The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 14

Sylvia regarded the potential sinner with amused curiosity.

"Do tell me what you might do," she begged. "Would you live with a man without marrying him?"

"Please don't be coa.r.s.e," said Gertrude. "I don't like it."

"I could put it much more coa.r.s.ely," Sylvia said, with a laugh. "Would you--"

"Sylvia!" Gertrude whistled through her teeth in an agony of apprehensive modesty. "I entreat you not to continue."

"There you are," said Sylvia. "That shows what rubbish all your scruples are. You're shocked at what you thought I was going to say. Therefore you ought to be shocked at yourself. As a matter of fact, I was going to ask if you would marry a man without loving him."

"If I were to marry," Gertrude said, primly, "I should certainly want to love my husband."

"Yes, but what do you understand by love? Do you mean by love the emotion that makes people go mad to possess--"

Gertrude rose from her chair. "Sylvia, the whole conversation is becoming extremely unpleasant. I must ask you either to stop or let me go out of the room."

"You needn't be afraid of any personal revelations," Sylvia a.s.sured her. "I've never been in love that way. I only wanted to find out if you had been and ask you about it."

"Never," said Gertrude, decidedly. "I've certainly never been in love like that, and I hope I never shall."

"I think you're quite safe. And I'm beginning to think I'm quite safe, too," Sylvia added. "However, if you won't discuss abstract morality in an abstract way, you mustn't expect me to do so, and the problem of housekeeping returns to the domain of practical morality, where principles don't count."

Sylvia decided after this conversation to accept Gertrude as a joke, and she ceased to be irritated by her any longer, though her sister-in-law stayed from Christmas till the end of February. In one way her presence was of positive utility, because Philip, who was very much on the lookout for criticism of his married life, was careful not to find fault with Sylvia while she remained at Green Lanes; it also acted as a stimulus to Sylvia herself, who used her like a grindstone on which to sharpen her wits. Another advantage from Gertrude's visit was that Philip was able to finish his text, thanks to her industrious docketing and indexing and generally fussing about in his study. Therefore, when Sylvia proposed that the twins should spend their Easter holidays at The Old Farm, he had no objection to offer.

The prospect of the twins' visit kept Sylvia at the peak of pleasurable expectation throughout the month of March, and when at last, on a budding morn in early April, she drove through sky-enchanted puddles to meet them, she sang for the first time in months the raggle-taggle gipsies, and reached the railway station fully half an hour before the train was due. n.o.body got out but the twins; yet they laughed and talked so much, the three of them, in the first triumph of meeting, that several pa.s.sengers thought the wayside station must be more important than it was, and asked anxiously if this was Galton.

Gladys and Enid had grown a good deal in six months, and now with their lengthened frocks and tied-back hair they looked perhaps older than sixteen. Their faces, however, had not grown longer with their frocks; they were as full of spirits as ever, and Sylvia found that while they still charmed her as of old with that quality of demanding to be loved for the sheer grace of their youth, they were now capable of giving her the intimate friends.h.i.+p she so greatly desired.

"You darlings," she cried. "You're like champagne-cup in two beautiful crystal gla.s.ses with rose-leaves floating about on top."

The twins, who with all that zest in their own beauty which is the prerogative of a youth unhampered by parental jealousy, frankly loved to be admired; Sylvia's admiration never made them self-conscious, because it seemed a natural expression of affection. Their att.i.tude toward Philip was entirely free from any conventional respect; as Sylvia's husband he was candidate for all the love they had for her, but when they found that Philip treated them as Sylvia's toys they withheld the honor of election and began to criticize him. When he seemed shocked at their criticism they began to tease him, explaining to Sylvia that he had obviously never been teased in his life. Philip, for his part, found them precocious and vain, which annoyed Sylvia and led to her seeking diversions and entertainment for the twins' holidays outside The Old Farm. As a matter of fact, she had no need to search far, because they both took a great fancy to Mr. Dorward, who turned out to have an altogether unusual gift for drawing nonsensical pictures, which were almost as funny as his own behavior, that behavior which irritated so many more people than it amused.

