Part 6

"But he is so good, so kind to every one, so fair in his dealings..."

"Good works without faith are insufficient to save a man."

"Well, for my part, I can't believe that any one will be lost because he may not follow the most correct kind of religion. I can't believe that God will punish any one who isn't very, very wicked indeed. He is so great; we are so little.... Just think, supposing we saw an ant doing anything wrong should we feel obliged to hurt it or burn it? Should we not be rather amused and pitiful? And mustn't we seem the very tiniest of ants to God?"

"Ah, Lucy! The belief in the fierce judgments of the Almighty is a fundamental Truth of our religion, and if your faith in that is shaken, everything will begin to go.... But the subject is too solemn to be lightly discussed, so let's talk about something else. Have you finished my slippers?"

"Yes, and they're perfectly lovely. A dark blue, with J.B. embroidered in white silk. I shall bring them with me to the station to-morrow.... Why, here we are at the gates of the garden! How we've walked and how we've talked! And look, John,"--drawing him back from standing too near the iron gates, "there's his lordship on the terrace, and I do believe the young lady with him is the one he's become engaged to!"

John looked in the direction whither Lucy discreetly inclined her head, beyond triumphs of carpet-bedding to the terrace which fronted the south side of the great house. And there, foremost of several groups of Sunday callers who were taking tea at small tables, they saw specially prominent a party of three: a pretty girl rather showily dressed in the height of 1886 fashion, an old lady, and an elderly man, tall, a little inclined to stoop, dressed in dark, loose-fitting tweeds. He had a long face with a massive jaw and rather a big nose. But though they were not visible at a distance of fifty yards there were kindly wrinkles round his dark grey eyes as he suddenly lifted them from the seated ladies and glanced across the flower beds to see who was looking at him from the outer world.

This was Lord Silchester; and John, not wishing to prolong his indiscretion, raised his wide-awake and turned away with his betrothed. He and Lucy then walked directly to Aldermaston, John leaving her at the railway station, where he consummated his breach of the Sabbath by taking an evening train back to Theale, and so returned to his home at the Aerated Waters factory for the last night he was ever to pass there.

The next morning, punctually at seven o'clock, Lucy's father drew up his gig before the booking-office of Theale station, and, getting a porter to hold the horse, helped Lucy down and accompanied her on to the station platform, where they found the Baines family already assembled: Mrs. Baines gloomily seated on a bench, Mr. Baines reading the old newspaper placards of the closed bookstall, and John busy seeing his numerous boxes labelled.

"Hullo, Baines!--and ma'am--hope you're well ... a bit cast down, I expect? But there, it's a fine career he's starting on.... Still, it's always a wrench. John"--extending his hand--"I've just called in to wish you good luck and a prosperous voyage and a happy return, by and bye. Mind you make a comfortable home out there for my little girl! I shall be feeling about as bad as you feel, ma'am" (Mrs. Baines kept a perfectly impassive face during these attempts at sympathy and did not even look at the speaker), "next--when is it to be? March?--when I come to part with Lucy. But life's made up of partings and meetings, which is why, some'ow, I don't like railway stations. Now I can't stop, and if I could, I should only be in the way. Must be off to market. Leave you Lucy. She'll walk back to school. Good-bye, John...."

And Farmer Josling hurried out of the station and his horse's hoofs sounded in quick succession on the ascent to the main road. Lucy, left behind actually found herself regretting that father had brought her in such good time as to give her five-and-twenty minutes or more of irresolute attendance on John. When she had presented him with the slippers, had squeezed his hand two or three times, and adjured him to write from the first stopping-place, besides sending a postcard from London to say he was leaving "all right"; had made a few suggestions about his luggage which, in spite of the urbanity of departure, were too futile to be answered or adopted; and had insisted on pushing the band of his blue tie under the shirt button at the back of his neck, so that it might not rise up over the collar: there seemed to be nothing left to say or do. The bookstall was not yet opened so there were no papers to be bought.

