Upon the following afternoon the vicar came to call at the manor. Jim had handed over to him as the oldest friend of the late Squire all his uncle’s letters, diaries, and other papers, and had asked him to look through them; and, the task being accomplished, he was now bringing them back, carefully docketed and tied up in a large parcel. As he entered the house there came to his venerable ears the sounds of singing and the twanging of strings.
“Dear me, what is that?” he asked the maid, pausing in the hall.
“Oh, it’s only the master a-playing of ’is banjo,” the girl explained, smiling at the vicar, who had been her friend since her earliest childhood. “’E often gets took like that, sir. Cook says it’s ’is furrin blood.”
“But he has no foreign blood,” Mr. Glenning told her.
“’E looks a furrin gentleman,” she replied, “and ’is ways....” She paused, remembering her manners.
The vicar was shown into the drawing-room, and here he found the Squire seated upon the arm of the sofa, his guitar across his knees.
“Hullo, padre!” said Jim. “Excuse the music.” He was somewhat abashed at thus being taken unawares,[88] for he had little idea that his singing was anything but an infernal noise, intended by Nature to be a vent to the feelings. And these feelings, just now, were of a somewhat violent character, for, though he was not yet aware of his plight, he was in love.
In the early part of the afternoon he had gone for a wandering walk in the woods adjoining the manor, in order to escape a sense of depression which had descended upon him. “It must be this old house,” he had said to himself, “with its weight of years. It feels like a trap in which I’ve been caught, a trap laid by the forefathers to catch the children and teach them their manners.” And therewith he had rushed out into the sunshine.
Mr. Glenning smiled indulgently. “I shall have to make use of your voice in church,” he said.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Jim laughed, pretending to edge away. “Your choir is bad enough as it is.”
The vicar was hurt, and Jim hastened to obliterate his thoughtless words by remarking that he had, not long since, come in from a tour of exploration in the woods, and had found them very pleasant.
“Yes,” his visitor replied, “they have grown up nicely. In the Civil War all the trees were felled by Cromwell’s men during the siege of Oxford; but one of your ancestors replanted the devastated area after the Restoration, and the place now looks, I dare say, just as it did before that unfortunate quarrel.”
The thought did not please Jim. Even the woods, then, which that afternoon seemed to him to be a place of escape from the pall of history, were but[89] a part of the chain of ancient circumstances which bound the whole estate. Even in their depths he would not be out of hearing of the voice of his forefathers, which told him that they had sowed for posterity and that he must do likewise.
He dismissed the irksome reflection by asking the vicar the nature of the parcel which he had deposited on the table.
Mr. Glenning explained that it contained his uncle’s letters, and therewith he unfastened the string, ceremoniously, and revealed a bundle of small packets. “I have been through all these, except this one package,” he said, holding up a small parcel, “and I certainly think they are worth keeping, for they display your uncle’s noble character in a variety of ways.”
“He seems to have been a fine old fellow,” Jim remarked.
“He was, indeed,” replied the vicar. “He represented all the best in our English life.” And therewith he enlarged upon the dead man’s virtues, while Jim listened attentively, feeling that the words were intended as an admonition to himself.
At length Mr. Glenning turned to the unopened package. “I have been much exercised in my mind,” he said, “as to what to do in regard to this one packet. It is marked, as you see, ‘To be destroyed at my death.’ Of course, the words do not actually state that the contents are not to be read; but I thought it would be best to consult you first.”
“Thanks,” replied Jim. “I’ll have a look at it some time.”
He opened the drawer in the bureau, and bundled[90] the letters into it, while the vicar watched him, feeling that he was sadly lacking in reverence, and not a little disappointed, perhaps, that the young man had not invited him to deal with the unopened packet.
Later, when Jim was alone once more, he took this mysterious packet from the drawer, and, seating himself upon the sofa beside the fire, cut the string.
The nature of the contents was at once apparent: they were the relics of an affair of the heart, and a glance at the signature of two or three of the letters revealed the fact that the writer was not Jim’s aunt. “Ah,” said he, with satisfaction, “then the old paragon was human, like all the rest of us.”
A perusal of the badly-written pages, however, dispelled the atmosphere of romance which the first short messages of twenty years ago had promised. The story began well enough, so far as he could gather. The lady, whose name was Emily, had evidently lost her heart to her middle-aged lover, and was delighted with the little house he had provided for her in a London suburb. Two or three years later she became a mother, but the child had died, and there was a pathetic document recording her grief. In more recent years the intrigue had developed into an established union; and Emily, now grown complacent, and probably fat, became a secondary spouse and mistress of the old gentleman’s alternative home. The tale ended, however, with Emily’s marriage, two years ago, at the age of forty, to a young city clerk; and the only romantic features of the close of his uncle’s double life was the fact that[91] he had preserved a little handkerchief of hers and a dead rose.
