THE second Mrs. Denison was, unfortunately for her husband’s household, one of those ladies who unite in themselves most of woman’s typical frailties. One of the most marked of these was a great jealousy of any member of her own sex who was younger, better looking, or in any way considered more generally attractive than herself. This jealousy rose to such a pitch in the case of her handsome step-daughter that she was more pleased at the discovery of the ineligibility of Olivia’s new admirer than disappointed at the failure of a prospect of getting rid of her.
In spite of her promises to Mrs. Brander, Mrs. Denison of course told her husband that night, with some triumph, what a desperate character he proposed to introduce into the bosom of his household on the following day. But her sensational tirade produced little effect. Mr. Denison had indeed heard the old story since he gave the vicar of Saint Cuthbert’s his invitation; and, to tell the truth, it had rather tended to increase than diminish the liking he had taken to the parson. An injudicious liking for the girls was a humanising foible which he could understand and excuse. As for the disappearance, it was an old story, and might contain an old slander. At any rate, even a murderer was better than a milksop. So he made light of his wife’s deep-voiced harangue, and pronounced his opinion that Mrs. Meredith Brander might find something better to do than to spread these foolish stories concerning her brother-in-law.
“Then you mean to take no steps, in the face of what I have told you, to prevent your own hearth from being polluted by the presence of a murderous libertine?” inquired Mrs. Denison, who had the liking of a narrow and half-educated mind, in moments of excitement, for language equal to the occasion.
“Well, I’m not going, after inviting a man to luncheon, to rush out and tell him we have heard a cock-and-bull story about his doings a quarter of a century ago, and so we can’t let him come in.”
“And so Beatrice and Reginald are to get their ideas of the church from this man? I might have known what sort of a clergyman you would pick up, who would never receive Mr. Lovekin or Mr. Butterworth! I am told this Mr. Vernon Brander doesn’t even dress like a clergyman.”
“He wears a round collar,” said Mr. Denison; “perhaps that will save the morals of Beatrice and Reginald. Anyhow, he doesn’t talk up in his head like old Buttermilk, and he doesn’t look so like a trussed chicken as that lean-necked Lovekin used to do.”
“At least there was no scandal about either of those gentlemen,” said his wife with dignity. “A girl could trust herself with either of them.”
“She’d have an odd taste if she couldn’t.”
“Perhaps you have no objection to this man as a suitor for your daughter?”
“He hasn’t proposed yet.”
“Or to the chance of her being found dead in a mysterious manner.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t make away with more than seventy-five per cent. of the girls he comes across. Olivia might take her chance,” said Mr. Denison, who was getting sleepy, and had had enough of the conversation.
This flippancy silenced her for a time; but it had for its permanent effect on Mrs. Denison the strengthening of her resolution to show this black sheep of the church what a high-principled British matron thought of him.
When, next day, the Reverend Vernon Brander arrived at the farm for luncheon, his evil star brought him before Olivia had returned from her morning walk. He was shown into the drawing-room, where, by Olivia’s orders, in honor of his coming, a fire blazed in the usually cheerless grate; for Mrs. Denison, although an indolent and extravagant housekeeper, practiced from habit a dozen uncomfortable and futile little economies, which she had learnt in her childhood’s days in her father’s small shop. On learning of the guest’s arrival, she made no haste to receive him; and Vernon was left for some time to an uninterrupted study of the room.
He decided at once, his thoughts while in this house all taking the same direction, that Olivia seldom or never sat in the room, that she did not like it, but that, nevertheless she had had something to do with the arrangement of it, and that much of the decorative work, both of needle and paint brush, with which it was adorned, was done by her active fingers. The position of each article of furniture was too coldly correct to please her, Vernon, used to the society of a woman of taste, felt sure. There was no pretty disorder of open book or music, untidy work-basket, with its picturesque overflow of feminine trifles; no disarranged cushion; no displaced chair. The piano was shut—looked even as if it might be locked; the furniture, of the pretty, modern, spindle-shanked, uncomfortable type, was evidently scarcely ever used. Vernon had time to wander about at his leisure until he found something which roused in him more than a passing interest. This was a large photographed head of Olivia, which stood by itself in a dark corner on a side table in a handsome oak frame. It had evidently been taken quite recently, and was an excellent likeness. Vernon could not resist the temptation to take it up and carry it to a window to examine it, as he could not do in the obscurity to which it had been condemned. Then, as he was still left undisturbed, he put the portrait on a centre table in the full light, and opening an album which lay not far off, began hunting for more photographs of the same girl. He found a page containing four, taken at different stages of childhood and gawky young girlhood. Going down on his knees beside the large portrait, he held open the album immediately underneath it, and began tracing out the development of the woman from the child with the deepest interest.
