Kitabı oku: «The Pennycomequicks (Volume 3 of 3)», sayfa 10

CHAPTER L.
IN THE HOSPICE

There is a toy, the delight of children, that consists in a manikin with his legs curled under him, weighted with lead in his globular nether parts. This manikin, however, persistently held down, or violently knocked over, always rights himself.

And there are human beings similarly constituted. With them self-conceit supplies the place of lead. There is no disturbing their equilibrium for more than a moment. Lay their heads in the dust, and the instant the finger that depressed them is removed, up go the heads again, nose in air. Strike them with horsewhip or poker, and they shiver in mute anger, unconscious of humiliation, and they are steady again, nose in air. Bore holes in them, and you cannot let out their ponderosity and disturb their equilibrium; set them on the fire, and you cannot melt the self-conceit out of them. It oozes out of their pores, it distils from their finger-tips, it streams out of their eyes, it pours from their lips, and yet never exhausts itself, any more than the oil in the cruse of the widow of Sarepta. Kick them, and they travel upright, nose in air, along the carpet; pitch them out of the window, and they go down head uppermost; sink them in the deepest well, and they sit, slowly disintegrating at the bottom, head up.

Philip was not one of these. It was true that in him was a large amount of self-esteem – or what religious people would call self-righteousness, but it was not an organic inbred quality; it had been developed by his education, by the circumstances of his early life, and could therefore be expelled from his system by sharp medicine. By one of those exquisitely pitiful provisions of Nature, which compensates to the nightingale for his plainness by giving him a tuneful voice, and to the peacock for his harsh notes by surrounding him with a glory of gold and green, men of little acquirements, little minds, little presence, are furnished with the blessed gift of bumptiousness, which makes them unconscious of their insignificance, which induces those who can by no probability be heroes to others to be heroes to themselves. Just as the most ignorant men are the most positive, so are the most empty men the most self-contained. They can blow themselves out with the breath of their own nostrils.

Success in life is not necessary to make a man conceited, nor beauty to superinduce vanity in a woman. The extravagances of conceit are found in those men who have made a botch of life, and of vanity in those women who have least personal charms. Every disappointment, every rebuff, throws them in on themselves, and they seek in themselves that approval and appreciation which is denied them without. Like Narcissus, but lacking his excuse, they fall in love with themselves, because no one else will love them. Is it not possible that appreciation may be an element as necessary to the psychical as oxygen is necessary to the physical life, that when it is not freely given or wrested from the world without, we may set to work to engender it for ourselves within, just as in Jules Verne's romance those who voyaged ten thousand leagues under the sea, being out of the element that naturally fed the lungs, manufactured it for themselves under water?

Had Philip been constitutionally conceited, had bumptiousness been congenital, like scrofula in the blood, or tubercle in the brain, the overthrow he had met with at the hands of Miss Durham would not have seriously affected him, would have had no educative effect on him. He would have sighed and resigned himself to the conviction that Miss Durham was to be pitied, not he, because an inscrutable Providence, which denies to some eyes the faculty of seeing colour, and to some ears the power to distinguish and enjoy melodies, and to some noses the capacity to delight in odours, had denied to Miss Durham the ability to admire and adore him.

In the classic tale, Achilles was plunged by his mother Thetis in the waters of Styx, which made him invulnerable, save in the heel by which she held him. So our good mother, Nature, takes some of her children, not the robust of brain and the Achillean in vigour and beauty, and renders them callous, so that they can pass through life unhurt by shaft of ridicule, scourge of rebuke, and flout of fortune. Every arrow glances off their skin, every blade used on them has its edge turned, every cudgel breaks without bruising. What happiness is theirs! They are whole and unhurt, whereas their richer endowed brothers are hacked, and pierced, and heart-broken.

The author had once to do with a worthy, pious man, put in a situation under him, who was triple-panoplied in the hide of self-esteem. As is usual with such persons, he was not much short of a fool, and did very foolish, inconsiderate things. When called to task for some egregious act, he bore the reprimand with meekness, then retired to his closet, where he prayed for him who had rebuked him, as for a persecutor. Never for one particle of a moment did it occur to him that he himself deserved blame. And the author knows full well that the callous-skinned who read these pages will feel no cut from his words, but draw up their heels under them, out of the way of his scythe.

