Obedience : a tale

Front matter

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Chapter I

You must have knowledge of Fleddon in the sixties; for with that rich complacent decade of our English heritage this story has concern. The tale of Catherine and Frank, if it has purpose other than mere entertainment, is a tale as much of changing England as of a maiden’s constancy, is no more of a love story than a lament for one of many epochs dead.

Great days for Fleddon were those easy prosperous days, when old Sir Harry Ormond hunted his own hounds over his own and neighbouring lands; when at long last the railway came; when once a most exalted personage dwelt overnight at Fleddon Park, laying a foundation stone and giving an august blessing to the agricultural college that was to rise beyond the boundary of the little town.

Maybe, in the alleys below the cattle-market and along the riverside, poverty was sharp; maybe, election times saw less of rivalry than of kind condescension masking Ormond threats; certainly, farms scattered on the stony uplands that stretched northward from the town dreaded the landlord’s bailiff more than the hand of God, for Ormond interest grasped, and ever more closely gripped, while Providence struck hard enough, but rarely.

Such obscure miseries as these, however, troubled the solid townsfolk little, and were unknown within the walls of Fleddon Park. Sir Harry told his wife and daughters only things suited to their womanish intelligence, and to the number of such things belonged nor tenants’ grievances, nor necessary shifts in Tory politics, nor those regrettable but heaven-ordered inequalities that are inseparable from oligarchy. As for the citizens of Fleddon, with shops dependent on the Ormond bounty and charities that waited on Sir Harry’s lead, they lived their daily round and drank their evenings through in the warm bar of the Ormond Arms, and flocked to meets and walked the steep grass drives of the Park on Sundays or gossiped in the sunny market-place, and were content (or seemed to be content) with Fleddon and its comfortable calm, over which brooded the pale Gothic beauty of the Abbey church.

In days to come, when feudal glories had begun to fade, the Abbey church became an economic stay to Fleddon life as firm and as essential as had ever Ormond been; for tourists — Scottish and American — came every summer in their thousands to gape untutored wonder at the old glass in the tall soaring windows, to flute high-pitched conventional expertise over the woodwork of the chancel stalls, the crotchets of the font canopy and the unique flamboyant finials of the pews. These tourists would eat, and dabble for antiques; and every moment of their visit set money wandering up and down the little town, called into being sum- - mer industries, lined pockets and filled coal-cellars against the desolate winter, when were few visitors, but only bleak north winds, creeping discomfortably across the frozen fields and along the narrow valley of the Glaive, whisking about the Abbey buttresses, flecking the market-place with little eddying cones of dust.

But this was the Fleddon of a later epoch, the Fleddon of the flaccid cultivated eighteen-nineties and of the early years of a new and unenlightened century. The sixties set the Park above the Abbey, knowing that all of good in England flowed from God and Queen Victoria, judging that Deity and Queen alike had given dignity to Ormond, but that Her Majesty could claim no share, either in the beauties or in the virtue of the church. From the logic of such reasoning was no escape; God’s House must be content to follow Fleddon Park in dignity. Wherefore a local guidebook, published in eighteen-fifty-nine, gives pride of place to the well-timbered grounds and noble mansion of the House of Ormond, then only passing, after grandiloquent description of that mansion’s somewhat pallid splendours, to an enumeration of the town’s archeological monuments, even among which the

Abbey church is not the first, the Wishing Well and the few yards of dubious Roman paving having precedence.

Doubtless the compiler of the guidebook knew his business. He was a man of Fleddon, and had his dwelling there. His very hearthstone owed its warmth to Ormond bounty, and Sir Harry, though a genial man enough, suffered no slights on his importance or on the divine right of his local power. That he himself was jealous of the Abbey church would be a foolish formulation of a mere attitude of mind; nevertheless, there had been more than a hint of such jealousy among his ancestors, and children willy-nilly breathe up parental prejudice, though they remain unconscious all their lives of half the influence of early years.

