Deadham Hard Part 8

To their reprehensible tendencies in this last respect the Miss Minetts could bear painful witness, as--with hushed voices and entreaties the sorry tale might "go no further"--they more than once confided to Theresa Bilson. For one Sat.u.r.day afternoon--unknown to the vicar--being zealous in the admonishing of recalcitrant church-goers and rounding up of possible Sunday-school recruits, they crossed to the island at low tide; and in their best district visitor manner--too often a sparkling blend of condescension and familiarity, warranted to irritate--severally demanded entrance to the first two of the black cottages.--The Inn they avoided.

Refined gentlewomen can hardly be expected, even in the interests of religion, to risk pollution by visiting a common tavern, more particularly when a company of half-grown lads and blue jerseyed men--who may, of course, have been carousing within--hangs about its morally malodorous door.

Of precisely what followed their attempted violation of the privacy of those two cottages, even the Miss Minetts themselves could subsequently give no very coherent account. They only knew that some half-hour later, with petticoats raised to a height gravely imperilling decency, they splashed landward across the causeway--now ankle-deep in water--while the lads congregated before the Inn laughed boisterously, the men turned away with a guffaw, dogs of disgracefully mixed parentage yelped, and the elder female members of the Proud and Sclanders families flung phrases lamentably subversive of gentility after their retreating figures from the foresh.o.r.e.

Modesty and mortification alike forbade the outraged ladies reporting the episode to Dr. Horniblow in extenso. But they succeeded in giving Miss Bilson a sufficiently lurid account of it to make "the darling little island," in as far as her charge, Damaris, was concerned, more than ever taboo. Their request that the story might "go no further" she interpreted with the elasticity usually accorded to such requests; and proceeded, at the first opportunity, to retail the whole shocking occurrence to her pupil as an example of the ingrat.i.tude and insubordination of the common people. For Theresa was nothing if not conservative and aristocratic.

From such august anachronisms as the divine right of kings and the Stuart succession, down to humble bobbing of curtseys and pulling of forelocks in to-day's village street, she held a permanent brief for the cla.s.ses as against the ma.s.ses. Unluckily the Miss Minetts' hasty and watery withdrawal, with upgathered skirts, across the causeway had appealed to Damaris' sense of comedy rather than of tragedy.--She didn't want to be unkind, but you shouldn't interfere; and if you insisted on interfering you must accept whatever followed. The two ladies in question were richly addicted to interfering she had reason to think.--And then they must have looked so wonderfully funny scuttling thus!

The picture remained by her as a thing of permanent mirth. So it was hardly surprising, in face of the dominant direction of her thoughts to-night, that, when the Miss Minetts' name punctuated Theresa's discourse recurrent as a cuckoo-cry, remembrance of their merrily inglorious retirement from the region of Faircloth's Inn should present itself. Whereupon Damaris' serious mood was lightened as by sudden sunshine, and she laughed.

Hearing which infectiously gay but quite unexpected sound, Miss Bilson stopped dead in the middle both of a nectarine and a sentence.

"What is the matter, Damaris?" she exclaimed. "I was explaining our difficulty in securing sufficient conveyances for some of our party to and from Marychurch station. I really do not see any cause for amus.e.m.e.nt in what I said."

"There wasn't anything amusing, dear Billy, I'm sure there wasn't,"

Damaris returned, the corners of her mouth still quivering and her eyes very bright. "I beg your pardon. I'm afraid I wasn't quite attending. I was thinking of something else. You were speaking about the carriage horses, weren't you? Yes."

But Theresa turned sulky. She had been posing, planing in mid-air around the fair castles hope and ambition are reported to build there. Her fat little feet were well off the floor, and that outbreak of laughter let her down with a b.u.mp. She lost her head, lost her temper and her opportunity along with it, and fell into useless scolding.

"You are extremely inconsequent and childish sometimes, Damaris," she said. "I find it most trying when I attempt to talk to you upon practical subjects, really pressing subjects, and you either cannot or will not concentrate. What can you expect in the future when you are thrown more on your own resources, and have not me--for instance--always to depend upon, if you moon through life like this? It must lead to great discomfort not only for yourself but for others. Pray be warned in time."

Damaris turned in her chair at the head of the table. A station not unconnected, in Theresa's mind, with the internal ordering of those same air-built castles, and consistently if furtively coveted by her. To Sir Charles's chair at the bottom of the table, she dared not aspire, so during his absence reluctantly retained her accustomed place at the side.

"You need not wait any longer, Mary," Damaris said, over her shoulder.

