Emma Cheyne. A prose idyll of English life

Front matter

% f rosr |uttll of ÆngKslj fife. BY ELLIS BRANDT. LONDON : CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1875. [All Rights Reserved.] LONDON : BRADBURT, AQNEW, & CO., TRINTERS, TVniTEERIARS. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. — INTRODUCTORY, DULL, AND INDISPENSABLE . . 1 II. — THE TJGHTS OF CUSTOMERS AP.E INSISTED ON . . 9 III. — COLIN Pr.OPOSES TO TUP.N OVER A NEW LEAF . 10 IV. — MR. CHEVNE LOSES HIS TEMPER AND FINDS IT ■ AGAIN 30 V. — JOSEPH TRIES AND FAILS TO MAKE HIMSELF AGREE- ABLE, AND A FEMALE THEOLOGIAN APPEARS 46 VI. — COLIN LOSES HIS HEAD 59 VII. — A LIBERAL OF THE COUNTRY, AND A TORY OF THE TOWN 74 VIII. — JEMMY BANGS REBUKES HIS CLERGYMAN . . . 84 IX. — COUNTER ATTEMPTS TO STRIKE A BARGAIN ; AND EMMA IS NOT SO ARTLESS AS SHE LOOKS . 96 X.— MR. FROGG 106 XI. — MR. FROGG AT THE PARSONAGE . . . .121 XII.— A THEOLOGICAL DINNER-

PART V

. . . . 130 XIII.— THE PRAYER-MEETING 1*3 Xiv.— MES. MUDGE'S NOSE 153 XV. — COLIN REVISITS OKENDALE AND MR. CHEYNE ASKS HIM WHETHER HE HAS STUDIED HENS . . 161 XVI.— MISS STERLING I68 XVII.— ABOUT TURNER, RUSKIN, MILLAIS, BRETT, LEIGH- TON, AND OTHER GREAT MEN . . .174 VI CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE XVIII. — PERHAPS THE WORST TUN EVER PERPETRATED . 207 XIX. — SINGLE COMBAT BETWEEN FROGG AND MUDGE . 220 XX. — A MARTYR IN A BATHING DRESS . . . . .232 XXI. —MR. AND MRS. FROGG 243 xxii. — colin's plot 250 XXIII. —A PRIMITIVE BISHOP— JOSEPH STICKS UP FOE HIS ORDER 268 xxiv. — colin's hope 290 XXV.— COLIN DOES AS EMMA BIDS HIM . . . 298 XXVI.— PALISSY THE POTTER AND HIS WIFE . . . 309 XXVII. — MR. SHRIKE 323 XXVIII. — THE BUTCHER-BIRD STRIKES niS VICTIM . . . 329 XXIX. — EMMA AT HOME

Chapter I. Introductory, Dull And Indispensable

Colin Grey was bom and bred in the village of Okendale, in one of the southern counties of England, not a hundred miles from London. His father was a Government official, who, in Colin's early boyhood, had retired on half or quarter pay-, and with a good orchard, a useful garden, a frugal wife, and a small fixed amount of hard cash regularly paid, calculated upon getting through the afternoon of life cheerily enough. He had three children besides Colin, two boys and a girl. He was a quietly sagacious man, of some information, and of a sufficiently intellectual cast of mind to become aware, ere he had been more than a year in Okendale, that the village could yield him no friend, no tolerable companion even, except the clergyman of the place, the Rev. Arthur Cheyne. i. Mr. Cheyne was a central, but hardly an in fluential personage in the village of Okendale.

In Lord Selbome's speeches— the vein cropped out principally when he was Sir Roundel! Palmer — there are glowing descriptions of the benign influence of Anglican clergymen in English villages. How much of myth and of poetry there was in these descriptions, and how much of solid fact, we shall not undertake to determine. Even Lord Selborne would admit that what he depicts as the rule may be subject to exceptions ; and one exception was furnished by the parish of Okendale. The villagers cared next to nothing about their clergyman. Their homage and allegiance were divided between John Grabber, of Stiff-land Farm, who lived in a plain old farm-house at the east end of the village, and Job Counter, London millionnaire, who lived in a big, new, ugly, expensive house, at the west end. Both of these were vulgar to the bone, with different kinds of vulgarity ; but both were undoubtedly rich, and the villagers reverently worshipped both.

