CHAPTER VI

There came a dreadful misgiving to her. She clutched her father’s arm as they stood together on the road.

“You are sure?” she said in a low voice, with her eyes looking at him with something of fierceness in their expression. “There is no mistake—no possibility of a mistake? Remember what the man was—a trickster—unscrupulous—you are sure? Is that a letter—a paper?”

“A paper,” he said—“several papers. There can be no doubt about it. And don’t speak ill of him now, Priscilla. You will be sorry for it. He died the death of a man. However bad his life may have been, he made up for it in his death.”

“A hero?” she said, and she was smiling so that her father was angered.

“I would not have believed it of you; it is unnatural,” he said. “Have you no sense of what’s proper—what’s decent?”

“I have no sense that makes me be a hypocrite,” she said. “The man cheated me—he was within an hour or two of making me the most pitiful creature. As it was he made me the laughing-stock of the world. No one thought of my misfortune in being married to an impostor, a criminal, and having my life ruined by him. Every one took it for granted that I was a poor weak creature, on the look-out for a husband and ready to jump at the first suitor who turned up. What could I long for but his death? What chance should I have of doing anything in the world so long as he was alive and married to me? What could I long for but his death? At first it was mine that I longed for; but then I saw that to long for his was more sensible—more in keeping with the will of Heaven.”

“The will of Heaven! How can you talk like that, Priscilla?”

“If God has any idea of justice—of right and wrong—as we have been taught to regard right and wrong by those who assure us that they have been let into some of His secrets—it could not be His will that I should have my life wrecked by that man. I felt that I was born for something better, and so I hoped that he would die. Now that by the goodness of God he is dead, shall I not be grateful? Oh, what fools! standing here on the roadside discussing a delicate point in theology instead of talking over the good news!”

He looked at her for a few stern moments, and then thrust into her hand a bundle of papers.

“Read them for yourself,” he said. “I am going into the town. I don’t want to be by while you are chuckling over the death of a man—a man who died as the noblest man might be proud to die—trying to save his fellow creatures from destruction. Read those papers for yourself, and then ask God to forgive you for your dreadful words.”

“He died like a hero,” she murmured, taking the papers; and then she smiled again.

Her father was striding down the hill; the self-respecting gait of the churchwarden was his—the uncompromising stride of the man who worshipped the Conventional, and never failed to go to church for this purpose, returning to eat a one o’clock dinner of roast sirloin and Yorkshire pudding.

She watched him for some time, and the smile had never left her face. Then she looked strangely at the bundle of papers which he had flung at her—his action had suggested flinging them—in his wrath at her utterance of all that had been in his own heart for more than a year.

She glanced at the papers. They were Canadian, she saw, and they were profuse in the display of strong lettering in the headlines of the columns that met her eyes. It seemed as if the half-column of headlines was designed to exhibit the resources of the typefounders. She saw, without unfolding the papers, that they referred to a wreck that had taken place off the coast of Nova Scotia, great stress being laid on the fact that sixteen lives were lost, and that a man who had tried to carry a line ashore from the wreck had been swept away to destruction. “A Hero’s Death!” was the headline that called attention to this detail.

She folded the papers back into their creases. She felt that she could not do full justice on the open road to the matter with which they dealt. She must hurry home and read every line in the seclusion of her own room. In the same spirit she had occasionally hurried to her home with a new novel by a favourite author under her arm. Nothing must disturb her. She must be allowed to gloat over every line—to dwell lovingly upon the bold lettering of the headings, “A Hero’s Death!”

She almost ran along the road in her eagerness; and now her elation had increased so greatly that she felt it to be indecent—almost disgraceful—all that her father had suggested that it was. It was all very well for her to be conscious of a certain amount of satisfaction on learning that she was released from the dreadful bondage which compelled her to be the wife of a convict, but it was quite another matter to feel herself lilting that comic opera air, “I’ll kiss you and die like a ‘ero”; and, when she succeeded in banishing that ridiculous melody from buzzing in her ears, to be conscious of the rattle of the drum and the trumpet call of the cornet introducing Don César’s singing of “Let me like a soldier fall” in the opera of “Maritana.” But there they went on in her ears—the banjo-bosh of the one and the swashbuckler’s swagger of the other, accepting the beat of her hastening feet for their tempo. The more she hurried, the more rapidly the horrid tuney things went on; and she had a dreadful feeling of never being able to escape from them.

