The exception

Book I I

T HE voice of the stream had hoarsened with the night’s rain, and the pools of the rocky glen, that yesterday had been low and translucent, were brim full, peaty-brown, and clouded with the fresh. Yeasty skimmings had collected at margins, and where the stream took a deeper plunge, thirty yards below where Berice Beckwith lay, the great spumy cheeses revolved slowly at the foot of the fall. But already the water was fast clearing, and through the overarching oak and birch and hazel the sun was shining again.

Near the mossy boulder on which Berice lay, a dead branch had lodged across a noisy rill. It had collected a little heap of water-rakings — mould, skeletonized leaves, glistening scum, and vegetable scurf. These fouled half the surface of the little pool above the branch ; below it the water made a gleaming edge, combed clear. The removal of the branch would have hastened considerably the purification of the stream.

Berice’s hand had been idly casting fragments into the pool, and her eyes had followed each morsel as it had been caught by the current and deposited against the rotten branch. There was quite a little cluster of soaked potentilla blossoms, the tiny cup-heads of mosses, and the flowerets of the bedstraws. An end of twig lay to her hand now ; without i otherwise moving the hand she flicked it with her middle finger towards the pool. It was heavier, and went farther than the other fragments ; it struck the water at the foot of a twelve-inch fall, disappeared in the boiling, and bobbed up again a yard away. It spun for a moment where current and backwash met, and then, instead of descending to the miniature barrage , it moved slowly up to the fall again, again to be driven under. Time after time, a dozen times, it did this, as if guided by some unresting, invisible Hand. . . .

Berice ’s cheek lay on the sleeve of her knitted white sweater, and a fold of the garment ran across her back to the hip that was uppermost, where it merged into the fuller roll about her waist. The collar of the sweater came up her throat like a man’s, and the spray of the stream, that swelled the lichens and made lush the mosses, had dimmed the thick coil of fair hair tucked away within it. That same spray, or some more secret moisture, had also made little wellings that filmed the light blue eyes that watched the circling twig.

The news that had caused this brimming had come the previous morning, sharply accentuating the unrest of weeks. Even in the roundabout manner of its arrival — the postman had given it to a housemaid, who had passed it on to the housekeeper — had lain an additional twinge. Had Skirethorns still been their own she and her uncle would have heard at least twelve hours earlier. But the new tenant was in the midst of his installation, knew his Cot ter dale and Ridsdale neighbours yet only by name, and in all probability Berice and her uncle had been assumed to have already departed. Even in allowing so slight a thing to add to her moodiness Berice was aware that she was unreasonable to do so.

Her uncle, of course, had instantly had out the trap, and the pair of them had driven over to Undershaws, behind the hill in Ridsdale. The drawn blinds, seen from the turn of the drive, had been confirmation enough of the news. They would have left again immediately, reserving their call of condolence for another occasion ; but while they had been eating the sandwiches a maid had brought on a tray, eating them in silence in the darkened room where the sun coming through the Venetian blinds made a bright ladder of light on the carpet, Mrs. Finch-Ommaney herself had entered. All at once it had seemed to Berice that her tower of prematurely white hair was more nearly indicative of her age than her still youthful complexion. She had been composed — a little theatrically composed, a little insistently occupying the centre of the stage and claiming her effect. In reply to the question in Everard Beckwith’s eyes she had inclined her carefully dressed head : it was true. . . . Particulars ? No, she had had no particulars yet ; she had cabled for particulars, but the reply had said little except that a letter was already on its way. — What had it been : a fall, a landslip, a bursting barrel ? Mrs. Finch-Ommaney did not know ; Lai had had three months’ shooting leave, had gone out to seek ovis-ammon, and this had happened on the very day before the end of his leave, or rather on the day before he was to have set off back again to his station. The shikaree (Hafiz, his name was, and he had accompanied Lai before, when he had shot those — the mounted heads of ibis and markhor and Thibetan gazelle that hung on the dining-room walls), the shikaree had returned to camp, presumably with . . . Mrs. Finch-Ommaney had covered her eyes with both plump hands, as if beseeching that they would not ask her to call that with which Hafiz had returned to camp ‘ her son.’ No, nothing else ; that was all the information to hand yet. — Berice and her uncle had stood with bowed heads before the bereft mother, and presently had moved to take their leave.

“ Forgive me for not letting you know immediately,” Mrs. Finch-Ommaney had then said, making a slightly obvious magnanimity of it that even in her sorrow she could think of others and their affairs. “ I thought you’d already left, and that the new tenant was at Skirethorns.”

