seed-pans and melon borders, was keenly interested, judicial, reflective, pleading, coaxing by turns--seemed, in fact, not to have a perplexity in her fair head. Her health was superb, she never had an ache nor failed of an appet.i.te. To see her sitting in the stable-yard on a sunny morning, her lap full of nozzling fox-hound pups, was to have a vision of Artemis Eileithyia. So, it seemed, the grave mother-hound, erect on haunches, with wise ears, and sidelong eyes showing the white, knew her certainly to be. Beside and over her stood Frodsham of the stables, and his underlings, firmly her friends.

She looked up, beaming. "Oh, Frodsham; aren't they sweet? One of them tries to suck my finger. What are you going to call them? I do hope you mean to keep them all."

"I doubt they're too many for the old b.i.t.c.h, Miss Percival. She'll not feed the lot of them. We'll be wise to duck the latest cast."

"Oh, no,--please. I'll feed it--I will, really. I couldn't let you drown it. Now, what are their names to be?"

"There's Melpomeen, Miss Percival, and Melody, and Melchior, and Melchizedek. That's for the b.i.t.c.hes."

She quizzed him. "No, Frodsham, really that won't do. I'm not quite sure about Melchizedek; but Melchior was a man--he was a king--a king of the East. And I believe Melchizedek was an angel."

Frodsham rubbed his chin. "May be you are right, Miss Percival. An angel, was he now? Wings to him? 'Tis a name for a bird, then. If we kept the hawks the old Squire used to love--there's a name for a peregrine!

Melchizedek--a fair mouthful."

"A Priest for ever," mused Jacobs, a wizened elder, the kennel man, who yet bowed to the coachman in his own yard. "We may put him among the dogs, I believe. We've Proteus, and Prophet; but no Priest."

Frodsham looked to Sanchia for direction, ignoring Jacobs. She flashed him a name. "Melisande, Frodsham. Call her Melisande, and save her life; and she shall be mine. I'll look after her. Please do." He owned to the spell of her eyes, of the sun upon her hair. "Melisande she shall be, Miss Percival, and your own," he said. "The Missus shall rear her if the old b.i.t.c.h won't. She's had six of her own, and knows what it is."

Regretfully, one by one, she put the striving blind things down; then rose and went her way into the gardens about the house. Slowly through the kitchen gardens she pa.s.sed. Glyde, thinning walled peach-trees, saw her, felt her go. She shed her benediction upon him--"Good morning, Struan,"-- and went on. He watched her for a while, then turned fiercely to his affair. Through dense shrubberies, over drenched lawns her way was; it led her to the lily-pond, which lay hidden within rhododendron walls, with a narrow cincture of gra.s.s path all about it. Dark-brown, still and translucent like an onyx it lay before her. It was her haunt of election when she was troubled, as now she was, when she gave herself time to remember it.

She stood, her hands clasped before her, close to the water's brim, and looked over the s.h.i.+ning surface. She had never yet squarely faced her difficulties. Her sceptre was slipping from her; her realm, usurped at first, hers by sufferance first, but then by love of them she ruled, could hold her but a little while more. The shadow of coming eclipse made her eyes grow sombre. Doubt of the unknown made lax her lips.

If Nevile's wife, with all her sins clotted on her, was dead, what was she herself going to do, or allow to be done? She had yielded to love--her first love and her last; but that had been long ago. Love, the fire, the trembling and the music in her heart; pride, the trust, the loyalty, the bliss of service; the wonder, the swooning, the glory like a sun upon her --all gone, burned out, or worked out. Why, how long had it lasted her? Her lips stretched to a bleak smile to think of it. Three months joy in herself, three months joy of him; then work, incessant and absorbing; and then the growth of a new pride, the pride of mind (for she found that she had a brain), and of a new love--for she found that she loved the creatures more than man. Education indeed! To draw from a child caught unawares the force and the brooding love of an Earth-G.o.ddess.

