Маргарет Олифант
Phoebe, Junior
CHAPTER XXVI
THE HALL
It is unnecessary to say that the dinner party in the Hall bore very little resemblance to those simple amusements in No. 6, Grange Lane. There were three or four people to meet Mr. May, who, as an orator and literary man, had greater reputation even such a little way from home than he had in his own town. He was a very good preacher, and those articles of his were much admired as “thoughtful” papers, searching into many mental depths, and fathoming the religious soul with wonderful insight. Ladies especially admired them; the ladies who were intellectual, and found pleasure in the feeling of being more advanced than their neighbours. The Rector's wife of the parish in which the Dorsets lived applied herself with great vigour to the art of drawing him out. She asked him questions with that air of delightful submission to an intellectual authority which some ladies love to assume, and which it pleases many men to accept. His daughters were not at all reverential of Mr. May, and it soothed him to get marks of devotion and literary submission out of doors. Even Sophy Dorset had gone through the phase of admiration for her cousin. This had been dissipated, it is true, long ago; but yet she did not laugh, as she usually did, at the believers in him. She listened to Mrs. Rector plying him with eager questions, asking his advice on that point and the other, and smiled, but was charitable. As for Cousin Anne, she was charitable by nature, and all the world got the advantage of it. Little Ursula was one of her prime favourites – a motherless girl, who was the eldest, and who had to work for the family, was of all others the thing which moved her sympathies most. The little Indian children had long ere this yielded to the charms of Aunt Anne. They followed her wherever she went like little spaniels, hanging on by her dress. She had to go up to the nursery to hear them say their prayers before she dressed for dinner.
“You see, this is a proof that with children one should never be discouraged,” she said; “for they did not take to me at first;” and she turned her mild countenance, beaming with soft light, upon Ursula. To be hampered by these babies clinging about her, to have them claiming imperiously her attention and her time, however she might be engaged; to give up to them the moments of leisure in which otherwise she might have had a little quiet and repose, this was what Anne Dorset considered as her recompense.
“Oh, I wish I could be as good to Amy and Robin! But I feel as if I should like to shake them often,” cried Ursula, “even though I love them with all my heart. Oh! Cousin Anne, I don't think there is any one like you.”
“Yes, that is what she thinks her reward,” said Sophy. “I should like something better, if it was I. Don't copy her, Ursula. It is better to have children of your own, and get other people to nurse them. Anne, you see, likes it. I want you to marry, and get all the good things in this life. Let us leave the self-denials to her; she likes them, you perceive.”
“I don't know why you should always talk of marrying to me, Cousin Sophy,” said Ursula with gentle reproach. “I hope I am not a girl to think of such things.”
“And why not? Is it not the first duty of woman, you little simpleton?” said Sophy Dorset, with a laugh.
But Ursula could not imagine that it was only in this general way that her cousin spoke. She could not but feel that this big Clarence Copperhead, with the diamond buttons, and that huge expanse of shirt-front, had something to do with Sophy's talk. There was six feet of him, which is a thing that goes a long way with a girl; and he was not bad-looking. And why did he come to Carlingford, having nothing in the world to do with the place? and coming to Carlingford, why was papa sought out, of all people, to be his tutor? Certainly the circumstances were such as invited conjecture, especially when added on to Sophy's allusions. He took Ursula in to dinner, which fluttered her somewhat; and though he was much intent upon the dinner itself, and studied the menu with a devotion which would have made her tremble for her housekeeping, had she been sufficiently disengaged to notice it, he yet found time to talk a little between the courses.
“I did not expect, when I saw you in London, that we were to meet again so soon, Miss May,” was the perfectly innocent remark with which he opened the conversation.
Ursula would have said it herself had he not said it, and all she could do was to answer, “No, indeed,” with a smile.
“And I am coming to your father to be coached,” continued the young man. “It is a funny coincidence, don't you think so? I am glad you came to that ball, Miss May. It makes me feel that I know you. I don't like starting off afresh, all at once, among people I don't know.”
“No,” said Ursula; “I should not like it either. But there are other people you know in Carlingford. There is the lady who was at the ball – the young lady in black, I used to call her – Miss Beecham; you must know her better than you know me.”