Everard had replied that he was getting in now, and had given Mrs. Finch-Ommaney a timidly imploring look. Everard always took things simply, credulously, and as they appeared to be.

“ And you — when are you leaving ? ” Mrs. Finch-Ommaney had continued, still with heroic selflessness.

Everard had answered that nothing was settled yet — that they were seeing Mr. Emney comfortable first — it might be a few days or it might be a fortnight. — Berice had interposed.

“ How’s Celia ? ”

Then Everard had drawn a breath of relief that the unnatural tension had seemed to be over. At the sound of the name of her dead boy’s betrothed on Berice’s lips Mrs. Finch- Ommaney had trembled, put her hand to her bosom, and with the other hand had clutched at the arm Everard Beckwith had made haste to offer her. Gently they had led her to a sofa, and she had broken into a plenitude of tears.

“ Oh, Berice, Berice ! ” she had sobbed. “ You are my daughter — the girl I hoped — hoped — oh, I hoped — at one time I even thought ”

“ Oh, hush ! ” Berice had murmured, shocked at the nakedness of the confession and refusing to hear any more. Already Everard Beckwith had made his escape. . . . Ten minutes later Berice had found him waiting for her in the trap, pulling at his long grey moustache and regarding the footboard profoundly.

“ She’s taking it badly, poor woman,” he had sighed when they were half way home.

Berice had made no reply. . . .

All this had been yesterday. Berice had spent half the night at her window, listening to the sound of the rain in the pinewood and occupied incessantly with one thought. That thought was, whether Mrs. Finch-Ommaney would have sobbed out those broken words if she had known all.

For seven years now her intimacy with the dead boy had been at an end, and nothing but his death could have brought it all so poignantly up again. Sitting there in the darkness at her open window she had lived much of those seven years over again. The heaviness of it all had come back to her — the days following the breaking-off, when she had come to herself again as if out of some blind trance of irresponsibility — the succeeding days, when half of her, defiant and self- justificatory, had warred with the other half that had more and more accused her — and so by stages to the days when the whole thing had seemed as remote and unreal as a dream of a previous existence. She had gone over it all again from the beginning, sitting there in the dark.

She did not know even now exactly what it had been. It had been a sort of secret engagement, yet it had lacked the explicitness of an engagement. It had been a reckless plunge into Life, to be regularized or not at some later date. It had been a crude and rebellious intellectual conviction, coming upon her at her vernal season, unguided by any mother, finding a ripening word here or there in the novelbox, subtle urges in things which the better-disciplined would have shaken oh, propinquity, the hour, and folly. She had tried to see it all again during the night : she had failed : she only knew, now, that the passage of those seven years seemed somehow to suggest a sort of Moral Statute of Limitations and (to give it that name) an automatic non-suiting of Nemesis. Even physically, so it was said, there no longer remained an atom of that old Berice Beckwith that had not been supplanted and renewed ; and even less than nothing, were that possible, did there remain of that old Berice within. She had long since changed her mind about those sprawling, untrained impulses of her youth.

And now he was dead. . . .

Exclusive of a period of correspondence by letter, the whole thing had lasted barely four months — the four months between Lionel Finch-Ommaney’s passing from Sandhurst and his attachment for a year to the Indian regiment. She had been eighteen months his senior, and it had been she who had made the running, he who had trailed a little stupidly after her. She had been precocious, and had considered herself entitled to make more than ordinary demands on Life ; Life, she had assumed, owed her exceptional treatment by reason of her being Berice Beckwith : and, vaguely divining that they get most who give most, she had been willing to give, even to the point of squandering. And four months had sufficed to disillusion her completely. She had not received in the same measure ; the revolting spirit in her had had to work double tides : it had not been in him to give as largely as she. Even when he l$d seemed to give he had but given her her own back again— -her own thoughts, expressed longings, gentle inventions, phrases even. In his deficiency Mrs. Finch-Ommaney’s wish had been frustrated ; and even in the interview of yesterday certain likenesses between the mother and the son had come out. In her heart she did not believe, with Everard, that Mrs. Finch-Ommaney was taking it insupport ably badly. She knew the strain. Lionel had accepted his rejection, despite his half-hearted protests, with ovine content. . . .

But Mrs. Finch-Ommaney was ignorant of all this, and when, two years ago, Lionel had come home on leave, quite heart-healed, and had gone back again the betrothed of Celia Chester (Berice had made a prolonged visit to friends about that time), the mother had fretted a little (for Berice), rearranged her stage, and made herself potentially a grandmother through a different channel. She would not have broken out so yesterday, Berice thought, but for some fundamental insufficiency, some obscure subordination of what was true to what was dramatically statable . . . and immediately she frowned, to find herself anatomizing a fellow-being in the unguarded hour of grief.