It has been proved by experiment that the tortoise can live though deprived of its brains, but the tortoise is the animal with the hardest epidermis known. Perhaps the converse may be true, that those animals with the largest proportion of brain may have the most sensitive skins.

Now Philip was no fool. He had plenty of sound sense, but his moral faculties had been warped by the circumstances of his early career, and he had grown up with great suspicion of others, but sure confidence in himself. Now, suddenly, his eyes had been opened by a rude shock; his moral nature had been subjected to a glissade and a jolt almost as severe as that which his body had undergone, and as he was not tough and horny-hided in mind, he felt the results as acutely. If he ached with bruises and sprains in flesh and sinew, so did he ache with bruise and sprain in all the tissues and fibres of his inner spiritual self.

When Salome returned to Philip's room she found him disinclined to talk; he was still twitching and quivering from the lashes he had received, conscious only of his present pain, covered with humiliation. He had not been given time to think of his future conduct, even to consider the retrospect; the present torture occupied and made to tingle every nerve of his soul.

With the innate tact which Salome possessed, she saw at once that he did not wish to be disturbed; though she could not divine that he had other cause for suffering than his fall, or that other injuries had been done him than those which made his body black and blue. She knew that he was in pain, and that he sought to disguise the fact from her, and though full of solicitude for him, she did not harass him with attentions.

She drew a little stool beside his bed, and seated herself on it, with needlework for the baby, and did not look at him.

He lay on his back, but turned his head, and saw her beautiful auburn hair, with the evening sun tinging it with orange fire. For some time he looked at it without thought of her, only of himself, his shame, his jarred self-respect. That jest of Artemisia about the Esquimaux watching about a hole in the ice, to pull out of it a fish, was present to him; he saw the fish come up flapping its tail and tossing to escape the barb; and then thought of himself being hauled out of the hole in the snow through which he had plunged. Then he considered how that she – this malicious woman – had held him with a hook in his jaws and had played with him, and then how he had been suddenly plunged out of a world of light and smoothness into an abyss where all was darkness and horror. Where was he? Into what had he fallen? Had he not almost shot over the precipice, and gone down into the uttermost depths of degradation? What if this accident had not befallen him? What if that woman had gone on playing with him, and had lured him further, as in the folk-tales the nixies of the waterfalls lure shepherds to throw themselves over, with the vain belief that by so doing they will fall into the arms and be received into the realm of the water sprites?

His ideas became confused. At one moment he was a fish caught by a barb, then he was clinging to a rock, withdrawing from the enticements of a siren. The sun had set, or no longer crowned Salome with fire, she continued her needlework till dusk closed in rapidly and prevented her seeing her stitches. But she sat on, upon her little stool, resting her cheek against the bedclothes. Philip, half dreaming, had caught a lock of her hair and twisted it round his finger, and held it as if it were something that was so firm, so sure that if he clung to it, if he would retain it about his finger as a golden hoop, he could not continue his slide and fall, and so thinking, or fancying, in a confused condition of mind, bred of, or fostered by pain and shame, he had fallen asleep. Salome sat on, did not venture to move her head lest she should disturb his sleep by withdrawing her hair from his fingers.

Next morning Mrs. Sidebottom, Miss Durham, Mrs. Baynes, and the Labarte girls, together with the captain, departed for Andermatt, leaving Salome with her husband in the hospice. They did not leave without an altercation and a controversy between Mrs. Sidebottom and the hostess relative to the bill, in which both engaged with unmatched weapons, as Mrs. Sidebottom could speak no Italian, and Signora Lombardi no English. The former could not be brought to admit that the hostess was justified in charging somewhat higher for provisions, six thousand eight hundred feet above the sea, than in the valleys where wine is produced and calves are reared. Mrs. Sidebottom effected no greater reduction than a franc and a half, which she insisted on having expunged, as a charge for a meal she protested she had not eaten. She then attempted to shift a couple of bottles of sparkling Asti from her account to that of Miss Durham, and to transfer sundry eggs for breakfast to the bill of Mrs. Baynes, who she was sure had ordered them, though she admitted having eaten them on the urgency of Janet. Eggs six thousand eight hundred feet above the sea are – well, eggs. Fowls at that elevation are sluggish layers, and eggs if brought up from the valleys run risks of being broken on the road. Mrs. Sidebottom, who resisted paying a penny a-piece for them when charged to her, saw that there was reason for setting that value on them when they were in Mrs. Baynes's account. She fought desperately over the fish. There were lakes hard-by the hospice doors, and fish in lakes, easily procurable, therefore it was unreasonable that they should be charged fancy prices.

