Hathercourt

“You are very merry,” he said, questioningly. “By-the-bye, Miss Western,” he went on, with some constraint but, nevertheless, resolution in his voice, “I hope you have good news of your sister?”

“Excellent, thank you,” replied Mary, looking up bravely into his face. “She is as happy and well as possible.”

There was a ring of truth in her voice, and, indeed, Mr Cheviott would have found it hard to doubt the truth of anything that voice of hers said.

“There is no bravado in that statement,” he said to himself. “I cannot understand it.”

“And what were you laughing at when I came in?” he said, turning to Alys, as if to change the subject.

Alys looked at Mary.

“Mary,” she said, mischievously, “shall I tell?”

“If you like,” said Mary, quietly.

“Oh, Mary, was just giving me her opinion of us – of you and me, Laurence – the result of her observations during the last ten days,” said Alys.

Mary looked up quickly.

“Alys,” was all she said; but Alys understood her. Mr Cheviott was listening attentively.

“Well,” Alys went on, “perhaps that is not putting it quite fairly. I must confess, Laurence, I forced the opinion out of her, and it took a good deal of forcing, too.”

“And what was the opinion – favourable or the reverse? May I not hear that?” asked Mr Cheviott.

“It was pretty favourable,” Alys replied. “On the whole, taking everything into consideration, the enormous disadvantages of our up-bringing, etc, etc, Miss Western is disposed to think that, on the whole, mind you, Laurence, only ‘on the whole,’ we are neither of us quite so bad as might have been expected. But then we must remember, for fear of this verdict making us too conceited, you see, Laurence – upsetting our ill-balanced minds, or anything of that sort – we must remember that it is not every day we can hope to meet with a judge so wide-minded, and philosophical, and unprejudiced, absolutely unprejudiced, as Miss Western.”

During this long tirade Mary remained perfectly silent, only towards its close her face flushed a little.

“Alys,” she said, when Alys at last left off speaking, the colour deepening in her face – “Alys, I don’t think that is quite fair.”

“Nor do I,” said Mr Cheviott, suddenly, for he too had been sitting silent, in apparent consideration. “But, Miss Western, I know Alys’s style pretty well. I can pick out with great precision the grains of fact from amongst her bewildering flowers of rhetoric, so, on the whole, mind you, Miss Western, only ‘on the whole,’ I feel rather gratified than the reverse by what she rails your verdict.”

“I am sorry for it,” said Mary, dryly.

“Why so?”

“I should think poorly of myself were I to feel any gratification at being told that, on the whole, I was not as bad as I might have been. There is no one hardly, I suppose, so bad but that it might be possible to conceive him worse.”

“That was not quite Alys’s wording of your opinion,” said Mr Cheviott. “Nor, I venture to say, quite the sentiment of the opinion itself. But in another sense I agree with you; there is hardly any one – no one, in fact – of whom we might not say, if we knew all the circumstances of his or her history – of his or her existence, in fact – that it was a wonder he or she was so good – not so bad.”

“That is taking the purely – I don’t know what to call it – the purely human view of it all,” said Mary, growing interested and losing her feeling of discomfort. “My father would say we are forgetting what should be and may be the most powerful influences of all, in whatever guise they come, on every life – the spiritual influences, I mean. And these can never be reduced to calculation and estimate, however wise men become.”

“Yes, but think of the terrible forest of ill-growing weeds, the awful barrier of evil, individual and inherited, these influences have to make their way through!”

He rose from his chair and went across the room to the fire-place, where he stood contemplating the two girls. Mary, in her plain grey tweed, unrelieved by any colour, except a blue knot at the throat, but fitting her tall figure to perfection. Her “browny-pink” complexion, hazel eyes, and bright chestnut hair, all speaking of youth and strength and healthfulness, contrasting with Alys, who lay loosely wrapped in the invalid shawls and mantles Mary had carefully arranged about her – prettier, more really lovely, perhaps, than her brother had ever seen her, her dark hair and eyes seeming darker than their wont, from the unusual whiteness of her face. She looked too lovely, thought Mr Cheviott, with a sigh, her fragility striking him sharply, in comparison with the firmness and yet elasticity of Mary’s movements, as she leaned over Alys to raise her a little. How natural, how strangely natural it all seemed! Mr Cheviott sighed.