The twins teased Mr. Dorward a good deal about his love-affair with Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, and though this teasing may only have coincided with Mr. Dorward's previous conviction that the two ladies were managing him and his parish rather too much for his dignity and certainly too much for his independence, there was no doubt that the quarrel between them was prepared during the time that Gladys and Enid were staying at Green Lanes; indeed, Sylvia thought she could name the actual afternoon.

Sylvia's intercourse with Miss Horne and Miss Hobart was still friendly enough to necessitate an early visit to Sunny Bank to present the twins. The two ladies were very fond of what they called "young people," and at first they were enraptured by Gladys and Enid, particularly when they played some absurd school-girl's trick upon Major Kettlewell. Sylvia, too, had by her tales of the island of Sirene inspired them with a longing to go there; they liked nothing better than to make her describe the various houses and villas that were for sale or to let, in every one of which in turn Miss Horne and Miss Hobart saw themselves installed.

On the particular afternoon from which Sylvia dated the preparation of the quarrel, they were all at tea with Mr. Dorward in his cottage. The conversation came round to Sirene, and Sylvia told how she had always thought that the vicar resembled a Roman Emperor. Was it Nero? He was perhaps flattered by the comparison, notwithstanding the ladies' loud exclamations of dissent, and was anxious to test the likeness from a volume of engraved heads which he produced. With Gladys sitting on one arm of his chair and Enid on the other, the pages were turned over slowly to allow time for a careful examination of each head, which involved a good deal of attention to Mr. Dorward's own. In the end Nero was ruled out and a more obscure Emperor was hailed as his prototype, after which the twins rushed out into the garden and gathered strands of ivy to encircle his imperial brow; Miss Horne and Miss Hobart, who had taken no part in the discussion, left immediately after the coronation, and though it was a perfectly fine evening, they announced, as they got into their vehicle, that it looked very much like rain.

Next Sunday the ladies came to church as usual, but Mr. Dorward kept them waiting half an hour for lunch while he showed the twins his ornaments and vestments, which they looked at solemnly as a penance for having spent most of the service with their handkerchiefs in their mouths. What Miss Horne and Miss Hobart said at lunch Sylvia never found out, but they drove away before Sunday-school and never came back to Green Lanes, either on that Sunday or on any Sunday afterward.

All that Mr. Dorward would say about the incident was: "Church fowls! Chaste fowls! Chaste and holy, but tiresome. The vicar mustn't be managed. Doesn't like it. Gets frightened. Felt remote at lunch. That was all. Would keep on talking. Got bored and more remote. Vicar got so remote that he had to finish his lunch under the table."

"Oh no, you didn't really?" cried the twins, in an ecstasy of pleasure. "You didn't really get under the table, Mr. Dorward?"

"Of course, of course, of course. Vicar always speaks the truth. Delicious lunch."

Sylvia had to tell Philip about this absurd incident, but he would only say that the man was evidently a buffoon in private as well as in public.

"But, Philip, don't you think it's a glorious picture? We laughed till we were tired."

"Gladys and Enid laugh very easily," he answered. "Personally I see nothing funny in a man, especially a clergyman, behaving like a clown."

"Oh, Philip, you're impossible!" Sylvia cried.

"Thanks," he said, dryly. "I've noticed that ever since the arrival of our young guests you've found more to complain of in my personality even than formerly."

"Young guests!" Sylvia echoed, scornfully. "Who would think, to hear you talk now, that you married a child? Really you're incomprehensible."

"Impossible! Incomprehensible! In fact thoroughly negative," Philip said.

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders and left him.

