CHAPTER VIII

Of course the next day some of the London newspapers contained ample, though by no means extravagant, reports of the wreck of the barque on the coast of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. They had previously published cables to the same effect, but only to the extent of a hundred words. At that time no more interest was attached to the incident than would be associated with the wreck of an ordinary vessel. It was not until the arrival of the Canadian papers that it was found that there was a popular feature in the transaction. The public mind, always deeply stirred by an account of a black-sheep hero, could not be ignored by the newspapers; and in recognition of this fact, several columns in the aggregate and a few sub-leaders appeared dealing with the attempt—a successful attempt too—made by Marcus Blaydon to make up for the errors of his past by an act of heroism that had cost him his life. Posthumous honour in this form is always administered with a generous hand; and the consequence was that, by the time the country papers had, on account of the local interest attaching to the loss of the barque Kingsdale, filled to overflowing the cup of effervescent incident in this connection, and offered it to their readers, Mr. Wadhurst had come to think of himself as the father-in-law of a hero. He actually had a feeling of pride when he saw his name in the bracketed paragraphs at the foot of the spirited account of the wreck: “It will be remembered that the heroic if unfortunate man, Marcus Blaydon, married on the morning of his arrest, the only daughter of a much-respected practical agriculturist, Mr. Phineas Wadhurst, of Athalsdean, near Framsby.”

He felt very bitterly on the subject of his daughter’s refusal to wear mourning; and now that the local papers had dealt so fully with the leading incident of the wreck, recognizing the popular element that it contained, he was angrier than ever. He asked her if she had any idea what the people would think of her if she were to appear among them without even a hint at the “weeds”; and when she replied that she had never thought of the people of Framsby and did not intend to begin now, he expressed himself as being ready to accept a compromise from her on this point. He tried to suggest to her the possibility of adopting such a costume as would make it plain that, while she deplored the past errors of her husband, she fully appreciated the elements of distinction associated with his last act.

That was what he had in his mind, but he did not quite succeed in giving definition to it with sufficient clearness to enforce its appeal to her sense of proportion; and when she told him so, he stalked away from her.

And that “romance of the sea,” as one newspaper termed it, had apparently attracted the attention of the lady who had been responsible for Priscilla’s meeting with the man, for the young widow received a long letter from her Aunt Emily the purport of which was to convince her that, in spite of what had been said at the time of her marriage, she, Aunt Emily, had been quite correct in the estimate she had formed of the character of Marcus Blaydon: he had shown himself to be a fine and noble gentleman—Aunt Emily harped on the word “gentleman,” as usual. She ended her letter with a sentence which, reduced to the plainest English, was in effect: “Since I did so well for you once before, if you come to me now you may depend on my doing as much for you again.”

Her father thought she should visit her aunt and give her another trial. (He wanted to get her as far away as possible from the observation of Framsby—to get her removed to some place where the absence of those distinguishing “weeds” would not arouse comment.)

Priscilla threw the letter, torn into shreds, out of the window, and some of the choicest paragraphs became the lining of a blackbird’s nest that was being hastily papered and plastered for the coming of a new brood.

She did not hasten to show herself in the street of Framsby. What was Framsby to her that she should flaunt in its face her feeling in regard to her position? She had no occasion to go into the town, and she took care that she did not create an artificial necessity for the sake of displaying her unconventionality. Her friend Rosa paid her a visit, accompanied by her mother, who really liked Priscilla. Now Rosa’s visit was one of congratulation, whereas her mother’s was one of condolence, so that she had no reason to complain on any score. She did not complain. She took the congratulations with the condolences in the spirit in which they were offered, and so every one was satisfied.

At the end of a fortnight she began to have a longing for some traffic with the outer world. She was becoming as melancholy as the Lady of Shalott; and the Daily Mirror, in which she gazed every morning to find a reflection of the incidents of life, only caused her longings to be increased. The things of the farm, the incidents of the orchard, the promise of the crops, the “likely” calves, the multiplying of the lambs, now ceased to interest her. Neither her father nor her mother had encouraged her to take any interest in the great money-making farm; they gave her to understand that her part in connection with the farm was to spend the money that it made for the family. She was to be a “lady,” and this involved laziness in all matters that mattered in connection with the farm. She was to give all her attention to her piano, to her painting, to her dressing, all these being accomplishments as essential to the development of a “lady” as an acquaintance with the methods of the farm was detrimental to the effecting of this end—the great end of life.

