The lighted room lay far behind her, safely enclosed like a precious jewel in midst of the surrounding darkness, the cold wind that blew across the heath, the terrors of the approaching night. Someone might see her and shoot at her for a witch; she might meet a witch herself, or a band of thieves and cut-throats, or the wicked Squire of Tumpleton who by aid of the devil jumped his horse over the church steeple, chipping off a bit with his hoof as you could see to this day, and never came to earth again but still rode through the air on windy nights, thundering over the roof; she might at last see his black horse borne on the air and be snatched up on it and never brought down again.
This fancy had given her defiant joy when a few hours since she had run over the common in daylight, the wind blowing her along. But now she only longed to be in bed and have Nurse bending over her, scolding her, holding between her gnarled brown hands a bowl of bread and milk for her.
All that day, Mr. Cork waited and watched for Nan. Mr. Hambridge did not even remark on her absence at supper, though he mentioned her when he talked of a cock-fight he would give sometime against Lord Stoking’s birds. His Lordship was staying at his country seat, not eight miles off, and might bring over some London gentlemen with him to see the sport.
“But mum’s the word to Mrs. Anne,” he said, nudging his chaplain, “the little jade will be mad to see the visitors from the town, and we want no women at the supper to spoil all.”
Through the night Mr. Cork heard the wind blowing up for rain; with daylight it began, blotting out the landscape. He went into the kitchen to get his breakfast at the hour when Mrs. Anne was accustomed to go for hers. The stone floor steamed under the heat of the fire; the herd-boys tramped in and out, leaving muddy pools in their footsteps; they were commanded to keep the door shut against the rain; the kitchen reeked with warm damp, and smelled of cheese and beer.
Mr. Cork was apt to think that the servants despised him for half belonging, and illegitimately, to their class. Their stupid faces and slow-witted speech irritated him, but when he saw sharpness in a servant, some brisk, insolent fellow such as his father must have been, it enraged him to the edge of murder. Now that he wanted to inquire for their mistress or at least her nurse, he envied his patron for what he had formerly despised, the comfort with which he would sit for hours in the kitchen, chatting with his men. Mr. Hambridge conceded to the new-fangled uppish custom of feeding out of the kitchen only as far as supper was concerned, the one formal meal of the day.
Mr. Cork’s training in intrigue had not made him a good plotter, but it had taught him to build up obstacles, to fear suspicion, to be chary of showing his anxiety in a household which appeared as little concerned as if a kitten had strolled out of it instead of its mistress. Already he thought they stared at him for staying so long. He went to the long gallery where he walked up and down and wondered whether Mrs. Anne were lost or ravished or murdered or lying ill in her room while he heard nothing of it till she was dead; or whether, in the extravagance of a green-sick maid, she might even have run and killed herself because he had been unkind.
In the midst of his horror his heart gave an exultant leap to think that she should crave his love and fear his power enough to die for it. The gallery was very dark, the rain dripped down the seven windows with a sucking noise, occasionally it splashed smartly against them, and then he would pause and look out through the small leaded panes of greenish bottle glass on to a world that looked dim and drowning.
He was standing at the end near his own room when round the corner of the other end there came a figure in a quaint, unfamiliar dress, spotted with bright colours. It was Nan, in the dress that Mr. Hambridge’s mother had worn as a bride. The stiff embroidered skirts covered her feet; she moved slowly and as if in time to music; her hair was arranged in smooth curls and confined by a comb; her hand, whiter than usual, held a lace handkerchief.
She was a stranger who was yet, as in a dream, identical with some familiar figure. And the familiarity was twofold; some other memory, too far back for him to claim, hammered at his heart and was refused admittance. For Mr. Cork did not know that a lady in a strange bright dress, of the same fashion as Nan now wore, had come to the cottage where he was brought up with other dirty little boys, and spoken softly to him and taken him on her knee, where he had sat gazing down at the thick encrusted pattern of her skirts, here a scarlet flower, and here a cock robin on a twig, here a snail and here a stag and here and there tiny stones, some white, some pink. Yet now, with an echo of that wonder, he stood as though he were a little boy, timid, worshipping, as he gazed at the embroidery on Nan’s old-fashioned dress, the flowers and birds and animals picked out with seed-pearls and corals, the tunic standing out round the waist in a stiff flounce, the lace collar and cuffs set over pink, a dress such as he had not seen since that one day when he had seen his mother.
