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Title: Clara Hopgood

Author: Mark Rutherford

Release Date: June, 2004  [EBook #5986]
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[This file was first posted on October 8, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, CLARA HOPGOOD ***




Transcribed from the 1907 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




CLARA HOPGOOD




CHAPTER I



About ten miles north-east of Eastthorpe lies the town of Fenmarket,
very like Eastthorpe generally; and as we are already familiar with
Eastthorpe, a particular description of Fenmarket is unnecessary.
There is, however, one marked difference between them.  Eastthorpe,
it will be remembered, is on the border between the low uplands and
the Fens, and has one side open to soft, swelling hills.  Fenmarket
is entirely in the Fens, and all the roads that lead out of it are
alike level, monotonous, straight, and flanked by deep and stagnant
ditches.  The river, also, here is broader and slower; more reluctant
than it is even at Eastthorpe to hasten its journey to the inevitable
sea.  During the greater part of the year the visitor to Fenmarket
would perhaps find it dull and depressing, and at times, under a
grey, wintry sky, almost unendurable; but nevertheless, for days and
weeks it has a charm possessed by few other landscapes in England,
provided only that behind the eye which looks there is something to
which a landscape of that peculiar character answers.  There is, for
example, the wide, dome-like expanse of the sky, there is the
distance, there is the freedom and there are the stars on a clear
night.  The orderly, geometrical march of the constellations from the
extreme eastern horizon across the meridian and down to the west has
a solemn majesty, which is only partially discernible when their
course is interrupted by broken country.

On a dark afternoon in November 1844, two young women, Clara and
Madge Hopgood, were playing chess in the back parlour of their
mother's house at Fenmarket, just before tea.  Clara, the elder, was
about five-and-twenty, fair, with rather light hair worn flat at the
side of her face, after the fashion of that time.  Her features were
tolerably regular.  It is true they were somewhat marred by an uneven
nasal outline, but this was redeemed by the curved lips of a mouth
which was small and rather compressed, and by a definite, symmetrical
and graceful figure.  Her eyes were grey, with a curious peculiarity
in them.  Ordinarily they were steady, strong eyes, excellent and
renowned optical instruments.  Over and over again she had detected,
along the stretch of the Eastthorpe road, approaching visitors, and
had named them when her companions could see nothing but specks.
Occasionally, however, these steady, strong, grey eyes utterly
changed.  They were the same eyes, the same colour, but they ceased
to be mere optical instruments and became instruments of expression,
transmissive of radiance to such a degree that the light which was
reflected from them seemed insufficient to account for it.  It was
also curious that this change, though it must have been accompanied
by some emotion, was just as often not attended by any other sign of
it.  Clara was, in fact, little given to any display of feeling.

Madge, four years younger than her sister, was of a different type
altogether, and one more easily comprehended.  She had very heavy
dark hair, and she had blue eyes, a combination which fascinated
Fenmarket.  Fenmarket admired Madge more than it was admired by her
in return, and she kept herself very much to herself, notwithstanding
what it considered to be its temptations.  If she went shopping she
nearly always went with her sister; she stood aloof from all the
small gaieties of the town; walked swiftly through its streets, and
repelled, frigidly and decisively, all offers, and they were not a
few, which had been made to her by the sons of the Fenmarket
tradesfolk.  Fenmarket pronounced her 'stuck-up,' and having thus
labelled her, considered it had exhausted her.  The very important
question, Whether there was anything which naturally stuck up?
Fenmarket never asked.  It was a great relief to that provincial
little town in 1844, in this and in other cases, to find a word which
released it from further mental effort and put out of sight any
troublesome, straggling, indefinable qualities which it would
otherwise have been forced to examine and name.  Madge was certainly
stuck-up, but the projection above those around her was not
artificial.  Both she and her sister found the ways of Fenmarket were
not to their taste.  The reason lay partly in their nature and partly
in their history.

Mrs Hopgood was the widow of the late manager in the Fenmarket branch
of the bank of Rumbold, Martin & Rumbold, and when her husband died
she had of course to leave the Bank Buildings.  As her income was
somewhat straitened, she was obliged to take a small house, and she
was now living next door to the 'Crown and Sceptre,' the principal
inn in the town.  There was then no fringe of villas to Fenmarket for
retired quality; the private houses and shops were all mixed
together, and Mrs Hopgood's cottage was squeezed in between the
ironmonger's and the inn.  It was very much lower than either of its
big neighbours, but it had a brass knocker and a bell, and distinctly
asserted and maintained a kind of aristocratic superiority.

Mr Hopgood was not a Fenmarket man.  He came straight from London to
be manager.  He was in the bank of the London agents of Rumbold,
Martin & Rumbold, and had been strongly recommended by the city firm
as just the person to take charge of a branch which needed thorough
reorganisation.  He succeeded, and nobody in Fenmarket was more
respected.  He lived, however, a life apart from his neighbours,
excepting so far as business was concerned.  He went to church once
on Sunday because the bank expected him to go, but only once, and had
nothing to do with any of its dependent institutions.  He was a great
botanist, very fond of walking, and in the evening, when Fenmarket
generally gathered itself into groups for gossip, either in the
street or in back parlours, or in the 'Crown and Sceptre,' Mr
Hopgood, tall, lean and stately, might be seen wandering along the
solitary roads searching for flowers, which, in that part of the
world, were rather scarce.  He was also a great reader of the best
books, English, German and French, and held high doctrine, very high
for those days, on the training of girls, maintaining that they need,
even more than boys, exact discipline and knowledge.  Boys, he
thought, find health in an occupation; but an uncultivated, unmarried
girl dwells with her own untutored thoughts, which often breed
disease.  His two daughters, therefore, received an education much
above that which was usual amongst people in their position, and each
of them--an unheard of wonder in Fenmarket--had spent some time in a
school in Weimar.  Mr Hopgood was also peculiar in his way of dealing
with his children.  He talked to them and made them talk to him, and
whatever they read was translated into speech; thought, in his house,
was vocal.

Mrs Hopgood, too, had been the intimate friend of her husband, and
was the intimate friend of her daughters.  She was now nearly sixty,
but still erect and graceful, and everybody could see that the
picture of a beautiful girl of one-and-twenty, which hung opposite
the fireplace, had once been her portrait.  She had been brought up,
as thoroughly as a woman could be brought up, in those days, to be a
governess.  The war prevented her education abroad, but her father,
who was a clergyman, not too rich, engaged a French emigrant lady to
live in his house to teach her French and other accomplishments.  She
consequently spoke French perfectly, and she could also read and
speak Spanish fairly well, for the French lady had spent some years
in Spain.  Mr Hopgood had never been particularly in earnest about
religion, but his wife was a believer, neither High Church nor Low
Church, but inclined towards a kind of quietism not uncommon in the
Church of England, even during its bad time, a reaction against the
formalism which generally prevailed.  When she married, Mrs Hopgood
did not altogether follow her husband.  She never separated herself
from her faith, and never would have confessed that she had separated
herself from her church.  But although she knew that his creed
externally was not hers, her own was not sharply cut, and she
persuaded herself that, in substance, his and her belief were
identical.  As she grew older her relationship to the Unseen became
more and more intimate, but she was less and less inclined to
criticise her husband's freedom, or to impose on the children a rule
which they would certainly have observed, but only for her sake.
Every now and then she felt a little lonely; when, for example, she
read one or two books which were particularly her own; when she
thought of her dead father and mother, and when she prayed her
solitary prayer.  Mr Hopgood took great pains never to disturb that
sacred moment.  Indeed, he never for an instant permitted a finger to
be laid upon what she considered precious.  He loved her because she
had the strength to be what she was when he first knew her and she
had so fascinated him.  He would have been disappointed if the
mistress of his youth had become some other person, although the
change, in a sense, might have been development and progress.  He did
really love her piety, too, for its own sake.  It mixed something
with her behaviour to him and to the children which charmed him, and
he did not know from what other existing source anything comparable
to it could be supplied.  Mrs Hopgood seldom went to church.  The
church, to be sure, was horribly dead, but she did not give that as a
reason.  She had, she said, an infirmity, a strange restlessness
which prevented her from sitting still for an hour.  She often
pleaded this excuse, and her husband and daughters never, by word or
smile, gave her the least reason to suppose that they did not believe
her.



CHAPTER II



Both Clara and Madge went first to an English day-school, and Clara
went straight from this school to Germany, but Madge's course was a
little different.  She was not very well, and it was decided that she
should have at least a twelvemonth in a boarding-school at Brighton
before going abroad.  It had been very highly recommended, but the
head-mistress was Low Church and aggressive.  Mr Hopgood, far away
from the High and Low Church controversy, came to the conclusion
that, in Madge's case, the theology would have no effect on her.  It
was quite impossible, moreover, to find a school which would be just
what he could wish it to be.  Madge, accordingly, was sent to
Brighton, and was introduced into a new world.  She was just
beginning to ask herself WHY certain things were right and other
things were wrong, and the Brighton answer was that the former were
directed by revelation and the latter forbidden, and that the 'body'
was an affliction to the soul, a means of 'probation,' our principal
duty being to 'war' against it.

Madge's bedroom companion was a Miss Selina Fish, daughter of
Barnabas Fish, Esquire, of Clapham, and merchant of the City of
London.  Miss Fish was not traitorous at heart, but when she found
out that Madge had not been christened, she was so overcome that she
was obliged to tell her mother.  Miss Fish was really unhappy, and
one cold night, when Madge crept into her neighbour's bed, contrary
to law, but in accordance with custom when the weather was very
bitter, poor Miss Fish shrank from her, half-believing that something
dreadful might happen if she should by any chance touch unbaptised,
naked flesh.  Mrs Fish told her daughter that perhaps Miss Hopgood
might be a Dissenter, and that although Dissenters were to be pitied,
and even to be condemned, many of them were undoubtedly among the
redeemed, as for example, that man of God, Dr Doddridge, whose Family
Expositor was read systematically at home, as Selina knew.  Then
there were Matthew Henry, whose commentary her father preferred to
any other, and the venerable saint, the Reverend William Jay of Bath,
whom she was proud to call her friend.  Miss Fish, therefore, made
further inquiries gently and delicately, but she found to her horror
that Madge had neither been sprinkled nor immersed!  Perhaps she was
a Jewess or a heathen!  This was a happy thought, for then she might
be converted.  Selina knew what interest her mother took in missions
to heathens and Jews; and if Madge, by the humble instrumentality of
a child, could be brought to the foot of the Cross, what would her
mother and father say?  What would they not say?  Fancy taking Madge
to Clapham in a nice white dress--it should be white, thought Selina-
-and presenting her as a saved lamb!

The very next night she began, -

'I suppose your father is a foreigner?'

'No, he is an Englishman.'

'But if he is an Englishman you must have been baptised, or
sprinkled, or immersed, and your father and mother must belong to
church or chapel.  I know there are thousands of wicked people who
belong to neither, but they are drunkards and liars and robbers, and
even they have their children christened.'

'Well, he is an Englishman,' said Madge, smiling.

'Perhaps,' said Selina, timidly, 'he may be--he may be--Jewish.
Mamma and papa pray for the Jews every morning.  They are not like
other unbelievers.'

'No, he is certainly not a Jew.'

'What is he, then?'

'He is my papa and a very honest, good man.'

'Oh, my dear Madge! honesty is a broken reed.  I have heard mamma say
that she is more hopeful of thieves than honest people who think they
are saved by works, for the thief who was crucified went to heaven,
and if he had been only an honest man he never would have found the
Saviour and would have gone to hell.  Your father must be something.'

'I can only tell you again that he is honest and good.'

Selina was confounded.  She had heard of those people who were
NOTHING, and had always considered them as so dreadful that she could
not bear to think of them.  The efforts of her father and mother did
not extend to them; they were beyond the reach of the preacher--mere
vessels of wrath.  If Madge had confessed herself Roman Catholic, or
idolator, Selina knew how to begin.  She would have pointed out to
the Catholic how unscriptural it was to suppose that anybody could
forgive sins excepting God, and she would at once have been able to
bring the idolator to his knees by exposing the absurdity of
worshipping bits of wood and stone; but with a person who was nothing
she could not tell what to do.  She was puzzled to understand what
right Madge had to her name.  Who had any authority to say she was to
be called Madge Hopgood?  She determined at last to pray to God and
again ask her mother's help.

She did pray earnestly that very night, and had not finished until
long after Madge had said her Lord's Prayer.  This was always said
night and morning, both by Madge and Clara.  They had been taught it
by their mother.  It was, by the way, one of poor Selina's troubles
that Madge said nothing but the Lord's Prayer when she lay down and
when she rose; of course, the Lord's Prayer was the best--how could
it be otherwise, seeing that our Lord used it?--but those who
supplemented it with no petitions of their own were set down as
formalists, and it was always suspected that they had not received
the true enlightenment from above.  Selina cried to God till the
counterpane was wet with her tears, but it was the answer from her
mother which came first, telling her that however praiseworthy her
intentions might be, argument with such a DANGEROUS infidel as Madge
would be most perilous, and she was to desist from it at once.  Mrs
Fish had by that post written to Miss Pratt, the schoolmistress, and
Selina no doubt would not be exposed to further temptation.  Mrs
Fish's letter to Miss Pratt was very strong, and did not mince
matters.  She informed Miss Pratt that a wolf was in her fold, and
that if the creature were not promptly expelled, Selina must be
removed into safety.  Miss Pratt was astonished, and instantly, as
her custom was, sought the advice of her sister, Miss Hannah Pratt,
who had charge of the wardrobes and household matters generally.
Miss Hannah Pratt was never in the best of tempers, and just now was
a little worse than usual.  It was one of the rules of the school
that no tradesmen's daughters should be admitted, but it was very
difficult to draw the line, and when drawn, the Misses Pratt were
obliged to admit it was rather ridiculous.  There was much debate
over an application by an auctioneer.  He was clearly not a
tradesman, but he sold chairs, tables and pigs, and, as Miss Hannah
said, used vulgar language in recommending them.  However, his wife
had money; they lived in a pleasant house in Lewes, and the line went
outside him.  But when a druggist, with a shop in Bond Street,
proposed his daughter, Miss Hannah took a firm stand.  What is the
use of a principle, she inquired severely, if we do not adhere to it?
On the other hand, the druggist's daughter was the eldest of six, who
might all come when they were old enough to leave home, and Miss
Pratt thought there was a real difference between a druggist and,
say, a bootmaker.

'Bootmaker!' said Miss Hannah with great scorn.  'I am surprised that
you venture to hint the remotest possibility of such a contingency.'

At last it was settled that the line should also be drawn outside the
druggist.  Miss Hannah, however, had her revenge.  A tanner in
Bermondsey with a house in Bedford Square, had sent two of his
children to Miss Pratt's seminary.  Their mother found out that they
had struck up a friendship with a young person whose father
compounded prescriptions for her, and when she next visited Brighton
she called on Miss Pratt, reminded her that it was understood that
her pupils would 'all be taken from a superior class in society,' and
gently hinted that she could not allow Bedford Square to be
contaminated by Bond Street.  Miss Pratt was most apologetic,
enlarged upon the druggist's respectability, and more particularly
upon his well-known piety and upon his generous contributions to the
cause of religion.  This, indeed, was what decided her to make an
exception in his favour, and the piety also of his daughter was 'most
exemplary.'  However, the tanner's lady, although a shining light in
the church herself, was not satisfied that a retail saint could
produce a proper companion for her own offspring, and went away
leaving Miss Pratt very uncomfortable.

'I warned you,' said Miss Hannah; 'I told you what would happen, and
as to Mr Hopgood, I suspected him from the first.  Besides, he is
only a banker's clerk.'

'Well, what is to be done?'

'Put your foot down at once.'  Miss Hannah suited the action to the
word, and put down, with emphasis, on the hearthrug a very large,
plate-shaped foot cased in a black felt shoe.

'But I cannot dismiss them.  Don't you think it will be better, first
of all, to talk to Miss Hopgood?  Perhaps we could do her some good.'

'Good!  Now, do you think we can do any good to an atheist?  Besides,
we have to consider our reputation.  Whatever good we might do, it
would be believed that the infection remained.'

'We have no excuse for dismissing the other.'

'Excuse! none is needed, nor would any be justifiable.  Excuses are
immoral.  Say at once--of course politely and with regret--that the
school is established on a certain basis.  It will be an advantage to
us if it is known why these girls do not remain.  I will dictate the
letter, if you like.'

Miss Hannah Pratt had not received the education which had been given
to her younger sister, and therefore, was nominally subordinate, but
really she was chief.  She considered it especially her duty not only
to look after the children's clothes, the servants and the accounts,
but to maintain TONE everywhere in the establishment, and to stiffen
her sister when necessary, and preserve in proper sharpness her
orthodoxy, both in theology and morals.

Accordingly, both the girls left, and both knew the reason for
leaving.  The druggist's faith was sorely tried.  If Miss Pratt's had
been a worldly seminary he would have thought nothing of such
behaviour, but he did not expect it from one of the faithful.  The
next Sunday morning after he received the news, he stayed at home out
of his turn to make up any medicines which might be urgently
required, and sent his assistant to church.

As to Madge, she enjoyed her expulsion as a great joke, and her
Brighton experiences were the cause of much laughter.  She had
learned a good deal while she was away from home, not precisely what
it was intended she should learn, and she came back with a strong,
insurgent tendency, which was even more noticeable when she returned
from Germany.  Neither of the sisters lived at the school in Weimar,
but at the house of a lady who had been recommended to Mrs Hopgood,
and by this lady they were introduced to the great German classics.
She herself was an enthusiast for Goethe, whom she well remembered in
his old age, and Clara and Madge, each of them in turn, learned to
know the poet as they would never have known him in England.  Even
the town taught them much about him, for in many ways it was
expressive of him and seemed as if it had shaped itself for him.  It
was a delightful time for them.  They enjoyed the society and
constant mental stimulus; they loved the beautiful park; not a
separate enclosure walled round like an English park, but suffering
the streets to end in it, and in summer time there were excursions
into the Thuringer Wald, generally to some point memorable in
history, or for some literary association.  The drawback was the
contrast, when they went home, with Fenmarket, with its dulness and
its complete isolation from the intellectual world.  At Weimar, in
the evening, they could see Egmont or hear Fidelio, or talk with
friends about the last utterance upon the Leben Jesu; but the
Fenmarket Egmont was a travelling wax-work show, its Fidelio psalm
tunes, or at best some of Bishop's glees, performed by a few of the
tradesfolk, who had never had an hour's instruction in music; and for
theological criticism there were the parish church and Ram Lane
Chapel.  They did their best; they read their old favourites and
subscribed for a German as well as an English literary weekly
newspaper, but at times they were almost beaten.  Madge more than
Clara was liable to depression.

No Fenmarket maiden, other than the Hopgoods, was supposed to have
any connection whatever, or to have any capacity for any connection
with anything outside the world in which 'young ladies' dwelt, and if
a Fenmarket girl read a book, a rare occurrence, for there were no
circulating libraries there in those days, she never permitted
herself to say anything more than that it was 'nice,' or it was 'not
nice,' or she 'liked it' or did 'not like it;' and if she had
ventured to say more, Fenmarket would have thought her odd, not to
say a little improper.  The Hopgood young women were almost entirely
isolated, for the tradesfolk felt themselves uncomfortable and
inferior in every way in their presence, and they were ineligible for
rectory and brewery society, not only because their father was merely
a manager, but because of their strange ways.  Mrs Tubbs, the
brewer's wife, thought they were due to Germany.  From what she knew
of Germany she considered it most injudicious, and even morally
wrong, to send girls there.  She once made the acquaintance of a
German lady at an hotel at Tunbridge Wells, and was quite shocked.
She could see quite plainly that the standard of female delicacy must
be much lower in that country than in England.  Mr Tubbs was sure Mrs
Hopgood must have been French, and said to his daughters,
mysteriously, 'you never can tell who Frenchwomen are.'

'But, papa,' said Miss Tubbs, 'you know Mrs Hopgood's maiden name; we
found that out.  It was Molyneux.'

'Of course, my dear, of course; but if she was a Frenchwoman resident
in England she would prefer to assume an English name, that is to say
if she wished to be married.'

Occasionally the Miss Hopgoods were encountered, and they confounded
Fenmarket sorely.  On one memorable occasion there was a party at the
Rectory:  it was the annual party into which were swept all the
unclassifiable odds-and-ends which could not be put into the two
gatherings which included the aristocracy and the democracy of the
place.  Miss Clara Hopgood amazed everybody by 'beginning talk,' by
asking Mrs Greatorex, her hostess, who had been far away to Sidmouth
for a holiday, whether she had been to the place where Coleridge was
born, and when the parson's wife said she had not, and that she could
not be expected to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of an infidel,
Miss Hopgood expressed her surprise, and declared she would walk
twenty miles any day to see Ottery St Mary.  Still worse, when
somebody observed that an Anti-Corn-Law lecturer was coming to
Fenmarket, and the parson's daughter cried 'How horrid!'  Miss
Hopgood talked again, and actually told the parson that, so far as
she had read upon the subject--fancy her reading about the Corn-
Laws!--the argument was all one way, and that after Colonel Thompson
nothing new could really be urged.

'What is so--' she was about to say 'objectionable,' but she
recollected her official position and that she was bound to be
politic--'so odd and unusual,' observed Mrs Greatorex to Mrs Tubbs
afterwards, 'is not that Miss Hopgood should have radical views.  Mrs
Barker, I know, is a radical like her husband, but then she never
puts herself forward, nor makes speeches.  I never saw anything quite
like it, except once in London at a dinner-party.  Lady Montgomery
then went on in much the same way, but she was a baronet's wife; the
baronet was in Parliament; she received a good deal and was obliged
to entertain her guests.'

Poor Clara! she was really very unobtrusive and very modest, but
there had been constant sympathy between her and her father, not the
dumb sympathy as between man and dog, but that which can manifest
itself in human fashion.



CHAPTER III



Clara and her father were both chess-players, and at the time at
which our history begins, Clara had been teaching Madge the game for
about six months.

'Check!' said Clara.

'Check! after about a dozen moves.  It is of no use to go on; you
always beat me.  I should not mind that if I were any better now than
when I started.  It is not in me.'

'The reason is that you do not look two moves ahead.  You never say
to yourself, "Suppose I move there, what is she likely to do, and
what can I do afterwards?"'

'That is just what is impossible to me.  I cannot hold myself down;
the moment I go beyond the next move my thoughts fly away, and I am
in a muddle, and my head turns round.  I was not born for it.  I can
do what is under my nose well enough, but nothing more.'

'The planning and the forecasting are the soul of the game.  I should
like to be a general, and play against armies and calculate the
consequences of manoeuvres.'

'It would kill me.  I should prefer the fighting.  Besides,
calculation is useless, for when I think that you will be sure to
move such and such a piece, you generally do not.'

'Then what makes the difference between the good and the bad player?'

'It is a gift, an instinct, I suppose.'

'Which is as much as to say that you give it up.  You are very fond
of that word instinct; I wish you would not use it.'

'I have heard you use it, and say you instinctively like this person
or that.'

'Certainly; I do not deny that sometimes I am drawn to a person or
repelled from him before I can say why; but I always force myself to
discover afterwards the cause of my attraction or repulsion, and I
believe it is a duty to do so.  If we neglect it we are little better
than the brutes, and may grossly deceive ourselves.'

At this moment the sound of wheels was heard, and Madge jumped up,
nearly over-setting the board, and rushed into the front room.  It
was the four-horse coach from London, which, once a day, passed
through Fenmarket on its road to Lincoln.  It was not the direct
route from London to Lincoln, but the Defiance went this way to
accommodate Fenmarket and other small towns.  It slackened speed in
order to change horses at the 'Crown and Sceptre,' and as Madge stood
at the window, a gentleman on the box-seat looked at her intently as
he passed.  In another minute he had descended, and was welcomed by
the landlord, who stood on the pavement.  Clara meanwhile had taken
up a book, but before she had read a page, her sister skipped into
the parlour again, humming a tune.

'Let me see--check, you said, but it is not mate.'

She put her elbows on the table, rested her head between her hands,
and appeared to contemplate the game profoundly.

'Now, then, what do you say to that?'

It was really a very lucky move, and Clara, whose thoughts perhaps
were elsewhere, was presently most unaccountably defeated.  Madge was
triumphant.

'Where are all your deep-laid schemes?  Baffled by a poor creature
who can hardly put two and two together.'

'Perhaps your schemes were better than mine.'

'You know they were not.  I saw the queen ought to take that bishop,
and never bothered myself as to what would follow.  Have you not lost
your faith in schemes?'

'You are very much mistaken if you suppose that, because of one
failure, or of twenty failures, I would give up a principle.'

'Clara, you are a strange creature.  Don't let us talk any more about
chess.'

Madge swept all the pieces with her hand into the box, shut it,
closed the board, and put her feet on the fender.

'You never believe in impulses or in doing a thing just because here
and now it appears to be the proper thing to do.  Suppose anybody
were to make love to you--oh! how I wish somebody would, you dear
girl, for nobody deserves it more--'  Madge put her head caressingly
on Clara's shoulder and then raised it again.  'Suppose, I say,
anybody were to make love to you, would you hold off for six months
and consider, and consider, and ask yourself whether he had such and
such virtues, and whether he could make you happy?  Would not that
stifle love altogether?  Would you not rather obey your first
impression and, if you felt you loved him, would you not say "Yes"?'

'Time is not everything.  A man who is prompt and is therefore
thought to be hasty by sluggish creatures who are never half awake,
may in five minutes spend more time in consideration than his critics
will spend in as many weeks.  I have never had the chance, and am not
likely to have it.  I can only say that if it were to come to me, I
should try to use the whole strength of my soul.  Precisely because
the question would be so important, would it be necessary to employ
every faculty I have in order to decide it.  I do not believe in
oracles which are supposed to prove their divinity by giving no
reasons for their commands.'

'Ah, well, _I_ believe in Shakespeare.  His lovers fall in love at
first sight.'

'No doubt they do, but to justify yourself you have to suppose that
you are a Juliet and your friend a Romeo.  They may, for aught I
know, be examples in my favour.  However, I have to lay down a rule
for my own poor, limited self, and, to speak the truth, I am afraid
that great men often do harm by imposing on us that which is
serviceable to themselves only; or, to put it perhaps more correctly,
we mistake the real nature of their processes, just as a person who
is unskilled in arithmetic would mistake the processes of anybody who
is very quick at it, and would be led away by them.  Shakespeare is
much to me, but the more he is to me, the more careful I ought to be
to discover what is the true law of my own nature, more important to
me after all than Shakespeare's.'

'Exactly.  I know what the law of mine is.  If a man were to present
himself to me, I should rely on that instinct you so much despise,
and I am certain that the balancing, see-saw method would be fatal.
It would disclose a host of reasons against any conclusion, and I
should never come to any.'

Clara smiled.  Although this impetuosity was foreign to her, she
loved it for the good which accompanied it.

'You do not mean to say you would accept or reject him at once?'

'No, certainly not.  What I mean is that in a few days, perhaps in a
shorter time, something within me would tell me whether we were
suited to one another, although we might not have talked upon half-a-
dozen subjects.'

'I think the risk tremendous.'

'But there is just as much risk the other way.  You would examine
your friend, catalogue him, sum up his beliefs, note his behaviour
under various experimental trials, and miserably fail, after all your
scientific investigation, to ascertain just the one important point
whether you loved him and could live with him.  Your reason was not
meant for that kind of work.  If a woman trusts in such matters to
the faculty by which, when she wishes to settle whether she is to
take this house or that, she puts the advantages of the larger back
kitchen on one side and the bigger front kitchen on the other, I pity
her.'

Mrs Hopgood at this moment came downstairs and asked when in the name
of fortune they meant to have the tea ready.