"Why?" Theresa began fussily, as the two maids left the room.

"Why?" Damaris took her up. "Because I prefer our being alone during the remainder of this conversation. I understand that you want to ask me about something to do with this excursion to Harchester. What is it, please?"

"My dear Damaris," the other protested, startled and scenting unexpected danger, "really your manner"--

"And yours.--Both perhaps would bear improvement. But that is by the way.

What is it, please, you want?"

"Really you a.s.sert yourself"--

"And you forget yourself--before the servants, too, I do not like it at all. You should be more careful."

"Damaris," she cried aghast, confounded to the verge of tears--"Damaris!"

"Yes--I am giving you my full attention. Pray let us be practical," the young girl said, sitting up tall and straight in the shaded lamp-light, the white dinner-table spread with gleaming gla.s.s and silver, fine china, fruit and flowers before her, the soft gloom of the long low room behind, all tender hint of childhood banished from her countenance, and her eyes bright now not with laughter but with battle. "Pray let us finish with the subject of the choir treat. Then we shall be free to talk about more interesting things."

Miss Bilson waved her hands hysterically.

"No--no--I never wish to mention it again. I am too deeply hurt by your behaviour to me, Damaris--your sarcasm.--Of course," she added, "I see I must withdraw my offer. It will cause the greatest inconvenience and disappointment; but for that I cannot hold myself responsible, though it will be most painful and embarra.s.sing to me after the kind appreciation I have received. Still I must withdraw it"--

"Withdraw what offer?"

"Why the offer I was explaining to you just now, when you ordered the maids out of the room. You really cannot deny that you heard what I said, Damaris, because you mentioned the carriage horses yourself."

Theresa sipped some water. She was recovering if not her temper, yet her grasp on the main issue. She wanted, so desperately, to achieve her purpose and, incidentally, to continue to play, both for her own benefit and that of the parish, her self-elected role of Lady Bountiful, of "official representative of The Hard"--as Dr. Horniblow by a quite innocent if ill-timed flourish of speech had unfortunately put it.

"The conveyances in the village are insufficient to take the whole party to the station," she continued. "An extra brake can be had at the Stag's Head in Mary church; but a pair of horses must be sent in to-morrow afternoon to bring it over here. I saw"--she hesitated a moment--"I really could see no objection to Patch taking our horses in to fetch the brake, and driving a contingent to the station in it next morning."

"And meeting the train at night, I suppose?" Damaris said calmly.

"Of course," Theresa answered, thus unconsciously declaring herself a rank outsider, and rushing blindly upon her fate.

For what thoroughbred member of the equestrian order does not know that next--and even that not always--to the ladies of his family and, possibly, the key of his cellar, an Englishman's stable is sacrosanct?

Dispose of anything he owns rather than his horses. To attempt touching them is, indeed, to stretch out your hand against the Ark of the Covenant and risk prompt withering of that impious limb. Yet poor Theresa blundered on.

"I told the vicar that, Sir Charles being from home, I felt I might make the offer myself, seeing how much it would simplify the arrangements and how very little work Patch has when you and I are alone here. It is a pity there is not time to obtain Sir Charles's sanction. That would be more proper, of course, more satisfactory. But under the circ.u.mstances it need not, I think, be regarded as an insuperable objection. I told the Miss Minetts and the vicar"--

Here Miss Bilson blushed, applying fork and spoon, in coy confusion, to the remains of the nectarine upon her plate.

"I told them," she repeated, "knowing Sir Charles as well as I do, I felt I might safely a.s.sure them of that."

In Damaris, meanwhile, anger gradually gave place to far more complex emotions. She sat well back in her chair, and clasped her hands firmly in her flowered Pompadour-muslin lap. Her eyes looked enormous as she kept them fixed gravely and steadily upon the speaker. For extraordinary ideas and perceptions concerning the said speaker crowded into her young head.

She did not like them at all. She shrank from dwelling upon or following them put. They, indeed, made her hot and uncomfortable all over. Had Theresa Bilson taken leave of her senses, or was she, Damaris, herself in fault--a harbourer of nasty thoughts? Consciously she felt to grow older, to grow up. And she did not like that either; for the grown-up world, to which Theresa acted just now as doorkeeper, struck her as an ugly and vulgar-minded place. She saw her ex-governess from a new angle--a more illuminating than agreeable one, at which she no longer figured as pitiful, her little a.s.sumptions and sillinesses calling for the chivalrous forbearance of persons more happily placed; but as actively impertinent, an usurper of authority and privileges altogether outside her office and her scope. She was greedy--not a pretty word yet a true one, covering both her manner of eating and her speech. Registering which facts Damaris was sensible of almost physical repulsion, as from something obscurely gross. Hence it followed that Theresa must, somehow, be stopped, made to see her own present unpleasantness, saved from herself in short--to which end it became Damaris' duty to unfurl the flag of revolt.