Imagine, first, the Fleddon of Sir Harry’s time. The river Glaive, flowing from Cotswold uplands Severnwards, swept, then as now, in a wide bend round the high-wooded promontory of Fleddon Park. Between the hill’s foot and the river clustered, then as now, the town of Fleddon — its heart the market-place, the Abbey church its diadem. But whereas the Fleddon of to-day has spread beyond the river and in rising terraces up the more gradual slope to southward, in the sixties only scattered cottages were built thus separated from the town itself, and were regarded scornfully as an outlying suburb. Between the river, then, and the hillside that walled the valley on the north,

OBEDIENCE og the small grey town was huddled. Above it rose the grass and woodland of Sir Harry Ormond’s park, and near the top — just far enough below the crest to find some shelter from the wind — ranged the long flat facade of Sir Harry Ormond’s home.

Around the house were pleasure-gardens, so designed as to make full use of the natural terrace chosen as building-site. Apart, however, from this area of comparatively level ground, the park was steeply up and down, commanding lovely views over the town of Fleddon to the southward, as well as to the east and west, in both of which directions the land fell rapidly towards the curving river.

What bearing, you will ask, has this on rivalry between the Abbey and the Park? Consider, please, their relative geographies. From the low level of the market-place the church tower rose one hundred and thirty feet into the air, dominating _ the old town, the marshes and the little hills beyond the river; but only the highest pinnacles of that most lovely tower were visible from the lawn of Fleddon Park, while a man standing at an upper window of the house itself could look down upon the tower-leads or, if his gaze were straight, look over them entirely.

That this was so bore witness to triumphant Ormond policy. The eighteenth century had faith in gesture, and the builder of the Fleddon mansionhouse went to his grave in seventeen-forty-five, ~ complacent in that he had, by choosing this new and lofty station for the House of Ormond, at least physically overtopped his rival. The family’s then existing home was sound and beautiful, but had in Ormond eyes this fatal fault — that it lay nearly at river-level and as though round the corner from the church enthroned. Wherefore its jealous owner tore it down, and had no other impulse in squandering his wealth on painful demolition of an old wellbuilt house and in the costly erection of a new, pretentious one, save the (to us childish) impulse to outdo the House of God.

He had his triumph, and, as remarked, fell happily to sleep in the dramatic year of forty-five. For near three quarters of a century the Abbey’s champions bided their time. Four Ormonds and full half-a-dozen clerics came and went. Then, in the troublous days that followed Waterloo, hazard gave to the church sensational revenge. The reigning Ormond, badly hit at Quatre Bras, died in the autumn of Napoleon’s defeat. His widow, with her little boy, lingered in London. Fleddon Park was shut and empty. The cruel winter dragged its length; gave place to the starved spring and summer of sixteen. From one end of England to the other was distress and murmuring. In Fleddon and its neighbourhood the winter of that cruel year found suffering labourers, farmers in bankruptcy, and silence in the stark box-like mills that squatted grimly on the river-banks. The slums grew restless; the local agitators sent an angry whisper round the miserable hovels of the poor. But discontent, that might have ended in Fleddon — as in so many other places — with the sacking of a few shops, found an unexpected outlet.

There came to Fleddon a wandering visionary, half-agitator and half-priest. The Reverend John Carver (such the name he used) would in himself provide a novel’s theme. He had the fanatic’s true blend of sympathy and bitterness. Well read in history, he had stored his mind with all the cruelties of feudalism, choosing to forget its fineness and nobility. He affected, in his ardour for divine authority, to resent the political impotence of God in matters secular. He did not claim that power should lie with the Church of England or with the Papacy or with the Wesleyans — only with God. The age-long struggle between lords temporal and spiritual was to his passionate mind a living issue, which, when he learnt of quarrels in the past between the Ormonds and the church, acquired at once a local application. Full of an angry pity for the misery around him and fiercely conscious of his mission as God’s sword-bearer, he saw a golden opportunity. The popular Sir Marcus Ormond was dead and his heir a little child whom no one knew; the poor of Fleddon were inflamed and suffering. One Sunday from the market-cross he preached a daring sermon (the doctrines became so inflammatory that their expounder was removed by force i OBEDIENCE before his peroration was complete), and, two nights later, the stables and the whole range of granaries and farm-buildings that straggled up the last slope of the hill behind the Ormond mansion were blazing furiously. ‘This night,’ wrote the Reverend John Carver in his journal —a document discovered long after he was dead and in part made public — ‘the great ones of the earth had opportunity to take heed of the Almighty militant.’

