“So you don’t think it was a bargain after all! Dear me! Well that is a disappointment. All I can say is that my dear mother had a linsey that was not one atom softer or stronger than this, and she paid just double for it—three pounds; she did indeed; she told me so herself, poor soul. I often heard her speak highly of that linsey when I was a child, and I quite well remember her saying that it had cost three pounds, and that it had been well worth the money.”
You might cry peccavi, and eat your words, and declare your conviction that it was the greatest windfall you ever heard of; nothing would pacify Miss Merrywig until she had carried her bargain to some one else, and had it guessed at a higher figure, which you were pretty sure to be informed of at the earliest opportunity, and triumphantly upbraided for your want of appreciation. Angélique was a great comfort to Miss Merrywig on this head. She loved a bargain dearly, and was proud of showing that she knew the difference between one that was and one that was not; accordingly, she was one of the first to whom Miss Merrywig submitted a new purchase. “Voyons!” the grenadier would say, and then she would take out her spectacles, wipe them, adjust them on her nose, and then deliberately rub the tissue between her finger and thumb, look steadily at Miss Merrywig, as if trying to gather a hint before committing herself, and then give an opinion. She generally premised with the cautious formula: “Dans mon pays it would be so-and-so. Of course I can only make a guess in this country; prices differ.” She was not often far astray; but even when she was, this preface disarmed Miss Merrywig, and, when Angélique hit the mark, her satisfaction was unbounded. Other people might say she had been cheated, or that she had paid the full value of the thing. There was Comte de la Bourbonais’ French maid, who said it was the greatest bargain she had ever seen; and being a Frenchwoman, and accustomed to French stuffs, she was more likely to know than people who had never been out of England in the whole course of their lives.
The other old maid who occupied a prominent position at Dullerton, and was on friendly terms with the grenadier, was Miss Bulpit. It would be difficult to meet with a greater contrast between any two people than between Miss Bulpit and Miss Merrywig. The latter talked in italics, emphasizing all the small words of her discourse, so as to throw everything out of joint. Miss Bulpit spoke “in mournful numbers,” brought out her sentences as slowly as a funeral knell, and was altogether funereal in her aspect. She was tall and lank, and wore a black silk wig, pasted in melancholy braids on either side of her face—a perfect foil to the gay little curls that danced on Miss Merrywig’s forehead like so many little bells keeping time to her tongue. Miss Bulpit was enthroned on a pedestal of one thousand five hundred pounds a year, and attended by all the substantial honors that spring from such a foundation. She was fully alive to the advantages of her position, and had never married from the fear of being sought more for her money than for herself. So, at least, rumor has it. Mr. Tobes, the Wesleyan clergyman of the next parish, whose awakening sermons decoyed the black sheep of the surrounding folds to him, had tried for the prize for more than seven years, but in vain. Miss Bulpit smiled with benevolent condescension on his assiduities, allowed him to meet her at the railway station and to hand her a bouquet occasionally; but this was the extent of his reward. He persevered, however; and, when Miss Bulpit shook her black silk head at him with a melancholy smile and a reproof for wasting on her the precious time that belonged to his flock, Mr. Tobes would reply that the laborer was worthy of his hire, and that no man could live without an occasional recompense for his labors.
Miss Bulpit was the lowest of the Low-Church, so zealous in propagating her own views as to be a severe trial to the vicar, Mr. Langrove. The vicar was a shy, scholarly man and a great lover of peace, but he was often hard pushed to keep the peace with Miss Bulpit. She crossed him in every way, and defied him to his very face; but it was done so mildly, with such an unction of zeal and such a sincere desire to correct his errors and make up for his shortcomings, that it was impossible to treat her like an ordinary antagonist. She had a soup-kitchen and a dispensary in her own house, where the poor of his parish were fed and healed; and if Miss Bulpit made these material things the medium of dealing with their souls, and if they chose to be dealt with, how could Mr. Langrove interfere to prevent it? If she had a call to break the word to others, why should she not obey it just as he obeyed his? He had his pulpit, which she did not interfere with—a mercy for which the vicar was not, perhaps, sufficiently grateful. Miss Bulpit was limited to no restriction of place or time; she could preach anywhere and at a moment’s notice; the water was always at high pressure, and only wanted a touch to set it flowing into any channel; the cottages, the wards of the hospital, the village school, the roadside, any place was a rostrum for her. If she met a group of laborers going home with their spades over their shoulders, Miss Bulpit would accost them with a few good words; and if they took them well, as their class mostly do from ladies, she would plunge into the promiscuous depths of that awful leather bag of hers that was Mr. Langrove’s horror, and evolve from a chaos of pill-boxes, socks, spectacles, soap, black draughts, buns, and bobbins, a packet of tracts, and, selecting an appropriate one, she would proceed to expound it, and wind up with a few texts out of the little black Testament that lived by itself in an outside pocket of the black leather bag. This state of things would have been bad enough, even if Miss Bulpit had held sound views; but what made it infinitely worse was that her orthodoxy was more than doubtful. But there was no way of putting her in her place. She was too rich for that. If she had been a poor woman, like Miss Merrywig, it would have been easy enough; but Miss Bulpit’s fortune had built a bulwark of defence round her, and against these stout walls the vicar’s shafts might be pointed in perfect safety to the enemy. It was a great mercy if they did not recoil on himself. Some persons accused him of being ungrateful. How could he quarrel with her for preaching in the school when she had re-roofed it for him, after he had spent six months in fruitless appeals to the board to do it? How could the authorities of the hospital refuse her the satisfaction of saying a few serious words to the inmates, when she supplied them with unlimited port-wine and jellies, and other delicacies which the authorities could not provide? It was very difficult to turn out a benefactor who paid liberally for her privileges, and had so firm a footing in every charitable institution of the county. The vicar was not on vantage-ground in his struggle to hold his own. Miss Bulpit was a pillar of the state of Dullerton. There were not a few who whispered that if either must go to the wall, it had better be the parson than the parishioner. Coals were at famine prices; soup and port-wine are comforting to the soul of man, and the donor’s strictures on S. James and exclusive enthusiasm for S. Paul were things that could be tolerated by those whom they did not concern.