He brushed his hand across his forehead. He wanted no cobwebs to obscure this meeting that he had foreseen in such various ways. But now that she was at last before him, alive, well, happy, playing a part in which he had had no share, his relief, instead of lifting him on wings as he had expected, fell on him like a stone.
He had lain awake all night in his concern for her, but she had none for him, she had parted from him in anger, she had stayed away from him until the next day, and then she came smiling towards him, absorbed in some mummery of her own, so callous to his feelings that she was not even conscious of them. She was no better than a heedless and ungrateful child.
She slid backwards and forwards, humming a tune; she lifted her skirts and danced to it, hopping up and down and tapping her heels, mimicking and exaggerating the airs of a fine lady; even when she answered his exasperated questions, she began by singing her replies and told him of her wanderings yesterday with such an obvious mixture of truth and falsehood that he could not unravel it. Had she really walked as far as Stoking Place and paid a visit on my Lord and Lady? She described the scene in their drawing-room minutely; a blackamoor in a silver turban had lolled by his lady’s chair and drank coffee out of her cup, “but,” said she, “his lady may have been a man, for she was dressed like one, and she had a high haughty air as though her head were on a coin. And a girl there in white gloves, embroidered in black and silver, opened a gilded cage and out flew a cloud of white sparrows and perched all over her. She held sugar for them and put a crumb on her lip, and a sparrow as white as a dove perched on her chin and took it. And black and white spaniels barked round her feet, asking for the sugar too.”
“Who spoke with you? How did they bring you back? On whose pillion? A servant’s?”
“In a coach. No, a flying chariot with six horses. Two sweet gallants accompanied me who talked very wickedly. One boasted of the many poor ladies that had died for love of him, and the other said, ‘If hearts could break indeed, you’d hear him walking everywhere as on cracked egg-shells.’”
He had pictured her dying for his sake and did not care to have that savage but sacred emotion ridiculed. “You are mad,” he exclaimed. “None of this last can be true.”
She turned to the window and stared out upon the rain.
“Nor it is,” she said petulantly, “but why should you not believe it? It might have happened like that.”
And so it might, if she had been brave enough to tap at the window-pane through which she had peeped at the gallant company at Stoking Place. But she had feared they would send her away for a gipsy, and so had remained crouched beneath a rose-bush, her bare feet planted in the mud, while on the other side of a piece of glass those glittering figures had moved about as in dumb show, since she could not hear what they said to make each other smile or look surprised. She had crept away and run over the common until at last she had found her way home, late and tired out and scared lest someone should shoot at her for a witch; she had gone straight up to bed and Nurse had brought her a bowl of bread and milk, and she was too glad to be there to mind that she had missed her only chance of entering the world.
And this morning in the lumber-room she had found the superb dress that Mrs. Catherine Hambridge had worn when she had kept state at Cricketts Manor and her son was a fat, snivelling child who would not keep out of the filth, though he had his ears boxed for it until one became quite deaf. For which reason he took a particular pleasure in letting the gardens run to seed that had been his mother’s pride. Mrs. Catherine had been a diminutive pecking shrew, infinitely more dangerous than Lady Ingleby’s equine restiveness could make her. Had the two ladies ever encountered, Lady Ingleby would have come off the loser. But Nan thought that only a lovely and gracious woman could wear such a dress and her delight at finding that it fit her was softened by pity for the mother of so uncouth a son. In it, she felt that she had joined the company that yesterday had been no more than a vision.
