Man and Maid Part 17

THE HERMIT OF "THE YEWS"

Maurice Brent knew a great deal about the Greek anthology, and very little about women. No one but himself had any idea how much he knew of the one, and no one had less idea than himself how little he knew of the other. So that when, a stranger and a pilgrim hopelessly astray amid a smart house-party, he began to fall in love with Camilla, it seemed to be no one's business to tell him, what everybody else knew, that Camilla had contracted the habit of becoming engaged at least once a year. Of course this always happened in the country, because it was there that Camilla was most bored. No other eligible young man happened to be free at the moment: Camilla never engaged herself to ineligibles. The habit of years is not easily broken: Camilla became engaged to Maurice, and, for the six months of the engagement, he lived in Paradise. A fool's Paradise, if you like, but Paradise all the same.

About Easter time Camilla told him, very nicely and kindly, that she had mistaken her own heart--she hoped he would not let it make him very unhappy. She would always wish him the best of good fortune, and doubtless he would find it in the affection of some other girl much nicer and more worthy of him than his sincere friend Camilla. Camilla was right--no one could have been less worthy of him than she: but after all it was Camilla he thought that he loved, Camilla he felt that he wanted, not any other girl at all, no matter how nice or how worthy.

He took it very quietly: sent her a note so cold and unconcerned that Camilla was quite upset, and cried most of the evening, and got up next day with swollen eyelids and a very bad temper. She was not so sure of her power as she had been--and the loss of such a certainty is never pleasant.

He, meanwhile, advertised for a furnished house, and found one--by letter, which seemed to be the very thing he wanted. "Handsomely and conveniently furnished five miles from a railway station--a well-built house standing in its own grounds of five acres--garden, orchard pasture, magnificent view." Being as unversed in the ways of house agents as in those of women, he took it on trust, paid a quarter's rent, and went down to take possession. He had instructed the local house agent to find a woman who would come in for a few hours daily to "do for him."

"I'll have no silly women living in the house," said he.

It was on an inclement June evening that the station fly set him down in front of his new house. The drive had been long and dreary, and seemed to Maurice more like seventy miles than seven. Now he let down the carriage window and thrust his head into the rain to see his new house.

It was a stucco villa, with iron railings in the worst possible taste.

It had an air at once new and worn out; no one seemed ever to have lived in it, and yet everything about it was broken and shabby. The door stuck a little at first with the damp, and when at last it opened and Maurice went over his house, he found it furnished mainly with oil-cloth and three-legged tables, and photographs in Oxford frames--like a seaside lodging-house. The house was clean, however, and the woman in attendance was clean, but the atmosphere of the place was that of a vault. He looked out through the streaming panes at the magnificent view so dwelt upon in the house agents' letters. The house stood almost at the edge of a disused chalk quarry; far below stretched a flat plain, dotted here and there with limekilns and smoky, tall chimneys. The five acres looked very bare and thistly, and the rain was dripping heavily from a shivering, half-dead cypress on to a draggled, long-haired gra.s.s plot. Mr Brent shivered too, and ordered a fire.

When the woman had gone, he sat long by the fire in one of those cane and wood chairs that fold up--who wants a chair to fold up?--so common in lodging-houses. Unless you sit quite straight in these chairs you tumble out of them. He gazed at the fire, and thought, and dreamed. His dreams were, naturally, of Camilla; his thoughts were of his work.

"I've taken the house for three years," said he. "Well, one place is as good as another to be wretched in. But one room I must furnish--for you can't work on oil-cloth."

So next day he walked to Rochester and bought some old bureaux, and chairs, and book-cases, a few Persian rugs and some bra.s.s things, unpacked his books and settled down to the hermit's life to which he had vowed himself. The woman came every morning from her cottage a mile away, and left at noon. He got his meals himself--always chops, or steaks, or eggs--and presently began to grow accustomed to the place.

When the sun shone it was not so bad. He could make no way against the thorns and thistles on his five acres, and they quickly grew into a very wilderness. But a wilderness is pleasant to wander in; and a few flowers had survived long neglect, and here and there put out red, or white, or yellow buds. And he worked away at his book about Greek poetry.

He almost believed that he was contented; he had never cared for people so much as for books, and now he saw no people, and his books began to crowd his shelves. No one pa.s.sed by "The Yews"--so called, he imagined, in extravagant compliment to the decaying cypress--for it stood by a gra.s.s-grown by-way that had once connected two main roads, each a couple of miles distant. These were now joined by a better road down in the valley, and no one came past Maurice's window save the milk, the bread, the butcher, and the postman.

Summer turned brown and dry and became autumn, autumn turned wet and chilly and grew into winter, and all the winds of heaven blew cold and damp through the cracks of the ill-built house.

Maurice was glad when the spring came; he had taken the house for three years, and he was a careful man, and also, in his way, a determined. Yet it was good to look out once more on something green, and to see sunshine and a warm sky; it was near Easter now. In all these ten months nothing whatever had happened to him. He had never been beyond his five acres--and no one had been to see him. He had no relations, and friends soon forget; besides, after all, friends, unlike relations, cannot go where they are not invited.

It was on the Sat.u.r.day before Easter that the quarryside fell in.

Maurice was working in his study when he heard a sudden crack and a slow, splitting sound, and then a long, loud, rumbling noise, like thunder, that echoed and re-echoed from the hills on each side. And, looking from his window, he saw the cloud of white dust rise high above the edge of the old quarry, and seem to drift off to join the cotton-wool clouds in the blue sky.