In time the little Felix Ormond grew to manhood, was told the story of his burning granaries and, most unjustly, taught to blame the Anglican establishment for a fanaticism that was none of theirs. He pondered his revenge and took it.

The Rector of Fleddon (now identified, for all his predecessor’s innocence and his own greater guiltlessness, with the disastrous John Carver) was a man of strong character and pronounced opinions, with whom Sir Felix Ormond had no difficulty in coming to a disagreement. A plan occurred to the Baronet by which he might at once inconvenience his personal opponent and vindicate the supremacy of his family over the church. He convinced himself that the architectural beauty of the Abbey outdid unsuitably in material emphasis the signs of Ormond dignity visible in the market-square. To redress the balance in favour of the Park, he determined to set the seal of Ormond on the very centre of the town. Between his drive-

OBEDIENCE II gates and the square were various tenements and the fine house in which the Rector’s sister lived. All was Ormond property. The leases most conveniently lapsed; at six months’ notice the unfortunate spinster was bidden to find another home — a process which the Ormond agent made no easier than was necessary — and in due course the various buildings were ruthlessly demolished. Sir Felix then prolonged his carriage-drive and built a vast baronial gate-house that dominated the north side of the market-place. That done, he was content. Had he not proved that house of man could bulk as largely in the heart of Fleddon as did House of God?

Unluckily for posterity, baronial building in the forties tended to obesity, to too emphatic buttresses and to rounded towers. The gate-house was a horror; nor could the Boar of Ormond, set in high relief above the archway of the carriage-gate, give dignity to what was only bombast. For full sixty years the Fleddon market-place suffered this violation of its loveliness. The mind of man is in few things more crass and obstinate than in acceptance of what is, than in resentment of what need not be; wherefore the ugliness of Ormond Gate found many to defend it and to shake heads over the impatience (if nothing worse) of young Sir John, who in the twentieth century succeeded unexpectedly to title and estates, and in the course of an orgy of iconoclasm swept the thing away. |

‘They do say, sir, that when the former Sir Felix built it, he took pride in laying his finger on the town that was his own.’

Jack Ormond shrugged.

“The old boy should have left a nicer fingermark,’ he said.

Thus Fleddon’s owner in the nineteen-hundreds. The sixties, on the other hand, were either more dutiful or less self-conscious. Sir Harry saw no fault in Ormond Gate. It gave access to his home, and that was reason for its being there. He was as unconcerned to remedy the landscape as to renew his father’s challenge to the church. Indeed, although he used it many times a week, he could not have described his gate-house to a stranger. It would have shocked him, rather, to be asked to do so.

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Chapter II I

On a late summer afternoon in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-eight three ladies sat beneath the cedars on the lawn at Fleddon Park. The sun was dipping in the west and lit the uneven grey of the long house-front to a warm drab. The air was very soft and still.

“You may say what you like, mamma; I hate him!’

Lady Ormond rustled still more deeply into her wide chair.

‘Surely “hate” is a little strong, my dear?’ she said mildly. ‘Young ladies should choose their words. Besides, what has he done that you dislike him so?’

Catherine tossed her head and pouted with the unreason of twenty-three.

“His shoulders are crooked.’

“Are they?’ replied the mother indifferently. ‘I never noticed them to be so.’

“— And he’s mean and ugly and — and generally horrid... .’

The vehemence of prejudice swept Catherine Ormond beyond the narrow limits of her vocabulary. She was conscious of having spoken foolishly, of looking still more foolish; she knew that Charlotte was watching; she feared that behind the anxiety of sisterly regret gleamed in those sombre eyes a light almost of malice. Had Charlotte seen? How much did Charlotte know? Behind the soft curve of her lips Catherine set her small white teeth. Youth and youth’s pride in secret liberty flamed suddenly within her. Charlotte might hint and probe and preach, but never a word’s admission should she get.

Lady Ormond spoke again:

‘You are too violent, child. I think you will agree that you hardly know Mr. Crossley well enough to judge so sweepingly. Your father likes him, and after all, he is more experienced than you.’

