Chapter 20

_PAST AND PRESENT._

The next morning Bessie was left entirely at liberty to amuse herself. Mr. Fairfax had breakfasted alone, and was gone to Norminster before she came down stairs. Jonquil made the communication. Bessie wondered whether it was often so, and whether she would have to make out the greater part of the days for herself. But she said nothing; some feeling that she did not reason about told her that there must be no complaining here, let the days be what they might. She wrote a long letter to Madame Fournier, and then went out of doors, having declined Mrs. Betts's proposed attendance.

"Where is the village?" she asked a boy who was sweeping up fallen leaves from the still dewy lawn. He pointed her the way to go. "And the church and parsonage?" she added.

"They be all together, miss, a piece beyond the lodge."

With an object in view Bessie could feel interested. She was going to see her mother's home, the house where she was herself born; and on the road she began to question whether she had any kinsfolk on her mother's side. Mrs. Carnegie had once told her that she believed not--unless there were descendants of her grandfather Bulmer's only brother in America, whither he had emigrated as a young man; but she had never heard of any. A cousin of some sort would have been most acceptable to Bessie in her dignified isolation. She did not naturally love solitude.

The way across the park by which she had been directed brought her out upon the high-road--a very pleasant road at that spot, with a fir wood climbing a shallow hill opposite, bounded by a low stone fence, all crusted with moss and lichen, age and weather.

For nearly half a mile along the roadside lay an irregular open space of broken ground with fine scattered trees upon it, and close turf where primroses were profuse in spring. An old woman was sitting in the shade knitting and tending a little black cow that cropped the sweet moist grass. Only for the sake of speaking Bessie asked again her way to the village.

"Keep straight on, miss, you can't miss it," said the old woman, and gazed up at her inquisitively.

So Bessie kept straight on until she came to the ivy-covered walls of the lodge; the porch opened upon the road, and Colonel Stokes was standing outside in conversation with another gentleman, who was the vicar of Kirkham, Mr. Forbes. Bessie went on when she had passed them, shyly disconcerted, for Colonel Stokes had come forward with an air of surprise and had asked her if she was lost. Perhaps it was unusual for young ladies to walk alone here? She did not know.

The gentlemen watched her out of sight. "Miss Fairfax, of course," said the vicar. "She walks admirably--I like to see that."

"A handsome girl," said Colonel Stokes. And then they reverted to their interrupted discussion, the approaching election at Norminster. The clergyman was very keen about it, the old Indian officer was almost indifferent.

Meanwhile Bessie reached the church--a very ancient church, spacious and simple, with a square tower and a porch that was called Norman. The graveyard surrounded it. A flagged pathway led from the gate between the grassy mounds to the door, which stood open that the Saturday sun might drive out the damp vapors of the week. She went in and saw whitewashed walls; thick round pillars between the nave and aisles; deep-sunken windows dim with fragmentary pieces of colored glass, and all more or less out of the perpendicular; a worm-eaten oak-screen separating the chancel and a solemn enclosure, erst a chapel, now the Fairfax pew; a loft where the choir sat in front for divine service, with fiddle and bassoon, and the school-children sat behind, all under the eye of the parson and his clerk, who was also the school-master.

In the chancel were several monuments to the memory of defunct pastors. The oldest was very old, and the inscription in Latin on brass; the newest was to Bessie's grandfather--the "Reverend Thomas Bulmer, for forty-six years vicar of this parish." From the dates he had married late, for he had died in a good old age in the same year as his daughter Elizabeth, and only two months before her. In smaller letters below the inscription-in-chief it was recorded that his wife Letitia was buried at Torquay in Cornwall, and that this monument was erected to their pious memory by their only child--"Elizabeth, the wife of the Reverend Geoffry Fairfax, rector of Beechhurst in the county of Hants."

All gone--not one left! Bessie pondered over this epitome of family history, and thought within herself that it was not without cause she felt alone here. With a shiver she returned into the sunshine and proceeded up the public road. The vicarage was a little low house, very humble in its externals, roofed with fluted tiles, and the walls covered to the height of the chamber windows with green latticework and creepers. It stood in a spacious garden and orchard, and had outbuildings at a little distance on the same homely plan. The living was in the gift of Abbotsmead, and the Fairfaxes had not been moved to house their pastor, with his three hundred a year, in a residence fit for a bishop. It was a simple, pleasant, rustic spot. The lower windows were open, so was the door under the porch. Bessie saw that it could not have undergone any material change since the summer days of twenty years ago, when her father, a bright young fellow fresh from college, went to read there of a morning with the learned vicar, and fell in love with his pretty Elizabeth, and wooed and won her.

