The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax Part 19

"Yes. My home is with my aunt. I shall be glad, very glad, to give you any help or direction that you like to ask for. Mrs. Stokes has a charming taste in dress, and is a dear little woman. You could not have a nicer friend; and she is well married, which is always an advantage in a girl's friend. You will like Colonel Stokes too."

In the course of the afternoon Bessie had the opportunity of judging for herself. Colonel Stokes brought his wife to call upon her. Their residence was close by Abbotsmead, at the Abbey Lodge, restored by Mr.

Fairfax for their occupation. Colonel Stokes was old enough to be his wife's father, and young enough to be her hero and companion. She was a plump little lady, full of spirits and loving-kindness. Bessie considered her, and decided that she was of her own age, but Mrs. Stokes had two boys at home to contradict that. She looked so girlish still in her sage matronhood because she was happy, gay, contented with her life, because her eyes were blue and limpid as deep lake water, and her cheeks round and fresh as half-blown roses ungathered. Her dress was as dainty as herself, and merited the eulogium that Miss Burleigh had pa.s.sed upon it.

"You are going to be so kind as to introduce me to a good milliner at Norminster?" Bessie said after a few polite preliminaries.

"Yes--to Miss Jocund, who will be delighted to make your acquaintance. I shall tell her to take pains with you, but there will be no need to tell her that; she always does take pains with girls who promise to do her credit. I am afraid there is not time to send to Paris for the blue bonnet you must wear next Thursday, but she will make you something nice; you may trust her. This wonderful election is the event of the day. We have resolved that Mr. Cecil Burleigh shall head the poll."

"How shall you ensure his triumph? Are you going to canva.s.s for him?"

"No, no, that is out of date. But Lady Angleby threatens that she will leave Brentwood, and never employ a Norminster tradesman again if they are so ungrateful as to refuse their support to her nephew. They are radicals every one."

"And is not she also a radical? She talks of the emanc.i.p.ation of women by keeping them at school till one-and-twenty, of the elevation of the ma.s.ses, and the mutual improvement of everybody not in the peerage."

"You are making game of her, like my Arthur. No, she is not a radical; that is all her _hum_. I believe Lord Angleby was something of the sort, but I don't understand much about politics."

"Only for the present occasion we are blue?" said Bessie airily.

"Yes--all blue," echoed Mrs. Stokes. "Sky-blue," and they both laughed.

"You must agree at what hour you will go into Norminster on Monday--the half-past-eleven train is the best," Colonel Stokes said.

"Cannot we go to-morrow?" his wife asked.

"No, it is Sat.u.r.day, market-day;" and his suggestion was adopted.

When the visit was over, in the pleasantness of the late afternoon, Bessie walked through the gardens and across the park with these neighbors to Abbotsmead. A belt of shrubbery and a sunk fence divided the grounds of the lodge from the park, and there was easy communication by a rustic bridge and a wicket left on the latch. "I hope you will come often to and fro, and that you will seek me whenever you want me. This is the shortest way," Mrs. Stokes said to her. Bessie thanked her, and then walked back to the house, taking her time, and thinking what a long while ago it was since yesterday.

Yesterday! Only yesterday she was on board the Foam that had brought her from France, that had pa.s.sed by the Forest--no longer ago than yesterday, yet as far off already as a year ago.

Thinking of it, she fell into a melancholy that belonged to her character. She was tired with the incidents of the day. At dinner Mr.

Fairfax seemed to miss something that had charmed him the night before.

She answered when he spoke, but her gayety was under eclipse. They were both relieved when the evening came to an end. Bessie was glad to escape to solitude, and her grandfather experienced a sense of vague disappointment, but he supposed he must have patience. Even Jonquil observed the difference, and was sorry that this bright young lady who had come into the house should enter so soon into its clouds; he was grieved too that his dear old master, who betrayed an unwonted humility in his desire to please her, should not at once find his reward in her affection. Bessie was not conscious that it would have been any boon to him. She had no rule yet to measure the present by except the past, and her experience of his usage in the past did not invite her tenderness. A reasonable and mild behavior was all she supposed to be required of her.

Anything else--whether for better or worse--would be spontaneous. She could not affect either love or dislike, and how far she could dissemble either she had yet to learn.

CHAPTER XX.

_PAST AND PRESENT._

The next morning Bessie was left entirely at liberty to amuse herself.

Mr. Fairfax had breakfasted alone, and was gone to Norminster before she came down stairs. Jonquil made the communication. Bessie wondered whether it was often so, and whether she would have to make out the greater part of the days for herself. But she said nothing; some feeling that she did not reason about told her that there must be no complaining here, let the days be what they might. She wrote a long letter to Madame Fournier, and then went out of doors, having declined Mrs. Betts's proposed attendance.

"Where is the village?" she asked a boy who was sweeping up fallen leaves from the still dewy lawn. He pointed her the way to go. "And the church and parsonage?" she added.

"They be all together, miss, a piece beyond the lodge."

