She was silent, standing before him like a little statuesque figure of desolation.
“As for the tale I told the neighbours,” he went on— “it was the best thing I could think of. If I had said you were a child I had taken in to adopt, not one of them would have believed me; ’twas a case of telling one lie or t’other, the real truth being so queer and out of the common, so I chose the easiest. And it’s been all right with you, my girl, whichever way you put it. There may be a few stuck-up young huzzies in the village that aren’t friendly to you, but you may take it that it’s more out of jealousy of Robin’s liking for you than anything else. Robin loves you — you know he does; and all you’ve got to do is to make him happy. Marry him, for the farm will be his when I’m dead, and it’ll give me a bit of comfort to feel that you’re settled down with him in the old home. For then I know it’ll go on just the same — just the same—”
His words trailed off brokenly. His head sank on his chest, and some slow tears made their difficult way out of his eyes and dropped on his silver beard.
She watched him with a certain grave compassion, but she did not at once go, as she would usually have done, to put her arms round his neck and console him. She seemed to herself removed miles away from him and from everything she had ever known. Just then there was a noise of rough but cheery voices outside shouting “good-night” to each other, and she said in a quiet tone:
“The men are away now. Is there anything you want before I go to bed?”
With a sudden access of energy, which contrasted strangely with his former feebleness, he rose and confronted her.
“No, there’s nothing I want!” he said, in vehement tones— “Nothing but peace and quietness! I’ve told you your story, and you take it ill. But recollect, girl, that if you consider any shame has been put on you, I’ve put equal shame on myself for your sake — I, Hugo Jocelyn, — against whom never a word has been said but this, — which is a lie — that my child, mine! — was born out of wedlock! I suffered this against myself solely for your sake — I, who never wronged a woman in my life! — I, who never loved but one woman, who died before I had the chance to marry her! — and I say and I swear I have sacrificed something of my name and reputation to you! So that you need not make trouble because you also share in the sacrifice. Robin thinks you’re my child, and therefore his cousin, — and he counts nothing against you, for he knows that what the world would count against you must be my fault and would be my fault, if the lie I started against myself was true. Marry Robin, I tell you! — and if you care to make me happy, marry him before I die. Then you’re safe out of all harm’s way. If you DON’T marry him—”
Her breath came and went quickly — she folded her hands across her bosom, trying to still the loud and rapid beating of her heart, but her eyes were very bright and steadfast.
“Yes? What then?” she asked, calmly.
“Then you must take the consequences,” he said. “The farm and all I have is left to Robin, — he’s my dead sister’s son and my nearest living kin—”
“I know that,” she said, simply, “and I’m glad he has everything. It’s right that it should be so. I shall not be in his way. You may be quite sure of that. But I shall not marry him.”
“You’ll not marry him?” he repeated, and seemed about to give vent to a torrent of invective when she extended her hands clasped together appealingly.
“Dad, don’t be angry! — it only hurts you and it does no good! Just before supper you reminded me of what they say in Church that ‘the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, even unto the third and fourth generation.’ I will not visit the sin of my father and mother on anyone. If you will give me a little time I shall be able to understand everything more clearly, and perhaps bear it better. I want to be quite by myself. I must try to see myself as I am, — unbaptised, nameless, forsaken! And if there is anything to be done with this wretched little self of mine, it is I that must do it. With God’s help!” She sighed, and her lips moved softly again in the last words, “With God’s help!”
He said nothing, and she waited a moment as if expecting him to speak. Then she moved to the table where she had been sitting and folded up her needlework.
“Shall I get you some wine, Dad?” she asked presently in a quiet voice.
“No!” he replied, curtly— “Priscilla can get it.”
“Then good-night!”
Still standing erect he turned his head and looked at her.