Bessie, imperfectly informed, exaggerated the resentment with which Mr. Fairfax had visited his offending son. It was never an active resentment, but merely a contemptuous acceptance of his irrevocable act. He said, "Geoffry has married to his taste. His wife is used to a plain way of living; they will be more useful in a country parish living on so, free from the temptations of superfluous means." And he gave the young couple a bare pittance. Time might have brought him relenting, but time does not always reserve us opportunities. And here was Bessie Fairfax considering the sorrows and early deaths of her parents, charging them to her grandfather's account, and confirming herself in her original judgment that he was a hard and cruel man.

The village of Kirkham was a sinuous wide street of homesteads and cottages within gardens, and having a green open border to the road where geese and pigs, cows and children, pastured indiscriminately. It was the old order of things where one man was master. The gardens had, for the most part, a fine show of fragrant flowers, the hedges were neatly trimmed, the fruit trees were ripening abundantly. Of children, fat and ruddy, clean and well clothed, there were many playing about, for their mothers were gone to Norminster market, and there was no school on Saturday. Bessie spoke to nobody, and nobody spoke to her. Some of the children dropt her a curtsey, but the majority only stared at her as a stranger. She felt, somehow, as if she would never be anything else but a stranger here. When she had passed through the village to the end of it, where the "Chequers," the forge, and the wheelwright's shed stood, she came to a wide common. Looking across it, she saw the river, and found her way home by the mill and the harvest-fields.

It would have enhanced Bessie's pleasure, though not her happiness perhaps, if she could have betaken herself to building castles in the Woldshire air, but the moment she began to indulge in reverie her thoughts flew to the Forest. No glamour of pride, enthusiasm, or any sort of delightful hope mistified her imagination as to her real indifference towards Abbotsmead. When she reached the garden she sat down amongst the roses, and gazed at the beautiful old flower-woven walls that she had admired yesterday, and felt like a visitor growing weary of the place. Even while her bodily eyes were upon it, her mind's eye was filled with a vision of the green slopes of the wilderness garden at Brook, and the beeches laving their shadows in the sweet running water.

"I believe I am homesick," she said. "I cannot care for this place. I should have had a better chance of taking to it kindly if my grandfather had let me go home for a little while. Everything is an effort here." And it is to be feared that she gave way again, and fretted in a manner that Madame Fournier would have grieved to see. But there was no help for it; her heart was sore, and tears relieved it.

* * * * *

Mr. Fairfax was at home to dinner. He returned from Norminster jaded and out of spirits. Now, Bessie, though she did not love him (though she felt it a duty to assert and reassert that fact to herself, lest she should forget it), felt oddly pained when she looked into his face and saw that he was dull; to be dull signified to be unhappy in Bessie's vocabulary. But timidity tied her tongue. It was not until Jonquil had left them to themselves that they attempted any conversation. Then Mr. Fairfax remarked, "You have been making a tour of investigation, Elizabeth: you have been into the village?"

Bessie said that she had, and that she had gone into the church. Then all at once an impulse came upon her to ask, "Why did you let my parents go so far away? was it so very wrong in them to marry?"

"No, not wrong at all. It is written, 'A man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife,'" was the baffling reply she got, and it silenced her. And not for that occasion only.

When Bessie retired into the octagon parlor her grandfather stayed behind. He had been to see Mr. John Short that day, and had heard that a new aspect had come over the electioneering sky. The Radicals had received an impetus from some quarter unknown, and were preparing to make such a hard fight for the representation of Norminster that the triumph of the Tory party was seriously threatened. This news had vexed him, but it was not of that he meditated chiefly when he was left alone. It was of Bessie. He had founded certain pleasurable expectations upon her, and he felt that these expectations were losing their bloom. He could not fail to recollect her quietness of last night, when he noticed the languor of her eyes, the dejection of her mouth, and the effort it was to her to speak. The question concerning her parents had aroused the slumbering ache of old remembrance, and had stung him anew with a sense of her condemnation. A feeling akin to remorse visited him as he sat considering, and by degrees realizing, what he had done to her, and was doing; but he had his motive, he had his object in it, and the motive had seemed to justify the means until he came to see her face to face. Contact with her warm, distinct humanity began immediately to work a change in his mind. Absent, he had decided that he could dispose of her as he would. Present, he recognized that she would have a voice, and probably a casting voice, in the disposal of herself. He might sever her from her friends in the Forest, but he would not thereby attach her to friends and kinsfolk in the north. His last wanton act of selfish unkindness, in refusing to let her see her old home in passing, was evidently producing its effect in silent grieving, in resentment and revolt.

