The Herb-Moon: a fantasia

Front matter

THE HERB-MOON. SIX-SHILLING NOVELS. Effie Hetherington. By Robert Buchanan. A Winning Hazard. By Mrs. Alexander. An Outcast of the Islands. By Joseph COXRAD. Almayer's Folly. By Joseph Conrad. The Ebbing of the Tide : South Sea Stories. By Louis Becke. The First Fleet Family. By Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery. Paddy's Woman, and Other Stories. By Humphrey James. Clara Hopgood. By Mark Rutherford. The Tales of John Oliver Hobbes. With Portrait of the Author. The Stickit Minister, and Some Common Men. By S. R. Crockett. The Lilac Sunbonnet. By S. R. Crockett. The Raiders. By S. R. Crockett. London : T. FISHER UNWIN. THE HERB- MOON A FANTASIA BY John Oliver Hobbes AUTHOR OF SOME EMOTIONS AND A MORAL A STUDY IN TEMPTATIONS THE SINNER'S COMEDY A BUNDLE OF LIFE LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN MDCCCXCVI AU rights reserved, CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE I. WHICH EXPLAINS A SITUATION ... I II. PHILOSOPHY AND VEGETABLES ... 26 III. WHAT THE HERB-MOON MEANS . . -32 IV. WHICH SHOWS THAT LOVERS CAN AT TIMES TALK REASON ..... 46 V. SUSAN SHEDS TEARS . . . . -55 VI. SOME SOLILOQUIES ..... 59 VII. TWO GENTLEMEN OF THE OLD SCHOOL . . 66 VIII. INTRODUCING A LADY WHO DISAPPROVED OF CYNICISM ...... 76 IX. CONCERNING HEROES, SORROW, AND A HORSE . 83 X. IN WHICH SUSAN HAS CAUSE TO REMEMBER ROSE ARDEN ...... IO9 XI. CHASTE CONVERSATION COUPLED WITH FEAR . II7 XII. CONCERNING A GODDESS OF MORTAL SPEECH 1 27 XIII. IN WHICH MRS. HARROWBY IS ELOQUENT . I 39 XIV. A LADY TALKS SENSE AND COMEDY LOOKS TEARFUL . . . . . . 153 XV. THE QUESTION OF EDWARd's SOUL . . I70 XVI. IN WHICH ROSE HAS TO RESTRAIN HER SYM- PATHIES . . . . . .189 XVII. SOME WAYS OF BEARING AFFLICTION . . 2O4 XVIII. IN WHICH A FEW ARE FOUND FAITHFUL . 210 XIX. THE LAST . . . . . . .223 A FANTASIA.

Chapter I. Which Explains

A SITUATION. jV/TISS CRECY, the rich brewer's only *■"-*■ daughter, threatened to walk if her ponies did not trot faster. "Whip the little creatures," she told her coachman, " but do not hurt them ! " They ambled through long winding roads hedged with white-thorn and black-thorn ; past wheat-fields, bean-fields, fields of barley ; past wide stretches of meadow enamelled with butter cups and clover ; past farmyards and little houses facing lawns ; past inns and churches and the cemetery where sheep' s-par sley — with its long green stems and white delicate flowers — waved 2 J over the graves, almost as high as the head stones. There were windmills and many small cottages to be seen either near or in the distance ; and lanes, marked out by tall poplars or young elms, ash and maple. Overhead the sun shone out with a sleepy brilliance, and, grey clouds, like a swarm of fantastic pigeons, roamed, driven by the breeze, across the sky.

As the phaeton turned a sudden corner, Miss Crecy saw, some few yards ahead, a young man, walking. He was tall, with fine square shoulders and a resolute face. " Can I give you a lift, Mr. Robsart ? " said the lady when she reached him. " Thanks," he replied, and stepped in beside her. Robsart was a clerk in a cotton factory, and hoped, in time, to occupy the post of overseer, formerly held by his father, now dead. The situation demanded good sense, patience, honesty, and every long virtue ; it belonged to that graceless order of responsibilities where the least mistake causes immense confusion, and the most scrupulous attention is accepted as a matter of course. Neither enthusiasm nor vanity had the smallest play in Robsart's life : it was all a question of duty and conscience and self-respect.

