His wonders to perform,
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.”
Ah! yes, it was His hand that had passed through the air, and that storm had rushed down upon that ship; it was His footsteps that had stirred up the seas to engulf it and that wretch who had tried to wreck her life—ah! it was he who had been the first to suffer wreck! Poor wretch! Poor wretch! In the course of her large thoughts of the mercy and justice of God she could even feel a passing current of pity for the wretch; but it was one of very low voltage: it would not have caused more than the merest deflection of the most sensitive patho-meter. When she had sighed “Poor wretch!” it was gone. Still she knew that she was no longer the hard woman that she had been ever since she had stood by the church porch and had watched the policeman putting the handcuffs on the man whom she had just married, and had heard his saturnine jest about having put a ring on her finger and then having bracelets put on his wrists. It was that hardness which had then come into her nature that caused her to speak to her father with such bitterness when he had met her with his news on the road.
But now she was changed. She would ask her father’s forgiveness, and perhaps he would understand her, though she did not altogether understand herself.
And still the newspapers lay folded in her lap; and her memory began to review in order the incidents that had led up to that catastrophe of fourteen months ago. It was when she was visiting her aunt Emily that she had met him.
But her memory seemed determined to show itself a more complete recorder than she had meant it to be of everything connected with this matter. It carried her back to the earlier days when her hair had been hanging down her back, and her aunt had had long consultations with her mother on the subject of her education. “Befitting for a lady”—that had been her aunt’s phrase—she, Priscilla, was to be educated in such a way as was befitting for a lady. Aunt Emily was herself a lady; she had done much better than her sister, Priscilla’s mother, who had only become a farmer’s wife. To be sure Phineas Wadhurst was not to be classed among the ordinary farmers of the neighbourhood, who barely succeeded in getting a living out of the land. The Wadhursts had been on their farm for some hundreds of years, and their names were to be read on a big square tablet in the church with 1581 figuring as the first date upon it. Some of them had made the land pay, but others had spent upon it the money that these had bequeathed to them, without prospering. It was old Phineas Wadhurst that had done best out of it, and when he died he had left to his son a small fortune in addition to a well-stocked farm.
But before many years had passed young Phineas, who had the reputation of being the longest-headed man that had ever been a Wadhurst, perceived that the conditions under which agriculture was carried on with a profit had changed considerably. He saw that the day of English wheat was pretty nearly over, but that if the day of wheat was over, the day of other things was dawning, and it was because he became the pioneer of profits that people called him long-headed. While his neighbours grumbled he experimented. The result was that in the course of five years he was making money more rapidly than it had ever been made out of the wheat. “Golden grain,” it had been called long ago. Phineas Wadhurst smiled. Golden butter was what he had his eye on—golden swedes which he grew for his cattle, so that every bullock became bullion and every heifer a mint.
And then he did a foolish thing. He got married.
The woman he chose was a “lady.” The English agriculturist’s ideal lady is some one who has had nothing to do with farming all her life; just as his ideal gentleman is a retired English shopkeeper. Eleanor Glynde was one of the daughters of a hardworking doctor in general practice in the little town of Limborough.