CHAPTER LXV.
A FINE CHRISTMAS SERMON
According to all the best accounts, that long and heavy frost began with the clearing of the sky upon Christmas-day. At least it was so in the south of England, though probably two or three days earlier in the northern countries. A great frost always advances slowly, creeping from higher latitudes. If the cold begins in London sooner than it does in Edinburgh, it very seldom lasts out the week; and if it comes on with a violent wind, its time is generally shorter. It does seem strange, but it is quite true, that many people, even well-informed, attribute to this severity of cold the destruction of the great French army during its retreat from Moscow, and the ruin of Napoleon. They know the date of the ghastly carnage of the Beresina and elsewhere, which happened more than a year ere this; but they seem to forget that each winter belongs to the opening, and not to the closing, year. Passing all such matters, it is enough to say that Christmas-day 1813 was unusually bright and pleasant. The lowering sky and chill grey mist of the last three weeks at length had yielded to the gallant assault of the bright-speared sun. That excellent knight was pricking merrily over the range of the South Down hills; his path was strewn with sparkling trinkets from the casket of the clouds; the brisk air moved before him, and he was glad to see his way again. But behind him, and before him, lay the ambush of the “snow-blink,” to catch him at night, when he should go down, and to stop him of his view in the morning. However, for the time, he looked very well; and as no one had seen him for ever so long, every one took him at his own price.
Rector Struan Hales was famous for his sermon on Christmas-day. For five-and-twenty years he had made it his grand sermon of the year. He struck no strokes of enthusiasm – which nobody dreamed of doing then, except the very low Dissenters – still he began with a strong idea that he ought to preach above the average. And he never failed to do so – partly through inspiration of other divines, but mainly by summing up all the sins of his parish, and then forgiving them.
The parish listened with apathy to the wisdom and eloquence of great men (who said what they had to say in English – a lost art for nearly two centuries), and then the parish pricked up all its ears to hear of its own doings. The Rector preached the first part of his sermon in a sing-song manner, with a good see-saw. But when he came down to his parish-bounds, and traced his own people’s trespasses, he changed his voice altogether, so that the deafest old sinner could hear him. It was the treat of all the year to know what the parson was down upon; and, to be sure, who had done it. Then, being of a charitable kind, and loving while he chastened, the Rector always let them go, with a blessing which sounded as rich as a grace for everybody’s Christmas dinner. Everybody went out of church, happy and contented. They had enough to talk about for a week; and they all must have earned the goodwill of the Lord by going to church on a week-day. But the Rector always waited for his two church-wardens to come into the vestry, and shake hands, and praise his sermon. And, not to be behindhand, Farmer Gates and Mr. Bottler (now come from Steyning to West Lorraine, and immediately appointed, in right of the number of pigs killed weekly, junior churchwarden) – these two men of excellent presence, and of accomplished manners, got in under the vestry arch, and congratulated the Rector.
Alice Lorraine was not at church. Everybody had missed her in her usual niche, between the two dark marble records of certain of her ancestors. There she used to sit, and be set off by their fine antiquity; but she did not go to church that day; for her mind was too full of disturbance.
West Lorraine Church had been honoured, that day, by the attendance of several people entitled to as handsome monuments as could be found inside it. For instance, there was Sir Remnant Chapman (for whom even an epitaph must strain its elastic charity); Stephen, his son – who had spent his harm, without having much to show for it; Colonel Clumps, who would rise and fight, if the resurrection restored his legs; a squire of high degree (a distant and vague cousin of the true Lorraines), who wanted to know what was going on, having great hopes through the Woeburn, but sworn to stick (whatever might happen) to his own surname, which was “Bloggs;” and last, and best of all, Joyce Aylmer, Viscount Aylmer’s only son, of a true old English family, but not a very wealthy one.
“A merry Christmas to you all!” cried Mr. Hales, as they stood in the porch. “A merry Christmas, gentlemen! But, my certy, we shall have a queer one. How keen the air is getting!”
They all shook hands with the parson, and thanked him, after the good old fashion, “for his learned and edifying discourse;” and they asked what he meant about the weather; but he was too deep to tell them. Even he had been wrong upon that matter, and had grown too wise to commit himself. Then Cecil, who followed her father of course, made the proper curtseys, as the men made bows to her; and Major Aylmer’s horse was brought, and a carriage for the rest of them.
