THE conversation which Arthur Arden thrust upon Clare by persistently waiting for her in the avenue was not a satisfactory one. Though she could not refuse to accept his explanation that he knew nothing about the strangers, yet a sense of uneasiness and discomfort remained in her mind. When once it is suggested that such secrets exist in a world which looks all fair and straightforward, it is difficult for a young mind to throw off at once the shock of the suggestion. Clare looked at her cousin, who was so much older than herself, and who had been so much in the world, acquiring, no doubt experiences of which she knew nothing, and shrank just a little aside, closing herself up, and putting on all her defences. “How do I know what his life has been, what things may have happened to him?” she said to herself. With a certain mingling of attraction and repulsion, she glanced at him from under her eyelashes. He had lived a man’s life, which is so different from a woman’s; he had been abroad in the world, swept along in the great current, driven from one place to another, from one society to another. And Clare felt that she could never tell what recollections he might have brought out of that great ocean in which he had been sailing, which was so unknown to her, and doubtless so distinct and clear to him. He might have left cares and sorrows behind him—nay, was it not certain that he must have left many a trace behind him, being such a man as he was? As she walked on beside him this feeling came over her so strongly that it swallowed up all other sentiments. She too had a little line of memories, innocent recollections, pangs of childish suffering, unjust reproofs, wounded self-love, and one great natural grief. It was like a little rivulet running under the bushes, hiding only the softest blameless secrets. But his must be like the sea, full of sunny islands and dark cliffs, with calms and storms in it, and havens and shipwrecks—things she could not possibly know of, except by some chance word now and then, and never could fully enter into. A certain admiration grew unconsciously in her mind, along with a great deal of dread and shrinking. What a fine thing it would be to be such a man! How wide his horizon in comparison with hers! How extended and varied his knowledge! Poor Clare! she shrank with a chilled sense that she never could partake or share this vast extent of experience; but it never occurred to her to inquire what kind of knowledge of the world is acquired at German gaming-tables. Clare’s imagination was utterly ignorant of the Turf, and the coulisses, and the Kursaal. She had an idea much more elevated than reality of the Clubs, and took it for granted that a man who was an Arden, even though he was poor, must have entrance always into the best society. He for his part walked by her side with the real recollections bubbling in his mind of which she formed so flattering a vision. He was remembering various things that would not have borne telling, even to ears much less innocent than those of Clare. The girl, who knew nothing about it, surrounded him with a bright and wide and noble world, swelling higher and greater than her unassisted thoughts could penetrate—with tragedies in it, no doubt, and sins, but all on so large a scale; whereas the meanest matters possible haunted Arthur’s mind, the narrow stifling atmosphere of commonplace dissipation, the “Life” which is a round of poor amusements, varied only by the excitement of gain or loss, with now and then a flavour of vice, the only piquant element in the poor mixture. Thus Imagination and Fact went side by side, unable to divine each other; and Clare shrank, yet wondered, secretly inclining towards the man who was so little known to her, painfully attracted and repelled, averting her face for the moment, but drawing near in her heart.
Lord Newmarch could only spare three days to the Ardens, one of which was a Sunday. And he walked dutifully to church, carrying Clare’s prayer-book, and placing himself by her side. “This is what I like,” he said. “The only real remnant of anything worth preserving in the feudal system. Here are your brother and yourself, Miss Arden, at the head of your people, to take their part or plead their cause, or redress their wrongs; here they can see you, and pay their homage; they have the advantage of feeling that you too worship God in the same place; they have the benefit of your example. This is the beautiful side of a country gentleman’s life.”
“But they see us, I assure you, on other days besides Sunday,” said Clare.
“That I do not doubt. Forgive me, Miss Arden, but it is very charming to see your sense of duty. Women seem to me generally to be deficient in that point. I see it in my sisters. They will be wildly charitable whenever their feelings are touched, and that is easily enough done, heaven knows. Any cottager on the estate—or off the estate, for that matter—who has a story to tell can accomplish it. But they have not that sense of duty to all, which is more or less impressed upon men who have dependents. Allow me to pay my tribute of admiration to one who is an exception to the rule.”
Clare made him a little curtsey in reply to his elaborate bow, and did not laugh, partly because she was wanting in the sense of humour, and partly because, to tell the truth, she agreed with him, and was so far conscious of her own excellence. And then he had suggested another line of reflection. “But your sisters”—she said, and hesitated, for it was not quite polite to say what she was going to say, that his sisters were young women of no family, with no feudal rights, and very different from a daughter of the house of Arden. It does not answer, however, to make this sort of speech to the son of an Earl, and Clare caught herself up.
“My sisters are comparatively little at Marchfield?” he suggested. “That is what you would say; and no doubt it is quite true; but still there is a deficiency in this point. There is no sense of duty. And I find it common among women. They do things from emotional motives, or because they like to do them, but not from that manly, serious sense—— I am not one of those who sneer at what are called women’s rights. For my part, I should be but too happy, for instance, to have the assistance of your fine instincts and administrative powers in public business; but, still, there are characteristic differences which cannot be overlooked——”
“Pray, don’t think I care for women’s rights,” said Clare, with a blush of indignation. “I hate the very name of them. Why should we be jested and sneered at for the sake of two or three here and there who make a talk? Let us alone, please. I would rather suffer a great deal, for my part, than hear all this odious, odious talk!”
