The Soldier and the Gentlewoman

by Hilda Vaughan

  Repressed here in childhood, she had fled from Plâs Einon in her rebellious youth, but on this quiet Sunday morning its cloistral loveliness enthralled her. Almost, she could have wished to live and die within its green horizon. Here was no smudge of factory smoke, no jostle of crowds, no anger of speed. To the east, she followed the silver loops of the river towards its peaty source; to the west, through a wooded valley, it moved seaward in a graceful curve. On the opposite hillside, to the south, the farmhouses were white as hawthorn flower and beside each homestead an orchard was pink with apple-blossom. Every tree in the landscape was unfurling at its own pace, for spring here had as many shades of green as autumn of yellow. She was tired of the rattle of towns, and would have liked to spend the morning among the song of birds and the ripple of water, idly and good humouredly envious of her sister’s life.

  It was a mood, no more. She was not envious of Gwenllian nor did she regret her own choice of life. She had married for love and for love’s sake only had borne children. For fifteen years she had lent money she could ill spare and had listened, perhaps too patiently, to all who came to her with their loves or their disappointments, their ambitions, failures, desires. If she had had Gwenllian’s wisdom, conserving her vitality for her own ends, she would have warded them off. But to ward them off, to cling to what was hers, was contrary to her nature. A fool, perhaps, by her sister’s standards, but not an unhappy one. Certainly, she thought with a smile, it’s too late to change. After this interlude in the stately quiet of Plâs Einon she must return to book-reviewing and washing-up and hire-purchase furniture and eager, ruthless children; not to property, not to security; not to hoarding—for she had nothing to hoard. Well, she had made her choice long ago, and would make it again on the same terms.

  But how happy Gwenllian ought to be, she reflected. Gwenllian loves possessions and now everything here is hers, as if she were an only son; and Frances, remembering that she had always believed her sister to have a character of iron, was surprised by the change in her. She had become more pious, less self-sufficient. She, who never begged, had begged for company at church, and Frances had heard in her voice something forlorn and troubled and very urgent. Even on weekdays, hearing the bells of Cwmnant, she would look up. sometimes with a strange glance of entreaty. “Will you come, too? We shall be in time, perhaps, if we make haste.” The neighbourhood was beginning to speak of her as of a saint; and Frances, remembering the tea-parties to which she had been taken during the past week, smiled, half in derision, half in wonder.

  Mrs. Roberts had led her into the warm dankness of her conservatory.

  “We all know how wrong it is to speak ill of the departed,” she had begun as soon as the other ladies were gone out of earshot to admire the maidenhair fern. “But to you, dear Frances, I can confess none of us considered your poor brother-in-law worthy of his splendid wife. I wouldn’t for the world suggest that his death—so young, poor thing!—was a merciful release. That would be shocking. Still …”

  “It might be true, like so many shocking things,” Frances had retorted, thinking of the worried, puppy-look on Dick’s face.

  Mrs. Roberts had had no answer ready.

  “How naughty you are,” she had exclaimed, taking refuge in archness. “But I did say to my husband, after that tragic night, ‘God does know what’s best for all parties—sometimes.’ You know, dear, he was sent for—the Doctor, I mean—at half-past three in the morning. And he found the patient dead, stone dead, and your poor, poor sister quite distracted with grief. Really beside herself, as though she hadn’t made every effort to save his life! The Doctor says he has never seen such devotion as hers. But it happens sometimes, he says, in spite of the best nursing in the world, that a patient’s strength gives out at the very moment when he seems to be recovering nicely. If the injection Gwenllian gave your poor brother-in-law couldn’t save him, nothing could. ‘It’s mere morbidity for you to blame yourself,’ the Doctor has repeatedly told your dear sister. But really, Frances, the Doctor admires your sister so much,” Mrs. Roberts had concluded with a simper, “that he makes me quite jealous. And he’s not the only man in the district to say how truly good she is. She is goodness itself, of course. But I always say, ‘oh, you men! If she didn’t look so handsome in her widow’s garb—’ But there!”

  And Mrs. Evans had waited for Frances in the church porch. “I’m so relieved to see you here,” she had whispered. “You may be able to improve your dear sister’s health and spirits. If ever a wife wore herself out for her husband, she did. The servants were all talking about it in the village. My husband hears everything when he goes on his parochial rounds. They say she wouldn’t let a soul do a thing for him but herself. And just fancy her being quite alone when he passed away! Any other woman would have left him to summon help, I’m sure. But she wouldn’t desert his bedside even to ring a bell. Wonderful, isn’t she? The vicar and I did pity and admire her so. I only hope her husband appreciated her great goodness—at the last.” And Mrs. Evans had let fall a sigh full of reproach. “But,” she had added brightly, “we mustn’t say a word against those who have left all their errors and follies behind.”

  Recalling these and kindred speeches, Frances turned away from the sunlit landscape, and with a grimace dragged on her church-going hat. Poor, inoffensive Dick! Adverse criticism could no longer make him wince. But was it conceivable that Gwenllian genuinely missed him, as the neighbours imagined? An unexplained shadow darkened her pride of ownership. That much was plain. But its cause? Had she not all she desired, who loved to be mistress of this house, to command its servants, to train its heirs?