With an object in view Bessie could feel interested. She was going to see her mother's home, the house where she was herself born; and on the road she began to question whether she had any kinsfolk on her mother's side. Mrs. Carnegie had once told her that she believed not--unless there were descendants of her grandfather Bulmer's only brother in America, whither he had emigrated as a young man; but she had never heard of any. A cousin of some sort would have been most acceptable to Bessie in her dignified isolation. She did not naturally love solitude.

The way across the park by which she had been directed brought her out upon the high-road--a very pleasant road at that spot, with a fir wood climbing a shallow hill opposite, bounded by a low stone fence, all crusted with moss and lichen, age and weather.

For nearly half a mile along the roadside lay an irregular open s.p.a.ce of broken ground with fine scattered trees upon it, and close turf where primroses were profuse in spring. An old woman was sitting in the shade knitting and tending a little black cow that cropped the sweet moist gra.s.s. Only for the sake of speaking Bessie asked again her way to the village.

"Keep straight on, miss, you can't miss it," said the old woman, and gazed up at her inquisitively.

So Bessie kept straight on until she came to the ivy-covered walls of the lodge; the porch opened upon the road, and Colonel Stokes was standing outside in conversation with another gentleman, who was the vicar of Kirkham, Mr. Forbes. Bessie went on when she had pa.s.sed them, shyly disconcerted, for Colonel Stokes had come forward with an air of surprise and had asked her if she was lost. Perhaps it was unusual for young ladies to walk alone here? She did not know.

The gentlemen watched her out of sight. "Miss Fairfax, of course," said the vicar. "She walks admirably--I like to see that."

"A handsome girl," said Colonel Stokes. And then they reverted to their interrupted discussion, the approaching election at Norminster. The clergyman was very keen about it, the old Indian officer was almost indifferent.

Meanwhile Bessie reached the church--a very ancient church, s.p.a.cious and simple, with a square tower and a porch that was called Norman. The graveyard surrounded it. A flagged pathway led from the gate between the gra.s.sy mounds to the door, which stood open that the Sat.u.r.day sun might drive out the damp vapors of the week. She went in and saw whitewashed walls; thick round pillars between the nave and aisles; deep-sunken windows dim with fragmentary pieces of colored gla.s.s, and all more or less out of the perpendicular; a worm-eaten oak-screen separating the chancel and a solemn enclosure, erst a chapel, now the Fairfax pew; a loft where the choir sat in front for divine service, with fiddle and ba.s.soon, and the school-children sat behind, all under the eye of the parson and his clerk, who was also the school-master.

In the chancel were several monuments to the memory of defunct pastors.

The oldest was very old, and the inscription in Latin on bra.s.s; the newest was to Bessie's grandfather--the "Reverend Thomas Bulmer, for forty-six years vicar of this parish." From the dates he had married late, for he had died in a good old age in the same year as his daughter Elizabeth, and only two months before her. In smaller letters below the inscription-in-chief it was recorded that his wife Let.i.tia was buried at Torquay in Cornwall, and that this monument was erected to their pious memory by their only child--"Elizabeth, the wife of the Reverend Geoffry Fairfax, rector of Beechhurst in the county of Hants."

All gone--not one left! Bessie pondered over this epitome of family history, and thought within herself that it was not without cause she felt alone here. With a shiver she returned into the sunshine and proceeded up the public road. The vicarage was a little low house, very humble in its externals, roofed with fluted tiles, and the walls covered to the height of the chamber windows with green latticework and creepers. It stood in a s.p.a.cious garden and orchard, and had outbuildings at a little distance on the same homely plan. The living was in the gift of Abbotsmead, and the Fairfaxes had not been moved to house their pastor, with his three hundred a year, in a residence fit for a bishop. It was a simple, pleasant, rustic spot. The lower windows were open, so was the door under the porch. Bessie saw that it could not have undergone any material change since the summer days of twenty years ago, when her father, a bright young fellow fresh from college, went to read there of a morning with the learned vicar, and fell in love with his pretty Elizabeth, and wooed and won her.

Bessie, imperfectly informed, exaggerated the resentment with which Mr.

Fairfax had visited his offending son. It was never an active resentment, but merely a contemptuous acceptance of his irrevocable act.

He said, "Geoffry has married to his taste. His wife is used to a plain way of living; they will be more useful in a country parish living on so, free from the temptations of superfluous means." And he gave the young couple a bare pittance. Time might have brought him relenting, but time does not always reserve us opportunities. And here was Bessie Fairfax considering the sorrows and early deaths of her parents, charging them to her grandfather's account, and confirming herself in her original judgment that he was a hard and cruel man.

The village of Kirkham was a sinuous wide street of homesteads and cottages within gardens, and having a green open border to the road where geese and pigs, cows and children, pastured indiscriminately. It was the old order of things where one man was master. The gardens had, for the most part, a fine show of fragrant flowers, the hedges were neatly trimmed, the fruit trees were ripening abundantly. Of children, fat and ruddy, clean and well clothed, there were many playing about, for their mothers were gone to Norminster market, and there was no school on Sat.u.r.day. Bessie spoke to n.o.body, and n.o.body spoke to her.

