Crowded Out! and Other Sketches Part 14

"Ah! yes, quite so. And there is much to see in this new country, in Canada, much to see. You will remain some time?"

"We will remain as long as it suits my brother," said Mr. Joseph. "At present, we can hardly tell."

"Quite so, quite so. I hope--I am sure my daughter concurs in the hope, that we shall see you in church as often as you can come and also--ah!

at the Rectory. Such society as we can give you here you may be a.s.sured we will endeavor to give with all our--ah! heart to the best of our ability."

"Thanks very much" returned Mr. Joseph. "I am sure my brother and I will be exceedingly glad to go and see you at the Rectory. About church I will say that we never go very regularly anywhere, but when it isn't too hot, too hot, you know, or too cold, or anything of that sort, I am sure we'll try to turn up there as well."

The rector, smiled indulgently. No call to be hard on the Mr. Foxleys, of Foxley Manor. Miss Maria left the Inn smitten for the fiftieth time.

"I knew I should marry an Englishman," she exclaimed ecstatically up the road with her father.

"The dark one, oh! the dark one!"

"They are somewhat peculiar young men I fancy, Maria. Of course Mrs.

c.o.x is a very careful and a very good woman and--ah! her place is a very respectable and comfortable one, and the order of travellers one meets, that is, one would meet if one went there, is quite proper indeed, but still, I thought, mind I do not say anything, I do not express any opinion Maria, I simply say, I _thought_, that they would have smoked for instance in the dinning-room or the bar, or on the verandah instead of in that very conspicuous manner just outside the kitchen door." But this was the first and last stricture that the rector made as to the conduct of the Mr. Foxleys, for by appearing in church two Sundays after his call and spending an evening on the vine-covered verandah of the pretty Rectory, they were speedily entered in the very best books kept by that worthy if slightly common-place gentleman and his gushing daughter.

The next persons of distinction in the village were the Miss Dexters, who lived with their father, at one time a prominent medical man, in the little cottage graced by the presence of the mighty oak which had so charmed the strangers when they first beheld it. Their father was old, very old indeed, and slightly shaken in his mind. He was also an Englishman and the daughters, not daring to enter upon life in town with their small income and a helpless old man on their hands into the bargain had retired to the country some ten years before the advent of the Mr. Foxleys. Charlotte the elder was now forty and Ellen over thirty-five. Neither of them had ever been beautiful and now they were, more or less pinched and worn in their aspect, but they were gentlewomen, neat and sweet spoken, and capable of offering small evening entertainments of cribbage and hot weak tea with bread and b.u.t.ter with a gracious and well bred air that marked them off as people who had seen "better times." G.o.d help such all over the world and thank Him too for the colonies, where such people can retreat without being said to hide, and live down their misfortunes or their follies or their weaknesses, and be of some use to others after a while! It would be hard to say why the Mr. Foxleys went as often as they did, especially Mr.

Joseph--to the Miss Dexters for tea. Perhaps the oak had much to do with it.

It had something I am sure, for indeed, it was the most beautiful tree for miles around and it was worth a good deal to sit under its cool shade in the Summer afternoons or to look up into its dark vault in the slowly dusking twilights. I can't defend Mr. Joseph further than this.

For between cribbage and choir practice, Sunday rambles in the woods and rows on the river, the lending of books and the singing of songs, the handing of bread and b.u.t.ter and the drinking of tea, Mr. Joseph had caused both the Miss Dexters to fall hopelessly and indeed fatally in love with him. When the Xmas holidays came, Joseph, who had a clerkship in town, spent his vacation naturally at the Inn with his brother, and then ensued a period of very mixed delight for the Miss Dexters.

For the callous Joseph made as violent love to the unresisting Miss Higgs over the Xmas tree and carols as she herself would have chosen to make to Mr. George had she been given the chance.

As for Mr. George, he was just as languid and silent as ever. He hardly ever went into the town at all, but preferred to remain on quietly at the inn, fishing, shooting and taking long walks in the summer days when it was fine, and when it rained, lounging in Mrs. c.o.x's kitchen. Here he always had his meals, for the kind friend he had found in his landlady gratified every whim, and any fancy he chose to profess, and cooked for him, washed for him and waited on him with unceasing and in fact ever-increasing devotion. Mr. Foxley's shirts and Mr. Foxley's socks, Mr. Foxley's white coats and Mr. Foxley's jane boots, his dog, his gun, and his effects generally were all sacred, all in irreproachable order, all objects of the greatest value and interest to Mrs. c.o.x and her niece. You see there were no children in this comfortable _menage_ and really, when the baking and the washing and the preserving and the churning were all done with early in the day or in the week there remained a good deal of time on Mrs. c.o.x's hands, which in her earnest womanly heart she felt she must fill up in some way. So it came that all this time and energy and devotion were after a while centred on Mr.