Franceline had been to see Miss Merrywig, who lived like a lizard in the grass, with a willow weeping copious tears over her mouldy little cottage. The cheerful old lady always spoke with thankfulness of the quiet and comfort of her home, and believed that everybody must envy her its picturesque situation, to say nothing of the delights of being wakened by the larks before daylight, and kept awake long after midnight by the nightingales. The woods at Dullerton were alive with nightingales. On emerging from the damp darkness after an hour with Miss Merrywig, Franceline found that the sun had climbed up to the zenith, and was pouring down a sultry glow that made the earth smoke again. There was a stile at the end of the wood, and she sat down to rest herself under the thick shade of a sycamore. The stillness of the noon was on everything. A few lively linnets tried to sing; but, the effort being prompted solely by duty, after a while they gave it up, and withdrew to the coolest nooks, and enjoyed their siesta like the lazy ones. Nobody stirred, except the insects that were chirping in the grass, and some bees that sailed from flower to flower, buzzing and doing field-labor when everybody else was asleep or idle. To the right the fields were brimful of ripening grain of every shade of gold; the deep-orange corn was overflowing into the pale amber of the rye, and the bearded barley was washing the hedge that walled it off from the lemon-colored wheat. To the left the rich grass-lands were dotted with flocks and herds. In the nearest meadow some cattle were herding. It was too hot to eat, so they stood surveying the fulness of the earth with mild, bovine gaze. They might have been sphinxes, they were so still; not a muscle in their sleek bodies moved, except that a tail lashed out against the flies now and then. Some were in the open field, holding up their white horns to the sunlight; others were grouped in twos and threes under a shady tree; but the noontide hush was on them all. Presently a number of horses came trooping leisurely up to the pond near the stile; the mild-eyed kine moved their slow heads after the procession, and then, one by one, trooped on with it. The noise of the hoofs plashing into the water, and the loud lapping of the thirsty tongues, was like a drink to the hot silence. Franceline watched them lifting their wet mouths, all dripping, from the pool, and felt as if she had been drinking too. There was a long, solemn pause, and then a sound like the blast of an organ rose up from the pond, swelling and sweeping over the fields; before it died away a calf in a distant paddock answered it.
If any one had told Franceline, as she sat on her stile, thinking sweet, nothing-at-all thoughts, under the sycamore tree, that she was communing with nature, she would have opened her dark eyes at them, and laughed. It was true, nevertheless. She might not know it, but she drew a great deal of her happiness from the woods and fields, and the birds and the sunsets. Her life had been from its babyhood, comparatively speaking, a solitary one, and the want, or rather the absence, of kindred companions had driven her unconsciously into companionship with nature. Her father’s society was a melancholy one enough for a young girl. Raymond’s mind was like an æolian harp set up in a ruin; every breath of wind that swept over it drew out sounds of sweet but mournful music. Even his cheerfulness—and it was uniform and genuine—had a note of sadness in it, like a lively air set in a minor key; there was nothing morbid or harsh in his spirit, but it was entirely out of tune with youth. He was perfectly resigned to life, but the spring was broken; he looked on at Franceline’s young gayety, as he might do at the flutterings and soarings of her doves, with infinite admiration, but without the faintest response within himself. So the child grew up as much alone as a bird might be with creatures of a different nature, and made herself a little world of her own—not a dream world, in the sense of ordinary romance; she had read no novels and knew nothing about the great problem of the human heart, except what its own promptings may have whispered to her. She made friends with the flowers and the birds and the woods, and loved them as if they were living companions. She watched their comings and goings, and found out their secrets, and got into a way of talking to them and telling them hers. As a child, the first peep of the snowdrop and the first call of the cuckoo was as exciting an event to her as the arrival of a new toy or a new dress to other little girls. She found S. Francis of Assisi’s beautiful hymn to his “brother, the sun, and his sisters, the moon and the stars,” one day in an old book of her father’s, and she learned it by heart, and would warble it in a duet with the nightingale out of her lattice-window sometimes when Angélique fancied her fast asleep. As she grew up the mystery of the poem grew clearer to her, and she repeated it with a deeper sense of sympathy with the brothers and sisters that dwell in the sky, and the clear, pure water, and everywhere in the beautiful creation. I am sorry if this sounds unnatural, but I cannot help it. I am describing Franceline as I knew her. But I don’t think it will seem unnatural if you notice the effect of surroundings on delicate-fibred children; how easily they follow the lights we hold out to them, and how vibratile their little spirits are. There was no absolute want of child society at Dullerton, any more