Apples of Sodom. A novel

Front matter

/i |3u the same Jluihor. IN HIDING. Crown 8vo, 6s. "A story which, in respect both of literary finish and power in the conception and development of character, marks a distinct advance on anything she has heretofore achieved." — Scottish Leader. "Readers of the more thoughtful class will feel that Miss Bramston has filled her small canvas very artistically ; good taste and literary skill are everywhere manifest." — Academ,: " It belongs to the best of its class. The pictures of life in a small English country town are natural, and denote observation and humour." — Morning Post. " Well worked out, the story being naturally told." — Queen. "A well-written and interesting story-" — Literary Church man. ";'An exceptionally good story, and carries the interest of the reader with it from beginning to end." — Church Review.

VOL. I. JUST READY, Crown 8vo, 2 vols., 12s. JACK O' LANTHORN, BY C. R. COLERIDGE. A NOVEL. BY M. BRAMSTON, 10 AUTHOR OF "IN HIDING," " UNCLE IVAN," ETC. " I watched the leaves of shining green That sprang my apple buds between. I smelt the flowers of white and rose, That heaped the boughs with summer snows : Now ruddy fruit weighs down my tree, I pluck and taste — ah, woe is me ! IN TWO VOLUMES.— VOL. I. LONDON: WALTER SMITH AND INNES, 31 & 32, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND. 1889. [All rights reserved.'] TO MY FRIENDLY CRITICS A. G. C. R. C. M. B. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. PAGE Prelude i

Part I. Leaf

CHAP. I. A CONFIDENCE 19 II. KEEPING HIS WORD 34 III. THE UNEXPECTED 44 IV. PHILANDERING 54 V. NOT ENOUGH AND TOO MUCH OS VI. PERPLEXITY 87 VII. TOO MANY COOKS 97 VIII. " DON'T GIVE ME UP ! " 115 IX. MUSIC TO THE RESCUE 126 X. IGNOBLE WARFARE I40 XI. CUTTING THE CAELE 151 XII. DOMESTIC BLISS 162 XIII. " NACHT-STUCK " 1 74 XIV. RESISTANCE 190 XV. A THORN IN THE FLESH CONTENTS. VI

Part II. Flower

PAGE CHAP. XVI. ANSTACE ■• 2I1 XVir. FRIENDSHIP IN A FOG ... 222 XVIII. "SHUT OUT" 238 ■3- XIX. DRAWN IN 250 XX. A CHANCE OF HELP 263 XXI. A STEP NEARER 275 XXII. LEITH HILI PRELUDE. "A heart as soft, a heart as kind, A heart as sound and free, As in the whole world thou canst find, That heart I'll give to thee.'' — Herrick, It was Speech-day at Harcheston School. The sunbeams that lay on the gray stone buildings and full-leaved limes were fuller of colour than usual, from the mist of heat which the July afternoon had brought with it ; they fell in golden flakes on the grass in the playing-fields, and lighted up into creamy glow the slender supple flannel-clad figures hard at work playing casual cricket. Round-checked boys, in Eton jackets and immaculate collars and hats, were to be seen introducing their proud relatives to the glories of the place, and pointing out with bated breath the various heroes of the school.

VOL. I. B Mothers and sisters are apt on these occasions to think their own Berties or Charlies the cream of the school, and not to discover the fact even if they are really commonplace and stupid little boys, with a tendency to gravitate towards the bottom of their form, and a probability verging towards certainty that they will be superannuated at sixteen or seventeen. Tommy Constable was one of these. He was a short, plump, pink-cheeked boy, with indeterminate figure and face, and hands in his trowsers' pockets, and he bore a striking likeness to the plump, pink widow who was eyeing him from time to time with maternal pride, and the plump, pink, rather pretty girl with her lilac parasol tilted on one side, indi cating near relationship. There was another member of the group strikingly unlike the others.

