Part 14

“You leave it to me, my dear,” he said. “I like your honesty and the way you have trusted me. It is a pleasure to help those who are willing to help themselves. You can make yourself comfortable at the rectory for the day; my daughter Mary will make you welcome. There, give me a kiss, my dear, to show your good feeling.”

And Bess kissed the old gentleman, a display of gratitude that might have shocked most grievously the more straitlaced of Dr. Sugg’s parishioners.

Mary Sugg assumed an air of mild and genteel hauteur when her father brought Bess into the parlor and desired his daughter to exercise his hospitality in the girl’s behalf. Like many plain and pious young women, Mary Sugg was inclined to view beauty with suspicion and to make of virtue a Madonna of Ugliness. She conceived it to be distinctly indiscreet of her father to introduce a strange girl into the house, especially when Janet and Sarah, the housemaid and the cook, had fled the place because of the small-pox. Mary Sugg atoned for her grimness, however, by being the possessor of a kind heart and a sympathetic nature. She made Bess a gracious little courtesy, and looked shyly at the girl, who was gazing round the parlor, with its solid Dutch furniture, its bookshelves, and its prints. A tall clock ticked sententiously beside the door. The chintz-curtained windows looked out upon the lawn and flower-beds, where Dr. Sugg’s daffodils and crocuses were in bloom.

The rector took his daughter apart into the hall, and, after closing the door, told her the whole of Bess’s trouble. Dr. Sugg was a great man when giving voice to his opinions, and his daughter still believed him certain of a bishopric. Perhaps, also, it was Bess’s very virtuous disinclination to be married that impressed Miss Mary’s virgin heart. Besides, Richard Jeffray had promised the girl help, and poor Mary thought Mr. Richard one of the sweetest fellows in Christendom. Therefore, she kissed her father and declared that she approved heartily of his sentiments and his sensibility.

“Why should not the girl stay with us?” she said, of a sudden, her tired eyes brightening. “Now that Janet and Sarah have left us I should like some help, and I do not want to get a woman up from the village.”

Dr. Sugg slapped his thigh, and regarded Mary as though she were a genius.

“Bless my soul,” he said, “what a clodpoll I am, to be sure. The very thing, my dear. The wench has been clear of the fever, and if she will stay with us there is no need for me to ride to Beechhurst. Go in and talk to her yourself, Mary.”

Miss Sugg’s sallow face had flushed a little.

“To be sure,” she exclaimed, “she looks a very decent young woman, clean and capable. I am surprised, sir—”

“Surprised, Mary?” asked the rector, with an amused twinkle.

“That a girl out of Pevensel should look so neat and respectable.”

“Can any good thing come out of Nazareth, eh?”

“Yes, father.”

“Egad, many good things do originate from Nazareth, my dear—more, I imagine, than from polite Jerusalem.”

Mary Sugg returned to the parlor, and confessed with some shy courtesy to Bess that the rector himself was in need of a servant. Could Bess cook and milk and mend stockings? Bess’s eyes were fixed searchingly on Miss Sugg’s face for the moment as though probing her sincerity. Contrasts that they were, there was a gentleness and an air of quiet sympathy about the parson’s daughter that appealed instinctively to the child of the woods. She met Mary’s offer in the spirit that prompted it, and thanked her with a tremulous light in her eyes.

“Madam,” she said, with simple stateliness, holding out her hand and making poor Mary look utterly commonplace, “I thank you for your kindness and your trust in me. I will serve you with all my heart.”

There is magic in gratitude, and Mary, blushing shyly, took Bess’s hand and liked the girl unreservedly from that moment.

“My father is a kind man,” she said, a little confusedly; “he is always ready to help those who are in trouble.”

“And I see that you are his daughter, madam.”

“I hope I try to be worthy of him, my dear.”

It was a quaint sight to see Mary Sugg with her awkward little body and her ugly face mothering Bess, who could have carried her in her arms like a child. Bess seemed to become strangely sweet and gentle. Her heart had gone out to this faded, shrivelled little person with the quiet face and the pale, short-sighted eyes. She was soon talking to Mary of her life in Pevensel, and Miss Sugg’s shocked face was a study in pained propriety when she heard of Dan’s brutality. Yet Mary Sugg was a very simple and untainted young woman for all her primness, and there was a certain inevitable ardor in Bess’s personality that appealed to good women and to children.