“Are you going?” he said. “Without your usual kiss? — your usual tenderness? Why should you change to me? Your own father — if he was your father — deserted you, — and I have been, a father to you in his place, wronging my own honourable name for your sake; am I to blame for this? Be reasonable! The laws of man are one thing and the laws of God are another, — and we have to make the best we can of ourselves between the two. There’s many a piece of wicked injustice in the world, but nothing more wicked than to set shame or blame on a child that’s born without permit of law or blessing of priest. For it’s not the child’s fault, — it’s brought into the world without its own consent, — and yet the world fastens a slur upon it! That’s downright brutal and senseless! — for if there is any blame attached to the matter it should be fastened on the parents, and not on the child. And that’s what I thought when you were left on my hands — I took the blame of you on myself, and I was careful that you should be treated with every kindness and respect — mind you that! Respect! There’s not a man on the place that doesn’t doff his cap to you; and you’ve been as my own daughter always. You can’t deny it! And more than that” — here his strong voice faltered— “I’ve loved you! — yes-I’ve loved you, little Innocent—”
She looked up in his face and saw it quivering with suppressed emotion, and the strange cold sense of aloofness that had numbed her senses suddenly gave way like snow melting in the spring. In a moment she was in his arms, weeping out her pent-up tears on his breast, and he, stroking her soft hair, soothed her with every tender and gentle word he could think of.
“There, there!” he murmured, fondly. “Thou must look at it in this way, dear child! That if God deprived thee of one father he gave thee another in his place! Make the best of that gift before it be taken from thee!”
CHAPTER IV
There are still a few old houses left in rural England which are as yet happily unmolested by the destroying ravages of modern improvement, and Briar Farm was one of these. History and romance alike had their share in its annals, and its title-deeds went back to the autumnal days of 1581, when the Duke of Anjou came over from France to England with a royal train of noblemen and gentlemen in the hope to espouse the greatest monarch of all time, “the most renowned and victorious” Queen Elizabeth, whose reign has clearly demonstrated to the world how much more ably a clever woman can rule a country than a clever man, if she is left to her own instinctive wisdom and prescience. No king has ever been wiser or more diplomatic than Elizabeth, and no king has left a more brilliant renown. As the coldest of male historians is bound to admit, “her singular powers of government were founded equally on her temper and on her capacity. Endowed with a great command over herself, she soon obtained an uncontrolled ascendant over her people. Few sovereigns of England succeeded to the throne under more difficult circumstances, and none ever conducted the government with such uniform success and felicity.” Had Elizabeth been weak, the Duke of Anjou might have realised his ambitious dream, with the unhappiest results for England; and that he fortunately failed was entirely due to her sagacity and her quick perception of his irresolute and feeble character. In the sumptuous train attendant upon this “Petit Grenouille,” as he styled himself in one of his babyish epistles to England’s sovereign majesty, there was a certain knight more inclined to the study of letters than to the breaking of lances, — the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin, who being much about the court in the wake of his somewhat capricious and hot-tempered master, came, unfortunately for hi
s own peace of mind, into occasional personal contact with one of the most bewitching young women of her time, the Lady Penelope Devereux, afterwards Lady Rich, she in whom, according to a contemporary writer, “lodged all attractive graces and beauty, wit and sweetness of behaviour which might render her the mistress of all eyes and hearts.” Surrounded as she was by many suitors, his passion was hopeless from the first, and that he found it so was evident from the fact that he suddenly disappeared from the court and from his master’s retinue, and was never heard of by the great world again. Yet he was not far away. He had not the resolution to leave England, the land which enshrined the lady of his love, — and he had lost all inclination to return to France. He therefore retired into the depths of the sweet English country, among the then unspoilt forests and woodlands, and there happening to find a small manor-house for immediate sale, surrounded by a considerable quantity of land, he purchased it for the ready cash he had about him and settled down in it for the remainder of his life. Little by little, such social ambitions as he had ever possessed left him, and with every passing year he grew more and more attached to the simplicity and seclusion of his surroundings. He had leisure for the indulgence of his delight in books, and he was able to give the rein to his passion for poetry, though it is nowhere recorded that he ever published the numerous essays, sonnets and rhymed pieces which, written in the picturesque caligraphy of the period, and roughly bound by himself in sheepskin, occupied a couple of shelves in his library. He entered with animation and interest into the pleasures of farming and other agricultural pursuits, and by-and-bye as time went on and the former idol of his dreams descended from her fair estate of virtue and scandalised the world by