Yet there seemed to be no living thing in the quiet valley. Sleepily lay the narrow river in its winding channel, marked by twin rows of pollard willows, now green with their first leaves; sleepily lay the thin blue smoke above the far white cottages and the grey churches; sleepily lay the warm sunlight over the ruddy ploughed fields, the green meadows, the dark fir-wood along the top of the hill; and sleepily it struck on the great, gleaming chalk-pit on the side of the incline; while a faint blue haze hung around the dim horizon, half hiding the white specks of houses on the distant uplands. It was a beautiful picture in the tender light of the young spring; but there was no Dove Anerley there.
He looked at his watch.
"Half-past ten," he thought, "and as our church is under repair, she is sure to walk to Woodhill church. But if I go down into the valley, I shall be sure to miss her."
As he spoke, there was visible a tiny speck of grey and brown crossing a broad meadow near the river; and almost at the same moment the subdued and distant music of the church bells floated up on the air. Will Anerley leaped from the coal-heap to the ground; and then straight down the hill he went, making free use of the fields on his way.
He suddenly found that the still valley was full of life, and sound, and gladness; that the morning was a miracle of mornings; that the breath of the sweet spring air seemed laden with the secret odours of innumerable flowers. And, indeed, as he walked on, there was plenty to delight him, even had Dove Anerley not been there. For the lamblike March had bequeathed to his fickle sister a legacy of golden weather, and she now carried it in her open hand, sharing it with all of us. The orchards were white with bloom, here and there a rose-red apple-tree among the snowy bunches of the pears; the meadows were thick with daisies and cowslips, the grey sheep throwing sharp black shadows on the glowing green; the tall elms, sprinkled over with young leaves, rose from rough and ragged earth banks that were covered with withered brier, and glistening celandine, dull coltsfoot, and ruddy dead-nettle; the stately chesnuts had burst their resinous buds and were already showing brown spikes of closed flowers; along the hedges, where the blackbird was nursing her young, and the thrush sitting on her second nestful of blue eggs, the blossoms of the blackthorn sparkled here and there like white stars among the rich, thick green of the elm; and through all these colours and lights and shadows ran, and hummed, and sung the coa.r.s.e cawing of rooks, the murmur of bees, the splashing of the river down at the mill, and the silvery music of a lark which hung as if suspended by a thread from the cold, clear blue above.
St. Mary-Kirby was just visible and no more. You could see the quaint old mill down by the riverside, and near it an ancient farm-house, with black cattle and horses in the yard, and white pigeons flying about the rusty-red tiles of the farm buildings. Further up, the old grey church, built of "Kentish rag," shone brightly in the sunshine; and then, among the trees, you caught a glimpse of the cottages, of Mr. Anerley"s house, fronting the village-green, and of the old inn with its swaying sign.
There is not in Kent a more thoroughly English village than St.
Mary-Kirby; and one, at least, of its inhabitants used to pray fervently every Sunday morning that no railway should ever come near its precincts.
When Will Anerley reached the bottom of the valley, he found a number of St. Mary-Kirby people walking in isolated groups, towards Woodhill church; but one only of these people had chosen a somewhat circuitous route through the meadows lying on the south side of the river. Why she had chosen this route was probably known only to herself; but, at any rate, Will paused by the side of a stile to which the path through the meadows led. He had recognised from a considerable distance the slate-grey silk dress and brown velvet jacket which she wore; and now, as he watched her coming along, he saw that she, too, had recognised him, and that there was a pleased look in her eyes.
"Why did you come this way?" he asked, as she drew near.
"Because I thought I should meet you," she replied, with a frank smile.
He helped her up and down the rude wooden steps, and as she alit upon the other side she suffered him to touch her cheek with his lips.
"Good morning, Dove."
"Good morning, Will. I made up my mind to scold you dreadfully; and all the way over from St. Mary I have been thinking what I should say to you; and now I haven"t it in my heart to say a single word."
"Heaght" for "heart," she said, and "woghd" for "word;" and there was a quaint softness in this purring, half-foreign p.r.o.nunciation which made her utterances all the more tender, and seemed to harmonize with the childlike prettiness of the large violet eyes set in the delicate face, which was surrounded by crisp and wavy light-brown hair.
"That"s a good girl," he said; and then she put her hand on his arm, and they walked away between the green hedges, towards Woodhill Church.
It was at a concert in St. James"s Hall that I first saw Dove Anerley; and while the people sang "Athalie," I sate and wondered what was the story written on that beautiful, almost sad face. It was one of those rare faces which tantalize you in the very act of admiring them. There was nothing in it of that mature, vigorous, definite beauty of form and complexion which a man may calmly observe and criticise in the face of a woman; but a tender uncertainty, a half-suggested and shrinking loveliness, which made one vaguely conscious that this frail and beautiful smile of nature might suddenly vanish from the fine features.