“Who? Phœbe? really!” he said, elevating his eyebrows. “Phœbe in Carlingford! By Jove! how the governor will laugh! I should like to know,” with a conscious smile on his countenance, “what she is doing there.”
“Her grandmamma is ill, and she is nursing her,” said Ursula simply, at which young Copperhead laughed again.
“Oh, that is how it is! Very good of her, don't you think? Shouldn't suppose she would be amusing, the old granny, and Phœbe likes to be amused. I must go to see her as soon as I can get there. You know, we are Dissenters at home, Miss May. Good joke, isn't it? The governor will not hear a word against them. As a matter of fact, nobody does go to chapel in our rank of life; but the governor sometimes is as obstinate as an old pig.”
“I suppose he likes it best,” said Ursula, gently; and here a new course came round, and for the moment Clarence had something else to do. He resumed after the entrées, which were poor, as he made a mental note.
“Is there anything to do at Carlingford, Miss May? I hope you skate. I am not much in the hunting way; nor your father, I suppose? for, to be sure, a hunting parson would never do. I am too heavy a weight for most horses, and the good of galloping over the country all day, after a poor brute of a fox! – but we must not say that before Sir Robert. I suppose it is dull?” he said, somewhat pathetically, looking in her face.
“We don't think it dull, Mr. Copperhead. It may be, perhaps, for a gentleman.”
“That's it,” said Clarence. “I don't know if it's because women have more resources, or because they want less; but you always get on better than we do, somehow; very lucky for you. You don't expect so much. I believe that's what it is.”
“Then that shows we are the most sensible,” said Ursula, roused, and a little indignant.
He paused, to make his choice between the inevitable turkey and the inevitable beef.
“I hope it's braised,” he said, in a devout undertone. “You don't expect so much, Miss May, that's what it is; you're always in the house. You don't care for exercise. Bless you, if I didn't take exercise, I should be fifteen stone before you could turn round. How much are you? about eight, perhaps; not much more. That makes a deal of difference: you don't require to keep yourself down.”
Ursula did not make any answer. She was prepared to look upon him very favourably, and accept what he said as full of originality and force; but the tone the conversation had taken was not entirely to her mind. Phœbe could have managed it; but Ursula was not Phœbe. She was more disposed to take offence at the young man's tone than to guide it into better ways.
“I hope your mother is well,” she said at last, falteringly, after a long pause. Ursula thought her companion would remark this pause, and think her displeased. She might have saved herself the trouble, for it was the braised turkey which kept Clarence quiet, not offence.
“Oh, quite well, I thank you. Not so well as when I am at home; she don't like parting with me,” he said, “but, of course, I can't be always at my mother's apron-strings. Women forget that.”
“She was very kind when I was in London.”
“Yes, that just pleases her; she is never so happy as when she is buying things for somebody,” he replied, betraying an acquaintance with the exact manner of the kindness which somewhat disturbed poor Ursula: “that is exactly her way. I dare say she'll come and see the Dorsets while I'm here.”
Then there was again a pause, and Clarence turned to speak to some one at his other side.
“No, I don't hunt much,” he said; “I have come into the country to be coached. My father's a modern sort of man, and wants a fellow to be up in history, and that sort of thing. Bore – yes; and I dare say Carlingford is very dull. Oh, yes, I will go out with the hounds now and then, if there is not a frost. I should rather like a frost for my part.”
It was a hunting lady who had started this new conversation, into which the stranger had drifted away, leaving Ursula stranded. She was slightly piqued, it must be allowed, and when Sophy asked her after dinner how she liked her companion, made a dignified reply.
“I have no doubt he is very nice,” she said; “I don't know much of gentlemen. He talks of papa as if he were a school-master, and thinks Carlingford will be dull.”
“So it is, Ursula. I have often heard you say so.”
“Yes, perhaps; but a stranger ought to be civil,” said the girl, offended; and she went and entrenched herself by the side of Cousin Anne, where the new pupil could not come near her. Indeed he did not seem very anxious to do so, as Ursula soon saw. She blushed very hotly all by herself, under Cousin Anne's shadow: that she could have been so absurd as ever to think – But his size, and the weight over which he had lamented, and his abundant whiskers and large shirt front, made it quite impossible for Ursula to think of him as a person to be educated. It must be Miss Beecham, she said to herself.
