Maidstone

“ Well, says the little black man, my Lady Dane was on a journey to her home on the Itchin in the company of her niece, that was daughter to the late Sir Philip's brother, and he was going afore to prepare for them at Maidstone, as they were not yet started. It seemed that my lady had property in Maidstone, and was for giving a water-fountain to the town in her kindness.
"My lady," says he, puffing himself out, "rises late, like any lady of the Court."
"Why," said I, "she must be a rare fine [55] woman—that she must, from your accounts. ”

“ Maidstone, again, should probably be Maidston, being Medwegston in the Saxon Chronicle, and almost certainly meaning the town on the Medway; although it is fair to say that an ending in stane is early found. Tilmanstone was earlier Telmeston, and Elmstone was Elmerston, and the earlier spellings of Goodnestone are Goodwinston, Gudewynston, and Goodneston.
Stones are much fewer than “tons,” although no doubt the number of such marks (origin of our milestones) was increased by the Romans. ”

“ Madeline asked, anxiously.
“I must start for Maidstone to-morrow morning,” I replied.
“Oh, dear!” she exclaimed. “How empty the place will seem and how lost we shall be without you to advise us.”
“I hope,” said I, “that the occasions for advice are past, and I shall not be so very far away, if you should want to consult me.”
“No,” said Barbara, “and I suppose you will not be away for very long. Shall you come back when your case is finished or shall you stay for the rest of the assizes?”
“I shall probably have some other briefs offered, which will detain me until the assizes are over. ”

“ Maitland was an orphan, and rich. He had been an unpopular lonely boy at a public school, where he was known as a “sap,” or assiduous student, and was remarked for an almost unnatural indifference to cricket and rowing. At Oxford, as he had plenty of money, he had been rather less unpopular. His studies ultimately won him a Fellowship at St. Gatien’s, where his services as a tutor were not needed. Maitland now developed a great desire to improve his own culture by acquaintance with humanity, and to improve humanity by acquaintance with himself. ”

“ I have often thought since that Maitland felt that most of his disasters sprang from the premature death of his father, whom he loved so tenderly. Indeed the elder man must have been a remarkable figure, a gentle, courtly, and most kindly man, himself born in exile and placed in alien circumstances. Maitland often used to speak, with a catch in his voice, of the way his father read to him. I remember not what books, but they were the classic authors of England; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem to imagine that the father had what is called a well-stocked library. ”

“ Such as are interested in the art of letters, and in those who practise in the High Court of Literature, will perceive what we had in our minds. Here is life, not a story or a constructed diary, and the art with which it is done is a secondary matter. If Henry Maitland bleeds and howls, so did Philoctetes, and the outcry of Henry Maitland is more pertinent to our lives. For all life, even at its best, is tragic; and there is much in Maitland's which is dramatically common to our world as we see it and live in it. ”

“ Maitland shook his head, scowling over the butler's burly shoulders at the rapidly augmenting concourse of servants in the hallway—lackeys, grooms, maids, cooks, and what-not; a background of pale, scared faces to the tableau in the library. "This won't do," considered Maitland. "Get back, all of you!" he ordered sternly, indicating the group with a dominant and inflexible forefinger. "Those who are wanted will be sent for. Now go! Higgins, you may stay." ”

“ A little bird, as they say, brought a hint of it—I hope, Maitland, a happy omen! A pleasant woman of the world, one who can take her own part in society, and your part, too, a little—if you will let me say so—is exactly what you need. I congratulate you very heartily. And are we likely to see the young lady in Oxford? Where is she just now?”
Maitland saw that the learned Bielby had indeed heard something, and not the right thing. He flushed all over as he thought of the truth, and of Mrs. St John Deloraine. ”

“ On hearing this speech, Lady Maitland changed, in an instant, from a state of violent passion to the rigidity and appearance of a marble statue.
Eyeing her with one of his peculiar looks, as much as to say, “I know all,” Geordie proceeded.
“I dinna want to put your leddyship to ony trouble by this veesit; but, being in want o’ some siller in thir hard times, I thocht I would tak the liberty o’ ca’in upon yer leddyship, as weel for the sake o’ being better acquainted wi’ a leddy o’ yer station and presence, as for the sake o’ gettin’ the little I require on my first introduction to high life.” ”