“Laurence,” exclaimed Alys, “what in the world is the matter?”

Her brother smiled.

“Nothing – that is to say, I can’t say what makes me sigh. I was thinking just then what a strange power of adaptation we human beings have. It seems to me so natural to be living here in this queer sort of way. You ill, Alys, and Miss Western nursing you. I could fancy it had always been so – in a dreamy, vague sort of way.”

“I know how you mean,” said Mary.

“Shall you be sorry when it is over, Laurence,” said Alys, “and we are back again at Romary, without our guardian angel?”

“One is always sorry, in a sense, when anything is over, at least, I am. I suppose I have the power of settling myself in a groove to an unusual degree,” said Mr Cheviott, evasively.

“You certainly have not the power of making pretty speeches,” said Alys. “I called Mary ‘our guardian angel,’ and you call her a ‘groove’.”

Just then Mrs Wills put her head in at the door with an inquiry for Miss Western, and Mary went out of the room.

“I wanted you to say something about Mary’s perhaps coming to Romary,” said Alys.

“Why? Do you think she would come?” asked Mr Cheviott, doubtfully.

“No, I do not think she would,” Alys replied, “but I wanted her to see that you would like her to come.”

“Did she say that she would never come to see you at Romary?” Mr Cheviott said.

“Yes, decidedly. Her words were, ‘I cannot fancy myself, under any circumstances whatever, going to Romary,’ and I thought I heard her half say ‘again’ – ‘going to Romary again.’ But she has never been there?” Mr Cheviott did not reply; he turned to the fire and began poking it vigorously.

“Laurence,” said Alys, feebly.

“What, dear?”

“Please don’t poke the fire so. It seems to hurt me.”

“I am so sorry,” said her brother, penitently. “It’s the same with everything,” he added to himself. “I seem fated to make a mess of everything I have to do with. – I wish I were not so clumsy,” he went on aloud to his sister. “What shall I do with you at Romary? How shall we ever get on without Miss Western?”

“I shall have to make the best of Mrs Golding, I suppose,” said Alys, in a melancholy voice. “But she fusses so! Oh, Laurence, isn’t it a pity? Just as I have found a girl who could be to me the friend I have wished for and needed all my life, a friend whom even you, now that you know her, approve of for me, that she should have this prejudice against knowing us. Indeed, it must be more than prejudice. She is too sensible and right-minded to be influenced by that.”

“Does she know that I, at one time, objected to your knowing her?” said Mr Cheviott.

“She knows something of it – not, of course, that I ever said so to her – but she is very quick, and gathered the impression somehow. But it is not that. She said you were quite right to be careful whom I knew, and that, of course, she and her people were strangers to you. I don’t think Mary would resent anything that she felt any one had a right to do. No, it is not that,” said Alys.

“What can it be, then? Is it her horror of putting herself under any obligation?”

“Obligation, Laurence! As if all the obligation were not on our side!”

“Well, yes. I don’t think I meant that exactly. I mean that, perhaps, she may feel that, owing her so much, we could not do less than invite her to Romary. She may have an exaggerated horror of any approach to being patronised.”

“No, she is not so silly. She knows we should be grateful to her for coming. She is neither so silly, nor, I must say, so vulgar-minded, as you imagine. Laurence, even though you own to liking and admiring her now, it seems as if you could not throw off that inveterate prejudice of yours,” said Alys, rather hotly.

Mr Cheviott, under his breath, gave vent to a slight exclamation.

“Good Heavens, Alys,” he said, aloud, “I think the prejudice is on your side. You cannot believe that I can act or feel unprejudicedly.”

“I do not know what to believe,” said Alys, dejectedly. “I am bewildered and disappointed. There is something that has been concealed from me, that much I am sure of. And I do think you might trust me, Laurence.”

It sounded to Laurence as if there were tears in her voice. He went over to her bed-side, and kissed her tenderly.

“My poor little Alys,” he said, “indeed I do trust you, and, indeed, I would gladly tell you anything you want to know, if I could. But there are times in one’s life when one cannot do what one would like. Can’t you trust me, Alys?”

Alys stroked his hand.

“Could I ever leave off trusting you, Laurence?” she said, fondly. “I do not mind so much when you tell me there is something you can’t tell – that is treating me like a sensible person, and not like a baby.”