“Ah, you feel it in that way?” said Lord Newmarch, impartially. “I cannot say I quite agree with you there, Miss Arden. You at present suffer nothing. You are young and rich, and—— and every one you meet with is your slave,” the young philosopher added gallantly, after a pause. “But that is not the case with all women. Some of them are oppressed by unjust laws, some feel the necessity of a career——”
“Helena Thornleigh, for instance,” said Clare. “I have no patience with her. Thornleigh village is in pretty good order, thanks to Ada; but only fancy a girl wanting a career, and all those dreadful cottages within a mile of her father’s house! Don’t you know Chomely and Little Felton, on the way to Thorne? They are frightful places. If the poor people were pigs, they could not be more uncomfortable. And what does Helena ever do to mend them? Why, there is a career ready to her hand.”
“But what could she do to mend them?” said Lord Newmarch, “I don’t suppose she has any money of her own.”
“She has her father’s,” said Clare indignantly, and walked on, elevating her head, her heart swelling with a recollection of all the power her father accorded to her, and all the revolutions she had made.
“Ah,” said Lord Newmarch, shaking his head, “there are fathers and fathers; and besides, Miss Thornleigh probably thinks that to gain a thing by wheedling her father, which her brother could do independently, is but a sign of bondage. She has a fine intellect, and a great deal of energy——”
“Then I would go and build them with my own hands!” said Clare, with that fine mixture of unreasoning Conservatism and Revolutionism which so often distinguishes a woman’s politics. She was the strictest Tory in the world: a change of law or custom was a horror to her. She scorned the idea of a career for Helena Thornleigh with the intensest inconsiderate disdain. But she would have backed her up about the cottages to the fullest extent that enthusiasm could go, and helped her to work at them had that been needful. Lord Newmarch put his head a little on one side and took a close view of her, which was not without meaning. Strong sense of duty, good fortune, enthusiasm in a certain way which might be most usefully trained, excellent old family, great personal beauty, youth. These were qualities most worthy of consideration. He could not feel that he had encountered any one yet who was quite so well endowed. She would do credit to the choice even of an Earl’s son; she might further even a high political career. He made a mental note in his mind to this effect as they arrived at the church door.
Mr. Fielding was not very much of a preacher. He looked venerable in his surplice, with his white hair, and he read the service with a certain paternal grace, like a father among his children. He had baptised the great majority of his hearers, married them, had some share in all the great events of their life, and had given them all the instruction they had in sacred things. Accordingly, there was no one so appropriate as he to conduct their prayers, to read them the simple lesson of love to God and aid to man. His teaching seldom went any further. His was not the preaching which insists upon the authority of the Church, or the extreme importance of the divisions of the ecclesiastical year. And though there were one or two points of doctrine which he held very strongly, it was only on very urgent pressure that he preached on them. His audience knew, or, at least, the instructed among his audience knew, that the Rector had been holding a very hot discussion with Dr. Somers when he produced one of his discourses upon Faith or Predestination. On such occasions Dr. Somers would himself be present, with his keen eyes confronting the gentle preacher in an attitude of war, and noting all the flaws in his armour; and it was well for Mr. Fielding that he was short-sighted and could not see his adversary. But on this Sunday there had been nothing to excite him. The June day was soft and balmy, and through the open door the peaceable blue sky and green boughs looked in to cool and lighten the atmosphere. A grave or two outside but made the sense of home more profound. The rustics worshipped with their dead around them, almost sharing their prayers, and eyes that wandered found nothing worse to look upon than the green grassy turf with its pathetic mounds below, and the deep blue, leading their thoughts to the unutterable, above. The line of educated faces in the Squire’s pew, and Dr. Somers, like a humanised eagle, seeing everything, were the only breaks in the usual audience. Here or there a farmer or two, with an ample wife more brilliant than her humble neighbours, headed a row of ruddy boys and girls—but these were as much rustics as the ploughmen round them. At the big door of the church, the west end, sat Perfitt and Mrs. Murray, two faces of a very different type. She looked on, rather than joined in the service, half disapproving, half interested; while he, with a certain matter-of-fact superiority, patronised and initiated the stranger, finding the places in the prayer-book for her, and thrusting it into her hand at every change. No one noted the two thus strangely introduced into a scene foreign and strange to at least one of them, except Edgar, who, perhaps, was not so attentive as he ought to have been to Mr. Fielding’s sermon, and to whom the changes on the old Scotchwoman’s face were interesting, he could not tell why. It seemed to him that he could divine what was passing through her mind, and he looked on with almost affectionate amusement at the listener, who was perhaps Mr. Fielding’s only attentive hearer in all the congregation. The good folks about were dropping asleep in the unaccustomed quiet, or else looking straight before them with complacent composure, hearing the words addressed to them as they heard the bees and insects, which made a slumberous pleasant hum about the place. That sound was natural to church, as the hum of bees and twitter of birds are natural which come so sweetly from the outer world. The hush, the warmth, the stray breath of air, now and then, the Sunday clothes, the hum of parson and bees together, the scent of the monthly rose laid on the prayer-book—all this was pleasant to the simple folk. They were doing their duty, and their hearts were at rest. But Mrs. Murray looked and commented, and sometimes softly shook her handsome Scotch head, and wondered if this was all the spiritual fare vouchsafed to the inhabitants of Arden. Edgar divined her thoughts as if he had known her all his life, and was more interested than if Mr. Fielding had been a much better preacher, though it would have been hard to tell why.