She was doomed for her wickedness to be haunted by those jingles for evermore.

Of course she had no idea that she was on the verge of hysteria; but her father would have known, if he had had any experience of the range of human emotion outside the profitable working of a large farm, that hysteria must be the sequel to that unnatural calm which his daughter had shown on learning that the man to whom she had bound herself was dead.

It was not, however, until she had reached her home and had gone very slowly upstairs to her room, that the buzzing and the lilting and the tinkling of tunes in her ears rushed together in a horrible terrifying jingle, and she cried out, flinging herself upon her bed in a paroxysm of wild tears and falsetto sobs. The reaction had come, and borne her down beneath its mad rush upon her.

When she became calm once more she had a sense of having been absurdly weak in failing to keep herself well in hand. She could not understand how it was that she had let herself behave so foolishly. If the man had been her lover she could not have been more upset by the news of his death, she thought.

But the thing had happened, however, and she felt that she might rest confident that it would never happen again. So she bathed her face and brushed her hair and set herself down to her newspapers on the seat at her open window. The sky was blue above the Downs, and the rain had left in the air a clean taste. In the meadow there were countless daffodils, and the afternoon sun was glistening upon the rain drops in their bells and on the blades of the emerald grasses of the slope. From the great brown field that was being ploughed came the rich smell of moist earth and the varying notes of the ploughman’s words to his team. When he got to the end of the furrow nearest to the farmhouse she heard his words clearly; then he turned, and his voice became indistinct as he plodded slowly on in the other direction. From the clumps of larch in the paddock came the cawing of innumerable rooks, but the song of the lark fell to her ears from the blue sky itself.

She sat for a long time with the newspapers in her lap. She had not for many months felt so restful as she did now. It seemed to her that she had been in prison for more than a year. She had heard through iron bars all the sounds that were now coming from the earth and the air and the sky, but she had not been able to enjoy them; on the contrary, they had irritated her, reminding her of the liberty which had once been hers, but which (she had felt) she was never again to know.

And now...

She sat there living in the luxury of that sense of freedom which had come to her—that sense of restfulness—of exquisite peace—the peace of God that passeth understanding. It had come to her straight from God, she felt. Although she had shown but little faith in the goodness of God, still He had not forgotten her. The words of the hymn came to her memory:—

‘’God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform,

He plants His footsteps in the sea

And rides upon the storm.”

Ah! yes, it was His hand that had passed through the air, and that storm had rushed down upon that ship; it was His footsteps that had stirred up the seas to engulf it and that wretch who had tried to wreck her life—ah! it was he who had been the first to suffer wreck! Poor wretch! Poor wretch! In the course of her large thoughts of the mercy and justice of God she could even feel a passing current of pity for the wretch; but it was one of very low voltage: it would not have caused more than the merest deflection of the most sensitive patho-meter. When she had sighed “Poor wretch!” it was gone. Still she knew that she was no longer the hard woman that she had been ever since she had stood by the church porch and had watched the policeman putting the handcuffs on the man whom she had just married, and had heard his saturnine jest about having put a ring on her finger and then having bracelets put on his wrists. It was that hardness which had then come into her nature that caused her to speak to her father with such bitterness when he had met her with his news on the road.

But now she was changed. She would ask her father’s forgiveness, and perhaps he would understand her, though she did not altogether understand herself.

And still the newspapers lay folded in her lap; and her memory began to review in order the incidents that had led up to that catastrophe of fourteen months ago. It was when she was visiting her aunt Emily that she had met him.