The twins went back to school at the beginning of May, and Sylvia, who missed them very much, had to fall back on Mr. Dorward to remind her of their jolly company. Their intercourse, which the twins had established upon a certain plane, continued now upon the same plane. Life had to be regarded as Alice saw it in Wonderland or through the looking-gla.s.s. Sylvia remembered with irony that it was Philip who first introduced her to those two books; she decided he had only liked them because it was correct to like them. Mr. Dorward, however, actually was somebody in that fantastic world, not like anybody Alice met there, but another inhabitant whom she just happened to miss.

To whom else but Mr. Dorward could have occurred that ludicrous adventure when he was staying with a brother priest in a remote part of Devons.h.i.+re?

"I always heard he was a little odd. However, we had dinner together in the kitchen. He only dined in the drawing-room on Thursdays."

"When did he dine in the dining-room?" Sylvia asked.

"Never. There wasn't a dining-room. There were a lot of rooms that were going to be the dining-room, but it was never decided which. And that cast a gloom over the whole house. My host behaved in the most evangelical way at dinner and only once threw the salad at the cook. After dinner we sat comfortably before the kitchen fire and discussed the Mozarabic rite and why yellow was no longer a liturgical color for confessors. At half past eleven my host suggested it was time to go to bed. He showed me up-stairs to a very nice bedroom and said good night, advising me to lock the door. I locked the door, undressed, said my prayers, and got into bed. I was just dozing off when I heard a loud tap at the door. I felt rather frightened. Rather frightened I felt. But I went to the door and opened it. Outside in the pa.s.sage was my host in his nightgown with a candlestick.

"'Past twelve o'clock,' he shouted. 'Time to change beds!' and before I knew where I was he had rushed past me and shut me out into the pa.s.sage."

"Did you change beds?"

"There wasn't another bed in the house. I had to sleep in one of the rooms that might one day be a dining-room, and the next morning a rural dean arrived, which drove me away."

Gradually from underneath what Philip called "a ma.s.s of affectation," but what Sylvia divined as an armor a.s.sumed against the unsympathetic majority by a shy, sensitive, and lovable spirit, there emerged for her the reality of Mr. Dorward. She began to comprehend his faith, which was as simple as a little child's; she began to realize also that he was impelled to guard what he held to be most holy against the jeers of unbelievers by diverting toward his own eccentricity the world's mockery. He was a man of the deepest humility who considered himself incapable of proselytizing. Sylvia used to put before him sometimes the point of view of the outside world and try to show how he could avoid criticism and gain adherents. He used always to reply that if G.o.d had intended him to be a missionary he would not have been placed in this lowly parish, that here he was unable to do much harm, and that any who found faith in his church must find it through the grace of G.o.d, since it was impossible to suppose they would ever find it through his own ministrations. He insisted that people who stayed away from church because he read the service badly or burned too many candles or wore vestments were only ostentatious wors.h.i.+pers who looked upon the church as wax-works must regard Madame Tussaud's. He explained that he had been driven to discourage the work of Miss Horne and Miss Hobart because he had detected in himself a tendency toward spiritual pride in the growth of a congregation that did not belong either to him or to G.o.d; if he had tolerated Miss Horne's methods for a time it was because he feared to oppose the Divine intention. However, as soon as he found that he was thinking complacently of a congregation of twenty-four, nearly every one of which was a pensioner of Miss Horne, he realized that they were instruments of the devil, particularly when at lunch they began to suggest....

"What?" Sylvia asked, when he paused.

"The only thing to do was to finish my lunch under the table," he snapped; nor would he be persuaded to discuss the quarrel further.

Sylvia, who felt that the poor ladies had, after all, been treated in rather a cavalier fas.h.i.+on and was reproaching herself for having deserted them, went down to Oaktown shortly after this to call at Sunny Bank. They received her with freezing coldness, particularly Miss Hobart, whose eyes under lowering eyelids were sullen with hate. She said much less than Miss Horne, who walked in and out of the s.h.i.+very furniture, fanning herself in her agitation and declaiming against Mr. Dorward at the top of her voice.

"And your little friends?" Miss Hobart put in with a smile that was not a smile. "We thought them just a little badly brought up."

"You liked them very much at first," Sylvia said.

