These Twain Part 78

She walked quickly, Edwin following. Simpson beheld their return with gentle surprise. In the private office Hilda shut the door. She then ran to the puzzled Edwin, and kissed him with the most startling vehemence, clasping her arms--in one hand she still held the m.u.f.f--round his neck. She loved him for being exactly as he was. She preferred his strange, uncouth method of granting a request, of yielding, of flattering her caprice, to any politer, more conventional methods of the metropolis. She thought that no other man could be as deeply romantic as Edwin. She despised herself for ever having been misled by the surface of him. And even the surface of him she saw now as it were, through the prism of pa.s.sionate affection, to be edged with the blending colours of the rainbow. And when they came again out of the office, after the sacred rite, and Edwin, as uplifted as she, glanced back nevertheless at the sheeted desk and the safe and the other objects in the room with the half-mechanical habitual solicitude of a man from whom the weight of responsibility is never lifted, she felt saddened because she could not enter utterly into his impenetrable soul, and live through all his emotions, and comprehend like a creator the always baffling wistfulness of his eyes. This sadness was joy; it was the aura of her tremendous satisfaction in his individuality and in her triumph and in the thought: "I alone stand between him and desolation."

II

"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare and the vehicle to a standstill in front of the "Live and Let Live" inn in the main street of the village of Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the high road from the Five Towns to Axe. And immediately the mare stopped she was enveloped in her own vapour.

"Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony. "And no bones broken!"

A man came out from the stable-yard.

The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that hundreds of English villages were giving that Christmas morning,--the illusion that its name was Arcadia, that finality had been reached, and that the forces of civilisation could go no further. More suave than a Dutch village, incomparably neater and cleaner and more delicately finished than a French village, it presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of long tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures nearly every aspect of which was beautiful. And if seven people of different ages and s.e.xes lived in a two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed by the weight of years, without drains and without water, and also without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to conclude that by some mysterious virtue their existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact ideal--especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was also Quarter Day--and that they would not on any account have it altered in the slightest degree. Who could believe that fathers of families drank away their children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad hostel--a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in the heart of every American traveller--"The Live and Let Live"? Who could have believed that the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas hymn inside the dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their fellow-Christians straggling under the lych into the church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the unknowable?

But after all the illusion of Arcadia was not entirely an illusion. In this calm, rime-decked, Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless trees enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort of relative finality had indeed been reached,--the end of an epoch that was awaiting dissolution.

Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of shutting up house for the day and eating the Christmas dinner with Tertius Ingpen. Although customarily regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits, its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity, its somewhat insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom, and its stomachic regrets, as an ordeal rather than a delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with reluctance and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred. But the situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and her teasing promise of a surprise, and the still continuing dearth of servants had been good arguments to persuade him.

And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and captious, thinking all the time of the deserted and cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook tingling and happy, and proud of Hilda,--proud of her verve, her persistency, and her success. She had carried him very far on the wave of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction. She had beguiled him into immediately spending mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a driving-ap.r.o.n, and a fancy whip. She had exhausted Unchpin, upset the routine of the lithographic business, and gravely overworked the mare, in her determination to learn to drive. She had had the equipage out at night for her lessons. On the other hand she had not in the least troubled herself about the purchase of a second horse for mercantile purposes, and a second horse had not yet been bought.

When she had announced that she would herself drive her husband and son over to Stockbrook, Edwin had absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin had been on her side; she had done the double journey with Unchpin, who judged her capable and the mare (eight years old) quite reliable, and who moreover wanted Christmas as much as possible to himself. And Hilda had triumphed. Walking the mare uphill--and also downhill--she had achieved Stockbrook in safety; and the conquering air with which she drew up at the "Live and Let Live" was delicious. The chit's happiness and pride radiated out from her. It seemed to Edwin that by the mere strength of violition she had actually created the dog-cart and its appointments, and the mare too! And he thought that he himself had not lived in vain if he could procure her such sensations as her glowing face then displayed. Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the little jars which good resolutions several weeks old had naturally not been powerful enough to prevent, were forgotten and forgiven. He would have given all his savings to please her caprice, and been glad. A horse and trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a trifling price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own tranquillity in his beloved house and business.

"Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.

Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the vehicle to the footpath, where George stood grinning. The stableman, in cla.s.sic att.i.tude, was at the mare's head.

Hilda jumped rather wildly. It was Edwin who countered the shock of her descent. The edge of her velvet hat knocked against his forehead, disarranging his cap. He could smell the velvet, as for an instant he held his wife--strangely acquiescent and yielding--in his arms, and there was something intimately feminine in the faint odour. All Hilda's happiness seemed to pa.s.s into him, and that felicity sufficed for him.

