Transcribed from the 1919 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
WESSEX TALES
Contents:
Preface
An Imaginative Woman
The Three Strangers
The Withered Arm
Fellow-Townsmen
Interlopers at the Knap
The Distracted Preacher
PREFACE
An apology is perhaps needed for the neglect of contrast which is shown
by presenting two consecutive stories of hangmen in such a small
collection as the following. But in the neighbourhood of county-towns
tales of executions used to form a large proportion of the local
traditions; and though never personally acquainted with any chief
operator at such scenes, the writer of these pages had as a boy the
privilege of being on speaking terms with a man who applied for the
office, and who sank into an incurable melancholy because he failed to
get it, some slight mitigation of his grief being to dwell upon striking
episodes in the lives of those happier ones who had held it with success
and renown. His tale of disappointment used to cause some wonder why his
ambition should have taken such an unfortunate form, but its nobleness
was never questioned. In those days, too, there was still living an old
woman who, for the cure of some eating disease, had been taken in her
youth to have her 'blood turned' by a convict's corpse, in the manner
described in 'The Withered Arm.'
Since writing this story some years ago I have been reminded by an aged
friend who knew 'Rhoda Brook' that, in relating her dream, my
forgetfulness has weakened the facts our of which the tale grew. In
reality it was while lying down on a hot afternoon that the incubus
oppressed her and she flung it off, with the results upon the body of the
original as described. To my mind the occurrence of such a vision in the
daytime is more impressive than if it had happened in a midnight dream.
Readers are therefore asked to correct the misrelation, which affords an
instance of how our imperfect memories insensibly formalize the fresh
originality of living fact - from whose shape they slowly depart, as
machine-made castings depart by degrees from the sharp hand-work of the
mould.
Among the many devices for concealing smuggled goods in caves and pits of
the earth, that of planting an apple-tree in a tray or box which was
placed over the mouth of the pit is, I believe, unique, and it is
detailed in one of the tales precisely as described by an old carrier of
'tubs' - a man who was afterwards in my father's employ for over thirty
years. I never gathered from his reminiscences what means were adopted
for lifting the tree, which, with its roots, earth, and receptacle, must
have been of considerable weight. There is no doubt, however, that the
thing was done through many years. My informant often spoke, too, of the
horribly suffocating sensation produced by the pair of spirit-tubs slung
upon the chest and back, after stumbling with the burden of them for
several miles inland over a rough country and in darkness. He said that
though years of his youth and young manhood were spent in this irregular
business, his profits from the same, taken all together, did not average
the wages he might have earned in a steady employment, whilst the
fatigues and risks were excessive.
I may add that the first story in the series turns upon a physical
possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and that
is well supported by the experiences of medical men and other observers
of such manifestations.
T. H.
April 1896.
AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN
When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a well-
known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to find
his wife. She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and
Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking
hall-porter
'By Jove, how far you've gone! I am quite out of breath,' Marchmill
said, rather impatiently, when he came up with his wife, who was reading
as she walked, the three children being considerably further ahead with
the nurse.
Mrs. Marchmill started out of the reverie into which the book had thrown
her. 'Yes,' she said, 'you've been such a long time. I was tired of
staying in that dreary hotel. But I am sorry if you have wanted me,
Will?'
'Well, I have had trouble to suit myself. When you see the airy and
comfortable rooms heard of, you find they are stuffy and uncomfortable.
Will you come and see if what I've fixed on will do? There is not much
room, I am afraid; hut I can light on nothing better. The town is rather
full.'
The pair left the children and nurse to continue their ramble, and went
back together.
In age well-balanced, in personal appearance fairly matched, and in
domestic requirements conformable, in temper this couple differed, though
even here they did not often clash, he being equable, if not lymphatic,
and she decidedly nervous and sanguine. It was to their tastes and
fancies, those smallest, greatest particulars, that no common denominator
could be applied. Marchmill considered his wife's likes and inclinations
somewhat silly; she considered his sordid and material. The husband's
business was that of a gunmaker in a thriving city northwards, and his
soul was in that business always; the lady was best characterized by that
superannuated phrase of elegance 'a votary of the muse.' An
impressionable, palpitating creature was Ella, shrinking humanely from
detailed knowledge of her husband's trade whenever she reflected that
everything he manufactured had for its purpose the destruction of life.
She could only recover her equanimity by assuring herself that some, at
least, of his weapons were sooner or later used for the extermination of
horrid vermin and animals almost as cruel to their inferiors in species
as human beings were to theirs.
