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Title: Clara Hopgood
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<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
<p>Transcribed from the 1907 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h1>CLARA HOPGOOD</h1>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>About ten miles north-east of Eastthorpe lies the town of Fenmarket,
very like Eastthorpe generally; and as we are already familiar with
Eastthorpe, a particular description of Fenmarket is unnecessary.
There is, however, one marked difference between them. Eastthorpe,
it will be remembered, is on the border between the low uplands and
the Fens, and has one side open to soft, swelling hills. Fenmarket
is entirely in the Fens, and all the roads that lead out of it are alike
level, monotonous, straight, and flanked by deep and stagnant ditches.
The river, also, here is broader and slower; more reluctant than it
is even at Eastthorpe to hasten its journey to the inevitable sea.
During the greater part of the year the visitor to Fenmarket would perhaps
find it dull and depressing, and at times, under a grey, wintry sky,
almost unendurable; but nevertheless, for days and weeks it has a charm
possessed by few other landscapes in England, provided only that behind
the eye which looks there is something to which a landscape of that
peculiar character answers. There is, for example, the wide, dome-like
expanse of the sky, there is the distance, there is the freedom and
there are the stars on a clear night. The orderly, geometrical
march of the constellations from the extreme eastern horizon across
the meridian and down to the west has a solemn majesty, which is only
partially discernible when their course is interrupted by broken country.</p>
<p>On a dark afternoon in November 1844, two young women, Clara and
Madge Hopgood, were playing chess in the back parlour of their mother’s
house at Fenmarket, just before tea. Clara, the elder, was about
five-and-twenty, fair, with rather light hair worn flat at the side
of her face, after the fashion of that time. Her features were
tolerably regular. It is true they were somewhat marred by an
uneven nasal outline, but this was redeemed by the curved lips of a
mouth which was small and rather compressed, and by a definite, symmetrical
and graceful figure. Her eyes were grey, with a curious peculiarity
in them. Ordinarily they were steady, strong eyes, excellent and
renowned optical instruments. Over and over again she had detected,
along the stretch of the Eastthorpe road, approaching visitors, and
had named them when her companions could see nothing but specks.
Occasionally, however, these steady, strong, grey eyes utterly changed.
They were the same eyes, the same colour, but they ceased to be mere
optical instruments and became instruments of expression, transmissive
of radiance to such a degree that the light which was reflected from
them seemed insufficient to account for it. It was also curious
that this change, though it must have been accompanied by some emotion,
was just as often not attended by any other sign of it. Clara
was, in fact, little given to any display of feeling.</p>
<p>Madge, four years younger than her sister, was of a different type
altogether, and one more easily comprehended. She had very heavy
dark hair, and she had blue eyes, a combination which fascinated Fenmarket.
Fenmarket admired Madge more than it was admired by her in return, and
she kept herself very much to herself, notwithstanding what it considered
to be its temptations. If she went shopping she nearly always
went with her sister; she stood aloof from all the small gaieties of
the town; walked swiftly through its streets, and repelled, frigidly
and decisively, all offers, and they were not a few, which had been
made to her by the sons of the Fenmarket tradesfolk. Fenmarket
pronounced her ‘stuck-up,’ and having thus labelled her,
considered it had exhausted her. The very important question,
Whether there was anything which naturally stuck up? Fenmarket
never asked. It was a great relief to that provincial little town
in 1844, in this and in other cases, to find a word which released it
from further mental effort and put out of sight any troublesome, straggling,
indefinable qualities which it would otherwise have been forced to examine
and name. Madge was certainly stuck-up, but the projection above
those around her was not artificial. Both she and her sister found
the ways of Fenmarket were not to their taste. The reason lay
partly in their nature and partly in their history.</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood was the widow of the late manager in the Fenmarket branch
of the bank of Rumbold, Martin & Rumbold, and when her husband died
she had of course to leave the Bank Buildings. As her income was
somewhat straitened, she was obliged to take a small house, and she
was now living next door to the ‘Crown and Sceptre,’ the
principal inn in the town. There was then no fringe of villas
to Fenmarket for retired quality; the private houses and shops were
all mixed together, and Mrs Hopgood’s cottage was squeezed in
between the ironmonger’s and the inn. It was very much lower
than either of its big neighbours, but it had a brass knocker and a
bell, and distinctly asserted and maintained a kind of aristocratic
superiority.</p>
<p>Mr Hopgood was not a Fenmarket man. He came straight from London
to be manager. He was in the bank of the London agents of Rumbold,
Martin & Rumbold, and had been strongly recommended by the city
firm as just the person to take charge of a branch which needed thorough
reorganisation. He succeeded, and nobody in Fenmarket was more
respected. He lived, however, a life apart from his neighbours,
excepting so far as business was concerned. He went to church
once on Sunday because the bank expected him to go, but only once, and
had nothing to do with any of its dependent institutions. He was
a great botanist, very fond of walking, and in the evening, when Fenmarket
generally gathered itself into groups for gossip, either in the street
or in back parlours, or in the ‘Crown and Sceptre,’ Mr Hopgood,
tall, lean and stately, might be seen wandering along the solitary roads
searching for flowers, which, in that part of the world, were rather
scarce. He was also a great reader of the best books, English,
German and French, and held high doctrine, very high for those days,
on the training of girls, maintaining that they need, even more than
boys, exact discipline and knowledge. Boys, he thought, find health
in an occupation; but an uncultivated, unmarried girl dwells with her
own untutored thoughts, which often breed disease. His two daughters,
therefore, received an education much above that which was usual amongst
people in their position, and each of them - an unheard of wonder in
Fenmarket - had spent some time in a school in Weimar. Mr Hopgood
was also peculiar in his way of dealing with his children. He
talked to them and made them talk to him, and whatever they read was
translated into speech; thought, in his house, was vocal.</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood, too, had been the intimate friend of her husband, and
was the intimate friend of her daughters. She was now nearly sixty,
but still erect and graceful, and everybody could see that the picture
of a beautiful girl of one-and-twenty, which hung opposite the fireplace,
had once been her portrait. She had been brought up, as thoroughly
as a woman could be brought up, in those days, to be a governess.
The war prevented her education abroad, but her father, who was a clergyman,
not too rich, engaged a French emigrant lady to live in his house to
teach her French and other accomplishments. She consequently spoke
French perfectly, and she could also read and speak Spanish fairly well,
for the French lady had spent some years in Spain. Mr Hopgood
had never been particularly in earnest about religion, but his wife
was a believer, neither High Church nor Low Church, but inclined towards
a kind of quietism not uncommon in the Church of England, even during
its bad time, a reaction against the formalism which generally prevailed.
When she married, Mrs Hopgood did not altogether follow her husband.
She never separated herself from her faith, and never would have confessed
that she had separated herself from her church. But although she
knew that his creed externally was not hers, her own was not sharply
cut, and she persuaded herself that, in substance, his and her belief
were identical. As she grew older her relationship to the Unseen
became more and more intimate, but she was less and less inclined to
criticise her husband’s freedom, or to impose on the children
a rule which they would certainly have observed, but only for her sake.
Every now and then she felt a little lonely; when, for example, she
read one or two books which were particularly her own; when she thought
of her dead father and mother, and when she prayed her solitary prayer.
Mr Hopgood took great pains never to disturb that sacred moment.
Indeed, he never for an instant permitted a finger to be laid upon what
she considered precious. He loved her because she had the strength
to be what she was when he first knew her and she had so fascinated
him. He would have been disappointed if the mistress of his youth
had become some other person, although the change, in a sense, might
have been development and progress. He did really love her piety,
too, for its own sake. It mixed something with her behaviour to
him and to the children which charmed him, and he did not know from
what other existing source anything comparable to it could be supplied.
Mrs Hopgood seldom went to church. The church, to be sure, was
horribly dead, but she did not give that as a reason. She had,
she said, an infirmity, a strange restlessness which prevented her from
sitting still for an hour. She often pleaded this excuse, and
her husband and daughters never, by word or smile, gave her the least
reason to suppose that they did not believe her.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Both Clara and Madge went first to an English day-school, and Clara
went straight from this school to Germany, but Madge’s course
was a little different. She was not very well, and it was decided
that she should have at least a twelvemonth in a boarding-school at
Brighton before going abroad. It had been very highly recommended,
but the head-mistress was Low Church and aggressive. Mr Hopgood,
far away from the High and Low Church controversy, came to the conclusion
that, in Madge’s case, the theology would have no effect on her.
It was quite impossible, moreover, to find a school which would be just
what he could wish it to be. Madge, accordingly, was sent to Brighton,
and was introduced into a new world. She was just beginning to
ask herself <i>why</i> certain things were right and other things were
wrong, and the Brighton answer was that the former were directed by
revelation and the latter forbidden, and that the ‘body’
was an affliction to the soul, a means of ‘probation,’ our
principal duty being to ‘war’ against it.</p>
<p>Madge’s bedroom companion was a Miss Selina Fish, daughter
of Barnabas Fish, Esquire, of Clapham, and merchant of the City of London.
Miss Fish was not traitorous at heart, but when she found out that Madge
had not been christened, she was so overcome that she was obliged to
tell her mother. Miss Fish was really unhappy, and one cold night,
when Madge crept into her neighbour’s bed, contrary to law, but
in accordance with custom when the weather was very bitter, poor Miss
Fish shrank from her, half-believing that something dreadful might happen
if she should by any chance touch unbaptised, naked flesh. Mrs
Fish told her daughter that perhaps Miss Hopgood might be a Dissenter,
and that although Dissenters were to be pitied, and even to be condemned,
many of them were undoubtedly among the redeemed, as for example, that
man of God, Dr Doddridge, whose <i>Family Expositor</i> was read systematically
at home, as Selina knew. Then there were Matthew Henry, whose
commentary her father preferred to any other, and the venerable saint,
the Reverend William Jay of Bath, whom she was proud to call her friend.
Miss Fish, therefore, made further inquiries gently and delicately,
but she found to her horror that Madge had neither been sprinkled nor
immersed! Perhaps she was a Jewess or a heathen! This was
a happy thought, for then she might be converted. Selina knew
what interest her mother took in missions to heathens and Jews; and
if Madge, by the humble instrumentality of a child, could be brought
to the foot of the Cross, what would her mother and father say?
What would they not say? Fancy taking Madge to Clapham in a nice
white dress - it should be white, thought Selina - and presenting her
as a saved lamb!</p>
<p>The very next night she began, -</p>
<p>‘I suppose your father is a foreigner?’</p>
<p>‘No, he is an Englishman.’</p>
<p>‘But if he is an Englishman you must have been baptised, or
sprinkled, or immersed, and your father and mother must belong to church
or chapel. I know there are thousands of wicked people who belong
to neither, but they are drunkards and liars and robbers, and even they
have their children christened.’</p>
<p>‘Well, he is an Englishman,’ said Madge, smiling.</p>
<p>‘Perhaps,’ said Selina, timidly, ‘he may be - he
may be - Jewish. Mamma and papa pray for the Jews every morning.
They are not like other unbelievers.’</p>
<p>‘No, he is certainly not a Jew.’</p>
<p>‘What is he, then?’</p>
<p>‘He is my papa and a very honest, good man.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, my dear Madge! honesty is a broken reed. I have
heard mamma say that she is more hopeful of thieves than honest people
who think they are saved by works, for the thief who was crucified went
to heaven, and if he had been only an honest man he never would have
found the Saviour and would have gone to hell. Your father must
be something.’</p>
<p>‘I can only tell you again that he is honest and good.’</p>
<p>Selina was confounded. She had heard of those people who were
<i>nothing</i>, and had always considered them as so dreadful that she
could not bear to think of them. The efforts of her father and
mother did not extend to them; they were beyond the reach of the preacher
- mere vessels of wrath. If Madge had confessed herself Roman
Catholic, or idolator, Selina knew how to begin. She would have
pointed out to the Catholic how unscriptural it was to suppose that
anybody could forgive sins excepting God, and she would at once have
been able to bring the idolator to his knees by exposing the absurdity
of worshipping bits of wood and stone; but with a person who was nothing
she could not tell what to do. She was puzzled to understand what
right Madge had to her name. Who had any authority to say she
was to be called Madge Hopgood? She determined at last to pray
to God and again ask her mother’s help.</p>
<p>She did pray earnestly that very night, and had not finished until
long after Madge had said her Lord’s Prayer. This was always
said night and morning, both by Madge and Clara. They had been
taught it by their mother. It was, by the way, one of poor Selina’s
troubles that Madge said nothing but the Lord’s Prayer when she
lay down and when she rose; of course, the Lord’s Prayer was the
best - how could it be otherwise, seeing that our Lord used it? - but
those who supplemented it with no petitions of their own were set down
as formalists, and it was always suspected that they had not received
the true enlightenment from above. Selina cried to God till the
counterpane was wet with her tears, but it was the answer from her mother
which came first, telling her that however praiseworthy her intentions
might be, argument with such a <i>dangerous</i> infidel as Madge would
be most perilous, and she was to desist from it at once. Mrs Fish
had by that post written to Miss Pratt, the schoolmistress, and Selina
no doubt would not be exposed to further temptation. Mrs Fish’s
letter to Miss Pratt was very strong, and did not mince matters.
She informed Miss Pratt that a wolf was in her fold, and that if the
creature were not promptly expelled, Selina must be removed into safety.
Miss Pratt was astonished, and instantly, as her custom was, sought
the advice of her sister, Miss Hannah Pratt, who had charge of the wardrobes
and household matters generally. Miss Hannah Pratt was never in
the best of tempers, and just now was a little worse than usual.
It was one of the rules of the school that no tradesmen’s daughters
should be admitted, but it was very difficult to draw the line, and
when drawn, the Misses Pratt were obliged to admit it was rather ridiculous.
There was much debate over an application by an auctioneer. He
was clearly not a tradesman, but he sold chairs, tables and pigs, and,
as Miss Hannah said, used vulgar language in recommending them.
However, his wife had money; they lived in a pleasant house in Lewes,
and the line went outside him. But when a druggist, with a shop
in Bond Street, proposed his daughter, Miss Hannah took a firm stand.
What is the use of a principle, she inquired severely, if we do not
adhere to it? On the other hand, the druggist’s daughter
was the eldest of six, who might all come when they were old enough
to leave home, and Miss Pratt thought there was a real difference between
a druggist and, say, a bootmaker.</p>
<p>‘Bootmaker!’ said Miss Hannah with great scorn.
‘I am surprised that you venture to hint the remotest possibility
of such a contingency.’</p>
<p>At last it was settled that the line should also be drawn outside
the druggist. Miss Hannah, however, had her revenge. A tanner
in Bermondsey with a house in Bedford Square, had sent two of his children
to Miss Pratt’s seminary. Their mother found out that they
had struck up a friendship with a young person whose father compounded
prescriptions for her, and when she next visited Brighton she called
on Miss Pratt, reminded her that it was understood that her pupils would
‘all be taken from a superior class in society,’ and gently
hinted that she could not allow Bedford Square to be contaminated by
Bond Street. Miss Pratt was most apologetic, enlarged upon the
druggist’s respectability, and more particularly upon his well-known
piety and upon his generous contributions to the cause of religion.
This, indeed, was what decided her to make an exception in his favour,
and the piety also of his daughter was ‘most exemplary.’
However, the tanner’s lady, although a shining light in the church
herself, was not satisfied that a retail saint could produce a proper
companion for her own offspring, and went away leaving Miss Pratt very
uncomfortable.</p>
<p>‘I warned you,’ said Miss Hannah; ‘I told you what
would happen, and as to Mr Hopgood, I suspected him from the first.
Besides, he is only a banker’s clerk.’</p>
<p>‘Well, what is to be done?’</p>
<p>‘Put your foot down at once.’ Miss Hannah suited
the action to the word, and put down, with emphasis, on the hearthrug
a very large, plate-shaped foot cased in a black felt shoe.</p>
<p>‘But I cannot dismiss them. Don’t you think it
will be better, first of all, to talk to Miss Hopgood? Perhaps
we could do her some good.’</p>
<p>‘Good! Now, do you think we can do any good to an atheist?
Besides, we have to consider our reputation. Whatever good we
might do, it would be believed that the infection remained.’</p>
<p>‘We have no excuse for dismissing the other.’</p>
<p>‘Excuse! none is needed, nor would any be justifiable.
Excuses are immoral. Say at once - of course politely and with
regret - that the school is established on a certain basis. It
will be an advantage to us if it is known why these girls do not remain.
I will dictate the letter, if you like.’</p>
<p>Miss Hannah Pratt had not received the education which had been given
to her younger sister, and therefore, was nominally subordinate, but
really she was chief. She considered it especially her duty not
only to look after the children’s clothes, the servants and the
accounts, but to maintain <i>tone</i> everywhere in the establishment,
and to stiffen her sister when necessary, and preserve in proper sharpness
her orthodoxy, both in theology and morals.</p>
<p>Accordingly, both the girls left, and both knew the reason for leaving.
The druggist’s faith was sorely tried. If Miss Pratt’s
had been a worldly seminary he would have thought nothing of such behaviour,
but he did not expect it from one of the faithful. The next Sunday
morning after he received the news, he stayed at home out of his turn
to make up any medicines which might be urgently required, and sent
his assistant to church.</p>
<p>As to Madge, she enjoyed her expulsion as a great joke, and her Brighton
experiences were the cause of much laughter. She had learned a
good deal while she was away from home, not precisely what it was intended
she should learn, and she came back with a strong, insurgent tendency,
which was even more noticeable when she returned from Germany.
Neither of the sisters lived at the school in Weimar, but at the house
of a lady who had been recommended to Mrs Hopgood, and by this lady
they were introduced to the great German classics. She herself
was an enthusiast for Goethe, whom she well remembered in his old age,
and Clara and Madge, each of them in turn, learned to know the poet
as they would never have known him in England. Even the town taught
them much about him, for in many ways it was expressive of him and seemed
as if it had shaped itself for him. It was a delightful time for
them. They enjoyed the society and constant mental stimulus; they
loved the beautiful park; not a separate enclosure walled round like
an English park, but suffering the streets to end in it, and in summer
time there were excursions into the Thüringer Wald, generally to
some point memorable in history, or for some literary association.
The drawback was the contrast, when they went home, with Fenmarket,
with its dulness and its complete isolation from the intellectual world.
At Weimar, in the evening, they could see Egmont or hear Fidelio, or
talk with friends about the last utterance upon the Leben Jesu; but
the Fenmarket Egmont was a travelling wax-work show, its Fidelio psalm
tunes, or at best some of Bishop’s glees, performed by a few of
the tradesfolk, who had never had an hour’s instruction in music;
and for theological criticism there were the parish church and Ram Lane
Chapel. They did their best; they read their old favourites and
subscribed for a German as well as an English literary weekly newspaper,
but at times they were almost beaten. Madge more than Clara was
liable to depression.</p>
<p>No Fenmarket maiden, other than the Hopgoods, was supposed to have
any connection whatever, or to have any capacity for any connection
with anything outside the world in which ‘young ladies’
dwelt, and if a Fenmarket girl read a book, a rare occurrence, for there
were no circulating libraries there in those days, she never permitted
herself to say anything more than that it was ‘nice,’ or
it was ‘not nice,’ or she ‘liked it’ or did
‘not like it;’ and if she had ventured to say more, Fenmarket
would have thought her odd, not to say a little improper. The
Hopgood young women were almost entirely isolated, for the tradesfolk
felt themselves uncomfortable and inferior in every way in their presence,
and they were ineligible for rectory and brewery society, not only because
their father was merely a manager, but because of their strange ways.
Mrs Tubbs, the brewer’s wife, thought they were due to Germany.
From what she knew of Germany she considered it most injudicious, and
even morally wrong, to send girls there. She once made the acquaintance
of a German lady at an hotel at Tunbridge Wells, and was quite shocked.
She could see quite plainly that the standard of female delicacy must
be much lower in that country than in England. Mr Tubbs was sure
Mrs Hopgood must have been French, and said to his daughters, mysteriously,
‘you never can tell who Frenchwomen are.’</p>
<p>‘But, papa,’ said Miss Tubbs, ‘you know Mrs Hopgood’s
maiden name; we found that out. It was Molyneux.’</p>
<p>‘Of course, my dear, of course; but if she was a Frenchwoman
resident in England she would prefer to assume an English name, that
is to say if she wished to be married.’</p>
<p>Occasionally the Miss Hopgoods were encountered, and they confounded
Fenmarket sorely. On one memorable occasion there was a party
at the Rectory: it was the annual party into which were swept all the
unclassifiable odds-and-ends which could not be put into the two gatherings
which included the aristocracy and the democracy of the place.
Miss Clara Hopgood amazed everybody by ‘beginning talk,’
by asking Mrs Greatorex, her hostess, who had been far away to Sidmouth
for a holiday, whether she had been to the place where Coleridge was
born, and when the parson’s wife said she had not, and that she
could not be expected to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of an infidel,
Miss Hopgood expressed her surprise, and declared she would walk twenty
miles any day to see Ottery St Mary. Still worse, when somebody
observed that an Anti-Corn-Law lecturer was coming to Fenmarket, and
the parson’s daughter cried ‘How horrid!’ Miss
Hopgood talked again, and actually told the parson that, so far as she
had read upon the subject - fancy her reading about the Corn-Laws! -
the argument was all one way, and that after Colonel Thompson nothing
new could really be urged.</p>
<p>‘What is so - ’ she was about to say ‘objectionable,’
but she recollected her official position and that she was bound to
be politic - ‘so odd and unusual,’ observed Mrs Greatorex
to Mrs Tubbs afterwards, ‘is not that Miss Hopgood should have
radical views. Mrs Barker, I know, is a radical like her husband,
but then she never puts herself forward, nor makes speeches. I
never saw anything quite like it, except once in London at a dinner-party.
Lady Montgomery then went on in much the same way, but she was a baronet’s
wife; the baronet was in Parliament; she received a good deal and was
obliged to entertain her guests.’</p>
<p>Poor Clara! she was really very unobtrusive and very modest, but
there had been constant sympathy between her and her father, not the
dumb sympathy as between man and dog, but that which can manifest itself
in human fashion.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Clara and her father were both chess-players, and at the time at
which our history begins, Clara had been teaching Madge the game for
about six months.</p>
<p>‘Check!’ said Clara.</p>
<p>‘Check! after about a dozen moves. It is of no use to
go on; you always beat me. I should not mind that if I were any
better now than when I started. It is not in me.’</p>
<p>‘The reason is that you do not look two moves ahead.
You never say to yourself, “Suppose I move there, what is she
likely to do, and what can I do afterwards?”’</p>
<p>‘That is just what is impossible to me. I cannot hold
myself down; the moment I go beyond the next move my thoughts fly away,
and I am in a muddle, and my head turns round. I was not born
for it. I can do what is under my nose well enough, but nothing
more.’</p>
<p>‘The planning and the forecasting are the soul of the game.
I should like to be a general, and play against armies and calculate
the consequences of manœuvres.’</p>
<p>‘It would kill me. I should prefer the fighting.
Besides, calculation is useless, for when I think that you will be sure
to move such and such a piece, you generally do not.’</p>
<p>‘Then what makes the difference between the good and the bad
player?’</p>
<p>‘It is a gift, an instinct, I suppose.’</p>
<p>‘Which is as much as to say that you give it up. You
are very fond of that word instinct; I wish you would not use it.’</p>
<p>‘I have heard you use it, and say you instinctively like this
person or that.’</p>
<p>‘Certainly; I do not deny that sometimes I am drawn to a person
or repelled from him before I can say why; but I always force myself
to discover afterwards the cause of my attraction or repulsion, and
I believe it is a duty to do so. If we neglect it we are little
better than the brutes, and may grossly deceive ourselves.’</p>
<p>At this moment the sound of wheels was heard, and Madge jumped up,
nearly over-setting the board, and rushed into the front room.
It was the four-horse coach from London, which, once a day, passed through
Fenmarket on its road to Lincoln. It was not the direct route
from London to Lincoln, but the <i>Defiance</i> went this way to accommodate
Fenmarket and other small towns. It slackened speed in order to
change horses at the ‘Crown and Sceptre,’ and as Madge stood
at the window, a gentleman on the box-seat looked at her intently as
he passed. In another minute he had descended, and was welcomed
by the landlord, who stood on the pavement. Clara meanwhile had
taken up a book, but before she had read a page, her sister skipped
into the parlour again, humming a tune.</p>
<p>‘Let me see - check, you said, but it is not mate.’</p>
<p>She put her elbows on the table, rested her head between her hands,
and appeared to contemplate the game profoundly.</p>
<p>‘Now, then, what do you say to that?’</p>
<p>It was really a very lucky move, and Clara, whose thoughts perhaps
were elsewhere, was presently most unaccountably defeated. Madge
was triumphant.</p>
<p>‘Where are all your deep-laid schemes? Baffled by a poor
creature who can hardly put two and two together.’</p>
<p>‘Perhaps your schemes were better than mine.’</p>
<p>‘You know they were not. I saw the queen ought to take
that bishop, and never bothered myself as to what would follow.
Have you not lost your faith in schemes?’</p>
<p>‘You are very much mistaken if you suppose that, because of
one failure, or of twenty failures, I would give up a principle.’</p>
<p>‘Clara, you are a strange creature. Don’t let us
talk any more about chess.’</p>
<p>Madge swept all the pieces with her hand into the box, shut it, closed
the board, and put her feet on the fender.</p>
<p>‘You never believe in impulses or in doing a thing just because
here and now it appears to be the proper thing to do. Suppose
anybody were to make love to you - oh! how I wish somebody would, you
dear girl, for nobody deserves it more - ’ Madge put her
head caressingly on Clara’s shoulder and then raised it again.
‘Suppose, I say, anybody were to make love to you, would you hold
off for six months and consider, and consider, and ask yourself whether
he had such and such virtues, and whether he could make you happy?
Would not that stifle love altogether? Would you not rather obey
your first impression and, if you felt you loved him, would you not
say “Yes”?’</p>
<p>‘Time is not everything. A man who is prompt and is therefore
thought to be hasty by sluggish creatures who are never half awake,
may in five minutes spend more time in consideration than his critics
will spend in as many weeks. I have never had the chance, and
am not likely to have it. I can only say that if it were to come
to me, I should try to use the whole strength of my soul. Precisely
because the question would be so important, would it be necessary to
employ every faculty I have in order to decide it. I do not believe
in oracles which are supposed to prove their divinity by giving no reasons
for their commands.’</p>
<p>‘Ah, well, <i>I</i> believe in Shakespeare. His lovers
fall in love at first sight.’</p>
<p>‘No doubt they do, but to justify yourself you have to suppose
that you are a Juliet and your friend a Romeo. They may, for aught
I know, be examples in my favour. However, I have to lay down
a rule for my own poor, limited self, and, to speak the truth, I am
afraid that great men often do harm by imposing on us that which is
serviceable to themselves only; or, to put it perhaps more correctly,
we mistake the real nature of their processes, just as a person who
is unskilled in arithmetic would mistake the processes of anybody who
is very quick at it, and would be led away by them. Shakespeare
is much to me, but the more he is to me, the more careful I ought to
be to discover what is the true law of my own nature, more important
to me after all than Shakespeare’s.’</p>
<p>‘Exactly. I know what the law of mine is. If a
man were to present himself to me, I should rely on that instinct you
so much despise, and I am certain that the balancing, see-saw method
would be fatal. It would disclose a host of reasons against any
conclusion, and I should never come to any.’</p>
<p>Clara smiled. Although this impetuosity was foreign to her,
she loved it for the good which accompanied it.</p>
<p>‘You do not mean to say you would accept or reject him at once?’</p>
<p>‘No, certainly not. What I mean is that in a few days,
perhaps in a shorter time, something within me would tell me whether
we were suited to one another, although we might not have talked upon
half-a-dozen subjects.’</p>
<p>‘I think the risk tremendous.’</p>
<p>‘But there is just as much risk the other way. You would
examine your friend, catalogue him, sum up his beliefs, note his behaviour
under various experimental trials, and miserably fail, after all your
scientific investigation, to ascertain just the one important point
whether you loved him and could live with him. Your reason was
not meant for that kind of work. If a woman trusts in such matters
to the faculty by which, when she wishes to settle whether she is to
take this house or that, she puts the advantages of the larger back
kitchen on one side and the bigger front kitchen on the other, I pity
her.’</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood at this moment came downstairs and asked when in the
name of fortune they meant to have the tea ready.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Frank Palmer, the gentleman whom we saw descend from the coach, was
the eldest son of a wholesale and manufacturing chemist in London.
He was now about five-and-twenty, and having just been admitted as a
partner, he had begun, as the custom was in those days, to travel for
his firm. The elder Mr Palmer was a man of refinement, something
more than a Whig in politics, and an enthusiastic member of the Broad
Church party, which was then becoming a power in the country.
He was well-to-do, living in a fine old red-brick house at Stoke Newington,
with half-a-dozen acres of ground round it, and, if Frank had been born
thirty years later, he would probably have gone to Cambridge or Oxford.
In those days, however, it was not the custom to send boys to the Universities
unless they were intended for the law, divinity or idleness, and Frank’s
training, which was begun at St Paul’s school, was completed there.
