Chapter Twenty Two.
Alys’s Brother.
“In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.”
Wordsworth.
Days passed—a week, ten days of Mr Brandreth’s fortnight were over, but still he would say nothing definite as to the possibility of moving Alys to Romary. And Alys herself seemed marvellously contented—the reason of which she made no secret of to Mary.
“You see I have never had a really close friend of near my own age—and you are only two years older,” she said one day. “And I never could have got to know you so well in any other circumstances—could I? You do understand me so well, Mary. It is perfectly wonderful. If I were never to see you again, I could not regret my accident since it has made me know you.”
Mary was silent.
“Why don’t you answer?” said Alys, anxiously. “Am I horribly selfish to speak so, when this time you have given up to me has kept you away from your dear home and all of them, and interfered with your regular duties?”
“No, dear,” said Mary, “it isn’t that at all. My being away from home has not mattered in the least; besides, I am near enough to hear at once if they really needed me. No, I was only thinking I could not say I did not regret your accident, because, though I am thankful you are so far better, I feel so anxious about you afterwards. Even though Mr Brandreth does not anticipate seriously-lasting injury, you may have a good deal of weariness and endurance before you. He told you?”
“Yes,” said Alys, composedly. “I know I shall not feel strong and well, as I used, for a long time, if ever. I shall have to rest a great deal, hanging about sofas, and all that—just what I hate. But I don’t mind. I am still glad it happened. It has done me good, and it has done some one else good too. Was that all you hesitated about, Mary?”
“Not quite.”
“Well, say the rest—do!”
“I was only thinking that I could not respond as heartily as I would like to your affection, Alys, because I hardly see that my friendship can be much good to you in the future.”
“Why?”
“Our lives are so differently placed—we are in such totally different spheres—”
“Oh! Mary,” exclaimed Alys, reproachfully, “you are not going to be proud, and refuse to know us because we are rich and you are—”
“Poor,” added Mary, smiling. “No, not on that account exactly.”
“Why, then? Is it because you suspect that at one time Laurence discouraged my knowing you? You can afford to forgive that, surely, now. And it was his duty, I suppose, to be very careful about whom I knew, having no mother or sister, you know; and at that time he did not know you.”
“No, he did not; and it was his duty, as you say, to be very careful. He did not know us, true, but at least he knew no harm of us, except that we were out of the charmed circle. And did that justify him in—Oh! Alys, dear, don’t make me speak about it. Let us be happy this little while we are together.”
“Mary, do you dislike Laurence?”
“I do not like unfounded prejudices,” replied Mary, evasively.
“That means Laurence, I suppose. But, Mary, people can outgrow their prejudices. I am not sure that you yourself are not at present partly affected by prejudice.”
“No,” said Mary, in a firm but somewhat low voice. “I am not, indeed. I cannot defend myself from the appearance of being so, but it is not the case, truly.”
Alys sighed.
“Don’t make yourself unhappy about it, dear,” said Mary.
“I can’t help it,” said Alys, dejectedly. “There is something I don’t understand. I don’t ask you to tell me anything you would rather not, but I am so disappointed. I wanted you to get to like Laurence. I know—I can see he likes you, and that was why I thought it had all happened so well. I did not mind the idea of being a sort of invalid for some time when I thought of your coming to see me often at Romary, and staying with us there. Mary, won’t you come? I was speaking to Laurence about it last night, and he said, if I could persuade you to come, he would be most grateful to you.”
“I don’t want him to be grateful to me,” said Mary, lightly.
“How can he help being so? What he meant was, of course, that if you came it would be out of goodness to me. You must know that he would consider it a favour.”
“Yes, I do. Mr Cheviott is not the least inclined to patronise people, I will say that for him,” said Mary, laughing.
“Then you will come to Romary?” said Alys, coaxingly.
Mary shook her head.
“I must be honest, Alys dear,” she said, “and to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine myself going to Romary ag—ever going to Romary, I mean, under any circumstances whatever.”
“How you must dislike Laurence!” said Alys. “Has he displeased you since you have been here?”
“Oh dear, no,” said Mary, eagerly. “He has been as kind and considerate as possible. I wish I could help hurting you, Alys. I can say one thing, I do like Mr Cheviott as your brother, more than I could have believed it possible I could ever like him.”
