The Girl from the Farm

Front matter

' Two opposed Rights come forth : the one breaks itself to pieces against the other : in this way both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified, the one towards the other: not as if this were right ; that other wrong. On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious moral habit : the other principle over against it is the equally religious claim — the claim of the consciousness of the reason, creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.' — HEGEL, Geschichte der Philosophic, Vol. ii. , page 102. Copyrighted in the United States All rights reserved BY GERTRUDE DIX LONDON: JOHN LANE.VIGO ST. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS., Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty

Chapter I Between

eight and nine miles from Allington stood a square farmhouse with a background of bleak hill. Around it the country was very thinly populated, dotted at wide intervals with cottages for the hinds, built of grey stone and roofed with slates, colourless where colour was most needed. The farm itself was of another style of archi tecture. It had originally been intended as a sort of villa residence, with a pretentious stucco front, which had blistered here and there in ugly patches, emphasised rather than con cealed, by a thin coating of whitewash. The once trim garden was now an untidy run for fowls, and a filthy duck-pond took the place of the central flower-bed. Marchant had seen this house from some A way off as he traversed the flat valley of un reclaimed land in which it stood. He now seated himself on some tree-trunks, a stone's throw from its broken gate, and regarded it intently.

The uncurtained windows looked at him with a blind stare ; the door, with broken hinge, yawned with the eternal ennui of an unchanging monotony. Close by, two sentinel poplars — dark and furtive trees — seemed to whisper and beckon to each other the creeping secrets of lives as ugly, colourless, and blind as those of the torpid organisms at the bottom of the pond. Marchant had walked four or five miles through the damp, level plain, floundering more than once into the boggy land, which had left its traces on his boots and gaiters. Till now he had looked at nothing — pre occupied with the mood of restless discontent which had driven him from house and town into the country. He had felt rather than seen that his surroundings had been depressing without knowing anything of their details — passing on his way much as he might have walked through some gallery of mediocre paint ings, merely aware of their uniform want of individuality, till one should suddenly detach itself from the rest with an imperative demand to be looked at, searched line by line for mean ings, and never forgotten.

The ugly, squalid house, with its blistered walls and the sparse nettles at their base, had a fascination for him. He had wanted change and beauty, and the straight, dank valley, bounded on either hand by a low, mist curtained wall of hills, had brought him to this. He tried to find some explanation for the curious attraction which rooted him to the spot. The air of tragedy which hung about it was due, he thought, to some other cause than the mere disposition of its stones and the signs of neglect and decay about them. Once or twice in his life, other places, with no peculiarities in their physical details, had seemed to single themselves from the rest to appeal to him in this remarkable way with suggestions of horror and crime. He was alive to impressions conveyed thus mysteri ously as the sensitised plate is receptive of more than can be perceived by the eyes.

He tried to recall the quasi-scientific theory which he had himself formed to account for the phenomenon. Wearied however, in his attempt to pick up the threads, he relapsed into vague speculations as to the sordid drama of lust or cruelty of which he felt sure this farm of fallen fortunes had been the theatre. For miles round the trees were few and far between, most of them elms, with bulky trunks and weed-like, unluxuriant tops, dotting the level behind him on either side of the grey streak of road, stretching away as far as the eye could see. The only hill for miles was the solitary mound which rose at the rear of the farm. It was bare of vegetation, except at its remotest edge, where five gnarled hawthorns, bent by centuries of wind, ran one after another down the slope like creatures petrified in flight.

The sight of a thin stream of smoke which curled against the hillside from a single chimney, reminded Marchant of his damp con dition ; and for the first time that day — a proof in itself of the depth of his depression — he drew his cigarette case from his pocket. Further evidence of the despondent mood in which he had set out was revealed to him in the fact that he had forgotten to refill his match-box. It was empty. With an exclamation of disgust he threw the tiny silver-plated bauble — too small for convenient practical use — over his shoulder into a nettle bed. Such match-boxes were an invention of the devil. When he most needed a smoke it was denied him. Well, he must make the best of his way to a railway station and return. He only hoped he might not have far to go. The road which ran opposite the house, passing the fringe of sheds on its left and crossing the level valley without boundary of hedge or tree, did not invite him.

