MR. SWINFORD was afterwards watched by the village in his progress from one house to another of the great people of Watcham—the General’s, where the family were at home, and he went in and stayed for a quarter of an hour: the Archdeacon’s, where they were out, and where some close observers felt that he showed great satisfaction in leaving cards: and then he walked with his alert quick step round the village, as if to take a general view of it, and then returned towards the cottage, which all the spectators thought he was neglecting, the house of Lady William, generally the first on the list of all callers. He was not very tall, as Emmy Plowden had so regretfully allowed, but yet not short either, as she had indignantly asserted after. And it was true that he was neither dark nor fair, but brown, common brown, according to Florence’s conclusion, the most well-wearing and steadygoing of all colours. His eyes, I think, were blue, which is a pleasant combination; but I don’t mean by that the heroical sentimental combination of black hair and dark blue eyes which is so dear to romance, and so distinct a type of beauty. Mr. Swinford’s eyes were of rather an ordinary blue, as his hair was of an ordinary brown, a little curly on his temples. And he had a pleasant colour, and, what was really the only very striking thing about him, a waxed and pointed moustache, after the fashion of his former dwelling-place. He walked briskly, but like a man not used to rough and muddy roads; stumbling sometimes, not remembering that it was necessary to look where he set his foot, and looking down now and then, with a sort of smiling dismay, upon the spots of mud upon his varnished shoes; yet he pushed on briskly all the same; and walked down to the landing-place to take a look at the river, which was looking its best, reflecting the sunshine which began to get low, and to dazzle in the eyes of the gazer. He gave a little pleased nod, as of approval to the river, and then he came back again to the village green, meeting the bands of children just dismissed, who had poured out of the school doors the minute before. He smiled upon them too, and their noise and their games, with little involuntary shrugs of his shoulders and uplifting of his eyebrows as he had to step out of their way: for they did not make room for him as they ought to have done, being rough and healthy village children, invaded by the spirit of the nineteenth century, and having passed beyond the age of curtseys and bows to the gentry. Some of the girls, indeed, stood aside with a little curiosity and pointed him out to each other, with whispers and giggles, which were less agreeable than the uproarious indifference of the rest. When he had got through the crowd, and passed the doors of the empty school, Leo suddenly stopped short at the sight of a face he knew. ‘What!’ he said, ‘you here?’ with very little pleasure in his tone.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Brown, with a slight sweep of a curtsey, ‘I am here. You do not say you are glad to see me, Leo.’
‘You know I am not glad to see you, and I do not pretend it. What are you doing here?’
Mrs. Brown smiled. She was a handsome woman, and looked, as all the village allowed, ‘superior’ to a village schoolmistress. She was tall and dark, not like Leo, but there was a resemblance in her face to that of his mother which filled him with an angry impatience whenever this woman crossed his path. She smiled, and again made a scarcely perceptible obeisance as of satirical humility. ‘That is my own concern,’ she said.
‘It is not mine, certainly: and I have no desire to know: but there is one thing I have to say,’ he said sternly. ‘Don’t come to the Hall—I won’t have you there. If I do you injustice I am sorry, but I don’t want you, please, in my house.’
‘And what then about your mother’s house?’ she said. ‘Has she no house; or where are her friends to see her? It is hard if at her age she has no place of her own to receive her friends.’
‘How do you venture to call yourself one of her friends?’
‘Ask her,’ said Mrs. Brown, with a smile. ‘I am sorry you let your prejudice carry you so far. Ask your mother, Leo, and then forbid me the house if you think well. I am going to see Mrs. Swinford to-night.’
He turned away from her angrily with a wave of his hand, while she stood for a moment looking after him. There was a faint smile of triumph on her face, but it was not malicious or unkind.
‘Bless us all, Mrs. Brown,’ said her colleague, the master, coming up with no very amiable look, ‘so it appears you know Mr. Swinford, and all the rest of the grandees?’
‘I don’t know anything about grandees: but I taught Leo Swinford his letters,’ said Mrs. Brown.
