The Story of a Marriage

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THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE All rights reserved HE BREAKFASTED SITTING UNDER A HEDGE. THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE BY MRS. ALFRED BALDWIN U AUTHOR OF ' WHERE TOWN AND COUNTRY MEET ' ' RICHARD DARE ' ETC. NEW AND REVISED EDITION LONDON J. M. DENT AND CO. ALDINE HOUSE I895 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty TO MR. JAMES PAYN IN TOKEN OF ADMIRATION AND GRATITUDE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. COOMBE DELAWAY ..... I II. FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS ... 6 III. HELEN WENTWORTH . . . .15 IV. TIM BALLINGER ..... 27 V. A COMPACT ...... 41 VI. KEEPING THE COMPACT . . . .51 VII. THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER ... 65 VIII. TERAH JARVIS ..... 76 IX. BORRADALE IS ANXIOUS FOR HIS FRIEND . 84 X. JARVIS ANXIOUS FOR HIS DAUGHTER . . 92 XI. TEMPLE DECIDES HIS OWN FATE . . .IOI XII. THE ACCEPTED LOVER .... I08 XIII.

AT THE CROWN INN . ' . . . 1 1 7 XIV. A BOMBSHELL AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE . 1 27 XV. A PARTING AND A MEETING . . . I34 XVI. A FAMILY PARTY ..... 144 XVII. MASTER AND PUPIL . . . -155 XVIII. A REKINDLED FLAME . . . .163 XIX. PINE COTTAGE . . . . .170 XX. A WEDDING ..... 176 XXI. THE BRIDE IN HER NEW HOME . . . 183 XXII. MR. AND MRS. TEMPLE . . . 1 88 XXIII. FRIENDS MEET AGAIN . . . .194 XXIV. THE STRIKE AT SMOKINGTON . . . 203 XXV. IN CONGENIAL SOCIETY .... PAGE

CHAPTER XXVI. THE WITNESS OF THE CLOUDS

Chapter I Coombe Delaway

' Every man truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself.' — Sir Thomas Browne. The manor-house at Coombe Delaway nestled at the foot of a wooded hill that gave it shelter from the north and east, while its fair front lay open to the shining west. All its casements, to the uppermost dormer windows, flashed back the bright rays of the sun, and the clipped yews in the terraced garden threw fan tastic outlines of clear-cut shadows on the grass. The house was a red-brick Elizabethan building with fluted chimney-stacks, like gigantic pandean pipes, down which the wind blew many a wild tune on a winter's night. But in the still summer after noon the silence was broken only by the occasional screech of the peacock that strutted to and fro on the terrace, spreading his argus-eyed tail, in the absence of all beholders, merely for the gratification of his own vanity.

Within doors the quiet was almost oppressive, for Coombe Delaway was a childless house, uncheered by the sound of young laughter and pattering footsteps. In the library opening into the wide hall, Mr. Stapleton sat reading, his dog lying at his feet, looking up with intelligent eyes whenever his master stirred. John Stapleton had the air of a man accustomed to be obeyed, who is at ease with himself and the world around him. He would pay tribute to Cæsar, but would also exact payment of the tribute due to himself. Distinctly a proud man, his pride was not of birth, wealth, or position. His pride was of the kind that has often sus- A ■-* tained the sinking heart of the poor. He was proud of the faithful discharge of his duty, of his word being his bond, of his equal dealings with high and low.

In appearance he was a typical Englishman, tall and stout, hair and complexion tending to red, with kindly grey eyes, and large firm mouth. In his marriage with a woman many years younger than him self, he was fortunate and happy. To look at Mrs. Stapleton's sweet face, and soft, beaming eyes, it was impossible to suppose that she had, or imagined she had, a trouble upon earth. But as years went by, and no children were born to her, there were times when she envied the wife of the poorest labourer on the estate, who stood at her cottage door with a babe in her arms. In the midst of all the happiness that enfolded her, Mrs. Stapleton was con scious of a very real void in her life, and for lack of the absorbing interest children would have supplied her with, she was driven to bestow an almost maternal love and thought upon her only and younger brother, Laurence Temple.