He lived at home, going to school in the morning and returning in the
evening. He was surrounded by every influence which was pure and
noble. Mr Maurice and Mr Sterling were his father’s guests,
and hence it may be inferred that there was an altar in the house, and
that the sacred flame burnt thereon. Mr Palmer almost worshipped
Mr Maurice, and his admiration was not blind, for Maurice connected
the Bible with what was rational in his friend. ‘What! still
believable: no need then to pitch it overboard: here after all is the
Eternal Word!’ It can be imagined how those who dared not
close their eyes to the light, and yet clung to that book which had
been so much to their forefathers and themselves, rejoiced when they
were able to declare that it belonged to them more than to those who
misjudged them and could deny that they were heretics. The boy’s
education was entirely classical and athletic, and as he was quick at
learning and loved his games, he took a high position amongst his school-fellows.
He was not particularly reflective, but he was generous and courageous,
perfectly straightforward, a fair specimen of thousands of English public-school
boys. As he grew up, he somewhat disappointed his father by a
lack of any real interest in the subjects in which his father was interested.
He accepted willingly, and even enthusiastically, the household conclusions
on religion and politics, but they were not properly his, for he accepted
them merely as conclusions and without the premisses, and it was often
even a little annoying to hear him express some free opinion on religious
questions in a way which showed that it was not a growth but something
picked up. Mr Palmer, senior, sometimes recoiled into intolerance
and orthodoxy, and bewildered his son who, to use one of his own phrases,
‘hardly knew where his father was.’ Partly the reaction
was due to the oscillation which accompanies serious and independent
thought, but mainly it was caused by Mr Palmer’s discontent with
Frank’s appropriation of a sentiment or doctrine of which he was
not the lawful owner. Frank, however, was so hearty, so affectionate,
and so cheerful, that it was impossible not to love him dearly.</p>
<p>In his visits to Fenmarket, Frank had often noticed Madge, for the
‘Crown and Sceptre’ was his headquarters, and Madge was
well enough aware that she had been noticed. He had inquired casually
who it was who lived next door, and when the waiter told him the name,
and that Mr Hopgood was formerly the bank manager, Frank remembered
that he had often heard his father speak of a Mr Hopgood, a clerk in
a bank in London, as one of his best friends. He did not fail
to ask his father about this friend, and to obtain an introduction to
the widow. He had now brought it to Fenmarket, and within half
an hour after he had alighted, he had presented it.</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood, of course, recollected Mr Palmer perfectly, and the
welcome to Frank was naturally very warm. It was delightful to
connect earlier and happier days with the present, and she was proud
in the possession of a relationship which had lasted so long.
Clara and Madge, too, were both excited and pleased. To say nothing
of Frank’s appearance, of his unsnobbish, deferential behaviour
which showed that he understood who they were and that the little house
made no difference to him, the girls and the mother could not resist
a side glance at Fenmarket and the indulgence of a secret satisfaction
that it would soon hear that the son of Mr Palmer, so well known in
every town round about, was on intimate terms with them.</p>
<p>Madge was particularly gay that evening. The presence of sympathetic
people was always a powerful stimulus to her, and she was often astonished
at the witty things and even the wise things she said in such company,
although, when she was alone, so few things wise or witty occurred to
her. Like all persons who, in conversation, do not so much express
the results of previous conviction obtained in silence as the inspiration
of the moment, Madge dazzled everybody by a brilliancy which would have
been impossible if she had communicated that which had been slowly acquired,
but what she left with those who listened to her, did not always seem,
on reflection, to be so much as it appeared to be while she was talking.
Still she was very charming, and it must be confessed that sometimes
her spontaneity was truer than the limitations of speech more carefully
weighed.</p>
<p>‘What makes you stay in Fenmarket, Mrs Hopgood? How I
wish you would come to London!’</p>
<p>‘I do not wish to leave it now; I have become attached to it;
I have very few friends in London, and lastly, perhaps the most convincing
reason, I could not afford it. Rent and living are cheaper here
than in town.’</p>
<p>‘Would you not like to live in London, Miss Hopgood?’</p>
<p>Clara hesitated for a few seconds.</p>
<p>‘I am not sure - certainly not by myself. I was in London
once for six months as a governess in a very pleasant family, where
I saw much society; but I was glad to return to Fenmarket.’</p>
<p>‘To the scenery round Fenmarket,’ interrupted Madge;
‘it is so romantic, so mountainous, so interesting in every way.’</p>
<p>‘I was thinking of people, strange as it may appear.
In London nobody really cares for anybody, at least, not in the sense
in which I should use the words. Men and women in London stand
for certain talents, and are valued often very highly for them, but
they are valued merely as representing these talents. Now, if
I had a talent, I should not be satisfied with admiration or respect
because of it. No matter what admiration, or respect, or even
enthusiasm I might evoke, even if I were told that my services had been
immense and that life had been changed through my instrumentality, I
should feel the lack of quiet, personal affection, and that, I believe,
is not common in London. If I were famous, I would sacrifice all
the adoration of the world for the love of a brother - if I had one
- or a sister, who perhaps had never heard what it was which had made
me renowned.’</p>
<p>‘Certainly,’ said Madge, laughing, ‘for the love
of <i>such</i> a sister. But, Mr Palmer, I like London.
I like the people, just the people, although I do not know a soul, and
not a soul cares a brass farthing about me. I am not half so stupid
in London as in the country. I never have a thought of my own
down here. How should I? But in London there is plenty of
talk about all kinds of things, and I find I too have something in me.
It is true, as Clara says, that nobody is anything particular to anybody,
but that to me is rather pleasant. I do not want too much of profound
and eternal attachments. They are rather a burden. They
involve profound and eternal attachment on my part; and I have always
to be at my best; such watchfulness and such jealousy! I prefer
a dressing-gown and slippers and bonds which are not so tight.’</p>
<p>‘Madge, Madge, I wish you would sometimes save me the trouble
of laboriously striving to discover what you really mean.’</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood bethought herself that her daughters were talking too
much to one another, as they often did, even when guests were present,
and she therefore interrupted them.</p>
<p>‘Mr Palmer, you see both town and country - which do you prefer?’</p>
<p>‘Oh! I hardly know; the country in summer-time, perhaps,
and town in the winter.’</p>
<p>This was a safe answer, and one which was not very original; that
is to say, it expressed no very distinct belief; but there was one valid
reason why he liked being in London in the winter.</p>
<p>‘Your father, I remember, loves music. I suppose you
inherit his taste, and it is impossible to hear good music in the country.’</p>
<p>‘I am very fond of music. Have you heard “St Paul?”
I was at Birmingham when it was first performed in this country.
Oh! it <i>is</i> lovely,’ and he began humming ‘<i>Be thou
faithful unto death</i>.’</p>
<p>Frank did really care for music. He went wherever good music
was to be had; he belonged to a choral society and was in great request
amongst his father’s friends at evening entertainments.
He could also play the piano, so far as to be able to accompany himself
thereon. He sang to himself when he was travelling, and often
murmured favourite airs when people around him were talking. He
had lessons from an old Italian, a little, withered, shabby creature,
who was not very proud of his pupil. ‘He is a talent,’
said the Signor, ‘and he will amuse himself; good for a ballad
at a party, but a musician? no!’ and like all mere ‘talents’
Frank failed in his songs to give them just what is of most value -
just that which separates an artistic performance from the vast region
of well-meaning, respectable, but uninteresting commonplace. There
was a curious lack in him also of correspondence between his music and
the rest of himself. As music is expression, it might be supposed
that something which it serves to express would always lie behind it;
but this was not the case with him, although he was so attractive and
delightful in many ways. There could be no doubt that his love
for Beethoven was genuine, but that which was in Frank Palmer was not
that of which the sonatas and symphonies of the master are the voice.
He went into raptures over the slow movement in the <i>C minor</i> Symphony,
but no <i>C minor</i> slow movement was discernible in his character.</p>
<p>‘What on earth can be found in “St Paul” which
can be put to music?’ said Madge. ‘Fancy a chapter
in the Epistle to the Romans turned into a duet!’</p>
<p>‘Madge! Madge! I am ashamed of you,’ said
her mother.</p>
<p>‘Well, mother,’ said Clara, ‘I am sure that some
of the settings by your divinity, Handel, are absurd. “<i>For
as in Adam all die</i>” may be true enough, and the harmonies
are magnificent, but I am always tempted to laugh when I hear it.’</p>
<p>Frank hummed the familiar apostrophe ‘<i>Be not afraid</i>.’</p>
<p>‘Is that a bit of “St Paul”?’ said Mrs Hopgood.</p>
<p>‘Yes, it goes like this,’ and Frank went up to the little
piano and sang the song through.</p>
<p>‘There is no fault to be found with that,’ said Madge,
‘so far as the coincidence of sense and melody is concerned, but
I do not care much for oratorios. Better subjects can be obtained
outside the Bible, and the main reason for selecting the Bible is that
what is called religious music may be provided for good people.
An oratorio, to me, is never quite natural. Jewish history is
not a musical subject, and, besides, you cannot have proper love songs
in an oratorio, and in them music is at its best.’</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood was accustomed to her daughter’s extravagance,
but she was, nevertheless, a little uncomfortable.</p>
<p>‘Ah!’ said Frank, who had not moved from the piano, and
he struck the first two bars of ‘<i>Adelaide</i>.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, please,’ said Madge, ‘go on, go on,’
but Frank could not quite finish it.</p>
<p>She was sitting on the little sofa, and she put her feet up, lay
and listened with her eyes shut. There was a vibration in Mr Palmer’s
voice not perceptible during his vision of the crown of life and of
fidelity to death.</p>
<p>‘Are you going to stay over Sunday?’ inquired Mrs Hopgood.</p>
<p>‘I am not quite sure; I ought to be back on Sunday evening.
My father likes me to be at home on that day.’</p>
<p>‘Is there not a Mr Maurice who is a friend of your father?’</p>
<p>‘Oh, yes, a great friend.’</p>
<p>‘He is not High Church nor Low Church?’</p>
<p>‘No, not exactly.’</p>
<p>‘What is he, then? What does he believe?’</p>
<p>‘Well, I can hardly say; he does not believe that anybody will
be burnt in a brimstone lake for ever.’</p>
<p>‘That is what he does not believe,’ interposed Clara.</p>
<p>‘He believes that Socrates and the great Greeks and Romans
who acted up to the light that was within them were not sent to hell.
I think that is glorious, don’t you?’</p>
<p>‘Yes, but that also is something he does not believe.
What is there in him which is positive? What has he distinctly
won from the unknown?’</p>
<p>‘Ah, Miss Hopgood, you ought to hear him yourself; he is wonderful.
I do admire him so much; I am sure you would like him.’</p>
<p>‘If you do not go home on Saturday,’ said Mrs Hopgood,
‘we shall be pleased if you will have dinner with us on Sunday;
we generally go for a walk in the afternoon.’</p>
<p>Frank hesitated, but at that moment Madge rose from the sofa.
Her hair was disarranged, and she pushed its thick folds backward.
It grew rather low down on her forehead and stood up a little on her
temples, a mystery of shadow and dark recess. If it had been electrical
with the force of a strong battery and had touched him, he could not
have been more completely paralysed, and his half-erect resolution to
go back on Saturday was instantly laid flat.</p>
<p>‘Thank you, Mrs Hopgood,’ looking at Madge and meeting
her eyes, ‘I think it very likely I shall stay, and if I do I
will most certainly accept your kind invitation.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Sunday morning came, and Frank, being in the country, considered
himself absolved from the duty of going to church, and went for a long
stroll. At half-past one he presented himself at Mrs Hopgood’s
house.</p>
<p>‘I have had a letter from London,’ said Clara to Frank,
‘telling me a most extraordinary story, and I should like to know
what you think of it. A man, who was left a widower, had an only
child, a lovely daughter of about fourteen years old, in whose existence
his own was completely wrapped up. She was subject at times to
curious fits of self-absorption or absence of mind, and while she was
under their influence she resembled a somnambulist rather than a sane
human being awake. Her father would not take her to a physician,
for he dreaded lest he should be advised to send her away from home,
and he also feared the effect which any recognition of her disorder
might have upon her. He believed that in obscure and half-mental
diseases like hers, it was prudent to suppress all notice of them, and
that if he behaved to her as if she were perfectly well, she would stand
a chance of recovery. Moreover, the child was visibly improving,
and it was probable that the disturbance in her health would be speedily
outgrown. One hot day he went out shopping with her, and he observed
that she was tired and strange in her manner, although she was not ill,
or, at least, not so ill as he had often before seen her. The
few purchases they had to make at the draper’s were completed,
and they went out into the street. He took her hand-bag, and,
in doing so, it opened and he saw to his horror a white silk pocket-handkerchief
crumpled up in it, which he instantly recognised as one which had been
shown him five minutes before, but he had not bought. The next
moment a hand was on his shoulder. It was that of an assistant,
who requested that they would both return for a few minutes. As
they walked the half dozen steps back, the father’s resolution
was taken. “I am sixty,” he thought to himself, “and
she is fourteen.” They went into the counting-house and
he confessed that he had taken the handkerchief, but that it was taken
by mistake and that he was about to restore it when he was arrested.
The poor girl was now herself again, but her mind was an entire blank
as to what she had done, and she could not doubt her father’s
statement, for it was a man’s handkerchief and the bag was in
his hands. The draper was inexorable, and as he had suffered much
from petty thefts of late, had determined to make an example of the
first offender whom he could catch. The father was accordingly
prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. When his
term had expired, his daughter, who, I am glad to say, never for an
instant lost her faith in him, went away with him to a distant part
of the country, where they lived under an assumed name. About
ten years afterwards he died and kept his secret to the last; but he
had seen the complete recovery and happy marriage of his child.
It was remarkable that it never occurred to her that she might have
been guilty, but her father’s confession, as already stated, was
apparently so sincere that she could do nothing but believe him.
You will wonder how the facts were discovered. After his death
a sealed paper disclosing them was found, with the inscription, “<i>Not
to be opened during my daughter’s life, and if she should have
children or a husband who may survive her, it is to be burnt</i>.”
She had no children, and when she died as an old woman, her husband
also being dead, the seal was broken.’</p>
<p>‘Probably,’ said Madge, ‘nobody except his daughter
believed he was not a thief. For her sake he endured the imputation
of common larceny, and was content to leave the world with only a remote
chance that he would ever be justified.’</p>
<p>‘I wonder,’ said Frank, ‘that he did not admit
that it was his daughter who had taken the handkerchief, and excuse
her on the ground of her ailment.’</p>
<p>‘He could not do that,’ replied Madge. ‘The
object of his life was to make as little of the ailment as possible.
What would have been the effect on her if she had been made aware of
its fearful consequences? Furthermore, would he have been believed?
And then - awful thought, the child might have suspected him of attempting
to shield himself at her expense! Do you think you could be capable
of such sacrifice, Mr Palmer?’</p>
<p>Frank hesitated. ‘It would - ’</p>
<p>‘The question is not fair, Madge,’ said Mrs Hopgood,
interrupting him. ‘You are asking for a decision when all
the materials to make up a decision are not present. It is wrong
to question ourselves in cold blood as to what we should do in a great
strait; for the emergency brings the insight and the power necessary
to deal with it. I often fear lest, if such-and-such a trial were
to befall me, I should miserably fail. So I should, furnished
as I now am, but not as I should be under stress of the trial.’</p>
<p>‘What is the use,’ said Clara, ‘of speculating
whether we can, or cannot, do this or that? It <i>is</i> now an
interesting subject for discussion whether the lie was a sin.’</p>
<p>‘No,’ said Madge, ‘a thousand times no.’</p>
<p>‘Brief and decisive. Well, Mr Palmer, what do you say?’</p>
<p>‘That is rather an awkward question. A lie is a lie.’</p>
<p>‘But not,’ broke in Madge, vehemently, ‘to save
anybody whom you love. Is a contemptible little two-foot measuring-tape
to be applied to such an action as that?’</p>
<p>‘The consequences of such a philosophy, though, my dear,’
said Mrs Hopgood, ‘are rather serious. The moment you dispense
with a fixed standard, you cannot refuse permission to other people
to dispense with it also.’</p>
<p>‘Ah, yes, I know all about that, but I am not going to give
up my instinct for the sake of a rule. Do what you feel to be
right, and let the rule go hang. Somebody, cleverer in logic than
we are, will come along afterwards and find a higher rule which we have
obeyed, and will formulate it concisely.’</p>
<p>‘As for my poor self,’ said Clara, ‘I do not profess
to know, without the rule, what is right and what is not. We are
always trying to transcend the rule by some special pleading, and often
in virtue of some fancied superiority. Generally speaking, the
attempt is fatal.’</p>
<p>‘Madge,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘your dogmatic decision
may have been interesting, but it prevented the expression of Mr Palmer’s
opinion.’</p>
<p>Madge bent forward and politely inclined her head to the embarrassed
Frank.</p>
<p>‘I do not know what to say. I have never thought much
about such matters. Is not what they call casuistry a science
among Roman Catholics? If I were in a difficulty and could not
tell right from wrong, I should turn Catholic, and come to you as my
priest, Mrs Hopgood.’</p>
<p>‘Then you would do, not what you thought right yourself, but
what I thought right. The worth of the right to you is that it
is your right, and that you arrive at it in your own way. Besides,
you might not have time to consult anybody. Were you never compelled
to settle promptly a case of this kind?’</p>
<p>‘I remember once at school, when the mathematical master was
out of the class-room, a boy named Carpenter ran up to the blackboard
and wrote “Carrots” on it. That was the master’s
nickname, for he was red-haired. Scarcely was the word finished,
when Carpenter heard him coming along the passage. There was just
time partially to rub out some of the big letters, but CAR remained,
and Carpenter was standing at the board when “Carrots” came
in. He was an excitable man, and he knew very well what the boys
called him.</p>
<p>‘“What have you been writing on the board, sir?”</p>
<p>‘“Carpenter, sir.”</p>
<p>‘The master examined the board. The upper half of the
second R was plainly perceptible, but it might possibly have been a
P. He turned round, looked steadily at Carpenter for a moment,
and then looked at us. Carpenter was no favourite, but not a soul
spoke.</p>
<p>‘“Go to your place, sir.”</p>
<p>‘Carpenter went to his place, the letters were erased and the
lesson was resumed. I was greatly perplexed; I had acquiesced
in a cowardly falsehood. Carrots was a great friend of mine, and
I could not bear to feel that he was humbugged, so when we were outside
I went up to Carpenter and told him he was an infernal sneak, and we
had a desperate fight, and I licked him, and blacked both his eyes.
I did not know what else to do.’</p>
<p>The company laughed.</p>
<p>‘We cannot,’ said Madge, ‘all of us come to terms
after this fashion with our consciences, but we have had enough of these
discussions on morality. Let us go out.’</p>
<p>They went out, and, as some relief from the straight road, they turned
into a field as they came home, and walked along a footpath which crossed
the broad, deep ditches by planks. They were within about fifty
yards of the last and broadest ditch, more a dyke than a ditch, when
Frank, turning round, saw an ox which they had not noticed, galloping
after them.</p>
<p>‘Go on, go on,’ he cried, ‘make for the plank.’</p>
<p>He discerned in an instant that unless the course of the animal could
be checked it would overtake them before the bridge could be reached.
The women fled, but Frank remained. He was in the habit of carrying
a heavy walking-stick, the end of which he had hollowed out in his schooldays
and had filled up with lead. Just as the ox came upon him, it
laid its head to the ground, and Frank, springing aside, dealt it a
tremendous, two-handed blow on the forehead with his knobbed weapon.
The creature was dazed, it stopped and staggered, and in another instant
Frank was across the bridge in safety. There was a little hysterical
sobbing, but it was soon over.</p>
<p>‘Oh, Mr Palmer,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘what presence
of mind and what courage! We should have been killed without you.’</p>
<p>‘The feat is not original, Mrs Hopgood. I saw it done
by a tough little farmer last summer on a bull that was really mad.
There was no ditch for him though, poor fellow, and he had to jump a
hedge.’</p>
<p>‘You did not find it difficult,’ said Madge, ‘to
settle your problem when it came to you in the shape of a wild ox.’</p>
<p>‘Because there was nothing to settle,’ said Frank, laughing;
‘there was only one thing to be done.’</p>
<p>‘So you believed, or rather, so you saw,’ said Clara.
‘I should have seen half-a-dozen things at once - that is to say,
nothing.’</p>
<p>‘And I,’ said Madge, ‘should have settled it the
wrong way: I am sure I should, even if I had been a man. I should
have bolted.’</p>
<p>Frank stayed to tea, and the evening was musical. He left about
ten, but just as the door had shut he remembered he had forgotten his
stick. He gave a gentle rap and Madge appeared. She gave
him his stick.</p>
<p>‘Good-bye again. Thanks for my life.’</p>
<p>Frank cursed himself that he could not find the proper word.
He knew there was something which might be said and ought to be said,
but he could not say it. Madge held out her hand to him, he raised
it to his lips and kissed it, and then, astonished at his boldness,
he instantly retreated. He went to the ‘Crown and Sceptre’
and was soon in bed, but not to sleep. Strange, that the moment
we lie down in the dark, images, which were half obscured, should become
so intensely luminous! Madge hovered before Frank with almost
tangible distinctness, and he felt his fingers moving in her heavy,
voluptuous tresses. Her picture at last became almost painful
to him and shamed him, so that he turned over from side to side to avoid
it. He had never been thrown into the society of women of his
own age, for he had no sister, and a fire was kindled within him which
burnt with a heat all the greater because his life had been so pure.
At last he fell asleep and did not wake till late in the morning.
He had just time to eat his breakfast, pay one more business visit in
the town, and catch the coach due at eleven o’clock from Lincoln
to London. As the horses were being changed, he walked as near
as he dared venture to the windows of the cottage next door, but he
could see nobody. When the coach, however, began to move, he turned
round and looked behind him, and a hand was waved to him. He took
off his hat, and in five minutes he was clear of the town. It
was in sight a long way, but when, at last, it disappeared, a cloud
of wretchedness swept over him as the vapour sweeps up from the sea.
What was she doing? talking to other people, existing for others, laughing
with others! There were miles between himself and Fenmarket.
Life! what was life? A few moments of living and long, dreary
gaps between. All this, however, is a vain attempt to delineate
what was shapeless. It was an intolerable, unvanquishable oppression.
This was Love; this was the blessing which the god with the ruddy wings
had bestowed on him. It was a relief to him when the coach rattled
through Islington, and in a few minutes had landed him at the ‘Angel.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>There was to be a grand entertainment in the assembly room of the
‘Crown and Sceptre’ in aid of the County Hospital.
Mrs Martin, widow of one of the late partners in the bank, lived in
a large house near Fenmarket, and still had an interest in the business.
She was distinctly above anybody who lived in the town, and she knew
how to show her superiority by venturing sometimes to do what her urban
neighbours could not possibly do. She had been known to carry
through the street a quart bottle of horse physic although it was wrapped
up in nothing but brown paper. On her way she met the brewer’s
wife, who was more aggrieved than she was when Mrs Martin’s carriage
swept past her in the dusty, narrow lane which led to the Hall.
Mrs Martin could also afford to recognise in a measure the claims of
education and talent. A gentleman came from London to lecture
in the town, and showed astonished Fenmarket an orrery and a magic lantern
with dissolving views of the Holy Land. The exhibition had been
provided in order to extinguish a debt incurred in repairing the church,
but the rector’s wife, and the brewer’s wife, after consultation,
decided that they must leave the lecturer to return to his inn.
Mrs Martin, however, invited him to supper. Of course she knew
Mr Hopgood well, and knew that he was no ordinary man. She knew
also something of Mrs Hopgood and the daughters, and that they were
no ordinary women. She had been heard to say that they were ladies,
and that Mr Hopgood was a gentleman; and she kept up a distant kind
of intimacy with them, always nodded to them whenever she met them,
and every now and then sent them grapes and flowers. She had observed
once or twice to Mrs Tubbs that Mr Hopgood was a remarkable person,
who was quite scientific and therefore did not associate with the rest
of the Fenmarket folk; and Mrs Tubbs was much annoyed, particularly
by a slight emphasis which she thought she detected in the ‘therefore,’
for Mr Tubbs had told her that one of the smaller London brewers, who
had only about fifty public-houses, had refused to meet at dinner a
learned French chemist who had written books. Mrs Martin could
not make friends with the Hopgoods, nor enter the cottage. It
would have been a transgression of that infinitely fine and tortuous
line whose inexplicable convolutions mark off what is forbidden to a
society lady. Clearly, however, the Hopgoods could be requested
to co-operate at the ‘Crown and Sceptre;’ in fact, it would
be impolitic not to put some of the townsfolk on the list of patrons.
So it came about that Mrs Hopgood was included, and that she was made
responsible for the provision of one song and one recitation.
For the song it was settled that Frank Palmer should be asked, as he
would be in Fenmarket. Usually he came but once every half year,
but he had not been able, so he said, to finish all his work the last
time. The recitation Madge undertook.</p>
<p>The evening arrived, the room was crowded and a dozen private carriages
stood in the ‘Crown and Sceptre’ courtyard. Frank
called for the Hopgoods. Mrs Hopgood and Clara sat with presentation
tickets in the second row, amongst the fashionable folk; Frank and Madge
were upon the platform. Frank was loudly applauded in ‘<i>Il
Mio Tesoro</i>,’ but the loudest applause of the evening was reserved
for Madge, who declaimed Byron’s ‘<i>Destruction of Sennacherib</i>’
with much energy. She certainly looked very charming in her red
gown, harmonising with her black hair. The men in the audience
were vociferous for something more, and would not be contented until
she again came forward. The truth is, that the wily young woman
had prepared herself beforehand for possibilities, but she artfully
concealed her preparation. Looking on the ground and hesitating,
she suddenly raised her head as if she had just remembered something,
and then repeated Sir Henry Wotton’s ‘<i>Happy Life</i>.’
She was again greeted with cheers, subdued so as to be in accordance
with the character of the poem, but none the less sincere, and in the
midst of them she gracefully bowed and retired. Mrs Martin complimented
her warmly at the end of the performance, and inwardly debated whether
Madge could be asked to enliven one of the parties at the Hall, and
how it could, at the same time, be made clear to the guests that she
and her mother, who must come with her, were not even acquaintances,
properly so called, but were patronised as persons of merit living in
the town which the Hall protected. Mrs Martin was obliged to be
very careful. She certainly was on the list at the Lord Lieutenant’s,
but she was in the outer ring, and she was not asked to those small
and select little dinners which were given to Sir Egerton, the Dean
of Peterborough, Lord Francis, and his brother, the county member.
She decided, however, that she could make perfectly plain the conditions
upon which the Hopgoods would be present, and the next day she sent
Madge a little note asking her if she would ‘assist in some festivities’
at the Hall in about two months’ time, which were to be given
in celebration of the twenty-first birthday of Mrs Martin’s third
son. The scene from the ‘<i>Tempest</i>,’ where Ferdinand
and Miranda are discovered playing chess, was suggested, and it was
proposed that Madge should be Miranda, and Mr Palmer Ferdinand.
Mrs Martin concluded with a hope that Mrs Hopgood and her eldest daughter
would ‘witness the performance.’</p>
<p>Frank joyously consented, for amateur theatricals had always attracted
him, and in a few short weeks he was again at Fenmarket. He was
obliged to be there for three or four days before the entertainment,
in order to attend the rehearsals, which Mrs Martin had put under the
control of a professional gentleman from London, and Madge and he were
consequently compelled to make frequent journeys to the Hall.</p>
<p>At last the eventful night arrived, and a carriage was hired next
door to take the party. They drove up to the grand entrance and
were met by a footman, who directed Madge and Frank to their dressing-rooms,
and escorted Mrs Hopgood and Clara to their places in the theatre.
They had gone early in order to accommodate Frank and Madge, and they
found themselves alone. They were surprised that there was nobody
to welcome them, and a little more surprised when they found that the
places allotted to them were rather in the rear. Presently two
or three fiddlers were seen, who began to tune their instruments.
Then some Fenmarket folk and some of the well-to-do tenants on the estate
made their appearance, and took seats on either side of Mrs Hopgood
and Clara. Quite at the back were the servants. At five
minutes to eight the band struck up the overture to ‘<i>Zampa</i>,’
and in the midst of it in sailed Mrs Martin and a score or two of fashionably-dressed
people, male and female. The curtain ascended and Prospero’s
cell was seen. Alonso and his companions were properly grouped,
and Prospero began, -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p> ‘Behold, Sir King,<br />The wronged Duke
of Milan, Prospero.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The audience applauded him vigorously when he came to the end of
his speech, but there was an instantaneous cry of ‘hush!’
when Prospero disclosed the lovers. It was really very pretty.
Miranda wore a loose, simple, white robe, and her wonderful hair was
partly twisted into a knot, and partly strayed down to her waist.
The dialogue between the two was spoken with much dramatic feeling,
and when Ferdinand came to the lines -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p> ‘Sir, she is mortal,<br />But by immortal
Providence she’s mine,’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>old Boston, a worthy and wealthy farmer, who sat next to Mrs Hopgood,
cried out ‘hear, hear!’ but was instantly suppressed.</p>
<p>He put his head down behind the people in front of him, rubbed his
knees, grinned, and then turned to Mrs Hopgood, whom he knew, and whispered,
with his hand to his mouth, -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘And a precious lucky chap he is.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Mrs Hopgood watched intently, and when Gonzalo invoked the gods to
drop a blessed crown on the couple, and the applause was renewed, and
Boston again cried ‘hear, hear!’ without fear of check,
she did not applaud, for something told her that behind this stage show
a drama was being played of far more serious importance.</p>
<p>The curtain fell, but there were loud calls for the performers.