But the window that she now looked through showed her only a dull, greenish world, and trees that floated about in it like the weeds at the bottom of the river, weeds that had entangled their playfellow, young Tom from the Croft, and held him till he was drowned. The light through the little panes looked as though it came through water. The gallery was like a ship sunk at the bottom of the sea, and she and Mr. Cork were imprisoned in it together.
“Oh,” she sighed, “how I wish they were here.”
“Your fine company?” But his tone had softened, for he knew that “they” had always meant her young brothers, and he was sorry for her when she was homesick. His companionship was beyond her intelligence. Yet he was unwilling to admit his inability to please her, from whatever cause. What did she do with them that he could not? Ball, or battledore and shuttlecock, such as the fops played in drawing-rooms? He would do more than that to please her, he thought with a catch at his heart, as the childish monkey face that had grown familiar to him looked at him from out of a strange dress, the dress of a lovely and gracious woman.
He said, “Will you not show me how to play the games you had at home?”
“But you are old,” she exclaimed.
He set his jaw and looked ten years older.
“Did you not once tell me that your father was so kind as to play with you?”
She gaped upon him, stupefied. Her father could twist his fat face into outrageous grimaces, dance about the room, imitate a coy Court lady or the baboon Captain Holmes had brought back from Guinea, or a German merchant as round and smooth as a ball whom he had seen cheating at cards and looking as innocent as a church under his high-crowned hat, stuck like a steeple on top of a dome. He never minded how silly he looked or who saw him. But the notion of Mr. Cork’s grim face, made to look ridiculous, shocked her. A sudden rush of laughter came to her relief, she leaned against the wall, she covered her face with her hands.
“Oh—but you—” she gasped, feeling the danger in that icy stillness that surrounded her laughter. “I do not know why I am laughing so—but you—you would be different—you are not like that.”
He knew that she was telling him he could never give her the pleasure that her father and brothers had given. He was condemned and found wanting before he had even been tried.
Something deeper than his constant pride was hurt. He had betrayed his tenderest part to her; in his pity for her solitude he had lowered himself to offer to play the child for her sake. He had shown kindness to what he had taken to be a defenceless creature, and now it bit his hand.
She wiped her eyes and looked up at him; the laughter rushed out of her face, it turned pitiful, imploring, but still he did not speak, and though she moved her lips, no word would come through them. As on the previous day, she turned and ran from him, not as then, half in mischief, but in terror.
Once again he paced that cold corridor alone, and seven squares of bleak and storm-swept country gave him his only hope of escape. There came into his mind the words of a brother Puritan who had fought more single-heartedly and suffered worse than he, whose cry rose from a prison cell: “Whilst we wrangle here in the dark we are dying.”
Ambition had failed him, his friends had forsaken him, he had no faith in the religion he professed and made his trade. And he too was dying, as was the young girl who had run from him in a dead woman’s dress, for each day brought them nearer to their death. We live but once, he told himself, and what, he asked, is there left?
His answer met him in the pulpit next day. On opening the sermon that he had placed there early that morning, he saw scrawled across the first page:
“Dere Mr. Corke praie doe not bee angrie.”
He stared at it so long that the congregation thought he had lost the beginning of his sermon.
He had not spoken with Nan since their meeting in the gallery. She had appeared at supper in her ordinary dress, had sat silent through the meal and retired earlier than usual. He had supposed her to be sulking. Her face was pale and there were heavy rims round her eyes; for an instant he had hoped that their quarrel had made her unhappy also. But he had reflected that she might only be tired after her escapade of the day before, and this at once checked his rising tenderness. She had shown him she wanted nothing from him; she should then have nothing. He had shut his heart tight lest any wandering kindness should again issue from it towards her.
And now in the pulpit, before all the watching eyes of his congregation, her plea for his kindness confronted him. He knew the labour it must have taken her to pen those few straggling words. She did not then ridicule him as he had thought, she was afraid of him, she wanted his kindness and feared to ask it except in the house of God where he could not answer her.