No thoughts of this kind crossed Mr. Clarence Copperhead's mind, as he stretched his big limbs before the drawing-room fire after dinner, and said “Brava!” when the ladies sang. He knew “Brava” was the right thing to say. He liked to be at the Hall, which he had never visited before, and to know that it was undeniable gentry which surrounded him, and which at the piano was endeavouring to gain his approbation. He was so much his father's son that he had a sense of pleasure and triumph in being thus elevated; and he had a feeling, more or less, of contempt for the clergyman, “only a parson,” who was to be his coach. He felt the power and the beauty of money almost as much as his father did. What was there he could not buy with it? the services of the most learned pundit in existence, for what was learning? or the prettiest woman going to be his wife, if that was what he wanted. It may be supposed then that he had very little attention indeed to bestow upon a girl like Ursula, who was only the daughter of his coach – nobody at all in particular – and that her foolish fancies on the subject might have been spared. He aired himself on the hearth-rug with great satisfaction, giving now and then a shake to one of his long limbs, and a furtive glance to see that all was perfect in the sit of the garment that clothed it. He had been ploughed it is true, but that did not interfere much with his mental satisfaction; for, after all, scholarship was a thing cultivated chiefly by dons and prigs, and poor men; and no doubt this other poor man, the parson, would be able to put all into his head that was necessary, just as much as would pay, and no more – a process the mere thought of which made Clarence yawn, yet which he had wound up his noble mind to submit to.
“Mind you, I don't say I am going to work,” he had said to his mother; “but if you think he can put it into me, he may try,” and he repeated much the same sentiment, with a difference, to Sophy Dorset, who by way of civility, while the Rector's wife paid court to Mr. May, talked to Clarence a little, from the corner of the ottoman close to the fire.
“Work! well, I suppose so, after a sort. I don't mean to make myself ill with midnight oil and that sort of thing,” he said (he was not at all clear in his mind as to how the midnight oil was applied), “but if Mr. May can get it into me, I'll give him leave; for one thing, I suppose there will be nothing else to do.”
“Not much in Carlingford; there are neither pictures, nor museums, nor fine buildings, nor anything of the sort; and very little society; a few tea-parties, and one ball in the season.”
Mr. Clarence Copperhead shrugged his large shoulders.
“I shan't go to the tea-parties, that's certain,” he said; “a fellow must hunt a little, I suppose, as the place is so destitute. As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.”
“Have you seen the box of curious things John sent me with the children?” said Sophy. “They are on the table at the end of the room, – yataghans, and I don't know what other names they have, all sorts of Indian weapons. I should think you would be interested in them.”
“Thanks, Cousin Sophy, I am very well where I am,” he said. He looked at her in such a way that she might have appropriated this remark as a compliment, had she pleased; but Sophy laughed, and it is to be feared did not feel the compliment, for she turned right round to somebody else, and took no more notice of Clarence. He was so fully satisfied with himself that he had not any strong sense of neglect, though he had but little conversation with the company. He was quite satisfied to exhibit himself and his shirt-front before the fire.
Next day he accompanied the Mays back to Carlingford. Mr. May had enjoyed his visit. His mind was free for the moment; he had staved off the evil day, and he had a little money in his pocket, the remains of that extra fifty pounds which he had put on to Tozer's bill. With some of it he had paid some urgent debts, and he had presented five pounds to Cotsdean to buy his wife a gown, and he had a little money in his pockets. So that in every way he was comfortable and more at ease than usual. The reckoning was four months off, which was like an eternity to him in his present mood of mind, and of course he would get the money before that time. There was so much time, indeed, that to begin to think of the ways and means of paying it at this early period seemed absurd. He was to have three hundred pounds for the year of Copperhead's residence with him, if he stayed so long, and that would do, if nothing else. Therefore Mr. May was quite easy in his mind, not in the least feeling the possibility of trouble in store for him. And the visit had been pleasant. He had enlarged his acquaintance, and that among the very sort of people he cared to know. He had been very well received by all the Dorsets, and introduced by Sir Robert as a relation, and he had received some personal incense about his works and his gifts which was sweet to him. Therefore he was in very good spirits, and exceedingly amiable. He conversed with his future pupil urbanely, though he had not concealed his entire concurrence in Sir Robert's opinion that he was “a cub.”
