The Tree of Knowledge Part 11

Lady Mabel did not require much pressing to induce her to accept the eagerly-offered tea and rest. She was tired and wet, hungry and thirsty, and in her graceful, Irish way, she made her acceptance seem like the conferring of a favor.

It was with some amused and speculative interest that she entered the house which had produced such an anachronism of Miss Elaine Brabourne.

The sisters greeted her with some nervousness, but as much cordiality as they knew how to show. Hospitality was a virtue they all possessed, though their opportunities of displaying it were few and far between. A grateful coolness was the first sensation which her ladys.h.i.+p experienced on entering the low-ceiled dining-room. A real Devons.h.i.+re "high tea" was spread on the table in tempting profusion. There were chudleighs and cream, cakes and honey, eggs from the poultry-yard, and such ham as could only be cured in perfection at Edge Willoughby.

Miss Ellen lay on her couch near the window, and, as she stretched her thin hand in kindly greeting, her guest was much impressed by the refined and intellectual type of her features, and their lovable expression. In the blue, shadowy eyes, with their long lashes, underlined as they were with the purple marks of suffering, and wrinkling in the corners with advancing years, could be clearly traced the wreck of the same beauty which was budding in Elaine. Miss Emily too was handsome, though a hard expression robbed her face of the charm of her sister's. Little Miss f.a.n.n.y, in her plump and plaintive amiability, was also prepossessing in her way, Charlotte only, with ma.s.sive jaw, large features, high forehead, and stony gaze, conveyed a feeling of awe.

This forehead was not only high but _polished_. It shone and twinkled in the light, as though the skin were too tightly stretched on the bony k.n.o.bs of the skull beneath. The spa.r.s.e hair was tightly strained away from it above--the frowning sandy eyebrows failed to soften it below.

Lady Mabel guessed at once who was the ruling spirit of this unconventual sisterhood.

The furniture of the room was the furniture of a by-gone day, when art had not been promulgated, and n.o.body thought of considering beauty as in any sense an important factor of one's happiness. In that sad period the fated Misses Willoughbys' youth had been cast. Alas! for the waste of good material which must then have been the rule! Girls intended by nature to be beautiful and charming, yet who, by dint of never comprehending their mission, managed only to be ugly and clumsy. The parents of these girls had forgotten the sweet and harmonious names of their Anglo-Saxon ancestry. There were no more Ediths, or Ethels, or Cicelys, or Dorothys. Even the age of Lady Betty had pa.s.sed and gone.

Amelia, Caroline and Charlotte, Maria and Augusta were the order of the day.

It agonizes one only to think of the way those unlucky girls violated the laws of taste. Their fathers surrounded them with bulky mahogany furniture, and green and blue woollen damask. No wonder they dressed themselves in harrowing mixture of magenta and pink and mauve. Why should they trouble to arrange their hair with any view to preserving the _contour_ of their head, when every tea-cup they used was a monstrosity, every jug or bowl the violation of a law?

The delicate fancy of Wedgewood and his school was banished and ignored with the Chippendale furniture and all the other graces of their grandfathers. Everything must be as large as possible, and as unwieldy.

The questions of beauty and of usefulness were as nothing if only the table or chair were sufficiently c.u.mbersome.

Mercifully for us that terrible time of degradation was short. A violent reaction soon set in. But the period left its marks behind it--left a generation which it had infected and lowered, out of whom it had knocked all the romance, from whom it had extracted, in some fatal way, the faculty to appreciate the beautiful, and the Misses Willoughby, house and all, were a living monument of its hideous influence.

The furniture remained as it had been in the life-time of their father.

The sisters never wore anything out, so what would have been the object of renewing it? Everything looked as it used to look, and was arranged as it had been arranged in the days of their wasted girlhood, what could Elaine desire further? She would fare as they had done. It seldom occurred to them that their mode of life left anything to be desired.

Let it not for a moment be thought that the study of art is here advocated as a remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to, or that the laws of beauty are in any way suggested as a subst.i.tute for those higher laws without which life must be incomplete. It is of course more than possible for a woman with no eye at all for color, and an absolute disregard for symmetry, to lead the life of a heroine or a saint. And yet an innate instinct seems to suggest a close connection between the beauty of holiness and all the other million forms in which beauty is hourly submitted to our eye; and it seems just within the limits of possibility that a link should exist between the decadence of taste and the undoubted and unparalleled stagnation of religious life which certainly was to be found side by side with it.