Mrs. Sidebottom achieved a great success in negotiating a bargain with a driver from Andermatt, whereby she and the captain were taken back by a returned carriage that had discharged its load at the hospice; she succeeded in securing the conveyance for half the ordinary price. Though she engaged the carriage for herself and her son, the captain did not return in it, but the three demoiselles Labarte. Janet and the captain, who had become inseparable, and who reacted on each other, he reviving her health, and she evoking life and wit out of his torpid nature, returned in a smaller trap behind the carriage of Mrs. Sidebottom. Miss Durham had made her own arrangements, and went off in a cabriolet by herself. She took an almost affectionate farewell of Salome, whom she really liked, though she despised her. Miss Durham was sure she had done Salome a good turn in the way in which she had brought Philip to his senses, and she accordingly patronized and petted his simple wife. She was pleased with herself for having contributed to the happiness of the young wife by making a fool of her husband, and then telling him what a fool he had been made.

Salome in her guilelessness reproached herself for having for a little while felt a suspicion of her husband and her friend, for having given way to a feeling of jealousy, for having been unhappy because Philip was so good and obliging as to make an effort to do what she had herself urged him to – make friends with the lonely American girl.

And Philip? In him self-reproach grew. It could grow now, for the soil was ready for it. Hitherto it was choked with the roots of pride and self-esteem. These had been torn up, and he was able now to appreciate himself justly and realize the preciousness of Salome.

Formerly he had looked upon himself as having done a grand and gracious act in taking her to him. An injustice had been committed – how he did not know – in some mysterious way, and he had stooped in the integrity of his soul to take up Salome, make her his wife, so as to indemnify her for her loss.

The suspicion he had entertained against his aunt relative to the will before the return of his uncle had been deepened since he had talked the matter over with Jeremiah. He had now very little doubt that Mrs. Sidebottom had succeeded in getting at the document unguardedly kept by Salome, and tearing away the signature. But though he was tolerably convinced that this fraudulent act had been committed by her, he had not till now considered that by this act his family was dishonoured, as was hers by the existence of Schofield. In what were the Pennycomequicks so much more virtuous than the Schofields? Earle Schofield, her father, was a swindler, and Louisa Sidebottom had committed an act that was felony.

And what was he, himself? He had wounded, driven from him with reproach and harshness the most innocent, single-hearted of women, who was faithful to him and to her duties in every fibre of mind, and body, and soul; whereas he, in a few hours, subjected to a slight temptation, had swerved from the path of right, had yielded to the fascination of the temptress, which he had not the moral strength to resist, and had been carried by her almost to the verge of committing a serious wrong.

The unworthiness of Schofield could be cancelled by the unworthiness of Mrs. Sidebottom. There was not much choice between them. But what was there to set in the account to balance his deviation in heart from his duty to Salome, the injustice and cruelty with which he had treated her at Mergatroyd?

Philip saw all this now clearly, and felt keen mortification and repentance. Salome was constantly with him; and he now, from his bed, and when he rose and walked leaning on her, had his eyes opened to see her many merits, to love the perfect purity and integrity of her soul. She was a child in heart, with the mind of a woman. She was not very clever, but she had common-sense. She was well but not highly educated, she had seen very little of the world, and this had necessarily given a narrow sweep to her powers; but her faculties were good, and with a widened range, her mind would rise to take an interest in all that was presented to her view. Hitherto he had liked Salome, appreciated her chiefly because she was a comfort to himself; now he loved her for her own sake.

Moreover, that little flare-up of jealousy in Salome's heart, a flare-up for which she accused herself before God on her knees – had transformed her regard for Philip into real love. The calm, lukewarm affection, sprung out of a sense of duty, had been changed by this spasm into ardent, passionate love.

That was a cold and colourless world – aloft on the summit of the St. Gothard Pass, and yet there the beautiful flowers of mutual love and trust between husband and wife came into blossom.

