Chapter 6
The New Inn proved some years ago to be too small for its would-be visitors. An addition couldn’t be built because there wasn’t any room; but the landlady succeeded in getting a house across the way. Here there are bedrooms, a sort of quiet tap-room of very great respectability, and the kitchens. As the dining-room is in house number one, the matter of serving dinner might seem to be attended with difficulty, but it is not apparent. The maids run across the narrow street with platters and dishes surmounted by great Britannia covers, and in rainy weather they give the soup or joint the additional protection of a large cotton umbrella. The walls of every room in the inn are covered with old china, much of it pretty, and some of it valuable, though the finest pieces are not hung, but are placed in glass cabinets. One cannot see an inch of wall space anywhere in bedrooms, dining- or sitting-rooms for the huge delft platters, whole sets of the old green dragon pattern, quaint perforated baskets, pitchers and mugs of British lustre, with queer dogs, and cats, and peacocks, and clocks of china. The massing of colour is picturesque and brilliant, and the whole effect decidedly unique. The landlady’s father and grandfather had been Bideford sea-captains and had brought here these and other treasures from foreign parts. As Clovelly is a village of seafolk and fisher-folk, the houses are full of curiosities, mostly from the Mediterranean. Egeria had no china in her room, but she had huge branches of coral, shells of all sizes and hues, and an immense coloured print of the bay of Naples. Tommy’s landlady was volcanic in her tastes, and his walls were lined with pictures of Vesuvius in all stages of eruption. My room, a wee, triangular box of a thing, was on the first floor of the inn. It opened hospitably on a bit of garden and street by a large glass door that wouldn’t shut, so that a cat or a dog spent the night by my bed-side now and then, and many a donkey tried to do the same, but was evicted.
Oh, the Clovelly mornings! the sunshine, the salt air, the savour of the boats and the nets, the limestone cliffs of Gallantry Bower rising steep and white at the head of the village street, with the brilliant sea at the foot; the walks down by the quay pool (not _key pool_, you understand, but _quaäy püül_ in the vernacular), the sails in a good old herring-boat called the _Lorna Doone_, for we are in Blackmore’s country here.
We began our first day early in the morning, and met at nine-o’clock breakfast in the coffee-room. Egeria came in glowing. She reminds me of a phrase in a certain novel, where the heroine is described as always dressing (seemingly) to suit the season and the sky. Clad in sea-green linen with a white collar, and belt, she was the very spirit of a Clovelly morning. She had risen at six, and in company with Phoebe, daughter of her house (the yellow-haired lassie mentioned previously), had prowled up and down North Hill, a transverse place or short street much celebrated by painters. They had met a certain bold fisher-lad named Jem, evidently Phoebe’s favourite swain, and explored the short passage where Fish Street is built over, nicknamed Temple Bar.
Atlas came in shortly after and laid a nosegay at Egeria’s plate.
“My humble burnt-offering, your ladyship,” he said.
_Tommy_: “She has lots of offerings, but she generally prefers to burn ’em herself. When Egeria’s swains talk about her, it is always ‘_ut vidi_,’ how I saw, succeeded by ‘_ut perii_,’ how I sudden lost my brains.”
_Egeria_: “_You_ don’t indulge in burnt-offerings” (laughing, with slightly heightened colour); “but how you do burn incense! You speak as if the skeletons of my rejected suitors were hanging on imaginary lines all over the earth’s surface.”
_Tommy_: “They are not hanging on ‘imaginary’ lines.”
_Mrs. Jack_: “Turn your thoughts from Egeria’s victims, you frivolous people, and let me tell you that I’ve been ‘up-along’ this morning and found—what do you think?—a library: a circulating library maintained by the Clovelly Court people. It is embowered in roses and jasmine, and there is a bird’s nest hanging just outside one of the open windows next to a shelf of Dickens and Scott. Never before have young families of birds been born and brought up with similar advantages. The snails were in the path just as we saw them yesterday evening, Atlas; not one has moved, not one has died! Oh, I certainly must come and live here. The librarian is a dear old lady; if she ever dies, I am coming to take her place. You will be postmistress at the Fairy Cross then, Egeria, and we’ll visit each other. And I’ve brought Dickens’ ‘Message from the Sea’ for you, and Kingsley’s ‘Westward Ho!’ for Tommy, and ‘The Wages of Sin’ for Atlas, and ‘Hypatia’ for Egeria, ‘Lorna Doone’ for Jack, and Charles Kingsley’s sermons for myself. We will read aloud every evening.”