“Well, Emily,” said Jim, aloud, “I wish you luck, wherever you are”; and with that he gently thrust the relics into the flames.
For some time he lay back upon the sofa in the firelight, his arms behind his head, and thought over the story which had been revealed. It seemed, then, that the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out,” was the essential of respectable life. A man could do what he liked, provided that his delinquencies were hidden from his neighbours. Was this sheer hypocrisy?—or was there some principle behind the code? Did not Plato once say: “Every man should exert himself never to appear to any one to be of base metal?” He had read the quotation somewhere. Ought a man’s epitaph, then, to be: “He lived nobly, in that he kept up appearances”?—or would it be better frankly to write: “He tried to walk delicately, but the old Adam tripped him up?”
What would the vicar, what would Miss Proudfoote, have said had either of them known of this double life? Where would then have been the beautiful example of a goodly life which his uncle had left behind him as an inspiration to the whole neighbourhood? Was it not better that the secret was kept?
He found no answer to the questions which he thus put to himself; and all that was apparent to him was that decent society was based not upon the truth, but upon the hiding of the truth, and that the more lofty the pretence the more high-principled would be the community. “Truly,” he muttered,[92] “we Anglo-Saxons are called hypocrites; but it is our hypocrisy that keeps us clean!” And with that he returned to his guitar.
A few days later he took Dolly for a walk across the fields. It was an autumnal afternoon, and although the sun shone down from a cloudless sky, there was a chilly haze over the land, which presaged the coming of the first frosts.
“I don’t know how I’m going to stand an English winter,” he said to her, as they sat to rest upon a stile, under an oak from which the leaves were falling. “Just look at the branches up there. They are nearly bare already.” He shuddered.
She looked at him almost reproachfully. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you say that,” she replied. “I love the winter. I am a child of the North, you know. To me the grey skies and the bare trees have a sort of meaning I can’t quite explain. They are so ... so English. Think of the long, dark evenings, when you sit over the hearth, and the firelight jumps and dances about the walls. Think how cosy one feels when one is tucked up in bed.”
He glanced down at her, and she smiled up at him with innocent eyes.
“Think of the snow on the ground,” she went on, “and the robins hopping about. You should just see me scampering over the snow in my big country boots, and sliding down the lane. Oh, it’s lovely!”
“I shouldn’t think my house is very warm,” he mused.
“It could be made awfully cosy, I’m sure,” she said. “You must have big log fires; and if I were[93] you I’d buy some screens to put behind the sofas and armchairs around the fire, so that you can have little lamp-lit corners where you can sit as warm as a toast.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” he answered.
“Have you got a woolly waistcoat?” she asked, and when he replied in the negative she told him that she would knit one for him at once. “I love knitting,” she said; and at the moment she believed that she did.
As they walked on she enlarged upon the delights of winter; and such pleasant pictures did she draw that Jim began to think the coming experience might hold unexpected happiness for him. She managed, somehow, to introduce herself into all the scenes which she sketched, now as a smiling little figure, vibrating with healthy life in the open air, now purring like a warm, sleepy kitten before the fire indoors.
“From what I saw the other night,” she told him, “you seem to have an excellent hot-water supply. You’ll be able to have beautiful hot baths.... I simply love lying in a boiling bath before I go to bed, don’t you?”
“I can’t say I do,” he laughed. “It makes the sheets feel so cold.”
“Oh, but you must have them warmed, with a hot-bottle or something,” she explained. “When it’s very, very cold I sometimes creep into bed with mother, and we cuddle up and warm each other.”
Again he glanced down at her quickly, wondering.... But her eyes were those of a child.
Presently their path led them through a gate[94] into a field in which a few cows were grazing; and on seeing them Dolly hesitated.
“You’ll think me awfully silly,” she faltered, swallowing nervously, “but I’m rather frightened of cows.”
He smiled down at her. “Take my arm,” he said; and without waiting for her to do so, he linked his own arm in hers and laid his hand over her fingers.
She looked anxiously at a mild-eyed, motherly cow which, weighed down by her full udder, moved towards them slowly. “Oh dear,” she whispered, “d’you think that cow is a bull?”
She tugged at his arm, hurrying him forward; and thereat he closed his hand more tightly over hers and drew her close to him. He had always regarded himself as a man of the world, and his intellect had ever poked fun at his sentiments. Yet now, in a situation so blatantly commonplace that he might have been expected to be totally unmoved by it, he was intrigued like a novice. Protecting a maiden from the cows!—it was the A.B.C. of the bumpkin’s lovelore; and yet that vulgar old lady, Nature, had once more effectually employed her hackneyed device to his undoing, and here was he rejoicing in his protective strength, thrilled by the beating heart of a frightened girl, as all his ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years had been thrilled before him in the heydays of their adolescence and in the morning of life.