If we believe, as it is to be supposed Christians must, that a purpose exists in all the loveliness which is scattered about so lavishly through the natural world, then surely it follows that we can hardly afford to do quite without the help so afforded us, lest, in forgetting the loveliness of nature, we lose our aspiration towards the perfection of nature's G.o.d.

Certainly, in the Willoughby family, the sister who evidently had the strongest feeling for beauty was the sister who most strongly suggested the Christian ideal of the spiritual life.

The world in which Lady Mabel Wynch-Frere now found herself was a world so altogether new to her as to be exceedingly interesting to her restless mind.

She did not find the particular grade of society in which her own lot was cast conspicuously fascinating. She had ability enough to despise the superficial life of a large portion of the fas.h.i.+onable world; and her delight was to seek out "fresh fields and pastures new."

Elaine had inspired her with a peculiar interest. She was confident that the girl was a unique specimen in our essentially modern world. To watch the gradual unfolding of a mind behind the magnificent blankness of those enormous eyes, would be a study in emotions entirely after her ladys.h.i.+p's own heart. She knew that she already exerted a certain influence over this uncouth result of the Misses Willoughbys' attempts at education.

As the girl sat at table, not eating a mouthful, her gaze was steadily rivetted on the new comer. To every word she uttered, a breathless attention was accorded. In vain the aunts remonstrated, and urged their usually meek charge to eat. She seemed dazed--in a dream--and sat on as if she did not hear them.

"My youngest brother and I are the best of friends," said Lady Mabel to Miss Ellen. "We are the most alike of any of the family, and it is always a pleasure to us to be together. My little ones have had the whooping-cough--I adore my children, and I quite wore out myself with nursing them. When they were quite recovered, Claud thought I should take a little rest. My husband is just now in command of his regiment, and could not come with us, so we planned this little tour. To-day's tragic incident has been most unexpected. Stanton is our goal--we propose returning to London from thence, as we hear there is not much to see beyond. We have come along from Land's End--all the way! It seems perhaps a little heartless to say so, but in one way this tragedy will be of great interest to my brother. He has so desired to get a glimpse of the inner lives of these people. We have felt such complete outsiders, he and I--we have seen the country, but we cannot know the natives. At each inn, everybody puts on their company manners at once.

We feel that they are endeavoring to suit their conversation to our rank. They will not appear before us naturally and simply; but you see, in a calamity like this, they have no time to pick their words. Like the doctor, one sees right into their hearts in such a moment; my brother will be deeply interested, I feel sure."

"I am sure I hope the Battis.h.i.+lls will remember to treat Mr. Cranmer with all due respect," said Miss Charlotte, with her manner of blank incomprehension of a word that had been said.

It was such a conspicuously inapposite remark, that even Lady Mabel had no answer ready, and felt her flow of conversation unaccountably impeded.

"They are very respectable people, as a rule," went on Miss Charlotte, "but Mrs. Battis.h.i.+ll is apt to be short in her temper if flurried. I hope she was not rude to you, Lady Mabel?"

"I scarcely saw her," answered her ladys.h.i.+p, perusing the speaker earnestly from her intense eyes.

"I can understand that desire to win the hearts of the people," said Miss Ellen, quietly; "and I think perhaps our Cornish and Devons.h.i.+re folk are particularly hard for strangers to read; they are very reserved, and their feelings are deep, and not easily stirred."

"I am sure they are very ordinary kind of people, _I_ never find any difficulty in getting on with them; I don't approve of all this rubbish about feeling," said Miss Charlotte, shortly.

Before the visitor had been half-an-hour at table, she knew that "I am sure" of Miss Charlotte's by heart, and a deep feeling of pity for those who had always to listen to it sprang up within her. There seemed to be no point on which the excellent lady was not sure, yet the mere statement of an opinion by anyone else appeared to rouse in her breast a feeling of covert ire.

"Elaine, my child, come here," said Miss Ellen, softly.

Elaine started, rose, and came round the table. Her aunt took her hands.

"You are eating nothing," she said, "and your hands are very hot. Don't you feel well? Are you tired?"

"I am sure," remarked Miss Charlotte, "she has had nothing to tire her--she drove all the way home from Poole."