“ And Maitland knew that had his father lived he would never have been thrown alone into the great city of Moorhampton, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Not all women understand the dangers that their sons may meet in such surroundings, and those who had charge of Henry Maitland's future never understood or recognized them in his youth. ”

“ This passage I never read; but, when Maitland told me of it, it struck me greatly and remained in my mind. These influences are one of the great uses of literary companionship among men of letters. As Henry Maitland used to say: "We come together and strike out sparks."
As I went north by train from St. Pée d'Ascain to Bordeaux, passing ancient Dax and all the sombre silences of the wounded serried rows of pines which have made an infertile soil yield something to commerce, Maitland's spirit, his wounded and often sickly spirit, was with me. ”

“ There was, however, another incident in his life which occurred not long before I went to America. He was then living in one room in the house of a journeyman bookbinder. On several occasions when I visited him there I saw his landlady, a young and not unpleasing woman, who seemed to take great interest in him, and did her very best to make him comfortable in narrow, almost impossible, surroundings. Her husband, a man a great deal older than herself, drank, and not infrequently ill-treated her. This was not wholly Maitland's story, for I saw the man myself, as well as his wife. ”

“ Maida replied, “and always have some one near the telephone if anybody calls up. And remember, if the baby doesn’t seem all right, telephone for the doctor at once. Get the hospital on the telephone at nine o’clock and ask how Mrs. Dore is this morning.” Then mounting her machine in a flash, Maida was off like a bird.
“Who would ever have thought,” Rosie said looking after her, “that the Maida Westabrook who first came to Primrose Court—so pale and thin and lame—would ever grow into such a strong girl? Do you remember, Laura?” ”

“ Nevertheless when I have had anything to do in life I have not been accustomed to let convention stand in my way. Such marriages have been arranged and have not been unsuccessful. There was, I thought, a real possibility of such a marriage as I proposed being anything but a failure. Our conversation ended at last in both of them undertaking to consider the matter if, after meeting Maitland again, they still remained of the same mind, and if he found that such a step was possible. ”

“ As I have said, I think that Maitland was really incapable of a great passion, and I am sure that he would have put up with the merest haus-frau, if she had known her work and possessed her patient soul in quiet without any lamentations. If there was any lamenting to be done Maitland himself might have done it in choice terms not without humour. And indeed he did lament, and not without cause. On my first visit to Ewell after his return from Devon I again met Mrs. Maitland. ”

“ For, of course, she had known that Maitland was Maitland and none other, from the instant when he told her to make good her escape and leave him to brazen it out: a task to daunt even as bold and resourceful a criminal as Anisty, and more especially if he were called upon to don the mask at a minute's notice, as Maitland had pretended to. ”

“ He was perfectly conscious after these experiences at Folkestone, and the east of England, that he owed very much both to Lake and Rivers. In fact he wrote to the doctor afterwards, saying that he and Rivers had picked him out of a very swampy place. He had always a great admiration for Rivers as a writer, and used to marvel wonderfully at his success. It seemed an extraordinary thing to Maitland that a man could do good work and succeed by it in England.
It was in 1902 that Maitland and Thérèse took up their abode in St. Pée d'Ascain, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. ”

“ The intelligence thus conveyed to him who was now once more Sir Horace Danforth Maitland, was of mingled sweet and bitter. He could not be insensible to the joy of returning to the home of his childhood and the people among whom he had grown to manhood, yet neither could he leave, without tender regrets, that in which he had first learned to love, and to live a true, a noble, and a happy life.
When Mary was first saluted as Lady Maitland by Edward, she turned a glance of inquiry upon her husband, and then upon her father, for both were present by previous arrangement ”

“ Several people came to me with proposals about a book on Henry Maitland. One of the partners of a big publishing house made me a definite offer for it on behalf of his firm. On the other hand one of his executors, Miss Kingdon, a most kindly and amiable and very able woman employed in a great accountant's office in the city, who had done very much for Henry Maitland in his later life, begged me not to do the book, or if I did it to hold it over until her responsibilities as executrix and trustee for the sons were at an end. ”

