Читать книгу Hathercourt - Molesworth Mrs. - Страница 1

Hathercourt Church is not beautiful, though the internal evidence in favour of its having at one time been so is considerable. It has suffered sorely at the hands of plasterers and white-washers; yet the utmost efforts of these misguided people have not altogether succeeded in effacing the traces of a better state of things – there is still grandeur in the sweep of the lofty roof, oak-raftered behind its dingy white covering; still “meaning and mystery” in the quaintly varying windows; much satisfaction for the learned in such matters, and indeed for the unlearned too, in the unmistakable beauty of the carved screen, the one object untampered with since the days when it gladdened the eyes of the ancient men who fashioned it, long, long ago.

A very long “long ago” that time used to seem to Mary Western when, in the intervals of her attention to the service, she sometimes dreamed of those far-away days. She was not much given to dreaming, but in Hathercourt Church there were circumstances under which the temptation became irresistible.

After a course of years the words of the morning service, especially when read, Sunday after Sunday, by the same familiar voice with precisely the same intonations, are apt to grow monotonous; and had Mary not occasionally allowed her thoughts to go wool-gathering, the chances are that her brown straw hat would have been seen to nod, and she might have fallen asleep altogether. For that part of Sunday morning which preceded their appearance in church was a tiring and trying ordeal to the elder daughters of the Western household. There was the early class at the school, there were “the boys” at home to keep peace among, there were the very little children in the nursery to coax into unwonted quiet, for on Sunday mornings “papa” really must not be disturbed, and mamma, “poor mamma,” looked to her girls to do their part in helping her.

Hathercourt Rectory offered in every particular a contrast to its neighbour, the church. The one was old, very old, the other comparatively new; the Rectory was full to overflowing of life and noise and bustle, the church, even when its whole congregation was assembled, seemed empty and bare and strangely silent.

“It is thinking about all the people that used to be here – the air is too full of their voices for outs to be heard much,” Mary said to herself sometimes, and her girlish eyes would see strange scenes, and strange murmurs would sound in her ears. There was the leper window in the chancel, which alone, she had been told, testified to a date not more recent than that of the reign of King John. Mary’s glance never fell upon it without a shudder, as in imagination – imagination in this case no doubt falling far short of reality – she saw huddled together the crowd of accursed beings, old world Pariahs, gazing up with bleared yet longing eyes at the priestly forms about to dispense the mystery to them, doubtless with little meaning but that of a charm. Then there were the tablets on the walls, many of them very old, telling in a few simple words a whole life history, or in some cases that of an entire family, whose members had either died out or left the neighbourhood so long that these chronicles of death were all that remained to tell of their ever having lived.

There was one tablet in particular on which Mary, sitting in her own corner of the wide bare pew, had for so many years, Sunday after Sunday, allowed her eyes to rest that it had grown to seem to her a part of her own life. The service would not have been the same to her without it; her father, she almost fancied, could not have got through his morning’s work had the tablet been removed from its place, a little to the left of the reading-desk. Mary knew its burden by heart as well as, or better than, “the creed, the ten commandments, and the Lord’s prayer,” yet she could no more help reading it afresh every time she came into church than one can help counting the tantalising telegraph-wires, as they slowly rise up, up, then down again, from the window of a railway-carriage.

Of a time far remote from railways and telegraphs told the old tablet in Hathercourt Church.

“Here lieth,” so ran the inscription, headed in the first place by an imposing coat-of-arms, the date 1597, and the initials M.B. – “Here lieth the bodi of Mawde, the elder sister of the twoe dovghters of Arthur Mayne, late of Southcotte, and the late wife of John Beverley of Hathercourt, who departed this worlde the sixt day of November, 1597, whiche John and Mawde had issve five soones and five dovghters, whiche Mawde, the wife of the seid John Beverley, esqvier, and dovghter of the seid Arthur Mayne, esqvier, was 37 yeres oolde at the time of her deathe.”

Mary’s meditations on “whiche Mawde” represented various stages in her own history. Long ago, in the days of little girlhood, the era of brown straw hats and tendency to nod, it was not Mawde herself, so much as the great army of “soones and dovghters” she had left behind, on which her imagination dwelt. They must have been quite tiny things, she calculated, some of these Beverley boys and girls, when their mother died. How they must have missed her! How, beyond words, terrible would be their plight, that of the nineteenth century Western children, that is to say, in such a case! Mary trembled at the mere dream of such a possibility. Poor little Beverley boys and girls! what had become of them all? Had they grown up into good men and women, and married and had children of their own, and died, and in their turn, perhaps, had tablets put up about them in far-away churches? What a great many stories might be told of all that had happened to poor Mawde’s children and children’s children since that dreary “sixt of November” when they were left motherless!