But her memory seemed determined to show itself a more complete recorder than she had meant it to be of everything connected with this matter. It carried her back to the earlier days when her hair had been hanging down her back, and her aunt had had long consultations with her mother on the subject of her education. “Befitting for a lady”—that had been her aunt’s phrase—she, Priscilla, was to be educated in such a way as was befitting for a lady. Aunt Emily was herself a lady; she had done much better than her sister, Priscilla’s mother, who had only become a farmer’s wife. To be sure Phineas Wadhurst was not to be classed among the ordinary farmers of the neighbourhood, who barely succeeded in getting a living out of the land. The Wadhursts had been on their farm for some hundreds of years, and their names were to be read on a big square tablet in the church with 1581 figuring as the first date upon it. Some of them had made the land pay, but others had spent upon it the money that these had bequeathed to them, without prospering. It was old Phineas Wadhurst that had done best out of it, and when he died he had left to his son a small fortune in addition to a well-stocked farm.

But before many years had passed young Phineas, who had the reputation of being the longest-headed man that had ever been a Wadhurst, perceived that the conditions under which agriculture was carried on with a profit had changed considerably. He saw that the day of English wheat was pretty nearly over, but that if the day of wheat was over, the day of other things was dawning, and it was because he became the pioneer of profits that people called him long-headed. While his neighbours grumbled he experimented. The result was that in the course of five years he was making money more rapidly than it had ever been made out of the wheat. “Golden grain,” it had been called long ago. Phineas Wadhurst smiled. Golden butter was what he had his eye on—golden swedes which he grew for his cattle, so that every bullock became bullion and every heifer a mint.

And then he did a foolish thing. He got married.

The woman he chose was a “lady.” The English agriculturist’s ideal lady is some one who has had nothing to do with farming all her life; just as his ideal gentleman is a retired English shopkeeper. Eleanor Glynde was one of the daughters of a hardworking doctor in general practice in the little town of Limborough.

She was an austere woman of thirty, of a pale complexion, which in the eyes of every agricultural community is the stamp of gentility in a lady. Mrs. Wadhurst took no interest in the cultivation of anything except her own pallor. She had once been known as the Lily of Limborough, and she lived in the perpetual remembrance of this tradition. She did not annoy her husband very much; and though there were a good many people who said that Phineas Wadhurst would have shown himself to be longer-headed if he had married a woman in his own station in life, who would have looked after the dairy and kept all the “hands” busy, yet the man felt secretly proud of his wife’s idleness and of her attention to her complexion. She read her novels and worked in crewels, and after five years became the mother of a girl, who grew up to be an extremely attractive creature, but a creature of whom her mother found great difficulty in making a lady.

Mrs. Wadhurst’s ideal lady did not differ greatly from the ideal of the agriculturists; only she added to their definition a rider that she was to be one who should be visited by Framsby. To be on visiting terms with Framsby represented the height of her social ambition.

But Framsby is a queer place. It has eight thousand inhabitants and three distinct “sets” of gentility. The aristocracy of the town is made up of the family of a land agent, the family of a retired physician, the family of a solicitor still in practice, the family of a clergyman’s widow, whose grandfather once “had the hounds,” as she tells you before you have quite made up your mind whether the day is quite wonderful for this time of the year, or if you mean to attend the forthcoming Sale of Work. These and the elderly wife of a retired colonial civil servant made up the ruling “set” at Framsby. They were on golfing terms with the other sets, but socially they declined to look on them as their equals. The other sets consisted of the bank managers, two of the three doctors and their families—for some reason or other the third doctor, with a foolish talkative wife and a couple of exceedingly plain daughters, had entrée at the aristocratic gatherings—a couple of retired officers of Sappers and their families, and some officials, the county surveyor, the master of the grammar school, and the manager of the brewery, each with his entourage.

Of course the clergymen of the Established Church and their families were, ex officio, members of all sets, but it was clearly understood by the ruling party that they were only admitted on sufferance—they must at all times recollect that they were only honorary members, without any power of voting or vetoing on any of the great questions of leaving cards on strangers, or of the membership of the Badminton Club.

And the funny part of the matter was that while the members of the best set were neither people of good family nor people who were in the least degree interesting in themselves, whereas several of the other set were both well born and educated, no one was found to dispute the fact that the one was the right set and the other the wrong set.