The afternoon post had just brought a letter from Laurence, and Mrs. Stapleton entered the library, where her husband was reading, to tell him the good news. 'O, John, is it not delightful? Laurence will be with us to morrow evening,' and she laughed a little pleased laugh as she replaced the letter in its envelope. Mr. Stapleton looked up at his wife's radiant face, and said — ' I am always glad to see Laurence ; and more than that, I am interested too.' ' Of course you are, my dear ; my brother is the most interesting young man we know, and if he could be persuaded to take life a shade less seriously he would be perfect.' 'Then, Norah, you ought to be thankful for any little failing that saves your brother from perfection. I hate your perfect men. You can explore their whole character. There is no pleasing element of mystery or uncertainty in them ; they leave nothing to the imagination,' and Mr. Stapleton reopened the volume he had closed, as though he wished to continue his reading undisturbed. ' It cannot be said that Laurence leaves nothing to the imagination, for it is impossible to conjecture what new idea may have sprung up in his mind since we last met.

Do you remember when he came to us last year from Cambridge during the Easter vacation,' continued Mrs. Stapleton, seating herself on a low chair by COOMBE DELAWAY 3 her husband, and gently taking his book from him to make sure of his undivided attention, 'do you remember he had cultivated a beard and moustache ? He said nature intended hair to grow on his face, and he would not thwart nature by shaving. And I told him if he wished to be consistent, neither should he cut his nails, for nature intended nails to grow as well as hair ; and he said I was an illogical creature. However, he is clean-shaven now, and must have changed his opinion, though I daren't ask him why.' Mr. Stapleton smiled. ' When your brother was last with us he thought he was not far from the kingdom of Heaven, feeling his way towards some bright discovery that should harmonise the jarring elements of society.

He has set himself a tough task if he thinks he can reform the world. Poor Laurence ! ' ' I should say, happy Laurence, to be capable of such faith and enthusiasm,' said Mrs. Stapleton. ' But I wish he did not think that drinking water, not smoking, and living mainly on cheese and apples was part of the great reformation of society ! ' ' I suppose, my dear, it is because Laurence holds that on this singularly unattractive diet his spiritual faculties are preserved at their best and brightest.' ' I am sure Laurence thinks it is the will of God that he should live in this way,' said Mrs. Stapleton gravely. ' That 's a mark of your reformer in all ages,' said her husband emphatically. ' He can always tell you what is the will of God on any given subject, and by a strange coincidence it is usually iden tical with his own will.

However, Norah, be sure to tell Mrs. Harter to have plenty of cheese and apples in the house, and if she can find a chair more rigid in the back and more austere in the seat than another, tell her to put it in your brother's room. I know his taste.' ' O, John,' suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Stapleton in a despairing voice, ' I had quite forgotten that you have a few gentlemen dining with you to-morrow ! It will spoil our evening with Laurence. How unfortunate ! and I know he dislikes a dinner-party. I wonder what he will do.' ' He will behave like a gentleman and dine with us, or else eat cheese and apples in his own room ; though I object to cheese in the bedrooms — it attracts the mice,' said Mr. Stapleton, as though seized with housewifely fears. Mrs. Stapleton was ten years older than the brother in whom she took so vivid an interest, dating from the time when they lost their parents, and she had resolved that the little boy should never know the want of motherly love and care.

Laurence had left Cambridge the year before, and was now living in London, but had not yet decided upon a profession, though his friends recom mended a fresh one to him daily. So far he had only arrived at the negative stage of choice, in which a man knows definitely what he does not want, while his mind is a blank as to any definite idea of what he would like, or what calling might be suited to him ; and though he took counsel with his friends, he did not dream of following their advice. The Bar would have suited him better than any other profession, but on no theory could he satisfy himself that it would be right to defend a man whom he knew to be guilty of a crime. An ancient work denounces ' Woe unto those who justify the wicked for a reward,' and Laurence supposed that this denun ciation would apply to him if he took a fee for endeavouring to save a rogue from well-merited punishment.