Mary took the girl into the kitchen, brewed her some coffee, and saw that she ate an honest meal. Then she showed her the whole house—the attic that was to be her bedroom, the press where the clean linen was kept, the closet where the pans and brushes were. She gave Bess one of her own aprons, an old pair of house shoes, and a cap. Bess had much of the practical in her constitution, and, moreover, she was burning to prove her gratitude to her friends. There was to be a leg of mutton for Dr. Sugg’s dinner that day. Bess bared her brown forearms, fastened on her apron, and blessed old Ursula for having taught her to be useful. Dr. Sugg was delighted with her cooking and with the quiet and graceful way she waited at table. Mary, a perfect housewife herself, congratulated her father on their refugee’s success.

“The girl looks quite a lady,” she said. “I must say I am in love with her, though she has only been with us half a day. I trust her terrible kinsfolk will not trouble her here.”

Dr. Sugg frowned and looked bellicose.

“The authority of this house,” he answered, “is sufficient to awe the rascals. My sympathies are wholly with the girl, my dear, and I shall protect her to the best of my ability.”

XXII

The old parsonage house, with its sombre atmosphere and its silence broken only by the ticking of the great Dutch clock in the parlor, seemed to Bess a secluded hermitage where she would be safe from her kinsfolk and from the savagery of her forest lover. The kitchen was in the wing at the back of the house, shut off from the fields by Dr. Sugg’s orchard and a holly hedge, and parted on the west from the church-yard by the garden and a high stone-wall. The very consciousness of her nearness to Jeffray filled her with contentment. She flitted about the brick-paved kitchen singing to herself at times, and thinking of Jeffray as she did her work. There was the cow to be called in from the parsonage meadow and milked at dawn and sunset. Mary Sugg herself answered the kitchen door so that Bess’s presence should be kept as secret as possible. Dr. Sugg alone went into Rodenham village, for since the breaking out of the small-pox his daughter had kept to the house and garden, leaving such business as lay outside the rectory to her father. Bess served her new friends with all the ardor of her nature. She brushed Dr. Sugg’s coat for him, buckled on his shoes, and warmed his slippers. As for Miss Mary, she had fallen coyly in love with their handsome handmaid, and treated her more as a friend than as a servant.

Each day Dr. Sugg would trudge up to the priory and make inquiries after Richard Jeffray’s health. For Bess it was the culminating moment in the day when she unlocked the front-door for the rector—for they kept the door locked—saw him hang his hat in the hall, and heard him remark with a twinkle that “Mr. Jeffray was doing very well.” Bess would turn back, in her red petticoat, white cap and apron, into the kitchen and sing softly to herself as she turned the joint on the spit, polished the pewter, or peeled apples for a tart. As yet she knew nothing of Jeffray’s betrothal to Miss Hardacre, and in her simple and passionate way she let her imagination roam at will. It was more a rare and sensuous dream with the girl, a passing and repassing of mysterious and alluring visions. Practical as she was in the trivialities of life, she became a desirous-eyed child of nature when love opened the gates of the sunset and of the dawn.

As for Miss Mary Sugg, she was a very modest creature, and had grown to regard the passionate intoxications of life as bordering on indecency. Like many inevitable spinsters, she had become ashamed, as it were, of her own sex, and the very reading of the banns in church made her mouth straighten primly and her hands clasp each other more chastely in her lap. The parson’s daughter appeared sincerely disturbed when Bess spoke to her of her life in Pevensel. Prudence and propriety! The very thought of such savagery as Dan’s sent a pious shiver through Miss Sugg’s frame. She admired Bess for her courage, and even looked up to her with some sort of awe as to one who had survived terrible temptings of the devil. Bess grew to trust the prim, kindly little creature in the course of a few days. She felt greatly moved to pet Miss Sugg, to stroke her gentle face, and caress her as a child might caress some smiling and delightful grandmother. Poor Mary took Bess’s attentions with blushes and a secret sense of pleasure. It had been her lot to be one of the odd women in the world, slighted by every one with the exception of Richard Jeffray and her father.

