Worse than a Crime. The history of a mistake

Front matter

a BY THE SAME AUTHOR A LIBERAL EDUCATION 'Mrs George Martyn's tale, "A Liberal Education," forms part of the Tavistock Library, to which it will surely prove a welcome addition. The author's descriptions osa soldier's life both in peace and war are excellent. Her love story also is well told, and one arrives at the close of this little volume with regret.' — Morning Post. ' There is something very healthy and artlessly attractive about the quaint little story, and an air of good-breeding, refinement and decent feeling permeates it all. The love-making is very prettily done.' St James1 Gazette. 1 . . . is freshly and prettily written, and has some charming love making scenes in a little country inn, near a river.' — The Guardian ' Gracefully written, and healthy as it is, the book is sure to interest everyone who reads it.'— Scotsman. ' We can scarcely imagine a more perfect railway novel for the average reader, within its own limits, than Mrs Martyn's "A Liberal Educa tion."

Without making any great demand upon the brain, it is a thoroughly interesting story, told in a simple, unaffected style, and both the incidents and the characters have been carefully thought out.' — Manchester Examiner. 'A well-written story, with plenty of individuality in the character, and naturalism in the incidents, besides point in the dialogue.' Liverpool Courier. 'The descriptions of nature are delicate in feeling, and charming, and one puts down the little volume . . . with a pleasant sense of having been not unprofitably entertained.' — Nation^ New York. Ube Ifoistorp of a flfoistafce BY \ Mrs GEORGE MARTYN AUTHOR OF 'A LIBERAL EDUCATION LONDON DIGBY, LONG & CO., PUBLISHERS IB BOUVERIE STREET, FLEET STREET, E.C CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. There is the Village, and looks how Quiet and Small, ...... 1 II.

Preaching down a Daughter's Heart, . . 8 III. The Maiden Passion for a Maid, . . .19 IV. Es ist eine alte Gesehichte, . . . .32 V. Gone, and the Light gone with Her ! . .37 VI. The Hope I dreamed of was a Dream. . . 46 VII. The Autumn Sunshine Everywhere, . . .52 VIII. I found My Sweet Little Doll, Dears, . 61 IX. Workmen up at the Hall, They are coming back from Abroad, . . . . .66 X. The little More, and how Much it is ! . . 77 XI. Forgive me, Mine was Jealousy in Love, . 91 XII. A Great Gulf yawns between Me and the Days of Yore 98 XIII. Am I my Brother's Keeper ! . ■ 106 XIV. Hinaus in die Welt und Weiter, . .117 XV. Cælum, non animum Mutant qui trans Mare currunt, Contents VIII CHAP. PAGE XVI. Shower and Storm and Blast, . . . 130 XVII. Although the Spring be fair in Joyous Garde, . 143 XVIII.

Chapter I There Is The Village, And Looks How Quiet And Small

Lawn tennis was evidently the order of the after noon, and the lawn at Bourne Abbas Rectory was dotted with white balls, while " the boys," .under which general term were included the Rector's pupils, his son and two of his son's college friends, idled expectantly under the great trees in the newest of flannel suits, and discussed the make and weights of racquets. There seemed to be several reasons why the Rector of Bourne Abbas should take pupils. His house was large and roomy, with a long, extra wing built by some former rector who had possessed almost more than his share of children. The parish, on the other hand, was not large; it consisted of a few fair-sized houses, including the Abbey, about half a dozen farms with the labourers' cottages belonging to them, a small inn, a general shop and a smithy.

Even with daily service and instruction in the village school, the work could hardly be called heavy, and Mr Muirhead liked to be busy. For many years he had been a private tutor, migrating from one family to another as his pupils grew up, and when he was about forty, and a fireside of his own seemed attractive, he was A given the living of St Mary's, Bourne Abbas, by the father of one of the " bears " he had successfully led, and he settled there with his bride, the pretty, penniless cousin of the great man who had presented him to the Kectory. At first he went on with his coaching because he felt strange without it, then, as years went by, it was a means of paying his son's school bills, and so it happened that the Rectory was seldom without some few young men reading for college, or for their degree, or, occasionally, for Orders.

