The Yellow Book/Volume 3/A Study in Sentimentality
A Study in Sentimentality
A phantom regiment of giant mist-pillars swept silently across the valley; beaded drops loaded each tuft of coarse, dull-tinted grass; the peat-hags gaped like black, dripping flesh-wounds in the earth's side; the distance suggested rectangular fields and wooded slopes—vague, grey, phantasmagoric; and down over everything floated the damp of fine rain.
Alec's heavy tread crunched the turfed bridle-path rhythmically, and from the stiff rim of his clerical hat the water dribbled on to his shoulders.
It was a rugged, irregular, almost uncouth face, and now the features were vacantly huddled in a set expression, obviously habitual. The cheeks were hunched up, almost concealing the small eyes; a wet wisp of hair straggled over the puckered forehead, and the ragged, fair moustache was spangled by the rain.
At his approach the sheep scampered up the fell-side; then, stood staring through the mist in anxious stupidity. And Alec, shaking the water from his hat, strode forward with an almost imperceptible gleam on his face. It was so that he liked the valley—all colourless and blurred, with the sky close overhead, like a low, leaden ceiling.
By-and-by, a cluster of cottages loomed ahead—a choppy pool of black slate roofs, wanly a-glimmer in the wet. As he entered the village, a group of hard-featured men threw him a curt chorus of greetings, to which he raised his stick in response, mechanically.
He mounted the hill. Three furnace-chimneys craned their thin necks to grime the sky with a dribbling, smoky breath; high on a bank of coal-dust, blurred silhouettes of trucks stood waiting in forlorn strings; women, limp, with unkempt hair, and loose, bedraggled skirts, stood round the doorways in gossiping groups.
"Which is Mrs. Matheson's?" he stopped to ask.
"There—oop there, Mr. Burkett—by yon ash—where them childer's standin'," they answered, all speaking together, eagerly. "Look ye! that be Mrs. Matheson herself."
Alec went up to the woman. His face clouded a little, and the puffs from his pipe came briskly in rapid succession.
"Mrs. Matheson, I've only just heard——Tell me, how did it happen?" he asked gently.
She was a stout, red-faced woman, and her eyes were all bloodshot with much crying. She wiped them hastily with the corner of her apron before answering.
"It was there, Mr. Burkett, by them rails. He was jest playin' aboot in't'road wi' Arnison's childer. At half-past one, t'grandmoother stepped across to fetch me a jug o' fresh water an' she see'd him settin' in door there. Then—mabbee twenty minutes later—t' rain coome on an' I thought to go to fetch him in. But I could'na see na sign of him anywhere. We looked oop and doon, and thought, mabbee, he'd toddled roond to t' back. An' then, all at once, Dan Arnison called to us that he was leein' in't' water, doon in beck-pool. An' Dan ran straight doon, an' carried him oop to me; but t'was na use. He was quite cold and drownded. An' I went———" But the sobs, rising thickly, swallowed the rest.
Alec put his hand on her shoulder soothingly.
"Ay, I know'd ye'd be grieved, Mr. Burkett. He was the bonniest boy in all t' parish."
She lifted the apron to her eyes again, while he crossed to the railings. The wood of the posts was splintered and worm-eaten, and the lower rail was broken away. Below, the rock shelved down some fifteen feet to the beck-pool, black and oily-looking.
"It's a very dangerous place," he said, half to himself.
"Ay, Mr. Burkett, you're right," interrupted a bent and wizened old woman, tottering forward.
"This be grandmoother, Mr. Burkett," Mrs. Matheson explained. "'Twas grandmoother that see'd him last———"
"Ay, Mr. Burkett," the old woman began in a high, tremulous treble. "When I went fer to fill t' jug fer Maggie he was a-settin' on't' steps there playin' with t' kitten, an' he called after me, 'Nanny!' quite happy-like; but I took na notice, but jest went on fer t' water. I shawed Mr. Allison the broken rail last month, when he was gittin' t' rents, and I told him he ought to put it into repair, with all them wee childer playin' all daytime on't' road. Didn't I, Maggie?" Mrs. Matheson assented incoherently. "An' he was very civil-like, was Mr. Allison, and he said he'd hev' it seen to. It's alus that way, Mr. Burkett," the old woman concluded, shaking her head wisely. "Folks wait till some accident occurs, and then they think to bestir themselves."
Alec turned to the mother, and touched her thick, nerveless hand.
"There, there, Mrs. Matheson, don't take on so," he said.
At his touch her sobbing suddenly ceased, and she let her apron fall.
"Will ye na coome inside, Mr. Burkett?" she asked.
And they all three went in together.
