Henriette had secured Mrs. Fullerton
for an ally, from the beginning. When Hadria’s
parents visited the Red House, Miss Temperley was asked
to meet them, by special request. Henriette employed
tact on a grand scale, and achieved results in proportion.
She was sorry that dear Hadria did not more quickly
recover her strength. Her health was not what
it ought to be. Mrs. Fullerton sighed. She
was ready to play into Miss Temperley’s hands
on every occasion.
The latter had less success in her
dealings with Miss Du Prel. She tried to discover
Hadria’s more intimate feelings by talking her
over with Valeria, ignoring the snubs that were copiously
administered by that indignant lady. Valeria
spoke with sublime scorn of this attempt.
“To try and pump information
out of a friend! Why not listen at the key-hole,
and be done with it!”
Henriette’s neat hair would
have stood on end, had she heard Miss Du Prel fit
adjectives to her conduct.
“I have learnt not to expect
a nice sense of honour from superior persons with
unimpeachable sentiments,” said Hadria.
“You are certainly a good hater!”
cried Valeria, with a laugh.
“Oh, I don’t hate Henriette;
I only hate unimpeachable sentiments.”
The sentiments that Henriette represented
had become, to Hadria, as the walls of a prison from
which she could see no means of escape.
She had found that life took no heed
either of her ambitions or of her revolts. “And
so I growl,” she said. She might hate and
chafe in secret to her heart’s content; external
conformity was the one thing needful.
“Hadria will be so different
when she has children,” everyone had said.
And so she was; but the difference was alarmingly in
the wrong direction. Throughout history, she
reflected, children had been the unfailing means of
bringing women into line with tradition. Who could
stand against them? They had been able to force
the most rebellious to their knees. An appeal
to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest
spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been
so trumpeted and exalted! Women might harbour
dreams and plan insurrections; but their children little
ambassadors of the established and expected were
argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics.
Their helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt
than regiments of armed soldiers.
Such were the thoughts that wandered
through Hadria’s mind as she bent her steps
towards the cottage near Craddock Church, where, according
to the gravedigger’s account, the baby of the
unhappy schoolmistress was being looked after by Mrs.
Gullick.
It would have puzzled the keenest
observer to detect the unorthodox nature of Mrs. Temperley’s
reflections, as she leant over the child, and made
enquiries as to its health and temperament.
Mrs. Gullick seemed more disposed
to indulge in remarks on its mother’s conduct
than to give the desired information; but she finally
admitted that Ellen Jervis had an aunt at Southampton
who was sending a little money for the support of
the child. Ellen Jervis had stayed with the aunt
during the summer holidays. Mrs. Gullick did not
know what was to be done. She had a large family
of her own, and the cottage was small.
Mrs. Temperley asked for the address of the aunt.
“I suppose no one knows who
the father is? He has not acknowledged the child!”
No; that was a mystery still.
About a week later, Craddock Dene
was amazed by the news that Mrs. Temperley had taken
the child of Ellen Jervis under her protection.
A cottage had been secured on the road to Craddock,
a trustworthy nurse engaged, and here the babe was
established, with the consent and blessing of the
aunt.
“You are the most inconsistent
woman I ever met!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.
“Why inconsistent?”
“You say that children have
been the means, from time immemorial, of enslaving
women, and here you go and adopt one of your enslavers!”
“But this child is not legitimate.”
Valeria stared.
“Whatever the wrongs of Ellen
Jervis, at least there were no laws written, and unwritten,
which demanded of her as a duty that she should become
the mother of this child. In that respect she
escapes the ignominy reserved for the married mother
who produces children that are not even hers.”
“You do manage to ferret out
the unpleasant aspects of our position!” Miss
Du Prel exclaimed. “But I want to know why
you do this, Hadria. It is good of you, but totally
unlike you.”
“You are very polite!”
cried Hadria. “Why should I not lay up store
for myself in heaven, as well as Mrs. Walker and the
rest?”
“You were not thinking of heaven
when you did this deed, Hadria.”
“No; I was thinking of the other place.”
“And do you hope to get any satisfaction out
of your protegee?”
Hadria shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. The
child is the result of great sorrow and suffering;
it is the price of a woman’s life; a woman who
offended the world, having lived for nearly forty
weary obedient years, in circumstances dreary enough
to have turned twenty saints into as many sinners.
No; I am no Lady Bountiful. I feel in defending
this child a sorry defence I know that
I am, in so far, opposing the world and the system
of things that I hate . Ah! how
I hate it!”
“Is it then hatred that prompts the deed?”
Hadria looked thoughtfully towards
the church tower, in whose shadow the mother of the
babe lay sleeping.
“Can you ever quite unravel
your own motives, Valeria? Hatred? Yes;
there is a large ingredient of hatred. Without
it, probably this poor infant would have been left
to struggle through life alone, with a mill-stone
round its neck, and a miserable constitution into the
bargain. I hope to rescue its constitution.
But that poor woman’s story touched me closely.
