Read Ebook: Mitchelhurst Place: A Novel. Vol. 2 (of 2) by Veley Margaret

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Ebook has 737 lines and 251130 words, and 15 pages

And yet the good woman had not been insincere when she spoke of the old times with a regretful accent in her voice. She remembered John Rothwell's father as a middle-aged gentleman, alert and strong. Those old times were the times when she was a rosy-cheeked girl, whom Simmonds came courting at her father the wheel-wright's, and not Simmonds only, for she might have done better if she had chosen. It was in the good old times that they set up their little shop, and that their little girl was born who had been in the churchyard three-and-twenty years come Christmas. There were no times now like those before Mitchelhurst Place was sold, when she didn't know what rheumatism was, and there were none of your new-fangled Board Schools, to teach children to think little of their elders. It was not to be supposed that Mrs. Simmonds thought that her stiff old joints would become flexible again if the Rothwells came back to the manor-house, but she certainly felt that in their reign the world went its way with fewer obstructions and less weariness, and was more brightly visible without the aid of spectacles. She had an impression, too, that the weather was better.

She straightened herself laboriously after taking the apple-pie from the oven, and was horrified to find the crust a little caught on one side. Having to explain how this had occurred when she carried it in, she had no opportunity of continuing the previous conversation, and the moment dinner was over Reynold was out again. The fact was that Mrs. Simmonds's parlour, which was small and low, and had been carefully shut up for many months, was not very attractive to the young man, who was fresh from the faded stateliness of the old Place. Besides, he was anxious to keep down importunate thoughts by sheer weariness, if in no other way.

He went that afternoon to the Hall, the dreary old farmhouse which Barbara had pointed out as the Rothwells' earlier home, and walked in the sodden pastures where she picked her cowslips in the spring. He looked more kindly at the old house, in spite of the ignoble disorder of its surroundings, but he lingered longest at the gate where she had shown him Mitchelhurst, spread out before him like the Promised Land. He studied it all in the fading light, and then, with a farewell glance at the white far-off front of the Place, he went down into the village, tired enough to drop asleep over the fire after tea.

"To-morrow, the letter," was his last thought as he lay down.

ONE MORE HOLIDAY.

The inevitable morning came, but the letter did not.

Harding was first incredulous, then when a light flashed upon him, he was at once amused and indignant.

"So! I kept you waiting till the latest day, and you are returning the compliment. I am given to understand that you can take your time as well as I? That's fair enough, no doubt, only it seems rather a small sort of revenge, and, as things have turned out, it's a nuisance. What is to be done now? Shall I wait another day for my instructions, or shall I go up to town at once? I told him to write here, but, after all, what is there to say, except, 'Be at the office on such a day?' Shall I go, or stay?"

He tossed up, not ill-pleased to decide his uncle's affairs so airily. The coin decreed that he should stay.

"It's just as well," he said to himself. "I don't want to seem impatient if he isn't."

But the additional day of idleness proved very burdensome. He fancied that the Mitchelhurst gossips watched his every movement; he felt himself in a false position; he shut himself up in his little sitting-room and asked for books. Mrs. Simmonds brought him all she had, but she looked upon reading as a penitential occupation for Sundays, and periods of affliction, and the volumes were well suited for the purpose. Harding thrust them aside. The local paper was nearly a week old, but he read every word of it.

"There'll be a new one to-morrow, sir," said his landlady, delighted to see that he enjoyed it so much.

"Thank you, Mrs. Simmonds, but I shall be far enough away by this time to-morrow," the young man replied.

He spent a considerable part of the afternoon lying on the horse-hair couch, and staring at the ceiling. A ceiling is not, as a rule, very interesting to study, and the only thing that could be said for this one was that it was conveniently near. Reynold could examine every smoke-stain at his ease, and every fly that chanced to stroll across his range of vision. The first he noticed made him think of Barbara and Joppa, but the later comers were simply wearisome. There is a distressing want of individuality about flies. Even when one buzzed about his head, with a fixed determination to wander awhile upon his forehead, he had not an idea which fly it was. It seemed to him, as he lay there, with his arm thrown up for a pillow, that flies in general were just one instrument of torture of, say, a billion-fly power. The afternoon sunshine and the smouldering fire had wakened more than he could reckon in the little parlour.

He would not have cared to confess how much he was troubled by his uncle's silence. He had expected to be met rather more than half-way, instead of which it seemed that he was to be taught to know his place. The idea was intolerable, and it haunted him.

When Mrs. Simmonds came in with a tray , she made a remark or two about things in general, which Reynold, turning his lustreless eyes upon her, endeavoured to receive with a decent show of interest. When she brought the tea-pot, she told him that Mr. Hayes had sent to the Rothwell Arms for a carriage early that afternoon. "Indeed!" said Reynold, this time endeavouring to conceal the interest he felt.