“Faint praise,” said Alys.
“But not of the ‘damning’ kind. I mean what I say,” persisted Mary. “And—perhaps you will think this worse than ‘faint praise’—since I have seen him in this way—as your brother—I cannot help thinking that circumstances, the way he has been brought up, have a good deal to answer for in his case.”
Alys’s face flushed a little, yet she was not offended.
“And why not in mine?” she said. “I have had more reason to be spoiled than poor Laurence. His youth was anything but a very smooth or happy one. My father was not rich always, you know.”
“Was he not? Still ‘rich’ is a comparative word. Mr Cheviott has always ‘moved in a certain sphere,’ as newspapers say, and he cannot have had much chance of seeing outside that sphere,” said Mary, with the calm philosophy of her twenty years’ thorough knowledge of the world in all its phases. “As for you, Alys, you are not spoiled, just because you are not. You are a duck—at least you have a duck’s back—it has run off you.”
And both girls were laughing at this when Mr Cheviott, just returned from his daily expedition to Romary, entered the room.
“You are very merry,” he said, questioningly. “By-the-bye, Miss Western,” he went on, with some constraint but, nevertheless, resolution in his voice, “I hope you have good news of your sister?”
“Excellent, thank you,” replied Mary, looking up bravely into his face. “She is as happy and well as possible.”
There was a ring of truth in her voice, and, indeed, Mr Cheviott would have found it hard to doubt the truth of anything that voice of hers said.
“There is no bravado in that statement,” he said to himself. “I cannot understand it.”
“And what were you laughing at when I came in?” he said, turning to Alys, as if to change the subject.
Alys looked at Mary.
“Mary,” she said, mischievously, “shall I tell?”
“If you like,” said Mary, quietly.
“Oh, Mary, was just giving me her opinion of us—of you and me, Laurence—the result of her observations during the last ten days,” said Alys.
Mary looked up quickly.
“Alys,” was all she said; but Alys understood her. Mr Cheviott was listening attentively.
“Well,” Alys went on, “perhaps that is not putting it quite fairly. I must confess, Laurence, I forced the opinion out of her, and it took a good deal of forcing, too.”
“And what was the opinion—favourable or the reverse? May I not hear that?” asked Mr Cheviott.
“It was pretty favourable,” Alys replied. “On the whole, taking everything into consideration, the enormous disadvantages of our up-bringing, etc, etc, Miss Western is disposed to think that, on the whole, mind you, Laurence, only ‘on the whole,’ we are neither of us quite so bad as might have been expected. But then we must remember, for fear of this verdict making us too conceited, you see, Laurence—upsetting our ill-balanced minds, or anything of that sort—we must remember that it is not every day we can hope to meet with a judge so wide-minded, and philosophical, and unprejudiced, absolutely unprejudiced, as Miss Western.”
During this long tirade Mary remained perfectly silent, only towards its close her face flushed a little.
“Alys,” she said, when Alys at last left off speaking, the colour deepening in her face—“Alys, I don’t think that is quite fair.”
“Nor do I,” said Mr Cheviott, suddenly, for he too had been sitting silent, in apparent consideration. “But, Miss Western, I know Alys’s style pretty well. I can pick out with great precision the grains of fact from amongst her bewildering flowers of rhetoric, so, on the whole, mind you, Miss Western, only ‘on the whole,’ I feel rather gratified than the reverse by what she rails your verdict.”
“I am sorry for it,” said Mary, dryly.
“Why so?”
“I should think poorly of myself were I to feel any gratification at being told that, on the whole, I was not as bad as I might have been. There is no one hardly, I suppose, so bad but that it might be possible to conceive him worse.”
“That was not quite Alys’s wording of your opinion,” said Mr Cheviott. “Nor, I venture to say, quite the sentiment of the opinion itself. But in another sense I agree with you; there is hardly any one—no one, in fact—of whom we might not say, if we knew all the circumstances of his or her history—of his or her existence, in fact—that it was a wonder he or she was so good—not so bad.”