For the sake of bread-winning there was no need that he should adopt any profession whatever. He had inherited ample means from his father, and was not anxious to set his pounds to work, begetting other pounds. To him money was simply and truly currency ; a some thing to flow from his hand to the hand of another, and never to lose this flowing property in stagnant accumulation. So long as he could work at anything that he believed to be of use in the world, there was no spur of necessity urging him on to enter the over crowded ranks of the professions, to occupy a place for which a thousand men, less lucky than himself, were scrambling. Laurence Temple was capable of strong friendship, and of real love for his fellow-men. The fire of his charity burned brightest at home, and from the warmth of his affection for his brethren in England a kindly glow extended itself to the world beyond.

He loved the upper and middle classes of Englishmen, with whom he associated ; but when Laurence asked himself, ' What do I know of my poorer brethren, that I may love them also ? ' he felt that he knew very little about them indeed. And how shall a man who knows only two out of the three estates that compose the realm, imagine that he knows anything of the great globe itself, and all that it inhabit ? He found it most difficult to gain any real know ledge of that mass of our countrymen whom, in contradistinction to the upper and middle classes, we call the lower classes of society. COOMBE DELAWAY 5 They are proud and exclusive, and view with suspicion a man who comes among them from a different rank of life from their own. But Laurence, undeterred by coldness or rudeness, resolved by such means as might suggest themselves to him to gain some practical acquaintance with that body of his countrymen for whom all political parties express so much admiration on such insufficient knowledge.

While he was at Cambridge he had spent each long vacation among workpeople in hideous manufacturing towns, living as they lived, and endeavouring to look at life from their point of view. Since leaving the University he had worked for a time in a cotton-mill in a northern town. After he had become accustomed to the ceaseless clack and rattle of the cotton-mill, and no longer was aware of the permeat ing stench of oil, and had seen as much as he then desired of his fellow-workmen, he left the north to seek employment in London, this time as a humble beginner in carpentry. At several work shops where he applied, when the manager saw his hands he bade him be off about his business, telling him that men like him cost their employers more by their blunders than they could ever hope to make by their work.

However, after much fruitless endeavour, Laurence induced a cabinetmaker, for a considerable sum of ready money, to take him into his workshop and teach him his trade, or, to speak with exactness, to teach him as much of the use of car penters' tools as he could learn in three months of steady application. In his efforts to learn something about working-men by associating with them, he approached his self-imposed task in a purely receptive frame of mind, unprejudiced for or against them as a class. He did not think them inspired with wisdom because they work with the hand more than with the brain, nor fit to guide the destinies of a great nation because of their numerical prepon derance. It was a strong sense of brotherhood that made him forego congenial society to live among rough and often rude people, who for the most part regarded him with a mingled feeling of aversion and suspicion.

Chapter II Friends And Neighbours

' I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting.' — Charles Lamb. The sound of approaching wheels betokened the arrival of the first guests, and Mrs. Stapleton had only time to say to her husband, ' I cannot think what has delayed Laurence,' and he to reply, ' We shall not wait for him. You forget that he always walks from the station, and that if he has a portmanteau to carry, and arrives late in consequence, he will be all the happier,' when the door was thrown open and Sir Stoke Poges was announced. A little later, when the other guests had arrived, and they were seated at the dinner-table, the company was at first somewhat taciturn, and a sound of noisy soup-swallowing was heard from the old naval officer, Captain Cox, and even from the more refined Mr. Newbury ; for it is a licence sometimes permitted themselves by those who would not for the world drink any other fluid audibly.