George Foxley, late of Foxley Manor, Notts. As for Mr. Joseph, the good woman oftener told him to "go along!" than anything else, for though she liked him, his love of mischief and several practical jokes he had played her which she termed "his ways," had rendered her cautious and a little distrustful of him. Such an existence proved very charming to all parties concerned, excepting perhaps the Miss Dexters, and their companion in misery, at the rectory. For the worst of it was, Xmas pa.s.sed and Easter came, and another spring dawned for the pretty little village of Ipswich and found the Mr. Foxleys still there. They never spoke of going away and n.o.body hinted it to them. The impression, natural in the extreme, that they were a couple of wealthy young Englishmen going about for pleasure, who just happening to come to Ipswich and being taken with it had stayed a little longer than they intended, was fast giving way to another. For it was a well-known fact that the Mr. Foxleys did not spend too much money either on themselves or on other people. They paid their way and that was all one could say about them. Squires was not included in this arrangement, however, but was forced to remain content with cigars, cast-off studs and a present at Christmas-time of a collie pup. I grieve to think of those poor Miss Dexters--foolish souls--going without b.u.t.ter on their bread and sugar in their tea that they might have both to offer Mr. Joseph when he might come in airily for a cup, and making their already too thin gowns last another winter, that they might spend a little money on a smoking cap for the same gentleman and a pair of knitted wristlets for his brother.

All these tokens of friendship and attachment the brothers accepted in the most charming and unconcerned way and never troubled themselves about returning the compliment as we say. It was quite true that they had not much money, but a little management of what they did possess would have left a small sum over each year, which might have been expended on say a pair of fur-lined gloves for Charlotte or a canary for Ellen, who was fond of pets and used to keep Bess with her for days, feeding the unconscious animal for its master's sake better than she was fed herself. And all this time Mr. Joseph never proposed and never hinted at his prospects or affairs in any way whatever!

The second summer of his stay saw old Mr. Dexter die. After his death Ellen drooped visibly. General disgust at life, insufficient food and sleep, and a hopeless pa.s.sion for Mr. Joseph sapped a naturally weak const.i.tution, and her sister soon realized another bitter shock when she helped Ellen to her bed one sultry September night from which she never rose again. The windows of the little cottage were open, and the unhappy girl could see the giant oak outside their door. How often she had sat there with her cruel friend, her hand on his shoulder, and her eyes fixed on his sharp, clear-cut features and laughing eyes! He had seemed so gentle, so earnest, so winning--had talked so cleverly, so hopefully, so gleefully. He had been the sunshine of her life, and alas!--of Charlotte's too! Each knew the other's secret, but by intuitive sympathy they had never alluded to it. They referred to him only as "Mr. Joseph,"

and on her death-bed Ellen sent her "kindest wishes to Mr. Joseph." She lingered till near the Christmas season, and then one day a small packet per English mail arrived. They occasionally heard from friends in the Old Country, and this special parcel contained a couple of silk handkerchiefs and a sprig of holly. Charlotte took them up to her in the evening, spreading them out on the bed. Ellen sat up, eagerly pressing the holly to her lips. Alas! what were the recollections it brought that the poor, weak frame and the poor, tired spirit could not brook them?

Perhaps--not perhaps--O most certainly, most truly of home and of England; of the mother so long vanished, dimly remembered, almost forgotten; of winding green lanes and of ivied walls, of little solemn churchyards--in none of which she would never lie; of peeps of blue sea from the middle of a wood; of a primrose at the foot of a tree; of the crowded coach and the sounding horn; and lastly of the recreant one whom she could not even call her lover, but who had made her love him so that her very life was eaten away by sickness of fear, of apprehension, of despair!

With the holly pressed to her lips, Ellen Dexter pa.s.sed out of this world into another.

