CHAPTER XVII.
EDWARD SEVERNE, master of arts, dreaded Rhoda Gale, M.D. He had deluded, in various degrees, several ladies that were no fools; but here was one who staggered and puzzled him. Bright and keen as steel, quick and spirited, yet controlled by judgment and always mistress of herself, she seemed to him a new species. The worst of it was, he felt himself in the power of this new woman, and, indeed, he saw no limit to the mischief she might possibly do him if she and Zoe compared notes. He had thought the matter over, and realized this more than he did when in London. Hence the good youth's delight at her illness, noticed in a former chapter.
He was very thoughtful all breakfast time, and as soon as it was over drew Vizard apart, and said he would postpone his visit to London until he had communicated with his man of business. He would go to the station and telegraph him, and by that means would do the civil and meet Miss Gale. Vizard stared at him.
“You meet my virago? Why, I thought you disapproved her entirely.”
“No, no; only the idea of a female doctor, not the lady herself. Besides, it is a rule with me, my dear fellow, never to let myself disapprove my friends' friends.”
“That is a bright idea, and you are a good fellow,” said Vizard. “Go and meet the pest, by all means, and bring her here to luncheon. After luncheon we will drive her up to the farm and ensconce her.”
Edward Severne had this advantage over most impostors, that he was masculine or feminine as occasion required. For instance, he could be hysterical or bold to serve the turn. Another example—he watched faces like a woman, and yet he could look you in the face like a man, especially when he was lying. In the present conjuncture a crafty woman would have bristled with all the arts of self-defense, but stayed at home and kept close to Zoe. Not so our master of arts; he went manfully to meet Rhoda Gale, and so secure a te'te-'a-te'te, and learn, if possible, what she meant to do, and whether she could be cannily propitiated. He reached the station before her, and wired a very intelligent person who, he knew, conducted delicate inquiries, and had been very successful in a divorce case, public two years before. Even as he dispatched this message there was a whistling and a ringing, and the sound of a coming train, and Ned Severne ran to meet Rhoda Gale with a heart palpitating a little, and a face beaming greatly to order. He looked for her in the first-class carriages, but she was in the second, and saw him. He did not see her till she stepped out on the platform. Then he made toward her. He took off his hat, and said, with respectful zeal, “If you will tell me what luggage you have, the groom shall get it out.”
Miss Gale's eyes wandered over him loftily. “I have only a box and a bag, sir, both marked 'R. G.'”
“Joe,” said he—for he had already made friends with all the servants, and won their hearts—“box and bag marked 'R. G.' Miss Gale, you had better take your seat in the carriage.”
Miss Gale gave a little supercilious nod, and he showed her obsequiously into the carriage. She laid her head back, and contemplated vacancy ahead in a manner anything but encouraging to this new admirer Fate had sent her. He turned away, a little discomfited, and when the luggage was brought up, he had the bag placed inside, and the box in a sort of boot, and then jumped in and seated himself inside. “Home,” said he to the coachman, and off they went. When he came in she started with well-feigned surprise, and stared at him.
“Oh,” said she, “I have met you before. Why, it is Mr. Severne. Excuse me taking you for one of the servants. Some people have short memories, you know.”
This deliberate affront was duly felt, but parried with a master-hand.
“Why, I am one of the servants,” said he; “only I am not Vizard's. I'm yours.”
“In-deed!”
“If you will let me.”
“I am too poor to have fine servants.”
“Say too haughty. You are not too poor, for I shan't cost you anything but a gracious word now and then.”
“Unfortunately I don't deal in gracious words, only true ones.”
“I see that.”
“Then suppose you imitate me, and tell me why you came to meet me?”
This question came from her with sudden celerity, like lightning out of a cloud, and she bent her eyes on him with that prodigious keenness she could throw into those steel gray orbs, when her mind put on its full power of observation.
Severne colored a little, and hesitated.
“Come now,” said this keen witch, “don't wait to make up a reason. Tell the truth for once—quick!—quick!—why did you come to meet me?”
