CHAPTER I
WHICH CARRIES OVER A TALE OF YEARS, AND CARRIES ON
The last sentence was written. His work finished. And, looking upon his completed creation, Charles Verity saw that it was good. Yet, as he put the pen back in the pen-tray and, laying the last page of manuscript face downwards upon the blotting-paper passed his hand over it, he was less sensible of exultation than of a pathetic emptiness. The book had come to be so much part of him that he felt a nasty wrench when he thus finally rid himself of it.
He had kept the personal pronoun out of it, strictly and austerely, desiring neither self-glorification nor self-advertisement. Yet his mind and attitude towards life seasoned and tempered the whole, giving it vitality and force. This was neither a "drum-and-trumpet history" designed to tickle the vulgar ear, nor a blank four-wall depository of dry facts, names, dates, statistics, such as pedants mustily adore; but a living thing, seen and felt. Not his subconscious, but that much finer and—as one trusts—more permanent element in our human constitution, his super-conscious self found expression in its pages and travelled freely, fruitfully, through them amid luminous and masterful ideas. At times the intellectual sweep threatened to be overdaring and overwide; so that, in the interests of symmetry and balance of construction, he had been forced to clip the wings of thought, lest they should bear him to regions too remotely high and rare. Race, religion, customs and the modifications of these, both by climate and physical conformation of the land on the face of which they operate, went to swell the interest and suggestion of his theme. In handling such varied and coloured material the intellectual exercise had been to him delicious, as he fashioned and put a fine edge to passages of admirable prose, coined the just yet startling epithet, perfected the flow of some graceful period, and ransacked the English language for fearless words in which to portray the mingled splendour and vileness of a barbaric oriental Court, the naked terrors of tribal feuds and internecine war.
The occupation had, indeed, proved at once so refreshing and so absorbing that he went leisurely, lengthening out the process of production until it came nearer covering the thirty months of elephantine gestation than the normal human nine.
With but two brief sojourns to England, for the consultation of certain authorities and of his publishers, the said near on thirty months were passed in wandering through Southern France, Central Italy, and, taking ship from Naples to Malaga, finally through Eastern and Northern Spain. Charles Verity was too practised a campaigner for his power of concentration to depend on the stability or familiarity of his surroundings. He could detach himself, go out into and be alone with his work, at will. But the last chapter, like the first, he elected to write in the study at The Hard. A pious offering of incense, this, to the pleasant memory of that excellent scholar and devoted amateur of letters, his great-uncle, Thomas Clarkson Verity, whose society and conversation awakened the literary sense in him as a schoolboy, on holiday from Harchester, now nearly five decades ago. He judged it a matter of good omen, moreover,—toying for the moment with kindly superstition—that the book should issue from a house redeemed by his kinsman from base and brutal uses and dedicated to the worship of knowledge and of the printed word. That fat, soft-bodied, mercurial-minded little gentleman—to whom no record of human endeavour, of human speculation, mental or moral experiment, came amiss—would surely relish the compliment, if his curious and genial ghost still, in any sort, had cognizance of this, his former, dwelling-place.
The Hard, just now, showed a remarkably engaging countenance, the year standing on the threshold of May.—Mild softly bright weather made amends for a wet and windy April, with sunshine and high forget-me-not blue skies shading to silver along the sea-line. The flower-beds, before the garden house-front, were crowded with early tulips, scarlet, golden, and shell-pink. Shrubberies glowed with rhododendrons, flamed with azaleas. At the corner of the battery and sea-wall, misty grey-green plumes of tamarisk veiled the tender background of grey-blue water and yellow-grey sand. Birds peopled the scene. Gulls, in strong fierce flight, laughed overhead. Swallows darted back and forth, ceaselessly twittering, as they built their cup-shaped mud nests beneath the eaves. Upon the lawn companies of starlings ran, flapping glossy wings, squealing, whistling; to the annoyance of a song thrush, in spotted waistcoat and neatly fitting brown surtout, who, now tall, now flattened to the level of the turf, its head turned sideways, peered and listened, locating the presence of the victim worm.—Three or four vigorous pecks—the starlings running elsewhere—to loosen the surrounding soil, and the moist pink living string was steadily, mercilessly, drawn upward into the uncompromising light of day, to be devoured wriggling, bit by bit, with most unlovely gusto.—The chaff-chaff sharpened his tiny saw tipping about the branches of the fir trees in the Wilderness, along with the linnets, tits, and gold-finches.
Such, out of doors, was the home world which received Damaris after those many months of continental travel, on the eve of her twenty-first birthday. To pass from the dynamic to the static mode must be always something of an embarrassment and trial, especially to the young with whom sensation is almost disconcertingly direct and lively. Damaris suffered the change of conditions not without a measure or doubt and wonder. For they made demands to which she had become unaccustomed, and to which she found it difficult to submit quite naturally and simply. A whole social and domestic order, bristling with petty obligations, closed down upon her, within the bounds of which she felt to move awkwardly, at first, conscious of constraint.