The amiable cow breathed heavily at them from a discreet distance, and then, suddenly hilarious,[95] lowered her head, kicked out her hind legs, and gambolled beside them for a few yards.
“Oh, oh!” cried Dolly, grabbing at Jim’s coat with her disengaged hand. “I’m sure he’s going to toss us! Oh, do let’s run!”
Jim halted, and held out his hand to the matronly beast. At that moment the jeering sprite which sits in the brain of every Anglo-Saxon, pointing with the finger of mockery at his heroics, was pushed from its throne; and for a brief spell the bravado of primitive, gasconading man—the young Adam cock-a-hoop—was dominant. Jim stepped forward, dragging Dolly with him, and hit the astonished cow sharply across her flank with his hand, whereat she went off at her best speed across the turf.
“Oh, how brave you are!” whispered Dolly; and with that the jesting sprite climbed back upon its throne, and Jim was covered with shame.
“Nonsense!” he said. “You don’t suppose cows are put into a field through which there’s a right of way unless they are perfectly harmless, do you?”
But pass it off as he might, Nature had played her old, old trick upon him, and in some subtle manner his relationship to Dolly had become more intimate, more alluring; so much so, indeed, that when he said “good-bye” to her he asked to be allowed soon to see her again.
“I want to go in to a lecture in Oxford to-morrow evening,” she replied; “but mother has to go to London, and won’t be back in time to take me. Would you like to come?”
“What’s the lecture about?” he asked.
“‘The Emotional Development of the Child,’”[96] she replied. “I love anything to do with children, and everybody says Professor Robarts is wonderful. He believes that a child’s character is formed in the first three or four years of its life, and he thinks all girls should learn just what to do, so that when they have babies of their own....” She paused, and a dreamy look came into her eyes: a speaking look which told of what the psycho-analysts call “the mother-urge”; and it made precisely that impression upon Jim’s excited senses which it was intended to make.
Wise was the Buddha when, in answer to Ananda’s question as to how he should behave in the presence of women, he made the laconic reply: “Keep wide awake.”
“Right!” said Jim. “I’ll order old Hook’s barouche, and drive you in.”
She told him that the lecture was to begin at nine, and he left her with the promise that he would call for her in good time.
Alone once more in his house, he could not put the thought of her from his mind. This, perhaps, is not to be wondered at, for he was a hot-blooded gipsy in more than appearance, and she was as pretty and soft a little picture of feminine charm as ever graced an English village. He failed, at any rate, to follow her strategy, and permitted himself to be flustered by it, although there was no deliberate method in her movements, nor did she employ any but those wiles which came almost instinctively to her. Jim, with his experience, ought to have realized that a woman who talks to a man innocently on intimate matters, such as those which had cropped[97] up without apparent intent in their recent conversation, is, either consciously or unconsciously, Nature’s agent-provocateur. She is leading his thoughts in that direction which is the goal of her life, according to the ruthless whisperings of Nature, who does not care one snap of the fingers for any but the first member of that blessed trinity, Body, Soul and Spirit. The deft art of suggestion, in the hands of an unscrupulous woman, is dangerous; but in those of a feather-brained little conglomerate of feminine charms and instincts, it is deadly.
These quiet summer and autumn months in the heart of the English countryside had sobered Jim’s mind, and his exalted fancy, which had led him at times as it were to hurl himself at the gates of heaven, was gone from him. He told himself that, having inherited this ancient house, it was his business to take to his bosom a wife and helpmate. His primitive manhood had been stirred by her, and his civilized reason justified the riot of his mere senses by the plea of practical advantage and domestic necessity. She was a splendid little housewife, he mused, a quiet little country girl who had learnt her lesson in the school of privation. She was so dainty, so soft, so pretty; she would always be singing and smiling about the house, arranging the flowers, drawing back the chintz curtains to let the sunlight in, dusting and polishing things, and, in the evenings, sitting curled up in an armchair knitting him waistcoats. It would be a pleasure to adorn her in pretty dresses and jewels, to take her up to London and show her the world, and to give her the keys of the domestic store-cupboards. So often in[98] his life he had been afflicted by the sense of his loneliness; but with her at his side that mental malady would be exorcized like a dreary ghost.
With such trivialities, when there is no real love, Nature the Unscrupulous disguises her crude designs, and hides the one thing that interests her in a shower of rice. All men and maidens are pawns in the murderous game of Survival; and whether they go to happiness or to their doom is a matter of utter indifference to the Player. Fortunately, there are souls as well as bodies, and of souls a greater than Nature is Master.