“I won’t,” said Tommy succinctly. “I’ve been down by the quay pool, and I’ve got acquainted with a lot of A1 chaps that have agreed to take me drift-fishing every night, and they are going to put out the Clovelly lifeboat for exercise this week, and if the weather is fine, Bill Marks is going to take Atlas and me to Lundy Island. You don’t catch me round the evening lamp very much in Clovelly.”
“Don’t be too slangy, Tommy, and who on earth is Bill Marks?” asked Jack.
“He’s our particular friend, Tommy’s and mine,” answered Atlas, seeing that Tommy was momentarily occupied with bacon and eggs. “He told us more yarns than we ever before heard spun in the same length of time. He is seventy-seven, and says he was a teetotaler until he was sixty-nine, but has been trying to make up time ever since. From his condition last evening, I should say he was likely to do it. He was so mellow, I asked him how he could manage to walk down the staircase. ‘Oh, I can walk down neat enough,’ he said, ‘when I’m in good sailing trim, as I am now, feeling just good enough, but not too good, your honour; but when I’m half seas over or three sheets in the wind, I roll down, your honour!’ He spends three shillings a week for his food and the same for his ‘rummidge.’ He was thrilling when he got on the subject of the awful wreck just outside this harbour, ‘the fourth of October, seventy-one years ago, two-and-thirty men drowned, your honour, and half of ’em from Clovelly parish. And I was one of the three men saved in another storm twenty-four years agone, when two-and-twenty men were drowned; that’s what it means to plough the great salt field that is never sown, your honour.’ When he found we’d been in Scotland, he was very anxious to know if we could talk ‘Garlic,’ said he’d always wanted to know what it sounded like.”
Somehow, in the days that followed, Tommy was always with his particular friends, the fishermen, on the beach, at the Red Lion, or in the shop of a certain boat-builder, learning the use of the calking-iron. Mr. and Mrs. Jack, Aunt Celia, and I unexpectedly found ourselves a quartette for hours together, while Egeria and Atlas walked in the churchyard, in the beautiful grounds of Clovelly Court, or in the deer park, where one finds as perfect a union of marine and woodland scenery as any in England.
Atlas may have taken her there because he could discuss single tax more eloquently when he was walking over the entailed estates of the English landed gentry, but I suspect that single tax had taken off its hat, and bowing profoundly to Egeria, had said, “After you, Madam!” and retired to its proper place in the universe; for not even the most blatant economist would affirm that any other problem can be so important as that which confronts a man when he enters that land of Beulah, which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of the City of Love.
Atlas was young, warm of heart, high of mind, and generous of soul. All the necessary chords, therefore, were in him, ready to be set in vibration. No one could do this more cunningly than Egeria; the only question was whether love would “run out to meet love,” as it should, “with open arms.”
We simply waited to see. Mrs. Jack, with that fine lack of logic that distinguished her, disclaimed all responsibility. “He is awake, at least,” she said, “and that is a great comfort; and now and then he observes a few very plain facts, mostly relating to Egeria, it is true. If it does come to anything, I hope he won’t ask her to live in a college settlement the year round, though I haven’t the slightest doubt that she would like it. If there were ever two beings created expressly for each other, it is these two, and for that reason I have my doubts about the matter. Almost all marriages are made between two people who haven’t the least thing in common, so far as outsiders can judge. Egeria and Atlas are almost too well suited for marriage.”