her liaison with Lord Mountjoy, he appears to have gradually resigned the illusions of his first love, for he married a simple village girl, remarkable, so it was said, for her beauty, but more so for her skill in making butter and cheese. She could neither read nor write, however, and the traditions concerning the Sieur Amadis relate that he took a singular pleasure in teaching her these accomplishments, as well as in training her to sing and to accompany herself upon the lute in a very pretty manner. She made him an excellent wife, and gave him no less than six children, three boys and three girls, all of whom were brought up at home under the supervision of their father and mother, and encouraged to excel in country pursuits and to understand the art of profitable farming. It was in their days that Briar Farm entered upon its long career of prosperity, which still continued. The Sieur Amadis died in his seventieth year, and by his own wish, expressed in his “Last Will and Testament,” was buried in a sequestered spot on his own lands, under a stone slab which he had himself fashioned, carving upon it his recumbent figure in the costume of a knight, a cross upon his breast and a broken sword at his side. His wife, though several years younger than himself, only lived a twelve-month after him and was interred by his side. Their resting-place was now walled off, planted thickly with flowers, and held sacred by every succeeding heir to the farm as the burial-place of the first Jocelyns. Steadily and in order, the families springing from the parent tree of the French knight Amadis had occupied Briar Farm in unbroken succession, and through three centuries the property had been kept intact, none of its possessions being dispersed and none of its land being sold. The house was practically in the same sound condition as when the Sieur Amadis fitted and furnished it for his own occupation, — there was the same pewter, the same solid furniture, the same fine tapestry, preserved by the careful mending of many hundreds of needles worked by hands long ago mingled with the dust of the grave, and, strange as it may seem to those who are only acquainted with the flimsy manufactures of to-day, the same stout hand-wrought linen, which, mended and replenished each year, lasted so long because never washed by modern methods, but always by hand in clear cold running water. There were presses full of this linen, deliriously scented with lavender, and there were also the spinning-wheels that had spun the flax and the hand-looms on which the threads had been woven. These were witnesses to the days when women, instead of gadding abroad, were happy to be at home — when the winter evenings seemed short and bright because as they sat spinning by the blazing log fire they were cheerful in their occupation, singing songs and telling stories and having so much to do that there was no time to indulge in the morbid analysis of life and the things of life which in our present shiftless day perplex and confuse idle and unhealthy brains.
And now after more than three centuries, the direct male line of Amadis de Jocelin had culminated in Hugo, commonly called Farmer Jocelyn, who, on account of some secret love disappointment, the details of which he had never told to anyone, had remained unmarried. Till the appearance on the scene of the child, Innocent, who was by the village folk accepted and believed to be the illegitimate offspring of this ill-starred love, it was tacitly understood that Robin Clifford, his nephew, and the only son of his twin sister, would be the heir to Briar Farm; but when it was seen how much the old man seemed to cling to Innocent, and to rely upon her ever tender care of him, the question arose as to whether there might not be an heiress after all, instead of an heir. And the rustic wiseacres gossiped, as is their wont, watching with no small degree of interest the turn of events which had lately taken place in the frank and open admiration and affection displayed by Robin for his illegitimate cousin, as it was thought she was, and as Farmer Jocelyn had tacitly allowed it to be understood. If the two young people married, everybody agreed it would be the right thing, and the best possible outlook for the continued prosperity of Briar Farm. For after all, it was the farm that had to be chiefly considered, so they opined, — the farm was an historic and valuable property as well as an excellent paying concern. The great point to be attained was that it should go on as it had always gone on from the days of the Sieur Amadis, — and that it should be kept in the possession of the same family. This at any rate was known to be the cherished wish of old Hugo Jocelyn, though he was not given to any very free expression of his feelings. He knew that his neighbours envied him, watched him and commented on his actions, — he knew also that the tale he had told them concerning Innocent had to a great extent whispered away his own good name and fastened a social slur upon the girl, — yet he could not, according to his own views, have seen any other way out of the difficulty. The human world is always wicked-tongued; and it is common knowledge that any man or woman introducing an “adopted” child into a family is at once accused, whether he or she be conscious of the accusation or not, of passing off his own bastard under the “adoption” pretext. Hugo Jocelyn was fairly certain that none of his neighbours would credit the romantic episode of the man on horseback arriving in a storm and leaving a nameless child on his hands. The story was quite true, — but truth is always precisely what people refuse to believe.