“What have you been reading lately?” he asked, when they had been transferred from the Dorsets' carriage, to the admiration and by the obsequious cares of all the attendant officials, into the railway carriage. Mr. May liked the fuss and liked the idea of that superiority which attended the Dorsets' guests. He had just been explaining to his companions that Sir Robert was the Lord of the Manor, and that all the homage done to him was perfectly natural; and he was in great good-humour even with this cub.
“Well, I've not been reading very much,” said Clarence, candidly. “What was the good? The governor did not want me to be a parson, or a lawyer, or anything of that sort, and a fellow wants some sort of a motive to read. I've loafed a good deal, I'm afraid. I got into a very good set, you know, first chop – Lord Southdown, and the Beauchamps, and that lot; and – well, I suppose we were idle, and that's the truth.”
“I see,” said Mr. May; “a good deal of smoke and billiards, and so forth, and very little work.”
“That's about it,” said the young man, settling himself and his trousers, which were the objects of a great deal of affectionate care on his part. He gave them furtive pulls at the knees, and stroked them down towards the ankle, as he got himself comfortably into his seat.
Mr. May looked at him with scientific observation, and Ursula with half-affronted curiosity; his self-occupation was an offence to the girl, but it was only amusing to her father. “An unmitigated cub,” Mr. May pronounced to himself; but there where he sat he represented three hundred a-year, and that, at least, was not to be despised. Ursula was not so charitable as her father; she was not amused by him in the slightest degree. Had he come down to Carlingford in humble worship of her pretty eyes, and with a romantic intention of making himself agreeable to her, the captivating flattery would have prepossessed Ursula, and prepared her to see him in a very pleasant light, and put the best interpretation upon all he did and said. But this pretty delusion being dissipated, Ursula was angry with herself for having been so foolish, and naturally angry with Clarence for having led her into it, though he was quite without blame in the matter. She looked at him in his corner – he had taken the best corner, without consulting her inclinations – and thought him a vulgar coxcomb, which perhaps he was. But she would not have been so indignant except for that little bit of injured feeling, for which really, after all, he was not justly to blame.
CHAPTER XXVII
A PAIR OF NATURAL ENEMIES
After the evening at Grange Lane which has been described, Reginald May met Northcote in the street several times, as was unavoidable, considering the size of the place, and the concentration of all business in Carlingford within the restricted length of the High Street. The two young men bowed stiffly to each other at first; then by dint of seeing each other frequently, got to inclinations a little more friendly, until at length one day when Northcote was passing by the College, as Reginald stood in the old doorway, the young chaplain feeling magnanimous on his own ground, and somewhat amused by the idea which suddenly presented itself to him, asked his Dissenting assailant if he would not come in and see the place. Reginald had the best of it in every way. It was he who was the superior, holding out a hand of favour and kindness to one who here at least, was beneath him in social consideration; and it was he who was the assailed, and, so to speak, injured party, and who nevertheless extended to his assailant a polite recognition, which, perhaps, no one else occupying the same position would have given. He was amused by his own magnanimity, and enjoyed it, and the pleasure of heaping coals of fire upon his adversary's head was entirely delightful to him.
“I know you do not approve of the place or me,” he said, forgetting in that moment of triumph all his own objections to it, and the ground upon which these objections were founded. “Come in and see it, will you? The chapel and the rooms are worth seeing. They are fair memorials of the past, however little the foundation may be to your mind.”
He laughed as he spoke, but without ill-humour; for it is easy to be good-humoured when one feels one's self on the gaining, not the losing side. As for Northcote, pride kept him from any demonstration of unwillingness to look at what the other had to show. He would not for worlds have betrayed himself. It was expedient for him, if he did not mean to acknowledge himself worsted, to put on a good face and accept the politeness cheerfully. So that it was on the very strength of the conflict which made them first aware of each other's existence, that they thus came together. The Dissenter declared his entire delight in being taken to see the place, and with secret satisfaction, not easily put into words, the Churchman led the way. They went to all the rooms where the old men sat, some dozing by the fire, some reading, some busy about small businesses; one had a turning-lathe, another was illuminating texts, a third had a collection of curiosities of a heterogeneous kind, which he was cleaning and arranging, writing neat little labels in the neatest little hand for each article.
