Secret Bread Part 10

The Parson waited a second and then, with a tiny pang of disappointment, went on:

"It is to be all right; everything is to be as it was before. I know you feel that is impossible, but it will hurt less and less with time, believe me. Character is what counts in the long run, Ishmael. And I have seen--I can't tell you how proudly--that you have character, that it has made its mark here. That shows in the way this affair has been taken. So pull yourself together; tell yourself how little it all really matters, and you'll find it is so."

A wave of affection for his friend went over Ishmael as he listened to the words that really fitted his case so little and were so kindly spoken. He felt in a flat muddle, unaware whether he wished he did feel all he was expected to or glad he did not; but one good thing the Parson's words accomplished. They purged him of the artificial standpoint of the afternoon. It was impossible for one as naturally direct as Ishmael to be in contact with so much of singleness of purpose as the Parson's and not be ashamed of his own impulses towards theatrical vision. He turned his head away to hide his emotion, which the Parson took to spring from the news he had imparted and welcomed with relief. He took the boy's hand and pressed it, a thing rare for him, who was so sensitive of others' wishes he generally left physical expression to them in the first place.

"Shall we be getting back?" he said, after a moment.

As they were walking over the moor a gleam of sun shone out, wavered, then strengthened, and before a soft breeze the mist began to vanish, only clinging here and there in the pockets of the moor like fine white wool rubbed off the backs of phantom sheep. For a while they strode in silence; then the Parson said:

"By the way, you know old Mr. Eliot's daughter, don't you? Tring told me she went to the dancing cla.s.ses."

"Yes.... Why?" Ishmael asked in sudden alarm.

If it had all come out--to have a girl mixed up in this story of his--the ignominy of it! The next moment with his relief mingled a contrition for his selfish impulse when Boase replied: "She's not well, apparently. Her father made Carron have a look at her; he's no faith in Harvey. Seems she's been doing too much for her strength--walking too far. She appears to think nothing of ten to fifteen miles."

"There's nothing wrong, really wrong, is there?"

"Oh, no, only they think change of air will be good for her and more rest. She's to go on a long visit to some relations in France. I don't know what she'll think of the change, a girl like that. She's a splendid creature."

"Have you met her?" asked Ishmael in surprise.

"Why, yes. Her father seemed to think she was a little hysterical and asked me to see if she would talk to me...."

"More talking ..." thought Ishmael.

"I don't think her at all hysterical. It seemed to me more physical. In fact, I suggested Mr. Carron. But I think there's nothing like a thorough change. Her father'll miss her, I fear, though."

Ishmael had a sly chuckle as he thought of others who would do likewise, and, catching a twinkle in the Parson's eye, it occurred to him for the first time that day that perhaps all the subtlety of the race was not confined to those of the age of himself and Killigrew. He grew a little hot; then the Parson began to speak on another theme, and he thought no more of Hilaria. He was to think of her less and less as the months during which she never came back to St. Renny went by, and he did not guess how he was to hear of her again.

"About your confirmation," the Parson was saying. "This affair will make no difference. There is no real reason why it should be put off. Dr.

Tring quite agrees with me. You are in the same mind about it, eh?"

Ishmael, who was feeling more and more as though the past week had been a grisly burden that was slipping off him like a bad dream, acquiesced in a rush of eager thankfulness. The complications of life were beginning to unfold in front of him, and both by training and heredity he turned to the things that bore relation elsewhere but in this life for a solution.

"I want to be decent ..." was all he said gruffly, but with a something so youthful in manner and sentiment that Boase had a yearning over him as in the days when he had been a little boy.

"Let me say one thing to you, Ishmael. I have said it before, but when you were less able to understand. You will meet people--men--who will tell you no man can keep altogether a rigid straightness in matters that, as you know, I hold important. You will meet women who will condone this view and tell you that they do not expect it, that men are 'different,' and that they would not even have it otherwise. Do not believe them. It may be true of some men, though, if they were brought up with other ideals, it would not be true of nearly as many as it is now. But it will not, I think, be true of you, which is all you are concerned with. Your very position should make you more scrupulous than most men. You have had a shock, I know, but has it yet occurred to you to think over the effect your father's conduct has had on those other lives--your brothers' and your sister's?"

"No," confessed Ishmael.

"Try. You are not fond of Archelaus, I know, and there is no reason why you should be. But try and see his point of view. He has the attachment to Cloom that you have--not the same kind; he would never have felt it a trust or something to be made better for its own sake, but he does feel he has a right to it, and that is a hard thing to bear. Ishmael, all this misery, the reason why your brothers have not been brought up as you have, with the same advantages, which now they can never gain all their lives long, the reason why Va.s.sie, who is clever and pretty, will have a difficulty in getting a husband worthy of her, is because your father lived according to the law of the flesh instead of the spirit.

Never place any child of yours in that position."

"I never will, I promise. But, I say, you know, Da Boase"--the childhood name slipped out unawares--"I don't think I care about that sort of thing--girls and all that. Not like Killigrew."

The Parson hid a smile. "You will not ripen as early as Killigrew, in all probability," he said, "but one does not have a temper such as yours without other pa.s.sions. There is another thing. Men of the world--Killigrew, when he is a little older--will tell you that it is possible and right to gratify those pa.s.sions at less cost than the embroilment your father made about him. Casual intercourse where no such question arises.... Do not listen to that either. If it is possible for you to be one of those who carry an undimmed banner, do. People often talk as though purity were negative, whereas it is very actual. Keep it as a beautiful thing that once lost is gone for ever at whatever gain of experience or even understanding."