Absorbed, as his habit was, in the occupation of the moment, he did not hear, or did not heed, the approach of footsteps across the hall. The door had not been properly closed, and, before he could change his position, it had been thrust open with peremptory touch, and he was in the presence of his hostess.
Glancing from him to the portrait on the table, and thence to the book in his hand, Mrs. Denison saw or guessed how he was employed, and feminine jealousy and dislike increased the horror and indignation she was nursing against this homicidal clergyman whom her husband had chosen to exalt at the expense of her own chosen divines. She stood with a stony and most unwelcoming face while Vernon, rising hastily with a bright laugh, shut the album, and came forward to meet her.
But she put forward no cordial hand, and vouchsafed him only the coldest little nod of the head. Vernon mistook the reason of this reception, confounding the step-mother with the mother, and supposing that his hostess was in arms at the liberty he had taken in thus openly worshipping at the young girl’s shrine.
“I must apologize for my attitude of apparent devotion,” he said; “but I was so much interested in tracing the development of the child as shown here,” and he held out the album, “into the woman as represented here,” and he touched the portrait on the table, “that I did not notice how unnecessarily devout my position had become.”
“Very unnecessarily,” assented Mrs. Denison, in a hard and frigid tone.
Poor Vernon looked much disconcerted by this rebuff.
“I hope you will believe,” he began, almost stammering in his confusion, “that I had no intention of taking a liberty in admiring your daughter’s portrait so openly——”
“My step-daughter’s!” interrupted Mrs. Denison, with a snap.
“Oh, ah, yes—I mean your step-daughter’s,”—floundered Vernon, more perplexed than ever. If she did not care about the girl, why this anger? “You must all be so much accustomed to the admiration Miss Denison excites that even an eccentric tribute may, I hope, be excused.”
With masculine want of tact he was getting deeper and deeper into the mire. Mrs. Denison’s cold, pale, plump face grew every moment more forbidding.
“The place is not so overrun with admirers of Olivia Denison as you seem to imagine,” said she, acidly. “There is nothing the matter with the girl’s face; on the other hand, we are not accustomed to consider it anything to rave about. We Londoners like beauty of a more delicate type.”
“If by delicate you mean puny and pale,” said Vernon, with rash honesty, “you certainly won’t get us up here to agree with you. But if you mean refined, I can’t imagine a face more ideally satisfying in that respect than Miss Denison’s.”
This was the last straw. The one consolation Mrs. Denison always had ready for herself on the irritating subject of Olivia’s beauty was that her own flaccid paleness made the girl’s bright coloring look “vulgar.” She had made her entrance in an aggressive mood; every word the unfortunate man had uttered had increased her prejudice against him, and had seemed specially designed for her annoyance. Inflamed by sullen anger, and rushing to the favorite conclusion of the ill-bred that she had been “insulted,” Mrs. Denison let loose upon her guest the vials of her wrath. She had just enough sense of decency not to get loud in her anger; but her thin, compressed lips and coldly venomous grey eyes struck a sort of terror into the unsuspecting clergyman, before her slow words came like the crash of a thunderbolt upon his ears. Mrs. Denison prefaced her speech by a hard, short laugh that scarcely moved the muscles of her flabby face.
“I suppose your taste still runs in the same direction that it did ten years ago then, and that you admire red-cheeked farmers’ daughters as much as ever?”
“I don’t understand you, madam,” said Vernon, growing paler than ever, if that were possible, but losing his nervousness in the face of this preposterous attack.
His recovered self-possession irritated Mrs. Denison, who had expected him to cower under her onslaught. Although she was already growing alarmed at what she had done, she was too sullenly obstinate to draw back, and she strengthened herself, even while her breath came faster and a slight flush came over her face, with the conviction that she was unmasking villainy, and putting to rout a man who was a disgrace to his sacred calling.
“Indeed, I should have thought that in this house, of all others, your memory would have been better.”