“The charity of our ancestors might have been worse employed,” said Reginald. “A home for the old and poor is surely as fine a kind of benevolence as one could think of – if benevolence is to be tolerated at all.”
“Ye-es,” said Northcote. “I don't pretend to disapprove of benevolence. Perhaps the young who have a future before them, who can be of use to their country, are better objects still.”
“Because they will pay,” said Reginald; “because we can get something out of them in return; while we have already got all that is to be had out of the old people? A very modern doctrine, but not so lovely as the old-fashioned way.”
“I did not mean that,” said the other, colouring. “Certainly it ought to pay; everything, I suppose, is meant to pay one way or other. The life and progress of the young, or the gratified sentiment of the benefactor, who feels that he has provided for the old – which is the noblest kind of payment? I think the first, for my part.”
“For that matter, there is a large and most flourishing school, which you will come across without fail if you work among the poor. Do you work among the poor? Pardon my curiosity; I don't know.”
“It depends upon what you call the poor,” said the other, who did not like to acknowledge the absence of this element in Salem Chapel; “if you mean the destitute classes, the lowest level, no; but if you mean the respectable, comfortable – ”
“Persons of small income?” said Reginald. “I mean people with no incomes at all; people without trades, or anything to earn a comfortable living by; labouring people, here to-day and away to-morrow; women who take in washing, and men who go about hunting for a day's work. These are the kind of people the Church is weighted with.”
“I don't see any trace of them,” said the Nonconformist. “Smooth lawns, fine trees, rooms that countesses might live in. I can't see any trace of them here.”
“There is no harm in a bit of grass and a few trees, and the rooms are cheaper in their long continuance than any flimsy new rubbish that could be built.”
“I know I am making an unfortunate quotation,” said Northcote; “but there is reason in it. It might be sold for so much, and given to the poor.”
“Cheating the poor, in the first place,” said Reginald, warmly concerned for what he felt to be his own; “just as the paddock an old horse dies in might bear a crop instead, and pay the owner; but what would become of the old horse?”
“Half-quarter of this space would do quite as well for your pensioners, and they might do without – ”
“A chaplain!” said Reginald, laughing in spite of himself. “I know you think so. It is a sinecure.”
“Well, I think they may say their prayers for themselves; a young man like you, full of talent, full of capability – I beg your pardon,” said Northcote, “you must excuse me, I grudge the waste. There are so many things more worthy of you that you might do.”
“What, for example?”
“Anything almost,” cried the other; “digging, ploughing, building – anything! And for me too.”
This he said in an undertone; but Reginald heard, and did not carry his magnanimity so far as not to reply.
“Yes,” he said; “if I am wasted reading prayers for my old men, what are you, who come to agitate for my abolition? I think, too, almost anything would be better than to encourage the ignorant to make themselves judges of public institutions, which the wisest even find too delicate to meddle with. The digging and the ploughing might be a good thing for more than me.”
“I don't say otherwise,” said the young Dissenter, following into the old fifteenth-century chapel, small but perfect, the young priest of the place. They stood together for a moment under the vaulted roof, both young, in the glory of their days, both with vague noble meanings in them, which they knew so poorly how to carry out. They meant everything that was fine and great, these two young men, standing upon the threshold of their life, knowing little more than that they were fiercely opposed to each other, and meant to reform the world each in his own way; one by careful services and visitings of the poor, the other by the Liberation Society and overthrow of the State Church; both foolish, wrong and right, to the utmost bounds of human possibility. How different they felt themselves standing there, and yet how much at one they were without knowing it! Northcote had sufficient knowledge to admire the perfect old building. He followed his guide with a certain humility through the details, which Reginald had already learned by heart.
