The keeper touched his hat, and set off. He always attended to the parson’s orders more than his own master’s. And Mr. Hales saw from the captain’s face that he had ordered things too freely.
“Steenie, I beg your pardon,” he said; “I forgot for the moment that I should have asked you before I despatched your man like that. But I did it for your own good, because we need no longer hurry.”
“Rector, I am infinitely obleeged to you. To order those men is so fatiguing. I always want some one to do it for me. And now we may go down the hill, I suppose, without snapping all our knee-caps. To go up a hill fast is a very bad thing; but to go down fast is a great deal worse, because you think you can do it.”
“My dear fellow, you may take your time. I will not walk you off your legs, as that wicked niece of mine did. How are you getting on there now?”
“Well, that is a delicate question, Rector. You know what ladies are, you know. But I do not see any reason to despair of calling you ‘uncle,’ in earnest.”
“Have you brought the old lady over to your side? You are sure to be right when that is done.”
“She has been on my side all along, for the sake of the land. Ah, how good it is!”
“And nobody else in the field, that we know of. Then Lallie can’t hold out so very much longer. Lord bless me! do you see that black line yonder?”
“To be sure! Why, it seems to be moving onward, like a great snake crawling. And it has a white head. What a wonderful thing!”
“It is our first view of the Woeburn. Would to heaven that it were our last one! The black is the water, and the white, I suppose, is the chalky scum swept before it. It is following the old track, as lava does. It will cross the Coombe road in about five minutes. If you want to get home, you must be quick to horse. Never mind the rain: let us run down the hill – or just stop one half-minute.”
They were sitting in the shelter of a chalky rock, with the sullen storm rising from the south behind them, and the drops already pattering. On the right hand and on the left, brown ridges, furzy rises, and heathery scollops overhanging slidden rubble, and the steep zigzags of the sheep, and the rounding away into nothing of the hill-tops, – all of these were fading into the slaty blue of the rain-cloud. Before them spread for leagues and leagues, clear and soft, and smiling still, the autumnal beauty of the wealdland. Tufting hamlets here and there, with darker foliage round them, elbows of some distant lane unconsciously prominent, swathes of colour laid on broadly where the crops were all alike; some bold tree of many ages standing on its right to stand; and grey church-towers, far asunder, landmarks of a longer view; in the fading distance many things we cannot yet make out; but hope them to be good and beauteous, calm, and large with human life.
This noble view expanded always the great heart of the Rector; and he never failed to point out clearly the boundary-line of his parish. He could scarcely make up his mind to miss that opportunity, even now; and was just beginning with a distant furze-rick, far to the westward under Chancton Ring, when Chapman, having heard it at least seven times, cut him short rather briskly.
“You are forgetting one thing, my dear sir. Your parish is being cut in two, while you are dwelling on the boundaries.
“Steenie, you are right. I had no idea that you had so much sense, my boy. You see how the ditches stand all full of water, so as to confuse me. A guinea for the first at the rectory gate! You ought to be handicapped. You call yourself twenty years younger, don’t you!”
“Here’s the guinea!” cried Chapman, as the parson set off; “two if you like; only let me come down this confounded hill considerately.”
Mr. Hales found nothing yet amiss with his own premises; some people had come to borrow shovels, and wheeling-planks, and such like; but the garden looked so fair and dry, with its pleasant slope to the east, that the master laughed at his own terrors; until he looked into the covered well, the never-failing black-diamond water, down below the tool-house. Here a great cone rose in the middle of the well, like a plume of black ostrich; and the place was alive with hollow noises.
“Dig the celery!” cried the Rector. “Every man and boy, come here. I won’t have my celery washed away, nor my drumhead savoys, nor my ragged Jack. Girls, come out, every one of you. There is not a moment to lose, I tell you. I never had finer stuff in all my life; and I won’t have it washed away, I tell you. Here, you heavy-breeched Dick! what the dickens are you gaping at? I shan’t get a thing done before dark, at this rate. Out of my way, every one of you. If ye can’t stir you stumps, I can.”