All his life long Mr. Fairfax had coveted affection, and had missed the way to win it. No one had ever really loved him except his sister Dorothy--so he believed; and Elizabeth was so like Dorothy in the face, in her air, her voice, her gestures, that his heart went out to her with a yearning that was almost pain. But when he looked at her, she looked at him again like Dorothy alienated--like Dorothy grown strange. It was a very curious revival out of the far past. When he was a young man and Lady Latimer was a girl, there had been a prospect of a double marriage between their families, but the day that destroyed one hope destroyed both, and Dorothy Fairfax died of that grief. Elizabeth, with her tear-worn eyes, was Dorothy's sad self to-night, only the eyes did not seek his friendly. They were gazing at pictures in the fire when he rejoined her, and though Bessie moved and raised her head in courteous recognition of his coming, there was something of avoidance in her manner, as if she shrank from his inspection. Perhaps she did; she had no desire to parade her distresses or to reproach him with them. She meant to be good--only give her time. But she must have time.

There was a book of photographs on the table that Frederick Fairfax and his wife had collected during their wedding-tour on the Continent. It was during the early days of the art, and the pictures were as blurred and faded as their lives had since become. Bessie was turning them over with languid interest, when her grandfather, perceiving how she was employed, said he could show her some foreign views that would please her better than those dim photographs. He unlocked a drawer in the writing-table and produced half a dozen little sketch-books, his own and his sister Dorothy's during their frequent travels together. It seemed that their practice had been to make an annual tour.

While Bessie examined the contents of the sketch-books, her grandfather stood behind her looking over her shoulder, and now and then saying a few words in explanation, though most of the scenes were named and dated. They were water-color drawings--bits of landscape, picturesque buildings, grotesque and quaint figures, odd incidents of foreign life, all touched with tender humor, and evidently by a strong and skilful hand; and flowers, singly or in groups, full of a delicate fancy. In the last volume of the series there were no more flowers; the scenes were of snow-peaks and green hills, of wonderful lake-water, and boats with awnings like the hood of a tilted cart; and the sky was that of Italy.

"Oh, these are lovely, but why are there no more flowers?" said Bessie thoughtlessly.

"Dorothy had given up going out then," said her grandfather in a low, strained voice.

Bessie caught her breath as she turned the next page, and came on a roughly washed-in mound of earth under an old wall where a white cross was set. A sudden mist clouded her sight, and then a tear fell on the paper.

"That is where she was buried--at Bellagio on Lake Como," said Mr. Fairfax, and moved away.

Bessie continued to gaze at the closing page for several minutes without seeing it; then she turned back the leaves preceding, and read them again, as it were, in the sad light of the end. It was half a feint to hide or overcome her emotion, for her imagination had figured to her that last mournful journey. Her grandfather saw how she was affected--saw the trembling of her hand as she paused upon the sketches and the furtive winking away of her tears. Dear Bessie! smiles and tears were so easy to her yet. If she had dared to yield to a natural impulse, she would have shut the melancholy record and have run to comfort him--would have clasped her hands round his arm and laid her cheek against his shoulder, and have said, "Oh, poor grandpapa!" with most genuine pity and sympathy. But he stood upon the hearth with his back to the fire, erect, stiff as a ramrod, with gloom in his eyes and lips compressed, and anything in the way of a caress would probably have amazed more than it would have flattered him. Bessie therefore refrained herself, and for ever so long there was silence in the room, except for the ticking of the clock on the chimney-piece and the occasional dropping of the ashes from the bars. At last she left looking at the sketches and mechanically reverted to the photographs upon which Mr. Fairfax came out of his reverie and spoke again. She was weary, but the evening was now almost over.

"I do not like those sun-pictures. They are not permanent, and a water-color drawing is more pleasing to begin with. You can draw a little, Elizabeth? Have you any sketches about Caen or Bayeux?"

