THE HOME AT HUNTSDEAN AND ITS NEW INMATES.
IT was the dreariest of November days. The only bright spot was a crimson sumach, spreading its gorgeous foliage against the watery grey of the sky, and misty back-ground of fog-hidden fields. It was a day that made the burdens of life seem heavier than they really were, and set the heart aching for the sunshine of the vanished summer.
The scene was as still as death. There was not wind enough to lift the pale vapours that hung over the meadows. No kindly breezes came to the poor brown leaves, heaped on the wayside, and carried them off to quiet hollows where they might have decent burial. Better rain and tempest than such a gloomy calm as this; and better the roar and rattle of the train than the heavy jog-trot of the carrier’s horses, and the rumble of his wagon.
“It will never be the same home again,” said Rhoda Farren to herself, as the old grey cottage came in sight. There was the low, moss-grown wall, built of flints—there were the splendid sumachs, brightening the desolate garden. Rhoda and her cousin Helen had chased each other along those grassy paths when they were children. But they were women now, and had put away childish things. Rhoda loved her cousin reasonably well, yet not well enough to give up her own bedroom to her and her baby.
The baby was the principal grievance. Rhoda had had very little to do with children; and being of a studious turn, she did not want to improve her acquaintance with them. In reading her favourite books she always skipped the parts that related their sayings and doings. It was, therefore, no small cross to find an infant of two months old introduced into the family circle. For there she had hoped to reign supreme.
She had a presentiment that there would be rivalry between the baby and herself—a struggle for mastery, in which her little opponent might possibly be victor. “Baby lips would laugh her down,” if she attempted remonstrance. Even parents and a fond brother might be won over to the cause of the small usurper.
For three years Rhoda Farren had been living away from home, only coming back for a fortnight at Christmas, and sometimes for a few days in midsummer. Neighbours and friends had looked upon her as fortunate. She had held the post of companion to the rich widow of a London merchant, and had been well treated, and not ill remunerated.
The widow was lately dead, and Miss Farren was returning to her home with an annuity of twenty pounds, to be paid regularly by Mrs. Elton’s executors.
Mrs. Elton had not been difficult to live with; and her companion had adapted herself to her ways more readily than most girls of twenty would have done. The quiet house in Cavendish Square had been no uncheerful home. But the mode of life there had strengthened Rhoda’s habits of self-indulgence. She had had ample time for reading and musing. No harsh words had chafed her temper, no small nuisances had planted thorns in her path. They had few visitors. Weeks would pass without their hearing other voices than those of the servants. It did not matter to them that there were mighty things done in the great world. It was an unwholesome life for two women to lead—a life of cramped interests and narrow thoughts.
Helen had been living in Islington, while Rhoda was in Cavendish Square. But in those days Miss Farren never went to see anybody; and she excused herself for not visiting Helen by saying that Mrs. Elton did not like her to be gadding about. Thus it came to pass that she had not even once seen her cousin’s husband.
She knew that Robert Clarris had taken Helen from her situation of nursery governess, and had married her after a brief acquaintance. Rhoda’s parents were Helen’s only surviving relatives, and they had given their full consent to the match. It was not a bad match for a penniless girl to make; for Robert Clarris was a confidential clerk in the office of Mr. Elton, son of the widow in Cavendish Square.
It was in July that Mrs. Elton’s health began to fail. Rhoda Farren saw the change stealing over her day by day, and knew what it portended. In a certain way she had been fond of the old woman; but it was an attachment without love. There would be no great pain when the ties between them were broken, and Rhoda was conscious of this. She was even angry with herself for not being more sorry that Mrs. Elton was dying.
“The worry of life is wearing me out, Rhoda,” said the widow one day, when Miss Farren had found her violently agitated, and in tears. It surprised her not a little to hear that Mrs. Elton had any worries. But when the wind shakes the full tree, there is always a great rustling of the leaves. The bare bough does not quake; it has nothing to lose. Mrs. Elton had been a rich woman from her youth upward, and she could not bear that a single leaf should be torn from her green branches.
“I have had a dreadful loss, Rhoda,” she continued; “a loss in my business. The business is mine, you know. I always said my son should never have it while I was alive. But of course I have let him carry it on for me, and very badly he has managed! That confidential clerk of his—Clarris—has robbed me of three hundred pounds!”
“You surely don’t mean my cousin Helen’s husband, Mrs. Elton?” cried Rhoda.
“How should I know anything about his being your cousin’s husband?” said the old lady peevishly. “His wife is a very unlucky woman, whoever she is. Three hundred pounds have been paid into Clarris’s hands for me, and he has embezzled every shilling of it. My son always had a ridiculous habit of petting the people he employed. This is what has come of it.”
“Is he in prison?” faltered Rhoda.
“No; I am sorry to say that he isn’t. Those lazy idiots, the detectives, have let him slip. He has had the impertinence to write a canting letter to my son, telling him that every farthing shall be restored.”
The fugitive was not captured. Perhaps Mr. Elton had a secret liking for the ci-devant clerk, and did not care to have him too hotly pursued. Poor lonely Helen had travelled without delay to her uncle’s house, and there her little girl had entered this troublesome world. At the end of October Mrs. Elton had ceased to fret for the three hundred pounds, and had gone where gold and silver are of small account. And on this November afternoon Rhoda Farren had returned to her old home once more.