With less avail, like consternation seized every family in West Lorraine. A river, of miraculous birth and power, was sweeping down upon all of them. There would never be any dry land any more; all the wise old women had said so. Everybody expected to see black water bubbling up under his bed that night.
Meanwhile this beautiful and grand issue of the gathered hill-springs moved on its way majestically, obeying the laws it was born of. The gale of the previous night had unsealed the chamber of great waters, forcing the needful air into the duct, and opening vaults that stored the rainfall of a hundred hills and vales. Through such a “bower of stalactite, such limpid realms and lakes enlock’d in caves,” Cyrene led her weeping son —
“Where all the rivers of the world he found,
In separate channels gliding underground.”
And now, as this cold resistless flood calmly reclaimed its ancient channel, swallowed up Nanny Stilgoe’s well, and cut off the Rector from his own church; as if to encounter its legendary bane, a poor young fellow, depressed, and shattered, feeble, and wan, and heavy-hearted, was dragging his reluctant steps up the valley of the Adur. Left on the naked rocks of Spain, conquered, plundered, and half-starved, Hilary Lorraine had fallen, with the usual reaction of a sanguine temperament, into low spirits and disordered health. So that when he at last made his way to Corunna, and found no British agent there, nor any one to draw supplies from, nothing but the pride of his family kept him from writing to the Count of Zamora. Of writing to England there was no chance. All communication ran through the channels of the distant and victorious army. So that he thought himself very lucky (in the present state of his health and fortunes), when the captain of an oil-ship bound for London, having lost three hands on the outward voyage, allowed him to work his passage. The fare of a landsman in feeble health was worth perhaps more than his services; but the captain was a kind-hearted man, and perceived (though he knew not who Hilary was) that he had that very common thing in those days, a “gent under a cloud” to deal with. And the gale, which had opened the Woeburn, shortened Hilary’s track towards it, by forcing his ship to run for refuge into Shoreham harbour.
“How shall I go home? What shall I say? Disgraced, degraded, and broken down, a stain upon my name and race, I am not fit to enter our old doors. What will my father say to me? And proud Alice – what will her thoughts be?”
With steps growing slower at each weary drag, he crossed the bridge of Bramber, and passed beneath the ivied towers of the rivals of his ancestors, and then avoiding Steyning town, he turned up the valley of West Lorraine. And the rain which had come on at middle-day, and soaked his sailor’s slops long ago, now took him on the flank judiciously. And his heart was so low, that he received it all without talking either to himself or it.
“I will go to the rectory first,” he thought; “Uncle Struan is violent, but he is warm. And though he has three children of his own, he loves me much more than my father does.”
With this resolution, he turned on the right down a lane that came out by the rectory. The lane broke out suddenly into black water; and a tall robust man stood in the twilight, with a heavy spade over his shoulder. And Hilary Lorraine went up to him.
“No, no, my man; not a penny to spare!” said the Rector in anticipation; “we have a great deal too much to do with our own poor, and with this new trouble especially. The times are hard – yes, they always are; I never knew them otherwise. But an honest man always can get good work. Or go and fight for your country, like a man. But we can’t have any vagrants in my parish.”
“I have fought for my country like a man, Uncle Struan; and this is all that has come of it.”
“Good God, Hilary!” cried the Rector; and for a long time he found nothing better to say.
“Yes, Uncle Struan, don’t you understand? Every one must have his ups and downs. I am having a long spell of downs just now.”
“My dear boy, my dear boy! Whatever have you done?”
“Do you mean to throw me over, Uncle Struan, as the rest of the world has beautifully done! Everything seems to be upset. What is the meaning of this broad, black stream?”
“Come into my study, and tell me all. I can let you in without sight of your aunt. The shock would be too great for her.”
Hilary followed, without a word. Mr. Hales led him in at the window, and warmed him, and covered him with his own dressing-gown, and watched him slowly recovering.
“Never mind the tar on your hands; it is an honest smell,” he said; “my poor boy, my poor boy, what you must have been through!”
“Whatever has happened to me,” answered Hilary, spreading his thin hands to the fire, “has been all of my own doing, Uncle Struan.”
