by Edith Nesbit
‘Let’s get inside again,’ says he. ‘Perhaps they are going home, and if they are not, we can stay there till they begin it again.’
So we opened the door and crept down the ladder. There was light now coming up from the bellringers’ loft through the holes in the floor, and we got down to the belfry easy, and as we got to the bottom of the ladder I heard my father’s voice in the loft below —
‘I don’t believe it,’ he was shouting. ‘It can’t be true. She’s a God-fearing girl.’
And then I heard my mother. ‘Come home, James,’ she said, ‘come home — it’s true. I told you you was too hard on them. Young folks will be young folks, and now, perhaps, our little girl has come to shame instead of being married decent, as she might have been, though Roman.’
Then there was silence for a bit, and then my father says, speaking softer, ‘Tell me again. I can’t think but what I’m dreaming.’
Then mother says—’Don’t I tell you she said she’d got the toothache, and she was going to lie down a bit, and I went to take her up some camomiles I’d been hotting, and she wasn’t there, and her bolsters and pillows, poor lamb, made up to pretend she was, and Johnson’s Ben, he see her along of William Birt by the Parson’s Shave with his arm round her — God forgive them both!’
Then says my father, ‘Here’s an end on’t. She’s no daughter o’ mine. If she was to come back to me, I’d turn her out of doors. Don’t let any one name her name to me never no more. I hain’t got no daughter,’ he said, ‘and may the Lord—’
I think my mother put her hands afore his mouth, for he stopped short, and mother, she said —
‘Don’t curse them, James. You’ll be sorry for it, and they’ll have trouble enough without that.’
And with that father and mother must have gone away, and the other ringers stood talking a bit.
‘She’d best not come back,’ said the leader, John Evans. ‘Out a-gallivanting with a young chap from five to eight as I understand! What’s the good of coming back? She’s lost her character, and a gal without a character, she’s like — like—’
‘Like a public-house without a licence,’ said the second ringer.
‘Or a cart without a horse,’ said the treble.
There was only one man spoke up for me — that was Jim Piper at the general shop. ‘I don’t believe no harm of that gal,’ says he, ‘no more nor I would of my own missus, nor yet of him.’
‘Well, let’s hope for the best,’ said the others. But I had a sort of feeling they was hoping for the worst, because when things goes wrong, it’s always more amusing for the lookers-on than when everything goes right. Presently they went clattering down the steps, and all was dark, and there was me and William among the cobwebs and the owls, holding each other’s hands, and as cold as stone, both of us.
‘Well?’ says William, when everything was quiet again.
‘Well!’ says I. ‘Good-bye, William. He won’t be as hard as his word, and if I couldn’t give you all my life to be a good wife to you, I have given you my character, it seems; not willing, it’s true; but there’s nothing I should grudge you, William, and I don’t regret it, and good-bye.’
But he held my hands tight.
‘Good-bye, William,’ I says again. ‘I’m going. I’m going home.’
‘Yes, my girl,’ says he, ‘you are going home; you’re going home with me to my mother.’ And he was masterful enough then, I can tell you. ‘If your father would throw you off without knowing the rights or wrongs of the story, it’s not for him you should be giving up your happiness and mine, my girl. Come home to my mother, and let me see the man who dares to say anything against my wife.’
And whether it was father’s being so hard and saying what he did about me before all those men, or whether it was me knowing that mother had stood up for us secret all the time, or whether it was because I loved William so much, or because he loved me so much, I don’t know. But I didn’t say another word, only began to cry, and we got downstairs and straight home to William’s mother, and we told her all about it; and we was cried in church next Sunday, and I stayed with the old lady until we was married, and many a year after; and a good mother she was to me, though only in law, and a good granny to our children when they come. And I wasn’t so unhappy as you may think, because mother come to see me directly, and she was at our wedding; and father, he didn’t say anything to prevent her going.