This was a tall slip of a girl, a head taller than any of the party, very slight and lithe, with a clear, brown com plexion, vivid dark eyes, and a frame so cunningly put together by nature, that although she had not nearly done growing, and might therefore have been expected to have a certain amount of girlish awkwardness about her, every movement that she made was full of grace, enhanced rather than diminished PRELUDE. 3 by her slim angularity. Armine Constable had been invited by her aunt, Mrs. Thomas Constable, to come with them to the Harcheston Speech-day and school concert in the evening ; and thus it came to pass that she formed one of the rather isolated group which sauntered about the playing-fields ; and, if truth must be told, thought that her Aunt Lucy managed her affairs very badly not to get somehow absorbed in the crowd of jovial holiday-makers, among whom they seemed to be an unknown colony of strangers, in spite of their link with Harcheston in the person of Master Tommy.

But then, Mrs. Thomas Con stable was a shy, middle-aged nobody, and Miss Armine Constable, at sixteen and a half, was mis tress of her father's house, and he was one of the cleverest and most popular men in the University of Oxbridge. " Look there, mater," quoth Master Tommy ; " those are the two biggest swells in the place, walking about arm-in-arm, in flannels." " I don't think it is very dignified for the head and second master to dress exactly like the boys," said Mrs. Constable ; " I thought you said they always wore caps and gowns, Tom." "Mater, you are green! Lucy, she thinks it's B Mumbo and Jumbo ! What larks it would be to see old Mumbo in flannels, with no wool on his head in the place where the wool ought to grow. Bless you, that's Simcox and Brand — Brenda, we call her. She's captain of cricket, and licked Dimborough to fits.

She's got the Beaton at Oxbridge too ; she always does get everything she tries for ; she's an awfully jolly fellow." " But why do you call him she?" said Armine. " I don't know. We always do. When a fellow's got a girl's name he does get called she. Brenda always is." " Doesn't she lick the fellows she hears doing it ? " said Armine. No ! She don't mind. She's awfully jolly." Do you know him well ? " said Lucy. Oh, yes." " Introduce him to us, Tom, there's a dear," said Lucy. " Well, you know, Brenda's rather a swell. I don't know that I know her quite well enough for that. You have to know a fellow awfully well to introduce him to your people, you know." " We'll take the risk," says Armine, with a good deal of amusement in her dark eyes. " I'm sure he— or PRELUDE. 5 she — whatever is the correct Harcheston expression, looks a good fellow."

" Yes ; but — I don't know him so very well, you know." " Have you ever spoken to him ? Confess ! " laughed Armine, whom Tom adored in spite of no encourage ment but teasing on the part of his pretty cousin. " Of course I have ! " " What did you talk about ? Come, the last time ! " said the merciless cousin. Tom's pink cheeks became crimson. " He licked you ? " said the unkind maiden. " Was it for calling him she ? Confess, now." "No, it wasn't! it was for smoking in Barnaby's, and she said she would have let me off if it had only made me sick. Who told you, Armine ? " " You yourself; I only guessed," laughed the " belle dame sans mercy." Lucy looked indignantly at Armine, and Mrs. Constable said, "Tom, my dear, I did hope you had not taken to those bad ways. You'll never grow if you do, and I've always begged you not."

There seemed some danger of an indefinitely me andering lecture, when Armine broke in at the first pause : " Tom, what will you bet that before the end of the day I don't introduce myself to Mr. Brenda?" " Armine, you couldn't ! Brenda's a bigger swell than you know ! She's captain of cricket ! She'd think you didn't know what manners were," said Tom. " Ch, would she ? " said Armine, with dancing mirth in her eyes. "My dear," said Mrs. Thomas Constable nervously, "please don't make yourself remarkable in any way — you know we are strangers here, and there are so many young men and boys." "Aunt Lucy, if you lived at Oxbridge you would not be so afraid of young men or boys," said Armine ; " I won't compromise you, and yet I bet Tom a box of chocolate creams I'll introduce myself to that boy in the most proper way in the world.