When a girl in the wrong set was spoken to or patronized by a frump in the other, she showed herself to be greatly pleased, and became quite cool and “distant” with her own associates; and when one of the frumps snubbed the ambitions of a girl in the wrong set, all the other girls in the wrong set became chilling in their attitude to that girl; and a knowledge of these facts may perhaps account for the impression which was very general in other parts of the county that Framsby was a queer place, and that its precious “sets” might be roughly classified as toads and toadies. It was clearly understood that Framsby was an awful place for strangers to come to. No matter how clever they were—no matter how greatly distinguished in the world outside Framsby—they were not visited, except by the tradesmen, until they had been resident for at least two years. This circumstance, however, by no means raised an insurmountable barrier between them and the people who were hunting up subscribers for some of their numerous “objects.” The newcomers were invariably called on for subscriptions by the very cream of the aristocracy of Framsby—subscriptions to the Hospital, to the Maternity Home, to the School Treats, to the Decayed Gardeners’ Fund, the Decayed Gentlewomen’s Fund, the Poor Brave Things’ Fund, the Zenana Missions Fund, the Guild of St. Michael and All Angels Fund, the Guild of Repentant Motherhood (affiliated with the Guild of St. Salome), and the Guild of Aimless Idlers. These and a score of equally excellent “objects” were without any delay brought under the notice of all newcomers; so that if the old inhabitants showed themselves to be extremely discourteous and inhospitable in regard to strangers, it must be acknowledged that they made up for their neglect of social “calls” by the frequency and the persistence of their visitations when they thought there was anything to be got out of them.

And these were the people for whose patronage Phineas Wadhurst’s wife pined all her life, and it was solely that her daughter might one day be received by some of the best set in Framsby that she agreed with her sister that Priscilla should be “finished” at a school the fees of which were notoriously exorbitant.

This was the point at which Priscilla’s review of the past began while she sat on her chair that afternoon, when for the first time for a year she had a sense of peace—a sense of her life being cleansed from some impurity that had been clinging to it. It was the sense of the rain-washed air that induced this feeling; and she smiled while she remembered how, even so long ago as the time of which she was thinking, she had been amused by the seriousness with which her pale mother and her aunt Emily discussed the likelihood there was that when the fact of her being “finished” at that expensive school should be reasonably presented to the right people at Framsby, it would prove irresistible as a claim upon their compassion, so that they would come to visit her in flocks.

Alas! she had gone to the expensive school and had learned when there a great number of things—some of them not even charged for in the long list of extras; but still she was only regarded by the great people of Framsby as a farmer’s daughter. Nay, several of the wrong set who had been on visiting terms with Mrs. Wadhurst took umbrage at the girl’s being sent to a school to which they could not afford to send their daughters; and they talked of the great evils that frequently resulted from a girl being educated “above her station”—Priscilla remembered the ridiculous phrase for many days. But whatever their ideas on proportionate education may have been, Priscilla was educated. She took good care that she had everything that her father’s money was paid for her to acquire. She did not mean to be over-exacting, but the truth was that she had a passion for learning everything that could be taught to her; and she easily took every prize that it was possible for her to take at the school.

But still the best set showed no signs of taking her up; and whatever chance she had of this form of rapture vanished on that day when, at a local bazaar, a young Austrian prince who spoke no English, was a visitor. He had been brought by Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst, but that lady, having another engagement in the town, had asked one of the best set to lead him to some person who could speak German. But a full parade of all the members of the best set failed to yield even one person who could speak one word of that language. They were all smiling profusely, but they smiled in English, and the prince knew no English. Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst was in despair, when suddenly Miss Caffyn, the daughter of the Rector of St. Mary’s in the Meadows, brought up, without a word of warning, Priscilla Wadhurst, offering the great lady a personal guarantee that she would have no difficulty with the prince.