It rose, and they presented themselves, Alonso still holding the hands
of the happy pair. The cheering now was vociferous, more particularly
when a wreath was flung at the feet of the young princess, and Ferdinand,
stooping, placed it on her head.</p>
<p>Again the curtain fell, the band struck up some dance music and the
audience were treated to ‘something light,’ and roared with
laughter at a pretty chambermaid at an inn who captivated and bamboozled
a young booby who was staying there, pitched him overboard; ‘wondered
what he meant;’ sang an audacious song recounting her many exploits,
and finished with a <i>pas-seul.</i></p>
<p>The performers and their friends were invited to a sumptuous supper,
and the Fenmarket folk were not at home until half-past two in the morning.
On their way back, Clara broke out against the juxtaposition of Shakespeare
and such vulgarity.</p>
<p>‘Much better,’ she said, ‘to have left the Shakespeare
out altogether. The lesson of the sequence is that each is good
in its way, a perfectly hateful doctrine to me.</p>
<p>Frank and Madge were, however, in the best of humours, especially
Frank, who had taken a glass of wine beyond his customary very temperate
allowance.</p>
<p>‘But, Miss Hopgood, Mrs Martin had to suit all tastes; we must
not be too severe upon her.’</p>
<p>There was something in this remark most irritating to Clara; the
word ‘tastes,’ for example, as if the difference between
Miranda and the chambermaid were a matter of ‘taste.’
She was annoyed too with Frank’s easy, cheery tones for she felt
deeply what she said, and his mitigation and smiling latitudinarianism
were more exasperating than direct opposition.</p>
<p>‘I am sure,’ continued Frank, ‘that if we were
to take the votes of the audience, Miranda would be the queen of the
evening;’ and he put the crown which he had brought away with
him on her head again.</p>
<p>Clara was silent. In a few moments they were at the door of
their house. It had begun to rain, and Madge, stepping out of
the carriage in a hurry, threw a shawl over her head, forgetting the
wreath. It fell into the gutter and was splashed with mud.
Frank picked it up, wiped it as well as he could with his pocket-handkerchief,
took it into the parlour and laid it on a chair.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The next morning it still rained, a cold rain from the north-east,
a very disagreeable type of weather on the Fenmarket flats. Madge
was not awake until late, and when she caught sight of the grey sky
and saw her finery tumbled on the floor - no further use for it in any
shape save as rags - and the dirty crown, which she had brought upstairs,
lying on the heap, the leaves already fading, she felt depressed and
miserable. The breakfast was dull, and for the most part all three
were silent. Mrs Hopgood and Clara went away to begin their housework,
leaving Madge alone.</p>
<p>‘Madge,’ cried Mrs Hopgood, ‘what am I to do with
this thing? It is of no use to preserve it; it is dead and covered
with dirt.’</p>
<p>‘Throw it down here.’</p>
<p>She took it and rammed it into the fire. At that moment she
saw Frank pass. He was evidently about to knock, but she ran to
the door and opened it.</p>
<p>‘I did not wish to keep you waiting in the wet.’</p>
<p>‘I am just off but I could not help calling to see how you
are. What! burning your laurels, the testimony to your triumph?’</p>
<p>‘Triumph! rather transitory; finishes in smoke,’ and
she pushed two or three of the unburnt leaves amongst the ashes and
covered them over. He stooped down, picked up a leaf, smoothed
it between his fingers, and then raised his eyes. They met hers
at that instant, as she lifted them and looked in his face. They
were near one another, and his hands strayed towards hers till they
touched. She did not withdraw; he clasped the hand, she not resisting;
in another moment his arms were round her, his face was on hers, and
he was swept into self-forgetfulness. Suddenly the horn of the
coach about to start awoke him, and he murmured the line from one of
his speeches of the night before -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘But by immortal Providence she’s mine.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>She released herself a trifle, held her head back as if she desired
to survey him apart from her, so that the ecstasy of union might be
renewed, and then fell on his neck.</p>
<p>The horn once more sounded, she let him out silently, and he was
off. Mrs Hopgood and Clara presently came downstairs.</p>
<p>‘Mr Palmer came in to bid you good-bye, but he heard the coach
and was obliged to rush away.’</p>
<p>‘What a pity,’ said Mrs Hopgood, ‘that you did
not call us.’</p>
<p>‘I thought he would be able to stay longer.’</p>
<p>The lines which followed Frank’s quotation came into her head,
-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘Sweet lord, you play me false.’<br /> ‘No,
my dearest love,<br /> I would not for the world.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘An omen,’ she said to herself; ‘“he would
not for the world.”’</p>
<p>She was in the best of spirits all day long. When the housework
was over and they were quiet together, she said, -</p>
<p>‘Now, my dear mother and sister, I want to know how the performance
pleased you.’</p>
<p>‘It was as good as it could be,’ replied her mother,
‘but I cannot think why all plays should turn upon lovemaking.
I wonder whether the time will ever come when we shall care for a play
in which there is no courtship.’</p>
<p>‘What a horrible heresy, mother,’ said Madge.</p>
<p>‘It may be so; it may be that I am growing old, but it seems
astonishing to me sometimes that the world does not grow a little weary
of endless variations on the same theme.’</p>
<p>‘Never,’ said Madge, ‘as long as it does not weary
of the thing itself, and it is not likely to do that. Fancy a
young man and a young woman stopping short and exclaiming, “This
is just what every son of Adam and daughter of Eve has gone through
before; why should we proceed?” Besides, it is the one emotion
common to the whole world; we can all comprehend it. Once more,
it reveals character. In <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Othello</i>, for
example, what is interesting is not solely the bare love. The
natures of Hamlet and Othello are brought to light through it as they
would not have been through any other stimulus. I am sure that
no ordinary woman ever shows what she really is, except when she is
in love. Can you tell what she is from what she calls her religion,
or from her friends, or even from her husband?’</p>
<p>‘Would it not be equally just to say women are more alike in
love than in anything else? Mind, I do not say alike, but more
alike. Is it not the passion which levels us all?’</p>
<p>‘Oh, mother, mother! did one ever hear such dreadful blasphemy?
That the loves, for example, of two such cultivated, exquisite creatures
as Clara and myself would be nothing different from those of the barmaids
next door?’</p>
<p>‘Well, at anyrate, I do not want to see <i>my</i> children
in love to understand what they are - to me at least.’</p>
<p>‘Then, if you comprehend us so completely - and let us have
no more philosophy - just tell me, should I make a good actress?
Oh! to be able to sway a thousand human beings into tears or laughter!
It must be divine.’</p>
<p>‘No, I do not think you would,’ replied Clara.</p>
<p>‘Why not, miss?<i> Your</i> opinion, mind, was not asked.
Did I not act to perfection last night?’</p>
<p>‘Yes.’</p>
<p>‘Then why are you so decisive?’</p>
<p>‘Try a different part some day. I may be mistaken.’</p>
<p>‘You are very oracular.’</p>
<p>She turned to the piano, played a few chords, closed the instrument,
swung herself round on the music stool, and said she should go for a
walk.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It was Mr Palmer’s design to send Frank abroad as soon as he
understood the home trade. It was thought it would be an advantage
to him to learn something of foreign manufacturing processes.
Frank had gladly agreed to go, but he was now rather in the mood for
delay. Mr Palmer conjectured a reason for it, and the conjecture
was confirmed when, after two or three more visits to Fenmarket, perfectly
causeless, so far as business was concerned, Frank asked for the paternal
sanction to his engagement with Madge. Consent was willingly given,
for Mr Palmer knew the family well; letters passed between him and Mrs
Hopgood, and it was arranged that Frank’s visit to Germany should
be postponed till the summer. He was now frequently at Fenmarket
as Madge’s accepted suitor, and, as the spring advanced, their
evenings were mostly spent by themselves out of doors. One afternoon
they went for a long walk, and on their return they rested by a stile.
Those were the days when Tennyson was beginning to stir the hearts of
the young people in England, and the two little green volumes had just
become a treasure in the Hopgood household. Mr Palmer, senior,
knew them well, and Frank, hearing his father speak so enthusiastically
about them, thought Madge would like them, and had presented them to
her. He had heard one or two read aloud at home, and had looked
at one or two himself, but had gone no further. Madge, her mother,
and her sister had read and re-read them.</p>
<p>‘Oh,’ said Madge, ‘for that Vale in Ida.
Here in these fens how I long for something that is not level!
Oh, for the roar of -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine<br />In
cataract after cataract to the sea.”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Go on with it, Frank.’</p>
<p>‘I cannot.’</p>
<p>‘But you know <i>Œnone</i>?’</p>
<p>‘I cannot say I do. I began it - ’</p>
<p>‘Frank, how could you begin it and lay it down unfinished?
Besides, those lines are some of the first; you <i>must</i> remember
-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“Behind the valley topmost Gargarus<br />Stands up and takes
the morning.”’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘No, I do not recollect, but I will learn them; learn them
for your sake.’</p>
<p>‘I do not want you to learn them for my sake.’</p>
<p>‘But I shall.’</p>
<p>She had taken off her hat and his hand strayed to her neck.
Her head fell on his shoulder and she had forgotten his ignorance of
<i>Œnone</i>. Presently she awoke from her delicious trance
and they moved homewards in silence. Frank was a little uneasy.</p>
<p>‘I do greatly admire Tennyson,’ he said.</p>
<p>‘What do you admire? You have hardly looked at him.’</p>
<p>‘I saw a very good review of him. I will look that review
up, by the way, before I come down again. Mr Maurice was talking
about it.’</p>
<p>Madge had a desire to say something, but she did not know what to
say, a burden lay upon her chest. It was that weight which presses
there when we are alone with those with whom we are not strangers, but
with whom we are not completely at home, and she actually found herself
impatient and half-desirous of solitude. This must be criminal
or disease, she thought to herself, and she forcibly recalled Frank’s
virtues. She was so far successful that when they parted and he
kissed her, she was more than usually caressing, and her ardent embrace,
at least for the moment, relieved that unpleasant sensation in the region
of the heart. When he had gone she reasoned with herself.
What a miserable counterfeit of love, she argued, is mere intellectual
sympathy, a sympathy based on books! What did Miranda know about
Ferdinand’s ‘views’ on this or that subject?
Love is something independent of ‘views.’ It is an
attraction which has always been held to be inexplicable, but whatever
it may be it is not ‘views.’ She was becoming a little
weary, she thought, of what was called ‘culture.’
These creatures whom we know through Shakespeare and Goethe are ghostly.
What have we to do with them? It is idle work to read or even
to talk fine things about them. It ends in nothing. What
we really have to go through and that which goes through it are interesting,
but not circumstances and character impossible to us. When Frank
spoke of his business, which he understood, he was wise, and some observations
which he made the other day, on the management of his workpeople, would
have been thought original if they had been printed. The true
artist knows that his hero must be a character shaping events and shaped
by them, and not a babbler about literature. Frank, also, was
so susceptible. He liked to hear her read to him, and her enthusiasm
would soon be his. Moreover, how gifted he was, unconsciously,
with all that makes a man admirable, with courage, with perfect unselfishness!
How handsome he was, and then his passion for her! She had read
something of passion, but she never knew till now what the white intensity
of its flame in a man could be. She was committed, too, happily
committed; it was an engagement.</p>
<p>Thus, whenever doubt obtruded itself, she poured a self-raised tide
over it and concealed it. Alas! it could not be washed away; it
was a little sharp rock based beneath the ocean’s depths, and
when the water ran low its dark point reappeared. She was more
successful, however, than many women would have been, for, although
her interest in ideas was deep, there was fire in her blood, and Frank’s
arm around her made the world well nigh disappear; her surrender was
entire, and if Sinai had thundered in her ears she would not have heard.
She was destitute of that power, which her sister possessed, of surveying
herself from a distance. On the contrary, her emotion enveloped
her, and the safeguard of reflection on it was impossible to her.</p>
<p>As to Frank, no doubt ever approached him. He was intoxicated,
and beside himself. He had been brought up in a clean household,
knowing nothing of the vice by which so many young men are overcome,
and woman hitherto had been a mystery to him. Suddenly he found
himself the possessor of a beautiful creature, whose lips it was lawful
to touch and whose heartbeats he could feel as he pressed her to his
breast. It was permitted him to be alone with her, to sit on the
floor and rest his head on her knees, and he had ventured to capture
one of her slippers and carry it off to London, where he kept it locked
up amongst his treasures. If he had been drawn over Fenmarket
sluice in a winter flood he would not have been more incapable of resistance.</p>
<p>Every now and then Clara thought she discerned in Madge that she
was not entirely content, but the cloud-shadows swept past so rapidly
and were followed by such dazzling sunshine that she was perplexed and
hoped that her sister’s occasional moodiness might be due to parting
and absence, or the anticipation of them. She never ventured to
say anything about Frank to Madge, for there was something in her which
forbade all approach from that side. Once when he had shown his
ignorance of what was so familiar to the Hopgoods, and Clara had expected
some sign of dissatisfaction from her sister, she appeared ostentatiously
to champion him against anticipated criticism. Clara interpreted
the warning and was silent, but, after she had left the room with her
mother in order that the lovers might be alone, she went upstairs and
wept many tears. Ah! it is a sad experience when the nearest and
dearest suspects that we are aware of secret disapproval, knows that
it is justifiable, throws up a rampart and becomes defensively belligerent.
From that moment all confidence is at an end. Without a word,
perhaps, the love and friendship of years disappear, and in the place
of two human beings transparent to each other, there are two who are
opaque and indifferent. Bitter, bitter! If the cause of
separation were definite disagreement upon conduct or belief, we could
pluck up courage, approach and come to an understanding, but it is impossible
to bring to speech anything which is so close to the heart, and there
is, therefore, nothing left for us but to submit and be dumb.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It was now far into June, and Madge and Frank extended their walks
and returned later. He had come down to spend his last Sunday
with the Hopgoods before starting with his father for Germany, and on
the Monday they were to leave London.</p>
<p>Wordsworth was one of the divinities at Stoke Newington, and just
before Frank visited Fenmarket that week, he had heard the <i>Intimations
of Immortality</i> read with great fervour. Thinking that Madge
would be pleased with him if she found that he knew something about
that famous Ode, and being really smitten with some of the passages
in it, he learnt it, and just as they were about to turn homewards one
sultry evening he suddenly began to repeat it, and declaimed it to the
end with much rhetorical power.</p>
<p>‘Bravo!’ said Madge, ‘but, of all Wordsworth’s
poems, that is the one for which I believe I care the least.’</p>
<p>Frank’s countenance fell.</p>
<p>‘Oh, me! I thought it was just what would suit you.’</p>
<p>‘No, not particularly. There are some noble lines in
it; for example -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“And custom lie upon thee with a weight,<br />Heavy as frost,
and deep almost as life!”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>But the very title - <i>Intimations of Immortality from Recollections
of Early Childhood</i> - is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which
is in everybody’s mouth -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>and still worse the vision of “that immortal sea,” and
of the children who “sport upon the shore,” they convey
nothing whatever to me. I find though they are much admired by
the clergy of the better sort, and by certain religiously-disposed people,
to whom thinking is distasteful or impossible. Because they cannot
definitely believe, they fling themselves with all the more fervour
upon these cloudy Wordsworthian phrases, and imagine they see something
solid in the coloured fog.’</p>
<p>It was now growing dark and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall,
but in a minute or two they ceased. Frank, contrary to his usual
wont, was silent. There was something undiscovered in Madge, a
region which he had not visited and perhaps could not enter. She
discerned in an instant what she had done, and in an instant repented.
He had taken so much pains with a long piece of poetry for her sake:
was not that better than agreement in a set of propositions? Scores
of persons might think as she thought about the ode, who would not spend
a moment in doing anything to gratify her. It was delightful also
to reflect that Frank imagined she would sympathise with anything written
in that temper. She recalled what she herself had said when somebody
gave Clara a copy in ‘Parian’ of a Greek statue, a thing
coarse in outline and vulgar. Clara was about to put it in a cupboard
in the attic, but Madge had pleaded so pathetically that the donor had
in a measure divined what her sister loved, and had done her best, although
she had made a mistake, that finally the statue was placed on the bedroom
mantelpiece. Madge’s heart overflowed, and Frank had never
attracted her so powerfully as at that moment. She took his hand
softly in hers.</p>
<p>‘Frank,’ she murmured, as she bent her head towards him,
‘it is really a lovely poem.’</p>
<p>Suddenly there was a flash of forked lightning at some distance,
followed in a few seconds by a roll of thunder increasing in intensity
until the last reverberation seemed to shake the ground. They
took refuge in a little barn and sat down. Madge, who was timid
and excited in a thunderstorm, closed her eyes to shield herself from
the glare.</p>
<p>The tumult in the heavens lasted for nearly two hours and, when it
was over, Madge and Frank walked homewards without speaking a word for
a good part of the way.</p>
<p>‘I cannot, cannot go to-morrow,’ he suddenly cried, as
they neared the town.</p>
<p>‘You <i>shall</i> go,’ she replied calmly.</p>
<p>‘But, Madge, think of me in Germany, think what my dreams and
thoughts will be - you here - hundreds of miles between us.’</p>
<p>She had never seen him so shaken with terror.</p>
<p>‘You <i>shall</i> go; not another word.’</p>
<p>‘I must say something - what can I say? My God, my God,
have mercy on me!’</p>
<p>‘Mercy! mercy!’ she repeated, half unconsciously, and
then rousing herself, exclaimed, ‘You shall not say it; I will
not hear; now, good-bye.’</p>
<p>They had come to the door; he went inside; she took his face between
her hands, left one kiss on his forehead, led him back to the doorway
and he heard the bolts drawn. When he recovered himself he went
to the ‘Crown and Sceptre’ and tried to write a letter to
her, but the words looked hateful, horrible on the paper, and they were
not the words he wanted. He dared not go near the house the next
morning, but as he passed it on the coach he looked at the windows.
Nobody was to be seen, and that night he left England.</p>
<p>‘Did you hear,’ said Clara to her mother at breakfast,
‘that the lightning struck one of the elms in the avenue at Mrs
Martin’s yesterday evening and splintered it to the ground?’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>In a few days Madge received the following letter:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘FRANKFORT, O. M.,<br />HÔTEL WAIDENBUSCH.</p>
<p>‘My dearest Madge, - I do not know how to write to you.
I have begun a dozen letters but I cannot bring myself to speak of what
lies before me, hiding the whole world from me. Forgiveness! how
is any forgiveness possible? But Madge, my dearest Madge, remember
that my love is intenser than ever. What has happened has bound
you closer to me. I <i>implore</i> you to let me come back.
I will find a thousand excuses for returning, and we will marry.
We had vowed marriage to each other and why should not our vows be fulfilled?
Marriage, marriage <i>at once</i>. You will not, you <i>cannot</i>,
no, you <i>cannot</i>, you must see you cannot refuse. My father
wishes to make this town his headquarters for ten days. Write
by return for mercy’s sake. - Your ever devoted</p>
<p>‘FRANK.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The reply came only a day late.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘My dear Frank, - Forgiveness! Who is to be forgiven?
Not you. You believed you loved me, but I doubted my love, and
I know now that no true love for you exists. We must part, and
part forever. Whatever wrong may have been done, marriage to avoid
disgrace would be a wrong to both of us infinitely greater. I
owe you an expiation; your release is all I can offer, and it is insufficient.
I can only plead that I was deaf and blind. By some miracle, I
cannot tell how, my ears and eyes are opened, and I hear and see.
It is not the first time in my life that the truth has been revealed
to me suddenly, supernaturally, I may say, as if in a vision, and I
know the revelation is authentic. There must be no wavering, no
half-measures, and I absolutely forbid another letter from you.
If one arrives I must, for the sake of my own peace and resolution,
refuse to read it. You have simply to announce to your father
that the engagement is at an end, and give no reasons. - Your faithful
friend</p>
<p>‘MADGE HOPGOOD.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Another letter did come, but Madge was true to her word, and it was
returned unopened.</p>
<p>For a long time Frank was almost incapable of reflection. He
dwelt on an event which might happen, but which he dared not name; and
if it should happen! Pictures of his father, his home his father’s
friends, Fenmarket, the Hopgood household, passed before him with such
wild rapidity and intermingled complexity that it seemed as if the reins
had dropped out of his hands and he was being hurried away to madness.</p>
<p>He resisted with all his might this dreadful sweep of the imagination,
tried to bring himself back into sanity and to devise schemes by which,
although he was prohibited from writing to Madge, he might obtain news
of her. Her injunction might not be final. There was but
one hope for him, one possibility of extrication, one necessity - their
marriage. It <i>must</i> be. He dared not think of what
might be the consequences if they did not marry.</p>
<p>Hitherto Madge had given no explanation to her mother or sister of
the rupture, but one morning - nearly two months had now passed - Clara
did not appear at breakfast.</p>
<p>‘Clara is not here,’ said Mrs Hopgood; ‘she was
very tired last night, perhaps it is better not to disturb her.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, no! please let her alone. I will see if she still
sleeps.’</p>
<p>Madge went upstairs, opened her sister’s door noiselessly,
saw that she was not awake, and returned. When breakfast was over
she rose, and after walking up and down the room once or twice, seated
herself in the armchair by her mother’s side. Her mother
drew herself a little nearer, and took Madge’s hand gently in
her own.</p>
<p>‘Madge, my child, have you nothing to say to your mother?’</p>
<p>‘Nothing.’</p>
<p>‘Cannot you tell me why Frank and you have parted? Do
you not think I ought to know something about such an event in the life
of one so close to me?’</p>
<p>‘I broke off the engagement: we were not suited to one another.’</p>
<p>‘I thought as much; I honour you; a thousand times better that
you should separate now than find out your mistake afterwards when it
is irrevocable. Thank God, He has given you such courage!
But you must have suffered - I know you must;’ and she tenderly
kissed her daughter.</p>
<p>‘Oh, mother! mother!’ cried Madge, ‘what is the
worst - at least to - you - the worst that can happen to a woman?’</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood did not speak; something presented itself which she refused
to recognise, but she shuddered. Before she could recover herself
Madge broke out again, -</p>
<p>‘It has happened to me; mother, your daughter has wrecked your
peace for ever!’</p>
<p>‘And he has abandoned you?’</p>
<p>‘No, no; I told you it was I who left him.’</p>
<p>It was Mrs Hopgood’s custom, when any evil news was suddenly
communicated to her, to withdraw at once if possible to her own room.
She detached herself from Madge, rose, and, without a word, went upstairs
and locked her door. The struggle was terrible. So much
thought, so much care, such an education, such noble qualities, and
they had not accomplished what ordinary ignorant Fenmarket mothers and
daughters were able to achieve! This fine life, then, was a failure,
and a perfect example of literary and artistic training had gone the
way of the common wenches whose affiliation cases figured in the county
newspaper. She was shaken and bewildered. She was neither
orthodox nor secular. She was too strong to be afraid that what
she disbelieved could be true, and yet a fatal weakness had been disclosed
in what had been set up as its substitute. She could not treat
her child as a sinner who was to be tortured into something like madness
by immitigable punishment, but, on the other hand, she felt that this
sorrow was unlike other sorrows and that it could never be healed.
For some time she was powerless, blown this way and that way by contradictory
storms, and unable to determine herself to any point whatever.
She was not, however, new to the tempest. She had lived and had
survived when she thought she must have gone down. She had learned
the wisdom which the passage through desperate straits can bring.
At last she prayed and in a few minutes a message was whispered to her.
She went into the breakfast-room and seated herself again by Madge.
Neither uttered a word, but Madge fell down before her, and, with a
great cry, buried her face in her mother’s lap. She remained
kneeling for some time waiting for a rebuke, but none came. Presently
she felt smoothing hands on her head and the soft impress of lips.
So was she judged.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It was settled that they should leave Fenmarket. Their departure
caused but little surprise. They had scarcely any friends, and
it was always conjectured that people so peculiar would ultimately find
their way to London. They were particularly desirous to conceal
their movements, and therefore determined to warehouse their furniture
in town, to take furnished apartments there for three months, and then
to move elsewhere. Any letters which might arrive at Fenmarket
for them during these three months would be sent to them at their new
address; nothing probably would come afterwards, and as nobody in Fenmarket
would care to take any trouble about them, their trace would become
obliterated. They found some rooms near Myddelton Square, Pentonville,
not a particularly cheerful place, but they wished to avoid a more distant
suburb, and Pentonville was cheap. Fortunately for them they had
no difficulty whatever in getting rid of the Fenmarket house for the
remainder of their term.</p>
<p>For a little while London diverted them after a fashion, but the
absence of household cares told upon them. They had nothing to
do but to read and to take dismal walks through Islington and Barnsbury,
and the gloom of the outlook thickened as the days became shorter and
the smoke began to darken the air. Madge was naturally more oppressed
than the others, not only by reason of her temperament, but because
she was the author of the trouble which had befallen them. Her
mother and Clara did everything to sustain and to cheer her. They
possessed the rare virtue of continuous tenderness. The love,
which with many is an inspiration, was with them their own selves, from
which they could not be separated; a harsh word could not therefore
escape from them. It was as impossible as that there should be
any failure in the pressure with which the rocks press towards the earth’s
centre. Madge at times was very far gone in melancholy.
How different this thing looked when it was close at hand; when she
personally was to be the victim! She had read about it in history,
the surface of which it seemed scarcely to ripple; it had been turned
to music in some of her favourite poems and had lent a charm to innumerable
mythologies, but the actual fact was nothing like the poetry or mythology,
and threatened to ruin her own history altogether. Nor would it
be her own history solely, but more or less that of her mother and sister.</p>
<p>Had she believed in the common creed, her attention would have been
concentrated on the salvation of her own soul; she would have found
her Redeemer and would have been comparatively at peace; she would have
acknowledged herself convicted of infinite sin, and hell would have
been opened before her, but above the sin and the hell she would have
seen the distinct image of the Mediator abolishing both. Popular
theology makes personal salvation of such immense importance that, in
comparison therewith, we lose sight of the consequences to others of
our misdeeds. The sense of cruel injustice to those who loved
her remained with Madge perpetually.</p>
<p>To obtain relief she often went out of London for the day; sometimes
her mother and sister went with her; sometimes she insisted on going
alone. One autumn morning, she found herself at Letherhead, the
longest trip she had undertaken, for there were scarcely any railways
then. She wandered about till she discovered a footpath which
took her to a mill-pond, which spread itself out into a little lake.
It was fed by springs which burst up through the ground. She watched
at one particular point, and saw the water boil up with such force that
it cleared a space of a dozen yards in diameter from every weed, and
formed a transparent pool just tinted with that pale azure which is
peculiar to the living fountains which break out from the bottom of
the chalk. She was fascinated for a moment by the spectacle, and
reflected upon it, but she passed on. In about three-quarters
of an hour she found herself near a church, larger than an ordinary
village church, and, as she was tired, and the gate of the church porch
was open, she entered and sat down. The sun streamed in upon her,
and some sheep which had strayed into the churchyard from the adjoining
open field came almost close to her, unalarmed, and looked in her face.
The quiet was complete, and the air so still, that a yellow leaf dropping
here and there from the churchyard elms - just beginning to turn - fell
quiveringly in a straight path to the earth. Sick at heart and
despairing, she could not help being touched, and she thought to herself
how strange the world is - so transcendent both in glory and horror;
a world capable of such scenes as those before her, and a world in which
such suffering as hers could be; a world infinite both ways. The
porch gate was open because the organist was about to practise, and
in another instant she was listening to the <i>Kyrie</i> from Beethoven’s
Mass in C. She knew it; Frank had tried to give her some notion
of it on the piano, and since she had been in London she had heard it
at St Mary’s, Moorfields. She broke down and wept, but there
was something new in her sorrow, and it seemed as if a certain Pity
overshadowed her.</p>
<p>She had barely recovered herself when she saw a woman, apparently
about fifty, coming towards her with a wicker basket on her arm.
She sat down beside Madge, put her basket on the ground, and wiped her
face with her apron.</p>
<p>‘Marnin’ miss! its rayther hot walkin’, isn’t
it? I’ve come all the way from Darkin, and I’m goin’
to Great Oakhurst. That’s a longish step there and back
again; not that this is the nearest way, but I don’t like climbing
them hills, and then when I get to Letherhead I shall have a lift in
a cart.’</p>
<p>Madge felt bound to say something as the sunburnt face looked kind
and motherly.</p>
<p>‘I suppose you live at Great Oakhurst?’</p>
<p>‘Yes. I do: my husband, God bless him! he was a kind
of foreman at The Towers, and when he died I was left alone and didn’t
know what to be at, as both my daughters were out and one married; so
I took the general shop at Great Oakhurst, as Longwood used to have,
but it don’t pay for I ain’t used to it, and the house is
too big for me, and there isn’t nobody proper to mind it when
I goes over to Darkin for anything.’</p>
<p>‘Are you going to leave?’</p>
<p>‘Well, I don’t quite know yet, miss, but I thinks I shall
live with my daughter in London. She’s married a cabinetmaker
in Great Ormond Street: they let lodgings, too. Maybe you know
that part?’</p>
<p>‘No, I do not.’</p>
<p>‘You don’t live in London, then?’</p>
<p>‘Yes, I do. I came from London this morning.’</p>
<p>‘The Lord have mercy on us, did you though! I suppose,
then, you’re a-visitin’ here. I know most of the folk
hereabouts.’</p>
<p>‘No: I am going back this afternoon.’</p>
<p>Her interrogator was puzzled and her curiosity stimulated.