“You shall have a cordial, and you shall tell me all. There, I have bolted the door. I am your parson as well as your uncle. All you say will be sacred with me. And I am sure you have done no great harm after all. We shall see what your dear aunt thinks of it.”
Then Hilary, sipping a little rum-and-water, wandered through his story; not telling it brightly, as once he might have done, but hiding nothing consciously.
“Do you mean to tell me there is nothing worse than that?” asked the Rector, with a sigh of great relief.
“There is nothing worse, uncle. How could it be worse?”
“And they turned you out of the army for that! How thankful I am for belonging to the Church! You are simply a martyred hero.”
“Yes, they turned me out of the army for that. How could they help it?” Reasoning thus, he met his uncle’s look of pity, and it was too much for him. He did what many a far greater man, and braver hero has done, and will do, when the soul is moving. He burst into a hot flood of tears.
CHAPTER LVI.
GOING DOWN THE HILL
Sir Roland Lorraine was almost as free from superstition as need be. To be wholly quit of that romantic element is a disadvantage still; and excepts a neighbour even now from the general neighbourly sympathy. Threescore years ago, of course, that prejudice was threefold.
The swing of British judgment mainly takes magnetic repulse from whatever the French are rushing after. When they are Republican, all of us rally for throne and Constitution. When they have a Parliament, we want none. When they are pressed under empire, we are apt to be glad that it serves them right. We know them to be brave and good, lovers of honour, and sensitive; but we cannot get over the line between us and them – and the rest of the world, perhaps.
Whatever might be said or reasoned, for or against the whole of such things, Sir Roland had long made up his mind to be moderate and neutral. He liked everybody to speak his best (according to self-opinion), and he liked to keep out of the way of them all, and relapse into the wiser ages. He claimed his own power to think for himself, as well as the mere right of doing so. And therefore he long had been “heterodox” to earnest, right-minded people.
Never the more, however, could he shake himself free from the inborn might of hereditary impress. The traditions of his house and race had still some power over him, a power increased by long seclusion, and the love of hearth and home. Therefore, when Trotman was cut off, on his way for his weekly paper, by a great black gliding flood, and aghast ran up the Coombe to tell it – Sir Roland, while he smiled, felt strange misgivings creeping coldly.
Alice, a sweet and noble maiden, on the tender verge of womanhood, came to her father’s side, and led him back to his favourite book-room. She saw that he was at the point of trembling; although he could still command his nerves, unless he began to think of them. Dissembling her sense of all this, she sat by the fire, and waited for him.
“My darling, we have had a very happy time,” he began at last to say to her; “you and I, for many years, suiting one another.”
“To be sure we have, father. And I mean to go on suiting you, for many more years yet.”
Her father saw by the firelight the sadness in her eyes; and he put some gaiety into his own, or tried.
“Lallie, you have brighter things before you – a house of your own, and society, and the grand world, and great shining.”
“Excellent things, no doubt, my father; but not to be compared with you and home. Have I done anything to vex you that you talk like this to me?”
“Let me see. Come here and show me. There are few things I enjoy so much as being vexed by you.”
“There, papa, you are in a hurry to have your usual laugh at me. You shall have no material now. ‘I knows what is right, and I means to do it’ – as the man said to me at the turnpike-gate, when he made me pay twice over. Consider yourself, my darling father, saddled for all your life with me.”
Sir Roland loved his daughter’s quick bright turns of love, and filial passion when her heart was really moved. A thousand complex moods and longings played around or pierced her then; yet all controlled, or at least concealed, by an English lady’s quietude. Alice was so like himself, that he always knew what she would think; and he tried his best to follow the zigzag flash of feminine feeling.
“My dear child,” he said at last: “something has been too much for you. Perhaps that foolish fellow’s story of this mysterious water. A gross exaggeration, doubtless. The finny tribe fast sticking by the gills in the nest of the wood-pigeon. Marry come up! Let us see these wonders. The moon is at the full to-night; and I hear no rain on the windows now. Go and fetch my crabstick, darling.”
“Oh, may I come with you, papa? Do say yes. I shall lie awake all night, unless I go. The moon is sure to clear the storm off; and I will wrap up so thoroughly.”
“But you cannot wrap up your feet, dear child; and the roads are continually flooded now.”
