It may seem exaggerated to speak so gravely of the foibles and absurdities of county town society as it existed in Mallingford some few years ago, as possibly it still exists in other yet more “conservative” places of the kind. If it appear so I can only say that to me it comes naturally to speak seriously of things I have myself felt strongly—absurdities if you like, but worse than absurdities, for they have sprung from deep rooted error, and their influence, again, has, in its turn, been an evil one. Besides which, it is necessary to a right comprehension of my heroine’s life and character, that the nature of the social atmosphere into which at this critical period of her history she was thrown, should be, to some extent at least, understood and justly appreciated.
Over the cobble stones, in the fly from the King’s Arms, Marion was rattled to her destination. “The Cross House,” as it was called, its name from its vicinity to the old market place (now, wonderful to say, deserted in favour of a more convenient site), in the centre of which, though no longer surrounded by booths and stalls, still stood in respectable decay the pride of Mallingford, the venerable cross. Queer things that ancient monument must have seen in its day; strange sights if all be true that is to be read concerning it, in the “Guide to Mallingford and its neighbourhood,” changes many and marvellous even in this sturdy little stronghold of conservatism! Of its antiquity, there can be no doubt, for it was already aged in 1641, when by some special good luck, or over-sight on the part of the fanatic destroyers, it escaped the fate of its fellow monuments.
To Marion in her childhood it had not been without appalling associations, for besides whispers of a heretic or two burnt to death at its base, there was a more ghastly legend of a modern Sapphira struck dead on the spot by what some good people used to call “a special dispensation of providence,” as an awful warning to succeeding generations. Marion’s nurse told her this pretty little story one day when the perfectly truthful child persisted in refusing to confess to a sin she had not committed; but it had an opposite effect to that anticipated. “If, then, I say I broke the jug, nurse, when I know I did not, God would perhaps kill me like the woman. Which way of putting it was rather beyond the nurse’s logical powers. Fortunately the real delinquent was afterwards discovered, and the little girl came off with flying colours!
As the fly stopped at the door of the Cross House, Geoffrey’s bright face appeared. He rang the bell, and notwithstanding the forbidding frowns of the prim, crabbed looking maid-servant, who answered the summons, stood his ground bravely, and carried out his intention of assisting at the first meeting of aunt and niece. They were almost strangers to each other, for the years during which they had not met had changed the girl from a child to a woman, and had nearly effaced from her recollection the personal appearance of her aunt, who had done little to attract of attach her young relative to herself.
Marion and Mr. Baldwin were shown into a room at the back of the house, on the first floor. A pleasant bright room it might have been, had its owner been a pleasant or bright person, for it looked out on an old-fashioned walled-in garden, which too, might easily have been rendered pretty and attractive, instead of formal and bare. An untidy, neglected garden is an unpleasant sight, but hardly less so to my mind is a faultlessly neat one, if stiff, ungraceful and prim—the one might quite as justly as the other be described as “uncared for.” No person who cares for a garden as it should be cared for, would be content with doling out to it the minimum of unlovely, unloving attention, necessary to keeping it merely in order—that particular kind of lifeless, stunted order which is one of the ugliest things I know.
So, as might be expected from the glance at the garden on entering, the room was very dreary, uninviting and colourless. The dingy library in the London house where we first met Marion was charming in comparison, for it, though dull and gloomy, always looked warm and comfortable, which was far from being the case with Miss Tremlett’s drawing-room. In the literal sense it was not cold, for winter and summer, spring and autumn, it was kept at an equal temperature by all means of tiresome inventions—patents most of them—self-adjusting ventilators and equalising stoves, pipes with hot air and pipes with cold, on which the credulous lady spent a small fortune in the course of each year. Still it always looked cold. It was so oppressively grey—drab rather. So obtrusively neutral, if such an expression be permissible; that one almost felt as if the most glaring mixture of colours would be preferable! I wonder, by the way, whence has arisen the notion so common to people of very small taste or no taste at all, that so long as they stick to greys and drabs and slate colour, they are perfectly unimpregnable, however terribly they may mingle the shades, or, which is almost as bad, distress more sensitive organizations by unbroken monotony of dingy gloom.
“I must say I like quiet colours,” you will hear said with a self-satisfied smile by the most hopelessly commonplace and least educated of your acquaintance.
“Quiet colours!” Just as well, my dear Madam, might you be proud of being stone deaf or lame of one leg, as of your incapability of admiring one of the most exquisite of our material gifts, that of colour. A pity truly that you and others of your refined tastes had not a hand in the arrangement of things in general; this world for instance, how very much more tasteful and less “vulgar” it would have been, had it been left to your unexceptionable greys and drabs! Not that greys and drabs are not good in their place, beautiful even, as a background to more vivid hues, a repose to the eye after the luxury of greens and blues and scarlets, which nature has the bad taste to love and cherish so fondly. But only fancy a whole world of greys and drabs! Oh, intensity of blue sky; oh, fields of emerald green; flowers of every conceivable perfection of colour; from deepest, richest, crimson, through golden gleams, to faintest blush of rose; oh, beautiful bright radiant things, what a dreary, ugly world this would be without you! But we, being more refined, in our tastes, some of us, prefer “quiet colours” as we call them. Rather I think, would I endure the agony of Mrs. Butcher’s Sunday bonnet before me in church, a perfect mass of utterly unassorted reds and greens and yellows, but in its way an innocent, “vulgar” barbaric expression of delight, untutored and, spontaneous, in the colour-beauty so profusely bestowed; rather I think this, than the other extreme, of cold, presumptuous scorn of this great gift, which results—In what? In a dungeon of a drawing-room like that of the unlovable Miss Tremlett at Mallingford! From which by-the-by we have wandered an inexcusably long way.