  “I’m thankful to say, I’m able to live within my means now,” she had told Frances last night. “It isn’t easy. But I take a pride in keeping this place as it should be kept, and for less than any one else could do it.” A slight emphasis on the word “now ” had been the nearest approach to any mention of Dick that Frances had heard his widow make. His name was never spoken. Something has happened to Gwenllian, Frances thought, that none of us will ever understand.

  She went down the shallow stairs that had been built for dignity and ease. Gwenllian was waiting in the hall. One of her black-gloved hands held a prayer book, and the other the child she was training to be head of the house.

  “I’ve wound twenty-five clocks while you were dressing,” she said in a tone of reproof; and Frances knew from her glance that to herself she added: “And you aren’t tidy, even now.” But there were many tart speeches from which Gwenllian now-a-days refrained. She contented herself with urging: “We must hurry, or we shan’t be settled in our pew before the five minute bell begins. It sets such a bad example to scramble in at the last moment… Illtyd, have you your sixpence quite safe?”

  The little boy looked up. A faint, bewildered anxiety was the normal expression of his pale face. But, knowing that he had the right answer this time, he ventured a small smile. “Yes, Mother. Nannie washed it, so as it shouldn’t leave a mark on my gloves.”

  They were white, and fitted him so well that his tiny fingers were stiffened by them. His sailor suit was snowy as his mother’s bed-linen, a credit to the gardener’s wife who was the family laundress. Frances, sorry for a child whose mother loved him so little for his own sake, smiled to think how astonished the neighbours would be by her pity. Gwenllian was considered a faultless parent.

  “That’s right,” she was saying. “Now you may run along ahead of us. But you’re to keep to the middle of the drive. You are not to chase birds or pick flowers or jump about and get hot, remember. Mother will be very cross if you disobey her.”

  “Yes, Mother,” he murmured, hanging his head, and sedately they set forth.

  The fluttering young leaves threw a delicate pattern of light and shade over the child’s white suit, but Gwenllian’s habit was too sombre to receive it. On week days she trudged about her estate in a short black skirt, greenish with exposure. But every Sunday, she put on her weeds of state. The dress b
ecame her well with its mournful folds and its lines of white at neck and wrist. Her incisive features were given an added severity by a close-fitting bonnet, made to resemble a nun’s head- dress by the long veil falling from it over her shoulders. She seemed a tragic figure as she passed up the aisle of the village church, holding her little orphaned boy by the hand.

  In wonder, Frances watched her kneeling, her attitude a prayer. Long after others were seated, she stayed upon her knees with head bowed low over clasped hands. Her finely chiselled fingers were interlaced. Upon one of them gleamed a wedding ring, her only ornament. If she had been a Catholic, one would have supposed that she was interceding for the soul of her beloved dead. Or did she pray that she might soon rejoin him? Yet she had commanded and bitterly despised him. His death alone could not have transformed her. But this posture of sorrow was no pose. The woman kneeling there, her tragic dark eyes gazing up now at the cross upon the altar, was deeply suffering. Frances stared, and marvelled more and more, until the clatter of hob-nailed boots on tesselated pavement disturbed her. A group of farm labourers was entering together in a last minute rush. A whiff of hair pomade and peppermint floated up to the Plâs Einon pew in its front rank below the pulpit. There was a creaking of leather as the lads jostled one another at the back of the church. The ancient sexton turned round to glare at them.

  A muffled Amen came from the Vestry. The organ quavered into sound, though scarcely into music, under the anxious fingers of Mrs. Evans. Everyone stood up and sat down again. Only Gwenllian sank upon her knees. The vicar looked complacently round his congregation, smoothed down his surplice with plump short-fingered hands, and in a creamy Carmarthenshire voice began to recite.

  “When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.”

  A spasm of eagerness contracted Gwenllian’s pale face. Frances saw her flinch at the words, “acknowledge and confess …” What made her conscience so sore? Why did she pour such a passion of entreaty into her murmured recital of the General Confession? “We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy law. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.”

  Frances looked round the church. Women, from behind their hands, or beneath the brims of their hats, were examining Mrs. Roberts’s new toque. Old men, already half asleep, muttered the words they had learned by rote long ago. A little boy slid a marble out of his trouser pocket and showed it privily to his fellow. A shy quick glance was exchanged between a youth and a maiden who shared the same book, though others were within reach. The sexton blew his nose and wiped his spectacles, and looked about him irritably, disapproving of those who were sucking lozenges by stealth. But Gwenllian was pouring her soul into every word of contrition that she uttered. Now her lips were moving in silence, following the form of the Priest’s Absolution: “And that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy.” She seemed to be whispering that phrase again and again to herself.

  The lulling mustiness of the church reminded Frances of the loft at Plâs Einon where fruit was stored and sometimes rotted. She saw the motes of dust drift down a shaft of sunlight. She listened to the soothing chants to which the psalms were droned and the stately cadence of words so old that their meaning had been worn away like the lettering on the stone slab before her eyes. A new generation of boys’ faces bloomed, pink and round as ripe apples, in the choir stalls; but they were indistinguishable from those she had known as a girl. Her crusading ancestor lay, still as ever, in the self-same spot, his crossed feet at rest upon his faithful dog.