Some of the children dropt her a curtsey, but the majority only stared at her as a stranger. She felt, somehow, as if she would never be anything else but a stranger here. When she had pa.s.sed through the village to the end of it, where the "Chequers," the forge, and the wheelwright's shed stood, she came to a wide common. Looking across it, she saw the river, and found her way home by the mill and the harvest-fields.

It would have enhanced Bessie's pleasure, though not her happiness perhaps, if she could have betaken herself to building castles in the Woldshire air, but the moment she began to indulge in reverie her thoughts flew to the Forest. No glamour of pride, enthusiasm, or any sort of delightful hope mistified her imagination as to her real indifference towards Abbotsmead. When she reached the garden she sat down amongst the roses, and gazed at the beautiful old flower-woven walls that she had admired yesterday, and felt like a visitor growing weary of the place. Even while her bodily eyes were upon it, her mind's eye was filled with a vision of the green slopes of the wilderness garden at Brook, and the beeches laving their shadows in the sweet running water.

"I believe I am homesick," she said. "I cannot care for this place. I should have had a better chance of taking to it kindly if my grandfather had let me go home for a little while. Everything is an effort here."

And it is to be feared that she gave way again, and fretted in a manner that Madame Fournier would have grieved to see. But there was no help for it; her heart was sore, and tears relieved it.

Mr. Fairfax was at home to dinner. He returned from Norminster jaded and out of spirits. Now, Bessie, though she did not love him (though she felt it a duty to a.s.sert and rea.s.sert that fact to herself, lest she should forget it), felt oddly pained when she looked into his face and saw that he was dull; to be dull signified to be unhappy in Bessie's vocabulary. But timidity tied her tongue. It was not until Jonquil had left them to themselves that they attempted any conversation. Then Mr.

Fairfax remarked, "You have been making a tour of investigation, Elizabeth: you have been into the village?"

Bessie said that she had, and that she had gone into the church. Then all at once an impulse came upon her to ask, "Why did you let my parents go so far away? was it so very wrong in them to marry?"

"No, not wrong at all. It is written, 'A man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife,'" was the baffling reply she got, and it silenced her. And not for that occasion only.

When Bessie retired into the octagon parlor her grandfather stayed behind. He had been to see Mr. John Short that day, and had heard that a new aspect had come over the electioneering sky. The Radicals had received an impetus from some quarter unknown, and were preparing to make such a hard fight for the representation of Norminster that the triumph of the Tory party was seriously threatened. This news had vexed him, but it was not of that he meditated chiefly when he was left alone.

It was of Bessie. He had founded certain pleasurable expectations upon her, and he felt that these expectations were losing their bloom. He could not fail to recollect her quietness of last night, when he noticed the languor of her eyes, the dejection of her mouth, and the effort it was to her to speak. The question concerning her parents had aroused the slumbering ache of old remembrance, and had stung him anew with a sense of her condemnation. A feeling akin to remorse visited him as he sat considering, and by degrees realizing, what he had done to her, and was doing; but he had his motive, he had his object in it, and the motive had seemed to justify the means until he came to see her face to face.

Contact with her warm, distinct humanity began immediately to work a change in his mind. Absent, he had decided that he could dispose of her as he would. Present, he recognized that she would have a voice, and probably a casting voice, in the disposal of herself. He might sever her from her friends in the Forest, but he would not thereby attach her to friends and kinsfolk in the north. His last wanton act of selfish unkindness, in refusing to let her see her old home in pa.s.sing, was evidently producing its effect in silent grieving, in resentment and revolt.

All his life long Mr. Fairfax had coveted affection, and had missed the way to win it. No one had ever really loved him except his sister Dorothy--so he believed; and Elizabeth was so like Dorothy in the face, in her air, her voice, her gestures, that his heart went out to her with a yearning that was almost pain. But when he looked at her, she looked at him again like Dorothy alienated--like Dorothy grown strange. It was a very curious revival out of the far past. When he was a young man and Lady Latimer was a girl, there had been a prospect of a double marriage between their families, but the day that destroyed one hope destroyed both, and Dorothy Fairfax died of that grief. Elizabeth, with her tear-worn eyes, was Dorothy's sad self to-night, only the eyes did not seek his friendly. They were gazing at pictures in the fire when he rejoined her, and though Bessie moved and raised her head in courteous recognition of his coming, there was something of avoidance in her manner, as if she shrank from his inspection. Perhaps she did; she had no desire to parade her distresses or to reproach him with them. She meant to be good--only give her time. But she must have time.

There was a book of photographs on the table that Frederick Fairfax and his wife had collected during their wedding-tour on the Continent. It was during the early days of the art, and the pictures were as blurred and faded as their lives had since become. Bessie was turning them over with languid interest, when her grandfather, perceiving how she was employed, said he could show her some foreign views that would please her better than those dim photographs. He unlocked a drawer in the writing-table and produced half a dozen little sketch-books, his own and his sister Dorothy's during their frequent travels together. It seemed that their practice had been to make an annual tour.