But he would answer. He turned in the three-decker pulpit to address the congregation, he reversed the great hour-glass that stood in its stand of wrought iron, decked with fleur-de-lis, and gave out his text but with no chapter and verse, saying only in the strained voice of one who dreams, “Pray do not be angry.”
It became evident to them, at first with wonder and then admiration, and then forgetfulness of all method, that contrary to his custom he spoke extempore. Even the deaf sexton listened, though he could not catch a word that came from those urgent lips.
Mr. Cork, who had been angry all his life, preached against anger. “Of what use is it to any man that he should eat his heart out in the cage of life?” he asked of all the bovine faces, placidly upturned to his. Many a time he had looked down on them and seen them as the faces of white swine, penned in their pews instead of styes. Now he preached only to his own heart. The world was evil, men were brutal, women false, these were the iron bars that bound humanity. Yet of what use to be angry since we ourselves are of the same stuff as those we rail against? Only by love could we understand this, for to hurt and to be hurt by one we loved was to discover in ourselves a cruelty worse than the tiger’s.
“Wild beasts prey upon an alien kind. It is left for man to torture his friends.” His thought had broken from him as if torn from his lips; for a moment he stared in silence over the church, and then, “What is there in life,” cried that white burning face, “if we leave it, not knowing love?”
At the word love, Bess Tiddle, at the back of the church, simpered and felt her earrings; Mr. Hambridge woke from a brief doze and straightway fell into another; beside him, Nan, whose eyes had not dared move from before her, now looked up, alert and quivering. She leaned a little forward, her arms spread slightly on either side of her, the finger-tips just touching the wooden seat. She seemed poised for flight as she sat there bound deep in the box-pew to the side of her slumbering husband.
As he looked down on them, pity and rage again tore Mr. Cork’s heart, and with them an emotion that now he could recognize and exult in, while he preached in praise of love, of life, of the unexpected beauties that grow in it and catch the weary traveller unaware.
To Nan, now gazing up at that towering figure, it seemed that a cloud had swept away from his face and the glory of God appeared in it as the sun shines out after storm.
Silence fell on the church. Then, rustling and scraping, the congregation r
ose, and in that instant before the glory fled from her, the air seemed to echo with the beat of mighty wings.
On a stone outside Mr. Hambridge’s pew was an inscription without name or date, blurred by the perpetual passage of feet. Nan had looked at: it every time she had entered or left the pew; lately, she had been able to decipher it. This time as the service ended and she stepped into the aisle, her foot under its pink rosette remained poised an instant above that mute supplication. “What is there in life,” Mr. Cork had asked, “if we leave it, not knowing love?” And here beneath her feet lay that ghostly message, exhorting her, not to repentance but response.
Dere Frend repent, mak no delaye.
I in my prime Was Snatcht awaye.
She did not recognize this whisper from the dead as an echo from her own irreligious heart, the prayer that she had unconsciously breathed ever since she had sat in that pew beside Mr. Hambridge. “Please God send me love soon and not through my husband.”
It had still been raining when they had entered; now outside the dark church the graves were bright as emerald, the thin trees gold, and the sharp autumnal breeze chased the drops from them like a shower of jewels. Mr. Cork had shown his true face, the sun had come out, and Nan stepped from the porch into a new world.
Round her, voices were speaking in perplexity and complaint of the sermon. Even the deaf sexton could subscribe to the general dissatisfaction with something too strange to be right. “Never even turned the hour-glass,” said he, who had once been accustomed to see the sands run through a third time every Sunday. In this weaker and degenerate age, sermons were not what they had been.
And there in front of them as if to prove the change was Joe Haskins, laboriously walking on his square toes up the churchyard path and opening his mouth and eyes as round as three pennies to find himself confronted with the congregation already coming out. For Joe, seeing that the rain had stopped and counting on a service of legitimate length, had slipped out of church soon after the service began and returned later, thinking to slip in as quietly again. He was finely caught, and by the Squire himself at the head of the congregation, who was yawning so that his face seemed split into two red halves, and stopped like that in a grinning gape at the sight of Joe Haskins.
None So Pretty Page 7
