‘I really think I should like to spend my life on these hills,’ said Laura, as she and John Treverton sat side by side behind the sturdy little coachman, whose quaintly comical face might have made the fortune of a low comedian. ‘It seems such a beautiful world, even in its wildness and solitude, so pure and fair, and free from the taint of sin.’
The sunlight behind the big brown tors was fading, and the air growing crisp and cool, keenly biting, even at odd times, though it was midsummer. John drew a soft woollen shawl round his companion’s shoulders, and even in this little action his heart thrilled at the thought that henceforward it was his duty to protect her from all the ills of life. And so through the deepening gloom they came to Camelot, a narrow street on the slant of a hill, folded in grey twilight as in a mantle.
The inn where Laura and her maid were to put up for the night was common-place and commercial — a house that had evidently seen better days, but which had plucked up its spirits and furbished up its rickety old furniture since the establishment of the North-Cornwall coach, a blessed institution, linking a wild and solitary district with railways and civilisation.
Here Laura rested comfortably enough through the short summer night, while John Treverton endured the discomforts of a second-rate tavern over against the market-place. At eight o’clock next morning he presented himself at the hotel where Laura and her maid were waiting for him, and then the three went on foot to the outlying church where John Treverton was to take this woman, Laura, for his wife for the second time within six months.
‘I could not have been happier in my choice of a locality than I was in fixing upon Camelot,’ said John, as they walked side by side along the country lane, between tall banks of briar and fern, in the sweet morning air, with the faithful Mary strolling discreetly in the rear. ‘I found the most accommodating old parson, who quite entered into my views when I told him that for certain reasons which I need not explain, I wished my marriage to be kept altogether quiet. ‘I shall not speak of it to a creature,” replied the good old soul. “No man would come to Camelot to be married who did not wish to hide himself from the eye of the world. I shall respect your secret, and I’ll take care that my clerk does the same.”’
The old church smelt rather like a vault when they went in out of the breezy summer day, but it was a cleanly whitewashed vault, and the sun was shining full upon the faded crimson velvet of the communion table, above which appeared the ten commandments and the royal arms in the hood old style. Steeped in that sunshine stood the bride and bridegroom, gravely, earnestly repeating the solemn words of the service; no witnesses of the act save the grey-headed clerk and the girl Mary, who seemed to think it incumbent upon somebody to be moved to tears, and who therefore gently sniffed and faintly sobbed in the background. Never had Laura looked lovelier than when she stood beside her husband in the little closet of a vestry, signing her name in the mouldy old register; never had she felt happier than when they walked away from the lonely old church, after a friendly leave-taking of the good vicar, who blessed them and gave them God speed as heartily as if they had been born and bred in his parish. The coach was to pick them up at the cross roads about half a mile from the church, having previously picked up their luggage in Camelot, and they were to go back across the moor to Lyonstown, and from Lyonstown by rail to the extreme west, and thence to the Scilly Isles.
‘Can nothing happen now to part us, John?’ Laura asked while they were sitting on a ferny bank waiting for the coach. ‘Are our lives secure from all evil in the future?’
‘Who can be armed against all misfortune, love?’ he asked. ‘Of one thing I am certain. You are my wife. Against the validity of our marriage of to-day no living creature can say a word.’
‘And the legality of our previous marriage might have been questioned.’
‘Yes, dearest, there would have always been that hazard.’
CHAPTER VII. HALCYON DAYS.
THERE were no bonfires or floral arches, no rejoicings of tenantry or farm labourers, when John Treverton and his wife came home to Hazlehurst Manor. They came unannounced one fine July afternoon, arriving in a fly hired at Beechampton, much to the distress of Mrs. Trimmer, who declared that there was absolutely nothing in the house. Yet many an anxious city housekeeper would have considered the noble array of hams, pendant from the massive beams of the kitchen ceiling, the flitch of bacon, the basket of new-laid eggs, the homely saffron-hued plum cakes, the dainty sweet biscuits, the ox tongues and silver side of beef in pickle, the chickens waiting to be plucked — worthy to count as something.
‘You might have sent me a telegram, mum, and then I might have done myself credit,’ said Mrs. Trimmer, dolefully. ‘I don’t believe there’s a bit of fish to be had in Hazlehurst. I was in the village at twelve o’clock this blessed day, and there was one sole frizzling on the slates at Trimpson’s, and I’ll warrant he’s been sold by this time.’
‘If he isn’t sold he must be pretty well baked, so we won’t have anything to say to him,’ said John Treverton, laughing. ‘Don’t worry yourself about dinner, my good creature; we are too happy to care what we eat.’
And then he put his arm round his wife’s waist and led her along the corridor that ended in the book-room, where she had left him in his despair seven little months ago. They went into this room together, and he shut the door behind them.
“Dear love, to think that I should enter this room the happiest of men. I, who sat by that table in such anguish as few men are ever called upon to suffer. Oh, Laura, that was the darkest day in my life.’