She had never antecedently regarded this occupation of his as any
objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting
life-leased at all cost, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers teach,
kept her from thinking of it at all till she had closed with William, had
passed the honeymoon, and reached the reflecting stage. Then, like a
person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she wondered what
she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it were rare
or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a pedestal,
everything to her or nothing.
She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had kept her heart
alive by pitying her proprietor's obtuseness and want of refinement,
pitying herself, and letting off her delicate and ethereal emotions in
imaginative occupations, day-dreams, and night-sighs, which perhaps would
not much have disturbed William if he had known of them.
Her figure was small, elegant, and slight in build, tripping, or rather
bounding, in movement. She was dark-eyed, and had that marvellously
bright and liquid sparkle in each pupil which characterizes persons of
Ella's cast of soul, and is too often a cause of heartache to the
possessor's male friends, ultimately sometimes to herself. Her husband
was a tall, long-featured man, with a brown beard; he had a pondering
regard; and was, it must be added, usually kind and tolerant to her. He
spoke in squarely shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a
condition of sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.
Husband and wife walked till they had reached the house they were in
search of, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and was fronted by a
small garden of wind-proof and salt-proof evergreens, stone steps leading
up to the porch. It had its number in the row, but, being rather larger
than the rest, was in addition sedulously distinguished as Coburg House
by its landlady, though everybody else called it 'Thirteen, New Parade.'
The spot was bright and lively now; but in winter it became necessary to
place sandbags against the door, and to stuff up the keyhole against the
wind and rain, which had worn the paint so thin that the priming and
knotting showed through.
The householder, who bad been watching for the gentleman's return, met
them in the passage, and showed the rooms. She informed them that she
was a professional man's widow, left in needy circumstances by the rather
sudden death of her husband, and she spoke anxiously of the conveniences
of the establishment.
Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the situation and the house; but, it
being small, there would not be accommodation enough, unless she could
have all the rooms.
The landlady mused with an air of disappointment. She wanted the
visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said, with obvious honesty.
But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied permanently by a
bachelor gentleman. He did not pay season prices, it was true; but as he
kept on his apartments all the year round, and was an extremely nice and
interesting young man, who gave no trouble, she did not like to turn him
out for a month's 'let,' even at a high figure. 'Perhaps, however,' she
added, 'he might offer to go for a time.'
They would not hear of this, and went back to the hotel, intending to
proceed to the agent's to inquire further. Hardly had they sat down to
tea when the landlady called. Her gentleman, she said, had been so
obliging as to offer to give up his rooms for three or four weeks rather
than drive the new-comers away.
'It is very kind, but we won't inconvenience him in that way,' said the
Marchmills.
'O, it won't inconvenience him, I assure you!' said the landlady
eloquently. 'You see, he's a different sort of young man from
most - dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy - and he cares more to be here
when the south-westerly gales are beating against the door, and the sea
washes over the Parade, and there's not a soul in the place, than he does
now in the season. He'd just as soon be where, in fact, he's going
temporarily, to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.'
She hoped therefore that they would come.
The Marchmill family accordingly took possession of the house next day,
and it seemed to suit them very well. After luncheon Mr. Marchmill
strolled out towards the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having despatched the
children to their outdoor amusements on the sands, settled herself in
more completely, examining this and that article, and testing the
reflecting powers of the mirror in the wardrobe door.
In the small back sitting-room, which had been the young bachelor's, she
found furniture of a more personal nature than in the rest. Shabby
books, of correct rather than rare editions, were piled up in a queerly
reserved manner in corners, as if the previous occupant had not conceived
the possibility that any incoming person of the season's bringing could
care to look inside them. The landlady hovered on the threshold to
rectify anything that Mrs. Marchmill might not find to her satisfaction.
'I'll make this my own little room,' said the latter, 'because the books
are here. By the way, the person who has left seems to have a good many.
He won't mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?'
'O dear no, ma'am. Yes, he has a good many. You see, he is in the
literary line himself somewhat. He is a poet - yes, really a poet - and he
has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on, but
not enough for cutting a figure, even if he cared to.'
'A poet! O, I did not know that.'
Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner's name written
on the title-page. 'Dear me!' she continued; 'I know his name very
well - Robert Trewe - of course I do; and his writings! And it is his
rooms we have taken, and him we have turned out of his home?'
Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with
interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own latter history will best
explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of
letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in
an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her
painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed
departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical
household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.