Presently she looked in Madge’s face.</p>
<p>‘Ah! my poor dear, you’ll excuse me, I don’t mean
to be forward, but I see you’ve been a-cryin’: there’s
somebody buried here.’</p>
<p>‘No.’</p>
<p>That was all she could say. The walk from Letherhead, and the
excitement had been too much for her and she fainted. Mrs Caffyn,
for that was her name, was used to fainting fits. She was often
‘a bit faint’ herself, and she instantly loosened Madge’s
gown, brought out some smelling-salts and also a little bottle of brandy
and water. Something suddenly struck her. She took up Madge’s
hand: there was no wedding ring on it.</p>
<p>Presently her patient recovered herself.</p>
<p>‘Look you now, my dear; you aren’t noways fit to go back
to London to-day. If you was my child you shouldn’t do it
for all the gold in the Indies, no, nor you sha’n’t now.
I shouldn’t have a wink of sleep this night if I let you go, and
if anything were to happen to you it would be me as ’ud have to
answer for it.’</p>
<p>‘But I must go; my mother and sister will not know what has
become of me.’</p>
<p>‘You leave that to me; I tell you again as you can’t
go. I’ve been a mother myself, and I haven’t had children
for nothing. I was just a-goin’ to send a little parcel
up to my daughter by the coach, and her husband’s a-goin’
to meet it. She’d left something behind last week when she
was with me, and I thought I’d get a bit of fresh butter here
for her and put along with it. They make better butter in the
farm in the bottom there, than they do at Great Oakhurst. A note
inside now will get to your mother all right; you have a bit of something
to eat and drink here, and you’ll be able to walk along of me
just into Letherhead, and then you can ride to Great Oakhurst; it’s
only about two miles, and you can stay there all night.’</p>
<p>Madge was greatly touched; she took Mrs Caffyn’s hands in hers,
pressed them both and consented. She was very weary, and the stamp
on Mrs Caffyn’s countenance was indubitable; it was evidently
no forgery, but of royal mintage. They walked slowly to Letherhead,
and there they found the carrier’s cart, which took them to Great
Oakhurst.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Mrs Caffyn’s house was a roomy old cottage near the church,
with a bow-window in which were displayed bottles of ‘suckers,’
and of Day & Martin’s blacking, cotton stuffs, a bag of nuts
and some mugs, cups and saucers. Inside were salt butter, washing-blue,
drapery, treacle, starch, tea, tobacco and snuff, cheese, matches, bacon,
and a few drugs, such as black draught, magnesia, pills, sulphur, dill-water,
Dalby’s Carminative, and steel-drops. There was also a small
stock of writing-paper, string and tin ware. A boy was behind
the counter. When Mrs Caffyn was out he always asked the customers
who desired any article, the sale of which was in any degree an art,
to call again when she returned. He went as far as those things
which were put up in packets, such as what were called ‘grits’
for making gruel, and he was also authorised to venture on pennyworths
of liquorice and peppermints, but the sale of half-a-dozen yards of
cotton print was as much above him as the negotiation of a treaty of
peace would be to a messenger in the Foreign Office. In fact,
nobody, excepting children, went into the shop when Mrs Caffyn was not
to be seen there, and, if she had to go to Dorking or Letherhead on
business, she always chose the middle of the day, when the folk were
busy at their homes or in the fields. Poor woman! she was much
tried. Half the people who dealt with her were in her debt, but
she could not press them for her money. During winter-time they
were discharged by the score from their farms, but as they were not
sufficiently philosophic, or sufficiently considerate for their fellows
to hang or drown themselves, they were obliged to consume food, and
to wear clothes, for which they tried to pay by instalments during spring,
summer and autumn. Mrs Caffyn managed to make both ends meet by
the help of two or three pigs, by great economy, and by letting some
of her superfluous rooms. Great Oakhurst was not a show place
nor a Spa, but the Letherhead doctor had once recommended her to a physician
in London, who occasionally sent her a patient who wanted nothing but
rest and fresh air. She also, during the shooting-season, was
often asked to find a bedroom for visitors to The Towers.</p>
<p>She might have done better had she been on thoroughly good terms
with the parson. She attended church on Sunday morning with tolerable
regularity. She never went inside a dissenting chapel, and was
not heretical on any definite theological point, but the rector and
she were not friends. She had lived in Surrey ever since she was
a child, but she was not Surrey born. Both her father and mother
came from the north country, and migrated southwards when she was very
young. They were better educated than the southerners amongst
whom they came; and although their daughter had no schooling beyond
what was obtainable in a Surrey village of that time, she was distinguished
by a certain superiority which she had inherited or acquired from her
parents. She was never subservient to the rector after the fashion
of her neighbours; she never curtsied to him, and if he passed and nodded
she said ‘Marnin’, sir,’ in just the same tone as
that in which she said it to the smallest of the Great Oakhurst farmers.
Her church-going was an official duty incumbent upon her as the proprietor
of the only shop in the parish. She had nothing to do with church
matters except on Sunday, and she even went so far as to neglect to
send for the rector when one of her children lay dying. She was
attacked for the omission, but she defended herself.</p>
<p>‘What was the use when the poor dear was only seven year old?
What call was there for him to come to a blessed innocent like that?
I did tell him to look in when my husband was took, for I know as before
we were married there was something atween him and that gal Sanders.
He never would own up to me about it, and I thought as he might to a
clergyman, and, if he did, it would ease his mind and make it a bit
better for him afterwards; but, Lord! it warn’t no use, for he
went off and we didn’t so much as hear her name, not even when
he was a-wandering. I says to myself when the parson left, “What’s
the good of having you?”’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn was a Christian, but she was a disciple of St James rather
than of St Paul. She believed, of course, the doctrines of the
Catechism, in the sense that she denied none, and would have assented
to all if she had been questioned thereon; but her belief that ‘faith,
if it hath not works, is dead, being alone,’ was something very
vivid and very practical.</p>
<p>Her estimate, too, of the relative values of the virtues and of the
relative sinfulness of sins was original, and the rector therefore told
all his parishioners that she was little better than a heathen.
The common failings in that part of the country amongst the poor were
Saturday-night drunkenness and looseness in the relations between the
young men and young women. Mrs Caffyn’s indignation never
rose to the correct boiling point against these crimes. The rector
once ventured to say, as the case was next door to her, -</p>
<p>‘It is very sad, is it not, Mrs Caffyn, that Polesden should
be so addicted to drink. I hope he did not disturb you last Saturday
night. I have given the constable directions to look after the
street more closely on Saturday evening, and if Polesden again offends
he must be taken up.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn was behind her own counter. She had just served
a customer with two ounces of Dutch cheese, and she sat down on her
stool. Being rather a heavy woman she always sat down when she
was not busy, and she never rose merely to talk.</p>
<p>‘Yes, it is sad, sir, and Polesden isn’t no particular
friend of mine, but I tell you what’s sad too, sir, and that’s
the way them people are mucked up in that cottage. Why, their
living room opens straight on the road, and the wind comes in fit to
blow your head off, and when he goes home o’ nights, there’s
them children a-squalling, and he can’t bide there and do nothing.’</p>
<p>‘I am afraid, though, Mrs Caffyn, there must be something radically
wrong with that family. I suppose you know all about the eldest
daughter?’</p>
<p>‘Yes, sir, I <i>have</i> heard it: it wouldn’t be Great
Oakhurst if I hadn’t, but p’r’aps, sir, you’ve
never been upstairs in that house, and yet a house it isn’t.
There’s just two sleeping-rooms, that’s all; it’s
shameful, it isn’t decent. Well, that gal, she goes away
to service. Maybe, sir, them premises at the farm are also unbeknown
to you. In the back kitchen there’s a broadish sort of shelf
as Jim climbs into o’ nights, and it has a rail round it to keep
you from a-falling out, and there’s a ladder as they draws up
in the day as goes straight up from that kitchen to the gal’s
bedroom door. It’s downright disgraceful, and I don’t
believe the Lord A’mighty would be marciful to neither of <i>us</i>
if we was tried like that.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn bethought herself of the ‘us’ and was afraid
that even she had gone a little too far; ‘leastways, speaking
for myself, sir,’ she added.</p>
<p>The rector turned rather red, and repented his attempt to enlist
Mrs Caffyn.</p>
<p>‘If the temptations are so great, Mrs Caffyn, that is all the
more reason why those who are liable to them should seek the means which
are provided in order that they may be overcome. I believe the
Polesdens are very lax attendants at church, and I don’t think
they ever communicated.’</p>
<p>Mrs Polesden at that moment came in for an ounce of tea, and as Mrs
Caffyn rose to weigh it, the rector departed with a stiff ‘good-morning,’
made to do duty for both women.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Mrs Caffyn persuaded Madge to go to bed at once, after giving her
‘something to comfort her.’ In the morning her kind
hostess came to her bedside.</p>
<p>‘You’ve got a mother, haven’t you - leastways,
I know you have, because you wrote to her.’</p>
<p>‘Yes.’</p>
<p>‘Well, and you lives with her and she looks after you?’</p>
<p>‘Yes.’</p>
<p>‘And she’s fond of you, maybe?’</p>
<p>‘Oh, yes.’</p>
<p>‘That’s a marcy; well then, my dear, you shall go back
in the cart to Letherhead, and you’ll catch the Darkin coach to
London.’</p>
<p>‘You have been very good to me; what have I to pay you?’</p>
<p>‘Pay? Nothing! why, if I was to let you pay, it would
just look as if I’d trapped you here to get something out of you.
Pay! no, not a penny.’</p>
<p>‘I can afford very well to pay, but if it vexes you I will
not offer anything. I don’t know how to thank you enough.’</p>
<p>Madge took Mrs Caffyn’s hand in hers and pressed it firmly.</p>
<p>‘Besides, my dear,’ said Mrs Caffyn, smoothing the sheets
a little, ‘you won’t mind my saying it, I expex you are
in trouble. There’s something on your mind, and I believe
as I knows pretty well what it is.’</p>
<p>Madge turned round in the bed so as no longer to face the light;
Mrs Caffyn sat between her and the window.</p>
<p>‘Look you here, my dear; don’t you suppose I meant to
say anything to hurt you. The moment I looked on you I was drawed
to you like; I couldn’t help it. I see’d what was
the matter, but I was all the more drawed, and I just wanted you to
know as it makes no difference. That’s like me; sometimes
I’m drawed that way and sometimes t’other way, and it’s
never no use for me to try to go against it. I ain’t a-going
to say anything more to you; God-A’mighty, He’s above us
all; but p’r’aps you may be comm’ this way again some
day, and then you’ll look in.’</p>
<p>Madge turned again to the light, and again caught Mrs Caffyn’s
hand, but was silent.</p>
<p>The next morning, after Madge’s return, Mrs Cork, the landlady,
presented herself at the sitting-room door and ‘wished to speak
with Mrs Hopgood for a minute.’</p>
<p>‘Come in, Mrs Cork.’</p>
<p>‘Thank you, ma’am, but I prefer as you should come downstairs.’</p>
<p>Mrs Cork was about forty, a widow with no children. She had
a face of which it was impossible to recollect, when it had been seen
even a dozen times, any feature except the eyes, which were steel-blue,
a little bluer than the faceted head of the steel poker in her parlour,
but just as hard. She lived in the basement with a maid, much
like herself but a little more human. Although the front underground
room was furnished Mrs Cork never used it, except on the rarest occasions,
and a kind of apron of coloured paper hung over the fireplace nearly
all the year. She was a woman of what she called regular habits.
No lodger was ever permitted to transgress her rules, or to have meals
ten minutes before or ten minutes after the appointed time. She
had undoubtedly been married, but who Cork could have been was a marvel.
Why he died, and why there were never any children were no marvels.
At two o’clock her grate was screwed up to the narrowest possible
dimensions, and the ashes, potato peelings, tea leaves and cabbage stalks
were thrown on the poor, struggling coals. No meat, by the way,
was ever roasted - it was considered wasteful - everything was baked
or boiled. After half-past four not a bit of anything that was
not cold was allowed till the next morning, and, indeed, from the first
of April to the thirty-first of October the fire was raked out the moment
tea was over. Mrs Hopgood one night was not very well and Clara
wished to give her mother something warm. She rang the bell and
asked for hot water. Maria came up and disappeared without a word
after receiving the message. Presently she returned.</p>
<p>‘Mrs Cork, miss, wishes me to tell you as it was never understood
as ’ot water would be required after tea, and she hasn’t
got any.’</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood had a fire, although it was not yet the thirty-first
of October, for it was very damp and raw. She had with much difficulty
induced Mrs Cork to concede this favour (which probably would not have
been granted if the coals had not yielded a profit of threepence a scuttleful),
and Clara, therefore, asked if she could not have the kettle upstairs.
Again Maria disappeared and returned.</p>
<p>‘Mrs Cork says, miss, as it’s very ill-convenient as
the kettle is cleaned up agin to-morrow, and if you can do without it
she will be obliged.’</p>
<p>It was of no use to continue the contest, and Clara bethought herself
of a little ‘Etna’ she had in her bedroom. She went
to the druggist’s, bought some methylated spirit, and obtained
what she wanted.</p>
<p>Mrs Cork had one virtue and one weakness. Her virtue was cleanliness,
but she persecuted the ‘blacks,’ not because she objected
to dirt as dirt, but because it was unauthorised, appeared without permission
at irregular hours, and because the glittering polish on varnished paint
and red mahogany was a pleasure to her. She liked the dirt, too,
in a way, for she enjoyed the exercise of her ill-temper on it and the
pursuit of it to destruction. Her weakness was an enormous tom-cat
which had a bell round its neck and slept in a basket in the kitchen,
the best-behaved and most moral cat in the parish. At half-past
nine every evening it was let out into the back-yard and vanished.
At ten precisely it was heard to mew and was immediately admitted.
Not once in a twelvemonth did that cat prolong its love making after
five minutes to ten.</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood went upstairs to her room, Mrs Cork following and closing
the door.</p>
<p>‘If you please, ma’am, I wish to give you notice to leave
this day week.’</p>
<p>‘What is the matter, Mrs Cork?’</p>
<p>‘Well, ma’am, for one thing, I didn’t know as you’d
bring a bird with you.’</p>
<p>It was a pet bird belonging to Madge.</p>
<p>‘But what harm does the bird do? It gives no trouble;
my daughter attends to it.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, ma’am, but it worrits my Joseph - the cat, I mean.
I found him the other mornin’ on the table eyin’ it, and
I can’t a-bear to see him urritated.’</p>
<p>‘I should hardly have thought that a reason for parting with
good lodgers.’</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood had intended to move, as before explained, but she did
not wish to go till the three months had expired.</p>
<p>‘I don’t say as that is everything, but if you wish me
to tell you the truth, Miss Madge is not a person as I like to keep
in the house. I wish you to know’ - Mrs Cork suddenly became
excited and venomous - ‘that I’m a respectable woman, and
have always let my apartments to respectable people, and do you think
I should ever let them to respectable people again if it got about as
I had had anybody as wasn’t respectable? Where was she last
night? And do you suppose as me as has been a married woman can’t
see the condition she’s in? I say as you, Mrs Hopgood, ought
to be ashamed of yourself for bringing of such a person into a house
like mine, and you’ll please vacate these premises on the day
named.’ She did not wait for an answer, but banged the door
after her, and went down to her subterranean den.</p>
<p>Mrs Hopgood did not tell her children the true reason for leaving.
She merely said that Mrs Cork had been very impertinent, and that they
must look out for other rooms. Madge instantly recollected Great
Ormond Street, but she did not know the number, and oddly enough she
had completely forgotten Mrs Caffyn’s name. It was a peculiar
name, she had heard it only once, she had not noticed it over the door,
and her exhaustion may have had something to do with her loss of memory.
She could not therefore write, and Mrs Hopgood determined that she herself
would go to Great Oakhurst. She had another reason for her journey.
She wished her kind friend there to see that Madge had really a mother
who cared for her. She was anxious to confirm Madge’s story,
and Mrs Caffyn’s confidence. Clara desired to go also, but
Mrs Hopgood would not leave Madge alone, and the expense of a double
fare was considered unnecessary.</p>
<p>When Mrs Hopgood came to Letherhead on her return, the coach was
full inside, and she was obliged to ride outside, although the weather
was cold and threatening. In about half an hour it began to rain
heavily, and by the time she was in Pentonville she was wet through.
The next morning she ought to have lain in bed, but she came down at
her accustomed hour as Mrs Cork was more than usually disagreeable,
and it was settled that they would leave at once if the rooms in Great
Ormond Street were available. Clara went there directly after
breakfast, and saw Mrs Marshall, who had already received an introductory
letter from her mother.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The Marshall family included Marshall and his wife. He was
rather a small man, with blackish hair, small lips, and with a nose
just a little turned up at the tip. As we have been informed,
he was a cabinet-maker. He worked for very good shops, and earned
about two pounds a week. He read books, but he did not know their
value, and often fancied he had made a great discovery on a bookstall
of an author long ago superseded and worthless. He belonged to
a mechanic’s institute, and was fond of animal physiology; heard
courses of lectures on it at the institute, and had studied two or three
elementary handbooks. He found in a second-hand dealer’s
shop a model, which could be taken to pieces, of the inside of the human
body. He had also bought a diagram of a man, showing the circulation,
and this he had hung in his bedroom, his mother-in-law objecting most
strongly on the ground that its effect on his wife was injurious.
He had a notion that the world might be regenerated if men and women
were properly instructed in physiological science, and if before marriage
they would study their own physical peculiarities, and those of their
intended partners. The crossing of peculiarities nevertheless
presented difficulties. A man with long legs surely ought to choose
a woman with short legs, but if a man who was mathematical married a
woman who was mathematical, the result might be a mathematical prodigy.
On the other hand the parents of the prodigy might each have corresponding
qualities, which, mixed with the mathematical tendency, would completely
nullify it. The path of duty therefore was by no means plain.
However, Marshall was sure that great cities dwarfed their inhabitants,
and as he himself was not so tall as his father, and, moreover, suffered
from bad digestion, and had a tendency to ‘run to head,’
he determined to select as his wife a ‘daughter of the soil,’
to use his own phrase, above the average height, with a vigorous constitution
and plenty of common sense. She need not be bookish, ‘he
could supply all that himself.’ Accordingly, he married
Sarah Caffyn. His mother and Mrs Caffyn had been early friends.
He was not mistaken in Sarah. She was certainly robust; she was
a shrewd housekeeper, and she never read anything, except now and then
a paragraph or two in the weekly newspaper, notwithstanding (for there
were no children), time hung rather heavily on her hands. One
child had been born, but to Marshall’s surprise and disappointment
it was a poor, rickety thing, and died before it was a twelvemonth old.</p>
<p>Mrs Marshall was not a very happy woman. Marshall was a great
politician and spent many of his evenings away from home at political
meetings. He never informed her what he had been doing, and if
he had told her, she would neither have understood nor cared anything
about it. At Great Oakhurst she heard everything and took an interest
in it, and she often wished with all her heart that the subject which
occupied Marshall’s thoughts was not Chartism but the draining
of that heavy, rush-grown bit of rough pasture that lay at the bottom
of the village. He was very good and kind to her, and she never
imagined, before marriage, that he ought to be more. She was sure
that at Great Oakhurst she would have been quite comfortable with him
but somehow, in London, it was different. ‘I don’t
know how it is,’ she said one day, ‘the sort of husband
as does for the country doesn’t do for London.’</p>
<p>At Great Oakhurst, where the doors were always open into the yard
and the garden, where every house was merely a covered bit of the open
space, where people were always in and out, and women never sat down,
except to their meals, or to do a little stitching or sewing, it was
really not necessary, as Mrs Caffyn observed, that husband and wife
should ‘hit it so fine.’ Mrs Marshall hated all the
conveniences of London. She abominated particularly the taps,
and longed to be obliged in all weathers to go out to the well and wind
up the bucket. She abominated also the dust-bin, for it was a
pleasure to be compelled - so at least she thought it now - to walk
down to the muck-heap and throw on it what the pig could not eat.
Nay, she even missed that corner of the garden against the elder-tree,
where the pig-stye was, for ‘you could smell the elder-flowers
there in the spring-time, and the pig-stye wasn’t as bad as the
stuffy back room in Great Ormond Street when three or four men were
in it.’ She did all she could to spend her energy on her
cooking and cleaning, but ‘there was no satisfaction in it,’
and she became much depressed, especially after the child died.
This was the main reason why Mrs Caffyn determined to live with her.
Marshall was glad she resolved to come. His wife had her full
share of the common sense he desired, but the experiment had not altogether
succeeded. He knew she was lonely, and he was sorry for her, although
he did not see how he could mend matters. He reflected carefully,
nothing had happened which was a surprise to him, the relationship was
what he had supposed it would be, excepting that the child did not live
and its mother was a little miserable. There was nothing he would
not do for her, but he really had nothing more to offer her.</p>
<p>Although Mrs Marshall had made up her mind that husbands and wives
could not be as contented with one another in the big city as they would
be in a village, a suspicion crossed her mind one day that, even in
London, the relationship might be different from her own. She
was returning from Great Oakhurst after a visit to her mother.
She had stayed there for about a month after her child’s death,
and she travelled back to town with a Letherhead woman, who had married
a journeyman tanner, who formerly worked in the Letherhead tan-yard,
and had now moved to Bermondsey, a horrid hole, worse than Great Ormond
Street. Both Marshall and the tanner were at the ‘Swan with
Two Necks’ to meet the covered van, and the tanner’s wife
jumped out first.</p>
<p>‘Hullo, old gal, here you are,’ cried the tanner, and
clasped her in his brown, bark-stained arms, giving her, nothing loth,
two or three hearty kisses. They were so much excited at meeting
one another, that they forgot their friends, and marched off without
bidding them good-bye. Mrs Marshall was welcomed in quieter fashion.</p>
<p>‘Ah!’ she thought to herself. ‘Red Tom,’
as the tanner was called, ‘is not used to London ways. They
are, perhaps, correct for London, but Marshall might now and then remember
that I have not been brought up to them.’</p>
<p>To return, however, to the Hopgoods. Before the afternoon they
were in their new quarters, happily for them, for Mrs Hopgood became
worse. On the morrow she was seriously ill, inflammation of the
lungs appeared, and in a week she was dead. What Clara and Madge
suffered cannot be told here. Whenever anybody whom we love dies,
we discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original.
We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to
us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely
unprepared. It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the
strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are
debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which ordinary
life disguises. Long after the first madness of their grief had
passed, Clara and Madge were astonished to find how dependent they had
been on their mother. They were grown-up women accustomed to act
for themselves, but they felt unsteady, and as if deprived of customary
support. The reference to her had been constant, although it was
often silent, and they were not conscious of it. A defence from
the outside waste desert had been broken down, their mother had always
seemed to intervene between them and the world, and now they were exposed
and shelterless.</p>
<p>Three parts of Mrs Hopgood’s little income was mainly an annuity,
and Clara and Madge found that between them they had but seventy-five
pounds a year.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Frank could not rest. He wrote again to Clara at Fenmarket;
the letter went to Mrs Cork’s, and was returned to him.
He saw that the Hopgoods had left Fenmarket, and suspecting the reason,
he determined at any cost to go home. He accordingly alleged ill-health,
a pretext not altogether fictitious, and within a few days after the
returned letter reached him he was back at Stoke Newington. He
went immediately to the address in Pentonville which he found on the
envelope, but was very shortly informed by Mrs Cork that ‘she
knew nothing whatever about them.’ He walked round Myddelton
Square, hopeless, for he had no clue whatever.</p>
<p>What had happened to him would scarcely, perhaps, have caused some
young men much uneasiness, but with Frank the case was altogether different.
There was a chance of discovery, and if his crime should come to light
his whole future life would be ruined. He pictured his excommunication,
his father’s agony, and it was only when it seemed possible that
the water might close over the ghastly thing thrown in it, and no ripple
reveal what lay underneath, that he was able to breathe again.
Immediately he asked himself, however, <i>if</i> he could live with
his father and wear a mask, and never betray his dreadful secret.
So he wandered homeward in the most miserable of all conditions; he
was paralysed by the intricacy of the coil which enveloped and grasped
him.</p>
<p>That evening it happened that there was a musical party at his father’s
house; and, of course, he was expected to assist. It would have
suited his mood better if he could have been in his own room, or out
in the streets, but absence would have been inconsistent with his disguise,
and might have led to betrayal. Consequently he was present, and
the gaiety of the company and the excitement of his favourite exercise,
brought about for a time forgetfulness of his trouble. Amongst
the performers was a distant cousin, Cecilia Morland, a young woman
rather tall and fully developed; not strikingly beautiful, but with
a lovely reddish-brown tint on her face, indicative of healthy, warm,
rich pulsations. She possessed a contralto voice, of a quality
like that of a blackbird, and it fell to her and to Frank to sing.
She was dressed in a fashion perhaps a little more courtly than was
usual in the gatherings at Mr Palmer’s house, and Frank, as he
stood beside her at the piano, could not restrain his eyes from straying
every now and then a way from his music to her shoulders, and once nearly
lost himself, during a solo which required a little unusual exertion,
in watching the movement of a locket and of what was for a moment revealed
beneath it. He escorted her amidst applause to a corner of the
room, and the two sat down side by side.</p>
<p>‘What a long time it is, Frank, since you and I sang that duet
together. We have seen nothing of you lately.’</p>
<p>‘Of course not; I was in Germany.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, but I think you deserted us before then. Do you
remember that summer when we were all together at Bonchurch, and the
part songs which astonished our neighbours just as it was growing dark?
I recollect you and I tried together that very duet for the first time
with the old lodging-house piano.’</p>
<p>Frank remembered that evening well.</p>
<p>‘You sang better than you did to-night. You did not keep
time: what were you dreaming about?’</p>
<p>‘How hot the room is! Do you not feel it oppressive?
Let us go into the conservatory for a minute.’</p>
<p>The door was behind them and they slipped in and sat down, just inside,
and under the orange tree.</p>
<p>‘You must not be away so long again. Now mind, we have
a musical evening this day fortnight. You will come? Promise;
and we must sing that duet again, and sing it properly.’</p>
<p>He did not reply, but he stooped down, plucked a blood-red begonia,
and gave it to her.</p>
<p>‘That is a pledge. It is very good of you.’</p>
<p>She tried to fasten it in her gown, underneath the locket, but she
dropped a little black pin. He went down on his knees to find
it; rose, and put the flower in its proper place himself, and his head
nearly touched her neck, quite unnecessarily.</p>
<p>‘We had better go back now,’ she said, ‘but mind,
I shall keep this flower for a fortnight and a day, and if you make
any excuses I shall return it faded and withered.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, I will come.’</p>
<p>‘Good boy; no apologies like those you sent the last time.
No bad throat. Play me false, and there will be a pretty rebuke
for you - a dead flower.’</p>
<p><i>Play me false</i>! It was as if there were some stoppage
in a main artery to his brain. <i>Play me false</i>! It
rang in his ears, and for a moment he saw nothing but the scene at the
Hall with Miranda. Fortunately for him, somebody claimed Cecilia,
and he slunk back into the greenhouse.</p>
<p>One of Mr Palmer’s favourite ballads was <i>The Three Ravens</i>.
Its pathos unfits it for an ordinary drawing-room, but as the music
at Mr Palmer’s was not of the common kind, <i>The Three Ravens</i>
was put on the list for that night.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘<i>She was dead herself ere evensong time. With a down,
hey down, hey down,<br />God send every gentleman<br />Such hawks, such
hounds, and such a leman. With down, hey down, hey down</i>.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Frank knew well the prayer of that melody, and, as he listened, he
painted to himself, in the vividest colours, Madge in a mean room, in
a mean lodging, and perhaps dying. The song ceased, and one for
him stood next. He heard voices calling him, but he passed out
into the garden and went down to the further end, hiding himself behind
the shrubs. Presently the inquiry for him ceased, and he was relieved
by hearing an instrumental piece begin.</p>
<p>Following on that presentation of Madge came self-torture for his
unfaithfulness. He scourged himself into what he considered to
be his duty. He recalled with an effort all Madge’s charms,
mental and bodily, and he tried to break his heart for her. He
was in anguish because he found that in order to feel as he ought to
feel some effort was necessary; that treason to her was possible, and
because he had looked with such eyes upon his cousin that evening.
He saw himself as something separate from himself, and although he knew
what he saw to be flimsy and shallow, he could do nothing to deepen
it, absolutely nothing! It was not the betrayal of that thunderstorm
which now tormented him. He could have represented that as a failure
to be surmounted; he could have repented it. It was his own inner
being from which he revolted, from limitations which are worse than
crimes, for who, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>The next morning found Frank once more in Myddelton Square.
He looked up at the house; the windows were all shut, and the blinds
were drawn down. He had half a mind to call again, but Mrs Cork’s
manner had been so offensive and repellent that he desisted. Presently
the door opened, and Maria, the maid, came out to clean the doorsteps.
Maria, as we have already said, was a little more human than her mistress,
and having overheard the conversation between her and Frank at the first
interview, had come to the conclusion that Frank was to be pitied, and
she took a fancy to him. Accordingly, when he passed her, she
looked up and said, - ‘Good-morning.’ Frank stopped,
and returned her greeting.</p>
<p>‘You was here the other day, sir, asking where them Hopgoods
had gone.’</p>
<p>‘Yes,’ said Frank, eagerly, ‘do you know what has
become of them?’</p>
<p>‘I helped the cabman with the boxes, and I heard Mrs Hopgood
say “Great Ormond Street,” but I have forgotten the number.’</p>
<p>‘Thank you very much.’</p>
<p>Frank gave the astonished and grateful Maria half-a-crown, and went
off to Great Ormond Street at once. He paced up and down the street
half a dozen times, hoping he might recognise in a window some ornament
from Fenmarket, or perhaps that he might be able to distinguish a piece
of Fenmarket furniture, but his search was in vain, for the two girls
had taken furnished rooms at the back of the house. His quest
was not renewed that week. What was there to be gained by going
over the ground again? Perhaps they might have found the lodgings
unsuitable and have moved elsewhere. At church on Sunday he met
his cousin Cecilia, who reminded him of his promise.</p>
<p>‘See,’ she said, ‘here is the begonia. I
put it in my prayer-book in order to preserve it when I could keep it
in water no longer, and it has stained the leaf, and spoilt the Athanasian
Creed. You will have it sent to you if you are faithless.
