Watersprings Part 2

III

WINDLOW

Mrs. Graves wrote back by return of post that she was delighted to think that Howard was coming. "I am getting an old woman," she said, "and fond of memories: and what I hear of you from your enthusiastic pupil Jack makes me wish to see my nephew, and proud of him too. This is a quiet house, but I think you would enjoy it; and it's a real kindness to me to come. I am sure I shall like you, and I am not without hopes that you may like me. You need not tie yourself down to any dates; just come when you can, and go when you must."

Howard liked the simplicity of the letter, and determined to go down at once. He started two days later. It was a fine spring day, and it was pleasant to glide through the open country all quickening into green.

He arrived in the afternoon at the little wayside station. It was in the south-east corner of Somersets.h.i.+re, and Howard liked the look of the landscape, the steep green downs, with their wooded dingles breaking down into rich undulating plains, dappled with hedgerow trees and traversed by gliding streams. He was met at the station by an old-fas.h.i.+oned waggonette, with an elderly coachman, who said that Mrs.

Graves had hoped to come herself, but was not very well, and thought that Mr. Kennedy would prefer an open carriage.

Howard was astonished at the charm of the whole countryside. They pa.s.sed through several hamlets, with beautiful old houses, built of a soft orange stone, weathering to a silvery grey, with evidences of careful and pretty design in their mullioned windows and arched doorways. The churches, with their great richly carved towers, pierced stone shutters, and cl.u.s.tered pinnacles, pleased him extremely, and he liked the simple and courteous greetings of the people who pa.s.sed them.

He had a sense, long unfamiliar to him, as though he were somehow coming home. The road entered a green valley among the downs. To the left, an outstanding bluff was crowned with the steep turfed bastions of an ancient fort, and as they went in among the hills, the slopes grew steeper, rich with hanging woods and copses, and the edges of the high thickets were white with bleached flints. At last they pa.s.sed into a hamlet with a church, and a big vicarage among shrubberies; this was Windlow Malzoy, the coachman said, and that was Mr. Sandys' house.

Howard saw a girl wandering about on the lawn--Jack's sister, he supposed, but it was too far off for him to see her distinctly; five minutes later they drove into Windlow. It lay at the very bottom of the valley; a clear stream ran beneath the bridge. There were but half a dozen cottages, and just ahead of them, ab.u.t.ting on the road, appeared the front of a beautiful simple house of some considerable size, with a large embowered garden behind it bordering on the river; Howard was astonished to see what a large and ancient building it was. The part on the road was blank of windows, with the exception of a dignified projecting oriel; close to which was a high Tudor archway, with big oak doors standing open. There were some plants growing on the coping--snapdragon and valerian--which gave it a look of age and settled use. The carriage drove in under the arch, and a small courtyard appeared. There was a stable on the right, with a leaded cupola; the house itself was very plain and stately, with two great traceried windows which seemed to belong to a hall, and a finely carved outstanding porch. The whole was built out of the same orange stone of which the churches were built, stone-tiled, all entirely homelike and solid.

He got down at the door, which stood open. An old man-servant appeared, and he found himself in a flagged pa.s.sage, with a plain wooden screen on his left, opening into the hall. It had a collegiate air which he liked. Then he was led out at the opposite end of the vestibule, the servant saying, "Mrs. Graves is in the garden, sir." He stepped out on to a lawn bordered with trees; opposite him was a stone-built Jacobean garden-house, with stone b.a.l.l.s on the bal.u.s.traded coping. Two ladies were walking on the gravel path; the older of the two, who walked with a stick, came up to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and gave him a kiss in a simple and motherly way, saying, "So here you actually are, my dear boy, and very much welcome." She then presented the other lady, a small, snub-nosed, middle-aged woman, saying, "This is Miss Merry, who lives with me, and keeps me more or less in order; she is quite excited at meeting a don; she has a respect for learning and talent, which is unhappily rare nowadays." Miss Merry shook hands as a spaniel might give its paw, and looked reverentially at Howard. His aunt put her hand through his arm, and said, "Let us walk about a little. I live by rule, you must know--that is, by Miss Merry's rule; and we shall have tea in a few minutes."

She pointed out one or two of the features of the house, and said, in answer to Howard's loudly expressed admiration, "Yes, it is a nice old house. Your uncle had a great taste for such things in days when people did not care much about them. He bought this very cheap, I believe, and was much attached to it; but he did not live long to enjoy it, you know. He died nearly thirty years ago. I meant to sell it, but somehow I did not, and now I hope to end my days here. It is not nearly as big as it looks, and a good deal of it consists of unused granaries and farm buildings. I sometimes think it is selfish of me to go on occupying it--it's a house that wants CHILDREN; but one isn't very consistent; and somehow the house is used to me, and I to it; and, after all, it is only waiting, which isn't the worst thing in the world!"