These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared in
various obscure magazines, and in two cases in rather prominent ones. In
the second of the latter the page which bore her effusion at the bottom,
in smallish print, bore at the top, in large print, a few verses on the
same subject by this very man, Robert Trewe. Both of them had, in fact,
been struck by a tragic incident reported in the daily papers, and had
used it simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor remarking in a note
upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of both poems prompted him
to give them together.
After that event Ella, otherwise 'John Ivy,' had watched with much
attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the signature
of Robert Trewe, who, with a man's unsusceptibility on the question of
sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a woman. To be
sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort of reason for
doing the contrary in her case; that nobody might believe in her
inspiration if they found that the sentiments came from a pushing
tradesman's wife, from the mother of three children by a matter-of-fact
small-arms manufacturer.
Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor
poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than
finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far
as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies
as well as the best in the human condition. Being little attracted by
excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when
feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely
rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he
ought not to have done.
With sad and hopeless envy, Ella Marchmill had often and often scanned
the rival poet's work, so much stronger as it always was than her own
feeble lines. She had imitated him, and her inability to touch his level
would send her into fits of despondency. Months passed away thus, till
she observed from the publishers' list that Trewe had collected his
fugitive pieces into a volume, which was duly issued, and was much or
little praised according to chance, and had a sale quite sufficient to
pay for the printing.
This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her
pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding
many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been
able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for
costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but
nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a fortnight - if
it had ever been alive.
The author's thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the
discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of
her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might
have done if she had been domestically unoccupied. Her husband had paid
the publisher's bill with the doctor's, and there it all had ended for
the time. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more
than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel
the old afflatus once more. And now by an odd conjunction she found
herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.
She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with the
interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his own verse was
among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it
here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the
landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young
man.
'Well, I'm sure you'd be interested in him, ma'am, if you could see him,
only he's so shy that I don't suppose you will.' Mrs. Hooper seemed
nothing loth to minister to her tenant's curiosity about her predecessor.
'Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his rooms even
when he's not here: the soft air of this place suits his chest, and he
likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly writing or
reading, and doesn't see many people, though, for the matter of that, he
is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be too glad to be
friendly with him if they knew him. You don't meet kind-hearted people
every day.'
'Ah, he's kind-hearted . . . and good.'
'Yes; he'll oblige me in anything if I ask him. "Mr. Trewe," I say to
him sometimes, "you are rather out of spirits." "Well, I am, Mrs.
Hooper," he'll say, "though I don't know how you should find it out."
"Why not take a little change?" I ask. Then in a day or two he'll say
that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and I assure
you he comes back all the better for it.'
'Ah, indeed! His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.'
'Yes. Still he's odd in some things. Once when he had finished a poem
of his composition late at night he walked up and down the room
rehearsing it; and the floors being so thin - jerry-built houses, you
know, though I say it myself - he kept me awake up above him till I wished
him further . . . But we get on very well.'
This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the rising
poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew
Ella's attention to what she had not noticed before: minute scribblings
in pencil on the wall-paper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.
'O! let me look,' said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of tender
curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.
'These,' said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew things,
'are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried
to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. My belief is that
he wakes up in the night, you know, with some rhyme in his head, and jots
it down there on the wall lest he should forget it by the morning. Some
of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in print in the
magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before. It
must have been done only a few days ago.'
'O yes! . . . '
Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her
companion would go away, now that the information was imparted. An
indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than literary
made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she accordingly
waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great store of emotion
would be enjoyed in the act.
Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella's husband
found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about without his
wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her. He did not disdain to go thus
alone on board the steamboats of the cheap-trippers, where there was
dancing by moonlight, and where the couples would come suddenly down with
a lurch into each other's arms; for, as he blandly told her, the company
was too mixed for him to take her amid such scenes. Thus, while this
thriving manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air out of his
sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was monotonous enough,
and mainly consisted in passing a certain number of hours each day in
bathing and walking up and down a stretch of shore. But the poetic
impulse having again waxed strong, she was possessed by an inner flame
which left her hardly conscious of what was proceeding around her.
She had read till she knew by heart Trewe's last little volume of verses,
and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival some of
them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal element
in the magnetic attraction exercised by this circumambient,
unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger than the intellectual
and abstract that she could not understand it. To be sure, she was
surrounded noon and night by his customary environment, which literally
whispered of him to her at every moment; but he was a man she had never
seen, and that all that moved her was the instinct to specialize a
waiting emotion on the first fit thing that came to hand did not, of
course, suggest itself to Ella.
