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Ebook has 3168 lines and 116351 words, and 64 pages

BESS OF THE WOODS

BY WARWICK DEEPING

LONDON AND NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS MCMVI

BESS OF THE WOODS

Richard Jeffray thrust back his chair from Sir Peter Hardacre's dining-table, and stood stiff and ill at ease, like a man but half sure of his own dignity. The Dutch clock had struck three, and the winter sunlight was still flooding through the tall windows upon the polished floor. A log-fire blazed on the irons; decanters and glasses glistened on the table about a great china punch-bowl covered with green dragons and blue mandarins.

It was early in the afternoon, and yet Parson Jessel's great wig was flapping forward with an unsaintly tilt over the pastor's left eye. Sir Peter, a fat and tuberose-nosed aristocrat, in a blue coat and a brocaded waistcoat, sprawled in his arm-chair at the end of the table, his paunch abutting against the board, his full-bottomed wig flowing in slovenly profusion about his blotchy face. On the far side of the table, with his back to the fire, sat Mr. Lot Hardacre, a heavy-shouldered gentleman in a scarlet hunting-coat and buckskin breeches, whose culture was half that of a jockey, half that of a card-sharper. A long clay pipe drooped from the angle of Mr. Lot Hardacre's mouth, and his coarse, chapped hands were stuffed into the pockets of his breeches.

Richard Jeffray bowed to these three gentlemen as though he was not wholly at his ease. Sir Peter Hardacre's ungainly torpor suggested that he had fed largely and too well.

"You will pardon me, Sir Peter," he said, with a glance at Mr. Lot's sodden and impudent face, "the days are short, and I must be in the saddle. You will make excuses for me to the ladies."

The baronet puffed out his lips and elevated his eyebrows sleepily. Parson Jessel had already begun to snore. Mr. Lancelot alone appeared to retain the sparklings of intelligence in his protuberant blue eyes. He removed his pipe from his mouth, and winked at Richard Jeffray with an air of benignant patronage.

"Sister Jilian's above, cousin," he said, "strumming on the harpsichord. We're coarse devils, Dick, eh? Jil is a gentle creature, and don't swear--at least, not often."

The baronet, bulging like a Silenus, nodded his head, and fumbling for his snuff-box spilled half the contents over his waistcoat.

"Going, Dick?" he quavered. "Gad, boy, it's damned early; we shall be with the ladies in the turn of a box. Sit down, lad. Son Lot will tell 'ee how he won fifty guineas from that card-clipping Captain Carteret last week--sapped the soldier fairly. Egad, Lot has marrow in him. Parson, pass the punch."

A loud snore from the ecclesiastic and a thick laugh from Mr. Lancelot betrayed how fate had dealt with the fuddled shepherd of the Hardacre souls. Sir Peter thrust out his lower lip, and swore.

"Damme," he said, "what a dull dog it is! Dick, lad, I'll match his sermons against the heaviest brew in Sussex. Kick him, Lot; kick his shins, boy; the bowl ain't empty yet."

The interlude was opportune. Richard Jeffray bowed once more to the baronet, mumbled an excuse, and leaving Mr. Lot to the breaking of the cleric's shins and slumber, stepped nimbly towards the door. Sir Peter gazed after him with an expression of fat and over-fed pity. "The lad was a nice lad, but, damn it, he couldn't drink, and, God help him, he wouldn't swear!" The baronet shook his wig and took snuff with some asperity. Meanwhile, Mr. Lot was amusing himself by holding the bowl of his pipe under the parson's nose. Richard, as he closed the door, heard a mighty and portentous sneeze herald the awakening of that saintly soul.

Richard Jeffray rode out through Hardacre Park with a look of melancholy reflection on his face. He turned, when he had ridden two hundred yards or more, and gazed back at the old house, with its stately red turrets and high gables clear-cut against the thin blue of a winter sky. A great beechwood rose on the slope of the hill behind the place, while around it lay the terraced walks and trim lawns of the garden. Closely clipped hollies and yews rose above the still water of the moat. The warm, red brick, mellow in the slanting light of the sun, the ivied buttresses, the lichened stone, seemed to tone rarely with the purple gloom of the wood beyond. And this betowered, tall-chimneyed, hundred-windowed house, this rare casket memorable with all the stateliness of a stately past, held for its jewels a bevy of boozing, fox-hunting bullies whose oaths and lewd badinage seemed fit only for a tavern.