They hated each other with a perfect hatred, and the war which raged between them divided the villagers into hostile factions. Grabber had made his money in the INTRODUCTORY, DULL AND INDISPENSABLE. 3 district ; he " knew his way about," as the villagers said, better than any man within ten miles ; he gave himself no airs, and would take his beer in the parlour of the Green Man with Nokes, the village plumber, and Stokes, the village grocer. Grabber, therefore, had many adherents, and entrenched him self firmly in the vestry. Counter knew that he had six times as much money as Grabber, and it seemed to him against the very nature of things that he should not carry all before him in such a place as Okendale. Happily we have almost nothing to do, in this narrative, with Grabber, and not very much with Counter ; but so much knowledge of Okendale affairs it was necessary for the reader to possess, in order that he might realise the isolation in which James Grey, the retired Government official, and Arthur Cheyne, the incumbent, found themselves in the village.

Cheyne was unworldly-, book-loving, poor ; in Okendale he was almost a cipher. Not even as a faint reminiscence did respect for mind, as such — for intellectual acquirement or any finer mental power than goes to the composition of a gushing B popular sermon — linger in Okendale. He glided through the village in the discharge of his routine duties ; wrote his sermons carefully, and read them quietly to the sprinkling of villagers who came to church ; and seldom was made the occasion even of remark, except when his honest way of reading the scriptural books in the Greek and Hebrew originals led him into some train of thought or illustration, which, being new to his hearers, suggested to their ingenuous ignorance that there was some flaw in his theology. James Grey, though not a highly cultivated man, was nevertheless able to appreciate Arthur Cheyne better than the villagers ; and appreciation is sweet to every son of Adam.

Grey was incapable of taking part in Okendale politics. He could respect neither Grabber nor Counter, but he had a clear feeling that the London man was the worse vulgarian of the two. He and Arthur Cheyne were insensibly attracted to each other, and might be seen sauntering about Greyr's orchard on warm afternoons, or slowly pacing at an earlier hour in the shaded walks of the parsonage garden. Grey plumed himself a little on being the friend of INTRODUCTORY, DULL AND INDISPENSABLE. 5 the clergyman, and deferred to Cheyne on the subject of the education of his children. Cheyne had been a good classic at Cambridge, and had lightened many a heavy hour by classical reading, during the dull years of his life at Okendale. But as boy, youth, and man, ho had cherished one enthusiasm, though a lack of decision, energy, and ambition had prevented it from ever budding into anything considerable in the way of action or achievement.

That one enthusiasm was for painting. He was a delicate draughtsman in light and shade, had produced exquisite sketches in water colours, and done some things in oil ; but he had never dared to rely even in part upon his pictorial faculty for a livelihood, and though a consummate judge of art, he was no artist. It was a pleasing diversion for Cheyne, and a highly prized advantage in the eyes of Grey, that the clergyman should give lessons to the three boys of the latter. They were able to arrange the matter pecuniarily ; for Cheyne did not object to a small addition to the scanty clerical income, and Grey, a firm and just man, had distinctly said that, if no remuneration could be accepted, no lessons should be given. Cheyne had, himself, two children. There had been several others, but they had died ; and between the two who survived, Joseph and Emma, there was a gap of several years.

Emma, at the time we speak of, was a girl of thirteen ; her brother was a lad of nineteen. Solid, irreproachable, prosaic, Joseph had exhibited a precocious capacity of appre hending all the economical points of his position, had been found by his father incapable of being prepared for a university, and now, with perfect satisfaction to himself and his father, received a small salary, with good prospects of one day earning a large salary, in the city. The paternal Cheyne felt that his son was not brilliant, and sometimes found his presence oppres sive ; but he was at heart glad to reflect that, should his own pensive and colourless existence be any day cut short, Joseph would be a pillar on which his daughter might securely lean. Emma was her father's darling, but in the clock-work virtues she was not eminent ; and her mother, who had died when she was eleven, would say that she had sometimes required more reproving in a week than the estimable Joseph in the whole course of his Hfe.

