"To put it plainly, Mary," said Mr. Brookes, wiping his tears away, and turning his back upon his Goodall, "I don't know what she hasn't done--everything. She is at the present moment the talk of Southwick.

The doctor here has seen her in the field at the back here with Meason at nine o'clock at night."

"Why did you allow her to leave the house at that hour? No young girl-- "

"She always takes her dogs out in the evening; I cannot prevent her doing that. It appears, too, that she has had Meason up in her bedroom."

"O James, you do not mean to say that my dear niece had a man in her bedroom!"

"Hester, dear, you have lived in a rectory and know nothing of the world. She says it isn't a bedroom. She pushes the bed away in the daytime, and covers it up to make it look like a couch. Besides, she keeps birds in her room, and Flossy had her puppies there. I am not excusing her conduct, pray do not think that, I am only telling you what she says."

"This is very serious. Are you quite sure? Perhaps she only meant to show the young man her birds or puppies. Her spirit must be broken, I can clearly see that."

"I allow them, as you know, one hundred pounds a year apiece. Maggie keeps none, but Sally always keeps accurate accounts of what she spends. I asked to see those accounts, for I had heard she had been giving her money to Meason, and she refused to let me see them. There is a sum of twenty pounds for which she can give no explanation. Then it is well known she gave a set of diamond studs to that fellow, and that he pledged them for five pounds in Brighton. He boasted he had done so, and said he intended to get plenty of money out of me before he had done with me. After that I ask you, how can I live in this place? When I go to the station in the morning I see these young fellows laughing at me over the tops of their newspapers. When I come home of an evening after a hard day's work, I find that my dinner--"

"Her spirit must be broken," said Aunt Mary, drawing her shawl about her, and crossing her hands. "Her spirit must be broken; she cannot be allowed to remain here to drive dear Maggie into a lunatic asylum. I am with you in that, James, but I cannot think you did well to let Frank Escott slip through your fingers. Had you not talked so much about money your daughter might have been Lady Mount Rorke."

"Talked too much about my money? Who would talk about it, I should like to know, if I didn't? I made it all myself. What do I care for that lot--a stuck-up lot, pooh, pooh! twist them all round my finger.

I am not going to give my daughter to a man who cannot make a settlement upon her."

Seeing he was not to be moved in anything that concerned his pocket, Aunt Mary returned to the consideration of what was to be done with Sally. "From what you tell me it is clear that Sally must not remain in Southwick a day longer than can be helped. I will take her with me to Woburn; and I think she had better go abroad as soon as we can hear of some one in whose charge we can place her. But it must not be a sea voyage--there is nothing more dangerous than to be on board a ship for a young girl who is at all inclined to be fast. All are thrown so much together. The cabins open out one into the other, and there is always a looking for something--a handkerchief, a bunch of keys, a lot of stooping and playing, twiddling of moustaches," said Aunt Mary, with a peal of laughter.

"Mary, dear, we should not speak lightly of wickedness."

"It was so that all the mischief was done when Emily Evans was sent out to the Cape--it was all done on board a ship. You remember the Evanses, James?--you ought to, you used to flirt pretty desperately with Lucy, the younger sister." And then Aunt Mary rattled off into interminable tales concerning the attachment contracted on board a ship in particular, its unfortunate consequences, how it brought about a divorce later on by sowing the seeds of pa.s.sion (Aunt Mary always p.r.o.nounced the word "pa.s.sion" in her narratives with strong emphasis), in the young girl's heart; and at various stages of her discourse she introduced fragments of the family history of the Evanses; she followed the wanderings of the different sisters from Homburg to Paris, from Paris to Scotland, from Scotland to the Punjab, explaining their different temperaments by heredity, which led her back into the obscure and remote times of grandfathers and grandmothers, and, having finally lost herself, she said: "What was I talking about? You have been listening to me, James, what was I talking about?"

Till the end of a week the discussion was continued. Aunt Mary tried hard to reconcile all parties to their different lots, and, as is usual in such cases, without attaining any result. And yet Aunt Mary went with her sister to see Frank in his studio. w.i.l.l.y accompanied them, and when they left he complained bitterly of how his time was wasted. "Regularly every evening, just as I am sitting down to work, I hear them coming along the pa.s.sage. First of all they go to get their grog--squeak, squeak, pop. I know it all so well. Then they come in with their tumblers, and they sit down on the sofa, and they begin.--I don't know what is to be done with dear Sally, unless we can send her abroad in the care of some relation. How is dear Maggie to-day? I hope I shall be able to induce her to put on her frock to-morrow, and come for a drive with me in the carriage. What a trouble young girls are in the house, to be sure. Then father begins to groan, and pulls out his handkerchief; he is quite alone, he has no one he can depend upon, then he laughs, 'Well, well, I suppose it will be all the same a hundred years hence.' So it goes on night after night. Here am I starting a big business, and I haven't a room to work in. Just as I am adding up a long column of figures, perhaps when I am within three of the top, Aunt Mary asks me a question, and it has to be gone over again. It is most provoking, there's no denying that it is most provoking." Frank agreed that nothing could be more provoking than to be interrupted when you were within three of the top of a long column of figures. On the following day he heard that the aunts had left, taking Sally with them. They had promised their brother to find a lady who would take dear Maggie under her care--one who would soon wean her from dressing-gowns and delusions, and restore her to staid remarks and stays; and hopes were entertained that the Manor House would not have to be sold after all.

