The stars, the sea, the night breeze, and a woman’s soul! Eternal tones evolving harmony from chaotic discords! Avarice, brutality, unlovely ignorance, and lust! Joan Gildersedge was Joan Gildersedge despite these excrescences of a debased progenitor. They touched her no more than clay can scratch a diamond. Though they enveloped her external being, they could not transform her soul. She lived within herself, conscious, spontaneous, inevitable. Her desires were spreading in prophetic dreams over a more magnanimous horizon. She was a gem hid in a casket, waiting for the lifting of the lid that she might shine.
Behind the casement the candle had completed its limitation of liberty. A hand rattled on the window-frame. Zeus Gildersedge’s nightly luxury had flickered to its socket, measured by two inches of wax nicked off neatly with an avaricious thumb-nail. His daughter, obeying the tyranny of greed, went slowly from under the starlight to bed.
II
THE village of Saltire straggled red-roofed up a green valley that branched northward from the shimmering ringlets of the Mallan. It was a sensuous patch of color, smothered up in woodland, warm and sun-steeped, overrun with roses. On either flank hills ascended, barriering the Saltire homesteads with tiers of trees. Sun and moon climbed over nebulous pines and larches to shine on red roof and flower-enamelled garden. Southward, moorland and meadow stretched towards the port of Rilchester and the sea.
Antiquarians had found in Saltire relics of considerable archæological interest. The guide-books expatiated sentimentally upon the wonders of St. Winifred’s Well, and on the church whose Norman nave had attached unto itself an Early English choir. Saltire was one of the wondrous few churches of repute where Cromwell had not stabled his horses. Sundry fine brasses blazoned the walls. Two crusaders slept cross-kneed in the chancel. Even a poet of distinction had written an ode under the patriarchal yew-tree in the churchyard. As for the cottages huddled under the benediction of the tower, they were as varied in humor as the centuries that had given them birth. Elizabethan, Jacobite, Georgian, a museum of British bourgeois architecture. There were only two new buildings in the village—a bald, blatant, granite-eyed chapel and a tavern, florid and cheerful. At the two village shops you could purchase all manner of merchandise, teething-powders and stationery, boot-polish and bacon.
Though the woodland valley above the Mallan burned a glorious Arcady, worthy of the glimmering armor of Arthurian princes, its inhabitants could hardly boast much kinship with such æsthetic surroundings. The Saltire folk, big-wigs and boors alike, were far from being Utopian either in morality or in creed. An oppressive narrowness took its text from the pulpit. For the Saltire sinners hell flamed with all its puerile and astounding fury. An atmosphere of stolid self-satisfaction pervaded the social ethics of the place. The philosophy of the local potentates smacked of vinegar; the average intelligence recalled the biblical “needle’s eye,” since nothing bulky could pass through it. There were clerical sermons on a Sunday and clerical arrogances during the week, flavored with an apathetic egotism and sour charity. The ladies of the village indulged largely in sundry Christian philanthropies, and yet were consistently unchristian in every larger sense. The laboring folk toiled, drank, and begot children. Suns came and went, but Saltire endured in pristine narrowness of soul.
The local celebrities were well differentiated and quaintly characteristic. There was the Reverend Jacob Mince, the vicar, lean, complacent, uxorious, and parsonic, a man who intoned through his nose, patronized creation, and was very wise concerning cabbages. Mrs. Mince, the vicaress, big, pallid, with a melancholy air of dilapidated Protestantism, contrasted with Mrs. Marjoy, the doctor’s wife, whose red face tilted its spectacles in the defence of virtue. Then there were the three Misses Snodley, maiden ladies of irreproachable morals, who drove a donkey chaise, delighted in scandal, and indulged in missionary work at a discreet distance. Lastly stood Mrs. Jumble, the intellectual light of the village, a most precise and pompous person, who read Shakespeare and delivered decretals on the conduct of life generally. In truth, there were numberless folk whose virtues it would be wearisome to chronicle and whose vices were inevitable and commonplace. Saltire was an orthodox and Christian village. It knew not Spinoza and would have martyred Kant.
Saltire Hall stood on a bluff, oak-girdled hill-side that sloped southward towards the water-meadows of the Mallan. Elizabethan in mood and feature, its tall chimney-stacks towered above the trees, its casements glimmered silver through the green. A rose-flecked terrace, archaic gardens, fish-ponds, and a wild fragment of park-land maintained a sympathetic setting to the house, over whose eaves a quaint melancholy brooded, as though the old manor found the Victorian present incompatible with the past.
There was a considerable gradation between bewigged and dark-featured Jacobites and the person of John Strong, Esq., a brazen bullionist, plump with the prosperity of a successful mercantile career. Saltire Hall—armor, ancestors, memories included—had fallen into the callous hands of a nineteenth-century tea merchant. John Strong, Esq., in the plenitude of years had gotten unto himself a picturesque and peaceful habitation. He had embarked his family upon the duck-pond of county society. He had become a power in Christendom, a ponderous autocrat heading the notabilities of an English village. He was a great man so long as he remained within two leagues of the village pump.
John Strong lived a British patriarch in his own household. His philosophy bulwarked itself upon solid state principles. He was orthodox to the backbone, a discreet and conventional Christian, an upholder of the monarchy, and a most punctilious church-warden. He possessed the arrogance of conviction begotten of long success. He could forgive a debt, but could not pardon any impropriety that based its being upon original intuition. His prejudices were like caltrops strewn before the advance of any unfamiliar philosophy. Question his convictions and he would vote you a fool or a prig, according to your age. He was as incapable of stomaching argument as a Jew of breakfasting off bacon.