Sometimes he resented its dulness and read about kings. His own history, how ever, had not been uneventful. At the time of his birth, his father was senior partner in the honourable firm — first established in 1700 — of Robsart & Son, cotton spinners. The lad was educated in the belief that he would, if he lived, inherit the business and advance a step further than his ancestors by representing his native town in the House of Commons. He was sent to Eton, and proceeded to Cambridge, where, at the end of his first year, he was summoned to Ottley, to find his father a bank rupt, their home under the hammer, and the factory sold to a Mr. Saxe, of Nottingham. It was a deadening blow. Old Robsart was an easy-tempered body, who, so long as he had a horse, good wine and the best tobacco, asked little of any one.

He had married the daughter of a famous Methodist, and having killed her — not by cruelty but by his want of religion (she had endeavoured to make him a Christian, and perished from the humiliation of her defeat) — he took for his second wife a widow with a pinched waist and easy morals, who, because she did not dye her hair, was called no harder name than injudicious for scattering money as if it were sawdust and drinking champagne by the pint. Robsart the son was always courteous to this lady — with Cromwell, " he liked not war on women " — but he chafed in secret to think that such a being could please the man his mother had loved and prayed for. The disgrace of the bankruptcy tried his proud spirit so far that he could only live by reminding himself that he might in time and by working, pay every creditor to the full and restore the family's injured integrity.

The older Robsart, with that distressing meekness which fills up the loss of relf-respect, accepted the position of a salaried servant in the factory established by his forefathers. All forced virtue is degrading in its effect. Robsart senior withered away in his attempt to act divine characteristics with a heart convulsed by every human instinct of jealousy and resentment. His native good-humour failed him after the novelty of a subordinate post became merged in mere routine. To be reprimanded for unpunctuality — (he liked to rise at noon), to make way for Mr. Saxe, to be forbidden his cigar during office hours — these were the restrictions which stopped his breath. He could meet his unpaid butcher, but he could not go out to luncheon at the sound of the yard bell. He died in a twelvemonth.

His wife did not long survive him. She became annoyed with her dressmaker, who used an inferior silk for the lining of her funeral robes. A petty law-suit ensued, and the little legacy left her by her husband was just sufficient to pay the costs of that litigation and her burial fees. This sordid, unbeautiful finish to the hopes of Robsart's boyhood, made a sad beginning for the second epoch in his career. A less courageous nature would have fled from the scene of disappointment — seeking forgetfulness in new surroundings, and a reputation where his father was unknown. But he chose instead to remain at Ottley. At first, he was looked upon with a certain mistrust, but before a year had passed, he was treated as a gentleman by the gentry and as a scholar by the poor. His sad expression made him popular with women ; and his poverty saved him from the envy of less handsome rivals.

Too poor to mix with the young men of his own education, and too refined to associate on any terms of intimacy with his inferiors, too proud to accept hospitalities he could not return and too ambitious to be easily resigned to a life of obscurity and loneliness, his existence was often a burden to himself and always an enigma to his friends. Miss Crecy, as she surveyed him slyly, spoke, in maternal accents, of his pallor, his evident ill-health. He was growing thin ; he needed a change ; would he be at the cricket match to-morrow ? Was he not glad that croquet was coming into fashion, and had he heard that Mr. Popelard was engaged ? No one had seen his Intended, but his mother looked greatly re lieved, so, no doubt, he was doing very well for himself. Ottley was not a marrying place. The girls with money wanted Army men, and the men with prospects wanted to keep their liberty.

