Chapter IV (1)
There was a certain day in the year the advent of which always imbued the Rector of Compton Regis with an irritability quite foreign to his nature. It was that Sunday, usually occurring somewhere between Lammas and Michaelmas, on which his conscience obliged him to preach a sermon on eternal punishment.
The Rector was not sound on Hell, and he knew it. Every year he sought miserably for some formula which should reconcile what he felt with what he believed, and he sat this afternoon at his study table surrounded by old discourses on the subject, running one hand distractedly through his thick grey hair while the other held the pen of an unready writer. Every now and then his gaze sought help from his beloved little cases of Romano-British coins, or from the backs of Camden and Dugdale, and once, leaving his uncongenial task, he got up and wistfully fingered his latest acquisition, the brass piece of Allectus, which lay waiting to be put in its place with its numismatical peers.
The Honourable and Reverend Stephen Grenville was one of those persons, abounding in these islands, whose theories and practice do not match. He stood, outwardly, for the union on equal terms of Church and State, but in his heart he really assigned to the former a different and a superior plane. His antiquarian leanings, very plainly manifested in his study, were the cause alike of this inconsistency, and of the measure of sympathy which, despite himself, he accorded to the “Oriel young men” whose enthusiasm (a thing he feared and disliked) would, he considered, wear off in time, and whose attachment to the historical foundation of the Church commanded his entire approval.
Aristocrat and Tory, the best-born gentleman in the neighbourhood (and the least likely to lay stress on the fact), he was greatly respected, and with reason. No dissenting chapel reared its head in the parish, and there was not a single public-house. It was his custom to celebrate Holy Communion at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, and on the Sundays immediately following those feasts, and to baptise and catechise on Sunday afternoons. His reading in church was very impressive. He knew every one of his flock personally; he endeavoured always to do his duty as he conceived it, else had he not now been struggling, poor gentleman, with an uncongenial topic....
“Have you any letters for the carrier, dear?” asked Horatia, putting her bonneted head in at the door. Sounds of impatient boundings and whimperings behind her hinted at an accompanying presence.
The Rector abandoned Hell for the moment. “There is the letter to your Aunt Julia, my love. I had to keep it back to make some inquiries about railroads... and then this sermon... Where have I put it?” Rumpling his hair still more violently he reflected, and having searched among the litter on his table, found what he sought and gave it to his daughter.
“Try and have your sermon finished when I come back in an hour’s time, there’s a good Papa,” suggested Horatia, kissing him. “I am sure what you said last year would do quite well. I shall go round by Five-Acres and back by the road.”
Outside the inn the Oxford carrier was just preparing to start, wrapped in an old many-caped coat, which had probably once adorned a greater luminary, some driver of the numerous London and Oxford coaches. Horatia gave him the letter, acknowledged the landlord’s respectful greeting, and summoning her spaniel from some ravishing discovery in the yard, turned along the road.
Presently the carrier passed her, cracking his whip in emulation of the Magnet or the Regulator, and as she watched the lumbering covered cart dwindle gradually in the distance, Horatia found her mind following the odyssey of Aunt Julia’s letter; saw it being trundled along the miles of road, past Kingston Bagpuize and Besselsleigh and down the long hill into Oxford; witnessed its transference next morning to the London coach at the Angel, and finally pictured the postman delivering it at Cavendish Square, and Aunt Julia receiving it at breakfast in the big, handsome, gloomy dining-room.
And because, not having any great love of that lady, she had seen little of Aunt Julia since her childhood, she instinctively imaged her as she had appeared in those days, with her smooth brown hair, her rich and smooth brown dress; and she saw, round the breakfast table, her eight cousins, all of the ages which were respectively theirs about the time of the battle of Salamanca. (Horatia herself was born in Trafalgar year, and owed her name to that fact.) Further, she recalled her never-forgotten and scarcely forgiven stay under Aunt Julia’s roof at that epoch.
She was six or seven, and she had been deposited in Aunt Julia’s care on account of an epidemic at Compton. Her nurse did not accompany her. Mrs. Baird, a strict Evangelical, brought up her children very literally in the fear of the Lord, and she believed in “breaking a child’s will.” Yet she was kind and perfectly just, while her offspring were such models of good behaviour that it seemed now to Horatia as if this process could not have been painful to them. But the atmosphere of compulsory religion, which attained its apogee on Sunday, caused Horatia to look upon that day with a novel horror. Church in the morning, with a long string of little be-pantalooned worshippers setting out in double file towards Margaret Chapel, the two rearmost reciting to their father, during that short transit, verses and hymns: after church more verses and hymns, and then it three o’clock a heavy meal, at which all the children dined with their parents. The conversation was instructive. Uncle James never failed to quote with approval Mr. Wilberforce’s application of the text in Proverbs about the dinner of herbs and the stalled ox, pointing out that his fortunate offspring enjoyed both the better meal and the blessings of affection. Afterwards there was more religious instruction, and family prayers, in the evening, of enormously swollen bulk. The first Sunday of her stay, Horatia bore these multiplied devotions because she was unaware, at any given moment, how much was still to follow. On the second Sunday she restrained herself until the evening. It was Aunt Julia’s custom always to hear the prayers of the younger children; but when Horatia in her turn was bidden to kneel at that unyielding lap, she refused. She would not say any more prayers: God, she announced, with confidence, must be tired; He had been hearing them all day. And in this opinion she remained firm.
