“
Very
,” said Mary, warmly. “It is a pleasure to do anything for her.”
“Poor child! And with such a brother! A
most
disagreeable, cold, haughty man, I hear. But he surely cannot be anything but courteous to you, Mary? Under the circumstances, anything else would be too outrageous.”
“Oh dear, no,” said Mary, hastily, startled a little somehow by her mother’s tone. “He is perfectly civil to me – most considerate, and I suppose I should say ‘kind.’ Only I shall be glad to be at home – they are talking now of moving Miss Cheviott to Romary on Thursday – and back into my regular ways. Mother, I’m an awful old maid already, I get into a groove and like to stay there.”
The words recurred to her on her way back to the Edge. Would she really be so glad to be home again? She had used Mr Cheviott’s expression, and it led her into the train of thought which had suggested it to him. Yes, there was truth in what he said. In almost every kind of life, in almost any circumstances, even if painful in themselves, there grows up secretly, as the days pass on, a curious, undefinable charm – a something it hurts us to break, though, till the necessity for so doing is upon us, we had been unconscious of its existence.
“It must be that,” said Mary. “I have got into the groove of my present life, and now that it is coming to an end, disagreeable though it has been, I feel it strangely painful to leave it. Of course it is natural I should feel pain in parting from Alys, whom I can
never
be with again; but, besides that, I am sorry to have done with the whole affair – the queer incongruous life, the old kitchen in the evenings, and Mr Cheviott and his books in the corner, the feeling I am of use to her, to them both, that they would have been wretchedly uncomfortable without me, and that even now that I am away for an hour they will be missing me. What queer, inconsistent complications we human beings are! It is just the coming to an end of it all, the beginning to see it in the haze of the past, that gives it a charm.”
She stood still and gazed across over the bare, long stretch of meadow land before her to the far distant horizon, radiant already in the colours of the fast setting sun. Suddenly a voice behind her made her start.
“Are you bidding the sun good-night?” it said.
Mary turned round and saw Mr Cheviott.
“Yes,” she replied. “I suppose I was. There, is something rather melancholy about a sunset, is there not?” she added after a little pause.
“There is something not rather, but very melancholy about all farewells. And sunset is good-bye forever to a day, though not to the sun,” said Mr Cheviott.
”‘Out of Eternity
This new day is born;
Into Eternity
At night will return.’”
“Yes,” said Mary again. “It is like what my little sister Francie once said, ‘What a sad thing
pastness
is.’”
“How pretty!” said Mr Cheviott. “Pastness! Yes, it is a sad thing, but fortunately not an ugly thing. Distance in time as well as in space, ‘lends enchantment to the view.’ How strangely little things affect us sometimes,” he went on. “There are occasions, little events of my life, that I cannot recall without an indescribable thrill, neither of pleasure nor pain, but a strange, acute mixture of both. And yet they are so trifling in themselves that I cannot explain why they should so affect me.”
“I think I have felt what you mean,” said Mary.
“And in the same way I have felt extraordinarily affected by a far-off view sometimes,” pursued Mr Cheviott. “When I was a boy, from my nursery window we had, on clear days, a view of the shire hills, and on the top, or nearly on the top of one of them, we could, on
very
clear days, distinguish a little white cottage. Do you know, I could never look at it without the tears coming into my eyes, and yet, if it had been near enough to see it plainly, most likely it was the most prosaic of white cottages.”
“I have had the same feeling about things
not
‘enchanted’ by distance,” said Mary. “Once, on a journey, driving rapidly, we suddenly passed a cottage with two girls sitting on the door-step. A ray of rather faint evening sunlight fell across them as they sat, otherwise everything about the scene was commonplace in the extreme. But yet
something
made me feel as if I were going to cry. I had to turn my head away and shut my eyes.”
“That’s just what I mean,” said Mr Cheviott, and then for a minute or two they both stood silent, gazing at the sunset.
“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, at last, “when you are back at the Rectory again, and the present little phase of your life is past and done with, I trust its ‘pastness’ may soften all the annoyance you have had to put up with. Even I, I would fain hope, may come in for a little of the benefit of the mellowing haze of distance and bygoneness?”
“I do not feel that I have had
any
annoyances to bear,” said Mary, cordially. “Alys has been only too unselfish, and – and – you, yourself, Mr Cheviott, have been most considerate of my comfort. My associations with the Edge can never be unpleasant.”
“Thank you – thank you, so very much,” said Mr Cheviott, so earnestly that Mary forthwith began to call hereof a humbug.