Sympathetic Mrs. Cooper, comely and comfortable Mary, and the Napoleonic Patch, still reigned in house and stable. Laura had returned to her former allegiance on the announcement of "the family's" arrival, and other underlings had been engaged by the upper servants in conclave. To these latter entered that Ulysses, Mr. Hordle, so rendering the establishment once again complete.
The neighbours duly called—Dr. and Mrs. Horniblow, conscious of notable preferment, since high ecclesiastical powers had seen fit to present the former to a vacant canonry at Harchester. For three months yearly he would in future be resident in the cathedral city. This would necessitate the employment of a curate at Deadham, for the spiritual life of its inhabitants must by no means suffer through its vicar's promotion. At the moment of Sir Charles and Damaris' return the curate excitement was at its height. It swept through the spinster-ranks of the congregation like an epidemic. They thrilled with unacknowledgeable hopes. The Miss Minetts, though mature, grew pink and quivered, confessing themselves not averse to offering board and lodging to a suitable, a well-connected, well-conducted paying guest. To outpourings on the enthralling subject of the curate, Damaris found herself condemned to listen from every feminine visitor in turn. It held the floor, to the exclusion of all other topics. Her own long absence, long journeys, let alone the affairs of the world at large, were of no moment to these very local souls. So our young lady retired within herself, deploring the existence of curates in general, and the projected, individual, Deadham curate in particular, with a heartiness she was destined later to remember. Had it been prophetic?—Not impossibly so, granted the somewhat strange prescience by which she was, at times, possessed.
For the psychic quality that, from a child, now and again had manifested itself in her—though happily unattended by morbid or hysteric tendencies, thanks to her radiant health—grew with her growth. To her, in certain moods and under certain conditions, the barrier between things seen and unseen, material and transcendental, was pervious. It yielded before the push of her apprehension, sense of what it guards, what it withholds within an ace of breaking through.
Affairs of the heart would, so far, seem to have begun and ended with the winter spent at St. Augustin. Now and again Damaris met an Englishman, or foreigner, who stirred her slightly. But if one accident of travel brought them together, another accident of travel speedily swept them apart. The impression was fugitive, superficial, fading out and causing but momentary regret. Colonel Carteret she only saw in London, during those two brief visits to England. He had been captivating, treating her with playful indulgence, teasing a little; but far away, somehow—so she felt him—though infinitely kind. And the dear man with the blue eyes—for she could use her old name for him again now, though she couldn't quite tell why—looked older. The sentimental passage at St. Augustin assumed improbability—a fact over which she should, in all reason, have rejoiced, yet over which she, in point of fact when safe from observation, just a little wept.
From Henrietta some few letters reached her. One of them contained the news that Marshall Wace, surmounting his religious doubts and scruples—by precisely what process remained undeclared—had at last taken Holy Orders. Concerning this joyful consummation Henrietta waxed positively unctuous. "He had gone through so much"—the old cry!—to which now was added conviction that his own trials fitted him to minister the more successfully to his brethren among the sorely tried.
"His preaching will, I feel certain, be quite extraordinarily original and sympathetic—full of poetry. And I need hardly tell you what an immense relief it is both to the General and to myself to feel he is settled in life, and that his future is provided for—though not, alas! in the way I fondly hoped, and which—for his happiness' sake and my own—I should have chosen," she insidiously and even rather cynically wrote.
But, if in respect of the affections our maiden, during these two years, made no special progress and gained no further experimental knowledge of the perilous workings of sex, her advance in other departments was ample.
For faith now called to her with no uncertain note. The great spiritual forces laid hold of her intelligence and imagination, drawing, moulding, enlightening her. In the library of a somewhat grim hotel at Avila, in old Castile, she lighted upon an English translation of the life of St. Theresa—that woman of countless practical activities, seer and sybil, mystic and wit. The amazing biography set her within the magic circle of Christian feminine beatitude; and opened before her gaze mighty perspectives of spiritual increase, leading upward through unnumbered ranks of prophets, martyrs, saints, angelic powers, to the feet of the Virgin Mother, with the Divine Child on her arm.—He, this last, as gateway, intermediary, between the human soul and the mystery of God Almighty, by whom, and in whom, all things visible and invisible subsist. For the first time some dim and halting perception, some faintest hint and echo, reached Damaris of the awful majesty, the awful beauty of the fount of Universal Being; and, caught with a great trembling, she worshipped.