The remarkable fact was that Jim, whose mind was now so full of the conjugal idea, was in no way suited to a domestic life. He was a rover, a self-constituted alien from society; but the original line of his thoughts had been warped by his inheritance of the family property, following as it did so closely upon his experience in the rest-house at K?m-es-Sultan and his consequent distaste for isolation. He was, as it were, a wild Bedouin tribesman from the desert, sojourning in a village caravanserai; and this little maiden who had sidled up to him had so taken his fancy that the habitation of man had come to seem an agreeable home, and the distant uplands were forgotten.
The grey and dreamy spires of Oxford themselves had wrought a change in him. No man can come under their influence and maintain his mental liberty: they are like a drug, soothing him into quiescence; they are like a poem that drones into the brain the vanity of vigorous action. From the windows of the manor they could be seen rising out of[99] an almost perpetual haze, and sometimes the breeze carried to this ancient house the ancient sound of their chimes and their tolling. They seemed to preach the blessedness of a quiet, peaceful life—home, marriage, children; the continuous reproduction of unchanging types and the mild obedience to the law of nature.
On the following evening Mr. Hook drove them into Oxford in the old barouche. It was a chilly night, and as the carriage rumbled along the dark lanes Jim and Dolly sat close to one another, with a fur rug spread across their knees.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been to a lecture before in my life,” said he, when their destination was reached.
“Nor had I,” she replied, “until we came to live at Eversfield. But it seems to be the correct thing to do in Oxford.” She amended her words: “I mean, the most interesting thing to do.”
The lecture was delivered in the hall of one of the colleges, and the Professor proved to be a dull, reasonable man of the family doctor type, who nevertheless aroused his audience, mostly female, to stern expressions of approval by his declaration that the hand that spanks the baby rules the world, and that Waterloo was won across the British mother’s lap.
It was after ten o’clock when they entered the carriage for the return journey; and before they had passed the outskirts of Oxford Dolly began to yawn.
“I went for a tremendous long ramble in the woods to-day,” she explained, “and now I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
[100]
He arranged the rug around her, and made her put her feet up on the opposite seat; then, extending his arm so that it rested behind her back, he told her to take off her hat, lean her head against him, and go to sleep. She settled herself down in this manner, naturally and without any hesitation: she was like a tired child.
In the carriage there was only a glimmer of light from the two lamps outside; and as he sat back somewhat stiffly upon the jolting seat he could but dimly see the mop of her fair hair against his shoulder and the tip of her nose. He felt extraordinarily happy, and there was a tenderness in his attitude towards her which was overwhelming. She seemed so innocent and so trustful; and when for a moment the thought entered his head that there was perhaps some half-conscious artifice in her behaviour, he dismissed the suggestion with resentment.
The carriage rolled on, and in the darkness he dreamt his dream just as all young men have dreamt it since the world began. It seemed clear to him, now, that he had missed the best of life, because he had seldom had an intimate comrade with whom to share his experiences; for, as Seneca said, “the possession of no good thing is pleasant without a companion.” In the days of his wanderings, of course, a companion had been out of the question; but now his travels were done, and there were no hardships to deter him from marriage. He recalled the words of the Caliph Omar which an Egyptian had once quoted to him: “After the Faith, no blessing is equal to a good wife”; and he remembered[101] something in the Bible about her price being far above rubies.
Yet such thoughts as these were but the feeble efforts of the mind to keep pace with the senses. He was like a drunken man who speaks slowly and distinctly to prove that he is not drunk. Had his senses permitted him to be honest with himself he would have admitted that consideration of the advantages of marriage had little influence upon him just now: he wanted Dolly for his own; he wanted to put his arms about her and to kiss her here and now while she slept; he wanted to pull her hair down so that it should tumble about his fingers; he wanted to feel her heart beating under his hand, to hear the sigh of her breath close to his ear....
He bent his head down so that his lips came close to her forehead, and as he did so she raised her face. He was too deeply bewitched to realize that, far from being tired, she was at that moment a conquering woman, working at high pressure, acutely aware of his every movement, her nerves and senses strained to win that which she so greatly desired.
For some minutes he remained abnormally still, a little shy perhaps, perhaps desiring to linger upon the wonderful moment like a child agape at the threshold of a circus. Presently she sat up.
“Why, I’ve been asleep!” she exclaimed. “Are we nearly home?”
“Yes,” he answered, without rousing himself from his dream.
She raised her hands to her head; she did something with her fingers which, in the dim light, he[102] could not see; and a moment later he felt her hair tumbling about his hand.
“Oh dear, my hair’s fallen down,” she said.
He drew in his breath sharply. “Don’t wake up!” he gasped. “Put your head down again where it was.”
With a sigh of contentment she did as she was told; but now his arms were around her, and all his ten fingers were buried in her hair. He could just discern her eyes looking up at him with a sort of dismay in them; he could see her mouth a little open. He bent down and kissed her lips.