It has been said that Mary Sugg regarded matrimony with suspicion, and though Miss Sugg had not the remotest hope of marrying Richard Jeffray herself, she had no liking for his betrothal to Jilian Hardacre. Mary, like all women of sense, was something of a gossip, and it was at Rodenham parsonage that Bess learned at last of Jeffray’s entanglement at Hardacre. Mary was helping Bess to clean the silver and the pewter in the pantry when she let the truth slip casually into the girl’s ears.

Bess started, reddened, and went on polishing Dr. Sugg’s tankard as though the news had no concern for her heart.

“I did not know Mr. Jeffray was to be married,” she said, frowning a little, and staring out of the narrow window.

Miss Sugg, lost in her own reflections for the moment, noticed nothing strained or unnatural in Bess’s manner.

“Yes, I suppose it will soon be quite an old affair,” she said, with a sigh.

“And is Miss Hardacre very handsome?”

“A matter of opinion, my dear.”

“Mr. Jeffray is very much in love with her?”

Miss Sugg’s mouth tightened primly.

“It is not my business,” she said, quietly, “to inquire into the warmth and nature of a gentleman’s affections.”

Poor Bess, her forecastings of the future were greatly changed by those few words of Mary Sugg’s. She woke no longer in the morning with a rush of joy to hear the thrushes singing in the parsonage garden. All her quaint imaginings were past and gone, for she was woman enough to feel the significance of this new truth. A kind of hopelessness took possession of her, a conviction that Jeffray had given her nothing but pity, and that all her dreams had been made of mist. Miss Hardacre was a great lady, and of course Mr. Jeffray was right in wishing to marry her. Bess went about her work with a dull ache at her heart. She no longer dreamed of the day when she should see Jeffray face to face again; rather, she dreaded the very thought of it, and grew full of a bitter humbleness that softened her whole nature. Her one yearning was to be saved from Dan and Isaac, to be left in peace awhile, unquestioned and alone.

It was the seventh evening of Bess’s sojourn at the parsonage. Dr. Sugg had gone down into the village to visit certain of the villagers who were sick to death of the fever, and Miss Sugg was sitting in her bedroom, sewing. Bess had been sweeping the kitchen and polishing the pewter and the plate. The evening was full of the splendor of spring, birds singing in every tree, and the sky a great sheet of gold in the west. The garden looked so green and fair with the sunlight shimmering through upon the grass, and daffodils asleep in the shade, that Bess had opened the garden door and looked up at the blue zenith and the golden west. The broad beds would soon be ablaze with tulips, red and white. Anemones and primroses were flowering in the shrubbery, and the gorse on the heath above Rodenham was gilding the purple of the hills.

Halting suddenly as she crossed the grass, she fancied that she caught the sound of footsteps close by in the church-yard. The stone-wall that divided the burial-ground, with its gray headstones and its yews, from the parsonage garden, stood some seven feet high, and was tufted along the summit with gilliflower and grass. Bess ran her eyes suspiciously along the edge that cut the gold of the western sky. Suddenly, just above her, she saw a pair of hairy hands come over the wall, the fingers clawing at the stone-work to gain a surer hold. A fur cap jerked up above the wall; a face followed it, the mouth agape, the eyes straining right and left into the dusk.

Bess, standing stone-still, recognized Dan, her cousin. He had a red handkerchief knotted about his forehead, and a pad of lamb’s-wool over his wounded ear. Her fear of him made her like Lot’s wife for the moment, as she stood discovered on the open lawn. She was conscious only of the grin on the man’s face, as he stared at her, and of the great, hairy hands still gripping the wall.

Her pistol! She felt in her bosom for it, and found with a shock of horror that she had left it in the attic. Dan, who had scrambled astride the wall, gave a hoarse shout and waved his hand. Bess had turned and was racing for the house. She heard Dan leap down from the wall and come padding after her across the grass. Mary Sugg’s white and terrified face showed for a moment at one of the upper windows. The parson’s daughter saw two more men leap down from the church-yard into the garden.

Bess stumbled over the step at the kitchen door, and half fell across the threshold. She struggled up and in, and clapped to the door, only to find Dan’s weight heaving against it before she could put up the bar. The latch and bolt gave way like brittle wood, and Bess herself was sent staggering against the wall. Before she could recover, Dan’s great arms were round her, his face thrust close to hers, his breath beating on her cheek.