Bond, the carrier, had picked up Miss Farren and her belongings when the train had set her down at the rural railway station. Then came the five mile drive to Huntsdean, over the roads that she had often traversed in her girlhood. The pallid mist clung to every branch of the familiar trees, and veiled the woodland alleys where she had watched the rabbits and squirrels in bygone times. Not a gleam of sunshine welcomed her back to the old haunts; not a brown hare leaped across her path; not a bird sent forth a note of welcome. Nature and Rhoda were in the same mood on that memorable day.
But if the whole scene had been radiant with flowers, Rhoda would still have chosen to “sit down upon her little handful of thorns.” She told herself again and again that her good days were done. Was she not coming home to find the house invaded, and her own room occupied, by the wife and child of a thief?
Yes, a thief. She called him that hard name a dozen times, and even whispered it as she sat under the wagon-tilt. It is a humbling fact, that humanity finds relief in calling names. Ay, it is a miserable thing to know that we have fastened many a bitter epithet on some whose names are written in the Book of Life.
“Wo!” cried Bond to his horses.
The ejaculation might have been applied to Rhoda; for it was a woful visage that emerged from the tilt and met the gaze of John Farren as he came out of the garden gate.
“You don’t look quite so young as you did, Rhoda,” he said when he had lifted her from the wagon and set her on her feet.
There are birds that pluck the feathers from their own breasts. For hours Rhoda had been silently graving lines upon her face, and deliberately destroying the bloom and freshness that God meant her to keep. But she did not like to be told of her handiwork. When Miss So-and-so’s friends remark that she is getting passé, is it any comfort to her to know that her own restless nature, and not Time, has deprived her of her comeliness? Many a woman is lovelier in her maturity than in her youth. But it is a kind of beauty that comes with the knowledge of “the things that belong unto her peace.”
John looked after her boxes, and paid the carrier. The wagon rumbled on through the village, the black retriever barking behind it, to the exasperation of Bond’s dog, which was tethered under the wain. Then the brother put his hands on his sister’s shoulders, glanced at her earnestly for a moment, and kissed her.
“Mother’s waiting for you,” he said.
As he spoke, Mrs. Farren appeared in the porch, and at the sight of her Rhoda’s ill-temper was ready to take flight. But Helen was behind her, waiting too—waiting to weary her cousin with all the details of her wretched story, and expecting her, perhaps, to pity Robert Clarris.
“It’s good to have you back again, my dear,” said the mother’s soft voice and glistening eyes.
“Ah, Rhoda!” piped Helen’s treble, “we were children together, were we not? Oh! what sorrows I’ve gone through, and how I have been longing to talk to you!”
Before Miss Farren could reply, a feeble wail arose from the adjoining room. The baby had lost no time in announcing its presence, and Helen hurried in to the cradle. Dim as the light was, her mother must have detected the annoyance on Rhoda’s face. Or perhaps her quick instinct served her instead of sight, for she hastened to say—
“It doesn’t often cry, poor little mite! But it has been ailing to-day.”
There was only one flight of stairs in the house. As Rhoda slowly ascended them, the loud, steady ticking of the old clock brought back many a childish memory. Would the hours pass as swiftly and brightly as they had done in earlier years? She sighed as she thought of all the small miseries that would make time hang heavily on her hands. It never even occurred to her then that
“No true life is long.”
A fretful spirit will spin hours out of minutes, and weeks out of days.
“I told you, Rhoda, my dear, that we had given your room to Helen. I said so in a letter, didn’t I?” remarked Mrs. Farren, leading the way into the chamber that she had prepared for her daughter. “This is nearly as good. And I felt sure that you would not grudge the larger room to that poor thing and her child.”
“What is to be, must be,” Rhoda replied.
“Don’t stop to unpack anything,” continued her mother, trying not to notice the gloomy answer. “Come downstairs again as soon as you can. There’s a good fire, and a bit of something nice for tea. It’s a kind of day that takes the light and colour out of everything,” she added, with a slight shiver. “I’ll never grumble at the weather that God sends; yet I’m always glad when we’ve got through November.”
It was Rhoda who had brought the damp mist indoors. It was Rhoda—God forgive her—who had taken the light and colour out of everything. In looking back upon our lives, we must always see the dark spots where we cast our shadow on another’s path—a path which, perhaps, ran very close beside our own. It may be that our dear ones, enfolded in the sunlight of Paradise, have forgotten the gloom that we once threw over their earthly way. But we never can.
When Rhoda went down into the old parlour, she found it glowing with fire and candle light. Her father had come in from the wet fields and the sheepfolds, and was waiting to give her a welcome. Red curtains shut out the foggy evening; red lights danced on the well-spread table. The baby, lying open-eyed on Helen’s lap, had its thumb in its mouth, and seemed disposed for quiet contemplation. The black retriever, stretched upon the hearth-rug, had finished a hard day’s barking, and was taking his well-earned repose.
They gave her the best chair and the warmest seat. All that household love could do was done; and she began to thaw a little under its influence.
Once or twice Helen tried to introduce the subject of her troubles, but the farmer and his wife quietly put it aside. Rhoda had made no secret of her resentment. There were many other things to be told; little episodes in village lives; little stories of neighbours and friends. The talk flowed on like a woodland stream that glides over this obstacle and under that. It was threading a difficult and intricate way, but it kept on flowing, till night broke up the family group.