The progress of the affair had thus far certainly been astonishingly rapid, but it might mean nothing. Egeria’s mind and heart were so easy of access up to a certain point that the traveller sometimes overestimated the distance covered and the distance still to cover. Atlas quoted something about her at the end of the very first day, that described her charmingly: “Ordinarily, the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are cleared away, to grant us rights of citizenship. She is like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait for dubious inspection.” But the description is incomplete. Egeria, indeed, made no one wait at the frontier for a dubious inspection of his passport; but once in the new domain, while he would be cordially welcomed to parks, gardens, lakes, and pleasure grounds, he would find unexpected difficulty in entering the queen’s private apartments, a fact that occasioned surprise to some of the travellers.
We all took the greatest interest, too, in the romance of Phoebe and Jem, for the course of true love did not run at all smooth for this young couple. Jack wrote a ballad about her, and Egeria made a tune to it, and sang it to the tinkling, old-fashioned piano of an evening:—
“Have you e’er seen the street of Clovelly? The quaint, rambling street of Clovelly, With its staircase of stone leading down to the sea, To the harbour so sleepy, so old, and so wee, The queer, crooked street of Clovelly.
“Have you e’er seen the lass of Clovelly? The sweet little lass of Clovelly, With kirtle of grey reaching just to her knee, And ankles as neat as ankles may be, The yellow-haired lass of Clovelly.
“There’s a good honest lad in Clovelly, A bold, fisher lad of Clovelly, With purpose as straight and swagger as free As the course of his boat when breasting a sea, The brave sailor lad of Clovelly.
“Have you e’er seen the church at Clovelly? Have you heard the sweet bells of Clovelly? The lad and the lassie will hear them, maybe, And join hand in hand to sail over life’s sea From the little stone church at Clovelly.”
When the nights were cool or damp we crowded into Mrs. Jack’s tiny china-laden sitting-room, and had a blaze in the grate with a bit of driftwood burning blue and green and violet on top of the coals. Tommy sometimes smelled of herring to such a degree that we were obliged to keep the door open; but his society was so precious that we endured the odours.
But there were other evenings out of doors, when we sat in a sheltered corner down on the pier, watching the line of limestone cliffs running westward to the revolving light at Hartland Point that sent us alternate flashes of ruby and white across the water. Clovelly lamps made glittering disks in the quay pool, shining there side by side with the reflected star-beams. We could hear the regular swish-swash of the waves on the rocks, and to the eastward the dripping of a stream that came tumbling over the cliff.
Such was our last evening in Clovelly; a very quiet one, for the charm of the place lay upon us and we were loath to leave it. It was warm and balmy, and the moonlight lay upon the beach. Egeria leaned against the parapet, the serge of her dress showing white against the background of rock. The hood of her dark blue yachting-cape was slipping off her head, and her eyes were as deep and clear as crystal pools.
Presently she began to sing,—first, “The Sands o’ Dee,” then,—
“Three fishers went sailing out into the west, Out into the west as the sun went down; Each thought of the woman who loved him the best, And the children stood watching them out of the town.”
Egeria is one of the few women who can sing well without an accompaniment. She has a thrilling voice, and what with the scene, the hour, and the pathos of Kingsley’s verses, tears rushed into my eyes, and Bill Marks’ words came back to me—“Two-and-twenty men drowned; that’s what it means to plough the great salt field that is never sown.”
Atlas gazed at her with eyes that no longer cared to keep their secret. Mrs. Jack was still uncertain; for me, I was sure. Love had rushed past him like a galloping horseman, and shooting an arrow almost without aim, had struck him full in the heart, that citadel that had withstood a dozen deliberate sieges.
It was midnight, and our few belongings were packed. Egeria had come to the Inn to sleep, and stole into my room to warm her toes before the blaze in my grate, for I was chilly and had ordered a sixpenny fire. When I say that she came in to warm her toes, I am asking you to accept her statement, not mine; it is my opinion that she came in for no other purpose than to tell me something that was in her mind and heart pleading for utterance.
I didn’t help her by leading up to the subject, because I thought her fib so flagrant and unnecessary; accordingly, we talked over a multitude of things,—Phoebe and Jem and their hard-hearted parents, our visit to Cardiff and Ilfracombe, Bill Marks and his wife, the service at the church, and finally her walk with Atlas in the churchyard.