Will you take it, Tom?" " Two to one," said Tom, daring but firm. " You won't do it ! " Armine only nodded her pretty head, half turned over her shoulder, with a saucy sparkle of her eyes under their long, sweeping lashes. Marcus Brand, unaware that he was the subject of so rash a bet, was spending this, his last day at PRELUDE. 7 school in that mixed frame of mind — half glad, half melancholy — which a successful and popular school boy feels on such an occasion. The pathos is partly real, partly a sentimental luxury of a new and ex quisite kind, and "Brenda" had enough of the girl in him to feel that there was a certain sweetness in it. He never thought of that day, in all his after life, without recalling the golden sunlight upon the green velvet lawn of the playing-field, the well-known faces of the " fellows " who adored him, to whom, as to Tommy Constable, his notice, of however dubious a nature, was an honour to be bragged of afterwards ; the sweet, jubilant, yet pathetic chime of the chapel bells ; the festival air of everything, and the sense that this was the end of one happy bit of life, and also the vestibule to another of unknown possibilities of joy and success.

In spite of his nickname, there was nothing effem inate about his appearance. He was a tall, graceful, well-developed lad of nineteen. His face would still have been unusually boyish if it had not been for the fair but perceptible fringe on his upper lip. He still possessed the shadowed eye-orbits and smooth cheeks that characterize a boy's face, and his golden hair curled under his blue cap as freely now as it had done at eight years old. It was a mobile, fine, im pressionable face, showing gentle birth and breeding, and considerable intellectual promise. But what made it different from other faces was its quick responsive ness, and the ready laugh of the eyes, even when the lips hardly moved. No one could help liking Brenda ; it was a pleasure to see the handsome happy face, and to be greeted in that unaffected, boyish manner, with that fresh young voice.

And perhaps there was an instinct after all in the feminine nickname, for the boy had an unusually soft heart, and though responsi bility, and the conscientiousness which seems innate in some finely organized natures, had prevented his rule as head of the school from becoming lax, it was chiefly with regard to moral offences that Brenda was found to be severe : the rougher spirits of his own standing complained that he never thought it worth while to enforce proper obedience as such to the Sixth, while he was always ready to lick a fellow for low talking or bullying, till you might as well live in a girl's schoolroom. It so happened that in the course of the afternoon, Brand and one of his friends were standing in a group consisting of what the boys irreverently called the Miss Mumbos and Jumboina.

The Miss Mumbos PRELUDE. 9 were tall, well-grown girls, otherwise Lily, Alice, and Kate Cranham, the daughters of the head master, who considered it their mission to "exercise an in fluence " over the boys. They considered many things their mission : among them was the acting of a quasi-maternal part to the small child in a white frock and broad black sash, who hung on Miss Kate's hand — a little orphan cousin, the object of a good deal of pathetic interest among the Harcheston masters' wives. Jumboina was Jenny Fermor, niece of the second master. Her father had been rector where Brand's was the squire, and she consequently was an old friend of Brand's, and called him by his Christian name. She was a small, slight creature, with auburnred hair, and the cream-and-roses complexion that generally accompanies it ; and the Miss Mumbos thought her frivolous, and said to each other that it was their duty to try to influence her.

Jenny was rather afraid of them, and would much rather have walked about with Lucy Constable, in whom she recognized a kindred spirit, and who was much interested in the fashions of the day, as was Jenny herself; for they both made their own dresses, and did it very well. But the Miss Mumbos swept her away from Lucy Constable, and it was not till they all got some how wedged into a group, and were talking to Brand and Simcox, that Jenny perceived her new friend, and her tall, slight, brown cousin close to her side. It was characteristic of Brand that little Nanny Fiennes, the black-sashed orphan, had managed to slide her hand in his as they stood in conversation, and that this had detained him talking to the Miss Mumbos longer than he would have done otherwise. Like the fair-haired Kiartan of the tragic Icelandic tale, every child loved him, and he did not like to free himself from that confiding, if inconvenient, clasp.