"Yes, one often likes people at first."

And as Sylvia looked at her she realized that Miss Hobart was not nearly so old as she had thought her, perhaps not yet fifty. Still, at fifty one had no right to be jealous.

"In fact," said Sylvia, brutally, "you liked them very much till you thought Mr. Dorward liked them too."

Miss Hobart's eyelids almost closed over her eyes and her thin lips disappeared. Miss Horne stopped in her restless parade and, pointing with her fan to the door, bade Sylvia be gone and never come to Sunny Bank again.

"The old witch," thought Sylvia, when she was toiling up the hill to Medworth in the midsummer heat. "I believe he's right and that she is the devil."

She did not tell Philip about her quarrel, because she knew that he would have reminded her one by one of every occasion he had taken to warn Sylvia against being friendly with any inhabitant of Tintown. A week or two later, Philip announced with an air of satisfaction that a van of Treacherites had arrived in Newton Candover and might be expected at Green Lanes next Sunday.

Sylvia asked what on earth Treacherites were, and he explained that they were the followers of a certain Mr. John Treacher, who regarded himself as chosen by G.o.d to purify the Church of England of popish abuses.

"A dreadful little cad, I believe," he added. "But it will be fun to see what they make of Dorward. It's a pity the old ladies have been kept away by the heat, or we might have a free fight."

Sylvia warned Mr. Dorward of the Treacherites' advent, and he seemed rather worried by the news; she had a notion he was afraid of them, which made her impatient, as she frankly told him.

"Not many of us. Not many of us," said Mr. Dorward. "Hope they won't try to break up the church."

The Treacherites arrived on Sat.u.r.day evening and addressed a meeting by The Old Farm, which fetched Philip out into the road with threats of having them put in jail for creating a disturbance.

"If you want to annoy people, go to church to-morrow and annoy the vicar," he said, grimly.

Sylvia, who had heard Philip's last remark, turned on him in a rage: "What a mean and cowardly thing to say when you know Mr. Dorward can't defend himself as you can. Let them come to church to-morrow and annoy the vicar. You see what they'll get."

"Come, come, Sylvia," Philip said, with an attempt at pacification and evidently ashamed of himself. "Let these Christians fight it out among themselves. It's nothing to do with us, as long as they don't...."

"Thank you, it's everything to do with me," she said. He looked at her in surprise.

Next morning Sylvia took up her position in the front of the church and threatened with her eye the larger congregation that had gathered in the hope of a row as fiercely as Miss Horne and Miss Hobart might have done. The Treacherites were two young men with pimply faces who swaggered into church and talked to one another loudly before the service began, commenting upon the ornaments with c.o.c.kney facetiousness. Ca.s.sandra Batt came over to Sylvia and whispered hoa.r.s.ely in her ear that she was afraid there would be trouble, because some of the village lads had looked in for a bit of fun. The service was carried through with constant interruptions, and Sylvia felt her heart beating faster and faster with suppressed rage. When it was over, the congregation dispersed into the churchyard, where the yokels hung about waiting for the vicar to come out. As he appeared in the west door a loud booing was set up, and one of the Treacherites shouted: "Follow me, loyal members of the Protestant Established Church, and destroy the idols of the Pope." Whereupon the iconoclast tried to push past Mr. Dorward, who was fumbling in his vague way with the lock of the door. He turned white with rage and, seizing the Treacherite by the scruff of his neck, he flung him head over heels across two mounds. At this the yokels began to boo more vehemently, but Mr. Dorward managed to shut the door and lock it, after which he walked across to the discomfited Treacherite and, holding out his hand, apologized for his violence. The yokels, who mistook generosity for weakness, began to throw stones at the vicar, one of which cut his face. Sylvia, who had been standing motionless in a trance of fury, was roused by the blood to action. With a bound she sprang at the first Treacherite and pushed him into a half-dug grave; then turning swiftly, she advanced against his companion with upraised stick.