‘Oh, that’s it,’ said the schoolmaster, with a sort of satisfaction. It was an intelligible relationship, and seemed rather to temper than enhance the painful superiority in appearance and manners of Mrs. Brown. He added, ‘It’s a fine evening,’ and went upon his way. He had no house attached to the school, while the mistress had: and he had wanted to get the appointment for his wife, who was not qualified, on the idea that he could help her to ‘rub through somehow,’ and that the house would be very convenient; but this point of view had not been taken by the authorities, and there was thus ‘a little coolness’ between him and his colleague, though she, of course, could not be supposed to be in fault. Now to hear that she had taught Mr. Swinford his letters partly consoled Mr. Atkinson. It showed she was no lady who had seen better days, no fallen star, but only a member of the profession all through, probably a nursery governess. He liked to be assured of this, and thought the better of her from that time.
Leo’s light-hearted and amiable countenance was covered by a passing cloud. He went on quickly, as if trying to throw off the impression. He had many recollections in his life connected with this woman, who had been a member of his family in his earliest remembrance, who had taught him his letters, as she said, and who had always played a part, he did not know what, in his mother’s life. She was not a servant, nor was she an equal. She had disappeared when they left the Hall in his childhood, but only to reappear again at intervals, and, he had always felt, for harm, though he could not tell what harm. The faint resemblance between her and his mother was a horror and annoyance to him more than words could say. It was, perhaps, her greatest offence, one he could not get over. And now to find her here, at their very door, as soon as they had settled in their own house, gave him a feeling of angry impatience which was intolerable. He hurried on to the only place in Watcham which was not strange to him, the little house which the village speculators thought he was neglecting, the cottage of Lady William. All the rest were curiosities to this young man of the world—the village Rectory, the retired old soldier, the decorous little establishments where everything was on so moderate a scale, yet where the inhabitants were so calmly secure in their position, their social elevation above the masses. The stranger from a larger sphere is apt to smile in all circumstances at such a little hierarchy. But to Leo Swinford it was, in addition to all, so quaintly characteristically English, so unlike anything to be seen elsewhere, especially so unlike France, to which he was most accustomed, that he had felt himself walking rather through a mild English novel—one of those he had read, amid more exciting fare, with amusement yet tenderness for the peculiarities of his own country—than through a real village and actual life. He had felt that he was playing his part in this simple society, doing his social duty, much amused and often tickled by the oddity of all its novel ways. He had meant all along, when those duties had been done, and when he had shown himself the amiable young squire, friendly and accessible, to go to Lady William and laugh with her over the humours of Watcham. She would understand all that. She knew the other point of view, and how odd it must all seem in the eyes of the cosmopolitan, who knew French curés better than English churchmen, and to whom the rural parish was the quaintest thing. But in the meantime this last encounter was not in the harmony of the rural parish; there was another element, a tone of the more meretricious drama, a sort of Porte St. Martin, he said to himself, thrown in. Somehow that which was so much more exciting seemed vulgar to him in this quiet place. It was all so tranquil here and seemed so pure, that the other tone of the fictitious and conventional came in with a shock. Porte St. Martin, that was what this woman was. Whereas there was nothing here that savoured of the theatre in any way, but all pure nature and simplicity, and real, though to him almost inconceivable life.
He went on all the same, even after this shock, to Lady William, with a wonderful comfort in finding that here was somebody who would understand him when he spoke. The cottage looked more ridiculously small than ever when he reached it. The Rectory, and the red brick mansions on the other side, were large in comparison with this little place standing lowly in its garden, with the trees hanging over it, and all the crop of climbing plants with the spring sap pushing up through their long shoots, and their new leaves forming. He almost stumbled over the gate, and felt that to step over it would be more natural than to open it and go in. Mab was in the garden busy about some new flower beds, at which she was working with a child’s spade and trowel. She lifted her honest simple face flushed with work, and laughed that she could not offer him such a dirty hand. ‘I have been grubbing,’ she said, ‘but mother is in the drawing-room.’ Her face was not only flushed, which sounds well enough, but red, and her fair hair a little in disorder from stooping over her ‘grubbing.’ Her plump arm was half bare, and looked very capable of work. She was a girl totally unconscious as yet of anything that was not homely and actual, not a budding woman with nerves and feelings, ready to thrill at a new presence. Whether it were Leo Swinford or any old woman that came in, it was quite the same to Mab. She laughed and pointed behind her to the tiny house, and the little open window. Even Emmy Plowden at the Rectory in all her English shyness and correctness might have made a timid effort to detain him a moment, to exchange a single word or two; but not Mab, who wanted to be rid of him simply, or even did not want that so much as to care whether he went or came. ‘Mother is in the drawing-room.’ She waited a moment with her trowel in her dirty hand till he should pass, then explained that she was in a hurry to get done before night, and stooped down again over her work.