For her part, she put love before everything. But perhaps she was sentimental. By this time, the ponies had reached the gates of a property known in the neighbour hood as Wentworth Place, formerly the homestead of the Robsarts, and now the residence of Mr. Saxe, the cotton-spinner. " I am going to tea with Mrs. Saxe," ex plained Miss Crecy. She would have taken Robsart much further if he had but promised to attend the cricket match ; as it was, she found him too ungrateful a person for a young lady of her fortune and amiability to waste time with. " Good-bye," said she. " Good-bye," said he. His lodgings were at an old farmhouse a mile or two beyond, and, as he turned away from the chestnut avenue of Wentworth Place, the home of his fathers for six generations, the way before him looked steep and desolate.

He had long passed that dramatic hour in grief when the very unex pectedness of the pang gives it at least the interest of a new experience. But now it had become a stale and voiceless sorrow — there was no more to be thought, or said, or done, and it was only when he felt a tightening of his heart that he knew that some sight or word had called the past once more to his remembrance. They were felling the elm trees which lined, at grassy intervals, the road ; several great branches lay hewn upon the ground, and, here and there, a weeping willow or a small yew or a holly bush studded the turf. There was a horseless waggon in an enclosure beyond where a boy with a scythe stood, eating bread and butter, by a grindstone. He dropped the scythe to touch his cap to Robsart. The path to Wrestle's Farm ran through a wide, flat meadow, where chickens were cooped, cattle fed, and the labourers' children played.

Now a jackdaw, now a magpie, now a rook and now a crow winged through the air, and the incessant twittering of birds made the stillness noisy. The house — half surrounded by a moat which served as a duck-pond — was small and moss-grown, two storeys high and with three windows only. One could step in at the front door and out at the back in five strides. Robsart's parlour, which he shared with the parish organist and the organist's sister, Mrs. Arden, was in the right wing — as far as possible from the cow-shed, the teeming hay-yard, and the half-filled stables. To-day, as he reached the threshold, a shower, which had been threatening for some hours, fell from the sky. He stood and watched its play, heard its sharp singing, before he went to the sitting-room. Rose Arden was there at needle-work, and as Robsart entered she smiled, sighed, and chose a brighter thread.

The room was meagrely furnished ; the long, low window, with its dim panes, opened out on a sunburnt lawn, hemmed in on one side by a brick wall and at the end by a. hedge. There was a star-shaped flowerbed in the centre, where a rose-tree and some scarlet geraniums grew. The rest was mostly cut into strips and squares for gooseberry and currant bushes, cabbages, beans, and potatoes. When days were hot and insects hummed and buzzed, birds piped and the breeze blew fresh, the outlook was, though narrow, rather gay ; but now the flowers were not yet in bloom, it rained, and an overpowering smell of humid earth made the air oppressive. Sometimes a raindrop, heavier than the others, fell with a dull splash on the window-sill, sometimes a rook flew over the distant tree-tops, but there was no other sound to be heard — no other living thing to see.

Perhaps Rose was glad to have no distraction from her work : the wonderful stitches on her silk coverlet multiplied, and the summer of life she had never known seemed to grow from under her fingers on to the blank material beneath them. Rose's face was not fair : the features, though refined, were too irregular to be gracious, and although her brow and soft brown eyes were beautiful, they showed the marks of over-long fatigue. An expression of intense sorrow veiled the pretty liveliness of her mien, and it was only when she laughed — which was seldom unless Robsart happened to be present — that one saw how well merriment became her. She seemed about five-and-thirty, although she was, in fact, fully seven years younger. Her skin had that curious waxen pallor often found in women, who, while they live in the country, breathing pure air, lose their colour and fade from lack of amusement.

Oh, those long days in the country — days of anxiety without distraction, of patient waiting for letters — no matter from whom — which never come, days of trivial necessary tasks impossible to shirk yet so wearisome in their accomplishment, days when life can promise neither love, nor youth, nor joy, nor even death — when the world seems but a mighty grind-mill where slaves eternally toil without rest and without hire. The merest half-belief in a living God will sustain many souls through adversities and trials of any picturesque or stirring order, but only the most exalted faith can give one the strength to bear in patience the misery of loneliness, the constant fret of uncongenial surroundings, the heavy burden of little common woes, which, because they are little and common, are so humiliating.