She would have talked with Mrs. Baines, who had retired to the little waiting-room and was pretending there to read a great roll of texts in big print hung against one of the walls. But at her first remark she noticed Mrs. Baines's eyelids were quivering and her under lip twitching in a way to indicate that she was a prey to almost uncontrollable emotion. Although she mechanically turned the leaves of the texts, her eyes were not focussing them, and something seemed to be moving up and down her lank throat which she could not finally swallow. She only answered Lucy's remark by an inarticulate gurgle and waved her away. There was something so pathetic in her dismal ugliness, in her awkwardly restrained emotion, that Lucy was suddenly moved to pity as she returned to the platform. Her embarrassment was cut short by the tumult occasioned by the approaching train, heralded by the clanging of the station bell. The train was full and John had hurriedly to pass all the second class compartments in review to find a place not only for himself but for the amorphous packages deemed too frail for the guard's van. When at last he had squeezed himself and his parcels past the obstructing knees of the established passengers; he had just time to twist round, stretch out over his surly neighbours' laps, and squeeze Lucy's timorously extended hand. Then the train gave a lurch forward and a slide backwards which made him nearly bite his tongue off in an attempt to say good-bye to his parents, and finally rolled slowly out of the station, while the forms of father, mother, and sweetheart left standing on the platform grouped themselves for one moment in an attitude of mute farewell before the advance of the train cut them off from his sight.

The retreating chain of carriages shut itself up like a telescope, and the station began to resume its sleepy calm. Mrs. Baines's emotion now could no longer be restrained from expression. She tottered towards the waiting-room and sinking heavily on to a hard wooden seat she choked and hiccupped and sobbed, and the tears rolled regularly, one after the other, down her cavernous cheeks. Lucy took her trembling hands and tried to soothe her; and then, Mrs. Baines, softened by this sympathy, lost all that remained of her self-control and abandoned herself limply on Lucy's shoulder.

"Oh!" she gasped, "I've parted with him in anger--he's gone! ... Perhaps I shall never see him again.... My boy.... My only son. I never said a kind word to him before he left. I thought there would be time.... I thought John would come and make it up. I was cross because he went out walking with you and came back late by train yesterday. You know I always taught him to observe the Sabbath. But I'd forgive him anything if he'd only come back and give me one kiss ... my boy...."

But John was well on his way to Reading, and the London express, and all his mother's tardy plaints were fruitless to recall him. Moreover, he was not perceptive. To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed much as usual; and he was certainly not conscious that she had parted with him in anger. He was fond of her in a way, but he had been used from childhood to her being always in a huff about something or other.

Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial calmness, straightened her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet strings, and walked a little of the way back with her towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively behind. For the rest of that day he enjoyed unrebuked freedom to do as he liked. He ate his fill and even smoked a pipe in the parlour. His wife having regained her composure held aloof from him in silent, stony grief.

Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of Aldermaston driving thither in a chaise and got a lift, nearly as far as her home, a substantial farmstead on the Mortimer road, close to both church and school. This enabled her to begin her duties punctually. She taught her girls and boys from nine to twelve and two to four. She thought of John with gentle melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of her betrothed's departure, especially his mother's wild display of grief. But the next morning as she walked from the farmstead to the school she actually hummed a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the dewy hedge and arranged them round her light straw hat. At the same time she had a twinge of remorse at her forgetfulness--poor John was doubtless now at sea watching England fade from the exile's view; and she forced herself to assume before her scholars an aspect of restrained grief.

Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather went by in her surroundings of perfect beauty, she confessed to herself she had seldom felt so happy, in spite of her sweetheart's absence.

*CHAPTER III*

*SIBYL AT SILCHESTER*

They had ridden over from opposite directions--he from Farleigh Wallop on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of early Christian Britain was then--and now--only marked by two-thirds of an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees. There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear, apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest--waving fields of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent farmstead--unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and its churchyard.

On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves. This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman. He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.

Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too obvious to the male eye.

Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns of the younger generation were distant cousins.

Roger (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five years ago--a little filled out perhaps.... And this is how we meet. How utterly different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh how you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say I didn't write--when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry--and now I hear from Maud you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden--I suppose it was you! And this is what women call fidelity!"

Sibyl (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case--not mere romantic school girls--they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and very unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several years--I should never again get such a chance ... and I really do like Lord Silchester, you don't know how kind he can be--and you can't really care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even wrote to me...."

Roger: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the World ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "Missionary meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."

Sibyl: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ... or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so I did post that World to you and got Gerry to address it--and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But do let's be calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I must get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming--she helped to bring it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "Damn her!") "She's got twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I am sorry ... in a way ... but you'll find heaps of girls, much nicer than I am, ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.) "And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now I know more about things--I was so young when you went away--I don't approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their--I mean aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)

Roger: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."