Reflect on your emotions, sir, when you receive a dead flower, and you
have the bitter consciousness also that you have damaged my creed without
any recompense.’</p>
<p>It was impossible not to protest that he had no thought of breaking
his engagement, although, to tell the truth, he had wished once or twice
he could find some way out of it. He walked with her down the
churchyard path to her carriage, assisted her into it, saluted her father
and mother, and then went home with his own people.</p>
<p>The evening came, he sang with Cecilia, and it was observed, and
he himself observed it, how completely their voices harmonised.
He was not without a competitor, a handsome young baritone, who was
much commended. When he came to the end of his performance everybody
said what a pity it was that the following duet could not also be given,
a duet which Cecilia knew perfectly well. She was very much pressed
to take her part with him, but she steadily refused, on the ground that
she had not practised it, that she had already sung once, and that she
was engaged to sing once more with her cousin. Frank was sitting
next to her, and she added, so as to be heard by him alone, ‘He
is no particular favourite of mine.’</p>
<p>There was no direct implication that Frank was a favourite, but an
inference was possible, and at least it was clear that she preferred
to reserve herself for him. Cecilia’s gifts, her fortune,
and her gay, happy face had made many a young fellow restless, and had
brought several proposals, none of which had been accepted. All
this Frank knew, and how could he repress something more than satisfaction
when he thought that perhaps he might have been the reason why nobody
as yet had been able to win her. She always called him Frank,
for although they were not first cousins, they were cousins. He
generally called her Cecilia, but she was Cissy in her own house.
He was hardly close enough to venture upon the more familiar nickname,
but to-night, as they rose to go to the piano, he said, and the baritone
sat next to her, -</p>
<p>‘Now, <i>Cissy</i>, once more.’</p>
<p>She looked at him with just a little start of surprise, and a smile
spread itself over her face. After they had finished, and she
never sang better, the baritone noticed that she seemed indisposed to
return to her former place, and she retired with Frank to the opposite
corner of the room.</p>
<p>‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if being happy in a thing
is a sign of being born to do it. If it is, I am born to be a
musician.’</p>
<p>‘I should say it is; if two people are quite happy in one another’s
company, it is as a sign they were born for one another.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, if they are sure they are happy. It is easier for
me to be sure that I am happier with a thing than with a person.’</p>
<p>‘Do you think so? Why?’</p>
<p>‘There is the uncertainty whether the person is happy with
me. I cannot be altogether happy with anybody unless I know I
make him happy.’</p>
<p>‘What kind of person is he with whom you <i>could</i> be without
making him happy?’</p>
<p>The baritone rose to the upper F with a clash of chords on the piano,
and the company broke up. Frank went home with but one thought
in his head - the thought of Cecilia.</p>
<p>His bedroom faced the south-west, its windows were open, and when
he entered, the wind, which was gradually rising, struck him on the
face and nearly forced the door out of his hand; the fire in his blood
was quenched, and the image of Cecilia receded. He looked out,
and saw reflected on the low clouds the dull glare of the distant city.
Just over there was Great Ormond Street, and underneath that dim, red
light, like the light of a great house burning, was Madge Hopgood.
He lay down, turning over from side to side in the vain hope that by
change of position he might sleep. After about an hour’s
feverish tossing, he just lost himself, but not in that oblivion which
slumber usually brought him. He was so far awake that he saw what
was around him, and yet, he was so far released from the control of
his reason that he did not recognise what he saw, and it became part
of a new scene created by his delirium. The full moon, clearing
away the clouds as she moved upwards, had now passed round to the south,
and just caught the white window-curtain farthest from him. He
half-opened his eyes, his mad dream still clung to him, and there was
the dead Madge before him, pale in death, and holding a child in her
arms! He distinctly heard himself scream as he started up in affright;
he could not tell where he was; the spectre faded and the furniture
and hangings transformed themselves into their familiar reality.
He could not lie down again, and rose and dressed himself. He
was not the man to believe that the ghost could be a revelation or a
prophecy, but, nevertheless, he was once more overcome with fear, a
vague dread partly justifiable by the fact of Madge, by the fact that
his father might soon know what had happened, that others also might
know, Cecilia for example, but partly also a fear going beyond all the
facts, and not to be accounted for by them, a strange, horrible trembling
such as men feel in earthquakes when the solid rock shakes, on which
everything rests.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>When Frank came downstairs to breakfast the conversation turned upon
his return to Germany. He did not object to going, although it
can hardly be said that he willed to go. He was in that perilous
condition in which the comparison of reasons is impossible, and the
course taken depends upon some chance impulse of the moment, and is
a mere drift. He could not leave, however, in complete ignorance
of Madge, and with no certainty as to her future. He resolved
therefore to make one more effort to discover the house. That
was all which he determined to do. What was to happen when he
had found it, he did not know. He was driven to do something,
which could not be of any importance, save for what must follow, but
he was unable to bring himself even to consider what was to follow.
He knew that at Fenmarket one or other of the sisters went out soon
after breakfast to make provision for the day, and perhaps, if they
kept up this custom, he might be successful in his search. He
accordingly stationed himself in Great Ormond Street at about half-past
nine, and kept watch from the Lamb’s Conduit Street end, shifting
his position as well as he could, in order to escape notice. He
had not been there half an hour when he saw a door open, and Madge came
out and went westwards. She turned down Devonshire Street as if
on her way to Holborn. He instantly ran back to Theobalds Road,
and when he came to the corner of Devonshire Street she was about ten
yards from him, and he faced her. She stopped irresolutely, as
if she had a mind to return, but as he approached her, and she found
she was recognised, she came towards him.</p>
<p>‘Madge, Madge,’ he cried, ‘I want to speak to you.
I must speak with you.’</p>
<p>‘Better not; let me go.’</p>
<p>‘I say I <i>must</i> speak to you.’</p>
<p>‘We cannot talk here; let me go.’</p>
<p>‘I must! I must! come with me.’</p>
<p>She pitied him, and although she did not consent she did not refuse.
He called a cab, and in ten minutes, not a word having been spoken during
those ten minutes, they were at St Paul’s. The morning service
had just begun, and they sat down in a corner far away from the worshippers.</p>
<p>‘Oh, Madge,’ he began, ‘I implore you to take me
back. I love you. I do love you, and - and - I cannot leave
you.’</p>
<p>She was side by side with the father of her child about to be born.
He was not and could not be as another man to her, and for the moment
there was the danger lest she should mistake this secret bond for love.
The thought of what had passed between them, and of the child, his and
hers, almost overpowered her.</p>
<p>‘I cannot,’ he repeated. ‘I <i>ought</i>
not. What will become of me?’</p>
<p>She felt herself stronger; he was excited, but his excitement was
not contagious. The string vibrated, and the note was resonant,
but it was not a note which was consonant with hers, and it did not
stir her to respond. He might love her, he was sincere enough
to sacrifice himself for her, and to remain faithful to her, but the
voice was not altogether that of his own true self. Partly, at
least, it was the voice of what he considered to be duty, of superstition
and alarm. She was silent.</p>
<p>‘Madge,’ he continued, ‘ought you to refuse?
You have some love for me. Is it not greater than the love which
thousands feel for one another. Will you blast your future and
mine, and, perhaps, that of someone besides, who may be very dear to
you? <i>Ought</i> you not, I say, to listen?’</p>
<p>The service had come to an end, the organist was playing a voluntary,
rather longer than usual, and the congregation was leaving, some of
them passing near Madge and Frank, and casting idle glances on the young
couple who had evidently come neither to pray nor to admire the architecture.
Madge recognised the well-known St Ann’s fugue, and, strange to
say, even at such a moment it took entire possession of her; the golden
ladder was let down and celestial visitors descended. When the
music ceased she spoke.</p>
<p>‘It would be a crime.’</p>
<p>‘A crime, but I - ’ She stopped him.</p>
<p>‘I know what you are going to say. I know what is the
crime to the world; but it would have been a crime, perhaps a worse
crime, if a ceremony had been performed beforehand by a priest, and
the worst of crimes would be that ceremony now. I must go.’
She rose and began to move towards the door.</p>
<p>He walked silently by her side till they were in St Paul’s
churchyard, when she took him by the hand, pressed it affectionately
and suddenly turned into one of the courts that lead towards Paternoster
Row. He did not follow her, something repelled him, and when he
reached home it crossed his mind that marriage, after such delay, would
be a poor recompense, as he could not thereby conceal her disgrace.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It was clear that these two women could not live in London on seventy-five
pounds a year, most certainly not with the prospect before them, and
Clara cast about for something to do. Marshall had a brother-in-law,
a certain Baruch Cohen, a mathematical instrument maker in Clerkenwell,
and to him Marshall accidentally one day talked about Clara, and said
that she desired an occupation. Cohen himself could not give Clara
any work, but he knew a second-hand bookseller, an old man who kept
a shop in Holborn, who wanted a clerk, and Clara thus found herself
earning another pound a week. With this addition she and her sister
could manage to pay their way and provide what Madge would want.
The hours were long, the duties irksome and wearisome, and, worst of
all, the conditions under which they were performed, were not only as
bad as they could be, but their badness was of a kind to which Clara
had never been accustomed, so that she felt every particle of it in
its full force. The windows of the shop were, of course, full
of books, and the walls were lined with them. In the middle of
the shop also was a range of shelves, and books were stacked on the
floor, so that the place looked like a huge cubical block of them through
which passages had been bored. At the back the shop became contracted
in width to about eight feet, and consequently the central shelves were
not continued there, but just where they ended, and overshadowed by
them were a little desk and a stool. All round the desk more books
were piled, and some manœuvring was necessary in order to sit
down. This was Clara’s station. Occasionally, on a
brilliant, a very brilliant day in summer, she could write without gas,
but, perhaps, there were not a dozen such days in the year. By
twisting herself sideways she could just catch a glimpse of a narrow
line of sky over some heavy theology which was not likely to be disturbed,
and was therefore put at the top of the window, and once when somebody
bought the <i>Calvin Joann. Opera Omnia, 9 vol. folio, Amst</i>.
1671 - it was very clear that afternoon - she actually descried towards
seven o’clock a blessed star exactly in the middle of the gap
the Calvin had left.</p>
<p>The darkness was very depressing, and poor Clara often shut her eyes
as she bent over her day-book and ledger, and thought of the Fenmarket
flats where the sun could be seen bisected by the horizon at sun-rising
and sun-setting, and where even the southern Antares shone with diamond
glitter close to the ground during summer nights. She tried to
reason with herself during the dreadful smoke fogs; she said to herself
that they were only half-a-mile thick, and she carried herself up in
imagination and beheld the unclouded azure, the filthy smother lying
all beneath her, but her dream did not continue, and reality was too
strong for her. Worse, perhaps, than the eternal gloom was the
dirt. She was naturally fastidious, and as her skin was thin and
sensitive, dust was physically a discomfort. Even at Fenmarket
she was continually washing her hands and face, and, indeed, a wash
was more necessary to her after a walk than food or drink. It
was impossible to remain clean in Holborn for five minutes; everything
she touched was foul with grime; her collar and cuffs were black with
it when she went home to her dinner, and it was not like the honest,
blowing road-sand of Fenmarket highways, but a loathsome composition
of everything disgusting which could be produced by millions of human
beings and animals packed together in soot. It was a real misery
to her and made her almost ill. However, she managed to set up
for herself a little lavatory in the basement, and whenever she had
a minute at her command, she descended and enjoyed the luxury of a cool,
dripping sponge and a piece of yellow soap. The smuts began to
gather again the moment she went upstairs, but she strove to arm herself
with a little philosophy against them. ‘What is there in
life,’ she moralised, smiling at her sermonising, ‘which
once won is for ever won? It is always being won and always being
lost.’ Her master, fortunately, was one of the kindest of
men, an old gentleman of about sixty-five, who wore a white necktie,
clean every morning. He was really a <i>gentle</i>man in the true
sense of that much misused word, and not a mere <i>trades</i>man; that
is to say, he loved his business, not altogether for the money it brought
him, but as an art. He was known far and wide, and literary people
were glad to gossip with him. He never pushed his wares, and he
hated to sell them to anybody who did not know their value. He
amused Clara one afternoon when a carriage stopped at the door, and
a lady inquired if he had a Manning and Bray’s <i>History of Surrey</i>.
Yes, he had a copy, and he pointed to the three handsome, tall folios.</p>
<p>‘What is the price?’</p>
<p>‘Twelve pounds ten.’</p>
<p>‘I think I will have them.’</p>
<p>‘Madam, you will pardon me, but, if I were you, I would not.
I think something much cheaper will suit you better. If you will
allow me, I will look out for you and will report in a few days.’</p>
<p>‘Oh! very well,’ and she departed.</p>
<p>‘The wife of a brassfounder,’ he said to Clara; ‘made
a lot of money, and now he has bought a house at Dulwich and is setting
up a library. Somebody has told him that he ought to have a county
history, and that Manning and Bray is the book. Manning and Bray!
What he wants is a Dulwich and Denmark Hill Directory. No, no,’
and he took down one of the big volumes, blew the dust off the top edges
and looked at the old book-plate inside, ‘you won’t go there
if I can help it.’ He took a fancy to Clara when he found
she loved literature, although what she read was out of his department
altogether, and his perfectly human behaviour to her prevented that
sense of exile and loneliness which is so horrible to many a poor creature
who comes up to London to begin therein the struggle for existence.
She read and meditated a good deal in the shop, but not to much profit,
for she was continually interrupted, and the thought of her sister intruded
itself perpetually.</p>
<p>Madge seldom or never spoke of her separation from Frank, but one
night, when she was somewhat less reserved than usual, Clara ventured
to ask her if she had heard from him since they parted.</p>
<p>‘I met him once.’</p>
<p>‘Madge, do you mean that he found out where we are living,
and that he came to see you?’</p>
<p>‘No, it was just round the corner as I was going towards Holborn.’</p>
<p>‘Nothing could have brought him here but yourself,’ said
Clara, slowly.</p>
<p>‘Clara, you doubt?’</p>
<p>‘No, no! I doubt you? Never!’</p>
<p>‘But you hesitate; you reflect. Speak out.’</p>
<p>‘God forbid I should utter a word which would induce you to
disbelieve what you know to be right. It is much more important
to believe earnestly that something is morally right than that it should
be really right, and he who attempts to displace a belief runs a certain
risk, because he is not sure that what he substitutes can be held with
equal force. Besides, each person’s belief, or proposed
course of action, is a part of himself, and if he be diverted from it
and takes up with that which is not himself, the unity of his nature
is impaired, and he loses himself.’</p>
<p>‘Which is as much as to say that the prophet is to break no
idols.’</p>
<p>‘You know I do not mean that, and you know, too, how incapable
I am of defending myself in argument. I never can stand up for
anything I say. I can now and then say something, but, when I
have said it, I run away.’</p>
<p>‘My dearest Clara,’ Madge put her arm over her sister’s
shoulder as they sat side by side, ‘do not run away now; tell
me just what you think of me.’</p>
<p>Clara was silent for a minute.</p>
<p>‘I have sometimes wondered whether you have not demanded a
little too much of yourself and Frank. It is always a question
of how much. There is no human truth which is altogether true,
no love which is altogether perfect. You may possibly have neglected
virtue or devotion such as you could not find elsewhere, overlooking
it because some failing, or the lack of sympathy on some unimportant
point, may at the moment have been prominent. Frank loved you,
Madge.’</p>
<p>Madge did not reply; she withdrew her arm from her sister’s
neck, threw herself back in her chair and closed her eyes. She
saw again the Fenmarket roads, that summer evening, and she felt once
more Frank’s burning caresses. She thought of him as he
left St Paul’s, perhaps broken-hearted. Stronger than every
other motive to return to him, and stronger than ever, was the movement
towards him of that which belonged to him.</p>
<p>At last she cried out, literally cried, with a vehemence which startled
and terrified Clara, -</p>
<p>‘Clara, Clara, you know not what you do! For God’s
sake forbear!’ She was again silent, and then she turned
round hurriedly, hid her face, and sobbed piteously. It lasted,
however, but for a minute; she rose, wiped her eyes, went to the window,
came back again, and said, -</p>
<p>‘It is beginning to snow.’</p>
<p>The iron pillar bolted to the solid rock had quivered and resounded
under the blow, but its vibrations were nothing more than those of the
rigid metal; the base was unshaken and, except for an instant, the column
had not been deflected a hair’s-breadth.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Mr Cohen, who had obtained the situation indirectly for Clara, thought
nothing more about it until, one day, he went to the shop, and he then
recollected his recommendation, which had been given solely in faith,
for he had never seen the young woman, and had trusted entirely to Marshall.
He found her at her dark desk, and as he approached her, she hastily
put a mark in a book and closed it.</p>
<p>‘Have you sold a little volume called <i>After Office Hours</i>
by a man named Robinson?’</p>
<p>‘I did not know we had it. I have never seen it.’</p>
<p>‘I do not wonder, but I saw it here about six months ago; it
was up there,’ pointing to a top shelf. Clara was about
to mount the ladder, but he stopped her, and found what he wanted.
Some of the leaves were torn.</p>
<p>‘We can repair those for you; in about a couple of days it
shall be ready.’</p>
<p>He lingered a little, and at that moment another customer entered.
Clara went forward to speak to him, and Cohen was able to see that it
was the <i>Heroes and Hero Worship</i> she had been studying, a course
of lectures which had been given by a Mr Carlyle, of whom Cohen knew
something. As the customer showed no signs of departing, Cohen
left, saying he would call again.</p>
<p>Before sending Robinson’s <i>After Office Hours</i> to the
binder, Clara looked at it. It was made up of short essays, about
twenty altogether, bound in dark-green cloth, lettered at the side,
and published in 1841. They were upon the oddest subjects: such
as, <i>Ought Children to learn Rules before Reasons? The Higher
Mathematics and Materialism. Ought We to tell Those Whom We love
what We think about Them? Deductive Reasoning in Politics.
What Troubles ought We to Make Known and What ought We to Keep Secret:
Courage as a Science and an Art.</i></p>
<p>Clara did not read any one essay through, she had no time, but she
was somewhat struck with a few sentences which caught her eye; for example
- ‘A mere dream, a vague hope, ought in some cases to be more
potent than a certainty in regulating our action. The faintest
vision of God should be more determinative than the grossest earthly
assurance.’</p>
<p>‘I knew a case in which a man had to encounter three successive
trials of all the courage and inventive faculty in him. Failure
in one would have been ruin. The odds against him in each trial
were desperate, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming.
Nevertheless, he made the attempt, and was triumphant, by the narrowest
margin, in every struggle. That which is of most value to us is
often obtained in defiance of the laws of probability.’</p>
<p>‘What is precious in Quakerism is not so much the doctrine
of the Divine voice as that of the preliminary stillness, the closure
against other voices and the reduction of the mind to a condition in
which it can <i>listen</i>, in which it can discern the merest whisper,
inaudible when the world, or interest, or passion, are permitted to
speak.’</p>
<p>‘The acutest syllogiser can never develop the actual consequences
of any system of policy, or, indeed, of any change in human relationship,
man being so infinitely complex, and the interaction of human forces
so incalculable.’</p>
<p>‘Many of our speculative difficulties arise from the unauthorised
conception of an <i>omnipotent</i> God, a conception entirely of our
own creation, and one which, if we look at it closely, has no meaning.
It is because God <i>could</i> have done otherwise, and did not, that
we are confounded. It may be distressing to think that God cannot
do any better, but it is not so distressing as to believe that He might
have done better had He so willed.’</p>
<p>Although these passages were disconnected, each of them seemed to
Clara to be written in a measure for herself, and her curiosity was
excited about the author. Perhaps the man who called would say
something about him.</p>
<p>Baruch Cohen was now a little over forty. He was half a Jew,
for his father was a Jew and his mother a Gentile. The father
had broken with Judaism, but had not been converted to any Christian
church or sect. He was a diamond-cutter, originally from Holland,
came over to England and married the daughter of a mathematical instrument
maker, at whose house he lodged in Clerkenwell. The son was apprenticed
to his maternal grandfather’s trade, became very skilful at it,
worked at it himself, employed a man and a boy, and supplied London
shops, which sold his instruments at about three times the price he
obtained for them. Baruch, when he was very young, married Marshall’s
elder sister, but she died at the birth of her first child and he had
been a widower now for nineteen years. He had often thought of
taking another wife, and had seen, during these nineteen years, two
or three women with whom he had imagined himself to be really in love,
and to whom he had been on the verge of making proposals, but in each
case he had hung back, and when he found that a second and a third had
awakened the same ardour for a time as the first, he distrusted its
genuineness. He was now, too, at a time of life when a man has
to make the unpleasant discovery that he is beginning to lose the right
to expect what he still eagerly desires, and that he must beware of
being ridiculous. It is indeed a very unpleasant discovery.
If he has done anything well which was worth doing, or has made himself
a name, he may be treated by women with respect or adulation, but any
passable boy of twenty is really more interesting to them, and, unhappily,
there is perhaps so much of the man left in him that he would rather
see the eyes of a girl melt when she looked at him than be adored by
all the drawing-rooms in London as the author of the greatest poem since
<i>Paradise Lost</i>, or as the conqueror of half a continent.
Baruch’s life during the last nineteen years had been such that
he was still young, and he desired more than ever, because not so blindly
as he desired it when he was a youth, the tender, intimate sympathy
of a woman’s love. It was singular that, during all those
nineteen years, he should not once have been overcome. It seemed
to him as if he had been held back, not by himself, but by some external
power, which refused to give any reasons for so doing. There was
now less chance of yielding than ever; he was reserved and self-respectful,
and his manner towards women distinctly announced to them that he knew
what he was and that he had no claims whatever upon them. He was
something of a philosopher, too; he accepted, therefore, as well as
he could, without complaint, the inevitable order of nature, and he
tried to acquire, although often he failed, that blessed art of taking
up lightly and even with a smile whatever he was compelled to handle.
‘It is possible,’ he said once, ‘to consider death
too seriously.’ He was naturally more than half a Jew; his
features were Jewish, his thinking was Jewish, and he believed after
a fashion in the Jewish sacred books, or, at anyrate, read them continuously,
although he had added to his armoury defensive weapons of another type.
In nothing was he more Jewish than in a tendency to dwell upon the One,
or what he called God, clinging still to the expression of his forefathers
although departing so widely from them. In his ethics and system
of life, as well as in his religion, there was the same intolerance
of a multiplicity which was not reducible to unity. He seldom
explained his theory, but everybody who knew him recognised the difference
which it wrought between him and other men. There was a certain
concord in everything he said and did, as if it were directed by some
enthroned but secret principle.</p>
<p>He had encountered no particular trouble since his wife’s death,
but his life had been unhappy. He had no friends, much as he longed
for friendship, and he could not give any reasons for his failure.
He saw other persons more successful, but he remained solitary.
Their needs were not so great as his, for it is not those who have the
least but those who have the most to give who most want sympathy.
He had often made advances; people had called on him and had appeared
interested in him, but they had dropped away. The cause was chiefly
to be found in his nationality. The ordinary Englishman disliked
him simply as a Jew, and the better sort were repelled by a lack of
geniality and by his inability to manifest a healthy interest in personal
details. Partly also the cause was that those who care to speak
about what is nearest to them are very rare, and most persons find conversation
easy in proportion to the remoteness of its topics from them.
Whatever the reasons may have been, Baruch now, no matter what the pressure
from within might be, generally kept himself to himself. It was
a mistake and he ought not to have retreated so far upon repulse.
A word will sometimes, when least expected, unlock a heart, a soul is
gained for ever, and at once there is much more than a recompense for
the indifference of years.</p>
<p>After the death of his wife, Baruch’s affection spent itself
upon his son Benjamin, whom he had apprenticed to a firm of optical
instrument makers in York. The boy was not very much like his
father. He was indifferent to that religion by which his father
lived, but he inherited an aptitude for mathematics, which was very
necessary in his trade. Benjamin also possessed his father’s
rectitude, trusted him, and looked to him for advice to such a degree
that even Baruch, at last, thought it would be better to send him away
from home in order that he might become a little more self-reliant and
independent. It was the sorest of trials to part with him, and,
for some time after he left, Baruch’s loneliness was intolerable.
It was, however, relieved by a visit to York perhaps once in four or
five months, for whenever business could be alleged as an excuse for
going north, he managed, as he said, ‘to take York on his way.’</p>
<p>The day after he met Clara he started for Birmingham, and although
York was certainly not ‘on his way,’ he pushed forward to
the city and reached it on a Saturday evening. He was to spend
Sunday there, and on Sunday morning he proposed that they should hear
the cathedral service, and go for a walk in the afternoon. To
this suggestion Benjamin partially assented. He wished to go to
the cathedral in the morning, but thought his father had better rest
after dinner. Baruch somewhat resented the insinuation of possible
fatigue consequent on advancing years.</p>
<p>‘What do you mean?’ he said; ‘you know well enough
I enjoy a walk in the afternoon; besides, I shall not see much of you,
and do not want to lose what little time I have.’</p>
<p>About three, therefore, they started, and presently a girl met them,
who was introduced simply as ‘Miss Masters.’</p>
<p>‘We are going to your side of the water,’ said the son;
‘you may as well cross with us.’</p>
<p>They came to a point where a boat was moored, and a man was in it.
There was no regular ferry, but on Sundays he earned a trifle by taking
people to the opposite meadow, and thus enabling them to vary their
return journey to the city. When they were about two-thirds of
the way over, Benjamin observed that if they stood up they could see
the Minster. They all three rose, and without an instant’s
warning - they could not tell afterwards how it happened - the boat
half capsized, and they were in eight or nine feet of water. Baruch
could not swim and went down at once, but on coming up close to the
gunwale he caught at it and held fast. Looking round, he saw that
Benjamin, who could swim well, had made for Miss Masters, and, having
caught her by the back of the neck, was taking her ashore. The
boatman, who could also swim, called out to Baruch to hold on, gave
the boat three or four vigorous strokes from the stern, and Baruch felt
the ground under his feet. The boatman’s little cottage
was not far off, and, when the party reached it, Benjamin earnestly
desired Miss Masters to take off her wet clothes and occupy the bed
which was offered her. He himself would run home - it was not
half-a-mile - and, after having changed, would go to her house and send
her sister with what was wanted. He was just off when it suddenly
struck him that his father might need some attention.</p>
<p>‘Oh, father - ’ he began, but the boatman’s wife
interposed.</p>
<p>‘He can’t be left like that, and he can’t go home;
he’ll catch his death o’ cold, and there isn’t but
one more bed in the house, and that isn’t quite fit to put a gentleman
in. Howsomever, he must turn in there, and my husband, he can
go into the back-kitchen and rub himself down. You won’t
do yourself no good, Mr Cohen,’ addressing the son, whom she knew,
‘by going back; you’d better stay here and get into bed
with your father.’</p>
<p>In a few minutes the boatman would have gone on the errand, but Benjamin
could not lose the opportunity of sacrificing himself for Miss Masters.
He rushed off, and in three-quarters of an hour had returned with the
sister. Having learned, after anxious inquiry, that Miss Masters,
so far as could be discovered, had not caught a chill, he went to his
father.</p>
<p>‘Well, father, I hope you are none the worse for the ducking,’
he said gaily. ‘The next time you come to York you’d
better bring another suit of clothes with you.’</p>
<p>Baruch turned round uneasily and did not answer immediately.
He had had a narrow escape from drowning.</p>
<p>‘Nothing of much consequence. Is your friend all right?’</p>
<p>‘Oh, yes; I was anxious about her, for she is not very strong,
but I do not think she will come to much harm. I made them light
a fire in her room.’</p>
<p>‘Are they drying my clothes?’</p>
<p>‘I’ll go and see.’</p>
<p>He went away and encountered the elder Miss Masters, who told him
that her sister, feeling no ill effects from the plunge, had determined
to go home at once, and in fact was nearly ready. Benjamin waited,
and presently she came downstairs, smiling.</p>
<p>‘Nothing the matter. I owe it to you, however, that I
am not now in another world.’</p>
<p>Benjamin was in an ecstasy, and considered himself bound to accompany
her to her door.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Baruch lay upstairs alone in no very happy temper.
He heard the conversation below, and knew that his son had gone.
In all genuine love there is something of ferocious selfishness.
The perfectly divine nature knows how to keep it in check, and is even
capable - supposing it to be a woman’s nature - of contentment
if the loved one is happy, no matter with what or with whom; but the
nature only a little less than divine cannot, without pain, endure the
thought that it no longer owns privately and exclusively that which
it loves, even when it loves a child, and Baruch was particularly excusable,
considering his solitude. Nevertheless, he had learned a little
wisdom, and, what was of much greater importance, had learned how to
use it when he needed it. It had been forced upon him; it was
an adjustment to circumstances, the wisest wisdom. It was not
something without any particular connection with him; it was rather
the external protection built up from within to shield him where he
was vulnerable; it was the answer to questions which had been put to
<i>him</i>, and not to those which had been put to other people.