“I didn't come to be bullied,” replied supple Severne, affecting sullenness.
“You didn't!” cried the other, acting vast surprise. “Then what did you come for?”
“I don't know; and I wish I hadn't come.”
“That I believe.” Rhoda shot this in like an arrow.
“But,” continued Severne, “if I hadn't, nobody would; for it is Vizard's justicing day, and the ladies are too taken up with a lord to come and meet such vulgar trifles as genius and learning and sci—”
“Come, come!” said Rhoda, contemptuously; “you care as little about science and learning and genius as I possess them. You won't tell me? Well, I shall find you out.” Then, after a pause, “Who is this lord?”
“Lord Uxmoor.”
“What kind of a lord is he?”
“A very bushy lord.”
“Bushy?—oh, bearded like the pard! Now tell me,” said she, “is he cutting you out with Miss Vizard?”
“You shall judge for yourself. Please spare me on that one topic—if you ever spared anybody in your life.”
“Oh, dear me!” said Rhoda, coolly. “I'm not so very cruel. I'm only a little vindictive and cat-like. If people offend me, I like to play with them a bit, and amuse myself, and then kill them—kill them—kill them; that is all.”
This pretty little revelation of character was accompanied with a cruel smile that showed a long row of dazzling white teeth. They seemed capable of killing anything from a liar up to a hickory-nut.
Severne looked at her and gave a shudder. “Then Heaven forbid you should ever be my enemy!” said he, sadly, “for I am unhappy enough already.”
Having delivered this disarming speech, he collapsed, and seemed to be overpowered with despondency. Miss Gale showed no signs of melting. She leaned back and eyed him with steady and composed curiosity, as a zoologist studying a new specimen and all its little movements.
They drove up to the Hall door, and Miss Gale was conducted to the drawing-room, where she found Lord Uxmoor and the two young ladies. Zoe shook hands with her. Fanny put a limp paw into hers, which made itself equally limp directly, so Fanny's dropped out. Lord Uxmoor was presented to her, at his own request. Soon after this luncheon was announced. Vizard joined them, welcomed Rhoda genially, and told the party he had ordered the break, and Uxmoor would drive them to the farm round by Hillstoke and the Common. “And so,” said he, “by showing Miss Gale our most picturesque spot at once, we may perhaps blind her to the horrors of her situation—for a time.”
The break was driven round in due course, with Uxmoor's team harnessed to it. It was followed by a dog-cart crammed with grooms, Uxmoorian and Vizardian. The break was padded and cushioned, and held eight or nine people very comfortably.. It was, indeed, a sort of picnic van, used only in very fine weather. It rolled on beautiful springs. Its present contents were Miss Gale and her luggage and two hampers full of good things for her; Vizard, Severne, and Miss Dover. Zoe sat on the box beside Lord Uxmoor. They drove through the village, and Mr. Severne was so obliging as to point out its beauties to Miss Gale. She took little notice of his comments, except by a stiff nod every now and then, but eyed each house and premises with great keenness.
At last she stopped his fluency by inquiring whether he had been into them all; and when he said he had not, she took advantage of that admission to inform him that in two days' time she should be able to tell him a great deal more than he was likely to tell her, upon his method of inspecting villages.
“That is right,” said Vizard; “snub him: he gets snubbed too little here. How dare he pepper science with his small-talk? But it is our fault—we admire his volubility.”
“Oh,” said Fanny, with a glance of defiance at Miss Gale, “if we are to talk nothing but science, it will be a weary world.”