'Philip,' exclaimed Salome, coming into his room with a letter in her hand, 'is it not kind of dear Janet? Here is another sweet note from her, telling me how darling baby is.'

'My dear, I know what a trial it is to you to be parted from him.'

'Oh, Philip – I am with you.' Then opening the letter and showing it him, 'Only fancy! – my father and Miss Durham have left the Impérial.'

'What – left Andermatt?'

'Yes.'

'Together?'

'I do not know; Janet does not say. And, Philip, she says you are to mind and get quickly well, for positively next week she and Lambert are to be married at the Embassy at Berne.'

CHAPTER LI.
AGAIN HYMEN

Is there in all Europe a more delightful old-world town than Berne? There are grander minsters, there are more princely mansions, but there is no lovelier situation than that occupied by the dear old city perched on a rock round which the green Aar forms a loop. May the great cancer of modern Berne that lies in the west never creep over and destroy the beauty of the ancient town, as the same horrible fungus growth is disfiguring and killing the charm out of nearly every ancient city on the Continent. Even our common red-brick houses are better than the vulgar ash-gray, Jerusalem-artichoke coloured edifices, all staringly alike, and equally uninteresting, that are growing up in long line and regular square in imperial Aix, in patrician Nürnberg, in episcopal Spires, everywhere treading on and trampling out beauty. In a hundred years, probably, all the great towns of the Middle Ages will have been transmuted from gold to lead, and be utterly unattractive. When we see a ruin of a church, an abbey, a castle, an old manor-house, even of a straw-thatched cottage, we are sad, for we think what they were, beautiful in their several ways, and all having lost much by becoming ruins. But of these modern edifices everything we can say is that we live in hope that they may become ruins, for then only can they conceivably touch the picturesque. In England, our builders have grasped the truth that there is beauty in a broken skyline, and in alternation of light and shadow in a frontage; but on the Continent, in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, no architect has risen above the idea of drawing parallel lines, and of making of every street an elementary study in perspective.

On a brilliant summer day, when the sun was streaming down out of a perfectly-blue sky into the long main street of Berne, alive with marketers, three cabs drew up at the entrance to the Hotel of the Wild Man, near the Clock-tower, and from them stepped, in the first place, a young man in light-gray trousers and lavender gloves, and then a young and pretty lady wearing a bridal veil, a wedding-dress of silver gray. From the second carriage descended three bridesmaids – no other than the Labarte girls – and from the third cab Mrs. Sidebottom and Philip and Salome.

Captain Pennycomequick had been married at the Embassy to Janet Baynes, and if the day's weather gave a true presage of the new life entered on, that of the captain and his bride was likely to be a happy one. But there were surer grounds on which to base a forecast of their hymeneal condition than the state of the weather. The captain was an amiable man, whom nothing would rouse to opposition, and Janet, as he and his mother had ascertained, was very comfortably off. She had or would have about five hundred a year, and five hundred per annum in France, where they intended to live, would allow of their enjoying themselves as much as if they had double that sum in England, not necessarily because things were cheaper in France, but because popular opinion allowed retrenchment in a thousand of those trifles which in England are the great outlets that let money leak away.

There was to be no wedding-tour; not because Janet did not desire to escape with the captain from the rest of the party, but because the Labarte girls absolutely refused to be parted with. They had suddenly woke to the discovery that Mrs. Sidebottom had hoodwinked them, had carried them away out of sight and hearing whilst love-making was in progress; a veil had been torn from before their eyes, and they saw through all her dodges and subterfuges, and were in combined mutiny and angry protest. Henceforth nothing would sever them from their aunt. A great opportunity had been lost through the craft of that designing old woman, a passion on a grand scale had raged, so to speak, under their noses, and they had not sniffed it. Their attention had been drawn away, and they had been unable to make those interesting and instructive studies in the process of love-making to its grand climax in proposal, which might have been theirs and been to them of incalculable interest and advantage, but for that dreadful Sidebottom. Thus – if they could no longer take observations in the conduct of lovers, they could examine, and store up their observations on the conduct of newly-married people in the honeymoon. They clung to their aunt, with their arms about her neck, they lavished expressions of tenderness, they protested that they could not and would not be separated from her; and Janet foresaw that a wedding-tour encumbered with the Labarte girls would be worse than none at all, or one with the Labarte girls plus Mrs. Sidebottom, and Salome and Philip to draw them off from her occasionally. As the party drove from the Embassy, Mrs. Sidebottom said to Philip:

'By the way, what do you think? Wonders will never cease. Did you see the entries in the marriage register previous to those made by Lamb and Janet?'