That was all she said, but, like the owl, “she thought the more.”

And Mr Cheviott too – his thoughts had no lack of material on which to exert themselves just then. He was sorry for Alys – very sorry – and not a little uneasy and ready to do anything in his power to please and gratify her. But how to do it?

“She cannot, under any circumstances whatever, imagine herself ever coming to Romary again,” he said to himself, over and over, as if there were a fascination in the words. “Ah, well, it is a part of the whole,” he added, bitterly, “and Alys must try to content herself with something else.”

A slight cloud seemed, for a day or two, to come over the comfort and cheerfulness of the little party at the farm. Mary was conscious of it without being able, exactly, to explain it. “But for Alys,” she felt satisfied that she would not care in the least.

“Mr Cheviott may ‘glower’ at me if he likes,” she said to herself. “I really don’t mind. I am not likely ever to see him again, so what does it matter? He is offended, I suppose, because I did not at once accept with delight the invitation which he condescended, grudgingly enough, no doubt, to allow poor Alys to give me.”

So in her own thoughts, as was her way, she made fun of the whole situation and imagined that Mr Cheviott’s decrease of cordiality and friendliness had not the slightest power to disturb her equanimity. Yet somehow in her honest conscience there lurked a faint misgiving. It was difficult to call his evident dejection haughtiness or temper, difficult to accuse of offensive condescension the man whose every word and tone was full of the gentlest, almost deprecating, deference and respect – most difficult of all to hold loyally to her old position of contempt for and repugnance to a man so unmistakably unselfish, so almost woman-like in his tender devotion to the sister dependent on his care.

“Yet he must be heartless,” persisted Mary, valiantly, “he must be narrow-minded and cruel, and he must be what any straightforward, honourable person would call unprincipled and intriguing, wherever the carrying out of his own designs is in question.”

“I shall be so glad to be home again, mamma,” she said to her mother one afternoon when she had left Alys for an hour or two, to go home to see how the Rectory was getting on without her.

“Yes, dear, I can well fancy it,” replied Mrs Western, sympathisingly. “You must just remember, you know, Mary, that your present task, however distasteful, is just as much a duty as if that poor girl were one of the cottagers about here. Indeed, almost more so. I dare say, in spite of their wealth and position, she is far more really friendless than any other of our poor neighbours. But she is a sweet girl, you say?”

“Very,” said Mary, warmly. “It is a pleasure to do anything for her.”

“Poor child! And with such a brother! A most disagreeable, cold, haughty man, I hear. But he surely cannot be anything but courteous to you, Mary? Under the circumstances, anything else would be too outrageous.”

“Oh dear, no,” said Mary, hastily, startled a little somehow by her mother’s tone. “He is perfectly civil to me – most considerate, and I suppose I should say ‘kind.’ Only I shall be glad to be at home – they are talking now of moving Miss Cheviott to Romary on Thursday – and back into my regular ways. Mother, I’m an awful old maid already, I get into a groove and like to stay there.”

The words recurred to her on her way back to the Edge. Would she really be so glad to be home again? She had used Mr Cheviott’s expression, and it led her into the train of thought which had suggested it to him. Yes, there was truth in what he said. In almost every kind of life, in almost any circumstances, even if painful in themselves, there grows up secretly, as the days pass on, a curious, undefinable charm – a something it hurts us to break, though, till the necessity for so doing is upon us, we had been unconscious of its existence.

“It must be that,” said Mary. “I have got into the groove of my present life, and now that it is coming to an end, disagreeable though it has been, I feel it strangely painful to leave it. Of course it is natural I should feel pain in parting from Alys, whom I can never be with again; but, besides that, I am sorry to have done with the whole affair – the queer incongruous life, the old kitchen in the evenings, and Mr Cheviott and his books in the corner, the feeling I am of use to her, to them both, that they would have been wretchedly uncomfortable without me, and that even now that I am away for an hour they will be missing me. What queer, inconsistent complications we human beings are! It is just the coming to an end of it all, the beginning to see it in the haze of the past, that gives it a charm.”

She stood still and gazed across over the bare, long stretch of meadow land before her to the far distant horizon, radiant already in the colours of the fast setting sun. Suddenly a voice behind her made her start.

“Are you bidding the sun good-night?” it said.