"I suppose it's all safe enough here," he said, and went back to his ma.n.u.scripts. But he could not work. At last something had happened; he found himself shaken and excited. He laid down the pen. "I wonder if any one was hurt?" he said; "the road runs just below, of course. I wonder whether there'll be any more of it--I wonder?" A wire jerked, the cracked bell sounded harshly through the silence of the house. He sprang to his feet. "Who on earth----" he said. "The house isn't safe after all, perhaps, and they've come to tell me."

As he went along the worn oil-cloth of the hall he saw through the comfortless white-spotted gla.s.s of his front door the outline of a woman's hat.

He opened the door--it stuck as usual--but he got it open. There stood a girl holding a bicycle.

"Oh!" she said, without looking at him, "I'm so sorry to trouble you--my bicycle's run down--and I'm afraid it's a puncture, and could you let me have some water, to find the hole--and if I might sit down a minute."

Her voice grew lower and lower.

He opened the door wide and put out his hand for the bicycle. She took two steps past him, rather unsteadily, and sat down on the stairs--there were no chairs: the furniture of the hall was all oil-cloth and hat pegs.

He saw now that she was very pale; her face looked greenish behind her veil's white meshes.

He propped the machine against the door, as she leaned her head back against the ugly marbled paper of the staircase wall.

"I'm afraid you're ill," he said gently. But the girl made no answer.

Her head slipped along the varnished wall and rested on the stair two steps above where she sat. Her hat was crooked and twisted; even a student of Greek could see that she had fainted.

"Oh Lord!" said he.

He got her hat and veil off--he never knew how, and he wondered afterwards at his own cleverness, for there were many pins, long and short; he fetched the cushion from his armchair and put it under her head; he took off her gloves and rubbed her hands and her forehead with vinegar, but her complexion remained green, and she lay, all in a heap, at the foot of his staircase.

Then he remembered that fainting people should be laid flat and not allowed to lie about in heaps at the foot of stairs, so he very gently and gingerly picked the girl up in his arms and carried her into his sitting-room. Here he laid her on the ground--he had no sofa--and sat beside her on the floor, patiently fanning her with a copy of the _Athenaeum_, and watching the pinched, pallid face for some sign of returning life. It came at last, in a flutter of the eyelids, a long-drawn, gasping breath. The Greek scholar rushed for whisky--brandy he esteemed as a mere adjunct of channel boats--lifted her head and held the gla.s.s to her lips. The blood had come back to her face in a rush of carnation; she drank--choked--drank--he laid her head down and her eyes opened. They were large, clear grey eyes--very bewildered-looking just now--but they and the clear red tint in cheeks and lips transformed the face.

"Good gracious," said he, "she's pretty! Pretty? she's beautiful!"

She was. That such beauty should so easily have hidden itself behind a green-tinted mask, with sunken eyelid, seemed a miracle to the ingenuous bookworm.

"You're better now," said he with feverish ba.n.a.lity. "Give me your hands--so--now can--yes, that's right--here, this chair is the only comfortable one----"

She sank into the chair, and waved away the more whisky which he eagerly proffered. He stood looking at her with respectful solicitude.

After a few moments she stretched her arms like a sleepy child, yawned, and then suddenly broke into laughter. It had a strange sound. No one had laughed in that house since the wet night when Mr Brent took possession of it, and he had never been able to bring himself to believe that any one had ever laughed there before.

Then he remembered having heard that women have hysterical fits as well as fainting fits, and he said eagerly: "Oh don't! It's all right--you were faint--the heat or something----"

"Did I faint?" she asked with interest. "I never fainted before.

But--oh--yes--I remember. It was rather horrible. The quarry tumbled down almost on me, and I just stopped short--in time--and I came round by this road because the other's stopped up, and I was so glad when I saw the house. Thank you so much; it must have been an awful bother. I think I had better start soon----"

"No, you don't; you're not fit to ride alone yet," said he to himself.

Aloud he said: "You said something about a puncture--when you are better I'll mend it. And, look here--have you had any lunch?"

"No," said she.

"Then--if you'll allow me." He left the room, and presently returned with the tray set for his own lunch; then he fetched from the larder everything he could lay hands on: half a cold chicken, some cold meat pudding, a pot of jam, bottled beer. He set these confusedly on the table. "Now," he said, "come and try to eat."

"It's very good of you to bother," she said, a little surprise in her tone, for she had expected "lunch" to be a set formal meal at which some discreet female relative would preside. "But aren't you--don't you--do you live alone, then?"

"Yes, a woman comes in in the mornings. I'm sorry she's gone: she could have arranged a better lunch for you."

"Better? why, it's lovely!" said she, accepting the situation with frank amus.e.m.e.nt, and she gave a touch or two to the table to set everything in its place.

Then they lunched together. He would have served her standing, as one serves a queen--but she laughed again, and he took the place opposite her. During lunch they talked.

After lunch they mended the punctured tyre, and talked all the while; then it was past three o'clock.

"You won't go yet," he said then, daring greatly for what seemed to him a great stake. "Let me make you some tea--I can, I a.s.sure you--and let us see if the tyre holds up----"

"Oh, the tyre is all right, thanks to your cleverness----"

"Well, then," said he desperately, "take pity on a poor hermit! I give you my word, I have been here ten months and three days, and I have not in that time spoken a single word to any human being except my bedmaker."

"But if you want to talk to people why did you begin being a hermit?"

"I thought I didn't, then."