After the village there was a long, gradual ascent of about a mile, and then they entered a new country. It was a series of woods and clearings, some grass, some arable. Huge oaks, flung their arms over a road lined on either side by short turf, close-cropped by the gypsies' cattle. Some band or other of them was always encamped by the road-side, and never two bands at once. And between these giant trees, not one of which was ever felled, you saw here and there a glade, green as an emerald; or a yellow stubble, glowing in the sun. After about a mile of this, still mounting, but gradually, they emerged upon a spacious table-land—a long, broad, open, grass plateau, studded with cottages. In this lake of grass Uxmoor drew up at a word from Zoe, to show Miss Gale the scene. The cottages were white as snow, and thatched as at Islip; but instead of vegetable-gardens they all had orchards. The trees were apple and cherry: of the latter not less than a thousand in that small hamlet. It was literally a lawn, a quarter of a mile long and about two hundred yards broad, bordered with white cottages and orchards. The cherries, red and black, gleamed like countless eyes among the cool leaves. There was a little church on the lawn that looked like a pigeon-house. A cow or two grazed peacefully. Pigs, big and little, crossed the lawn, grunting and squeaking satisfaction, and dived into the adjacent woods after acorns, and here and there a truffle the villagers knew not the value of. There was a pond or two in the lawn; one had a wooden plank fixed on uprights, that went in some way. A woman was out on the board, bare-armed, dipping her bucket in for water. In another pond an old knowing horse stood gravely cooling his heels up to the fetlocks. These, with shirts, male and female, drying on a line, and whiteheaded children rolling in the dust, and a donkey braying his heart out for reasons known only to himself, if known at all, were the principal details of the sylvan hamlet; but on a general survey there were grand beauties. The village and its turf lay in the semicircular sweep of an unbroken forest; but at the sides of the leafy basin glades had been cut for drawing timber, stacking bark, etc., and what Milton calls so happily “the checkered shade” was seen in all its beauty; for the hot sun struggled in at every aperture, and splashed the leaves and the path with fiery flashes and streaks, and topaz brooches, all intensified in fire and beauty by the cool adjacent shadows.
Looking back, the view was quite open in most places. The wooded lanes and strips they had passed were little more in so vast a panorama than the black stripes on a backgammon board. The site was so high that the eye swept over all, and rested on a broad valley beyond, with a patchwork pattern of variegated fields and the curling steam of engines flying across all England; then swept by a vast incline up to a horizon of faint green hills, the famous pastures of the United Kingdom. So that it was a deep basin of foliage in front; but you had only to turn your body, and there was a forty-mile view, with all the sweet varieties of color that gem our fields and meadows, as they bask in the afternoon sun of that golden time when summer melts into autumn, and mellows without a chill.
“Oh,” cried Miss Gale, “don't anybody speak, please! It is too beautiful!”
They respected an enthusiasm so rare in this young lady, and let her contemplate the scene at her ease.
“I reckon,” said she, dogmatically, and nodding that wise little head, “that this is Old England—the England my ancestors left in search of liberty, and that's a plant that ranks before cherry-trees, I rather think. No, I couldn't have gone; I'd have stayed and killed a hundred tyrants. But I wouldn't have chopped their heads off” (to Vizard, very confidentially); “I'd have poisoned 'em.”
“Don't, Miss Gale!” said Fanny; “you make my blood run cold.”
As it was quite indifferent to Miss Gale whether she made Miss Dover's blood run cold or not, she paid no attention, but proceeded with her reflections. “The only thing that spoils it is the smoke of those engines, reminding one that in two hours you or I, or that pastoral old hermit there in a smock-frock, and a pipe—and oh, what bad tobacco!—can be wrenched out of this paradise, and shrieked and rattled off and flung into that wilderness of brick called London, where the hearts are as hard as the pavement—except those that have strayed there from Barfordshire.”
The witch changed face and tone and everything like lightning, and threw this last in with a sudden grace and sweetness that contrasted strangely with her usual sharpness.
Zoe heard, and turned round to look down on her with a smile as sweet as honey. “I hardly think that is a drawback,” said she, amicably. “Does not being able to leave a place make it sweeter? for then we are free in it, you know. But I must own there is a drawback—the boys' faces, Miss Gale, they are so pasty.”
“Indeed!” says Rhoda, pricking up her ears.