The Miss Mumbos, considering that their mission was the boys' improvement, might be said to set about their work in a bold and original manner, which enter tained Armine Constable, and embarrassed Marcus Brand. " Well, Brand, we shall see you at supper after the concert. It isn't really good-bye, though Harcheston will hardly seem itself without you," said Miss Mumbo. "And," said Alice, "there will be no decent bass in the choir, and nobody to keep the small Dragon in order." " I only had to lick him once," said Brand, with his laughing eyes. " Pendragon isn't a bad little chap." PRELUDE. 11 "Well, I am sure your influence has been the making of him," said Miss Cranham. At this, Brand blushed the ingenuous blush of youth, and at last detached his hand from Nanny's, and was lifting his cap to turn away, when the pretty brown girl stopped him, saying, " I beg your pardon, aren't you Mr. Brand ?

" Brand signified his identity, and she went on, " My cousin and I want to thank you for looking after Tom Constable's morals in the way of smoking. We think it is so very good of you not to allow him to turn himself into a chimney." " Brand's influence over all the small boys is admirable," said Miss Mumbo; "we were just telling him how much he would be missed." Brand's blush deepened from embarrassment to vexation, when he caught a sympathetic twinkle in the dark eyes of his new acquaintance which cheered him. He turned round to talk to her, and the Miss Mumbos moved on, with poor little Jenny in their train — Jenny, who had not yet had a word with him, though she had known him ever since she could remember anything, and thought him the most beautiful and magnificent person in Harcheston, or, indeed, in the world.

I wish Brand wasn't going away," said Nanny Fiennes ; " he's much the nicest boy in the school : isn't he, Miss Fermor?" It was said with the solemnity of eight years old, and they all laughed. " Nanny is right ; Brand will be a loss," said Miss Lily Cranham. " The choir won't look like itself without his golden head." "And his influence will be missed," said Alice. " We must try to stir up somebody else to take his place," said Kate. Jenny Fermor flashed with indignation. Conceive any one in the world taking Marcus Brand's place ! She quite hated Kate Cranham. The legend that attributed the capacity of hot temper to red hair was not falsified in the instance of Jenny Fermor, though the ordinary aspect she wore in Harcheston society was that of a gentle, frivolous little girl, " with no mind."

Meanwhile, Armine Constable had engrossed Brand. She was a girl who might at the present day b: labelled in some circles a " magnetic " person. Wherever she was, whether she talked or whether she was silent, you were conscious of her ; and perhaps the more so, that she never seemed conscious of herself. At an age when most girls are agonized with PRELUDE. 13 shyness in society, and freeze into silence the un happy stranger who addresses them, Armine was accustomed to think it her vocation to " make under graduates talk," and being both clever, pretty, and amusing, had attained a good deal of girlish success in this way. She was not one of those girls with whom a young man's fancy invariably turns to thoughts of love. They admired her, as indeed it was impossible not to do so radiant and pretty a maiden ; but the absolute unsentimentality of the terms on which she took them up effectually prevented any undergraduate friendship of Armine's developing any tenderer element.

For that they turned to the more ordinary damsel, of the Lucy Constable or Jenny Fermor type. Marcus Brand enjoyed his ten minutes with this brilliant young girl, and got on so well that he was quite sorry when Dr. Cranham came round saying that he wanted to introduce him to Mr. Pointz, an Oxbridge don, whose acquaintance he might find advantageous. Brand said in his heart, " Bother old Mumbo," but he was alive to the doctor's kindness, and submitted with a fair grace, and a sensation that whether or not he found Mr. Pointz's an advantageous acquaintanceship at Oxbridge, he had certainly formed one which he did not mean to let drop with pretty Miss Armine Constable. The field was full, and they did not meet again. Armine, with her aunt and cousins, went in to tea at the Fermors, where Mrs. Constable picked up an old acquaintance in a Harcheston resident, who asked all the party to dine with them before the concert.

Jenny Fermor made tea, and looked very charming in her white frock and blue ribbons, with her pretty, pathetic, pointed little features, end her delicate complexion. Jenny generally looked rather pensive, and sometimes irritated her kindly good-natured aunt by perpetually posing as the bereaved orphan. Mrs. Fermor wanted to make Jenny happy, but she was perpetually thrown back by the way in which Jenny accepted slights and offered sacrifices which were by no means incumbent on her to offer, and then pitied herself for it. This afternoon, for instance, Jenny had given up her ticket for the evening's concert to a visitor, to whom her aunt had been lamenting that she feared it was quite impossible to get one so late in the day. Mrs. Fermor thought she was tired and wanted to escape the fatigue, and was somewhat vexed when Jenny afterwards posed as a martyr, and said that she thought her aunt had looked as if she wished it.

