Romance and Jane Weston

Front matter

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JANE WESTON By RICHARD PRYCE

Chapter I I

IT was the persistent visits of one man (other things, of course, contributing) that sent her thoughts as persistently flying to the recollection of another, and of something which she would have said she had not only put out of her mind long ago, but forgotten. Actually, of course, she had done neither. She was Miss Weston. He was the Rector of the parish. The other man’s name she did not even know — wherein was the rub; the insuperable obstacle; the first and the final reason for everything: for the breaking-off of what could not be said even to have begun, of what, if it had begun, ought not to have had so much as the beginning of a beginning. She would not think of it, would not, and, the Rector gone, his imminent proposal once more parried, thought of nothing else.

She did not dislike Mr. Morgan. Indeed, she rather liked him. She had enjoyed his visits till, exactly two years after the death of his wife, his visits began to take a new air and to show a definite purpose. Even then, when, that is, she became aware of their purpose — as how could she not? — she was not altogether ill-pleased. It was always agreeable to your vanity to be wanted. But did she ' want anyone, and, if so, was Mr. Morgan exactly what she could conceive herself to want? .

Did she want anyone?

Through the brown study into which she fell after Mr. Morgan’s departure, she watched Ellen clear away the tea-things. A neat little thing, Ellen, a Shropshire girl, with demure eyes and many more strings to her bow than the two that coquettishly fastened her apron. Miss Weston’s tolerant smile was often turned upon Ellen’s confidences. Ellen, handing a dish, perhaps, or shaking a duster out of a window, would convey that another adventure had happened to her (where you would have thought that there was so little chance of adventure!), and Miss Weston’s amused ‘‘ Well, Ellen?’’ would release the story.

‘“The cheek of the young man, ’m—someone I’d never seen before. Looking over his shoulder, too, when I turned my head.”’

‘Just so, Ellen. Very impertinent as you say. But why did you turn your head?”’

‘Well, ’m, I had to see if he was looking. Because of what he’d said as he passed — which I hadn’t answered.”

‘And what had he said?”’

‘‘Some nonsense or other. I’m sure I took no notice. If I could tell him whether the gorse was still in blossom in these parts I think it was. As if he couldn’t see for himself!”

‘Ah, a botanist.”

‘“‘T don’t know about that, ’m. More like a clurk, ’m, I thought, though he hadn’t a bicycle.”’

_ A bicycle was what generally brought a genteeler stranger to that out-of-the-way part of the world. You were a native or you came on wheels. Natives, you knew. Strangers had to arrive. But Ellen would have had adventures on a desert island.

Yes, other things certainly contributed — notably Ellen and the case of Ellen: the implications of that something which Ellen had so conspicuously and which she, her mistress, equally conspicuously had not, and yet for one brief moment had certainly seemed to have. Perhaps had? Was there not, after all, Mr. Morgan? Perhaps had? For how, like the Miss Lots with never a man in the neighbourhood — but, to be sure, Mr. Morgan! — could she possibly know? That, in itself, if she had not already been thinking, would have supplied matter for thought. Mr. Morgan, then, - against a perpetual background of Ellen. Adventures all the time, for Ellen (who, like Mary the immortal Housemaid of a song which in its day had reached even that back-of-God-speed) was in truth a ‘magnet for the men’; and always, behind these, at least three solid and serious aspirants whom, it was to be feared, she played one against another at the pleasure of a veering will. For Ellen, like Mary, all the men, men, men; for her, Ellen’s mistress, just Mr. Morgan and the memory of what ought to have been forgotten.

After Ellen had gone, Miss Weston continued to think. Just Mr. Morgan! Had any other woman in the world so restricted a choice? — so restricted an acquaintance? There were no country houses of any consideration in the immediate district, practically no neighbours.