‘Forget it,’ she said earnestly; ‘never let the past be named between us. There is so much of it that is still a mystery to me. You have told me so little of your early life, John, that if I were to think of the past I might begin to doubt you. Oh, love, I have trusted you blindly. Even when all things looked dark I went on trusting you; I clung to my belief in your goodness. I don’t know whether it was my weakness or my strength which made me so confident.’
‘It was your strength, dearest, the strength of innocence, the strength of that divine charity which “thinketh no evil.” Dear love, it shall be the business of my life to prove you right, to show myself worthy of your trust.’
They roamed about the house together, looking at everything, as if each object were new to both, happy as children. They recalled their first meeting — their second — and confessed all they had felt on each occasion. It was delightful to them to travel backward through the history of their love, now that life was bright and the future seemed all secure.
So their life went on for many days, Laura initiating her husband in his position as Squire of Hazlehurst. She took him round to all the cottages and introduced him to their inmates, and together they planned improvements which were to make Hazlehurst Manor one of the most perfect estates in the country. Above all things was there to be happiness for every one. Drainage and sanitation were to be so improved that fever and infection would be almost an impossibility. Every farm labourer was to have a clean and comfortable shelter, and a patch of ground where he might grow his cabbages, and, if blessed with a love of the beautiful, rear roses and carnations that might vie with the flowers in a ducal garden. Here in this mild western world, where frost and snow were almost strangers, the labouring man might clothe his cottage wall with myrtle, and brow fuchsias as big as apple-trees.
To John Treverton, sick to the heart of cities, the novelty of this country life was full of delight. He was interested in the stables, the home farm, the gardens, even the poultry yard. He had a kindly word for the lowest hind upon his land. It seemed as if, in the great happiness of his married life, he had opened his heart to all mankind.
‘And are you really happy, Laura?’ he asked one day, when he and his wife were dawdling through the August afternoon beside the river where they had met in the June moonlight. ‘Do you honestly believe that your adopted father made the best possible provision for your future when he gave you to me?’
He asked this question in a moment of delicious idleness, lying at his wife’s feet, she sitting in a natural easy chair formed by two blocks of granite, moss-gown, ferny, luxurious, books and work half-forgotten by her side, and by his in idle fishing rod. He had little doubt as to the answer to his question, or he would hardly have asked it.
‘I think dear papa must have had a prophetic power to choose what was best for me,’ she said, smiling down at her husband.
And then they went on in a strain which was very sweet to them both, travelling step by step over those early days when they were almost strangers, recalling with a, studious minuteness what he had felt and thought, what she bad dreamed and hoped. How he had begun with a fixed determination to detest her; and how that gloomy resolve had slipped out of his mind at their first interview, despite his endeavour to hold it fast.
‘There is one question that I have wanted to ask you, Laura,’ he said, presently, growing suddenly grave, with a look in which there was a shadow of trouble, ‘but I have shrunk from asking it, somehow, and put it off indefinitely. And yet it is a very natural curiosity on my part, and can hardly offend you.’
Her face was even more serious than his by this time, and wore a look of fear. She answered not a word, but sat, with lips, slightly parted, waiting for him to go on.
‘You remember your interview with a gentleman whom you admitted to the garden after dark, and whom you described to me afterwards as a relation. How is it, love, that in all our confidential talk you have never told me anything about that man?’
‘The answer is simple enough,’ she said, quietly, yet he could but wonder to see how pale she had brown. ‘In all our talk together we have spoken of things that belong to our happiness. You have never touched upon the dark passages in your life, nor I on those in mine. You remember what Longfellow says: —
“Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
The relation of whom you speak is one who has not done well in this world. My dear adopted father was prejudiced against him, or at any rate he thought so. From time to time he has appealed to me secretly for aid, and I have helped him secretly. I am sorry for him, deeply sorry, and I am glad to help him, at a distance; but there are reasons why I have never sought, why I never should seek, to bring him nearer to me.’
‘I feel sure that whatever you have done has keen wise and right, dearest. There must be a black sheep in every family. I huge played the part myself, and ought to sympathise with all such delinquents.’
Delicacy prevented his pursuing the subject further. Could he do less than trust her fully, who had shown such noble confidence in him?
A life so happy would have been bounded within a very narrow circle had John Treverton and his wife consulted only their own inclination; but society expects something from a well-born country gentleman with fourteen thousand a year. The Lady Parkers and Lady Barkers, of whom Celia had spoken somewhat disparagingly, came in state, swinging lightly on C springs in their old family carriages, to call upon the young couple.
Invitations to ceremonious dinners followed in due course, and were reluctantly accepted; since it would have seemed ungracious to refuse them: and by-and-bye Mrs. Trimmer, the housekeeper, suggested that the Manor House ought to give a series of dinners, such as she remembered when she was a biddy-paced young kitchen-maid in the service of Jasper Treverton’s father and mother.