And yet the mother had agreed with the father that their foolish Emmy, with her black hair, hazel eyes, wild ways,. INTRODUCTORY, DULL AND INDISPENSABLE. 7 light laugh, and thoughtless chatter, was the life of the parsonage. Charles and Albert Grey took to their classics with steady, jog-trot energy-, and the clergyman was soon able to give a good account of their progress ; Colin seemed a dunce. He would listen as long as you liked to classical stories, and was immensely interested in any detail of armourer's work or graver's work, of which he could catch a glimpse in the classical writers, as, for example, in Homer's account of the shield of Achilles, which work, by the way, that poet, with the strange habit men have had in all ages of cheating their neighbour of his honest fame in order to flatter some god, ascribed to Hephæstos.

But to the gram matical work of the classical student his mind was impervious. He could not learn the Greek verbs, regular or irregular; his brothers soon left him behind in Latin. " I fear," said Cheyne to Grey, " we shall never make a scholar of your youngest boy." This was his mild way of saying that he did not think it possible to impart so much Greek and Latin to Colin as might enable him to enter the service of his country by the door-way of com petitive examination. The two model brothers pulled together, and Colin was much left to himself. Albert and Charles looked on him as something between a baby, a fool, and a milksop, and he had not the consolation of having a much better opinion of himself. Old Grey, a soft-hearted parent, had long given up the idea that Colin could be disciplined into practicality.

"A moon-struck, wool-gathering lad," he said to Cheyne. " I cannot think how he will gain a livelihood. He would have fallen into the river before now if his sister hadn't a way of looking after him." The clergyman was not ready of speech, and was honest of mind ; and as his own opinion of Colin and his prospects was not substantially different from that of his friend, he could only whisper some common place about his possibly turning out clever after all, and with a more than usually sympathethic shake of the hand, take leave.

Chapter II. The Rights Of Customers Are Insisted Ox

Colin had not, as was said, enjoyed that great alle viation of every kind of unhappiness and misfortune which is derived from a good opinion of one's self ; but he had not been without alleviations ; only-, from their being of a kind peculiar to himself, he had learned to make a profound secret of them. If ever, in an enthusiastic moment, he gave a hint of their nature to the people about him, he did not meet with encouragement to pursue his communications. One evening he came into the room where his father, his mother, and the whole family were assembled, in a manifestly irrepressible fervour of ex citement. There was a glow in his eye and on his brow that was beautiful. His costume was free and easy in the extreme. Straw hat, worn at such an angle as to expose face and brow ; loose jacket of darkish blue, worn open ; no waistcoat.

The season was the end of August. " It was divine ! " he exclaimed. " 0 father and mother, I wish you had seen it ! Through the trunks from the eastern corner of the orchard — the island of pure gold, set in the blue, the vermilion high above, and the purple down below — and " " Shut up ! shut up ! — no more of your confounded bosh," said Albert, with the sharp irritation with which an elder brother snubs a younger; especially an elder brother who feels himself an example to the household. " And I'll thank you, Master Moon calf, to take your hat off before coming into this room, — other-wise you may find it knocked off faster than you like." Albert had been employed, at the moment of Colin's entrance, in extracting nourishment for his healthy soul from Dr. Earwig's inestimable work on Greek syntax.

He now, keeping his page with his inserted fore-finger, took up the book and with it tip-tilted Colin's hat to the floor. "Don't, Albert," said Charles, with a half-sneering, half-pitying chuckle. " It's no use. But Colin " — Charles was a good young man and had thoughts of going into the Church — " you should take care not to mix up sacred things with ryour nonsense. There is indeed a sense in which nature is divine, but to apply the word indiscriminately is an " "Yes, yes, Charley," said the impatient Albert. " Keep the rest for the Sunday-school. I want to get on with my work." " You shouldn't be so hard on your brother," said old Grey pensively'. " Oh, I don't know, father," said Albert ; " we may as well speak now. "We'll have to keep him some day." " I'm not so sure of that," remarked Sarah, who had strong feminine ambition, and whose motherly aspirations rose as high as the thought that she might one day be protectress of and provider for the fool of the family.

