Miss Bretherton

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

He knew a few families in the neighbourhood, but he kept away from them, and almost his only connection with the outer world, during his first month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Châteauvieux, who was at Etretât with her husband. She wrote her brother very lively, characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the little Norman town swarms in the season.

After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look restlessly at the Etretât postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public sort of existence as the Etretât life. The bathing scenes, and the fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread of naturalism, became very flat to him. He was astonished that his sister was not as anxious to start for Italy as he was to hear that she had done so.

This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the daily post. At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his letters. But, after the date mentioned, it occurred to him that his letters reached him with an abominable irregularity, and that it would do his work no harm, but, on the contrary, much good, if he took a daily constitutional in the direction of the post-office, which gave a touch of official dignity to the wasp-filled precincts of a grocer's shop in the village, some two miles off.

For some considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends in this life. His sister's persistence in sticking to the soil of France began to seem to him extraordinary! However, at last, the monotony of the Etretât postmarks was broken by a postcard from Lyons. 'We are here for the night on some business of Paul's; to-morrow we hope to be at Turin, and two or three days later at Venice. By the way, where will the Brethertons be? I must trust to my native wits, I suppose, when I get there. She is not the sort of light to be hidden under a bushel.'

This postcard disturbed Kendal not a little, and he felt irritably that somebody had mismanaged matters. He had supposed, and indeed suggested, that Miss Bretherton should enclose his note in one of her own to his sister's Paris address, giving, at the same time, some indication of a place of meeting in Venice. But if she had not done this, it was very possible that the two women might miss each other after all. Sometimes, when he had been contemplating this possibility with disgust, he would with a great effort make himself reflect why it was that he cared about the matter so disproportionately. Why was he so deeply interested in Isabel Bretherton's movements abroad, and in the meeting which would bring her, so to speak, once more into his own world? Why! because it was impossible, he would answer himself indignantly, not to feel a profound interest in any woman who had ever shared as much emotion with you as she had with him in those moments at Nuneham, who had received a wound at your hands, had winced under it, and still had remained gracious, and kind, and womanly! 'I should be a hard-hearted brute,' he said to himself, 'if I did not feel a very deep and peculiar interest in her—if I did not desire that Marie's friendship should abundantly make up to her for my blundering!'

Did he ever really deceive himself into imagining that this was all? It is difficult to say. The mind of a man no longer young, and trained in all the subtleties of thought, does not deal with an invading sentiment exactly as a youth would do with all his experience to come. It steals upon him more slowly, he is capable of disguising it to himself longer, of escaping from it into other interests. Passion is in its ultimate essence the same, wherever it appears and under whatever conditions, but it possesses itself of human life in different ways. Slowly, and certainly, the old primeval fire, the commonest, fatalest, divinest force of life, was making its way into Kendal's nature. But it was making its way against antagonistic forces of habit, tradition, self-restraint,—it found a hundred other interests in possession;—it had a strange impersonality and timidity of nature to fight with. Kendal had been accustomed to live in other men's lives. Was he only just beginning to live his own?

But, however it was, he was at least conscious during this waiting time that life was full of some hidden savour; that his thoughts were never idle, never vacant; that, as he lay flat among the fern in his moments of rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,—visions of a slender form fashioned with Greek suppleness and majesty, of a soft and radiant presence, of looks all womanliness, and gestures all grace, of a smile like no other he had ever seen for charm, of a quick impulsive gait! He followed that figure through scene after scene; he saw primroses in its hand, and the pale spring blue above it; he recalled it standing tense and still with blanched cheek and fixed appealing eye, while all round the June woods murmured in the breeze; he surrounded it in imagination with the pomp and circumstance of the stage, and realised it as a centre of emotion to thousands. And then from memories he would pass on to speculations, from the scenes he knew to those he could only guess at, from the life of which he had seen a little to the larger and unexplored life beyond.

And so the days went on, and though he was impatient and restless, yet indoors his work was congenial to him, and out of doors the sun was bright, and all the while a certain little god lay hidden, speaking no articulate word, but waiting with a mischievous patience for the final overthrow of one more poor mortal.

At last the old postmistress, whom he had almost come to regard as cherishing a personal grudge against him, ceased to repulse him, and, after his seven years of famine, the years of abundance set in. For the space of three weeks letters from Venice lay waiting for him almost every alternate morning, and the heathery slopes between the farm and the village grew familiar with the spectacle of a tall thin man in a rough tweed suit struggling, as he walked, with sheets of foreign paper which the wind was doing its best to filch away from him.

The following extracts from these letters contain such portions of them as are necessary to our subject:—