The Sheep-Stealers

by Violet Jacob

Like all young, open natures who love truly, Harry was humble. His own inferiority to the girl at his side was manifest to him as he looked up at her through the grasses. His life had been, if anything, rather more regular than that of the ordinary young man, for the extreme genuineness of his nature had necessitated that some real feeling, however transient, should direct his desires. Nevertheless, temptations that assailed others had not stepped aside in his favour, and it was a miracle to him that this creature, so delicate, so pure, so refined, should be willing to walk out of the fairy radiance of her maiden kingdom to join hands with him. The little demure air that never left her, even when she had seemed most near to him, was a charm. There was always a suggestion about her of not giving too much, and he admired it as he might have admired the delicacy of scent in a white flower.

He loved refinement, though he could not distinguish between the false and the true, being younger in his mind than in his years; and it is the irony of life that a knowledge of valuations comes to many—indeed to most—when it is too late to be useful. He had reverence in him and a high ideal of womanhood; though it was a crude one, it was the best that his youth and unanalytic nature could frame. The dainty calm and reserve with which Isoline had met his obvious love was as if the white flower grew on a height to be scaled with patience, and bloomed to be touched by one hand alone. He was not the first to mistake coldness for purity.

[CHAPTER XXIV
A CARD HOUSE]

THE news of the engagement fell like a bombshell into the circle at Waterchurch; to all but Llewellyn it came as an absolute surprise. Harry’s temporary attachment to any pretty girl who came in his way was taken as such a matter of course by his parents, that the attentions he had bestowed on Isoline during the few days she had stayed with them were nothing out of the ordinary run of events.

Mr. Lewis had made his consent conditional, promising to give it when he should hear of the Squire’s approval, and withholding it entirely till Harry should assure him of the sanction. Isoline, to whom her uncle’s decision suggested a flying in the face of Providence, relapsed into soft obstinacy, submitting outwardly to what for the moment seemed inevitable, and covering a persistence which would recognize no scruple with a layer of docility. Her attitude was that of a sand-bag towards a bullet—it offered no visible resistance. At the same time it was impenetrable.

The Vicar had but little respect for the conventional view of marriage. While he held it unwise for young people to plunge hand in hand into the dismal bog of extreme poverty, only to waste their youth and strength in the sordid flounderings which alone can keep their heads above water, his ideas of the important things of life were at variance with those of most people. He regarded the poverty which necessitates some self-denial as a strengthener of the bonds which tie those whose love is love indeed, and the outward circumstances which (whatever they may say) are the things deemed most essential by the majority, seemed to him to have a secondary place.

He was an intensely spiritual man. Abstract things were more real to him than the things usually called tangible facts. Though he lived in a retired spot and kept so much apart from the world, his earlier life had lain in crowded places, and he had studied men and women very profoundly. His mental search after truth had been keen, and he was one who liked half-truths so little that it irked him to have to mix with those whose current coin they were. He would almost have preferred lies. That was one reason why solitude was dear to him. There was only one person among his neighbours with whom he felt himself in true accord, and that was Lady Harriet Fenton. She was a woman whom no expediency and no custom could ever induce to deal in false values.

The tying up for life of two people seemed immeasurably more awful to the Vicar than it does to the world in general, for he reckoned with things to whose existence little attention is paid. The power of two characters to raise or lower each other, was in his eyes a more real thing than the power of two purses to maintain the establishment that their owners’ friends expect of them. But while he held these opinions, he had seen enough to show him that to hundreds of natures the suitable establishment is all-satisfying, and will preserve them in a lukewarm felicity until death parts them. He knew that strong meat is not for babes. Isoline was a babe, but he was not so sure about Harry. Mr. Fenton’s difficulties were no secret to him, and he was aware that, should the young man marry, he would have to content himself with very little. Isoline, even when her husband should have become head of the family, would scarcely be able to keep up the show he suspected her of coveting. It was a point on which he resolved to enlighten her.

Although he considered him far too young to think of marriage, he had always liked Harry, for his simplicity and impetuous ways struck him less as blunt intelligence than as late development, and he believed that, were he to develop in the society of Isoline, he would develop away from her; his character at twenty-five was yet in the making, while hers, at nineteen, was set. All this was more to him than the fact that his niece would, socially speaking, be marrying well.