When Howard found an opportunity of scrutinising his aunt, which he did as she poured out tea, he saw a very charming old lady, who was not exactly handsome, but was fresh-coloured and silvery-haired, and had a look of the most entire tranquillity and self-possession. She looked as if she had met and faced trouble at some bygone time; there were traces of sorrow about the brow and eyes, but it was a face which seemed as if self had somehow pa.s.sed out of it, and was yet strong with a peculiar kind of fearless strength. She had a lazy and contented sort of laugh, and yet gave an impression of energy, and of a very real and vivid life. Her eyes had a great softness and brilliancy, and Howard liked to feel them dwelling upon him. As they sat at tea she suddenly put her hand on his and said, "My dear boy, how you remind me of your mother! I suppose you hardly even remember her as a young woman; but though you are half hidden in that beard of yours, you are somehow just like her, and I feel as if I were in the schoolroom again at Hunsdon in the old days. No, I am not sentimental. I don't want it back again, and I don't hate the death that parts us. One can't go back, one must go forward--and, after all, hearts were made to love with, and not to break!"

They spent a quiet evening in the still house. Mrs. Graves said to Howard, "I know that men always want to go and do something mysterious after tea; but to-night you must just sit here and get used to me. You needn't be afraid of having to see too much of me. I don't appear before luncheon, and Jane looks after me; and you must get some exercise in the afternoons. I don't go further than the village. I expect you have lectures to write; and you must do exactly what you like." They sat there, in the low panelled room, and talked easily about old recollections. They dined in simple state in the big hall with its little gallery, at a round table in the centre, lighted by candles. The food was simple, the wine was good.

"Marengo chicken," said Mrs. Graves as a dish was handed round. "That's one of Jane's historical allusions. If you don't know why it is called Marengo, Jane will rejoice to enlighten you." After the meal she begged him to smoke. "I like it," said Mrs. Graves; "I have even smoked myself in seclusion, but now I dare not--it would be all over the parish to-morrow."

After dinner they went back to the drawing-room, and Miss Merry turned out to be quite a good pianist, playing some soft old music at the end of the gently lighted room. Mrs. Graves went off early. "You had better stop and smoke here," she said to Howard. "There's a library where you can work and smoke to-morrow; and now good night, and let me say how I delight to have you here--I really can't say how much!"

Howard sat alone in the drawing-room. He had an almost painful faculty of minute observation, and the storage of new impressions was a real strain to him. To-day it seemed that they had poured in upon him in a cataract, and he felt dangerously wakeful; why had he been such a fool as to have missed this beautiful house, and this home atmosphere of affection? He could not say. A stupid persistence in his own plans, he supposed. Yet this had been waiting for him, a home such as he had never owned. He thought with an almost terrified disgust of his rooms at Beaufort, as the logs burned whisperingly in the grate, and the smoke of his cigarette rose on the air. Was it not this that he had been needing all along? At last he rose, put out the candles, and made his way to the big panelled bedroom which had been given him. He lay long awake, wondering, in a luxurious repose, listening to the whisper of the breeze in the shrubberies, and the faint murmur of the water in the full-fed stream.

IV

THE POOL

Very early in the morning Howard woke to hear the faint twittering of the birds begin in bush and ivy. It was at first just a fitful, drowsy chirp, a call "are you there? are you there?" until, when all the sparrows were in full cry, a thrush struck boldly in, like a solo marching out above a humming accompaniment of strings. That was a delicious hour, when the mind, still unsated of sleep, played softly with happy, homelike thoughts. He slept again, but the sweet mood lasted; his breakfast was served to him in solitude in a little panelled parlour off the Hall; and in the fresh April morning, with the sunlight lying on the lawn and lighting up the old worn detail of the carved cornices, he recovered for a time the boyish sense of ecstasy of the first morning at home after the return from school. While he was breakfasting, a scribbled note from Jack was brought in.

"Just heard you arrived last night; it's an awful bore, but I have to go away to-day--an old engagement made, I need hardly say, FOR me and not BY me; I shall turn up to-morrow about this time. No WORK, I think.

A day of calm resolution and looking forward manfully to the future! My father and sister are going to dine at the Manor to-night. I shall be awfully interested to hear what you think of them. He has been looking up some things to talk about, and I can tell you, you'll have a dose.

Maud is frightened to death.--Yours

"Jack.

"P.S.--I advise you to begin COUNTING at once."

A little later, Miss Merry turned up, to ask Howard if he would care to look round the house. "Mrs. Graves would like," she said, "to show it you herself, but she is easily tired, and can't stand about much." They went round together, and Howard was surprised to find that it was not nearly as large a house as it looked. Much s.p.a.ce was agreeably wasted in corridors and pa.s.sages, and there were huge attics with great timbered supports, needed to sustain the heavy stone tiling, which had never been converted into living rooms. There was the hall, which took up a considerable part of one side; out of this, towards the road, opened the little parlour where he had breakfasted, and above it was a library full of books, with its oriel overhanging the road, and two windows looking into the garden. Then there was the big drawing-room.