In the natural way of passion under the too practical conditions which
civilization has devised for its fruition, her husband's love for her had
not survived, except in the form of fitful friendship, any more than, or
even so much as, her own for him; and, being a woman of very living
ardours, that required sustenance of some sort, they were beginning to
feed on this chancing material, which was, indeed, of a quality far
better than chance usually offers.
One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, whence,
in their excitement, they pulled out some clothing. Mrs. Hooper
explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and hung it up in the closet
again. Possessed of her fantasy, Ella went later in the afternoon, when
nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, unhitched one of
the articles, a mackintosh, and put it on, with the waterproof cap
belonging to it.
'The mantle of Elijah!' she said. 'Would it might inspire me to rival
him, glorious genius that he is!'
Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to
look at herself in the glass. His heart had beat inside that coat, and
his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never
reach. The consciousness of her weakness beside him made her feel quite
sick. Before she had got the things off her the door opened, and her
husband entered the room.
'What the devil - '
She blushed, and removed them
'I found them in the closet here,' she said, 'and put them on in a freak.
What have I else to do? You are always away!'
'Always away? Well . . . '
That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself
have nourished a half-tender regard for the poet, so ready was she to
discourse ardently about him.
'You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma'am,' she said; 'and he has
just sent to say that he is going to call to-morrow afternoon to look up
some books of his that he wants, if I'll be in, and he may select them
from your room?'
'O yes!'
'You could very well meet Mr Trewe then, if you'd like to be in the way!'
She promised with secret delight, and went to bed musing of him.
Next morning her husband observed: 'I've been thinking of what you said,
Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much to
amuse you. Perhaps it's true. To-day, as there's not much sea, I'll
take you with me on board the yacht.'
For the first time in her experience of such an offer Ella was not glad.
But she accepted it for the moment. The time for setting out drew near,
and she went to get ready. She stood reflecting. The longing to see the
poet she was now distinctly in love with overpowered all other
considerations.
'I don't want to go,' she said to herself. 'I can't bear to be away! And
I won't go.'
She told her husband that she had changed her mind about wishing to sail.
He was indifferent, and went his way.
For the rest of the day the house was quiet, the children having gone out
upon the sands. The blinds waved in the sunshine to the soft, steady
stroke of the sea beyond the wall; and the notes of the Green Silesian
band, a troop of foreign gentlemen hired for the season, had drawn almost
all the residents and promenaders away from the vicinity of Coburg House.
A knock was audible at the door.
Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became
impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came up.
She rang the bell.
'There is some person waiting at the door,' she said.
'O no, ma'am! He's gone long ago. I answered it.'
Mrs. Hooper came in herself.
'So disappointing!' she said. 'Mr. Trewe not coming after all!'
'But I heard him knock, I fancy!'
'No; that was somebody inquiring for lodgings who came to the wrong
house. I forgot to tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before lunch
to say I needn't get any tea for him, as he should not require the books,
and wouldn't come to select them.'
Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his
mournful ballad on 'Severed Lives,' so aching was her erratic little
heart, and so tearful her eyes. When the children came in with wet
stockings, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could
not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.
* * * * *
'Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of - the gentleman who lived here?'
She was getting to be curiously shy in mentioning his name.
'Why, yes. It's in the ornamental frame on the mantelpiece in your own
bedroom, ma'am.'
'No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.'
'Yes, so they are; but he's behind them. He belongs rightly to that
frame, which I bought on purpose; but as he went away he said: "Cover me
up from those strangers that are coming, for God's sake. I don't want
them staring at me, and I am sure they won't want me staring at them." So
I slipped in the Duke and Duchess temporarily in front of him, as they
had no frame, and Royalties are more suitable for letting furnished than
a private young man. If you take 'em out you'll see him under. Lord,
ma'am, he wouldn't mind if he knew it! He didn't think the next tenant
would be such an attractive lady as you, or he wouldn't have thought of
hiding himself; perhaps.'
'Is he handsome?' she asked timidly.
'I call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn't.'
'Should I?' she asked, with eagerness.
'I think you would, though some would say he's more striking than
handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, with a very electric
flash in his eye when he looks round quickly, such as you'd expect a poet
to be who doesn't get his living by it.'
'How old is he?'
'Several years older than yourself, ma'am; about thirty-one or two, I
think.'
Ella was, as a matter of fact, a few months over thirty herself; but she
did not look nearly so much. Though so immature in nature, she was
entering on that tract of life in which emotional women begin to suspect
that last love may be stronger than first love; and she would soon, alas,
enter on the still more melancholy tract when at least the vainer ones of
her sex shrink from receiving a male visitor otherwise than with their
backs to the window or the blinds half down. She reflected on Mrs.