But a buzz of conversation very shortly arose, that would have drowned a louder sound than that of imbibing soup. Sir Stoke Poges was telling Mrs. Stapleton of the new stables and kennels he was building at Poges Court, and for her better understanding sketched the front elevation of them on his stiffly-starched wristband. Mr. Newbury was inquiring of Mr. Scantlebury-Fox whether the new people at Buckley Grange were such as he might ask to his table. Mr. Carruthers was informing his host that ' the foren sic intellect finds it necessary occasionally to unbend ' ; while Captain Cox in a tremendous voice was telling the company generally that when he was a boy the wheat one year was diseased, and the bread made from it so bad ' that if you shied a loaf at the wall it stuck there, begad.' The nature of the assertion, and the tone in which it was uttered, caused all eyes to be turned in amused astonishment on Captain Cox.

He looked fiercely round him, and said, ' True, begad ; done it many a hundred times,' and relapsed into silence, unconscious that his voice had made the room ring. ' We are expecting my brother this evening,' said Mrs. Staple ton to Mr. Carruthers with a pleased smile. ' Indeed ! I have not had the pleasure of meeting your interesting young relative since he completed his academical career at the University,' and he slowly turned his head and shoulders towards his hostess. ' Have you not seen Laurence since he left Cambridge ? ' said Mrs. Stapleton, unconsciously translating Mr. Carruthers' language into Saxon ; ' but here he is to answer for himself,' and Laurence entered the room as she spoke. He kissed his sister on the brow, shook hands with his brother-in-law, and bowed to his friends generally. ' I must apologise for being so late,' he said, as he seated himself by Mrs. Stapleton, ' but I have had my dinner, so I shall incon venience no one ; the train was nearly an hour behind time.' He sat where the light fell on his face, and threw the clear out line of his features in relief against the dark background of the oak panelled wall.

Laurence Temple was only four-and-twenty, so that his face was marked with no long record of the past ; but it spoke eloquently of the present. It was the face of a man whose inner life is his real life, and whose body is in subjection to his mind. A look of perfect health pervaded face and form, and his body ap peared a fit dwelling-place for the clean soul within. His brother-in-law looked with a kindly smile on Laurence's intellectual, eager face and spare frame, in contrast with the stolid faces and overfed bodies of the other gentlemen present. He was like a greyhound among oxen. ' If I thought it would make me look like you, Laurence, I would adopt your diet at once.' ' In what does the peculiarity of his diet consist, may I inquire ? ' said Mr. Carruthers, whose great toe was at the very moment red hot with gout. ' If Laurence is living now as he was a few months ago, he takes neither meat nor wine.' Mr. Carruthers turned his large round head in its collar socket till he fully faced Temple, and said — ' In my profession such a regimen would be monstrous and impossible.

The wear and tear of brain fibre is too great. I owe it to my clients to partake freely of animal food and of alcohol, that I may be the better qualified to discharge my duties towards them.' ' No doubt your profession is an arduous one,' said Temple, ' but I contrive to work hard on a diet that excludes wine and meat, and am at least as strong as other men.' ' Well,' said Captain Cox emphatically, ' I shall go on eating meat as hard as I can, if it 's only to keep the animal creation in its proper place. Besides, hang it all, the thing 's a plain duty. The Almighty requires us to kill and eat the animals, because if we don't they '11 kill and eat us, and then there 'd be a pretty how-do-you-do,' and he looked fiercely round the table in the hope of contradiction. ' Let me offer you a glass of port, Laurence,' said Mr. Staple ton ; ' it is not an animal fluid like milk ; it is a vegetable product, so you need not be afraid of it.' 'You almost convince me by your delightful sophistry,' said Laurence, laughing, and drawing a dish of walnuts towards him. ' But if I did drink port I doubt if I could properly appreciate it this side of five-and-forty years of age-' ' Don't you flatter yourself that you would be able to appreciate port wine even then, unless you serve an apprenticeship to it in your youth,' said Sir Stoke Poges, whose eyes shone bluer as his face became redder. ' It is a taste a young man cannot begin to cultivate too soon, and then it is possible, though by no means certain, that at five-and-forty he may know something about it.' After their guests had departed, Mr. and Mrs. Stapleton and Laurence drew near the hearth, where, summer evening though it was, a wood fire was burning.