Upstairs there were but a half a dozen bedrooms. The offices and the servants' bedrooms were in the wing on the road. There was but little furniture in the house. Mr. Graves had had a preference for large bare rooms; and such furniture as there was, was all for use and not for ornament, so that there was a refres.h.i.+ng lack of any aesthetic pose about it. There were but few pictures, but most of the rooms were panelled and needed no other ornament. There was a refres.h.i.+ng sense of s.p.a.ce everywhere, and Howard thought that he had never seen a house he liked so well. Miss Merry chirped away, retailing little bits of history. Howard now for the first time learned that Mr. Graves had retired early from business with a considerable fortune, and being fond of books and leisure, and rather delicate in health, had established himself in the house, which had taken his fancy. There were some fifteen hundred acres of land attached, divided up into several small farms.

Miss Merry was filled with a reverential sort of adoration of Mrs.

Graves; "the most wonderful person, I a.s.sure you! I always feel she is rather thrown away in this remote place."

"But she likes it?" said Howard.

"Yes, she likes everything," said Miss Merry. "She makes everyone feel happy: she says very little, but you feel somehow that all is right if she is there. It's a great privilege, Mr. Kennedy, to be with her; I feel that more and more every day."

This artless praise pleased Howard. When he was left alone he got out his papers; but he found himself restless in a pleasant way; he strolled through the garden. It was a singular place, of great extent; the lawn was carefully kept, but behind the screen of shrubs the garden extended far up the valley beside the river in a sort of wilderness; and he could see by the clumps of trees and the gra.s.sy mounds that it must have once been a great formal pleasaunce, which had been allowed to follow its own devices; at the far end of it, beside the stream, there was a long flagged terrace, with a stone bal.u.s.trade looking down upon the stream, and beyond that the woods closed in. He left the garden and followed the stream up the valley; the downs here drew in and became steeper, till he came at last to one of the most lovely places he thought he had ever set eyes upon. The stream ended suddenly in a great clear pool, among a clump of old sycamores; the water rose br.i.m.m.i.n.g out of the earth, and he could see the sand fountains rising and falling at the bottom of the basin; by the side of it was a broad stone seat, with carved back and ends. There was not a house in sight; beyond there was only the green valley-end running up into the down, which was here densely covered with thickets. It was perfectly still; and the only sound was the liquid springing of the water in the pool, and the birds singing in the bushes. Howard had a sudden sense that the place held a significance for him. Had he been there before, in some dream or vision? He could not tell; but it was strangely familiar to him. Even so the trees had leaned together, and the clear ripples pulsed upon the bank. Something strange and beautiful had befallen him there. What was it? The mind could not unravel the secret.

He sat there long in the sun, his eyes fixed upon the pool, in a blissful content that was beyond thought. Then he slowly retraced his steps, full of an intense inner happiness.

He found his aunt in the garden, sitting out in the sun. He bent down to kiss her, and she detained his hand for a moment. "So you are at home?" she said, "and happy?--that is what I had wished and hoped. You have been to the pool--yes, that is a lovely spot. It was that, I think, which made your uncle buy the place; he had a great love of water--and in my unhappy days here, when I had lost him, I used often to go there and wish things were otherwise. But that is all over now!"

After luncheon, Miss Merry excused herself and said she was going to the village to see a farm-labourer's wife, who had lost a child and was in great distress. "Poor soul!" said Mrs. Graves. "Give her my love, and ask her to come and see me as soon as she can." Presently as they sat together, Howard smoking, she asked him something about his work.

"Will you tell me what you are doing?" she said. "I daresay I should not understand, but I like to know what people are thinking about--don't use technical terms, but just explain your idea!"

Howard was just in the frame of mind, trying to revive an old train of thought, in which it is a great help to make a statement of the range of a subject; he said so, and began to explain very simply what was in his mind, the essential unity of all religion, and his attempt to disentangle the central motive from outlying schemes and dogmas. Mrs.

Graves heard him attentively, every now and then asking a question, which showed that she was following the drift of his thought.

"Ah, that's very interesting and beautiful," she said at last. "May I say that it is the one thing that attracts me, though I have never followed it philosophically. Now," she went on, "I am going to reduce it all to practical terms, and I don't want to beat about the bush--there's no need for that! I want to ask you a plain question.

Have you any religion or faith of your own?"