Of course Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst was delighted. She saw that Miss Wadhurst was the most presentable girl in the hall, and she made no enquiry respecting her lineage or the armorial bearings of her father, but at once presented her to the young man, and noticed with great interest that she was not in the least fluttered at the honour; she was as much at her ease with him as if she had been in the habit of meeting princes all her life. She chattered to Prince Alex in his own language quite briskly, and for an hour and a half she had him all to herself, and delivered him up at the end of that time safe and sound to Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst, on that lady’s return.

This incident, taken in connection with its illustration in a London paper through the medium of an enterprising snap-shottist on the staff of the local Gazette, in which Priscilla “came out” extremely well, ruined whatever chance she might once have had of being visited by Framsby’s best. They ignored her existence upon every occasion when they might reasonably have been expected to notice her; and the failure of her plans was too much for her mother. The lingering Lily of Limborough took to her bed—she had taken to her sofa the year before—and never held up her head afterwards.

And all the time that she was complaining of the want of appreciation of Framsby for all those accomplishments which constitute a “lady,” she was imploring her daughter to make her a promise that she would not spend her future in so uncongenial a neighbourhood. Her aunt Emily, the wife of a prosperous brewer in a minor way in one of the largest cities in the Midlands, had joined her voice with that of Mrs. Wadhurst in this imploration; and with a view of giving her a chance of forming a permanent connection far away from the detestable place, had insisted on her paying several visits of some months’ duration to her own house, and had presented to her favourable consideration more than one eligible man.

Somehow nothing came of these attentions, and Mrs. Wadhurst became gradually more feeble. Then all at once there appeared on the scene a gentleman named Blaydon, who occupied a good position in one of the great mercantile firms of the Midland city, having come there some years before from his home in Canada. He was greatly “smitten”—the expression was to be found in one of Aunt Emily’s letters—with Priscilla, and there could be no doubt as to his intentions. There was none when he proposed to her, and was rejected.

He went away, sunk into the depths of an abyss of disappointment. And then it was that Aunt Emily threw up her hands in amazement. She wished to know whom the girl expected to marry—she, the daughter of a farmer—a wealthy and well-to-do farmer, to be sure, but still nothing more than a farmer. Did she look for a peer of the realm—a duke—or maybe a baronet or a prince? And Mr. Blaydon had eight hundred a year and a good situation. Moreover he had been told that her father was a farmer, and yet he had behaved as a gentleman!

What, in the face of all this impetuosity, was Priscilla’s plaint that she had no affection for the man—that she felt she could not be happy with him—that she was not the sort of wife that such a man wanted?

Aunt Emily ridiculed her protests. They were artificial, she affirmed. They were the result of reading foolish novels in foreign languages; and in a year or two she would find out the mistake she was making—yes, when it would be too late—too late!

Priscilla fled to her home, but only to find that the story of her folly, of her flying in the face of Providence—the phrase was Aunt Emily’s—had got there before her.

Within a week she had written accepting Mr. Blaydon. Her mother—her dying mother—backed up by her father, had brought this about. She had implored Priscilla to accept the man.

“My last words to you, my child—think of that,” she had said. “The last request of a dying mother anxious for her child’s happiness. I tell you, Priscilla, that I shall die happy if I can see you safely married to a man who will take you away from this neighbourhood. If you refuse, what will be your reflections so long as you live? You will have it on your soul that you refused to listen to the last prayer of your dying mother.”

The girl made a rush for the writing-table with her heart full of anger and her eyes full of tears. But she wrote the letter, and the ardent and eligible Mr. Blaydon came down to Framsby, and they were married one February morning in Athalsdean Church, and he was arrested on a charge of embezzlement when they were in the act of leaving the sacred building. The police officers had arrived ten minutes too late.

It was the sentiment of the young and innocent wife, dwelt on so pathetically by his counsel—“Was it right that she, that guileless girl, should be made to suffer for a crime of which she was as innocent as an infant unborn?” he enquired—it was this sentiment that caused the jury to recommend him to mercy and the judge to sentence him to one year’s imprisonment only, from the date of his committal.

He went to prison, and Priscilla went home, and continued to call herself by her maiden name—was she not as a maiden entitled to it? she asked. Six weeks later her mother died; and now...