Rose had been born with a spirit of adventure, which her uneventful life left undeveloped, and her frail body utterly belied. The story of her youth caused pity even in Ottley, where human sympathies ran in no rapid stream. Her husband, a lieutenant in the Navy, had lost his reason from the effects of a sunstroke, and was now in a private asylum. Rose was nineteen at the time of her marriage, and before her twentieth birthday she found herself in the terrible position of a young wife with no one to protect her, with no right to accept affection, with no right to bestow it, and with a craving for companionship so com pelling, that in stifling it she broke her heart. When her only brother left Oxford, she went with him to the little town of Ottley, where he had accepted the post of parish organist, hoping, in time, to become choir-master at the cathedral.

He was known to the Bishop as a young man of good character, exceptional talents and most respectable family : it was on his lordship's recommendation that he was offered the situation he now occupied. That Rose should live with her brother was considered quite the best thing, and that Robsart should form a third in the household was not, on the whole, to be wondered at. He was a steady, high-minded young man, said current opinion, and one had but to see Mrs. Arden to understand the relationship perfectly. She was a good creature of any age, with no sort of fascination. It was all charming and platonic and idyllic. But such a pity ! such a pity ! For Robsart was a fine-looking fellow. One could be sure that he had thrown away a number of chances solely on account of his friendship for Edward Banish and Mrs. Arden.

Rose, that day, had been restless in Robsart's absence. She had been for a little walk in the meadow, and changed her dress twice. It struck her that she was growing old, and her grey alpaca gown of the summer before, seemed, when she looked in the glass, a trying colour. And she wept. It was not her custom to brood upon the past, yet this afternoon many things which she had long ceased to think of fell upon her mind. Several moments in her history came again with a pathos more vivid than her actual living of them. One had been — ah, many years back, in the small Catholic chapel of a little fishing-town in the south of England. It was an Easter Sunday, and she had wandered in to hear the Mass sung. Her seat faced the high altar, and when she gazed upon the cross it seemed, not an emblem of sorrow, but the mysterious key to the city of eternal happiness.

There were lilies below and around ; flame coloured azaleas and deep-purple flowers of some homelier variety ; the gold on the priest's vestments shone in the candle-light, and, through one stained-glass window, a ray of the sun lit up a wooden figure of the Virgin, curiously carved, with onyx eyes and a robe of some glittering stuff embroidered by nuns. Rose observed all these things just as one scans the features of a well-known face or a familiar spot : if there had been no visible flowers, no sun, no candles, or no gold, their meaning, nevertheless, would still have seemed there — like the true elements in a fantastic dream. The Great Sacrifice was made ; the celebrant, the deacons and the acolytes filed out to joyous music and in solemn procession : one by one each worshipper left the building : Rose was alone.

For that celestial minute, she felt that despair and sin and grief and disappointment had passed away for ever, that the peace of God, making all things perfect, was come upon the land — never to depart again therefrom. She prayed without words : her spirit sang its song of thanksgiving in silence ; life was so sweet ; eternity, so brief ; heaven, so like a fairer earth. She thought of the saints and martyrs till her heart thrilled with passionate admiration and a fearful longing for the power to suffer, endure, and conquer similarly. Ah, if one could but be sure of that ultimate triumph ! There was the doubt — the burden. What of the souls who fought, yet apparently failed — dying, unknown, unacknowledged, all their labours unrewarded ; who turned aside from the broad way, yet, for some reason, were not to be found upon the narrow one ?

The saints who had no day ! Had any one sung their histories, preached their martyrdom ? Her impetuous spirit paused at a plan of life which, in her judgment, made the pleasures of this world insipid, yet left the recompense of the white future undefined. She was young, ardent — full of hope and splendid vigour ; she longed for combats, temptations, trials of faith, hardship, persecution — longed for them because she felt so sure that nothing could dismay her ; nothing overcome her pride of girlhood. Most of us in our apprentice days feel mighty enough to bear the burden of success, but how many have the strength to fail ? How many would dare to choose the gift of failure ? The question pursued her ; it carried the accent of defiance. Yet, she thought, why not forget the crowning victory or the final humiliation, whichever it might be : the task was the thing — the task — a faithful answer to one's calling.

