Foxglove Manor, Volume I (of III)
It was only natural that these matters-should draw the vicar and his fair parishioner very close to each other; and that intimate relationship of soul with soul by subtle degrees widened and widened till each became deeply interested in everything that could in any way affect the other. In spite of his strongest resolve to be true to Edith, Mr. Santley felt himself irresistibly drawn to her beautiful rival. He struggled with the enchantment till further resistance seemed useless, and then he sought refuge in self-deception. His nature, he fancied, was wide enough to include the love of both. To Edith he could give the affection of a husband, to Ellen the anticipative passion of a disfranchised spirit. One was a temporal, the other an eternal sentiment.
One afternoon, as they were returning from a visit, being on the edge of the moss about a couple of miles from the village, they were overtaken by a storm. There was a clump of trees hard by, and they entered it for shelter. Mrs. Haldane had her waterproof with her; but the rain drove in such drenching showers, that the vicar insisted on her standing under his umbrella and sheltering her person with her own. Side by side, with the large trunk of a beech-tree behind them and its tossing branches overhead, they stood there for nearly half an hour. He held his umbrella over her so that his arm almost touched her further shoulder. They were very close together, and while she watched the flying volleys of rain he was gazing on the beautiful complexion of her face and neck, on the rich dark masses of her hair, her sweet arched eyebrows and long curving eyelashes. For years he had not been able to regard her so closely. She did not notice his scrutiny at first, but, when she did, little sunny flushes of colour made her loveliness still more electrical. They were talking of the storm at first, but now there was an interval of silence. She felt his eyes upon her face – they seemed to touch her, and the contract made her cheeks glow. At last she turned and looked straight at him.
“I was thinking of long ago,” he said in answer to her look; “do you remember how once we were caught by a thunderstorm at Seacombe, and we stood together under a tree just as we are now?”
“What an excellent memory you have!” she said with a smile, while her colour again rose.
“I never forget anything,” rejoined Mr. Santley with emphasis. “But surely you too recollect that?”
“Oh yes; I have not forgotten it,” she said lightly. “We were very foolish people in those days.”
“We were very happy people, were we not?
“Yes, I think we were; it was a childish happiness.”
“Manhood, then, has brought me no greater. Ah, Ellen, you seem to have easily let the past slip away from you. With me it is as vivid to-day as if it were only yesterday that you and I walked on the cliffs together. Do you remember we went to the gipsy’s camp in the sand-hills, and had our fortunes told?”
Mrs. Haldane blushed and laughed.
“We were foolish enough to do anything, I think, at that time.”
“That pretty gipsy girl with the dark almond eyes and red-and-amber headdress was sadly out in her reading of our destinies.”
Mrs. Haldane made no reply. These reminiscences, and especially the tone in which the vicar dwelt on them, disquieted her.
“I think the worst of the shower is over now,” she said, stepping from under his umbrella. As she spoke, however, a fresh gust of wind and rain contradicted her, and she stepped further into the shelter of the tree. Mr. Santley clearly understood the significance of her words and action.
“It is raining far too heavily to go yet,” he said gently. “Let me hold my umbrella over you.”
She consented a little uneasily, but he laid his hand upon her arm and said —
“I have displeased you by referring to the past, have I not? Come, be frank with me. Surely we are good enough friends by this to speak candidly to each other.”
She raised her great dark eyes to his face and replied gravely,
“I do not like you to speak of the past in that way. I do not think it is right. I hope we are good enough friends to speak candidly. I have trusted you as a friend, as a very dear and true friend. I wish to keep you always my friend; but when you spoke just now of our childish liking for each other, I do not think you spoke as a – friend.”
The vicar was silent, and his eyes were cast on the ground.
“Have I done you an injustice?” she asked in a low tone, after a little pause. “Then, pray, do forgive me.”
The vicar regarded her with a look of sadness, and took the little gloved hand she held out to him.
“You do me injustice in thinking that I have forgotten your position.”
Mrs. Haldane coloured deeply.