Plas Llwyn, the one big place of that part of the country, was ten miles away. It belonged to Lord Barmouth, who had other places and came down only for shooting parties in the autumn. Lady Barmouth had called, it was true, and Miss Weston, hiring a conveyance, had returned the visit for her mother. There the matter ended. There were farmers; a solicitor or two; the doctor and his family; a few nondescripts in the village. No, no neighbours to speak of. And it was only lately, in the light of Mr. Morgan’s patent intentions, that she had become conscious of how unusual her circumstances must be. That, to be sure, had not always been so. Before her mother inherited the cottage and started the illness which, beginning soon afterwards, was to last for the better part of ten years, her circumstances had been no more unusual than those of anyone else. With her mother she had travelled a little and lived — always somehow in apartments or ‘furnished houses’ — at such places as Bath, or Leamington, or Cheltenham, where marriageable men do not notably abound, but where Jane — Miss Weston — had had, it is to be supposed, as good chances of attracting what men there were as other presentable but portionless girls. But she had not attracted them, or, if she had attracted one or two who had not been abashed by the amused tolerance with which, quite unconsciously it is possible, she regarded what was then looked upon as the dominant sex, they had not attracted her. ‘Too jolly independent’ may be said to have summed up the general male criticism of Bath, Leamington, and Cheltenham upon a rather self-contained, wholly humorous, quite good-looking young woman. Then, isolated, her one adventure.

It had happened at Brighton, where she and her mother were staying in Regency Square. It had happened, as such things do happen, on the Pier. That in itself had had its part in the decision which she had so suddenly come to and which, at the bottom of her heart, she believed, with a sort of retrospective conviction, unshakable, dismiss the thought of it as she © would, to have affected — potentially anyway — the whole course of her life. The inherited prejudices of generations had leapt to the surface and impelled her, forced her, to precipitate action. Someone you met on the Pier; someone who picked you up, or, worse, whom you picked up (on the Pier!); someone who without introduction scraped acquaintance with you — the idea was unthinkable! ‘Pick up’! ‘Scrape’! The very sound of the words! They were, however, the words you used, the words you had to use, in such a connection. She was Miss Weston, not a shop-girl, or a Pier-girl, or even an Ellen. (Luckier shopgirls? luckier seaside girls, uncompromisingly as you condemned them? — luckier Ellen? whom somehow you did not condemn at all, but frankly envied.) She was Miss Weston, however, with generations of circumspect self-respecting Westons behind her. No other course had been open to her. Yet there had been the other course if she had really been strong enough — though strength of a very real kind had been required for the sudden course she had taken! There had been another course, and, if she had taken that, she knew, knew in her slim but well-covered bones, that she would not now have been Miss Weston with just a reluctant memory and a Hobson’s choice of Mr. Morgan or no one at all! Strange how minutely she remembered him —not Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan, substantial as he was, was shadowy compared with the unknown man, the stranger like Ellen’s ‘clurk,’ whom she had seen once in her life, and by her own action was never to see again. Twelve years and, deny as she might, she remembered. For once she would let herself remember. He was dark, and she had thought that she liked fair men. He was not tall, and she had thought men ought to be tall. He was thickset, and the man of her dreams — she had had her dreams as a girl, like every other — was slender. She could see him now as he sat in the sun, the breeze flapping his newspaper when he turned it. She could see the strong hands that held it, brown against the white of the paper, less brown, almost white, indeed, against the brown of his suit. She did not know which pleased her more, the brownness of them or the whiteness of them, but what pleased her most was their look of firmness and strength. She looked away from them abruptly, conscious of their dangerous attraction for her — the hands of a stranger — and, in connection with them, of a painful and wholly unexpected clutch at her heart. What had come to her?

She returned to her book. This was Thomas Hardy’s ‘‘Two on a Tower,’ which she was reading then for the first time, and in which, up to the moment when, glancing up from it, she had become aware of him, she had been absorbed. Even now, twelve years later, she could recapture something of the glow with which, during her stay in Brighton, she had read this particular book for the first time. Later readings, in the light of maturer judgment, may have modified her younger enthusiasm for it, but she would never forget the excitement with which, at her first introduction to it, she had lost herself (and somehow also found herself) in the story of the ill-fated loves of Lady Constantine and the young astronomer under the frightening mystery of the everlasting stars. What she associated with such coupled names as ‘‘Abelard’”’ and ‘““Héloise,”’ ‘‘Paolo”’ and ‘‘ Francesca,’’ ‘‘ Paul’”’ and ‘‘Virginia,’’ bits of “Manon Lescaut,” and, even, though altogether different, of ‘‘Madame Bovary’’ (much later, when she considered herself of an age at which she might read what she chose!) set the same sort of chord vibrating in her. Perhaps an excitement already generated in her by the book played a part in her betrayal... .