“Form no false hopes of an epidemic. This is not an infirmary in a wood, Miss Gale,” said Vizard. “My sister is a great colorist, and pitches her expectations too high. I dare say their faces are not more pasty than usual; but this is a show place, and looks like a garden; so Zoe wants the boys to be poppies and pansies, and the girls roses and lilies. Which—they—are—not.”
“All I know is,” said Zoe, resolutely, “that in Islip the children's faces are rosy, but here they are pasty—dreadfully pasty.”
“Well, you have got a box of colors. We will come up some day and tint all the putty-faced boys.” It was to Miss Dover the company owed this suggestion.
“No,” said Rhoda. “Their faces are my business; I'll soon fix them. She didn't say putty-faced; she said pasty.”
“Grateful to you for the distinction, Miss Gale,” said Zoe.
Miss Gale proceeded to insist that boys are not pasty-faced without a cause, and it is to be sought lower down. “Ah!” cried she, suddenly, “is that a cherry that I see before me? No, a million. They steal them and eat them by the thousand, and that's why. Tell the truth, now, everybody—they eat the stones.”
Miss Vizard said she did not know, but thought them capable.
“Children know nothing,” said Vizard. “Please address all future scientific inquiries to an 'old inhabitant.' Miss Gale, the country abounds in curiosities; but, among those curiosities, even Science, with her searching eye, has never yet discovered an unswallowed cherry stone in Hillstoke village.”
“What! not on the trees?”
“She is too much for me. Drive on, coachman, and drown her replies in the clatter of hoofs. Round by the Stag, Zoe. I am uneasy till I have locked Fair Science up. I own it is a mean way of getting rid of a troublesome disputant.”
“Now I think it is quite fair,” said Fanny. “She shuts you up, and so you lock her up.”
“'Tis well,” said Vizard, dolefully. “Now I am No. 3—I who used to retort and keep girls in their places—with difficulty. Here is Ned Severne, too, reduced to silence. Why, where's your tongue? Miss Gale, you would hardly believe it, this is our chatterbox. We have been days and days, and could not get in a word edgewise for him. But now all he can do is to gaze on you with canine devotion, and devour the honey—I beg pardon, the lime-juice—of your lips. I warn you of one thing, though; there is such a thing as a threatening silence. He is evidently booking every word you utter; and he will deliver it all for his own behind your back some fine day.”
With this sort of banter and small talk, not worth deluging the reader dead with, they passed away the time till they reached the farm.
“You stay here,” said Vizard—“all but Zoe. Tom and George, get the things out.” The grooms had already jumped out of the dog-cart, and two were at the horses' heads. The step-ladder was placed for Zoe, and Vizard asked her to go in and see the rooms were all right, while he took Miss Gale to the stables. He did so, and showed her a spirited Galloway and a steady old horse, and told her she could ride one and drive the other all over the country.
She thanked him, but said her attention would be occupied by the two villages first, and she should make him a report in forty-eight hours.
“As you please,” said he. “You are terribly in earnest.”
“What should I be worth if I was not?'
“Well, come and see your shell; and you must tell me if we have forgotten anything essential to your comfort.”
She followed him, and he led her to a wing of the farmhouse comparatively new, and quite superior to the rest. Here were two good sunny rooms, with windows looking south and west, and they were both papered with a white watered pattern, and a pretty French border of flowers at the upper part, to look gay and cheerful.
Zoe was in the bedroom, arranging things with a pretty air of hospitality. It was cheerily fitted up, and a fire of beech logs blazing.
“How good you are!” said Rhoda, looking wistfully at her. But Zoe checked all comments by asking her to look at the sitting-room and see if it would do. Rhoda would rather have stayed with Zoe; but she complied, and found another bright, cheerful room, and Vizard standing in the middle of it. There was another beech fire blazing, though it was hot weather. Here was a round table, with a large pot full of flowers, geraniums and musk flowers outside, with the sun gilding their green leaves most amiably, and everything unpretending, but bright and comfortable; well padded sofa, luxurious armchair, stand-up reading desk, and a very large knee-hole table; a fine mirror from the ceiling to the dado; a book-case with choice books, and on a pembroke table near the wall were several periodicals. Rhoda, after a cursory survey of the room, flew to the books. “Oh!” said she, “what good books! all standard works; and several on medicine; and, I declare, the last numbers of the Lancet and the Medical Gazette, and the very best French and German periodicals! Oh, what have I done? and what can I ever do?”