'I did not look.'

'I did; and whilst you were arranging about fees I made inquiries. There was a marriage at the Embassy this morning, before our affair. An unheard-of thing in Berne to have two English weddings the same day, so the chaplain said.'

'I dare say.'

'And guess who they were who entered the holy bonds.'

'I really cannot. I know none likely.'

'But you do know, and are quite able to guess.'

'I have not the energy, then.'

'Why, Colonel Yeo, that is to say, Earl Schofield and our friend at Andermatt, Miss Durham.'

'Nonsense!' Philip was startled.

'It is a fact. I suppose he really is an earl, for he was entered in the register as Earl Schofield, and not as Colonel Beaple Yeo.'

'But,' Philip stammered, 'it is not possible; he cannot.'

'He has. I saw the entries. They were married half an hour before we arrived.'

'I will inquire about it,' said Philip, 'as soon as ever the carriage stops. I will go back to the Embassy. Something must be done. He had no right to marry.'

'Why not?'

Philip did not answer. He was excited and uneasy.

'You cannot go till after the breakfast,' said Mrs. Sidebottom, 'and I suppose it is too late to forbid the banns. I presume he is really an earl. He says that the attainder is up. He truly is a distinguished-mannered man, and I like him. He looks a nobleman.'

In the evening the entire party visited the Schanzli, a garden or restaurant on a commanding hill above Berne, once occupied by a fort from which it takes its name. From the terrace is seen the range of the Oberland mountains, and, in the middle distance below, is the town viewed in its full length with towers and spires, and gabled roofs of chocolate-brown tile. Visitors are attended on by waitresses in the pretty costume of the canton.

The evening was lovely, a meet conclusion to so bright a day. The setting sun illumined the distant snows of the giants of the Oberland, and quivered in the windows of the city below. There are epoch-making scenes in life, scenes to which the memory recurs with unalloyed pleasure, scenes which have been revelations of beauty or majesty to the soul, and such a scene is that from the Schanzli to the visitor who is there for the first time. It is a double revelation to him – the splendour of the glacier mountain world, and simultaneously with it a realization of the beauty, the charm of that old world of the Middle Ages which is being remorselessly and surely effaced, and on which in another century the men of that generation will be unable to look, or will know of it only a few scattered monuments, set in wastes of hideousness, and judge of it only as one might judge of the ocean by contemplating a few shells dug out of a chalk bed.

The party of Pennycomequick-Sidebottom-Labarte had settled itself to a marble-topped, or, to be more exact, imitation marble-topped table, and had ordered the waitress to bring the carte of wines and meats, when Claudine Labarte nudged her aunt, and whispered:

'See! see! There they are, M. le Comte de Schoville and our dear Artemise. Shall we go to them?'

'On no account,' said Mrs. Penycombe-Quick, that is to say Janet, hastily. 'Besides,' she looked in the same direction, 'they do not seem to desire our interference.'

All looked at the little table, not far distant, where sat Beaple Yeo, alias Schofield, and his bride. The same day that had smiled on Lambert and Janet had laughed over them, but without sure augury of calm weather apparently; for already a post-nuptial storm had broken loose. Beaple Yeo was leaning back in his green-painted iron chair, very red and blotched in face, and opposite him was Artemisia whom he had just made his wife, flushed and talking rapidly.

It was clear that they were in angry altercation – about what could not be learned – for their voices were drowned by the music from the little theatre in the grounds, in which the overture to Boildieu's 'Jean de Paris' was being performed.

Beaple Yeo curled his whisker round his forefinger, and said something in reply to a discharge of angry words from Artemisia; whatever it was that he said, it so stung her that, losing all self-control, she sprang to her feet, leaned across the table, and struck him on the cheek. Beaple lost his equilibrium, and went over with his chair on the gravel of the terrace, to the great amusement of the Swiss waitress, and of the scattered visitors at the tables, who had noticed the altercation. Artemisia was startled at her own violence, and ashamed; she looked round, and caught sight of the friends she had made at Andermatt. Her colour was so heightened with passion that it could not become deeper with shame. Instead of resuming her seat, without regarding the humiliated man who was picking himself up from the ground, she came directly to the table where the party of Pennycomequick-Sidebottom was seated, and with heaving bosom and flashing eye, she stood before Philip, and said in a tone broken with excitement: 'You have helped to deceive me. It was mean – it was cruel! You insulted me first of all, and then you conspired with this – this man to play me a base trick. It was unworthy of a gentleman, of an Englishman.'