So it came to pass that, when he said bitterly to himself that, if he
were at that moment lying dead at the bottom of the river, Benjamin
would have found consolation very near at hand, he was able to reflect
upon the folly of self-laceration, and to rebuke himself for a complaint
against what was simply the order of Nature, and not a personal failure.</p>
<p>His self-conquest, however, was not very permanent. When he
left York the next morning, he fancied his son was not particularly
grieved, and he was passive under the thought that an epoch in his life
had come, that the milestones now began to show the distance to the
place to which he travelled, and, still worse, that the boy who had
been so close to him, and upon whom he had so much depended, had gone
from him.</p>
<p>There is no remedy for our troubles which is uniformly and progressively
efficacious. All that we have a right to expect from our religion
is that gradually, very gradually, it will assist us to a real victory.
After each apparent defeat, if we are bravely in earnest, we gain something
on our former position. Baruch was two days on his journey back
to town, and as he came nearer home, he recovered himself a little.
Suddenly he remembered the bookshop and the book for which he had to
call, and that he had intended to ask Marshall something about the bookseller’s
new assistant.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Madge was a puzzle to Mrs Caffyn. Mrs Caffyn loved her, and
when she was ill had behaved like a mother to her. The newly-born
child, a healthy girl, was treated by Mrs Caffyn as if it were her own
granddaughter, and many little luxuries were bought which never appeared
in Mrs Marshall’s weekly bill. Naturally, Mrs Caffyn’s
affection moved a response from Madge, and Mrs Caffyn by degrees heard
the greater part of her history; but why she had separated herself from
her lover without any apparent reason remained a mystery, and all the
greater was the mystery because Mrs Caffyn believed that there were
no other facts to be known than those she knew. She longed to
bring about a reconciliation. It was dreadful to her that Madge
should be condemned to poverty, and that her infant should be fatherless,
although there was a gentleman waiting to take them both and make them
happy.</p>
<p>‘The hair won’t be dark like yours, my love,’ she
said one afternoon, soon after Madge had come downstairs and was lying
on the sofa. ‘The hair do darken a lot, but hers will never
be black. It’s my opinion as it’ll be fair.’</p>
<p>Madge did not speak, and Mrs Caffyn, who was sitting at the head
of the couch, put her work and her spectacles on the table. It
was growing dusk; she took Madge’s hand, which hung down by her
side, and gently lifted it up. Such a delicate hand, Mrs Caffyn
thought. She was proud that she had for a friend the owner of
such a hand, who behaved to her as an equal. It was delightful
to be kissed - no mere formal salutations - by a lady fit to go into
the finest drawing-room in London, but it was a greater delight that
Madge’s talk suited her better than any she had heard at Great
Oakhurst. It was natural she should rejoice when she discovered,
unconsciously that she had a soul, to which the speech of the stars,
though somewhat strange, was not an utterly foreign tongue.</p>
<p>She retained her hold on Madge’s hand.</p>
<p>‘May be,’ she continued, ‘it’ll be like its
father’s. In our family all the gals take after the father,
and all the boys after the mother. I suppose as <i>he</i> has
lightish hair?’</p>
<p>Still Madge said nothing.</p>
<p>‘It isn’t easy to believe as the father of that blessed
dear could have been a bad lot. I’m sure he isn’t,
and yet there’s that Polesden gal at the farm, she as went wrong
with Jim, a great ugly brute, and she herself warnt up to much, well,
as I say, her child was the delicatest little angel as I ever saw.
It’s my belief as God-a-mighty mixes Hisself up in it more nor
we think. But there <i>was</i> nothing amiss with him, was there,
my sweet?’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn inclined her head towards Madge.</p>
<p>‘Oh, no! Nothing, nothing.’</p>
<p>‘Don’t you think, my dear, if there’s nothing atwixt
you, as it was a flyin’ in the face of Providence to turn him
off? You were reglarly engaged to him, and I have heard you say
he was very fond of you. I suppose there were some high words
about something, and a kind of a quarrel like, and so you parted, but
that’s nothing. It might all be made up now, and it ought
to be made up. What was it about?’</p>
<p>‘There was no quarrel.’</p>
<p>‘Well, of course, if you don’t like to say anything more
to me, I won’t ask you. I don’t want to hear any secrets
as I shouldn’t hear. I speak only because I can’t
abear to see you here when I believe as everything might be put right,
and you might have a house of your own, and a good husband, and be happy
for the rest of your days. It isn’t too late for that now.
I know what I know, and as how he’d marry you at once.’</p>
<p>‘Oh, my dear Mrs Caffyn, I have no secret from you, who have
been so good to me: I can only say I could not love him - not as I ought.’</p>
<p>‘If you can’t love a man, that’s to say if you
can’t <i>abear</i> him, it’s wrong to have him, but if there’s
a child that does make a difference, for one has to think of the child
and of being respectable. There’s something in being respectable;
although, for that matter, I’ve see’d respectable people
at Great Oakhurst as were ten times worse than those as aren’t.
Still, a-speaking for myself, I’d put up with a goodish bit to
marry the man whose child wor mine.’</p>
<p>‘For myself I could, but it wouldn’t be just to him.’</p>
<p>‘I don’t see what you mean.’</p>
<p>‘I mean that I could sacrifice myself if I believed it to be
my duty, but I should wrong him cruelly if I were to accept him and
did not love him with all my heart.’</p>
<p>‘My dear, you take my word for it, he isn’t so particklar
as you are. A man isn’t so particklar as a woman.
He goes about his work, and has all sorts of things in his head, and
if a woman makes him comfortable when he comes home, he’s all
right. I won’t say as one woman is much the same as another
to a man - leastways to all men - but still they are <i>not</i> particklar.
Maybe, though, it isn’t quite the same with gentlefolk like yourself,
- but there’s that blessed baby a-cryin’.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn hastened upstairs, leaving Madge to her reflections.
Once more the old dialectic reappeared. ‘After all,’
she thought, ‘it is, as Clara said, a question of degree.
There are not a thousand husbands and wives in this great city whose
relationship comes near perfection. If I felt aversion my course
would be clear, but there is no aversion; on the contrary, our affection
for one another is sufficient for a decent household and decent existence
undisturbed by catastrophes. No brighter sunlight is obtained
by others far better than myself. Ought I to expect a refinement
of relationship to which I have no right? Our claims are always
beyond our deserts, and we are disappointed if our poor, mean, defective
natures do not obtain the homage which belongs to those of ethereal
texture. It will be a life with no enthusiasms nor romance, perhaps,
but it will be tolerable, and what may be called happy, and my child
will be protected and educated. My child! what is there which
I ought to put in the balance against her? If our sympathy is
not complete, I have my own little oratory: I can keep the candles alight,
close the door, and worship there alone.’</p>
<p>So she mused, and her foes again ranged themselves over against her.
There was nothing to support her but something veiled, which would not
altogether disclose or explain itself. Nevertheless, in a few
minutes, her enemies had vanished, like a mist before a sudden wind,
and she was once more victorious. Precious and rare are those
divine souls, to whom that which is aërial is substantial, the
only true substance; those for whom a pale vision possesses an authority
they are forced unconditionally to obey.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Mrs Caffyn was unhappy, and made up her mind that she would talk
to Frank herself. She had learned enough about him from the two
sisters, especially from Clara, to make her believe that, with a very
little management, she could bring him back to Madge. The difficulty
was to see him without his father’s knowledge. At last she
determined to write to him, and she made her son-in-law address the
envelope and mark it private. This is what she said:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘DEAR SIR, - Although unbeknown to you, I take the liberty
of telling you as M. H. is alivin’ here with me, and somebody
else as I think you ought to see, but perhaps I’d better have
a word or two with you myself, if not quite ill-convenient to you, and
maybe you’ll be kind enough to say how that’s to be done
to your obedient, humble servant,</p>
<p>‘MRS CAFFYN.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>She thought this very diplomatic, inasmuch as nobody but Frank could
possibly suspect what the letter meant. It went to Stoke Newington,
but, alas! he was in Germany, and poor Mrs Caffyn had to wait a week
before she received a reply. Frank of course understood it.
Although he had thought about Madge continually, he had become calmer.
He saw, it is true, that there was no stability in his position, and
that he could not possibly remain where he was. Had Madge been
the commonest of the common, and his relationship to her the commonest
of the common, he could not permit her to cast herself loose from him
for ever and take upon herself the whole burden of his misdeed.
But he did not know what to do, and, as successive considerations and
reconsiderations ended in nothing, and the distractions of a foreign
country were so numerous, Madge had for a time been put aside, like
a huge bill which we cannot pay, and which staggers us. We therefore
docket it, and hide it in the desk, and we imagine we have done something.
Once again, however, the flame leapt up out of the ashes, vivid as ever.
Once again the thought that he had been so close to Madge, and that
she had yielded to him, touched him with peculiar tenderness, and it
seemed impossible to part himself from her. To a man with any
of the nobler qualities of man it is not only a sense of honour which
binds him to a woman who has given him all she has to give. Separation
seems unnatural, monstrous, a divorce from himself; it is not she alone,
but it is himself whom he abandons. Frank’s duty, too, pointed
imperiously to the path he ought to take, duty to the child as well
as to the mother. He determined to go home, secretly; Mrs Caffyn
would not have written if she had not seen good reason for believing
that Madge still belonged to him. He made up his mind to start
the next day, but when the next day came, instructions to go immediately
to Hamburg arrived from his father. There were rumours of the
insolvency of a house with which Mr Palmer dealt; inquiries were necessary
which could better be made personally, and if these rumours were correct,
as Mr Palmer believed them to be, his agency must be transferred to
some other firm. There was now no possibility of a journey to
England. For a moment he debated whether, when he was at Hamburg,
he could not slip over to London, but it would be dangerous. Further
orders might come from his father, and the failure to acknowledge them
would lead to evasion, and perhaps to discovery. He must, therefore,
content himself with a written explanation to Mrs Caffyn why he could
not meet her, and there should be one more effort to make atonement
to Madge. This was what went to Mrs Caffyn, and to her lodger:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘DEAR MADAM, - Your note has reached me here. I am very
sorry that my engagements are so pressing that I cannot leave Germany
at present. I have written to Miss Hopgood. There is one
subject which I cannot mention to her - I cannot speak to her about
money. Will you please give me full information? I enclose
£20, and I must trust to your discretion. I thank you heartily
for all your kindness. - Truly yours,</p>
<p>‘FRANK PALMER.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘MY DEAREST MADGE, - I cannot help saying one more word to
you, although, when I last saw you, you told me that it was useless
for me to hope. I know, however, that there is now another bond
between us, the child is mine as well as yours, and if I am not all
that you deserve, ought you to prevent me from doing my duty to it as
well as to you? It is true that if we were to marry I could never
right you, and perhaps my father would have nothing to do with us, but
in time he might relent, and I will come over at once, or, at least,
the moment I have settled some business here, and you shall be my wife.
Do, my dearest Madge, consent.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>When he came to this point his pen stopped. What he had written
was very smooth, but very tame and cold. However, nothing better
presented itself; he changed his position, sat back in his chair, and
searched himself, but could find nothing. It was not always so.
Some months ago there would have been no difficulty, and he would not
have known when to come to an end. The same thing would have been
said a dozen times, perhaps, but it would not have seemed the same to
him, and each succeeding repetition would have been felt with the force
of novelty. He took a scrap of paper and tried to draft two or
three sentences, altered them several times and made them worse.
He then re-read the letter; it was too short; but after all it contained
what was necessary, and it must go as it stood. She knew how he
felt towards her. So he signed it after giving his address at
Hamburg, and it was posted.</p>
<p>Three or four days afterwards Mrs Marshall, in accordance with her
usual custom, went to see Madge before she was up. The child lay
peacefully by its mother’s side and Frank’s letter was upon
the counterpane. The resolution that no letter from him should
be opened had been broken. The two women had become great friends
and, within the last few weeks, Madge had compelled Mrs Marshall to
call her by her Christian name.</p>
<p>‘You’ve had a letter from Mr Palmer; I was sure it was
his handwriting when it came late last night.’</p>
<p>‘You can read it; there is nothing private in it.’</p>
<p>She turned round to the child and Mrs Marshall sat down and read.
When she had finished she laid the letter on the bed again and was silent.</p>
<p>‘Well?’ said Madge. ‘Would you say “No?”’</p>
<p>‘Yes, I would.’</p>
<p>‘For your own sake, as well as for his?’</p>
<p>Mrs Marshall took up the letter and read half of it again.</p>
<p>‘Yes, you had better say “No.” You will find
it dull, especially if you have to live in London.’</p>
<p>‘Did you find London dull when you came to live in it?’</p>
<p>‘Rather; Marshall is away all day long.’</p>
<p>‘But scarcely any woman in London expects to marry a man who
is not away all day.’</p>
<p>‘They ought then to have heaps of work, or they ought to have
a lot of children to look after; but, perhaps, being born and bred in
the country, I do not know what people in London are. Recollect
you were country born and bred yourself, or, at anyrate, you have lived
in the country for the most of your life.’</p>
<p>‘Dull! we must all expect to be dull.’</p>
<p>‘There’s nothing worse. I’ve had rheumatic
fever, and I say, give me the fever rather than what comes over me at
times here. If Marshall had not been so good to me, I do not know
what I should have done with myself.’</p>
<p>Madge turned round and looked Mrs Marshall straight in the face,
but she did not flinch.</p>
<p>‘Marshall is very good to me, but I was glad when mother and
you and your sister came to keep me company when he is not at home.
It tired me to have my meals alone: it is bad for the digestion; at
least, so he says, and he believes that it was indigestion that was
the matter with me. I should be sorry for myself if you were to
go away; not that I want to put that forward. Maybe I should never
see much more of you: he is rich: you might come here sometimes, but
he would not like to have Marshall and mother and me at his house.’</p>
<p>Not a word was spoken for at least a minute.</p>
<p>Suddenly Mrs Marshall took Madge’s hand in her own hands, leaned
over her, and in that kind of whisper with which we wake a sleeper who
is to be aroused to escape from sudden peril, she said in her ear, -</p>
<p>‘Madge, Madge: for God’s sake leave him!’</p>
<p>‘I have left him.’</p>
<p>‘Are you sure?’</p>
<p>‘Quite.’</p>
<p>‘For ever?’</p>
<p>‘For ever!’</p>
<p>Mrs Marshall let go Madge’s hand, turned her eyes towards her
intently for a moment, and again bent over her as if she were about
to embrace her. A knock, however, came at the door, and Mrs Caffyn
entered with the cup of coffee which she always insisted on bringing
before Madge rose. After she and her daughter had left, Madge
read the letter once more. There was nothing new in it, but formally
it was something, like the tolling of the bell when we know that our
friend is dead. There was a little sobbing, and then she kissed
her child with such eagerness that it began to cry.</p>
<p>‘You’ll answer that letter, I suppose?’ said Mrs
Caffyn, when they were alone.</p>
<p>‘No.’</p>
<p>‘I’m rather glad. It would worrit you, and there’s
nothing worse for a baby than worritin’ when it’s mother’s
a-feedin it.’</p>
<p>Mr Caffyn wrote as follows:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘DEAR SIR, - I was sorry as you couldn’t come; but I
believe now as it was better as you didn’t. I am no scollard,
and so no more from your obedient, humble servant,</p>
<p>‘MRS CAFFYN.</p>
<p>‘<i>P.S</i>. - I return the money, having no use for the same.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Baruch did not obtain any very definite information from Marshall
about Clara. He was told that she had a sister; that they were
both of them gentlewomen; that their mother and father were dead; that
they were great readers, and that they did not go to church nor chapel,
but that they both went sometimes to hear a certain Mr A. J. Scott lecture.
He was once assistant minister to Irving, but was now heretical, and
had a congregation of his own creating at Woolwich.</p>
<p>Baruch called at the shop and found Clara once more alone.
The book was packed up and had being lying ready for him for two or
three days. He wanted to speak, but hardly knew how to begin.
He looked idly round the shelves, taking down one volume after another,
and at last he said, -</p>
<p>‘I suppose nobody but myself has ever asked for a copy of Robinson?’</p>
<p>‘Not since I have been here.’</p>
<p>‘I do not wonder at it; he printed only two hundred and fifty;
he gave away five-and-twenty, and I am sure nearly two hundred were
sold as wastepaper.’</p>
<p>‘He is a friend of yours?’</p>
<p>‘He was a friend; he is dead; he was an usher in a private
school, although you might have supposed, from the title selected, that
he was a clerk. I told him it was useless to publish, and his
publishers told him the same thing.’</p>
<p>‘I should have thought that some notice would have been taken
of him; he is so evidently worth it.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, but although he was original and reflective, he had no
particular talent. His excellence lay in criticism and observation,
often profound, on what came to him every day, and he was valueless
in the literary market. A talent of some kind is necessary to
genius if it is to be heard. So he died utterly unrecognised,
save by one or two personal friends who loved him dearly. He was
peculiar in the depth and intimacy of his friendships. Few men
understand the meaning of the word friendship. They consort with
certain companions and perhaps very earnestly admire them, because they
possess intellectual gifts, but of friendship, such as we two, Morris
and I (for that was his real name) understood it, they know nothing.’</p>
<p>‘Do you believe, that the good does not necessarily survive?’</p>
<p>‘Yes and no; I believe that power every moment, so far as our
eyes can follow it, is utterly lost. I have had one or two friends
whom the world has never known and never will know, who have more in
them than is to be found in many an English classic. I could take
you to a little dissenting chapel not very far from Holborn where you
would hear a young Welshman, with no education beyond that provided
by a Welsh denominational college, who is a perfect orator and whose
depth of insight is hardly to be matched, save by Thomas À Kempis,
whom he much resembles. When he dies he will be forgotten in a
dozen years. Besides, it is surely plain enough to everybody that
there are thousands of men and women within a mile of us, apathetic
and obscure, who, if, an object worthy of them had been presented to
them, would have shown themselves capable of enthusiasm and heroism.
Huge volumes of human energy are apparently annihilated.’</p>
<p>‘It is very shocking, worse to me than the thought of the earthquake
or the pestilence.’</p>
<p>‘I said “yes and no” and there is another side.
The universe is so wonderful, so intricate, that it is impossible to
trace the transformation of its forces, and when they seem to disappear
the disappearance may be an illusion. Moreover, “waste”
is a word which is applicable only to finite resources. If the
resources are infinite it has no meaning.’</p>
<p>Two customers came in and Baruch was obliged to leave. When
he came to reflect, he was surprised to find not only how much he had
said, but what he had said. He was usually reserved, and with
strangers he adhered to the weather or to passing events. He had
spoken, however, to this young woman as if they had been acquainted
for years. Clara, too, was surprised. She always cut short
attempts at conversation in the shop. Frequently she answered
questions and receipted and returned bills without looking in the faces
of the people who spoke to her or offered her the money. But to
this foreigner, or Jew, she had disclosed something she felt.
She was rather abashed, but presently her employer, Mr Barnes, returned
and somewhat relieved her.</p>
<p>‘The gentleman who bought <i>After Office Hours</i> came for
it while you were out?’</p>
<p>‘Oh! what, Cohen? Good fellow Cohen is; he it was who
recommended you to me. He is brother-in-law to your landlord.’
Clara was comforted; he was not a mere ‘casual,’ as Mr Barnes
called his chance customers.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>About a fortnight afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, Cohen went to
the Marshalls’. He had called there once or twice since
his mother-in-law came to London, but had seen nothing of the lodgers.
It was just about tea-time, but unfortunately Marshall and his wife
had gone out. Mrs Caffyn insisted that Cohen should stay, but
Madge could not be persuaded to come downstairs, and Baruch, Mrs Caffyn
and Clara had tea by themselves. Baruch asked Mrs Caffyn if she
could endure London after living for so long in the country.</p>
<p>‘Ah! my dear boy, I have to like it.’</p>
<p>‘No, you haven’t; what you mean is that, whether you
like it, or whether you do not, you have to put up with it.’</p>
<p>‘No, I don’t mean that. Miss Hopgood, Cohen and
me, we are the best of friends, but whenever he comes here, he allus
begins to argue with me. Howsomever, arguing isn’t everything,
is it, my dear? There’s some things, after all, as I can
do and he can’t, but he’s just wrong here in his arguing
that wasn’t what I meant. I meant what I said, as I had
to like it.’</p>
<p>‘How can you like it if you don’t?’</p>
<p>‘How can I? That shows you’re a man and not a woman.
Jess like you men. <i>You’d</i> do what you didn’t
like, I know, for you’re a good sort - and everybody would know
you didn’t like it - but what would be the use of me a-livin’
in a house if I didn’t like it? - with my daughter and these dear,
young women? If it comes to livin’, you’d ten thousand
times better say at once as you hate bein’ where you are than
go about all day long, as if you was a blessed saint and put upon.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn twitched at her gown and pulled it down over her knees
and brushed the crumbs off with energy. She continued, ‘I
can’t abide people who everlastin’ make believe they are
put upon. Suppose I were allus a-hankering every foggy day after
Great Oakhurst, and yet a-tellin’ my daughter as I knew my place
was here; if I was she, I should wish my mother at Jericho.’</p>
<p>‘Then you really prefer London to Great Oakhurst?’ said
Clara.</p>
<p>‘Why, my dear, of course I do. Don’t you think
it’s pleasanter being here with you and your sister and that precious
little creature, and my daughter, than down in that dead-alive place?
Not that I don’t miss my walk sometimes into Darkin; you remember
that way as I took you once, Baruch, across the hill, and we went over
Ranmore Common and I showed you Camilla Lacy, and you said as you knew
a woman who wrote books who once lived there? You remember them
beech-woods? Ah, it was one October! Weren’t they
a colour - weren’t they lovely?’</p>
<p>Baruch remembered them well enough. Who that had ever seen
them could forget them?</p>
<p>‘And it was I as took you! You wouldn’t think it,
my dear, though he’s always a-arguin’, I do believe he’d
love to go that walk again, even with an old woman, and see them heavenly
beeches. But, Lord, how I do talk, and you’ve neither of
you got any tea.’</p>
<p>‘Have you lived long in London, Miss Hopgood?’ inquired
Baruch.</p>
<p>‘Not very long.’</p>
<p>‘Do you feel the change?’</p>
<p>‘I cannot say I do not.’</p>
<p>‘I suppose, however, you have brought yourself to believe in
Mrs Caffyn’s philosophy?’</p>
<p>‘I cannot say that, but I may say that I am scarcely strong
enough for mere endurance, and I therefore always endeavour to find
something agreeable in circumstances from which there is no escape.’</p>
<p>The recognition of the One in the Many had as great a charm for Baruch
as it had for Socrates, and Clara spoke with the ease of a person whose
habit it was to deal with principles and generalisations.</p>
<p>‘Yes, and mere toleration, to say nothing of opposition, at
least so far as persons are concerned, is seldom necessary. It
is generally thought that what is called dramatic power is a poetic
gift, but it is really an indispensable virtue to all of us if we are
to be happy.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn did not take much interest in abstract statements.
‘You remember,’ she said, turning to Baruch, ‘that
man Chorley as has the big farm on the left-hand side just afore you
come to the common? He wasn’t a Surrey man: he came out
of the shires.’</p>
<p>‘Very well.’</p>
<p>‘He’s married that Skelton girl; married her the week
afore I left. There isn’t no love lost there, but the girl’s
father said he’d murder him if he didn’t, and so it come
off. How she ever brought herself to it gets over me. She
has that big farm-house, and he’s made a fine drawing-room out
of the livin’ room on the left-hand side as you go in, and put
a new grate in the kitchen and turned that into the livin’ room,
and they does the cooking in the back kitchen, but for all that, if
I’d been her, I’d never have seen his face no more, and
I’d have packed off to Australia.’</p>
<p>‘Does anybody go near them?’</p>
<p>‘Near them! of course they do, and, as true as I’m a-sittin’
here, our parson, who married them, went to the breakfast. It
isn’t Chorley as I blame so much; he’s a poor, snivellin’
creature, and he was frightened, but it’s the girl. She
doesn’t care for him no more than me, and then again, although,
as I tell you, he’s such a poor creature, he’s awful cruel
and mean, and she knows it. But what was I a-goin’ to say?
Never shall I forget that wedding. You know as it’s a short
cut to the church across the farmyard at the back of my house.
The parson, he was rather late - I suppose he’d been giving himself
a finishin’ touch - and, as it had been very dry weather, he went
across the straw and stuff just at the edge like of the yard.
There was a pig under the straw - pigs, my dear,’ turning to Clara,
‘nuzzle under the straw so as you can’t see them.
Just as he came to this pig it started up and upset him, and he fell
and straddled across its back, and the Lord have mercy on me if it didn’t
carry him at an awful rate, as if he was a jockey at Epsom races, till
it come to a puddle of dung water, and then down he plumped in it.
You never see’d a man in such a pickle! I heer’d the
pig a-squeakin’ like mad, and I ran to the door, and I called
out to him, and I says, “Mr Ormiston, won’t you come in
here?” and though, as you know, he allus hated me, he had to come.
Mussy on us, how he did stink, and he saw me turn up my nose, and he
was wild with rage, and he called the pig a filthy beast. I says
to him as that was the pig’s way and the pig didn’t know
who it was who was a-ridin’ it, and I took his coat off and wiped
his stockings, and sent to the rectory for another coat, and he crept
up under the hedge to his garden, and went home, and the people at church
had to wait for an hour. I was glad I was goin’ away from
Great Oakhurst, for he never would have forgiven me.’</p>
<p>There was a ring at the front door bell, and Clara went to see who
was there. It was a runaway ring, but she took the opportunity
of going upstairs to Madge.</p>
<p>‘She has a sister?’ said Baruch.</p>
<p>‘Yes, and I may just as well tell you about her now - leastways
what I know - and I believe as I know pretty near everything about her.
You’ll have to be told if they stay here. She was engaged
to be married, and how it came about with a girl like that is a bit
beyond me, anyhow, there’s a child, and the father’s a good
sort by what I can make out, but she won’t have anything more
to do with him.’</p>
<p>‘What do you mean by “a girl like that.”’</p>
<p>‘She isn’t one of them as goes wrong; she can talk German
and reads books.’</p>
<p>‘Did he desert her?’</p>
<p>‘No, that’s just it. She loves me, although I say
it, as if I was her mother, and yet I’m just as much in the dark
as I was the first day I saw her as to why she left that man.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn wiped the corners of her eyes with her apron.</p>
<p>‘It’s gospel truth as I never took to anybody as I’ve
took to her.’</p>
<p>After Baruch had gone, Clara returned.</p>
<p>‘He’s a curious creature, my dear,’ said Mrs Caffyn,
‘as good as gold, but he’s too solemn by half. It
would do him a world of good if he’d somebody with him who’d
make him laugh more. He <i>can</i> laugh, for I’ve seen
him forced to get up and hold his sides, but he never makes no noise.
He’s a Jew, and they say as them as crucified our blessed Lord
never laugh proper.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Baruch was now in love. He had fallen in love with Clara suddenly
and totally. His tendency to reflectiveness did not diminish his
passion: it rather augmented it. The men and women whose thoughts
are here and there continually are not the people to feel the full force
of love. Those who do feel it are those who are accustomed to
think of one thing at a time, and to think upon it for a long time.
‘No man,’ said Baruch once, ‘can love a woman unless
he loves God.’ ‘I should say,’ smilingly replied
the Gentile, ‘that no man can love God unless he loves a woman.’
‘I am right,’ said Baruch, ‘and so are you.’</p>
<p>But Baruch looked in the glass: his hair, jet black when he was a
youth, was marked with grey, and once more the thought came to him -
this time with peculiar force - that he could not now expect a woman
to love him as she had a right to demand that he should love, and that
he must be silent. He was obliged to call upon Barnes in about
a fortnight’s time. He still read Hebrew, and he had seen
in the shop a copy of the Hebrew translation of the <i>Moreh Nevochim</i>
of Maimonides, which he greatly coveted, but could not afford to buy.
Like every true book-lover, he could not make up his mind when he wished
for a book which was beyond his means that he ought once for all to
renounce it, and he was guilty of subterfuges quite unworthy of such
a reasonable creature in order to delude himself into the belief that
he might yield. For example, he wanted a new overcoat badly, but
determined it was more prudent to wait, and a week afterwards very nearly
came to the conclusion that as he had not ordered the coat he had actually
accumulated a fund from which the <i>Moreh Nevochim</i> might be purchased.
When he came to the shop he saw Barnes was there, and he persuaded himself
he should have a quieter moment or two with the precious volume when
Clara was alone. Barnes, of course, gossiped with everybody.</p>
<p>He therefore called again in the evening, about half an hour before
closing time, and found that Barnes had gone home. Clara was busy
with a catalogue, the proof of which she was particularly anxious to
send to the printer that night. He did not disturb her, but took
down the Maimonides, and for a few moments was lost in revolving the
doctrine, afterwards repeated and proved by a greater than Maimonides,
that the will and power of God are co-extensive: that there is nothing
which might be and is not. It was familiar to Baruch, but like
all ideas of that quality and magnitude - and there are not many of
them - it was always new and affected him like a starry night, seen
hundreds of times, yet for ever infinite and original.</p>
<p>But was it Maimonides which kept him till the porter began to put
up the shutters? Was he pondering exclusively upon God as the
folio lay open before him? He did think about Him, but whether
he would have thought about Him for nearly twenty minutes if Clara had
not been there is another matter.</p>
<p>‘Do you walk home alone?’ he said as she gave the proof
to the boy who stood waiting.</p>
<p>‘Yes, always.’</p>
<p>‘I am going to see Marshall to-night, but I must go to Newman
Street first. I shall be glad to walk with you, if you do not
mind diverging a little.’</p>
<p>She consented and they went along Oxford Street without speaking,
the roar of the carriages and waggons preventing a word.</p>
<p>They turned, however, into Bloomsbury, and were able to hear one
another. He had much to say and he could not begin to say it.