CHAPTER IV



Frank Palmer, the gentleman whom we saw descend from the coach, was
the eldest son of a wholesale and manufacturing chemist in London.
He was now about five-and-twenty, and having just been admitted as a
partner, he had begun, as the custom was in those days, to travel for
his firm.  The elder Mr Palmer was a man of refinement, something
more than a Whig in politics, and an enthusiastic member of the Broad
Church party, which was then becoming a power in the country.  He was
well-to-do, living in a fine old red-brick house at Stoke Newington,
with half-a-dozen acres of ground round it, and, if Frank had been
born thirty years later, he would probably have gone to Cambridge or
Oxford.  In those days, however, it was not the custom to send boys
to the Universities unless they were intended for the law, divinity
or idleness, and Frank's training, which was begun at St Paul's
school, was completed there.  He lived at home, going to school in
the morning and returning in the evening.  He was surrounded by every
influence which was pure and noble.  Mr Maurice and Mr Sterling were
his father's guests, and hence it may be inferred that there was an
altar in the house, and that the sacred flame burnt thereon.  Mr
Palmer almost worshipped Mr Maurice, and his admiration was not
blind, for Maurice connected the Bible with what was rational in his
friend.  'What! still believable:  no need then to pitch it
overboard:  here after all is the Eternal Word!'  It can be imagined
how those who dared not close their eyes to the light, and yet clung
to that book which had been so much to their forefathers and
themselves, rejoiced when they were able to declare that it belonged
to them more than to those who misjudged them and could deny that
they were heretics.  The boy's education was entirely classical and
athletic, and as he was quick at learning and loved his games, he
took a high position amongst his school-fellows.  He was not
particularly reflective, but he was generous and courageous,
perfectly straightforward, a fair specimen of thousands of English
public-school boys.  As he grew up, he somewhat disappointed his
father by a lack of any real interest in the subjects in which his
father was interested.  He accepted willingly, and even
enthusiastically, the household conclusions on religion and politics,
but they were not properly his, for he accepted them merely as
conclusions and without the premisses, and it was often even a little
annoying to hear him express some free opinion on religious questions
in a way which showed that it was not a growth but something picked
up.  Mr Palmer, senior, sometimes recoiled into intolerance and
orthodoxy, and bewildered his son who, to use one of his own phrases,
'hardly knew where his father was.'  Partly the reaction was due to
the oscillation which accompanies serious and independent thought,
but mainly it was caused by Mr Palmer's discontent with Frank's
appropriation of a sentiment or doctrine of which he was not the
lawful owner.  Frank, however, was so hearty, so affectionate, and so
cheerful, that it was impossible not to love him dearly.

In his visits to Fenmarket, Frank had often noticed Madge, for the
'Crown and Sceptre' was his headquarters, and Madge was well enough
aware that she had been noticed.  He had inquired casually who it was
who lived next door, and when the waiter told him the name, and that
Mr Hopgood was formerly the bank manager, Frank remembered that he
had often heard his father speak of a Mr Hopgood, a clerk in a bank
in London, as one of his best friends.  He did not fail to ask his
father about this friend, and to obtain an introduction to the widow.
He had now brought it to Fenmarket, and within half an hour after he
had alighted, he had presented it.

Mrs Hopgood, of course, recollected Mr Palmer perfectly, and the
welcome to Frank was naturally very warm.  It was delightful to
connect earlier and happier days with the present, and she was proud
in the possession of a relationship which had lasted so long.  Clara
and Madge, too, were both excited and pleased.  To say nothing of
Frank's appearance, of his unsnobbish, deferential behaviour which
showed that he understood who they were and that the little house
made no difference to him, the girls and the mother could not resist
a side glance at Fenmarket and the indulgence of a secret
satisfaction that it would soon hear that the son of Mr Palmer, so
well known in every town round about, was on intimate terms with
them.

Madge was particularly gay that evening.  The presence of sympathetic
people was always a powerful stimulus to her, and she was often
astonished at the witty things and even the wise things she said in
such company, although, when she was alone, so few things wise or
witty occurred to her.  Like all persons who, in conversation, do not
so much express the results of previous conviction obtained in
silence as the inspiration of the moment, Madge dazzled everybody by
a brilliancy which would have been impossible if she had communicated
that which had been slowly acquired, but what she left with those who
listened to her, did not always seem, on reflection, to be so much as
it appeared to be while she was talking.  Still she was very
charming, and it must be confessed that sometimes her spontaneity was
truer than the limitations of speech more carefully weighed.

'What makes you stay in Fenmarket, Mrs Hopgood?  How I wish you would
come to London!'

'I do not wish to leave it now; I have become attached to it; I have
very few friends in London, and lastly, perhaps the most convincing
reason, I could not afford it.  Rent and living are cheaper here than
in town.'

'Would you not like to live in London, Miss Hopgood?'

Clara hesitated for a few seconds.

'I am not sure--certainly not by myself.  I was in London once for
six months as a governess in a very pleasant family, where I saw much
society; but I was glad to return to Fenmarket.'

'To the scenery round Fenmarket,' interrupted Madge; 'it is so
romantic, so mountainous, so interesting in every way.'

'I was thinking of people, strange as it may appear.  In London
nobody really cares for anybody, at least, not in the sense in which
I should use the words.  Men and women in London stand for certain
talents, and are valued often very highly for them, but they are
valued merely as representing these talents.  Now, if I had a talent,
I should not be satisfied with admiration or respect because of it.
No matter what admiration, or respect, or even enthusiasm I might
evoke, even if I were told that my services had been immense and that
life had been changed through my instrumentality, I should feel the
lack of quiet, personal affection, and that, I believe, is not common
in London.  If I were famous, I would sacrifice all the adoration of
the world for the love of a brother--if I had one--or a sister, who
perhaps had never heard what it was which had made me renowned.'

'Certainly,' said Madge, laughing, 'for the love of SUCH a sister.
But, Mr Palmer, I like London.  I like the people, just the people,
although I do not know a soul, and not a soul cares a brass farthing
about me.  I am not half so stupid in London as in the country.  I
never have a thought of my own down here.  How should I?  But in
London there is plenty of talk about all kinds of things, and I find
I too have something in me.  It is true, as Clara says, that nobody
is anything particular to anybody, but that to me is rather pleasant.
I do not want too much of profound and eternal attachments.  They are
rather a burden.  They involve profound and eternal attachment on my
part; and I have always to be at my best; such watchfulness and such
jealousy!  I prefer a dressing-gown and slippers and bonds which are
not so tight.'

'Madge, Madge, I wish you would sometimes save me the trouble of
laboriously striving to discover what you really mean.'

Mrs Hopgood bethought herself that her daughters were talking too
much to one another, as they often did, even when guests were
present, and she therefore interrupted them.

'Mr Palmer, you see both town and country--which do you prefer?'

'Oh!  I hardly know; the country in summer-time, perhaps, and town in
the winter.'

This was a safe answer, and one which was not very original; that is
to say, it expressed no very distinct belief; but there was one valid
reason why he liked being in London in the winter.

'Your father, I remember, loves music.  I suppose you inherit his
taste, and it is impossible to hear good music in the country.'

'I am very fond of music.  Have you heard "St Paul?"  I was at
Birmingham when it was first performed in this country.  Oh! it IS
lovely,' and he began humming 'Be thou faithful unto death.'

Frank did really care for music.  He went wherever good music was to
be had; he belonged to a choral society and was in great request
amongst his father's friends at evening entertainments.  He could
also play the piano, so far as to be able to accompany himself
thereon.  He sang to himself when he was travelling, and often
murmured favourite airs when people around him were talking.  He had
lessons from an old Italian, a little, withered, shabby creature, who
was not very proud of his pupil.  'He is a talent,' said the Signor,
'and he will amuse himself; good for a ballad at a party, but a
musician? no!' and like all mere 'talents' Frank failed in his songs
to give them just what is of most value--just that which separates an
artistic performance from the vast region of well-meaning,
respectable, but uninteresting commonplace.  There was a curious lack
in him also of correspondence between his music and the rest of
himself.  As music is expression, it might be supposed that something
which it serves to express would always lie behind it; but this was
not the case with him, although he was so attractive and delightful
in many ways.  There could be no doubt that his love for Beethoven
was genuine, but that which was in Frank Palmer was not that of which
the sonatas and symphonies of the master are the voice.  He went into
raptures over the slow movement in the C minor Symphony, but no C
minor slow movement was discernible in his character.

'What on earth can be found in "St Paul" which can be put to music?'
said Madge.  'Fancy a chapter in the Epistle to the Romans turned
into a duet!'

'Madge!  Madge!  I am ashamed of you,' said her mother.

'Well, mother,' said Clara, 'I am sure that some of the settings by
your divinity, Handel, are absurd.  "For as in Adam all die" may be
true enough, and the harmonies are magnificent, but I am always
tempted to laugh when I hear it.'

Frank hummed the familiar apostrophe 'Be not afraid.'

'Is that a bit of "St Paul"?' said Mrs Hopgood.

'Yes, it goes like this,' and Frank went up to the little piano and
sang the song through.

'There is no fault to be found with that,' said Madge, 'so far as the
coincidence of sense and melody is concerned, but I do not care much
for oratorios.  Better subjects can be obtained outside the Bible,
and the main reason for selecting the Bible is that what is called
religious music may be provided for good people.  An oratorio, to me,
is never quite natural.  Jewish history is not a musical subject,
and, besides, you cannot have proper love songs in an oratorio, and
in them music is at its best.'

Mrs Hopgood was accustomed to her daughter's extravagance, but she
was, nevertheless, a little uncomfortable.

'Ah!' said Frank, who had not moved from the piano, and he struck the
first two bars of 'Adelaide.'

'Oh, please,' said Madge, 'go on, go on,' but Frank could not quite
finish it.

She was sitting on the little sofa, and she put her feet up, lay and
listened with her eyes shut.  There was a vibration in Mr Palmer's
voice not perceptible during his vision of the crown of life and of
fidelity to death.

'Are you going to stay over Sunday?' inquired Mrs Hopgood.

'I am not quite sure; I ought to be back on Sunday evening.  My
father likes me to be at home on that day.'

'Is there not a Mr Maurice who is a friend of your father?'

'Oh, yes, a great friend.'

'He is not High Church nor Low Church?'

'No, not exactly.'

'What is he, then?  What does he believe?'

'Well, I can hardly say; he does not believe that anybody will be
burnt in a brimstone lake for ever.'

'That is what he does not believe,' interposed Clara.

'He believes that Socrates and the great Greeks and Romans who acted
up to the light that was within them were not sent to hell.  I think
that is glorious, don't you?'

'Yes, but that also is something he does not believe.  What is there
in him which is positive?  What has he distinctly won from the
unknown?'

'Ah, Miss Hopgood, you ought to hear him yourself; he is wonderful.
I do admire him so much; I am sure you would like him.'

'If you do not go home on Saturday,' said Mrs Hopgood, 'we shall be
pleased if you will have dinner with us on Sunday; we generally go
for a walk in the afternoon.'

Frank hesitated, but at that moment Madge rose from the sofa.  Her
hair was disarranged, and she pushed its thick folds backward.  It
grew rather low down on her forehead and stood up a little on her
temples, a mystery of shadow and dark recess.  If it had been
electrical with the force of a strong battery and had touched him, he
could not have been more completely paralysed, and his half-erect
resolution to go back on Saturday was instantly laid flat.

'Thank you, Mrs Hopgood,' looking at Madge and meeting her eyes, 'I
think it very likely I shall stay, and if I do I will most certainly
accept your kind invitation.'



CHAPTER V



Sunday morning came, and Frank, being in the country, considered
himself absolved from the duty of going to church, and went for a
long stroll.  At half-past one he presented himself at Mrs Hopgood's
house.

'I have had a letter from London,' said Clara to Frank, 'telling me a
most extraordinary story, and I should like to know what you think of
it.  A man, who was left a widower, had an only child, a lovely
daughter of about fourteen years old, in whose existence his own was
completely wrapped up.  She was subject at times to curious fits of
self-absorption or absence of mind, and while she was under their
influence she resembled a somnambulist rather than a sane human being
awake.  Her father would not take her to a physician, for he dreaded
lest he should be advised to send her away from home, and he also
feared the effect which any recognition of her disorder might have
upon her.  He believed that in obscure and half-mental diseases like
hers, it was prudent to suppress all notice of them, and that if he
behaved to her as if she were perfectly well, she would stand a
chance of recovery.  Moreover, the child was visibly improving, and
it was probable that the disturbance in her health would be speedily
outgrown.  One hot day he went out shopping with her, and he observed
that she was tired and strange in her manner, although she was not
ill, or, at least, not so ill as he had often before seen her.  The
few purchases they had to make at the draper's were completed, and
they went out into the street.  He took her hand-bag, and, in doing
so, it opened and he saw to his horror a white silk pocket-
handkerchief crumpled up in it, which he instantly recognised as one
which had been shown him five minutes before, but he had not bought.
The next moment a hand was on his shoulder.  It was that of an
assistant, who requested that they would both return for a few
minutes.  As they walked the half dozen steps back, the father's
resolution was taken.  "I am sixty," he thought to himself, "and she
is fourteen."  They went into the counting-house and he confessed
that he had taken the handkerchief, but that it was taken by mistake
and that he was about to restore it when he was arrested.  The poor
girl was now herself again, but her mind was an entire blank as to
what she had done, and she could not doubt her father's statement,
for it was a man's handkerchief and the bag was in his hands.  The
draper was inexorable, and as he had suffered much from petty thefts
of late, had determined to make an example of the first offender whom
he could catch.  The father was accordingly prosecuted, convicted and
sentenced to imprisonment.  When his term had expired, his daughter,
who, I am glad to say, never for an instant lost her faith in him,
went away with him to a distant part of the country, where they lived
under an assumed name.  About ten years afterwards he died and kept
his secret to the last; but he had seen the complete recovery and
happy marriage of his child.  It was remarkable that it never
occurred to her that she might have been guilty, but her father's
confession, as already stated, was apparently so sincere that she
could do nothing but believe him.  You will wonder how the facts were
discovered.  After his death a sealed paper disclosing them was
found, with the inscription, "Not to be opened during my daughter's
life, and if she should have children or a husband who may survive
her, it is to be burnt."  She had no children, and when she died as
an old woman, her husband also being dead, the seal was broken.'

'Probably,' said Madge, 'nobody except his daughter believed he was
not a thief.  For her sake he endured the imputation of common
larceny, and was content to leave the world with only a remote chance
that he would ever be justified.'

'I wonder,' said Frank, 'that he did not admit that it was his
daughter who had taken the handkerchief, and excuse her on the ground
of her ailment.'

'He could not do that,' replied Madge.  'The object of his life was
to make as little of the ailment as possible.  What would have been
the effect on her if she had been made aware of its fearful
consequences?  Furthermore, would he have been believed?  And then--
awful thought, the child might have suspected him of attempting to
shield himself at her expense!  Do you think you could be capable of
such sacrifice, Mr Palmer?'

Frank hesitated.  'It would--'

'The question is not fair, Madge,' said Mrs Hopgood, interrupting
him.  'You are asking for a decision when all the materials to make
up a decision are not present.  It is wrong to question ourselves in
cold blood as to what we should do in a great strait; for the
emergency brings the insight and the power necessary to deal with it.
I often fear lest, if such-and-such a trial were to befall me, I
should miserably fail.  So I should, furnished as I now am, but not
as I should be under stress of the trial.'

'What is the use,' said Clara, 'of speculating whether we can, or
cannot, do this or that?  It IS now an interesting subject for
discussion whether the lie was a sin.'

'No,' said Madge, 'a thousand times no.'

'Brief and decisive.  Well, Mr Palmer, what do you say?'

'That is rather an awkward question.  A lie is a lie.'

'But not,' broke in Madge, vehemently, 'to save anybody whom you
love.  Is a contemptible little two-foot measuring-tape to be applied
to such an action as that?'

'The consequences of such a philosophy, though, my dear,' said Mrs
Hopgood, 'are rather serious.  The moment you dispense with a fixed
standard, you cannot refuse permission to other people to dispense
with it also.'

'Ah, yes, I know all about that, but I am not going to give up my
instinct for the sake of a rule.  Do what you feel to be right, and
let the rule go hang.  Somebody, cleverer in logic than we are, will
come along afterwards and find a higher rule which we have obeyed,
and will formulate it concisely.'

'As for my poor self,' said Clara, 'I do not profess to know, without
the rule, what is right and what is not.  We are always trying to
transcend the rule by some special pleading, and often in virtue of
some fancied superiority.  Generally speaking, the attempt is fatal.'

'Madge,' said Mrs Hopgood, 'your dogmatic decision may have been
interesting, but it prevented the expression of Mr Palmer's opinion.'

Madge bent forward and politely inclined her head to the embarrassed
Frank.

'I do not know what to say.  I have never thought much about such
matters.  Is not what they call casuistry a science among Roman
Catholics?  If I were in a difficulty and could not tell right from
wrong, I should turn Catholic, and come to you as my priest, Mrs
Hopgood.'

'Then you would do, not what you thought right yourself, but what I
thought right.  The worth of the right to you is that it is your
right, and that you arrive at it in your own way.  Besides, you might
not have time to consult anybody.  Were you never compelled to settle
promptly a case of this kind?'

'I remember once at school, when the mathematical master was out of
the class-room, a boy named Carpenter ran up to the blackboard and
wrote "Carrots" on it.  That was the master's nickname, for he was
red-haired.  Scarcely was the word finished, when Carpenter heard him
coming along the passage.  There was just time partially to rub out
some of the big letters, but CAR remained, and Carpenter was standing
at the board when "Carrots" came in.  He was an excitable man, and he
knew very well what the boys called him.

'"What have you been writing on the board, sir?"

'"Carpenter, sir."

'The master examined the board.  The upper half of the second R was
plainly perceptible, but it might possibly have been a P.  He turned
round, looked steadily at Carpenter for a moment, and then looked at
us.  Carpenter was no favourite, but not a soul spoke.

'"Go to your place, sir."

'Carpenter went to his place, the letters were erased and the lesson
was resumed.  I was greatly perplexed; I had acquiesced in a cowardly
falsehood.  Carrots was a great friend of mine, and I could not bear
to feel that he was humbugged, so when we were outside I went up to
Carpenter and told him he was an infernal sneak, and we had a
desperate fight, and I licked him, and blacked both his eyes.  I did
not know what else to do.'

The company laughed.

'We cannot,' said Madge, 'all of us come to terms after this fashion
with our consciences, but we have had enough of these discussions on
morality.  Let us go out.'

They went out, and, as some relief from the straight road, they
turned into a field as they came home, and walked along a footpath
which crossed the broad, deep ditches by planks.  They were within
about fifty yards of the last and broadest ditch, more a dyke than a
ditch, when Frank, turning round, saw an ox which they had not
noticed, galloping after them.

'Go on, go on,' he cried, 'make for the plank.'

He discerned in an instant that unless the course of the animal could
be checked it would overtake them before the bridge could be reached.
The women fled, but Frank remained.  He was in the habit of carrying
a heavy walking-stick, the end of which he had hollowed out in his
schooldays and had filled up with lead.  Just as the ox came upon
him, it laid its head to the ground, and Frank, springing aside,
dealt it a tremendous, two-handed blow on the forehead with his
knobbed weapon.  The creature was dazed, it stopped and staggered,
and in another instant Frank was across the bridge in safety.  There
was a little hysterical sobbing, but it was soon over.

'Oh, Mr Palmer,' said Mrs Hopgood, 'what presence of mind and what
courage!  We should have been killed without you.'

'The feat is not original, Mrs Hopgood.  I saw it done by a tough
little farmer last summer on a bull that was really mad.  There was
no ditch for him though, poor fellow, and he had to jump a hedge.'

'You did not find it difficult,' said Madge, 'to settle your problem
when it came to you in the shape of a wild ox.'

'Because there was nothing to settle,' said Frank, laughing; 'there
was only one thing to be done.'

'So you believed, or rather, so you saw,' said Clara.  'I should have
seen half-a-dozen things at once--that is to say, nothing.'

'And I,' said Madge, 'should have settled it the wrong way:  I am
sure I should, even if I had been a man.  I should have bolted.'

Frank stayed to tea, and the evening was musical.  He left about ten,
but just as the door had shut he remembered he had forgotten his
stick.  He gave a gentle rap and Madge appeared.  She gave him his
stick.

'Good-bye again.  Thanks for my life.'

Frank cursed himself that he could not find the proper word.  He knew
there was something which might be said and ought to be said, but he
could not say it.  Madge held out her hand to him, he raised it to
his lips and kissed it, and then, astonished at his boldness, he
instantly retreated.  He went to the 'Crown and Sceptre' and was soon
in bed, but not to sleep.  Strange, that the moment we lie down in
the dark, images, which were half obscured, should become so
intensely luminous!  Madge hovered before Frank with almost tangible
distinctness, and he felt his fingers moving in her heavy, voluptuous
tresses.  Her picture at last became almost painful to him and shamed
him, so that he turned over from side to side to avoid it.  He had
never been thrown into the society of women of his own age, for he
had no sister, and a fire was kindled within him which burnt with a
heat all the greater because his life had been so pure.  At last he
fell asleep and did not wake till late in the morning.  He had just
time to eat his breakfast, pay one more business visit in the town,
and catch the coach due at eleven o'clock from Lincoln to London.  As
the horses were being changed, he walked as near as he dared venture
to the windows of the cottage next door, but he could see nobody.
When the coach, however, began to move, he turned round and looked
behind him, and a hand was waved to him.  He took off his hat, and in
five minutes he was clear of the town.  It was in sight a long way,
but when, at last, it disappeared, a cloud of wretchedness swept over
him as the vapour sweeps up from the sea.  What was she doing?
talking to other people, existing for others, laughing with others!
There were miles between himself and Fenmarket.  Life! what was life?
A few moments of living and long, dreary gaps between.  All this,
however, is a vain attempt to delineate what was shapeless.  It was
an intolerable, unvanquishable oppression.  This was Love; this was
the blessing which the god with the ruddy wings had bestowed on him.
It was a relief to him when the coach rattled through Islington, and
in a few minutes had landed him at the 'Angel.'



CHAPTER VI



There was to be a grand entertainment in the assembly room of the
'Crown and Sceptre' in aid of the County Hospital.  Mrs Martin, widow
of one of the late partners in the bank, lived in a large house near
Fenmarket, and still had an interest in the business.  She was
distinctly above anybody who lived in the town, and she knew how to
show her superiority by venturing sometimes to do what her urban
neighbours could not possibly do.  She had been known to carry
through the street a quart bottle of horse physic although it was
wrapped up in nothing but brown paper.  On her way she met the
brewer's wife, who was more aggrieved than she was when Mrs Martin's
carriage swept past her in the dusty, narrow lane which led to the
Hall.  Mrs Martin could also afford to recognise in a measure the
claims of education and talent.  A gentleman came from London to
lecture in the town, and showed astonished Fenmarket an orrery and a
magic lantern with dissolving views of the Holy Land.  The exhibition
had been provided in order to extinguish a debt incurred in repairing
the church, but the rector's wife, and the brewer's wife, after
consultation, decided that they must leave the lecturer to return to
his inn.  Mrs Martin, however, invited him to supper.  Of course she
knew Mr Hopgood well, and knew that he was no ordinary man.  She knew
also something of Mrs Hopgood and the daughters, and that they were
no ordinary women.  She had been heard to say that they were ladies,
and that Mr Hopgood was a gentleman; and she kept up a distant kind
of intimacy with them, always nodded to them whenever she met them,
and every now and then sent them grapes and flowers.  She had
observed once or twice to Mrs Tubbs that Mr Hopgood was a remarkable
person, who was quite scientific and therefore did not associate with
the rest of the Fenmarket folk; and Mrs Tubbs was much annoyed,
particularly by a slight emphasis which she thought she detected in
the 'therefore,' for Mr Tubbs had told her that one of the smaller
London brewers, who had only about fifty public-houses, had refused
to meet at dinner a learned French chemist who had written books.
Mrs Martin could not make friends with the Hopgoods, nor enter the
cottage.  It would have been a transgression of that infinitely fine
and tortuous line whose inexplicable convolutions mark off what is
forbidden to a society lady.  Clearly, however, the Hopgoods could be
requested to co-operate at the 'Crown and Sceptre;' in fact, it would
be impolitic not to put some of the townsfolk on the list of patrons.
So it came about that Mrs Hopgood was included, and that she was made
responsible for the provision of one song and one recitation.  For
the song it was settled that Frank Palmer should be asked, as he
would be in Fenmarket.  Usually he came but once every half year, but
he had not been able, so he said, to finish all his work the last
time.  The recitation Madge undertook.

The evening arrived, the room was crowded and a dozen private
carriages stood in the 'Crown and Sceptre' courtyard.  Frank called
for the Hopgoods.  Mrs Hopgood and Clara sat with presentation
tickets in the second row, amongst the fashionable folk; Frank and
Madge were upon the platform.  Frank was loudly applauded in 'Il Mio
Tesoro,' but the loudest applause of the evening was reserved for
Madge, who declaimed Byron's 'Destruction of Sennacherib' with much
energy.  She certainly looked very charming in her red gown,
harmonising with her black hair.  The men in the audience were
vociferous for something more, and would not be contented until she
again came forward.  The truth is, that the wily young woman had
prepared herself beforehand for possibilities, but she artfully
concealed her preparation.  Looking on the ground and hesitating, she
suddenly raised her head as if she had just remembered something, and
then repeated Sir Henry Wotton's 'Happy Life.'  She was again greeted
with cheers, subdued so as to be in accordance with the character of
the poem, but none the less sincere, and in the midst of them she
gracefully bowed and retired.  Mrs Martin complimented her warmly at
the end of the performance, and inwardly debated whether Madge could
be asked to enliven one of the parties at the Hall, and how it could,
at the same time, be made clear to the guests that she and her
mother, who must come with her, were not even acquaintances, properly
so called, but were patronised as persons of merit living in the town
which the Hall protected.  Mrs Martin was obliged to be very careful.
She certainly was on the list at the Lord Lieutenant's, but she was
in the outer ring, and she was not asked to those small and select
little dinners which were given to Sir Egerton, the Dean of
Peterborough, Lord Francis, and his brother, the county member.  She
decided, however, that she could make perfectly plain the conditions
upon which the Hopgoods would be present, and the next day she sent
Madge a little note asking her if she would 'assist in some
festivities' at the Hall in about two months' time, which were to be
given in celebration of the twenty-first birthday of Mrs Martin's
third son.  The scene from the 'Tempest,' where Ferdinand and Miranda
are discovered playing chess, was suggested, and it was proposed that
Madge should be Miranda, and Mr Palmer Ferdinand.  Mrs Martin
concluded with a hope that Mrs Hopgood and her eldest daughter would
'witness the performance.'

Frank joyously consented, for amateur theatricals had always
attracted him, and in a few short weeks he was again at Fenmarket.
He was obliged to be there for three or four days before the
entertainment, in order to attend the rehearsals, which Mrs Martin
had put under the control of a professional gentleman from London,
and Madge and he were consequently compelled to make frequent
journeys to the Hall.

At last the eventful night arrived, and a carriage was hired next
door to take the party.  They drove up to the grand entrance and were
met by a footman, who directed Madge and Frank to their dressing-
rooms, and escorted Mrs Hopgood and Clara to their places in the
theatre.  They had gone early in order to accommodate Frank and
Madge, and they found themselves alone.  They were surprised that
there was nobody to welcome them, and a little more surprised when
they found that the places allotted to them were rather in the rear.
Presently two or three fiddlers were seen, who began to tune their
instruments.  Then some Fenmarket folk and some of the well-to-do
tenants on the estate made their appearance, and took seats on either
side of Mrs Hopgood and Clara.  Quite at the back were the servants.
At five minutes to eight the band struck up the overture to 'Zampa,'
and in the midst of it in sailed Mrs Martin and a score or two of
fashionably-dressed people, male and female.  The curtain ascended
and Prospero's cell was seen.  Alonso and his companions were
properly grouped, and Prospero began, -


   'Behold, Sir King,
The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero.'


The audience applauded him vigorously when he came to the end of his
speech, but there was an instantaneous cry of 'hush!' when Prospero
disclosed the lovers.  It was really very pretty.  Miranda wore a
loose, simple, white robe, and her wonderful hair was partly twisted
into a knot, and partly strayed down to her waist.  The dialogue
between the two was spoken with much dramatic feeling, and when
Ferdinand came to the lines -


   'Sir, she is mortal,
But by immortal Providence she's mine,'


old Boston, a worthy and wealthy farmer, who sat next to Mrs Hopgood,
cried out 'hear, hear!' but was instantly suppressed.