“That is taking the purely—I don’t know what to call it—the purely human view of it all,” said Mary, growing interested and losing her feeling of discomfort. “My father would say we are forgetting what should be and may be the most powerful influences of all, in whatever guise they come, on every life—the spiritual influences, I mean. And these can never be reduced to calculation and estimate, however wise men become.”
“Yes, but think of the terrible forest of ill-growing weeds, the awful barrier of evil, individual and inherited, these influences have to make their way through!”
He rose from his chair and went across the room to the fire-place, where he stood contemplating the two girls. Mary, in her plain grey tweed, unrelieved by any colour, except a blue knot at the throat, but fitting her tall figure to perfection. Her “browny-pink” complexion, hazel eyes, and bright chestnut hair, all speaking of youth and strength and healthfulness, contrasting with Alys, who lay loosely wrapped in the invalid shawls and mantles Mary had carefully arranged about her—prettier, more really lovely, perhaps, than her brother had ever seen her, her dark hair and eyes seeming darker than their wont, from the unusual whiteness of her face. She looked too lovely, thought Mr Cheviott, with a sigh, her fragility striking him sharply, in comparison with the firmness and yet elasticity of Mary’s movements, as she leaned over Alys to raise her a little. How natural, how strangely natural it all seemed! Mr Cheviott sighed.
“Laurence,” exclaimed Alys, “what in the world is the matter?”
Her brother smiled.
“Nothing—that is to say, I can’t say what makes me sigh. I was thinking just then what a strange power of adaptation we human beings have. It seems to me so natural to be living here in this queer sort of way. You ill, Alys, and Miss Western nursing you. I could fancy it had always been so—in a dreamy, vague sort of way.”
“I know how you mean,” said Mary.
“Shall you be sorry when it is over, Laurence,” said Alys, “and we are back again at Romary, without our guardian angel?”
“One is always sorry, in a sense, when anything is over, at least, I am. I suppose I have the power of settling myself in a groove to an unusual degree,” said Mr Cheviott, evasively.
“You certainly have not the power of making pretty speeches,” said Alys. “I called Mary ‘our guardian angel,’ and you call her a ‘groove’.”
Just then Mrs Wills put her head in at the door with an inquiry for Miss Western, and Mary went out of the room.
“I wanted you to say something about Mary’s perhaps coming to Romary,” said Alys.
“Why? Do you think she would come?” asked Mr Cheviott, doubtfully.
“No, I do not think she would,” Alys replied, “but I wanted her to see that you would like her to come.”
“Did she say that she would never come to see you at Romary?” Mr Cheviott said.
“Yes, decidedly. Her words were, ‘I cannot fancy myself, under any circumstances whatever, going to Romary,’ and I thought I heard her half say ‘again’—‘going to Romary again.’ But she has never been there?” Mr Cheviott did not reply; he turned to the fire and began poking it vigorously.
“Laurence,” said Alys, feebly.
“What, dear?”
“Please don’t poke the fire so. It seems to hurt me.”
“I am so sorry,” said her brother, penitently. “It’s the same with everything,” he added to himself. “I seem fated to make a mess of everything I have to do with.—I wish I were not so clumsy,” he went on aloud to his sister. “What shall I do with you at Romary? How shall we ever get on without Miss Western?”
“I shall have to make the best of Mrs Golding, I suppose,” said Alys, in a melancholy voice. “But she fusses so! Oh, Laurence, isn’t it a pity? Just as I have found a girl who could be to me the friend I have wished for and needed all my life, a friend whom even you, now that you know her, approve of for me, that she should have this prejudice against knowing us. Indeed, it must be more than prejudice. She is too sensible and right-minded to be influenced by that.”
“Does she know that I, at one time, objected to your knowing her?” said Mr Cheviott.
“She knows something of it—not, of course, that I ever said so to her—but she is very quick, and gathered the impression somehow. But it is not that. She said you were quite right to be careful whom I knew, and that, of course, she and her people were strangers to you. I don’t think Mary would resent anything that she felt any one had a right to do. No, it is not that,” said Alys.
“What can it be, then? Is it her horror of putting herself under any obligation?”
“Obligation, Laurence! As if all the obligation were not on our side!”
“Well, yes. I don’t think I meant that exactly. I mean that, perhaps, she may feel that, owing her so much, we could not do less than invite her to Romary. She may have an exaggerated horror of any approach to being patronised.”