"What were they going to do?" he wondered, as he propped his head on his hand and sipped his tea. Was the old man taking Barbara away? What did it mean?

It meant simply that Mr. Hayes had wearied of his self-imposed seclusion, and had announced to his niece that he should drive over to Littlemere and see Masters. He added that he might not return to dinner, and that she was not to wait for him. While Reynold lay on the sofa the carriage had gone by, with the little man sitting in it, his head rather more bowed than usual, planning how he would explain the quarrel to his friend. "Masters will understand--he knows how the fellow behaved the night before," said Mr. Hayes to himself a score of times. But every time he said it he felt a little less certain that Masters would understand exactly as he wished.

Mrs. Simmonds, returning after a considerable interval, told her lodger that the wind was getting up, and she thought there was going to be a change in the weather. She mostly knew, as she informed him, on account of her rheumatism. Reynold opened the door for her and her tray, and then went to the window.

The moon had risen, the low roofs and gaunt poplars of Mitchelhurst were black in its light, and wild wreaths of cloud were tossed across the sky. It was a sky that seemed to mean something, to have a mood and expression of its own. Reynold watched it for a few minutes, till its vastness made the little box of a room, where even the flies had fallen asleep again, insupportably small. He took his hat and went out.

He did not care which way he went, if only it were not in the direction of the Place. Mr. Hayes, when he charged Barbara not to go near the gate, had a sort of fancy that the young fellow might walk defiantly on the very edge of the forbidden ground, and peer through the bars with a white, spiteful face. The girl acquiesced indifferently. She might not altogether understand Reynold Harding, but she knew most certainly that he would never approach them.

It chanced that evening that he took a narrow lane which led out of the Littlemere road. It proved to be a rugged but very gradual ascent. Presently it led him through a gate, and, still gently rising, became a mere cart track across open fields, where the wind came in sudden, hurrying gusts over the grey slopes, and brought undefinable suggestions of hopelessness and solitude. Reaching the highest point the wayfarer passed through another gate, and pursued a level road, bordered by spaces of unenclosed grass, sometimes widening almost to a common, sometimes shrinking to a mere strip between the white way and the low hedgerows. Reynold pushed forward, gazing at the sky. The clouds, torn and driven by the wind, fled wildly overhead, like shattered squadrons, and yet rolled up in new unconquered masses, as if from a gloomy host encamped on the horizon. The moon, slowly climbing the heavens, fought her way as a swimmer fights the waves. Now she would show a pale face through the blanched ripples of a misty sea, then would be over-powered by a black deluge of cloud, which darkened earth and sky, and swept over her sunken and scarcely suspected presence. And then suddenly she would emerge, pearl-white and pure, from the midst of the fierce confusion, rising unopposed over a gulf of shadowy blue. Or yet again she would glance mockingly from behind a rent veil of gossamer at the lonely little traveller who toiled so far below, under the vast arch of the heavens, and who raised his pre-occupied eyes to her, from the world of dream and mystery which he carried with him under the little arch of his skull. To Harding just then that inner world seemed more real, stranger, and less trodden, than did the world without. The billows of cloud, vast and formless and dark, rolling on high, were no more than symbols of the undefined forebodings which gathered blackly in his soul and changed with every thought. The wild and restless melancholy of the evening harmonised so marvellously with his temper, that he could almost have forgotten its outward reality, had it not been for the wind which blew freshly in his face. It did not seem possible that, when hereafter he came back to Mitchelhurst, he could walk this way whenever he pleased.

Yet he noted landmarks now and then. Here was a thin row of firs, slim and black, then a bare stretch of road where he stepped quickly, his shadow at his side for company, and then a sturdy oak, with all its brown leaves astir in a gust, which whispered hurriedly as he went by. Somewhat further yet the way grew narrow, dipping down into a little hollow, where a runnel of clear water crossed it, glancing over the pebbly earth. There was a plank at one side, and Reynold, stepping on it, smelt the water-mint which clustered at its edge. It seemed, somehow, as if the night, which uttered his desolate thoughts in the wind and the flying clouds, breathed them in that perfume.

Reynold was one of those who take little interest, even as children, in stories of goblins and witches, yet who sympathise with the mood which gave such legends birth, something which in its unshapen darkness and mystery is more impressive than the strangest vision. Why this inexplicable mood, with its world-wide suggestiveness, should have come upon him that evening, transforming the bit of upland country through which he walked to a grey and ghostly region, he could not tell. He tried to reason with his shadowy presentiments. He was going to his work the next day; that very evening he was going back to the little parlour over the shop; Mrs. Simmonds would have his supper ready, old Simmonds would be smoking bad tobacco in the back room; his walk would lead to nothing else. Yet he could not convince himself. He could call up his uncle and Mrs. Simmonds before his eyes, but they were grotesque apparitions in his cloudland. What was it that he was awaiting? Why did he feel as if the crisis of his fate were come, as if it would be upon him before the night were over? "Are we to see it out together?" he said, looking up at the moon.

