Part 3

"The little I've read and heard shows me they would never do that. African cannibals, it seems, are rather careful whom they eat. Generally only their war captives or their old people. They wouldn't eat a peaceful stranger, a white man. However, on the east side of Africa the negroes are _not_ cannibals, any more than we are."

"Isn't it curious, John, to think what different ideas of right and wrong prevail amongst the peoples of the world? Here, you say, there are some tribes in Africa which eat their own relations. Well, I daresay it is thought quite a right and proper thing to do--out there--just as we in England think the old folk ought to be cherished and taken care of, and kept alive as long as possible. Only fancy how funny it would sound to us to be told that Mr. Jones showed very bad feeling because he wouldn't join his brother and sister in eating up old Aunt Brown! And yet I daresay that is what cannibal scandal-mongers often say to one another. Isn't it wonderful how one lot of human beings can think and act so differently to another lot; and yet each party considers that nobody is right but those who believe as they do? Supposing one day some black missionaries landed in England, dressed in large earrings, bead necklaces, pocket handkerchiefs and nothing else, and tried to persuade us to worship some hideous idol and leave off wearing so many clothes. How astonished we would be ... and yet they would think they were doing right, just as our missionaries do who go out to teach savages the Gospel...."

"Well, I confess I don't see the resemblance. What we preach is the Truth, the Living Truth. What _they_ believe is a lie of the Devil."

"Yes, but they don't _know_ it is. They must think it is the truth or they wouldn't go on believing in it year after year. When I was teaching geography the other day, I was quite _astonished_ to find in the Manual that about _four or five hundred millions_ of people were Buddhists. Isn't it _dreadful_ to think of their all being wrong, all living in vain. Surely God won't punish them for it hereafter?"

"It's hard to say. If they had the means of grace offered to them and rejected the Message I should think He would. But that is the chief object of our Foreign Missions, to teach the heathen the true principles of Christianity and bring the Light of the Gospel to them that sit in darkness. When this has been done throughout the earth, no one will then be able to say he sinned in ignorance, 'because he knew not the way of Life.'"

"And yet, John, see here in England what different views of religion even good people take. Father goes to Church; you go to Chapel; and each thinks the other on the wrong road to Heaven."

"Oh no! Lucy, I wouldn't go so far as that. Of course, I believe that our Connection has been vouchsafed a special revelation of God's Will and Purpose among men. But all the same I feel sure that many a Church person comes into the way of Truth though it may be after much tribulation. Why, I wouldn't deny that even _Roman Catholics_ may be saved, if they have led a godly life and acted up to their lights. At the same time, those who have the Truth among them and are wilfully blind to its teaching are incurring a heavy responsibility."

"Then you think father stands less chance of being saved than you do?"

"Well ... yes ... I do; because in his Church he does not possess the same means of grace as are given to our Connection."

"But he is so good, so kind to every one, so fair in his dealings..."

"Good works without faith are insufficient to save a man."

"Well, for my part, I can't believe that _any_ one will be lost because he may not follow the most correct kind of religion. I can't believe that God will punish any one who isn't very, very wicked indeed. He is so great; we are so little.... Just think, supposing we saw an ant doing anything wrong should we feel obliged to hurt it or burn it? Should we not be rather amused and pitiful? And mustn't we seem the very tiniest of ants to God?"

"Ah, Lucy! The belief in the fierce judgments of the Almighty is a fundamental Truth of our religion, and if your faith in _that_ is shaken, everything will begin to go.... But the subject is too solemn to be lightly discussed, so let's talk about something else. Have you finished my slippers?"

"Yes, and they're perfectly _lovely_. A dark blue, with J.B. embroidered in white silk. I shall bring them with me to the station to-morrow.... Why, here we are at the gates of the garden! _How_ we've walked and _how_ we've talked! And look, John,"--drawing him back from standing too near the iron gates, "there's his lordship on the terrace, and I do believe the young lady with him is the one he's become engaged to!"

John looked in the direction whither Lucy discreetly inclined her head, beyond triumphs of carpet-bedding to the terrace which fronted the south side of the great house. And there, foremost of several groups of Sunday callers who were taking tea at small tables, they saw specially prominent a party of three: a pretty girl rather showily dressed in the height of 1886 fashion, an old lady, and an elderly man, tall, a little inclined to stoop, dressed in dark, loose-fitting tweeds. He had a long face with a massive jaw and rather a big nose. But though they were not visible at a distance of fifty yards there were kindly wrinkles round his dark grey eyes as he suddenly lifted them from the seated ladies and glanced across the flower beds to see who was looking at him from the outer world.