But as time passed on, and Mary grew into womanhood, Mawde herself engaged her sympathy. Thirty-seven when she died, that was not so very old. She must have been married young, probably, and had a busy life of it. Was her husband kind and good, and did she love him and look up to him? They could not have been poor, that was one comfort to think of; life, even with the ten “soones and dovghters,” could not have been quite so hard upon John Beverley’s wife as, Mary thought with a little sigh, “mamma” found it sometimes. And then her fancy would wander to the sister dimly alluded to in the inscription, the younger daughter of Arthur Mayne. What was her name, what had become of her, and did she and Mawde love each other very much? Mary used to wonder, as her glance strayed to her sister at the other corner of the old pew – her own especial sister, for somehow Alexa and Josephine, being much the younger for one thing, never seemed quite as much her sisters as Lilias. How strange and sad that the record of affection should die, and only the bare fact of the old relationships exist! Mary could hardly picture to herself a tablet even three hundred years hence bearing her name, on which there should be no mention of Lilias too.

The congregation at Hathercourt Church was never, under the most favourable circumstances, those even of “weather permitting” to the extent of cloudless skies and clean roads, anything but a scanty one. And on rainy days, or very cold days, or very hot days, it was apt to dwindle down to a depressing extent. Of an afternoon it was seldom quite so poor, for, unlike the denizens of the manufacturing regions, who would consider it very hard lines to have to hurry over their Sunday hot joint for the sake of so-called evening service three or four hours before its time, the agriculturalists, employers, and employed of Meadshire and its neighbouring counties, much prefer the half-past two o’clock service to any other: So, as a rule, Mr Western reserved his new sermon for the afternoon, contenting himself with choosing for the morning one of the neatly tacked together manuscripts which for many years had lain in a dusty pile in a corner of his study. Sometimes, when they compared notes on the subject, Lilias and Mary agreed that they preferred the old sermons to the new.

“Papa must have been clever when he was young,” Mary would observe, thoughtfully.

“He is clever now,” Lilias would rejoin, with some little show of indignation.

“Yes – but – I suppose anxieties, and cares, and growing older, cloud it over in a way,” was the best solution Mary could arrive at as to why greater things had not come of her father’s talents.

Perhaps the truth was that they were not very remarkable – not so remarkable, certainly, as to have forced for themselves a way through the adverse circumstances of being united to a somewhat easy-going, kindly, and contented nature such as that of the Rector of Hathercourt, whose worldly needs had never been pressing enough to force him to great exertion, who loved the place he had lived in for a quarter of a century, and was not hard upon his people, even though they were averse to morning service, and now and then indulged in forty winks, even of an afternoon.

“We have got into each other’s ways,” he would say sometimes, with a mixture of deprecation and self-congratulation, when, even to Hathercourt, echoes of the strange noises beginning to be heard in the ecclesiastical “great world” would find their way. “We understand each other, and know each other’s good points. I don’t pretend to go along with all these changes, though I am far from saying no good may come out of them. But they are not in our way – they are not in our way; and, after all, there is something in letting well alone. It is something to feel, as I hope to do when I die, that at least I haven’t left my people worse men and women than I found them – eh, Polly?”

For on his second daughter’s face there came sometimes a look her father hardly understood – a look of questioning and consideration, of less readiness to take things just as she found them, than altogether tallied with his philosophy. Yet Mary was his favourite child. Lilias disagreed with him openly in her sweet-tempered way, grumbling with a sunny face at their monotonous and secluded life, and openly avowed her determination to change it for a different one, should she ever get a chance of doing so to advantage.

“What would you do with five old maids, papa?” she would say sometimes. “Just fancy us all in a doleful row – the five Miss Westerns! In ten years hence even Francie will be grown up, remember.”

“Ten years may bring – indeed, are sure to bring many changes, Lily dear,” her mother would say – “some, perhaps, that it would take half the heart out of us could we foresee.”

“Mamma is so sensible and reasonable always, I sometimes think she has forgotten what it was to be a girl,” said the elder to the younger sister one October Sunday morning as they were crossing the pretty little bit of inclosed meadow land which was all that separated the church from the Rectory.

“No,” said Mary, “it isn’t that; she knows and remembers quite well. It is that she knows too well, I fancy.”