He was on the point of rising, when, from a thin plantation on the left, there suddenly emerged the figure of a pedlar with an old-fashioned pack. He stayed where he was, wondering if the inhabitants of the farm bought of pedlars. As he waited, the man stopped, opened his tray, and displaying his wares in front of him, walked in at the broken gate as though he was no stranger. Marchant could see his gestures as he held out one thing after another for sale ; but the woman who had come in answer to his summons stood too far back in the shadow of the portico for him to catch a glimpse of her. He was all the better pleased. A rosy country wench intent on bobbins and tapes would have been an artistic impossibility. After five minutes or so the pedlar turned away and walked slowly towards the gate, stamping on the vestiges of a path as though to call attention to his departure.

A little way along the road, out of range of door or window, in shelter of the furthest of the sheds, he came to a halt, and instead of re-fastening his pack, drew from under a tray half-a dozen pink-paper-covered books, which he arranged in a frivolous row on the top of his cottons and haberdashery, to their entire con cealment. It was plain that he was waiting for some one with whom he had a secret understanding, and his patience was evidently on the point of becoming exhausted, when Marchant, who was looking in the direction of the house, saw a figure appear from one side of it. It was that of a girl, who, avoiding the more obvious way through the garden, slipped through a gap in the hedge, and in a few moments re-appeared at the door of the outbuilding, close to which the pedlar was standing.

Neither her shape nor movements were those of the bovine country-wench. It suddenly struck Marchant that he wanted matches, and he rose and moved towards the couple, neither of whom heard his approach along the soft mud of the road. It was begin ning to rain again. The girl bent intently over the tray of books, regarding one of all the rest with an eagerness expressed in every line of her face and figure. ' I will have this,' she said at last, ' at least — if I have enough money.' ' It's dearer than the others,' answered the pedlar ; ' sixpence.' Her face fell. ' Then I cannot have it,' she faltered ; ' I have only fourpence.' ' There are plenty of others to choose from. This, now,' he held up a flaring paper cover — ' I'd sooner have this myself. Look at that ship a-fire, and the lady a-clinging to the mast in the middle of the flames.' But the girl's regard was fixed regretfully on her first choice. ' I want that one,' she sighed in an intent half-whisper.

Her inability to possess the crude sentences, badly printed on cheap paper, with the pictured hero on the fly-leaf, pourtrayed in exact conformity to the ideal of a barber's block, involved the keenest disappoint ment. To an ordinary observer there would have seemed nothing to choose between any two of the literary productions on the tray ; to her, for some reason, this one eclipsed all the rest so completely that they were compara tively undesirable. Marchant looked at her unperceived. She was young, unformed, angular, and might well have been the victim of frequent hard words, even of blows. There was about her a restrained and blighted air, like that of a flower which has grown on poor soil. He observed to himself that she was a lily on a dung-hill ; that she belonged to the picture ; that in certain ways the influence of the strange house was upon her, though in others she had escaped it.

The rain began to fall still more heavily, and to blot the thin paper covers. ' Come, lass, come,' said the pedlar ; ' it 's heavy work when you 're so slow in coming to a point. Make your cakes quicker, or they'll be sad eating. Your sweetheart won't stand first on one leg and then on another, as I'm doing, while you are waiting to say yes. He'll be off to the wench round the corner that can give him a quick answer.' ' I might save up,' she meditated. ' Will you be coming soon again ?' 'a'.y, in a canny bit. Maybe three weeks or 1 so. At the sound of wheels in the distance, he looked along the road, and both perceived a stranger, who approached with the air of a purchaser. The pedlar was known ironically as ' Hand some Jack.' His coarse, brown skin was pitted with the marks of small-pox. He was square, short, and straddle-legged, yet the girl had ahvays thought him rather less, than more, repulsive than the men among whom she lived.

The stranger towered full head and shoulders above the top of his dog-skin cap. He was tall, straight, clean-limbed, and unbent by the hard labour which divides the adult agricultural labourer into two classes — the middle-aged and the old. His clothes were things of in dividual colour and texture, unstained with wind, weather, and earth in that hard warfare in which Nature sets her own livery upon her assailants, as if in proof that she is stronger than they. His manners, mode of speech, way of standing and moving, were the result of generations of freedom from excessive manual toil. He belonged to the race of masters. To the girl, with her dower of imagination fed with a romance of unreality, he was the in habitant of another world — that heaven of her dreams in which all men and women were wonderful and gracious beings, beautifully clothed and housed, exempt from toiling and from spinning by divine right.