Bess struggled fiercely, beating one fist in his face, and striving to untwine herself from his arms. He was too strong for her, however, and she read the savage delight of it in his eyes. Crushing Bess to him, and lifting her off her feet, he carried her out into the garden, mocking her as she pleaded, fought, and threatened.

Isaac, and Solomon, his brother, were waiting under the holly hedge closing the orchard. They ran forward to meet Dan, and set to to bind Bess’s wrists and ankles, while Dan held her down upon the grass. Isaac was mocking her the while with an exultation that made his smooth face seem diabolical under its white hair. Bess, desperate, and struggling still, cursed him as he held her left arm pinned against the ground while Solomon knotted the cord about her wrist.

“Old man,” she said, “be sure that I shall kill you some day.”

Isaac, thrusting his hand into her hair, and twisting a mass of it about his fingers, wrenched at the strands till Bess cried out with pain.

“You would run away from us, eh! We’ll cure you of your tricks, my lady. This is the last time you’ll laugh at us, I guess.”

“Devil—”

“That’s as it may be, my dear. Quick, lad, tie up her feet. I’ll shove this rag in her mouth and tie the cloth over it. That’s the trick. Up with her, Dan, she’s yours now, I reckon.”

Dan took Bess in his arms, hugging her tight to his broad chest, and carried her through the orchard and out into the meadow. Isaac and Solomon followed, keeping a keen watch behind them to see whether they were to be meddled with from the house. On the road over Rodenham heath old Isaac’s wagon was waiting, with three stout horses in the team. One of Solomon’s sons, Enoch, held the ropes. There was a pile of loose straw in the wagon, and Dan, half throwing Bess in over the tail-board, climbed in after her and covered her with the straw. Isaac and Solomon clambered in after him, and, whipping up the horses, they went at a trot for the wooded slopes of Pevensel.

XXIII

Richard Jeffray’s recovery from the small-pox was hailed by the tenants of the Rodenham estate as nothing less than a public blessing. The farmers were astute enough to know when they had a generous “booby” for a landlord, a man who could easily be cheated, and who was ready to listen to their grievances instead of sensibly grinding the gold out of their tough and materialistic hearts. Hence they listened with unction to Dr. Sugg’s thanksgiving sermon, and thanked Providence when they realized that there would be no raising of their rents.

Even the Lady Letitia experienced a comfortable sensation when she read the good news in a letter from Dr. Sugg, or, rather, when Parsons read it to her at a distance of three paces, lest there should be any infection in the sheet. Jeffray was an amiable relative who might oblige her delicately on occasions. As for the Hardacre folk, their sympathies were centred for the moment in their own family, for Jilian was abed with the small-pox, and Sir Peter and Mr. Lot were much agitated in their minds as to how her precious complexion would withstand the ravages of the disease.

There were flowers on the broad window-seat of Jeffray’s bedroom window, flowers that should have testified to some gentle and soft-eyed presence in the house. Who was it that had set those gorgeous king-cups in that bowl of blue, filled those tall vases with wild hyacinths, and ranged the tulips red and white in pots along the window-ledge? No woman’s hand had done the deed. Blunt Dick Wilson was the culprit on this occasion. Wilson, whose creased and cynical face had come back through Rodenham, tanned by the sea-wind and the sun upon the downs. Peter Gladden had shown no reluctance to delegate many of his duties to his master’s friend, and the painter had put aside his brushes and busied himself with phials and feeding-cups, spoons and red flannel, warming-pans and iced-wine.

One May morning Richard sat at his open window, looking over the park towards Rodenham village and the purple slopes of Pevensel. There had been no Maying in the village that month, and the blackthorn and the broom, the palm and wild-cherry, had escaped unbroken, for though the pest appeared to have spent its malice, death had entered many of the cottages. George Gogg, of the Wheat Sheaf, had lost his daughter, a plump, black-haired, bright-eyed wench, whose red cheeks and red ribbons had turned many a young farmer’s head. Old Sturtevant, the cobbler, had gone the way of all flesh, and several more of the villagers, men, women, and children, were lying under the green-sward in Rodenham church-yard. As for Jeffray, he was but in a feeble way himself, and Surgeon Stott had decreed it that he was to be troubled with no news from the outer world as yet.