Mary turned round and saw Mr Cheviott.

“Yes,” she replied. “I suppose I was. There, is something rather melancholy about a sunset, is there not?” she added after a little pause.

“There is something not rather, but very melancholy about all farewells. And sunset is good-bye forever to a day, though not to the sun,” said Mr Cheviott.

”‘Out of EternityThis new day is born;Into EternityAt night will return.’”

“Yes,” said Mary again. “It is like what my little sister Francie once said, ‘What a sad thing pastness is.’”

“How pretty!” said Mr Cheviott. “Pastness! Yes, it is a sad thing, but fortunately not an ugly thing. Distance in time as well as in space, ‘lends enchantment to the view.’ How strangely little things affect us sometimes,” he went on. “There are occasions, little events of my life, that I cannot recall without an indescribable thrill, neither of pleasure nor pain, but a strange, acute mixture of both. And yet they are so trifling in themselves that I cannot explain why they should so affect me.”

“I think I have felt what you mean,” said Mary.

“And in the same way I have felt extraordinarily affected by a far-off view sometimes,” pursued Mr Cheviott. “When I was a boy, from my nursery window we had, on clear days, a view of the shire hills, and on the top, or nearly on the top of one of them, we could, on very clear days, distinguish a little white cottage. Do you know, I could never look at it without the tears coming into my eyes, and yet, if it had been near enough to see it plainly, most likely it was the most prosaic of white cottages.”

“I have had the same feeling about things not ‘enchanted’ by distance,” said Mary. “Once, on a journey, driving rapidly, we suddenly passed a cottage with two girls sitting on the door-step. A ray of rather faint evening sunlight fell across them as they sat, otherwise everything about the scene was commonplace in the extreme. But yet something made me feel as if I were going to cry. I had to turn my head away and shut my eyes.”

“That’s just what I mean,” said Mr Cheviott, and then for a minute or two they both stood silent, gazing at the sunset.

“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, at last, “when you are back at the Rectory again, and the present little phase of your life is past and done with, I trust its ‘pastness’ may soften all the annoyance you have had to put up with. Even I, I would fain hope, may come in for a little of the benefit of the mellowing haze of distance and bygoneness?”

“I do not feel that I have had any annoyances to bear,” said Mary, cordially. “Alys has been only too unselfish, and – and – you, yourself, Mr Cheviott, have been most considerate of my comfort. My associations with the Edge can never be unpleasant.”

“Thank you – thank you, so very much,” said Mr Cheviott, so earnestly that Mary forthwith began to call hereof a humbug.

Would it not have been honest to have said a little more – to have told him that, while she really did thank him for his courtesy and thoughtfulness, nothing that had happened had, in the least, shaken her real opinion of his character? Of the other side of his character, so she mentally worded it in instinctive self-defence of her constancy. For, indeed, to her there had come to be two Mr Cheviotts – Alys’s brother, and, alas! Arthur Beverley’s cousin!

Chapter Twenty Three

Arthur’s Cousin

“I loved him not, and yet, now he is gone,I checked him when he spoke; yet could he speak – ”W.S. Landor.

The evening that followed this little conversation was one of the – if not the – pleasantest of those Mary had spent at the farm. Alys seemed wonderfully stronger and better, or else she had caught the infection of her brother’s unusually good spirits, and, till considerably past her ordinary hour of settling for the night, Mr Cheviott and Mary stayed in her room, laughing, chattering, and joking till Mrs Wills began to think more experienced nurses would be better fitted to take care of the young lady.

“Not that Miss Mary has not an old head on young shoulders, if ever such could be,” she remarked to her husband, “but Miss Cheviott, for all that she’s a-lying there so weakly-like, and many a month, it’s my opinion, when they get her home again, will have to lie; she do have a sperrit of her own. And the master, as I’m always a-going to call him, thinking of our Captain Beverley it must be, he has a deal of fun in him, has Mr Cheviott, for all his quiet ways, as no one would fancy was there.”

But, by and by, Mary exerted her authority. Alys must go to sleep. What would Mr Brandreth say if he found her knocked up and wearied the next day – Wednesday, too, the day before the move to Romary, for which all her strength would be required? So whether sleepy or not, Alys had to obey orders, and, as Mary had a long letter to Lilias to write, Mr Cheviott volunteered to read his sister to sleep, for which Mary sincerely thanked him.