She forgot the rain, the pedlar, and her disappointment in a momentary admiration, bold in its self-forget fulness. The stranger bought matches, and put down a large piece of silver in payment, and the pedlar began to fumble for change, talking all the while. Was there nothing else with which he could oblige the gentleman ? Could he not supply him with anything in the way of haberdashery? Or did he wish to make a present to a lady — here was his op portunity. Here were needle-boxes, ribands and laces, which a pretty lass not so very far off would give him a curtsey or a kiss for. ' Hand some Jack ' turned to her with a leer of good fellowship. She blushed crimson with anger and shame, and turning suddenly passed into the out-house. Midway between the two thresholds she came to a stand, her eyes fixed, without seeing them, on the great pools which covered the yard beyond the door in front of her, into which the rain-drops now began to fall heavily.

That was a man of the enchanted outer world ! How different from the men she knew — how noble and splendid ! If she could only see him again ! But what would he think of her after the way in which the pedlar had spoken ? Would he suppose ? She took a few reluctant steps in the direction of the yard, and stopped midway across the floor. Which way would the stranger go ? Perhaps Allington — that great and marvellous place to which she had once been taken, with the many houses, the dwellings of divine beings like him himself, with the same soft speech and fine clothing. Suddenly she became alive to the fact that it was raining very fast, as the moving rings upon the pools grew wider. Would he find shelter? Where was he now? What had happened in the road since she turned her back upon it? Forgetting her abstraction, she listened intently as the sound of wheels came splashing through the mud, and a vehicle drew up close to the out-house wall.

The pedlar's voice answered in response to a cheery offer of a lift, and the pedlar's clumsy movements were audible as he climbed up into the cart. Would the stranger go too ? So far as she could judge, he had not done so, for the wheels rolled on again immediately. She must go back. She was glad she had seen him, though she might never do so again. She shut her eyes, the more completely to conjure up his image. As she did so, there was a slight movement behind her. She turned. The subject of her thought was standing in the open doorway, hat in hand. It was raining hard ; might he shelter for a few moments ? She made some unintel ligible reply, which he translated into an assent. In the near, disturbing presence of this wonder of the unknown, outer world, her heart beat fast, and the mental image which a few moments ago had been so clear to her, wavered, and was broken up like a reflection in troubled water.

Humiliated by the thought that he might still be thinking of her in the light of the pedlar's hateful aspersion, passionately eager for some word or look from this gracious being that would show her that after all he did not so misjudge her, she hesitated between conflict ing desires to escape and to remain. Standing thus, bareheaded, under the broken rafters, she gave no sign of the emotions which alternately prompted her to go or stay. To the onlooker she was merely a pale slim girl, whose claim to prettiness it was rather hard to decide, waiting patiently for the storm to pass. The out-house was a rudely-walled space, which, like the rest of the farm-buildings, had fallen into decay. A large portion of the dilapidated roof had disappeared altogether, while that which remained was little more than a lacework of rotten beams, to which the thatch adhered only in places.

The middle of the floor, in which the girl was standing, afforded little better shelter than the open road, and only in the corner nearest the outer door was there any real refuge from the rain. During the next five minutes it seemed to do its best to find new doors of entrance overhead, pouring down here and there in continuous little streams. The stranger was the first to perceive that drops were falling on the shoulders of her thin print dress. Still afraid to look at him, she heard him move. Perhaps he was already going ! No, it was towards her that he came. Another moment and she felt herself gently enveloped in something soft and warm. His large Inverness cape completely covered the upper part of her body from neck to waist. The immediate effect of his action was not lost upon Marchant.

At his touch the pale, cold, timid creature was transformed ; the girl became a woman. Rosy colour dyed her cheeks, and her down-cast, brown eyes were raised to his, filled with a dog-like gratitude out of all proportion to the benefit conferred. He did not despise her, then ! How kind he was, how very kind ! In all her life no one had ever shown her consideration such as this. As a matter of course she had borne the brunt of the most inclement weather ; her worst physical discomfort had been the occasion of jest rather than sympathy. In the kind warm atmosphere that surrounded her, she breathed freely, forgetting all her timidity and shame. The thick folds of the cloak had magic in their touch, as though they had belonged to some mantle of enchantment, and the stranger who had bestowed it upon her took his place at the head of the heroic and divine beings, who sat enthroned in the high places of her imagin ary world.