“Are you coming with us, Rector? We dine early,” said Sir Remnant, with a hungry squeak. “You can’t have another service, can you? God knows, you have done enough for one day.”
“Enough to satisfy you, at any rate,” the Rector answered, smiling: “but I should have my house about my ears, if I dined outside of it on a Christmas-day. Plain and wholesome and juicy fare, sir – none of your foreign poisons. Well, good-bye, gentlemen; I shall hope to see all of you again to-morrow, if the snow is not too deep.” The Rector knew that a very little snow would be quite enough to stop them, on the morning of the morrow – the Sunday.
“Snow, indeed! No sign of snow!” Sir Remnant answered sharply; he had an inborn hate of snow, and he wanted to be at home on the Monday. “But I say, Missie, remember one thing. Tuesday fortnight is the day. Have all your fal-lals ready. Blushing bridesmaids – ah! fine creatures! I shall claim a score of busses, mind. Don’t you wish it was your own turn, eh?”
The old rogue, with a hearty smack, blew a kiss to Cecil Hales, who blushed and shivered, and then tried to smile, for fear of losing her locket; for it had been whispered that Sir Remnant Chapman had ordered a ten-guinea locket in London for each of the six bridesmaids. So checking the pert reply, which trembled on the tip of her tongue, she made them a pretty curtsey, as they drove away.
“Now, did you observe, papa,” she asked, as she took her father’s arm, bent fully to gossip with him up the street, “how terribly pale Major Aylmer turned, when he heard about the bridesmaids? I thought he was going to drop; as they say he used to do, when he first came home from America. I am sure I was right, papa; I am sure I was, in what I told you the other day.”
“Nonsense, fiddlesticks, romantic flummery! You girls are never content without rivalry, jealousy, love and despair.”
“You may laugh as much as you like; but it makes no difference to me, papa. I tell you that Major Aylmer has lost his heart to Alice, a great deal worse than he lost his head in America.”
“Well, then, he must live with no head and no heart. He can’t have Alice. He has got no money; even if it were possible to change the bridegroom at the door of the church.”
“I will tell you what proves it beyond all dispute. You know how that wretched little Captain Chapman looks up when he hates any one, and thinks he has made a hit of it. There – like that; only I can’t do it, until I get much uglier. He often does it to me you know. And then he patted his wonderful waistcoat.”
“Now, Cecil, what spiteful things girls are! It is quite impossible that he can hate you.”
“I am thankful to say that he does, papa; or perhaps you might have sold me to him. If ever any girl was sold, Alice is both bought and sold. And Sir Roland cannot love her as she used to think, or he would have had nothing to do with it. It must be fearfully bitter for her. And to marry a man who is tipsy every night and tremulous every morning. Oh, papa, papa!”
“My dear you exaggerate horribly. You have always disliked poor Steenie; perhaps that is why he looks up to you. We must hope for the best; we must hope for the best. Why, bless my heart, if every man was to have the whole of his doings raked up, I should never want the marriage-register!”
“Oh, but papa, if we could only manage to change the man, you know! The other is so different; so kind, and noble, and grand, and simple! If any man in all the world is worthy to marry dear Alice, it is Major Aylmer.”
“The man might be changed; but not the money,” said the Rector, rather shortly; and his daughter knew from the tone of his voice that she must quit the subject; the truth being (as she was well aware) that her father was growing a little ashamed of his own share in the business.
CHAPTER LXVI.
COMING DOWN IN EARNEST
Dark weather and dark fortune do not always come together. Indeed, the spirit of the British race, and the cheer flowing from high spirit, seem to be most forward in the worst conditions of the weather. Something to battle with, something to talk about, something to make the father more than usually welcome, and the hearth more bright and warm to him, and something also which enlarges, by arousing charity, and spreads a man’s interior comfort into general goodwill – bitter weather, at the proper season, is not wholly bitterness.
But when half-a-dozen gentlemen, who care not a fig for one another, hate books (as they hated their hornbooks), scorn all indoor pursuits but gambling, gormandising, and drinking, and find little scope for pursuing these – when a number of these are snowed up together, and cannot see out of the windows – to express it daintily, there is likely to be much malediction.
