Читать книгу The New Abelard (Vol. 1-3) - Robert Williams Buchanan - Страница 17

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That bore of bores—a tedious male cousin!—Old Play.

Loitering slowly onward from stile to stile, from field to field, and from pasture to pasture, the two ladies at last reached a country road leading right through the heart of the parish, and commanding from time to time a view of the distant sea. They found Fensea, as usual, fast asleep, basking in the midst of its own breath; the red-tiled houses dormant, the population invisible, save in the square or market-place opposite the tavern, where a drowsy cart-horse was blinking into a water trough, and a somnambulistic ostler was vacantly looking on. Even in the open shops such as Radford the linendraper’s and Summerhayes the grocer’s, nothing seemed doing. But just as they left the village behind them, and saw in front of them the spire of the village church peeping through the trees, they suddenly came face to face with a human being who was walking towards them in great haste and with some indications of ill-temper.

‘Ah, here you are!’ ejaculated this individual. ‘I have been hunting for you up and down.’

He was a man under thirty, and looking very little over twenty, though his face showed little of the brightness and candour of early manhood. His hair was cropped close and he was clean-shaven; his eyes were yellowish and large, of an expression so fixed and peculiar as to have been compared by irreverent friends to ‘hard-boiled eggs’; his forehead was low, his jaw coarse and determined. With regard to his dress, it was of the description known as horsey; short coat and tight-fitting trousers of light tweed, a low-crowned hat of the same material, white neckcloth fastened by a horseshoe pin.

This was George Craik, son of Sir George Craik, Bart., of Craik Castle, in the neighbourhood, and Alma’s cousin on her father’s side.

Alma greeted him with a nod, while he shook hands with her companion.

‘Did you ride over, George?’ she inquired.

‘Yes; I put my nag up at the George, and walked up to the Larches. Not finding you at home, I strolled down to the vicarage, thinking to find you there. But old Bradley is not at home; so I suppose there was no attraction to take you.’

The young lady’s cheek flushed, and she looked at her relation, not too amicably.

‘Old Bradley, as you call him (though he is about your own age, I suppose), is away in London. Did you want to see him?’

George shrugged his shoulders, and struck at his boots irritably with his riding-whip.

‘I wanted to see you, as I told you. By the way, though, what’s this they’re telling me about Bradley and the Bishop? He’s come to the length of his tether at last, I suppose? Well, I always said he was no better than an atheist, and a confounded radical into the bargain.’

‘An atheist, I presume,’ returned the young lady superciliously, ‘is a person who does not believe in a Supreme Being. When you describe Mr. Bradley as one, you forget he is a minister of the Church of Christ.’

George Craik scowled, and then laughed contemptuously.

‘Of course you defend him!’ he cried. ‘You will tell me next, I dare say, that you share his opinions.’

‘When you explain to me what they are, I will inform you,’ responded Alma, moving slowly on, while George lounged after her, and Miss Combe listened in amused amazement.

‘It’s a scandal,’ proceeded the young man, ‘that a fellow like that should retain a living in the Church. Cripps tells me that his sermon last Sunday went slap in the face of the Bible. I myself have heard him say that some German fellow had proved the Gospels to be a tissue of falsehoods.’

Without directly answering this invective, Alma looked coldly round at her cousin over her shoulder. Her expression was not encouraging, and her manner showed a very natural irritation.

‘How amiable we are this morning!’ she exclaimed. ‘Pray, do you come all the way from Craik to give me a discussion on the whole duty of a Christian clergyman? Really, George, such attempts at edification have a curious effect, coming from you.’

The young man flushed scarlet, and winced nervously under his cousin’s too ardent contempt.

‘I don’t pretend to be a saint,’ he said, ‘but I know what I’m talking about. I call Bradley a renegade! It’s a mean thing, in my opinion, to take money for preaching opinions in which a man does not believe.’

‘Only just now you said that he preached heresy—or atheism—whatever you like to call it.’

‘Yes; and is paid for preaching the very reverse.’

Alma could no longer conceal her irritation.

‘Why should we discuss a topic you do not understand? Mr. Bradley is a gentleman whose aims are too high for the ordinary comprehension, that is all.’

‘Of course you think me a fool, and are polite enough to say so!’ persisted George. ‘Well, I should not mind so much if Bradley had not succeeded in infecting you with his pernicious opinions. He has done so, though you may deny it! Since he came to the neighbourhood, you have not been like the same girl. The fellow ought to be horsewhipped if he had his deserts.’

Alma stopped short, and looked the speaker in the face.

‘Be good enough to leave me—and come back when you are in a better temper.’