" You're a hard, unkind fellow, Albert." " My love," said his mother to Colin, " you have been heated, and are tired. I shall get you a cup of tea." Colin had relapsed into the silence and seclusion of his solitary life ; but the glories of the sunset, seen through the orchard trunks, were still around him with their consoling gleams. The kind mother bustled about. She knew what Colin liked as well as Rebekah knew what pleased Isaac. She brought him a faultless cup of tea, — one of the few things of an entirely material kind of which he had a perfect appreciation. He knew the reward his mother liked and expected. He put his arms round her neck and kissed her as when he had been a boy of five. "Very pretty — quite idyllic," sneered Albert. " He's likely to get better when he's petted up for making a fool of himself."

" Be quiet, Albert," said old Grey. " Your harsh ness at all events has never done Colin good ; and he can't be wrong to be a pleasure to his mother." Albert went on with Earwig, combating in his manly soul that consciousness of injury with which he realised that the music and feasting and sweet words are always for the prodigals and the oafs, never for modcl youths like himself. It was, he thought, very hard ; for he firmly believed that he would have to keep Colin some day. But Colin's woes were not over for the evening. A tap came to the door of the room, Mary Anno put in her head and said that John Block wanted to speak with master. This was always an ordeal from which Grey shrank. John Block was his headman, under whose eye were orchard, garden, live stock, everything. Grey justly valued him, for he had that local knowledge without which life in Okendale would have been for Grey simply a process of being victimised.

The orchard, three acres in extent, yielding, in a good season, some thirty tons of fruit, contributed an important part of Grey's income. Block understood both how to manage the orchard and to dispose of the fruit. He was in fact indispensable to Grey, but it was one half-con scious object of Grey's life to reduce his intercourse with John to a minimum. He detested the idea of an interview now, but thought, with lazy sagacity, that it could be most expeditiously managed if John stood for a minute at the door of the room, and said what he had to say. " Tell Block to step this way," said Grey to Mary Anne. And Block's firm and leisurely step was presently heard in the passage. " "Well, Block, what is it ? " said the master, when a thick-set, red-faced, shrewd-featured man of fifty, evidently with something on his mind, showed him self in the doorway.

"Is there anything the matter ? " " I want to know what I'm to do, sir," said Block with a loudness of tone hardly consistent with respect for his employer. " I can't have nothin' to do with the orchard if this is to be the way, and you'll have to look out for another." John was so possessed with his grievance that he had forgotten to put statement before complaint, — not an unexampled failing, even in classes much higher in the social scale than John Block's. " But what is it ? " said Grey. " You have not told me. "Well, sir, you know the Alexandra apples. There's just three trees, and only one of them has much on. And I promised one of my customers that he was to have every apple in the lot. I don't get my customers without lookin' for them, and Clennam took ten ton o' fruit last year. He wants the Alexandras for deckerating purposes — he said so hissen to me and my missus — and he serves the Prince of "Wales.

"We can't nowise afford to offend Clennam. But he won't buy what we want to sell by the ton if we don't keep for him what he can't buy except by the dozen. He saw these Alexandras six weeks ago ; and he expects them ; and he has a right to them ; and I'm bound to see that he has them. But if Mister Colin comes and takes the very best Alexandra in the orchard, what am I to do ? I want to know. Mister Colin goes about the orchard no better'n a babby, and I niwer knows what he may take next. If it was King's pippins, or Mother Cary's, or Williams' pears, he might eat a bushel, — I shouldn't mind, — but to take and eat that Alexandra ! — It was worth nine-pence to Clennam, — he should be ashamed of his-self ! I've got to keep my promise to my customers, and if this is to be the way, I'd better go, — that's all."