He, meanwhile, was as yet quite unconscious of her. With her eyes on her book, she knew this, to a curious mixture of relief and regret. He looked up from his reading from time to time as people passed, and followed them sometimes with amused or interested eyes. She could see without looking. She herself never tired of watching the Brighton crowd — heterogeneous but always with one dominant factor, and, if she had known it, watched its movements with much the same amused and interested detachment. Was quite a like crowd to be seen anywhere else west of Suez? . . . such an opulence of bosom in its women, of diamond-ringed fingers in its men? Such dark-headed, almond-eyed Lalla Rookhishness in its children, such a flashing generally of eyes — and noses?

She read for some minutes, but without assimilating what she read. She could not bring her mind to bear upon the printed words. She had read the same paragraph three times. What ailed her? Never before had she been so acutely conscious of anyone as she was now of this stranger. She knew, without looking, when he moved. He put down his paper presently and produced a book. She looked up at last from her own and glanced, not at him, but at the people near him, expecting she knew not what — some sign of quickened pulses in them also? She might have thought that a magnetism which affected her so strongly —a pull as of the moon on the tide — must, in one way or another, have affected all who came within the radius of its operation. No one else seemed affected by it at all. The two girls who sat in: the chairs nearest to his — giggling girls, quite harmless probably, but not above exchanging provocative glances with the passers-by of the opposite sex — were plainly unaware of any disturbing forces soever. An elderly woman on his other side knitted placidly. She, it was clear, as impervious as they to a battery of the activeness of which she herself was aware in every fibre of her being. Others also, near by, manifestly as completely unaffected. For her then only? For her. That made what she was experiencing the more significant. It made what she was experiencing really significant. If for her only: an attunement .. . ?

But he was unconscious of her.

The flaw in that argument.

She was minded to get up and walk away — not because he was unconscious of her, but because her thoughts, the trend of her thoughts, everything to do with what was passing, vol-

AND JANE WESTON I!

untarily or involuntarily, through her mind, was ridiculous and quite unlike her. But she did not get up and walk away. It was someone else who now did this — the occupant of the chair on her right, who recognised and joined a friend in the perambulating throng. The chair remained vacant for some moments. Then, because it chanced to be rather better placed with regard to the sun than the one in which he had been sitting, and wholly, as she knew, unbecause of her (he, while she trembled, was still as ever entirely unaware of her), the unknown disturber of her serenity moved across to it and established himself beside her. She, while he settled himself in it, returned under throbbing eyelids to her book — returned to it with a desperate concentration and a frenzied, inward, voiceless prayer that her blood might not betray her. It did not. She felt it ebb from her lowered face. She had not made a fool of herself, and was not to do so. She was safe — saved? — outwardly cool and collected if, within, there were still active fires. ' She knew the exact moment at which he on his part first became conscious of her. His consciousness of her came to him through her feet, as hers in a way had connected itself with his hands. She had what her mother — as proud of them as, quite frankly, she was herself — always called the ‘Weston foot.’ ‘ Your father had the most beautiful foot I’ve ever seen in a man.’ She, like Cinderella of the immortal glass slipper, had easily the prettiest feet of any company in which she might chance to find herself, and was accustomed, without ever displaying them unduly, or even duly, to seeing them admired. A vainer woman would have made play with them. She never did this, taking them (with possibly, however, a subtler | vanity) for granted. But she saw to it religiously that they should be always perfectly shod. |

He had seen her feet. From that moment she knew that he was conscious of her. .

Twelve years ago, and she remembered. It was as if the twelve years slipped from her as she remembered. She had been happy enough in those years, yet, as she thought of them, it seemed to her that she had slept through them. Slept through them and was waking? Only now was waking?

