Читать книгу A Question of Faith - Lily Dougall - Страница 3

Table of Contents

On a mild day in February, an English gentleman, by name Matthew Knighton, was walking across a bit of moorland on the borders of his own estate. He was bound for a neighboring hamlet to meet a friend who was expected to arrive there by the weekly coach, which at this season was the only public means of passenger transport in the locality.

Knighton had just ascended a short steep hill to reach the upland which he was now crossing. Before him, stretching in ridge beyond ridge, green fore-ground merging into gray and misty distance, was one of the great moors that lie south of the Bristol Channel.

His path was a narrow cart-road. On either side the turf, wherever it was seen, was of very vivid and tender green, by reason of moss that grew thickly in the grass; but on the greater part of the ground, heather with its brown seeds, and gorse with a few winter blossoms, were the covering. A few minutes brought him to where, in a hollow of the undulating ground near the descent of a steep combe, half a dozen old cottages were falling into ruins. There was no sign of life about any of these hovels except one, in the door of which stood an old woman who appeared to be the only inhabitant of the place, unless a jackdaw with clipped wings, who hopped at her feet, could be looked upon as her companion.

The old woman’s eye was still bright and her features shapely, although her skin was withered, wrinkled, and brown. She was dressed in such garments as an old witch might wear. She no sooner saw who was coming than she waved the stick she held with a sort of majestic welcome.

“Well, what now?” asked Knighton, with testy tolerance, arrested, when he came near, by this peculiar demonstration.

He was a man perhaps about fifty, with iron-gray hair and shaven face; he was not above medium height, but strong both of feature and of limb; he looked like a country gentleman who did not often bestir himself to go up to town, but he looked also as if he brought what was best in town down to him, for in his face there was no lack of that keener intelligence which mental activity gives.

This middle-aged man and aged woman stood facing one another on the windy moor, the one possessing all the advantage of what is called education and good breeding; the other, nothing but what nature had bestowed of long experience and wit. And yet they were not altogether unlike, these two; many encounters had given to each a sort of rough conception that they two looked out upon the world of men around them from very similar standpoints.

“I’ll tell ’ee a thing I’ve been a-thinken of, zir. There’s beatles as crawl about; they’ve got fealers, zoo they can knaw where they be going an’ what they be doing. If half the beatles wer’ a-given no fealers, an’ had to run among them as has, would that be right and vair?”

“Very hard on them, Gor, I should say.”

“But moast o’ men are a-made thet way zhure enough, an’ it’s no vault to them thet they know no moor of God or man than they can zee and ’ear and zmell—beatles wi’out fealers they be. Is it right and vair?”

The Squire meditated a moment. He was accustomed to have many questions brought to him to decide, but perhaps few as congenial.

“Their forefathers neglected to use the feelers that were given them; they grew weak and dropped off, so their children had none.”

He looked, not without a good deal of inward curiosity, to see how far the shrewd old woman would understand.

“Oh, thee be allus a-squaring things for th’ Almighty for us poor volks; but don’t tell I—I zay it’s not vair.”

Knighton went on his way over a ridge of hill.

When the coach stopped, it put down only one passenger and his luggage. He was a young man, and, seen at a little distance, he was quite like the ordinary young man that one sees in the illustrations of magazine stories. That is to say, his clothes were made by a good tailor, his features were regular, and his hair and mustache were just what they ought to be. Observed more closely, he had, of course, an individuality; it would have been natural to suppose that he was a person of good taste and good feeling, probably strongly actuated by both. Knighton greeted him.

“Good of you to come,” said the traveler. “A tremendous comfort to see some one person I know. Old Crusoe, marching out of the waves, couldn’t have been much more in terra incognita than I am.” He spoke in a rather excited way, as if his speech was more wordy than usual.

“Will you walk?” asked the other. “You will want to stretch your legs; and the trap has a circuit to make.”

The two men started back upon the path across the moor.

The younger man’s name was Henry Harvey. He was an artist. Although descended from a family of this neighborhood, he had never visited the place before. It was he who spoke.

“When my father and I met you in town you were so tremendously kind that I feel as if I must talk to you a bit about this affair. I hope it won’t bore you; you see you know her so well; and about the place and everything. You see, theoretically I don’t believe in being married by family arrangement, and neither, of course, does my cousin Alice; but we’ve had to write a good many letters to one another. Hang me if I’m not half bowled over, and I think Alice”—

“Is favorably inclined toward you.”

“Well, apart from the question of liking, it is a decidedly good arrangement for us both. The rents here are barely enough for her to scratch along on, and I would like to have the old place and can afford to keep it up.”

Here no remark came in answer. Harvey, who was sensitive to approval or disapproval, began again.

“You see, of course, we don’t mean to dispense with love, but I was merely showing why, liking each other as we do, Alice might think it worth while to come and have a try for it.”

“Quite a situation for a novel.”

“Yes, isn’t it; only, some way, in real life things never smack of romance as they do in books—at least not until they are long past: there is too much detail, too much or too little personal responsibility, I don’t know which. But, you know, of course it all depends on Miss Bolitho. You have known her all her life, and, to tell the truth, I am frightened at her character. I know she has been up to Cambridge like a man, and taken a degree, or whatever they give the feminines. Is she appallingly strong-minded?”