“ The ghostly room, in the Early William Morris manner, looked cosey and even homelike when the lamp was lit, when the dusky blue curtains were drawn, and a monster of the deep—one of the famous Oxford soles, larger than you ever see them elsewhere—smoked between Maitland and Barton. Beside the latter stood a silver quart pot, full of “strong,” a reminiscence of “the old coaching days,” when Maitland had read with Barton for Greats. ”

“ The old clock in a corner of the study chimed resonantly and with deliberation: four double strokes; and while yet the deep-throated music was dying into silence the telephone bell shrieked impertinently.
Maitland bit savagely on the gag and knotted his brows, trying to bear it. The effect was that of a coarse file rasped across raw quivering nerves. And he lay helpless, able to do no more toward endurance than to dig nails deep into his palms. ”

“ Of course, it is quite obvious that he had a boyish kind of passion for Marian Hilton, but it was certainly not that kind of passion which mostly keeps boys innocent. Indeed those calf loves which afflict youths are at the same time a great help to them, for a boy is really as naturally coy as any maiden. If by any chance Maitland, instead of coming into the hands of a poor girl of the streets of Moorhampton, had fallen in love with some young girl of decent character and upbringing, his passions would not have been so fatally roused. ”

“ Maitland knew, and none knew better, that in a triumphant passage there is triumphant rhythm, and in a passage full of mourning or melancholy the accompanying and native rhythm is both melancholy and mournful. How many times, too, I have heard him quote, again from Landor, "Many flowers must perish ere a grain of corn be ripened."
All this time the wife was I know not where, nor did I trouble much to inquire. Miss Kingdon and Miss Greathead looked after her very patiently, and did good work for their friend Maitland, as he well knew. ”

“ But "Magna Graecia" is pure Maitland; it is absolutely himself. It is, indeed, very nearly the Maitland who might have been if ill luck had not pursued him from his boyhood. Had he been a successful man on the lines that fate pointed out to him; had he succeeded greatly—or nobly, as he would have said—at the University; had he become a tutor, a don, a notable man among men of letters, still would he have travelled in southern Italy, and made his great pilgrimage to the Fonte di Cassiodorio. ”

“ That wet Sunday made Maitland a welcome guest at the Stephen's house; and it brought other happiness in its train. In 1886 Maitland was married in the village church of Brockenhurst, Hants, to Florence Henrietta, eldest daughter of Mr Herbert Fisher, some time Vice Warden of the Stannaries, and niece of Mrs Leslie Stephen. Two daughters, the elder born in 1887, and the younger in 1889, were the offspring of the marriage. ”

“ Maitland had been a gentleman’s son of the east country, but driven out of his father’s house, when a laddie, by his stepmother; and that he had served as a servant lad with her father, who was the Laird of Yillcogie, but ran through his estate, and left her, his only daughter, in little better than beggary with her auntie, the mother of Captain Malcolm, her husband that was. Provost Maitland in his servitude had ta’en a notion of her ”

“ If Maitland had gone abroad at one, and without intending to keep his engagement at Eugene's, then he must have been despoiled before that hour, and without his knowledge. Surely, if the jewels had been taken from him with his cognizance, the hue and cry would have been out and Anisty would not have dared to linger so long in the neighborhood!
To be just with herself, the girl had not gone to the restaurant with much real hope of finding Maitland there. Curiosity had drawn her,—just to see if. ... But it was too preposterous to credit, that he should have cared enough. ... ”

“ The firm, resolute chin, the sensitive, sweet line of scarlet lips, the straight little nose, the brows delicately arched, the large, alert, tawny eyes with the dangerous sweet shadows beneath, the glint as of raw copper where her hair caught the light—Maitland appreciated them all far too well; and clutched nervously the rail of the seat, trying to steady himself, to re-collect his routed wits and consider sensibly that it all was due to the magic of the moon, belike; the witchery of this apparition that looked down into his eyes so gravely. ”