And in this way it came about that Evelyn Muirhead was brought up in an atmosphere of boyishness. She had no sister, no dear girl friends, and her mother was well past her youth, so she had no companions except her brother, whom she adored, and " the boys," who were inclined, as she grew older, to adore her. Evelyn's frank ways were not, however, encouraging to sentiment, and by her unmerciful snubbing of any indications of the tender passion, she maintained a friendly give-and-take relationship between herself and her father's pupils, which sometimes surprised people who were ignorant of the system on which she had been educated. This system was, briefly, allowing familiarity to breed, if not contempt, a very disdainful tolerance of " sentimental folly," and it had the effect of keeping her heart-whole and fancy-free through those first few trying years that follow a girl's coming out.

She danced and played tennis, rode and skated, went to Oxford for Commem : and pic nicked at Henley, and kept, through it all, "the dew of youth" in her heart, and the light of unshadowed girlishness in her laughing, hazel eyes. She was not, strictly speaking, a pretty girl, but her figure was straight and active as a well-grown boy's, her eyes were bright and clear, she had the charm of fresh, healthy colouring, and her frequent smile showed a set of perfect teeth. " Evelyn, dear," her mother said, this July afternoon as the girl came down equipped for tennis, " I am not sure that I like that hat." " Oh, isn't it becoming ? " she asked, turning, with some anxiety in her face, to a mirror on the wall. Mrs Muirhead smiled. " Do you know that I believe that this is the first time I ever heard you ask that question?" she said.

Evelyn blushed suddenly, for she knew well that her usual inquiry was simply, " Am I tidy ? " with no thought of, "Do I look nice?" such as girls have as a rule, and she dismissed the idea now, saying brusquely, — "It shades my eyes, mother; never mind if it is not the latest fashion," and the mother, with a vague stirring of uneasiness in her mind, led the way on to the lawn. Who could it be, she wondered, that Evelyn desired to please ? Not either of the boys, surely ? Could it be Gerard Tailleur, " the blue-eyed giant " as she laughingly called him, who was spending part of his " long vac. " at the Rectory for quiet reading; or Frank Lester, the keen, dark-eyed mathematician, who was doing the same ? Mrs Muirhead sighed as she followed her daughter's light, quick movements down the terrace steps, between the flower beds flaming with the scarlet and gold of geranium and calceolaria, and across the smooth, green level of the tennis lawn.

She knew that sooner or later she must awake to the fact that Evelyn was a woman, and, as such, would probably embark on that stream whose current proverbially runs anything but smoothly, but that the hour of launching her frail craft of happiness should be so imminent she had not guessed, and that one seemingly innocent, little question about her hat opened the mother's eyes to possibilities she had hitherto ignored. There seemed little danger of hidden fires, however, under the sparkling surface talk that went on in the deep shade of the beeches that afternoon, and Evelyn, even to her mother's watchful notice, was as unembarrassed as usual. " But I wonder," mused Mrs Muirhead, " whether it is quite wise to let Alan bring his friends here quite as much as he does, and these two are par ticularly charming, to my mind at least," and she looked at them critically, her newly-awakened anxiety making her take special note of their personal characteristics.

Frank Lester was of middle height, slight and sinewy, with dark bright eyes and brown hair ; he was a famous short distance runner, the possessor of a good tenor voice, and holder of the best mathematical scholarship Oxford had to bestow. Mrs Muirhead travelled on to Gerard Tailleur — Gerard who was so concerned if you spelled his name Tyler, Gerard who was never in time for breakfast, who smiled on all the world with his dark-lashed blue eyes, who possessed all the charm inherited and acquired from a family of good blood and refined education, a son of Anak who stood over six feet in his stockings. No woman, and few men, looked at him without a friendly softening of eye and voice ; surely Evelyn must be excused if she wished to appear at her best before him. Mrs Muirhead scrutinised him now with a glance that might have been envious had not her own son sat close beside her, his knee making a resting-place for Tailleur's smooth dark head.