Richard Jeffray whipped his black mare out of Hardacre Chase, leaving the gaunt trees, the dew-drenched grass and rotting bracken for the muddy road that curled up towards the moors. He was a slim yet wiry youth, with a sallow face and a pair of sparkling Spanish eyes. A sensitive intelligence showed in every fibre. He wore his own black hair unpowdered, and though nature appeared to have intended him for a macaroni, he boasted more scholarly slovenliness than fashionable elegance in his clothes. Cousin Lot thought him a pretty fellow enough, but too damned womanish to be of any use in the world. The local squires respected his wealth and his breeding, did not hesitate to set their daughters at his service, and chose to despise him over their punch-bowls as a milksop and a fool.

Richard topped the heath, and reined in to scan the shadowy slopes of the wilds of Pevensel. In the far south, huge, hog-backed hills brooded over the sea, purple under a passing cloud, or glistening in the slanting sun. South, east, and west rolled the forest land, hill on hill and valley on valley, mist-wrapped, splashed with light or smirched with shadow, a region of gloom, or of mysterious delight.

Richard Jeffray sat in the saddle and stared about him like a man refreshed. His pale face colored, his eyes brightened. This forest land, called Pevensel of old, and voted "a damned rubbish heap" by the Baronet Peter, appealed to the sentimentalist as a wild delicacy snatched from the material maw of Mammon. Here were no cropped hedges and sullen fields, no sour and unclean villages, no cabbage gardens, no frowsy and rubbish-ridden farms. Nature had her sway in Pevensel. Even the wild things were clean, sleek, and fair of limb, beautiful according to the idea upon which each had been created. The falcon glimmering under the clouds; the hare scampering amid the heather. These were preferable to clumsy, bandy-legged oafs, and to women whose tongues were as unclean as their garments.

Richard rode on again down the sandy road that ran like a gray streak through the waste of green. Had six months passed since he had posted back from Italy with the news of his father's death big in his heart? Had he not left England as a boy, and returned to it something of a man, intoxicated with many delightful superstitions, and fired with a belief in the stately grandeur of the English nation. Sir Peter and his Sussex squires had tumbled Mr. Richard's amiable theories down into their native mire. Cousin Lot had laughed and sneered at him. The Lady Letitia had assailed his soul with such worldly wisdoms as disregarded sentiment and honor. Richard had ruled his own house at Rodenham six months, built his dead father's tomb, and attempted to ingratiate himself with the boors who crowded Rodenham village. He had rattled his poetical notions against the skulls of his Sussex peers, and half-fooled himself into imagining that he was in love with gray-eyed Mistress Jilian, his cousin, who wore flaming petticoats and preposterous hoops, and rouged and ogled like the veteran of thirty that she was. Richard Jeffray confessed himself a fool as he rode down that day through the wilds of Pevensel and cogitated upon the beauties of a rustic life. The landscape was certainly not at fault, and the man of sentiment believed himself in sympathy with nature. The human element was the poison in the pot. He supposed that these Wealden folk became, like the clay they lived upon, heavy and sodden, dedicated to the producing of wheat at sixty shillings a quarter.

The sky seemed prophetic of snow, a canopy of purple clouds pressing from the north like some fate-bearing vapor of the Norse legends. The west was a great cavern of fire, with ruddy veins of glowing ore tonguing scarlet and gold across the sky. The wild, fir-spired wastes of Pevensel loomed strange and mysterious under the slanting light. There were tall thickets bannered with crimson on the hills, stretches of rusty heather and dark-green gorse, covered as with a web of gold. Now and again a vague wind would start up out of the silence, and come roaring and moaning amid the swaying trees.

From Beacon Rock the road plunged suddenly into a broad valley. A tawny, iron-stained stream trickled on one side of the highway; on the other a beechwood rose towards the west, its round pillars and bronze carpeting of leaves streaked and splashed by the setting sun. A thousand intertwining branches netted the red and angry splendor of the sky.

There was a sudden scuffling in the wood as Jeffray rode by, a score of black pigs running squeaking and grunting amid the dead leaves and bracken. Close to the road, under the shadow of a great beech, sat an old woman with her chin near her knees, her nose a red hook above her lipless mouth. Behind the crone, and leaning against the trunk of the tree, stood a girl in a green gown and scarlet stays laced up over her full yet girlish bust, her short gown displaying a pair of buckled shoes and neat, gray-stockinged ankles. She wore also a red cloak, the hood, lined with rabbit-skin, turned back upon her shoulders.

