Stanley John Weyman

“ Mary replied, swept away by her feelings. “Is that enough? Because in this quiet corner, which is home to my uncle and a refuge to me, no call reaches you, is it enough that you do no harm? Is there no good to be done? Think, Mr. Basset! I am ignorant, a woman. But I know that to-day there are great questions calling for an answer, wrongs clamoring to be righted, a people in travail that pleads for ease! I know that there is work in England for men, for all! Work, that if there be any virtue left in ancient blood should summon you as with a trumpet call!” ”

“ And there were men and maids more than on two farms to-day, some in the house, some in thatched cottages with a run on the common and wood for the getting. I remember, as if they were yesterday, hot summer afternoons when there’d be a stillness on the farm and all drowsed together, the bees, and the calves, and the old sheep-dog, and the only sounds that broke the silence were the cluck of a hen, or the clank of pattens on the dairy-floor, while the sun fell hot on the orchard, where a little boy hunted for damsons! That’s what I often see, my lord,” Stubbs continued stoutly. ”

“ This was the fourth occasion on which Audley had come to Mary’s rescue, and, sensible as she was, she was too thoroughly woman to be proof against the suggestion. On three of the four occasions the odds had been against his appearance. Yet he had come. To-day in particular, as if no pain that threatened her could be indifferent to him, as if no trouble approached her but touched a nerve in him, he had risen from the very ground to help and sustain her.
Could the coldest decline to feel interest in one so strangely linked with her by fortune? ”

“ Peter Audley, a dear, good gentleman. You would like to wash your hands? Yes, my dear! Not that you are not—and his lordship will wait for us upstairs. Yes, there’s a step. I knew your father, to be sure, to be sure. A new brush, my dear. And now will you let me—not that your sweet face needs any ornament! Yes, I talk too much—but, there, my love, when you are as old——”
She was a simple soul, and because her tongue rarely stopped she might have been thought to see nothing. But women, unlike men, can do two things at once, and little escaped her twinkling spectacles. ”

“ In a moment farce took the place of tragedy; the danger was over. “We’ll tell your wife, Ben!” screamed a youth, and the crowd laughed and followed. Other wits took their turn. “You’ll want a new coat for the wedding, Ben!” cried one. And now and again amid the laughter a sterner note survived. “We’ll ha’ you yet, Ben!” a man would cry. “You’re not out of the wood yet, Ben!”
Mary’s face burned, but she stuck to her post, plodding on beside the gig, and after this fashion the queer procession, heralded by a score of urchins crying the news, entered the streets of the town. ”

“ On dark days it broke the fringe of woodland and stood up, gloomy and forbidding, the portal of a Doubting Castle. On bright days, with its hundred diamond panes a-glitter in the sunshine, it seemed to be the porch of a fairy palace, the silent home of some Sleeping Beauty. At all times it imposed itself upon men below and spoke of something beyond, something unseen, greater, mysterious.
To Mary Audley, who saw it at its best, the very stains of the plaster glorified by the morning light, it was a thing of joy. ”

“ And it was at the head of a crowd of three or four hundred of the riff-raff of Riddsley that she broke in upon the quiet of the suburban road in which The Butterflies stood. Tumultuously, followed by laughter and hooting and cheers, she swept along it with her train, and came to a halt before the house.
No house was ever more surprised. Mrs. Wilkinson’s scared face peered above one blind, her sisters’ caps showed above another. Was it an accident? Was it a riot? Was it a Puseyite protest? What was it? Every servant, every neighbor, Lord Audley himself came to the windows. ”

“ There John Audley’s twenty thousand pounds opened a wide door. He would build, drain, manure, make roads, re-stock. He would make all things new. From him as from a centre comfort should flow. He saw himself growing old in the middle of his people, a lonely, but not an unhappy man.
As he passed the bridge at Riddsley he thought of the Boshams, and weary as he was, he drew rein at their door. Ben Bosham came out, bare-headed; a short, elderly man with a bald forehead and a dirty complexion, a man who looked like a cobbler rather than the cow-keeper he was. ”

“ Mary gave way. They turned to go in, but it was noticeable that as they moved towards the house each, stirred by the same thought, swept the extent of the park with eyes that clung to it, and were loth to leave it. Each hung for a moment, searching this alley or that, fancying a clue in some distant object, or taking a clump of gorse, or a jagged stump for the fallen man. All were harassed by the thought that they might be abandoning him; that in turning their backs on the bald, wintry landscape they might be carrying away with them his last chance. ”

“ There had been a library, but Basset had taken the best books to the Gatehouse. And there were in the closed drawing-room, and in some of the bedrooms, old family portraits, bad for the most part; the best lay in marble in Blore Church. But in the parlor, which was the living-room, hung only paintings of fat oxen and prize sheep; and the garden which ran up to the walls of the house, and in summer was a flood of color, lay in these days dank and lifeless, ebbing away from bee-skips and chicken-coops. The park had been ploughed during the great war, and now pined in thin pasture. ”

“ I believe that you, the electors of Riddsley, are going to sell the birthright of health which you have received; and the heritage of freedom which this land has enjoyed for generations and on which the power of Bonaparte broke as on a rock. You think you are going to have cheap bread, and, maybe, you are! But at what a cost! Cheap bread is foreign bread. To you, the laborers, I say that foreign bread means that the fields you till will be laid to grass and you will go to work in Dudley and Walsall and Bury and Bolton, in mills and pits and smoke and dust! ”

“ Audley was his rival, but that he might have forgiven, as men forgive great wrongs and in time smile on their enemies. But the little wrongs, who can forgive these—the slight, the sneer, the assumption of superiority, the upper hand lightly taken and insolently held?
Not Peter Basset, at a moment when he was being tried almost beyond bearing. For every day, between the finding of the body and the funeral, and often more than once in the day he had to see Mary, he had to advise her, he had—for there was no one else—to explain matters to her, to bear her company. ”