It is so hard, so outrageous! The emptiness of
her existence; the lack of outlet for her affections;
the endless monotony; and then the sudden new interest
and food for the starved emotions; the hero-worship
that is latent in us all; and then good
heavens! for a touch of poetry, of romance
in her life, she would have been ready to believe
in the professions of the devil himself and
this man was a very good understudy for the devil!
Ah! If ever I should meet him!”
“What would you do?” Valeria asked curiously.
“Avenge her,” said Hadria with set lips.
“Easier said than done, my dear!”
Gossip asserted that the father of
the child was a man of some standing, the bolder spirits
even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this
was conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened
to it.
Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized
with Mrs. Temperley’s ill-advised charity.
Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman’s
wife as another of society’s victims. She
placed side by side the schoolmistress in her sorrow
and disgrace, and the careworn woman at the Vicarage,
with her eleven children, and her shrivelled nature,
poor and dead as an autumn leaf that shivers before
the wind. They had both suffered so
Mrs. Temperley dared to assert in the same
cause. They were both victims of the same creed.
It was a terrible cultus, a savage idol that
had devoured them both, as cruel and insatiable as
the brazen god of old, with his internal fires, which
the faithful fed devoutly, with shrinking girls and
screaming children.
“I still fail to understand
why you adopt this child,” said Valeria.
“My Caterina would never have done it.”
“The little creature interests
me,” said Hadria. “It is a tiny field
for the exercise of the creative forces. Every
one has some form of active amusement. Some like
golf, others flirtation. I prefer this sort of
diversion.”
“But you have your own children
to interest you, surely far more than this one.”
Hadria’s face grew set and defiant.
“They represent to me the insult
of society my own private and particular
insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It
is through them that I am to be subdued and humbled.
Just once in a way, however, the thing does not quite
‘come off.’”
“What has set you on edge so, I wonder.”
“People, traditions, unimpeachable sentiments.”
“Yours are not unimpeachable
at any rate!” Valeria cried laughing. “Caterina
is an angel compared with you, and yet my publisher
has his doubts about her.”
“Caterina would do as
I do, I know,” said Hadria. “Those
who are looked at askance by the world appeal to my
instincts. I shall be able to teach this child,
perhaps, to strike a blow at the system which sent
her mother to a dishonoured grave, while it leaves
the man for whose sake she risked all this, in peace
and the odour of sanctity.”
Time seemed to be marked, in the sleepy
village, by the baby’s growth. Valeria,
who thought she was fond of babies, used to accompany
Hadria on her visits to the cottage, but she treated
the infant so much as if it had been a guinea-pig
or a rabbit that the nurse was indignant.
The weeks passed in rapid monotony,
filled with detail and leaving no mark behind them,
no sign of movement or progress. The cares of
the house, the children, left only limited time for
walking, reading, correspondence, and such music as
could be wrung out of a crowded day. An effort
on Hadria’s part, to make serious use of her
musical talent had been frustrated. But a pathetic,
unquenchable hope always survived that presently,
when this or that corner had been turned, this or that
difficulty overcome, conditions would be conquered
and opportunity arrive. Not yet had she resigned
her belief that the most harassing and wearying and
unceasing business that a human being can undertake,
is compatible with the stupendous labour and the unbounded
claims of an artist’s career. The details
of practical life and petty duties sprouted up at
every step. If they were put aside, even for a
moment, the wheels of daily existence became clogged
and then all opportunity was over. Hope had begun
to alternate with a fear lest that evasive corner should
never be turned, that little crop of interruptions
never cease to turn up. And yet it was so foolish.
Each obstacle in itself was paltry. It was their
number that overcame one, as the tiny arrows of the
Lilliputs overcame Gulliver.
One of Hadria’s best friends
in Craddock Dene was Joseph Fleming, who had become
very intimate at the Red House during the last year
or two. Hadria used to tire of the necessity
to be apparently rational (such was her own version),
and found it a relief to talk nonsense, just as she
pleased, to Joseph Fleming, who never objected or took
offence, if he occasionally looked surprised.
Other men might have thought she was laughing at them,
but Joseph made no such mistake when Mrs. Temperley
broke out, as she did now and then, in fantastic fashion.
She was standing, one morning, on
the little bridge over the stream that ran at a distance
of a few hundred yards from the Red House. The
two boys were bespattering themselves in the meadow
below, by the water’s verge. They called
up at intervals to their mother the announcement of
some new discovery of flower or insect.
Watching the stream sweeping through
the bridge, she seemed the centre of a charming domestic
scene to Joseph Fleming, who chanced to pass by with
his dogs. He addressed himself to her maternal
feelings by remarking what handsome and clever boys
they were.
“Handsome and clever?”
she repeated. “Is that all you can
say, Mr. Fleming? When you set about it, I think
you might provide a little better food for one’s
parental sentiment. I suppose you will go and
tell Mrs. Walker that her dozen and a half
are all handsome and clever too!”
“Not so handsome and clever
as yours,” replied Mr. Fleming, a little aghast
at this ravenous maternal vanity.
