CHAPTER XI.
SUSIE AND HER LOVERS.
SUSIE had been nearly a month in Edgeley, and a new faculty had developed in her—a faculty that lies dormant for a life long with many people, and that is impossible to others—the faculty of living in the country. She had never known what that was. Not only in town, in the midst of London, but in the strange, rigid, conventional, severely-regulated life of the great hospital, she had spent all the most important years of her life, and thought she knew no other way. Had she been interrogated on the subject, Susie would have said that the country might be very good for a change—it was, as everybody knew, the very place for convalescents; where people ought to be sent to get well: but for those who were well to start with, oh no! This she would have said in all good faith, in that serene unacquaintance with what she rejected, which is the panoply of the simple mind.
But when she got to the country, almost the first morning Susie woke up in the quiet, in the clear air, and kind, mild sunshine which beamed out of the skies like a smile of God, and had no stony pavement to rebound from and turn into an oven—with a soft rapture such as all her life she had never known before. She had thought she liked the crowd, the stir, the perpetual call upon her, and what people called the life, which was nowhere so vigorous, so intent, so full of change, as in town. But in a moment she became aware that all this was a mistake, and that it was for the country she had been born. This had been a delightful revelation to Susie. And there had followed quickly another revelation, which never is unimportant in a young woman’s life, but which in her peculiar existence had been somehow eluded: and this was her own possession of that feminine power and influence of which books are full, but which Susie had not seen much of in ordinary life. Sometimes, indeed, there had happened cases in which a young doctor had somehow been transported beyond the line of his duties, by some one, perhaps a sister, most probably a young lady on probation, or one who was playing at nursing, as some will. And this had been at once wrong, which gave it piquancy as an incident, and amusing. But such incidents were very rare; people in the hospital being too busy to think of anything of the kind. Susie had been, without knowing, the object of one or two dawning enthusiasms of this description. In one case she had perhaps vaguely suspected the possibility: but Mrs. Sandford gave neither opportunity nor encouragement, and the thing had blown over.
Now, however, it had fully dawned upon her that she herself, tranquil and simple in early maturity, no longer a girl, as she said to herself, nor in the age of romance, had come to that moment of sovereignty which sooner or later falls to most women, notwithstanding all statistics—the power of actually affecting, disposing of, the life of another. It does not always turn out to be of profound importance in a man’s life that he has been refused by a certain woman. But for the time, at least, both parties feel that it is of great importance: and the result of acceptance, colouring and determining the course of two lives, cannot be exaggerated. Susie discovered, first with amusement, afterwards with a little fright, that the visits of Percy Spencer and of Mr. Cattley were not without meaning. The two curates, who were so different! Their position gave them a certain right to come, and her position as a stranger and a temporary inhabitant exempted her, so far, at least, as she was aware, from the remarks and criticisms to which another young woman living alone might have been subject. But Susie had nobody to interfere, no duenna, not even a well-trained maid to say not at home. These visitors came in with a little preliminary knock at the parlour door without asking if it was permitted—without any formality of announcement. The door of the house was always open, and Sarah in the kitchen would have thought it strange indeed to be interrupted in her morning work by anyone ringing at the bell.
A month is a long time when it is passed in this land of intimacy. Susie was asked frequently to the rectory, not always with Mrs. Egerton’s free will—but there are necessities in that way which ladies in the country cannot ignore: and it was very rarely that a day passed without a meeting in the village street, if no more—at some cottage where Susie had made herself useful, but most frequently in her own little sanctuary, in the parlour so familiar to both these gentlemen, so much more familiar to them than to her. At first they were continually meeting there, and their meetings were not pleasant. For Percy did his best to exasperate Mr. Cattley by a pretended deference to his old age and antiquated notions, or by the elevation of his own standard of churchmanship over the mild pretensions of the clergyman who did not call himself a priest. And Mr. Cattley would retaliate by times with a middle-aged contempt for boyish enthusiasms, by assuring his young friend that by-and-by he would see things in a different light.