When I was churched after my first, and the boy was christened — in our own church, for I had made William promise it should be so if ever we had any — mother was there, and she said to me: ‘Take the child,’ she said, ‘and go to your father at home; and when he sees the child, he’ll come round, I’ll lay a crown; for his bark,’ she says, ‘was allus worse than his bite.’
And I did so, and the pears was hard and red on the wall as they was the night William climbed up to my window, and I went into the kitchen, and there was father sitting in his big chair, and the Bible on the table in front of him, with his spectacles; but he wasn’t reading, and if it had been any one else but father, I should have said he had been crying. And so I went in, and I showed him the baby, and I said —
‘Look, father, here’s our little baby; and he’s named James, for you, father, and christened in church the same as I was. And now I have got a child of my own,’ says I, for he didn’t speak, ‘dear father, I know what it is to have a child of your own go against your wishes, and please God mine never will — or against yours either. But I couldn’t help it, and O father, do forgive me!’
And he didn’t say anything, but he kissed the boy, and he kissed him again. And presently he says —
‘It’s ‘most time your mother was home from church. Won’t you be setting the tea, Kate?’
So I give him the baby to hold, for I knew everything was all right betwixt us.
And all the children have been christened in the church. But I think when father is taken from us — which in the nature of things he must be, though long may it be first! — I think I shall be a Roman Catholic too; for it doesn’t seem to me to matter much one way or the other, and it would please William very much, and I am sure it wouldn’t hurt me. And what’s the good of being married to the best man in the world if you can’t do a little thing like that to please him?
A DEATH-BED CONFESSION
AND so you think I shall go to heaven when I die, sir! And why? Because I have spent my time and what bits of money I’ve had in looking after the poor in this parish! And I would do it again if I had my time to come over again; but it will take more than that to wipe out my sins, and God forgive me if I can’t always believe that even His mercy will be equal to it. You’re a clergyman, and you ought to know. I think sometimes the black heart in me, that started me on that deed, must have come from the devil, and that I am his child after all, and shall go back to him at the last. Don’t look so shocked, sir. That’s not what I really believe; it’s only what I sometimes fear I ought to believe, when I wake up in the chill night and think things over, lying here alone.
To see me old and prim, with my cap and little checked shawl, you’d never think that I was once one of the two prettiest girls on all the South Downs. But I was, and my cousin Lilian was the other. We lived at Whitecroft together at our uncle’s. He was a well-to-do farmer, as well-to-do as a farmer could be in such times as those, and on such land as that.
Whenever I hear people say ‘home,’ it’s Whitecroft I think of, with its narrow windows and thatch roof and the farm-buildings about it, and the bits of trees all bent one way with the wind from the sea.
Whitecroft stands on a shoulder of the Downs, and on a clear day you can see right out to sea and over the hollow where Felscombe lies cuddled down close and warm, with its elms and its church, and its bright bits of gardens. They are sheltered from the sea wind down there, but there’s nothing to break the wing of it as it rolls across the Downs on to Whitecroft; and of a night Lilian and I used to lie and listen to the wind bang
ing the windows, and know that the chimneys were rocking over our heads, and feel the house move to and fro with the strength of the wind like as if it was the swing of a cradle.
Lilian and I had come there, little things, and uncle had brought us up together, and we loved each other like sisters until that happened, and this is the first time I have told a human soul about it; and if being sorry can pay for things — well, but I’m afraid there are some things nothing can pay for.
It was one wild windy night, when, if you should open the door an inch, everything in the house jarred and rattled. We were sitting round the fire, uncle and Lilian and me, us with our knitting and him asleep in his newspaper, and nobody could have gone to sleep with a wind like that but a man who has been bred and born at sea, or on the South Downs.
Lilian and I were talking over our new winter dresses, when there come a knock at the side door, not nigh so loud as some of the noises the wind made, but not being used to it, uncle sat up, wide awake, and said, ‘Hark!’ In a minute it come again, and then I went to the door and opened it a bit. There was some one outside who began to speak as soon as he saw the light, but I could not hear what he said for the roaring of the wind, and the cracking of the trees outside.