“No, she is not so silly. She knows we should be grateful to her for coming. She is neither so silly, nor, I must say, so vulgar-minded, as you imagine. Laurence, even though you own to liking and admiring her now, it seems as if you could not throw off that inveterate prejudice of yours,” said Alys, rather hotly.
Mr Cheviott, under his breath, gave vent to a slight exclamation.
“Good Heavens, Alys,” he said, aloud, “I think the prejudice is on your side. You cannot believe that I can act or feel unprejudicedly.”
“I do not know what to believe,” said Alys, dejectedly. “I am bewildered and disappointed. There is something that has been concealed from me, that much I am sure of. And I do think you might trust me, Laurence.”
It sounded to Laurence as if there were tears in her voice. He went over to her bed-side, and kissed her tenderly.
“My poor little Alys,” he said, “indeed I do trust you, and, indeed, I would gladly tell you anything you want to know, if I could. But there are times in one’s life when one cannot do what one would like. Can’t you trust me, Alys?”
Alys stroked his hand.
“Could I ever leave off trusting you, Laurence?” she said, fondly. “I do not mind so much when you tell me there is something you can’t tell—that is treating me like a sensible person, and not like a baby.”
That was all she said, but, like the owl, “she thought the more.”
And Mr Cheviott too—his thoughts had no lack of material on which to exert themselves just then. He was sorry for Alys—very sorry—and not a little uneasy and ready to do anything in his power to please and gratify her. But how to do it?
“She cannot, under any circumstances whatever, imagine herself ever coming to Romary again,” he said to himself, over and over, as if there were a fascination in the words. “Ah, well, it is a part of the whole,” he added, bitterly, “and Alys must try to content herself with something else.”
A slight cloud seemed, for a day or two, to come over the comfort and cheerfulness of the little party at the farm. Mary was conscious of it without being able, exactly, to explain it. “But for Alys,” she felt satisfied that she would not care in the least.
“Mr Cheviott may ‘glower’ at me if he likes,” she said to herself. “I really don’t mind. I am not likely ever to see him again, so what does it matter? He is offended, I suppose, because I did not at once accept with delight the invitation which he condescended, grudgingly enough, no doubt, to allow poor Alys to give me.”
So in her own thoughts, as was her way, she made fun of the whole situation and imagined that Mr Cheviott’s decrease of cordiality and friendliness had not the slightest power to disturb her equanimity. Yet somehow in her honest conscience there lurked a faint misgiving. It was difficult to call his evident dejection haughtiness or temper, difficult to accuse of offensive condescension the man whose every word and tone was full of the gentlest, almost deprecating, deference and respect—most difficult of all to hold loyally to her old position of contempt for and repugnance to a man so unmistakably unselfish, so almost woman-like in his tender devotion to the sister dependent on his care.
“Yet he must be heartless,” persisted Mary, valiantly, “he must be narrow-minded and cruel, and he must be what any straightforward, honourable person would call unprincipled and intriguing, wherever the carrying out of his own designs is in question.”
“I shall be so glad to be home again, mamma,” she said to her mother one afternoon when she had left Alys for an hour or two, to go home to see how the Rectory was getting on without her.
“Yes, dear, I can well fancy it,” replied Mrs Western, sympathisingly. “You must just remember, you know, Mary, that your present task, however distasteful, is just as much a duty as if that poor girl were one of the cottagers about here. Indeed, almost more so. I dare say, in spite of their wealth and position, she is far more really friendless than any other of our poor neighbours. But she is a sweet girl, you say?”
“Very,” said Mary, warmly. “It is a pleasure to do anything for her.”
“Poor child! And with such a brother! A most disagreeable, cold, haughty man, I hear. But he surely cannot be anything but courteous to you, Mary? Under the circumstances, anything else would be too outrageous.”
“Oh dear, no,” said Mary, hastily, startled a little somehow by her mother’s tone. “He is perfectly civil to me—most considerate, and I suppose I should say ‘kind.’ Only I shall be glad to be at home—they are talking now of moving Miss Cheviott to Romary on Thursday—and back into my regular ways. Mother, I’m an awful old maid already, I get into a groove and like to stay there.”
