‘Sunninghill has the effect of being much higher than it is with that great level stretch of flat country. It impresses the imagination just as much as your giants. Don’t laugh, Annie; but your mountains stifle me. I never have air enough to breathe. I like miles and miles of country round me. You know my weakness.’
‘Sunninghill before the Alps!’ she cried, laughing. ‘’Tis clear you are a true cockney. Give me your shoulder for a pillow; I think I shall go to sleep.’
And so she did; and the horses jogged on and on, now slow, now fast, their bells jingling, and Donato’s whip making harmless circles and slashes over their heads; and houses and hedgerows, and slopes of mountain, flew past in a dream. James Beresford could see nothing but the wan lines of the face that rested on his shoulder, solemn in that deep sleep of weariness. How worn she was! how pale! growing whiter, he thought, and whiter, till sometimes in terror he stooped down close to make sure that the pale lips were parted by living breath.
CHAPTER IV.
THE THREE CHARITIES.
To live at Sunninghill, with one’s feet on a level with the highest pinnacle of the big Castle at St. George’s, what a thing it was in summer! All that country is eloquent with trees—big beeches, big oaks, straight elms, sweet birch-trees; even the very holly-bushes, in their dark green, grow tall into prickly, straggling monsters, as big as the elms. But the triumph of the place perhaps is in spring, when the primroses come too thick for counting, and the woods are full of their fairy, indefinable fragrance. In the ripe summer there was no such lovely suggestion about; all was at that perfection which suggests only decay. The wild flowers were foxgloves, with here and there in the marshy places a lingering plume of meadow-sweet. The ferns had grown too strong and tall, like little trees. The woods were in their darkest, fullest garments of green; not another leaflet to come anywhere; all full, and mature, and complete. Wild honeysuckle waved flags of yellow and brown from the high branches of big trees, which it had caught and tangled in; and made the hedge into one big wall of flowers—almost too much when the sun was on it. In the very heart of August it was as cool in these shadowy wood-walks as in a Gothic chapel, and here and there on a little plateau of brown earth a bench underneath a tree offered rest and a view to the wayfarer. Mrs. Burchell was sitting on one of these, panting a little, on the special day we have to record. She was that rector’s wife already mentioned, who was a contemporary of Cherry Beresford, and who grudged so much that ‘two single women’ should have all the delights of Sunninghill. She was just Miss Cherry’s age, fat and fair, but more than forty, and she had seven children, and felt herself inconceivably in advance of Cherry, for whom she retained her old friendship however, modified by a little envy and a good deal of contempt. Cherry was an old maid; that of itself surely was quite enough to warrant the contempt and the envy. You had but to look at Mr. Burchell’s rectory, which lay at the foot of the hill under the shadow of the woods, but facing towards the high road, which was very dusty, and exposed without a tree to the blaze of the west, and to compare it with the beautiful house on the top of the hill, sheltered so carefully, not too much nor too little—set in velvet lawns and dewy gardens, dust and noise kept at arm’s length—to see the difference between them. It was a difference which Mrs. Burchell for her part could not learn not to resent; though, indeed, but for the benefice bestowed by Miss Beresford, the Burchells must have had a much worse lot, or indeed perhaps never would have united their lots at all. The rector’s wife might have been as poor a creature as Miss Cherry, an old maid, and none of the seven Burchells might ever have come into being, but for the gift of that dusty Rectory from the ladies on the hill; but the rectorinn did not think of that. She was seated on the bench under the big oak, fanning herself with her handkerchief, while Agnes, her eldest daughter, and Dolly, her youngest, dutifully waited for her. They were going up to ‘The Hill’ for tea, which was a weekly ceremonial at least.
‘At all events, mamma, you must allow,’ said Agnes, ‘that it is better to live at the foot of the hill than at the top. You never could take any walks if you had this long pull up every time you went out.’
‘They don’t have any long pull,’ said her mother; ‘they have their carriage. Ah, yes, they are very different from a poor clergyman’s wife, who has done her duty all her life without much reward for it. It is not those who deserve them most, or who have most need of them, who get the good things of this life, my dear. I don’t want to judge my neighbours; but Miss Charity Beresford I have heard all my life was not so very much better than a heathen. It may not go so far as that—but I have seen her, with my own eyes, laugh at your papa’s best sermons. I am afraid she is not far removed from the wicked that flourish like a green bay tree; yet look at her lot in life and your papa’s—a gentleman, too, and a clergyman with so many opportunities of doing good—and she in this fine place, a mere old woman!’
‘If papa lived here should we all live here?’ said Dolly, whose small brain was confused by this suggestion; ‘then I should have the pony instead of Cara, and Miss Cherry would be my auntie! Oh, I wish papa lived here!’
‘Hold your tongue,’ said her mother. ‘Cherry Beresford is a ridiculous old creature. Dear me, when I think of the time when she and I were girls together! Who would have thought that I should have been the one to toil up here in the sun, while she drove in her carriage. Oh, yes, that’s very true, she was born the richest—but some girls have better luck than others! It was mine, you see, to marry a poor clergyman. Ah, well, I daresay Cherry would give her head to be in my place now!’