Block was never before known to deliver so long and vehement an oration as this. Anger certainly makes oratory if it does not make poetry. John, you observe, was entirely in the right. He was bound to keep his promise to his customers. It had never dawned upon Block's mind that an apple could have any other use than one of two, — to be eaten, or to serve for " deckeration." The philosophic reader is bound to respect and sympathise with Block. " I didn't eat it," said Colin. John Block was a privileged person, strong in the knowledge that his master could not do without him. He took liberties which Grey winced under, though he knew not how to prevent them. By ordering John to come to the room door and tell his story, he had himself made all those present parties to the inter view, and when Colin now replied to Block, he had to submit to the mortification of hearing Block answer.

"Don't you go for to tell me, Mister Colin. I knows y*ou took the apple," — having taken it and having eaten it were but different ways of saying the same thing to Block's intelligence, and he thought Colin was simply telling a school-boy fib. " If you didn't take it, who did? You're allays moonin' about as if you wanted a nurse to look arter you." " Of course I took the apple, but it wasn't to eat," said Colin. This was a poser to Block, for he could not think that Colin had taken it for purposes of " deckeration." Old Grey felt annoyed at the scene, and resolved to cut it short. Experience had taught him how to stroke down the valuable but insufferable Block. " It is perfectly right of you, Block, to keep your promise to your customers. I have always told you I respect you for doing so. It was foolish and thoughtless of Colin to touch the apple without consulting you."

A largish word, as to whose meaning Block's ideas might be hazy, was often useful in the stroking down process. " I have no doubt," proceeded Grey, " he wanted only to look at it, and I wish he could have looked at it on the tree. You have done your duty, Block, and Colin must be more careful in future. And now good night ; it's time you were in bed, for you must be early on the road to-morrow." " That's true, sir," said Block, quite mollified. He liked his master in a patronising kind of way. " Good night ; and I'll tell my missus to keep an eye on Mister Colin lest he should fall into the well" (the wells of the district were about fifteen feet deep,) "or be tossed by the red cow — she's not safe since she calved. Good night, sir, good night, ma'am." Exit Block ; a happy man ; sensible of being indis pensable in the general system of tilings.

The intelligent and practical Albert, whose Greek had not prospered since Colin's entrance, was now naturally influenced by that spitefulness which is sometimes the shadow of the prudential virtues. He made remarks, illustrative of this spitefulness, which we need not record, but which were not pleasant for Colin to hear. Charles, the future preacher, saw an opening for good advice. " I should have thought, Colin, you were old enough to look at a pretty apple without picking it. Your age is fifteen, if I mistake not — or is it five ? " Charles was a dull boy, and Colin knew it ; at this point, therefore, his feelings were far from enviable. He deigned no reply. He fell back into his seclusion. But neither Albert's spite nor Charles's dulness could take from him the delight with which he had looked, and looked, and yet again looked, on the yellow ground and crimson streaks of that apple.

Chapter III. Colin Proposes To Turn Over

A NEW LEAF. The Quarterly Review says that people don't read Scott and Byron now ; we may, therefore, venture to print fines which, forty years ago, every well-informed milliner, not to mention Lord Macaulay's Encyclo pædia incarnated in a school-boy, knew by heart. ' 0 woman, in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou ! " The man who wrote this had a right notion of women. No one who is at ease, no one who is unro mantically good and stupidly comfortable, has much chance with them ; but we venture to add, by way of comment on the words of the gentle and wise minstrel, that it does not require wringing of the brow, or any startling exhibition of anguish, to win c their gracious favour. Masculine and forlorn — a man yet requiring help — a creature jostled from the throng of hurrying, grasping, fighting male animals, to droop and sigh alone — always finds a friend in woman.