Did Mr. Joseph Foxley care? Who knows? I should know if anybody ever did, but I do not hold Mr. Joseph so very much to blame after all. For a man is often innocent of love-making at the very moment a woman is fancying herself violently in love with him, and fancying, moreover, that he is in love with her. Can anything be more fatal, more pernicious, more terrible? And yet I believe there is nothing more common. There are some men who press more tenderly than the requirements of ordinary social intercourse call for or allow, the hand of every woman they meet They are not necessarily flirts. Perhaps they never go farther than that clinging hand-pressure. It is a relic of the customs of the days of chivalry--a little more and this man will kiss the hand. Let the lady be beautiful, gracious, the hour dusk, or close on midnight, the room a pretty one, and the environment pleasing, he will bend over the hand, and if he does not kiss it he will retain it just long enough to make her wish he had kissed it. If she is a woman of the world she will laugh as she returns the pressure, making it purposely as thrilling as she can--then she will forget it completely the next moment as she dispenses five o'clock tea or late coffee and cake to her husband or brother. But if she be not a woman of the world, then G.o.d help her on her tear-wet pillow, or before her slowly-dying fire as she thinks of that hand-pressure. It is enough to last her all her life, she thinks--and yet, should it not come again? But--_should_ it come again!

And the pillow is wet with fresh tears, or the brow is prematurely wrinkled watching the decaying embers, while the man--let us do him justice--is as blindly unconscious--unconscious! Why, at that very moment he is making love--what _he_ calls making love--to the woman of his choice, his wife, his mistress, or his _fiancee_! These are the men who do the most mischief in the world. Your brute, your beast, your groveller in ditches, is not nearly so dangerous. Women recoil from him.

They understand him. But the man who presses their hand awakes them, rouses their susceptibility, causes the tender trouble to steal over them that so often ends in grief, or despair, or death! And this is because neither s.e.x is as yet properly trained in the vital duty of responsibility, by which I mean that faculty of self-repression which will cause a woman to try and understand what a man means when he presses her hand, and cause the man to try and understand what a woman feels when he does so. As for poor Ellen Dexter, it is dear that she was not a woman of the world; but her sister Charlotte and Miss Maria at the Rectory, if not precisely women of the world, were yet made of much sterner stuff than she had been, and consequently, after much reflection, decided that they were not going to be made fools of, in village parlance. Miss Maria had, of course, long ago given up Mr.

George Foxley altogether.

"He is not human," she said to her father, "and I don't believe he _is_ one of the Foxleys of Foxley Manor at all."

"There can be no doubt about that, my dear," answered the actor.

"Difficulties I should say--ah--difficulties have brought these young men out here, but we must do our duty by them, we must do our duty.

Their father is a fine old gentleman, and well off, and a stanch Tory, my dear. Patience, my dear Maria. The photographs are quite correct and the seals bear quite the proper crest--ah--quite so."

So Miss Maria transferred her affections to Mr. Joseph. The second Christmas pa.s.sed away, and a third spring dawned for Ipswich. The Inn was just as comfortable as ever and so were apparently the two Mr.

Foxleys but for one fact and that was, Mr. George's health was not as good as it had been. Always delicate, he had gradually failed, growing more and more languid, more and more whimsical in spite of his comfortable abode and the diligent care of his landlady. Poor Milly! How she worked for him too, between hours, after hours, before hours! When the attacks of pleurisy, painful in the extreme, from which he suffered, came on either in the night or during the day, Milly was always near with her strong young arms, not quite so pink as they used to be, and her quick young eyes, a shade more subtle than they used to be, ready to apprehend and quiet the pain before it came. How Miss Maria at the Rectory and Charlotte Dexter in her lonely cottage would have envied her had they known, but though there were gossips in plenty in the village, nothing that occurred in the rose-scented drawing-room ever went out into that tattling little Ipswichian world.

"Are your young gentlemen with you yet, Mrs. c.o.x? And one of 'em not over strong? Deary me! that makes it hard for you and the young gal But you be standing it remarkable well. And gentlemen born you say! They do say that the other one wi' the specked skin be making fools of Miss Maria up at the Rectory and old Miss Dexter at the cottage. Well! well!

Poor Miss Ellen was gone afore we knew it like, poor soul, that was so kind!"

Much of this cunning volubility sprung upon Mrs. c.o.x in pumping fashion failed to extort from her anything but good-humoured smiles and laughs.

If I have not taken the trouble to describe this beloved Mrs. c.o.x to you before this, it is because I fear you will say the picture is Unreal, no such landlady, no such woman could exist out of England But why not? My story, remember, deals with people and things as they were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago there were such Inns, though few at number, to be found in Western Canada--ay--and as English as any that a certain Mrs.

