At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

“I wish you had,” said Kent. “Let us have just one rubber before I go. There is time.”

But Kent walked home that night with a new trouble at his heart that kept him awake a great part of the night.

Meanwhile Clytie was not enjoying herself at Durdleham. At first there were eager embraces, trifling tendernesses and solicitudes. The dear prodigal had returned, but the fatted calf was killed discreetly, lest it should convey a husk-flavoured reproach. Grace and Janet bubbled over with light Durdleham gossip, seeking to interest, and Clytie earnestly and sympathetically sought to be in touch with her surroundings. It was a real heartfelt effort on both sides towards harmony. But it soon became patent that these efforts were unavailing. Clytie saw the old prejudices barring her at every turn. She recognised with the bitterness of disillusionment that she was the bit of grit in the family machinery, stopping the smoothness of its working. As long as she identified herself with Durdleham interests things went well; but as soon as she, in her turn, ventured to sketch the bright incidents in her town life she felt a check in the current of mutual sympathy. If she was reserved, her sisters complained. They ought to know something of her friends, her occupations. When she was expansive they shrank cold and crablike into their mail of prejudice.

Her intimacy with a strange Bohemian man was a thorn in the side of the family. Mr. Davenant considered it extremely injudicious, and Mrs. Blather whispered to him that she scarcely thought it moral. Janet was too horrified to allude directly to the circumstance. But, in her neat, prim bedchamber, she prayed to the Almighty to lead her erring sister out of the paths of temptation. She duly informed Clytie of this act of piety, and when Clytie burst into laughter that was nearer to tears than to merriment, left the room in virtuous indignation.

Clytie could not help confessing to herself that she longed for Kent's companionship, with its broader sympathies and inspiring influences, but the view the household took of it pained her with a sense of aching discomfort, and made her feel a strange diffidence in writing to him as she had promised. She at last addressed him a short little note, stiff and constrained, which reached him the morning after his conversation with Wither and did not help to cheer him. Too proud to wait for an opportunity of posting this letter herself, she placed it on the hall slab together with the rest of the outgoing correspondence of the family. Although a hundred letters might have lain there for post without any one of them attracting Mrs. Blather's attention,—she was too pure-minded a gentlewoman for idle curiosity to be one of her failings,—it was too good an opportunity for the imps who seem sometimes to regulate human affairs to let slip, and as a matter of course Mrs. Blather's eye fell upon the address.

“So you are keeping up a violent correspondence with that man,” she remarked acidly to Clytie. It is the way of some women to exaggerate.

Clytie bit her lip, cheeking an impulsive answer. What was the use of a retort?

Women of broad, liberal education, with interests beyond the nursery, still-room, and the afternoon-tea table, are known to live together, like men, in comparative harmony. They have learned the lesson the higher, broader life teaches of rising or declining instinctively to another being's plane of thought or feeling. It is hardly a fault of sex that women are petty, spiteful, and intolerant. When the conditions of life are narrow and illiberal any human being, man or woman, runs the risk of being shaped by them. And that is why Mrs. Blather and Janet, good, upright women according to their lights, subordinated their affection to their principles, and stood away shocked from their sister. Their traditional ideals of femininity had been sinned against. The crime was all but unpardonable. It was always present with them, always assuming fresh, distorted shapes. They were on a different plane from Clytie, and viewed all her actions in a false perspective.

Clytie was hurt, wounded in her womanly pride. She knew that there was much clay in her composition, and often felt with chastening self-abasement how much nearer the angels Winifred was than herself. Yet she was accustomed to live in an atmosphere free from reproach. Winifred, Kent, the Farquharsons, and others of her friends might touch with light, tender finger on here and there an imperfection in her character or conduct; for this she was grateful, knowing the deeper feelings of esteem and respect that prompted. But to move in a circle where she was looked upon as a black sheep, as a girl on the path to unutterable abysses, galled her to the quick, sent the hot blood mounting in stinging waves to her cheek, leaving the heart cold. Yet she had learned not to blame her sisters over much. She had lost her militant scorn of Jacob. Kent had taught her that although Esau might possess the higher birthright which no bartering of pottage could alienate, there was still saving grace in the stolen birthright which Jacob guarded so jealously. But this knowledge did not make her heart less sore.

The happiest time in this Christmas visit was when she could get away into the old lumber-attic in which she had dreamed so many girlish dreams. It had long been dismantled of the Liberty curtains, Persian rugs, and cheap Japaneseries that had lent it the suggestion of artistic atmosphere the girl of eighteen had craved. It was bare now, except for a table and chair and a few odds and ends of artist's materials, but a fire could be laid in the grate to make things look cheery, and there was still the deeply recessed attic-window where she could stand and look out over the same drear landscape. It was only the ordinary midland succession of fields, now black with winter, and pastures through which the river ran, its course only indicated by the fringing line of pollards and willows. Away on the slope to the west rose a clump of trees from which peeped a few houses and a church spire, the little village of Wexwith. In the foreground ran the highroad skirted with new red-brick cottages, a touch of sordidness added by man to the ungenerous dreariness of nature. Once this had affected Clytie with a sense of the unutterable melancholy of things. The young are prone to be so affected. They are rather proud when they realise it; it is a kind of youthful vanity. But Clytie, like the wiser among us, sought brightness as she grew older, and although she could not consider the landscape cheerful, looked at it only through the memories of five years. Every spot had associations for her. There was the cottage where she had seen the little bully strike his playmate, the original conception of the picture that had helped to cause her welcome banishment from home. Next to it used to live the old beldame who threw out of doors the custards and jellies that Janet with angelic perseverance used to take her. What cruel mockery she used to make of Janet in those days! Now she submissively helped to carry the custards. Behind the swelling uplands over the village the sun set, a red ball in the wintry sky. For how many wild fantastic daubs had not that formed a background!