II

Not many women so solitary. But her solitariness had come to her so naturally that in a way she had scarcely noticed it. The actual cause was, of course, her mother’s long illness — one of those obscure gentle ailments which, in the case of patients of another class, or even of patients of her own class, fill, not uncheerfully, half the beds in Homes for the Incurable, wherever such institutions exist. It began gently the year after Jane’s adventure and the unexpected move to Aberllwyn, ran its gentle, uneventful course for nine years and five months, and ended as gently as it had begun. In all this time Jane — Miss Weston, for there was no one but her mother to call her Jane — hardly ever went away. Bonds, it will be seen; but never were bonds lighter or less irksome. They were not irksome at all. If it took two lives to live one, Jane did not know it — or knew it but at rare intervals, and then only in relation to the forbidden dream of the might-have-been. She loved her bonds.

No, the years, if they had left her so oddly stranded, had not been unhappy. They had not been empty. They had been pleasant, easy, sheltered years, not even gravely shadowed by the acknowledged menace which hung over them. Some day her mother would die. But so would she, so would everyone. Meanwhile there was nothing to be done, no operation to be faced and submitted to — nothing worse, in fact, than a protracted invalidism which was unlikely to prove distressing, but from which recovery was very improbable. If her mother could bear her sentence cheerfully, she could. The changes that had come in the course of the years had come so gradually as to be almost imperceptible. The wheeled chair, the sofa; not till the last few months the bed continuously. A cheerful garden, a cheerful drawing-room, a cheerful bedroom. Mrs. Weston had not only been uncomplaining, but, with her books and her needlework, her spirits unflagging, actively, if also passively, quite contented. Impossible to trae the years as © other than happy.

The house from the first had been an unending source of delight to both of them. In it Mrs. Weston’s cousin, its former owner, an old Anglo-Indian tired of the East, had lived the life more or less of a recluse. He had bought it on his retirement, and expended upon it the care and the affection which others might have lavished upon a wife or a child. He had happened upon it by chance, fallen in love with it at first sight, entered into negotiations with the proprietors next day, and, within a month, completed its purchase. Its very position, at the back, as it has been said, of Godspeed, which incidentally had caused it to lie empty for long enough to bring it within the scope of his modest purse, was an attraction in his eyes. It became the joy and the hobby of his declining years.

Jane Weston would never forget her own and her mother’s first sight of it. Their delight had been but the echo of his. He had seen it empty; they had seen it filled with the harvest of his years of discriminating, loving search. Everything was ‘right.’ The furniture, the china, the pictures preserved, and completed, rather than made, the essential atmosphere of the mellow, low-ceilinged rooms.

But, before the house itself, the excitement of the journey of discovery; and, before that, from the day of the arrival of the letter which had apprised Mrs. Weston of her unsuspected good fortune, weeks of excitement. Mother and daughter had set out from London, whither the proving of the will and the business, generally, connected with solicitors’ offices and Somerset House, had taken them. Even the visits to Somerset House had been an excitement. For once, nothing depressing in a gloomy business. Her mother had _ hardly known, or considered that she had hardly known, her benevolent relation. Jane had not known him at all. Their hearts had warmed to him, but the personal note which invests such visits with melancholy was necessarily absent. It was inevitable that pleasurable emotions should predominate.

Paddington, then, on a bright morning of early summer saw the two set forth. The journey was sheer pleasure. Maidenhead, with its glimpse of the shining river; Oxford, with its spires; Leamington, where they bought Banbury cakes; Warwick; Birmingham, with its smoky red-brick and uncompromising commercial activities; the fascinating darkened waste of the Black Country, slag, furnaces smouldering or active, with here and there a chimney crowned with flames; Wolverhampton, long, rather cheerless platforms; then the gradual lifting of the smoke as Staffordshire gave place to Shropshire . . . these, roughly, the salient impressions of a run that was familiar to them both as far as Shrewsbury. Thenceforth all was new to them. Neither of them had ever been in Wales. They looked out of the windows like children, and, like children, or sight-seers in Switzerland, say — negotiating, eager-eyed, the passes of the Saint Gothard or the Simplon — crossed the compartment from side to side to miss nothing that might be seen. No mountains yet, but an increasing hilliness. A steadily increasing hilliness. Presently, on their right as they journeyed, a higher hill, twin-peaked. A mountain? They would call it a mountain — the first. (The Breidden, when they came to know names — Welshpool’s own mountain by right of view.) A few minutes later Welshpool. They were in Wales.