"I really don't want that sort of thing," persisted Ishmael a little outraged he should not be thought to know best.

"However that may be," said the Parson, rather sharply, "different by nature or grace, you should never let your difference make you feel superior. A person who despises or fails to sympathise with all the sorrow and the sin in the lives of others is the worst of sinners. There are even times when chast.i.ty can be very chill and bare, though purity is always lovely."

"But you were saying----" began Ishmael, then stopped. "I think I do know what you mean," he said more humbly. The Parson made no reply, but, stopping in his walk, looked over a low wall of loose granite and laid his arms along it. "Come and look here a minute," he said.

The sun had died away, but the mist had not returned, and a still greyness held the world in the low-lying part of the moor which they had reached.

Fields lay on one side and stretched in a parti-coloured patterning over the slope before them as they leant upon the wall. The breeze, too, seemed not to stir there, as though the pearly greyness that seemed to tinge the very air were a blight that lay on sound and motion as well as sight. No breath stirred strong enough to lift the petals of the gorse-blossoms by the wall, or rustle the wayside plants. The only movement came from a field of long gra.s.s on the slope--one of the pattern of fields, newly-ploughed, short-turfed, or misted with green from the three-weeks-old corn springing a few inches high, a pattern that lay like a coverlet drawn over the rounded flank of the hill. And over that one field movement was busy--the rank gra.s.s was exactly the length, density, texture, to respond to what imperceptible breath there was, and that gra.s.s only. Over and over it pa.s.sed the silvery waves made by the bending of the blades, over and over, always rippling up the slope till it looked as though a film of smoke were perpetually being blown from below to vanish over the crest. Ripple after ripple, ripple after ripple, shivered up the slope and was gone--the field shuddered and breathed with it; there was something uncanny about this silent unceasing movement in the dead landscape--this visible effect of an invisible thing.

"We're most of us too full of effort," said the Parson abruptly; "we think too much of trying to be good, of whether what we are going to do is right or wrong. Whereas if we only got our minds into the right att.i.tude the rest would follow naturally and be worth all the striving.

If we could only be more flower-like--let ourselves grow and blossom.

Look at that field, the only thing moving; d'you see it? Well, it's rippling like that all by itself because it's the only thing able to answer to the little breath that's abroad. If you get yourself sound and right and don't worry about yourself, then you respond to the breath of the Spirit, like that gra.s.s. For the wind bloweth where it listeth...."

He fell into a silence, and Ishmael, stirred out of the crust of depression which had held him so many days, felt all his heart and high hopes, his eagerness for life and its possibilities, stirring within him again. He drew a deep breath and stretched widely, sloughing off mental sloth in the physical act as young things can. He felt more alive because more conscious of himself and his surroundings than ever before, eager and ready to take up the remainder of his time at St. Renny. He stirred a little by the Parson's side.

Boase brought his thought to an ending with the rest of the quotation: "So is everyone that is born of the Spirit...."

BOOK II

GROWTH

CHAPTER I

A FAMILY ALb.u.m

Va.s.silissa Beggoe stooped to take a final look at herself in the small mirror, for she was so tall that, in her flowery bonnet that swooped upwards from her piled chignon, she nearly touched the sloping roof of her bedroom. She stooped and gave a glow--half smile, half a quickening of light, over her whole face--at what she saw in the cloudy gla.s.s, which could not materially dim her white and gold splendour. A slight thickness of modelling here and there, notably in the short nose and too-rounded chin, blurred the fineness of her beauty and might make for hardness later on, but now, at twenty-one, Va.s.sie's wonderful skin and her splendid a.s.surance were too dazzling for criticism to look at her and live. She gave a pat, more approbation than correction, to a rose on the bonnet, smoothed the lapels of her Alexandra jacket--so-called after the newly-made Princess of Wales--and pulled up her gloves under its pegtop sleeves. Then she turned with a swoop and a swish of her wide blue taffeta skirts.

"There!" she exclaimed in the studiously clear notes she had not been able to free from a slight metallic quality; "that's not so bad a sight to go and meet a little brother, I believe?"

The younger, softer, slighter bit of femininity on the bed gave a gentle little sound that meant admiration, and clasped a pair of dimpled, not very clean, little hands together.

"You're beautiful, Va.s.sie, just beautiful. And just like a lady...."

"I am a lady," said Va.s.sie sharply. "How am I not a lady, I should like to know? Haven't I been four years in a boarding-school, and don't I go and stay with a clergyman's family in Plymouth? A lady.... When I was at Plymouth last month for the Prince's wedding celebrations one of the officers of a battleship asked who I was!"

"I know, you've told me. Va.s.sie--"

"Well?"

"Nothing. Only I sometimes wonder why you've never got wed up there to Plymouth. One of those officers, or perhaps a clergyman...?"

Va.s.sie rather wondered herself, but all she said was: "I'm not going to give up my freedom for the first man who lifts his little finger, I can tell you. I haven't such a great opinion of the menfolk. Conceited creatures, the most of them. I mean to pick and choose. And I mean Ishmael to help me."

"Oh, Va.s.sie, how?" came from the wide-eyed listener on the bed.