Mrs. Stapleton stirred the smouldering logs and sent a shower of sparks rushing up the wide chimney. The ruddy light shone on her round white arms, and threw a warm glow on her sweet, animated face, as she turned with a smile to Laurence, and, drawing him towards her, gave him a sisterly kiss upon his mouth. ' Now, my dear brother, that these good people are gone, let us sit by the fire and have a three-cornered talk together before we go to bed.' ' With all my heart. You and John shall take possession of the arm-chairs, as becomes your dignity, and I will perch on the music stool, and spin round and face you alternately.' ' Face Norah first ; I think she wants to find fault with you for not answering her last half-dozen letters,' said Mr. Stapleton. ' Oh, no, I forgive you the moment I see you.

But I did want to know what you have been doing since you left the cabinet maker's. Let me look at your hands, Laurence. Are they getting hard and coarse, like a workman's ? ' ' Or like a fellow's in a university eight,' said her brother, turning round on the music-stool and spreading out a pair of well-shaped, strong-looking hands for her inspection. ' Oh, what a cut this has been on your left thumb ! And you have had a horrid pinch on this third finger nail ! But surely all this roughness is not necessary, in addition to wounds and bruises, while there is glycerine to be had ? You really could not offer a hand like that to a lady, Laurence.' ' My dear Norah, I have not the remotest intention of doing anything of the kind ' ; and, looking critically at his hands, he was obliged to confess that his sojourn in a cotton-mill, followed by three months at a carpenter's bench and a couple of months in a printer's office, had neither improved their texture nor their colour. ' Well, Laurence, and how are you getting on with your self appointed task among your new friends ? ' asked John Stapleton as he lighted a cigar. 'Fairly well, I think.

I expect so little, it would take a great deal to disappoint me. I have made some friends among the men I have worked with in different places, and a few very good fellows come to me five evenings a week to learn something about English literature and arithmetic' ' Don't say that the same men come to you for instruction on five consecutive nights,' said Mrs. Stapleton, dropping her fan in her lap with an air of exhaustion. Laurence laughed as he said, ' Don't be afraid, my dear sister, of the British workman overstraining his brains. It is not the manner of him, and he is not driven to it, as we are, by com petitive examinations. No, I have a sufficient number of friends among them to make up a class of a dozen or so nightly, without always seeing the same faces. Then occasionally we have a talk, lecture, or whatever one likes to call it, on things in general, or the men argue on some subject of their own choosing, and we grow very warm over it ; sometimes there is even a tendency to clinch our argument by blows, as most of us are accustomed to use our hands more than our brains.' ' I rather regret myself that one cannot resort to blows as an end of argument,' said John Stapleton, 'for if there is a thing I hate it is a man who won't see reason ; it shows such a con foundedly obstinate temper.

By the way, Laurence, I suppose you have not been able to argue many of your working-men friends into your way of thinking with regard to smoking, water-drinking, going without meat, and general indifference to luxury ? ' Laurence rose from the music-stool and paced to and fro in the room, as his habit was when he grew interested in the conversation. 'I have not attempted to make a single convert to my own opinions ; and why, because I hold certain opinions, and regulate my life by them, I should strive to make other men think and act with me, I cannot see ' ; and Laurence stopped suddenly in his patrol, opposite a picture on the wall that he had known all his life, and looked into it as though he had never seen it before. ' Nevertheless, that is the usual motive that takes a man like yourself among uneducated men.