The glimpse of Powis Castle which they caught augmented their sense of pleasure.

Romance met them here with outstretched hands. Momentarily they were plunged back into days before trains, before coaches. Forden presently; Montgomery; Newtown. It was there the train began toclimb. Also they had left the towns behind them.

A five-mile drive in an open wagonnette took them from the station to their new home. Their excitement, which had been growing, reached an ecstatic point at the bend of the road which brought it into view. The smiling little house... .

Memories, memories, one leading to another. But she was back on the Pier at Brighton.

From her feet to her face. That the stranger should wish to see the face that belonged to the owner of the feet was no more and no less than the most modest vanity could expect. She did expect it. She knew that she even wished it. Her immediate concern, always under the lowered eyelids, was how exactly he would engineer his purpose, if — but she had no real doubts — he had such a purpose. Not furtively she hoped; not too casually. Yet how else? His chair was so near to hers. He could not turn round deliberately, could he, and just look at her? That seemed impossible. That was nevertheless somehow what she believed he must do. Ought she not, then, to get up and move away? She couldn’t. Also she did not want to.

What was that? Only Ellen singing in the pantry. Where did she get her songs? Songs of decades and decades ago. Songs that were old, some of them, when her — Jane’s — mother had been young. She knew this one — a favourite song with Ellen, though it must have dated from the sixties at least, and come down to her from grandmother or great-aunts:

“Oh, isn’t it a pity such a pretty girl as I

Should be shut up in a nunnery to pine away and die?

No, I won’t bea nun! No, I won’tbeanun.. .”

She, Miss Weston, could not hear the words through the intervening spaces of walls and passage, but she knew them and could fit them to the distant melody.

“‘No, I won’t bea nun...

She smiled to herself. No, that, certainly, Ellen would not! Wouldn’t have to be, wouldn’t be allowed to be. Ellen’s songs, wherever she found them, or however she came by them, always somehow expressed her. The ‘Oh, isn’t it a pity’ — wouldn’t it be a pity, that is — and the ‘Such a pretty girl as I’... how exactly ‘right’! Incarceration, in connection with Ellen, unthinkable, monstrous! And, admitting an adventure, or, as now, insinuating herself into your consciousness, sliding in between you and your memories on the lilt of an old song, how oddly, how very oddly, because so insistently and so persistently, Ellen did contribute! The discovery was arresting.

The result of the interruption was that Jane, of the memories, was whisked back from Brighton — leaving the stranger—to the house again. She and her mother welcomed at the door by Mrs. Williams — Missis Willyamce, the former owner’s housekeeper — with curtsies and no resentment, and entering into their possession with little gasps and purrings of delight. Shining slippery dark oak and a smell of beeswax; these the first impressions of the mellow hall. The fanlight over the door. ‘Look, Mother.’ The slippery leisurely oak staircase with the broad grooved rail and the twisty bannisters. The slow tick of a grandfather’s clock. A William and Mary chest-of-drawers on legs, with china, three Nankin bowls, a large one flanked by two smaller, on the top of it. Mrs. Williams opening the door— brass box lock with drop handles — of the drawing-room in which she was now sitting: the first sight of it... the first sight! How they had loved it! How she loved it still!’ How she would always love it! The secret of the strange solitariness of her life was enclosed in the gracious friendliness of its four white panelled walls. How could one be lonely in such a haunt of ancient peace? The sun streaming in through the three tall, narrowish windows with the bookshelves between, just as it was streaming in now. You did not know what to look at first, the view from the windows, a deep fall into the valley backed by hills that you could call mountains, with veritable mountains behind them — Plinlimmon? Cader Idris? — or the treasures in the room itself. She was to grow accustomed to views, but never to lose the feelings with which they inspired her. She and her mother went to the windows, to each of the windows in turn.