But Priscilla had, without any desire to go against the will of her parents, come to perceive how infinitely more interesting were the things of the farm than the working of tea cloths and the embroidering of teapot cosies—the eminently ladylike occupations which her mother encouraged her to pursue. The consequence was that, in the course of a year or two, she knew a great deal about the farm, and several times she had detected errors made by the men responsible for at least two of the departments; but having only communicated her knowledge to the men themselves, and not to her father, she had not hurt the susceptibilities of either the former or the latter.

But now, as the month of May went on, and she remained watching how all living things around her were full of the delights of companionship, she had a sense of loneliness—of isolation. She felt keenly just now the cruelty of her position in respect of the “sets” at Framsby. She knew that the Tennis and Croquet Club was in full swing, but she was not a member. Rosa Caffyn had been made to understand by Mrs. Gifford, the lady who practically ran the club, that she need not put up Miss Wadhurst’s name, for she would have no chance of being admitted. Then there were two cricket matches being played on the county ground, but she had no one with whom she could go, though she took great interest in cricket, and all Framsby would be there.

She felt very lonely in her isolation on the Downs, and began to go for long walks in the company only of Douglas, her Scotch collie, keeping as remote as possible from the motor tracks, for the month was turning out dusty dry. But in spite of her intentions in this direction, she detected the aroma of burning petrol when she was on her way home through a rather steep brambly lane, the surface of which retained the cart ruts of the previous winter—perhaps of an earlier winter still. The scent seemed warm, so she was not surprised to come upon the fons et origo when she had followed the bend of the lane toward the old coach road. The machine was standing with one wheel up on the ditch, and its engine was silent. Two men were on their knees in front of the exposed machinery, but it was plain that their posture was not devotional—in fact, from the character of a word or two that strayed to her ears, she gathered that it was just the opposite.

He waited for her to smile first: he seemed uncertain and rather anxious to know what she would do and so give him the note for him to follow; and when she smiled quite happily and unconcernedly, his mouth widened visibly, and he gave her an excellent caricature of a jocose boy. He had no notion of letting her walk on after she had greeted him and said:

“Thank you so much for sending the primroses. That is your motor, is it not? Nothing material, I hope?”

“Sure to be nothing when it’s found out,” he said. “It’s a bit pink-eyed to-day—had rather a lurid night.”

“Oh, really?” she said. “I thought that those things had iron constitutions—stand any amount of racket.”

“I suppose I should say something about the amount of spirit they consume and that,” he remarked, still smiling.

“Too obvious,” she said, shaking her head. “Still after the obviousness of my ‘iron constitution’ you might say anything. What a lovely day it is—just the sort of day for a breakdown!”

She had begun to walk on, saying her last sentence with a sort of good-bye nod and smile.

“Might I walk on a bit with you?” he asked, becoming solemn and pitching his voice half a tone lower. “The fact is”—his voice became lower still, almost confidential—“the chap knows more about the machine than I do, and he works best when let alone.”

“Of course you may walk as far as you wish. I shall be only too glad, I can tell you,” said she. “I have been having a lot of solitary walks of late, and I’m sick of them. I was longing for some one to talk to.”

“I’m sorry you haven’t come across some one who is better in that line than myself,” said he. “I never was up to much as a talker.”

“Why, you talked quite a lot that day when you gave us so nice a lunch.”

“Oh, I always talk a lot—no mistake about that; but there’s no brains behind it all—no, not even grammar,” he added, after an anxious moment.

“You have plenty of brains,” she said, looking at him as if her remark had reference to the size of his head and she was verifying it. “What makes you fancy that you’ve no brains?”

“I do the wrong things so often—things that no chap would do if he had brains enough to think whether he should do them or not.”

“For instance?”

“Oh, for instance? Gloriana! I’ve instances enough. Well, go no further than this moment. I’m not sure that another chap—a chap that remembers things, and knows the decent thing to do—would have stopped you in the way I did.”

“Why shouldn’t you stop me if you wished? Why, you were excessively polite in asking me if you might walk with me to keep you from getting in the way of the chauffeur.”

“Of course—that’s all right the way you put it; but—but—well, I heard from Mrs. Pearce who you were, and then I read all that in the papers, so that I wasn’t sure if—if—it was just the thing, you know.”

“If it was quite in good taste to speak naturally to one who had suffered a recent bereavement?”

He nodded, his eyes brightening as if in recognition of the excellent way in which she expressed what was in his mind. He went further, seeming to feel quite pleased that he had in his mind something that could be so well expressed.

“Mr. Wingfield,” she said, “you have the highest form of brain power, let me tell you—the power to see in a single glance what most other men would require to have explained to them, and even then not be able to grasp properly. You saw in a moment that I was not the sort of girl who would try to affect the part of the bereaved widow, taking all the circumstances of the bereavement into consideration.”

