Читать книгу Thorpe Regis - Frances Mary Peard - Страница 4

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“So many worlds, so much to do,

So little done, such things to be.”

In Memoriam.

The path from Thorpe Regis to Hardlands lay across two or three of those green fields which ran in and out of the village and gave it the air of deep retirement remarked by the few visitors who jogged in a fly from the nearest town to see the thatched cottages, the red church, the apple orchards, and the great myrtles which grew boldly up to the very eaves of the houses. You might reach Hardlands in a more dignified and deliberate fashion by driving along the old London road, and turning into a short lane, when the iron gate would soon appear in sight; but the most sociable and habitual means of approach was that which led through the fields to a narrow shrubbery path, emerging from which the long white house, with a green veranda stretching half-way across its front, became pleasantly visible at once.

Between Hardlands and the Vicarage a very brisk communication was kept up. The Squire and the Vicar had not indeed been friends beyond the term of Mr. Miles’s residence at Thorpe, but that had now reached a period of fifteen years; and although fifteen years at their time of life will not balance an earlier friendship of but five, and although there was neither similarity nor natural sympathy between the two men, yet neighbourhood and a certain amount of isolation had formed a bond which either of the two would have found it painful to break. Mr. Chester, moreover, had lost his wife while the Mileses were yet fresh comers, and with two motherless girls left upon his hands it became a natural thing to apply in his perplexity to Mrs. Miles, a woman in whom, whatever else might lack strength, it was not the sweet tenderness of motherly instincts. Winifred and little Bessie were at least as much in the Vicarage nursery as their own, sharing all things with Marion and Anthony; and if, as they grew older, a half-unconscious change took place in their relationships, it had not been the means of loosening the intimacy, or diminishing the number of mutual visits. Bessie and her father had that morning looked in at the Vicarage, and in the late afternoon Marion and Anthony walked across the fields by the familiar path along which they could have gone blindfold, towards Hardlands.

The day was one of those exhilarating days of early summer, before any languor of great beat has stolen into its heart, and while the freshness of spring still leaps up in breezy flutterings of leaf and bough. Hay-making was going on vigorously, and the air was laden with the grateful scent. There were fields yet green with cool depths of waving grass, and others where keen shadows fell upon the smoothly shaven turf. Here and there a foxglove reared itself upwards in the hedges, here and there dog-roses unfolded innocent little pink and white buds. Without any striking beauty in the landscape about Thorpe, a certain pastoral and homely charm in the thatched cottages, the fields, the blossoming orchards, and even in such unromantic details as the shallow duck-pond under Widow Andrews’s wall, made a more exacting demand upon the affections of those who lived among them than could altogether be understood by such as only looked upon them from the outside. Anthony Miles, as he walked along with his head a little thrown back, switching the grass with a laurel rod confiscated from Widow Andrews’s little grandson, who had been caught by the brother and sister, as they passed, using it as an instrument of torture upon a smaller and weaker companion, was not thinking of the familiar objects with any conscious sense of admiration, and yet they were affecting him pleasantly; so that, although he might have said many other places were filling his heart at this time—for there is an age with both men and women when place has even more power than people—it is likely that, had he known the truth about himself, he would, after all, have found Thorpe in the warmest corner; old sleepy stupid Thorpe with its hay-ricks, its bad farming, and its broad hedges cumbering the land, against which he was at this moment inveighing to Marion.

“Did you ever see anything cut up like these half-dozen acres? There’s one slice taken out, and here’s another; a hedge six foot across at the bottom if it’s an inch, and a row of useless elms sucking all the goodness out of the ground. I don’t believe there’s a richer bit of soil in all England, and they can do no more than get a three-cornered mouthful of pasture out of it for one old cow.”

“O Anthony, why can’t you let things alone, when they don’t concern you? My father has allowed you to have your own way about the paddock, and you surely need not tease Mr. Chester to death over his hedges.”

“That is so like a woman, who can never see anything beyond her own shadow. Can’t you understand that it would be for the good of Thorpe if the ground that feeds people’s mouths were better drained and if there were more of it?”

“So this is to be the next hobby, is it?”

“Farming? Hum, I don’t know. If I could induce old Chester to go in for a few experiments, it might be worth while, perhaps, to get up the subject. But everything is on such an absurdly small scale here, that it would be hardly possible to do anything satisfactory.”

“And you really mean that you would be willing for all your schemes to resolve themselves into the miserable mediocrity of settling down at Thorpe and improving the hedges of the district!” said Marion indignantly.

“One might do a good deal in that way,” Anthony answered, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes as he looked at his sister. Any one who had seen him at that moment must have been struck with the extreme boyishness of his appearance. It might have been the curly light brown hair, or, more likely, the slight figure and sloping shoulders, but something there was which had changed but little for the last ten years, and kept him a boy still. Marion looked years older. He was always irritating her by his quick changes, his enthusiasm, his projects for the good of other people. So long as he might have his own way in the doing, there was nothing that he would not have done.

