Hathercourt

She held out her hand. Mr Cheviott took it in his, holding it for one little moment longer than was really necessary.

“Is it always to be war between us, Miss Western?” as if the words could not be kept back. “Heaven knows how glad I should be to leave forever all the painful part of the past.”

Mary slowly shook her head. Then looking up suddenly again, she said, gently:

“We have got on very well here without fighting. Why should not the truce last till the end of the time here? There is only another day.”

“Yes,” repeated Mr Cheviott. “Only one other day.”

Then Mary went off to bed, but not, for much longer than her wont, to sleep. Her mind seemed strangely bewildered and perplexed.

“I have lost all my mile-stones,” she said to herself. “I feel as if I were being forced to think black white in the strangest way. But I won’t – no, I won’t, won’t, won’t!”

And with this laudable determination she went to sleep.

It was late before Mr Cheviott left the kitchen fire-side that night.

“Will the truce last,” he was saying to himself, “even through another day? Twenty times in an hour I have been on the point of saying what, indeed, would end it one way or another. And Arthur thought I could not sympathise with him! I wonder on which of the two of us that idiotic will has entailed the greater suffering?”

His good spirits seemed all to have deserted him by the next morning. He was grave and almost stern, and, so said Alys, “objectionably affairé about some stupid letters sent on from Romary.” Alys was unusually talkative and obtrusively cheerful, but Mary understood her through it all. A cloud of real sorrow was over both girls, more heavily on Mary, for she knew what Alys was still silently determined to hope against, that this was far more than the “last day” of their queer life at the farm, that it was the end of the strange but strong friendship that, despite all obstacles, had sprung up between them.

For though Alys had almost pointedly refrained from any recurrence to the question of their meeting again at Romary, and Mary had been only too ready to second her in all avoidance of the subject, this absence of discussion had in no wise softened the girl’s resolution.

“Never,” she repeated to herself, “never under any circumstances can I imagine myself entering that house again.”

And the day wore on without any allusion being made to the when or the where of their ever meeting again.

Late in the afternoon Mary had gone at Alys’s request to pick some of the pretty spring flowers to be found in profusion in the Balner woods hard by, when, as she was returning homewards, laden with primroses and violets, looking up she saw Mr Cheviott coming quickly along the path to meet her.

“Alys?” she exclaimed, quickly, with just the slightest shade of anxiety in her voice. “Does she want me?”

“Oh, no,” replied Mr Cheviott, with a smile. “Alys is all right. What an anxious nurse you are, Miss Western!”

“Yes,” said Mary, “it is silly. I must get accustomed to the idea of her doing without me. But I could not help having a feeling to-day of a different kind of anxiety – a feeling of almost superstitious fear lest anything should go wrong with her to-day – the last day. It would be so hard to leave her less well than she is, and – of course,” she went on, looking up with a slight flush on her face, “I own to being a little proud of her! It is a great satisfaction to hear Mr Brandreth say that, considering all, she could not have got on better than she has done.”

“Of course it is,” said Mr Cheviott, warmly. “And I am more glad than I can say that you feel it so. It is a little bit of a reward for you.”

Mary did not reply, and they walked on slowly for a few moments in silence.

“How pretty your flowers are,” said Mr Cheviott, at last.

“Lovely, are they not?” replied Mary, half burying her face, as she spoke, in a great rich cluster of primroses that she had tied up together into a sort of ball. “They are the best flowers of all – these spring ones – there can be no doubt about it.”

“Or is it that they are the spring ones,” suggested Mr Cheviott.

“A little perhaps,” allowed Mary. “Have I not got a quantity? Alys took a fancy for some to take home to Romary.”

“Poor child, she will not be able to gather any for herself this year,” said Mr Cheviott.

“No,” said Mary.

“And she will not have you to gather them for her after to-day.”

“No,” said Mary again, this time more dryly.

Mr Cheviott stopped short, and as they were placed in the path, Mary, without positive rudeness, could not help stopping too.

“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, abruptly, “is your decision quite unshaken?”

“What decision?” said Mary, quietly.