He put his head down behind the people in front of him, rubbed his
knees, grinned, and then turned to Mrs Hopgood, whom he knew, and
whispered, with his hand to his mouth, -


'And a precious lucky chap he is.'


Mrs Hopgood watched intently, and when Gonzalo invoked the gods to
drop a blessed crown on the couple, and the applause was renewed, and
Boston again cried 'hear, hear!' without fear of check, she did not
applaud, for something told her that behind this stage show a drama
was being played of far more serious importance.

The curtain fell, but there were loud calls for the performers.  It
rose, and they presented themselves, Alonso still holding the hands
of the happy pair.  The cheering now was vociferous, more
particularly when a wreath was flung at the feet of the young
princess, and Ferdinand, stooping, placed it on her head.

Again the curtain fell, the band struck up some dance music and the
audience were treated to 'something light,' and roared with laughter
at a pretty chambermaid at an inn who captivated and bamboozled a
young booby who was staying there, pitched him overboard; 'wondered
what he meant;' sang an audacious song recounting her many exploits,
and finished with a pas-seul.

The performers and their friends were invited to a sumptuous supper,
and the Fenmarket folk were not at home until half-past two in the
morning.  On their way back, Clara broke out against the
juxtaposition of Shakespeare and such vulgarity.

'Much better,' she said, 'to have left the Shakespeare out
altogether.  The lesson of the sequence is that each is good in its
way, a perfectly hateful doctrine to me.

Frank and Madge were, however, in the best of humours, especially
Frank, who had taken a glass of wine beyond his customary very
temperate allowance.

'But, Miss Hopgood, Mrs Martin had to suit all tastes; we must not be
too severe upon her.'

There was something in this remark most irritating to Clara; the word
'tastes,' for example, as if the difference between Miranda and the
chambermaid were a matter of 'taste.'  She was annoyed too with
Frank's easy, cheery tones for she felt deeply what she said, and his
mitigation and smiling latitudinarianism were more exasperating than
direct opposition.

'I am sure,' continued Frank, 'that if we were to take the votes of
the audience, Miranda would be the queen of the evening;' and he put
the crown which he had brought away with him on her head again.

Clara was silent.  In a few moments they were at the door of their
house.  It had begun to rain, and Madge, stepping out of the carriage
in a hurry, threw a shawl over her head, forgetting the wreath.  It
fell into the gutter and was splashed with mud.  Frank picked it up,
wiped it as well as he could with his pocket-handkerchief, took it
into the parlour and laid it on a chair.



CHAPTER VII



The next morning it still rained, a cold rain from the north-east, a
very disagreeable type of weather on the Fenmarket flats.  Madge was
not awake until late, and when she caught sight of the grey sky and
saw her finery tumbled on the floor--no further use for it in any
shape save as rags--and the dirty crown, which she had brought
upstairs, lying on the heap, the leaves already fading, she felt
depressed and miserable.  The breakfast was dull, and for the most
part all three were silent.  Mrs Hopgood and Clara went away to begin
their housework, leaving Madge alone.

'Madge,' cried Mrs Hopgood, 'what am I to do with this thing?  It is
of no use to preserve it; it is dead and covered with dirt.'

'Throw it down here.'

She took it and rammed it into the fire.  At that moment she saw
Frank pass.  He was evidently about to knock, but she ran to the door
and opened it.

'I did not wish to keep you waiting in the wet.'

'I am just off but I could not help calling to see how you are.
What! burning your laurels, the testimony to your triumph?'

'Triumph! rather transitory; finishes in smoke,' and she pushed two
or three of the unburnt leaves amongst the ashes and covered them
over.  He stooped down, picked up a leaf, smoothed it between his
fingers, and then raised his eyes.  They met hers at that instant, as
she lifted them and looked in his face.  They were near one another,
and his hands strayed towards hers till they touched.  She did not
withdraw; he clasped the hand, she not resisting; in another moment
his arms were round her, his face was on hers, and he was swept into
self-forgetfulness.  Suddenly the horn of the coach about to start
awoke him, and he murmured the line from one of his speeches of the
night before -


'But by immortal Providence she's mine.'


She released herself a trifle, held her head back as if she desired
to survey him apart from her, so that the ecstasy of union might be
renewed, and then fell on his neck.

The horn once more sounded, she let him out silently, and he was off.
Mrs Hopgood and Clara presently came downstairs.

'Mr Palmer came in to bid you good-bye, but he heard the coach and
was obliged to rush away.'

'What a pity,' said Mrs Hopgood, 'that you did not call us.'

'I thought he would be able to stay longer.'

The lines which followed Frank's quotation came into her head, -


'Sweet lord, you play me false.'
      'No, my dearest love,
   I would not for the world.'


'An omen,' she said to herself; '"he would not for the world."'

She was in the best of spirits all day long.  When the housework was
over and they were quiet together, she said, -

'Now, my dear mother and sister, I want to know how the performance
pleased you.'

'It was as good as it could be,' replied her mother, 'but I cannot
think why all plays should turn upon lovemaking.  I wonder whether
the time will ever come when we shall care for a play in which there
is no courtship.'

'What a horrible heresy, mother,' said Madge.

'It may be so; it may be that I am growing old, but it seems
astonishing to me sometimes that the world does not grow a little
weary of endless variations on the same theme.'

'Never,' said Madge, 'as long as it does not weary of the thing
itself, and it is not likely to do that.  Fancy a young man and a
young woman stopping short and exclaiming, "This is just what every
son of Adam and daughter of Eve has gone through before; why should
we proceed?"  Besides, it is the one emotion common to the whole
world; we can all comprehend it.  Once more, it reveals character.
In Hamlet and Othello, for example, what is interesting is not solely
the bare love.  The natures of Hamlet and Othello are brought to
light through it as they would not have been through any other
stimulus.  I am sure that no ordinary woman ever shows what she
really is, except when she is in love.  Can you tell what she is from
what she calls her religion, or from her friends, or even from her
husband?'

'Would it not be equally just to say women are more alike in love
than in anything else?  Mind, I do not say alike, but more alike.  Is
it not the passion which levels us all?'

'Oh, mother, mother! did one ever hear such dreadful blasphemy?  That
the loves, for example, of two such cultivated, exquisite creatures
as Clara and myself would be nothing different from those of the
barmaids next door?'

'Well, at anyrate, I do not want to see MY children in love to
understand what they are--to me at least.'

'Then, if you comprehend us so completely--and let us have no more
philosophy--just tell me, should I make a good actress?  Oh! to be
able to sway a thousand human beings into tears or laughter!  It must
be divine.'

'No, I do not think you would,' replied Clara.

'Why not, miss?  YOUR opinion, mind, was not asked.  Did I not act to
perfection last night?'

'Yes.'

'Then why are you so decisive?'

'Try a different part some day.  I may be mistaken.'

'You are very oracular.'

She turned to the piano, played a few chords, closed the instrument,
swung herself round on the music stool, and said she should go for a
walk.



CHAPTER VIII



It was Mr Palmer's design to send Frank abroad as soon as he
understood the home trade.  It was thought it would be an advantage
to him to learn something of foreign manufacturing processes.  Frank
had gladly agreed to go, but he was now rather in the mood for delay.
Mr Palmer conjectured a reason for it, and the conjecture was
confirmed when, after two or three more visits to Fenmarket,
perfectly causeless, so far as business was concerned, Frank asked
for the paternal sanction to his engagement with Madge.  Consent was
willingly given, for Mr Palmer knew the family well; letters passed
between him and Mrs Hopgood, and it was arranged that Frank's visit
to Germany should be postponed till the summer.  He was now
frequently at Fenmarket as Madge's accepted suitor, and, as the
spring advanced, their evenings were mostly spent by themselves out
of doors.  One afternoon they went for a long walk, and on their
return they rested by a stile.  Those were the days when Tennyson was
beginning to stir the hearts of the young people in England, and the
two little green volumes had just become a treasure in the Hopgood
household.  Mr Palmer, senior, knew them well, and Frank, hearing his
father speak so enthusiastically about them, thought Madge would like
them, and had presented them to her.  He had heard one or two read
aloud at home, and had looked at one or two himself, but had gone no
further.  Madge, her mother, and her sister had read and re-read
them.

'Oh,' said Madge, 'for that Vale in Ida.  Here in these fens how I
long for something that is not level!  Oh, for the roar of -


"The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea."


Go on with it, Frank.'

'I cannot.'

'But you know OEnone?'

'I cannot say I do.  I began it--'

'Frank, how could you begin it and lay it down unfinished?  Besides,
those lines are some of the first; you MUST remember -


"Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
Stands up and takes the morning."'


'No, I do not recollect, but I will learn them; learn them for your
sake.'

'I do not want you to learn them for my sake.'

'But I shall.'

She had taken off her hat and his hand strayed to her neck.  Her head
fell on his shoulder and she had forgotten his ignorance of OEnone.
Presently she awoke from her delicious trance and they moved
homewards in silence.  Frank was a little uneasy.

'I do greatly admire Tennyson,' he said.

'What do you admire?  You have hardly looked at him.'

'I saw a very good review of him.  I will look that review up, by the
way, before I come down again.  Mr Maurice was talking about it.'

Madge had a desire to say something, but she did not know what to
say, a burden lay upon her chest.  It was that weight which presses
there when we are alone with those with whom we are not strangers,
but with whom we are not completely at home, and she actually found
herself impatient and half-desirous of solitude.  This must be
criminal or disease, she thought to herself, and she forcibly
recalled Frank's virtues.  She was so far successful that when they
parted and he kissed her, she was more than usually caressing, and
her ardent embrace, at least for the moment, relieved that unpleasant
sensation in the region of the heart.  When he had gone she reasoned
with herself.  What a miserable counterfeit of love, she argued, is
mere intellectual sympathy, a sympathy based on books!  What did
Miranda know about Ferdinand's 'views' on this or that subject?  Love
is something independent of 'views.'  It is an attraction which has
always been held to be inexplicable, but whatever it may be it is not
'views.'  She was becoming a little weary, she thought, of what was
called 'culture.'  These creatures whom we know through Shakespeare
and Goethe are ghostly.  What have we to do with them?  It is idle
work to read or even to talk fine things about them.  It ends in
nothing.  What we really have to go through and that which goes
through it are interesting, but not circumstances and character
impossible to us.  When Frank spoke of his business, which he
understood, he was wise, and some observations which he made the
other day, on the management of his workpeople, would have been
thought original if they had been printed.  The true artist knows
that his hero must be a character shaping events and shaped by them,
and not a babbler about literature.  Frank, also, was so susceptible.
He liked to hear her read to him, and her enthusiasm would soon be
his.  Moreover, how gifted he was, unconsciously, with all that makes
a man admirable, with courage, with perfect unselfishness!  How
handsome he was, and then his passion for her!  She had read
something of passion, but she never knew till now what the white
intensity of its flame in a man could be.  She was committed, too,
happily committed; it was an engagement.

Thus, whenever doubt obtruded itself, she poured a self-raised tide
over it and concealed it.  Alas! it could not be washed away; it was
a little sharp rock based beneath the ocean's depths, and when the
water ran low its dark point reappeared.  She was more successful,
however, than many women would have been, for, although her interest
in ideas was deep, there was fire in her blood, and Frank's arm
around her made the world well nigh disappear; her surrender was
entire, and if Sinai had thundered in her ears she would not have
heard.  She was destitute of that power, which her sister possessed,
of surveying herself from a distance.  On the contrary, her emotion
enveloped her, and the safeguard of reflection on it was impossible
to her.

As to Frank, no doubt ever approached him.  He was intoxicated, and
beside himself.  He had been brought up in a clean household, knowing
nothing of the vice by which so many young men are overcome, and
woman hitherto had been a mystery to him.  Suddenly he found himself
the possessor of a beautiful creature, whose lips it was lawful to
touch and whose heartbeats he could feel as he pressed her to his
breast.  It was permitted him to be alone with her, to sit on the
floor and rest his head on her knees, and he had ventured to capture
one of her slippers and carry it off to London, where he kept it
locked up amongst his treasures.  If he had been drawn over Fenmarket
sluice in a winter flood he would not have been more incapable of
resistance.

Every now and then Clara thought she discerned in Madge that she was
not entirely content, but the cloud-shadows swept past so rapidly and
were followed by such dazzling sunshine that she was perplexed and
hoped that her sister's occasional moodiness might be due to parting
and absence, or the anticipation of them.  She never ventured to say
anything about Frank to Madge, for there was something in her which
forbade all approach from that side.  Once when he had shown his
ignorance of what was so familiar to the Hopgoods, and Clara had
expected some sign of dissatisfaction from her sister, she appeared
ostentatiously to champion him against anticipated criticism.  Clara
interpreted the warning and was silent, but, after she had left the
room with her mother in order that the lovers might be alone, she
went upstairs and wept many tears.  Ah! it is a sad experience when
the nearest and dearest suspects that we are aware of secret
disapproval, knows that it is justifiable, throws up a rampart and
becomes defensively belligerent.  From that moment all confidence is
at an end.  Without a word, perhaps, the love and friendship of years
disappear, and in the place of two human beings transparent to each
other, there are two who are opaque and indifferent.  Bitter, bitter!
If the cause of separation were definite disagreement upon conduct or
belief, we could pluck up courage, approach and come to an
understanding, but it is impossible to bring to speech anything which
is so close to the heart, and there is, therefore, nothing left for
us but to submit and be dumb.



CHAPTER IX



It was now far into June, and Madge and Frank extended their walks
and returned later.  He had come down to spend his last Sunday with
the Hopgoods before starting with his father for Germany, and on the
Monday they were to leave London.

Wordsworth was one of the divinities at Stoke Newington, and just
before Frank visited Fenmarket that week, he had heard the
Intimations of Immortality read with great fervour.  Thinking that
Madge would be pleased with him if she found that he knew something
about that famous Ode, and being really smitten with some of the
passages in it, he learnt it, and just as they were about to turn
homewards one sultry evening he suddenly began to repeat it, and
declaimed it to the end with much rhetorical power.

'Bravo!' said Madge, 'but, of all Wordsworth's poems, that is the one
for which I believe I care the least.'

Frank's countenance fell.

'Oh, me!  I thought it was just what would suit you.'

'No, not particularly.  There are some noble lines in it; for example
-


"And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"


But the very title--Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood--is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which is in
everybody's mouth -


"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;"


and still worse the vision of "that immortal sea," and of the
children who "sport upon the shore," they convey nothing whatever to
me.  I find though they are much admired by the clergy of the better
sort, and by certain religiously-disposed people, to whom thinking is
distasteful or impossible.  Because they cannot definitely believe,
they fling themselves with all the more fervour upon these cloudy
Wordsworthian phrases, and imagine they see something solid in the
coloured fog.'

It was now growing dark and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall,
but in a minute or two they ceased.  Frank, contrary to his usual
wont, was silent.  There was something undiscovered in Madge, a
region which he had not visited and perhaps could not enter.  She
discerned in an instant what she had done, and in an instant
repented.  He had taken so much pains with a long piece of poetry for
her sake:  was not that better than agreement in a set of
propositions?  Scores of persons might think as she thought about the
ode, who would not spend a moment in doing anything to gratify her.
It was delightful also to reflect that Frank imagined she would
sympathise with anything written in that temper.  She recalled what
she herself had said when somebody gave Clara a copy in 'Parian' of a
Greek statue, a thing coarse in outline and vulgar.  Clara was about
to put it in a cupboard in the attic, but Madge had pleaded so
pathetically that the donor had in a measure divined what her sister
loved, and had done her best, although she had made a mistake, that
finally the statue was placed on the bedroom mantelpiece.  Madge's
heart overflowed, and Frank had never attracted her so powerfully as
at that moment.  She took his hand softly in hers.

'Frank,' she murmured, as she bent her head towards him, 'it is
really a lovely poem.'

Suddenly there was a flash of forked lightning at some distance,
followed in a few seconds by a roll of thunder increasing in
intensity until the last reverberation seemed to shake the ground.
They took refuge in a little barn and sat down.  Madge, who was timid
and excited in a thunderstorm, closed her eyes to shield herself from
the glare.

The tumult in the heavens lasted for nearly two hours and, when it
was over, Madge and Frank walked homewards without speaking a word
for a good part of the way.

'I cannot, cannot go to-morrow,' he suddenly cried, as they neared
the town.

'You SHALL go,' she replied calmly.

'But, Madge, think of me in Germany, think what my dreams and
thoughts will be--you here--hundreds of miles between us.'

She had never seen him so shaken with terror.

'You SHALL go; not another word.'

'I must say something--what can I say?  My God, my God, have mercy on
me!'

'Mercy! mercy!' she repeated, half unconsciously, and then rousing
herself, exclaimed, 'You shall not say it; I will not hear; now,
good-bye.'

They had come to the door; he went inside; she took his face between
her hands, left one kiss on his forehead, led him back to the doorway
and he heard the bolts drawn.  When he recovered himself he went to
the 'Crown and Sceptre' and tried to write a letter to her, but the
words looked hateful, horrible on the paper, and they were not the
words he wanted.  He dared not go near the house the next morning,
but as he passed it on the coach he looked at the windows.  Nobody
was to be seen, and that night he left England.

'Did you hear,' said Clara to her mother at breakfast, 'that the
lightning struck one of the elms in the avenue at Mrs Martin's
yesterday evening and splintered it to the ground?'



CHAPTER X



In a few days Madge received the following letter:-


'FRANKFORT, O. M.,
HOTEL WAIDENBUSCH.

'My dearest Madge,--I do not know how to write to you.  I have begun
a dozen letters but I cannot bring myself to speak of what lies
before me, hiding the whole world from me.  Forgiveness! how is any
forgiveness possible?  But Madge, my dearest Madge, remember that my
love is intenser than ever.  What has happened has bound you closer
to me.  I IMPLORE you to let me come back.  I will find a thousand
excuses for returning, and we will marry.  We had vowed marriage to
each other and why should not our vows be fulfilled?  Marriage,
marriage AT ONCE.  You will not, you CANNOT, no, you CANNOT, you must
see you cannot refuse.  My father wishes to make this town his
headquarters for ten days.  Write by return for mercy's sake.--Your
ever devoted

'FRANK.'


The reply came only a day late.


'My dear Frank,--Forgiveness!  Who is to be forgiven?  Not you.  You
believed you loved me, but I doubted my love, and I know now that no
true love for you exists.  We must part, and part forever.  Whatever
wrong may have been done, marriage to avoid disgrace would be a wrong
to both of us infinitely greater.  I owe you an expiation; your
release is all I can offer, and it is insufficient.  I can only plead
that I was deaf and blind.  By some miracle, I cannot tell how, my
ears and eyes are opened, and I hear and see.  It is not the first
time in my life that the truth has been revealed to me suddenly,
supernaturally, I may say, as if in a vision, and I know the
revelation is authentic.  There must be no wavering, no half-
measures, and I absolutely forbid another letter from you.  If one
arrives I must, for the sake of my own peace and resolution, refuse
to read it.  You have simply to announce to your father that the
engagement is at an end, and give no reasons.--Your faithful friend

'MADGE HOPGOOD.'


Another letter did come, but Madge was true to her word, and it was
returned unopened.

For a long time Frank was almost incapable of reflection.  He dwelt
on an event which might happen, but which he dared not name; and if
it should happen!  Pictures of his father, his home his father's
friends, Fenmarket, the Hopgood household, passed before him with
such wild rapidity and intermingled complexity that it seemed as if
the reins had dropped out of his hands and he was being hurried away
to madness.

He resisted with all his might this dreadful sweep of the
imagination, tried to bring himself back into sanity and to devise
schemes by which, although he was prohibited from writing to Madge,
he might obtain news of her.  Her injunction might not be final.
There was but one hope for him, one possibility of extrication, one
necessity--their marriage.  It MUST be.  He dared not think of what
might be the consequences if they did not marry.

Hitherto Madge had given no explanation to her mother or sister of
the rupture, but one morning--nearly two months had now passed--Clara
did not appear at breakfast.

'Clara is not here,' said Mrs Hopgood; 'she was very tired last
night, perhaps it is better not to disturb her.'

'Oh, no! please let her alone.  I will see if she still sleeps.'

Madge went upstairs, opened her sister's door noiselessly, saw that
she was not awake, and returned.  When breakfast was over she rose,
and after walking up and down the room once or twice, seated herself
in the armchair by her mother's side.  Her mother drew herself a
little nearer, and took Madge's hand gently in her own.

'Madge, my child, have you nothing to say to your mother?'

'Nothing.'

'Cannot you tell me why Frank and you have parted?  Do you not think
I ought to know something about such an event in the life of one so
close to me?'

'I broke off the engagement:  we were not suited to one another.'

'I thought as much; I honour you; a thousand times better that you
should separate now than find out your mistake afterwards when it is
irrevocable.  Thank God, He has given you such courage!  But you must
have suffered--I know you must;' and she tenderly kissed her
daughter.

'Oh, mother! mother!' cried Madge, 'what is the worst--at least to--
you--the worst that can happen to a woman?'

Mrs Hopgood did not speak; something presented itself which she
refused to recognise, but she shuddered.  Before she could recover
herself Madge broke out again, -

'It has happened to me; mother, your daughter has wrecked your peace
for ever!'

'And he has abandoned you?'

'No, no; I told you it was I who left him.'

It was Mrs Hopgood's custom, when any evil news was suddenly
communicated to her, to withdraw at once if possible to her own room.
She detached herself from Madge, rose, and, without a word, went
upstairs and locked her door.  The struggle was terrible.  So much
thought, so much care, such an education, such noble qualities, and
they had not accomplished what ordinary ignorant Fenmarket mothers
and daughters were able to achieve!  This fine life, then, was a
failure, and a perfect example of literary and artistic training had
gone the way of the common wenches whose affiliation cases figured in
the county newspaper.  She was shaken and bewildered.  She was
neither orthodox nor secular.  She was too strong to be afraid that
what she disbelieved could be true, and yet a fatal weakness had been
disclosed in what had been set up as its substitute.  She could not
treat her child as a sinner who was to be tortured into something
like madness by immitigable punishment, but, on the other hand, she
felt that this sorrow was unlike other sorrows and that it could
never be healed.  For some time she was powerless, blown this way and
that way by contradictory storms, and unable to determine herself to
any point whatever.  She was not, however, new to the tempest.  She
had lived and had survived when she thought she must have gone down.
She had learned the wisdom which the passage through desperate
straits can bring.  At last she prayed and in a few minutes a message
was whispered to her.  She went into the breakfast-room and seated
herself again by Madge.  Neither uttered a word, but Madge fell down
before her, and, with a great cry, buried her face in her mother's
lap.  She remained kneeling for some time waiting for a rebuke, but
none came.  Presently she felt smoothing hands on her head and the
soft impress of lips.  So was she judged.



CHAPTER XI



It was settled that they should leave Fenmarket.  Their departure
caused but little surprise.  They had scarcely any friends, and it
was always conjectured that people so peculiar would ultimately find
their way to London.  They were particularly desirous to conceal
their movements, and therefore determined to warehouse their
furniture in town, to take furnished apartments there for three
months, and then to move elsewhere.  Any letters which might arrive
at Fenmarket for them during these three months would be sent to them
at their new address; nothing probably would come afterwards, and as
nobody in Fenmarket would care to take any trouble about them, their
trace would become obliterated.  They found some rooms near Myddelton
Square, Pentonville, not a particularly cheerful place, but they
wished to avoid a more distant suburb, and Pentonville was cheap.
Fortunately for them they had no difficulty whatever in getting rid
of the Fenmarket house for the remainder of their term.

For a little while London diverted them after a fashion, but the
absence of household cares told upon them.  They had nothing to do
but to read and to take dismal walks through Islington and Barnsbury,
and the gloom of the outlook thickened as the days became shorter and
the smoke began to darken the air.  Madge was naturally more
oppressed than the others, not only by reason of her temperament, but
because she was the author of the trouble which had befallen them.
Her mother and Clara did everything to sustain and to cheer her.
They possessed the rare virtue of continuous tenderness.  The love,
which with many is an inspiration, was with them their own selves,
from which they could not be separated; a harsh word could not
therefore escape from them.  It was as impossible as that there
should be any failure in the pressure with which the rocks press
towards the earth's centre.  Madge at times was very far gone in
melancholy.  How different this thing looked when it was close at
hand; when she personally was to be the victim!  She had read about
it in history, the surface of which it seemed scarcely to ripple; it
had been turned to music in some of her favourite poems and had lent
a charm to innumerable mythologies, but the actual fact was nothing
like the poetry or mythology, and threatened to ruin her own history
altogether.  Nor would it be her own history solely, but more or less
that of her mother and sister.

Had she believed in the common creed, her attention would have been
concentrated on the salvation of her own soul; she would have found
her Redeemer and would have been comparatively at peace; she would
have acknowledged herself convicted of infinite sin, and hell would
have been opened before her, but above the sin and the hell she would
have seen the distinct image of the Mediator abolishing both.
Popular theology makes personal salvation of such immense importance
that, in comparison therewith, we lose sight of the consequences to
others of our misdeeds.  The sense of cruel injustice to those who
loved her remained with Madge perpetually.

To obtain relief she often went out of London for the day; sometimes
her mother and sister went with her; sometimes she insisted on going
alone.  One autumn morning, she found herself at Letherhead, the
longest trip she had undertaken, for there were scarcely any railways
then.  She wandered about till she discovered a footpath which took
her to a mill-pond, which spread itself out into a little lake.  It
was fed by springs which burst up through the ground.  She watched at
one particular point, and saw the water boil up with such force that
it cleared a space of a dozen yards in diameter from every weed, and
formed a transparent pool just tinted with that pale azure which is
peculiar to the living fountains which break out from the bottom of
the chalk.  She was fascinated for a moment by the spectacle, and
reflected upon it, but she passed on.  In about three-quarters of an
hour she found herself near a church, larger than an ordinary village
church, and, as she was tired, and the gate of the church porch was
open, she entered and sat down.  The sun streamed in upon her, and
some sheep which had strayed into the churchyard from the adjoining
open field came almost close to her, unalarmed, and looked in her
face.  The quiet was complete, and the air so still, that a yellow
leaf dropping here and there from the churchyard elms--just beginning
to turn--fell quiveringly in a straight path to the earth.  Sick at
heart and despairing, she could not help being touched, and she
thought to herself how strange the world is--so transcendent both in
glory and horror; a world capable of such scenes as those before her,
and a world in which such suffering as hers could be; a world
infinite both ways.  The porch gate was open because the organist was
about to practise, and in another instant she was listening to the
Kyrie from Beethoven's Mass in C.  She knew it; Frank had tried to
give her some notion of it on the piano, and since she had been in
London she had heard it at St Mary's, Moorfields.  She broke down and
wept, but there was something new in her sorrow, and it seemed as if
a certain Pity overshadowed her.

She had barely recovered herself when she saw a woman, apparently
about fifty, coming towards her with a wicker basket on her arm.  She
sat down beside Madge, put her basket on the ground, and wiped her
face with her apron.

'Marnin' miss! its rayther hot walkin', isn't it?  I've come all the
way from Darkin, and I'm goin' to Great Oakhurst.  That's a longish
step there and back again; not that this is the nearest way, but I
don't like climbing them hills, and then when I get to Letherhead I
shall have a lift in a cart.'

Madge felt bound to say something as the sunburnt face looked kind
and motherly.

'I suppose you live at Great Oakhurst?'

'Yes.  I do:  my husband, God bless him! he was a kind of foreman at
The Towers, and when he died I was left alone and didn't know what to
be at, as both my daughters were out and one married; so I took the
general shop at Great Oakhurst, as Longwood used to have, but it
don't pay for I ain't used to it, and the house is too big for me,
and there isn't nobody proper to mind it when I goes over to Darkin
for anything.'

'Are you going to leave?'