“No,” continued the vicar, “I have not forgotten that. I cannot forget it. And if I still love you with the old love of those vanished years, if I love you with a love which will colour my whole life, do not imagine that it is with any hope of a response in this world. I do your husband no injustice; I do you no dishonour. I loved you long before he knew you; I shall love you still in that after life in which he has deliberately abandoned all claim to you in the very existence of which he places no belief. Between this and then let me be your friend – your brother; let me be as one in whom you will ever find sympathy and devotedness; one who can share and understand all your doubts and distress, all your temptations and trials. I do not ask you to love me; I only ask you to let me love you.” This gust of passion was so sudden, so unexpected, so overwhelming, that almost before she was aware, he had spoken and she had listened. And now as she thought of what he said a strangely mixed sensation of doubt and pleasure awoke within her. All that he wished to be he was indeed already in her eyes – her adviser, sympathiser, friend. Only this secret unexpectant love which lived on the past and the future agitated her. And yet surely it was a pure spiritual love which asked for no return on this side of the grave. These thoughts occurred to her before she took the sober common-sense view of what he had said.
“You are taking too visionary, too feverish a view of life when you speak in that way,” she said gently. “We cannot live on dreams. Our duties, our work, our disappointments and cares are too real for us to be satisfied with any love less real. You will some day meet some one worthy of your affection, capable of sympathising with you and aiding you in your life-work – some one who will be a fitting helpmeet to you. For my part, I think that whenever we have missed what we are apt to consider a great happiness it is a sure sign that God intends some better thing for us.”
The vicar shook his head silently.
“Oh, you must have more faith!” she continued brightly. “And it ought to be very easy for you to have faith in this matter. You have all the advantages on your side. And, if I may be frank with you, I will say that I think you would be happier if you were married. You need some responsive heart, and nowhere could one more need close companionship than in such a place as Omberley.”
The rain had ceased, and as she spoke the last words she glanced up at the clouds breaking away from the sunny blue of the sky.
“I think we may safely start now. How bright and sweet everything looks after the rain; and what a fragrance the fields have!”
Mr. Santley did not attempt to renew the conversation. Clearly she was not in the mood, and he believed that what he had said had fallen as seed in a generous soil, and would germinate in the warmth of her fervid temperament. It was enough that she knew he still loved her.
Such a knowledge is ever dangerous to an imaginative woman. For several days after that incident Mrs. Haldane never thought of the vicar, never heard his name mentioned without at the same time unconsciously recalling – or rather without having flashed upon her a mental picture not only of that little wood near the moss, but of the romantic shore at Seacombe. She felt a strange tender interest in the man who had loved her so long, and still loved her so hopelessly, so unselfishly. Hitherto in their relationship she had only thought of herself, of her own needs and her own happiness. She had looked up to him. But that avowal had changed their position towards one another in a singular way. He to whom every one felt entitled to appeal to for advice, assistance, consolation, was evidently himself in need of human affection. She had hitherto regarded the priest rather than the man, but now the man chiefly engaged her attention, and attracted her sympathy while he excited and perplexed her imagination. What could she do to be of service to him? She set her woman’s wit to work in a woman’s way, and speedily arrived at one means of serving him.
“George,” she said to her husband one morning at breakfast, “I have been thinking of asking an old schoolfellow of mine, Hettie Taylor, to come and spend a few weeks with us. She lives in London, and she will be delighted with the change to the country, I know. What do you say?”
“Beginning to feel lonely already?” he asked, glancing up at her.
“Oh no, not at all. Only I have been thinking of her, and should like to have her with me again for a little while. I am sure you will like her. She is very pretty – such beautiful brown hair and eyes – and decidedly intellectual.”
“Ask her by all means, then.”
“Thanks. I will write to her to-day. No, not to-day – I shall be busy seeing after the children’s picnic. Will you not come, dear? You know you love children.”
“To a picnic, my dear girl!” cried Mr. Haldane aghast.
“Yes, in Barton Wood. The children are all going in a couple of waggons. And there will be some of the old people there if the weather is fine. Do come.”