"Ah," said Howard, "who can say? I am a conformist, certainly, because I recognise in religion a fine sobering, civilising force at work, and if one must choose one's side, I want to be on that side and not on the other. But religion seems to me in its essence a very artistic thing, a perception of effects which are hidden from many hearts and minds. When a man speaks of definite religious experience, I feel that I am in the presence of a perception of something real--as real as music and painting. But I doubt if it is a sense given to all, or indeed to many; and I don't know what it really is. And then, too, one comes across people who hold it in an ugly, or a dreary, or a combative, or a formal way; and then sometimes it seems to me almost an evil thing."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "I understand that. May I give you an instance, and you will see if I perceive your thought. The good Vicar here, my cousin Frank, Jack's father--you will meet him to-night--is a man who holds a rigid belief, or thinks he holds it. He preaches what he calls the sinew and bone of doctrine, and he is very stern in the pulpit. He likes lecturing people in rows! But in reality he is one of the kindest and vaguest of men. He preached a stiff sermon about conversion the other day--I am pretty sure he did not understand it himself--and he disquieted one of my good maids so much that she went to him and asked what she could do to get a.s.surance. He seems to have hummed and hawed, and then to have said that she need not trouble her head about it--that she was a good girl, and had better be content with doing her duty. He is the friendliest of men, and that is his real religion; he hasn't an idea how to apply his system, which he learned at a theological college, but he feels it his duty to preach it."

"Yes," said Howard, "that is just what I mean; but there must be some explanation for this curious outburst of forms and doctrines, so contradictory in the different sects. Something surely causes both the form of religion and the force of it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "just as in an engine something causes both the steam and the piston-rod; it's an intelligence somewhere that fits the one to the other. But then, as you say, what is the cause of all this extravagance and violence of expression?"

"That is the human element," said Howard--"the cautious, conservative, business-like side that can't bear to let anything go. All religion begins, it seems to me, by an outburst of moral force, an attempt to simplify, to get a principle; and then the people who don't understand it begin to make it technical and defined; uncritical minds begin to attribute all sorts of vague wonders to it--things unattested, natural exaggerations, excited statements, impossible claims; and then these take traditional shape and the poor steed gets hung with all sorts of incongruous burdens."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "but the force is there all the time; the old hard words, like regeneration and atonement, do not mean DEFINITE things--that is the mischief; they are the receipts made up by stupid, hard-headed people who do not understand; but they stand for large and wonderful experiences and are like the language of children telling their dreams. The moral genius who sees through it all and gives the first impulse is trying to deal with life directly and frankly; and the difficulty arises from people who see the attendant circ.u.mstances and mistake them for the causes. But I do not see it from that side, of course! I understand what you are aiming at. You are trying to disentangle all the phenomena, are you not, and referring them to their real causes, instead of lumping them all together as the phenomena of religion?"

"Yes," said Howard, "that is what I am doing. I suppose I am naturally sceptical; but I want to put aside all that stands on insecure evidence, and all the sham terminology that comes from a muddled delight in the supernatural. I want to give up and clear away all that is not certain--material things must be brought to the test of material laws--and to see what is left."

"Well," said Mrs. Graves, "now I will tell you my own very simple experience. I began, I think, with a very formal religion, and I tried in my youth to attach what was really instinctive to religious motives.

It got me into a sad mess, because I did not dare to go direct to life.

I used to fret because your uncle seemed so indifferent to these things. He was a wise and good man, and lived by a sort of inner beauty of character that made all mean cruel spiteful petty things impossible to him. Then when he died, I had a terrible time to go through. I felt utterly adrift. My old system did not give me the smallest help. I was trying to find an intellectual solution. It was then that I met Miss Gordon, the great evangelist. She saw I was unhappy, and she said to me one day: 'You have no business to be unhappy like this. What you want is STRENGTH, and it is there all the time waiting for you! You are arguing your case with G.o.d, complaining of the injustice you have received, trying to excuse yourself, trying to find cause to blame Him.

Your life has been broken to pieces, and you are trying to shelter yourself among the fragments. You must cast them all away, and thank G.o.d for having pierced through the fortress in which you were imprisoned. You must just go straight to Him, and open your heart, as if you were opening a window to the sun and air.' She did not explain, or try to give me formulas or phrases, she simply showed me the light breaking round me.

"It came to me quite suddenly one morning in my room upstairs. I was very miserable indeed, missing my dear husband at every turn, quite unable to face life, shuddering and shrinking through the days. I threw it all aside, and spoke to G.o.d Himself. I said, 'You made me, You put me here, You sent me love, You sent me prosperity. I have cared for the wrong things, I have loved in the wrong way. Now I throw everything else aside, and claim strength and light. I will sorrow no more and desire no more; I will take every day just what You send me, I will say and do what You bid me. I will make no pretences and no complaints. Do with me what You will.'

"I cannot tell you what happened to me, but a great tide of strength and even joy flowed into my whole being; it was the water of life, clear as crystal; and yet it was myself all the time! I was not different, but I was one with something pure and wise and loving and eternal.