PRELUDE. 15 " Wished it ! " said Mrs. Fermor. " I wished nothing but to get rid of the woman. Really, Jenny, you are the most dreadful little goose ! " With which she went up to dress for dinner, and Jenny to cool her hot cheeks in the freshening even ing air, feeling that the world was hollow, and her " dolls all stuffed with sawdust." She did not allow herself to cry ; the effect of tears was to make her delicate skin come out in unbecoming red patches, and Jenny had consideration for her looks ; but she felt extremely pensive, and Jenny was not less pretty pensive than cheerful. As she paced slowly along the garden path in her white frock, and with the sun glinting through the acacia leaves, now on her rose-tinted cheek, now on her ruddy golden hair, she looked like a Japan lily become incarnate in a girl.

" And I have never said good-bye to Marcus," she said to herself, while her lip quivered. She did not see Marcus Brand as he stepped noiselessly over the grass to her side till he was close to her, and could catch the sudden flash of pleasure that transfigured her face. That in itself was some thing to make him feel warmly towards poor little Jenny, even if he had not felt a property in her as his old nursery playmate, and pitied her (unnecessarily), as bullied by Mrs. Jumbo. " I'm so glad to find you, Jenny," said Brand. " I wanted to see you to say good-bye, and ask if you had any messages for the girls." " My love, please," said Jenny, "and I wish I was coming home too — oh, ever so much ! " and the pretty lip quivered a little. " I wish you were. But Harcheston is an awfully jolly place," said Marcus, full of the pathetic boyish pain of parting : " I don't believe all my life long I shall ever find any place like it.

When I'm at Oxbridge, I shall come here every term, as often as ever I can." "Will you?" said Jenny, in a tone of incredulous joy. " How lovely ! I thought I should never see you again, and you are the only bit of home here." " I mean to come whenever I can, and I shall be sure to come and look you up," said Marcus. Then, by way of cheering her : " We're going to have a ripping good concert, only you must be prepared for an awful cram. Mind you look out for ' Celia's charms,' it's such a joke, and old Timbaloo plays the fool awfully in the bass ! " " I'm not going," said Jenny wistfully. PRELUDE. 17 " Not going ? What a howling shame ! I say though, why not ? " " Aunt Susan wanted my ticket for somebody — or she gave me to understand she did — so I had to offer to give it up. When one hasn't any home of one's own, you know, one has to go to the wall sometimes ; " and the delicate cheek flushed, and a big tear fell.

"Mrs. Jumbo is an old brute," said Brand; " but I'll manage it, Jenny. Old Timbaloo made me promise to keep two extra tickets for some friends of his, and I told him I couldn't promise more than one ; but I've got two and you shall have the other." " Oh, Marcus, how good of you ! " said Jenny. " Thanks awfully ! It will be nice ! I should have hated to miss your last concert ! You are the very last bit of Blagden to me, you know," she went on, with a tearful little smile ; " and when you are gone I shall be altogether in exile," and another tear fell. " Poor little Jenny," said the boy ; " I wish I could change places with you, and stay in this jolly old place for ever! But it's different with you, I know." "Yes," said Jenny, "you wouldn't feel like that if you had nobody in the world to care for you, and no real home."

Perhaps at any other time boyish reticence and vol. 1. c shyness might have overcome the effect of girlish pathos. But Marcus had been in a hot-bed of boyish emotion all day ; and partly out of chivalrous pity, partly out of a conviction that things must be set right which made Jenny not appreciate Harcheston, he set himself to comfort her. " Don't say you've nobody to care for you, Jenny ! I care awfully," he said, with unwonted softness in his merry blue eyes ; and then — they neither of them knew hew it was, but the boy and girl had both found the entrance into that gate of rosy mist and fairy dreams, which so often hints to the young of bewilderingly beautiful possibilities, of which in after life they fail to find the golden clue. That school concert was to both of them irradiated with glory seen by no one else, and when Brand stood up to sing in his boyish bass, " Queen of my Life," every one allowed that he had surpassed himself in sweetness and spirit. But nobody knew that little Jenny Fermor was his inspiring genius. I. LEAF