Jeffray glanced at the pair as he reined in to avoid riding down a couple of pigs that were grunting and scurrying about the road. The girl in the red cloak was a tall wench with coal-black hair, petulant, full lips, cheeks tanned a rich red, a color that would have made the ladies of St. James's appear pale and dim. Her eyes were of a hard and crude blue, looking almost fierce under their straight black brows. There was a haughty and intractable air about her. The sensuous curve of her strong figure seemed to suggest the agility and strength of a beautiful savage.

The old woman had clambered up and was laying her stick across the backs of the pigs with a verve that did her hardihood credit. The girl by the tree stood motionless, as though in no mood for playing under-swine-herd to the old lady. She was staring boldly at Jeffray, with no play of emotion upon her face, no softening of her large and petulant mouth. She looked, indeed, like a child of the wild woods, taught to rely solely upon her senses, and those primitive instincts that the forest life had developed.

The old woman dropped a courtesy to Jeffray as he rode on, but the girl by the tree favored him only with her barbaric stare. The storm wind was rising. It came crying through the wood like the massed trumpet-blasts of some black-bannered host. Jeffray drew his cloak about him, whipped up his horse, and held on for Rodenham. He still saw the hard blue eyes, the full, petulant lips, the black hair falling desirously about the ill-tempered and glowing face. He thought of Miss Jilian Hardacre's rouged cheeks and simpering gray eyes. Surely the baronet's daughter needed more blood under her delicate skin when even this forest wench made her seem thin and old.

It had begun to snow by the time Jeffray had left Pevensel Forest for the meadow-lands and brown fallows that spoke of civilization. Dusk had fallen, the whirling snow-flakes dimming the red glow in the west, yet filling the twilight with a gray radiance. Richard saw the lights of Rodenham village glimmering faintly in the valley below him. Soon he was riding through his own park with the thickening snow driving like mist amid the trees.

Jeffray left his mare at the stables and entered the house by the side door from the garden. The old priory of Rodenham was one of those dream-houses that seem built up out of the idyls of the past. It was full of long galleries, dark entries, beams, recessed windows, huge cupboards, and winding stairs. Casements glimmered in unexpected places. The rooms led one into the other at all angles, and were rarely on a level. Here were panels black with age, phantasmal beds, carved chests that might have tombed mysteries for centuries, faded tapestries that breathed forth tragedy as they waved upon the walls. All was dark, mellow, stately, silent. The very essences of life seemed to have melted into the stones; the deep throes of the human heart had become as echoes in each solemn room.

Jeffray found the Lady Letitia, his aunt, playing piquet in the damask drawing-room with Dr. Sugg, the rector of Rodenham. The Lady Letitia was a red-beaked and bushy browed old vulture, with wicked eyes and a budding beard. Her towering "head" was stuffed full of ribbons and feathers, her stupendous hoop of red damask, her gown flowered red and blue. The Lady Letitia was one of those preposterous old ladies who labor under the delusion that a woman of sixty may still presume to trade upon the reputation of impudent loveliness she had created some thirty years ago. Everything about the Lady Letitia was false and artificial. Her teeth and eyebrows were emblems of what her virtues were, manufactured articles to make the wearer passable in society. The old lady had deigned to drive down from London in her coach-and-four to spend Christmas with her nephew, a piece of affectionate economy necessitated by heavy losses at cards. She had deigned also to take Richard's education in hand. The lad was deplorably quiet, gauche, and sensitive.

"So you are back at last, Richard," she said, looking like a pompous old parrot, with one eye on her cards and one on her nephew. "Seat yourself, Dr. Sugg; Richard does not want you to stand on ceremony. Snowing, eh? Detestable weather; the country is like a quagmire already, as I may see by your coat and breeches, nephew. It is usual for a gentleman to dress before presenting himself to a lady. You look surprised, Richard. 'Is it not my own house?' you say. Certainly, mon cher, so it is, but I am a lady of birth, sir, and I like to be treated as such. How is Mistress Jilian? Deft at the harpsichord as ever?"

Richard, whose face had flushed towards the end of this oration, drew a chair beside the card-table, and seated himself before the fire. It was characteristic of the Lady Letitia that she had a habit of ruling and correcting every one. She would tilt her beak of a nose, fix her wicked little eyes on the victim, and drop gall and bitterness from her shrivelled old mouth with a condescension that made her detestable. There was an avaricious glint in the old lady's eyes for the moment. Poor Dr. Sugg, purple-faced and stertorous, came nightly to the priory in clean ruffles and a well-powdered wig to permit the Lady Letitia to possess herself of his small cash in the hope that the worthy dowager might use her influence on his behalf with my lord the bishop.

