CHAPTER I HOME
She lay in a quiet corner of the Rectory Garden, looking up at the majestic white clouds, that sailed across the blue of the summer sky, like Viking ships under full sail, speeding along over the deep blue of a limitless ocean. How glorious they were! How wonderful to contemplate these summer nimbi, in their immaculate, fleecy whiteness, in their shadowy recesses, in their glistening summits. They were pure and radiant, even as the girl's soul was, and by their affinity with it they seemed to call it up to them, to lift it up away from the sordid Rectory, with its harsh, unloving father, its dejected, stupid mother, its quarrelling daughters; away from the horrible village, full of vice, squalor and disease; away from the narrow stone church, in which a yet narrower creed was weekly preached. Away from all these, to the contemplation of the pure and the beautiful, these glorious clouds called her, and she loved them, the friends and companions of her thoughts through many a lonely hour. Now, in the hush of a hot afternoon, she lay very still under the gold rain of the laburnum-trees, looking up at the towering snowy masses in a rapture of delight.
Stossop Rectory lay, in its old-fashioned country grounds, inland from the sea about two miles on the south coast of Devon, and a very beautiful old place it was, long and low, containing many rooms, and having a deep gabled roof of Titian-red, that showed above the wealth of white and delicately pink roses that veiled its face; and if the Rectory from without looked the typical, peaceful English home, so within was it the really typical English home, full of disunion, pettiness, quarrelling, hatred and discontent. The English are perhaps of all humanity the greatest humbugs; they love, more than anything in the world, pretence; and the farther away the reality is from the sham they create out of their imagination the more dearly they love the sham; hence those amazing pictures of the domestic hearth, the happy, rosy-cheeked children, the smiling mother, the loving, protective father; the gentle temper, the sunny cheerfulness, the air of rest and peace and safety pervading all. Has anyone ever been the inmate of, or the visitor to, such a home? Let all who read these lines recall their recollections of home, their own and those they have seen. Whoever it was who wrote "Home, Sweet Home," one feels the author must have been an orphan and brought up at a school. The home in reality is the place where everyone feels they can display their bad temper and their bad manners, as they can wear their oldest, ugliest clothes and their surliest expressions. The heroic manly brothers of the story-book spend their time in pulling their sisters' hair and kicking them under the table; the gentle sisters hate them secretly in return; the father grumbles at his wife, the wife scolds the servants; and so the dreary round of home life goes on. The boys escape from it as soon as they can; the girls rebelliously long to follow; the unhappy wife and mother hopes vaguely for some relief that never comes; the father cherishes in his heart the memory of his last visit to town, on business, and looks forward eagerly to the next, enlivening the dull and stupid time that intervenes by bullying his wife.
Such is the average home, and such was it at Stossop Rectory, and, but for the enchanted garden, Regina Marlow, the Rector's youngest daughter, who was of totally different stamp and mould from the rest of the family, could never have supported life in it at all.
Some really golden moments in Mrs. Marlow's life, in which the Rector had no part—being away on one of his business visits to town—accounted for Regina. She was the child of love and passion, as the others were of distaste and dislike, for Mrs. Marlow entertained for her husband that solid dislike which is the basis of most marital relations. And the elder daughters, conceived and nurtured in it, had hate engrained in every fibre of their bodies. It showed in the spiteful gleams of their eyes, in the downward turn of their mouths, in their incessant wrangling with each other. Beautiful they were, for Mrs. Marlow was beautiful, but the nine months of inward revolt from her husband that she had suffered in each case while they were being fashioned within her, of her blood and her bone and her brain, had given them both the terrible curse of the hating soul. But Regina, born of love, of that sweet tenderness like the spring zephyr, of that wild passion like a summer storm, that the gods have given to man to illumine the darkness of the earth, Regina showed love and joy in every line of her face and form. Her mouth was always smiling; its curves were upwards, not downwards. Her voice was soft with all the notes of love and sex in it; her eyelids were sweetly arched; her blue eyes overflowed with tenderness and smiles; her soul was filled to the brim with what the Rector would have termed the "grace of God," and not untruly, since God is love. All through Regina's creation her mother had dwelt on love and on its sacred memories, and naturally enough the embryo conceived and reared in love and loving thoughts came into the world fitted out and equipped for love. Ah, how little do women think of the evil they commit when they give themselves to husbands they do not love! The hideous crime it is, blacker than any, to give life to beings burdened with evil souls, do they ever think of it? That hate they feel for the father, do they not realise how it bears fruit in the evil tempers and passions of the child? Mrs. Marlow, deep in her inmost heart, always thought of Regina, the gay, loving, radiant Regina, as the child of sin. No small voice ever whispered to her that the elder children, fretful, vicious, unhealthy, malicious, reflections of her own state of mind when bearing them, were children of a greater sin—against themselves, against society, against the human race.
She never thought about these things; she believed herself to be a thoroughly good woman, who had sinned once in her life, but sincerely repented.
She had dismissed her lover; she had turned a deaf ear to the passionate entreaties of the man who really wanted her, and had remained to do her duty to her husband, who would have been so thankful to be free from her—duty, which consisted, according to her ideas, in counting his shirts when they came home from the wash, presiding over the flannel club he had started in the village, seeing that he had three meals a day and that the Rectory was cleaned up twice a year, and disliking him extremely the whole time.
Year by year her face hardened and her intellect diminished under the cramping influence of the hating habit; now and then the lines of her mouth would soften and her eyes glow tenderly as she thought of Regina's father, but she immediately chased the warmth of love out of her heart as most improper, and hastened off to fold her husband's clothes or put his books in order, with the proper feeling of repulsion, hatred and disgust to which she was accustomed.
Whether such a state of living and being would really be acceptable to the one who said, Love one another, and Blessed are the pure in heart, she never stopped to ask herself. That she would have been accounted by him the "whitened sepulchre" never occurred to her.