Alan Muirhead inherited the beauty which Evelyn had somehow just missed, and his clear-cut features and ultra-refined face, though betraying some thing of the delicacy which had made his childhood one long anxiety, were attractive enough, especially to his mother, who idolised her clever son and seemed to love him better for all the sleepless nights and weary days she had spent for him in his infancy. But her motherly self-con gratulations were cut short by the ai-rival of visitors, and very speedily the courts were filled, and the old garden rang with fresh, young voices, and the familiar cries of "Love" "Fault" "Our Vantage." Evelyn played well, a reliable, un affected game, with a swift, direct service, and a steady, unhurried return stroke that made her a valuable partner, and she was always in demand.

Another favoured player, though by no means so good a performer, was a tall, slim girl, whom the boys addressed as Miss Whitgift, and whom Evelyn called Lucy, but the cause of her popularity was explained by one glance at her face. She had received as dower from the gods the " fatal gift of beauty." She had great, soft, brown eyes, with slightly drooping lids, her head was crowned with masses of hair touched here and there with gold, the outline of her face was a faultless oval, and its colour, or want of colour, a clear creamy white, relieved by hardly a tinge of pink. She was un deniably a girl it would have been very difficult to overlook in any assembly, and with her present surrounding of ordinary, bright - faced, country town girls she was specially conspicuous. Gerard Tailleur saw her that day for the first time, but he managed to secure her as his partner in more than one set, and cheerfully lost game after game owing to her indifferent play, feeling amply compensated for his defeat by one look from those wonderful eyes.

" Whom is Lucy playing with ? " asked Mrs Whitgift from her seat under the beech tree. "An Oxford friend of Alan's," said Mrs Muir head. "His name is Tailleur." "One of the Downshire Tailleurs, I suppose," said Mrs Whitgift, severely. "Yes; his uncle is the present baronet. This boy, I imagine, is his heir." Mrs Whito-ift looked at her with astonished disapproval. " Haven't you ascertained ? " she asked, with an involuntary glance at Evelyn. " No, I have not actually inquired," answered the Rector's wife, a little nervously. "I should have said probable heir, because I have heard that his uncle has not long been married." " Indeed ! " remarked Mrs Whitgift. " Will you kindly send a message to Lucy to tell her I wish her to come and rest when that set is finished." This was by no means the first time that Mrs Muirhead had been, by implication, reproved during her years of acquaintance with Mrs Whitgift, and the Rector's gentle wife had found peace hard to maintain when Lucy's upbringing and its results were contrasted with Evelyn's education, mainly to show the defects of the latter.

She was glad now, when she detected a warlike tone in Mrs Whitgift's voice, to see her husband coming from the house toward them, for his very presence, with his grave, good looks and courteous manner, was like oil on troubled water. " Have you any news for us to-day ? " he asked, turning to Mrs Whitgift as he sank into a capa cious chair. " You speak as though my little cottage were a centre of information," she said affably. " I fancy most people feel they gain something by a visit there," replied the Rector, with his most courtly manner. " But the little item of information I have for you to-day is one distinctly of local interest, and in our limited society may even be called important." "Let's have it then, papa," said Evelyn, who stood just behind him, her bright eyes watching the quick passage of the balls to and fro.

"The Abbey has been purchased." Mr Muir head paused that his statement might have due effect. Its immediate result was a chorus of sur prise, pleasure and consternation. " You don't say so ! " " Really, after all these years!" "What a good thing for the place!" " What a pity we shall be shut out of those lovely woods ! " And in the first pause Mrs Whitgift said quietly, "Let us hope the new owners may be a real acquisition to the neighbourhood." " Yes ; pleasant people who will entertain and be worth knowing," put in Evelyn, her eyes still on the game. " I would rather say Christian people, whom it will be an advantage to know," corrected Lucy's mother, and she turned to Mr Muirhead for further information. " Whatever they are we must make the best of them now," he said cheerfully. " Their name is Cumberland — I believe a brother and sister."