The night on which Innocent had learned her own history for the first time was a night of consummate beauty in the natural world. When all the gates and doors of the farm and its outbuildings had been bolted and barred for the night, the moon, almost full, rose in a cloudless heaven and shed pearl-white showers of radiance all over the newly-mown and clean-swept fields, outlining the points of the old house gables and touching with luminous silver the roses that clambered up the walls. One wide latticed window was open to the full inflowing of the scented air, and within its embrasure sat a lonely little figure in a loose white garment with hair tumbling carelessly over its shoulders and eyes that were wet with tears. The clanging chime of the old clock below stairs had struck eleven some ten minutes since, and after the echo of its bell had died away there had followed a heavy and intense silence. The window looked not upon the garden, but out upon the fields and a suggestive line of dark foliage edging them softly in the distance, — away down there, under a huge myriad-branched oak, slept the old knight Sieur Amadis de Jocelin and his English rustic wife, the founders of the Briar Farm family. The little figure in the dark embrasure of the window clasped its white hands and turned its weeping eyes towards that ancie
nt burial-place, and the moon-rays shone upon its fair face with a silvery glimmer, giving it an almost spectral pallor. “Why was I ever born?” sighed a trembling voice— “Oh, dear God! Why did you let it be?”
The vacant air, the vacant fields looked blankly irresponsive. They had no sympathy to give, — they never have. To great Mother Nature it is not important how or why a child is born, though she occasionally decides that it shall be of the greatest importance how and why the child shall live. What does it matter to the forces of creative life whether it is brought into the world “basely,” as the phrase goes, or honourably? The child exists, — it is a human entity — a being full of potential good or evil, — and after a certain period of growth it stands alone, and its parents have less to do with it than they imagine. It makes its own circumstances and shapes its own career, and in many cases the less it is interfered with the better. But Innocent could not reason out her position in any cold-blooded or logical way. She was too young and too unhappy. Everything that she had taken pride in was swept from her at once. Only that very morning she had made one of her many pilgrimages down to the venerable oak beneath whose trailing branches the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin lay, covered by the broad stone slab on which he had carved his own likeness, and she had put a little knot of the “Glory” roses between his mailed hands which were folded over the cross on his breast, and she had said to the silent effigy:
“It is the last day of the haymaking, Sieur Amadis! You would be glad to see the big crop going in if you were here!”
She was accustomed to talk to the old stone knight in this fanciful way, — she had done so all her life ever since she could remember. She had taken an intense pride in thinking of him as her ancestor; she had been glad to trace her lineage back over three centuries to the love-lorn French noble who had come to England in the train of the Due d’Anjou — and now — now she knew she had no connection at all with him, — that she was an unnamed, unbaptised nobody — an unclaimed waif of humanity whom no one wanted! No one in all the world — except Robin! He wanted her; — but perhaps when he knew her true history his love would grow cold. She wondered whether it would be so. If it were she would not mind very much. Indeed it would be best, for she felt she could never marry him.
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 799