'Well, I don't quite know yet, miss, but I thinks I shall live with
my daughter in London.  She's married a cabinetmaker in Great Ormond
Street:  they let lodgings, too.  Maybe you know that part?'

'No, I do not.'

'You don't live in London, then?'

'Yes, I do.  I came from London this morning.'

'The Lord have mercy on us, did you though!  I suppose, then, you're
a-visitin' here.  I know most of the folk hereabouts.'

'No:  I am going back this afternoon.'

Her interrogator was puzzled and her curiosity stimulated.  Presently
she looked in Madge's face.

'Ah! my poor dear, you'll excuse me, I don't mean to be forward, but
I see you've been a-cryin':  there's somebody buried here.'

'No.'

That was all she could say.  The walk from Letherhead, and the
excitement had been too much for her and she fainted.  Mrs Caffyn,
for that was her name, was used to fainting fits.  She was often 'a
bit faint' herself, and she instantly loosened Madge's gown, brought
out some smelling-salts and also a little bottle of brandy and water.
Something suddenly struck her.  She took up Madge's hand:  there was
no wedding ring on it.

Presently her patient recovered herself.

'Look you now, my dear; you aren't noways fit to go back to London
to-day.  If you was my child you shouldn't do it for all the gold in
the Indies, no, nor you sha'n't now.  I shouldn't have a wink of
sleep this night if I let you go, and if anything were to happen to
you it would be me as 'ud have to answer for it.'

'But I must go; my mother and sister will not know what has become of
me.'

'You leave that to me; I tell you again as you can't go.  I've been a
mother myself, and I haven't had children for nothing.  I was just a-
goin' to send a little parcel up to my daughter by the coach, and her
husband's a-goin' to meet it.  She'd left something behind last week
when she was with me, and I thought I'd get a bit of fresh butter
here for her and put along with it.  They make better butter in the
farm in the bottom there, than they do at Great Oakhurst.  A note
inside now will get to your mother all right; you have a bit of
something to eat and drink here, and you'll be able to walk along of
me just into Letherhead, and then you can ride to Great Oakhurst;
it's only about two miles, and you can stay there all night.'

Madge was greatly touched; she took Mrs Caffyn's hands in hers,
pressed them both and consented.  She was very weary, and the stamp
on Mrs Caffyn's countenance was indubitable; it was evidently no
forgery, but of royal mintage.  They walked slowly to Letherhead, and
there they found the carrier's cart, which took them to Great
Oakhurst.



CHAPTER XII



Mrs Caffyn's house was a roomy old cottage near the church, with a
bow-window in which were displayed bottles of 'suckers,' and of Day &
Martin's blacking, cotton stuffs, a bag of nuts and some mugs, cups
and saucers.  Inside were salt butter, washing-blue, drapery,
treacle, starch, tea, tobacco and snuff, cheese, matches, bacon, and
a few drugs, such as black draught, magnesia, pills, sulphur, dill-
water, Dalby's Carminative, and steel-drops.  There was also a small
stock of writing-paper, string and tin ware.  A boy was behind the
counter.  When Mrs Caffyn was out he always asked the customers who
desired any article, the sale of which was in any degree an art, to
call again when she returned.  He went as far as those things which
were put up in packets, such as what were called 'grits' for making
gruel, and he was also authorised to venture on pennyworths of
liquorice and peppermints, but the sale of half-a-dozen yards of
cotton print was as much above him as the negotiation of a treaty of
peace would be to a messenger in the Foreign Office.  In fact,
nobody, excepting children, went into the shop when Mrs Caffyn was
not to be seen there, and, if she had to go to Dorking or Letherhead
on business, she always chose the middle of the day, when the folk
were busy at their homes or in the fields.  Poor woman! she was much
tried.  Half the people who dealt with her were in her debt, but she
could not press them for her money.  During winter-time they were
discharged by the score from their farms, but as they were not
sufficiently philosophic, or sufficiently considerate for their
fellows to hang or drown themselves, they were obliged to consume
food, and to wear clothes, for which they tried to pay by instalments
during spring, summer and autumn.  Mrs Caffyn managed to make both
ends meet by the help of two or three pigs, by great economy, and by
letting some of her superfluous rooms.  Great Oakhurst was not a show
place nor a Spa, but the Letherhead doctor had once recommended her
to a physician in London, who occasionally sent her a patient who
wanted nothing but rest and fresh air.  She also, during the
shooting-season, was often asked to find a bedroom for visitors to
The Towers.

She might have done better had she been on thoroughly good terms with
the parson.  She attended church on Sunday morning with tolerable
regularity.  She never went inside a dissenting chapel, and was not
heretical on any definite theological point, but the rector and she
were not friends.  She had lived in Surrey ever since she was a
child, but she was not Surrey born.  Both her father and mother came
from the north country, and migrated southwards when she was very
young.  They were better educated than the southerners amongst whom
they came; and although their daughter had no schooling beyond what
was obtainable in a Surrey village of that time, she was
distinguished by a certain superiority which she had inherited or
acquired from her parents.  She was never subservient to the rector
after the fashion of her neighbours; she never curtsied to him, and
if he passed and nodded she said 'Marnin', sir,' in just the same
tone as that in which she said it to the smallest of the Great
Oakhurst farmers.  Her church-going was an official duty incumbent
upon her as the proprietor of the only shop in the parish.  She had
nothing to do with church matters except on Sunday, and she even went
so far as to neglect to send for the rector when one of her children
lay dying.  She was attacked for the omission, but she defended
herself.

'What was the use when the poor dear was only seven year old?  What
call was there for him to come to a blessed innocent like that?  I
did tell him to look in when my husband was took, for I know as
before we were married there was something atween him and that gal
Sanders.  He never would own up to me about it, and I thought as he
might to a clergyman, and, if he did, it would ease his mind and make
it a bit better for him afterwards; but, Lord! it warn't no use, for
he went off and we didn't so much as hear her name, not even when he
was a-wandering.  I says to myself when the parson left, "What's the
good of having you?"'

Mrs Caffyn was a Christian, but she was a disciple of St James rather
than of St Paul.  She believed, of course, the doctrines of the
Catechism, in the sense that she denied none, and would have assented
to all if she had been questioned thereon; but her belief that
'faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone,' was something
very vivid and very practical.

Her estimate, too, of the relative values of the virtues and of the
relative sinfulness of sins was original, and the rector therefore
told all his parishioners that she was little better than a heathen.
The common failings in that part of the country amongst the poor were
Saturday-night drunkenness and looseness in the relations between the
young men and young women.  Mrs Caffyn's indignation never rose to
the correct boiling point against these crimes.  The rector once
ventured to say, as the case was next door to her, -

'It is very sad, is it not, Mrs Caffyn, that Polesden should be so
addicted to drink.  I hope he did not disturb you last Saturday
night.  I have given the constable directions to look after the
street more closely on Saturday evening, and if Polesden again
offends he must be taken up.'

Mrs Caffyn was behind her own counter.  She had just served a
customer with two ounces of Dutch cheese, and she sat down on her
stool.  Being rather a heavy woman she always sat down when she was
not busy, and she never rose merely to talk.

'Yes, it is sad, sir, and Polesden isn't no particular friend of
mine, but I tell you what's sad too, sir, and that's the way them
people are mucked up in that cottage.  Why, their living room opens
straight on the road, and the wind comes in fit to blow your head
off, and when he goes home o' nights, there's them children a-
squalling, and he can't bide there and do nothing.'

'I am afraid, though, Mrs Caffyn, there must be something radically
wrong with that family.  I suppose you know all about the eldest
daughter?'

'Yes, sir, I HAVE heard it:  it wouldn't be Great Oakhurst if I
hadn't, but p'r'aps, sir, you've never been upstairs in that house,
and yet a house it isn't.  There's just two sleeping-rooms, that's
all; it's shameful, it isn't decent.  Well, that gal, she goes away
to service.  Maybe, sir, them premises at the farm are also unbeknown
to you.  In the back kitchen there's a broadish sort of shelf as Jim
climbs into o' nights, and it has a rail round it to keep you from a-
falling out, and there's a ladder as they draws up in the day as goes
straight up from that kitchen to the gal's bedroom door.  It's
downright disgraceful, and I don't believe the Lord A'mighty would be
marciful to neither of US if we was tried like that.'

Mrs Caffyn bethought herself of the 'us' and was afraid that even she
had gone a little too far; 'leastways, speaking for myself, sir,' she
added.

The rector turned rather red, and repented his attempt to enlist Mrs
Caffyn.

'If the temptations are so great, Mrs Caffyn, that is all the more
reason why those who are liable to them should seek the means which
are provided in order that they may be overcome.  I believe the
Polesdens are very lax attendants at church, and I don't think they
ever communicated.'

Mrs Polesden at that moment came in for an ounce of tea, and as Mrs
Caffyn rose to weigh it, the rector departed with a stiff 'good-
morning,' made to do duty for both women.



CHAPTER XIII



Mrs Caffyn persuaded Madge to go to bed at once, after giving her
'something to comfort her.'  In the morning her kind hostess came to
her bedside.

'You've got a mother, haven't you--leastways, I know you have,
because you wrote to her.'

'Yes.'

'Well, and you lives with her and she looks after you?'

'Yes.'

'And she's fond of you, maybe?'

'Oh, yes.'

'That's a marcy; well then, my dear, you shall go back in the cart to
Letherhead, and you'll catch the Darkin coach to London.'

'You have been very good to me; what have I to pay you?'

'Pay?  Nothing! why, if I was to let you pay, it would just look as
if I'd trapped you here to get something out of you.  Pay! no, not a
penny.'

'I can afford very well to pay, but if it vexes you I will not offer
anything.  I don't know how to thank you enough.'

Madge took Mrs Caffyn's hand in hers and pressed it firmly.

'Besides, my dear,' said Mrs Caffyn, smoothing the sheets a little,
'you won't mind my saying it, I expex you are in trouble.  There's
something on your mind, and I believe as I knows pretty well what it
is.'

Madge turned round in the bed so as no longer to face the light; Mrs
Caffyn sat between her and the window.

'Look you here, my dear; don't you suppose I meant to say anything to
hurt you.  The moment I looked on you I was drawed to you like; I
couldn't help it.  I see'd what was the matter, but I was all the
more drawed, and I just wanted you to know as it makes no difference.
That's like me; sometimes I'm drawed that way and sometimes t'other
way, and it's never no use for me to try to go against it.  I ain't
a-going to say anything more to you; God-A'mighty, He's above us all;
but p'r'aps you may be comm' this way again some day, and then you'll
look in.'

Madge turned again to the light, and again caught Mrs Caffyn's hand,
but was silent.

The next morning, after Madge's return, Mrs Cork, the landlady,
presented herself at the sitting-room door and 'wished to speak with
Mrs Hopgood for a minute.'

'Come in, Mrs Cork.'

'Thank you, ma'am, but I prefer as you should come downstairs.'

Mrs Cork was about forty, a widow with no children.  She had a face
of which it was impossible to recollect, when it had been seen even a
dozen times, any feature except the eyes, which were steel-blue, a
little bluer than the faceted head of the steel poker in her parlour,
but just as hard.  She lived in the basement with a maid, much like
herself but a little more human.  Although the front underground room
was furnished Mrs Cork never used it, except on the rarest occasions,
and a kind of apron of coloured paper hung over the fireplace nearly
all the year.  She was a woman of what she called regular habits.  No
lodger was ever permitted to transgress her rules, or to have meals
ten minutes before or ten minutes after the appointed time.  She had
undoubtedly been married, but who Cork could have been was a marvel.
Why he died, and why there were never any children were no marvels.
At two o'clock her grate was screwed up to the narrowest possible
dimensions, and the ashes, potato peelings, tea leaves and cabbage
stalks were thrown on the poor, struggling coals.  No meat, by the
way, was ever roasted--it was considered wasteful--everything was
baked or boiled.  After half-past four not a bit of anything that was
not cold was allowed till the next morning, and, indeed, from the
first of April to the thirty-first of October the fire was raked out
the moment tea was over.  Mrs Hopgood one night was not very well and
Clara wished to give her mother something warm.  She rang the bell
and asked for hot water.  Maria came up and disappeared without a
word after receiving the message.  Presently she returned.

'Mrs Cork, miss, wishes me to tell you as it was never understood as
'ot water would be required after tea, and she hasn't got any.'

Mrs Hopgood had a fire, although it was not yet the thirty-first of
October, for it was very damp and raw.  She had with much difficulty
induced Mrs Cork to concede this favour (which probably would not
have been granted if the coals had not yielded a profit of threepence
a scuttleful), and Clara, therefore, asked if she could not have the
kettle upstairs.  Again Maria disappeared and returned.

'Mrs Cork says, miss, as it's very ill-convenient as the kettle is
cleaned up agin to-morrow, and if you can do without it she will be
obliged.'

It was of no use to continue the contest, and Clara bethought herself
of a little 'Etna' she had in her bedroom.  She went to the
druggist's, bought some methylated spirit, and obtained what she
wanted.

Mrs Cork had one virtue and one weakness.  Her virtue was
cleanliness, but she persecuted the 'blacks,' not because she
objected to dirt as dirt, but because it was unauthorised, appeared
without permission at irregular hours, and because the glittering
polish on varnished paint and red mahogany was a pleasure to her.
She liked the dirt, too, in a way, for she enjoyed the exercise of
her ill-temper on it and the pursuit of it to destruction.  Her
weakness was an enormous tom-cat which had a bell round its neck and
slept in a basket in the kitchen, the best-behaved and most moral cat
in the parish.  At half-past nine every evening it was let out into
the back-yard and vanished.  At ten precisely it was heard to mew and
was immediately admitted.  Not once in a twelvemonth did that cat
prolong its love making after five minutes to ten.

Mrs Hopgood went upstairs to her room, Mrs Cork following and closing
the door.

'If you please, ma'am, I wish to give you notice to leave this day
week.'

'What is the matter, Mrs Cork?'

'Well, ma'am, for one thing, I didn't know as you'd bring a bird with
you.'

It was a pet bird belonging to Madge.

'But what harm does the bird do?  It gives no trouble; my daughter
attends to it.'

'Yes, ma'am, but it worrits my Joseph--the cat, I mean.  I found him
the other mornin' on the table eyin' it, and I can't a-bear to see
him urritated.'

'I should hardly have thought that a reason for parting with good
lodgers.'

Mrs Hopgood had intended to move, as before explained, but she did
not wish to go till the three months had expired.

'I don't say as that is everything, but if you wish me to tell you
the truth, Miss Madge is not a person as I like to keep in the house.
I wish you to know'--Mrs Cork suddenly became excited and venomous--
'that I'm a respectable woman, and have always let my apartments to
respectable people, and do you think I should ever let them to
respectable people again if it got about as I had had anybody as
wasn't respectable?  Where was she last night?  And do you suppose as
me as has been a married woman can't see the condition she's in?  I
say as you, Mrs Hopgood, ought to be ashamed of yourself for bringing
of such a person into a house like mine, and you'll please vacate
these premises on the day named.'  She did not wait for an answer,
but banged the door after her, and went down to her subterranean den.

Mrs Hopgood did not tell her children the true reason for leaving.
She merely said that Mrs Cork had been very impertinent, and that
they must look out for other rooms.  Madge instantly recollected
Great Ormond Street, but she did not know the number, and oddly
enough she had completely forgotten Mrs Caffyn's name.  It was a
peculiar name, she had heard it only once, she had not noticed it
over the door, and her exhaustion may have had something to do with
her loss of memory.  She could not therefore write, and Mrs Hopgood
determined that she herself would go to Great Oakhurst.  She had
another reason for her journey.  She wished her kind friend there to
see that Madge had really a mother who cared for her.  She was
anxious to confirm Madge's story, and Mrs Caffyn's confidence.  Clara
desired to go also, but Mrs Hopgood would not leave Madge alone, and
the expense of a double fare was considered unnecessary.

When Mrs Hopgood came to Letherhead on her return, the coach was full
inside, and she was obliged to ride outside, although the weather was
cold and threatening.  In about half an hour it began to rain
heavily, and by the time she was in Pentonville she was wet through.
The next morning she ought to have lain in bed, but she came down at
her accustomed hour as Mrs Cork was more than usually disagreeable,
and it was settled that they would leave at once if the rooms in
Great Ormond Street were available.  Clara went there directly after
breakfast, and saw Mrs Marshall, who had already received an
introductory letter from her mother.



CHAPTER XIV



The Marshall family included Marshall and his wife.  He was rather a
small man, with blackish hair, small lips, and with a nose just a
little turned up at the tip.  As we have been informed, he was a
cabinet-maker.  He worked for very good shops, and earned about two
pounds a week.  He read books, but he did not know their value, and
often fancied he had made a great discovery on a bookstall of an
author long ago superseded and worthless.  He belonged to a
mechanic's institute, and was fond of animal physiology; heard
courses of lectures on it at the institute, and had studied two or
three elementary handbooks.  He found in a second-hand dealer's shop
a model, which could be taken to pieces, of the inside of the human
body.  He had also bought a diagram of a man, showing the
circulation, and this he had hung in his bedroom, his mother-in-law
objecting most strongly on the ground that its effect on his wife was
injurious.  He had a notion that the world might be regenerated if
men and women were properly instructed in physiological science, and
if before marriage they would study their own physical peculiarities,
and those of their intended partners.  The crossing of peculiarities
nevertheless presented difficulties.  A man with long legs surely
ought to choose a woman with short legs, but if a man who was
mathematical married a woman who was mathematical, the result might
be a mathematical prodigy.  On the other hand the parents of the
prodigy might each have corresponding qualities, which, mixed with
the mathematical tendency, would completely nullify it.  The path of
duty therefore was by no means plain.  However, Marshall was sure
that great cities dwarfed their inhabitants, and as he himself was
not so tall as his father, and, moreover, suffered from bad
digestion, and had a tendency to 'run to head,' he determined to
select as his wife a 'daughter of the soil,' to use his own phrase,
above the average height, with a vigorous constitution and plenty of
common sense.  She need not be bookish, 'he could supply all that
himself.'  Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn.  His mother and Mrs
Caffyn had been early friends.  He was not mistaken in Sarah.  She
was certainly robust; she was a shrewd housekeeper, and she never
read anything, except now and then a paragraph or two in the weekly
newspaper, notwithstanding (for there were no children), time hung
rather heavily on her hands.  One child had been born, but to
Marshall's surprise and disappointment it was a poor, rickety thing,
and died before it was a twelvemonth old.

Mrs Marshall was not a very happy woman.  Marshall was a great
politician and spent many of his evenings away from home at political
meetings.  He never informed her what he had been doing, and if he
had told her, she would neither have understood nor cared anything
about it.  At Great Oakhurst she heard everything and took an
interest in it, and she often wished with all her heart that the
subject which occupied Marshall's thoughts was not Chartism but the
draining of that heavy, rush-grown bit of rough pasture that lay at
the bottom of the village.  He was very good and kind to her, and she
never imagined, before marriage, that he ought to be more.  She was
sure that at Great Oakhurst she would have been quite comfortable
with him but somehow, in London, it was different.  'I don't know how
it is,' she said one day, 'the sort of husband as does for the
country doesn't do for London.'

At Great Oakhurst, where the doors were always open into the yard and
the garden, where every house was merely a covered bit of the open
space, where people were always in and out, and women never sat down,
except to their meals, or to do a little stitching or sewing, it was
really not necessary, as Mrs Caffyn observed, that husband and wife
should 'hit it so fine.'  Mrs Marshall hated all the conveniences of
London.  She abominated particularly the taps, and longed to be
obliged in all weathers to go out to the well and wind up the bucket.
She abominated also the dust-bin, for it was a pleasure to be
compelled--so at least she thought it now--to walk down to the muck-
heap and throw on it what the pig could not eat.  Nay, she even
missed that corner of the garden against the elder-tree, where the
pig-stye was, for 'you could smell the elder-flowers there in the
spring-time, and the pig-stye wasn't as bad as the stuffy back room
in Great Ormond Street when three or four men were in it.'  She did
all she could to spend her energy on her cooking and cleaning, but
'there was no satisfaction in it,' and she became much depressed,
especially after the child died.  This was the main reason why Mrs
Caffyn determined to live with her.  Marshall was glad she resolved
to come.  His wife had her full share of the common sense he desired,
but the experiment had not altogether succeeded.  He knew she was
lonely, and he was sorry for her, although he did not see how he
could mend matters.  He reflected carefully, nothing had happened
which was a surprise to him, the relationship was what he had
supposed it would be, excepting that the child did not live and its
mother was a little miserable.  There was nothing he would not do for
her, but he really had nothing more to offer her.

Although Mrs Marshall had made up her mind that husbands and wives
could not be as contented with one another in the big city as they
would be in a village, a suspicion crossed her mind one day that,
even in London, the relationship might be different from her own.
She was returning from Great Oakhurst after a visit to her mother.
She had stayed there for about a month after her child's death, and
she travelled back to town with a Letherhead woman, who had married a
journeyman tanner, who formerly worked in the Letherhead tan-yard,
and had now moved to Bermondsey, a horrid hole, worse than Great
Ormond Street.  Both Marshall and the tanner were at the 'Swan with
Two Necks' to meet the covered van, and the tanner's wife jumped out
first.

'Hullo, old gal, here you are,' cried the tanner, and clasped her in
his brown, bark-stained arms, giving her, nothing loth, two or three
hearty kisses.  They were so much excited at meeting one another,
that they forgot their friends, and marched off without bidding them
good-bye.  Mrs Marshall was welcomed in quieter fashion.

'Ah!' she thought to herself.  'Red Tom,' as the tanner was called,
'is not used to London ways.  They are, perhaps, correct for London,
but Marshall might now and then remember that I have not been brought
up to them.'

To return, however, to the Hopgoods.  Before the afternoon they were
in their new quarters, happily for them, for Mrs Hopgood became
worse.  On the morrow she was seriously ill, inflammation of the
lungs appeared, and in a week she was dead.  What Clara and Madge
suffered cannot be told here.  Whenever anybody whom we love dies, we
discover that although death is commonplace it is terribly original.
We may have thought about it all our lives, but if it comes close to
us, it is quite a new, strange thing to us, for which we are entirely
unprepared.  It may, perhaps, not be the bare loss so much as the
strength of the bond which is broken that is the surprise, and we are
debtors in a way to death for revealing something in us which
ordinary life disguises.  Long after the first madness of their grief
had passed, Clara and Madge were astonished to find how dependent
they had been on their mother.  They were grown-up women accustomed
to act for themselves, but they felt unsteady, and as if deprived of
customary support.  The reference to her had been constant, although
it was often silent, and they were not conscious of it.  A defence
from the outside waste desert had been broken down, their mother had
always seemed to intervene between them and the world, and now they
were exposed and shelterless.

Three parts of Mrs Hopgood's little income was mainly an annuity, and
Clara and Madge found that between them they had but seventy-five
pounds a year.



CHAPTER XV



Frank could not rest.  He wrote again to Clara at Fenmarket; the
letter went to Mrs Cork's, and was returned to him.  He saw that the
Hopgoods had left Fenmarket, and suspecting the reason, he determined
at any cost to go home.  He accordingly alleged ill-health, a pretext
not altogether fictitious, and within a few days after the returned
letter reached him he was back at Stoke Newington.  He went
immediately to the address in Pentonville which he found on the
envelope, but was very shortly informed by Mrs Cork that 'she knew
nothing whatever about them.'  He walked round Myddelton Square,
hopeless, for he had no clue whatever.

What had happened to him would scarcely, perhaps, have caused some
young men much uneasiness, but with Frank the case was altogether
different.  There was a chance of discovery, and if his crime should
come to light his whole future life would be ruined.  He pictured his
excommunication, his father's agony, and it was only when it seemed
possible that the water might close over the ghastly thing thrown in
it, and no ripple reveal what lay underneath, that he was able to
breathe again.  Immediately he asked himself, however, IF he could
live with his father and wear a mask, and never betray his dreadful
secret.  So he wandered homeward in the most miserable of all
conditions; he was paralysed by the intricacy of the coil which
enveloped and grasped him.

That evening it happened that there was a musical party at his
father's house; and, of course, he was expected to assist.  It would
have suited his mood better if he could have been in his own room, or
out in the streets, but absence would have been inconsistent with his
disguise, and might have led to betrayal.  Consequently he was
present, and the gaiety of the company and the excitement of his
favourite exercise, brought about for a time forgetfulness of his
trouble.  Amongst the performers was a distant cousin, Cecilia
Morland, a young woman rather tall and fully developed; not
strikingly beautiful, but with a lovely reddish-brown tint on her
face, indicative of healthy, warm, rich pulsations.  She possessed a
contralto voice, of a quality like that of a blackbird, and it fell
to her and to Frank to sing.  She was dressed in a fashion perhaps a
little more courtly than was usual in the gatherings at Mr Palmer's
house, and Frank, as he stood beside her at the piano, could not
restrain his eyes from straying every now and then a way from his
music to her shoulders, and once nearly lost himself, during a solo
which required a little unusual exertion, in watching the movement of
a locket and of what was for a moment revealed beneath it.  He
escorted her amidst applause to a corner of the room, and the two sat
down side by side.

'What a long time it is, Frank, since you and I sang that duet
together.  We have seen nothing of you lately.'

'Of course not; I was in Germany.'

'Yes, but I think you deserted us before then.  Do you remember that
summer when we were all together at Bonchurch, and the part songs
which astonished our neighbours just as it was growing dark?  I
recollect you and I tried together that very duet for the first time
with the old lodging-house piano.'

Frank remembered that evening well.

'You sang better than you did to-night.  You did not keep time:  what
were you dreaming about?'

'How hot the room is!  Do you not feel it oppressive?  Let us go into
the conservatory for a minute.'

The door was behind them and they slipped in and sat down, just
inside, and under the orange tree.

'You must not be away so long again.  Now mind, we have a musical
evening this day fortnight.  You will come?  Promise; and we must
sing that duet again, and sing it properly.'

He did not reply, but he stooped down, plucked a blood-red begonia,
and gave it to her.

'That is a pledge.  It is very good of you.'

She tried to fasten it in her gown, underneath the locket, but she
dropped a little black pin.  He went down on his knees to find it;
rose, and put the flower in its proper place himself, and his head
nearly touched her neck, quite unnecessarily.

'We had better go back now,' she said, 'but mind, I shall keep this
flower for a fortnight and a day, and if you make any excuses I shall
return it faded and withered.'

'Yes, I will come.'

'Good boy; no apologies like those you sent the last time.  No bad
throat.  Play me false, and there will be a pretty rebuke for you--a
dead flower.'

PLAY ME FALSE!  It was as if there were some stoppage in a main
artery to his brain.  PLAY ME FALSE!  It rang in his ears, and for a
moment he saw nothing but the scene at the Hall with Miranda.
Fortunately for him, somebody claimed Cecilia, and he slunk back into
the greenhouse.

One of Mr Palmer's favourite ballads was The Three Ravens.  Its
pathos unfits it for an ordinary drawing-room, but as the music at Mr
Palmer's was not of the common kind, The Three Ravens was put on the
list for that night.


'She was dead herself ere evensong time.  With a down, hey down, hey
down,
God send every gentleman
Such hawks, such hounds, and such a leman.  With down, hey down, hey
down.'


Frank knew well the prayer of that melody, and, as he listened, he
painted to himself, in the vividest colours, Madge in a mean room, in
a mean lodging, and perhaps dying.  The song ceased, and one for him
stood next.  He heard voices calling him, but he passed out into the
garden and went down to the further end, hiding himself behind the
shrubs.  Presently the inquiry for him ceased, and he was relieved by
hearing an instrumental piece begin.

Following on that presentation of Madge came self-torture for his
unfaithfulness.  He scourged himself into what he considered to be
his duty.  He recalled with an effort all Madge's charms, mental and
bodily, and he tried to break his heart for her.  He was in anguish
because he found that in order to feel as he ought to feel some
effort was necessary; that treason to her was possible, and because
he had looked with such eyes upon his cousin that evening.  He saw
himself as something separate from himself, and although he knew what
he saw to be flimsy and shallow, he could do nothing to deepen it,
absolutely nothing!  It was not the betrayal of that thunderstorm
which now tormented him.  He could have represented that as a failure
to be surmounted; he could have repented it.  It was his own inner
being from which he revolted, from limitations which are worse than
crimes, for who, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?