As Mrs. Denison had remained standing, Vernon had perforce done the same. He now took a step to the left, so that the light might fall on his face as well as on hers as he answered her.
“If you have any accusation to make against me, will you be kind enough to make it in so many words, and not in roundabout hints?”
He had managed to make the woman feel the full awkwardness of the position into which she had brought herself. She hesitated and stammered, even though her grey eyes did not flinch from their vindictive stare.
“I—I had heard—everybody has—stories which—a clergyman, too!—I should never have thought——”
“No. People never do think, when they bring a vague charge, that they ought to be ready to substantiate it. Will you tell me what you heard?”
“I am not to be brought to book in this way,” said Mrs. Denison, recovering herself, and speaking in a louder voice. “You cannot be ignorant of the stories about you, and you cannot be surprised that I don’t think you a fit person to—to be a friend to—to young girls.”
There was a pause, which Mrs. Denison found very awkward. She stood with one hand upon a small octagonal table, feeling very anxious that this most obnoxious visitor would either go or give her an opportunity of going. Vernon, on his side, stood perfectly still before her, staring at the floor, not with the shamefaced look of remorse and guilt, but with an expression of painful and earnest thought. At last he raised his head, and his black eyes, full of passion and fire, met her own cold grey ones steadily.
“You have heard that I caused the disappearance of a girl ten years ago?” said he, not abruptly, but with grave deliberateness.
“Er—yes—something—yes—of the sort,” answered Mrs. Denison, taken aback.
“And on sufficiently good authority to warrant your considering it true?”
“On the very best authority. I never act on any other,” said the lady, hastily.
Vernon looked perplexed, and his tone grew a little more diffident as he continued—
“Then why not have spared me the humiliation of this reception? Just two lines sent by the stable boy would have been enough, and you may be sure I should never have troubled you with what, I hope, has been a painful interview to you.”
Vernon said “hope,” and even put a slight emphasis on the word, as he had a suspicion that his hostess was ill-natured enough to have found some enjoyment in his discomfiture. With a ceremonious and dignified bow he was passing her on his way to the door, when a genial voice startled them both, and Mr. Denison entered.
Not being a man of specially quick perceptions, the new comer did not at once see that anything was wrong. He seized Vernon by both hands, welcomed him in warm words, and with apologies for having been absent on his arrival.
“And where’s my Olivia?” he went on, turning to his wife, now observing for the first time the unpromising frown on that lady’s face, and believing that his daughter’s neglect was the cause. “She should have been here to help you entertain Mr. Brander.”
Mrs. Denison began to say something inarticulately, but Vernon, in a clear and deliberate voice, took the words out of her mouth.
“You do Mrs. Denison injustice. Judging from the manner in which she has entertained me, I should think she is not only able, but that she prefers, to do without any assistance.”
Mrs. Denison looked both confused and alarmed, as she stammered something about Mr. Brander’s having misunderstood her. For her husband, like many other easy-going men, was subject to occasional fits of passionate violence, which, for a woman of Mrs. Denison’s cold and somewhat stodgy temperament, had peculiar terrors.
“Misunderstood!” cried he, in an ominous tone of surprise and perplexity.
“Misunderstood what?”
“I think the misunderstanding was on the lady’s side,” said Vernon, very calmly, moving a step nearer the door. “For if Mrs. Denison really thought that I could comfortably partake of her hospitality after being accused by her of unspecified crimes, she made a mistake which I must now beg to leave her leisure to recognize.”
Without giving Mr. Denison, who had grown during this speech absolutely livid with anger, time to answer him, Vernon Brander hurried out of the room and out of the house.
But Mr. Denison’s outbursts of passion, if violent, were short lived. After having inveighed for a few minutes furiously against woman’s talkativeness and woman’s indiscretion, he allowed himself to be talked round by his wife, into believing that what little she had said to the Reverend Vernon touching his former delinquencies, he had brought upon himself by a very impertinent expression of his admiration for Olivia. Being at heart a man of peace, and unable to retain displeasure with any one for long, Mr. Denison had subsided into an uneasy and conscience-pricked silence on the subject, when Olivia’s footsteps, bounding through the hall with the agility of youth and high spirits, startled both husband and wife.
The girl sprang into the room like a flash of sunshine, but being far more acute than her father, the first glance from his face to that of his wife showed her that something was wrong.