“How do you mean, Polly? I’m stupid at understanding things, unless people say them plainly. Stay a minute, we are in plenty of time – nobody is coming to church yet, and it is so nice here under the trees.” Lilias leaned against one of a beautiful cluster of horse-chestnuts growing in the middle of the church paddock, and as she spoke looked up through the already fast baring branches to the cold, grey, blue sky overhead. “Dear me, how very quickly the leaves are falling this year!” she said, “it was that stormy weather in September that shook them, and, once they begin to fall, winter seems to come with a rush.”

Mary smiled, and her lips moved as if she was going to speak, but she stopped and said nothing.

“What were you going to say, Mary?” asked Lilias, whose eyes had idly journeyed down from the sky to her sister’s face. “Why did you stop?”

“On second thoughts I thought it not worth saying,” replied Mary, “but I’ll tell you if you like. It was only what you said about the leaves – it made me think that was what mother feels. She knows how fast they fall once they begin, and it makes her afraid for us in a way. She doesn’t want to hurry us out into the storms; we have always been so well sheltered.”

Lilias looked at her sister for a minute without speaking. “How prettily you see things,” she said, admiringly. “You think of things that would never come into my head, yet people fancy you are the practical and prosaic one of us all. I believe it is all because you are called Mary.”

“But Mary was just not the practical and prosaic one. You mean Martha.”

“No; no, I don’t. Marys nowadays are practical and prosaic, any way. I don’t mean to say that you are, except sometimes, perhaps. I think you must be very like what mamma was at your age, but I fancy you are cleverer and – ”

“And what?”

“And wiser – at least, in some ways. You would not be satisfied to marry just such a person as my father must have been; you would want some one more energetic and stronger altogether.”

“Perhaps,” said Mary. “But I do not think we need speculate about that sort of thing for me, Lilias; there’s plenty of time to think what sort of a person I would marry, if ever I do, which very likely I won’t.”

“Don’t speak like Mrs Gamp, and please don’t be so sensible, Mary. If you only would be silly sometimes, you would be perfect – quite perfect,” said Lilias.

Mary smiled.

“But indeed,” continued Lilias, “I am not at all sure that it is sensible to look at things as you do. If none of us marry, or do anything for ourselves, it will come to be rather hard upon papa in a few years.”

“But why suppose none of us will marry?” said Mary. “It is unlikely, to say the least, that we shall all be old maids.”

“I don’t know that it is,” replied Lilias, seriously. “I am three-and-twenty, remember, and you not two years younger, and things go on just the same year after year; we never make a new acquaintance or go anywhere.”

“Except to the Brocklehurst ball,” put in Mary.

“Oh, that Brocklehurst ball,” said Lilias, laughing. “Many and many a time, when it comes round again, I have been tempted to give up going, just that I might be able to say I had not been, when every one shakes it at me reproachfully if ever I grumble. What good is the Brocklehurst ball, Mary? It is so crowded, and the people come all in great parties; we never get to know any one. I suppose our beauty is not of that striking order to shine out through country made dresses, and crowds of finer people! I enjoy it, of course – even dancing with Frank Bury is better than not dancing at all.”

“Or with one of Mr Greville’s curates,” said Mary, mischievously.

“Don’t,” said Lilias. “I cannot bear the subject. I told you some time ago – and I shall always say so – the bane of our life has been curates. Because papa is a poor clergyman, with lots of daughters, every one seems to think there can be, and should be, nothing before us but curates. It almost makes me dislike papa, to think he ever was one!”

“Lilias,” said Mary, suddenly, “we shall be late. The school children have gone in, and there are the Smithson girls coming up the lane, and they are always late. Do come!”

It felt chilly in church that morning. There was a decidedly autumn “feel” in the air, and the ancient building always seemed ready to meet winter, with its gloom and cold, more than half way. With corresponding reluctance to admit warmth and sunshine, it shrank from the genial spring-time – summer had to be undeniably summer before its presence could be realised within the aged walls. And this morning the congregation was even unusually small, which made the bareness and chilliness more obtrusive.