This culminating perception, in terms of time, amounted to no more than a single flash, the fraction of an instant's contact. An hour or so later, being very young and very human, the things of everyday resumed their sway. A new dress engaged her fancy, a railway journey through—to her—untrodden country excited her, a picturesque street scene held her delighted interest. Nevertheless that had taken place within her—call it conversion, evocation, the spiritual receiving of sight, as you please—upon which, for those who have once experienced it, there is no going back while life and reason last. Obscured, overlaid, buried beneath the dust of the trivial and immediate, the mark of revelation upon the forehead and the heart can never be obliterated quite. Its resurrection is not only possible but certain, if not on the near side, then surely on the farther side of death.
And not only did faith thus call her, at this period, but art, in its many forms, called her likewise. The two, indeed, according to her present understanding of them, moved—though at different levels—side by side, singularly conjoined, art translating faith into terms of sound, form and colour, faith consecrating and supplementing art. All of which, as she pondered, appeared to her only fitting and reasonable—the object of art being to capture beauty and touch reality, the substance of faith being nothing less than beauty and reality absolute.
With Sir Charles sometimes, but more often with her aunt, Miss Felicia—most enthusiastic, diligent and ingenuous of sightseers—she visited buildings of historic interest, galleries of statuary and of pictures. For here, too, in architecture, in marble god or hero, upon painted panel or canvas, she caught, at moments, some flickering shadow of the everlasting light, touched at moments both by its abiding terror and the ecstasy of its everlasting youth. But this appreciation of the height and grandeur of man's endeavour was new in her. To Nature she had from childhood, been curiously near. She sought expression and confirmation of it with silent ardour, her mind aflame with the joy of recognition. And, as daily, hourly background to these her many experiments and excursions, was the stable interest of her father's book. For in the pages of that, too, she caught sight of beauty and reality of no mean order, held nobly to ransom through the medium of words.
And while this high humour still possessed her, alive at every point, her thoughts—often by day, still oftener in dreams or wakeful intervals by night—rapt away beyond the stars, she was called upon, as already noted, to pass abruptly from the dynamic to the static mode. Called on to embrace domestic duties, and meet local social obligations, including polite endurance of long-drawn disquisitions regarding Canon Horniblow's impending curate. The drop proved disconcerting, or would have eminently done so had not another element—disquieting yet very dear—come into play.
Meantime the change from the stimulating continental atmosphere to the particularly soft and humid, not to say stagnant, English one, acted as a drop too. She drooped during the process of acclimatization. The fetid sweet reek off the mud-flats of the Haven oppressed and strangely pursued her, so that she asked for the horses to take her to the freshness of the high lying inland moors, for a boat to carry her across the tide-river to the less confined air and outlook of the Bar. Sight and sense of the black wooden houses, upon the forbidden island, hanging like disreputable boon companions about the grey stone-built inn, oppressed and strangely pursued her too. She could see them from her bedroom between the red trunks of the bird-haunted Scotch firs in the Wilderness. First thing, on clear mornings, the sunlight glittered on the glass of their small windows. Last thing, at night, the dim glow of lamp-light showed through open doorway, or flimsy curtain from within. They stood alone, but curiously united and self-sufficing, upon the treeless inhospitable piece of land, ringed by the rivers, the great whispering reed-beds and the tide. Their life was strangely apart from, defiant of, that of the mainland and the village. It yielded obedience to traditions and customs of an earlier, wilder age; and in so much was sinister, a little frightening. Yet out of precisely this rather primitive and archaic environment came Darcy Faircloth, her half-brother, the human being closest to her by every tie of blood and sentiment in the world save one—the father of them both. The situation was startling, alike in its incongruities and in its claims.
During those two years of continental wandering—following upon her meeting with him at Marseilles—the whole sweet and perplexing matter of Faircloth had fallen more or less into line, taking on a measure of simplicity and of ease. She thought of him with freedom, wrote to him when he could advise her of his next port of call.—To him at Deadham, by his request, he being very careful for her, she never wrote.—And therefore, all the more perhaps, being here at Deadham, his home and all the suggestive accessories of it so constantly before her eyes, did her relation to him suffer a painful transformation. In remembrance she had come to picture him on board his ship, governing his little floating kingdom with no feeble or hesitating sway. But here every impeding fact of class and education, every worldly obstacle to his and her intercourse, above all the hidden scandal of his birth sprang into high relief. All the dividing, alienating influences of his antecedents, his social position and her own, swung in upon her with aggravated intensity and pathos.