Had Mrs. Finch-Ommaney known ! . . .

But Berice had been over all this during the night, and weariness drives out emotion. Her thoughts turned of themselves to lesser things, of which these few remaining days at Skirethorns provided plenty. Her uncle lingered, giving supervision here and there, held by that good temper of his that was largely inertia ; but Berice was anxious to get it over. The sooner the old order was completely at an end and the new one begun the better. Half a day would suffice for the packing of her own belongings. . . .

And the emotional drop was a relief in more ways than one. Even Lionel Finch-Ommaney’s death might, she knew not exactly how, be counted among the things that brought relief. True, her whole nature would have revolted at the idea of considering Death’s dread scission for one moment in its aspect of timeliness or convenience ; but actually, practically, and emotional altitudes apart, his death did make things straighter. Only she knew how many times, in weariness and petulance and fret she had wished that certain things might be terminated ; well, here they were, terminated as far as they ever could be terminated, and there was nothing left but to concur. . . . Berice did concur. She even had a sudden, and hardly habitual, access of honesty with herself. She did feel lighter. There was nothing to be gained by denying it. It was God’s will, and she acquiesced. It did not occur to her just then that acquiescence in God’s will is a matter variable in its difficulty, the variability turning on the extent to which that will happens to coincide with our own.

Nor was the sense of relief incompatible with some measure, yes, a large measure, of sympathy for Mrs. Finch-Ommaney. It even enhanced that sympathy, as if to make some obscure and secret amends and pay a pound over rather than half an ounce short. For that accident far away in Thibet, whatever it had been — slip of the foot, bursting barrel, the trampling of an infuriated animal — had laid to rest other things than its immediate victim. In suppressing some things it had allowed others to take their proper place. De mortuis . . . she murmured the words ... it was not merely that. It was not mere silence in regard to the unworthier things. Already things not unworthy were beginning to shine with a soft glamour. Lionel’s memory had a tenderness that Lionel himself had never known, and enough remained of the gentle fount whence it sprang once more to moisten Berice’s eyes as she gazed at the clearing stream — as she watched, through a bright blur, the soaked flowerets by the dead branch and the monotonous circuit of the twig up the backwash, down the fall, and up the backwash again. . . .

Well, it was over. She thought ncfw that it had been sweet while it had lasted, to darling with eyes, even though the darlinging had been her own ; at any rate it was already beginning to be sweet to remember it, all purged and idealized. One by one, as she lay gazing into the water, the memories returned to her — an unforgettable walk, a moving tone, an uncovenanted look so strangely thrilling, a reckless escapade of a meeting in the pinewood at dawn and a stealing back to the sleeping house before the morning star had paled, assignations at Bunny’s painting cottage up on the moor . . . and, after he had left, the earlier letters. . . .

She remembered, too, the melancholy evening on which she had burnt his letters, those letters of an ardour so curiously kindled from her own. She had not realized then that the flame that had consumed them was the first refining fire of their intercourse, memory’s real beginning after the false start of facts. And now Death, the last purification, had come, and the Lionel chapter was closed. . . .

But no : it was not closed if the loveliest part of it remained. It would yet end far far better than it had begun. Thenceforward it would be a sweet and supporting memory close at her heart. It would be, thenceforward, her standard of loveliness for all things pretending to be lovely, her touchstone with which all things fresh and gay and of the dayspring must stand the test of comparison. This at any rate she would take from Skirethorns with her. And Lionel had had to die to make it possible. That, perhaps, was what poets meant by brooding on Death until they fell in love with it. Beyond its bitterness lay peace and light, repose beyond its sharpness . . . but she felt herself getting into an exalted mood again, and ceased to think.

A bright ray had crept round until it rested on her cheek, and she moved. She sat up, and the folds of the sweater became a single soft roll about her waist. A mesh of subdued light danced about the boulder, and the little mat of flowerets showed dark on the lustrous pool. The end of the twig was still circling monotonously down the stream, up its margin, and down again. Her eyes rested on it, and at an idle fancy she smiled faintly. She knew that she had but to dislodge the dead branch and in a few minutes the pool would be clear again, even as her own life was now the clearer for the removal of something that had for long obstructed its current. . . .

Dallyingly she put out one hand to the branch.

