At the very top of the winding footpath cut deeply into the sandstone side of the East Cliff Hill at Hastings, a wooden seat, set a little back from the road, invites the panting climber to rest for five minutes after his steep ascent from the primitive fisher village of Old Hastings, which nestles warmly in the narrow sun-smitten gulley at his feet. On this seat, one bright July morning, Herbert Le Breton lay at half length, basking in the brilliant open sunshine and evidently waiting for somebody whom he expected to arrive by the side path from the All Saints’ Valley. Even the old coastguardsman, plodding his daily round over to Ecclesbourne, noticed the obvious expectation implied in his attentive attitude, and ventured to remark, in his cheery familiar fashion, ‘She won’t be long a-comin’ now, sir, you may depend upon it: the gals is sure to be out early of a fine mornin’ like this ‘ere.’ Herbert stuck his double eye-glass gingerly upon the tip of his nose, and surveyed the bluff old sailor through it with a stony British stare of mingled surprise and indignation, which drove the poor man hastily off, with a few muttered observations about some people being so confounded stuck up that they didn’t even understand the point of a little good-natured seafarin’ banter.
As the coastguardsman disappeared round the corner of the flagstaff, a young girl came suddenly into sight by the jutting edge of sandstone bluff near the High Wickham; and Herbert, jumping up at once from his reclining posture, raised his bat to her with stately politeness, and moved forward in his courtly graceful manner to meet her as she approached. ‘Well, Selah,’ he said, taking her hand a little warmly (judged at least by Herbert Le Breton’s usual standard), ‘so you’ve come at last! I’ve been waiting here for you for fully half an hour. You see, I’ve come down to Hastings again as I promised, the very first moment I could possibly get away from my pressing duties at Oxford.’
The girl withdrew her hand from his, blushing deeply, but looking into his face with evident pleasure and admiration. She was tall and handsome, with a certain dashing air of queenliness about her, too; and she was dressed in a brave, outspoken sort of finery, which, though cheap enough in its way, was neither common nor wholly wanting in a touch of native good taste and even bold refinement of contrast and harmony. ‘It’s very kind of you to come, Mr. Walters,’ she answered in a firm but delicate voice. ‘I’m so sorry I’ve kept you waiting. I got your letter, and tried to come in time; but father he’s been more aggravating than usual, almost, this morning, and kept saying he’d like to know what on earth a young woman could want to go out walking for, instead of stopping at home at her work and minding her Bible like a proper Christian. In HIS time young women usen’t to be allowed to go walking except on Sundays, and then only to chapel or Bible class. So I’ve not been able to get away till this very minute, with all this bundle of tracts, too, to give to the excursionists on the way. Father feels a most incomprehensible interest, somehow, in the future happiness of the Sunday excursionists.’
‘I wish he’d feel a little more interest in the present happiness of his own daughter,’ Herbert said smiling. ‘But it hasn’t mattered your keeping me waiting here, Selah. Of course I’d have enjoyed it all far better in your society—I don’t think I need tell you that now, dear—but the sunshine, and the sea breeze, and the song of the larks, and the plash of the waves below, and the shouts of the fishermen down there on the beach mending their nets and putting out their smacks, have all been so delightful after our humdrum round of daily life at Oxford, that I only wanted your presence here to make it all into a perfect paradise.—Why, Selah, how pretty you look in that sweet print! It suits your complexion admirably. I never saw you wear anything before so perfectly becoming.’
Selah drew herself up with the conscious pride of an unaffected pretty girl. ‘I’m so glad you think so, Mr. Walters,’ she said, playing nervously with the handle of her dark-blue parasol. ‘You always say such very flattering things.’
‘No, not flattering,’ Herbert answered, smiling; ‘not flattering, Selah, simply truthful. You always extort the truth from me with your sweet face, Selah. Nobody can look at it and not forget the stupid conventions of ordinary society. But please, dear, don’t call me Mr. Walters. Call me Herbert. You always do, you know, when you write to me.’
‘But it’s so much harder to do it to your face, Mr. Walters,’ Selah said, again blushing. ‘Every time you go away I say to myself, “I shall call him Herbert as soon as ever he comes back again;” and every time you come back, I feel too much afraid of you, the moment I see you, ever to do it. And yet of course I ought to, you know, for when we’re married, why, naturally, then I shall have to learn to call you Herbert, shan’t I?’
‘You will, I suppose,’ Herbert answered, rather chillily: ‘but that subject is one upon which we shall be able to form a better opinion when the time comes for actually deciding it. Meanwhile, I want you to call me Herbert, if you please, as a personal favour and a mark of confidence. Suppose I were to go on calling you Miss Briggs all the time! a pretty sort of thing that would be! what inference would you draw as to the depth of my affection? Well, now, Selah, how have these dreadful home authorities of yours been treating you, my dear girl, all the time since I last saw you?’