Would it not have been honest to have said a little more – to have told him that, while she really did thank him for his courtesy and thoughtfulness, nothing that had happened had, in the least, shaken her real opinion of his character? Of the other side of his character, so she mentally worded it in instinctive self-defence of her constancy. For, indeed, to her there had come to be two Mr Cheviotts – Alys’s brother, and, alas! Arthur Beverley’s cousin!
Chapter Twenty Three
Arthur’s Cousin
“I loved him not, and yet, now he is gone,
I checked him when he spoke; yet could he speak – ”
W.S. Landor.
The evening that followed this little conversation was one of the – if not the – pleasantest of those Mary had spent at the farm. Alys seemed wonderfully stronger and better, or else she had caught the infection of her brother’s unusually good spirits, and, till considerably past her ordinary hour of settling for the night, Mr Cheviott and Mary stayed in her room, laughing, chattering, and joking till Mrs Wills began to think more experienced nurses would be better fitted to take care of the young lady.
“Not that Miss Mary has not an old head on young shoulders, if ever such could be,” she remarked to her husband, “but Miss Cheviott, for all that she’s a-lying there so weakly-like, and many a month, it’s my opinion, when they get her home again, will have to lie; she do have a sperrit of her own. And the master, as I’m always a-going to call him, thinking of our Captain Beverley it must be, he has a deal of fun in him, has Mr Cheviott, for all his quiet ways, as no one would fancy was there.”
But, by and by, Mary exerted her authority. Alys must go to sleep. What would Mr Brandreth say if he found her knocked up and wearied the next day – Wednesday, too, the day before the move to Romary, for which all her strength would be required? So whether sleepy or not, Alys had to obey orders, and, as Mary had a long letter to Lilias to write, Mr Cheviott volunteered to read his sister to sleep, for which Mary sincerely thanked him.
He came into the kitchen an hour or so later, while she was still busy with her letter. He had a book in his hand, and sat down quietly to read it beside the fire. After a while the kitchen clock struck ten.
“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, “I think if I had any authority over you, as you have over Alys, I would exert it to make you go to bed. You were up very early, you have been on your feet, about one thing and another, nearly all day, besides a good long walk; and now you are writing I should be afraid to say
how
many sheets full. Don’t you intend to take any rest? I feel responsible, remember, for the condition in which you go back to the Rectory, and I don’t want your father and mother to think Alys and I have no conscience about overworking you.”
Mary left off writing, and looked up with a smile. Her wavy brown hair was somewhat disarranged, and she pushed it back off her temples with a slight gesture of weariness. Her face was a little flushed, but her eyes were bright and happy-looking. Those dear, good, honest eyes of hers, ready to tell of pleasure and content, as of, it must be confessed, disapproval or indignation! She made a pleasant picture, tumbled hair notwithstanding – she reminded Mr Cheviott, somehow, of the day he had first seen her under the porch of the old church, when she had looked up in his face with that peculiarly attractive expression of hers of hearty, fearless good-will.
“I do believe, now that I leave off writing and can think about it,” she said, “I do believe I
am
a little tired. Not that I have done anything unusual to-day by any means. I suppose I must go to bed,” looking regretfully at her not yet completed letter; “but writing to Lilias is such a temptation.”
“She is enjoying herself very much, you say,” observed Mr Cheviott, in so natural and unconstrained a manner that, for the moment, Mary actually forgot that he was the speaker, forgot her ordinarily quick rising indignation whenever he ventured to name Lilias at all.
“Exceedingly,” she replied, warmly. “I have never had such cheerful, almost merry, letters from her before when she has been away. I am delighted; but a little astonished all the same,” she added, in a lower voice, almost as if speaking to herself.
“I am so
very
glad of it,” said Mr Cheviott, fervently, yet with a sort of hesitation which recalled Mary to herself. Quick as thought the blood mounted to her temple – she turned sharply, the whole expression of her being, even to the pretty curves of her slight firm figure, seeming to her observer to change and harden. She gathered up the loose sheets of her letter and made a step or two towards the door. Then her habitual instincts of consideration and courtesy asserting themselves, she stopped short.
“I think I had better go to bed,” she said. “Goodnight, Mr Cheviott.”
Hitherto, latterly that is to say, in the prevalence of a tacit truce between these two, the usual amenities of intimate and friendly social relations had half unconsciously crept in.
“For Alys’s sake,” Mary had decided, when for the first time she found herself shaking hands with the man she had prayed she might “never see again,” “for Alys’s sake it is necessary to make no fuss, and perhaps for my own, too, it is on the whole more dignified to behave in an ordinary way.”