And this is exactly what fell upon them, for more than a week, at Coombe Lorraine. They made a most excellent dinner on Christmas-day, about three o’clock, as they all declared; and, in spite of the shortness of the days, they saw their way till the wine came. They were surprised at this, so far as any of them noticed anything; for, of course, no glance of the setting sun came near the old house in the winter. And they thought it a sign of fine hunting-weather, and so they went on about it; whereas it was really one of the things scarcely ever seen down here, but common in the arctic regions – the catch, and the recast, and the dispersion of all vague light downward, by the dense grey canopy of gathering snow-vapour.
The snow began about seven o’clock, when the influence of the sun was lost; and for three days and three nights it snowed, without taking or giving breathing-time. It came down without any wind, or unfair attempt at drifting. The meaning of the sky was to snow and no more, and let the wind wait his time afterwards. There was no such thing as any spying between the flakes at any time. The flakes were not so very large, but they came as close together as the sand pouring down in an hour-glass. They never danced up and down, like gnats or motes, as common snowflakes do, but one on the back of another fell, expecting millions after them. And if any man looked up to see that gravelly infinitude of pelting spots, which swarms all the air in a snowstorm, he might just as well have shut both eyes, before it was done by snowflakes.
All the visitors, except the Colonel, were to have left on Monday morning, but only one of them durst attempt the trackless waste of white between the South Down Coombe and their distant homes. For although no drifting had begun as yet, some forty hours of heavy fall had spread a blinding cover over road and ditch, and bog and bank, and none might descry any sign-post, house, tree, or hill, or other land-mark, at the distance of a hundred yards, through the snow, still coming down as heavily as ever. Therefore everybody thought Major Aylmer almost mad, when he ordered his horse for the long ride home in the midst of such terrible weather.
“I don’t think I ought to let you go,” his host said, when the horse came round, as white already as a counterpane. “Alice, where is your persuasive voice? Surely you might beg Major Aylmer to see what another day will bring.”
“Another day will only make it worse,” Joyce Aylmer replied, with a glance at Alice, which she perfectly understood. “I might be snowed up for a week, Sir Roland, with my father the whole time fidgeting. And after all, what is this compared to the storms we had in America?”
“Oh, but you were much stronger then. You would not be here, were it not so.”
“I scarcely know. I shall soon rejoin if I get on so famously as this. But I am keeping you in the cold so long, and Miss Lorraine in a chilly draught. Good-bye once more. Can I leave any message for you at the Rectory?”
In another second the thick snow hid him and his floundering horse, as they headed towards the borstall, for as yet there was only a footbridge thrown over the course of the Woeburn, and horsemen or carriages northward bound were obliged to go southward first, and then turn to the right on the high land, and thus circumvent the stream; even as Alice quickly thinking, had enabled poor Bonny to recover his Jack.
Alice went back, with a sigh, to her own little room to sit and think awhile. She knew that she had seen the last of a man whom she could well have loved, and who loved her (as she knew somehow) much too well already. Feeling that this could do no good, but only harm to both of them, he had made up his mind to go, ere any mischief should arise from it. He had no idea how vastly Alice scorned poor Steenie Chapman, otherwise even his duty to his host might perhaps have failed him. However, he had acted wisely, and she would think no more of him.
This resolution was hard to keep, when she heard a little later in the day, that the Major had sent back his groom after making believe to take him. The groom brought a message from his master, begging quarters for a day or two, on the plea that his horse had broken down; but Alice felt sure that he had been sent back, because Major Aylmer would not expose him to the risk which he meant himself to face. For she knew it to be more than twenty miles (having studied the map on the subject) from Coombe Lorraine to Stoke-Aylmer. And ill in the teeth of a bitter wind, now just beginning to crawl and wail, as only a snowy wind can do.
The rest of the gentlemen plagued the house. It was hard to say which was the worst of them – Sir Remnant (who went to the lower regions to make the acquaintance of the kitchen-maids), or Colonel Clumps (who sat on a sideboard, and fought all his battles over again with a park of profane artillery), or Squire Bloggs (who bit his nails, and heavily demanded beer all day), or Steenie, who scorned beer altogether, and being repulsed by Onesimus Binns, at last got into Trotman’s “study,” and ordered some bottles up, and got on well. He sent for his groom, and he sent for his horn (which he had not wind enough to blow), and altogether he carried on so with a greasy pack of cards and a dozen grimy tumblers, that while the women, being strictly sober, looked down on his affability, the men said they had known much worse.