" Old ? " questioned two or three voices. " Rich ? " suggested two or three more. Mr Muirhead raised his eyebrows and shook his head slightly. " I know very little," he answered ; " very little. They are wealthy, I understand — in fact, Mr Cumberland has some large business — " " Not brewing, I trust," interposed Mrs Whitgift. " Not brewing, I believe. There is a rumour of some branch of the iron trade, but also I have heard an assertion that his income is derived from colonial produce." " Tintacks, sugar and lard," quoted Evelyn in an undertone, but happily no one heard her but one or two of the boys who were close at hand, and the flow of conversation continued smoothly. With such a topic it was not likely to run dry.

Chapter II Preaching Down

A DAUGHTER'S HEART Bourne Abbey stood on the bank of the river opposite church and Rectory, and its sloping woods of beech and oak and fir were a well-known feature of the river landscape. For years the old house — built two hundred years ago out of, and on to, the remains of a famous abbey — had stood empty. The lands were mortgaged, everything needed re pair and nothing seemed likely to get it. At last came the inevitable foreclosure and the purchase of the domain by Mr Cumberland. Mr Muirhead was thus far correct in his little item of gossip which had so fluttered the tennis party at the Rectory. The new owners were brother and sister; they were wealthy, and their money was derived from " something in the City." And to this something Mr Cumberland attended with exemplary diligence. One of the attractions of Bourne Abbas, in his eyes, had been the fact that it was only five-and-twenty miles from town, so that when he resided there he could still be at his office by half-past ten without undue hurry or exertion.

For though Bourne Abbas remained to all outward appearance the same as it had been for centuries, the quiet river, a few miles further down, was churned by restless wheels and polluted by the mill refuse of an upstart commercial centre, started into life by the railway, and known as Bourne Magna. The village people were distantly, condescends mgly civil to the town, extending it a patronising finger occasionally when any scheme was started which gained their approval, while the town thought the village terribly slow, full of old-fashioned prejudice, and inclined to be stuck up. Looked at from the town point of view, it was an extraordinary thing that Mrs Whitgift, when she came to seek a house in the neighbourhood, should prefer .an old rambling cottage, with an untidy garden such as hers was, to a trim, detached villa on the outskirts of Bourne Magna.

But Mrs Whitgift soon convinced the local house agents that she was a person who knew what she wanted, and she settled with her only daughter in " Abbey Lodge," with its shrub-grown garden, which was only divided by a wall (with a gate in it) from the towing-path of the river, beyond which sloped up the Abbey lands with their tranquil meadows and far-stretching, green coverts. There was a private bridge across the water a little lower down, and a path leading over it made a direct communication between the Abbey and the church. There was one fact about the new owners of the Abbey which did not become public property at once, and this was that they possessed a nephew. Not that he was an insignificant possession by any means, being presumably heir to everything they had. His father had been what horticulturalists would have called a " sport " from the Cumberland stock, for business was utterly distasteful to him ; a desk and ledger were badges of a slavery from which his irregularity soon gained him emancipation, and the firm found it more advantageous to pay him an income, on condition that he left the earning of it in their hands.

He put the copingstone on his folly by marrying — out of admiration for her fair face and sweet voice — an unknown singer, and by dying within a few years, deeply in debt, leaving as a legacy to his brother and sister a dark-eyed baby son whose name was Austin. " The singingwoman," as the firm called her, married again shortly, and seemed glad to hand the child over unreservedly to his uncle and aunt, and they, though they grumbled at first, accepted the charge, and lavished on the lonely boy all the care that love and wealth combined could bestow. He went to a good public school, of course, and to the University, equally of course, and when he an nounced, after a very brief trial, that office work would kill him in a year, they despatched him to Dresden to study music, then to Paris, finally on a voyage round the world to enlarge his views and help him to decide on a career.