But to-night, dignity or no dignity, her indignation was again too fully aroused to allow anything to interfere with its expression, and she was proceeding in queenly fashion to the door, when, to her amazement, Mr Cheviott stepped forward and stood in her way.
“Miss Western,” he said, quietly, “won’t you say goodnight? Won’t you shake hands with me as usual?”
Mary hesitated. She did not want to make herself ridiculous – for Lilias’s sake even, she shrank from the slightest appearance of petulance or small resentment. She hesitated; then looking up bravely, said, honestly:
“I would rather not, but – ” A pair of dark eyes were gazing down upon her – gazing as if they would read her very soul, so earnest, so
true
in their expression that Mary could not but own to herself that it was difficult to realise that they belonged to an unprincipled and dishonourable man.
“But?” he said, gravely.
“I was only going to say, if you think so much of shaking hands, I don’t mind,” said Mary, with a curious mixture of deprecation and defiance in her tone. “I don’t want to be uncourteous or exaggerated – besides, what is there in shaking hands? We do so half a dozen times a day with people we do not care the least for.”
“Yes,” said Mr Cheviott, gravely still, “we do. But people one doesn’t care the least for are different from people one positively dislikes, or worse still,
distrusts
.”
“Can’t you leave all that?” said Mary, sadly. “
I
cannot help what – what happened, and, indeed” – her voice trembling a little – “towards the Mr Cheviott I have known
here
I should be most wrong to have any but friendly feelings.”
She held out her hand. Mr Cheviott took it in his, holding it for one little moment longer than was really necessary.
“Is it always to be war between us, Miss Western?” as if the words could not be kept back. “Heaven knows how glad
I
should be to leave forever all the painful part of the past.”
Mary slowly shook her head. Then looking up suddenly again, she said, gently:
“We have got on very well here without fighting. Why should not the truce last till the end of the time here? There is only another day.”
“Yes,” repeated Mr Cheviott. “Only one other day.”
Then Mary went off to bed, but not, for much longer than her wont, to sleep. Her mind seemed strangely bewildered and perplexed.
“I have lost all my mile-stones,” she said to herself. “I feel as if I were being forced to think black white in the strangest way. But I won’t – no, I won’t,
won’t
, won’t!”
And with this laudable determination she went to sleep.
It was late before Mr Cheviott left the kitchen fire-side that night.
“Will the truce last,” he was saying to himself, “even through another day? Twenty times in an hour I have been on the point of saying what, indeed,
would
end it one way or another. And Arthur thought I could not sympathise with him! I wonder on which of the two of us that idiotic will has entailed the greater suffering?”
His good spirits seemed all to have deserted him by the next morning. He was grave and almost stern, and, so said Alys, “objectionably
affairé
about some stupid letters sent on from Romary.” Alys was unusually talkative and obtrusively cheerful, but Mary understood her through it all. A cloud of real sorrow was over both girls, more heavily on Mary, for she knew what Alys was still silently determined to hope against, that this was far more than the “last day” of their queer life at the farm, that it was the end of the strange but strong friendship that, despite all obstacles, had sprung up between them.
For though Alys had almost pointedly refrained from any recurrence to the question of their meeting again at Romary, and Mary had been only too ready to second her in all avoidance of the subject, this absence of discussion had in no wise softened the girl’s resolution.
“Never,” she repeated to herself, “never under
any
circumstances can I imagine myself entering that house again.”
And the day wore on without any allusion being made to the when or the where of their ever meeting again.
Late in the afternoon Mary had gone at Alys’s request to pick some of the pretty spring flowers to be found in profusion in the Balner woods hard by, when, as she was returning homewards, laden with primroses and violets, looking up she saw Mr Cheviott coming quickly along the path to meet her.
“Alys?” she exclaimed, quickly, with just the slightest shade of anxiety in her voice. “Does she want me?”
“Oh, no,” replied Mr Cheviott, with a smile. “Alys is all right. What an anxious nurse you are, Miss Western!”
“Yes,” said Mary, “it is silly. I must get accustomed to the idea of her doing without me. But I could not help having a feeling to-day of a different kind of anxiety – a feeling of almost superstitious fear lest anything should go wrong with her to-day – the last day. It would be so hard to leave her less well than she is, and – of course,” she went on, looking up with a slight flush on her face, “I own to being a little proud of her! It is a great satisfaction to hear Mr Brandreth say that, considering all, she could not have got on better than she has done.”