The words recurred to her on her way back to the Edge. Would she really be so glad to be home again? She had used Mr Cheviott’s expression, and it led her into the train of thought which had suggested it to him. Yes, there was truth in what he said. In almost every kind of life, in almost any circumstances, even if painful in themselves, there grows up secretly, as the days pass on, a curious, undefinable charm—a something it hurts us to break, though, till the necessity for so doing is upon us, we had been unconscious of its existence.
“It must be that,” said Mary. “I have got into the groove of my present life, and now that it is coming to an end, disagreeable though it has been, I feel it strangely painful to leave it. Of course it is natural I should feel pain in parting from Alys, whom I can never be with again; but, besides that, I am sorry to have done with the whole affair—the queer incongruous life, the old kitchen in the evenings, and Mr Cheviott and his books in the corner, the feeling I am of use to her, to them both, that they would have been wretchedly uncomfortable without me, and that even now that I am away for an hour they will be missing me. What queer, inconsistent complications we human beings are! It is just the coming to an end of it all, the beginning to see it in the haze of the past, that gives it a charm.”
She stood still and gazed across over the bare, long stretch of meadow land before her to the far distant horizon, radiant already in the colours of the fast setting sun. Suddenly a voice behind her made her start.
“Are you bidding the sun good-night?” it said.
Mary turned round and saw Mr Cheviott.
“Yes,” she replied. “I suppose I was. There, is something rather melancholy about a sunset, is there not?” she added after a little pause.
“There is something not rather, but very melancholy about all farewells. And sunset is good-bye forever to a day, though not to the sun,” said Mr Cheviott.
”‘Out of Eternity
This new day is born;
Into Eternity
At night will return.’”
“Yes,” said Mary again. “It is like what my little sister Francie once said, ‘What a sad thing pastness is.’”
“How pretty!” said Mr Cheviott. “Pastness! Yes, it is a sad thing, but fortunately not an ugly thing. Distance in time as well as in space, ‘lends enchantment to the view.’ How strangely little things affect us sometimes,” he went on. “There are occasions, little events of my life, that I cannot recall without an indescribable thrill, neither of pleasure nor pain, but a strange, acute mixture of both. And yet they are so trifling in themselves that I cannot explain why they should so affect me.”
“I think I have felt what you mean,” said Mary.
“And in the same way I have felt extraordinarily affected by a far-off view sometimes,” pursued Mr Cheviott. “When I was a boy, from my nursery window we had, on clear days, a view of the shire hills, and on the top, or nearly on the top of one of them, we could, on very clear days, distinguish a little white cottage. Do you know, I could never look at it without the tears coming into my eyes, and yet, if it had been near enough to see it plainly, most likely it was the most prosaic of white cottages.”
“I have had the same feeling about things not ‘enchanted’ by distance,” said Mary. “Once, on a journey, driving rapidly, we suddenly passed a cottage with two girls sitting on the door-step. A ray of rather faint evening sunlight fell across them as they sat, otherwise everything about the scene was commonplace in the extreme. But yet something made me feel as if I were going to cry. I had to turn my head away and shut my eyes.”
“That’s just what I mean,” said Mr Cheviott, and then for a minute or two they both stood silent, gazing at the sunset.
“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, at last, “when you are back at the Rectory again, and the present little phase of your life is past and done with, I trust its ‘pastness’ may soften all the annoyance you have had to put up with. Even I, I would fain hope, may come in for a little of the benefit of the mellowing haze of distance and bygoneness?”
“I do not feel that I have had any annoyances to bear,” said Mary, cordially. “Alys has been only too unselfish, and—and—you, yourself, Mr Cheviott, have been most considerate of my comfort. My associations with the Edge can never be unpleasant.”
“Thank you—thank you, so very much,” said Mr Cheviott, so earnestly that Mary forthwith began to call hereof a humbug.
Would it not have been honest to have said a little more—to have told him that, while she really did thank him for his courtesy and thoughtfulness, nothing that had happened had, in the least, shaken her real opinion of his character? Of the other side of his character, so she mentally worded it in instinctive self-defence of her constancy. For, indeed, to her there had come to be two Mr Cheviotts—Alys’s brother, and, alas! Arthur Beverley’s cousin!