“About coming to see us at Romary, about, in fact, continuing to honour us with your acquaintanceship – I would like to say friendship, but I am afraid of vexing you – or the reverse.”

Mary pulled a poor primrose to pieces, petal by petal, before she replied.

“I wish,” she said, at last, with an appeal almost approaching to pathos in her tones, “I wish you had done as I begged you last night – let this last day end peacefully without rousing anything discordant. Mr Cheviott,” she went on, with an attempt at a smile, “you don’t know me. There are certain directions in which I feel so intensely that it would not take much to make me actually fierce – there is something of the Tartar underlying what you think cool self-possession – and one of those directions is my sister Lilias.” Her voice faltered a little. “Now won’t you be warned,” she added, speaking more lightly, “won’t you be warned, and let our pleasant truce last to the end?”

“To the end,” he repeated, with some bitterness. “A matter of a few hours, and, for the sake of keeping those peaceful, I am to relinquish my only chance of – of ever coming to a better understanding with you? No, Miss Western, I cannot let the subject drop thus.”

“Then what do you want to know?” she said, facing round upon him.

“I want to know if you keep to your determination never to come to see my sister at Romary, never to enter my house again, never, in fact, to have anything more to say to Alys, who is attached to you, and whom I know you care for? You may say she might come to see you, but at present, at any rate, that is impossible – besides, in such forced intercourse there could be no real enjoyment.”

“No,” said Mary, “there could not be. It is best to call things by their right names. I do care for Alys, deeply and truly, but I do not wish or intend to go on knowing her. I would not ask her to come to my home to see me, because I cannot go to her home to see her.”

“And why not?”

“Because she is your sister,” replied Mary, calmly. “And because I could not receive the hospitality of a man who has behaved as I believe you to have behaved.”

Mr Cheviott drew a step nearer her, and Mary, impelled, in spite of herself, to look up in his face, saw that it had grown to a deadly whiteness. She saw, too, something which she was half puzzled, half frightened at – something which in her short, peaceful experience of life, she had never come into close contact with – a strong man’s overwhelming indignation at unjust accusation. She stood silent. What could she say?

“This is fearfully hard to bear,” he said, at last. “I thought I was prepared for it, but – in spite of myself, I suppose – I had cherished hopes that recently your opinion of me had begun to soften. Miss Western, has it never occurred to you as possible that you have misjudged me?”

Mary hesitated.

“Yes,” she said, at last. “I may own to you that – lately – I have tried to think if it was possible.”

“You have wished to find it possible?” said Mr Cheviott, eagerly.

“Sometimes,” said Mary.

“God bless you for that,” he exclaimed, “and – ”

“No, do not say that,” she interrupted. “I have more often wished not to find it so, for I – I gave you every chance – I put it all so plainly to you that horrible day at Romary – no, it is impossible that I have done you injustice. Were I to begin to think so, I should feel that I was losing my judgment, my right estimate of things altogether. But I do not wish to continue thinking worse of you than you deserve – you may have learned to see things differently – is it that you were going to tell me? Heaven knows if your interference has done what can never be undone, or not; but, however this is, I do not want to refuse to hear that you have changed.”

Mr Cheviott’s face grew sterner and darker.

“I have not changed,” he said. “What I did was for the best, and I could not but do the same again in similar circumstances.”

“Then,” said Mary, hardening at once, “I really have nothing more to say or to hear. Please let me pass.”

“No,” he replied. “Not yet. Miss Western, I value your good opinion more than that of any one living. I cannot let you go like this. It is my last chance. Do you not know what I feel for you – can you not see what you are making me suffer? I have never loved any woman before – am I to give up all hope on account of this terrible prejudice of yours? But for that I could have made you care for me – I know I could – could I not? Mary, tell me.”

His voice softened into a tenderness, compared with which the gentlest tones he had ever addressed to his sister were hard. But little heard Mary of tenderness or softness in his words. She stood aghast, literally aghast with astonishment – amazement rather – so intense that at first she could scarcely believe that her ears were not deceiving her. Then, as the full meaning of his words came home to her, indignation, overwhelming indignation, took the place of every other feeling, and burning words rose to her lips. For the moment “the Tartar” was, indeed, uppermost.