The youth just had time to gasp a notification to the surrounding witnesses that Sylvia a.s.saulted him first, before he ran; but the yokels, seeing that the squire's wife was on the side of the parson, and fearing for the renewal of their leases and the repairs to their cottages, turned round upon the Treacherites and dragged them off toward the village pond.

"Come on, Ca.s.sandra," Sylvia cried. "Let's go and break up the van."

Ca.s.sandra seized her pickax and followed Sylvia, who with hair streaming over her shoulders and elation in her aspect charged past The Old Farm just when Philip was coming out of the gate.

"Come on, Philip!" she cried. "Come on and help me break up their d.a.m.ned van."

By this time the attack had brought most of the village out of doors. Dogs were barking; geese and ducks were flapping in all directions; Sylvia kept turning round to urge the s.e.xton, whose progress was hampered by a petticoat's slipping down, not to bother about her clothes, but to come on. A grandnephew of the old woman picked up the crimson garment and, as he pursued his grandaunt to restore it to her, waved it in the air like a standard. The yokels, who saw the squire watching from his gate, a.s.sumed his complete approval of what was pa.s.sing (as a matter of fact he was petrified with dismay), and paid no attention to the vicar's efforts to rescue the Treacherites from their doom in the fast-nearing pond. The van of the iconoclasts was named Ridley: "By G.o.d's grace we have to-day lit such a candle as will never be put out" was printed on one side. On the other was inscribed, "John Treacher's Poor Preachers. Supported by Voluntary Contributions." By the time Sylvia, Ca.s.sandra, and the rest had finished with the van it was neither legible without nor habitable within.

Naturally there was a violent quarrel between Sylvia and Philip over her behavior, a quarrel that was not mended by her being summoned later on by the outraged Treacherites, together with Mr. Dorward and several yokels.

"You've made a fool of me from one end of the county to the other," Philip told her. "Understand once and for all that I don't intend to put up with this sort of thing."

"It was your fault," she replied. "You began it by egging on these brutes to attack Mr. Dorward. You could easily have averted any trouble if you'd wanted to. It serves you jolly well right."

"There's no excuse for your conduct," Philip insisted. "A stranger pa.s.sing through the village would have thought a lunatic asylum had broken loose."

"Oh, well, it's a jolly good thing to break loose sometimes--even for lunatics," Sylvia retorted. "If you could break loose yourself sometimes you'd be much easier to live with."

"The next time you feel repressed," he said, "all I ask is that you'll choose a place where we're not quite so well known in which to give vent to your feelings."

The argument went on endlessly, for neither Sylvia nor Philip would yield an inch; it became, indeed, one of the eternal disputes that rea.s.sert themselves at the least excuse. If Philip's egg were not cooked long enough, the cause would finally be referred back to that Sunday morning; if Sylvia were late for lunch, her unpunctuality would ultimately be dated from the arrival of the Treacherites.

Luckily the vicar, with whom the events of that Sunday had grown into a comic myth that was continually being added to, was able to give Sylvia relief from Philip's exaggerated disapproval. Moreover, the Treacherites had done him a service by advertising his church and bringing a certain number of strangers there every Sunday out of curiosity; these pilgrims inflated the natives of Green Lanes with a sense of their own importance, and they now filled the church, taking pride and pleasure in the owners.h.i.+p of an attraction and boasting to the natives of the villages round about the size of the offertory. Mr. Dorward's popery and ritualism were admired now as commercial smartness, and if he had chosen to ride into church on Palm Sunday or any other Sunday on a donkey (a legendary ceremony invariably attributed to High Church vicars), there was not a man, woman, or child in the parish of Green Lanes that would not have given a prod of encouragement to the sacred animal.