But many days had not sped when an event occurred that precipitated the five acres into the jaws of the builders. Meason had sailed for Melbourne, and his sister, thinking that some of Sally's letters might be of use to Mr. Brookes, offered to surrender them upon the receipt of a cheque for one hundred pounds--a very modest sum, she urged, considering the character of the letters, most of which concerned artfully laid plans to meet in the train going or coming from London.

Mr. Brookes called on the shade of dear Julia, but he was not a man to be blackmailed--he had made all his money himself, and on that point was immovable. He prepared to leave Southwick. He looked fondly on his gla.s.s-houses, and despairingly on his Friths, Goodalls, and Bouguereaus, and he wondered if they would look as well in the new rooms as in the old, and what sum they would realise if he were to include them in the auction; for an auction was necessary. Mr. Brookes did not thus decide to abandon his acres without many a sob, nor is it certain that the final step would have been taken if the gentle builder had not gilded his insidious hand, and if certain rumours were not about that the villas in the Southdown Road were not letting, and that Southwick would never be anything but what it was, a dirty little village--half suburb, half village.

XVII

Frank was grieved and troubled at the sad accounts that came to him of Maggie's health; he was perplexed, too, for he knew himself to be the cause, and he longed to relieve and to cure her. It seemed to him that he would give his life to go to her, and comfort her with love, and yet he was impotent to make the least effort to attain the end he desired. He lay in the sad and cruel memory of Lizzie, his mind filled with ign.o.ble visions of her life with the waiter, or with delicate fancies of her beauty amid the summer of the Thames. He mused on her gracious figure and face, illuminated by reflections from the water, set off by the bulrushes and floating blossoms which she so eagerly coveted, and varied by the movements of the waist and shoulders, the round white arm, the trailing scarf, and all the wistful charm of the slumbering evening. He thought of the country light, the sound and smell of cows, of the sparrows in the vine, the cottage looking so cosy amid the foliage, the bit of garden full of old-fashioned flowers, tall lilies, convolvuluses, and marigolds, and the sitting- room full of things belonging to her--her flowers, her books, her music, and he thought of this until his life was sick with desire, and there grew a burning pain about his heart.

A man's struggles in the web of a vile love are as pitiful as those of a fly in the meshes of the spider; he crawls to the edge, but only to ensnare himself more completely; he takes pleasure in ridiculing her, but whether he praises or blames, she remains mistress of his life; all threads are equally fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to bind him faster. A man in love suggests the spider's web, and when he is seeking to escape from a woman that will degrade his life, the cruelty which is added completes and perfects the comparison. A man's love for a common woman is as a fire in his vitals; sometimes it seems quenched, sometimes it is torn out by angry hands, but always some spark remains; it contrives to unite about its victim, and in the end has its way. It is a cancerous disease, but it cannot be cut out like a cancer. It is more deadly; it is inexplicable. All good things, wealth and honour, are forfeited for it; long years of toil, trouble, privation of all kinds, are willingly accepted; on one side all the sweetness of the world, on the other nothing of worth, often vice, meanness, ill-temper, all that go to make life a madness and a terror; twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years lie a head of him and her, but the years and their burdens are not for his eyes any more than the flowers he elects to disdain. Love is blind, but sometimes there is no love. How then shall we explain this inexplicable mystery; wonderful riddle that none shall explain and that every generation propounds?

Frank lingered in Southwick, for he had promised w.i.l.l.y to stay with him when he went to live at the stables on the Portslade Road. Summer was nearly over, hunting would soon commence, and he could keep a couple of hunters--w.i.l.l.y had calculated it out--for two and twenty shillings a week. He had ceased to paint, and when he went to the studio it was to play the piano or the violin. None knew of Lizzie, and all knew of Maggie. It was thought a little strange that he would not forgive her, but the obscurity of the story of this point and the delight felt in her misfortune helped to intensify and idealise Frank in the popular mind, and when he played Gounod in the still evenings the young ladies would steal from the villas and wander sentimentally through the shadows about the green. He got up late in the morning, he lingered over breakfast, and until it was time to go to Brighton he lay on the sofa watching the cricketers and the children playing, shaping resolutions, and striving with himself and deceiving himself.

A dozen times, a hundred times, he had concluded he must see Maggie; he had decided he would write to Lord Mount Rorke, that he would go to Mr. Brookes and settle the matter off-hand. But, somehow, he did nothing. His mind was absorbed in a novel, which he narrated when w.i.l.l.y came to see him. It concerned the accident that led a man not to marry the woman he loved, and was in the main an incoherent version of his own life at Southwick.

"I don't think I told you," said w.i.l.l.y, "that they are removing the furniture to-day."

"You don't say so--to-day? And where is your father?"

"He is in London, at the 'Metropole.'"