Marion had small sympathy for such notions; she clung to what was her own with a passion and a wilfulness which made her blind to what she would not see, but she did not care to go out of that circle. Yet people said that the brother and sister were alike, and to a certain extent the world’s judgments were correct, as the world’s judgments often are, only that a hundred little things too subtile for so large a beholder made a gulf between the two. He provoked her constantly as he was provoking her now.

“I sometimes think you will end in doing nothing,” she said, walking on quickly.

“So do I, a dozen times a day. Who’s this coming?—isn’t it that fellow Stephens? I’ve a bone to pick with him, I can tell him. What do you suppose he’s after now? He wants Maddox to let him have that bit of ground close by the school to build a chapel upon. I think I see it! Stokes gave me a hint of it, and I’ve been bullying Maddox all the morning, and pretty well got his word for it at last. The canting methodistical rascal! I wish I could see him kicked out of the place.”

Anthony was speaking with great energy. He and Marion were walking through the cool meadows, beyond which lay the softly swelling hills. To the left, a little in front of them, the Hardlands shrubbery gate led into a thin belt of fir-trees, but the path continued through the meadows, until it crossed a small stream, and reached a lane branching from the high road. People liked to turn away from the hard dust and get into these pretty fields, where soft shadows fell gently and the delicate cuckoo flowers grew; and Mr. Chester had tacitly suffered a right of way to be established, though he inveighed against it on every occasion. It was a grievance with which he would not have parted for the world, even if his own natural kind-heartedness had not been entirely on the side of the tired wayfarers, and nobody took any notice of it. So that even Anthony’s indignation did not extend itself to the fact that David Stephens was coming towards them along the narrow track.

“I shall go on: Winifred will be wondering what has become of us,” said Marion, who had not sufficiently forgiven her brother to be ready to take his side in the contest. He stood still with his hand on the gate, waiting for Stephens to pass, so determinedly, that the man as he reached the spot stopped at once.

He was much shorter than Anthony, as short, indeed, as an ordinary-sized boy of fourteen, and there was an actual though not very prominent deformity of figure. Yet this warp of nature seldom struck those who fronted him, for the head and face were so powerful and remarkable that they irresistibly seized the attention. Even Anthony, who was as enthusiastic in his prejudices as in his other feelings, was conscious of something in the eyes which checked his first flow of resentment. He would have preferred beginning with a more trenchant opening than—

“Hallo, Stephens, you’re the person I wanted to see.”

“Did you, sir? Well, this is the second time I’ve been to Thorpe to-day.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Anthony, recovering himself, and feeling the words come to him. “I’ve seen Maddox, he’s just been at our house, and what you’re after won’t do at all. Do you suppose my father would stand one of your ranting places stuck up just under his nose? You’d better take yourself off a few miles, for, let me tell you, Thorpe doesn’t want to see you, and you may find it a little hotter residence than you have any fancy for.”

“I am not afraid of threats, sir,” said Stephens quietly.

Anthony had been speaking in an authoritative tone, as if his decision quite set the matter at rest, and opposition irritated him as usual.

“I simply tell you what will happen if you come where you’re not wanted,” he said, raising his voice. “And as to the chapel, we’ll take care that is never built. You may call it a threat if you please, but it’s one that will find itself a fact.”

“Mr. Miles, the word of God has borne down fiercer things than you are like to hold over me, and it will do so yet again. I am sorry to go against you, but I must either do that or against the inward conviction.”

“Cant,” muttered Anthony wrathfully. “And so you suppose you’re to have that field?”

“Mr. Maddox has as good as promised it, sir.”

“You’ll find him in a different mind now.”

“He’ll not go against his word!”

For the first time during the interview Stephens’s quietness was broken by a touch of passion. His eyes, lit up by a sudden fire, fastened themselves anxiously upon Anthony. Anthony, who had hitherto been the angry one of the two, felt a contemptuous satisfaction at having raised this wrath.

“His word! Things are not done quite so easily as all that. You had better turn and go back again, for all the good you’ll get by going on.”

“I should be glad of a direct answer, sir,” said David, restraining himself with an effort. “Has Mr. Maddox told you downright that he will not let us have the field?”

“Yes, he has.”

Stephens’s face had lost its red flush, but his eyes still held their deep fire.

“Then God forgive you!” he said in a low passionate voice, opening out his hands slightly, and walking away with quick steps. Anthony did not look after him; he turned into the little path, and began to whistle with a certain sense of pleasure in his victory which was not checked by any pitiful misgivings.