His decision took the form of remarkably comfortable rooms in town, and the purchase of some ponderous volumes on law, and at present, when he was eight-and-twenty, his calling had gone no farther. He was graciously pleased to admire the Abbey and to choose two rooms in it for his own habitation, also to interview and engage experienced keepers, who undertook to fill the woods with game so that it might be worth while " to bring a fellow or two down occasionally," as he expressed it. He had, however, no intention of deserting Piccadilly for the green pastures of the Abbey, until, one August afternoon, lounging at the library window which overlooked the wide stretch of gravel by the front door, he saw Mrs Whitgift and her daughter come to pay their first duty visit. He told himself afterwards that it was absurd for a man, to whom the fairest faces of London and other great cities were no strange sight, to be haunted by the brown eyes of a demure country child, who was badly dressed, and who actually seemed in awe of her mother.

That she was behind the times was undeniably proved by these first preliminary observations, but they did not drive away the lingering, persistent memory of her face, nor banish the desire to make those wonder ful eyes meet his less indifferently. The impression Lucy received of his appearance was not calculated to disturb her maiden medita tions. He was not tall — the hero of her dreams was above the ordinary stature of men ; he was dark and pale — her ideal was a son of the Vikings, golden-haired and blue-eyed ; he was soft of voice and quiet in manner — her heart was to be taken only by force, stormed by a paladin who did not know the meaning of defeat. Piqued by her indifference, which was too com plete to be the outcome of coquetry, stirred by her really unusual beauty, and half amused by her childish ignorance of the world, Cumberland made a point of frequenting all the little gatherings to which he was bidden after the first solemn inter change of visits with neighbours had been gone through.

The Rectory he found his happiest hunting ground, for the younger men there were in clined to look up to him as a being of wider experience than themselves, Evelyn's straightfor ward friendliness pleased him, and there, too, Lucy was occasionally to be found without her mother. This, however, did not always ensure him any monopoly of her society, for Tailleur haunted her steps, waited to hand her balls if he were not playing tennis with her, learned her taste in cakes and her preference in the choice of chairs, and secured the position of escort when they strolled, a light-hearted little company enough, along the river bank, while the shadows lay long and dark across the shining water. For some weeks, there fore, their intercourse was limited to the merest social civilities, and the long weeks of August passed and left Lucy's dark eyes as demure as ever.

The first Sunday in September was still and hot, and during the peaceful afternoon hours the young men at the Rectory " rested " in varied attitudes on the lawn, one swinging in a hammock under the beech, while another reclined in a long, low basket chair, and two more, with their hands clasped under their heads, were flat on their backs looking up into the wonderful golden-green of the sunlit beech leaves. About four o'clock, down the long path leading to the church meadows, came Evelyn Muir head deep in converse with Cumberland, whom she admitted to almost the same easy friendship as "the boys." As they strolled slowly along the shady walk, the idle figures on the lawn one by one assumed alert and wide-awake positions, but Evelyn took no heed of them, until near enough to say, in her quietest tone, — " How thoroughly you appreciate the day of rest, don't you ?

" " We work so hard all the week, Miss Muirhead," said a chorus of two or three voices at once. " Ah, yes," she replied, " one is so apt to forget that fact," and she quietly accepted the most com fortable of the garden chairs vacated in her honour, while Cumberland settled himself on the grass at her feet. " And what does Miss Whitgift do on Sunday ? " he asked softly, looking across the garden to where the meadow land joined the lawn. " Lucy ? oh, there is not much she can do ; sits with a good book in front of her and tries to imagine what she would do if she were left to herself," said Evelyn, audaciously. " It would be nothing except what was awfully proper, I'm sure," ventured one of " the boys." "Don't you think so? " asked Evelyn. "If it were me, I should be pining to try all the things I had never been allowed to do."

" Bat possibly she knows nothing of such for bidden delights," put in Cumberland, gently. " Does she though ? She knows that other girls enjoy themselves generally." " While she does not ? " It was Cumberland who spoke again. "No," said Evelyn, scornfully. "She mayn't dance for fear of harming her immortal soul, and she may hardly play tennis because the heat affects her mortal complexion, and theatres are snares, and novels are ditto, and — " "But you cannot mean," broke in Cumberland, " that she is denied all these forms of recreation ? " Evelyn nodded decisively. " All that and more besides," she answered. " Oh, I'd do something more desperate than walk with a crook in my neck, like a drooping sunflower, if I had been brought up as she has." "She is being starved," said Cumberland, im pressively.