CHAPTER XVI



The next morning found Frank once more in Myddelton Square.  He
looked up at the house; the windows were all shut, and the blinds
were drawn down.  He had half a mind to call again, but Mrs Cork's
manner had been so offensive and repellent that he desisted.
Presently the door opened, and Maria, the maid, came out to clean the
doorsteps.  Maria, as we have already said, was a little more human
than her mistress, and having overheard the conversation between her
and Frank at the first interview, had come to the conclusion that
Frank was to be pitied, and she took a fancy to him.  Accordingly,
when he passed her, she looked up and said,--'Good-morning.'  Frank
stopped, and returned her greeting.

'You was here the other day, sir, asking where them Hopgoods had
gone.'

'Yes,' said Frank, eagerly, 'do you know what has become of them?'

'I helped the cabman with the boxes, and I heard Mrs Hopgood say
"Great Ormond Street," but I have forgotten the number.'

'Thank you very much.'

Frank gave the astonished and grateful Maria half-a-crown, and went
off to Great Ormond Street at once.  He paced up and down the street
half a dozen times, hoping he might recognise in a window some
ornament from Fenmarket, or perhaps that he might be able to
distinguish a piece of Fenmarket furniture, but his search was in
vain, for the two girls had taken furnished rooms at the back of the
house.  His quest was not renewed that week.  What was there to be
gained by going over the ground again?  Perhaps they might have found
the lodgings unsuitable and have moved elsewhere.  At church on
Sunday he met his cousin Cecilia, who reminded him of his promise.

'See,' she said, 'here is the begonia.  I put it in my prayer-book in
order to preserve it when I could keep it in water no longer, and it
has stained the leaf, and spoilt the Athanasian Creed.  You will have
it sent to you if you are faithless.  Reflect on your emotions, sir,
when you receive a dead flower, and you have the bitter consciousness
also that you have damaged my creed without any recompense.'

It was impossible not to protest that he had no thought of breaking
his engagement, although, to tell the truth, he had wished once or
twice he could find some way out of it.  He walked with her down the
churchyard path to her carriage, assisted her into it, saluted her
father and mother, and then went home with his own people.

The evening came, he sang with Cecilia, and it was observed, and he
himself observed it, how completely their voices harmonised.  He was
not without a competitor, a handsome young baritone, who was much
commended.  When he came to the end of his performance everybody said
what a pity it was that the following duet could not also be given, a
duet which Cecilia knew perfectly well.  She was very much pressed to
take her part with him, but she steadily refused, on the ground that
she had not practised it, that she had already sung once, and that
she was engaged to sing once more with her cousin.  Frank was sitting
next to her, and she added, so as to be heard by him alone, 'He is no
particular favourite of mine.'

There was no direct implication that Frank was a favourite, but an
inference was possible, and at least it was clear that she preferred
to reserve herself for him.  Cecilia's gifts, her fortune, and her
gay, happy face had made many a young fellow restless, and had
brought several proposals, none of which had been accepted.  All this
Frank knew, and how could he repress something more than satisfaction
when he thought that perhaps he might have been the reason why nobody
as yet had been able to win her.  She always called him Frank, for
although they were not first cousins, they were cousins.  He
generally called her Cecilia, but she was Cissy in her own house.  He
was hardly close enough to venture upon the more familiar nickname,
but to-night, as they rose to go to the piano, he said, and the
baritone sat next to her, -

'Now, CISSY, once more.'

She looked at him with just a little start of surprise, and a smile
spread itself over her face.  After they had finished, and she never
sang better, the baritone noticed that she seemed indisposed to
return to her former place, and she retired with Frank to the
opposite corner of the room.

'I wonder,' she said, 'if being happy in a thing is a sign of being
born to do it.  If it is, I am born to be a musician.'

'I should say it is; if two people are quite happy in one another's
company, it is as a sign they were born for one another.'

'Yes, if they are sure they are happy.  It is easier for me to be
sure that I am happier with a thing than with a person.'

'Do you think so?  Why?'

'There is the uncertainty whether the person is happy with me.  I
cannot be altogether happy with anybody unless I know I make him
happy.'

'What kind of person is he with whom you COULD be without making him
happy?'

The baritone rose to the upper F with a clash of chords on the piano,
and the company broke up.  Frank went home with but one thought in
his head--the thought of Cecilia.

His bedroom faced the south-west, its windows were open, and when he
entered, the wind, which was gradually rising, struck him on the face
and nearly forced the door out of his hand; the fire in his blood was
quenched, and the image of Cecilia receded.  He looked out, and saw
reflected on the low clouds the dull glare of the distant city.  Just
over there was Great Ormond Street, and underneath that dim, red
light, like the light of a great house burning, was Madge Hopgood.
He lay down, turning over from side to side in the vain hope that by
change of position he might sleep.  After about an hour's feverish
tossing, he just lost himself, but not in that oblivion which slumber
usually brought him.  He was so far awake that he saw what was around
him, and yet, he was so far released from the control of his reason
that he did not recognise what he saw, and it became part of a new
scene created by his delirium.  The full moon, clearing away the
clouds as she moved upwards, had now passed round to the south, and
just caught the white window-curtain farthest from him.  He half-
opened his eyes, his mad dream still clung to him, and there was the
dead Madge before him, pale in death, and holding a child in her
arms!  He distinctly heard himself scream as he started up in
affright; he could not tell where he was; the spectre faded and the
furniture and hangings transformed themselves into their familiar
reality.  He could not lie down again, and rose and dressed himself.
He was not the man to believe that the ghost could be a revelation or
a prophecy, but, nevertheless, he was once more overcome with fear, a
vague dread partly justifiable by the fact of Madge, by the fact that
his father might soon know what had happened, that others also might
know, Cecilia for example, but partly also a fear going beyond all
the facts, and not to be accounted for by them, a strange, horrible
trembling such as men feel in earthquakes when the solid rock shakes,
on which everything rests.



CHAPTER XVII



When Frank came downstairs to breakfast the conversation turned upon
his return to Germany.  He did not object to going, although it can
hardly be said that he willed to go.  He was in that perilous
condition in which the comparison of reasons is impossible, and the
course taken depends upon some chance impulse of the moment, and is a
mere drift.  He could not leave, however, in complete ignorance of
Madge, and with no certainty as to her future.  He resolved therefore
to make one more effort to discover the house.  That was all which he
determined to do.  What was to happen when he had found it, he did
not know.  He was driven to do something, which could not be of any
importance, save for what must follow, but he was unable to bring
himself even to consider what was to follow.  He knew that at
Fenmarket one or other of the sisters went out soon after breakfast
to make provision for the day, and perhaps, if they kept up this
custom, he might be successful in his search.  He accordingly
stationed himself in Great Ormond Street at about half-past nine, and
kept watch from the Lamb's Conduit Street end, shifting his position
as well as he could, in order to escape notice.  He had not been
there half an hour when he saw a door open, and Madge came out and
went westwards.  She turned down Devonshire Street as if on her way
to Holborn.  He instantly ran back to Theobalds Road, and when he
came to the corner of Devonshire Street she was about ten yards from
him, and he faced her.  She stopped irresolutely, as if she had a
mind to return, but as he approached her, and she found she was
recognised, she came towards him.

'Madge, Madge,' he cried, 'I want to speak to you.  I must speak with
you.'

'Better not; let me go.'

'I say I MUST speak to you.'

'We cannot talk here; let me go.'

'I must!  I must! come with me.'

She pitied him, and although she did not consent she did not refuse.
He called a cab, and in ten minutes, not a word having been spoken
during those ten minutes, they were at St Paul's.  The morning
service had just begun, and they sat down in a corner far away from
the worshippers.

'Oh, Madge,' he began, 'I implore you to take me back.  I love you.
I do love you, and--and--I cannot leave you.'

She was side by side with the father of her child about to be born.
He was not and could not be as another man to her, and for the moment
there was the danger lest she should mistake this secret bond for
love.  The thought of what had passed between them, and of the child,
his and hers, almost overpowered her.

'I cannot,' he repeated.  'I OUGHT not.  What will become of me?'

She felt herself stronger; he was excited, but his excitement was not
contagious.  The string vibrated, and the note was resonant, but it
was not a note which was consonant with hers, and it did not stir her
to respond.  He might love her, he was sincere enough to sacrifice
himself for her, and to remain faithful to her, but the voice was not
altogether that of his own true self.  Partly, at least, it was the
voice of what he considered to be duty, of superstition and alarm.
She was silent.

'Madge,' he continued, 'ought you to refuse?  You have some love for
me.  Is it not greater than the love which thousands feel for one
another.  Will you blast your future and mine, and, perhaps, that of
someone besides, who may be very dear to you?  OUGHT you not, I say,
to listen?'

The service had come to an end, the organist was playing a voluntary,
rather longer than usual, and the congregation was leaving, some of
them passing near Madge and Frank, and casting idle glances on the
young couple who had evidently come neither to pray nor to admire the
architecture.  Madge recognised the well-known St Ann's fugue, and,
strange to say, even at such a moment it took entire possession of
her; the golden ladder was let down and celestial visitors descended.
When the music ceased she spoke.

'It would be a crime.'

'A crime, but I--'  She stopped him.

'I know what you are going to say.  I know what is the crime to the
world; but it would have been a crime, perhaps a worse crime, if a
ceremony had been performed beforehand by a priest, and the worst of
crimes would be that ceremony now.  I must go.'  She rose and began
to move towards the door.

He walked silently by her side till they were in St Paul's
churchyard, when she took him by the hand, pressed it affectionately
and suddenly turned into one of the courts that lead towards
Paternoster Row.  He did not follow her, something repelled him, and
when he reached home it crossed his mind that marriage, after such
delay, would be a poor recompense, as he could not thereby conceal
her disgrace.



CHAPTER XVIII



It was clear that these two women could not live in London on
seventy-five pounds a year, most certainly not with the prospect
before them, and Clara cast about for something to do.  Marshall had
a brother-in-law, a certain Baruch Cohen, a mathematical instrument
maker in Clerkenwell, and to him Marshall accidentally one day talked
about Clara, and said that she desired an occupation.  Cohen himself
could not give Clara any work, but he knew a second-hand bookseller,
an old man who kept a shop in Holborn, who wanted a clerk, and Clara
thus found herself earning another pound a week.  With this addition
she and her sister could manage to pay their way and provide what
Madge would want.  The hours were long, the duties irksome and
wearisome, and, worst of all, the conditions under which they were
performed, were not only as bad as they could be, but their badness
was of a kind to which Clara had never been accustomed, so that she
felt every particle of it in its full force.  The windows of the shop
were, of course, full of books, and the walls were lined with them.
In the middle of the shop also was a range of shelves, and books were
stacked on the floor, so that the place looked like a huge cubical
block of them through which passages had been bored.  At the back the
shop became contracted in width to about eight feet, and consequently
the central shelves were not continued there, but just where they
ended, and overshadowed by them were a little desk and a stool.  All
round the desk more books were piled, and some manoeuvring was
necessary in order to sit down.  This was Clara's station.
Occasionally, on a brilliant, a very brilliant day in summer, she
could write without gas, but, perhaps, there were not a dozen such
days in the year.  By twisting herself sideways she could just catch
a glimpse of a narrow line of sky over some heavy theology which was
not likely to be disturbed, and was therefore put at the top of the
window, and once when somebody bought the Calvin Joann.  Opera Omnia,
9 vol. folio, Amst. 1671--it was very clear that afternoon--she
actually descried towards seven o'clock a blessed star exactly in the
middle of the gap the Calvin had left.

The darkness was very depressing, and poor Clara often shut her eyes
as she bent over her day-book and ledger, and thought of the
Fenmarket flats where the sun could be seen bisected by the horizon
at sun-rising and sun-setting, and where even the southern Antares
shone with diamond glitter close to the ground during summer nights.
She tried to reason with herself during the dreadful smoke fogs; she
said to herself that they were only half-a-mile thick, and she
carried herself up in imagination and beheld the unclouded azure, the
filthy smother lying all beneath her, but her dream did not continue,
and reality was too strong for her.  Worse, perhaps, than the eternal
gloom was the dirt.  She was naturally fastidious, and as her skin
was thin and sensitive, dust was physically a discomfort.  Even at
Fenmarket she was continually washing her hands and face, and,
indeed, a wash was more necessary to her after a walk than food or
drink.  It was impossible to remain clean in Holborn for five
minutes; everything she touched was foul with grime; her collar and
cuffs were black with it when she went home to her dinner, and it was
not like the honest, blowing road-sand of Fenmarket highways, but a
loathsome composition of everything disgusting which could be
produced by millions of human beings and animals packed together in
soot.  It was a real misery to her and made her almost ill.  However,
she managed to set up for herself a little lavatory in the basement,
and whenever she had a minute at her command, she descended and
enjoyed the luxury of a cool, dripping sponge and a piece of yellow
soap.  The smuts began to gather again the moment she went upstairs,
but she strove to arm herself with a little philosophy against them.
'What is there in life,' she moralised, smiling at her sermonising,
'which once won is for ever won?  It is always being won and always
being lost.'  Her master, fortunately, was one of the kindest of men,
an old gentleman of about sixty-five, who wore a white necktie, clean
every morning.  He was really a GENTLEman in the true sense of that
much misused word, and not a mere TRADESman; that is to say, he loved
his business, not altogether for the money it brought him, but as an
art.  He was known far and wide, and literary people were glad to
gossip with him.  He never pushed his wares, and he hated to sell
them to anybody who did not know their value.  He amused Clara one
afternoon when a carriage stopped at the door, and a lady inquired if
he had a Manning and Bray's History of Surrey.  Yes, he had a copy,
and he pointed to the three handsome, tall folios.

'What is the price?'

'Twelve pounds ten.'

'I think I will have them.'

'Madam, you will pardon me, but, if I were you, I would not.  I think
something much cheaper will suit you better.  If you will allow me, I
will look out for you and will report in a few days.'

'Oh! very well,' and she departed.

'The wife of a brassfounder,' he said to Clara; 'made a lot of money,
and now he has bought a house at Dulwich and is setting up a library.
Somebody has told him that he ought to have a county history, and
that Manning and Bray is the book.  Manning and Bray!  What he wants
is a Dulwich and Denmark Hill Directory.  No, no,' and he took down
one of the big volumes, blew the dust off the top edges and looked at
the old book-plate inside, 'you won't go there if I can help it.'  He
took a fancy to Clara when he found she loved literature, although
what she read was out of his department altogether, and his perfectly
human behaviour to her prevented that sense of exile and loneliness
which is so horrible to many a poor creature who comes up to London
to begin therein the struggle for existence.  She read and meditated
a good deal in the shop, but not to much profit, for she was
continually interrupted, and the thought of her sister intruded
itself perpetually.

Madge seldom or never spoke of her separation from Frank, but one
night, when she was somewhat less reserved than usual, Clara ventured
to ask her if she had heard from him since they parted.

'I met him once.'

'Madge, do you mean that he found out where we are living, and that
he came to see you?'

'No, it was just round the corner as I was going towards Holborn.'

'Nothing could have brought him here but yourself,' said Clara,
slowly.

'Clara, you doubt?'

'No, no!  I doubt you?  Never!'

'But you hesitate; you reflect.  Speak out.'

'God forbid I should utter a word which would induce you to
disbelieve what you know to be right.  It is much more important to
believe earnestly that something is morally right than that it should
be really right, and he who attempts to displace a belief runs a
certain risk, because he is not sure that what he substitutes can be
held with equal force.  Besides, each person's belief, or proposed
course of action, is a part of himself, and if he be diverted from it
and takes up with that which is not himself, the unity of his nature
is impaired, and he loses himself.'

'Which is as much as to say that the prophet is to break no idols.'

'You know I do not mean that, and you know, too, how incapable I am
of defending myself in argument.  I never can stand up for anything I
say.  I can now and then say something, but, when I have said it, I
run away.'

'My dearest Clara,' Madge put her arm over her sister's shoulder as
they sat side by side, 'do not run away now; tell me just what you
think of me.'

Clara was silent for a minute.

'I have sometimes wondered whether you have not demanded a little too
much of yourself and Frank.  It is always a question of how much.
There is no human truth which is altogether true, no love which is
altogether perfect.  You may possibly have neglected virtue or
devotion such as you could not find elsewhere, overlooking it because
some failing, or the lack of sympathy on some unimportant point, may
at the moment have been prominent.  Frank loved you, Madge.'

Madge did not reply; she withdrew her arm from her sister's neck,
threw herself back in her chair and closed her eyes.  She saw again
the Fenmarket roads, that summer evening, and she felt once more
Frank's burning caresses.  She thought of him as he left St Paul's,
perhaps broken-hearted.  Stronger than every other motive to return
to him, and stronger than ever, was the movement towards him of that
which belonged to him.

At last she cried out, literally cried, with a vehemence which
startled and terrified Clara, -

'Clara, Clara, you know not what you do!  For God's sake forbear!'
She was again silent, and then she turned round hurriedly, hid her
face, and sobbed piteously.  It lasted, however, but for a minute;
she rose, wiped her eyes, went to the window, came back again, and
said, -

'It is beginning to snow.'

The iron pillar bolted to the solid rock had quivered and resounded
under the blow, but its vibrations were nothing more than those of
the rigid metal; the base was unshaken and, except for an instant,
the column had not been deflected a hair's-breadth.



CHAPTER XIX



Mr Cohen, who had obtained the situation indirectly for Clara,
thought nothing more about it until, one day, he went to the shop,
and he then recollected his recommendation, which had been given
solely in faith, for he had never seen the young woman, and had
trusted entirely to Marshall.  He found her at her dark desk, and as
he approached her, she hastily put a mark in a book and closed it.

'Have you sold a little volume called After Office Hours by a man
named Robinson?'

'I did not know we had it.  I have never seen it.'

'I do not wonder, but I saw it here about six months ago; it was up
there,' pointing to a top shelf.  Clara was about to mount the
ladder, but he stopped her, and found what he wanted.  Some of the
leaves were torn.

'We can repair those for you; in about a couple of days it shall be
ready.'

He lingered a little, and at that moment another customer entered.
Clara went forward to speak to him, and Cohen was able to see that it
was the Heroes and Hero Worship she had been studying, a course of
lectures which had been given by a Mr Carlyle, of whom Cohen knew
something.  As the customer showed no signs of departing, Cohen left,
saying he would call again.

Before sending Robinson's After Office Hours to the binder, Clara
looked at it.  It was made up of short essays, about twenty
altogether, bound in dark-green cloth, lettered at the side, and
published in 1841.  They were upon the oddest subjects:  such as,
Ought Children to learn Rules before Reasons?  The Higher Mathematics
and Materialism.  Ought We to tell Those Whom We love what We think
about Them?  Deductive Reasoning in Politics.  What Troubles ought We
to Make Known and What ought We to Keep Secret:  Courage as a Science
and an Art.

Clara did not read any one essay through, she had no time, but she
was somewhat struck with a few sentences which caught her eye; for
example--'A mere dream, a vague hope, ought in some cases to be more
potent than a certainty in regulating our action.  The faintest
vision of God should be more determinative than the grossest earthly
assurance.'

'I knew a case in which a man had to encounter three successive
trials of all the courage and inventive faculty in him.  Failure in
one would have been ruin.  The odds against him in each trial were
desperate, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming.
Nevertheless, he made the attempt, and was triumphant, by the
narrowest margin, in every struggle.  That which is of most value to
us is often obtained in defiance of the laws of probability.'

'What is precious in Quakerism is not so much the doctrine of the
Divine voice as that of the preliminary stillness, the closure
against other voices and the reduction of the mind to a condition in
which it can LISTEN, in which it can discern the merest whisper,
inaudible when the world, or interest, or passion, are permitted to
speak.'

'The acutest syllogiser can never develop the actual consequences of
any system of policy, or, indeed, of any change in human
relationship, man being so infinitely complex, and the interaction of
human forces so incalculable.'

'Many of our speculative difficulties arise from the unauthorised
conception of an OMNIPOTENT God, a conception entirely of our own
creation, and one which, if we look at it closely, has no meaning.
It is because God COULD have done otherwise, and did not, that we are
confounded.  It may be distressing to think that God cannot do any
better, but it is not so distressing as to believe that He might have
done better had He so willed.'

Although these passages were disconnected, each of them seemed to
Clara to be written in a measure for herself, and her curiosity was
excited about the author.  Perhaps the man who called would say
something about him.

Baruch Cohen was now a little over forty.  He was half a Jew, for his
father was a Jew and his mother a Gentile.  The father had broken
with Judaism, but had not been converted to any Christian church or
sect.  He was a diamond-cutter, originally from Holland, came over to
England and married the daughter of a mathematical instrument maker,
at whose house he lodged in Clerkenwell.  The son was apprenticed to
his maternal grandfather's trade, became very skilful at it, worked
at it himself, employed a man and a boy, and supplied London shops,
which sold his instruments at about three times the price he obtained
for them.  Baruch, when he was very young, married Marshall's elder
sister, but she died at the birth of her first child and he had been
a widower now for nineteen years.  He had often thought of taking
another wife, and had seen, during these nineteen years, two or three
women with whom he had imagined himself to be really in love, and to
whom he had been on the verge of making proposals, but in each case
he had hung back, and when he found that a second and a third had
awakened the same ardour for a time as the first, he distrusted its
genuineness.  He was now, too, at a time of life when a man has to
make the unpleasant discovery that he is beginning to lose the right
to expect what he still eagerly desires, and that he must beware of
being ridiculous.  It is indeed a very unpleasant discovery.  If he
has done anything well which was worth doing, or has made himself a
name, he may be treated by women with respect or adulation, but any
passable boy of twenty is really more interesting to them, and,
unhappily, there is perhaps so much of the man left in him that he
would rather see the eyes of a girl melt when she looked at him than
be adored by all the drawing-rooms in London as the author of the
greatest poem since Paradise Lost, or as the conqueror of half a
continent.  Baruch's life during the last nineteen years had been
such that he was still young, and he desired more than ever, because
not so blindly as he desired it when he was a youth, the tender,
intimate sympathy of a woman's love.  It was singular that, during
all those nineteen years, he should not once have been overcome.  It
seemed to him as if he had been held back, not by himself, but by
some external power, which refused to give any reasons for so doing.
There was now less chance of yielding than ever; he was reserved and
self-respectful, and his manner towards women distinctly announced to
them that he knew what he was and that he had no claims whatever upon
them.  He was something of a philosopher, too; he accepted,
therefore, as well as he could, without complaint, the inevitable
order of nature, and he tried to acquire, although often he failed,
that blessed art of taking up lightly and even with a smile whatever
he was compelled to handle.  'It is possible,' he said once, 'to
consider death too seriously.'  He was naturally more than half a
Jew; his features were Jewish, his thinking was Jewish, and he
believed after a fashion in the Jewish sacred books, or, at anyrate,
read them continuously, although he had added to his armoury
defensive weapons of another type.  In nothing was he more Jewish
than in a tendency to dwell upon the One, or what he called God,
clinging still to the expression of his forefathers although
departing so widely from them.  In his ethics and system of life, as
well as in his religion, there was the same intolerance of a
multiplicity which was not reducible to unity.  He seldom explained
his theory, but everybody who knew him recognised the difference
which it wrought between him and other men.  There was a certain
concord in everything he said and did, as if it were directed by some
enthroned but secret principle.

He had encountered no particular trouble since his wife's death, but
his life had been unhappy.  He had no friends, much as he longed for
friendship, and he could not give any reasons for his failure.  He
saw other persons more successful, but he remained solitary.  Their
needs were not so great as his, for it is not those who have the
least but those who have the most to give who most want sympathy.  He
had often made advances; people had called on him and had appeared
interested in him, but they had dropped away.  The cause was chiefly
to be found in his nationality.  The ordinary Englishman disliked him
simply as a Jew, and the better sort were repelled by a lack of
geniality and by his inability to manifest a healthy interest in
personal details.  Partly also the cause was that those who care to
speak about what is nearest to them are very rare, and most persons
find conversation easy in proportion to the remoteness of its topics
from them.  Whatever the reasons may have been, Baruch now, no matter
what the pressure from within might be, generally kept himself to
himself.  It was a mistake and he ought not to have retreated so far
upon repulse.  A word will sometimes, when least expected, unlock a
heart, a soul is gained for ever, and at once there is much more than
a recompense for the indifference of years.

After the death of his wife, Baruch's affection spent itself upon his
son Benjamin, whom he had apprenticed to a firm of optical instrument
makers in York.  The boy was not very much like his father.  He was
indifferent to that religion by which his father lived, but he
inherited an aptitude for mathematics, which was very necessary in
his trade.  Benjamin also possessed his father's rectitude, trusted
him, and looked to him for advice to such a degree that even Baruch,
at last, thought it would be better to send him away from home in
order that he might become a little more self-reliant and
independent.  It was the sorest of trials to part with him, and, for
some time after he left, Baruch's loneliness was intolerable.  It
was, however, relieved by a visit to York perhaps once in four or
five months, for whenever business could be alleged as an excuse for
going north, he managed, as he said, 'to take York on his way.'

The day after he met Clara he started for Birmingham, and although
York was certainly not 'on his way,' he pushed forward to the city
and reached it on a Saturday evening.  He was to spend Sunday there,
and on Sunday morning he proposed that they should hear the cathedral
service, and go for a walk in the afternoon.  To this suggestion
Benjamin partially assented.  He wished to go to the cathedral in the
morning, but thought his father had better rest after dinner.  Baruch
somewhat resented the insinuation of possible fatigue consequent on
advancing years.

'What do you mean?' he said; 'you know well enough I enjoy a walk in
the afternoon; besides, I shall not see much of you, and do not want
to lose what little time I have.'

About three, therefore, they started, and presently a girl met them,
who was introduced simply as 'Miss Masters.'

'We are going to your side of the water,' said the son; 'you may as
well cross with us.'

They came to a point where a boat was moored, and a man was in it.
There was no regular ferry, but on Sundays he earned a trifle by
taking people to the opposite meadow, and thus enabling them to vary
their return journey to the city.  When they were about two-thirds of
the way over, Benjamin observed that if they stood up they could see
the Minster.  They all three rose, and without an instant's warning--
they could not tell afterwards how it happened--the boat half
capsized, and they were in eight or nine feet of water.  Baruch could
not swim and went down at once, but on coming up close to the gunwale
he caught at it and held fast.  Looking round, he saw that Benjamin,
who could swim well, had made for Miss Masters, and, having caught
her by the back of the neck, was taking her ashore.  The boatman, who
could also swim, called out to Baruch to hold on, gave the boat three
or four vigorous strokes from the stern, and Baruch felt the ground
under his feet.  The boatman's little cottage was not far off, and,
when the party reached it, Benjamin earnestly desired Miss Masters to
take off her wet clothes and occupy the bed which was offered her.
He himself would run home--it was not half-a-mile--and, after having
changed, would go to her house and send her sister with what was
wanted.  He was just off when it suddenly struck him that his father
might need some attention.

'Oh, father--' he began, but the boatman's wife interposed.

'He can't be left like that, and he can't go home; he'll catch his
death o' cold, and there isn't but one more bed in the house, and
that isn't quite fit to put a gentleman in.  Howsomever, he must turn
in there, and my husband, he can go into the back-kitchen and rub
himself down.  You won't do yourself no good, Mr Cohen,' addressing
the son, whom she knew, 'by going back; you'd better stay here and
get into bed with your father.'

In a few minutes the boatman would have gone on the errand, but
Benjamin could not lose the opportunity of sacrificing himself for
Miss Masters.  He rushed off, and in three-quarters of an hour had
returned with the sister.  Having learned, after anxious inquiry,
that Miss Masters, so far as could be discovered, had not caught a
chill, he went to his father.

'Well, father, I hope you are none the worse for the ducking,' he
said gaily.  'The next time you come to York you'd better bring
another suit of clothes with you.'