It was not that the girl seemed unwell, or even in any degree fragile; but simply that one, in looking at her face, could not help regretting that her loveliness was not less delicate and more p.r.o.nounced, that there was not more life and less sensitiveness in her large violet eyes.
How beautiful she looked that evening! The pa.s.sionate music seemed to have called up a flush upon her bright complexion, and lent some strange wistfulness to her big eyes; and then, when she turned to her companions and smiled, her pretty mouth and nut-white teeth might have driven a painter mad. Indeed, I know of at least one artist then present who forgot all about Mendelssohn in trying so to fix her expression on his memory that he might afterwards reproduce it on canvas-her expression, her face, and the loose golden-brown hair bound down by a band of dark-blue velvet. It was two years afterwards that accident threw me in the way of the Anerleys. I had never forgotten the meaning apparently written on that sensitive face; but Dove"s story, as I then heard it, differed entirely from what I had imagined.
"Why have you come alone this morning?" said Will Anerley to his companion, as they walked.
"You know papa never goes to church," said the young girl. "And mamma has never gone to hear Mr. Oldham since he spoke to her about the Athanasian creed. I suppose you did not hear about that since you came home?"
"No," said Will; though he had an idea why his mother-whom Dove had also been taught to call "mamma"-feared the Athanasian creed.
"You know," continued the girl, very seriously, "how anxious mamma is because papa won"t go to church, and because of his studies and the strange things he says at times; and sometimes she gets very sad about it. It is the only thing she is ever sad about; and when I tell her that there can"t be much wrong in what so good a man believes, she only gets the sadder, and sometimes cries a little bit. Well, this Sunday morning she and I were talking about it all the way to church, and she was very much disturbed. I don"t think she had ever paid any attention to the Athanasian creed before; but on that morning, Mr. Oldham read it, and I saw her look strangely at him and at the book. Then all at once her face got quite white, she shut the book, and without a word to me walked out of the church and went straight home."
"And I suppose my father laughed a little, and tried to make her believe that he had already constructed some theoretical fire-escape from the dangers with which he was threatened?"
"Mr. Oldham came over next day to call upon mamma, and he was talking very seriously to her, and making her very miserable-indeed, she was crying nearly all the time-when papa came into the room."
"Oh-was it by the door that Mr. Oldham left?"
"What do you mean? Papa stood there, with that curious smile he has on his face when he puzzles and perplexes people, you know; and in a few minutes Mr. Oldham was in a terrible rage. I remember distinctly one thing papa said. "Mr. Oldham," he said, with a sort of twinkle in his eye, "I am not surprised that you have the Athanasian creed in your service; for clergymen, like other men, must be allowed the use of bad language occasionally. But you should indulge yourself privately, and not frighten women when they go to pray in your church.""
"How very wicked of him! But then, Dove, Mr. Oldham belongs to the next parish; and he had no business to go poaching on Mr. Bexley"s manor."
"And so very anxious she is about you also, Will. She is sometimes very sad about papa; but she can"t help seeing what a good man he is. She says to me that you are young, and that if you grow up to believe what he believes, you may not be quite the same-you know, dear, that is only a feeling she has."
"Who wouldn"t be orthodox to please such a mother?" said Will.
"And I, too," said the girl, with a touch of colour in her cheek, and in rather a lower voice, "I should be grieved to think that-that-that you did not care about going to church, and that you did not believe as we do."
"What should have made you think about all these things?" asked Anerley, with some astonishment.
"Well, when you wrote to us from Ja.s.sy, saying you were coming home, mamma came to papa and begged him to lock up all those dangerous books he is so fond of. "My dear," he said to her, "Will knows more about such matters than I know; for he has breathed the new atmosphere of these new times, whereas I have nothing to help me but reading." Is it true, Will?"
"Is what true? I tell you, darling, I will be whatever you wish me to be; so don"t distress your mind about it."
It was their arrival at the church-door which stopped this conversation.
They entered, and seated themselves in a tall, damp pew, while a small organ was sending its smooth and solemn notes through the hushed little building.
They were not "engaged," these two; but themselves and everybody connected with them looked forward to their marriage as a matter of course. Dove Anerley was the daughter of a distant relative of Mrs.