“By strong-minded do you mean”—

“Oh—wearing big boots, you know, and a top-coat, and pot-hat, and”—

“The strength of Miss Bolitho’s clothing is, as far as I have observed; proportioned to the severity of the weather and her need to expose herself to it. If by ‘the strength of her mind’ you mean the strength of her will, I should think that, also, would be brought into force only when it was required.”

“Is she such a paragon? A fellow wrote to me the other day, and said that his wife had no faults, but she was also very nice; and that the ‘but’ was not inadvertent. And there is something in that view of it, you know; it’s the best proof, I always say, of the ‘Adam’s fall’ story that we can’t even conceive of a person being charming and faultless.”

Knighton spoke mildly. “Faultlessness, then, in your idea involves one of those two greatest faults against God and man,—insipidity or arrogance?”

“But about Miss Bolitho—she wrote to me that she was not religious. That is the worst of modern women—not being religious.”

“All women in other ages you conceive to have been devout and holy?”

“Well, she meant she was an agnostic or something. Now, I am not grand at religion, but I had about as soon hang myself as believe that things were bounded by the evidence of my senses.”

“I do not know that ‘agnostic’ applies to her in its exact meaning.”

“Hang it, if I have used the word wrongly! I am just like the lady who met the vicar after he had given a lecture on the Gnostics, and said that she was so much obliged to him, for she had never known precisely what agnostics were before.”

They passed the cottages where the witch lived, and just beyond they left the road by which Knighton had come an hour before, keeping to a path running beside a combe, that here cut into the hill over which they were walking. The sides of the combe were not bare, but thickly wooded with a low growth of oak which still retained its sere leaves; and although among them in some places hollies grew luxuriant, the myriad of dead leaves and the grotesque shapes of the roots of a former generation of oaks, out of which, in many cases, the younger trees grew, gave the hollow a peculiarly desolate appearance. A stream which gathered in the higher hill above was seen pitching down the rocky centre of the place, and heard after it ceased to be seen.

At the edge of the wood the path again divided into two. The one led downward along the side of the combe, about halfway between the stream and the summit, but the trees were so thick that a little way below neither path nor stream could be descried from the top; the other path led on, through some cultivated fields, over the open brow of the bluff on which they were. It was this that Knighton took. Harvey, who had been observing the prospect with eager eyes, felt disappointment.

“What a shame our way does not lie down there! What a romantic place!” Then after a pause, in which the rugged grandeur of the moor above, the soft color of the leaves of the wood and strange shapes of its roots, grew upon him, he added, with some quiet strength of purpose in his tone, “I will make a picture of that.”

“In summer?” said Knighton.

“No; now. Look at the grays of that sky. Look at the mass of tawny leaves and the stream”—

“And kill yourself—you, unaccustomed to a damp climate.”

“It is bleak up here in the wind.”

“Nothing to-day to what it usually is.”

“Nevertheless, I will make the picture.”

There was something about him when he spoke of the picture that commanded Knighton’s respect. He spoke in a more cordial tone.

“As a matter of fact we can get to Norcombe as well by the lower path, but farther down it runs rather narrow at the edge of a steep bit of rock. It is hardly safe in my opinion. In any case it is a shut-in place. I prefer the open.”

This prosaic preference jarred on Harvey’s tastes; he did not listen intently to what Knighton went on to say; the idea of the new picture had taken possession of him. The artistic faculty is stimulated just in proportion as the whole mind is stimulated. Harvey had, as it were, lately fallen heir to an engagement of marriage with his second cousin Miss Bolitho—in so far, at least, as a will can entail such an engagement. He had come quickly to ratify or cancel the arrangement. He was deeply excited; at the very source of all his ordinary thoughts and feelings life was pulsing more strongly; and that his art was an integral part of him was proved in this—that he was now more perfectly an artist than at ordinary seasons. He looked back lingeringly at the place he had chosen, as they walked on.

Behind them, as they now walked, the higher ridge of the moorland rose with its vivid greens of moss and gray greens of wintry heaths; before them, below the descent, could be seen the low meadows of the valley of Norcombe, to which they were bound. Beyond that, again, another hill rose, gray because it was well-wooded and leafless. Before they came to the descent they stopped at a good-sized cottage or small farmhouse, the only house on the hill. It was a lonely place, but its inmates had no appearance of leading a solitary life. They were a stalwart, peaceful, country couple, who in summer let their best rooms to such chance tourists as might wish to explore the beauty of the secluded neighborhood. Knighton had stopped at the cottage on business of his own. While they tarried, Harvey learned these particulars.

“I will take these rooms,” he said to Knighton. “I can live here as well as at Norcombe Inn, and I can make my picture.”

Knighton raised his eyebrows. “You will be farther from Norcombe,” he said.

“Just at present I am a good deal more frightened of Norcombe than of any other place in the wide world. And, look here, you won’t desert me this evening; you promised to let me make my first visit under your protection. I am really very much alarmed, you know. Just put yourself in my place! But I suppose you are one of those very magnificent fellows who would never be frightened of a woman.”

There was nothing in Knighton’s face that expressed either assent or denial with regard to the flattery thus thrust at him.

Harvey engaged his lodging. After that he walked on with Knighton down to the village of Norcombe, to the inn whither his luggage had been sent.