After a while, however, they fell into a system, arranging their comings and goings with a mutual and jealous care in order that they might not meet. And they both gave Susie a great deal of information about themselves. She sat, and smiled, and listened, not without a subdued pleasure in that power which she had discovered later than usual, and which even this mutual antagonism made more flattering. Percy was full of schemes in which he demanded her interest.
‘Everything has gone on here in the old-fashioned way,’ he said, ‘in the famous old let-alone way. Aunt Mary has pottered about: she is the only one that has done anything. My father never had any energy. He would have let anyone take the reins out of his hands. And she has done it; and she has always had old Cattley under her thumb. He has not dared to say his soul was his own. To see him sit and stare and worship her used to be our fun when we were boys. Jack must have told you.’
‘No, never. John saw nothing that was not perfect. He worshipped all of you, I think.’
‘Some of us too much, perhaps—not me, I am certain,’ said Percy. ‘But old Cattley was the greatest joke, Miss Sandford. How you would have laughed!’ (Susie, however, did not laugh at all at this suggestion, but sat as grave as a judge, with her eyes bent on her sewing.) ‘But nothing could have been more unecclesiastical,’ Percy continued, recovering his gravity. ‘It was the first thing I had to do in getting the parish into my hands. Aunt Mary had to be put down.’
‘Has she been put down?’ said Susie, laughing a little in her turn.
‘I flatter myself, completely,’ said the young man. ‘She has learned to keep her own place, which is everything. My father gives no trouble; he sees how things have been neglected, and he is quite willing that I should have it all in my own hands. I hope, especially if I have your help, Miss Sandford, to have the cottage hospital and all the improvements of which we have talked carried out. If I might hope that you would set it going——’
‘But would not that be like your aunt’s interference over again, with no right at all,’ Susie said.
‘No one can have any right—save what is given them by the clergy. And you are not my aunt—very different! How I should love to delegate as much as is fit of my authority to you!’ He paused a moment, with a sigh and tender look, at which Susie secretly laughed, but outwardly took no notice. Then he added: ‘Aunt Mary would have no delegation. She interferes as if she thought she had a right to do it—a pretension not tenable for a moment. But to entrust the woman’s part—to find an Ancilla Domini, dear Miss Sandford, in you!’
Mr. Cattley was not so lively as this. He would sit for a long time by the little work-table which had belonged to old Mrs. Sandford, and say very little. He would sometimes relate to Susie something about her grandparents, and talk of the pretty old lady with her white hands.
‘They were here when I first came,’ he would say. ‘I was a little lonely when I came. I was one of the youngest of an immense family. My people were glad to get rid of us, I think, especially the young ones, who were of no great account. And my mother was dead. Edgeley was very pleasant to me. I was taken up at the rectory as if I had been a son of the house. And nobody can tell what she—what they all—were to me.’
Mr. Cattley coughed a little over the she, to make it look as if it were a mistake, changing it into they.
‘Mrs. Egerton,’ said Susie, with a directness which brought a little colour to the old curate’s cheek, ‘must have been very pretty then.’
‘To me she is beautiful now,’ he said, fervently, ‘and always will be. I am not of the opinion that age has anything to do with beauty. It becomes a different kind. It is not a girl’s or a young woman’s beauty any longer, but it is just as beautiful. You will forgive me, Miss Sandford——’
‘I have nothing to forgive,’ said Susie, but she said it with a little heat. ‘I like people to be faithful,’ she added, perhaps indiscreetly.
Mr. Cattley did not answer for some time. And then he said:
‘I am going away now, and another life is beginning. I have been rather a dreamer all my life, but I must be so no longer. I begin to feel the difference. I think, if you will not be offended, that it is partly you who have taught me——’
‘I!’ cried Susie, with something like fright. ‘I don’t know how that could be——’
‘Nor I either,’ he said, with a smile which Susie felt to be very ingratiating. ‘You have not intended it, nor thought of it, but still you have done it. There is something that is so real in you, if I may say so—a sweet, practical truth that makes other people think.’