Faster and faster fell the rain. Dear rain, kind rain ! that made them prisoners together, she had no desire that it should cease ! Neither on his part had Marchant. This sensitive girl appeared to him in the light of a discovery — like a rare jewel hidden away amongst lumber. He might have hesitated on the chivalrous loan of his own garment to a less dainty and attractive creature, but as it was, even her poor clothes did not jar on his æsthetic sense. A lily on a dunghill ! He repeated his simile to himself with pleasure in its aptness. Who would have expected to find a like treasure in this place of all others ? Whence came those beautiful brown eyes and lips like twin flowers ? What a pity philanthropists like his mother did not expend some of their energies on behalf of girls like this, instead of putting off all assistance till they had grown ugly, or got into trouble.

They were a set of muddleheads, leaving such creatures to a life of degrading poverty and toil, when a little timely help might have transformed them. In imagination he saw himself in the light of a future reformer, bestowing benefaction on poor but interesting damsels. He begged her to come into the comparatively dry corner in which he was standing, declaring that he could not monopolise the best shelter the place afforded, and they stood together, side by side. He asked her questions. She had lived in this place all her life ; had never heard tell of either father or mother ; the people at the farm, who were not related to her in any way, had taken her ' out of charity.' He mentally corrected his own simile. Lilies do not grow on dunghills, but are sometimes by accident found there. Influences other than those of the rough, coarse people among whom she lived, had moulded this creature into her far away unlikeness to the ordinary country girl.

It was doubtless a question of heredity. The father and mother, of whom she knew nothing. had left her a heritage of spiritual and physical characteristics, which, if they had never been developed, had as certainly never been blunted or coarsened. It might even be that her mother had belonged to the more educated classes, and, deserted and in trouble, had come to this out of the way spot to die unknown, and in a strange place. This was so much mere speculation ; but one thing at least was certain, — the child, whatever her parentage, had been left with the cruel inheritance of a nature with a capacity for pleasure she might never enjoy, and a susceptibility to pain which many years of a hard and laborious life would not deaden. Her experiences of life were limited. Once or twice she had been to Al lington, to the fair ; when she could afford it, she bought books from the pedlar on his periodical visits ; for the rest, the words ' I work ' summed up the whole of her existence.

Doubtless the people at the farm had shown hard commercial wisdom in taking her ' out of charity.' Poor little thing ! The fact that this strange man should ask her questions about herself, should condescend to interest himself in the details of her life, lifted her to a giddy height within his reach. He lived in Allington, the great and mar vellous place, with its church above the river, B its shops full of wares, of which she hardly knew the use, its houses, which were the dwellings of marvellous beings like himself. He lived there in that dignified, beautiful place, a king and prince among the rest. It might be that she had even seen the very house he dwelt in at the end of one of those trim gardens, through the gates of which she had peeped, where gracious beings sat beneath the trees, or played at games in light cool garments.

Inside she could guess a little of what the houses were like, with carpets according to the description of the novelettes, so soft that the feet sunk into them ; with low luxurious chairs and tables, and books everywhere with gilt edges. For a moment she allowed herself a vivid picture of herself amid this splendour. She trod the stairs and floors with trailing draperies of silk, which made a pleasant mur mur as she moved. Every one about her was soft-voiced, kind, and pleasant ; she might do as she chose, buy what things she liked ; better than all this — but the vision grew too dazzling, and she fell to earth and cold reality. He was going away to these things she would never see. To-morrow would be just the same as all other days. She would never see him again. Her work was waiting for her even now, as it would always do.

Vaguely she realised that the morrow would be just like other days. She would come down in the dim, raw morning to rake the ashes out ofthe grate, and light the fire. She would milk the two dejected cows in readiness for the cart that carried their poor yield away to the town. She would get the breakfast ready, and the details of the day's work would go on as usual, in fetching and carrying from slopstone to hearth, and from hearth to slopstone, — in feeding the animals, and in attending to the wants of the human creatures of the place, who were just other and more exacting animals than the pigs and the hens. To-morrow would wear itself into night ; night would bring the prospect of other to-morrows in endless vista. She shivered slightly under Marchant's cloak. Her companion looked out at the diminish ing rain-drops, and consulted his watch with a mental calculation as to the distance that lay between him and dinner.

He ought to start in a short five minutes. He glanced at the girl who was standing a few paces from him : — the blighted expression had returned to her face, and her figure seemed to have shrunk visibly under the folds of his Inverness. At this moment she turned, and their eyes met. 'Come!' he exclaimed, encouragingly, 'you look quite mournful. What have I done ? Have I offended you ? ' She shook her head for reply. ' Then don't be so unkind as to send me away without a smile.' For the first time he thought he could see faint traces of tears about her eyes. ' You poor girl,' he continued, ' for give me if 1 am a brute — but I believe you have been crying.' His kind and sympathising tones were as grateful to her as a healing touch upon a sore, and her thoughts immediately expressed them selves in her eyes. ' Those scoundrels ill-treat you, then ! ' he exclaimed, with an angry glance in the direction of the farm.