George gave a disagreeable laugh.

‘No; I’m coming to lunch with you.’

‘That you shall not, unless you promise to conduct yourself like a gentleman.’

‘Well, hang the parson—since you can’t bear him to be discussed. I didn’t come over to quarrel.’

‘You generally succeed in doing so, however.’

‘No fault of mine; you snap a fellow’s head off, when he wants to give you a bit of good advice. ‘There, there,’ he added, laughing again, but not cordially, ‘let us drop the subject. I want something to eat.’

Alma echoed the laugh, with about an equal amount of cordiality.

‘Now you are talking of what you do understand. Lunch will be served at two.’

As she spoke they were passing by the church gate, and saw, across the churchyard, with its long rank grass and tombstones stained with mossy slime, the old parish church of Fensea:—a quaint timeworn structure, with an arched and gargoyled entrance, Gothic windows, and a belfry of strange device. High up in the belfry, and on the boughs of the great ash-trees surrounding the burial acre, jackdaws were gathered, sleepily discussing the weather and their family affairs. A footpath, much overgrown with grass, crossed from the church porch to a door in the weather-beaten wall communicating with the adjacent vicarage—a large, dismal, old-fashioned residence, buried in gloomy foliage.

Miss Combe glanced at church and churchyard with the air of superior enlightenment which a Christian missionary might assume on approaching some temple of Buddha or Brahma. George, glancing over the wall, uttered an exclamation.

‘What’s the matter now?’ demanded Alma.

‘Brown’s blind mare grazing among the graves,’ said young Craik with righteous indignation. He was about to enlarge further on the delinquencies of the vicar, and the shameful condition of the parish, of which he had just discovered a fresh illustration, but, remembering his recent experience, he controlled himself and contented himself with throwing a stone at the animal, which was leisurely cropping the grass surrounding an ancient headstone. They walked on, and passed the front of the vicarage, which looked out through sombre ash-trees on the road. The place seemed dreary and desolate enough, despite a few flower-beds and a green lawn. The windows were mantled in dark ivy, which drooped in heavy clusters over the gloomy door.

Leaving the vicarage behind them, the three followed the country road for about a mile, when, passing through the gate of a pretty lodge, they entered an avenue of larch-trees leading up to the mansion to which they gave their name. Here all was bright and well kept, the grass swards cleanly swept and variegated with flower-beds, and leading on to shrubberies full of flowering trees. The house itself, an elegant modern structure, stood upon a slight eminence, and was reached by two marble terraces commanding a sunny view of the open fields and distant sea.

It may be well to explain here that the Larches, with a large extent of the surrounding property, belonged to Miss Alma Craik in her own right, the lady being an orphan and an only child. Her father, a rich railway contractor, had bought the property and built the house just before she was born. During her infancy her mother had died, and before she was of age her father too had joined the great majority; so that she found herself, at a very early age, the heiress to a large property, and with no relations in the world save her uncle, Sir George Craik, and his son. Sir George, who had been knighted on the completion of a great railway bridge considered a triumph of engineering skill, had bought an adjacent property at about the time when his brother purchased the lands-of Fensea.

The same contrast which was noticeable between the cousins had existed between the brothers, Thomas and George Craik. They were both Scotchmen, and had begun life as common working engineers, but there the resemblance ceased. Thomas had been a comparative recluse, thoughtful, melancholy, of advanced opinions, fond of books and abstruse speculation; and his daughter’s liberal education had been the consequence of his culture, and in a measure of his radicalism. George was a man of the world, quick, fond of money, a Conservative in politics, and a courtier by disposition, whose ambition was to found a ‘family,’ and who disapproved of all social changes unconnected with the spread of the railway system and the success of his own commercial speculations. Young George was his only son, and had acquired, at a very early age, all the instincts (not to speak of many of the vices) of the born aristocrat. He was particularly sensitive on the score of his lowly origin, and his great grudge against society was that it had not provided him with an old-fashioned ancestry. Failing the fact, he assumed all the fiction, of an hereditary heir of the soil, but would have given half his heirloom to any one who could have produced for him an authentic ‘family tree,’ and convinced him that, despite his father’s beginnings, his blood had in it a dash of ‘blue.’

George Craik lunched with his cousin and her companion in a spacious chamber, communicating with the terrace by French windows opening to the ground. He was not a conversationalist, and the meal passed in comparative silence. Alma could not fail to perceive that the young man was unusually preoccupied and taciturn.

At last he rose without ceremony, strolled out on the terrace, and lit a cigar. He paced up and down for some minutes, then, with the air of one whose mind is made up, he looked in and beckoned to his cousin.