Mary was busy in a calculation as to how many years would have passed since Mawde Beverley’s death “come” the next “sixt of November,” a date fast approaching, for it was now late in October, when there fell on her ears a sound – the mere shadow of a sound it seemed at first – which almost made her think she was dreaming. Such a sound had never before been heard in Hathercourt Church on a Sunday morning; the sensation it produced in her, as gradually it grew louder and clearer, and more unmistakable, was so overpowering that she was positively afraid to look up. Had she done so she would have expected to see the whole congregation turning to the door in awestruck anticipation of some portentous event. For the sound was that of carriage wheels – coming nearer, nearer, till at last – yes, there could now be no mistake, they stopped at the church gate. Then, after a little pause, came the creaking of the heavy oaken door, opened cautiously – the intruders evidently expecting themselves to be late comers – and seeming, as is the manner of doors, on that account to make all the more noise. Again a little hesitation, then the sound of footsteps, several footsteps, coming along the aisle, the rustle of dresses, a faint, indescribable stir in the air, the result, probably, of the heads of nearly all the congregation present being turned in the direction of the persons approaching. Mary’s curiosity overcame her at last. She glanced up, first at Lilias, whose eye she caught for an instant, an instant in which it spoke volumes.

“You must look at what is coming up the aisle,” it said, “it is worth looking at. See how discreetly I manage to do so – my prayer-book a little to one side. No one would guess I was not attending to the service.”

But from where Mary sat so much diplomacy was hardly called for. Another moment brought the newcomers full in her view, as they filed in, one after the other, two ladies, then two gentlemen, to a pew some little way in front. The first lady was middle-aged, if not elderly, well-dressed and rather fat; the second was tall and thin, and seemingly very young, well-dressed too, and – an accidental turn of her head brought the face full in sight – yes, there was no doubt of it, very, very pretty. Pretty with the prettiness that is almost, but not quite, beauty, that might, perhaps, grow to be such in a few years, for just now she could not, thought Mary, be more than sixteen or seventeen – the rounded cheek and white forehead, on which the dark, soft hair lay so nestlingly, had no lines or suspicions of furrows such as are seldom altogether escaped even at twenty; the nose, the mouth, the lovely, happy looking eyes, showing bright blue through the long black lashes, all told of the very first spring-time of life; the poise of the graceful little head on the shoulders, the flutter of unconcealed interest with which she looked about her, put her extreme youth beyond a doubt.

“How pretty she is!” thought Mary. “How bright and sweet and happy she looks!”

And for a moment or two the girl personally so interested her that she forgot to ask herself the question at which Lilias had long ago aimed, “Who can she be?” or rather, “Who can they be?”

For the “they” was made up by more interesting objects than the well-dressed, rather fat lady at the top of the pew. The rest of the “they” consisted of two gentlemen, who next fell under Mary’s investigation. Neither of them was old, yet one was decidedly older than the other; both were good-looking, but one was better than good-looking, he was undoubtedly handsome, and his expression was almost as attractive in its way as that of the young girl beside him. Could they be brother and sister? thought Mary to herself. There was no striking likeness between them, certainly, but neither was there any decided unlikeness, and she fancied there was something brother and sister-like in the way they sat together, sharing a hymn-book when the time came for the anthem’s substitute, Hathercourt Church being supposed to be “a place where they sing,” though the way in which the singing was performed was sometimes a matter of mortification to the Western girls, considering the time and labour they bestowed on the “choir.” It seemed unusually bad to Mary to-day, listening, as she caught herself doing, with “other people’s ears;” and once, when she fancied that she detected the ghost of a smile pass between the two young people on whom she was bestowing so much attention, she felt her cheeks grow hot, and she turned her eyes away from them with a little feeling of irritation.

“I wish strangers would stay away, if they come to criticise,” she said to herself.

Just then for the first time she caught distinct sight of the face of the other gentleman, the elder of the two. It was grave and serious enough to please her, surely! Too grave and serious by far, she decided. It was like turning from sunshine into gloom to watch his dark, quiet face after the two beside him. He looked older, a great deal older, than his companions.

“Thirty-three or four, at least,” was the age with which many credited him, but when she looked at his face again, she doubted the correctness of her opinion. It was more grave than old, after all, and after all, too, there was something rather nice about it. What fun it would be to talk them all over with Lilias afterwards! What – Suddenly a little pause in her father’s voice startled her wandering thoughts back to the present; the sermon was just coming to an end, and with considerable compunction Mary confessed the truth to herself – she had not heard a word of it! Certainly these strangers had a great deal to answer for.

