A Woman's Burden: A Novel

CHAPTER III.

POVERTY HALL

What Miriam meant by her mysterious question, and what Mr. Barton meant by his mysterious answer, was known only to themselves. They seemed to understand one another without recourse to words for the situation – whatever the situation might be – adjusted itself between them on a swift interchange of glances. Mr. Barton was regarded by the parish at large as being as deep as a well; had the parish seen him with Mrs. Darrow's governess at the moment, it might have considered him even deeper. But the young man whom these glances mostly concerned, saw nothing of the by-play which was to influence his future. He chatted with Dicky, and commended him for his prowess in having run into the meadow to reconnoitre the whereabouts of the bull. Gerald knew better than to scold the boy for his folly; he knew what a sensitive, nervous child Dicky was, and chose this way of soothing him by applauding what he knew had been his intention, so that the little lad plucked up his courage, and recovered his nerve – so far as his feeble body could do so. Poor Dicky, he had a weak heart, overstrung nerves, and an injudicious mother; and between them, was fast being ruined body and soul, when Miriam came to save him. But for that strange meeting on Waterloo Bridge, Dicky's chances of life would not have been what they were. But then that same meeting is responsible for so much of moment, as will be seen hereafter – and all because Mr. Barton took one turning instead of another, and so lost himself in a fog. If ever Providence worked to great ends by small means, it was when Mr. Richard Barton, Squire of Lesser Thorpe, was made to mistake Waterloo Bridge for the Bridge of Westminster.

"I am so glad you are here again, Cousin Gerald," said Dicky, patting the young man's slim hand. "You'll tell me stories, won't you, and play cricket with me, and I've got such a jolly governess," finished Dicky incoherently.

Gerald laughed in his pleasant fashion.

"I'll tell you any amount of stories, and I'll play cricket, and I'll adore your governess, Dicky."

"Oh, you mustn't. Hilda will be so angry."

With his usual precocity, Dicky saw more than he was meant to see, and said more than he should have said. Gerald flushed somewhat, and picking up the boy placed him on his shoulder.

"You talk too much, young man," said he gaily. "Miss Crane," with an anxious look lest she should have overheard Dicky's indiscretion, "shall I carry this rascal home for you?"

"Isn't he too heavy, Mr. Arkel?"

"Heavy?" The echo came from Barton. "Why, Gerald is a champion athlete, and plays with cannonballs like feathers. He is Apollo and Hercules both in one."

"At present he is Mercury carrying a soul to the Elysian fields," cried Gerald, and strode off with Dicky, who was delighted with this classical allusion which, from that reading which Miriam so deplored, he was quite able to appreciate.

"I am Achilles! I am Ulysses!" shouted Dicky in ecstasy. "Hermes takes me to Pluto and Queen Persephone. Ai! Ai! Ai!" and Dicky lamented in classical style.

Barton looked after the pair.

"You ought to be satisfied," said he to Miriam. "He is a handsome fellow, though he is a fool."

"He neither looks like a fool, nor talks like one, Mr. Barton."

What reply the cynic would have made to this curt contradiction it is impossible to say; but at that moment a shadow fell on the grass near them. Only the shadow – the shadow of a man; yet Barton whipped round with the sudden snarl of a startled wild beast. His snarl was even more hateful than his chuckle, and Miriam winced as she also turned to see the substance of the shadow. Even now, well-nourished, rested, and having recovered her nerve, as she had, she still dreaded Barton. There was something so uncanny about him – something akin to the satyr – to Pan, the inspirer of causeless terrors – that she could never overcome a creeping of the flesh, a sinking of the heart when in his presence. Mr. Hyde, of fictitious fame, was not more hateful.