Chapter I

A CONFIDENCE. "Ye see that darkish-blue cloud there upon the 'rizon — you know what I mean by the 'rizon, where the land and sky seems to meet. You mark my words, as that cloud '11 spread o'er the sky pretty nigh as quick as you'd spread a tarpaulin over one of your hay-ricks." — G. Eliot. FOUR years after the occurrences of the last chapter, Armine Constable was sitting in the shade of the great lime which covered nearly all the available lawn of her father's garden. Patience and Reginald Bunthorne had not at that time slain aestheticism, and Armine's dress, both in hue and make, showed tendencies in that direction. But so thoroughly healthy, brilliant, and original a young woman had no chance of ever rivalling the limp beauties of Burne Jones and Rossetti, and though her dark hair was ruffled up into a friz that did not of right belong to it, her bright eyes, expressive lips, and vivacious c manner showed that she had too much individuality to play any part, however fashionable, but that which nature had assigned her.

Miss Constable was considered, perhaps not without reason, as the most remarkable young lady in Oxbridge. She was looked upon with some awe, v, ith some disapproval, and with much admiration. Her, father, Professor Constable, united European celebrity in prehistoric archæology with Oxbridge fimc as an amateur in music and majolica; and his daughter had inherited his versatility of mind. She played the violin, at that time a less universal accomplishment for young ladies than at present, and was in much request for string quartettes, as she was always accurate and in tune. She painted doors and window-shutters effectively with daffodils, bulrushes, and cranes. She had a fine taste in old china, and a great many china plates and peacock's feathers adorned her drawing-room. She had also bv no means contemptible intellectual powers, and upon hearing some lady dispraised by certain worshippers of the conventional feminine for her devotion to the philosophy of the day, Armine sent for the works of Buckle, Herbert Spencer, and Mill, and read several of them through not unintelligently.

She thought of working up for the Oxbridge women's examinations, but came to the conclusion that the necessary grind in mathematics — which was not her strongest point — would be distasteful to her. Her father did not urge the point, as he admired artistic rather than intellectual eminence in young ladies; and Armine, who had power in her to have distinguished herself in two or three distinct lines had she devoted herself to the steady pursuit of one, remained in the position of an intellectual butterfly, flitting about from subject to subject, and able to talk brilliantly upon most with out going very deep into any. Armine's mother had died when she was a little child. She had belonged to a family in which it was customary for the eldest child, whether boy or girl, to bear the name of Armine, originally the surname of some maternal ancestor ; and she had continued the custom in her own family.

When Armine joined a large family of girls next door, with whom her father had arranged that she should be educated, it seemed as if all the Ethels and Fannys and Minnies about this boyish name emphasized her difference from other girls. None of the Marsdens were nearly so clever, handsome, or taking as she was, and their chief effect upon her was to give her an immense contempt for conventionality. At fifteen, when her chief companions among the Marsdens went to a French school, Armine left the school-room proper, had masters and attended lectures : and most of these masters thought her their most interesting pupil, and lamented in chorus that she would not devote herself to their special subject. Professor Constable did not intend to make her an inde pendent young lady at that age, but Armine's force of character unconsciously pushed her forward, and at sixteen she was the recognized mistress of the house.

Armine was interested in her fellow-creatures as well as in her own literary and artistic efforts, and she early began to show that she had unusual social capacities. Her father had always had a way of attracting undergraduates, and his house did not become less attractive when Armine was its presiding genius, though she laughed down all attempts at sentiment on the part of her admirers, and gave them to understand that she liked their company only as long as they remained rational. That she succeeded in this attempt may be inferred from the fact that the ladies who had at first shaken their heads over the afternoon teas at Professor Constable's, where Armine, surrounded by undergraduates, presided at the tea-table unsupported by any lady chaperon, gradually came to look upon the institution as harmless.