Aunt Letitia turned suddenly and rapped her nephew's shoulder with her fan.

"Richard," she said, with some asperity, "is it customary to sit between a lady and the fire?"

Jeffray apologized and shifted his chair. Dr. Sugg was engaged in shuffling the cards; the dowager's black eyes were busy scanning her nephew's person with the critical keenness of a woman of the world.

"Richard, where did you get that coat?" she asked.

"At Lewes, aunt."

"Pooh! the rascal has made it like a sack. You must have a smart tailor, boy. I cannot allow you to be disgraced by your clothes."

Dr. Sugg, who was glancing over his cards, cast a pathetic look at Richard, and groaned over his inveterate bad luck. Aunt Letitia's eyes glistened; her rouged and scraggy face was radiant with miserly good humor.

"My dear Richard," she said, benignantly, "I must really take you to The Wells with me, and introduce you into respectable society. You must learn elegance, dignity, address. These virtues are as necessary to a young man of good family as a good tailor or a smart hatter. You must have your hair dressed properly; I will instruct Gladden myself in the latest fashion. Bucolic melancholy does not pass for fine breeding in elegant circles."

Jeffray smiled somewhat cynically at his aunt as he watched her clutching at poor Sugg's shillings. He was heartily tired of his elderly relative's imperial patronage. She condescended to accept his hospitality, and improved the occasion by pestering him with her worldly superficialities, abusing his "bookishness" and amending his manners. The nephew looked forward to his aunt's departure with a sincerity that was ingenuous and enthusiastic. The Lady Letitia was still, however, bent upon economy. Though the country bored her excessively, she was saving money at her nephew's expense, and his hospitality would enable her to go to Tunbridge Wells in the spring unencumbered by debt.

Richard Jeffray had brought many books, pictures, and curios from abroad, having been plentifully supplied with money by his father, who had been something of an antiquary and a man of taste. The old library, with its towering shelves and wainscoted walls, held the treasures that Richard had transmitted from time to time from Italy. Here were Etruscan and Greek vases; boxes of coins, rings, and charms; fragments of statuary and of mosaic. The gathering of engraved stones had formed Jeffray's most extravagant hobby. Egyptian scarabaei, gnostic charms, classical cameos and intaglios, mostly forged, were packed away in a satinwood bureau. Jeffray boasted a strong-box full of sapphires, emeralds, garnets, opals, chalcedonies, sards, jaspers and other stones. Old Peter Gladden had set two lighted candles on the escritoire near the window. A manuscript lay open on the writing flap, the manuscript of an epic that Richard had been laboring at for months. It was conceived in the Miltonic style, and dealt with the descent of Christ into Hades.

The Lady Letitia was yawning over the love affairs of Sophia Weston when her nephew joined her in the drawing-room. She roused herself, sat up stiffly in her chair, and held up her fan to keep the heat of the fire from her painted face. The dowager regarded Richard with the solemnity of a witch of Endor. Jeffray had learned to dread these nightly interviews. Aunt Letitia was forever flinging her sarcasms at his head, and being a sensitive and easy-tempered youth he had never presumed to flout her in her pedagogic utterances.

It was evident to Richard that the dowager had been meditating as usual over his youthful eccentricities. She looked more pompous and austere than usual, like some hoary catechist ready to hear the callow creed of youth. The wind was moaning over the great house, tossing the sombre boughs of the cedars that towered above the lawns. The windows rattled; every chimney was full of sound. Jeffray flung more wood upon the fire, and sat down opposite his aunt with a look of melancholy resignation on his face.

"Richard," said the old lady, suddenly, tilting her red beak and fixing her eyes upon her nephew.

Jeffray roused himself as from a reverie.

"You are often at Hardacre House."

"Am I, Aunt Letitia?"

"Often enough, Richard, to suggest the attraction to me."

Jeffray turned and watched the fire. The light played upon his sallow face and melancholy eyes, his plain black coat, the white ruffles falling down upon the small and refined hands. There was an air of picturesqueness about him that even Aunt Letitia recognized, despite the fact that she preferred a mischievous dandy to a book-befogged scholar.

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