For a week Sir Roland Lorraine was compelled to endure this wearing worry – tenfold wearisome as it was to a man of his peculiar nature. He had always been shy of inviting guests; but when they were once inside his door the hospitality of his race and position revived within him. All in the house was at their service, including the master himself, so far as old habits can be varied, but now he was almost like the whelk that admits the little crab for company, and is no more the master of his own door. No man in all England longed that the roads might look like roads again more heartily and sadly than the hospitable Sir Roland.
With brooms of every sort and shape, and shovels, and even pickaxes, all the neighbourhood turned out, as soon as ever a man could manage to open his own cottage-door. For three days it had been no good to try to do anything but look on; but the very first moment the sky left off, everybody living under it began to recover courage. The boys came first in a joyful manner, sinking over their brace-buttons in the shallow places, and then the girls came, and were puzzled by the manner of their dress, till they made up their minds to be boys for a time.
And after these came out their mother, for the sake of scolding them; and then the father could do no less than stand on his threshold with pipe in mouth, and look up wisely at the sky, and advise everybody to wait a bit. And thus a great many people managed to get out of their houses. And it was observed, not only then, but also for many years to come, how great the mercy of the Lord was. Having seen fit to send such a storm, he chose for it, not a Wednesday night, nor a Thursday night, nor a Friday night, but a Saturday night, when He knew, in His wisdom, that every man had got his wages, and had filled his bread-pan.
As for the roads, they were blocked entirely against both wheels and horses, until a violent wind arose from the east, and winnowed fiercely. Sweeping along all the bend of the hill, and swaying the laden copses, it tore up the snow in squally spasms, and cast white blindness everywhere. Three days the snow had defied the wind, and for three days now the wind had its way. Vexed mortals could do nothing more than shelter themselves in their impotence, and hope, as they shivered and sniffed at their pots, that the Lord would repent of His anger. It was already perceived, and where people could get together they did not hide it, that Mr. Bottler must go up, and Farmer Gates come down a peg. For, although the sheep were folded well, and mainly fetched into the hollows, as soon as the drift began it was known that the very precaution would murder them. For sheep have a foolish trick of crowding into the lee of the fold, just where the drift must be the deepest. But pigs are as clever as their mother, dirt – which always gets over everything. So Farmer Gates lost three hundred sheep, while Bottler did not lose a pig, but saved (and exalted the price of) his bacon.
When the snow, on the wings of the wind, began to pierce the windows of Coombe Lorraine (for in such case no putty will keep it out), and every ancient timber creaked with cold disgust of shrinking, and the “drawing” of all the fireplaces was more to the door than the chimney, and the chimneys drew submissive moans to the howling of the tempest, and chilly rustles and frosty taps sounded outside the walls and in – from all these things the young lady of the house gained some hope and comfort. Surely in such weather no one could ever think of a wedding; nobody could come or go; it would take a week to dig out the church, and another week to get to it. Blow, blow, thou east wind, blow, and bury rather than marry us.
But the east wind (after three days of blowing, and mixing snow of earth and sky) suddenly fell with a hollow sound, like the “convolutions of a shell” into deep silence. Clear deep silence settled on the storm of drifted billows. As the wind left them, so they stopped, until the summer rose under them; for spring there was none in that terrible year, and no breath of summer until it broke forth. And now set in the long steadfast frost, which stopped the Thames and Severn, the Trent and Tweed, and all the other rivers of Great Britain. From the source to the mouth a man might cross them without feeling water under him.
Alas for poor Alice! The roads of the weald (being mainly unhedged at that time) were opened as if by “Sesame.” The hill-roads were choked many fathoms deep wherever they lay in shelter; but the furious wind had swept the flat roads clear, as with a besom.
Their brown track might be traced for miles, frozen as hard as an oaken plank, except where a slight depression, or a sudden bend, or a farmer’s wall, had kept the white wave from shoaling. So, as soon as a passage had been dug through the borstall, and down the hill to the westward, the Chapmans were free to come and go with their gaudy coach as usual.
Alice took this turn of matters with all the calmness of despair. It was nothing but a childish thing to long for a few days’ reprieve, which could not help her much, and might destroy all the good of her sacrifice. In one way or the other she must go; standing so terribly across the welfare of all that was dear to her, and seeming (as she told herself) to have no one now to whom she was dear. With no one to advise or aid her, no one even to feel for her, she had to meet the saddest doom that can befall proud woman – wedlock with an object.