‘They used to send out invitation for two or three dinner parties when the pheasant shooting bean, and get it over,’ said Mrs. Trimmer, ‘for they were homely people, and didn’t care much for company. The old gentleman was wrapped up in his books, and the old lady was wrapped up in her garden; but when they gave a dinner there was no mistake about it.’
Laura submitted to inexorable custom.
‘We have eaten people’s dinners, and I suppose we mast invite them here,’ she said, with an air of serio-comic vexation, ‘or they will consider us dishonest. Shall I make a list of the people to be asked, Jack, and shall we give Trimmer carte blanche about the dinner?’
‘I suppose that will be best,’ assented John, whose Christian name affection had corrupted to Jack. ‘Trimmer is a capital cook of the substantial English school. Her menu may be wanting in originality, but it will be safe.’
‘Well, I am glad you are awaking try the necessity of living like civilised Christians, instead of spooning all day in the seclusion of a house, compared with which Robinson Crusoe’s island must have been a vortex of dissipation,’ exclaimed Celia Clare, who was present at this discussion. ‘I am glad that at last, if it were only for my sake, you are going to conform to the laws of society. How am I to get a husband, I should like to know, unless I meet people here? There is no other house worth visiting in the neighbourhood.’
‘We’ll take your necessities into consideration, my clear girl,’ answered John, gaily, ‘and if you can suggest any eligible bachelors, we’ll ask them to dinner.’
‘That’s exactly what I cannot do,’ said Celia, with a despairing shrug. ‘There are no eligible bachelors indigenous to the soil. The only plan would be to put a nota bene to your cards of invitation, “If you have any nice young men about you, pray bring them.”’
‘Laura might give a dance at Christmas, and then we might beat up for young men,’ answered John. ‘I’m afraid as long as we confine ourselves to dinner parties, we shall not be able to do much for you, my poor Celia.’
‘But are you not going to have people to stay in the house when the pheasant shooting begins?’ inquired Celia, with uplifted eyebrows. ‘Are not your old friends going to rally round you? I thought they always did when a man came into a fortune.’
‘I believe that is one of the characteristics of friendship,’ said John. ‘But I lost sight of my old friends — the friends of my soldiering days, that is to say — nearly seven years ago, and I don’t care about digging them out.’
‘I wonder they don’t come to the surface of their own accord, ‘said Celia. ‘And how about the friends you have made since you sold out? You can’t have existed seven years without society.’
‘I have existed quite as long as that without what you would call society.’
‘All, I see,’ assented Celia, ‘the people you have known are not people you would care to bring here, or to introduce to your wife.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Poor Laura,’ thought Celia, and then there followed a pause, brief but uncomfortable.
‘Shall I write the list of invitations?’ asked Laura, who was sitting at her Davenport. They were in the book-room, the fresh autumnal air blowing in across beds and borders filled with September’s gaudy flowers.
‘Yes, dear, beginning, of course, with Sir Joshua and Lady Parker, and descending gradually in the social scale to — —’
‘My father and mother,’ interrupted Celia, ‘if you mean to ask them. I’m sure you can’t go lower than the parson of the parish; for he’s generally the poorest man in it.’
‘And often the most beloved,’ said John Treverton.
‘Do you think I should give my first dinner party without inviting your father and mother, Celia?’ asked Laura, reproachfully. ‘They will be my most honoured guests.’
‘Heaven knows how the mater is to get a new gown,’ ejaculated Celia; ‘but I’m sure she can’t come in the old one. That grey satin of hers has been to so many dinner parties that I should think it could go by itself, and would know how to behave, without having poor mother inside it. How well all the servants hereabouts must know the back of that dress, and the dark patch on the shoulder, where Lady Barker’s butler spilt some lobster sauce. It is like the blood-stain on Lady Macbeth’s hand. All the benzine in the world won’t take it out. Oh, by-the-bye,’ pursued Celia, rattling on breathlessly, ‘if you really don’t mind being overrun with the Clare family, would you write a card for Ted?’
‘With pleasure,’ said Laura, ‘but is he not in London?’
&n
bsp; ‘At this present moment he is; but we are expecting him daily at the Vicarage. The fact is he has not made his mark, poor fellow, and he is rather tired of London. I suppose there are too many young men there, all wanting to make their mark.’
CHAPTER VIII. A VILLAGE IAGO.
EDWARD CLARE came back to his native village a few days later, looking somewhat dilapidated by his campaign in the great metropolis. He had found the gates of literature so beset with aspirants, many of them as richly endowed as himself, that the idea of pushing his way across the threshold seemed almost hopeless, indeed quite hopeless, for a young man who wanted to succeed in life without working very hard, or with at most a little spasmodic industry. His verses, when he was lucky, had earned him something like five pounds a month; when luck was against him he had earned nothing. A newspaper man, whose acquaintance he made at the Cheshire Cheese, had advised him to learn shorthand, and try his fortune as a reporter, working upwards from that platform to the editorial chair. This was an honest drudgery which might do very well for your dull plodders, but against which the fiery soul of Edward Clare revolted.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 605