He looked at her in frank admiration for some moments; then he said:

“It’s you that have the brains, to see that that is just what I saw. I knew in a moment that you would not put on a woebegone air when you know what everybody else knows, that you have only cause to feel delighted.”

“Not exactly——”

“I beg your pardon; of course not delighted—a man’s a man—you couldn’t feel delighted to hear of the death of any man, even though he was as great a rascal as the fellow who did his best to drag you down to hell with him. If he had cared the merest scrap for you he never would have asked you to marry him—he would have run away to the other end of the world or cut his throat first.”

“Yes; but he’s dead now.”

“Yes, I know; de mortuis and the rest; and so no one should speak a word against Judas Iscariot. A kiss—a kiss was the sign of the betrayal.”

There was a suggestion of fierceness in the way he spoke, but nothing that approached the passion with which she flared up, “He never kissed me—never once!” she cried, her face flushing and her hands trembling visibly. Her collie, who had been running ahead, turned and came back to her. He looked up at her and then glanced, enquiringly, at the man. She laid one trembling hand on the dog’s head, and then seemed to calm herself. “Pardon me,” she said, “you really did not suggest—but you had every right to take it for granted that we had been lovers—that I had some regard for him. It is as great a crime for a woman to marry a man without caring for him in the least as it is for the man to marry her. I deserved all that I suffered; but I was spared, thank God, the memory of having had so much as one kiss from him. I never told him that I had any regard for him; but I did say that perhaps one day I might come to have some sort of feeling for him, but till then—I wonder if anything like this ever happened before. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Funny? No. If any one else told me of it, I would think it funny; but when I look at you, I don’t think anything of the sort.”

“It is funny, and what’s funnier still is that you are the first person whom I have told this to. Now, why should I tell it to you?”

“I don’t know why, I’m sure, only I can tell you that you have told it to the right man. And now will you go a step further and confide in me how it was that you ever did marry the fellow? and we’ll drop the subject for ever and the day after. Don’t tell me if you don’t wish.”

“I have gone so far that I may as well go further. I never knew until now how fascinating a thing is confession. I suppose that if it were not for women there would be no such thing as a confessional in any church.”

“I should say not; but their secrets are sacred.”

“I could never doubt you, and that is why I tell you now that I allowed myself to be persuaded by my poor mother into marrying that man. She believed that it would be for my own good.”

“Of course. But why—why? Your father has heaps of money, I’m told, and the man’s position was a poor one.”

“It was my position in this neighbourhood that was a poor one. You see, I’m only the daughter of a farmer.”

“What better could you be? The Wadhursts have been at Athalsdean for hundreds of years, and in the neighbourhood for maybe a thousand. The name is Saxon. I looked up the whole dynasty in the county history.”

“Then you know all about that; but is there any county history that will tell you who are the sort of people at Framsby that have it in their power to decree who are to be visited and who are not?”

“A pack of idiots—old women—tabbies with their claws always out, and not prize tabbies at that. I’ve heard all about them. The family of the village sawbones—the village attorney—a colonial clerk whose ability was assessed at four or five hundred a year—I have been properly coached on the whole crew—all rotters. But it’s the same way in every beggarly town like Framsby. It’s in the hands of half-a-dozen tabbies, and their whole aim is to keep out the nicest people—the best-looking girls and the best educated.”

“They kept me out, at any rate. Perhaps they were right; if they began admitting farmers’ daughters into their sacred circle, where would its sacredness be? They kept me out as they had kept my poor mother out, and the very means that she had taken to have me recognized—the education that she insisted on my getting, the expensive frocks, the good furs— real sables, mind, not musquash sables at forty pounds or rabbit-skin sables at thirty shillings, but real sables—these only caused the door to be more tightly closed against me; and my dear mother took it all so much to heart that she never raised her head afterwards. That was why she made me accept the first offer I received from some one who would take me away from this neighbourhood.”

“You should not have allowed yourself to be forced, mother or no mother. A girl like you!”

“She was dying. She said to me: ‘Will you let me go down to the grave without having my one request granted? I have done everything for you—will you not do this one thing for me so that I may close my eyes in peace?’”

He shook his head. Then he looked at her, but he only saw the back of her head; she had turned away her face and her eyes were on the ground. He knew that they were full of tears. They walked on slowly for some time, and then he took his right hand out of the pocket of his jacket and let it drop till it was on a level with her left. Very gently his fingers closed over hers for a moment—only a moment.