Simultaneously with defiance toward her sister came to Catherine a softening and a pity toward her mother. She felt suddenly guilty before the voluminous patience of her mother’s attitude. Leaning forward she patted the plump arm that hung loose beside the lady’s chair.

‘I am sorry, mamma,’ she murmured. ‘I spoke hastily.’

Lady Ormond, in restored serenity, smiled at her younger daughter. She was glad to leave a subject that had been raised only from motives of duty and in obedience to Sir Harry’s order. Vaguely she had wondered why her little Catherine need thus rapidly be married off. When her husband commanded that the topic be re-opened, with all maternal tact and firmness the good lady had made tentative objection. The girl was very young. How much more comfortable to let things go on as they were and had been; to keep the child at home and still enjoy her quiet help and easy cheerfulness. The house was not so gay that it could lose its brightest inmate without suffering for the loss. But Sir Harry had been obdurate. ‘The girl has had ample time to learn self-control,’ he had declared. ‘Crossley may come any day. She must realise her responsibility in the matter.’ So Lady Ormond had yielded, as she had always yielded — but her mind was unquiet and her conscience not at rest.

Now if Charlotte were in question — Charlotte who was already twenty-eight... Her suitors had come, gestured feebly and retired. Lady Ormond, in the gentle depths of her heart, could understand and forgive their fickleness; she pitied Charlotte, but knew her for her own worst enemy. The note of ambition was a little audible; a man wishes his wife to further 47s schemes and not her own. With a little start the mother roused herself. Charlotte was speaking.

“You will spoil your work, Catherine, if you gaze about you all the time. Embroidery needs care, you know.’

Catherine coloured slightly and her head drooped over her task.

“What is it you are making, darling?’

Caressingly sweet the voice, that of a fourth lady who had now come silently to join the group beneath the Fleddon cedars. This was Aunt Letty. ‘Aunt Letty is so kind,’ Catherine had been taught to say. ‘Kind Aunt Letitia’ was an Ormond c/iché. ‘I am sure,’ Charlotte would say in her reproving mood, ‘I am sure, Catherine, that no girls ever had a kinder aunt than our dear Aunt Letty; we should try to give her pleasure, even though by so doing we go against our own inclinations.’

And to kind Aunt Letty Catherine made reply: ‘I am working a smoking-cap, Auntie, for my Uncle James.’

The newcomer settled in a wicker chair and spread her sewing on her knees.

‘A fortunate uncle, indeed! I had thought the pretty trifle meant for Felix. Dear Felix! How handsome he is! I declare, Mary, that when he called on us in London a few months ago I said to Frederick — after the boy had gone — that I never met a handsomer young man, although I go about. a great deal. When do you expect him home?’

Lady Ormond sat motionless and her small rounded hands neither twitched nor stirred. Yet was she thinking rapidly, asking herself (somewhat as Catherine had done a moment earlier) how much of dear Letitia’s pleasant speech were kindliness and how much probing. What did Letitia know? But of thought or urgency she made no sign, answering in level tones her sister-in-law’s inquiry.

“We hope to-morrow. But Felix has many friends and cannot always adjust his plans as he would like.’

‘How much you will like that, girls, will you not?’ cried Aunt Letitia. ‘A brother is such a help and protection to his sisters. I expect he will take you to garden-parties and drive you out and give you all manner of pleasure!’

“Perhaps he will take us to Lord Lypiatt’s. Would you like that, Catherine?’

At her sister’s words Catherine flushed painfully and bit her lip. Then with an effort, answered quietly:

_ “Very much. I hear it is an interesting house. But Mr. Crossley would probably not invite us.’

‘Did you say “Crossley,” darling?’ asked her aunt. (It was one of Aunt Letitia’s trials to be slightly deaf. In consequence, she would sometimes cause unwelcome revival of a theme successfully disposed of, or, as in this case, bring conversation back to a point whence others present had with deliberate care escaped) — ‘because, if so, I recollect meeting a Mr. Crossley at the Duchess’s —not your Duchess, of course, Mary; the Duchess of Wendover; the Duke was Minister for a short time, you know, and Frederick had naturally a deal to do with him — Mr. PAilip Crossley I think he was. He seemed a delightful young man and is, I was told, heir to a fine property. Of course —’

‘Philip Crossley is Lord Lypiatt’s eldest son,

Letitia,’ said Lady Ormond calmly. ‘They live about ten miles from here.’ She rose slowly from her chair.