The little room had been scrubbed and tidied, and a number of chairs, ranged round the table, blocked the floor.
"We've bin busy all marnin', gitting' things a bit smartened oop for t'inquest. T' coroner's cooming at twelve," the grandmother explained.
"Will ye coome oopstairs, Mr. Burkett—jest—jest to tak' a look at him?" Mrs. Matheson asked in a subdued voice.
Alec followed her, squeezing his burly frame up the narrow, creaking staircase.
The child lay on the clean, white bed. A look of still serenity slept on his pallid face. His tawny curls were smoothed back, and some snowdrops were scattered over the coverlet. All was quite simple.
Mrs. Matheson stood in the doorway, struggling noisily with her sobs.
"It is God's will," Alec said quietly.
"He was turned four last week," she blurted out. "Ye'll excuse me, Mr. Burkett, but I'm that overdone that I jest canna' help myself," and she sank into a chair.
He knelt by the dead child's side and prayed, while the slow rise and fall of the mother's sobs rilled the room. When he rose his eyes were all moist.
"God will help you, if you ask Him. His ways are secret. We cannot understand His purpose. But have faith in Him. He has done it for the best," he said.
"Ay, I know, I know, Mr. Burkett. But ye see he was the youngest, and that bonny———"
"Let me try to comfort you," he said.
******
When they came downstairs again, her face was calmer and her voice steadier. The coroner, a dapper man with a bright-red tie, was taking off his gloves and macintosh; the room was fast filling with silent figures, and the old grandmother was hobbling to and fro with noisy, excited importance.
"Will ye na' stay for t' inquest?"
Alec shook his head. "No, I can't stop now. I have a School-board meeting to go to. But I will come up this afternoon."
"Thank'ee, Mr. Burkett, God bless thee," said Mrs. Matheson.
He shook hands with the coroner, who was grumbling concerning the weather; then strode out back down the valley.
Though long since he had grown familiar with the aspects of suffering, that scene in the cottage, by reason of its very simplicity, had affected him strangely. His heart was full of slow sorrow for the woman's trouble, and the image of the child, lying beautiful in its death-sleep, passed and repassed in his mind.
By-and-bye, the moaning of the wind, the whirling of lost leaves, the inky shingle-beds that stained the fell-sides, inclined his thoughts to a listless brooding.
Life seemed dull, inevitable, draped in sombre, drifting shadows, like the valley-head. Yet in all good he saw the hand of God, a mysterious, invisible force, ever imperiously at work beneath the ravages of suffering and of sin.
It was close upon six o'clock when he reached home. He was drenched to the skin, and as he sat before the fire, dense clouds of steam rose from his mud-stained boots and trousers.
"Now, Mr. Burkett, jest ye gang and tak off them things, while I make yer tea. Ye'll catch yer death one of these days—I know ye will. I sometimes think ye haven't more sense than a boy, traipsin' about all t' day in't' wet, and niver takin' yer meals proper-like."
A faint smile flickered across his face. He was used to his landlady's scoldings.
"A child was drowned yesterday in the beck up at Beda Cottages. I had to go back there this afternoon to arrange about the funeral," he mumbled, half-apologetically.
Mrs. Parkin snorted defiantly, bustling round the table as she spread the cloth. Presently she broke out again:
"An' noo, ye set there lookin' as white as a bogle. Why don't ye go an' git them wet clothes off. Ye're fair wringin'."
He obeyed; though the effort to rise was great. He felt curiously cold: his teeth were clacking, and the warmth from the flames seemed delicious.
In his bedroom a dizziness caught him, and it was a moment before he could recognise the familiar objects. And he realised that he was ill, and looked at himself in the glass with a dull, scared expression. He struggled through his dressing however, and went back to his tea. But, though he had eaten nothing since the morning, he had no appetite; so, from sheer force of habit, he lit a pipe, wheeling his chair close to the fire.
And, as the heat penetrated him, his thoughts spun aimlessly round the day's events, till these gradually drifted into the background of his mind, as it were, and he and they seemed to have become altogether detached. His forehead was burning, and a drowsy, delicious sense of physical weakness was stealing over his limbs. He was going to be ill, he remembered; and it was with vague relief that he looked forward to the prospect of long days of monotonous inactivity, long days of repose from the daily routine of fatigue. The details of each day's work, the accomplishment of which, before, had appeared so indispensable, now, he felt in his lassitude, had faded to insignificance. Mrs. Parkin was right: he had been overdoing himself; and with a clear conscience he would take a forced holiday in bed. Things in the parish would get along without him till the end of the week. There was only the drowned child's funeral, and, if he could not go, Milner, the neighbouring vicar, would take it for him. His pipe slipped from his hand to the hearthrug noiselessly, and his head sank forward. . . .