There was a great mass of something to be communicated pent up within
him, and he would have liked to pour it all out before her at once.
It is just at such times that we often take up as a means of expression
and relief that which is absurdly inexpressive and irrelevant.</p>
<p>‘I have not seen your sister yet; I hope I may see her this
evening.’</p>
<p>‘I hope you may, but she frequently suffers from headache and
prefers to be alone.’</p>
<p>‘How do you like Mr Barnes?’</p>
<p>The answer is not worth recording, nor is any question or answer
which was asked or returned for the next quarter of an hour worth recording,
although they were so interesting then. When they were crossing
Bedford Square on their return Clara happened to say amongst other commonplaces,
-</p>
<p>‘What a relief a quiet space in London is.’</p>
<p>‘I do not mind the crowd if I am by myself.’</p>
<p>‘I do not like crowds; I dislike even the word, and dislike
“the masses” still more. I do not want to think of
human beings as if they were a cloud of dust, and as if each atom had
no separate importance. London is often horrible to me for that
reason. In the country it was not quite so bad.’</p>
<p>‘That is an illusion,’ said Baruch after a moment’s
pause.</p>
<p>‘I do not quite understand you, but if it be an illusion it
is very painful. In London human beings seem the commonest, cheapest
things in the world, and I am one of them. I went with Mr Marshall
not long ago to a Free Trade Meeting, and more than two thousand people
were present. Everybody told me it was magnificent, but it made
me very sad.’ She was going on, but she stopped. How
was it, she thought again, that she could be so communicative?
How was it? How is it that sometimes a stranger crosses our path,
with whom, before we have known him for more than an hour, we have no
secrets? An hour? we have actually known him for centuries.</p>
<p>She could not understand it, and she felt as if she had been inconsistent
with her constant professions of wariness in self-revelation.</p>
<p>‘It is an illusion, nevertheless - an illusion of the senses.
It is difficult to make what I mean clear, because insight is not possible
beyond a certain point, and clearness does not come until penetration
is complete and what we acquire is brought into a line with other acquisitions.
It constantly happens that we are arrested short of this point, but
it would be wrong to suppose that our conclusions, if we may call them
so, are of no value.’</p>
<p>She was silent, and he did not go on. At last he said, -</p>
<p>‘The illusion lies in supposing that number, quantity and terms
of that kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but
I cannot go further, at least not now. After all, it is possible
here in London for one atom to be of eternal importance to another.’</p>
<p>They had gone quite round Bedford Square without entering Great Russell
Street, which was the way eastwards. A drunken man was holding
on by the railings of the Square. He had apparently been hesitating
for some time whether he could reach the road, and, just as Baruch and
Clara came up to him, he made a lurch towards it, and nearly fell over
them. Clara instinctively seized Baruch’s arm in order to
avoid the poor, staggering mortal; they went once more to the right,
and began to complete another circuit. Somehow her arm had been
drawn into Baruch’s, and there it remained.</p>
<p>‘Have you any friends in London?’ said Baruch.</p>
<p>‘There are Mrs Caffyn, her son and daughter, and there is Mr
A. J. Scott. He was a friend of my father.’</p>
<p>‘You mean the Mr Scott who was Irving’s assistant?’</p>
<p>‘Yes.’</p>
<p>‘An addition - ’ he was about to say, ‘an additional
bond’ but he corrected himself. ‘A bond between us;
I know Mr Scott.’</p>
<p>‘Do you really? I suppose you know many interesting people
in London, as you are in his circle.’</p>
<p>‘Very few; weeks, months have passed since anybody has said
as much to me as you have.’</p>
<p>His voice quivered a little, for he was trembling with an emotion
quite inexplicable by mere intellectual relationship. Something
came through Clara’s glove as her hand rested on his wrist which
ran through every nerve and sent the blood into his head.</p>
<p>Clara felt his excitement and dreaded lest he should say something
to which she could give no answer, and when they came opposite Great
Russell Street, she withdrew her arm from his, and began to cross to
the opposite pavement. She turned the conversation towards some
indifferent subject, and in a few minutes they were at Great Ormond
Street. Baruch would not go in as he had intended; he thought
it was about to rain, and he was late. As he went along he became
calmer, and when he was fairly indoors he had passed into a despair
entirely inconsistent - superficially - with the philosopher Baruch,
as inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in Bedford Square.
He could well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss Hopgood’s
suppression of him. Ass that he was not to see what he ought to
have known so well, that he was playing the fool to her; he, with a
grown-up son, to pretend to romance with a girl! At that moment
she might be mocking him, or, if she was too good for mockery, she might
be contriving to avoid or to quench him. The next time he met
her, he would be made to understand that he was <i>pitied</i>, and perhaps
he would then learn the name of the youth who was his rival, and had
won her. He would often meet her, no doubt, but of what value
would anything he could say be to her. She could not be expected
to make fine distinctions, and there was a class of elderly men, to
which of course he would be assigned, but the thought was too horrible.</p>
<p>Perhaps his love for Clara might be genuine; perhaps it was not.
He had hoped that as he grew older he might be able really to <i>see</i>
a woman, but he was once more like one of the possessed. It was
not Clara Hopgood who was before him, it was hair, lips, eyes, just
as it was twenty years ago, just as it was with the commonest shop-boy
he met, who had escaped from the counter, and was waiting at an area
gate. It was terrible to him to find that he had so nearly lost
his self-control, but upon this point he was unjust to himself, for
we are often more distinctly aware of the strength of the temptation
than of the authority within us, which falteringly, but decisively,
enables us at last to resist it.</p>
<p>Then he fell to meditating how little his studies had done for him.
What was the use of them? They had not made him any stronger,
and he was no better able than other people to resist temptation.
After twenty years continuous labour he found himself capable of the
vulgarest, coarsest faults and failings from which the remotest skiey
influence in his begetting might have saved him.</p>
<p>Clara was not as Baruch. No such storm as that which had darkened
and disheartened him could pass over her, but she could love, perhaps
better than he, and she began to love him. It was very natural
to a woman such as Clara, for she had met a man who had said to her
that what she believed was really of some worth. Her father and
mother had been very dear to her; her sister was very dear to her, but
she had never received any such recognition as that which had now been
offered to her: her own self had never been returned to her with such
honour. She thought, too - why should she not think it? - of the
future, of the release from her dreary occupation, of a happy home with
independence, and she thought of the children that might be. She
lay down without any misgiving. She was sure he was in love with
her; she did not know much of him, certainly, in the usual meaning of
the word, but she knew enough. She would like to find out more
of his history; perhaps without exciting suspicion she might obtain
it from Mrs Caffyn.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Mr Frank Palmer was back again in England. He was much distressed
when he received that last letter from Mrs Caffyn, and discovered that
Madge’s resolution not to write remained unshaken. He was
really distressed, but he was not the man upon whom an event, however
deeply felt at the time, could score a furrow which could not be obliterated.
If he had been a dramatic personage, what had happened to him would
have been the second act leading to a fifth, in which the Fates would
have appeared, but life seldom arranges itself in proper poetic form.
A man determines that he must marry; he makes the shop-girl an allowance,
never sees her or her child again, transforms himself into a model husband,
is beloved by his wife and family; the woman whom he kissed as he will
never kiss his lawful partner, withdraws completely, and nothing happens
to him.</p>
<p>Frank was sure he could never love anybody as he had loved Madge,
nor could he cut indifferently that other cord which bound him to her.
Nobody in society expects the same paternal love for the offspring of
a housemaid or a sempstress as for the child of the stockbroker’s
or brewer’s daughter, and nobody expects the same obligations,
but Frank was not a society youth, and Madge was his equal. A
score of times, when his fancy roved, the rope checked him as suddenly
as if it were the lasso of a South American Gaucho. But what could
he do? that was the point. There were one or two things which
he could have done, perhaps, and one or two things which he could not
have done if he had been made of different stuff; but there was nothing
more to be done which Frank Palmer could do. After all, it was
better that Madge should be the child’s mother than that it should
belong to some peasant. At least it would be properly educated.
As to money, Mrs Caffyn had told him expressly that she did not want
it. That might be nothing but pride, and he resolved, without
very clearly seeing how, and without troubling himself for the moment
as to details, that Madge should be entirely and handsomely supported
by him. Meanwhile it was of great importance that he should behave
in such a manner as to raise no suspicion. He did not particularly
care for some time after his return from Germany to go out to the musical
parties to which he was constantly invited, but he went as a duty, and
wherever he went he met his charming cousin. They always sang
together; they had easy opportunities of practising together, and Frank,
although nothing definite was said to him, soon found that his family
and hers considered him destined for her. He could not retreat,
and there was no surprise manifested by anybody when it was rumoured
that they were engaged. His story may as well be finished at once.
He and Miss Cecilia Morland were married. A few days before the
wedding, when some legal arrangements and settlements were necessary,
Frank made one last effort to secure an income for Madge, but it failed.
Mrs Caffyn met him by appointment, but he could not persuade her even
to be the bearer of a message to Madge. He then determined to
confess his fears. To his great relief Mrs Caffyn of her own accord
assured him that he never need dread any disturbance or betrayal.</p>
<p>‘There are three of us,’ she said, ‘as knows you
- Miss Madge, Miss Clara and myself - and, as far as you are concerned,
we are dead and buried. I can’t say as I was altogether
of Miss Madge’s way of looking at it at first, and I thought it
ought to have been different, though I believe now as she’s right,
but,’ and the old woman suddenly fired up as if some bolt from
heaven had kindled her, ‘I pity you, sir - you, sir, I say - more
nor I do her. You little know what you’ve lost, the blessedest,
sweetest, ah, and the cleverest creature, too, as ever I set eyes on.’</p>
<p>‘But, Mrs Caffyn,’ said Frank, with much emotion, ‘it
was not I who left her, you know it was not, and, and even - ’</p>
<p>The word ‘now’ was coming, but it did not come.</p>
<p>‘Ah,’ said Mrs Caffyn, with something like scorn, ‘<i>I</i>
know, yes, I do know. It was she, you needn’t tell me that,
but, God-a-mighty in heaven, if I’d been you, I’d have laid
myself on the ground afore her, I’d have tore my heart out for
her, and I’d have said, “No other woman in this world but
you” - but there, what a fool I am! Goodbye, Mr Palmer.’</p>
<p>She marched away, leaving Frank very miserable, and, as he imagined,
unsettled, but he was not so. The fit lasted all day, but when
he was walking home that evening, he met a poor friend whose wife was
dying.</p>
<p>‘I am so grieved,’ said Frank ‘to hear of your
trouble - no hope?’</p>
<p>‘None, I am afraid.’</p>
<p>‘It is very dreadful.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, it is hard to bear, but to what is inevitable we must
submit.’</p>
<p>This new phrase struck Frank very much, and it seemed very philosophic
to him, a maxim, for guidance through life. It did not strike
him that it was generally either a platitude or an excuse for weakness,
and that a nobler duty is to find out what is inevitable and what is
not, to declare boldly that what the world oftentimes affirms to be
inevitable is really evitable, and heroically to set about making it
so. Even if revolt be perfectly useless, we are not particularly
drawn to a man who prostrates himself too soon and is incapable of a
little cursing.</p>
<p>As it was impossible to provide for Madge and the child now, Frank
considered whether he could not do something for them in the will which
he had to make before his marriage. He might help his daughter
if he could not help the mother.</p>
<p>But his wife would perhaps survive him, and the discovery would cause
her and her children much misery; it would damage his character with
them and inflict positive moral mischief. The will, therefore,
did not mention Madge, and it was not necessary to tell his secret to
his solicitor.</p>
<p>The wedding took place amidst much rejoicing; everybody thought the
couple were most delightfully matched; the presents were magnificent;
the happy pair went to Switzerland, came back and settled in one of
the smaller of the old, red brick houses in Stoke Newington, with a
lawn in front, always shaved and trimmed to the last degree of smoothness
and accuracy, with paths on whose gravel not the smallest weed was ever
seen, and with a hot-house that provided the most luscious black grapes.
There was a grand piano in the drawing-room, and Frank and Cecilia became
more musical than ever, and Waltham Lodge was the headquarters of a
little amateur orchestra which practised Mozart and Haydn, and gave
local concerts. A twelvemonth after the marriage a son was born
and Frank’s father increased Frank’s share in the business.
Mr Palmer had long ceased to take any interest in the Hopgoods.
He considered that Madge had treated Frank shamefully in jilting him,
but was convinced that he was fortunate in his escape. It was
clear that she was unstable; she probably threw him overboard for somebody
more attractive, and she was not the woman to be a wife to his son.</p>
<p>One day Cecilia was turning out some drawers belonging to her husband,
and she found a dainty little slipper wrapped up in white tissue paper.
She looked at it for a long time, wondering to whom it could have belonged,
and had half a mind to announce her discovery to Frank, but she was
a wise woman and forbore. It lay underneath some neckties which
were not now worn, two or three silk pocket handkerchiefs also discarded,
and some manuscript books containing school themes. She placed
them on the top of the drawers as if they had all been taken out in
a lump and the slipper was at the bottom.</p>
<p>‘Frank my dear,’ she said after dinner, ‘I emptied
this morning one of the drawers in the attic. I wish you would
look over the things and decide what you wish to keep. I have
not examined them, but they seem to be mostly rubbish.’</p>
<p>He went upstairs after he had smoked his cigar and read his paper.
There was the slipper! It all came back to him, that never-to-be-forgotten
night, when she rebuked him for the folly of kissing her foot, and he
begged the slipper and determined to preserve it for ever, and thought
how delightful it would be to take it out and look at it when he was
an old man. Even now he did not like to destroy it, but Cecilia
might have seen it and might ask him what he had done with it, and what
could he say? Finally he decided to burn it. There was no
fire, however, in the room, and while he stood meditating, Cecilia called
him. He replaced the slipper in the drawer. He could not
return that evening, but he intended to go back the next morning, take
the little parcel away in his pocket and burn it at his office.
At breakfast some letters came which put everything else out of mind.
The first thing he did that evening was to revisit the garret, but the
slipper had gone. Cecilia had been there and had found it carefully
folded up in the drawer. She pulled it out, snipped and tore it
into fifty pieces, carried them downstairs, threw them on the dining-room
fire, sat down before it, poking them further and further into the flames,
and watched them till every vestige had vanished. Frank did not
like to make any inquiries; Cecilia made none, and thence-forward no
trace existed at Waltham Lodge of Madge Hopgood.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Baruch went neither to Barnes’s shop nor to the Marshalls for
nearly a month. One Sunday morning he was poring over the <i>Moreh
Nevochim</i>, for it had proved too powerful a temptation for him, and
he fell upon the theorem that without God the Universe could not continue
to exist, for God is its Form. It was one of those sayings which
may be nothing or much to the reader. Whether it be nothing or
much depends upon the quality of his mind.</p>
<p>There was certainly nothing in it particularly adapted to Baruch’s
condition at that moment, but an antidote may be none the less efficacious
because it is not direct. It removed him to another region.
It was like the sight and sound of the sea to the man who has been in
trouble in an inland city. His self-confidence was restored, for
he to whom an idea is revealed becomes the idea, and is no longer personal
and consequently poor.</p>
<p>His room seemed too small for him; he shut his book and went to Great
Ormond Street. He found there Marshall, Mrs Caffyn, Clara and
a friend of Marshall’s named Dennis.</p>
<p>‘Where is your wife?’ said Baruch to Marshall.</p>
<p>‘Gone with Miss Madge to the Catholic chapel to hear a mass
of Mozart’s.’</p>
<p>‘Yes,’ said Mrs Caffyn. ‘I tell them they’ll
turn Papists if they do not mind. They are always going to that
place, and there’s no knowing, so I’ve hear’d, what
them priests can do. They aren’t like our parsons.
Catch that man at Great Oakhurst a-turnin’ anybody.’</p>
<p>‘I suppose,’ said Baruch to Clara, ‘it is the music
takes your sister there?’</p>
<p>‘Mainly, I believe, but perhaps not entirely.’</p>
<p>‘What other attraction can there be?’</p>
<p>‘I am not in the least disposed to become a convert.
Once for all, Catholicism is incredible and that is sufficient, but
there is much in its ritual which suits me. There is no such intrusion
of the person of the minister as there is in the Church of England,
and still worse amongst dissenters. In the Catholic service the
priest is nothing; it is his office which is everything; he is a mere
means of communication. The mass, in so far as it proclaims that
miracle is not dead, is also very impressive to me.’</p>
<p>‘I do not quite understand you,’ said Marshall, ‘but
if you once chuck your reason overboard, you may just as well be Catholic
as Protestant. Nothing can be more ridiculous than the Protestant
objection, on the ground of absurdity, to the story of the saint walking
about with his head under his arm.’</p>
<p>The tea things had been cleared away, and Marshall was smoking.
Both he and Dennis were Chartists, and Baruch had interrupted a debate
upon a speech delivered at a Chartist meeting that morning by Henry
Vincent.</p>
<p>Frederick Dennis was about thirty, tall and rather loose-limbed.
He wore loose clothes, his neck-cloth was tied in a big, loose knot,
his feet were large and his boots were heavy. His face was quite
smooth, and his hair, which was very thick and light brown, fell across
his forehead in a heavy wave with just two complete undulations in it
from the parting at the side to the opposite ear. It had a trick
of tumbling over his eyes, so that his fingers were continually passed
through it to brush it away. He was a wood engraver, or, as he
preferred to call himself, an artist, but he also wrote for the newspapers,
and had been a contributor to the <i>Northern Star</i>. He was
well brought up and was intended for the University, but he did not
stick to his Latin and Greek, and as he showed some talent for drawing
he was permitted to follow his bent. His work, however, was not
of first-rate quality, and consequently orders were not abundant.
This was the reason why he had turned to literature. When he had
any books to illustrate he lived upon what they brought him, and when
there were no books he renewed his acquaintance with politics.
If books and newspapers both failed, he subsisted on a little money
which had been left him, stayed with friends as long as he could, and
amused himself by writing verses which showed much command over rhyme.</p>
<p>‘I cannot stand Vincent,’ said Marshall, ‘he is
too flowery for me, and he does not belong to the people. He is
middle-class to the backbone.’</p>
<p>‘He is deficient in ideas,’ said Dennis.</p>
<p>‘It is odd,’ continued Marshall, turning to Cohen, ‘that
your race never takes any interest in politics.’</p>
<p>‘My race is not a nation, or, if a nation, has no national
home. It took an interest in politics when it was in its own country,
and produced some rather remarkable political writing.’</p>
<p>‘But why do you care so little for what is going on now?’</p>
<p>‘I do care, but all people are not born to be agitators, and,
furthermore, I have doubts if the Charter will accomplish all you expect.’</p>
<p>‘I know what is coming’ - Marshall took the pipe out
of his mouth and spoke with perceptible sarcasm - ‘the inefficiency
of merely external remedies, the folly of any attempt at improvement
which does not begin with the improvement of individual character, and
that those to whom we intend to give power are no better than those
from whom we intend to take it away. All very well, Mr Cohen.
My answer is that at the present moment the stockingers in Leicester
are earning four shillings and sixpence a week. It is not a question
whether they are better or worse than their rulers. They want
something to eat, they have nothing, and their masters have more than
they can eat.’</p>
<p>‘Apart altogether from purely material reasons,’ said
Dennis, ‘we have rights; we are born into this planet without
our consent, and, therefore, we may make certain demands.’</p>
<p>‘Do you not think,’ said Clara, ‘that the repeal
of the corn laws will help you?’</p>
<p>Dennis smiled and was about to reply, but Marshall broke out savagely,
-</p>
<p>‘Repeal of the corn laws is a contemptible device of manufacturing
selfishness. It means low wages. Do you suppose the great
Manchester cotton lords care one straw for their hands? Not they!
They will face a revolution for repeal because it will enable them to
grind an extra profit out of us.’</p>
<p>‘I agree with you entirely,’ said Dennis, turning to
Clara, ‘that a tax upon food is wrong; it is wrong in the abstract.
The notion of taxing bread, the fruit of the earth, is most repulsive;
but the point is - what is our policy to be? If a certain end
is to be achieved, we must neglect subordinate ends, and, at times,
even contradict what our own principles would appear to dictate.
That is the secret of successful leadership.’</p>
<p>He took up the poker and stirred the fire.</p>
<p>‘That will do, Dennis,’ said Marshall, who was evidently
fidgety. ‘The room is rather warm. There’s nothing
in Vincent which irritates me more than those bits of poetry with which
he winds up.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“God made the man - man made the slave,”</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>and all that stuff. If God made the man, God made the slave.
I know what Vincent’s little game is, and it is the same game
with all his set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we
shall see. Let us once get the six points, and the Established
Church will go, and we shall have secular education, and in a generation
there will not be one superstition left.’</p>
<p>‘Theological superstition, you mean?’ said Clara.</p>
<p>‘Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?’</p>
<p>‘A few. The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader
is just as profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as
injurious as the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of
the Inquisition.’</p>
<p>‘Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would
do again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables
and a hell and a heaven.’</p>
<p>‘I maintain,’ said Clara with emphasis, ‘that if
a man declines to examine, and takes for granted what a party leader
or a newspaper tells him, he has no case against the man who declines
to examine, or takes for granted what the priest tells him. Besides,
although, as you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little
patience when I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited
creature who goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is
to believe nothing on one particular subject which his own precious
intellect cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his
duty to swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth.
As to the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when
the majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical
establishment which ever existed.’</p>
<p>Baruch’s lips moved, but he was silent. He was not strong
in argument. He was thinking about Marshall’s triumphant
inquiry whether God is not responsible for slavery. He would have
liked to say something on that subject, but he had nothing ready.</p>
<p>‘Practical people,’ said Dennis, who had not quite recovered
from the rebuke as to the warmth of the room, ‘are often most
unpractical and injudicious. Nothing can be more unwise than to
mix up politics and religion. If you <i>do</i>,’ Dennis
waved his hand, ‘you will have all the religious people against
you. My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is under the illusion that
the Church in this country is tottering to its fall. Now, although
I myself belong to no sect, I do not share his illusion; nay, more,
I am not sure’ - Mr Dennis spoke slowly, rubbed his chin and looked
up at the ceiling - ‘I am not sure that there is not something
to be said in favour of State endowment - at least, in a country like
Ireland.’</p>
<p>‘Come along, Dennis, we shall be late,’ said Marshall,
and the two forthwith took their departure in order to attend another
meeting.</p>
<p>‘Much either of ’em knows about it,’ said Mrs Caffyn
when they had gone. ‘There’s Marshall getting two
pounds a week reg’lar, and goes on talking about people at Leicester,
and he has never been in Leicester in his life; and, as for that Dennis,
he knows less than Marshall, for he does nothing but write for newspapers
and draw for picture-books, never nothing what you may call work, and
he does worrit me so whenever he begins about poor people that I can’t
sit still. <i>I</i> do know what the poor is, having lived at
Great Oakhurst all these years.’</p>
<p>‘You are not a Chartist, then?’ said Baruch.</p>
<p>‘Me - me a Chartist? No, I ain’t, and yet, maybe,
I’m something worse. What would be the use of giving them
poor creatures votes? Why, there isn’t one of them as wouldn’t
hold up his hand for anybody as would give him a shilling. Quite
right of ’em, too, for the one thing they have to think about
from morning to night is how to get a bit of something to fill their
bellies, and they won’t fill them by voting.’</p>
<p>‘But what would you do for them?’</p>
<p>‘Ah! that beats me! Hang somebody, but I don’t
know who it ought to be. There’s a family by the name of
Longwood, they live just on the slope of the hill nigh the Dower Farm,
and there’s nine of them, and the youngest when I left was a baby
six months old, and their living-room faces the road so that the north
wind blows in right under the door, and I’ve seen the snow lie
in heaps inside. As reg’lar as winter comes Longwood is
knocked off - no work. I’ve knowed them not have a bit of
meat for weeks together, and him a-loungin’ about at the corner
of the street. Wasn’t that enough to make him feel as if
somebody ought to be killed? And Marshall and Dennis say as the
proper thing to do is to give him a vote, and prove to him there was
never no Abraham nor Isaac, and that Jonah never was in a whale’s
belly, and that nobody had no business to have more children than he
could feed. And what goes on, and what must go on, inside such
a place as Longwood’s, with him and his wife, and with them boys
and gals all huddled together - But I’d better hold my tongue.
We’ll let the smoke out of this room, I think, and air it a little.’</p>
<p>She opened the window, and Baruch rose and went home.</p>
<p>Whenever Mrs Caffyn talked about the labourers at Great Oakhurst,
whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had been
a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual life,
art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling. When
the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and women
shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in fireside
ecstasies over the divine Plato or Shakespeare is surely not such a
virtue as we imagine it to be.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>Baruch sat and mused before he went to bed. He had gone out
stirred by an idea, but it was already dead. Then he began to
think about Clara. Who was this Dennis who visited the Marshalls
and the Hopgoods? Oh! for an hour of his youth! Fifteen
years ago the word would have come unbidden if he had seen Clara, but
now, in place of the word, there was hesitation, shame. He must
make up his mind to renounce for ever. But, although this conclusion
had forced itself upon him overnight as inevitable, he could not resist
the temptation when he rose the next morning of plotting to meet Clara,
and he walked up and down the street opposite the shop door that evening
nearly a quarter of an hour, just before closing time, hoping that she
might come out and that he might have the opportunity of overtaking
her apparently by accident. At last, fearing he might miss her,
he went in and found she had a companion whom he instantly knew, before
any induction, to be her sister. Madge was not now the Madge whom
we knew at Fenmarket. She was thinner in the face and paler.
Nevertheless, she was not careless; she was even more particular in
her costume, but it was simpler. If anything, perhaps, she was
a little prouder. She was more attractive, certainly, than she
had ever been, although her face could not be said to be handsomer.
The slight prominence of the cheek-bone, the slight hollow underneath,
the loss of colour, were perhaps defects, but they said something which
had a meaning in it superior to that of the tint of the peach.
She had been reading a book while Clara was balancing her cash, and
she attempted to replace it. The shelf was a little too high,
and the volume fell upon the ground. It contained Shelley’s
<i>Revolt of Islam.</i></p>
<p>‘Have you read Shelley?’ said Baruch.</p>
<p>‘Every line - when I was much younger.’</p>
<p>‘Do you read him now?’</p>
<p>‘Not much. I was an enthusiast for him when I was nineteen,
but I find that his subject matter is rather thin, and his themes are
a little worn. He was entirely enslaved by the ideals of the French
Revolution. Take away what the French Revolution contributed to
his poetry, and there is not much left.’</p>
<p>‘As a man he is not very attractive to me.’</p>
<p>‘Nor to me; I never shall forgive his treatment of Harriet.’</p>
<p>‘I suppose he had ceased to love her, and he thought, therefore,
he was justified in leaving her.’</p>
<p>Madge turned and fixed her eyes, unobserved, on Baruch. He
was looking straight at the bookshelves. There was not, and, indeed,
how could there be, any reference to herself.</p>
<p>‘I should put it in this way,’ she said, ‘that
he thought he was justified in sacrificing a woman for the sake of an
<i>impulse</i>. Call this a defect or a crime - whichever you
like - it is repellent to me. It makes no difference to me to
know that he believed the impulse to be divine.’</p>
<p>‘I wish,’ interrupted Clara, ‘you two would choose
less exciting subjects of conversation; my totals will not come right.’</p>
<p>They were silent, and Baruch, affecting to study a Rollin’s
<i>Ancient History</i>, wondered, especially when he called to mind
Mrs Caffyn’s report, what this girl’s history could have
been. He presently recovered himself, and it occurred to him that
he ought to give some reason why he had called. Before, however,
he was able to offer any excuse, Clara closed her book.</p>
<p>‘Now, it is right,’ she said, ‘and I am ready.’</p>
<p>Just at that moment Barnes appeared, hot with hurrying.</p>
<p>‘Very sorry, Miss Hopgood, to ask you to stay for a few minutes.
I recollected after I left that the doctor particularly wanted those
books sent off to-night. I should not like to disappoint him.
I have been to the booking-office, and the van will be here in about
twenty minutes. If you will make out the invoice and check me,
I will pack them.’</p>
<p>‘I will be off,’ said Madge. ‘The shop will
be shut if I do not make haste.’</p>
<p>‘You are not going alone, are you?’ said Baruch.