There was a little delay in the coming out of church. The Smithson girls, and old Mrs Bedell, and even the school-children and the clerk seemed to be stupefied by the presence of the unexpected visitors; they all hung back and stared at the strangers, and at each other, as if they did not know what to do, till at last Lilias Western, waxing impatient, touched her mother with the end of her parasol, and leaning across little Francie and Brooke, whispered something which resulted in the rector’s wife, contrary to the usual order of procedure, leading the way down the aisle, followed by her goodly array of sons and daughters. Thus encouraged, the rest of the congregation followed with a rush, and when Lilias looked back from the door, there was no one to be seen in the church but the two gentlemen and two ladies, gazing about them in dignified desertion.

“What a set of boors all the people make themselves look,” exclaimed Lilias, almost before the Rectory party was out of earshot of the other members of the congregation.

“Hush, Lilias, some of them will hear you,” said her mother. “They don’t mean to be rude, poor people. You must remember how unaccustomed they are to strangers.”

“Mamma,” interrupted George, the second Western boy, hurrying up – “mamma, who can those people be? They’ve come out of church, and they’re standing staring about as if they didn’t know what to do. Where can they be going to? Their carriage hasn’t come back.”

Lilias’s fair face flushed – a very small amount of excitement was enough to deepen the soft pink colour of her cheeks at any time.

“We should do something, mamma,” she said, appealingly. “Shouldn’t Basil or George run back and ask them if they would like to wait at the Rectory till their carriage comes? You, Basil, run back, do, and ask them if they wouldn’t like to come in and rest a little.” (Basil was much the best-looking of “the boys.”)

“Rest – rubbish!” he said, contemptuously. “Haven’t they been resting in church all this time? I’m not going with such a nonsensical message,” and he turned away.

“George, you go, as Basil seems afraid of behaving like a gentleman,” said Mrs Western.

But George, too, hesitated.

“I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t for those ladies. Mother, they are so awfully grand,” he said, beseechingly.

Lilias’s face grew scarlet.

“I will go myself, then,” she exclaimed, and turning quickly, she had gone some way across the grass before the others quite understood her intention. Mrs Western looked distressed.

“Lilias excites herself so,” she said.

“I’ll ran after her, mother,” said Mary, quickly, and in another moment she was by her sister’s side. Lilias was still flushed and breathless to boot.

“Did you ever know such ill-mannered, rude – ” she was beginning, but Mary interrupted her.

“They are just boys,” she said, philosophically. “But, Lilias, you have put yourself quite into a fever. Let me go and speak to these ladies – yes, do, I would rather – it is better for me than for you.”

“But why?” said Lilias, doubtfully, though visibly relaxing her speed.

Mary laughed.

“I can’t say exactly, but somehow it’s not dignified for you to go hurrying back in that sort of way, and for me – well, I don’t think it matters.”

Lilias still hesitated.

“It isn’t that,” she said; “I wouldn’t have you do anything I would not do myself, only – Mary, you will laugh at me – I do feel so shabbily dressed.”

Mary did not laugh. She looked at her sister with real sympathy and concern. There are some of the trials of poverty whose stings are even more acutely felt at three-and-twenty than at seventeen, and Mary pitied Lilias where she might have laughed at Alexa.

“Let me speak to them, then,” she repeated. “Do, Lilias; I will hurry on, and you may follow slowly and see how I comport myself,” and Lilias made no further objection.

“How Lilias under-estimates herself,” she thought. “Who, with eyes in their heads, would think of her dress when they see her face?”

She was close to the little group of strangers by this time. They were standing just outside the porch, “staring about them,” George had said – rather, it seemed to Mary, examining with some interest the outside appearance of the ancient church. Three of them did not see her approach, the two ladies and the handsome, fair-haired man were at a little distance and looking the other way; only the elder of the two gentlemen was standing so as to face her, and he appeared sublimely unconscious of her errand having anything to do with himself or his friends. He moved aside a little as she drew near, evidently with the idea that she was going into the church again. Mary’s heart beat a little faster; this was by no means what she had bargained for, but there was no retreat possible now. There was Lilias slowly advancing in the background, her grey alpaca skirt trailing behind her on the grass with all the elegance of silk or cashmere – somehow Lilias never looked shabbily dressed! – her very observant blue eyes doubtless taking in the situation fully. Mary felt that the credit of the family was in her hands; she must prove herself equal to the occasion.

“I – I beg your pardon – excuse me,” she began, but the gentleman did not seem to understand that she was speaking to him; half mechanically he raised his hat, under the impression that the young woman, or lady, he had scarcely observed which, was about to pass by him into the porch, when again she spoke, and this time more distinctly. “Excuse me,” she said again; “mamma – my mother, I mean – thinks perhaps the ladies will be tired. Do you think they would like to come over to the Rectory and rest a little?”