“You say this to me!” she exclaimed. “You dare to say this to me. You, the man who, in deference to contemptible class-prejudice and to gratify some selfish schemes, did not hesitate to trample a woman’s heart under foot, and to spoil the best chance for good that ever came to a man you profess to care for —you, selfish, heartless, unprincipled man, dare to tell me, Mary Western, that you love me! Are you going out of your senses, Mr Cheviott? Do you forget that I am Lilias’s sister?”

“No,” he said, in atone which somehow compelled her attention. “I do not forget it, and I am not ashamed to say so. I do not offer you – for it would but be thrown at my feet with scorn – but I would have offered you a man’s honest, disinterested devotion, were you able to believe in such a thing as coming from me. But you are blinded by prejudice – you will take into account nothing but your own preconceived interpretation. You will not allow the possibility of my being innocent of what you accuse me of. So be it. But there have been women who have known an honest man when they found such a one, and have not found their trust misplaced.”

Some answering chord was touched for the instant in Mary’s heart. Her tone was less hard, less cruelly contemptuous when she spoke again.

“I am not doubting your sincerity as regards myself,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “I suppose you do mean what you say, however extraordinarily incomprehensible it appears to me. But that makes things no better – oh! if you had but left me under the delusion that there was something to respect in you! I thought you narrow-minded and prejudiced to a degree, but I had grown to think you had some principle – that in what you did you were actuated by what you believed to be right. But what am I to think now? Where are all the well-considered reasons for interfering between your cousin and my sister that you would have had me believe in, now that – that – you find the case your own, or fancy it is so? What can I, too, think of your principle and disinterestedness?”

“What you choose,” said Mr Cheviott, bitterly. “It can matter little. But you make one mistake. I never gave you any reasons for my interference. I told you I had acted for the best, and I madly imagined it possible that having come to know me, you might have begun to believe it possible that my conduct was honest and disinterested. I had not intended to confess to you what I have done. My object in speaking to you again was purely – believe me or not, as you like – to try to gain for my sister the hope of sometimes seeing you. I was going on to volunteer to absent myself from Romary, if personal repugnance to me was the obstacle, if only you would sometimes come. But I am only human; your words and your tone drove me into what I little intended – into what I must have been mad to say to you.”

He stopped; he had spoken in a strangely low tone, but he had spoken very fast, and Mary’s first sensation when his voice ceased was of bewilderment approaching almost to a kind of mental chaos, and of vague but galling self-reproach. But for a moment she said nothing, and Mr Cheviott was already turning away, when she called him back, faintly and irresolutely, but he heard her still.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said, brokenly. “I suppose I have said what I should not. I suppose I let my anger get the better of me. But I have never learned to dissimulate. Your words seemed to me, remembering what I did, an insult. I suppose I should have thanked you for – for the honour. But it has all been a mistake. You must see I could never have cared for you —never; were I ten times satisfied you had done Lilias no wrong, your conduct to her remains the same. But I wish to be reasonable. Let us forget all this, and, so far as can be, let us part friends.”

She held out her hand, this time in vain.

“No,” said Mr Cheviott. “I cannot shake hands on such terms. I run no risk of hurting your feelings by saying so; you, I know, do not attach much consequence to so empty a ceremony, but unfortunately I do. Goodbye, Miss Western.”

He raised his hat and turned away.

When he was fairly out of sight, Mary sat down on the short grass that bordered the wood-path, leaned her head against the stump of an old tree standing close by and burst into tears. Then she took her flowers, the pretty, winsome things she had plucked so carefully, gathered them all into one heap, and, rising from her seat, moved by some sudden instinct of remorse, threw them – threw them, with all the strength of her vigorous young arms, away, back among the underwood and grassy tangle where they had grown.

“Primroses and violets,” she said as she did so, “I shall never be able to endure the sight of you again.”

Chapter Twenty Four

Et Tu, Brute!

”… How strange the tangle is!What old perplexity is this?”Songs of Two Worlds.