‘Can I help you?’ he said, with the instinct of politeness, looking helplessly at her.
‘Oh dear, no!’ said Mab, with energy. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about gardening; and then I like best to do it myself. Go in and talk to mother, Mr. Swinford. You’ll find her there.’
What a change it was to go into that little drawing-room! I am not of opinion that there was more ‘taste’ shown in this little room than in the other houses about. There were no art stuffs, no decorative articles to speak of; one or two sketches which were not very good, and one or two prints which were better, hung on the walls; even the cheap ‘pots’ which country ladies prize were not to be seen here: there were no Japanese fans. But Leo felt there was something in the room which he had not found anywhere else, and which made him feel himself at home, not playing the simple drama of a country life. But I really think that he deceived himself, and that the only thing different was Lady William, who was sitting by the table at her needlework, which she laid down when he came in. She was very constant at her needle, always busy, but she knew better than to keep on sewing when a man came to see her, especially such a man as Leo Swinford, who probably would have thought it an affectation, if not in her, yet in any one else who had treated him so. A conventional man would naturally think that the woman thought herself pretty in that attitude with her eyes cast down.
‘Well,’ said Lady William, ‘you have been parading the village, paying your visits. I have heard of your progress this hour past; and now I presume they are over, and you have come here to rest.’
‘How pleasant it is,’ said Leo, throwing himself into a chair, ‘to be understood before one says anything! That is precisely what I have been doing, and what I have come to do.’
‘There was no great insight required in either case,’ said Lady William. ‘And how do you like us now you have seen us, Leo? The Rectory is homely, but they’re all as good as gold. Yes, they are, though they are my people. You know one doesn’t often admire one’s sister-in-law, and I don’t pretend to admire her; but she’s a good woman, and the girls are excellent.’
Leo allowed to breathe into his voice a slight, though very slight, suspicion of fatigue.
‘You will not be surprised, dear lady,’ he said, ‘if I say that the member of the family who interested me most was your brother; and who is the son who could not be found, who is reading with his father?’
‘Ah, Jim, poor boy!’
‘Yes? I think I understand; there are then troubles even in this idyllic life?’
‘It is so little a stranger knows. I think there is no idyllic life. We are very prosaic and poor, and our troubles are so very real—vulgar, you might call them. We look up, on the other hand, to what we call your brilliant and gay life, and think, surely there are no troubles there. Thus it is true, you see, the one half of the world never understands the other.’
‘But you,’ said Leo, ‘know both.’
‘Do I? I had a little share of the other, very short, and not, perhaps, very satisfactory. I never found it very brilliant or gay. The village life I know by heart, and its troubles, which are bad enough; small little vices and weakness, dreadfully poor and commonplace: you can’t understand how pitiful they are.’
‘Can’t I? Well, so far as it is of any use, you must teach me. For you know from henceforth I am English, and will do my duty. My duty, perhaps, does not demand an endless seclusion here.’
‘Seclusion do you call it? You will have half the people in London pouring down soon, when your mother feels she has got established, and is ready to receive them.’
‘Very likely,’ he said. ‘That will not change matters much. Society is the same everywhere. At all events, I shall always have you to come to.’
‘It is very good of you to think that I can help you. There’s metal more attractive. The village is not everything; in the county there are some pleasant people.’
‘If you knew how sick I am of pleasant people! In sober fact, don’t you know, I want to feel that I have something to do in the world, and if this is my sphere, to make it really so, and fill the place which you would say God had appointed for me.’
‘Don’t you say so, Leo?’
‘I don’t refuse to say so. I know so little. Religion has not held much place in my life. Between the abbé of the stage and the “clergyman” of the English, what have I ever known? I have not been instructed by any one, except’—he laughed a little. ‘Do you know I remember scraps among all sorts of stuff, of the hymns you used to teach me—how long, long ago!’
‘Yes, it is very long ago.’ The room was rather dark; the day was waning. Mab outside was putting her tools together to leave off work. It was not possible for the two indoors to see each other’s faces, but there was something tremulous in Lady William’s tone. Leo Swinford put out his hand and laid it upon hers.
‘You must begin again—not with the hymns, perhaps—but to teach me what is the best way.’
Evidently there was a great deal of discrimination in what Emmy Plowden said.