“Where’s Mr. Brander?” she asked abruptly, already with a dash of suspicion in her tone. “Lucy told me he’d been here nearly half an hour.”
Mr. Denison walked away to the nearest window without speaking; Mrs. Denison leaned back in the easy chair which she was occupying with an assumption of easy dignity meant to conceal the uneasiness which she felt. For to displease Olivia seriously, much as the elder woman might affect to ignore the girl’s feelings, was a very different thing from displeasing her good-tempered father.
“Mr. Brander has been and has gone,” said Mrs. Denison, with an air of offended dignity. “He has proved himself unworthy the honor of being admitted as a friend into my family, and I never wish to hear his name mentioned again.”
“You don’t think I’m to be satisfied like that,” said Olivia, very quietly. Then she stood, with hands clasped and passionate, earnest eyes, gazing at her step-mother’s doughy face with a steadfastness which caused that lady to “fidget” uneasily, and thus to destroy the effect of her efforts at dignified composure.
“You’re forgetting yourself strangely, Olivia, to speak to me in that manner. I am mistress here, and I am not going to be dictated to by a chit of a girl.”
“You have said something, done something, to send him away; I am sure of it,” said the girl with breathless earnestness, not heeding her step-mother’s fretful protest. “I will know what it is; I have a right to know. Papa,” she went on, turning towards her father entreatingly, and speaking in a voice that grew softer the moment she addressed him, “you know Mr. Brander has been kind to me, most unselfishly, disinterestedly kind—and just when I wanted help and kindness. You would not let him be rudely treated, would you? You would never allow your guest to be insulted, I am sure. Tell me what has happened; I must know. Do tell me; do satisfy me. I am not curious; I am miserable until I know.”
She had crossed the room to him, put affectionate hands on his shoulders, and was looking into his face with tender pleading, far more irresistible even than his wife’s peremptory reasoning had been. He could not look her in the face, but frowned, and made feeble and futile attempts to get rid of the clinging fingers. Mrs. Denison’s hard voice then struck upon their ears.
“Really, Edward, you’re not going to allow yourself to be talked over in that way, I hope. Surely you and I are the best judges as to who are, and who are not fit acquaintances for our children. And when the wife of the vicar of the parish herself warns me that such and such a man is a criminal of a sort not fit to be admitted into a decent house, I don’t think any one can dispute that we have authority for what we do.”
“The wife of the vicar! Mrs. Brander!” exclaimed Olivia in bewilderment. “She told you that about her brother-in-law?”
Mrs. Denison did not answer. She was ready to bite her tongue out for her indiscretion in mentioning her informant’s name. For she knew Olivia’s impulsive nature, and was very much afraid that the girl would get her into trouble with the vicar’s wife, with whom she was anxious to stand well. For Mrs. Brander’s well-bred simplicity of manner, and a certain air of being queen of the district which years of homage had given her, had made a strong impression on the ex-governess. Olivia read the truth in her step-mother’s confusion, and a new spring of anger bubbled up in her heart.
“The wicked, treacherous woman!” she panted, scarcely aloud, but with great vehemence. “He shall know who are the friends who spread these stories about him.”
She was turning impulsively towards the door, drawing on as she did so, one of the gloves she had taken off, when Mrs. Denison, with unaccustomed agility, sprang up from her chair and laid a heavy hand on the girl’s arm.
“Where are you going?” she asked, peremptorily, with much anxiety.
Olivia looked down at her face with a resolute expression, which made her step-mother’s hands tingle to box her ears.
“I am going to find Mr. Vernon Brander, to tell him of the slanders that are being spread about him and who spreads them, and I am going to apologize most humbly for the treatment he has received in this house this morning.”
If Olivia had trusted herself for another minute in Mrs. Denison’s clutches, the last ray of that good lady’s self-restraint would have been torn away, and she would have recalled her old methods of school room rule by bringing her plump hand in sharp contact with the girl’s cheeks. But Olivia was too quick for her. With an agile twist of her imprisoned arm she freed herself, and shaking her head at her father, who was crossing the room to follow her, she left the room even more rapidly than Vernon Brander had done.