“What! Are you going to gush like the rest—and about nothing?” said Vizard. “Then I'm off. Come along, Zoe;” and he hurried his sister away.
She came at the word; but as soon as they were out of the house, asked him what was the matter.
“I thought she was going to gush. But I dare say it was a false alarm.”
“And why shouldn't she gush, when you have been so kind?”
“Pooh—nonsense! I have not been kind to her, and don't mean to be kind to her, or to any woman; besides, she must not be allowed to gush; she is the parish virago—imported from vast distances as such—and for her to play the woman would be an abominable breach of faith. We have got our gusher, likewise our flirt; and it was understood from the first that this was to be a new dramatis persona—was not to be a repetition of you or la Dover, but—ahem—the third Grace, a virago: solidified vinegar.”
Rhoda Gale felt very happy. She was young, healthy, ambitious, and sanguine. She divined that, somehow, her turning point had come; and when she contrasted her condition a month ago, and the hardness of the world, with the comfort and kindness that now surrounded her, and the magnanimity which fled, not to be thanked for them, she felt for once in a way humble as well as grateful, and said to herself, “It is not to myself nor any merit of mine I owe such a change as all this is.” What some call religion, and others superstition, overpowered her, and she kneeled down and held communion with that great Spirit which, as she believed, pervades the material universe, and probably arises from it, as harmony from the well strung harp. Theory of the day, or Plato redivivus—which is it?
“O great creative element, and stream of tendencies in the universe, whereby all things struggle toward perfection, deign to be the recipient of that gratitude which fills me, and cannot be silent; and since gratitude is right in all, and most of all in me at this moment, forgive me if, in the weakness of my intellect, I fall into the old error of addressing you as an individual. It is but the weakness of the heart; we are persons, and so we cry out for a personal God to be grateful to. Pray receive it so—if, indeed, these words of mine have any access to your infinitely superior nature. And if it is true that you influence the mind of man, and are by any act of positive volition the cause of these benefits I now profit by, then pray influence my mind in turn, and make me a more worthy recipient of all these favors; above all, inspire me to keep faithfully to my own sphere, which is on earth; to be good and kind and tolerant to my fellow creatures, perverse as they are sometimes, and not content myself with saying good words to you, to whose information I can add nothing, nor yet to your happiness, by any words of mine. Let no hollow sentiment of religion keep me long prating on my knees, when life is so short, and” (jumping suddenly up) “my duties can only be discharged afoot.”
Refreshed by this aspiration, the like of which I have not yet heard delivered in churches—but the rising generation will perhaps be more fortunate in that respect—she went into the kitchen, ordered tea, bread and butter, and one egg for dinner at seven o'clock, and walked instantly back to Hillstoke to inspect the village, according to her ideas of inspection.
Next morning down comes the bailiff's head man in his light cart, and a note is delivered to Vizard at the breakfast table. He reads it to himself, then proclaims silence, and reads it aloud:
“DEAR SIR—As we crossed your hall to luncheon, there was the door of a small room half open, and I saw a large mahogany case standing on a marble table with one leg, but three claws gilt. I saw 'Micro' printed on the case. So I hope it is a microscope, and a fine one. To enable you to find it, if you don't know, the room had crimson curtains, and is papered in green flock. That is the worst of all the poisonous papers, because the texture is loose, and the poisonous stuff easily detached, and always flying about the room. I hope you do not sit in it, nor Miss Vizard, because sitting in that room is courting death. Please lend me the microscope, if it is one, and I'll soon show you why the boys are putty faced. I have inspected them, and find Miss Dover's epithet more exact than Miss Vizard's, which is singular. I will take great care of it. Yours respectfully,