Bessie modestly said that she had, and went to bring them; school-girl fashion, she wished to exhibit her work, and to hear that the money spent on her neglected education had not been all spent in vain. Her grandfather was graciously inclined to commend her productions. He told her that she had a nice touch, and that it was quite worth her while to cultivate her talent. "It will add a great interest to your travels when you have the chance of travelling," he said; "for, like life itself, travelling has many blank spaces that a taste for sketching agreeably fills up. Ten o'clock already? Yes--good-night."

* * * * *

The following morning Mr. Fairfax and Bessie walked to church together. Along the road everybody acknowledged the squire with bow or curtsey, and the little children stood respectfully at gaze as he passed. He returned the civility of all by lifting a forefinger to his hat, though he spoke to none, and Bessie was led to understand that he had the confidence of his people, and that he probably deserved it. For a sign that there was no bitterness in his own feelings, each token of regard was noted by her with satisfaction.

At the lodge Colonel and Mrs. Stokes joined them, and Mrs. Stokes's bright eyes frankly appreciated the elegant simplicity of Bessie's attire, her chip bonnet and daisies, her dress of French spun silk, white and violet striped, and perfectly fitting Paris gloves. She nodded meaningly to Bessie, and Bessie smiled back her full comprehension that the survey was satisfactory and pleasing.

Some old customs still prevailed at Kirkham. The humble congregation was settled in church before the squire entered his red-curtained pew, and sat quiet after sermon until the squire went out. Bessie's thoughts roved often during the service. Mr. Forbes read apace, and the clerk sang out the responses like an echo with no time to lose. There had been a death in the village during the past week, and the event was now commemorated by a dirge in which the children's shrill treble was supported by the majority of the congregation. The sermon also took up the moral of life and death. It was short and pithy; perhaps it was familiar, and none the less useful for that. Mr. Forbes was not concerned to lead his people into new ways; he believed the old were better. Work and pray, fear God and keep His commandments, love your neighbor, and meddle not with those who are given to change,--these were his cardinal points, from which he brought to bear on their consciences much powerful doctrine and purifying precept. He was a man of high courage and robust faith, who practised what he preached, and bore that cheerful countenance which is a sign of a heart in prosperity.

After service Colonel and Mrs. Stokes walked home with Mr. Fairfax and Bessie, lunched at Abbotsmead, and lounged about the garden afterward. This was an institution. Sunday is long in country houses, and good neighbors help one another to get rid of it. The Stokes's boys came in the afternoon, to Bessie's great joy; they made a noisy playground of the garden, and behaved just like Jack and Tom and Willie Carnegie, kicking up their heels and laughing at nothing.

"There are no more gooseberries," cried their mother, catching the younger of the two, a bluff copy of herself, and offering him to Bessie to kiss. Bessie kissed him heartily. "You are fond of children, I can see," said her new friend.

"I like a houseful! Oh, when have I had a nice kiss at a boy's hard, round cheeks? Not for years! years! I have five little brothers and two sisters at home."

Mrs. Stokes regarded Bessie with a touched surprise, but she asked no questions; she knew her story in a general inaccurate way. The boy gazed in her face with a pretty lovingness, rubbed his nose suddenly against hers, wrestled himself out of her embrace, and ran away. "When you feel as if you want a good kiss, come to my house," said his mother, her blue eyes shining tenderly. "It must be dreadful to miss little children when you have lived with them. I could not bear it. Abbotsmead always looks to me like a great dull splendid prison."

"My grandfather makes it as pleasant to me as he can; I don't repine," said Bessie quickly. "He has given me a beautiful little filly to ride, but she is not quite trained yet; and I shall beg him to let me have a companionable dog; I love a dog."

The church-bells began to ring for afternoon service. Mrs. Stokes shook her head at Bessie's query: nobody ever went, she said, but servants and poor people. Evening service there was none, and Mr. Forbes dined with the squire; that also was an institution. The gentlemen talked of parochial matters, and Bessie, wisely inferring that they could talk more freely in her absence, left them to themselves and retreated to her private parlor, to read a little and dream a great deal of her friends in the Forest.

At dusk there was a loud jangling indoors and out, and Mrs. Betts summoned her young lady down stairs. She met her grandfather and Mr. Forbes issuing from the dining-room, and they passed together into the hall, where the servants of the house stood on parade to receive their pastor and master. They were assembled for prayers. Once a week, after supper, this compliment was paid to the Almighty--a remnant of ancient custom which the squire refused to alter or amend. When Bessie had assisted at this ceremony she had gone through the whole duty of the day, and her reflection on her experience since she came to Abbotsmead was that life as a pageant must be dull--duller than life as a toil.