“What wretched poverty of expression!”
Hadria complained. “I ask for bread, and
truly you give me a stone.”
Joseph Fleming eyed his companion
askance. “I I admire your boys
immensely, as you know,” he said.
“Not enough, not enough.”
“What can I say more?”
“A mother has to find in her
children all that she can hope to find in life, and
she naturally desires to make the most of them, don’t
you see?”
“Ah! yes, quite so,” said Joseph dubiously.
“Nobody, I suppose, likes to
be commonplace all round; one must have some poetry
somewhere so most women idealize their children,
and if other people won’t help them in the effort,
don’t you see? it is most discouraging.”
“Are you chaffing, or what?” Joseph enquired.
“No, indeed; I am perilously serious.”
“I can well understand how a
mother must get absorbed in her children,” said
Joseph. “I suppose it’s a sort of
natural provision.”
“Think of Mrs. Allan with her
outrageous eight all making mud-pies!”
cried Hadria; “a magnificent ‘natural provision!’
A small income, a small house, with those pervasive
eight. You know the stampede when one goes to
call; the aroma of bread and butter (there are few
things more inspiring); the cook always about to leave;
Mrs. Allan with a racking headache. It is indeed
not difficult to understand how a mother would get
absorbed in her children. Why, their pinafores
alone would become absorbing.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Fleming.
Then a little anxious to change the subject:
“Oh, by the way, have you heard that the Priory
is really to be inhabited at last? Professor
Theobald has almost decided to take it.”
“Really? that will be exciting
for Craddock Dene. We shall have another household
to dissect and denounce. Providence watches over
us all, I verily believe.”
“I hope so,” Joseph replied gravely.
“Truly I hope so too,”
Hadria said, no less seriously, “for indeed we
need it.”
Joseph was too simple to be greatly
surprised at anything that Mrs. Temperley might say.
He had decided that she was a little eccentric, and
that explained everything; just as he explained instances
of extraordinary reasoning power in a dog by calling
it “instinct.” Whatever Mrs. Temperley
might do was slightly eccentric, and had she suddenly
taken it into her head to dance a fandango on the public
road, it would have merely put a little extra strain
on that word.
By dint of not understanding her,
Joseph Fleming had grown to feel towards Mrs. Temperley
a genuine liking, conscious, in his vague way, that
she was kind at heart, however bitter or strange she
might sometimes be in her speech. Moreover, she
was not always eccentric or unexpected. There
would come periods when she would say and do very much
as her neighbours said and did; looking then pale and
lifeless, but absolutely beyond the reach of hostile
criticism, as her champion would suggest to carping
neighbours.
Not the most respected of the ladies
who turned up their disapproving noses, was more dull
or more depressing than Hadria could be, on occasion,
as she had herself pointed out; and would not this
soften stony hearts?
When she discovered that her kindly
neighbour had been fighting her battles for her, she
was touched; but she asked him not to expend his strength
on her behalf. She tried in vain to convince him
that she did not care to be invited too often to submit
to the devitalizing processes of social intercourse,
to which the families of the district shrank not from
subjecting themselves. If Joseph Fleming chanced
to call at the Red House after her return from one
of these entertainments, he was sure to find Mrs.
Temperley in one of her least comprehensible moods.
But whatever she might say, he stood up for her among
the neighbours with persistent loyalty. He decked
her with virtues that she did not possess, and represented
her to the sceptical district, radiant in domestic
glory. Hadria thus found herself in an awkwardly
uncertain position; either she was looked at askance,
as eccentric, or she found herself called upon to
make good expectations of saintliness, such as never
were on land or sea.
Saintly? Hadria shook her head.
She could imagine no one further from such a condition
than she was at present, and she felt it in her, to
swing down and down to the very opposite pole from
that serene altitude. She admitted that, from
a utilitarian point of view, she was making a vast
mistake. As things were, Mrs. Walker and Mrs.
Allan, laboriously spinning their ponderous families
on their own axes, in a reverent spirit, had chosen
the better part. But Hadria did not care.
She would not settle down to make the best
of things, as even Algitha now recommended, “since
there she was, and there was no helping it.”
“I will never make the
best of things,” she said. “I know
nothing that gives such opportunities to the Devil.”
Hadria had characteristically left
the paradox unjustified.
“What do you mean?” asked
Algitha. “Surely the enemy of good has most
hold over the discontented spirit.”
Hadria likened the contented to stagnant
pools, wherein corruptions grow apace. “It
is only the discontented ocean that remains, for all
its storms, fresh and sane to the end.”
But though she said this, for opposition’s
sake perhaps, she had her doubts about her own
theory. Discontent was certainly the initiator
of all movement; but there was a kind of sullen discontent
that stagnated and ate inwards, like a disease.
Better a cheerful sin or two than allow that
to take hold!
“But then there is this sickly
feminine conscience to deal with!” she exclaimed.
“It clings to the worst of us still, and prevents
the wholesome big catastrophes that might bring salvation.”