In the beginning, she could have told herself (but never did), she was to be pitied, not blamed. Reticent among her free-speaking sisters, shy, what the maids call "a deep one," rarely a talker, keeping always her own counsel, she had first been moved to utter herself by the extreme carelessness of Ingram whether she did so or not. The blame--if it is to be laid--must be upon her mother when she, knowing Ingram's story of miserable marriage and separation, allowed the man to continue a friend of the house, be much with her girl, and unfold himself under her clear young eyes. What she was about--that masterful, self-absorbed woman--there's no saying. It was always supposed that, with five beautiful daughters to market, she had pushed Welbore Percival--Thomas Welbore Percival, East India merchant of The Poultry--into lavish entertainment of his friends and acquaintance. Ingram, a squire and son of squires, was perhaps a shade above her degree; she may have required him to give a tone. This, considering that wretched marriage of his--a month's engagement in defiance of head-shaking, a blazing Hanover Square wedding, a year's bickering, one month's acrimony (done by letter) and Ingram's unquenchable hatred of the woman--this, I say, you may well doubt. But I can give no other explanation. He came, he talked in his high-voiced, querulous, bitter-humoured way, he saw and sought the grave young Sanchia, and he won her pitying heart directly he had engrossed her watching eyes.

She was a girl intensely interested in a hundred dawning things, to whom love had come late. Until she was near twenty you would have thought her s.e.xless. Senhouse, her poetical friend and teacher--her only friend, her only confidant--had dubbed her Artemis; and it may well have been his adoring service of her pure flame which first turned it inwards, to scorch her heart. All that she had learned of this scholar gypsy she poured out as balm over the stricken Ingram, who swallowed it and her together. Then the truth about him was blared upon her suddenly, and she found that he was to be pitied. Guileless victim of a hateful woman as she believed him then, she found that she held a store of balm. She pitied him deeply, she opened, she poured out her treasure. Enthusiasm for the saving work captained her thereafter; nothing would turn her from her purpose. Ingram was to be saved by love: she gave him all.

To do him justice, a young man born to possess and command, he did his best to repair what was beyond repair. He told her the truth unasked by her; he confessed that he loved her, and owned that he had no business to do it. Nearness, circ.u.mstance, brooding on that which was true of both of them and must not be uttered by either, did the rest. Upon that evening in the drawing-room when they found themselves alone, each trembling under the G.o.d, they simply drifted together, and without effort to resist, mingled their natures through the lips. Discovery, earthquake and eclipse, her mother's chill rage, her father's tears, her sisters' dismay; all this and more she endured. She pa.s.sioned like a young martyr. She admitted the facts without comment, and accepted the consequences without a falter.

They might have whelmed a greater heart than hers; turned on to the town as she was to all intent, at two-and-twenty, a girl with the face and figure of a G.o.ddess, with fifty pounds between her and the devil. They might have sent her, at the least, weeping and trembling into Ingram's arms. But they did not. She was of finer clay. She took a lodging in Pimlico, and, to fit herself for employment, went to school. The commercial course which she chose was the shortest possible, but all that she felt she could afford. "My dear young lady, we can only promise you a smattering--really no more for the money." "It must start me," said Sanchia, and began. There was a month more to run when Ingram found her, and, glad as she was of him, doting and doted upon, in the first flood of youth and love, she persisted in it, finished it out, and got her diploma for what it was worth, before, as he put it, she would listen to reason.

It sounded extremely reasonable to him what he then proposed; and also to her, though Chevenix scorned its propounder. As Ingram put it to her, it attracted her newborn pride of knowledge. She was to flesh her steel, so to speak, in reality: in plainer words, she, with her smattering of accounts, was to manage a great house, an army of servants, possibly an estate. Excessively in love as she was, with all the music of it in her untried ears, she knew already in herself that her mind must have other food than her heart's rapture. I think, indeed, that she would have declined him altogether if he had proposed nothing more tangible to her than perpetual honeymoon. That was what Senhouse would certainly have proposed to her--she saw that in every look of his, and read it in every line he sent her; but that had never attracted her. She had given Senhouse her confidence, but not her heart. Ingram's proposals, therefore, pleased her. She had not a sweet enough tooth, nor the taste for flattery which the other involved. She was entirely without vanity. Therefore, however little honourable and however much a lover of his ease Ingram may have shown himself in making them, his reasonable proposals were gratefully received. It was he who suggested, but she who took the lead. She began immediately to plan her new career--was perfectly business-like. Ingram was to leave London at once, and go to Wanless--to his duties of the bench, his delights of the field, cares of the farm. He was to announce to his househould his intention of "settling down"; and he was to announce the advent of a housekeeper. In this very outset of his bliss he must needs do as she bade him. He went, and made her ways as smooth as they could be made. Her rooms were a.s.signed to her; her duties mapped out, the exact range of her authority. Her wages were fixed, to be paid quarterly.