And Alys did not get her flowers, poor girl. Nor was she told the reason why. But late that last evening, when the packing was done, and the various little personalities that, even in an enforced sojourn of the kind, are sure to collect about people, above all about people of individuality and refinement, were all collected together and put away, and the farm-house rooms had resumed their ordinary consistent bareness, Mary sat down by Alys’s bed and put her arms round the girl’s neck and kissed her with a clinging tenderness that brought the tears to Alys’s eyes.

“Dear Alys,” she said, softly, “I want to thank you.”

“To thank me,” replied Alys, in astonishment. “Oh, no, Mary, all the thanks are, must be, on one side.”

“No,” said Mary, “I have many things to thank you for. You have been so patient and sweet, and so grateful for the little I have been able to do for you. And one thing I may thank you for certainly.”

“What?” whispered Alys.

“For loving me,” said Mary. “You have done me good, Alys. I was growing, not perhaps exactly selfish, but self-centred. I put my own home and my own people before everything else, in a narrow-minded way, and I fancied that people who were different from us externally – people who had had fewer struggles and more luxuries than my parents – must of necessity be narrow-minded and self-absorbed and unsympathising. Alys, it is absurd, but do you know I do believe I have myself been growing into the very thing I so detested – I do believe, in a sense, I was encouraging a kind of class prejudice?”

Alys listened attentively.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “Mary, you are awfully honest.”

“I don’t know,” replied Mary, vaguely. “Self-deception must be a kind of dishonesty.”

Alys hardly heard her. She was watching eagerly for the upshot of this confession, yet afraid of startling away the concession she was hoping for by any premature congratulation on her friend’s altered views. So she lay, without speaking, till at last Mary’s silence roused her to new misgiving.

“Won’t you go on with what you were saying?” she ventured at last.

“What was it?” said Mary.

“Oh! about your being glad you had got to know us, and – ”

“Nay,” exclaimed Mary, “I am sure I did not say that, Alys. What I said was that I thanked you for showing me how loving and sympathising you are, and that being prosperous and rich and courted and all that, as you are, need not necessarily make one narrow-minded and selfish.”

“Well,” said Alys, “it comes to much the same thing. I don’t see why you need have flown up so at my way of putting it.”

“Because,” said Mary, with vehemence, disproportionate to the occasion, “I was speaking of and to you, Alys – you alone.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” said Alys, “I would like my praise far, far more, Mary, if you would give poor Laurence a little bit of it too. He deserves it, while I – ”

“Never mind,” said Mary, uneasily. “Don’t let us get into a discussion, dear Alys.”

“I am sure I don’t want to discuss anything except the end of your sentence. Do finish, Mary. Now that you have got to know me, or like me a little, you are not going to keep to your horrible resolution?”

Mary’s face clouded.

“I see, what you mean,” she said. “Oh! Alys, I am sorry to pain you, and very, very sorry not to be able to look forward to seeing you again, but I cannot change. I cannot – ”

Alys leaned forward and put her hand over Mary’s mouth.

“No,” she said, “I won’t let you repeat that. I know what is coming, ‘I cannot under any circumstances whatever imagine myself, etc.’ No, Mary, you are not to say that. It is a sort of tempting Providence to be obstinate. Fancy now what might happen. Suppose I get much worse, Mary, – suppose that great London doctor that Laurence is going to have down to see me, says I can’t get better – that I am going to die – wouldn’t you come to Romary then, to say good-bye, Mary?”

Mary turned away her head and sighed deeply.

“I was not going to say what you thought, Alys,” she said, at length. “I was only going to say that I cannot see any probability of my ever going to you at Romary. If you ever marry, Alys – I should not say that; you are sure to marry —when you do, I shall go to see you in your own home, if you still care to have me, and if your husband has no objection.”

“But yours, Mary? What about his objections or non-objections?” said Alys.

“They will never exist, for there will never be such a person,” said Mary, calmly. “It was settled – oh, I can’t tell you how long ago, always, I think – in all our family conclaves there was never a dissentient voice on the subject – that I was to be an old maid. I am thoroughly cut out for it. Any one can see that. ‘Dans mon coeur il n’y a point d’amour’ of that kind, certainly,” she hummed, lightly.