"Yes, but she has been agitated--she has had a shock," said Miss Ellen, anxiously; with a strange feeling, as she looked into the girl's dilated eyes, that Elaine was gone, and that she was perusing the face of a stranger. "Do you feel shaken, dear child?"

"Yes," said Elaine at last, in her unready way.

"She had better have a little wine and water, and lie down," said her aunt, sympathetically. "Go and lie on the sofa, Elaine dear, and rest. I am so vexed--so grieved for her to see such a terrible thing," she said to Lady Mabel. "One would always keep young girls in ignorance even to existence of crime."

"Oh, would you?" said her ladys.h.i.+p, in accents of such real surprise that each sister looked up electrified at the bare idea of questioning such orthodox teaching. "I mean," she explained, with a smile, "that I think women ought to be very useful members of society, and I should not at all like to feel that the sight of a wounded wayfarer by the roadside only inspired one with the desire to faint. I shall wish all my girls to attend ambulance cla.s.ses, so that a broken limb may always find them a help, not a hindrance. One cannot shut up girls in bandboxes nowadays, and I would not, if I could. Let them be of some use in their generation--able to stop a bleeding artery till the doctor comes, as well as able to bake a cake or make their clothes. Do you agree with me, Miss Willoughby?"

Ellen hardly knew. The doctrine was to her so utterly novel. Charlotte's breath was so taken away that she had not a word to offer.

"Every woman is sure to have emergencies in her life, is she not?" asked her ladys.h.i.+p, in her earnest winning way. "If not of one kind, then of another. If she marries, her children are certain to call forth her resources, if she does not marry, her nephews and nieces very probably will do so instead. How can a girl take a serious view of life if she does not know its realities? Of course there are limits--there are things which had better not be discussed before girls, because it would do them no good to know them, and there is no need to intrude the ghastly and the wicked unnecessarily into their lives; but I certainly would train a girl's nerves so that a shock should not utterly prostrate her. I would teach her courage and presence of mind."

There was no answer whatever to this speech. Miss Charlotte, having never reflected on the subject in her life, had no opinion to offer. She had always taken it for granted that a lady should do nothing beyond needlework, and perhaps a little gardening. "Accomplishments" were the order of her day, in which list were bracketed together, with grim unconscious irony, watercolor painting and the manufacture of wax flowers!

Her ladys.h.i.+p rose, and crossed the room with her light energetic step to where Elaine had seated herself on the sofa. The girl had not lain down, but remained with her eyes fixed on the visitor, drinking in every word she uttered. A cool hand was laid on her forehead, and a pair of wonderful eyes gazed down into hers!

"Oh, yes--her forehead is very hot. I would not give her wine; give her some iced milk and soda water and let her go to bed, she is quite exhausted," she said. "And now I must bid you good-night, if I do not wish to be benighted," she added, rising.

"Oh, but indeed we cannot let you go on to-night," said Miss Ellen eagerly. "You must be good enough to stay with us here. We have many more rooms than we can occupy, and we shall be glad to be of use----"

There was some polite demur, but it was overruled; all the sisters seconded Ellen's invitation, and finally Lady Mabel gratefully accepted it, and sent her coachman up to Poole, to apprise her brother of her whereabouts, and to bring back the latest news of the invalid.

Meanwhile the night had come. With all its stars it hung quietly over the fairy valley in solemn and moonless splendor. Elaine, sent to bed, had crept out from between the sheets, and knelt, crouched down by her window, awaiting the return of the messenger from Poole.

So irregular a proceeding was a complete novelty in her career; but oh!

the strange, new, trembling charm of having such a day's experiences to look back upon!

It had all happened so rapidly, in such a few hours. That afternoon had begun, dull and eventless; now, how different was everything. In an undefined, vague way she felt that things could never more be quite as they had been. A boundary line had been pa.s.sed. The world was different, and for the first time in her nineteen years she was engaged in the perilous delight of contemplating her own ident.i.ty.

Up to the dark purple vault of heaven were sighed that night vague aspirations from a heart which had never aspired before; a prayer went with them, which, brief and shapeless as it was, was nevertheless the first real prayer of Elaine Brabourne's heart:

"Oh, if only he may not die!"

After all, the Misses Willoughby were but human, and had all the feelings of the English provincial middle-cla.s.ses.