The new-comer was a tall lean man, so tall, so lean, that he might be defined in the terms of Euclid as a line, having length without breadth. His legs were long, his arms were long, even his head was long; and clothed in a suit of solemn black, which reflected no lustre, he came as a blot on the sunny landscape. His eyes were small and close together; they looked everywhere but at the person he was addressing, past you, about you, but never by any chance at you; and – as Miriam heard, not then, but long afterwards – he had a deep, booming, cracked voice, such as might come from a flawed and rusty bell. She did not know the man at the time; she had cause to know him later; and he always appeared in the same noiseless, stealthy, slinking way. If Barton was a rat, this man was akin to the serpent.

And the queerness of the thing was that he did not speak to Barton, nor did Barton speak to him. The two evil creatures – Miriam instinctively felt that both were evil – looked at one another; then Barton, without a word to the governess, passed away with the stranger, for all the world as if the latter were the devil come for his soul. Perhaps Miss Crane was unduly impressionable – perhaps she had not altogether recovered her state of health – but she shuddered and grew pale to the lips as those two black figures dwindled into the distance. Involuntarily she glanced at the grass as though it had been scorched by their tread. Who was the stranger? who was Barton? She knew as much about one as she did about the other.

"I must go back," she muttered, clenching her hands. "I will not bend to that man's power. It was bad in London – it is worse here. And Gerald Arkel – " her thoughts made no further use of words, and her eyes followed the stalwart figure of the young man as he bounded towards the village, evidently playing at being a horse for Dicky's greater delight. With a sigh Miriam walked rapidly after them. She did not look again in the direction of Mr. Barton and his attendant demon.

When she came up with them, Dicky was a mediæval knight, and Gerald his war steed. Miriam could not forbear admiring the kindly nature of the man. But his kindliness and love of play were characteristic of Gerald Arkel. He was gay, indolent, and of a sunny disposition; everybody else's best friend and his own worst enemy. He had never done a stroke of work, and apparently never intended to, since he regarded himself as his uncle's heir. Handsome and light-hearted, overflowing with animal spirits, full of exuberant vitality, he was one of those rare beings who seem created to enjoy life. Yet he was weak and self-indulgent, and without the necessary will or self-control to guide his wayward course. Miriam learned those weaknesses later – learned them, pitied and tolerated them by the love which grew up in her heart. As yet she admired him only. Young Apollo, young Hercules, a splendid specimen of manhood; but love came in the end, and with it much sorrow. Not that Miriam would have minded the sorrow so much; her life from her cradle had been one long trouble, and she was well seasoned to it. The wonder was that her evil fortunes had left no shadow, no line on her brow; for now as she walked beside Mr. Arkel, and found him so pleasant and sympathetic a character, she chatted gaily, and was, to all appearance, every whit as light-hearted as he, whose life had been one long flood of sunshine.

"I am afraid you will find this place dull, Miss Crane," said Gerald.

"I find it peaceful, Mr. Arkel, and that is enough for me."

"You have had trouble?" he asked with quick sympathy.

"My parents died while I was in my teens," explained Miriam, "and I was left a penniless orphan. Yes, I have had trouble. Shadow has been as much my portion as sunshine appears to have been yours."

Gerald set down Dicky, and took his hand.

"Oh, I have had my troubles too," said he easily, "but I don't feel them much. Perhaps my nature is too shallow."

"Or too sunny, Mr. Arkel – if a nature can be too sunny. Did you ever read Hawthorne's 'Marble Faun'? – I believe it is called 'Transformation' in the English edition."

"No." Gerald stared at the apparent irrelevancy of this question. "Why?"

"Because you are so very much like one of the characters in it – a child of nature, called Donatello. You are just the kind of man children love and animals trust."

"Oh, I get on pretty well with everyone," cried Gerald, tossing back his bright hair, "and everyone gets on with me."

"Ah, you are 'simpatico,' as the Italians say."

Arkel turned an expressive eye on Miriam. He was very sympathetic, especially towards pretty women; and with one exception, this governess was the prettiest he had ever seen. Yet the adjective was not one he would have chosen deliberately as adequately descriptive of Miss Crane. He would have said beautiful rather – imperious, regal; the word "pretty" was but the outcome of his habit of loose expression. He knew quite well that it could not correctly be applied to her. She was no white-frocked, pink and white miss, with coquetry in every step she took over the cobble stones of the village street. Such a one though, was now close upon them, and as Arkel recognised her, he raised his hat, and his eyes and lips smiled in greeting.