“Of course it is,” said Mr Cheviott, warmly. “And I am more glad than I can say that you feel it so. It is a little bit of a reward for you.”
Mary did not reply, and they walked on slowly for a few moments in silence.
“How pretty your flowers are,” said Mr Cheviott, at last.
“Lovely, are they not?” replied Mary, half burying her face, as she spoke, in a great rich cluster of primroses that she had tied up together into a sort of ball. “They are the best flowers of all – these spring ones – there can be no doubt about it.”
“Or is it that they
are
the spring ones,” suggested Mr Cheviott.
“A little perhaps,” allowed Mary. “Have I not got a quantity? Alys took a fancy for some to take home to Romary.”
“Poor child, she will not be able to gather any for herself this year,” said Mr Cheviott.
“No,” said Mary.
“And she will not have you to gather them for her after to-day.”
“No,” said Mary again, this time more dryly.
Mr Cheviott stopped short, and as they were placed in the path, Mary, without positive rudeness, could not help stopping too.
“Miss Western,” said Mr Cheviott, abruptly, “is your decision quite unshaken?”
“What decision?” said Mary, quietly.
“About coming to see us at Romary, about, in fact, continuing to honour us with your acquaintanceship – I would
like
to say friendship, but I am afraid of vexing you – or the reverse.”
Mary pulled a poor primrose to pieces, petal by petal, before she replied.
“I wish,” she said, at last, with an appeal almost approaching to pathos in her tones, “I wish you had done as I begged you last night – let this last day end peacefully without rousing anything discordant. Mr Cheviott,” she went on, with an attempt at a smile, “you don’t know me. There are certain directions in which I feel so intensely that it would not take much to make me actually fierce – there is something of the Tartar underlying what you think cool self-possession – and one of those directions is my sister Lilias.” Her voice faltered a little. “Now won’t you be warned,” she added, speaking more lightly, “won’t you be warned, and let our pleasant truce last to the end?”
“To the end,” he repeated, with some bitterness. “A matter of a few hours, and, for the sake of keeping those peaceful, I am to relinquish my only chance of – of ever coming to a better understanding with you? No, Miss Western, I cannot let the subject drop thus.”
“Then what do you want to know?” she said, facing round upon him.
“I want to know if you keep to your determination never to come to see my sister at Romary, never to enter my house again, never, in fact, to have anything more to say to Alys, who is attached to you, and whom I know you care for? You may say she might come to see you, but at present, at any rate, that is impossible – besides, in such forced intercourse there could be no real enjoyment.”
“No,” said Mary, “there could not be. It is best to call things by their right names. I do care for Alys, deeply and truly, but I do not wish or intend to go on knowing her. I would not ask her to come to my home to see me, because I cannot go to her home to see her.”
“And why not?”
“Because she is your sister,” replied Mary, calmly. “And because I could not receive the hospitality of a man who has behaved as I believe you to have behaved.”
Mr Cheviott drew a step nearer her, and Mary, impelled, in spite of herself, to look up in his face, saw that it had grown to a deadly whiteness. She saw, too, something which she was half puzzled, half frightened at – something which in her short, peaceful experience of life, she had never come into close contact with – a strong man’s overwhelming indignation at unjust accusation. She stood silent. What could she say?
“This is
fearfully
hard to bear,” he said, at last. “I thought I was prepared for it, but – in spite of myself, I suppose – I had cherished hopes that recently your opinion of me had begun to soften. Miss Western, has it never occurred to you as possible that you have misjudged me?”
Mary hesitated.
“Yes,” she said, at last. “I may own to you that – lately – I have tried to think if it
was
possible.”
“You have
wished
to find it possible?” said Mr Cheviott, eagerly.
“Sometimes,” said Mary.
“God bless you for that,” he exclaimed, “and – ”
“No, do not say that,” she interrupted. “I have more often wished
not
to find it so, for I – I gave you every chance – I put it all so plainly to you that horrible day at Romary – no, it is impossible that I have done you injustice. Were I to begin to think so, I should feel that I was losing my judgment, my right estimate of things altogether. But I do not wish to continue thinking worse of you than you deserve – you may have learned to see things differently – is it that you were going to tell me? Heaven knows if your interference has done what can never be undone, or not; but, however this is, I do not want to refuse to hear that you have changed.”
Mr Cheviott’s face grew sterner and darker.
“I have not changed,” he said. “What I did was for the best, and I could not but do the same again in similar circumstances.”