Baruch turned round uneasily and did not answer immediately.  He had
had a narrow escape from drowning.

'Nothing of much consequence.  Is your friend all right?'

'Oh, yes; I was anxious about her, for she is not very strong, but I
do not think she will come to much harm.  I made them light a fire in
her room.'

'Are they drying my clothes?'

'I'll go and see.'

He went away and encountered the elder Miss Masters, who told him
that her sister, feeling no ill effects from the plunge, had
determined to go home at once, and in fact was nearly ready.
Benjamin waited, and presently she came downstairs, smiling.

'Nothing the matter.  I owe it to you, however, that I am not now in
another world.'

Benjamin was in an ecstasy, and considered himself bound to accompany
her to her door.

Meanwhile, Baruch lay upstairs alone in no very happy temper.  He
heard the conversation below, and knew that his son had gone.  In all
genuine love there is something of ferocious selfishness.  The
perfectly divine nature knows how to keep it in check, and is even
capable--supposing it to be a woman's nature--of contentment if the
loved one is happy, no matter with what or with whom; but the nature
only a little less than divine cannot, without pain, endure the
thought that it no longer owns privately and exclusively that which
it loves, even when it loves a child, and Baruch was particularly
excusable, considering his solitude.  Nevertheless, he had learned a
little wisdom, and, what was of much greater importance, had learned
how to use it when he needed it.  It had been forced upon him; it was
an adjustment to circumstances, the wisest wisdom.  It was not
something without any particular connection with him; it was rather
the external protection built up from within to shield him where he
was vulnerable; it was the answer to questions which had been put to
HIM, and not to those which had been put to other people.  So it came
to pass that, when he said bitterly to himself that, if he were at
that moment lying dead at the bottom of the river, Benjamin would
have found consolation very near at hand, he was able to reflect upon
the folly of self-laceration, and to rebuke himself for a complaint
against what was simply the order of Nature, and not a personal
failure.

His self-conquest, however, was not very permanent.  When he left
York the next morning, he fancied his son was not particularly
grieved, and he was passive under the thought that an epoch in his
life had come, that the milestones now began to show the distance to
the place to which he travelled, and, still worse, that the boy who
had been so close to him, and upon whom he had so much depended, had
gone from him.

There is no remedy for our troubles which is uniformly and
progressively efficacious.  All that we have a right to expect from
our religion is that gradually, very gradually, it will assist us to
a real victory.  After each apparent defeat, if we are bravely in
earnest, we gain something on our former position.  Baruch was two
days on his journey back to town, and as he came nearer home, he
recovered himself a little.  Suddenly he remembered the bookshop and
the book for which he had to call, and that he had intended to ask
Marshall something about the bookseller's new assistant.



CHAPTER XX



Madge was a puzzle to Mrs Caffyn.  Mrs Caffyn loved her, and when she
was ill had behaved like a mother to her.  The newly-born child, a
healthy girl, was treated by Mrs Caffyn as if it were her own
granddaughter, and many little luxuries were bought which never
appeared in Mrs Marshall's weekly bill.  Naturally, Mrs Caffyn's
affection moved a response from Madge, and Mrs Caffyn by degrees
heard the greater part of her history; but why she had separated
herself from her lover without any apparent reason remained a
mystery, and all the greater was the mystery because Mrs Caffyn
believed that there were no other facts to be known than those she
knew.  She longed to bring about a reconciliation.  It was dreadful
to her that Madge should be condemned to poverty, and that her infant
should be fatherless, although there was a gentleman waiting to take
them both and make them happy.

'The hair won't be dark like yours, my love,' she said one afternoon,
soon after Madge had come downstairs and was lying on the sofa.  'The
hair do darken a lot, but hers will never be black.  It's my opinion
as it'll be fair.'

Madge did not speak, and Mrs Caffyn, who was sitting at the head of
the couch, put her work and her spectacles on the table.  It was
growing dusk; she took Madge's hand, which hung down by her side, and
gently lifted it up.  Such a delicate hand, Mrs Caffyn thought.  She
was proud that she had for a friend the owner of such a hand, who
behaved to her as an equal.  It was delightful to be kissed--no mere
formal salutations--by a lady fit to go into the finest drawing-room
in London, but it was a greater delight that Madge's talk suited her
better than any she had heard at Great Oakhurst.  It was natural she
should rejoice when she discovered, unconsciously that she had a
soul, to which the speech of the stars, though somewhat strange, was
not an utterly foreign tongue.

She retained her hold on Madge's hand.

'May be,' she continued, 'it'll be like its father's.  In our family
all the gals take after the father, and all the boys after the
mother.  I suppose as HE has lightish hair?'

Still Madge said nothing.

'It isn't easy to believe as the father of that blessed dear could
have been a bad lot.  I'm sure he isn't, and yet there's that
Polesden gal at the farm, she as went wrong with Jim, a great ugly
brute, and she herself warnt up to much, well, as I say, her child
was the delicatest little angel as I ever saw.  It's my belief as
God-a-mighty mixes Hisself up in it more nor we think.  But there WAS
nothing amiss with him, was there, my sweet?'

Mrs Caffyn inclined her head towards Madge.

'Oh, no!  Nothing, nothing.'

'Don't you think, my dear, if there's nothing atwixt you, as it was a
flyin' in the face of Providence to turn him off?  You were reglarly
engaged to him, and I have heard you say he was very fond of you.  I
suppose there were some high words about something, and a kind of a
quarrel like, and so you parted, but that's nothing.  It might all be
made up now, and it ought to be made up.  What was it about?'

'There was no quarrel.'

'Well, of course, if you don't like to say anything more to me, I
won't ask you.  I don't want to hear any secrets as I shouldn't hear.
I speak only because I can't abear to see you here when I believe as
everything might be put right, and you might have a house of your
own, and a good husband, and be happy for the rest of your days.  It
isn't too late for that now.  I know what I know, and as how he'd
marry you at once.'

'Oh, my dear Mrs Caffyn, I have no secret from you, who have been so
good to me:  I can only say I could not love him--not as I ought.'

'If you can't love a man, that's to say if you can't ABEAR him, it's
wrong to have him, but if there's a child that does make a
difference, for one has to think of the child and of being
respectable.  There's something in being respectable; although, for
that matter, I've see'd respectable people at Great Oakhurst as were
ten times worse than those as aren't.  Still, a-speaking for myself,
I'd put up with a goodish bit to marry the man whose child wor mine.'

'For myself I could, but it wouldn't be just to him.'

'I don't see what you mean.'

'I mean that I could sacrifice myself if I believed it to be my duty,
but I should wrong him cruelly if I were to accept him and did not
love him with all my heart.'

'My dear, you take my word for it, he isn't so particklar as you are.
A man isn't so particklar as a woman.  He goes about his work, and
has all sorts of things in his head, and if a woman makes him
comfortable when he comes home, he's all right.  I won't say as one
woman is much the same as another to a man--leastways to all men--but
still they are NOT particklar.  Maybe, though, it isn't quite the
same with gentlefolk like yourself,--but there's that blessed baby a-
cryin'.'

Mrs Caffyn hastened upstairs, leaving Madge to her reflections.  Once
more the old dialectic reappeared.  'After all,' she thought, 'it is,
as Clara said, a question of degree.  There are not a thousand
husbands and wives in this great city whose relationship comes near
perfection.  If I felt aversion my course would be clear, but there
is no aversion; on the contrary, our affection for one another is
sufficient for a decent household and decent existence undisturbed by
catastrophes.  No brighter sunlight is obtained by others far better
than myself.  Ought I to expect a refinement of relationship to which
I have no right?  Our claims are always beyond our deserts, and we
are disappointed if our poor, mean, defective natures do not obtain
the homage which belongs to those of ethereal texture.  It will be a
life with no enthusiasms nor romance, perhaps, but it will be
tolerable, and what may be called happy, and my child will be
protected and educated.  My child! what is there which I ought to put
in the balance against her?  If our sympathy is not complete, I have
my own little oratory:  I can keep the candles alight, close the
door, and worship there alone.'

So she mused, and her foes again ranged themselves over against her.
There was nothing to support her but something veiled, which would
not altogether disclose or explain itself.  Nevertheless, in a few
minutes, her enemies had vanished, like a mist before a sudden wind,
and she was once more victorious.  Precious and rare are those divine
souls, to whom that which is aerial is substantial, the only true
substance; those for whom a pale vision possesses an authority they
are forced unconditionally to obey.



CHAPTER XXI



Mrs Caffyn was unhappy, and made up her mind that she would talk to
Frank herself.  She had learned enough about him from the two
sisters, especially from Clara, to make her believe that, with a very
little management, she could bring him back to Madge.  The difficulty
was to see him without his father's knowledge.  At last she
determined to write to him, and she made her son-in-law address the
envelope and mark it private.  This is what she said:-


'DEAR SIR,--Although unbeknown to you, I take the liberty of telling
you as M. H. is alivin' here with me, and somebody else as I think
you ought to see, but perhaps I'd better have a word or two with you
myself, if not quite ill-convenient to you, and maybe you'll be kind
enough to say how that's to be done to your obedient, humble servant,

'MRS CAFFYN.'


She thought this very diplomatic, inasmuch as nobody but Frank could
possibly suspect what the letter meant.  It went to Stoke Newington,
but, alas! he was in Germany, and poor Mrs Caffyn had to wait a week
before she received a reply.  Frank of course understood it.
Although he had thought about Madge continually, he had become
calmer.  He saw, it is true, that there was no stability in his
position, and that he could not possibly remain where he was.  Had
Madge been the commonest of the common, and his relationship to her
the commonest of the common, he could not permit her to cast herself
loose from him for ever and take upon herself the whole burden of his
misdeed.  But he did not know what to do, and, as successive
considerations and reconsiderations ended in nothing, and the
distractions of a foreign country were so numerous, Madge had for a
time been put aside, like a huge bill which we cannot pay, and which
staggers us.  We therefore docket it, and hide it in the desk, and we
imagine we have done something.  Once again, however, the flame leapt
up out of the ashes, vivid as ever.  Once again the thought that he
had been so close to Madge, and that she had yielded to him, touched
him with peculiar tenderness, and it seemed impossible to part
himself from her.  To a man with any of the nobler qualities of man
it is not only a sense of honour which binds him to a woman who has
given him all she has to give.  Separation seems unnatural,
monstrous, a divorce from himself; it is not she alone, but it is
himself whom he abandons.  Frank's duty, too, pointed imperiously to
the path he ought to take, duty to the child as well as to the
mother.  He determined to go home, secretly; Mrs Caffyn would not
have written if she had not seen good reason for believing that Madge
still belonged to him.  He made up his mind to start the next day,
but when the next day came, instructions to go immediately to Hamburg
arrived from his father.  There were rumours of the insolvency of a
house with which Mr Palmer dealt; inquiries were necessary which
could better be made personally, and if these rumours were correct,
as Mr Palmer believed them to be, his agency must be transferred to
some other firm.  There was now no possibility of a journey to
England.  For a moment he debated whether, when he was at Hamburg, he
could not slip over to London, but it would be dangerous.  Further
orders might come from his father, and the failure to acknowledge
them would lead to evasion, and perhaps to discovery.  He must,
therefore, content himself with a written explanation to Mrs Caffyn
why he could not meet her, and there should be one more effort to
make atonement to Madge.  This was what went to Mrs Caffyn, and to
her lodger:-


'DEAR MADAM,--Your note has reached me here.  I am very sorry that my
engagements are so pressing that I cannot leave Germany at present.
I have written to Miss Hopgood.  There is one subject which I cannot
mention to her--I cannot speak to her about money.  Will you please
give me full information?  I enclose 20 pounds, and I must trust to your
discretion.  I thank you heartily for all your kindness.--Truly
yours,

'FRANK PALMER.'


'MY DEAREST MADGE,--I cannot help saying one more word to you,
although, when I last saw you, you told me that it was useless for me
to hope.  I know, however, that there is now another bond between us,
the child is mine as well as yours, and if I am not all that you
deserve, ought you to prevent me from doing my duty to it as well as
to you?  It is true that if we were to marry I could never right you,
and perhaps my father would have nothing to do with us, but in time
he might relent, and I will come over at once, or, at least, the
moment I have settled some business here, and you shall be my wife.
Do, my dearest Madge, consent.'


When he came to this point his pen stopped.  What he had written was
very smooth, but very tame and cold.  However, nothing better
presented itself; he changed his position, sat back in his chair, and
searched himself, but could find nothing.  It was not always so.
Some months ago there would have been no difficulty, and he would not
have known when to come to an end.  The same thing would have been
said a dozen times, perhaps, but it would not have seemed the same to
him, and each succeeding repetition would have been felt with the
force of novelty.  He took a scrap of paper and tried to draft two or
three sentences, altered them several times and made them worse.  He
then re-read the letter; it was too short; but after all it contained
what was necessary, and it must go as it stood.  She knew how he felt
towards her.  So he signed it after giving his address at Hamburg,
and it was posted.

Three or four days afterwards Mrs Marshall, in accordance with her
usual custom, went to see Madge before she was up.  The child lay
peacefully by its mother's side and Frank's letter was upon the
counterpane.  The resolution that no letter from him should be opened
had been broken.  The two women had become great friends and, within
the last few weeks, Madge had compelled Mrs Marshall to call her by
her Christian name.

'You've had a letter from Mr Palmer; I was sure it was his
handwriting when it came late last night.'

'You can read it; there is nothing private in it.'

She turned round to the child and Mrs Marshall sat down and read.
When she had finished she laid the letter on the bed again and was
silent.

'Well?' said Madge.  'Would you say "No?"'

'Yes, I would.'

'For your own sake, as well as for his?'

Mrs Marshall took up the letter and read half of it again.

'Yes, you had better say "No."  You will find it dull, especially if
you have to live in London.'

'Did you find London dull when you came to live in it?'

'Rather; Marshall is away all day long.'

'But scarcely any woman in London expects to marry a man who is not
away all day.'

'They ought then to have heaps of work, or they ought to have a lot
of children to look after; but, perhaps, being born and bred in the
country, I do not know what people in London are.  Recollect you were
country born and bred yourself, or, at anyrate, you have lived in the
country for the most of your life.'

'Dull! we must all expect to be dull.'

'There's nothing worse.  I've had rheumatic fever, and I say, give me
the fever rather than what comes over me at times here.  If Marshall
had not been so good to me, I do not know what I should have done
with myself.'

Madge turned round and looked Mrs Marshall straight in the face, but
she did not flinch.

'Marshall is very good to me, but I was glad when mother and you and
your sister came to keep me company when he is not at home.  It tired
me to have my meals alone:  it is bad for the digestion; at least, so
he says, and he believes that it was indigestion that was the matter
with me.  I should be sorry for myself if you were to go away; not
that I want to put that forward.  Maybe I should never see much more
of you:  he is rich:  you might come here sometimes, but he would not
like to have Marshall and mother and me at his house.'

Not a word was spoken for at least a minute.

Suddenly Mrs Marshall took Madge's hand in her own hands, leaned over
her, and in that kind of whisper with which we wake a sleeper who is
to be aroused to escape from sudden peril, she said in her ear, -

'Madge, Madge:  for God's sake leave him!'

'I have left him.'

'Are you sure?'

'Quite.'

'For ever?'

'For ever!'

Mrs Marshall let go Madge's hand, turned her eyes towards her
intently for a moment, and again bent over her as if she were about
to embrace her.  A knock, however, came at the door, and Mrs Caffyn
entered with the cup of coffee which she always insisted on bringing
before Madge rose.  After she and her daughter had left, Madge read
the letter once more.  There was nothing new in it, but formally it
was something, like the tolling of the bell when we know that our
friend is dead.  There was a little sobbing, and then she kissed her
child with such eagerness that it began to cry.

'You'll answer that letter, I suppose?' said Mrs Caffyn, when they
were alone.

'No.'

'I'm rather glad.  It would worrit you, and there's nothing worse for
a baby than worritin' when it's mother's a-feedin it.'

Mr Caffyn wrote as follows:-


'DEAR SIR,--I was sorry as you couldn't come; but I believe now as it
was better as you didn't.  I am no scollard, and so no more from your
obedient, humble servant,

'MRS CAFFYN.

'P.S.--I return the money, having no use for the same.



CHAPTER XXII



Baruch did not obtain any very definite information from Marshall
about Clara.  He was told that she had a sister; that they were both
of them gentlewomen; that their mother and father were dead; that
they were great readers, and that they did not go to church nor
chapel, but that they both went sometimes to hear a certain Mr A. J.
Scott lecture.  He was once assistant minister to Irving, but was now
heretical, and had a congregation of his own creating at Woolwich.

Baruch called at the shop and found Clara once more alone.  The book
was packed up and had being lying ready for him for two or three
days.  He wanted to speak, but hardly knew how to begin.  He looked
idly round the shelves, taking down one volume after another, and at
last he said, -

'I suppose nobody but myself has ever asked for a copy of Robinson?'

'Not since I have been here.'

'I do not wonder at it; he printed only two hundred and fifty; he
gave away five-and-twenty, and I am sure nearly two hundred were sold
as wastepaper.'

'He is a friend of yours?'

'He was a friend; he is dead; he was an usher in a private school,
although you might have supposed, from the title selected, that he
was a clerk.  I told him it was useless to publish, and his
publishers told him the same thing.'

'I should have thought that some notice would have been taken of him;
he is so evidently worth it.'

'Yes, but although he was original and reflective, he had no
particular talent.  His excellence lay in criticism and observation,
often profound, on what came to him every day, and he was valueless
in the literary market.  A talent of some kind is necessary to genius
if it is to be heard.  So he died utterly unrecognised, save by one
or two personal friends who loved him dearly.  He was peculiar in the
depth and intimacy of his friendships.  Few men understand the
meaning of the word friendship.  They consort with certain companions
and perhaps very earnestly admire them, because they possess
intellectual gifts, but of friendship, such as we two, Morris and I
(for that was his real name) understood it, they know nothing.'

'Do you believe, that the good does not necessarily survive?'

'Yes and no; I believe that power every moment, so far as our eyes
can follow it, is utterly lost.  I have had one or two friends whom
the world has never known and never will know, who have more in them
than is to be found in many an English classic.  I could take you to
a little dissenting chapel not very far from Holborn where you would
hear a young Welshman, with no education beyond that provided by a
Welsh denominational college, who is a perfect orator and whose depth
of insight is hardly to be matched, save by Thomas A Kempis, whom he
much resembles.  When he dies he will be forgotten in a dozen years.
Besides, it is surely plain enough to everybody that there are
thousands of men and women within a mile of us, apathetic and
obscure, who, if, an object worthy of them had been presented to
them, would have shown themselves capable of enthusiasm and heroism.
Huge volumes of human energy are apparently annihilated.'

'It is very shocking, worse to me than the thought of the earthquake
or the pestilence.'

'I said "yes and no" and there is another side.  The universe is so
wonderful, so intricate, that it is impossible to trace the
transformation of its forces, and when they seem to disappear the
disappearance may be an illusion.  Moreover, "waste" is a word which
is applicable only to finite resources.  If the resources are
infinite it has no meaning.'

Two customers came in and Baruch was obliged to leave.  When he came
to reflect, he was surprised to find not only how much he had said,
but what he had said.  He was usually reserved, and with strangers he
adhered to the weather or to passing events.  He had spoken, however,
to this young woman as if they had been acquainted for years.  Clara,
too, was surprised.  She always cut short attempts at conversation in
the shop.  Frequently she answered questions and receipted and
returned bills without looking in the faces of the people who spoke
to her or offered her the money.  But to this foreigner, or Jew, she
had disclosed something she felt.  She was rather abashed, but
presently her employer, Mr Barnes, returned and somewhat relieved
her.

'The gentleman who bought After Office Hours came for it while you
were out?'

'Oh! what, Cohen?  Good fellow Cohen is; he it was who recommended
you to me.  He is brother-in-law to your landlord.'  Clara was
comforted; he was not a mere 'casual,' as Mr Barnes called his chance
customers.



CHAPTER XXIII



About a fortnight afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, Cohen went to
the Marshalls'.  He had called there once or twice since his mother-
in-law came to London, but had seen nothing of the lodgers.  It was
just about tea-time, but unfortunately Marshall and his wife had gone
out.  Mrs Caffyn insisted that Cohen should stay, but Madge could not
be persuaded to come downstairs, and Baruch, Mrs Caffyn and Clara had
tea by themselves.  Baruch asked Mrs Caffyn if she could endure
London after living for so long in the country.

'Ah! my dear boy, I have to like it.'

'No, you haven't; what you mean is that, whether you like it, or
whether you do not, you have to put up with it.'

'No, I don't mean that.  Miss Hopgood, Cohen and me, we are the best
of friends, but whenever he comes here, he allus begins to argue with
me.  Howsomever, arguing isn't everything, is it, my dear?  There's
some things, after all, as I can do and he can't, but he's just wrong
here in his arguing that wasn't what I meant.  I meant what I said,
as I had to like it.'

'How can you like it if you don't?'

'How can I?  That shows you're a man and not a woman.  Jess like you
men.  YOU'D do what you didn't like, I know, for you're a good sort--
and everybody would know you didn't like it--but what would be the
use of me a-livin' in a house if I didn't like it?--with my daughter
and these dear, young women?  If it comes to livin', you'd ten
thousand times better say at once as you hate bein' where you are
than go about all day long, as if you was a blessed saint and put
upon.'

Mrs Caffyn twitched at her gown and pulled it down over her knees and
brushed the crumbs off with energy.  She continued, 'I can't abide
people who everlastin' make believe they are put upon.  Suppose I
were allus a-hankering every foggy day after Great Oakhurst, and yet
a-tellin' my daughter as I knew my place was here; if I was she, I
should wish my mother at Jericho.'

'Then you really prefer London to Great Oakhurst?' said Clara.

'Why, my dear, of course I do.  Don't you think it's pleasanter being
here with you and your sister and that precious little creature, and
my daughter, than down in that dead-alive place?  Not that I don't
miss my walk sometimes into Darkin; you remember that way as I took
you once, Baruch, across the hill, and we went over Ranmore Common
and I showed you Camilla Lacy, and you said as you knew a woman who
wrote books who once lived there?  You remember them beech-woods?
Ah, it was one October!  Weren't they a colour--weren't they lovely?'

Baruch remembered them well enough.  Who that had ever seen them
could forget them?

'And it was I as took you!  You wouldn't think it, my dear, though
he's always a-arguin', I do believe he'd love to go that walk again,
even with an old woman, and see them heavenly beeches.  But, Lord,
how I do talk, and you've neither of you got any tea.'

'Have you lived long in London, Miss Hopgood?' inquired Baruch.

'Not very long.'

'Do you feel the change?'

'I cannot say I do not.'

'I suppose, however, you have brought yourself to believe in Mrs
Caffyn's philosophy?'

'I cannot say that, but I may say that I am scarcely strong enough
for mere endurance, and I therefore always endeavour to find
something agreeable in circumstances from which there is no escape.'

The recognition of the One in the Many had as great a charm for
Baruch as it had for Socrates, and Clara spoke with the ease of a
person whose habit it was to deal with principles and
generalisations.

'Yes, and mere toleration, to say nothing of opposition, at least so
far as persons are concerned, is seldom necessary.  It is generally
thought that what is called dramatic power is a poetic gift, but it
is really an indispensable virtue to all of us if we are to be
happy.'

Mrs Caffyn did not take much interest in abstract statements.  'You
remember,' she said, turning to Baruch, 'that man Chorley as has the
big farm on the left-hand side just afore you come to the common?  He
wasn't a Surrey man:  he came out of the shires.'

'Very well.'

'He's married that Skelton girl; married her the week afore I left.
There isn't no love lost there, but the girl's father said he'd
murder him if he didn't, and so it come off.  How she ever brought
herself to it gets over me.  She has that big farm-house, and he's
made a fine drawing-room out of the livin' room on the left-hand side
as you go in, and put a new grate in the kitchen and turned that into
the livin' room, and they does the cooking in the back kitchen, but
for all that, if I'd been her, I'd never have seen his face no more,
and I'd have packed off to Australia.'

'Does anybody go near them?'

'Near them! of course they do, and, as true as I'm a-sittin' here,
our parson, who married them, went to the breakfast.  It isn't
Chorley as I blame so much; he's a poor, snivellin' creature, and he
was frightened, but it's the girl.  She doesn't care for him no more
than me, and then again, although, as I tell you, he's such a poor
creature, he's awful cruel and mean, and she knows it.  But what was
I a-goin' to say?  Never shall I forget that wedding.  You know as
it's a short cut to the church across the farmyard at the back of my
house.  The parson, he was rather late--I suppose he'd been giving
himself a finishin' touch--and, as it had been very dry weather, he
went across the straw and stuff just at the edge like of the yard.
There was a pig under the straw--pigs, my dear,' turning to Clara,
'nuzzle under the straw so as you can't see them.  Just as he came to
this pig it started up and upset him, and he fell and straddled
across its back, and the Lord have mercy on me if it didn't carry him
at an awful rate, as if he was a jockey at Epsom races, till it come
to a puddle of dung water, and then down he plumped in it.  You never
see'd a man in such a pickle!  I heer'd the pig a-squeakin' like mad,
and I ran to the door, and I called out to him, and I says, "Mr
Ormiston, won't you come in here?" and though, as you know, he allus
hated me, he had to come.  Mussy on us, how he did stink, and he saw
me turn up my nose, and he was wild with rage, and he called the pig
a filthy beast.  I says to him as that was the pig's way and the pig
didn't know who it was who was a-ridin' it, and I took his coat off
and wiped his stockings, and sent to the rectory for another coat,
and he crept up under the hedge to his garden, and went home, and the
people at church had to wait for an hour.  I was glad I was goin'
away from Great Oakhurst, for he never would have forgiven me.'

There was a ring at the front door bell, and Clara went to see who
was there.  It was a runaway ring, but she took the opportunity of
going upstairs to Madge.

'She has a sister?' said Baruch.

'Yes, and I may just as well tell you about her now--leastways what I
know--and I believe as I know pretty near everything about her.
You'll have to be told if they stay here.  She was engaged to be
married, and how it came about with a girl like that is a bit beyond
me, anyhow, there's a child, and the father's a good sort by what I
can make out, but she won't have anything more to do with him.'

'What do you mean by "a girl like that."'

'She isn't one of them as goes wrong; she can talk German and reads
books.'

'Did he desert her?'

'No, that's just it.  She loves me, although I say it, as if I was
her mother, and yet I'm just as much in the dark as I was the first
day I saw her as to why she left that man.'

Mrs Caffyn wiped the corners of her eyes with her apron.

'It's gospel truth as I never took to anybody as I've took to her.'

After Baruch had gone, Clara returned.

'He's a curious creature, my dear,' said Mrs Caffyn, 'as good as
gold, but he's too solemn by half.  It would do him a world of good
if he'd somebody with him who'd make him laugh more.  He CAN laugh,
for I've seen him forced to get up and hold his sides, but he never
makes no noise.  He's a Jew, and they say as them as crucified our
blessed Lord never laugh proper.



CHAPTER XXIV



Baruch was now in love.  He had fallen in love with Clara suddenly
and totally.  His tendency to reflectiveness did not diminish his
passion:  it rather augmented it.  The men and women whose thoughts
are here and there continually are not the people to feel the full
force of love.  Those who do feel it are those who are accustomed to
think of one thing at a time, and to think upon it for a long time.
'No man,' said Baruch once, 'can love a woman unless he loves God.'
'I should say,' smilingly replied the Gentile, 'that no man can love
God unless he loves a woman.'  'I am right,' said Baruch, 'and so are
you.'