'I beg your pardon,' said Philip; 'I do not understand of what you are speaking. I am quite unaware that I ever deceived you.'

'You told me he was a nobleman – an earl – and he is nothing of the kind.'

'I never said he was.'

'I asked you, and you answered me that he was an earl.'

'I did no such thing. You misunderstood me. You asked me whether he had any right to the title of Earl of Schofield, and I answered – I recall exactly my words – that he was perfectly justified in calling himself Earle Schofield. That is his name. Whether he has any right to call himself Beaple Yeo, and to claim to be a colonel, is another matter on which I entertain grave doubts; but I have none whatever that his surname is Schofield, and that his Christian name is Earle.'

Artemisia did not speak for a minute, she was very angry and ashamed. When she had in some measure recovered her self-possession, she said bitterly: 'You might have been more explicit.'

'I refused to say much about the man. I had my reasons. Moreover, I had no idea that the matter was one of importance to you.'

'I have sold myself to him. I have married him this day, and only now have discovered that I have been basely imposed upon.'

'It is I – I who have been taken in,' shouted Yeo, coming forward, pushing to the table, regardless of the shrinking fear that appeared in the faces of Salome and Janet. 'It is I,' he repeated, 'I that have been deceived. I was led to believe you were a wealthy American, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars – and – and I want to know where is the money? You are an adventuress.'

'And you are an adventurer,' laughed Artemisia. 'Perhaps we have taken each other in, and we are both fools to have been so easily deceived. Who told you I was a rich American heiress?'

'The waiter at the Imperial.'

'And he told me you were a rich milord.'

'I want to know what you really are,' said Yeo, who was also very angry – angry and disappointed. 'I have a right to know who or what manner of person I have married.'

'And I,' said Artemisia, 'I also want to know who and what manner of person I have married.'

'That, perhaps, I can tell you,' said Philip gravely. 'But not in the presence of these ladies. Mr. Schofield, or whatever you call yourself, I will trouble you to return to your table, or reseat yourself where you were. I see the waitress is in alarm lest she should lose payment for what you ordered and have consumed.'

Beaple Yeo sulkily went back to his place. Philip with a sign, showed Artemisia that he desired her to follow. She obeyed. When they were beyond earshot of Mrs. Sidebottom, Salome, and the rest, Philip said, standing by the little table, 'Mr. Schofield, I also wish to ask of you a question.'

'I am ready, my dear boy, to be put through my catechism,' answered Yeo, with recovered assurance. 'If you want the pedigree of Schofield, I have it at my fingers' ends.'

'It is not the pedigree so much as the alliances of Earle Schofield that interest me,' said Philip.

'Oh, the Schofields have been allied with the best blood in the land, better than your twopenny-ha'penny manufacturers.'

'I must ask you to tell me whether, before you married Miss Durham at the Embassy to-day, you had ascertained that an alliance – not a very high one – was at an end.'

'What do you mean?' asked Yeo, with his face slightly changing colour.

'You may happen to remember Ann Dewis, the coal-barge woman, whom you married at Hull some sixteen years ago?'

Beaple uttered a low oath.

'I have reason to know,' continued Philip, 'that she is alive – and you know that she is so, as well as I do. Miss Durham, this fellow had no right to marry you. His legitimate wife is still alive; no countess, but a vulgar old woman who owns and works a coal-barge on the Keld-dale Canal. He has a son by her. One good turn deserves another, and as you did me a real kindness at the hospice I repay it by freeing you from a degrading union just contracted with this wretched man, who is a mere adventurer and swindler. And now, one word with you, Schofield. The evidence of your bigamy is at hand. Take care that you never show your face at Mergatroyd to annoy me or my wife, or that you trouble Janet – if you do I shall have you immediately arrested on a charge of felony, for what you have done to-day.'