“Then,” said Mary, hardening at once, “I really have nothing more to say or to hear. Please let me pass.”
“No,” he replied. “Not yet. Miss Western, I value your good opinion more than that of any one living. I cannot let you go like this. It is my last chance. Do you not know what I feel for you – can you not see what you are making me suffer? I have never loved any woman before – am I to give up all hope on account of this terrible prejudice of yours? But for that I could have made you care for me – I know I could – could I not? Mary, tell me.”
His voice softened into a tenderness, compared with which the gentlest tones he had ever addressed to his sister were hard. But little heard Mary of tenderness or softness in his words. She stood aghast, literally aghast with astonishment – amazement rather – so intense that at first she could scarcely believe that her ears were not deceiving her. Then, as the full meaning of his words came home to her, indignation, overwhelming indignation, took the place of every other feeling, and burning words rose to her lips. For the moment “the Tartar” was, indeed, uppermost.
“You say this to me!” she exclaimed. “You
dare
to say this to me. You, the man who, in deference to contemptible class-prejudice and to gratify some selfish schemes, did not hesitate to trample a woman’s heart under foot, and to spoil the best chance for good that ever came to a man you profess to care for —
you
, selfish, heartless, unprincipled man, dare to tell me, Mary Western, that you love me! Are you going out of your senses, Mr Cheviott? Do you forget that I am Lilias’s sister?”
“No,” he said, in atone which somehow compelled her attention. “I do not forget it, and I am not ashamed to say so. I do not offer you – for it would but be thrown at my feet with scorn – but I would have offered you a man’s honest, disinterested devotion, were you able to believe in such a thing as coming from me. But
you
are blinded by prejudice – you will take into account nothing but your own preconceived interpretation. You will not allow the
possibility
of my being innocent of what you accuse me of. So be it. But there
have
been women who have known an honest man when they found such a one, and have not found their trust misplaced.”
Some answering chord was touched for the instant in Mary’s heart. Her tone was less hard, less cruelly contemptuous when she spoke again.
“I am not doubting your sincerity as regards myself,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “I suppose you do mean what you say, however extraordinarily incomprehensible it appears to me. But
that
makes things no better – oh! if you had but left me under the delusion that there was something to respect in you! I thought you narrow-minded and prejudiced to a degree, but I had grown to think you had some principle – that in what you did you were actuated by what you believed to be right. But what am I to think now? Where are all the well-considered reasons for interfering between your cousin and my sister that you would have had me believe in, now that – that – you find the case your own, or fancy it is so? What can I, too, think of your principle and disinterestedness?”
“What you choose,” said Mr Cheviott, bitterly. “It can matter little. But you make one mistake. I never gave you
any
reasons for my interference. I told you I had acted for the best, and I madly imagined it possible that having come to know me,
you
might have begun to believe it possible that my conduct was honest and disinterested. I had not intended to confess to you what I have done. My object in speaking to you again was purely – believe me or not, as you like – to try to gain for my sister the hope of sometimes seeing you. I was going on to volunteer to absent myself from Romary, if personal repugnance to me was the obstacle, if only you would sometimes come. But I am only human; your words and your tone drove me into what I little intended – into what I must have been mad to say to
you
.”
He stopped; he had spoken in a strangely low tone, but he had spoken very fast, and Mary’s first sensation when his voice ceased was of bewilderment approaching almost to a kind of mental chaos, and of vague but galling self-reproach. But for a moment she said nothing, and Mr Cheviott was already turning away, when she called him back, faintly and irresolutely, but he heard her still.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, brokenly. “I suppose I have said what I should not. I suppose I let my anger get the better of me. But I have never learned to dissimulate. Your words seemed to me, remembering what I did, an insult. I suppose I
should
have thanked you for – for the honour. But it has all been a mistake. You must see I could never have cared for you —
never
; were I ten times satisfied you had done Lilias no wrong, your conduct to her remains the same. But I wish to be reasonable. Let us forget all this, and, so far as can be, let us part friends.”
She held out her hand, this time in vain.
“No,” said Mr Cheviott. “I cannot shake hands on such terms. I run no risk of hurting your feelings by saying so; you, I know, do not attach much consequence to so empty a ceremony, but unfortunately I do. Goodbye, Miss Western.”
He raised his hat and turned away.
When he was fairly out of sight, Mary sat down on the short grass that bordered the wood-path, leaned her head against the stump of an old tree standing close by and burst into tears. Then she took her flowers, the pretty, winsome things she had plucked so carefully