It is to do something at them, to them, or for them — to stop their beer, or their tobacco, or to interfere with them generally in any of the thousand ways that suggest themselves to one's love of benevolent tyranny.' 'That's quite true,' said Laurence, as he finished his inspection of the picture without having an idea of what he had looked at ; ' and I am often told that, in being among workmen as much as I am without trying to convert them either to a political creed or to some pet hobby of my own, I am losing an opportunity.' ' I must say that I think this is true, Laurence, and that you do lose an opportunity,' said his brother-in-law gravely. ' I cannot see it. I go among workmen with as little self consciousness as I went among my friends at Cambridge, and there it was not said to me, " You are losing an opportunity in not trying to impress your own opinions on your friends."

I go among workmen because I have a strong regard for them, and am deeply interested in them, and they teach me in various ways as much as I can teach them. And, speaking of politics, I am not clear that it is fair to require from uneducated men their unknow ing adhesion to a belief I have only attained to by thought and knowledge.' ' That may be very noble, my dear fellow, but it strikes me as unpractical ; while you from conscientious motives abstain from exercising your just influence over men as yet incapable of form ing their own opinions, worse men than yourself have no such scruples, and do not hesitate to make tools of the ignorant for their own purposes.' Here Norah Stapleton rose with an ill-disguised yawn. ' If you are going to talk politics, my dears, I will leave you to it, and wish you good-night,' and, waving her hand to her brother, she left the room with a light laugh. ' To return to what we were saying,' said Laurence, when he had closed the door after his sister and taken possession of her vacant chair. ' You are right in saying unscrupulous men make tools of the ignorant for their own purposes.

So far as I have any influence with uneducated men, instead of trying to impress my own opinions on them, I endeavour to set them on cultivating their powers to the point at which it is possible for them either to form an intelligent opinion for themselves or to judge of the value of those that are offered to them ready-made by others.' ' I see we should not think alike on this point,' said John Stapleton, as he threw the end of his cigar into the fire. ' I frankly admit that I view the working-class as so many possible voters, and the only influence I should care to exert over them would be to bring them to the poll to swell the Liberal vote.' ' I see you take the usual view of them. There is one thing, my dear John, for which I heartily pity working-men, and that is for belonging to a class that is looked upon as a happy hunting-ground by every man who rides a hobby.

Think what they suffer from men cleverer than themselves who are always at them. Radicals, Tories, Socialists, Blue-ribboners, and what not, all besiege them, appealing to them by arguments they dare not offer to educated men, and that would be an insult to an intelligent baby.' ' There again, Laurence, you seem to condemn yourself for not using your influence over your uneducated friends by appealing to their reason for some definite good object, such as the spread of Liberalism among them, for instance.' ' He who would teach others must himself be a believer,' said Laurence, ' and I regard all political schools with too much indif ference to have attached myself to any particular one. I have voted both for the Liberals and for the Tories by way of expressing my sympathy with the whole round of English political thought.

It seems to me that to label oneself Liberal or Tory for life one must shut one's eyes to every aspect of a question but that favoured by one's party, and a narrow, one-sided view of wide subjects would be the result. We require our party leaders thus to stultify themselves, but I cannot see that the rank-and-file are called upon to perform such an intellectual sacrifice. No doubt your party man on either side despises me ; but if I retain my freedom of thought, I can afford to be looked down upon. Viewing politics as I do, you see why it does not seem to me of the slightest import ance how working-men vote, or whether they vote at all'; and Laurence, who had walked the room like a quarter-deck while he was speaking, stood still opposite his brother-in-law's chair, and fixed his clear eyes on him. ' Such indifference as yours to the politics of the working-classes ought to make you a very happy man,' said Mr. Stapleton ; ' for my part, I am often profoundly troubled by my anxiety about it,' and he rose to wind up the moderator lamp, that was burning dim. ' I should be anxious, too, my dear fellow, if I thought that politics could give to working-men the one thing I think they stand in need of most — that is, more sympathy and expansion of heart, and less pride and class prejudice.' ' Certainly politics won't help them to that,' said Mr. Stapleton with a short laugh. ' I 'm afraid we are all rather narrow in our sympathy, and confine it a good deal to our own class.' ' Yes ; and so far as I have seen, this narrow feeling is stronger the lower one descends in the social scale.