“We went inside,” said Egeria, “and I copied the inscription on the bronze tablet that Atlas liked so much on Sunday: ‘Her grateful and affectionate husband’s last and proudest wish will be that whenever Divine Providence shall call him hence, his name may be engraved on the same tablet that is sacred in perpetuating as much virtue and goodness as could adorn human nature.’” Then she went on, with apparent lack of sequence: “Penelope, don’t you think it is always perfectly safe to obey a Scriptural command, because I have done it?”
“Did you find it in the Old or the New Testament?”
“The Old.”
“I should say that if you found some remarks about breaking the bones of your enemy, and have twisted it out of its connection, it would be particularly bad advice to follow.”
“It is nothing of that sort.”
“What is it, then?”
She took out a tortoise-shell dagger just here, and gave her head an absent-minded shake so that her lustrous coil of hair uncoiled itself and fell on her shoulders in a ruddy spiral. It was a sight to induce covetousness, but one couldn’t be envious of Egeria. She charmed one by her lack of consciousness.
“The happy lot Be his to follow Those threads through lovely curve and hollow, And muse a lifetime how they got Into that wild, mysterious knot,”—
quoted I, as I gave her head an insinuating pat. “Come, Egeria, stand and deliver! What is the Scriptural command, that having first obeyed, you ask my advice about afterwards?”
“Have you a Bible?”
“You might not think it, but I have, and it is here on my table.”
“Then I am going into my room, to lock the door, and call the verse through the keyhole. But you must promise not to say a word to me till to-morrow morning.”
I was not in a position to dictate terms, so I promised. The door closed, the bolt shot into the socket, and Egeria’s voice came so faintly through the keyhole that I had to stoop to catch the words:—
“Deuteronomy, 10:19.”
I flew to my Bible. Genesis—Exodus—Leviticus—Numbers—Deuteronomy—Deut-er-on-omy—Ten—Nineteen—
“_Love ye therefore the stranger_—”
V PENELOPE AT HOME
“’Tis good when you have crossed the sea and back To find the sit-fast acres where you left them.”
EMERSON.
BERESFORD BROADACRES, _April_ 15, 19–.
PENELOPE, in the old sense, is no more! No mound of grass and daisies covers her; no shaft of granite or marble marks the place where she rests;—as a matter of fact she never does rest; she walks and runs and sits and stands, but her travelling days are over. For the present, in a word, the reason that she is no longer “Penelope,” with dozens of portraits and three volumes of “Experiences” to her credit, is, that she is Mrs. William Hunt Beresford.
As for Himself, he is just as much William Hunt Beresford as ever he was, for marriage has not staled, nor fatherhood withered, his infinite variety. There may be, indeed, a difference, ever so slight; a new dignity, and an air of responsibility that harmonizes well with the inch of added girth at his waist-line and the grey thread or two that becomingly sprinkle his dark hair.
And where is Herself, the vanished Penelope, you ask; the companion of Salemina and Francesca; the traveller in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; the wanderer in Switzerland and Italy? Well, if she is a thought less irresponsible, merry, and loquacious, she is happier and wiser. If her easel and her palette are not in daily evidence, neither are they altogether banished from the scene; and whatever measure of cunning Penelope’s hand possessed in other days, Mrs. Beresford has contrived to preserve.
If she wields the duster occasionally, in alternation with the paint-brush and the pen, she has now a new choice of weapons; and as for models,—her friends, her neighbours, even her enemies and rivals, might admire her ingenuity, her thrift, and her positive genius in selecting types to paint! She never did paint anything beautifully but children, though her backgrounds have been praised, also the various young things that were a vital part of every composition. She could never draw a horse or a cow or an ox to her satisfaction, but a long-legged colt, or a newborn Bossy-calf were well within her powers. Her puppies and kittens and chickens and goslings were always admired by the public, and the fact that the mothers and fathers in the respective groups were never quite as convincing as their offspring,—this somehow escaped the notice of the critics.
Very well, then, what was Penelope inspired to do when she became Mrs. Beresford and left the Atlantic rolling between the beloved Salemina, Francesca, and herself? Why, having “crossed the sea and back” repeatedly, she found “the sit-fast acres” of the house of Beresford where she “left them” and where they had been sitting fast for more than a hundred years.