And her calling was not to high places or through dazzling paths ; she was going to be married and live very humbly. . . . Oh, how long ago it was ! She was a girl then, and she used to laugh all day. How long ago it was ! Arden had been a bad husband ; he was often drunk and he did not know how to treat a refined woman. Yet she had cared for him because he loved her after his own brutal fashion : in the intervals of churlishness and ill-temper, he would read poetry aloud and kiss her pretty hands, take her to the theatre, or buy flowers. Then, after eight strange months, came the sunstroke and all the horror of insanity. She had tried to keep him at home, but he killed their dog, and would have killed her too : so they took him away. He could never recover, they said. She cried for two years, and studied art needlework.

She could now earn enough money to keep herself very comfortably and pay for her brother's annual trip to Switzerland. He was delicate. Robsart came into her existence, she knew not how. He was her brother's friend, and he was living at Ottley when they first came there : they had agreed to settle alto gether at the farmhouse. That was all. But in the woman's mind the story turned upon one scene which happened when they had been in Ottley just three months. Edward had gone to the choir practice, and she and Robsart were together, sitting idly, in the parlour. They talked about spring, and ideals, and the nightin gale. " You know," said Robsart, quite suddenly, " that I love you." " Yes," she answered. They looked into the night of each other's eyes till day seemed to dawn in them. " There is nothing to fear," said he, " in love — in affection."

She glanced past him, out on to the world she had, for too long a second, forgotten. The curtains had not been drawn, and she could see the barren garden where darkness seemed to flow like a silent tide— flooding the land with mystery. Alone it swept — the greatest, most solitary of all lonelinesses. Robsart followed the direction of her gaze, and with something like jealousy, drew down the frayed, green blinds. " There is nothing to see," he said, " there is no moon." She leant her head against the shutter and trembled into tears. " Don't cry," said Robsart. " Oh, Rose, do not cry ! " "I am not — I am not," she whispered, and sobbing, stole past him out of the room. For weeks she had been happy enough in the knowledge that he was near her : she had been a listener for his footsteps — for the sound of his voice.

And now she knew what this meant. It was all wrong. They could never again watch the sky together or listen to the nightin gale or wander through the fields at sunset ; they could never again smile at lovers when they met them, Sunday evenings, on the road from church. Robsart seemed to understand that these things were at an end, and once, when he surprised her in tears, he spoke quite roughly about the bad starch they used for his collars. " Perhaps the fault is in the ironing," she suggested. . " I shall make a row about it," said he, and, as he dared not look longer at her poor, pale face, he went out, walked miles, and came home too tired to eat his supper. As Rose sat at her eternal needlework, her throat would swell : she felt the exceeding bitter cry but could not utter it, and her lips grew more compressed, and the lines round her mouth more deep, and the fire in her temples more cruel.

At two-and-twenty love does not leave us laughing. "I must go to Lauderston," said Robsart, one day ; " this place does not agree with me." This was more than she could bear. " Wait another month," she pleaded, " till the pear-trees are in bloom. They look so pretty ! " So he stayed, and every week he found it easier to remain. Rose became so dull. By degrees and after many cruel shocks to his sentiment, he began to own to himself her poverty of personal attractions, and he thought he must have seen her before under the glamour of a foolish, incomprehensible passion. She watched his love die out : she killed the lover in him just as she had slain. the woman in herself. She told her heart, which was too numb to ache, that it was better so. She ceased to care very much for his company ; but then she no longer cared for anything : she felt chilled by her own coldness.

She still said her prayers— the Our Father and a quaint little hymn she had been taught when a child, but she made no special petitions — The Herb- Moon. 20 named no names. It may be that she dared not. Yet she never called herself unhappy, for she had so many orders for her needlework. She read Thomas a Kempis and tried to follow the " Imitation of Christ." Of course, she fell behind often, and often wondered whether a rule so hard could ever be entirely obeyed. Other rules, however, which read more sweetly seemed to lead to mistakes and griefs yet darker ; so, obedient and uncomplaining, she struggled on in the old groove. Her time — that second unmarked time one has apart from one's daily occupation — was spent in waiting on the two men whose sitting-room she shared. She studied their tastes, lived in their work, bore with their moods and humours.