“But, but, Mary,” said Alys, “finish the verse.”

“How do you know it?” said Mary. “It’s an old Norman or Breton song. Mother sang it when she was a girl.”

“I do know the second line, and that is all that matters,” said Alys, sagely. “Well, good-night, Mary. You are not quite as naughty as you have been, but that is the best I can say for you. However, I shall live in hope. But I am awfully dull, Mary. And how merry we were last night! It is too bad of Laurence to have gone over to Romary so late to-night, just when he might have known our – at least my spirits would need cheering. You, of course, have the getting back to your beloved people to look forward to.”

And, two mornings after this, Mary woke to find herself in her own familiar room at the Rectory. What a dream the last fortnight seemed! And what a long time ago appeared now the day of Alys Cheviott’s accident! Spring had come on fast since then. The leaves of the creeper round Mary’s window were beginning to peep in and to be visible as she lay in bed, the birds’ busy twitter and the early sunlight told that the world was waking up once more to approaching summer. How home-like and peaceful it seemed! yet Mary could not feel as delighted to be at home again as she had expected.

“I am anxious about Alys, I suppose,” she said to herself, “and sorry to have been obliged to disappoint her. If she knew, what would she think or feel? would she ever wish to see me again? I hardly think so, and I could never be at ease in her presence. Another reason in favour of my decision. Yet I wish I could have avoided saying some of the things I did – even to him. Oh, if only I could forget all about it!”

For, notwithstanding all the strength of mind she brought to bear on the subject, that scene in the wood Mary could not succeed in banishing from her thoughts. Over and over again it rose up before her, leaving behind it each time, it seemed to her, a sharper sting of pain, a more humiliating sense of self-reproach. Yet how and where had she been wrong? Was it not better to be honest at all costs? Over and over again she determined to banish it finally from her memory, but no sooner had she done so than some trifle – the sight of a primrose in Francie’s hat, or some apparently entirely disconnected allusion, would bring it back again as vividly as ever, and, with a certain fascination that Mary could not explain to herself, every word that Mr Cheviott had said, every change of expression that had come over his face, would repeat themselves to her imagination. Was it true? she asked herself, was it true what he had said to her? – but for her previous knowledge of his real character, but for the deep-dyed “prejudice,” as he had called it, against him in her mind, could she ever have grown to care for this man? Surely not – yet why did this assertion of his recur to her so often, and not altogether in the sense of re-arousing her indignation?

“He is like two people in one,” she said to herself, “but as to which is the real one, facts, fortunately, leave me in no doubt. And yet I am sorry to have wounded him so deeply, little as he cared for the feelings of others.”

“You look tired, Mary dear,” said her mother, when, after the early Rectory breakfast, Mary was preparing as usual to collect her sisters and little Brooke for lessons in the school-room. “Don’t you think you might leave the children to manage for themselves one other day? You need rest, I am sure, after all you have gone through.”

“No, mother dear, I am really not tired,” said Mary. “I only feel rather – I don’t know how – dissipated, I suppose, unsettled, or whatever you like to call it.”

“That only means tired, dear,” repeated her mother, fondly, so fondly – for Mrs Western was not, as a rule, demonstrative with her children – that Mary felt angry with herself for not being able to respond more gratefully to her solicitude, for, in fact, feeling rather irritated than soothed by it.

“But I have really had nothing to tire me, mother,” she persisted. “Alys Cheviott was as considerate as possible, and, except the first two nights, I had no watching or anxiety. It was hardly to be called ‘nursing’.”

“Perhaps not,” allowed Mrs Western, “but there was the constraint and discomfort of the life – above all, the enforced intercourse with that disagreeable man – that Mr Cheviott, whom you dislike so. I really cannot tell you, Mary dear, how much I have admired your unselfishness and moral courage during this trying time. But you will never regret it. Who knows how much good you may have done that poor girl for all her life – poor I cannot but call her, notwithstanding her riches and position, and everything – fatherless and motherless, and with such a cold, selfish brother as her only protector.”