This was Lord Silchester; and John, not wishing to prolong his indiscretion, raised his wide-awake and turned away with his betrothed. He and Lucy then walked directly to Aldermaston, John leaving her at the railway station, where he consummated his breach of the Sabbath by taking an evening train back to Theale, and so returned to his home at the Aerated Waters factory for the last night he was ever to pass there.

The next morning, punctually at seven o'clock, Lucy's father drew up his gig before the booking-office of Theale station, and, getting a porter to hold the horse, helped Lucy down and accompanied her on to the station platform, where they found the Baines family already assembled: Mrs. Baines gloomily seated on a bench, Mr. Baines reading the old newspaper placards of the closed bookstall, and John busy seeing his numerous boxes labelled.

"Hullo, Baines!--and ma'am--hope you're well ... a bit cast down, I expect? But there, it's a fine career he's starting on.... Still, it's always a wrench. John"--extending his hand--"I've just called in to wish you good luck _and_ a prosperous voyage _and_ a happy return, by and bye. Mind you make a comfortable home out there for my little girl! I shall be feeling about as bad as you feel, ma'am" (Mrs. Baines kept a perfectly impassive face during these attempts at sympathy and did not even look at the speaker), "next--when is it to be? March?--when I come to part with Lucy. But life's made up of partings and meetings, which is why, some'ow, I don't like railway stations. Now I can't stop, and if I could, I should only be in the way. Must be off to market. Leave you Lucy. She'll walk back to school. Good-bye, John...."

And Farmer Josling hurried out of the station and his horse's hoofs sounded in quick succession on the ascent to the main road. Lucy, left behind actually found herself regretting that father had brought her in such good time as to give her five-and-twenty minutes or more of irresolute attendance on John. When she had presented him with the slippers, had squeezed his hand two or three times, and adjured him to write from the first stopping-place, besides sending a postcard from London to say he was leaving "all right"; had made a few suggestions about his luggage which, in spite of the urbanity of departure, were too futile to be answered or adopted; and had insisted on pushing the band of his blue tie under the shirt button at the back of his neck, so that it might not rise up over the collar: there seemed to be nothing left to say or do. The bookstall was not yet opened so there were no papers to be bought.

She would have talked with Mrs. Baines, who had retired to the little waiting-room and was pretending there to read a great roll of texts in big print hung against one of the walls. But at her first remark she noticed Mrs. Baines's eyelids were quivering and her under lip twitching in a way to indicate that she was a prey to almost uncontrollable emotion. Although she mechanically turned the leaves of the texts, her eyes were not focussing them, and something seemed to be moving up and down her lank throat which she could not finally swallow. She only answered Lucy's remark by an inarticulate gurgle and waved her away. There was something so pathetic in her dismal ugliness, in her awkwardly restrained emotion, that Lucy was suddenly moved to pity as she returned to the platform. Her embarrassment was cut short by the tumult occasioned by the approaching train, heralded by the clanging of the station bell. The train was full and John had hurriedly to pass all the second class compartments in review to find a place not only for himself but for the amorphous packages deemed too frail for the guard's van. When at last he had squeezed himself and his parcels past the obstructing knees of the established passengers; he had just time to twist round, stretch out over his surly neighbours' laps, and squeeze Lucy's timorously extended hand. Then the train gave a lurch forward and a slide backwards which made him nearly bite his tongue off in an attempt to say good-bye to his parents, and finally rolled slowly out of the station, while the forms of father, mother, and sweetheart left standing on the platform grouped themselves for one moment in an attitude of mute farewell before the advance of the train cut them off from his sight.

The retreating chain of carriages shut itself up like a telescope, and the station began to resume its sleepy calm. Mrs. Baines's emotion now could no longer be restrained from expression. She tottered towards the waiting-room and sinking heavily on to a hard wooden seat she choked and hiccupped and sobbed, and the tears rolled regularly, one after the other, down her cavernous cheeks. Lucy took her trembling hands and tried to soothe her; and then, Mrs. Baines, softened by this sympathy, lost all that remained of her self-control and abandoned herself limply on Lucy's shoulder.

"Oh!" she gasped, "I've parted with him in anger--he's gone! ... Perhaps I shall never see him again.... My boy.... My only son. I never said a kind word to him before he left. I thought there would be time.... I thought John would come and make it up. I was cross because he went out walking with you and came back late by train yesterday. You know I always taught him to observe the Sabbath. But I'd forgive him _anything_ if he'd only come back and give me _one_ kiss ... my boy...."