Away, she felt sweetly secure of him. Sure his and her bond remained inviolate. Sure his affection never wavered or paled, but stood always at the flood, a constant quantity upon which she could draw at need; or—to change the metaphor—a steady foundation upon which her heart could safely build. He would not, could not, ever fail her. This had been sufficient to stay her longing for sight and speech of him, her longing for his bodily presence. But now, in face of the very concrete facts of the island, the inn, which bore his name and where his mother lived and ruled, of the property he owned, the place and people to which—by half at least of his nature and much more than half his memory—he belonged, the comfort of this spiritual esoteric relation became but a meagre evasive thing. It was too unsubstantial. Doubts and fears encircled it. She grew heart-sick for some fresh testimony, some clear immediate assurance that time and absence had not staled or undermined the romance.
If only she could speak of it! But that was forbidden by every obligation of filial piety. Never had her relation to her father been more tender, more happy; yet only through sudden pressure of outward circumstance could she speak to him of Faircloth. To do so, without serious necessity, would be, as she saw it, a wanton endangering of his peace.—If only the dear man with the blue eyes hadn't removed himself! She had counted upon his permanent support and counsel, on his smoothing away difficulties from the path of her dealings with Faircloth; but he appeared to have given her altogether the go-by, to have passed altogether out of her orbit. And meditating, in the softly bright May weather beneath those high forget-me-not blue skies, upon his defection, our maiden felt quite desperately experienced and grown up, thrown back upon her own resources, thrown in upon her rather solitary life.
Throughout the summer visitors came and went; but never those two desired figures, Faircloth or Carteret. Dr. McCabe, vociferous in welcome, affectionate, whimsical and choleric, trundled over from Stourmouth on a bicycle of phenomenal height.
"On the horse without wheels I'm proficient enough," he declared. "Know the anatomy of the darlin' beast as well as I do my own, inside and out. But, be dashed, if the wheels without the horse aren't beyond me quite. Lord love you, but the skittish animal's given me some ugly knocks, cast me away, it has, in the wayside ditch, covering me soul with burning shame, and me jacket with malodorous mud."
At intervals Aunt Harriet Cowden and Uncle Augustus drove over in state the twelve miles from Paulton Lacy—the lady faithful to garments dyed, according to young Tom Verity, in the horrid hues of violet ink. She expressed her opinions with ruthless frankness, criticized, domineered, put all and sundry in—what she deemed—"their place"; and departed for the big house on the confines of Arnewood Forest again, to, had she but known it, a chorus of sighings of relief from those she left behind her and on whose emotional and intellectual tastes and toes she so mercilessly trod.
Garden parties, tennis tournaments, the Napworth cricket week, claimed Damaris' attendance in turn, along with agreeable display of her foreign spoils in the matter of Paris hats and frocks. Proofs arrived in big envelopes perpetually by post; first in the long, wide-margined galley form, later in the more dignified one of quire and numbered page. The crude, sour smell of damp paper and fresh printer's ink, for the first time assailed our maiden's nostrils. It wasn't nice; yet she sniffed it with a quaint sense of pleasure. For was it not part of the whole wonderful, beautiful business of the making of books? To the artist the meanest materials of his art have a sacredness not to be denied or ignored. They go to forward the birth of the precious whole, and hence are redeemed, for him, from all charge of common or uncleanness.
Finally Miss Felicia, arriving in mid-June, paid an unending visit, of which Damaris felt no impatience. Miss Felicia during the last two years had, indeed, become a habit. The major affairs of life it might be both useless and unwise to submit to her judgment. She lost her way in them, fluttering ineffectual, gently hurried and bird-like. But, in life's minor affairs, her innocent enthusiasm was invaluable as an encouraging asset. It lent point and interest to happenings and occupations otherwise trivial or monotonous. If silly at times, she never was stupid—distinction of meaning and moment.—A blameless creature, incapable of thinking, still more of speaking, evil of the worst or weakest, her inherent goodness washed about you like sun-warmed water, if sterile yet translucently pure.
And so the months accumulated. The clear colours of spring ripened to the hotter gamut of mid-summer, to an August splendour of ripening harvest in field, orchard and hedgerow, and thence to the purple, russet and gold of autumn. The birds, their nesting finished, ceased from song, as the active care of hungry fledglings grew on them. The swallows had gathered for their southern flight, and the water-fowl returned from their northern immigration to the waters and reed-beds of the Haven, Sir Charles Verity's book, in two handsome quarto volumes, had been duly reviewed and found a place of honour in every library, worth the name, in the United Kingdom, before anything of serious importance occurred directly affecting our maiden. Throughout spring, summer and the first weeks of autumn, she marked time merely. Her activities and emotions—in as far, that is, as outward expression of these last went—were vicarious, those of others. She glowed over and gloried in the triumph of her father's book, it is true, but it was his adventure, after all, rather than her own.
Then suddenly, as is the way with life, events crowded on one another, the drama thickened, sensation was tuned to a higher pitch. And it all began, not unludicrously, through the praiseworthy, if rather ill-timed moral indignation of Canon Horniblow's newly installed curate, Reginald Sawyer.