than grown-up society; but Franceline de la Bourbonais did not care for it somehow. She felt shy amongst the noisy, romping children that swarmed in the nurseries of Dullerton, and they thought her a queer child, and did not get on well with her. The only house where she cared at all to go in her juvenile days was the vicarage; but the attraction was the vicar himself, rather than his full home, that was like an aviary of chattering parrots and chirping canaries. Now that the parrots were grown up and “going out,” Franceline saw very little of them. They were occupied making markers on perforated card-board for all their friends, or else “doing up” their dresses for the next dinner or croquet party; the staple topic of their conversation after these entertainments was why Mr. Charlton took Miss This down to dinner, instead of Miss That; whether it was an accident, or whether there was anything in it; and how divinely Mr. Charlton had sung “Ah, non giunge.” These things were not the least interesting to Franceline, who was not “out,” or ever likely to be. Who would take her, and where could she get dresses to go? She hated perforated card-board work, and she did not know Mr. Charlton. It was no wonder, therefore, she felt out of her element at the vicarage, like a wild bird strayed into a cackling farmyard, and that the Langrove girls thought her dull and cold.
It would be a very superficial observer, nevertheless, who would accuse Franceline of either coldness or dulness, as she sits there on this lovely summer day, her gypsy hat thrown back, and showing the small head in its unbroken outline against the sky, with the red gold hair drifting in wavy braids from the broad, ivory forehead, while her dark eyes glance over the landscape with an intense listening expression, as if some inaudible voices were calling to her. It was very pleasant sitting there in the shade doing nothing, and there is no saying how long she might have indulged in the delicious far niente, if a thrush had not wakened suddenly in the foliage over her head, and reminded her that it was time to be stirring. It was nearly three hours since she had left home, and Angélique would be wondering what had become of her. With a fairy suddenness of motion she rose up, vaulted over the stile with the agility of a young kid, and plunged into the teeming field. There was a footpath through it in ordinary times, but it was flooded now, and she had to wade through the rye, putting her arms out before her, as if she were swimming; for a light breeze had sprung up and was blowing the tawny wave in ripples almost into her face. She shut her eyes for a moment, and, opening them, suddenly fancied she was in the middle of the sea, the sun lighting up the yellow depths with myriads of scarlet poppies and blue-bells, that shone like fairy sea-weed through the stems. She had not got quite to the end of the last field when she heard a sound of voices coming down the park toward a small gate that opened into the fields. She hurried on, thinking it must be Sir Simon, and perhaps her father; and it was not until he was close by the gate that she discovered her mistake. One of the voices belonged to Mr. Charlton, the other to a young man whom she had never seen before. Franceline knew Mr. Charlton by sight. She had met him once at Miss Merrywig’s, who was a particular friend of his—but then everybody was a particular friend of Miss Merrywig’s—and a few times when she was out walking with Sir Simon and her father, and the young man had stood to shake hands; but this had not led to anything beyond a bowing acquaintance. That was not Mr. Charlton’s fault. There were few things that would have gratified him more than to be able to establish himself as a visitor at The Lilies; but M. de la Bourbonais had not given him the smallest sign of encouragement, so he had to content himself with raising his hat instinctively an inch higher than to any other lady of his acquaintance when he met Franceline on the road or in the green lanes—he on horseback, she, of course, on foot; and when the young French girl returned his salute by that stately little bend of her head, he would ride on with a sense of elation, as if a royal princess had paid him some flattering attention. This was the first time they had met alone on foot. Mr. Charlton’s first impulse was to speak; but something stronger than first impulse checked him, and, before he had made up his mind about it, he had lost an opportunity. The stranger, whose presence of mind was disturbed by no scruples or timidity, stepped quickly forward, and lifted the latch of the heavy wooden gate, and swung it back, lifting his hat quite off, and remaining uncovered till Franceline had passed in. It was very vexatious to Mr. Charlton to have missed the chance of the little courtesy, and to feel that his companion had the largest share in the bow that included them both as she walked rapidly on. Franceline’s curiosity, meanwhile, was excited. Who could this strange gentleman be, who looked so like a Frenchman, and bowed like one? If he was a guest of Mr. Charlton’s, she would never know, most likely; but if he was staying at the Court, she would soon hear all about him. She wondered which way they were going. The gate had clicked, so they were sure to have gone on. Franceline scarcely stopped to consider this, but, obeying the impulse of the moment, turned round and looked. She did so, and saw the stranger, with his hand still upon the gate, looking after her.
TO BE CONTINUED.