“Here is the proper place for us to live,” she said to Himself, when they first viewed the dear delightful New England landscape over together. “Here is where your long roots are, and as my roots have been in half a hundred places they can be easily transplanted. You have a decent income to begin on; why not eke it out with apples and hay and corn and Jersey cows and Plymouth Rock cocks and hens, while I use the scenery for my pictures? There are backgrounds here for a thousand canvases, all within a mile of your ancestral doorstep.”
“I don’t know what you will do for models in this remote place,” said Himself, putting his hands in his pockets and gazing dubiously at the abandoned farm-houses on the hillsides; the still green dooryards on the village street where no children were playing, and the quiet little brick school-house at the turn of the road, from which a dozen half-grown boys and girls issued decorously, looking at us like scared rabbits.
“I have an idea about models,” said Mrs. Beresford.
And it turned out that she had, for all that was ten years ago, and Penelope the Painter, merged in Mrs. Beresford the mother, has the three loveliest models in all the countryside!
Children, of course, are common enough everywhere; not, perhaps, as common as they should be, but there are a good many clean, well-behaved, truthful, decently-featured little boys and girls who will, in course of time, become the bulwarks of the Republic, who are of no use as models. The public is not interested in, and will neither purchase nor hang on its walls anything but a winsome child, a beautiful child, a pathetic child, or a picturesquely ragged and dirty child. (The latter type is preferably a foreigner, as dirty American children are for some reason or other quite unsalable.)
All this is in explanation of the foregoing remarks about Mrs. Beresford’s ingenuity, thrift, and genius in selecting types to paint. The ingenuity lay in the idea itself; the thrift, in securing models that should belong to the Beresford “sit-fast acres” and not have to be searched for and “hired in” by the day; and the genius, in producing nothing but enchanting, engrossing, adorable, eminently “paintable” children. They are just as obedient, interesting, grammatical, and virtuous as other people’s offspring, yet they are so beautiful that it would be the height of selfishness not to let the world see them and turn green with envy.
When viewed by the casual public in a gallery, nobody of course believes that they are real until some kind friend says: “No, oh, no! not ideal heads at all; perfect likenesses; the children of Mr. and Mrs. Beresford; Penelope Hamilton, whose signature you see in the corner, _is_ Mrs. Beresford.”
When they are exhibited in the guise of, and under such titles as: “Young April,” “In May Time,” “Girl with Chickens,” “Three of a Kind” (Billy with a kitten and a puppy tumbling over him), “Little Mothers” (Frances and Sally with their dolls), “When all the World is Young” (Billy, Frances, and Sally under the trees surrounded by a riot of young feathered things, with a lamb and a Jersey calf peeping over a fence in the background), then Himself stealthily visits the gallery. He stands somewhere near the pictures pulling his moustache nervously and listening to the comments of the bystanders. Not a word of his identity or paternity does he vouchsafe, but occasionally some acquaintance happens to draw near, perhaps to compliment or congratulate him. Then he has been heard to say vaingloriously: “Oh, no! they are not flattered; rather the reverse. My wife has an extraordinary faculty of catching likenesses, and of course she has a wonderful talent, but she agrees with me that she never quite succeeds in doing the children justice!”
Here we are, then, Himself and I, growing old with the country that gave us birth (God bless it!) and our children growing up with it, as they always should; for it must have occurred to the reader that I am Penelope, Hamilton that was, and also, and above all, that I am Mrs. William Hunt Beresford.
_April_ 20, 19–.
Himself and I have gone through the inevitable changes that life and love, marriage and parenthood, bring to all human creatures; but no one of the dear old group of friends has so developed as Francesca. Her last letter, posted in Scotland and delivered here seven days later, is like a breath of the purple heather and brings her vividly to mind.
In the old days when we first met she was gay, irresponsible, vivacious, and a decided flirt,—with symptoms of becoming a coquette. She was capricious and exacting; she had far too large an income for a young girl accountable to nobody; she was lovely to look upon, a product of cities and a trifle spoiled.