‘Shut that door!’ uncle shouted from the parlour. ‘Let the dog in, whatever he is, and let him tell his tale this side the oak.’
So I let him in and shut the door after him, and I had better have shut to the lid of my own coffin after me.
Him that I let in was dripping wet, and all spent with fighting the wind on these Downs, where it is like a lion roaring for its prey, and will go nigh to kill you, if you fight it long enough. He leaned against the wall and said —
‘I have lost my way, and I have had a nasty fall. I think there is something wrong with my arm — hollow — slip — light — hospitality beg your pardon, I’m sure,’ and with that he fainted dead off on the cocoanut matting at my feet.
Uncle came out when I screamed, and we got the stranger in and put him on the big couch by the fire. Uncle was nursing up with one of his bad attacks of bronchitis, the same thing that carried him off in the end, and the first thing he said when he’d felt the poor chap’s arm down was —
‘This is a bad break. Which of you girls will go and wake one of the waggoners to fetch Doctor from Felscombe?’
‘I will,’ I said.
But before I went I got out the port wine and the brandy, and bade Lilian rub his hands a bit, and be sure she didn’t let him see her looking frightened when he come to.
Why did I do that? Because the Lord made me to be a fool — giving him her pretty face to be the first thing he looked at when he come to after that long, dreary spell on the Downs, and that black journey into the strange place where people go to when they faint.
But everything that there was of me ached to be of some use to him. So I went, and once outside the door it seemed easier to take Brown Bess and go myself to Felscombe than to rouse the waggoners, who were but sleepy and slow-headed at the best of times. So I saddled Brown Bess myself and started.
It was but a small way across the Downs that I had to lead her, it being almost as much as both of us could do to keep our feet in the fury of the wind. Then you go down the steep hill into the village, and as soon as we had passed the brow, it was easy and I mounted. I was down there in less time than it would have taken to rouse one of those heavy-headed carters; and Doctor, he come back with me, walking beside Brown Bess with his hand on her bridle, he not being by any means loth to come out such a night, because, forsooth, it was me that fetched him. Oh yes! I might have married him if I had wanted to, and more than one better man than him; but that’s neither here nor there.
When we got in, we found Lilian kneeling by the sofa rubbing the young man’s hands as I had told her to, and his eyes were open, and there was a bit of colour in his cheek, and he was looking at her like as any one but a fool might have known he would look; and the Doctor, he saw it too, and looked at me and grinned; and if I had been God, that grin should have been his last. No, I don’t mean to be irreverent, but it’s true, all the same.
Well, the arm was set, and when he was a bit easier we settled round the fire, and he told us that his name was Edgar Linley, and he was an artist, and had been painting the angry sunset that had come before that night’s storm, and got caught in the dusk and so lost his way, as many do on our Downs at home, some not so lucky as him to see a light and get to it.
This Mr. Linley had a way with him like no other man I ever see; not only a way to please women with, but men too. I never saw my uncle so taken up with anybody; and the long and the short of it was that he stayed there a month, and we nursed him; and at the end of the month I knew no more than I had known that evening when I had seen him looking at Lilian; but he and Lilian, they had learned a deal in that time.
And one evening I was at my bedroom window, and I see them coming up the path in the red light of the evening, walking very close together, and I went down very quick to the parlour, where uncle was just come in to his tea and taking his big boots off, and I sat down there, for I wanted to hear how they’d say it, though I knew well enough what they had got to say. And they came in and he says, very frank and cheery —
‘Mr. Verinder,’ he says, ‘Lilian and I have made up our minds to take each other, with your consent, for better, for worse.’
And uncle was as pleased as Punch; and as for me, I didn’t believe in God then, or I should have prayed Him to strike them both down dead as they stood.
Why did I hate them so? And you call yourself a man and a parson, and one that knows the heart of man! Why did I hate them? Because I loved him as no woman will ever love you, sir, if you’ll pardon me being so bold, if you live to be a thousand.