‘Come out here,’ he said. ‘Never mind your hat—there is no sun to speak of.’

After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped out and joined him.

‘Do you want me?’ she asked carelessly. ‘I would rather leave you to your smoke, and go to the library with Miss Combe. We’re studying Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles” together, and she reads a portion aloud every afternoon.’

She knew that something was coming by the fixed gaze with which he regarded her, and the peculiar expression in his eyes. His manner was far less like that of a lover than that of a somewhat sulky and tyrannical elder brother—and indeed they had been so much together from childhood upward that she felt the relation between them to be quite a fraternal one. Nevertheless, his mind just then was occupied with a warmer sentiment—the one, indeed, which often leads the way to wedlock.

He began abruptly enough.

‘I say, Alma, how long is this to last?’ he demanded not without asperity.

‘What, pray?’

‘Our perpetual misunderstandings. I declare if I did not know what a queer girl you are, I should think you detested me!’

‘I like you well enough, George—when you are agreeable, which is not so often as I could wish.’

Thus she answered, with a somewhat weary laugh.

‘But you know I like you better than anything in the world!’ he cried eagerly. ‘You know I have set my heart on making you my wife.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, George!’ replied Alma. ‘Love between cousins is an absurdity.’

She would have added an ‘enormity,’ having during her vagrant studies imbibed strong views on the subject of consanguinity, but, advanced as she was, she was not quite advanced enough to discuss a physiological and social problem with the man who wanted to marry her. In simple truth, she had the strongest personal objection to her cousin, in his present character of lover.

‘I don’t see the absurdity of it,’ answered the young man, ‘nor does my father. His heart is set upon this match, as you know; and besides, he does not at all approve of your living the life you do—alone, without a protector, and all that sort of thing.’

By this time Alma had quite recovered herself, and was able to reassume the air of sweet superiority which is at once so bewitching in a pretty woman, or so irritating. It did not bewitch George Craik; it irritated him beyond measure. A not inconsiderable experience of vulgar amours in the country, not to speak of the business known as sowing wild oats’ in Paris and London, had familiarised him with a different type of woman. In his cousin’s presence he felt, not abashed, but at a disadvantage. She had a manner, too, of talking down to him, as to a younger brother, which he disliked exceedingly; and more than once, when he had talked to her in the language of love, he had smarted under her ridicule.

So now, instead of taking the matter too seriously, she smiled frankly in his face, and quietly took his arm.

‘You must not talk like that, George,’ she said, walking up and down with him. ‘When you do, I feel as if you were a very little boy, and I quite an old woman. Even if I cared for you in that way—and I don’t, and never shall—we are not at all suited to each other. Our thoughts and aims in life are altogether different. I like you very much as a cousin, of course, and that is just the reason why I can never think of you as a husband. Don’t talk of it again, please!—and forgive me for being quite frank—I should not like you to have any misconception on the subject.’

‘I know what it is,’ he cried angrily. ‘It is that clergyman fellow! He has come between us.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ answered Alma with heightened colour. ‘If there was not another man in the world, it would be all the same so far as you and I are concerned.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it. Bradley is your choice. A pretty choice! A fellow who is almost a beggar, and in a very short time will be kicked out of the Church as a heretic.’

She released his arm, and drew away from him in deep exasperation; but her feeling towards him was still that of an elder sister annoyed at the gaucherie of a privileged brother.

‘If you continue to talk like that of Mr. Bradley, we shall quarrel, George. I think you had better go home now, and think it over. In any case, you will do no good by abusing an innocent man who is vastly your superior.’

All the bad blood of George Craik’s heart now mounted to his face, and his frame shook with rage.

‘Bradley will have to reckon with me,’ he exclaimed furiously. ‘What right has he to raise his eyes towards you? Until he came down here, we were the best of friends; but he has poisoned your heart against me, and against all your friends. Never mind! I’ll have it out with him, before many days are done!’

Without deigning to reply, Alma walked from him into the house.

An hour later, George Craik mounted his horse at the inn, and rode furiously homeward. An observer of human nature, noticing the expression of his countenance, and taking count of his square-set jaw and savage mouth, would have concluded perhaps that Alma estimated his opposition, and perhaps his whole character, somewhat too lightly. He had a bull-dog’s tenacity, when he had once made up his mind to a course of action.

But when he was gone, the high-spirited lady of his affections dismissed him completely from her thoughts. She joined Miss Combe in the library, and was soon busy with the problem of the Unknowable, as presented in the pages of the clearest-headed philosopher of our time.