‘I am going in. I have letters to write. Do not sit out too long, girls; the evenings get rather chilly. Letitia, if you would be good enough to spare the time, I should like to go through a pattern-book from Marshalls’. You are so clever at choosing.’

“Dear Mary! Of course! I live to help others. I am sure, as Frederick says —’

But Lady Ormond was already on the terrace, her broad, indifferent back swaying steadily for desk and pattern-book.

For a few moments after their elders’ disappearance, the two girls sewed industriously. Then Charlotte crossed the lawn to the chair lately occupied by Lady Ormond.

‘Cathy, dear,’ she said gently. ‘You wil] be careful, won’t you?’

Catherine did not turn her head. Her needle stabbed.

‘Oh!’ she cried, and carried the blood spot to her lips. Then, over the barrier of white hand and sucking steadily, she looked her sister in the face: “What do you mean?’

The words were indistinct, their passage hindered by the wounded finger. Maybe to that obstruction was due the abruptness of the tone. A shadow flitted over Charlotte’s grave brown eyes.

“Don’t keep me at arm’s length, Cathy,’ she pleaded. “We have lately been such friends. And I only want to help. Suppose it had been papa or Felix or even Mr. Chater — that had —’

The younger sister drooped long eyelashes; over the creamy brown of her skin crept another of those telltale blushes. So Charlotte 4ad seen! But how much? And what would happen? What could be stopped happening? Outwardly calm, though her heart beat fast, she played pathetically for time.

“You are so mysterious, Lottie! Suppose what had been papa or Felix or even Mr. Chater?’

‘Oh, Cathy, Cathy. Must you pretend with me?’

Must she pretend? That was indeed the question. A longing to tell all to Charlotte seized and shook her. Once before she had nearly told her mother; but the chance had passed. Now was another golden opportunity. ‘Tell her!’ cried conscience. “Tell her now!’

But it would seem that hazard of circumstance and human fads are ever ranged against one’s wiser impulses. Catherine had all but opened her lips to share her secret with her sister, when she observed that from the bead chain, hung about Charlotte’s neck, dangled a small gold cross. This cross had been a gift from an early and a favoured suitor, who had been curate to the Reverend Theodore Chater, then as now rector of Fleddon. Catherine, at that time a hoyden of seventeen, had hated her sister’s clerical admirer, conscious rather of his fat face and unconvinced pomposity than of the excellence of his family connections. She remembered the giving of the cross and its display by the delighted Charlotte in the joint bedroom where the girls then slept. Later — and this she remembered still more vividly — the creature had left Fleddon and his lady-love, and was not seen or heard of more. She had cried out against him for an unmanly wretch, but had been chid by Charlotte, sadly patient. ‘We can never judge another’s motives, darling,’ Charlotte had said. ‘But he had asked you, Lottie, had he not?’ To which insistent questioning Charlotte had never made response, while the younger girl had grieved for many days that she was thus excluded from a sister’s confidence.

Now, in the unlucky moment of Catherine’s own imminent confession, the light glinting from poor Charlotte’s ‘cross of memory’ (she wore it once a year, more proud to be unmaidenly than he had been ashamed of his unmanliness) flickered across her eyes and roused the past from sleep. ‘She would not tell me once...’

.Crisply she answered: ‘“Pretend?” Indeed, Lottie, I am no actress! I haven’t the least idea what you are hinting at.’

The bright love faded from the other’s eyes; her face set into the hard lines that came more easily now than a few years ago.

OBEDIENCE a1

“Very well, dear,’ she said, rising. ‘It must be as you please. But some day you will be sorry you did not trust me. I am going in now. There are notices to be revised for the concert at the Institute.’

She gathered her work from the garden-table and walked quickly to the house.

Pity poor Charlotte!

If

What, then, had Charlotte seen? How much indeed did Charlotte know?