‘Much the same as usual, Mr. Walters—Herbert, I mean,’ Selah answered, hastily correcting herself. ‘The regular round. Prayers; clean the shop; breakfast, with a chapter; serve in the shop all morning; dinner, with a chapter; serve in the shop all afternoon; tea, with a chapter; prayer meeting in the evening; supper, with a chapter; exhortation; and go to bed, sick of it all, to get up next morning and repeat the entire performance da capo, as they always say in the music to the hymn-books. Occasional relaxations,—Sunday at chapel three times, and Wednesday evening Bible class; mothers’ assembly, Dorcas society, missionary meeting, lecture on the Holy Land, dissolving views of Jerusalem, and Primitive Methodist district conference in the Mahanaim Jubilee meeting hall. Salvation privileges every day and all the year round, till I’m ready to drop with it, and begin to wish I’d only been lucky enough to have been born one of those happy benighted little pagans in a heathen land where they don’t know the value of the precious Sabbath, and haven’t yet been taught to build Primitive Methodist district chapels for crushing the lives out of their sons and daughters!’
Herbert smiled a gentle smile of calm superiority at this vehement outburst of natural irreligion. ‘You must certainly be bored to death with it all, Selah,’ he said, laughingly. ‘What a funny sort of creed it really is, after all, for rational beings! Who on earth could believe that the religion these people use to render your life so absolutely miserable is meant for the same thing as the one that makes my poor dear brother Ronald so perfectly and inexpressibly serene and happy? The formalism of lower natures, like your father’s, has turned it into a machine for crushing all the spontaneity out of your existence. What a régime for a high-spirited girl like you to be compelled to live under, Selah!’
‘It is, it is!’ Selah answered, vehemently. ‘I wish you could only see the way father goes on at me all the time about chapel, and so on, Mr. Wal—Herbert, I mean. You wouldn’t wonder, if you were to hear him, at my being anxious for the time to come when you can leave Oxford and we can get comfortably married. What between the drudgery of the shop and the drudgery of the chapel my life’s positively getting almost worn out of me.’
Herbert took her hand in his, quietly. It was not a very small hand, but it was prettily, though cheaply, gloved, and the plain silver bracelet that encircled the wrist, though simple and inexpensive, was not wanting in rough tastefulness. ‘You’re a bad philosopher, Selah,’ he said, turning with her along the path towards Ecclesbourne; ‘you’re always anxious to hurry on too fast the lagging wheels of an unknown future. After all, how do you know whether we should be any the happier if we were really and truly married? Don’t you know what Swinburne says, in “Dolores”—you’ve read it in the Poems and Ballads I gave you—
Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives,
And marriage and death and division
Make barren our lives?’
‘I’ve read it,’ Selah answered, carelessly, ‘and I thought it all very pretty. Of course Swinburne always is very pretty: but I’m sure I never try to discover what on earth he means by it. I suppose father would say I don’t read him tearfully and prayerfully—at any rate, I’m quite sure I never understand what he’s driving at.’
‘And yet he’s worth understanding,’ Herbert answered in his clear musical voice—‘well worth understanding, Selah, especially for you, dearest. If, in imitation of obsolete fashions, you wished to read a few verses of some improving volume every night and morning, as a sort of becoming religious exercise in the elements of self-culture, I don’t know that I could recommend you a better book to begin upon than the Poems and Ballads. Don’t you see the moral of those four lines I’ve just quoted to you? Why should we wish to change from anything so free and delightful and poetical as lovers into anything so fettered, and commonplace, and prosaic, and BANAL, as wives and husbands? Why should we wish to give up the fanciful paradise of fluttering hope and expectation for the dreary reality of housekeeping and cold mutton on Mondays? Why should we not be satisfied with the real pleasure of the passing moment, without for ever torturing our souls about the imaginary but delusive pleasure of the unrealisable, impossible future?’
‘But we MUST get married some time or other, Herbert,’ Selah said, turning her big eyes full upon him with a doubtful look of interrogation. ‘We can’t go on courting in this way for ever and ever, without coming to any definite conclusion. We MUST get married by-and-by, now mustn’t we?’
‘Je n’en vois pas la nécessité, moi,’ Herbert answered with just a trace of cynicism in his curling lip. ‘I don’t see any MUST about it, that is to say, in English, Selah. The fact is, you see, I’m above all things a philosopher; you’re a philosopher, too, but only an instinctive one, and I want to make your instinctive philosophy assume a rather more rational and extrinsic shape. Why should we really be in any hurry to go and get married? Do the actual married people of our acquaintance, as a matter of fact, seem so very much more ethereally happy—with their eight children to be washed and dressed and schooled daily, for example—than the lovers, like you and me, who walk arm-in-arm out here in the sunshine, and haven’t yet got over their delicious first illusions? Depend upon it, the longer you can keep your illusions the better. You haven’t read Aristotle in all probability; but as Aristotle would put it, it isn’t the end that is anything in love-making, it’s the energy, the active pursuit, the momentary enjoyment of it. I suppose we shall have to get married some day, Selah, though I don’t know when; but I confess to you I don’t look forward to the day quite so rapturously as you do. Shall we feel more the thrill of possession, do you think, than I feel it now when I hold your hand in mine, so, and catch the beating of your pulse in your veins, even through the fingers of your pretty little glove? Shall we look deeper into one another’s eyes and hearts than I look now into the very inmost depths of yours? Shall we drink in more fully the essence of love than when I touch your lips here—one moment, Selah, the gorse is very deep here—now d............