“I was wrong,” he said. “There was nothing else left for you to do; but it was rough on you. Well, well; you have had a bad year of it—that’s all, but you might have had a bad fifty years. It’s odd how the rights of a story do get about somehow, whatever people may say. Now that gossipy old woman, Mrs. Pearce, was only too glad to tell me all about you when you went away that day we met; and when I said that it was your own fault—that it was a shame, but you had made your own bed—she took your part and said that if duty to a mother was a fault, then you were to blame. She holds that a girl should do just what a mother tells her to do in all matters, but especially as regards marriage. I don’t. But then I fancy I miss my gear pretty frequently when I try to express myself on most matters. I’m all for independence of thought and action. That’s why they presented me with the Fellowship at the University.”

“A Fellowship—and you said you had no brains?” She had recovered herself and was now looking at him with only the smallest trace of her former emotion in her face.

“A Fellowship—yes, the Fellowship of the Boot,” he said with a grin.

“Oh, you were sent down?”

“If you wish to put it that way.”

“It was your independence of thought that did it?”

“Beyond a doubt. You see, I never could see the humour in talking of the University as the Varsity; and I pretended not to understand one of the dons—the surliest and the most ignorant of the lot, if I knew anything——”

“But you don’t. You confessed just now that you didn’t”

“I know that—he was a chap with the mug and the pug of a pugilist. They’ve made him a bishop since—a sort of bishop.”

“A sort of bishop, Mr. Wingfield?”

“This one was made Metropolitan of the Salamander Archipelago. His see was in the sea—that was the joke made at the time. Anyhow, I asked him on what philological grounds he called the University the Varsity. I added that I came to Oxford to be educated, but I didn’t think that the people who shirked the correct pronunciation of the name of the very institution itself, but adopted the vulgarest that could be imagined and clung to it in spite of all correction, could say that they were earning their money honestly.”

“You said that to a don?”

“To that effect. You see he had been cheeking me like ribbons about something else.”

“And so they sent you down for your independence of thought?”

“Well, there was a bit of a scrap over the Varsity question. I got up a faction who had pledged themselves to call the place the University, and in our zeal for the truth we insulted the Varsity faction. They replied with counter-insults that took the form of pieces of brick aimed at our windows; we replied with pieces of stone and a few tins of ready-made paint that I had picked up seeing them go for next to nothing at a sale. It was that paint that did it. The paint was traced to me, and so I was the one to be sacrificed on the altar of pure pronunciation of the English language as opposed to the Oxford manner.”

“Well, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are a martyr to your own opinions, and that your opinions were right.”

“Yes, but though we hear that a great cause has its foundations cemented by the blood of martyrs, yet it didn’t turn out that way when I was the martyr; they went back to the old vulgarity of Varsity in a moment. There was not one there to pass on the blazing torch of pure English which I had lighted for them.”

“You shouldn’t have made the torch out of the old oak.”

He gazed at her in amazement.

“Who told you that about the oak door?” he asked.

“No one; only it occurred to me that there must have been something of that sort going on in the course of the proceedings. I have heard that you may do anything you please at Oxford if you only keep good hours and respect the oak. Here comes your machine. The chauffeur quite bore out the character you gave him; but I shall feel that I did something to help him by taking you out of his way.”

“Confound him! he’s just a bit too quick,” said Mr. Wingfield. “We’ve got a lot more to say, haven’t we?”

“You must say it to the chauffeur,” she said.

“No; I’ll send him home with the machine and you’ll let me walk up the hill with you.”

“Not to-day, please. Good-bye. I am very glad that we met. I have got rid of my gloomiest thoughts. I knew that what I wanted was a chat with some one who was—was—like you—some one not just like the rest of the world—some one who was a rigid purist in the matter of pronunciation—some one who had gained distinction as a painter.”

“Oh, I say; you must forget that business. I’m not proud of it now. As a matter of fact I can recollect very little that I have a reason to be proud of.”

“Good-bye. You maybe proud of having pulled a poor girl out of the black depths of her own reflections.”

“Not black depths, surely.”

“Black, without relief. You pulled me out of the Slough of Despond, and the world appears with a rose-coloured ribbon or two fluttering about it before my eyes. Thank you again and again. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. We are pretty sure to meet again. I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for you to suggest some place where you are likely to take your walks abroad?”

She shook her head.

“That would be to set oneself up as a sort of Providence, wouldn’t it?”

“I like to make arrangements beforehand for coincidences,” said he. “Never mind. When you feel gloomy, and want somebody to confess to, don’t forget that I’m your man.”

“You may be sure of that.”

They had walked a dozen yards or so away from where the car had pulled up, and now he went back to it, and took the wheel from the chauffeur. She watched him start and gave him a little wave of her hand.

He was a mile away before she had turned her face homeward.