‘You mean,’ said Susie, with a blush, ‘that I am very matter-of-fact?’
‘No, I don’t mean that. I suppose what I mean is, that I have been going on in a kind of a dream, and you are so living that I feel the contrast. You must not ask me to explain. I’m not good at explaining. But I know what I mean. I wish you knew Overton, Miss Sandford.’
‘Yes,’ said Susie, simply, ‘I should like to know it—when do you go?’
He smiled vaguely.
‘That is what I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘I should be there now. When do you go, Miss Sandford?’
‘I don’t know that either,’ she said, with a blush of which she was greatly ashamed. ‘I suppose I ought to go now: but the country life is pleasant, far more than I could have thought, after living so long in town.’
‘You have always lived in town?’
‘As long as I can remember,’ said Susie.
‘That is perhaps what makes one feel that you are living through and through. It must quicken the blood. Now I,’ said Mr. Cattley, ‘am a clodhopper born. I love everything that belongs to the country, and nothing of the town—except——’ he said, and laughed and looked at her with pleasant, mild, admiring eyes.
‘You must make an exception,’ said Susie, ‘or you will seem to say that you dislike me.’
He shook his head at that with a smile—as if anything so much out of the question could be imagined by no one. It was all very simple, tranquil, and sweet, nothing that was impassioned in it, perhaps a little too much of the middle-aged composure and calm. But Susie liked the implied trust, the gentle entire admiration and appreciation. It might not be romantic, perhaps, but she had a feeling that she might go to Overton or anywhere putting her hand in that of this mild man. If there was a little prick of feeling in respect to Mrs. Egerton, who had been so long the object of his devotion, that was soothed by the natural triumphant confidence of youth in its own unspeakable superiority over everyone who was old: and to Susie at twenty-six (though that, she was willing to allow, was not very young) a woman of forty-eight was a feminine Methusaleh, and certainly not to be feared.
Nothing more had been said; and these two were tranquilly sitting together; she at her work, he close to her little table, in a pleasant silence which might have been that of the profoundest calm friendship, or the most tranquil domestic love. And it might have ended in nothing more than was then visible—a great mutual confidence and esteem: or it might end at any moment in the few words which would suffice to unite these two lives into one for all their mortal duration. But as they sat there silently, in that intense calm fellowship, the ears of both were caught by the sound of hurried footsteps approaching, so quick, so precipitate, that it was not possible to dissociate them from the idea of calamity.
Mr. Cattley lifted his head and looked towards the door; Susie involuntarily put down her work. She thought of an accident, in the semi-professional habit of her thoughts, and her mind leaped naturally into the question where she could find bandages and the other appliances? while he, whose duty took another turn, instinctively felt in his breast-pocket for the old well-worn Prayer-book, from which he was never separated. Then there was a clang of the open door, pushed against the wall by some one entering eagerly. And the next moment the parlour door burst open, and Elly appeared—Elly with her eyes very wide open and shining, her mouth set firm, a wind of vigorous and rapid movement coming in with her, disturbing the papers on the table. The curate jumped up in alarm, with a cry: ‘Elly, what is the matter?’ and a changing colour. Susie thought the same as he did—that something must have happened at the rectory, and rose up, but not with the same eagerness as he.
‘Oh, you are here, Mr. Cattley,’ said Elly, with an impatient wave of her hand. She was breathless, scarcely able to get out the words, which ran off in a sort of sibilation at the end. Then she sat down hastily, and paused to take breath. ‘It was Susie,’ she went on, with a gasp, ‘that I wanted to see.’
‘I will go away,’ said the curate, ‘but tell me first that nothing is wrong—that nothing has happened.’
Elly took a minute or two to recover her breath, which she drew in long inspirations, relieving her heart.
‘Since you are here,’ she said, ‘you may stay, for you have known everything. Nothing wrong? Oh, everything is wrong. But nothing has happened to Aunt Mary, if that is what you mean.’