But Baruch looked in the glass:  his hair, jet black when he was a
youth, was marked with grey, and once more the thought came to him--
this time with peculiar force--that he could not now expect a woman
to love him as she had a right to demand that he should love, and
that he must be silent.  He was obliged to call upon Barnes in about
a fortnight's time.  He still read Hebrew, and he had seen in the
shop a copy of the Hebrew translation of the Moreh Nevochim of
Maimonides, which he greatly coveted, but could not afford to buy.
Like every true book-lover, he could not make up his mind when he
wished for a book which was beyond his means that he ought once for
all to renounce it, and he was guilty of subterfuges quite unworthy
of such a reasonable creature in order to delude himself into the
belief that he might yield.  For example, he wanted a new overcoat
badly, but determined it was more prudent to wait, and a week
afterwards very nearly came to the conclusion that as he had not
ordered the coat he had actually accumulated a fund from which the
Moreh Nevochim might be purchased.  When he came to the shop he saw
Barnes was there, and he persuaded himself he should have a quieter
moment or two with the precious volume when Clara was alone.  Barnes,
of course, gossiped with everybody.

He therefore called again in the evening, about half an hour before
closing time, and found that Barnes had gone home.  Clara was busy
with a catalogue, the proof of which she was particularly anxious to
send to the printer that night.  He did not disturb her, but took
down the Maimonides, and for a few moments was lost in revolving the
doctrine, afterwards repeated and proved by a greater than
Maimonides, that the will and power of God are co-extensive:  that
there is nothing which might be and is not.  It was familiar to
Baruch, but like all ideas of that quality and magnitude--and there
are not many of them--it was always new and affected him like a
starry night, seen hundreds of times, yet for ever infinite and
original.

But was it Maimonides which kept him till the porter began to put up
the shutters?  Was he pondering exclusively upon God as the folio lay
open before him?  He did think about Him, but whether he would have
thought about Him for nearly twenty minutes if Clara had not been
there is another matter.

'Do you walk home alone?' he said as she gave the proof to the boy
who stood waiting.

'Yes, always.'

'I am going to see Marshall to-night, but I must go to Newman Street
first.  I shall be glad to walk with you, if you do not mind
diverging a little.'

She consented and they went along Oxford Street without speaking, the
roar of the carriages and waggons preventing a word.

They turned, however, into Bloomsbury, and were able to hear one
another.  He had much to say and he could not begin to say it.  There
was a great mass of something to be communicated pent up within him,
and he would have liked to pour it all out before her at once.  It is
just at such times that we often take up as a means of expression and
relief that which is absurdly inexpressive and irrelevant.

'I have not seen your sister yet; I hope I may see her this evening.'

'I hope you may, but she frequently suffers from headache and prefers
to be alone.'

'How do you like Mr Barnes?'

The answer is not worth recording, nor is any question or answer
which was asked or returned for the next quarter of an hour worth
recording, although they were so interesting then.  When they were
crossing Bedford Square on their return Clara happened to say amongst
other commonplaces, -

'What a relief a quiet space in London is.'

'I do not mind the crowd if I am by myself.'

'I do not like crowds; I dislike even the word, and dislike "the
masses" still more.  I do not want to think of human beings as if
they were a cloud of dust, and as if each atom had no separate
importance.  London is often horrible to me for that reason.  In the
country it was not quite so bad.'

'That is an illusion,' said Baruch after a moment's pause.

'I do not quite understand you, but if it be an illusion it is very
painful.  In London human beings seem the commonest, cheapest things
in the world, and I am one of them.  I went with Mr Marshall not long
ago to a Free Trade Meeting, and more than two thousand people were
present.  Everybody told me it was magnificent, but it made me very
sad.'  She was going on, but she stopped.  How was it, she thought
again, that she could be so communicative?  How was it?  How is it
that sometimes a stranger crosses our path, with whom, before we have
known him for more than an hour, we have no secrets?  An hour? we
have actually known him for centuries.

She could not understand it, and she felt as if she had been
inconsistent with her constant professions of wariness in self-
revelation.

'It is an illusion, nevertheless--an illusion of the senses.  It is
difficult to make what I mean clear, because insight is not possible
beyond a certain point, and clearness does not come until penetration
is complete and what we acquire is brought into a line with other
acquisitions.  It constantly happens that we are arrested short of
this point, but it would be wrong to suppose that our conclusions, if
we may call them so, are of no value.'

She was silent, and he did not go on.  At last he said, -

'The illusion lies in supposing that number, quantity and terms of
that kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but I
cannot go further, at least not now.  After all, it is possible here
in London for one atom to be of eternal importance to another.'

They had gone quite round Bedford Square without entering Great
Russell Street, which was the way eastwards.  A drunken man was
holding on by the railings of the Square.  He had apparently been
hesitating for some time whether he could reach the road, and, just
as Baruch and Clara came up to him, he made a lurch towards it, and
nearly fell over them.  Clara instinctively seized Baruch's arm in
order to avoid the poor, staggering mortal; they went once more to
the right, and began to complete another circuit.  Somehow her arm
had been drawn into Baruch's, and there it remained.

'Have you any friends in London?' said Baruch.

'There are Mrs Caffyn, her son and daughter, and there is Mr A. J.
Scott.  He was a friend of my father.'

'You mean the Mr Scott who was Irving's assistant?'

'Yes.'

'An addition--' he was about to say, 'an additional bond' but he
corrected himself.  'A bond between us; I know Mr Scott.'

'Do you really?  I suppose you know many interesting people in
London, as you are in his circle.'

'Very few; weeks, months have passed since anybody has said as much
to me as you have.'

His voice quivered a little, for he was trembling with an emotion
quite inexplicable by mere intellectual relationship.  Something came
through Clara's glove as her hand rested on his wrist which ran
through every nerve and sent the blood into his head.

Clara felt his excitement and dreaded lest he should say something to
which she could give no answer, and when they came opposite Great
Russell Street, she withdrew her arm from his, and began to cross to
the opposite pavement.  She turned the conversation towards some
indifferent subject, and in a few minutes they were at Great Ormond
Street.  Baruch would not go in as he had intended; he thought it was
about to rain, and he was late.  As he went along he became calmer,
and when he was fairly indoors he had passed into a despair entirely
inconsistent--superficially--with the philosopher Baruch, as
inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in Bedford Square.  He could
well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss Hopgood's suppression of
him.  Ass that he was not to see what he ought to have known so well,
that he was playing the fool to her; he, with a grown-up son, to
pretend to romance with a girl!  At that moment she might be mocking
him, or, if she was too good for mockery, she might be contriving to
avoid or to quench him.  The next time he met her, he would be made
to understand that he was PITIED, and perhaps he would then learn the
name of the youth who was his rival, and had won her.  He would often
meet her, no doubt, but of what value would anything he could say be
to her.  She could not be expected to make fine distinctions, and
there was a class of elderly men, to which of course he would be
assigned, but the thought was too horrible.

Perhaps his love for Clara might be genuine; perhaps it was not.  He
had hoped that as he grew older he might be able really to SEE a
woman, but he was once more like one of the possessed.  It was not
Clara Hopgood who was before him, it was hair, lips, eyes, just as it
was twenty years ago, just as it was with the commonest shop-boy he
met, who had escaped from the counter, and was waiting at an area
gate.  It was terrible to him to find that he had so nearly lost his
self-control, but upon this point he was unjust to himself, for we
are often more distinctly aware of the strength of the temptation
than of the authority within us, which falteringly, but decisively,
enables us at last to resist it.

Then he fell to meditating how little his studies had done for him.
What was the use of them?  They had not made him any stronger, and he
was no better able than other people to resist temptation.  After
twenty years continuous labour he found himself capable of the
vulgarest, coarsest faults and failings from which the remotest skiey
influence in his begetting might have saved him.

Clara was not as Baruch.  No such storm as that which had darkened
and disheartened him could pass over her, but she could love, perhaps
better than he, and she began to love him.  It was very natural to a
woman such as Clara, for she had met a man who had said to her that
what she believed was really of some worth.  Her father and mother
had been very dear to her; her sister was very dear to her, but she
had never received any such recognition as that which had now been
offered to her:  her own self had never been returned to her with
such honour.  She thought, too--why should she not think it?--of the
future, of the release from her dreary occupation, of a happy home
with independence, and she thought of the children that might be.
She lay down without any misgiving.  She was sure he was in love with
her; she did not know much of him, certainly, in the usual meaning of
the word, but she knew enough.  She would like to find out more of
his history; perhaps without exciting suspicion she might obtain it
from Mrs Caffyn.



CHAPTER XXV



Mr Frank Palmer was back again in England.  He was much distressed
when he received that last letter from Mrs Caffyn, and discovered
that Madge's resolution not to write remained unshaken.  He was
really distressed, but he was not the man upon whom an event, however
deeply felt at the time, could score a furrow which could not be
obliterated.  If he had been a dramatic personage, what had happened
to him would have been the second act leading to a fifth, in which
the Fates would have appeared, but life seldom arranges itself in
proper poetic form.  A man determines that he must marry; he makes
the shop-girl an allowance, never sees her or her child again,
transforms himself into a model husband, is beloved by his wife and
family; the woman whom he kissed as he will never kiss his lawful
partner, withdraws completely, and nothing happens to him.

Frank was sure he could never love anybody as he had loved Madge, nor
could he cut indifferently that other cord which bound him to her.
Nobody in society expects the same paternal love for the offspring of
a housemaid or a sempstress as for the child of the stockbroker's or
brewer's daughter, and nobody expects the same obligations, but Frank
was not a society youth, and Madge was his equal.  A score of times,
when his fancy roved, the rope checked him as suddenly as if it were
the lasso of a South American Gaucho.  But what could he do? that was
the point.  There were one or two things which he could have done,
perhaps, and one or two things which he could not have done if he had
been made of different stuff; but there was nothing more to be done
which Frank Palmer could do.  After all, it was better that Madge
should be the child's mother than that it should belong to some
peasant.  At least it would be properly educated.  As to money, Mrs
Caffyn had told him expressly that she did not want it.  That might
be nothing but pride, and he resolved, without very clearly seeing
how, and without troubling himself for the moment as to details, that
Madge should be entirely and handsomely supported by him.  Meanwhile
it was of great importance that he should behave in such a manner as
to raise no suspicion.  He did not particularly care for some time
after his return from Germany to go out to the musical parties to
which he was constantly invited, but he went as a duty, and wherever
he went he met his charming cousin.  They always sang together; they
had easy opportunities of practising together, and Frank, although
nothing definite was said to him, soon found that his family and hers
considered him destined for her.  He could not retreat, and there was
no surprise manifested by anybody when it was rumoured that they were
engaged.  His story may as well be finished at once.  He and Miss
Cecilia Morland were married.  A few days before the wedding, when
some legal arrangements and settlements were necessary, Frank made
one last effort to secure an income for Madge, but it failed.  Mrs
Caffyn met him by appointment, but he could not persuade her even to
be the bearer of a message to Madge.  He then determined to confess
his fears.  To his great relief Mrs Caffyn of her own accord assured
him that he never need dread any disturbance or betrayal.

'There are three of us,' she said, 'as knows you--Miss Madge, Miss
Clara and myself--and, as far as you are concerned, we are dead and
buried.  I can't say as I was altogether of Miss Madge's way of
looking at it at first, and I thought it ought to have been
different, though I believe now as she's right, but,' and the old
woman suddenly fired up as if some bolt from heaven had kindled her,
'I pity you, sir--you, sir, I say--more nor I do her.  You little
know what you've lost, the blessedest, sweetest, ah, and the
cleverest creature, too, as ever I set eyes on.'

'But, Mrs Caffyn,' said Frank, with much emotion, 'it was not I who
left her, you know it was not, and, and even--'

The word 'now' was coming, but it did not come.

'Ah,' said Mrs Caffyn, with something like scorn, '_I_ know, yes, I
do know.  It was she, you needn't tell me that, but, God-a-mighty in
heaven, if I'd been you, I'd have laid myself on the ground afore
her, I'd have tore my heart out for her, and I'd have said, "No other
woman in this world but you"--but there, what a fool I am!  Goodbye,
Mr Palmer.'

She marched away, leaving Frank very miserable, and, as he imagined,
unsettled, but he was not so.  The fit lasted all day, but when he
was walking home that evening, he met a poor friend whose wife was
dying.

'I am so grieved,' said Frank 'to hear of your trouble--no hope?'

'None, I am afraid.'

'It is very dreadful.'

'Yes, it is hard to bear, but to what is inevitable we must submit.'

This new phrase struck Frank very much, and it seemed very
philosophic to him, a maxim, for guidance through life.  It did not
strike him that it was generally either a platitude or an excuse for
weakness, and that a nobler duty is to find out what is inevitable
and what is not, to declare boldly that what the world oftentimes
affirms to be inevitable is really evitable, and heroically to set
about making it so.  Even if revolt be perfectly useless, we are not
particularly drawn to a man who prostrates himself too soon and is
incapable of a little cursing.

As it was impossible to provide for Madge and the child now, Frank
considered whether he could not do something for them in the will
which he had to make before his marriage.  He might help his daughter
if he could not help the mother.

But his wife would perhaps survive him, and the discovery would cause
her and her children much misery; it would damage his character with
them and inflict positive moral mischief.  The will, therefore, did
not mention Madge, and it was not necessary to tell his secret to his
solicitor.

The wedding took place amidst much rejoicing; everybody thought the
couple were most delightfully matched; the presents were magnificent;
the happy pair went to Switzerland, came back and settled in one of
the smaller of the old, red brick houses in Stoke Newington, with a
lawn in front, always shaved and trimmed to the last degree of
smoothness and accuracy, with paths on whose gravel not the smallest
weed was ever seen, and with a hot-house that provided the most
luscious black grapes.  There was a grand piano in the drawing-room,
and Frank and Cecilia became more musical than ever, and Waltham
Lodge was the headquarters of a little amateur orchestra which
practised Mozart and Haydn, and gave local concerts.  A twelvemonth
after the marriage a son was born and Frank's father increased
Frank's share in the business.  Mr Palmer had long ceased to take any
interest in the Hopgoods.  He considered that Madge had treated Frank
shamefully in jilting him, but was convinced that he was fortunate in
his escape.  It was clear that she was unstable; she probably threw
him overboard for somebody more attractive, and she was not the woman
to be a wife to his son.

One day Cecilia was turning out some drawers belonging to her
husband, and she found a dainty little slipper wrapped up in white
tissue paper.  She looked at it for a long time, wondering to whom it
could have belonged, and had half a mind to announce her discovery to
Frank, but she was a wise woman and forbore.  It lay underneath some
neckties which were not now worn, two or three silk pocket
handkerchiefs also discarded, and some manuscript books containing
school themes.  She placed them on the top of the drawers as if they
had all been taken out in a lump and the slipper was at the bottom.

'Frank my dear,' she said after dinner, 'I emptied this morning one
of the drawers in the attic.  I wish you would look over the things
and decide what you wish to keep.  I have not examined them, but they
seem to be mostly rubbish.'

He went upstairs after he had smoked his cigar and read his paper.
There was the slipper!  It all came back to him, that never-to-be-
forgotten night, when she rebuked him for the folly of kissing her
foot, and he begged the slipper and determined to preserve it for
ever, and thought how delightful it would be to take it out and look
at it when he was an old man.  Even now he did not like to destroy
it, but Cecilia might have seen it and might ask him what he had done
with it, and what could he say?  Finally he decided to burn it.
There was no fire, however, in the room, and while he stood
meditating, Cecilia called him.  He replaced the slipper in the
drawer.  He could not return that evening, but he intended to go back
the next morning, take the little parcel away in his pocket and burn
it at his office.  At breakfast some letters came which put
everything else out of mind.  The first thing he did that evening was
to revisit the garret, but the slipper had gone.  Cecilia had been
there and had found it carefully folded up in the drawer.  She pulled
it out, snipped and tore it into fifty pieces, carried them
downstairs, threw them on the dining-room fire, sat down before it,
poking them further and further into the flames, and watched them
till every vestige had vanished.  Frank did not like to make any
inquiries; Cecilia made none, and thence-forward no trace existed at
Waltham Lodge of Madge Hopgood.



CHAPTER XXVI



Baruch went neither to Barnes's shop nor to the Marshalls for nearly
a month.  One Sunday morning he was poring over the Moreh Nevochim,
for it had proved too powerful a temptation for him, and he fell upon
the theorem that without God the Universe could not continue to
exist, for God is its Form.  It was one of those sayings which may be
nothing or much to the reader.  Whether it be nothing or much depends
upon the quality of his mind.

There was certainly nothing in it particularly adapted to Baruch's
condition at that moment, but an antidote may be none the less
efficacious because it is not direct.  It removed him to another
region.  It was like the sight and sound of the sea to the man who
has been in trouble in an inland city.  His self-confidence was
restored, for he to whom an idea is revealed becomes the idea, and is
no longer personal and consequently poor.

His room seemed too small for him; he shut his book and went to Great
Ormond Street.  He found there Marshall, Mrs Caffyn, Clara and a
friend of Marshall's named Dennis.

'Where is your wife?' said Baruch to Marshall.

'Gone with Miss Madge to the Catholic chapel to hear a mass of
Mozart's.'

'Yes,' said Mrs Caffyn.  'I tell them they'll turn Papists if they do
not mind.  They are always going to that place, and there's no
knowing, so I've hear'd, what them priests can do.  They aren't like
our parsons.  Catch that man at Great Oakhurst a-turnin' anybody.'

'I suppose,' said Baruch to Clara, 'it is the music takes your sister
there?'

'Mainly, I believe, but perhaps not entirely.'

'What other attraction can there be?'

'I am not in the least disposed to become a convert.  Once for all,
Catholicism is incredible and that is sufficient, but there is much
in its ritual which suits me.  There is no such intrusion of the
person of the minister as there is in the Church of England, and
still worse amongst dissenters.  In the Catholic service the priest
is nothing; it is his office which is everything; he is a mere means
of communication.  The mass, in so far as it proclaims that miracle
is not dead, is also very impressive to me.'

'I do not quite understand you,' said Marshall, 'but if you once
chuck your reason overboard, you may just as well be Catholic as
Protestant.  Nothing can be more ridiculous than the Protestant
objection, on the ground of absurdity, to the story of the saint
walking about with his head under his arm.'

The tea things had been cleared away, and Marshall was smoking.  Both
he and Dennis were Chartists, and Baruch had interrupted a debate
upon a speech delivered at a Chartist meeting that morning by Henry
Vincent.

Frederick Dennis was about thirty, tall and rather loose-limbed.  He
wore loose clothes, his neck-cloth was tied in a big, loose knot, his
feet were large and his boots were heavy.  His face was quite smooth,
and his hair, which was very thick and light brown, fell across his
forehead in a heavy wave with just two complete undulations in it
from the parting at the side to the opposite ear.  It had a trick of
tumbling over his eyes, so that his fingers were continually passed
through it to brush it away.  He was a wood engraver, or, as he
preferred to call himself, an artist, but he also wrote for the
newspapers, and had been a contributor to the Northern Star.  He was
well brought up and was intended for the University, but he did not
stick to his Latin and Greek, and as he showed some talent for
drawing he was permitted to follow his bent.  His work, however, was
not of first-rate quality, and consequently orders were not abundant.
This was the reason why he had turned to literature.  When he had any
books to illustrate he lived upon what they brought him, and when
there were no books he renewed his acquaintance with politics.  If
books and newspapers both failed, he subsisted on a little money
which had been left him, stayed with friends as long as he could, and
amused himself by writing verses which showed much command over
rhyme.

'I cannot stand Vincent,' said Marshall, 'he is too flowery for me,
and he does not belong to the people.  He is middle-class to the
backbone.'

'He is deficient in ideas,' said Dennis.

'It is odd,' continued Marshall, turning to Cohen, 'that your race
never takes any interest in politics.'

'My race is not a nation, or, if a nation, has no national home.  It
took an interest in politics when it was in its own country, and
produced some rather remarkable political writing.'

'But why do you care so little for what is going on now?'

'I do care, but all people are not born to be agitators, and,
furthermore, I have doubts if the Charter will accomplish all you
expect.'

'I know what is coming'--Marshall took the pipe out of his mouth and
spoke with perceptible sarcasm--'the inefficiency of merely external
remedies, the folly of any attempt at improvement which does not
begin with the improvement of individual character, and that those to
whom we intend to give power are no better than those from whom we
intend to take it away.  All very well, Mr Cohen.  My answer is that
at the present moment the stockingers in Leicester are earning four
shillings and sixpence a week.  It is not a question whether they are
better or worse than their rulers.  They want something to eat, they
have nothing, and their masters have more than they can eat.'

'Apart altogether from purely material reasons,' said Dennis, 'we
have rights; we are born into this planet without our consent, and,
therefore, we may make certain demands.'

'Do you not think,' said Clara, 'that the repeal of the corn laws
will help you?'

Dennis smiled and was about to reply, but Marshall broke out
savagely, -

'Repeal of the corn laws is a contemptible device of manufacturing
selfishness.  It means low wages.  Do you suppose the great
Manchester cotton lords care one straw for their hands?  Not they!
They will face a revolution for repeal because it will enable them to
grind an extra profit out of us.'

'I agree with you entirely,' said Dennis, turning to Clara, 'that a
tax upon food is wrong; it is wrong in the abstract.  The notion of
taxing bread, the fruit of the earth, is most repulsive; but the
point is--what is our policy to be?  If a certain end is to be
achieved, we must neglect subordinate ends, and, at times, even
contradict what our own principles would appear to dictate.  That is
the secret of successful leadership.'

He took up the poker and stirred the fire.

'That will do, Dennis,' said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety.
'The room is rather warm.  There's nothing in Vincent which irritates
me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.


"God made the man--man made the slave,"


and all that stuff.  If God made the man, God made the slave.  I know
what Vincent's little game is, and it is the same game with all his
set.  They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see.  Let us
once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we
shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be
one superstition left.'

'Theological superstition, you mean?' said Clara.

'Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?'

'A few.  The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as
profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as
the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the
Inquisition.'

'Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do
again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables
and a hell and a heaven.'

'I maintain,' said Clara with emphasis, 'that if a man declines to
examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper
tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or
takes for granted what the priest tells him.  Besides, although, as
you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little patience when
I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited creature who
goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is to believe
nothing on one particular subject which his own precious intellect
cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his duty to
swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth.  As to
the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when the
majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical
establishment which ever existed.'

Baruch's lips moved, but he was silent.  He was not strong in
argument.  He was thinking about Marshall's triumphant inquiry
whether God is not responsible for slavery.  He would have liked to
say something on that subject, but he had nothing ready.

'Practical people,' said Dennis, who had not quite recovered from the
rebuke as to the warmth of the room, 'are often most unpractical and
injudicious.  Nothing can be more unwise than to mix up politics and
religion.  If you DO,' Dennis waved his hand, 'you will have all the
religious people against you.  My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is
under the illusion that the Church in this country is tottering to
its fall.  Now, although I myself belong to no sect, I do not share
his illusion; nay, more, I am not sure'--Mr Dennis spoke slowly,
rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling--'I am not sure that
there is not something to be said in favour of State endowment--at
least, in a country like Ireland.'

'Come along, Dennis, we shall be late,' said Marshall, and the two
forthwith took their departure in order to attend another meeting.

'Much either of 'em knows about it,' said Mrs Caffyn when they had
gone.  'There's Marshall getting two pounds a week reg'lar, and goes
on talking about people at Leicester, and he has never been in
Leicester in his life; and, as for that Dennis, he knows less than
Marshall, for he does nothing but write for newspapers and draw for
picture-books, never nothing what you may call work, and he does
worrit me so whenever he begins about poor people that I can't sit
still.  _I_ do know what the poor is, having lived at Great Oakhurst
all these years.'

'You are not a Chartist, then?' said Baruch.

'Me--me a Chartist?  No, I ain't, and yet, maybe, I'm something
worse.  What would be the use of giving them poor creatures votes?
Why, there isn't one of them as wouldn't hold up his hand for anybody
as would give him a shilling.  Quite right of 'em, too, for the one
thing they have to think about from morning to night is how to get a
bit of something to fill their bellies, and they won't fill them by
voting.'

'But what would you do for them?'

'Ah! that beats me!  Hang somebody, but I don't know who it ought to
be.  There's a family by the name of Longwood, they live just on the
slope of the hill nigh the Dower Farm, and there's nine of them, and
the youngest when I left was a baby six months old, and their living-
room faces the road so that the north wind blows in right under the
door, and I've seen the snow lie in heaps inside.  As reg'lar as
winter comes Longwood is knocked off--no work.  I've knowed them not
have a bit of meat for weeks together, and him a-loungin' about at
the corner of the street.  Wasn't that enough to make him feel as if
somebody ought to be killed?  And Marshall and Dennis say as the
proper thing to do is to give him a vote, and prove to him there was
never no Abraham nor Isaac, and that Jonah never was in a whale's
belly, and that nobody had no business to have more children than he
could feed.  And what goes on, and what must go on, inside such a
place as Longwood's, with him and his wife, and with them boys and
gals all huddled together--But I'd better hold my tongue.  We'll let
the smoke out of this room, I think, and air it a little.'

She opened the window, and Baruch rose and went home.

Whenever Mrs Caffyn talked about the labourers at Great Oakhurst,
whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had
been a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual
life, art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling.
When the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and
women shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in
fireside ecstasies over the divine Plato or Shakespeare is surely not
such a virtue as we imagine it to be.



CHAPTER XXVII



Baruch sat and mused before he went to bed.  He had gone out stirred
by an idea, but it was already dead.  Then he began to think about
Clara.  Who was this Dennis who visited the Marshalls and the
Hopgoods?  Oh! for an hour of his youth!  Fifteen years ago the word
would have come unbidden if he had seen Clara, but now, in place of
the word, there was hesitation, shame.  He must make up his mind to
renounce for ever.  But, although this conclusion had forced itself
upon him overnight as inevitable, he could not resist the temptation
when he rose the next morning of plotting to meet Clara, and he
walked up and down the street opposite the shop door that evening
nearly a quarter of an hour, just before closing time, hoping that
she might come out and that he might have the opportunity of
overtaking her apparently by accident.  At last, fearing he might
miss her, he went in and found she had a companion whom he instantly
knew, before any induction, to be her sister.  Madge was not now the
Madge whom we knew at Fenmarket.  She was thinner in the face and
paler.  Nevertheless, she was not careless; she was even more
particular in her costume, but it was simpler.  If anything, perhaps,
she was a little prouder.  She was more attractive, certainly, than
she had ever been, although her face could not be said to be
handsomer.  The slight prominence of the cheek-bone, the slight
hollow underneath, the loss of colour, were perhaps defects, but they
said something which had a meaning in it superior to that of the tint
of the peach.  She had been reading a book while Clara was balancing
her cash, and she attempted to replace it.  The shelf was a little
too high, and the volume fell upon the ground.  It contained
Shelley's Revolt of Islam.

'Have you read Shelley?' said Baruch.

'Every line--when I was much younger.'

'Do you read him now?'

'Not much.  I was an enthusiast for him when I was nineteen, but I
find that his subject matter is rather thin, and his themes are a
little worn.  He was entirely enslaved by the ideals of the French
Revolution.  Take away what the French Revolution contributed to his
poetry, and there is not much left.'

'As a man he is not very attractive to me.'

'Nor to me; I never shall forgive his treatment of Harriet.'

'I suppose he had ceased to love her, and he thought, therefore, he
was justified in leaving her.'

Madge turned and fixed her eyes, unobserved, on Baruch.  He was
looking straight at the bookshelves.  There was not, and, indeed, how
could there be, any reference to herself.

'I should put it in this way,' she said, 'that he thought he was
justified in sacrificing a woman for the sake of an IMPULSE.  Call
this a defect or a crime--whichever you like--it is repellent to me.
It makes no difference to me to know that he believed the impulse to
be divine.'

'I wish,' interrupted Clara, 'you two would choose less exciting
subjects of conversation; my totals will not come right.'

They were silent, and Baruch, affecting to study a Rollin's Ancient
History, wondered, especially when he called to mind Mrs Caffyn's
report, what this girl's history could have been.  He presently
recovered himself, and it occurred to him that he ought to give some
reason why he had called.  Before, however, he was able to offer any
excuse, Clara closed her book.

'Now, it is right,' she said, 'and I am ready.'

Just at that moment Barnes appeared, hot with hurrying.

'Very sorry, Miss Hopgood, to ask you to stay for a few minutes.  I
recollected after I left that the doctor particularly wanted those
books sent off to-night.  I should not like to disappoint him.  I
have been to the booking-office, and the van will be here in about
twenty minutes.  If you will make out the invoice and check me, I
will pack them.'