“A picnic, my dear Nell, is pure atavism – it is one of those lapses into savagery which betray the aboriginal arboreal blood,” said Mr. Haldane, laughing. “No, no; I have too much respect for the civilization of the century and for my personal comfort to willingly retrograde to the Drift Period.”
CHAPTER X. THE KISS
The artist in search of a pretty rural subject could not do better than paint a village holiday – a holiday from which the men and women are all but excluded, and the village school-children and the old people are gathered together for a voyage through the leafy lanes to the picturesque playground of a neighbouring wood. Such an enjoyable spectacle as that presented on the day of the Omberley school-treat deserved to be immortalized by art, if only for the sake of filling a city parlour with a sense of eternal summer. It was a glorious August morning that laughed out over Omberley on the day of the great picnic. The young people were astir early, for it had been impossible to sleep from the excitement they felt after the first glimmer of dawn. About ten o’clock the streets were gay with troops of children, clean, rosy-cheeked, and dressed in their Sunday clothes, who went singing to the rendezvous at the schoolhouse. There they were received by Miss Dora Greatheart, who inspected them all, and expressed her approbation at finding them so neat and prim. In twos and threes the old people, the men in tall hats and swallow-tailed coats for the most part, and the women in their best black gowns and church bonnets, came slowly along the road, gossiping and laughing and breathing hard with the weakness of old age. Then came the musicians – old Gabriel Ware, the sexton, with his fiddle, and two younger men, one of whom played the concertina and the other the cornopean, each with a huge nosegay in his breast and wearing the jauntiest air conceivable. There was a happy buzz of excitement about the schoolhouse as the people assembled; a joyous babble of the clear treble voices of little lads and lasses, and the piping notes of garrulous patriarchs and ancient dames; a strange picture, as pathetic as it was pretty, of bright young faces and dancing little figures mingling among gray wrinkled visages and frail stooping shapes.
“Well, Dora, we are to have a fine day,” said Edith, as she entered the garden and shook hands with the schoolmistress.
“Splendid; only we shall be a little late in starting. We should have been off at ten, and the waggons have not come yet. Why, here is old Daddy coming!”
She had stepped out to the road to look for the waggons, and now she went to welcome the new arrival whom she called Daddy. He was a very old, very wiry little man, with a funny little face full of wrinkles, a pair of little grey eyes, and a perfectly bald head. This was the oldest inhabitant of Omberley; and though he was in his ninety-second year, he was as brisk and hearty as many who were twenty years his juniors.
“Well, Daddy, you have actually come!” said Dora, shaking hands with him. “I am very glad. And how do you feel to-day? Pretty strong and hearty?’
“Strong as Samson, mistress, and hearty as – hearty as anything,” replied the old man, with a chuckle.
“Please, miss,” said a young woman who accompanied him, “mother sends her duty, and will you kindly take care of him and see as he doesn’t go a-thinking.”
Daddy’s only symptom of senility was an aptitude to fall into a state of unconsciousness, and in these cases, which sometimes lasted for hours together, he would sit down wherever he was, and consequently ran considerable risks when he went out-of-doors alone. Though the old fellow was quite unable to give any account of himself during these lapses into oblivion, he always stoutly declared that he had been only thinking.
“And please, miss, you’ll find his bacca-box and his pipe in his tail pocket, and his hankercher, and the matches is in his vest pocket. He do forget where he puts his things.”
Daddy laughed scornfully.
“I never forgets nothing, I don’t,” he said boastingly. “I can mind o’ the great beech as was blown down on the green in the whirlywind of ‘92; ay, I mind – ”
A loud cheer from the school children interrupted the flow of Daddy’s reminiscences. The greeting was intended for the vicar and the patroness of the festival, Mrs. Haldane, who now drove up to the school-house. She was already acquainted with Dora, but she had not yet met either Edith or the oldest inhabitant. Mr. Santley introduced both as the waggons came in sight, and at once the cheering was renewed, and the children streamed out into the road. What a fine sight those waggons were v – the long, curved, wheeled ships of the inland farmer, painted yellow and red, and drawn by big horses, with huge collars and bright iron chains! The semicircular canvas awning had been removed, but the wooden arches which supported it were wreathed with leaves and flowers, and festoons hung overhead between arch and arch. The horses, too, were gaily decked out, each having a nosegay between its ears, and its mane and tail tied up with ribbons. The bottom of the waggons were covered with trusses of straw, to make comfortable seats for the old folk. The more daring of the lads were already clambering up the wheels, and securing seats on the flakes which went along the sides of the rustic ship like a sort of outrigger.