“Not on the chalk, papa; never on the chalk, except in the very hollow places. Besides, I will put on my new French clogs. They can’t be much less than six inches thick. I shall stand among the deluge high enough for the fish to build their nests on me.”
“Daughter of folly, and no child of mine, go and put your clogs on. We will go out at the eastern door, to arouse no curiosity.”
As the master and his daughter passed beneath the astrologer’s tower, and left the house by his private entrance, they could not help thinking of the good old prince, and his kind anxiety about them. To the best of their knowledge, the wise Agasicles had never heard of the Woeburn; or perhaps his mind had been so much engrossed with the comet that he took no heed of it. And even in his time, this strange river was legendary as the Hydaspes.
After the heavy and tempestuous rain, the night was fair, as it generally is, even in the worst of weather, when the full moon rises. The long-chained hill, with its level outline stretching towards the south of east, afforded play for the glancing light of a watery and laborious moon. Long shadows, laid in dusky bars, or cast in heavy masses where the hollow land prevailed for them, and misty columns hovering and harbouring over tree-clumps, and gleams of quiet light pursuing avenues of opening – all of these, at every step of deep descent, appeared to flicker like a great flag waving.
“What a very lovely night! How beautifully the clouds lie!” cried Alice, being apt to kindle rashly into poetry: “they softly put themselves in rows, and then they float towards the moon, and catch the silver of her smile – oh, why do they do that, papa?”
“Because the wind is west, my dear. Take care; you are on a great flint I fear. You are always cutting your boots out.”
“No, papa, no. I have got you this time. That shows how much you attend to me. I have got my great French clogs on.”
“Then how very unsafe to be looking at the moon! Lean on me steadily, if you must do that. The hill is slippery with slime on the chalk. You will skate away to the bottom, and leave me mourning.”
“Oh, how I should love to skate, if ladies ever could do such a thing! I can slide very nicely, as you know, papa. Don’t you think, after all this rain, we are sure to have a nice cold winter?”
“Who can tell, Lallie? I only hope not. You children, with your quick circulation, active limbs, and vigorous lungs, are always longing for frost and snow. But when they come, you get tired of them, within a week at the utmost. But in your selfish spring of life you forget all the miseries of the poor and old, or even young folk who are poor, and the children starving everywhere. And the price of all food is now most alarming.”
“I am sure I meant no harm,” said Alice; “one cannot always think of everything. Papa, do you know that you have lately taken to be very hard on me?”
“Well now, everybody says that of me,” Sir Roland answered thoughtfully; “I scarcely dreamed that my fault was that. But out of many mouths I am convicted. Struan Hales says it; and so does my mother. Hilary seemed to imply it also, at the time when he last was heard of. Mine own household, Trotman, Mrs. Pipkins, and that charitable Mrs. Merryjack, have combined to take the same view of me. There must be truth in it. I cannot make head against such a cloud of witnesses. And now Alice joins them. What more do I want? I must revise my opinion of myself, and confess that I am a hard-hearted man.”
This question Sir Roland debated with himself, in a manner which had long been growing upon him, in the gathering love of solitude. Being by nature a man with a most extraordinary love of justice, he found it hard (as such rare men do) to be perfectly sure about anything. He always desired to look at a subject from every imaginable outside view, receding (like a lark in the clouds) from groundling consideration, yet frankly open (like a woodcock roasting) to anything good put under him. Nobody knew him; but he did his best when he thought of that matter, to know himself.
Now, his daughter allowed him to follow out his meditation quietly; and then she said as they went down the hill, warily heeding each other’s steps —
“Papa, I beg you particularly to pay no attention whatever to your own opinion, or any other opinion in the world, except perhaps, at least, perhaps – ”
“Perhaps that of Alice.”
“Quite so, papa. About my own affairs my opinion is of no value: but about yours, and the family in general, it is really – something.”
“Wisest of our race, and bravest, you are rushing into the water, darling – stop; you have forgotten what we came for. We came to see the Woeburn, and here it is!”
“Is this it? And yesterday I walked across this very place! Oh, what a strange black river!”