'I will be off,' said Madge.  'The shop will be shut if I do not make
haste.'

'You are not going alone, are you?' said Baruch.  'May I not go with
you, and cannot we both come back for your sister?'

'It is very kind of you.'

Clara looked up from her desk, watched them as they went out at the
door and, for a moment, seemed lost.  Barnes turned round.

'Now, Miss Hopgood.'  She started.

'Yes, sir.'

'Fabricius, J. A.  Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica in qua continentur.'

'I need not put in the last three words.'

'Yes, yes.'  Barnes never liked to be corrected in a title.  'There's
another Fabricius Bibliotheca or Bibliographia.  Go on--Basili opera
ad MSS. codices, 3 vols.'

Clara silently made the entries a little more scholarly.  In a
quarter of an hour the parcel was ready and Cohen returned.

'Your sister would not allow me to wait.  She met Mrs Marshall; they
said they should have something to carry, and that it was not worth
while to bring it here.  I will walk with you, if you will allow me.
We may as well avoid Holborn.'

They turned into Gray's Inn, and, when they were in comparative
quietude, he said, -

'Any Chartist news?' and then without waiting for an answer, 'By the
way, who is your friend Dennis?'

'He is no particular friend of mine.  He is a wood-engraver, and
writes also, I believe, for the newspapers.'

'He can talk as well as write.'

'Yes, he can talk very well.'

'Do you not think there was something unreal about what he said?'

'I do not believe he is actually insincere.  I have noticed that men
who write or read much often appear somewhat shadowy.'

'How do you account for it?'

'What they say is not experience.'

'I do not quite understand.  A man may think much which can never
become an experience in your sense of the word, and be very much in
earnest with what he thinks; the thinking is an experience.'

'Yes, I suppose so, but it is what a person has gone through which I
like to hear.  Poor Dennis has suffered much.  You are perhaps
surprised, but it is true, and when he leaves politics alone he is a
different creature.'

'I am afraid I must be very uninteresting to you?'

'I did not mean that I care for nothing but my friend's aches and
pains, but that I do not care for what he just takes up and takes
on.'

'It is my misfortune that my subjects are not very--I was about to
say--human.  Perhaps it is because I am a Jew.'

'I do not know quite what you mean by your "subjects," but if you
mean philosophy and religion, they are human.'

'If they are, very few people like to hear anything about them.  Do
you know, Miss Hopgood, I can never talk to anybody as I can to you.'

Clara made no reply.  A husband was to be had for a look, for a
touch, a husband whom she could love, a husband who could give her
all her intellect demanded.  A little house rose before her eyes as
if by Arabian enchantment; there was a bright fire on the hearth, and
there were children round it; without the look, the touch, there
would be solitude, silence and a childless old age, so much more to
be feared by a woman than by a man.  Baruch paused, waiting for her
answer, and her tongue actually began to move with a reply, which
would have sent his arm round her, and made them one for ever, but it
did not come.  Something fell and flashed before her like lightning
from a cloud overhead, divinely beautiful, but divinely terrible.

'I remember,' she said, 'that I have to call in Lamb's Conduit Street
to buy something for my sister.  I shall just be in time.'  Baruch
went as far as Lamb's Conduit Street with her.  He, too, would have
determined his own destiny if she had uttered the word, but the power
to proceed without it was wanting and he fell back.  He left her at
the door of the shop.  She bid him good-bye, obviously intending that
he should go no further with her, and he shook hands with her, taking
her hand again and shaking it again with a grasp which she knew well
enough was too fervent for mere friendship.  He then wandered back
once more to his old room at Clerkenwell.  The fire was dead, he
stirred it, the cinders fell through the grate and it dropped out all
together.  He made no attempt to rekindle it, but sat staring at the
black ashes, not thinking, but dreaming.  Thirty years more perhaps
with no change!  The last chance that he could begin a new life had
disappeared.  He cursed himself that nothing drove him out of himself
with Marshall and his fellowmen; that he was not Chartist nor
revolutionary; but it was impossible to create in himself enthusiasm
for a cause.  He had tried before to become a patriot and had failed,
and was conscious, during the trial, that he was pretending to be
something he was not and could not be.  There was nothing to be done
but to pace the straight road in front of him, which led nowhere, so
far as he could see.



CHAPTER XXVIII



A month afterwards Marshall announced that he intended to pay a
visit.

'I am going,' he said, 'to see Mazzini.  Who will go with me?'

Clara and Madge were both eager to accompany him.  Mrs Caffyn and Mrs
Marshall chose to stay at home.

'I shall ask Cohen to come with us,' said Marshall.  'He has never
seen Mazzini and would like to know him.'  Cohen accordingly called
one Sunday evening, and the party went together to a dull, dark,
little house in a shabby street of small shops and furnished
apartments.  When they knocked at Mazzini's door Marshall asked for
Mr --- for, even in England, Mazzini had an assumed name which was
always used when inquiries were made for him.  They were shown
upstairs into a rather mean room, and found there a man, really about
forty, but looking older.  He had dark hair growing away from his
forehead, dark moustache, dark beard and a singularly serious face.
It was not the face of a conspirator, but that of a saint, although
without that just perceptible touch of silliness which spoils the
faces of most saints.  It was the face of a saint of the Reason, of a
man who could be ecstatic for rational ideals, rarest of all
endowments.  It was the face, too, of one who knew no fear, or, if he
knew it, could crush it.  He was once concealed by a poor woman whose
house was surrounded by Austrian soldiers watching for him.  He was
determined that she should not be sacrificed, and, having disguised
himself a little, walked out into the street in broad daylight, went
up to the Austrian sentry, asked for a light for his cigar and
escaped.  He was cordial in his reception of his visitors,
particularly of Clara, Madge and Cohen, whom he had not seen before.

'The English,' he said, after some preliminary conversation, 'are a
curious people.  As a nation they are what they call practical and
have a contempt for ideas, but I have known some Englishmen who have
a religious belief in them, a nobler belief than I have found in any
other nation.  There are English women, also, who have this faith,
and one or two are amongst my dearest friends.'

'I never,' said Marshall, 'quite comprehend you on this point.  I
should say that we know as clearly as most folk what we want, and we
mean to have it.'

'That may be, but it is not Justice, as Justice which inspires you.
Those of you who have not enough, desire to have more, that is all.'

'If we are to succeed, we must preach what the people understand.'

'Pardon me, that is just where you and I differ.  Whenever any real
good is done it is by a crusade; that is to say, the cross must be
raised and appeal be made to something ABOVE the people.  No system
based on rights will stand.  Never will society be permanent till it
is founded on duty.  If we consider our rights exclusively, we extend
them over the rights of our neighbours.  If the oppressed classes had
the power to obtain their rights to-morrow, and with the rights came
no deeper sense of duty, the new order, for the simple reason that
the oppressed are no better than their oppressors, would be just as
unstable as that which preceded it.'

'To put it in my own language,' said Madge, 'you believe in God.'

Mazzini leaned forward and looked earnestly at her.

'My dear young friend, without that belief I should have no other.'

'I should like, though,' said Marshall, 'to see the church which
would acknowledge you and Miss Madge, or would admit your God to be
theirs.'

'What is essential,' replied Madge, 'in a belief in God is absolute
loyalty to a principle we know to have authority.'

'It may, perhaps,' said Mazzini, 'be more to me, but you are right,
it is a belief in the supremacy and ultimate victory of the
conscience.'

'The victory seems distant in Italy now,' said Baruch.  'I do not
mean the millennial victory of which you speak, but an approximation
to it by the overthrow of tyranny there.'

'You are mistaken; it is far nearer than you imagine.'

'Do you obtain,' said Clara, 'any real help from people here?  Do you
not find that they merely talk and express what they call their
sympathy?'

'I must not say what help I have received; more than words, though,
from many.'

'You expect, then,' said Baruch, 'that the Italians will answer your
appeal?'

'If I had no faith in the people, I do not see what faith could
survive.'

'The people are the persons you meet in the street.'

'A people is not a mere assemblage of uninteresting units, but it is
not a phantom.  A spirit lives in each nation which is superior to
any individual in it.  It is this which is the true reality, the
nation's purpose and destiny, it is this for which the patriot lives
and dies.'

'I suppose,' said Clara, 'you have no difficulty in obtaining
volunteers for any dangerous enterprise?'

'None.  You would be amazed if I were to tell you how many men and
women at this very moment would go to meet certain death if I were to
ask them.'

'Women?'

'Oh, yes; and women are of the greatest use, but it is rather
difficult to find those who have the necessary qualifications.'

'I suppose you employ them in order to obtain secret information?'

'Yes; amongst the Austrians.'

The party broke up.  Baruch manoeuvred to walk with Clara, but
Marshall wanted to borrow a book from Mazzini, and she stayed behind
for him.  Madge was outside in the street, and Baruch could do
nothing but go to her.  She seemed unwilling to wait, and Baruch and
she went slowly homewards, thinking the others would overtake them.
The conversation naturally turned upon Mazzini.

'Although,' said Madge, 'I have never seen him before, I have heard
much about him and he makes me sad.'

'Why?'

'Because he has done something worth doing and will do more.'

'But why should that make you sad?'

'I do not think there is anything sadder than to know you are able to
do a little good and would like to do it, and yet you are not
permitted to do it.  Mazzini has a world open to him large enough for
the exercise of all his powers.'

'It is worse to have a desire which is intense but not definite, to
be continually anxious to do something, you know not what, and always
to feel, if any distinct task is offered, your incapability of
attempting it.'

'A man, if he has a real desire to be of any service, can generally
gratify it to some extent; a woman as a rule cannot, although a
woman's enthusiasm is deeper than a man's.  You can join Mazzini to-
morrow, I suppose, if you like.'

'It is a supposition not quite justifiable, and if I were free to go
I could not.'

'Why?'

'I am not fitted for such work; I have not sufficient faith.  When I
see a flag waving, a doubt always intrudes.  Long ago I was forced to
the conclusion that I should have to be content with a life which did
not extend outside itself.'

'I am sure that many women blunder into the wrong path, not because
they are bad, but simply because--if I may say so--they are too
good.'

'Maybe you are right.  The inability to obtain mere pleasure has not
produced the misery which has been begotten of mistaken or baffled
self-sacrifice.  But do you mean to say that you would like to enlist
under Mazzini?'

'No!'

Baruch thought she referred to her child, and he was silent.

'You are a philosopher,' said Madge, after a pause.  'Have you never
discovered anything which will enable us to submit to be useless?'

'That is to say, have I discovered a religion? for the core of
religion is the relationship of the individual to the whole, the
faith that the poorest and meanest of us is a person.  That is the
real strength of all religions.'

'Well, go on; what do you believe?'

'I can only say it like a creed; I have no demonstration, at least
none such as I would venture to put into words.  Perhaps the highest
of all truths is incapable of demonstration and can only be stated.
Perhaps, also, the statement, at least to some of us, is a sufficient
demonstration.  I believe that inability to imagine a thing is not a
reason for its non-existence.  If the infinite is a conclusion which
is forced upon me, the fact that I cannot picture it does not
disprove it.  I believe, also, in thought and the soul, and it is
nothing to me that I cannot explain them by attributes belonging to
body.  That being so, the difficulties which arise from the perpetual
and unconscious confusion of the qualities of thought and soul with
those of body disappear.  Our imagination represents to itself souls
like pebbles, and asks itself what count can be kept of a million,
but number in such a case is inapplicable.  I believe that all
thought is a manifestation of the Being, who is One, whom you may
call God if you like, and that, as It never was created, It will
never be destroyed.'

'But,' said Madge, interrupting him, 'although you began by warning
me not to expect that you would prove anything, you can tell me
whether you have any kind of basis for what you say, or whether it is
all a dream.'

'You will be surprised, perhaps, to hear that mathematics, which, of
course, I had to learn for my own business, have supplied something
for a foundation.  They lead to ideas which are inconsistent with the
notion that the imagination is a measure of all things.  Mind, I do
not for a moment pretend that I have any theory which explains the
universe.  It is something, however, to know that the sky is as real
as the earth.'

They had now reached Great Ormond Street, and parted.  Clara and
Marshall were about five minutes behind them.  Madge was unusually
cheerful when they sat down to supper.

'Clara,' she said, 'what made you so silent to-night at Mazzini's?'
Clara did not reply, but after a pause of a minute or two, she asked
Mrs Caffyn whether it would not be possible for them all to go into
the country on Whitmonday?  Whitsuntide was late; it would be warm,
and they could take their food with them and eat it out of doors.

'Just the very thing, my dear, if we could get anything cheap to take
us; the baby, of course, must go with us.

'I should like above everything to go to Great Oakhurst.'

'What, five of us--twenty miles there and twenty miles back!
Besides, although I love the place, it isn't exactly what one would
go to see just for a day.  No!  Letherhead or Mickleham or Darkin
would be ever so much better.  They are too far, though, and, then,
that man Baruch must go with us.  He'd be company for Marshall, and
he sticks up in Clerkenwell and never goes nowhere.  You remember as
Marshall said as he must ask him the next time we had an outing.'

Clara had not forgotten it.

'Ah,' continued Mrs Caffyn, 'I should just love to show you
Mickleham.'

Mrs Caffyn's heart yearned after her Surrey land.  The man who is
born in a town does not know what it is to be haunted through life by
lovely visions of the landscape which lay about him when he was
young.  The village youth leaves the home of his childhood for the
city, but the river doubling on itself, the overhanging alders and
willows, the fringe of level meadow, the chalk hills bounding the
river valley and rising against the sky, with here and there on their
summits solitary clusters of beech, the light and peace of the
different seasons, of morning, afternoon and evening, never forsake
him.  To think of them is not a mere luxury; their presence modifies
the whole of his life.

'I don't see how it is to be managed,' she mused; 'and yet there's
nothing near London as I'd give two pins to see.  There's Richmond as
we went to one Sunday; it was no better, to my way of thinking, than
looking at a picture.  I'd ever so much sooner be a-walking across
the turnips by the footpath from Darkin home.'

'Couldn't we, for once in a way, stay somewhere over-night?'

'It might as well be two,' said Mrs Marshall; 'Saturday and Sunday.'

'Two,' said Madge; 'I vote for two.'

'Wait a bit, my dears, we're a precious awkward lot to fit in--
Marshall and his wife me and you and Miss Clara and the baby; and
then there's Baruch, who's odd man, so to speak; that's three
bedrooms.  We sha'n't do it--Otherwise, I was a-thinking--'

'What were you thinking?' said Marshall.

'I've got it,' said Mrs Caffyn, joyously.  'Miss Clara and me will go
to Great Oakhurst on the Friday.  We can easy enough stay at my old
shop.  Marshall and Sarah, Miss Madge, the baby and Baruch can go to
Letherhead on the Saturday morning.  The two women and the baby can
have one of the rooms at Skelton's, and Marshall and Baruch can have
the other.  Then, on Sunday morning, Miss Clara and me we'll come
over for you, and we'll all walk through Norbury Park.  That'll be
ever so much better in many ways.  Miss Clara and me, we'll go by the
coach.  Six of us, not reckoning the baby, in that heavy ginger-beer
cart of Masterman's would be too much.'

'An expensive holiday, rather,' said Marshall.

'Leave that to me; that's my business.  I ain't quite a beggar, and
if we can't take our pleasure once a year, it's a pity.  We aren't
like some folk as messes about up to Hampstead every Sunday, and
spends a fortune on shrimps and donkeys.  No; when I go away, it IS
away, maybe it's only for a couple of days, where I can see a blessed
ploughed field; no shrimps nor donkeys for me.'



CHARTER XXIX



So it was settled, and on the Friday Clara and Mrs Caffyn journeyed
to Great Oakhurst.  They were both tired, and went to bed very early,
in order that they might enjoy the next day.  Clara, always a light
sleeper, woke between three and four, rose and went to the little
casement window which had been open all night.  Below her, on the
left, the church was just discernible, and on the right, the broad
chalk uplands leaned to the south, and were waving with green barley
and wheat.  Underneath her lay the cottage garden, with its row of
beehives in the north-east corner, sheltered from the cold winds by
the thick hedge.  It had evidently been raining a little, for the
drops hung on the currant bushes, but the clouds had been driven by
the south-westerly wind into the eastern sky, where they lay in a
long, low, grey band.  Not a sound was to be heard, save every now
and then the crow of a cock or the short cry of a just-awakened
thrush.  High up on the zenith, the approach of the sun to the
horizon was proclaimed by the most delicate tints of rose-colour, but
the cloud-bank above him was dark and untouched, although the blue
which was over it, was every moment becoming paler.  Clara watched;
she was moved even to tears by the beauty of the scene, but she was
stirred by something more than beauty, just as he who was in the
Spirit and beheld a throne and One sitting thereon, saw something
more than loveliness, although He was radiant with the colour of
jasper and there was a rainbow round about Him like an emerald to
look upon.  In a few moments the highest top of the cloud-rampart was
kindled, and the whole wavy outline became a fringe of flame.  In a
few moments more the fire just at one point became blinding, and in
another second the sun emerged, the first arrowy shaft passed into
her chamber, the first shadow was cast, and it was day.  She put her
hands to her face; the tears fell faster, but she wiped them away and
her great purpose was fixed.  She crept back into bed, her agitation
ceased, a strange and almost supernatural peace overshadowed her and
she fell asleep not to wake till the sound of the scythe had ceased
in the meadow just beyond the rick-yard that came up to one side of
the cottage, and the mowers were at their breakfast.

Neither Mrs Caffyn nor Clara thought of seeing the Letherhead party
on Saturday.  They could not arrive before the afternoon, and it was
considered hardly worth while to walk from Great Oakhurst to
Letherhead merely for the sake of an hour or two.  In the morning Mrs
Caffyn was so busy with her old friends that she rather tired
herself, and in the evening Clara went for a stroll.  She did not
know the country, but she wandered on until she came to a lane which
led down to the river.  At the bottom of the lane she found herself
at a narrow, steep, stone bridge.  She had not been there more than
three or four minutes before she descried two persons coming down the
lane from Letherhead.  When they were about a couple of hundred yards
from her they turned into the meadow over the stile, and struck the
river-bank some distance below the point where she was.  It was
impossible to mistake them; they were Madge and Baruch.  They
sauntered leisurely; presently Baruch knelt down over the water,
apparently to gather something which he gave to Madge.  They then
crossed another stile and were lost behind the tall hedge which
stopped further view of the footpath in that direction.

'The message then was authentic,' she said to herself.  'I thought I
could not have misunderstood it.'

On Sunday morning Clara wished to stay at home.  She pleaded that she
preferred rest, but Mrs Caffyn vowed there should be no Norbury Park
if Clara did not go, and the kind creature managed to persuade a pig-
dealer to drive them over to Letherhead for a small sum,
notwithstanding it was Sunday.  The whole party then set out; the
baby was drawn in a borrowed carriage which also took the provisions,
and they were fairly out of the town before the Letherhead bells had
ceased ringing for church.  It was one of the sweetest of Sundays,
sunny, but masses of white clouds now and then broke the heat.  The
park was reached early in the forenoon, and it was agreed that dinner
should be served under one of the huge beech trees at the lower end,
as the hill was a little too steep for the baby-carriage in the hot
sun.

'This is very beautiful,' said Marshall, when dinner was over, 'but
it is not what we came to see.  We ought to move upwards to the
Druid's grove.'

'Yes, you be off, the whole lot of you,' said Mrs Caffyn.  'I know
every tree there, and I ain't going there this afternoon.  Somebody
must stay here to look after the baby; you can't wheel her, you'll
have to carry her, and you won't enjoy yourselves much more for
moiling along with her up that hill.'

'I will stay with you,' said Clara.

Everybody protested, but Clara was firm.  She was tired, and the sun
had given her a headache.  Madge pleaded that it was she who ought to
remain behind, but at last gave way for her sister looked really
fatigued.

'There's a dear child,' said Clara, when Madge consented to go.  'I
shall lie on the grass and perhaps go to sleep.'

'It is a pity,' said Baruch to Madge as they went away, 'that we are
separated; we must come again.'

'Yes, I am sorry, but perhaps it is better she should be where she
is; she is not particularly strong, and is obliged to be very
careful.'

In due time they all came to the famous yews, and sat down on one of
the seats overlooking that wonderful gate in the chalk downs through
which the Mole passes northwards.

'We must go,' said Marshall, 'a little bit further and see the oak.'

'Not another step,' said his wife.  'You can go it you like.'

'Content; nothing could be pleasanter than to sit here,' and he
pulled out his pipe; 'but really, Miss Madge, to leave Norbury
without paying a visit to the oak is a pity.'

He did not offer, however, to accompany her.

'It is the most extraordinary tree in these parts,' said Baruch; 'of
incalculable age and with branches spreading into a tent big enough
to cover a regiment.  Marshall is quite right.'

'Where is it?'

'Not above a couple of hundred yards further; just round the corner.'

Madge rose and looked.

'No; it is not visible here; it stands a little way back.  If you
come a little further you will catch a glimpse of it.'

She followed him and presently the oak came in view.  They climbed up
the bank and went nearer to it.  The whole vale was underneath them
and part of the weald with the Sussex downs blue in the distance.
Baruch was not much given to raptures over scenery, but the
indifference of Nature to the world's turmoil always appealed to him.

'You are not now discontented because you cannot serve under
Mazzini?'

'Not now.'

There was nothing in her reply on the face of it of any particular
consequence to Baruch.  She might simply have intended that the
beauty of the fair landscape extinguished her restlessness, or that
she saw her own unfitness, but neither of these interpretations
presented itself to him.

'I have sometimes thought,' continued Baruch, slowly, 'that the love
of any two persons in this world may fulfil an eternal purpose which
is as necessary to the Universe as a great revolution.'

Madge's eyes moved round from the hills and they met Baruch's.  No
syllable was uttered, but swiftest messages passed, question and
answer.  There was no hesitation on his part now, no doubt, the woman
and the moment had come.  The last question was put, the final answer
was given; he took her hand in his and came closer to her.

'Stop!' she whispered, 'do you know my history?'

He did not reply, but fell upon her neck.  This was the goal to which
both had been journeying all these years, although with much weary
mistaking of roads; this was what from the beginning was designed for
both!  Happy Madge! happy Baruch!  There are some so closely akin
that the meaning of each may be said to lie in the other, who do not
approach till it is too late.  They travel towards one another, but
are waylaid and detained, and just as they are within greeting, one
of them drops and dies.

They left the tree and went back to the Marshalls, and then down the
hill to Mrs Caffyn and Clara.  Clara was much better for her rest,
and early in the evening the whole party returned to Letherhead,
Clara and Mrs Caffyn going on to Great Oakhurst.  Madge kept close to
her sister till they separated, and the two men walked together.  On
Whitmonday morning the Letherhead people came over to Great Oakhurst.
They had to go back to London in the afternoon, but Mrs Caffyn and
Clara were to stay till Tuesday, as they stood a better chance of
securing places by the coach on that day.  Mrs Caffyn had as much to
show them as if the village had been the Tower of London.  The wonder
of wonders, however, was a big house, where she was well known, and
its hot-houses.  Madge wanted to speak to Clara, but it was difficult
to find a private opportunity.  When they were in the garden,
however, she managed to take Clara unobserved down one of the twisted
paths, under pretence of admiring an ancient mulberry tree.

'Clara,' she said, 'I want a word with you.  Baruch Cohen loves me.'

'Do you love him?'

'Yes.'

'Without a shadow of a doubt?'

'Without a shadow of a doubt.'

Clara put her arm round her sister, kissed her tenderly and said, -

'Then I am perfectly happy.'

'Did you suspect it?'

'I knew it.'

Mrs Caffyn called them; it was time to be moving, and soon afterwards
those who had to go to London that afternoon left for Letherhead.
Clara stood at the gate for a long time watching them along the
straight, white road.  They came to the top of the hill; she could
just discern them against the sky; they passed over the ridge and she
went indoors.  In the evening a friend called to see Mrs Caffyn, and
Clara went to the stone bridge which she had visited on Saturday.
The water on the upper side of the bridge was dammed up and fell over
the little sluice gates under the arches into a clear and deep basin
about forty or fifty feet in diameter.  The river, for some reason of
its own, had bitten into the western bank, and had scooped out a
great piece of it into an island.  The main current went round the
island with a shallow, swift ripple, instead of going through the
pool, as it might have done, for there was a clear channel for it.
The centre and the region under the island were deep and still, but
at the farther end, where the river in passing called to the pool, it
broke into waves as it answered the appeal, and added its own
contribution to the stream, which went away down to the mill and
onwards to the big Thames.  On the island were aspens and alders.
The floods had loosened the roots of the largest tree, and it hung
over heavily in the direction in which it had yielded to the rush of
the torrent, but it still held its grip, and the sap had not forsaken
a single branch.  Every one was as dense with foliage as if there had
been no struggle for life, and the leaves sang their sweet song, just
perceptible for a moment every now and then in the variations of the
louder music below them.  It is curious that the sound of a weir is
never uniform, but is perpetually changing in the ear even of a
person who stands close by it.  One of the arches of the bridge was
dry, and Clara went down into it, stood at the edge and watched that
wonderful sight--the plunge of a smooth, pure stream into the great
cup which it has hollowed out for itself.  Down it went, with a
dancing, foamy fringe playing round it just where it met the surface;
a dozen yards away it rose again, bubbling and exultant.

She came up from the arch and went home as the sun was setting.  She
found Mrs Caffyn alone.

'I have news to tell you,' she said.  'Baruch Cohen is in love with
my sister, and she is in love with him.'

'The Lord, Miss Clara!  I thought sometimes that perhaps it might be
you; but there, it's better, maybe, as it is, for--'

'For what?'

'Why, my dear, because somebody's sure to turn up who'll make you
happy, but there aren't many men like Baruch.  You see what I mean,
don't you?  He's always a-reading books, and, therefore, he don't
think so much of what some people would make a fuss about.  Not as
anything of that kind would ever stop me, if I were a man and saw
such a woman as Miss Madge.  He's really as good a creature as ever
was born, and with that child she might have found it hard to get
along, and now it will be cared for, and so will she be to the end of
their lives.'

The evening after their return to Great Ormond Street, Mazzini was
surprised by a visit from Clara alone.

'When I last saw you,' she said, 'you told us that you had been
helped by women.  I offer myself.'

'But, my dear madam, you hardly know what the qualifications are.  To
begin with, there must be a knowledge of three foreign languages,
French, German and Italian, and the capacity and will to endure great
privation, suffering and, perhaps, death.'

'I was educated abroad, I can speak German and French.  I do not know
much Italian, but when I reach Italy I will soon learn.'

'Pardon me for asking you what may appear a rude question.  Is it a
personal disappointment which sends you to me, or love for the cause?
It is not uncommon to find that young women, when earthly love is
impossible, attempt to satisfy their cravings with a love for that
which is impersonal.'

'Does it make any difference, so far as their constancy is
concerned?'

'I cannot say that it does.  The devotion of many of the martyrs of
the Catholic church was repulsion from the world as much as
attraction to heaven.  You must understand that I am not prompted by
curiosity.  If you are to be my friend, it is necessary that I should
know you thoroughly.'

'My motive is perfectly pure.'

They had some further talk and parted.  After a few more interviews,
Clara and another English lady started for Italy.  Madge had letters
from her sister at intervals for eighteen months, the last being from
Venice.  Then they ceased, and shortly afterwards Mazzini told Baruch
that his sister-in-law was dead.

All efforts to obtain more information from Mazzini were in vain, but
one day when her name was mentioned, he said to Madge, -

'The theologians represent the Crucifixion as the most sublime fact
in the world's history.  It was sublime, but let us reverence also
the Eternal Christ who is for ever being crucified for our
salvation.'

'Father,' said a younger Clara to Baruch some ten years later as she
sat on his knee, 'I had an Aunt Clara once, hadn't I?'

'Yes, my child.'

'Didn't she go to Italy and die there?'

'Yes.'

'Why did she go?'

'Because she wanted to free the poor people of Italy who were
slaves.'




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