She loosed one end of it, and with a plop and a gurgle half the mass went over the little fall. She cleared the other end, and, as it still stuck, pushed at it with her foot. It gave ; the liberated water broke into a clear musical spouting, and in scarce more than a minute the pebbly bottom could be seen, with the minnows darting across it. Berice’s bosom rose as if a physical weight had been lifted from it, and she became aware of the singing of a lark. . . .

The new hopefulness in her breast demanded more air and space than were to be had in the narrow glen, and she rose almost blithely. Stepping from rock to rock she left the stream and began the ascent of a steep bank towards the hill-top and the sky. The sound of the stream diminished behind her ; the air was clear and bright, and the earth smoked lightly with the morning evaporation from a million leaves and petals and grasses.

At the top of the hill she sat down again on a boulder of silvery limestone. About her were bents, with nodding harebells and potentilla, and over the pinewood below she saw the smoke of the Skirethorns chimneys. In her mind she saw the house itself — large and in ill repair, with its shabby, solid old furniture, its wildernesses of steep gardens, the shapes of trout roughly incised in its limestone cornerstones, and Berice’s own birthday-heights notched against the edge of the gun-room door. And beyond all lay the hills that guarded the deep Dale, scarce less loved than the house itself.

Berice experienced no further emotion, although she knew that she was about to take her farewell of these things. It seemed fitting that all the changes should come at once. She sat for long, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, before she was aware of a step behind her and of a shadow on the grey-green bents. She turned. Harrison Emney, the new tenant, stood before her, cap in hand, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief.

II

H IS thin and poplar-like figure was clad in tweeds, not conspicuously new, yet lacking, as it were, that touch of the sun that turns the meadows to hay. Mechanically he glanced at the handkerchief with which he mopped his brow.

“ Good morning, Miss Beckwith,” he said, puffing. “ How frantically hot ! I’m afraid I’m a little too long in the back to mount these hills as your splendid Dalesmen do. Fivenine’s the useful height for a man — not my lankiness. ...”

It was characteristic of Harrison Emney that he made little modest disparagements of the good things that were his own. In this case his smile gave the cue that, at his hearer’s pleasure, his remark might be taken as pleasantly preposterous. Berice, looking away across the Dale, merely replied that it was hot — and steep — and that Mr. Emney’s new car would

not be of much use up that hillside

“ The runabout ? No, it’s hardly graded up to this. Am I disturbing you ? ”

“ Oh, no.”

He sat down by her side, mopping his brow once more and then putting the handkerchief into his pocket. Then he put his elbows on his knees, and with the fingers of his right hand began to make little flips on the knuckles of his left ; they were long and spare and reddish hands, and very carefully kept. Berice did not speak, and his own silence seemed, in some odd and negative way, to assume a degree of intimacy between them that made talking for talking’s sake unnecessary. He seemed to measure the duration of the silence before remarking, with an exaggerated stretching of himself : “ And my landlord — your uncle — how is he this morning ? ” Berice, hardly thinking either of her uncle or of the man who asked after him, replied that she hadn’t seen Everard yet

to

— that she had breakfasted alone and had then come out. “ He may be up at the Pool,” she added.

“Ah, yes, the Pool ; very likely ; seeing to the stocking. The trout came yesterday — I shall finish in the poorhouse yet, Miss Beckwith ! . . . But really, Mr. Beckwith’s so keen on the water and coverts that I think I shall have to try to get him to stay on as head keeper ! ”

The smile with which he made his little jest seemed less to come spontaneously than to be a result of the pull of the muscles that surrounded his mouth. Again it pointed the pleasantry, and again Berice was conscious for a moment of a thing she had noticed before in him — a slight overdoing of the right thing. To call that magnificent car “ a runabout ” seemed, somehow, excessive modesty in possession ; and it would have been franker, less secretive, less Scotch (she applied the unreasonable adjective), had he said that he could really quite well afford to stock the Pool up the hill with trout and omitted the reference to the poorhouse. There was no reason why he should apologize for his wealth. She glanced at him. His general appearance was one of sandy irascibility, held well in check ; his reddish moustache was waxed, and the brown irises of his eyes had a hot and reddish cast ; and Berice, who hitherto had not spent a wonder on him, now found herself guessing his age to be about forty-two. He continued :

“ No, I really don’t know how I shall manage without him, for I can’t make out half that Jacky and these fellows say. As a means of conveying anything to me their dialect is a distinct failure. But that’s by the way, for I hope you’re not thinking of leaving just yet. Pure selfishness on my part, Miss Beckwith, seeing what an excellent keeper I shall lose. . . ”

Had he ventured to add the gallantry his eyes looked, as to what he would lose when Berice herself left, she would hardly have noticed it, for the sight of the chimney-smoke above the pinewood had begun to tug just a little at her heart again. Perhaps the proximity of the new master had something to do with this.