Lupin presided over in fascinating fiction, and much more English than many Inns of the present day in England. Twenty years ago there was such a landlady, rosy and plump and cheerful, wearing a flowered gown, a black silk ap.r.o.n and a cap with a purple pansy in it and broad and comfortable lappets, who, when her work was done, would sit in her small private room opposite the bar also hung with red curtains, making patchwork quilts or playing a demure rubber with the Scotch store-keeper, or Irish stage driver, or an occasional gentleman from town. Such was Mrs. c.o.x, widow of Captain c.o.x, able seaman, but bad lot, who died when they had been five years in Canada, leaving her with her one child. The public business had attracted her after her loss and she accordingly went into it on the advice of her numerous friends. People who despise her calling need not listen to me if I allude to--for I have not time to recount--all her kindness, her cheerfulness, her powers of dispensing comfort, and warmth, and happiness, and promoting the direct and indirect welfare of everyone who came in her path. By what strange coincidence the brothers Foxley had been led to her glowing fireside and her motherly arms br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with zeal and kindness for the whole human race, does not matter. It is sufficient that they found her and found with her a sense of comparative peace and security which compensated for the one big slice of trouble Fortune had treated them to before their departure from England. For them did the wall flowers bloom and the mignonette at the window, for them did the oleander blossom and the old clock strike, for them did the jessamine climb and the one hawthorn tree yield its annual soft white drift of snow, and yet who shall say that they were altogether unworthy, even, if with that picture of poor Ellen Dexter in my mind, I have to say that they did not deserve it?

CHAPTER III.

If Mr. Joseph Foxley had but known the sentiments animating the couple of maiden b.r.e.a.s.t.s that awaited his Sat.u.r.day visits in Ipswich, he would have been genuinely surprised. The truth is Mr. Joseph was rather what is termed a general lover. He liked the s.e.x in its entirety.

Collectively he loved all women and belonged to that hand-pressing section of humanity which I have alluded to as mischievous. Were there not at least five young ladies in town, at whose houses he visited, and who were more or less interested in the young Englishman as he in them?

Did Miss Charlotte dream of them or Miss Maria at the rectory? If so, they never dared to ask Mr. Joseph to give any account of his doings in town, although they managed to glean what he did with himself in the village. He respected Charlotte Dexter enough to intend at some future day to tell her a little more about himself and his brother than he had yet done; as for Miss Maria, she only bored him and fed his contempt.

"When a rather elderly old girl giggles after everything she says, conversation is difficult and sympathy out of the question," he had said to his brother! When Mr. Joseph had known these young ladies for four years, Miss Maria took her revenge in _her_ way, that was by marrying the younger brother of Mr. Simon P. Rattray, partner in the mill and the red brick house by the river. The vision of becoming the cherished wife of an English aristocrat and going home to reside in a manor house built in the sixteenth century, with occasional visits to London and glimpses of the Royal Family had gradually faded, and she accepted the less rose-coloured lot that Mr. Lyman B. Rattray offered her, sitting in her father's study, with his hair very much brushed up on one side and very much flattened down on the other, a white tie and light-yellow duster adorning his spare person.

Such was the American of those days--twenty years ago--there are none such now I allow.

Miss Maria, who was considered "very English," shuddered as she regarded him. It so fell out that it being Sat.u.r.day, Mr. Joseph was just then pa.s.sing--"kind of happening along" Mr. Rattray would have said--_en route_ to the Inn and his brother, on foot in spite of the dusty road and the hot August sun, clad in trim tight knickerbockers and carrying an immense bunch of red field lilies, a gun, and a leather satchel over his shoulder. Slight and straight and cool, he looked the picture of a contented cheerful energetic young English man. Along the road he came whistling an old country tune. Miss Maria who had sighted him afar off, begged her visitor's pardon and went to the window to arrange the blind.

How her heart warmed to that cruel Mr. Joseph, how she loved him then just for that last moment! Her heart--that foolish old maid's heart--beat quickly, beat thickly, she remembered to have read something somewhere about people who could will other people to look at them, to speak to them, to even think of them, to move across a room at their pleasure. If she could but do that! She did try, with her fingers clenched on the blind, and her eyes fixed on Mr. Joseph, she did wish with all her might that he would turn his head and see her at the window and wave his hand gallantly as he had done on one or two previous occasions. Then she would beckon and he would run across and entering the room disconcert this odious Mr. Lyman B. Rattray and put an end to his stony wooing. But alas! for Miss Maria and her mesmeric powers! The harder she tried, the less she succeeded. On came Mr. Joseph, supremely unconscious of the injured heart beating behind the windowpane. At one moment it seemed as if he were about to turn and look in her direction.