" How do you mean ? " asked Tailleur, suddenly, giving vicious pulls at the grass as he spoke. " Surely hers is a soul that should be fed with all beauty and sweetness of every kind," said Cumberland. " Would flowers blossom without dew and sunshine ? And how can a woman's soul develop when it is offered for nourishment only the stones of a narrow, dogmatic theology ? " " Spoken like a book," said Evelyn, emphatically ; " but Lucy's soul has to get along somehow on tracts and Sunday-school prize stories." Cumberland sighed. " Poor child," he said ; " but your society must be very refreshing to her, Miss Muirhead." " She is not allowed to be too much refreshed," said Evelyn. " I am considered rather dangerous, and my conversation as not always sufficiently im proving." The boys glanced at each other and smiled, but Cumberland repeated dreamily, — "Que vous ai-je done fait, oh, mes jeunes minks ?

" and there was a short silence, broken by his rising to say good-bye. " Tea will be out in a minute, won't you stay ? " asked Evelyn, hospitably. He shook his head, smiling. " Not to-day, thanks," he answered, as if weightier matters than tea were on his mind ; and with a comprehensive nod to the boys he went, slowly disappearing down the church path. " He's awfully clever, isn't he ? " said one of the younger men, when he was gone. " I suppose he is," answered Evelyn, " only he has never done very much to prove it." " Well, there's no need for him to work, I suppose," said another. " No actual need, but I don't like idle men." " You think sooner or later someone is sure to find mischief for them to do ? " Evelyn smiled. " More than possible, I should say," she replied brightly, " and now I am going to fetch mamma."

" Can't we go ? " cried the boys. " No, thanks, she might not like you to find her with her book on the floor and probably her cap on one side," laughed the girl over her shoulder as she walked away. But five minutes later, when she reappeared with her mother, Mrs Muirhead showed no sign of having been discovered in such a de moralised condition ; her soft lace cap was decorously straight on her smooth grey hair, and her spectacles marked the place in the volume of sermons she carried. The boys were on their feet the instant she appeared, each one eager to have his seat accepted, or to contribute a cushion to her further comfort, and her gentle thanks, spoken with the graciousness that was peculiarly her own, made them all feel that they had done her some special service, and caused a little thrill of conscious virtue that made the party round Evelyn's tea-table a very peaceful one.

Then Mr Muirhead came out, fresh from the final perusal of his evening sermon, and the circle seemed complete, except that the girl's eyes wandered questioningly now and again in the direction of the church path, as if the lengthening shadows hid someone she hoped to see. And in a few minutes someone came — Frank Lester — walking with firm quick tread across the smooth turf, and pausing to look on the little assembly with one hand holding back a bough of the far-spreading tree. " I hardly deserve any tea," he said, in his clear, deep voice. " Am I not dreadfully late ? " " Oh, no," said Evelyn, carelessly, " we have left plenty for you," and she did not look up as she spoke. Lester quietly dispossessed the youth who occupied the chair nearest the tea-tray, and settled himself by Evelyn's side, watching her intently until, as if compelled by his gaze, she raised her eyes to his face.

A slight lifting of his eyebrows accompanied his low-spoken question, — " Was I late ? " She flushed hotly. "A little." " Forgive me," spoken lower still and unheard in the general hum of talk between the others. The girl's lips trembled momentarily, and her answering look spoke, unconsciously, more than pardon ; then she made some laughing comment on the subject engrossing her mother's attention, and a general desultory conversation filled the time until the bells began to chime for evening service, and the little party broke up. Meanwhile, Cumberland, musing on the subject of his talk in the Rectory garden, was wandering along the towing-path, until he reached the bend opposite the first sloping stretch of the Abbey woods. Here he sat for some while watching the stream and throwing into it any twigs and pebbles that lay within his reach.