‘May I not go with you, and cannot we both come back for your
sister?’</p>
<p>‘It is very kind of you.’</p>
<p>Clara looked up from her desk, watched them as they went out at the
door and, for a moment, seemed lost. Barnes turned round.</p>
<p>‘Now, Miss Hopgood.’ She started.</p>
<p>‘Yes, sir.’</p>
<p>‘<i>Fabricius</i>, <i>J. A. Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica
in qua continentur</i>.’</p>
<p>‘I need not put in the last three words.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, yes.’ Barnes never liked to be corrected
in a title. ‘There’s another <i>Fabricius Bibliotheca</i>
or <i>Bibliographia</i>. Go on - <i>Basili opera ad MSS. codices</i>,
3 vols.’</p>
<p>Clara silently made the entries a little more scholarly. In
a quarter of an hour the parcel was ready and Cohen returned.</p>
<p>‘Your sister would not allow me to wait. She met Mrs
Marshall; they said they should have something to carry, and that it
was not worth while to bring it here. I will walk with you, if
you will allow me. We may as well avoid Holborn.’</p>
<p>They turned into Gray’s Inn, and, when they were in comparative
quietude, he said, -</p>
<p>‘Any Chartist news?’ and then without waiting for an
answer, ‘By the way, who is your friend Dennis?’</p>
<p>‘He is no particular friend of mine. He is a wood-engraver,
and writes also, I believe, for the newspapers.’</p>
<p>‘He can talk as well as write.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, he can talk very well.’</p>
<p>‘Do you not think there was something unreal about what he
said?’</p>
<p>‘I do not believe he is actually insincere. I have noticed
that men who write or read much often appear somewhat shadowy.’</p>
<p>‘How do you account for it?’</p>
<p>‘What they say is not experience.’</p>
<p>‘I do not quite understand. A man may think much which
can never become an experience in your sense of the word, and be very
much in earnest with what he thinks; the thinking is an experience.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, I suppose so, but it is what a person has gone through
which I like to hear. Poor Dennis has suffered much. You
are perhaps surprised, but it is true, and when he leaves politics alone
he is a different creature.’</p>
<p>‘I am afraid I must be very uninteresting to you?’</p>
<p>‘I did not mean that I care for nothing but my friend’s
aches and pains, but that I do not care for what he just takes up and
takes on.’</p>
<p>‘It is my misfortune that my subjects are not very - I was
about to say - human. Perhaps it is because I am a Jew.’</p>
<p>‘I do not know quite what you mean by your “subjects,”
but if you mean philosophy and religion, they are human.’</p>
<p>‘If they are, very few people like to hear anything about them.
Do you know, Miss Hopgood, I can never talk to anybody as I can to you.’</p>
<p>Clara made no reply. A husband was to be had for a look, for
a touch, a husband whom she could love, a husband who could give her
all her intellect demanded. A little house rose before her eyes
as if by Arabian enchantment; there was a bright fire on the hearth,
and there were children round it; without the look, the touch, there
would be solitude, silence and a childless old age, so much more to
be feared by a woman than by a man. Baruch paused, waiting for
her answer, and her tongue actually began to move with a reply, which
would have sent his arm round her, and made them one for ever, but it
did not come. Something fell and flashed before her like lightning
from a cloud overhead, divinely beautiful, but divinely terrible.</p>
<p>‘I remember,’ she said, ‘that I have to call in
Lamb’s Conduit Street to buy something for my sister. I
shall just be in time.’ Baruch went as far as Lamb’s
Conduit Street with her. He, too, would have determined his own
destiny if she had uttered the word, but the power to proceed without
it was wanting and he fell back. He left her at the door of the
shop. She bid him good-bye, obviously intending that he should
go no further with her, and he shook hands with her, taking her hand
again and shaking it again with a grasp which she knew well enough was
too fervent for mere friendship. He then wandered back once more
to his old room at Clerkenwell. The fire was dead, he stirred
it, the cinders fell through the grate and it dropped out all together.
He made no attempt to rekindle it, but sat staring at the black ashes,
not thinking, but dreaming. Thirty years more perhaps with no
change! The last chance that he could begin a new life had disappeared.
He cursed himself that nothing drove him out of himself with Marshall
and his fellowmen; that he was not Chartist nor revolutionary; but it
was impossible to create in himself enthusiasm for a cause. He
had tried before to become a patriot and had failed, and was conscious,
during the trial, that he was pretending to be something he was not
and could not be. There was nothing to be done but to pace the
straight road in front of him, which led nowhere, so far as he could
see.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>A month afterwards Marshall announced that he intended to pay a visit.</p>
<p>‘I am going,’ he said, ‘to see Mazzini. Who
will go with me?’</p>
<p>Clara and Madge were both eager to accompany him. Mrs Caffyn
and Mrs Marshall chose to stay at home.</p>
<p>‘I shall ask Cohen to come with us,’ said Marshall.
‘He has never seen Mazzini and would like to know him.’
Cohen accordingly called one Sunday evening, and the party went together
to a dull, dark, little house in a shabby street of small shops and
furnished apartments. When they knocked at Mazzini’s door
Marshall asked for Mr --- for, even in England, Mazzini had an assumed
name which was always used when inquiries were made for him. They
were shown upstairs into a rather mean room, and found there a man,
really about forty, but looking older. He had dark hair growing
away from his forehead, dark moustache, dark beard and a singularly
serious face. It was not the face of a conspirator, but that of
a saint, although without that just perceptible touch of silliness which
spoils the faces of most saints. It was the face of a saint of
the Reason, of a man who could be ecstatic for rational ideals, rarest
of all endowments. It was the face, too, of one who knew no fear,
or, if he knew it, could crush it. He was once concealed by a
poor woman whose house was surrounded by Austrian soldiers watching
for him. He was determined that she should not be sacrificed,
and, having disguised himself a little, walked out into the street in
broad daylight, went up to the Austrian sentry, asked for a light for
his cigar and escaped. He was cordial in his reception of his
visitors, particularly of Clara, Madge and Cohen, whom he had not seen
before.</p>
<p>‘The English,’ he said, after some preliminary conversation,
‘are a curious people. As a nation they are what they call
practical and have a contempt for ideas, but I have known some Englishmen
who have a religious belief in them, a nobler belief than I have found
in any other nation. There are English women, also, who have this
faith, and one or two are amongst my dearest friends.’</p>
<p>‘I never,’ said Marshall, ‘quite comprehend you
on this point. I should say that we know as clearly as most folk
what we want, and we mean to have it.’</p>
<p>‘That may be, but it is not Justice, as Justice which inspires
you. Those of you who have not enough, desire to have more, that
is all.’</p>
<p>‘If we are to succeed, we must preach what the people understand.’</p>
<p>‘Pardon me, that is just where you and I differ. Whenever
any real good is done it is by a crusade; that is to say, the cross
must be raised and appeal be made to something <i>above</i> the people.
No system based on rights will stand. Never will society be permanent
till it is founded on duty. If we consider our rights exclusively,
we extend them over the rights of our neighbours. If the oppressed
classes had the power to obtain their rights to-morrow, and with the
rights came no deeper sense of duty, the new order, for the simple reason
that the oppressed are no better than their oppressors, would be just
as unstable as that which preceded it.’</p>
<p>‘To put it in my own language,’ said Madge, ‘you
believe in God.’</p>
<p>Mazzini leaned forward and looked earnestly at her.</p>
<p>‘My dear young friend, without that belief I should have no
other.’</p>
<p>‘I should like, though,’ said Marshall, ‘to see
the church which would acknowledge you and Miss Madge, or would admit
your God to be theirs.’</p>
<p>‘What is essential,’ replied Madge, ‘in a belief
in God is absolute loyalty to a principle we know to have authority.’</p>
<p>‘It may, perhaps,’ said Mazzini, ‘be more to me,
but you are right, it is a belief in the supremacy and ultimate victory
of the conscience.’</p>
<p>‘The victory seems distant in Italy now,’ said Baruch.
‘I do not mean the millennial victory of which you speak, but
an approximation to it by the overthrow of tyranny there.’</p>
<p>‘You are mistaken; it is far nearer than you imagine.’</p>
<p>‘Do you obtain,’ said Clara, ‘any real help from
people here? Do you not find that they merely talk and express
what they call their sympathy?’</p>
<p>‘I must not say what help I have received; more than words,
though, from many.’</p>
<p>‘You expect, then,’ said Baruch, ‘that the Italians
will answer your appeal?’</p>
<p>‘If I had no faith in the people, I do not see what faith could
survive.’</p>
<p>‘The people are the persons you meet in the street.’</p>
<p>‘A people is not a mere assemblage of uninteresting units,
but it is not a phantom. A spirit lives in each nation which is
superior to any individual in it. It is this which is the true
reality, the nation’s purpose and destiny, it is this for which
the patriot lives and dies.’</p>
<p>‘I suppose,’ said Clara, ‘you have no difficulty
in obtaining volunteers for any dangerous enterprise?’</p>
<p>‘None. You would be amazed if I were to tell you how
many men and women at this very moment would go to meet certain death
if I were to ask them.’</p>
<p>‘Women?’</p>
<p>‘Oh, yes; and women are of the greatest use, but it is rather
difficult to find those who have the necessary qualifications.’</p>
<p>‘I suppose you employ them in order to obtain secret information?’</p>
<p>‘Yes; amongst the Austrians.’</p>
<p>The party broke up. Baruch manœuvred to walk with Clara,
but Marshall wanted to borrow a book from Mazzini, and she stayed behind
for him. Madge was outside in the street, and Baruch could do
nothing but go to her. She seemed unwilling to wait, and Baruch
and she went slowly homewards, thinking the others would overtake them.
The conversation naturally turned upon Mazzini.</p>
<p>‘Although,’ said Madge, ‘I have never seen him
before, I have heard much about him and he makes me sad.’</p>
<p>‘Why?’</p>
<p>‘Because he has done something worth doing and will do more.’</p>
<p>‘But why should that make you sad?’</p>
<p>‘I do not think there is anything sadder than to know you are
able to do a little good and would like to do it, and yet you are not
permitted to do it. Mazzini has a world open to him large enough
for the exercise of all his powers.’</p>
<p>‘It is worse to have a desire which is intense but not definite,
to be continually anxious to do something, you know not what, and always
to feel, if any distinct task is offered, your incapability of attempting
it.’</p>
<p>‘A man, if he has a real desire to be of any service, can generally
gratify it to some extent; a woman as a rule cannot, although a woman’s
enthusiasm is deeper than a man’s. You can join Mazzini
to-morrow, I suppose, if you like.’</p>
<p>‘It is a supposition not quite justifiable, and if I were free
to go I could not.’</p>
<p>‘Why?’</p>
<p>‘I am not fitted for such work; I have not sufficient faith.
When I see a flag waving, a doubt always intrudes. Long ago I
was forced to the conclusion that I should have to be content with a
life which did not extend outside itself.’</p>
<p>‘I am sure that many women blunder into the wrong path, not
because they are bad, but simply because - if I may say so - they are
too good.’</p>
<p>‘Maybe you are right. The inability to obtain mere pleasure
has not produced the misery which has been begotten of mistaken or baffled
self-sacrifice. But do you mean to say that you would like to
enlist under Mazzini?’</p>
<p>‘No!’</p>
<p>Baruch thought she referred to her child, and he was silent.</p>
<p>‘You are a philosopher,’ said Madge, after a pause.
‘Have you never discovered anything which will enable us to submit
to be useless?’</p>
<p>‘That is to say, have I discovered a religion? for the core
of religion is the relationship of the individual to the whole, the
faith that the poorest and meanest of us is a person. That is
the real strength of all religions.’</p>
<p>‘Well, go on; what do you believe?’</p>
<p>‘I can only say it like a creed; I have no demonstration, at
least none such as I would venture to put into words. Perhaps
the highest of all truths is incapable of demonstration and can only
be stated. Perhaps, also, the statement, at least to some of us,
is a sufficient demonstration. I believe that inability to imagine
a thing is not a reason for its non-existence. If the infinite
is a conclusion which is forced upon me, the fact that I cannot picture
it does not disprove it. I believe, also, in thought and the soul,
and it is nothing to me that I cannot explain them by attributes belonging
to body. That being so, the difficulties which arise from the
perpetual and unconscious confusion of the qualities of thought and
soul with those of body disappear. Our imagination represents
to itself souls like pebbles, and asks itself what count can be kept
of a million, but number in such a case is inapplicable. I believe
that all thought is a manifestation of the Being, who is One, whom you
may call God if you like, and that, as It never was created, It will
never be destroyed.’</p>
<p>‘But,’ said Madge, interrupting him, ‘although
you began by warning me not to expect that you would prove anything,
you can tell me whether you have any kind of basis for what you say,
or whether it is all a dream.’</p>
<p>‘You will be surprised, perhaps, to hear that mathematics,
which, of course, I had to learn for my own business, have supplied
something for a foundation. They lead to ideas which are inconsistent
with the notion that the imagination is a measure of all things.
Mind, I do not for a moment pretend that I have any theory which explains
the universe. It is something, however, to know that the sky is
as real as the earth.’</p>
<p>They had now reached Great Ormond Street, and parted. Clara
and Marshall were about five minutes behind them. Madge was unusually
cheerful when they sat down to supper.</p>
<p>‘Clara,’ she said, ‘what made you so silent to-night
at Mazzini’s?’ Clara did not reply, but after a pause
of a minute or two, she asked Mrs Caffyn whether it would not be possible
for them all to go into the country on Whitmonday? Whitsuntide
was late; it would be warm, and they could take their food with them
and eat it out of doors.</p>
<p>‘Just the very thing, my dear, if we could get anything cheap
to take us; the baby, of course, must go with us.</p>
<p>‘I should like above everything to go to Great Oakhurst.’</p>
<p>‘What, five of us - twenty miles there and twenty miles back!
Besides, although I love the place, it isn’t exactly what one
would go to see just for a day. No! Letherhead or Mickleham
or Darkin would be ever so much better. They are too far, though,
and, then, that man Baruch must go with us. He’d be company
for Marshall, and he sticks up in Clerkenwell and never goes nowhere.
You remember as Marshall said as he must ask him the next time we had
an outing.’</p>
<p>Clara had not forgotten it.</p>
<p>‘Ah,’ continued Mrs Caffyn, ‘I should just love
to show you Mickleham.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn’s heart yearned after her Surrey land. The
man who is born in a town does not know what it is to be haunted through
life by lovely visions of the landscape which lay about him when he
was young. The village youth leaves the home of his childhood
for the city, but the river doubling on itself, the overhanging alders
and willows, the fringe of level meadow, the chalk hills bounding the
river valley and rising against the sky, with here and there on their
summits solitary clusters of beech, the light and peace of the different
seasons, of morning, afternoon and evening, never forsake him.
To think of them is not a mere luxury; their presence modifies the whole
of his life.</p>
<p>‘I don’t see how it is to be managed,’ she mused;
‘and yet there’s nothing near London as I’d give two
pins to see. There’s Richmond as we went to one Sunday;
it was no better, to my way of thinking, than looking at a picture.
I’d ever so much sooner be a-walking across the turnips by the
footpath from Darkin home.’</p>
<p>‘Couldn’t we, for once in a way, stay somewhere over-night?’</p>
<p>‘It might as well be two,’ said Mrs Marshall; ‘Saturday
and Sunday.’</p>
<p>‘Two,’ said Madge; ‘I vote for two.’</p>
<p>‘Wait a bit, my dears, we’re a precious awkward lot to
fit in - Marshall and his wife me and you and Miss Clara and the baby;
and then there’s Baruch, who’s odd man, so to speak; that’s
three bedrooms. We sha’n’t do it - Otherwise, I was
a-thinking - ’</p>
<p>‘What were you thinking?’ said Marshall.</p>
<p>‘I’ve got it,’ said Mrs Caffyn, joyously.
‘Miss Clara and me will go to Great Oakhurst on the Friday.
We can easy enough stay at my old shop. Marshall and Sarah, Miss
Madge, the baby and Baruch can go to Letherhead on the Saturday morning.
The two women and the baby can have one of the rooms at Skelton’s,
and Marshall and Baruch can have the other. Then, on Sunday morning,
Miss Clara and me we’ll come over for you, and we’ll all
walk through Norbury Park. That’ll be ever so much better
in many ways. Miss Clara and me, we’ll go by the coach.
Six of us, not reckoning the baby, in that heavy ginger-beer cart of
Masterman’s would be too much.’</p>
<p>‘An expensive holiday, rather,’ said Marshall.</p>
<p>‘Leave that to me; that’s my business. I ain’t
quite a beggar, and if we can’t take our pleasure once a year,
it’s a pity. We aren’t like some folk as messes about
up to Hampstead every Sunday, and spends a fortune on shrimps and donkeys.
No; when I go away, it <i>is</i> away, maybe it’s only for a couple
of days, where I can see a blessed ploughed field; no shrimps nor donkeys
for me.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>CHARTER XXIX</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>So it was settled, and on the Friday Clara and Mrs Caffyn journeyed
to Great Oakhurst. They were both tired, and went to bed very
early, in order that they might enjoy the next day. Clara, always
a light sleeper, woke between three and four, rose and went to the little
casement window which had been open all night. Below her, on the
left, the church was just discernible, and on the right, the broad chalk
uplands leaned to the south, and were waving with green barley and wheat.
Underneath her lay the cottage garden, with its row of beehives in the
north-east corner, sheltered from the cold winds by the thick hedge.
It had evidently been raining a little, for the drops hung on the currant
bushes, but the clouds had been driven by the south-westerly wind into
the eastern sky, where they lay in a long, low, grey band. Not
a sound was to be heard, save every now and then the crow of a cock
or the short cry of a just-awakened thrush. High up on the zenith,
the approach of the sun to the horizon was proclaimed by the most delicate
tints of rose-colour, but the cloud-bank above him was dark and untouched,
although the blue which was over it, was every moment becoming paler.
Clara watched; she was moved even to tears by the beauty of the scene,
but she was stirred by something more than beauty, just as he who was
in the Spirit and beheld a throne and One sitting thereon, saw something
more than loveliness, although He was radiant with the colour of jasper
and there was a rainbow round about Him like an emerald to look upon.
In a few moments the highest top of the cloud-rampart was kindled, and
the whole wavy outline became a fringe of flame. In a few moments
more the fire just at one point became blinding, and in another second
the sun emerged, the first arrowy shaft passed into her chamber, the
first shadow was cast, and it was day. She put her hands to her
face; the tears fell faster, but she wiped them away and her great purpose
was fixed. She crept back into bed, her agitation ceased, a strange
and almost supernatural peace overshadowed her and she fell asleep not
to wake till the sound of the scythe had ceased in the meadow just beyond
the rick-yard that came up to one side of the cottage, and the mowers
were at their breakfast.</p>
<p>Neither Mrs Caffyn nor Clara thought of seeing the Letherhead party
on Saturday. They could not arrive before the afternoon, and it
was considered hardly worth while to walk from Great Oakhurst to Letherhead
merely for the sake of an hour or two. In the morning Mrs Caffyn
was so busy with her old friends that she rather tired herself, and
in the evening Clara went for a stroll. She did not know the country,
but she wandered on until she came to a lane which led down to the river.
At the bottom of the lane she found herself at a narrow, steep, stone
bridge. She had not been there more than three or four minutes
before she descried two persons coming down the lane from Letherhead.
When they were about a couple of hundred yards from her they turned
into the meadow over the stile, and struck the river-bank some distance
below the point where she was. It was impossible to mistake them;
they were Madge and Baruch. They sauntered leisurely; presently
Baruch knelt down over the water, apparently to gather something which
he gave to Madge. They then crossed another stile and were lost
behind the tall hedge which stopped further view of the footpath in
that direction.</p>
<p>‘The message then was authentic,’ she said to herself.
‘I thought I could not have misunderstood it.’</p>
<p>On Sunday morning Clara wished to stay at home. She pleaded
that she preferred rest, but Mrs Caffyn vowed there should be no Norbury
Park if Clara did not go, and the kind creature managed to persuade
a pig-dealer to drive them over to Letherhead for a small sum, notwithstanding
it was Sunday. The whole party then set out; the baby was drawn
in a borrowed carriage which also took the provisions, and they were
fairly out of the town before the Letherhead bells had ceased ringing
for church. It was one of the sweetest of Sundays, sunny, but
masses of white clouds now and then broke the heat. The park was
reached early in the forenoon, and it was agreed that dinner should
be served under one of the huge beech trees at the lower end, as the
hill was a little too steep for the baby-carriage in the hot sun.</p>
<p>‘This is very beautiful,’ said Marshall, when dinner
was over, ‘but it is not what we came to see. We ought to
move upwards to the Druid’s grove.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, you be off, the whole lot of you,’ said Mrs Caffyn.
‘I know every tree there, and I ain’t going there this afternoon.
Somebody must stay here to look after the baby; you can’t wheel
her, you’ll have to carry her, and you won’t enjoy yourselves
much more for moiling along with her up that hill.’</p>
<p>‘I will stay with you,’ said Clara.</p>
<p>Everybody protested, but Clara was firm. She was tired, and
the sun had given her a headache. Madge pleaded that it was she
who ought to remain behind, but at last gave way for her sister looked
really fatigued.</p>
<p>‘There’s a dear child,’ said Clara, when Madge
consented to go. ‘I shall lie on the grass and perhaps go
to sleep.’</p>
<p>‘It is a pity,’ said Baruch to Madge as they went away,
‘that we are separated; we must come again.’</p>
<p>‘Yes, I am sorry, but perhaps it is better she should be where
she is; she is not particularly strong, and is obliged to be very careful.’</p>
<p>In due time they all came to the famous yews, and sat down on one
of the seats overlooking that wonderful gate in the chalk downs through
which the Mole passes northwards.</p>
<p>‘We must go,’ said Marshall, ‘a little bit further
and see the oak.’</p>
<p>‘Not another step,’ said his wife. ‘You can
go it you like.’</p>
<p>‘Content; nothing could be pleasanter than to sit here,’
and he pulled out his pipe; ‘but really, Miss Madge, to leave
Norbury without paying a visit to the oak is a pity.’</p>
<p>He did not offer, however, to accompany her.</p>
<p>‘It is the most extraordinary tree in these parts,’ said
Baruch; ‘of incalculable age and with branches spreading into
a tent big enough to cover a regiment. Marshall is quite right.’</p>
<p>‘Where is it?’</p>
<p>‘Not above a couple of hundred yards further; just round the
corner.’</p>
<p>Madge rose and looked.</p>
<p>‘No; it is not visible here; it stands a little way back.
If you come a little further you will catch a glimpse of it.’</p>
<p>She followed him and presently the oak came in view. They climbed
up the bank and went nearer to it. The whole vale was underneath
them and part of the weald with the Sussex downs blue in the distance.
Baruch was not much given to raptures over scenery, but the indifference
of Nature to the world’s turmoil always appealed to him.</p>
<p>‘You are not now discontented because you cannot serve under
Mazzini?’</p>
<p>‘Not now.’</p>
<p>There was nothing in her reply on the face of it of any particular
consequence to Baruch. She might simply have intended that the
beauty of the fair landscape extinguished her restlessness, or that
she saw her own unfitness, but neither of these interpretations presented
itself to him.</p>
<p>‘I have sometimes thought,’ continued Baruch, slowly,
‘that the love of any two persons in this world may fulfil an
eternal purpose which is as necessary to the Universe as a great revolution.’</p>
<p>Madge’s eyes moved round from the hills and they met Baruch’s.
No syllable was uttered, but swiftest messages passed, question and
answer. There was no hesitation on his part now, no doubt, the
woman and the moment had come. The last question was put, the
final answer was given; he took her hand in his and came closer to her.</p>
<p>‘Stop!’ she whispered, ‘do you know my history?’</p>
<p>He did not reply, but fell upon her neck. This was the goal
to which both had been journeying all these years, although with much
weary mistaking of roads; this was what from the beginning was designed
for both! Happy Madge! happy Baruch! There are some so closely
akin that the meaning of each may be said to lie in the other, who do
not approach till it is too late. They travel towards one another,
but are waylaid and detained, and just as they are within greeting,
one of them drops and dies.</p>
<p>They left the tree and went back to the Marshalls, and then down
the hill to Mrs Caffyn and Clara. Clara was much better for her
rest, and early in the evening the whole party returned to Letherhead,
Clara and Mrs Caffyn going on to Great Oakhurst. Madge kept close
to her sister till they separated, and the two men walked together.
On Whitmonday morning the Letherhead people came over to Great Oakhurst.
They had to go back to London in the afternoon, but Mrs Caffyn and Clara
were to stay till Tuesday, as they stood a better chance of securing
places by the coach on that day. Mrs Caffyn had as much to show
them as if the village had been the Tower of London. The wonder
of wonders, however, was a big house, where she was well known, and
its hot-houses. Madge wanted to speak to Clara, but it was difficult
to find a private opportunity. When they were in the garden, however,
she managed to take Clara unobserved down one of the twisted paths,
under pretence of admiring an ancient mulberry tree.</p>
<p>‘Clara,’ she said, ‘I want a word with you.
Baruch Cohen loves me.’</p>
<p>‘Do you love him?’</p>
<p>‘Yes.’</p>
<p>‘Without a shadow of a doubt?’</p>
<p>‘Without a shadow of a doubt.’</p>
<p>Clara put her arm round her sister, kissed her tenderly and said,
-</p>
<p>‘Then I am perfectly happy.’</p>
<p>‘Did you suspect it?’</p>
<p>‘I knew it.’</p>
<p>Mrs Caffyn called them; it was time to be moving, and soon afterwards
those who had to go to London that afternoon left for Letherhead.
Clara stood at the gate for a long time watching them along the straight,
white road. They came to the top of the hill; she could just discern
them against the sky; they passed over the ridge and she went indoors.
In the evening a friend called to see Mrs Caffyn, and Clara went to
the stone bridge which she had visited on Saturday. The water
on the upper side of the bridge was dammed up and fell over the little
sluice gates under the arches into a clear and deep basin about forty
or fifty feet in diameter. The river, for some reason of its own,
had bitten into the western bank, and had scooped out a great piece
of it into an island. The main current went round the island with
a shallow, swift ripple, instead of going through the pool, as it might
have done, for there was a clear channel for it. The centre and
the region under the island were deep and still, but at the farther
end, where the river in passing called to the pool, it broke into waves
as it answered the appeal, and added its own contribution to the stream,
which went away down to the mill and onwards to the big Thames.
On the island were aspens and alders. The floods had loosened
the roots of the largest tree, and it hung over heavily in the direction
in which it had yielded to the rush of the torrent, but it still held
its grip, and the sap had not forsaken a single branch. Every
one was as dense with foliage as if there had been no struggle for life,
and the leaves sang their sweet song, just perceptible for a moment
every now and then in the variations of the louder music below them.
It is curious that the sound of a weir is never uniform, but is perpetually
changing in the ear even of a person who stands close by it. One
of the arches of the bridge was dry, and Clara went down into it, stood
at the edge and watched that wonderful sight - the plunge of a smooth,
pure stream into the great cup which it has hollowed out for itself.
Down it went, with a dancing, foamy fringe playing round it just where
it met the surface; a dozen yards away it rose again, bubbling and exultant.</p>
<p>She came up from the arch and went home as the sun was setting.
She found Mrs Caffyn alone.</p>
<p>‘I have news to tell you,’ she said. ‘Baruch
Cohen is in love with my sister, and she is in love with him.’</p>
<p>‘The Lord, Miss Clara! I thought sometimes that perhaps
it might be you; but there, it’s better, maybe, as it is, for
- ’</p>
<p>‘For what?’</p>
<p>‘Why, my dear, because somebody’s sure to turn up who’ll
make you happy, but there aren’t many men like Baruch. You
see what I mean, don’t you? He’s always a-reading
books, and, therefore, he don’t think so much of what some people
would make a fuss about. Not as anything of that kind would ever
stop me, if I were a man and saw such a woman as Miss Madge. He’s
really as good a creature as ever was born, and with that child she
might have found it hard to get along, and now it will be cared for,
and so will she be to the end of their lives.’</p>
<p>The evening after their return to Great Ormond Street, Mazzini was
surprised by a visit from Clara alone.</p>
<p>‘When I last saw you,’ she said, ‘you told us that
you had been helped by women. I offer myself.’</p>
<p>‘But, my dear madam, you hardly know what the qualifications
are. To begin with, there must be a knowledge of three foreign
languages, French, German and Italian, and the capacity and will to
endure great privation, suffering and, perhaps, death.’</p>
<p>‘I was educated abroad, I can speak German and French.
I do not know much Italian, but when I reach Italy I will soon learn.’</p>
<p>‘Pardon me for asking you what may appear a rude question.
Is it a personal disappointment which sends you to me, or love for the
cause? It is not uncommon to find that young women, when earthly
love is impossible, attempt to satisfy their cravings with a love for
that which is impersonal.’</p>
<p>‘Does it make any difference, so far as their constancy is
concerned?’</p>
<p>‘I cannot say that it does. The devotion of many of the
martyrs of the Catholic church was repulsion from the world as much
as attraction to heaven. You must understand that I am not prompted
by curiosity. If you are to be my friend, it is necessary that
I should know you thoroughly.’</p>
<p>‘My motive is perfectly pure.’</p>
<p>They had some further talk and parted. After a few more interviews,
Clara and another English lady started for Italy. Madge had letters
from her sister at intervals for eighteen months, the last being from
Venice. Then they ceased, and shortly afterwards Mazzini told
Baruch that his sister-in-law was dead.</p>
<p>All efforts to obtain more information from Mazzini were in vain,
but one day when her name was mentioned, he said to Madge, -</p>
<p>‘The theologians represent the Crucifixion as the most sublime
fact in the world’s history. It was sublime, but let us
reverence also the Eternal Christ who is for ever being crucified for
our salvation.’</p>
<p>‘Father,’ said a younger Clara to Baruch some ten years
later as she sat on his knee, ‘I had an Aunt Clara once, hadn’t
I?’</p>
<p>‘Yes, my child.’</p>
<p>‘Didn’t she go to Italy and die there?’</p>
<p>‘Yes.’</p>
<p>‘Why did she go?’</p>
<p>‘Because she wanted to free the poor people of Italy who were
slaves.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
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