  “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” Among the congregation she saw no new faces; only familiar ones grown more resigned; only features that had been childish, set fast now in a parent’s likeness. Some, also, were missing. And above the Plâs Einon pew hovered the figure of death with a scythe in his hands. Upon the tablet commemorating Owain ap Einon, who departed this life in the year of grace sixteen hundred and twenty-one, the sculptor had lavished all the gruesome conceits of his age. Time’s hour-glass, the writhing worm and the grinning skull of corruption, were carved at each of its four corners. Frances as a child had been afraid to look upon it except when the sun shone on her from the lancet window across the nave, for she had been told that if sunlight fell upon a woman at her prayers it presaged a special blessing.

  The only new thing in the ancient church was a memorial on the wall above Gwenllian’s head. Frances, looking up, read Dick’s name, his regiment, the dates of his birth and of his succession to Plâs Einon, and below them the odd claim that Gwenllian had included in his epitaph:

  Who, having served throughout the Great War, died, in indirect consequence of that Service, February 13, 1926.

  “DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI”

  It was a blemish here, this crude brazen tablet, Frances thought, turning her eyes away. How gently grave and sheltering were these grey stone walls that had stood through the centuries! How lovely, after all, was the shrine of those traditions against which she had rebelled! Church and home: she said the words to herself, lulled by their sound. Had not Gwenllian, perhaps, been wise to stay in the quiet valley of her birth, accepting as sufficient the external beauty of her ancestors’ way of life? Must not that existence be fair which wore so gracious a face? In the midst of her musing, she heard the vicar pronouncing the Ten Commandments. His benevo- lent tone implied that they were a formula and no more; it was unnecessary to speak to his flock of the less polite transgressions.

  “Honour thy father and thy mother,” he purred, “that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

  “Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law,” mumbled the people. The clear voice of the lady of the manor led them.

  “Thou shalt do no murder,” the vicar said. His rosy fat face almost smiled an apology.

  Gwenllian’s response was not audible. An arrow of sunlight struck across the place where she knelt, but did not touch her. The brass tablet above her was kindled by the flash. The capital letters of the inscription gleamed with a brilliant, liquid red. Gwenllian’s eyes became fixed on them in a look of extreme horror; her cheeks turned pale and her mouth sagged. Before clasped hands could hide it, Frances had seen her face and had read it.

  Beyond need of proof or hope of refutation, she perceived the truth. She knew now what it was that she had dreaded when she urged Dick to escape from his inheritance: and, rising from the place that had become intolerable to her, she fled out of the church.

  Chapter II

  FRANCES LOOKS ON HER FORMER HOME

  In the churchyard, her knees felt weak as melting wax; but she managed to run, so great was her haste to be gone. From the grey headstones and the dark rampart of yew trees she broke away, and began to hurry, she did not know whither, along the empty village street. Queer Lloyd, the Anabaptist, who tended neither church nor chapel, came out of his cottage door and tried to stay her with speech. She could not grasp its meaning, and shook her head and fled from him. She climbed over the nearest hedge to avoid further encounter. Thoms pricked her legs and tore her clothes. Uphill she ran, through long wet grass that sucked at her skirt and clogged her feet. Soon the cold moisture soaked through her shoes, and her breath came in sobs. Her eyes were fixed upon the highest point she could see, a round lump on the shoulder of the hill she was ascending. From there she would be able to look down, perhaps with calm, for she would be far from the horror that had gripped her in church, far as the larks that filled the blue sky above her head with song. In that high place she might be able to think. But thinking would do no good. Murder had been done, and nothing could undo it. No-one but herself would know, but she would not forget.
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  At last she came to the tumulus and climbed its steep side. When she reached the top, she started back, seeing a man at her feet. He was lying on his stomach in the hollow made by the digging of a treasure seeker. Seeing a woman’s skirt almost over him, he raised himself on his elbow and looked up with a grin. She encountered the bright glance of black, birdlike eyes. His expression changed at once to dismay.

  “Duwch,” he exclaimed, leaping up. “Well, indeed now, if it isn’t Miss Frances! I wasn’t looking to see you here, Ma’am, partic’lar not on a Sunday morning.”

  He began to dart sidelong glances right and left, as though he expected another to appear. It crossed her mind that he was there to court, and her presence was a check on his pleasing anticipations. She ought to be gone at once, but was too shaken to move.

  When he had shuffled from foot to foot and waited for her to go, he asked: “May I make so bold as to ask how long you are staying this time at the Plâs?” With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated the grey chimneys and roof of the big house below them.

  “I’m leaving today,” she said on a sudden impulse. “There’s a mail train on Sundays. I could catch it at Llanon if I were to walk there now, couldn’t I?” That was what she must do. She could not go back. She would never go back. Never.

  Aware of the countryman’s furtive regard, she asked at random. “Have you ever known anyone who could foretell coming events, Jones?”

  He grinned. “I’ve heard a deal o’ talk among the old folk about such.”