Olivia flew along the road towards St. Cuthbert’s as if pursued. The thought that the man who had done so much both to help and protect her should have been exposed to the vulgar insults of the tyrant of her father’s household threw her into a frenzy of anger and humiliation for which she found no balm. With her indignation against Mrs. Meredith Brander, on the other hand, there mingled an unacknowledged consolation. She did not like that lady; she was also unconsciously jealous of her strong hold upon her brother-in-law. Therefore the discovery of Mrs. Brander’s perfidy, which could not fail to weaken that hold, had an element which was not unwelcome. But to do the girl justice, this selfish feeling was in very small proportion to the passionate wish to make some amends to him for the indignity he had just suffered.
It has been a dull morning and now the rain was beginning to fall, and to envelope the hills far away on the left with a haze which by its density threatened something worse than a light shower. In her impulsive eagerness to start on her errand of consolation, she had not thought of the mundane precaution of taking an umbrella, and although she was now not too much absorbed to regret the omission, she was far too impatient to go back. As the rain fell faster she began to run, and when she came in sight of the ruinous church, standing still far away in the valley below her, partly hidden by the gaunt and cheerless Vicarage, she had to pause for breath, although by that time her clothes were wet through. Through the veil of rain she caught sight of a man who was making his way towards St. Cuthbert’s by a shorter path, over the meadows and through the straggling trees which at this point skirted the hill on the south side of the valley. It must be Vernon Brander, she felt sure, returning passionately angry or deeply humiliated, from his unlucky visit to the farm.
Olivia wanted to overtake him before he could reach his house: so with her usual impetuous rashness, she broke through the hedge on her left, ran, tumbled, and slipped down the hill, which was slippery with wet grass, scrambled through the damp, dead underwood which grew between the trees at the bottom, and, running for the rest of the way, got into the lane leading to the church, and, turning the last sharp corner in a brilliant spurt, ran into the man she was pursuing as he leaned against the churchyard gate.
And it was not Vernon Brander after all!
The man had turned, hearing the rapid footsteps behind him, and the change in the girl’s face, as she learnt her mistake, was far too pronounced for him not to see easily that she was disappointed.
“I’m the wrong man, missee, I’m afraid,” said he good-humoredly, and in a manner perfectly free from offence.
Olivia knew that this was the new tenant of Rishton Church Cottage; she had seen him on the previous Sunday, not indeed inside the church, of which he had confessed to the vicar a frank abhorrence, but leaning over the low wall of his garden to watch the worshippers, as they left the building, with half-shut, critical eyes.
“No,” said she, apologetically; “I thought it was the vicar.”
A curious look, partly of interest and partly, as it seemed to her, of pity came over his face.
“The vicar of this rat run?” he asked, with a nod of his head in the direction of the church.
“The Vicar of St. Cuthbert’s,” answered the girl with some dignity.
Her ideas on the subject of conversation with strangers were strictly conventional, but besides the universal interest and curiosity which the mystery surrounding the new comer excited, she felt a sudden conviction that the attraction which brought him to this remote neighborhood was not unconnected with Vernon Brander.
The stranger gave a sort of grunt, and nodded significantly.
“I thought so,” said he.
Olivia turned away, with a deep flush in her cheeks, much vexed with herself for having given the man an opening for a remark which seemed highly impertinent. She was making boldly for the Vicarage when she heard the stranger’s voice again. He had followed and was walking beside her.
“Look here, Miss Denison,” he began, in a serious and respectful tone, “although I am a stranger to you, you are not one to me, for I’ve studied you since I’ve been in this neighborhood, as I’ve studied all the rest of my neighbors. And if I thought of them all as I do of you, it would be better for some of them.”
Olivia turned suddenly towards him, and stopped, impressed by his tone, and filled with dread of what was coming.
“Don’t be frightened,” he continued, in a voice which, for the rough man, was almost gentle. “You’re a fine, high-spirited, generous girl, and I want to be able to say to you that I will never harm you nor yours.”
“You want to be able to say it!” she exclaimed in bewilderment.
“Yes. As long as you remain Miss Denison I can say it, but if you were to shut your ears to everybody’s warnings and marry the Vicar of St. Moulder-in-the Hole here, I couldn’t.”
“Why, who are you?” cried the girl, in a tremulous voice.
“Ned Mitchell, brother to Nellie Mitchell, who was done away with here ten years ago. And I’m here to make the man who murdered her swing for it!”