As Alice drew suddenly back and shuddered, Sir Roland Lorraine threw his left arm round her, without a word, and looked at her. The light of the full moon fell on her face, through a cleft of jagged margins, and the shadow of a branch that had lost its leaves lay on her breast, and darkened it.
“Why, Lallie, you seem to be quite frightened,” her father said, after waiting long; “look up at me, and tell me, dear.”
“No, I am not at all frightened, papa, but perhaps I am a little out of spirits.”
“Why?” asked Sir Roland; “you surely do not pay heed to old rhymes and silly legends. I call this a fine and very lively water. I only wish it were always here.”
“Oh, papa, don’t say that, I implore you. And I felt you shiver when you saw it first. You know what it means for our family, – loss of life once, loss of property twice, and the third time the loss of honour, – and with that, of course, our extinction.”
“You little goose, none can lose their honour without dishonourable acts. Come, Miss Cassandra; of the present Lorraines – a very narrow residue – who is to be distinguished thus?”
“Father, you know so much more than I do; but I thought that many people were disgraced, without having ever deserved it.”
“Disgraced, my darling; but not dishonoured. What could disgrace ever be to us? – a thing that comes and goes according to the fickle season – a result of the petty human weather, as this melancholy water is of the larger influence.”
“Papa, then you own that it is melancholy. That was just what I wanted you to do. You always take things so differently from everybody else, that I began to think you would look upon this as a happy outburst of a desirable watering-water.”
“Well done, Lallie! The command of language is an admirable gift. But the want of it leads to still finer issues. This watering-water seems inclined to go on for a long time watering.”
“Of course, it must go flowing, flowing, until its time is over.”
“Lallie, you have, among many other gifts, a decided turn for epigram. You scarcely could have described more tersely the tendencies of water. I firmly believe that this stream will go on flowing and flowing, until it quite stops.”
“Papa, you are a great deal too bad. You must perceive that you are so even by the moonlight. I say the most sensible things ever thought of, and out of them you make nonsense. Now let me have my turn. So please you, have you thought of bridges? How is our butcher to come, or our miller, our letters, or even our worthy beggars? We are shut off in front. Without building a boat can I ever hear even uncle Struan preach? Hark! I hear something like him.”
“You frivolous Lallie! you are too bad. I cannot permit such views of things.”
“Of course, papa, I never meant that. Only please to listen.”
The dark and deep stream, which now had grown to a width of some twelve yards perhaps, was gliding swiftly, but without a murmur, towards the broad and watery moon. On the right-hand side, steep scars of chalk, shedding gleams of white rays, made the hollow places darker; while on the other side, furzy tummocks, patches of briar, and tufted fallows spread the many-pointed light among their shadows justly.
“Please to listen,” again said Alice, shrinking from her father, lest she might be felt to tremble. “What a plaintive, thrilling sound! It must be a good banshee, I am sure; a banshee that knows how good we are, and protests against our extinction. There it is again – and there seems to be another wail inside of it.”
“A Chinese puzzle of noises, Lallie, and none of them very musical. Your ears are keener than mine, of course; but being extinct of romance, I should say that I heard a donkey braying.”
“Papa, now! papa, if it comes to that – and I said it was like Uncle Struan’s voice! But I beg his pardon, quite down on my knees, if you think that it can be a donkey.”
“I am saved all the trouble of thinking about it. There he is, looking hard at us!”
“Oh no, papa, he is not looking hard at us. He is looking most softly and sadly. What a darling donkey! and his nose is like a snowdrop!”
Clearly in the moonlight shone, on the opposite bank of the Woeburn, the nose of Jack the donkey. His wailings had been coming long, and his supplications rising; he was cut off from his home, and fodder, and wholly beloved Bonny. And the wail inside a wail – as Alice had described it – was the sound of the poor boy’s woe, responsive to the forlorn appeal of Jack. On the brink of the cruel dividing water they must have been for a long time striding up and down, over against each other, stretching fond noses vainly forward, and outvying one another in the luxury of poetic woe.
“Don’t say a word, papa,” whispered Alice; “the boy cannot see us here behind this bush, and we can see him beautifully in the moonlight. I want to know what he will do, so much.”