A very brilliant wild yellow canary crossed over his head and lit on a small shrub just inside the garden paling. Had it remained there, would Miss Maria have ever become the wife of Mr. Lyman B. Rattray? No one knows, for the canary flew away again to the other side of the road and Mr. Joseph's eyes followed it In a moment he was past, and the chance was gone for ever. Miss Maria left her window and sat down opposite her visitor. There was nothing to keep her now, nothing to give her courage and hope for the future, new fire for her faded eyes, new strength for her jaded limbs. Yet she was only thirty-four. How strange it is that some unmarried women are old at that age, even while living in luxury and surrounded by every care and all affection, while many a married woman, though beset with trials and weaknesses and perhaps a brood of restless little ones to pull her gown and get in the way of her busy feet, retains her figure and her step, her smile and her complexion, her temper and her nerves!

It but remained for Charlotte Dexter to take her revenge in her way.

Going very seldom out of her house, and never visiting at the Inn she was really very ignorant of the doings of either Mr. George or Mr.

Joseph Foxley. Towards the one she had never been greatly drawn, for the other she felt all the pa.s.sion that only a supremely lonely woman can feel in middle age for a man younger than herself who charms her as a child, while he captivates her as a lover. Of Mrs. c.o.x and Milly moreover, she hardly ever thought, and in fact had not seen the latter for a long time. If she had it is not likely she would even have recognized in the tall pale shapely young woman with braids of dark hair and white linen cuffs fastened--must I tell it? with a pair of antique monogram studs, the plump little handmaiden of four years back. As it was, she only waited on day after day, to hear Mr. Joseph speak. Instead of Mr. Joseph however appeared another and less welcome confidante. This was the most malignant gossip in the village, Mrs. Woods, the wife of the butcher, a tall red faced woman with high cheek-bones on which the color seemed to have been badly smirched, watery eyes and a couple of protruding yellow teeth. She looked more like a butcher than the butcher himself who was a mild little man with soft silky fair hair and small nervous fluttering hands. Yet he managed to summon sufficient character to go on a tremendous burst--I know of no other word, every third or fourth month and disappear for a week When these periodical eclipses took place, his wife would come flying into the Inn with her bonnet hanging round her neck and a large green and red plaid shawl streaming out behind her.

"Where's Woods?" She would say. "Where's Woods? Give me Woods! Give 'im up, I tell you; give 'im up now!"

But Woods was never found inside Mrs. c.o.x's neat dwelling, nor indeed anywhere, although it had been whispered on, one occasion that he had been seen in the back room of the little "Temperance Hotel" with the male Methodist in attendance. This, of course, was clearly impossible.

It was this Mrs. Woods then that stopped at Dexter's Oak one Friday morning with her donkey-cart and a small piece of the neck of mutton in it. She was not an entirely bad woman, though a downright cunning virago, and perhaps some inkling of the nature of the blow that was about to fall on Miss Dexter's head caused her to come prepared by an acceptable present to somewhat mitigate its appalling approach.

"I be at the Inn bright and early this morning Miss," she began, "and brought 'em their bit of fresh meat. And I'm bringin' you a bit as was over, and it is'nt a bad piece for a stew, if you like a stew, Miss, with an onion or two."

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Woods," said Charlotte, who had come out to the front door and now stood on the lower step, looking over the cart.

"I'm afraid I can't settle with you just at present," she said further, with some effort, "you can call some other time when you are pa.s.sing.

Will that do? and is it weighed?"

"It is, miss, and I'll not say a word about the payin'! Six pound and a 'alf, and Woods gone agen--I weighed it myself."

"Oh! I am sorry to hear that," said Charlotte. "Your husband gives you a great deal of trouble. I am very sorry, and he is not at the inn?"

If Charlotte was guilty at that moment of purposely leading the conversation up to this always for her most enthralling, most engrossing subject, she soon enough received her punishment. On she went to her own destruction.

"At the inn!" repeated the butcher's wife, with ineffable scorn on her cruel mouth. She wiped her watery eyes and settled the refractory bonnet before going on.

"No miss, he's not at the inn, and if he was sober, he wouldn't be at the inn, and you'll never see him, nor me, nor 'Ide yonder, nor anyone on us at all no more at the inn. For the inn's changed 'ands, miss.