The young men walked on slowly in silence, and when they came to the lodge gate, standing wide open, and saw the curtainless windows and the flowerless greenhouses, w.i.l.l.y said: "It is very sad to see all the things you have known since you were a child sold by auction."

"Oh, yes, it is. Look at the swards. Do they not look sad already?

Those beautiful elms, under whose shade we have sat, will be cut down, and stucco work and gla.s.s porticoes take their places. Oh, it is very sad."

"My father never had any feeling, he never cared for the place. Had I been in his place I should have invested my money in land and gone in for the county families."

"How old was I when I came down to see you for the first time-- fourteen, I think? How well I remember everything. It was there, look, through that glade, that I saw your sisters coming to meet me, they were then only ten or eleven years old. I can see them in my mind's eye, quite distinctly, walking towards me, Grace leading the way, and now she is a mother; and they were all so dark. I remember thinking I had never seen girls so dark, they were like foreigners. And do you remember how your father scolded Sally for carrying me round the garden on her back, and she used to wake me up in the mornings by rolling croquet b.a.l.l.s along the floor into my room. Oh, what good, dear days those were, and to think they are dead and gone, and that the house is going to be pulled down; and the garden--oh! the moonlights in that garden, where I walked with the girls, with scarves round their shoulders, through the dreamy light and shade. We have sung songs, and talked of all manner of things. You don't feel as I feel."

"Yes I do, my dear fellow, I think I feel a great deal more, only I don't talk so much about it."

"I know it is infinitely sad. This dear old wall! There is Maggie's window: how often have I looked up to that window for her winsome face, and I shall never look again."

"You are as bad as my father. Cheer up; I suppose it will be all the same a hundred years hence."

"No, no, it won't be the same. Why should all I feel and love be forgotten. I suppose it will be all the same. There goes Berkins. I hate that man."

"So do I."

"If time takes away pleasant things it takes unpleasant things too, and those who live a hundred years hence will not be troubled with that fool. True, there will be other Berkinses, and there will be other gardens, and other girls, but that doesn't make it the least less sad to see this garden pa.s.s into bricks and mortar."

Two footmen approached Mr. Berkins, and with all solemnity helped him to take off his overcoat. He said a few words to w.i.l.l.y, and was soon loudly ordering the workmen who were taking the Goodalls and the Friths from the walls.

"Take care, there! Hi, you! get on the ladder and take hold of this end of the picture. There, that's better! That's the way to do it!"

"That's what he said when he shot my bird," w.i.l.l.y whispered; and they tried to laugh as they went upstairs. But their footsteps sounded hollow, and the wardrobes, where they had so often put their clothes, stood wide open, desolately empty. They looked out of the windows, and heard the voices of the work-people.

"How very sad it is," said Frank; then, after a long silence: "How beautiful a scene like this would be in a book--a young girl leaving her home, straying through the different rooms musing on the different pieces of furniture, all of which recall the past. I think I shall write it. I wish you would tell me what you feel; I mean, I wish you would tell me what impresses itself most on your mind, and, as it were, epitomises the whole. You have known all this since you were a child. You have played in these pa.s.sages; some spot, some piece of furniture, your toys--I suppose they are gone long ago; but something must stand out and a.s.sert itself amid conflicting thoughts. Do tell me."

w.i.l.l.y stroked his moustache. "Of course it is very sad, but it is difficult to put one's feelings into words. I should have to think about it; I don't think I could say off-hand."

At that moment there came a great crash.

"What the devil is that?" cried Frank.

"I hope they haven't broken the statue of Flora," said w.i.l.l.y, and a look of alarm overspread his face. Frank felt that if such were the case he should feel no great sorrow. They ran down the echoing stairs.

The workmen had got drunk in the cellars and in removing the statue they had let it fall, and it strewed the floor--an arm here, a fragment of drapery there.

"I knew what would happen. I told Mr. Brookes so. All my statues are in marble."

"Come away, I can't listen to that cad. I wouldn't have had Flora broken for a hundred pounds. When I was a child I used to stand and look at her. I never could make out how she was made, and I always wanted to look inside. If you'd like to know what I feel most sorry for, it is Flora. She has stood amid the flowers in the bow window as long as I can remember."

They followed the high road by Windmill Inn, where they struck across the Downs, and when they reached the first crest they could see the paddocks and enclosures situated along the road in the valley, and the private house so trim and middle-cla.s.s. "Splendid paddocks and first- rate stabling. The house is not much. When I am making fifteen per cent. on my money I shall go in for a little architecture. If I had a gla.s.s I could show you Blue Mantle's stable. Do you see two horses in the paddock, right away on the left, in the far corner--Apple Blossom and Astarte? Apple Blossom is by See-saw out of Melody, by Stockwell out of Fairy Queen. Is that good enough for you? Astarte is by Blue Gown out of Merry Maid, by Beadsman out of Aurora. What do you say to that?"

"I see you have been looking up the Stud Book."

"Business, sir, business. And if I were to go in for owning a racer or two, just look and see what a magnificent training ground; miles upon miles of downland. Did you ever see a handsomer view? You must paint me some landscapes for my dining-room."