He was dreaming of the old churchyard. The trees were rocking their slim, bare arms; drip, drip, drip, the drops pattered on to the tombstones, tight-huddled in the white, wet light of the moon; the breath of the old churchyard tasted warm and moist, like the reek of horses after a long journey.
The child's funeral was finished. Mrs. Matheson had cried noisily into her apron; the mourners were all gone now; and alone, he sat down on the fresh-dug grave. By the moonlight he tried to decipher the names carved on the slabs; but most of the letters had faded away, and moss-cushions had hidden the rest. Then he found it—"George Matheson, aged four years and five days," and underneath were carved Mrs. Matheson's words: "He was the bonniest boy in all the parish." He sat on, with the dread of death upon him, the thought of that black senselessness ahead, possessing him, so sudden, so near, so intimate, that it seemed entirely strange to have lived on, forgetful of it. By- and-bye, he saw her coming towards him—Ethel, like a figure from a picture, wearing a white dress that trailed behind her, a red rose pinned at the waist, and the old smile on her lips. And she came beside, him, and told him how her husband had gone away for ever, and he understood at once that he and she were betrothed again, as it had been five years ago. He tried to answer her, but somehow the words would not come; and, as he was striving to frame them, there came a great crash. A bough clattered down on the tombstones; and with a start he awoke.
A half-burned coal was smoking in the fender. He felt as if he had been sleeping for many hours.
He fell to stupidly watching the red-heat, as it pulsed through the caves of coal, to imagining himself climbing their ashen mountain-ridges, across dark defiles, up the face of treacherous precipices. . . .
Hundreds of times, here, in this room, in this chair, before this fire, he had sat smoking, picturing the old scenes to himself, musing of Ethel Fulton (Ethel Winn she had been then; but, after her marriage, he had forced himself to think of her as bearing her husband's name—that was a mortification from which he had derived a sort of bitter satisfaction). But now, with the long accumulation of his solitude—five years he had been vicar of Scarsdale—he had grown so unconscious of self, so indifferent to the course of his own existence, that every process of his mind had, from sheer lack of external stimulation, stagnated, till, little by little, the growth of mechanical habit had come to mould its shape and determine its limitations. And hence, not for a moment had he ever realised the grip that this habit of sentimental reminiscence had taken on him, nor the grotesque extent of its futile repetition. Such was the fervour of his attitude towards his single chapter of romance.
Five years ago, she and he had promised their lives to one another. And the future had beckoned them onward, gaily, belittling every obstacle in its suffusion of glad, alluring colour. He was poor: he had but his curate's stipend, and she was used to a regular routine of ease. But he would have tended her wants, waiting on her, watching over her, indefatigably; chastening all the best that was in him, that he might lay it at her feet. And together, hand in hand, they would have laboured in God's service. At least so it seemed to him now.
Then had come an enforced separation; and later, after a prolonged, unaccountable delay, a letter from her explaining, in trite, discursive phrases, how it could never be—it was a mistake—she had not known her own mind—now she could see things clearer—she hoped he would forgive and forget her.
A wild determination to go at once to her, to plead with her, gripped him; but for three days he was helpless, bound fast by parish duties. And when at last he found himself free, he had already begun to perceive the hopelessness of such an errand, and, with crushed and dogged despair, to accept his fate as irrevocable.
In his boyhood—at the local grammar-school, where his ugliness had made him the butt of his class, and later, at an insignificant Oxford college, where, to spare his father, whose glebe was at the time untenanted, he had set himself grimly to live on an impossibly slender allowance—at every turn of his life, he had found himself at a disadvantage with his fellows. Thus he had suffered much, dumbly—meekly many would have said—without a sign of resentment, or desire for retaliation. But all the while, in his tenacious, long-suffering way, he was stubbornly inuring himself to an acceptance of his own disqualifications. And so, once rudely awakened from his dream of love, he wondered with heavy curiosity at his faith in its glamorous reality, and, remembering the tenour of his life, suffered bitterly like a man befooled by his own conceit.
Some months after the shattering of his romance, the rumour reached him that James Fulton, a prosperous solicitor in the town, was courting her. The thing was impossible, a piece of idle gossip, he reasoned with himself. Before long, however, he heard it again, in a manner that left no outlet for doubt.
It seemed utterly strange, unaccountable, that she, whose eager echoing of all his own spiritual fervour and enthusiasm for the work of the Church still rang in his ears, should have chosen a man, whose sole talk had seemed to be of dogs and of horses, of guns and of game; a man thick-minded, unthinking, self-complacent; a man whom he himself had carelessly despised as devoid of any spark of spirituality.