A frightened ' Hush ! ' from her confirmed him in his suppositions better than words would have done. He was conscious of an inrush of chivalrous feeling. His mind reverted to the philanthropists, and he had a wild idea of getting some one of them to interest himself in her case. His question as to what was now to be done, applied as much to her deliverance as to his deeply felt desire to see her look happy and charming again. ' You can't stay here all your life, of course,' he continued. ' It's a shame these people should have got hold of you.' Her thoughts echoed his words — ' a shame.' He knew, then, without any telling, that she was unhappy and over-worked. She pondered half in wonder at this strange man's sympathy, half in deepened consciousness of the meshes about her feet. Hilary Marchant's desire to lead her back to a lighter plane of feeling was for the moment clouded by a real instinct of pity.

What great barriers separate human creatures from each other ; how difficult, nay, impossible, it was to do a radically kind act without misunderstanding ! The world had become so prosaic that any assistance from man to woman, not on its own conventional lines (he was vague enough as to the form it would take in this particular instance) would be branded at once as quixotic, or misunder stood and maligned. He once more broke the silence. ' A penny for your thoughts ! ' he said, with a slight movement towards her. She answered him frankly enough. ' I was wishing I were you,' she said. ' What wouldn't I give to be able to live at Allington.' His own grievance at having to live there at all was uppermost in his reply. ' It is indeed a place of lively and stirring interests,' he said, with a sarcasm which was quite thrown away on her. 'But why shouldn't you live where you please,' he continued. 'A pretty girl can generally do as she likes, can't she ? ' Pretty ! he called her pretty.

She took a step or two away from him with raised head and elastic carriage. She had doubted often as to whether she had any claim at all to good looks, hardly daring to flatter herself with the idea that she possessed any of the charms attributed to adorable heroines of romance. Her thoughts flew to the Lady Angelas and Blanches of her novelettes, as though she were not after all so far from their company. Was it after all impossible for her to be like those blest and glorious beings, admired and loved ? To them beauty had always been the key to the summit and crown of their desires. Could she but go to Allington, all good fortune might wait upon her also. To Allington — to Allington — but how ? Absorbed in her own thoughts, she lost consciousness of Marchant's presence, and a remark by which he sought to attract her attention fell unheeded on her ears.

What was to be her first step towards Allington and the world ? A daring thought began slowly to shape itself in the region of possibilities. What others had done she might do also. A se quence of pictures formed themselves vividly in her brain, in which she saw herself the heroine. It was early morning, a fortnight later in the year, when the sun rose a little earlier than at present. With the first faint light, for which she had been watching, she rose from her bed, dressed herself carefully in clean, mended clothes, took the few coins from her secret store, and with a bundle, containing all her worldly possessions, crept stealthily down the creaking, uncarpeted stairs. The light came faintly through the shutters of the living room as she passed through it for the last time, and along the passage, at the rear of the house to the door, the bolts of which should have been well oiled beforehand.

Once outside, she would creep round the house, out of the way of the dogs, reach the road, put on her shoes in the shelter of the out-house. At half-past five or so, by the time she had walked on a mile or two, a market cart, than which the sun itself was not more constant, would pass along the road, and stop to give her a lift. So she would ride easily to Allington. Once there, the rest would not be so very difficult. Country girls were in request as servant maids, and ' service ' promised the first step of an enviable career. In her abstraction she did not notice that Marchant was watching her with a puzzled, half-piqued expression, ascribing her silence to a coquettish feint of displeasure at his compli ment. ' What on earth do you find of such tremen dous interest in that bit of wall ? ' he inquired, banteringly.

As he spoke a ruddy shaft of sunset light pierced into the dimmest recesses of the outhouse, and both turned simultaneously to the door at their rear. The sinking sun had broken through the clouds, which flamed at their edges as though they burned with fire. A stormy crimson light suffused the open spaces of the sky, which grew rapidly wider, and were reflected in the pools and long wet roads across the valley, till they gleamed like fiery water courses. The girl pointed to the widest and brightest of these. ' That's the way to Allington,' she cried, ' Look, it's a golden road ! '