He would have understood all about everything with half what I have been telling you. As it is, I sometimes think that he understood, for he was very gentle with me and kind, not making too much of Lilian when I was by, yet never with a look or a word that wasn’t the look and the word of her good, true lover; and she was very happy, for she loved him as much as that blue-and-white teacup kind of woman can love; and that’s more than I thought for at the time.
He was an orphan, and well off, and there was nothing to wait for, so the wedding was fixed for early in the new year; and I sewed at her new clothes with a marrow of lead in every bone of my fingers.
A truly understanding person might get some meaning out of my words when I say that I loved her in my heart all the time that I was hating her; and the devil himself must have sent out my soul and made use of the rest of me on that night I shall tell you about presently.
It was in the sharp, short, frosty days that brought in Christmas that uncle came home one day from Lewes, looking thunder black, with an eye like fire and a mouth like stone. And he walked straight into the kitchen where we three were making toast for tea, for Edgar was one of us by this time, and lent a hand at all such little things as young folks can be merry over together. And uncle says —
‘Leave my house, young man; it’s an honest house and a clean, and no fit place for a sinful swine. Get out,’ he says, ‘“For without are dogs—”’
With that he went on with a long text of Revelation that I won’t repeat to you, sir, for I know your ears are nice, and it’s out of one of the plainest-spoken parts of the Bible. Edgar turned as white as a sheet.
‘I swear to God,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t to blame. I know what you have heard, but if I can’t whiten myself without blacking a woman
I’ll live and die as black as hell,’ he says. ‘But I don’t need whitening with those that love me,’ he says, looking at Lilian and then at me — oh! yes, he looked at me then.
I said, ‘No, indeed,’ and so did Lilian; but she began to cry, and before we had time to think what it was all about, he had taken his hat and kissed Lilian and was gone. But he turned back at the door again.
‘I’ll write to you,’ he says to Lilian, ‘but I don�
��t cross this door again till those words are unsaid,’ and so he was gone.
Him being gone, uncle told us what he had heard in Lewes, and what all folks there believed to be the truth; how young Edgar had carried on, as men may not, with a young married woman, the grocer’s wife where he lodged, the end of it being that she drowned herself in a pond near by, leaving as her last word that he was the cause of it; and so he may have been, but not the way my uncle and the folk at Lewes thought, I’ll stake my soul. God makes His troubles in dozens; He don’t make a new patterned one for every back. I wasn’t the only woman who ever loved Edgar Linley without encouragement and without hope, and risked her soul because she was mad with loving him.
But when uncle had told us all this with a black look on his face I never had seen before, he said —
‘Girls, I have always been a clean liver, and I have brought you up in the fear of the Lord. I don’t want to judge any man, and Lilian is of age and her own mistress. It’s not for me to say what she shall or shan’t do, but if she marries that scoundrel, she has my curse here and hereafter, and not one penny of my money, if it was to save her from the workhouse.’
After that we were sad enough at Whitecroft. But in two days come a letter from Edgar to Lilian; and when she had read it, she looked at me and said, ‘O Isabel, whatever shall I do? I never can marry without dear uncle’s consent,’ and I turned and went from her without a word, because I couldn’t bear to see her arguing and considering what to do, when the best thing in the world was to her hand for the taking.
All the next week she cried all day and most of the night. Then uncle went to London, my belief being it was to alter his will, so that if Lilian married Edgar, she should feel it in her pocket, anyhow, and he was to stay all night, and the farm servants slept out of the house, and we were without a maid at the time. So Lilian and me were left alone at Whitecroft.
Lilian and I didn’t sleep in one room now. I had made some excuse to sleep on the other side of the house, because I couldn’t bear to wake up of mornings and see her lying there so pretty, looking like a lily in her white nightgown and her fair hair all tumbled about her face. It was more than any woman could have borne to see her lying there, and think that early in the new year it was him that would see her lying like that of a morning.