He did not desire any happiness personal to himself. He wanted only to live in her. His contentment was profound, complete, rapturous.

And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda would certainly have neglected the well-being of the mare, he could say to the stableman:

"Put the rug over her, will you?"

"h.e.l.lo! Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as he threw the coloured rug on the mare.

Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly round the bend of the road, waving and smiling. He had had a relapse, after a too early sortie, and was recovering from it.

"I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking hands. "Merry Christmas, all!"

"Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily.

"Out? Yes. I'm as fit as a fiddle. And I've been ordered mild exercise." He squared off gaily against George and hit the stout adolescent in the chest.

"What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired.

"Oh! We'll call for them afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Yes. Come along--before you catch a chill." She winked openly at Ingpen, who returned the wink. "Come along, dear. It's not far. We have to walk across the fields."

"Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin.

"Yes. And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied absently, remembering various references of Hilda's to a surprise. His heart misgave him. Ingpen and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and mischievous. He had a notion that living with a woman was comparable to living with a volcano--you never knew when a dangerous eruption might not occur.

Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe had occurred.

"Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin, uneasily.

They were all four slithering about in brown clay under a ragged hedge in which a few red berries glowed.

"It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday," said Hilda.

"Oh! So you were here the day before yesterday, were you? ... What's that house there?" Edwin turned to Ingpen.

"He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and then went off into his characteristic crescendo laugh.

The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house, squat and square, with yellow walls, black uncurtained windows, high slim chimney, and a blue slate roof, showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a clump of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen.

"Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen. "Seat of the Beechinors for about a hundred years."

"'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically.

"It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda brightly. "So we thought we'd have a look at it."

And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all along what the surprise was. It was astounding that a man could pa.s.s with such rapidity as Edwin from vivid joy to black and desolate gloom. She well knew that the idea of living in the country was extremely repugnant to him, and that nothing would ever induce him to consent to it. And yet she must needs lay this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise, and thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments earlier had been the embodiment of surrender in his arms! He said no word. He hummed a few notes and glanced airily to right and left with an effort after unconcern. The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the fact of Christmas, forbade him to speak freely. He could not suddenly stop and drive his stick into the earth and say savagely:

"Now listen to me! Once for all, I won't have this country house idea!

So let it be understood,--if you want a row, you know how to get it."

The appearance of amity--and the more high-spirited the better--must be kept up throughout the day. Nevertheless in his heart he challenged Hilda desperately. All her good qualities became insignificant, all his benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous. She was the impossible woman. He saw a tremendous vista of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy in warfare was known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple, of commonsense, and of social decency. He had made her a present of a horse and trap--solely to please her--and this was his reward! The more rope you gave these creatures, the more they wanted! But he would give no more rope. Compromise was at an end. The battle would be joined that night.... In his grim and resolute dejection there was something almost voluptuous. He continued to glance airily about, and at intervals to hum a few notes.

Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road, and opposite was the worn iron gate of Ladderedge Hall, with a house-agent's board on it. A short curved gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door of the house. In front were a lawn and a flower-garden, beyond a paddock, and behind a vegetable garden and a glimpse of stabling; a compact property! Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket. The plotters were all prepared; they took their victim for a simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!

In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without seeing, and heard as in a dream without listening. This was the hall, this the dining-room, this the drawing-room, this the morning-room.... White marble mantelpieces, pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging in strips, cobwebs, uneven floors, scaly ceilings, the invisible vapour of human memories! This was the kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the scullery still more enormous (with a pump-handle flanking the slopstone)! No water. No gas. And what was this room opening out of the kitchen? Oh!

That must be the servants' hall.... Servants' hall indeed! Imagine Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a servants' hall therein!

Sn.o.bbishness unthinkable! He would not be able to look his friends in the face.... On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room.

Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a splendid bath-room.... Ingpen, the ever expert, conceived a tank-room in the roof, and traced routes for plumbers' pipes. George, excited, and comprehending that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect, ran up to the attic floor to study on the spot the problem of the tank-room, and Ingpen followed. Edwin stared out of a window at the prospect of the Arcadian village lying a little below across the sloping fields.

"Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.

Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the welfare of the suffering f.e.c.kless bachelor, Tertius Ingpen. She had paid visit after visit in order to watch over his convalescence. Choosing to ignore his scorn for all her s.e.x, she had grown more friendly with him than even Edwin had ever been. Indeed by her sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem callous in comparison. And all the time she had merely been pursuing a private design--with what girlish deceitfulness.

In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen and George echoed from above down the second flight of stairs.

"No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on the landing.

Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:

"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."