Before allowing Daddy to be helped on board, Miss Greatheart beckoned to her a little pale-faced girl who was obliged to use crutches.
“Nannie dear, I want you to look after Daddy as much as you can. When you are tired of him you must come and tell me. Don’t let him go away by himself, and wake him up if he sleeps too long.”
This was said in a whisper to the child, who smiled and nodded.
“Now, Daddy, here’s little Nannie Swales,” said Dora; “I want you to take care of her. You’re the only person I can trust to look after her properly. And she likes to talk to you and see you smoke.”
The little old man smiled and chuckled complacently.
“Put her aside of me, mistress, and I’ll see as no ill comes to her.”
What could have been more charmingly idyllic than those two great waggons, crowded with little shining-eyed tots, merry lads and lasses, withered old men and women, all happy and contented? The blue sky laughed down on them; the green leaves and flowers embowered them; and as a start was; made, one of the musicians struck up “For we’ll a-hunting go” on the concertina, and a score of clear, fresh voices joined in the jovial song.
Through the village, which turned out to wave hands to them as they passed singing and cheering, away through gold-green stretches of ripening harvest, past empty fields where the hay had all been cut and carted, between level expanses of root crops lying green in the hot sun, till at last the dark embankment of Barton Wood rises above the distant sky. How cool and refreshing it is, after the glare of the midday sun, to get into the green shadowland of these grand old beeches and sycamores!
The road winds leisurely as if to seek out the coolest recesses of the wood, and beneath the great bunches of heavy foliage, what quiet, dim distances one sees between the trunks, strewn thick with withered leaves, through which the moss and grass and a thousand moist plants thrust their emerald way, and blue and pink and yellow flowers are clustered in cushions of velvet colour! A few yards away from the road the air seems brown and transparent. That must be the reason why the leaves of the mountain ash are so darkly green, and the berries so brilliantly crimson. If you pluck a bunch and take it out of the wood, you will find it has become disenchanted; the colour is no longer the same.
The road is not a highway, but leads to an old quarry of brown sandstone. There has been no work done here for a few years, but many generations of stonemasons have plied hammer and chisel in this picturesque workshop. It is a tradition that the stone of Foxglove Manor, old as it is, was got here. The old church was built from these brown walls of stone; so was the Vicarage, and so were the windowsills and facings of all the houses in Omberley. It is an unusually large quarry, for a great deal of stone has been taken away during these two hundred odd years. A great deal of half-shaped stone lies about in large square and oblong blocks, both on the floor of the quarry, and among the trees at its entrance. The trees must have sprung up since many of these blocks were cut, otherwise it is not easy to see why they should have been put where you now find them. On two sides the walls of rock are high and precipitous, but on the others the grass and ferns and beeches are carried into the quarry as on the swell of a green wave. A stone shed and hut, roofed with red tiles, stand at the foot of one of these slopes, and here the commissariat department has established itself. A romantic, green, cosy, convenient spot for a picnic and a dance!
The waggons were driven right into the quarry, and the horses were hobbled and allowed to graze beneath the trees. The hour before dinner was spent in wandering through the woods gathering flowers and berries, in rolling about on the soft grass, or in smoking and chatting among the blocks of sandstone. When the cornopean sounded the signal for the feast, the youngsters came trooping in, dancing and eager to begin, for the excitement had prevented most of them from taking breakfast.