“I don’t see what he can do except howl,” Sir Roland answered quietly: “and certainly he seems to possess remarkable powers in that way.”
“Bo-hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo!” wept Bonny in confirmation of this opinion; and “eke-haw, eke-haw,” from a nose of copious pathos, formed the elegiac refrain. Then having exhausted the well of weeping, the boy became fitter for reasoning. He wiped his eyes with his scarlet sleeves, and stretched forth his arms reproachfully.
“Oh Jack, Jack, Jack, whatever have I done to you? all the crumb of the loaf you had, and the half of the very last orchard I run, and the prime of old Nanny’s short-horns, and if you wasn’t pleased, you might a’ said so all the morning, Jack. There’s none in all the world as knoweth what you and I be, but one another. And there is none as careth for either on us, only you and me, Jack. Don’t ’ee, Jack, don’t ’ee go and run away. If ’ee do, I’ll give the thieves all as we’ve collected, and the rogues as calls us two waggabones.”
“My poor boy,” said Sir Roland Lorraine, suddenly parting the bush between them, in fear of another sad boo-hoo – for Bonny had stirred his own depths, so that he was quite ready to start again – “my poor boy, you seem to be very unhappy about your donkey.”
Bonny made answer to never a word. This woe belonged only to Jack and himself. They could never think of being meddled with.
“Bonny,” said Alice, in her soft sweet voice, and kindly touching him, as he turned away, “do you wish to know how to recover your Jack? Would you go a long way to get him back again?”
“To the outermost end of the world, Miss, if the whole of the way wor fuzz-bush. Miles and miles us have gone a’ready.”
“You need not go quite to the end of the world. Instead of going up and down these banks, keep steadily up the water. In about a mile you will come to its head, if what I have heard of it is true; then keep well above it, and round the hill, and you will meet the white-nosed donkey.”
“Hee-haw!” said Jack from the opposite bank, not without a whisk of tail. Then the boy, without a word of thanks, by reason of incredulity, whistled a quick reply, and set off to test this doubtful theory.
“Observe now the bliss of possessing a donkey,” Sir Roland began to meditate; “I am not at all skilful in asses, whether golden, or leaden, or wooden, or even as described by Ælian. But the contempt to which they are born, proves to my mind that they do not deserve it; or otherwise how would they get it? My sentence is clumsy. My idea – if there be one – has not managed to express itself. I hear the white-nosed donkey in the distance braying at me, with an overpowering echo of contempt. I am unequal to this contest. Let me withdraw to my book-room.”
“Indeed, papa, you will do nothing of the sort. You are always withdrawing to your book-room; and even I must not come in; and what good ever comes of it? You must, if you please, make up your mind to meet things very differently. And only think how long it is since we have heard of poor Hilary! There are troubles coming, overwhelming troubles, on all with the name or love of Lorraine, as sure as I stand, my dear father, before you.”
“Then I pray you to stand behind me, Alice. What an impulsive child it is! And the moonlight, my darling, has had some effect, as it always has, wonderfully on such girls. You have worked yourself up, Lallie; I can see it. My pet, I must watch you carefully.
“What a mistake you make, papa! I never do anything of the sort. You seem to regard me as anybody’s child, to be reasoned with, out of a window. I may be supposed to say foolish things, and to imagine all sorts of nonsense; and, of course, I cannot reason, because it is not born with us. And then, when I try, I have no chance whatever; though perfect justice is my aim; and – who comes lingering after me?”
“Your excellent father,” Sir Roland answered, kissing away his child’s excitement. “Your loving father does all this, my pet, and brings you quite home to stern reason. And now he will take you home to your home. You have caught the sad spirit of the donkey, petling; you long to go up and down this water, with some one to bewail you on the other side.”
“Yes, papa, so I do. You are so clever! But I think I should go down and up, papa; if the quadruped you are thinking of went up and down.”
“Now Lallie!” he said; and he said no more. For he knew that she hinted at Stephen Chapman, and wanted to fight her own battle against him, now that she was in the humour. The father was ready to put off the conflict – as all good fathers must be – and he led his dear child up the hill, or let her lead him peacefully.