Hooper's remark, and said no more about age.
Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had
gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the yacht,
and would not be able to get back till next day.
After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children till
dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room, with a serene
sense of something ecstatic to come. For, with the subtle luxuriousness
of fancy in which this young woman was an adept, on learning that her
husband was to be absent that night she had refrained from incontinently
rushing upstairs and opening the picture-frame, preferring to reserve the
inspection till she could be alone, and a more romantic tinge be imparted
to the occasion by silence, candles, solemn sea and stars outside, than
was afforded by the garish afternoon sunlight.
The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was
not yet ten o'clock. To gratify her passionate curiosity she now made
her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments and putting
on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of the table and
reading several pages of Trewe's tenderest utterances. Then she fetched
the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, took out the likeness,
and set it up before her.
It was a striking countenance to look upon. The poet wore a luxuriant
black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which shaded the
forehead. The large dark eyes, described by the landlady, showed an
unlimited capacity for misery; they looked out from beneath well-shaped
brows as if they were reading the universe in the microcosm of the
confronter's face, and were not altogether overjoyed at what the
spectacle portended.
Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone: 'And it's you
who've so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!'
As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her eyes
filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips. Then she
laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.
She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three
children, to let her mind stray to a stranger in this unconscionable
manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings
as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts
and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps
luckily for himself; considering that he had to provide for family
expenses.
'He's nearer my real self, he's more intimate with the real me than Will
is, after all, even though I've never seen him,' she said.
She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she
was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe's verses
which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true. Putting
these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge upon the coverlet, and
contemplated it as she lay. Then she scanned again by the light of the
candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wall-paper beside her
head. There they were - phrases, couplets, bouts-rimes, beginnings and
middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley's scraps, and the
least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if
his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls,
walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her
own now. He must often have put up his hand so - with the pencil in it.
Yes, the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed by one who
extended his arm thus.
These inscribed shapes of the poet's world,
'Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,'
were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to him
in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no fear of
the frost of criticism. No doubt they had often been written up hastily
by the light of the moon, the rays of the lamp, in the blue-grey dawn, in
full daylight perhaps never. And now her hair was dragging where his arm
had lain when he secured the fugitive fancies; she was sleeping on a
poet's lips, immersed in the very essence of him, permeated by his spirit
as by an ether.
While she was dreaming the minutes away thus, a footstep came upon the
stairs, and in a moment she heard her husband's heavy step on the landing
immediately without.
'Ell, where are you?'
What possessed her she could not have described, but, with an instinctive
objection to let her husband know what she had been doing, she slipped
the photograph under the pillow just as he flung open the door, with the
air of a man who had dined not badly.
'O, I beg pardon,' said William Marchmill. 'Have you a headache? I am
afraid I have disturbed you.'
'No, I've not got a headache,' said she. 'How is it you've come?'
'Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I
didn't want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere else to-
morrow.'
'Shall I come down again?'
'O no. I'm as tired as a dog. I've had a good feed, and I shall turn in
straight off. I want to get out at six o'clock to-morrow if I can . . .
I shan't disturb you by my getting up; it will be long before you are
awake.' And he came forward into the room.
While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the photograph
further out of sight.
'Sure you're not ill?' he asked, bending over her.
'No, only wicked!'
'Never mind that.' And he stooped and kissed her.
Next morning Marchmill was called at six o'clock; and in waking and
yawning she heard him muttering to himself: 'What the deuce is this
that's been crackling under me so?' Imagining her asleep he searched
round him and withdrew something. Through her half-opened eyes she
perceived it to be Mr. Trewe.
'Well, I'm damned!' her husband exclaimed.
'What, dear?' said she.
'O, you are awake? Ha! ha!'
'What do you mean?'
'Some bloke's photograph - a friend of our landlady's, I suppose. I
wonder how it came here; whisked off the table by accident perhaps when
they were making the bed.'
'I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped in then.'
'O, he's a friend of yours? Bless his picturesque heart!'
Ella's loyalty to the object of her admiration could not endure to hear
him ridiculed. 'He's a clever man!' she said, with a tremor in her
gentle voice which she herself felt to be absurdly uncalled for.
'He is a rising poet - the gentleman who occupied two of these rooms
before we came, though I've never seen him.'
'How do you know, if you've never seen him?'
'Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.'