She would take nothing else from him--no jewellery (she wore nothing but simple things, which had been given her by her parents or sisters--amber, a string of cowries, an agate heart, a bangle or two), no frocks. She was to have two hundred a year, and throughout her time to this present she had no more, and kept herself exquisitely upon it, with a sense of what was due to him, to herself, and to her position, which was admirable, unhesitating, and never at fault. In due time she arrived and entered upon her career. That which was unlawful seemed now justified; the secret intimacy, the wedded amity, the giving, which was the dearest gain she had. Discretion, on her side unsleeping, on his the more effective because he never seemed to have any, secured them. There was no open scandal among the neighbours; whatever the household may have suspected, very little was said. Within a year her servants were her slaves. The Rector, it is true, reproached her for not going to church. She deprecated his indignation, but didn't go.

Up to the day when we first met with her, her garden-hat in her hand, reading her telegram by the garden window, she had been eight years governor of Wanless--and for nearly two of those years alone. For the first two or three of them Ingram, revelling in his snug ease, with little to do but devise things--alterations, extensions, ventures into farming, and the like, which it was her delight to execute--never left the county, hardly cared to leave the estate. He entertained very sparingly: Chevenix came once or twice, his own brother, Maxwell Ingram; there were some other dinner-parties to the countryside, hunt-breakfasts, once a hunt-ball, at none of which ceremonies did she appear. He endured these wearinesses, shrugging them away as soon as he could, to hasten from a dinner of dry toast and knives and forks to his room--the Master's room--where supper, Sanchia, sweet intimacy awaited him. He spent thus by far the cleanliest and most sane years of his wayward life. She soothed, amused, stimulated him at once. He taught her all he knew of country-lore, gave her, as they say, "the hang" of landed estate; he learned by teaching, and might have become a wholesome gentleman.

But domestic business called him to London presently. He went, and was away three months, with lawyers, fierce threatenings from Claire, intermediaries, friends of both parties, and the rest of them. He was worried, flurried, put into a rage; exploded, put himself a thousand times in the wrong; finally, he came back to Wanless embittered and restless. He came back to find himself welcome, but not excessively so. At least he thought not. His extensions, suggested in that first wonderful time--a range of gla.s.s-houses, new heating apparatus, acetylene gas installations, were well advanced. Sanchia's brows were often knit over estimates, specifications, and bills. He had to pay for novelties from which the salt had evaporated; he he was never very fond of paying, and now, it seemed, he wasn't very fond of what he had to pay for. Sanchia was kind to him, but there was a difference. She was as happy as the day was long, always at work, outdoors or in, had not a moment for him (business apart) until the very end of the day, when (at eleven or so) she dressed with care and went to him at his supper. Sanchia was perfectly happy; but he was not.

He stayed six months that year--from April to September; but then went to Scotland, deer-stalking, shooting pheasants. He was back for Christmas and brought a houseful of guests--all men. Again she welcomed him, again she was kind. He was now a little blunted to the fine shades of love, took his happiness as it happened to come, and could rub his hands over the household blessing she was. By-and-by, at the end of her fourth year, she took over the gardens as well as the house, was accepted by Mr. Menzies as his liege-lady and by young Clyde as much more than that. The estate- management, home-farm, woods, tenancies, were given up to her at the end of the fifth year, just before Ingram sailed for West Africa on a shooting expedition. By that time he had grown to depend upon her entirely for everything. She was become the faithful well-tried wife of standing, which in a man of Ingram's bone means that nothing remained of love but entire confidence and occasional gratification. After this, he left her for long periods together; for the whole of the eighth year he was abroad, "idiotically happy," as he had told her.

During all this time no intercourse with her family--except those furtive letters from her adoring old father, which were pitiful to her, because they could not be answered as he would have had them; and nothing from her friend of the Open, who had at last got himself a mate. It seemed that she had made a clean break, and that nothing of what had made her dawning life sweet and sane was to mingle with the sweetness and sanity which she had brought into Wanless. And then--after eight years--she caught herself looking back. And now--here was an end of the dream.