The little town of Wyvenwich lies upon the northern slope of such a bank as this. Before it spreads a bleak sandy plain seven miles across, while behind all is fertility and leafy luxuriance. To the south, over the hill, and past the ruins of a forgotten monastery, lies a vast purple moor, which undulates inland until a mixed forest of pine, oak and beech shuts out further investigation. The red heather literally hangs over the sea, and a high tide, coupled with a north-easterly gale, beating against the soft sand-cliffs, never fails to reduce the breadth of Wyvenwich Moor a yard or so. The heathland slopes gently down to a vast marsh, in the midst of which stands a solitary red-brick cottage, the home of the marsh-man. The nearest house to it is the Mizzen Heath Coast-guard Station, set back from the greedy sea upon the height of the moor; and beyond that, surrounded by trees on all sides except the front, is Wyl's Hall.
The parish register tells of Wylies since the thirteenth century. Nothing of great importance, perhaps, but the name is there, and the possessors of it appear to have done their duty faithfully in the state of life in which they were placed. Baptism, marriage, death—what could human ambition require beyond that? And now the old race is extinct. A lonely widow, childless, almost kinless, lives in Wyl's Hall; and the last possessor of the name, kindly honest Admiral Wylie, lies in his great solitude among the nameless northern dead, far away in the deserted Norse churchyard upon the mountain-side.
Brenda Gilholme found a place for herself in the great human mill where we are all so many 'hands' serving our little looms, feeding our insignificant crushers with honest raw material which goes away from us and never comes again. Even to her analytical, deep-searching mind it was clear that Mrs. Wylie had need of someone to bear her company in her widowhood, and so she stayed unquestioningly at Wyl's Hall now that Mrs. Wylie had returned there.
Here she lived just like an ordinary little country maiden who knew nothing of Greek verbs and was profoundly ignorant respecting political economy. She knew all about the tides, and sympathized with old Godbold, the marsh-man, when the north-east winds blew against the ebbing tide, and laughed at all his five creaking windmills. She learnt the names of all the six stalwart coastguardsmen stationed at Mizzen Heath, and was deeply versed in the smuggling lore of this famous smuggling country, where the most honest and law-abiding man can scarcely look at the long deserted coast, the intersected marshland, and the silent sandy roads, without thinking of contraband wares. These coastguardsmen, with their civil tongues and ready ways, occupied an important position in the domestic economy of Wyl's Hall. Their little turf refuge was at the foot of the kitchen garden, and there a pleasant-spoken man was to be found by night and day.
Women are weak where sailors are concerned. Mrs. Wylie set an evil example with the London newspaper, and the portly cook followed with surreptitious cold pudding when her dishes were washed on a warm evening. There was always something requiring a man's hand at Wyl's Hall, and the coastguards had a certain leisure, during which the most somnolent could scarcely sleep. No man slumbers quite peacefully about five o'clock in the evening, however actively employed he may have been during the previous night; and, indeed, at all times of day or night there was usually one of the six Mizzen Heath guardians awake and off duty.
Into this little world, shut off by shallow seas in front, closed in by vast moors behind, Brenda had quietly made her way like some new and gracious flower when the flowers of earth were still frozen in. In it she had found a place, among its denizens a welcome. And this was life. This the end and aim of all existence. To do a little good, to leave a pleasant memory in a few hearts. Ah, my brothers, the marble slabs in every church tell of men's virtues and men's deeds; lauding them and praising them beyond their value! 'And of Mary, his wife, who died at the age of seventy-six.' A short record, a simple statement. We do not hear of her virtues and her deeds, and only a few of us vaguely surmise that she may have had a hand in the shaping of that wonderful vessel, her lord and master, whose good name will go down to posterity—an example to men unborn. Could the life of 'Mary, his wife,' be dissected, I think it would prove to be a cleaner record.
And so Brenda, in her way, was doing her share of unrecorded good, working out her small existence in a daily round of trivial self-sacrifices, self-suppressions, self-abnegations, as the majority of women are doing round us now. In a manner she was happy, for youth itself is a happiness, because it is a deceptive glamour of anticipation—anticipation which, thank God! we can never learn to recognise as destined to certain disappointment. At times she vaguely questioned the benefit accruing from the possession of an exceptional education, but fortunately she was unaware that she was endowed with an exceptional intellect. She did not suspect that she could have scanned the wide expanse of sea and land spread out around the coastguards' refuge without finding a human mind worthy so much as to hold mere passing intercourse with hers.
She never looked upon this existence as permanent. It could not last. Something would come, some change for good or evil, and the powers—the infinite womanly powers of love and self-sacrifice—would have a larger scope. Meanwhile she did her duty by Mrs. Wylie with unfailing energy and inexhaustible cheerfulness. Between these two women, as between the elder and Theo Trist, there had been no definite exchange of sentiments. Both would have said that their tacit devotion to each other was nothing else than a practical worldly arrangement of mutual advantage and equal benefit.
Mrs. Wylie was almost her old self again. At times the former cheerfulness of demeanour would lighten up the old house. There was the same capable sense of comfort in her presence, the same readiness to make the best of unpropitious environments. Her own sorrow, never publicly aired, was hidden deeply beneath a certain cheerfulness which can only be described as worldly. Worldliness is not a vice, it is a social virtue. Why should we parade our sorrows and clothe ourselves in a meek coat of obtrusive resignation? There is enough grief in life to justify a little slurring over, a little avoidance of grievous topics. If Mrs. Wylie never referred to her late husband in touching terms, it was not because his memory was devoid of meaning to her; it was because she cordially disliked any approach to cant, because the memory was too sacred a thing to be discussed. Of course, society at large and her neighbours in particular had a say in the matter—the usual kind of say—flavoured with tea and thin bread, garnished with spite and kindly malice. But Mrs. Wylie had always been rashly indifferent to criticism. She had chosen to ignore the precious advice of sundry female counsellors, who knew infinitely more about her affairs and their mismanagement than she did herself. And this was the result—the neighbourhood would talk, it is a way neighbourhoods have, and really there was cause for it. Cause, indeed—I should think so! Why, Miss Ferret, the elderly unmarried daughter of the late vicar of Wyvenwich, had never even been told the details of the small tragedy in Norway. And instead of coming down quietly to Wyl's Hall the widow had actually lived in her chambers in town—a flat, near Piccadilly. A flat, indeed, and Admiral Wylie scarce cold in his grave! There is some deep reproach in this which is not quite clear to my obtuse male brain, but I am assured upon the best authority that the matter was much spoken of at Wyvenwich. There are some people whose chief aim in life seems to be to avoid being spoken of. They try all their days to walk in a trodden path, to live a vegetating existence, which is so absolutely commonplace and everyday, so compassed about by rule and the safe guiding of precedent, that there is absolutely nothing left to speak about. Then they shake their lace-caps, or pull down their starched waistcoats, and, in the self-laudation of their bloodless hearts, are happy.
All through February and March the two ladies had lived happily at Wyl's Hall, without longing for the busier life of London. The human mind is even more adaptable to circumstances than the body that carries it. Small interests soon take the place of large, and quietude follows on excitement without any great mental change being necessary.