Edward suffered heroic pains from some internal malady. Days when he felt bright he would be wildly boisterous : he would shout, sing, play the fool, and, after an hour of undisciplined hilarity, become quarrelsome. At other times he had only dark looks, ominous mutterings, and no appetite. When these fits were upon him, poor Rose used to shed dry tears in her lonely corner — fearing some calamity, she knew not what. In the evenings, two of the three would play chess, or one would read aloud while the others listened, or they would go for a walk, or they would each take a book. On rare occasions they went to en tertainments at the Town Hall, but they had always to leave early on account of Edward's health, or because the music was too outrageous for his scholarly ear. . Rose rather liked songs with a valse refrain, and once she greatly enjoyed a wretched performance of The Humorous Lieu tenant.

Edward, in consequence, would hardly speak to her for a week. He was a man of violent prejudices. Yet when Rose tried to resent his tyrannical conduct, the remembrance of his many acts of kindness, his noblesse, his tender ness caught her soul, stealing over her desolation like the morning sunshine over bleak hills. He was editing an edition of Bach, correcting, sug gesting, annotating, but all that was as nothing : he longed to give voice to the symphonies in his own brain, and because he could not, he suffered, like some wretch in chains — tongue-tied, yet with a golden message to tell could he but utter it. His worse moods were those of religious melancholy, which afflicted him to madness. He had composed a few chorales under this influence, but Rose shuddered when she heard them, and found no beauty in harmonies born of such dissonant emotions.

Sometimes Robsart would discover that she looked ill, and they would arrange to take her for a drive in the trap. It took half an hour to harness the pony ; Susan (who managed the farm) held the cart, and Adam, her husband, fumbled with the reins ; Robsart and Edward, looking on, would add confusion to the scene by interference. Then a discussion would follow : who should drive ? And which way should they go ? Rose's suggestions were seldom if ever regarded, and the weary woman would usually find herself being shaken over the bleakest part of the country with Edward, moan ing over his liver, at her back, and Robsart, wondering how soon they could get home, by her side. Both men were devoted to her : neither of them had ever seen a woman who he thought her equal, but they never had time to tell her so and were, in any case, too shy to even let her guess it.

Love, however, is a state of giving — and unconscious giving, and Rose never looked for praise or gratitude. When they carried her off on these unprofitable excursions, she saw the kindly motive under their apparent savagery and even found the exquisite pleasure they sought to give her, in suffering so much for the satisfaction of their conscience. Once on returning from an ex ceptionally painful encounter with the east wind over sharp stones, she heard Robsart encouraging poor Edward by a reminder — " that after all, Rose enjoyed a drive and it did her so much good ! " She learnt to speak not of herself. In their sitting-room the boards groaned, the wind moaned, the flies droned, but Rose was nearly always silent. She talked when her advice was invited, and lEdward had often been pleased to call her " no fool " ; she considered all subjects in their relation to Robsart and her brother : in every discussion she counted herself — her own desires, her own heart, her own hopes as nothing in the world.

She dreaded giving counsels of perfection and was often, in her conversation, so liberal-minded as to astonish Robsart, who found such worldly-wisdom — while he acted on it — by no means charming in a woman. When he entered the room after his drive with Miss Crecy, some of the old amazement— even disbelief — fell upon him that he had ever been desperately, deeply, sorrowfully in love with the plain and ageing woman who sat there, grey in the face, embroidering doves and butterflies on a pink silk quilt. And as she worked, she sang — O weep, my heart, for Summer days are fled, The earth is cold, and roses that were red, Birds that once sang, and little things that flew Are dead. The pallid day is moist with chilling dew, There is no noon, because the wind that blew The clouds across the sun, is stern, poor heart, Like you.