He came into the kitchen an hour or so later, while she was still busy with her letter. He had a book in his hand, and sat down quietly to read it beside the fire. After a while the kitchen clock struck ten.

“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, “I think if I had any authority over you, as you have over Alys, I would exert it to make you go to bed. You were up very early, you have been on your feet, about one thing and another, nearly all day, besides a good long walk; and now you are writing I should be afraid to say how many sheets full. Don’t you intend to take any rest? I feel responsible, remember, for the condition in which you go back to the Rectory, and I don’t want your father and mother to think Alys and I have no conscience about overworking you.”

Mary left off writing, and looked up with a smile. Her wavy brown hair was somewhat disarranged, and she pushed it back off her temples with a slight gesture of weariness. Her face was a little flushed, but her eyes were bright and happy-looking. Those dear, good, honest eyes of hers, ready to tell of pleasure and content, as of, it must be confessed, disapproval or indignation! She made a pleasant picture, tumbled hair notwithstanding – she reminded Mr Cheviott, somehow, of the day he had first seen her under the porch of the old church, when she had looked up in his face with that peculiarly attractive expression of hers of hearty, fearless good-will.

“I do believe, now that I leave off writing and can think about it,” she said, “I do believe I am a little tired. Not that I have done anything unusual to-day by any means. I suppose I must go to bed,” looking regretfully at her not yet completed letter; “but writing to Lilias is such a temptation.”

“She is enjoying herself very much, you say,” observed Mr Cheviott, in so natural and unconstrained a manner that, for the moment, Mary actually forgot that he was the speaker, forgot her ordinarily quick rising indignation whenever he ventured to name Lilias at all.

“Exceedingly,” she replied, warmly. “I have never had such cheerful, almost merry, letters from her before when she has been away. I am delighted; but a little astonished all the same,” she added, in a lower voice, almost as if speaking to herself.

“I am so very glad of it,” said Mr Cheviott, fervently, yet with a sort of hesitation which recalled Mary to herself. Quick as thought the blood mounted to her temple – she turned sharply, the whole expression of her being, even to the pretty curves of her slight firm figure, seeming to her observer to change and harden. She gathered up the loose sheets of her letter and made a step or two towards the door. Then her habitual instincts of consideration and courtesy asserting themselves, she stopped short.

“I think I had better go to bed,” she said. “Goodnight, Mr Cheviott.”

Hitherto, latterly that is to say, in the prevalence of a tacit truce between these two, the usual amenities of intimate and friendly social relations had half unconsciously crept in.

“For Alys’s sake,” Mary had decided, when for the first time she found herself shaking hands with the man she had prayed she might “never see again,” “for Alys’s sake it is necessary to make no fuss, and perhaps for my own, too, it is on the whole more dignified to behave in an ordinary way.”

But to-night, dignity or no dignity, her indignation was again too fully aroused to allow anything to interfere with its expression, and she was proceeding in queenly fashion to the door, when, to her amazement, Mr Cheviott stepped forward and stood in her way.

“Miss Western,” he said, quietly, “won’t you say goodnight? Won’t you shake hands with me as usual?”

Mary hesitated. She did not want to make herself ridiculous – for Lilias’s sake even, she shrank from the slightest appearance of petulance or small resentment. She hesitated; then looking up bravely, said, honestly:

“I would rather not, but – ” A pair of dark eyes were gazing down upon her – gazing as if they would read her very soul, so earnest, so true in their expression that Mary could not but own to herself that it was difficult to realise that they belonged to an unprincipled and dishonourable man.

“But?” he said, gravely.

“I was only going to say, if you think so much of shaking hands, I don’t mind,” said Mary, with a curious mixture of deprecation and defiance in her tone. “I don’t want to be uncourteous or exaggerated – besides, what is there in shaking hands? We do so half a dozen times a day with people we do not care the least for.”

“Yes,” said Mr Cheviott, gravely still, “we do. But people one doesn’t care the least for are different from people one positively dislikes, or worse still, distrusts.”

“Can’t you leave all that?” said Mary, sadly. “I cannot help what – what happened, and, indeed” – her voice trembling a little – “towards the Mr Cheviott I have known here I should be most wrong to have any but friendly feelings.”