And, at this moment, when the first smartings of bitter bewilderment were upon him, the little living of Scarsdale fell vacant, and his rector, perhaps not unmindful of his trouble, suggested that he should apply for it.
The valley was desolate and full of sombre beauty; the parish, sparsely-peopled but extensive; the life there would be monotonous, almost grim, with long hours of lonely brooding. The living was offered to him. He accepted it excitedly.
And there, busied with his new responsibilities, throwing himself into the work with a suppressed, ascetic ardour, news of the outside world reached him vaguely, as if from afar.
He read of her wedding in the local newspaper: later, a few trite details of her surroundings; and then, nothing more.
But her figure remained still resplendent in his memory, and, as time slipped by, grew into a sort of gleaming shrine, incarnating for him all the beauty of womanhood. And gradually, this incarnation grew detached, as it were, from her real personality, so that, when twice a year he went back to spend Sunday with his old rector, to preach a sermon in the parish church, he felt no shrinking dread lest he should meet her. He had long ceased to bear any resentment against her, or to doubt that she had done what was right. The part that had been his in the little drama seemed altogether of lesser importance.
***** All night he lay feverishly tossing, turning his pillow aglow with heat, from side to side; anxiously reiterating whole incoherent conversations and jumbled incidents.
At intervals, he was dimly conscious of the hiss of wind-swept leaves outside, and of rain-gusts rattling the window-panes; and later, of the sickly light of early morning streaking the ceiling with curious patterns. By-and-bye, he dropped into a fitful sleep, and forgot the stifling heat of his bed.
Then the room had grown half full of daylight, and Mrs. Parkin was there, fidgetting with the curtains. She said something which he did not hear, and he mumbled that he had slept badly, and that his head was aching.
Some time later—how long he did not know—she appeared again, and a man, whom he presently understood to be a doctor, and who put a thermometer, the touch of which was deliciously cool, under his armpit, and sat down at the table to write. Mrs. Parkin and he talked in whispers at the foot of the bed: they went away; Mrs. Parkin brought him a cup of beef-tea and some toast; and then he remembered only the blurred memories of queer, unfinished dreams.
Consciousness seemed to return to him all of a sudden; and, when it was come, he understood dimly that, somehow, the fatigue of long pain was over, and he tasted the peaceful calm of utter lassitude.
He lay quite still, his gaze following Mrs. Parkin, as she moved to and fro across the room, till it fell on a basket-full of grapes that stood by the bedside. They were unfamiliar, inexplicable; they puzzled him; and for awhile he feebly turned the matter over in his mind. Presently she glanced at him, and he lifted his hand towards the basket.
"Would ye fancy a morsel o' fruit noo? 'Twas Mrs. Fulton that sent 'em," she said.
She held the basket towards him, and he lifted a bunch from it. They were purple grapes, large and luscious-looking. Ethel had sent them. How strange that was! For an instant he doubted if he were awake, and clutched the pillow to make sure that it was real.
"Mrs. Fulton sent them?" he repeated.
"Ay, her coachman came yesterday in't' forenoon to inquire how ye were farin', and left that fruit for ye. Ay, Mr. Burkett, but ye've had a mighty quantity o' callers. Most all t' parish has been askin for news o' ye. An' that poor woman from t' factory cottages has been doon forenoon and night."
"How long have I been in bed?" he asked after a pause.
"Five days and five nights. Ye've bin nigh at death's door, ravin' and moanin' like a madman. But, noo, I must'na keep ye chatterin'. Ye should jest keep yeself quiet till t' doctor coomes. He'll be mighty surprised to find ye so much improved, and in possession of yer faculties."
And she left him alone.
He lay staring at the grapes, while excitement quickened every pulse. Ethel had sent them—they were from Ethel—Ethel had sent them through his brain, to and fro, boisterously, the thought danced. And then, he started to review the past, dispassionately, critically, as if it were another man's; and soon, every detail, as he lingered on it, seemed to disentangle itself, till it all achieved a curious simplification. The five years at Scarsdale became all blurred: they resembled an eventless waste-level, through which he had been mechanically trudging. But the other day, it seemed, he was with her—he and she betrothed to one another. A dozen scenes passed before his eyes: with a flush of hot, intolerable shame, he saw himself, clumsy, uncouth, devoid of personal charm, viewing her bluntly, selfishly through the cumbrous medium of his own Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/221 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/222 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/223 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/224 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/225 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/226 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/227 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/228 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/229 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/230 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/231 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/232 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/233 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/234 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/235 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/236 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/237 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/238 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/239 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/240 Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/241