Mr. Cattley grew very red, and cast a glance at Susie, who on her part sat down quickly, silently, without asking any question, which had its significance. Perhaps she only felt that, as there was evidently no need for bandages she could not have much to do with it, either; perhaps—but it is unnecessary to investigate further. For Elly added, immediately,
‘I have got a letter from Jack, which I don’t understand at all.’
She had recovered her breath. There was an air of defiance and resolution upon her face. She drew her chair into the open space in front of Susie, and challenged her as if to single combat.
‘I want to know,’ she said, ‘from you—I don’t mind Mr. Cattley being there, because he knows us both so well, and has been in it all along. I want to know, from you—is there any reason, any secret reason, that he could find out and did not know before, that could stand between Jack and me?’
Susie looked at her with an astonished face, her mouth a little open, her eyes fixed in wonder. She did not make any reply, but that was comprehensible, for the question seemed to take her altogether by surprise.
‘I don’t think you understand me,’ said Elly, plaintively, ‘and I’m sure I don’t wonder. You know, Mr. Cattley, at least; Jack went away full of his great scheme which was to make him rich, which was to make Aunt Mary’s opposition as much contrary to prudence as it was to—to good sense and—everything,’ cried Elly, ‘for of course the only drawback in it, as everybody must have seen with half an eye, was that I was not good enough for him, a rising engineer, with the finest profession in the world! However, we were engaged all the same. People might say not, but we were—in every sense of the word—I to him and he to me!’
Her face was like the sky as she told her tale, now swept by clouds, now clearing into full and open light. She grew red and pale, and dark and bright in a continued succession, and kept her eyes fixed with mingled defiance and appeal on Susie’s face.
‘Now tell me,’ she said, ‘for you must know—is there anything that Jack could find out that would change all that in a moment? What is there that he could find out that would make him think differently of himself and of every creature? Can’t you tell me, Susie? You are his only sister; you must know, if anyone knows. What is it? What is it? Mr. Cattley, her face is changing too. Oh, for goodness sake, make her tell me! If I only knew, I could judge for myself. Make her say what it is!’
The clouds that came and went on Elly’s face seemed suddenly to have blown upon that wind of emotion to Susie’s. After her first look of wonder, she had given the questioner a quick suspicious troubled glance. Then Susie picked up her work again and bent her head over it, and appeared to withdraw her attention altogether. She went on working in an agitated way a minute or two after this appeal had been made to her. Then she suddenly raised her head.
‘What could he have found out? How should I know what he could find out? What was there to find out?’
‘These are the questions I am asking you,’ cried Elly. ‘Here is his letter. I brought it to show you. It is a letter,’ cried the girl, ‘which anybody may see, not what anyone could call a love-letter. I suppose he has found out, after having spoken, that he did not—care for me as he thought.’
‘Elly,’ said the curate, ‘I know nothing about it—but I am sure that is not true.’
‘Oh, you should see the letter,’ she cried, with a faint laugh. The clouds with a crimson tinge had wrapped her face in gloom and shame. Then she paused and put her hands to her eyes to hide the quick-coming tears. ‘Why should one be ashamed?’ she said. ‘I was not ashamed before. It was I who insisted before; for I was quite sure—quite sure—— And now what am I to think? for he has given me up, Susie, he has given me up!’
Susie kept her head bent over her work.
‘Because,’ she said, ‘of something he has found out?’
‘Because of—yes—yes. Read it, if you like—anyone may read it. Because he thought his father was dead and he finds out now that he is alive; but what is his father to me? No father can make a slave of Jack, for he is a man. What have I do with his father, Susie?’
Susie’s work served her no longer as a shield. It dropped from her hands: she was very pale, everything swam before her eyes.
‘Oh, what is it—what is it—what is it?’ cried Elly, clapping her hands together with a frenzy of eagerness and anxiety and curiosity, which resounded through the silence of the house.