Anerley"s, who had gladly escaped from a variety of misfortunes by the easy gateway of death; and Mr. Anerley had adopted the child, brought her up, and grown pa.s.sionately fond of her. He was a man of very peculiar notions, which had earned for him among the vulgar the charitable t.i.tle of atheist and materialist; and so this dangerous and wicked person sat down one day before his son, when the young man had come home from college, and said to him:
"Attend to what I am going to say, Will. You have a good prospect before you: you have a sound const.i.tution, a tolerable education, and plenty of natural ability. I am not going to spoil your chances in life by letting you fancy that you will have any money at my death-do you understand? I will start you in any profession you choose; thereafter you must fight your own battle, as befits a man; and whatever I leave will go to your mother and to Dove. If you were a fool, I should make some provision for you; as it is, I won"t."
"Why, you don"t suppose, father, I would rob either Dove or my mother of anything you could give them?"
That was all that pa.s.sed between the two men on the subject; and in time it came to be regarded as a matter of course that Dove Anerley was to inherit whatever wealth her foster-father should leave behind him, irrespective of the provision for his widow. Had Will Anerley stayed at home, and been accustomed to regard Dove as his sister, he would never have thought of marrying her. But even in his boyhood he had been of a singularly active and inquiring character; always anxious to study new subjects, new scenes, new faces; never satisfied with any achievement as an ultimate result; and so, his apprenticeship completed, instead of hiring himself out as an a.s.sistant to the engineer of some railway or other company, and spending a dull life in a dingy office, he threw himself boldly upon the world, and went up and down, acquiring such knowledge as no man can gain by the study of books. Nor was it only in professional directions that his inquiries extended! He had caught what is called "the spirit" of these times; was full of vague idealisms, particularly of a philanthropic kind; and was moved by a restless desire to trace back to first principles the commonest conditions of modern existence. That is a phase through which most young men who read books pa.s.s. Now and again only do we find a man of sufficient strength of character to preserve those gentle tendencies against the rough wear and tear of travel and its consequent experience. Great, therefore, was his delight to have a profession which allowed him to move freely about; and wherever he went the tender remembrance of Dove Anerley went with him.
As for her, she had never taken any pains to conceal from anybody her fondness for him-a fondness which had grown to be a part of her life.
He was mixed up in all the finest aspirations, he was the creator of all the n.o.blest idealisms, of her too delicately sensitive organization. In that supreme religious exaltation which is produced by fine music, by earnest prayer, or by a beautiful sunset, his was the human face towards which, unconsciously to herself, she looked for the divine sympathy and compa.s.sion which in such moments man begs from the Deity. Even now, as they stood in the old oaken pew, and as she sang sweetly and clearly that tenderest of hymns-
"Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide!
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me!"
-was she guilty of any great crime in involuntarily making him the object of that impa.s.sioned cry? Her love was her religion, her religion her love; she knew not how to distinguish between them, and like the old Romans had but one word to describe this holiest feeling of her nature.
"Now, Will," she said, cheerfully, as the people streamed out of the close little building into the sweet-smelling air, "let us have a nice long walk through Woodhill Wood on our way home; it is covered with flowers just now; and then you will tell me why you did not come down last night. Everybody expected you, and dinner was as dull as it could be without you. The Hepburns were over, you know, and Mr. Drysdale, and they came half an hour too soon and sate in the drawing-room, and talked of nothing but the number of breeding partridges, and the condition of the trout, and how they hoped the orchards wouldn"t suffer by this early hot weather. Only big John Hepburn-who does nothing in the world but shoot and go to hounds, you know-made papa laugh very much by stretching his long legs, yawning, and saying disconsolately, "Ah, yes, Mr.
Anerley, we"re getting into the dreary summer months." He couldn"t understand why papa laughed, and said he had made no joke he was aware of."
By this time they had walked through the tall green gra.s.s of the churchyard, had clambered up the hill a bit, and left the warm sunshine for the cool shade of the wood. Only here and there did the sunlight glimmer down through the dense forest of young oak and birch; but there was no need of sunlight to make that tangled carpeting of moss and gra.s.s and wild-flowers any the brighter. All around them, and as far as they could see down the glades between the trees, the earth was thick with anemones and great cl.u.s.ters of primroses, here and there a few wild hyacinths among patches of tenderly veined wood-sorrel, and everywhere the blush-coloured cuckoo-flower with its coronet of pale pink buds.
Hushed and still the place was, except when a jay went screaming from one tall tree to another, or some cawing rook flew past through the width of fleecy blue and white overhead.
"I stayed in town, then, Dove, to go to a little supper, and there I met Miss Brunel."
"The actress whom everybody is talking about?"
"Yes."
"You met her privately?"
"Yes; why should that astonish you?"