And what a luxurious feast it was The vicar, Mrs. Haldane, Edith, and Miss Greatheart, went about the various groups seeing that every one was well supplied with what they liked best. After the cold meats, pies, and pastry, came a liberal distribution of fruit and milk to the children, and a glass of wine to the old people; and at this point Daddy was made the object of so much nudging and whispering and signalling, that at last he got upon his feet and made a wonderful little speech on behalf of the company, keeping his wine-glass in his hand all the time, and every now and then holding it up between his eye and the light with the shrewd air of a connoisseur. Then there were three cheers for Mrs. Haldane, and three cheers for the vicar, three for Dora and for Edith, and happily some young rascal, whose milk had been too strong for him, proposed in a frightened scream three cheers for. Daddy, which were very heartily given by all the school children, though the seniors looked much shocked and surprised at so daring a demonstration.
In about an hour the racing and games were to begin, and meanwhile Mrs. Haldane, the vicar, and the two young ladies were to have lunch together. It is not necessary to enter into any detail of the various sports which took place, or to linger over the dancing and merrymaking that followed. When the fun was at its height, and Daddy was capering gaily to the jigging of the small orchestra, Edith, who felt only half interested, slipped quietly away into the wood. She was not surprised or aggrieved that Mr. Santley paid so much attention to the lady of the Manor, but she felt hurt that he seemed so completely to forget and overlook herself. She wished now to be a little alone in Arden, for Edith loved the woods, and in every glade she could imagine in her fanciful moments that Jaques, or Rosalind, or Touchstone had just gone by, so closely had she associated the dramatic idyl with every piece of English forest-land.
She followed at haphazard a foot-track that went through the trees until she reached a brook, which she found she could cross by means of three slippery-looking stepping-stones, against which the water bickered and gurgled as it raced along. All the steep banks were knee-deep in beautiful ferns close by the waters edge, and higher up the slope grew luxurious tufts of wild flowers. The sound of-the water was very pleasant to hear, and when she had nimbly jumped across it, instead of following the path, she went up the side of the stream to where a mountain ash leaned its dense clusters of blood-bright berries right across. At the foot of the tree was a large boulder, and, after a glance round her, she sat down and drew off her shoes and stockings. The weather was warm, and the clear, sun-flecked water was irresistibly inviting. There she sat for some time, dreamily paddling with her little white feet, like a pretty dryad whose tree grew in too dry a soil.
She had finished playing with the cool stream, and was letting her feet dry in the patches of sunlight that pierced through the branches above her, when she heard a sound of voices. She hastily tried to draw on her stockings, but her skin was still too moist; and so, gathering her feet under her skirt, she concealed herself as much as possible from the observation of the intruders. As they approached she recognized the voices with a start, and crouched down behind the boulder more closely than before.
“We can go no further this way,” said Mrs. Haldane.
“Oh yes, we can. I will assist you over the stones,” the vicar rejoined.
“They look very treacherous and slippery, and the water makes one nervous, running so fast.”
“Look, it is quite safe!” said the vicar; and Edith, peeping from the side of the boulder, saw him step quickly across the brook. “It is a pity you should miss the old Roman camp, when you are so near it.”
“If you will come back and assist me from this side, I will try them,” said Mrs. Haldane..
The vicar returned across the brook, and Edith saw the lady gather her dress and prepare to step on to the first stone.
“Now, you must be ready to reach me your hand in case I need it.”
“Oh, you will find it quite easy when you try. Don’t stop, but go right across without hesitation.”
Mrs. Haldane jumped fairly enough on to the first boulder, but, instead of allowing the forward impetus to carry her on, she tried to stop and steady herself on the narrow footing among the rushing water. She lost at once her balance and her courage, and turning to him with outstretched arms, she cried out, “Quick! quick! I shall fall!”
She threw herself back to the side as she spoke, and he caught her in his arms. Her arms were about his neck, her face close to his; he felt her breath upon his cheek. It was only for an instant, and as she tried to recover herself, their eyes met with a flash of self-consciousness. In the passionate excitement of that supreme moment he strained her to his breast, and pressed his lips to her in a long, violent kiss.
Edith sprang to her feet as though she had been stung; but instantly she recollected herself, and sank down into her hiding-place.
Mrs. Haldane tore herself from the arms that encircled her, and fronted the vicar with a flushed, angry face.
“Are you mad, Mr. Santley?” she asked indignantly. “Allow me to pass at once.”