The young girl arrived at this conclusion in a spirit of rather pathetic seriousness. It is far from easy, at eighteen, to control tongue and temper to the extent of joining battle with your elders in calm and dignified sort. To lay about you in a rage is easy enough. But rage is tiresomely liable to defeat its own object and make you make a fool of yourself. Any unfurling of the flag would be useless, and worse than useless, unless it heralded victory sure and complete--Damaris realized this. So she kept a brave front, although her pulse quickened and she had a bad little empty feeling around her heart.

Fortunately, however, for her side of the campaign, Theresa--emboldened by recapitulation of her late boastings at the Miss Minetts'

tea-table--hastened to put a gilded dome to her own indiscretion and offence. For nothing would do but Damaris must accompany her on this choir treat! She declared herself really compelled to press the point. It offered such an excellent opportunity of acquiring archaeological knowledge--had not the Dean most kindly promised to conduct the party round the Cathedral himself and deliver a short lecture _en route_?--and of friendly social intercourse, both of which would be very advantageous to Damaris. As she was without any engagement for the day clearly neither should be missed. Of course, everyone understood how unsuitable it would be to ask Sir Charles to patronize parish excursions and events.--Here Miss Bilson became lyrical, speaking with gasping breath and glowing face, of "a call to exalted spheres of action, of great Proconsuls, Empire Builders, Pillars of the State."--Naturally you hesitated to intrude on the time and attention of such a distinguished person--that in point of fact was her main reason for disposing of the matter of the carriage horses herself. How could she trouble Sir Charles with such a homely detail?--But Damaris' case, needless to remark, was very different. At her age it was invidious to be too exclusive. Miss Felicia Verity felt--so she, Theresa, was certain--that it was a pity Damaris did not make more friends in the village now she was out of the schoolroom.

May and Doris Horniblow were sweet girls and highly educated. They, of course, were going. And Captain Taylor, she understood would bring his daughter, Louisa--who was home for a few days before the opening of term at the Tillingworth High School where she was second mistress.

"It is always well to realize the attainments of young people of your own age, even if they are not in quite the same social grade as yourself.

Your going would give pleasure too. It will be taken as a compliment to the vicar and the Church--may really, in a sense, be called patriotic since an acknowledgment of the duty we owe, individually, to the local community of which we form part. And then," she added, naively giving herself away at the last, "of course, if you go over to the station in the brake Patch cannot make any difficulties about driving it."

Here Theresa stayed the torrent of her eloquence and looked up, to find Damaris' eyes fixed upon her in incredulous wonder.

"Have you nothing to say, dear, in answer to my proposition?" she enquired, with a suddenly anxious, edgy little laugh.

"I am afraid I have a lot to say, some of which you won't like."

"How so?" Theresa cried, still playfully. "You must see how natural and reasonable my suggestion is." Then becoming admonitory. "You should learn to think a little more of others.--It is a bad habit to offer opposition simply for opposition's sake."

"I do not oppose you for the mere pleasure of opposing," Damaris began, determined her voice should not shake. "But I'm sorry to say, I can't agree to the horses being used to draw a loaded brake. I could not ask Patch. He would refuse and be quite right in refusing. It's not their work--nor his work either."

She leaned forward, trying to speak civilly and gently.

"There are some things you don't quite understand about the stables, or about the servants--the things which can't be done, which it's impossible to ask.--No,--wait, please--please let me finish"--

For between astonishment, chagrin, and an inarticulate struggle to protest, Miss Bilson's complexion was becoming almost apoplectic and her poor fat little cheeks positively convulsed.

"I dislike saying such disagreeable things to you, but it can't be avoided. It would be cowardly of me not to tell you the truth.--You shall have the brougham the day after to-morrow, and I'll write to Miss Minett in the morning, and tell her you will call for her and her sister, on your way to Marychurch, and that you will bring them back at night. I will give Patch his orders myself, so that there may be no confusion. And I will subscribe a pound to the expenses of the choir treat. That is all I can promise in the way of help."

"But--but--Damaris, think of the position in which you place me! I cannot be thrust aside thus. I will not submit. It is so humiliating, so--so--I offered the horses. I told the vicar he might consider it settled about the extra brake"--

"I know. That was a mistake. You had no right to make such an offer."