He hardly knew whether he had uttered the question aloud or not, and he stopped short. There was a pool close by, roughly fenced from the road, and fringed with ragged bushes on the further side. He sat down on the rail. "To-morrow," he said to himself, "nothing can happen before to-morrow." He took old Mr. Harding's letter from his pocket, and tried to read it in the moonlight, but a sudden gust caught it, and almost tore it out of his hand. He crushed the flapping paper together, put it back, and sat gazing at the black pool at his side, idly wondering whether it were deep enough to drown a man. It looked deep, he thought--as deep as the heavens, and a troubled gleam of moonlight rested on it every now and then. Harding knew well that he should never touch his life, yet he played that night with the fancy that in one of the darkened moments when the moon was hidden, it would not be difficult to drop below that shadowy surface, and effectually end the business, so that when the bright glance rested there again it should read nothing. He fancied the moon-beams travelling swiftly along the road, and not finding him, while he lay hidden under the water, with a clump of osiers bending and quivering above him in the windy night. "Why couldn't I do it?" he asked himself. "Why do I go on to meet my ill-luck? It is coming, I know, to play me some devil's trick--I feel it in the air, just as Mrs. Simmonds feels a change of the weather in her poor bones."

The wind, which had fought against him as he came, seemed now so impatient to get him safely back to Mrs. Simmonds, that it fairly took him by the shoulders and hurried him along, as if it knew that it was between nine and ten, and that the good lady was addicted to early hours. And perhaps Reynold himself was slightly ashamed of his moonlit vagary, and not altogether unwilling to seek the shelter of that little roof. He ran and walked down the field path, and saw the glimmering lights of the village below, small sparks of friendly welcome in the great night. When, finally, he turned into the Littlemere road, and was somewhat sheltered from the wind, he met a couple of youths, fresh from the "Rothwell Arms," harmonious in their desire to sing together, but not in the result of their efforts. About a hundred yards further he encountered the Mitchelhurst policeman. The road was quite populous and homely.

He had outstripped his forebodings in his hurried race, and the question whether his landlady would think that he was very late for supper was uppermost in his mind. He opened the door, which was never fastened till Simmonds bolted it at night, and drew a breath which gave him a comprehensive idea of the variety of goods they kept in stock. With the chilly sweetness of the night air still upon him, the young man strode into his room, and confronted Barbara Strange, who rose from the sofa to meet him.

All his misgivings overtook him in a moment.

MOONSHINE.

"Miss Strange!" he exclaimed, amazed.

"If I had known," he repeated confusedly, as he stepped forward. "What is it?"

They had not shaken hands in his first astonishment, and now she still looked up at him, and his hand dropped unheeded.

"I don't know what you will say to me," she began. "I am so very, very sorry--I felt I must come myself and ask you to forgive me."

Barbara started, and the hot tears dropped, and slid over her burning blushes. She turned away, but too late to hide them. "What do you mean?" she said. "You don't know. I haven't told you yet. What do you suppose I have come for like this? What do you mean?"

He drew back as if he were stung.

"Well, what is it then?"

She threw two letters on the table.

He stopped short, looking from the letters to her and back again. Barbara shrank away, drawing herself together, but she resolutely fixed her eyes upon his face.

"Why--why--" stammered Harding, turning as pale as death, and then he dropped into a chair and began to laugh.

The letter that lay nearest to him was directed "R. Harding, Esq." in his own handwriting.

"It is my fault!" cried Barbara. "Tell me what I have done! It is something that matters very much! I knew it--I felt it was, the moment I found them. I came with them directly--I was so afraid you might have gone away. Don't laugh! Oh I know it matters dreadfully!"

Harding had had time to master himself.

"On the contrary," he said, "it doesn't matter at all."

He threw himself back in his chair, tilting it carelessly, and looking at Barbara.

"Doesn't it?" said the girl incredulously. "Doesn't it really?"

"Not a bit; why should it? How did it happen?"

Since everything was lost, he might as well hear her talk.

"It was my fault," Barbara repeated, still doubtfully. "I told you to put them on the hall table--it was the day we had those people to dinner."

Reynold nodded.

"I had my apron on, I was busy. I went out to speak to the gardener, and I thought I would give them to the boy, so I put them in my apron pocket, yours and one of mine, and I never thought of them again."

He had balanced his chair very dexterously, and was still looking at her.

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