One hot September afternoon Sylvia was walking back from Medworth when she was overtaken by Mr. Pluepott in his cart. They stopped to exchange the usual country greetings, at which by now Sylvia was an adept. When presently Mr. Pluepott invited her to take advantage of a lift home she climbed up beside him. For a while they jogged along in silence; suddenly Mr. Pluepott delivered himself of what was evidently much upon his mind: "Mrs. Iredale," he began, "you and me has known each other the best part of two years, and your coming and having a cup of tea with Mrs. Pluepott once or twice and Mrs. Pluepott having a big opinion of you makes me so bold."

He paused and reined in his pony to a walk that would suit the gravity of his communication.

"I'd like to give you a bit of a warning as from a friend and, with all due respect, an admirer. Being a married man myself and you a young lady, you won't go for to mistake my meaning when I says to you right out that women is worse than the devil. Miss Horne! As I jokingly said to Mrs. Pluepott, though, being a sacred subject, she wouldn't laugh, 'Miss Horne!' I said. 'Miss Horns! That's what she ought to be called.' Mrs. Iredale," he went on, pulling up the pony to a dead, stop and turning round with a very serious countenance to Sylvia--"Mrs. Iredale, you've got a wicked, bad enemy in that old woman."

"I know," she agreed. "We quarreled over something."

"If you quarreled, and whether it was your fault or whether it was hers, isn't nothing to do with me, but the lies she's spreading around about you and the Reverend Dorward beat the band. I'm not speaking gossip. I'm not going by hearsay. I've heard her myself, and Miss Hobart's as bad, if not worse. There, now I've told you and I hope you'll pardon the liberty, but I couldn't help it."

With which Mr. Pluepott whipped up his pony to a frantic gallop, and very soon they reached the outskirts of Green Lanes, where Sylvia got down.

"Thanks," she said, offering her hand. "I don't think I need bother about Miss Horne, but it was very kind of you to tell me. Thanks very much," and with a wave of her stick Sylvia walked pensively along into the village. As she pa.s.sed Mr. Dorward's cottage she rattled her stick on his gate till he looked out from a window in the thatch, like a bird disturbed on its nest.

"Hullo, old owl!" Sylvia cried. "Come down a minute. I want to say something to you."

The vicar presently came blinking out into the sunlight of the garden.

"Look here," she said, "do you know that those two old villains in Oaktown are spreading it about that you and I are having a love-affair? Haven't you got a prescription for that sort of thing in your church business? Can't you curse them with bell, book, and candle, or something? I'll supply the bell, if you'll supply the rest of the paraphernalia."

Dorward shook his head. "Can't be done. Cursing is the prerogative of bishops. Not on the best terms with my bishop, I'm afraid. Last time he sent for me I had to spend the night and I left a rosary under my pillow. He was much pained, my spies at the Palace tell me."

"Well, if you don't mind, I don't mind," she said. "All right. So long."

Three days later, an anonymous post-card was sent to Sylvia, a vulgar Temptation of St. Anthony; and a week afterward Philip suddenly flung a letter down before her which he told her to read. It was an ill-spelled ungrammatical screed, which purported to warn Philip of his wife's behavior, enumerated the hours she had spent alone with Dorward either in his cottage or in the church, and wound up with the old proverb of there being none so blind as those who won't see. Sylvia blushed while she read it, not for what it said about herself, but for the vile impulse that launched this smudged and scrabbled impurity.

"That's a jolly thing to get at breakfast," Philip said.

"Beastly," she agreed. "And your showing it to me puts you on a level with the sender."

"I thought it would be a good lesson for you," he said.

"A lesson?" she repeated.

"Yes, a lesson that one can't behave exactly as one likes, particularly in the country among a lot of uneducated peasants."

"But I don't understand," Sylvia went on. "Did you show me this filthy piece of paper with the idea of asking me to change my manner of life?"

"I showed it to you in order to impress upon you that people talk, and that you owe it to me to keep their tongues quiet."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Something perfectly simple," Philip said. "I want you to give up visiting Dorward in his cottage and, as you have no religious inclinations, I should like you to avoid his church."

"And that's why you showed me this anonymous letter?"

He nodded.

"In fact you're going to give it your serious attention?" she continued.