"Miss Marsh, where are you going?"

"Home," replied Hilda, swiftly glancing at the speaker and the governess. "How are you, Miss Crane? Dicky, don't wink, it's vulgar. I didn't know you were here, Mr. Arkel."

"Arrived yesterday," responded that young gentleman. "Uncle Barton asked me down for a week. Why, I don't know! but I was glad to come." He fixed his bright eyes on Hilda, and a colour came into his cheeks. "I was very glad to come," he repeated.

"Of course, I know how fond you are of Mr. Barton."

"If you will excuse me," said Miriam, unwilling to be an inconvenient third, "I will go – come, Dicky."

"I must go too. I will leave you with Mr. Arkel," and before either Arkel or Miriam could parry so very pointed a thrust, Hilda tripped away with a smiling face and – it must be confessed – an angry heart. Although, of course, she knew nothing of the episode which had been the means of bringing them together, her instinct told her that Gerald and Miss Crane were in strong sympathy one with the other.

Like an ass between two bundles of hay – the simile, though uncomplimentary, will serve – Gerald looked after Hilda, and then glanced at the governess. She had already moved away, and was walking on rather fast with Dicky dancing beside her. Courtesy demanded that he should follow her, but a tugging at his heart-strings drew him in Hilda's direction. With characteristic self-indulgence, Mr. Arkel obeyed his own inclination rather than the other thing, and tried to catch up with Hilda. But a side-glance informing her of this pursuit, Miss Marsh thereupon resolved to punish this young man for his all too-patent admiration of the governess – "that red-haired minx," as she called her.

Just as Gerald came up with her, and was on the point of speaking, Hilda, in pretended ignorance of his presence, shot into a broken-down gate, through a desolate garden, and into a dilapidated house. From behind a torn curtain which partially veiled a dirty window, she had the satisfaction of seeing him retreat with a somewhat sulky expression on his usually bright face.

"Serve you right," she said to herself. "You'll find I am not the one to take you from that carroty horror;" which remark was vulgar, unjust, and spiteful – so spiteful that it could only be prompted by one feeling.

Hilda's home was a tumble-down old house set in a neglected garden. Mr. Marsh was a physician – that is to say he was allowed by the laws of his country to prescribe drugs and generally to administer in a medical way to a small practice. Things were so with him that he had long since given up any idea of a peaceful existence; and it was always a matter of supreme amazement to him that his patients sought to prolong their lives at the cost of swallowing the doses he prescribed for them. For himself, he paid an infinitesimal sum yearly by way of rent for Poverty Hall, as his residence was dubbed in the village; earned enough to feed and clothe those dependent upon him in the most penurious way, and managed, as he phrased it, "to drag them up somehow." Two of the boys were doing for themselves in London, and had dropped out of ken, since they neither sent money nor wrote to their father; three were at school, where Dr. Marsh found it hard work to keep them, and since someone must pay, the four sisters remained at home, and were furnished by Hilda with a scratch education, she being the only one of the girls who had received a good one. Hilda detested teaching her sisters, and gave them as little of her time as she well could without falling foul of her father. For the rest she was like a lily of the fields, and neither toiled nor spun. Mrs. Marsh – she was of ample habit – did the toiling and the spinning, with the assistance of the exhausted menial aforesaid. When not scrubbing, or baking, or mending, she indulged in the most mawkish class of fiction, and complained querulously of her lot the while. Yet even the Marsh family had their idea of a millennium – when Hilda would marry a rich man, and the rich man would rain gold on Poverty Hall. That was why Hilda was pampered and much was pardoned to her. She was the Circassian beauty destined for the seraglio of some millionaire sultan; and the proceeds of her sale was to set up the family for life.