“There is nothing so perfect, so beautiful, so real now-a-days,” said the young Churchman, with a natural expansion of mind over the beauty to which he had fallen heir. It seemed to him, as he looked up at the tall windows with their graceful tracery, that he was the representative of all who had worked out their belief in God within these beautiful walls, and of all the perpetual worshippers who had knelt among the old brasses of the early founders upon the worn floor. The other stood beside him with a half envy in his mind. The Dissenter did not feel himself the heir of those centuries in the same unhesitating way. He tried to feel that he was the heir of something better and more spiritual, yet felt a not ungenerous grudge that he could not share the other kinship too.
“It is very beautiful and noble,” he said. “I should like to feel for it as you do; but what I should like still better would be to have the same clear certainty of faith, the same conviction that what they were doing was the only right thing to do which made both building and prayer so unfaltering in those days. We can't be so sure even of the span of an arch now.”
“No – nor can you be content with the old span, even though it is clearly the best by all rules,” said Reginald. The other smiled; he was the most speculative of the two, being perhaps the most thoughtful; and he had no fifteenth-century chapel to charm, nor old foundation to give him an anchor. He smiled, but there was a little envy in his mind. Even to have one's life set out before one within clear lines like this, would not that be something? If it had but been possible, no doubt saying prayers for the world, even with no better than the old men of the College to say amen, had something more beautiful in it than tours of agitation for the Liberation Society; but Northcote knew that for him it was not possible, any more than was the tonsure of Reginald's predecessor, who had said mass when first those pinnacles were reared towards heaven. After he had smiled he sighed, for the old faith was more lovely than all the new agitations; he felt a little ashamed of the Liberation Society, so long as he stood under that groined and glorious roof.
“May!” said some one, coming in suddenly. “I want you to go to the hospital for me. I am obliged to go off to town on urgent business – convocation work; and I must get a lawyer's opinion about the reredos question; there is not a moment to lose. Go and see the people in the pulmonary ward, there's a good fellow; and there are two or three bad accidents; and that old woman who is ill in Brown's cottage, you saw her the other day; and the Simmonds in Back Grove Street. I should have had a day's work well cut out, if I had not had this summons to town; but the reredos question is of the first importance, you know.”
“I'll go,” said Reginald. There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically, through the ears, as it were, of a sceptic. Reginald, seeing Northcote's keen eyes gleam at the sound of the Rector's voice, instinctively fell into sympathy with him, and heard the speech through him; and though he himself felt the importance of the reredos, yet he saw in a moment how such a question would take shape in the opinion of the young Dissenter, in whom he clearly saw certain resemblances to himself. Therefore he assented very briefly, taking out his note-book to put down the special cases of which the Rector told him. They had a confidential conversation in a corner, during which the new-comer contemplated the figure of Northcote in his strange semi-clerical garments with some amaze. “Who is your friend?” he said abruptly, for he was a rapid man, losing no time about anything.
“It is not my friend at all; it is my enemy who denounced me at the Dissenters' meeting.”
“Pah!” cried the Rector, curling up his nostrils, as if some disagreeable smell had reached him. “A Dissenter here! I should not have expected it from you, May.”
“Nor I either,” said Reginald; but his colour rose. He was not disposed to be rebuked by any rector in Carlingford or the world.
“Are you his curate,” said Northcote, “that he orders you about as if you were bound to do his bidding? I hope, for your own sake, it is not so.”
Now it was Reginald's turn to smile. He was young, and liked a bit of grandiloquence as well as another.
“Since I have been here,” he said, “in this sinecure, as you call it – and such it almost is – I have been everybody's curate. If the others have too much work, and I too little, my duty is clear, don't you think?”
Northcote made no reply. Had he known what was about to be said to him, he might have stirred up his faculties to say something; but he had not an idea that Reginald would answer him like this, and it took him aback. He was too honest himself not to be worsted by such a speech. He bowed his head with genuine respect. The apology of the Churchman whom he had assaulted, filled him with a kind of reverential confusion; he could make no reply in words. And need it be said that Reginald's heart too melted altogether when he saw how he had confounded his adversary? That silent assent more than made up for the noisy onslaught. That he should have thus overcome Northcote made Northcote appear his friend. He was pleased and satisfied beyond the reach of words.