“ And, oh, that reminds me,” he continued. “ I’ve a case of old crockery of some sort coming to-day that I should be awfully glad to have your opinion on. I believe it’s not a bad lot as such things go — cheap for what it is, my agent says — he’s supposed to understand these things, and is honest enough as agents go. I think you save in the long run by dealing with a reliable man — fearful rascals some of them are — what’s that they say ? Experientia docet — I’ve been let in once or twice, and there’s nothing like that for opening your eyes ”

His off-hand sentences merely deflected the current of Berice’s meditation slightly. For a fortnight past the arrival of each fresh consignment of Emney’s belongings had meant a rearrangement or removal of the old, and to Berice nothing could compensate for the changes. The Skirethorns things were old, but they belonged to Skirethorns. . . . She strove to hold off the returning ache by noting mentally that Mr. Emney seemed to be something of a thing-worshipper. She remembered that almost at their first meeting he had laughingly confessed that he found in his pictures and porcelains and bric-ci-brac a sort of moral support — liked to have them about him — “ his household lares” he had called them, with the Latin word negligently dropped as if he did the honours of the language — and he was speaking now of a Hepplewhite sideboard. . . .

“ But I really don’t know that it’s worth moving that magnificent old dower-chest for,” he was saying. “ The dower-chest’s oak, of course, and it’s merely a personal predilection of my own — quite indefensible, you know — that makes me prefer the livelier woods, rosewood and mahogany — a matter of taste, of course ”

He ran on, taking, though she scarcely noticed it, a hundred things for granted. It was not the sound, but the sudden ceasing of his voice, that presently interrupted Berice’s meditation. She turned with a gesture of apology for her inattention.

“ I beg your pardon — I’m afraid I wasn’t listening — you were saying something about a sideboard ? ”

He might have replied that he had been speaking about a sideboard, five minutes before ; but apparently he found something that he considered it better worth his while to say. A certain physical resplendence about her, a bouncingness almost, had taken his eye ; he had noticed the height of her eighteenth birthday mark on the edge of the gun-room door — had asked whether he might venture to ask what those marks were ; and she could hardly, he thought, be more than twenty-six now. It was on his mind that he would very much have liked to pass the barrier of her reticence. ...

All at once he dropped his eyes, and a sudden consciousness and embarrassment showed in his manner.

“ Do you know, Miss Beckwith, I’m afraid that after all I do disturb you,” he murmured, prodding at a harebell with his stick.

He forced her to repeat her apology.

“ Oh, I don’t mean just that,” he continued, digging away at the harebell until it was forced into the turf. “ I don’t mean that I’m in the way at this present moment ; I mean, that I disturb you by being here, in this place, at all. I’m afraid it’s my bad luck to be an intruder.”

She glanced at him.

“ Since we have to let Skirethorns it’s my uncle’s good luck that you did intrude,” she replied, looking away again.

“ It’s very kind of you to put it that way,” he returned, selecting another harebell to prod at, “ but — all the same — I am an outsider here, and naturally you feel it. The whole thing’s probably got a little on your nerves — quite, oh, quite naturally. Of course, in the case of my good landlord — whom I should like to call my friend also ”

Suddenly he stopped. Berice had again turned her eyes on him, at first uncomprehendingly, then steadily and inquiringly. She really did not quite understand him. In speaking of the thing at all he was rather rubbing it in ; not that it greatly mattered one way or the other, but . . . another man, she thought, would quietly have taken things as they stood, and have accepted the hostship of the house for which he paid rent without further remark. His slight eagerness to reveal himself puzzled her ; she was perfectly incurious about him ; and it was certainly without reflection, and perhaps still under the influence of her emotion of an hour before, that, seizing on a word for lack of anything better, she inquired in a detached voice :

“ Why will you call my uncle ‘ your landlord ’ ? ”

^The careless words had not escaped her before she was suddenly conscious of what she had done. She bit her lip as the explanation of it all flashed upon her. She had noticed it before, of course, taking him in much as she had taken in the car and the sideboards and the packing-cases that had come addressed to him ; but she had accounted him, like them, merely as something new and to be seen no more after a week or two, and had gone on to think of more interesting things. She now reddened like a peony for what she had said.

“ I mean — I mean — of course he is that,” she stammered.

This was worse, and she stopped again, red to her blonde nape. . . , She could only hope secretly that he was as thick-skinned as he seemed to be.