The unpoctical brothers of our mooning acquaintance hinted that he was a molly-coddle or something like it; it is undeniable that he had a preference for female society. His mother had always been kind and good to him, and he adored her ; sister Sarah considered herself bound to shield him from the rude ness of his brothers, and found it a very* jfleasant thing to play the patroness. Sarah and Emma had been thrown much together, and, so far as two persons very differently constituted could be, they were friends. In their company, and in walks with them in the oak wood or by the river side, Colin thawed, expanded, became quite a different fellow from what he was in the presence of dull Charles or spiteful Albert. He could talk enough ; though, as matron Sarah regretted to observe, his talk was often trivial, and she found it difficult, during their peregrinations, to direct his mind to the succession of the kings of England, the geography of Wales, or any subject equally profitable and charming.

The harmless creature — we mean Colin— had some books which he dearly loved, among them Tennyson's poems and Ruskin's Letters on Drawing, and he was much fonder of talking of these and what theysuggested than of listening to the instructive observations of Sarah. They were walking by the river once, for example, and had reached that spot where the old aspen rises above the willows, when Colin suddenly cried out, " Didn't yrou see it then ? I saw the whole in one glance, — ' Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver Through the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river ' Didn't you see that little gust that turned out the silver white of the willows, made everyleaf to the very top of the old aspen quiver, and went dusking and shivering over the face of the river ?

Those words," said Colin, growing warm, " are perfectly miraculous. The * dusking ' and ' shivering ' on the surface are not poetry — they are drawing — they are painting — a man grows immortal when he can see such things at a glance and arrest them for ever. It is nothing either to see them or to say them when Tennyson has been before you." "I didn't see anything at all," said Sarah, "and I don't think there was anything to see ; but I do wish, Colin dear, that you would not talk in that wild way about miracles and immortality. You know what Cb aides would say if he were here, and I'm sure Emma will be shocked." This was not a wise speech. Charles was bad enough in propria persona; to echo Charles was not a course likely to exalt Sarah in Colin's eyes. The opinion that, because Emma was a clergyman's daughter, her vote would be on the side of stiffest orthodoxy, was also the reverse of shrewd.

The families of clergymen do not always take to theology-. Emma said, with a laugh, that she had no idea what she should be shocked at. She had observed the passing of the breezebefore Colin spoke, and thought Tennyson's description wonderful. The " Lady of Shalott," she added, was a favourite of hers, though there were some of Tennyson's poems she liked still better. And so they two began talking about Tennyson in a very desultory, chit-chat way, like two finches comparing notes, quite pleased with their chirpings and themselves, and making it impossible for gover ness Sarah to direct the conversation into an improv ing channel. When they turned from the river side into the wood, Colin ceased to chatter about Tenny son, and began to chatter about Ruskin. Sarah's face wore a look of heaviness and disappointment.

She could not but think her brother was talking non sense, — unintelligible, useless nonsense, — which would never help him to a living ; and yet, the more he talked, the more pleased did Emma seem, the more bright and pretty did she look. The flush became her, and the eager, interested light in her eyes. Matronly Sarah had difficulty in getting the trifling creatures along. They would scramble up banks, or go peering into little ferny dells. Colin explained to Emma that there is a curve in which every great tree grows, a curve repeated, he said, in every leaf; and talked Ruskinese on the grouping of the boughs, and the capricious, living, laughing way in which the sun beams steal in and out among the hollows of the foliage ; and tried to show that every growing tiring in the wood, from the leaves of arum below the hedge to the five oaks on the river bank, stood linked together in some fellowship, some unity, some order ; its liberty never lawlessness, its order never uniformity.

" There arc lessons in these things," said this philosopher, becoming extraordinarily animated, "more pleasant than Charley's sermons, lessons written in green and shadowy shapes of waving words, and blossomed brightness of vivid wit, lessons written by the sun beam and whispered by the breeze." They laughed at his eloquence, and he laughed at himself. Mr. Ruskin holds, we think, that youths of Colin's years do not understand him ; Colin at least read him so enthusiastically that many passages became lodged in the boy's memory without his quite knowing it ; and his own words and Ruskin's would flow out together without his distinctly apprehending which was which. " I must say I don't understand you now," observed Emma — a drop of comfort for which Sarah was devoutly thankful. Colin, as we' said, joined in the laugh against himself; but, as they re-entered the village, he felt that he had never had a pleasanter walk.