Only having suffered the mildest reproofs for wrong-doing, Horatia was not warned when the eulogy of the rod of correction taken from the Book of Proverbs was chosen for the nightly reading, but when the other children had been dismissed she suddenly experienced, at the lap she had scorned, the practical effect of the wise man’s teaching. Yet Aunt Julia, though she had not spared for her crying, suffered defeat, for Horatia did not say her prayers, and her visit was shortly afterwards terminated lest she should contaminate the other children. Aunt Julia indeed offered to undertake a course of “bringing the child to her senses” at some future date, but the Rector declined the proposal, nor did Horatia visit again in Cavendish Square until she was nearly grown up. It was many a day, too, before she could be coaxed by her father to resume the practice of prayer.
Aunt Julia’s hair was not so brown now, and of the eight daughters five were prosperously married. Horatia knew that none of them considered herself to have had a childhood other than happy. Perhaps it was a good preparation for the state of matrimony, to have your “will broken” early in life. If so, how far was she herself from possessing that desired qualification!
Horatia smiled at the thought as she walked along. Since the death of the mother whom she could not remember, and the extinction of the hope of a son (for Mr. Grenville had a feeling against second marriages), she had been to her father almost everything that a son could have been—with the added advantage that she was never obliged to leave him. Latin and Greek and ancient history had been laid open to her as to a boy; she was able to take an interest in the Rector’s antiquarian pursuits, and could have abstracted passages from the Fathers for him if he had wanted them. All this Mr. Grenville had taught her himself, turning a deaf ear to family representations on the necessity of a governess, the use of the globes, and deportment. Music and Italian masters, however, visited the Rectory from time to time, imparting knowledge when their pupil was in the mood to receive it, but it was to the old émigré priest settled at East Hendred, whom she loved, that she owed her remarkably good knowledge and pronunciation of French, and her interest in the history of his native land. For after all Horatia was not a typical classical scholar; her acquaintance with Greek and Latin authors was by no means extensive, and need not so much have alarmed her neighbours.
(2)
Decidedly it would, after all, soon be autumn in earnest. Only five days ago, when she was in the garden among the flowers, Horatia had scouted the thought, but there was less of summer here. Farmer Wilson’s beeches were actually beginning to turn. There was a tiny trail of leaves along the side of Narrow Lane, as she could see by glancing down it. The high road, less overshadowed, was clearer of these evidences of mortality. How blue was the line of the Downs!
A horseman overtook her, riding fast, and raising his hat as he passed, but without looking at her. It was no one that she knew, yet, a good rider herself, Horatia instinctively remarked his ease and grace, his perfect seat. He was taking the same road as she, but long before she got to the turn he had disappeared round it; and indeed she had forgotten him even sooner, for Rover the spaniel suddenly went delirious over a hedgehog which he just then discovered, and which he had to be coerced into leaving behind. Horatia was still praising and scolding her dog when she got to the turn—and when the sound of loud screaming ahead caused her to hasten her steps.
By the side of the road, a little way down, was a group composed of the gentleman who had passed her, his horse, and a small child in a pinafore. From this infant, seated upon the border of grass, proceeded the loud wails which Horatia had heard; the rider, one buckskinned knee upon the ground, was stooping over it and addressing it in tones that, as Horatia came nearer, sounded alternately anxious and coaxing.
“It is Tommy Wilson,” thought Miss Grenville aghast. “He is always playing in the road, and now he’s been ridden over.... But it can’t be serious, or he would not be able to yell like that.” Nevertheless she hastened still more. The gentleman, absorbed in his blandishments, did not hear her.
“Leetle boy,” she heard him say—“leetle boy, you are not hurt, not the least in the world. You are frightened, soit, but you are not hurt. See, here is a crown”—the yells ceased for a moment—“now rise and go to your home. Quoi! you cannot stand upon your feet?” For he had lifted the infant to a standing posture, which it instantly abandoned, falling this time prone upon the ground, and emitting now perfect shrieks of rage or terror.
“Dieu! a-t-il des poumons!” exclaimed the young man despairingly to himself. He made a gesture and rose; at the same instant heard Horatia’s step and, turning round, snatched off his hat. His mien implored the succour which she would have rendered in any case.
“Is the child really hurt, Sir?” she asked. As well pretend that she took him for an Englishman, since he spoke the tongue so readily!
“Mademoiselle,” said the young man dramatically, “I swear to you that my horse never passed within a foot of him. But he runs across the road in front of me, and falls down; I dismount and pick him up—what else could I do?—and since that time he ceases not to yell comme un démon!”
His brilliant, speaking dark-blue eyes rested on her with a mixture of humour, appeal, and (it was impossible not to recognise it) of admiration. His black silk cravat was so high that his chin creased it; his chamois-coloured cashmere waistcoat was fastened with buttons of chased gold, and the cut of his greenish-bronze coat testified to an ultra-fashionable tailor. Horatia looked at Tommy Wilson, now rolling on the grass in a perfect luxury of woe. Bending over him she seized him firmly by the arm.
“Tommy,” she commanded, “get up!” More successful than the Frenchman, she restored him to some measure of equilibrium. “Now you are coming with me to the doctor to show him where you are hurt. Come along!”
Her voice, which he knew, had the effect of reducing the youth’s lamentations, but at her suggestion a fresh tide of alarm swept over his round, smeared face. He resisted, ejaculating hoarsely: “No, Miss! No, Miss ‘Ratia! No, I ’ont!”
“Very well then, I shall bring the doctor to you here,” said Miss Grenville firmly. “Now mind, Tommy, that you stay where you are without moving till I come back with him. Do you hear?” She loosed her hold and stood back, holding up a warning finger.
A success almost startling rewarded her manoeuvre. For five seconds, perhaps, Thomas Wilson stood blinking at her through his tears, his mouth working woefully at the corners; then, with an expression of forlorn determination, he turned, ran past the horse, and set off to trot home at a pace which dispelled the least suspicion of injury.