Richard, muffled up in a dressing-gown, with dusky mottlings covering his thin face, sat before the open window and looked out over the park. The disease had seized him sharply, but not dangerously, and even Richard had vanity enough to feel some satisfaction at Surgeon Stott’s verdict that he would be left with few scars. There is a delicious languor in convalescence when the world seems to spread itself anew before the reawakened eyes, and life is reborn like a dream of renewed youth into the heart. Nature seems to welcome the exile with smiling eyes and soft breathings of her green-clad bosom. So might it have been for Richard that spring day as he saw the great trees standing so calm and still under the blue heavens, and the green billows of the park a-glisten under the sun.

Sickness is held to solemnize the soul, to chasten the understanding, and purge the passion out of man. It is considered to be a season of severe self-judgment, and of inward searchings of the heart, a season when religious impulses should struggle to the surface, and solemn promises be made to propitiate the god who has granted health. Such is the orthodox exposition of the doctrine of disease. The pious hand points to the precipice that has provided the mortal with a chance of realizing the abysses of the unknown.

But with Jeffray his recovery was as the coming forth of a moth from the cramping sack of custom. He had much to repent of in the past, but the repentance was romantic rather than religious. It was a lifting up of the hands to the light, not the wan and sickly light of prosaic morality, but the glow of the instincts that burn on the altar of nature, the life fire of love, of wonder, and of worship.

It was towards Bess—Bess of the Woods—that Jeffray’s thoughts flew feverishly as he lay in bed or sat propped up in his chair before the window. He yearned to see that face again, to watch the light kindling in the keen-sighted eyes, to hear the deep and husky modulations of her voice. He was eager to learn whether she were safe from Dan or no, and to tell her why the tryst at Holy Cross had been broken. His thoughts hovered more tenderly about her radiant face bathed by the splendor of its dusky hair than about Miss Jilian’s tawny head. His recollections of Miss Hardacre were neither satisfying to his soul nor flattering to the future. He remembered her as vain, peevish, ready to wax petulant over trifles, selfishly jealous of her own safety.

It is scarcely necessary to spin a flimsy tissue of words about Richard Jeffray’s thoughts. Probably his illness had suffered his convictions to sink to the solid earth instead of drifting feather-like in air. Frankly, he discovered in himself a strong and aggressive disinclination to make Miss Jilian Hardacre his wife. It was no great psychological problem, but merely a question of nature asserting herself in the magic person of poor Bess. Bess was a finer and lovelier being than Miss Hardacre; she had more soul, more splendor of outline, more womanly suggestiveness. And thus Mr. Richard sat brooding in his chair, watching the clouds drift across the blue, and wondering what the near future had in store for him.

Perhaps Jeffray was not sorry to have his solitude broken by the sound of Dick Wilson’s heavy and deliberate footsteps in the gallery, and the shining of his red face round the edge of the oak door. The painter wore the same rusty suit of clothes, and he had been mourning his approaching parting with these well-worn retainers, for Surgeon Stott had ordered him to burn every shred of them before he left Rodenham. In danger of being “nonsuited,” Mr. Dick was contemplating a descent upon the late Mr. Jeffray’s wardrobe, since it was certain that he could not turn Adamite in the cause of cleanliness, and perhaps end in a mad-house by reason of his nudity.

Jeffray’s pale face, with the shadow-rings under the eyes, lighted up at Wilson’s coming. The painter had a roll of manuscript in his hand. He went and sat in the window-seat, after pushing aside the bowl of king-cups, and patted the roll of paper with peculiar and amusing emphasis.

“May I congratulate you, sir,” he said, “on having revived the spirit of the Elizabethans?”

Jeffray colored, like a boy whose mother has caught him inditing verses to a pretty milliner.

“What! You have been reading my epic, Dick?”

“I have, sir, I have. I discovered it in the library, and you will pardon the friendly curiosity that prompted me to bury my nose in it.”

Jeffray laughed shyly, and lay back with his hands clasped behind his head. The painter had unfolded the roll, and, holding it before him, with a quaint and sententious pride, read the three opening stanzas of the poem.

“There is life for you,” he said, warmly. “The divine utterance, the gushing out of song.”