‘*Tt’s wonderful, Mother.”’

‘‘Wonderful, Jane.”

Mrs. Williams appeared to call the hills ‘banks’ — perhaps even the mountains. She stood smiling in the background. She came from Aberdovey herself, and said they should see the Happy Valley. ‘There was grand it was at Aberdovey, an Aberystwith — with bands’ (‘bahnds’ — something like that in the broadness of the vowel) ‘across the estu-erry. There was the Col-lege too at Aberystwith and crowds of visitors in the sum-mer. It was very qui-et here in Aber- Ilwyn.’ )

Jane and her mother, under the spell as they were of the house and what they saw from its windows, were assuredly to learn that Aber- Ilwyn was ‘very qui-et.’ But in their delight with everything they had no fear of quiet. The remoteness of the district occasioned them no misgivings — rather, as in the case of their self-sufficing relation, did it seem an attraction in their eyes.

Mrs. Williams withdrew, to see, with the help of their Jehu, to the disposal of their luggage and to get tea. Mrs. Weston followed her to the door.

“One minute, Mrs. Williams. Will you settle with him? How much will it be?”’

‘The master always had it put down, ’m.”’

“Very well. Then for himself. Will you give him this?”

“‘Oh, too much, indeed. Half that, ’m. Plenty.”

“Well, you know best.”’

Far from the madding crowd? Who wanted the madding crowd?

While their luggage bumped its way to their rooms, Jane tried the piano. The piano was probably the only modern thing in the room.

‘Piece by piece, do you think? Thing by thing? Did he make no mistakes?” Mrs. Weston was pursuing her tour of inspection. Jane had joined her. They were standing before a walnut cabinet. The china on its shelves called forth the questions.

‘““None,” Jane said. ‘‘If he did, or if he was doubtful, he discarded. I can imagine him only in the terms of Genesis.”

You never had to say the whole of what you meant to Mrs. Weston.

‘“““Saw that it was good,’”’ she said now, smiling. ... ‘“‘And the evening and the THOMIN ee

‘‘More than six evenings and six mornings in his case. And when he rested he had finished his labours.”’

‘“‘We must get china books — furniture books. We must learn to know .. . to identify as he did. Years of study before us. I don’t believe there’s a thing wrong.”

They were still exploring when Mrs. Williams brought in tea. |

They had seen only the drawing-room — the hall on the way to it — and there was the rest of the house. But first tea.

Fresh delights, but delights that were no longer surprises; the cups and saucers, the teapot, the slender spoons.

It was almost a relief to turn to the business of eating and drinking. They were more than ready for their tea. There were hot cakes, there was home-made bread, there was honey in the honeycomb.

When they had finished their tea, they continued their explorations. A window on the stairs gave them the same view as that from the windows of the drawing-room, but from a different angle. Trees, hills, mountains, the placid valley; above a clump of trees a church tower which the drawing-room windows did not command.

“Our parish church, no doubt,’ Mrs. Weston said. The first unconscious stirring of Mr. Morgan; the first faint hint of the Morgan motif which was to become so familiar.

Mrs. Williams, hearing them on the stairs, came out of her kitchen to know if she should show them round, but Mrs. Weston, nodding and smiling, said they would find their way.

The doors of two rooms stood open. Mrs. Weston’s luggage was in the first and larger room. She gave a little cry of delight at the sight of the four-post bed with the faded brocade hangings. Afterwards Jane was to remember that her first words on seeing it were that it was the sort of bed one would like to die in. Old Cousin James probably had died in it, Jane thought; but she was wrong, as she learned subsequently from Mrs. Williams. Colonel Tremlet had occupied the room at the end of the passage, which, for the sake of the dressing-room which was attached to it and into which he had fitted a bath, had appealed to him more. But actually, when she knew the house better, she was to find that she was not less conscious of him in one room than another. His spirit if not his ghost —or his spirit as distinguishable from his ghost, for she would not have been surprised to meet his ghost in rooms and passages which breathed his spirit so palpably — was discernible everywhere.