'O; well, I must up and be off. I shall be home rather early. Sorry I
can't take you to-day, dear. Mind the children don't go getting
drowned.'
That day Mrs. Marchmill inquired if Mr. Trewe were likely to call at any
other time.
'Yes,' said Mrs. Hooper. 'He's coming this day week to stay with a
friend near here till you leave. He'll be sure to call.'
Marchmill did return quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some
letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he and
his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had expected to
do - in short, in three days.
'Surely we can stay a week longer?' she pleaded. 'I like it here.'
'I don't. It is getting rather slow.'
'Then you might leave me and the children!'
'How perverse you are, Ell! What's the use? And have to come to fetch
you! No: we'll all return together; and we'll make out our time in North
Wales or Brighton a little later on. Besides, you've three days longer
yet.'
It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose rival talent she
had a despairing admiration, and to whose person she was now absolutely
attached. Yet she determined to make a last effort; and having gathered
from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely spot not far from the
fashionable town on the Island opposite, she crossed over in the packet
from the neighbouring pier the following afternoon.
What a useless journey it was! Ella knew but vaguely where the house
stood, and when she fancied she had found it, and ventured to inquire of
a pedestrian if he lived there, the answer returned by the man was that
he did not know. And if he did live there, how could she call upon him?
Some women might have the assurance to do it, but she had not. How crazy
he would think her. She might have asked him to call upon her, perhaps;
but she had not the courage for that, either. She lingered mournfully
about the picturesque seaside eminence till it was time to return to the
town and enter the steamer for recrossing, reaching home for dinner
without having been greatly missed.
At the last moment, unexpectedly enough, her husband said that he should
have no objection to letting her and the children stay on till the end of
the week, since she wished to do so, if she felt herself able to get home
without him. She concealed the pleasure this extension of time gave her;
and Marchmill went off the next morning alone.
But the week passed, and Trewe did not call.
On Saturday morning the remaining members of the Marchmill family
departed from the place which had been productive of so much fervour in
her. The dreary, dreary train; the sun shining in moted beams upon the
hot cushions; the dusty permanent way; the mean rows of wire - these
things were her accompaniment: while out of the window the deep blue sea-
levels disappeared from her gaze, and with them her poet's home. Heavy-
hearted, she tried to read, and wept instead.
Mr. Marchmill was in a thriving way of business, and he and his family
lived in a large new house, which stood in rather extensive grounds a few
miles outside the city wherein he carried on his trade. Ella's life was
lonely here, as the suburban life is apt to be, particularly at certain
seasons; and she had ample time to indulge her taste for lyric and
elegiac composition. She had hardly got back when she encountered a
piece by Robert Trewe in the new number of her favourite magazine, which
must have been written almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea,
for it contained the very couplet she had seen pencilled on the wallpaper
by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent. Ella could resist
no longer, but seizing a pen impulsively, wrote to him as a brother-poet,
using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her letter on his
triumphant executions in metre and rhythm of thoughts that moved his
soul, as compared with her own brow-beaten efforts in the same pathetic
trade.
To this address there came a response in a few days, little as she had
dared to hope for it - a civil and brief note, in which the young poet
stated that, though he was not well acquainted with Mr. Ivy's verse, he
recalled the name as being one he had seen attached to some very
promising pieces; that he was glad to gain Mr. Ivy's acquaintance by
letter, and should certainly look with much interest for his productions
in the future.
There must have been something juvenile or timid in her own epistle, as
one ostensibly coming from a man, she declared to herself; for Trewe
quite adopted the tone of an elder and superior in this reply. But what
did it matter? he had replied; he had written to her with his own hand
from that very room she knew so well, for he was now back again in his
quarters.
The correspondence thus begun was continued for two months or more, Ella
Marchmill sending him from time to time some that she considered to be
the best of her pieces, which he very kindly accepted, though he did not
say he sedulously read them, nor did he send her any of his own in
return. Ella would have been more hurt at this than she was if she had
not known that Trewe laboured under the impression that she was one of
his own sex.
Yet the situation was unsatisfactory. A flattering little voice told her
that, were he only to see her, matters would be otherwise. No doubt she
would have helped on this by making a frank confession of womanhood, to
begin with, if something had not happened, to her delight, to render it
unnecessary. A friend of her husband's, the editor of the most important
newspaper in the city and county, who was dining with them one day,
observed during their conversation about the poet that his (the editor's)
brother the landscape-painter was a friend of Mr. Trewe's, and that the
two men were at that very moment in Wales together.