“ Audley did not doubt the truth of Toft’s story. It confirmed his fears only too well; and the family tradition—that too weighed with him. He sat for a long time staring before him, then, uneasy and restless, he rose and paced the floor. He went to and fro, to and fro, until by-and-by he came to a stand before one of the windows. He drummed with his fingers on the glass. There was one way, certainly. Stubbs had said so, and Stubbs was right. There was one way, if he could make up his mind to the limitations it would impose upon him. If he could make up his mind to be a poor man. ”

“ On the box, caped and gloved, the pink of fashion, sat no less a person than his lordship himself. A servant in the well-known livery, a white coat with a blue collar, sat behind him.
The vans which had freed Ben blocked the great man’s way, and he was moving at a walk. All heads were bared as he passed, and he was acknowledging the courtesy with his whip when Ben stepped before the horses and lifted his hand. In an instant a hundred eyes were on the man and he knew that he had burned his boats. ”

“ But the men who were the loudest and the most confident cried that cheap bread would mend all. The poor, they said, would have to eat and to spend. They would buy goods, the glut would cease. The wheels would turn again, there would be work and wages. The Golden Age would return. So preached the Manchester men.
In the meantime the doctors wrangled, and the patient grew a little, not much, better. And Mary Audley and Etruria walked across the moorland in the evening sunshine, with a light breeze stirring the bracken, and waves of shadow moving athwart the stretches of purple ling. ”

“ The truth was that Mary was not in love, but she was ready to be in love. She was glad and sorry, grave and gay, without reason; like a stream that dances over the shallows, and rippling and twinkling goes its way through the sunshine, knowing nothing of the deep pool that awaits it.
Presently, acting upon some impulse, she opened a drawer in one of the tables. It contained a portrait in crayons of Peter Basset, which John Audley had shown her. ”

“ Nor could any Quaker girl have been more gentle or more demure.
But she might have had no tongue, she was so loth to use it; and a hundred times Mary wondered what was behind that reticence. Sometimes she thought that the girl was merely stupid. Sometimes she yoked her with her father in the suspicions she entertained of him. More often, moved by the girl’s meek eyes, she felt only a vague irritation. She was herself calm by nature, and reserved by training, the last to gossip with a servant, even with one whose refinement appeared innate. But Etruria’s dumbness was beyond her. ”

“ At one moment he saw himself growing old, without the energy to help himself or others, still toying with trifles, the last and feeblest of his blood. At another he thought of Mary, and saw her smiling through the flowering hawthorn, or bending over a book with the firelight on her hair. Or again, stung by the lash of her reproaches he tried to harden himself to do something. Should he take the land into his own hands, and drain and fence and breed stock and be of use, were it only as a struggling farmer in his own district? ”

“ Sic itur ad astra! So men and women begin to love.
She spent the morning between the room in which John Audley was making a slow recovery, and the deserted library which already wore a cold and unused aspect. In the one and the other she felt a restlessness and a disturbance which she was fain to set down to yesterday’s alarm. The old interests invited her in vain. Do what she would, she could not keep her mind off the appointment before her. Her eyes grew dreamy, her thoughts strayed, her color came and went. ”

“ As she passed, stair by stair, the curving wainscot of dull wood which so many generations had rubbed, she carried with her the picture of Basset standing in thought in the middle of the hall, his eyes on the doorway that gaped on the night. Then a big man with a genial face usurped his place; and she smiled and sighed.
A moment later she went into Etruria’s room to learn how she was, and caught the girl rising from her knees. “Oh, Miss,” she said, coloring as she met Mary’s eyes, “if we had not been there!” ”

“ Mary murmured to herself, “Courage!” And she recalled a saying which she had learned from the maid, “At the worst, ten fingers!” Then, seeing that at last they were entering the streets of the town and that the weary journey was over—she had left Paris the day before—she touched Joséphine. “We are there,” she said.
The maid awoke with her eyes on the bagman, who was stout. “Ah!” she muttered. “In England they are like that! No wonder that they travel seeing that their bones are so padded! But, for me I am one ache.” ”

“ She recalled Basset’s ill-humor, or his—jealousy. At the thought of what the word implied, Mary colored.
There could be nothing in the notion, yet she probed her own feelings. Certainly she liked Lord Audley. If he was not handsome, he had that air of strength and power which impresses women; and he had ease and charm, and the look of fashion which has its weight with even the most sensible of her sex. He had all these and he was a man, and she admired him and was grateful to him. ”

“ Toft’s door stood open and a stream of firelight and candlelight poured from it and cut the January fog. She was hard at work, cooking funeral meats with the help of a couple of women; for quietly as John Audley had lived, he could not be buried without some stir. Odd people would come, drawn by the Audley name, squires who boasted some distant connection with the line, a few who had been intimate with him in past days. And the gentry far and wide would send their carriages, and the servants must be fed. Still the preparations jarred on Basset as he crossed the court. ”

“ The growth of a century had long trespassed on the walk, a hundred and fifty yards long, which led through the yew-wood, and had been in its time a stately avenue trimmed to the neatness of a bowling green. Now it was little better than a tunnel, dark even at noon, and at night bristling with a hundred perils. Basset peered into the blackness, listened, hesitated. But he was honestly anxious on John Audley’s account, and contenting himself with exclaiming that the man was mad, he began to grope his way along the path. ”

“ She had learned from Etruria how near to that pattern of love which Mr. Colet preached the love of man and woman could rise. She had a new conception of its strength and its power to expel what was selfish or petty. She had seen it in its noblest form in Etruria, and she knew that her feeling for Lord Audley was not in the same world with Etruria’s feeling for the curate. ”