But John was well on his way to Reading, and the London express, and all his mother's tardy plaints were fruitless to recall him. Moreover, he was not perceptive. To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed much as usual; and he was certainly not conscious that she had parted with him in anger. He was fond of her in a way, but he had been used from childhood to her being always in a huff about something or other.

Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial calmness, straightened her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet strings, and walked a little of the way back with her towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively behind. For the rest of that day he enjoyed unrebuked freedom to do as he liked. He ate his fill and even smoked a pipe in the parlour. His wife having regained her composure held aloof from him in silent, stony grief.

Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of Aldermaston driving thither in a chaise and got a lift, nearly as far as her home, a substantial farmstead on the Mortimer road, close to both church and school. This enabled her to begin her duties punctually. She taught her girls and boys from nine to twelve and two to four. She thought of John with gentle melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of her betrothed's departure, especially his mother's wild display of grief. But the next morning as she walked from the farmstead to the school she actually hummed a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the dewy hedge and arranged them round her light straw hat. At the same time she had a twinge of remorse at her forgetfulness--poor John was doubtless now at sea watching England fade from the exile's view; and she forced herself to assume before her scholars an aspect of restrained grief.

Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather went by in her surroundings of perfect beauty, she confessed to herself she had seldom felt so happy, in spite of her sweetheart's absence.

*CHAPTER III*

*SIBYL AT SILCHESTER*

They had ridden over from opposite directions--he from Farleigh Wallop on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of early Christian Britain was then--and now--only marked by two-thirds of an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees. There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear, apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest--waving fields of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent farmstead--unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and its churchyard.

On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves. This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman. He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.

Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too obvious to the male eye.

Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns of the younger generation were distant cousins.

_Roger_ (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five years ago--a little filled out perhaps.... And _this_ is how we meet. How _utterly_ different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh _how_ you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say _I_ didn't write--when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry--and _now_ I hear from Maud you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden--I suppose it was _you_! And this is what women call _fidelity_!"

_Sibyl_ (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case--not mere romantic school girls--they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and _very_ unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several years--I should never again get such a chance ... and I really _do_ like Lord Silchester, you don't know _how_ kind he can be--and you can't _really_ care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even _wrote_ to me...."

_Roger_: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the _World_ ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "_Missionary_ meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."

_Sibyl_: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ... or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so I _did_ post that _World_ to you and got Gerry to address it--and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But _do_ let's be calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I _must_ get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming--she helped to bring it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "_Damn_ her!") "She's got twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I _am_ sorry ... in a way ... but you'll find _heaps_ of girls, _much_ nicer than I am, ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.) "And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now I know more about things--I was so young when you went away--I don't approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their--I mean aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)

_Roger_: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."

_Sibyl_: "Well! I _did_ think I might, and _not_ selfishly. There's papa--more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be able to marry for _ever_ so long...."

(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")

_Sibyl_: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a year, _if_ you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I should have to come home. I _don't_ like roughing it, I should _dislike_ hot countries; and I _hate_ black people.... No, Roger ... dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several years to come; and then ... I'll--I'll find some really _nice_ girl to marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government--aren't you glad that _horrid_ old Gladstone's _gone_?--He'll be at the Colonial Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him, once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages that might accrue from Sibyl's _mariage de convenance_. He'd be _hanged_ if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south, find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham----

"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a grass widow at home...."

Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him, still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He rode--yes--they had already had decorous rides together, but she imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out of him by the groom....

Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty--at any rate close on fifty-six--and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though really she wouldn't mind if _she_ died first, men were so perfectly hateful, and so was your family--if you were a woman. You were expected to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by others who held you bound by foolish promises made when you were a mere girl without any knowledge of the world. Still, there was a possibility--just a possibility--for weren't we all mortal?--that she might find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day. Roger by then would have made a great career, become a sort of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd have discovered and named lakes after royalty; then they might meet again; and who could say? Certainly, if it came to _love_, she wouldn't deny she had never felt _quite_ the same towards any one as she had towards Roger....

But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely, saying they were positively indecent: at which she expressed herself as very angry. Then leading out the horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to mount and swung himself into the saddle. He escorted her silently to Aldermaston main street, raised his hat, and rode off up the Mortimer road with a set face and angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.