In all the agony of doubt (and the more agonised for knowing she had wronged her sister and herself) Catherine Ormond sat and stared across the trim lawn to where tall clustered roses flanked the grassy path to the old sundial. At least, if she had told the truth, she would have known the truth! But now she knew not whether Charlotte only guessed or whether she had certain proof. Of what? There was only one incident she could have witnessed. Or was there? Might she not, unperceived, have seen that moment of delight — or that — or that? Or was it only Charlotte that had seen? Were others talking — talking of Aer, Catherine Ormond, as they talked of Winnie Dysart at the Ball and Cross? She shuddered. It was horrible!

But the next instant hope overcame foreboding. She was absurd and panic-foolish. No one but

Charlotte knew anything; and Charlotte only the trifling sight that she had seen, only that fleeting touch of hands...

And forthwith hope in turn gave place to sweeter memory. Catherine, against the dim curtain of the gathering dusk, saw for the fiftieth time the scenes of wonder that composed her secret drama.

She saw the gloom of the steep gravel drive that swept down from Fleddon Park to Ormond Gate. Tall hedges of box and yew closed in this sombre road, and from behind the hedges rose beech-trees, waving naked arms in the sullen tumult of a windy March. Grey clouds raced overhead, skimming the tortured trees. The deep trench of the drive between its dark steep hedges was like a long cold box, with tilted muddy floor and close-clipped walls and a grey, shifting, angry lid.

She saw herself, muffled in cloak and shawl, come hurrying down this cheerless way. Beside her leapt her little spaniel Rex, joyous and golden brown for all the wildness of the weather. They reached the last turn of the drive, beyond which the tunnelled gateway gave final access to the town. Clattering hoofs, a thunderous echo from the vaulted arch, the heavy screech of wheels on muddy gravel —and with a crack of whip her brother Felix swung round the curve, driving tandem in his smart high dog-cart.

She crouched against the hedge, her hands raised _ to her throat to stay the cry that struggled there.

Her little dog, a moment earlier in happy frolic some few yards before his mistress’s eyes, was down among the~plunging hoofs. He rolled and scrambled desperately. Poor Catherine moved to pluck him from the scrimmage, when Felix shouted, reined his horses to their haunches and brought the whole equipage to panting halt.

The bundle of brown hair seemed to lie motionless. But slowly, painfully, it raised its head and began dragging horribly toward the hedge.

“His legs are broken!’ wailed the distracted girl. “Oh, Felix, you have killed my Rex!’

She bent to the poor tortured dog, and her tears rained upon his patient agony.

Her brother, on his high box-seat, looked guilty and absurd. The horses shifted recklessly. He dared not loose the reins nor try to clamber down to Catherine’s help.

‘I’m devilish sorry, Kate,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t leave these brutes. I’ll drive them on to the stables and come back. Keep the little fellow there till I send Potter down to you.’

But she made no sign of hearing what he said, only bent closer over Rex and wept more bitterly.

Hardly had Felix set his dog-cart again in motion, when she was conscious of a figure at her side.

“May I see the little dog, Miss Ormond? I ama veterinary surgeon, and may be able to relieve him.’

She looked up, and blue eyes met hers, eyes that were strong and masculine, but soft with pity for her mangled pet.

‘Oh, if you can!’ she cried. “Is he dying? Save him for me!’

The young man did not answer, but stooped at once to where Rex lay, half in his mistress’s arms, half on the muddy ground. Seeing a stranger, he erowled feebly and made as if to snap.

“He does not like any one to touch him but me,’ she said with.a pathetic little smile. ‘Be careful. He may bite you.’

‘No, he will not do that; will you, old man? There — let me see; now this way a little — that’s better’

Was there a magic in the long, deft fingers that so gently felt the mangled limbs? No sooner had this stranger touched the dog than the poor beast — a moment earlier snarling with pain and fear — lay quiet and silent. The young doctor never raised his eyes from the examination. Catherine, marvelling the more each second at his power over her little friend, glanced curiously at his face and figure. He was tall and muscular; crouched easily beside her on the drive; and, as she watched the lean, grave face, with its firm chin and thin determined mouth, she told herself that he was more than handsome, for he was kind as well, and strong.

“The back legs are crushed,’ he said suddenly. “But not, I hope, broken. If you would allow me

— my surgery is close by — ?’

Catherine felt a fierce confidence in this young stranger that drove every other consideration from her head.