CHAPTER IX
"Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill?"
RUPERT BROOKE.
I do not think you have ever heard of the little village of Riff in Lowshire, Reader, unless you were born and bred in it as I was. If you were, you believe of course that it is the centre of the world. But if you were not, it is possible you may have overlooked it in your scheme of life, or hurried past it in the train reading a novel, not even looking out as I have done a hundred times to catch a glimpse of it lying among its water meadows behind the willows.
But unless you know exactly where to look you can only catch a momentary glimpse, because the Rieben with its fringe of willows makes a half-circle round Riff and guards it from inquisitive eyes.
Parallel with the Rieben, but half a mile away from it on higher ground, runs the great white high road from London to Yarmouth. And between the road and the river lies the village of Riff. But you cannot see it or even the top of its church tower from the road, because the park of Hulver Manor comes in between, stretching in long leafy glades of oak and elm and open sward, and hiding the house in its midst, the old Tudor house which has stood closed and shuttered so long, ever since Mr.
Manvers died.
When at last the park comes to an end, a deep lane breaks off from the main road, and pretending that it is going nowhere in particular and that time would be lost in following it, edges along like a homing cat beside the park wall in the direction of Riff, skirting a gate and a cl.u.s.ter of buildings, _laiterie_, barn and dovecot, which are all you can see of Red Riff Farm from the lane. I point it out to you as we pa.s.s, for we shall come back there later on. Riff is much nearer than you think, for the ground is always falling a little towards the Rieben, which is close at hand though invisible also.
And between the park and the river lies the hidden village of Riff.
You come upon it quite suddenly at the turn of the lane, with its shallow ford, and its pink-plastered cottages sprinkled among its high trees, and its thatched Vicarage, and "The Hermitage" with the honeysuckle over the porch, and the almshouses near the great Italian gates of Hulver Manor, and somewhat apart in its walled garden among its twisted pines the Dower House where Lady Louisa Manvers was living, poor soul, at the time this story was written.
I have only to close my eyes and I can see it all--can imagine myself sitting with the Miss Blinketts in their little parlour at The Hermitage, with a daguerreotype of the defunct Pere Blinkett over the mantelpiece, and Miss Amy"s soft voice saying, "They do say Lady Louisa"s cook is leaving to be married. But they will say anything at Riff. I never believe more than half I hear."
The Hermitage stood on a little slice of ground which fell away from the lane. So close was The Hermitage to the lane, and the parlour windows were so low, and the lane beyond the palings so high, that the inmates could only guess at the ident.i.ty of the pa.s.sers-by by their legs. And rare guests and rarer callers, arriving in the wagonnette from the Manvers Arms, could actually look into the bedroom windows, while the Miss Blinketts" eyes, peering over the parlour muslins, were fixed upon their lower limbs.
And if I keep my eyes tightly shut and the eyes of memory open, I can see as I sit stroking Miss Blinkett"s cat the legs of the new Vicar pa.s.s up the lane outlined against a lilac skirt. And Miss Amy, who is not a close observer of life, opines that the skirt belongs to Miss Janey Manvers, but Miss Blinkett senior instantly identifies it as Annette"s new spotted muslin, which she had seen Mrs. Nicholls "getting up" last week.
But that was twenty years ago. I can only tell you what Riff was like then, for it is twenty years since I was there, and I am not going there any more, for I don"t want to see any of the changes which time must have wrought there, and if I walked down the village street now I should feel like a ghost, for only a few of the old people would remember me.
And the bright-eyed, tow-headed little lads whom I taught in Sunday school are scattered to the four winds of heaven. The Boer War took some of them, and London has engulfed more, only a few remaining at Riff as sad-looking middle-aged men, farm hands, and hedgers and ditchers, and cowmen.
And I hear that now the motors go banging along the Yarmouth high road day and night, and that Riff actually has a telegraph office of its own and that the wires go in front of The Hermitage, only the Miss Blinketts are not there to see it. A literary lady lives there now, and I hear she has changed the name to "Quill Cottage," and has made a garden in the orchard where old Nan"s cottage was by the twisted pear tree: old Nan the witch, who grew mistletoe in all the trees in her domain, and cured St. Vitus" dance with it. No, I will not go to Riff any more, for I do not want to see any of these things, and least of all the literary lady who is writing her novels in the quiet rooms where my two old friends knitted and read Thomas a Kempis.
Twenty years ago, in the days when my father was doctor at Riff and when Annette came to live there, we could not help noticing--indeed, Mrs.
Nicholls often mentioned it--what a go-ahead place Riff was, far more up to date than Sweet Apple Tree, and even than Meverly Mill. We measured everything in those days by Sweet Apple Tree, and the measurement was always in our favour. We did not talk much about Riebenbridge, where the ""Sizes" were held, and the new ""Sylum" had just been built. We were somewhat awed by Riebenbridge, but poor lag-behind Sweet Apple Tree, lost amid its reeds together with the Rieben, was the subject of sincere pity to the Riff folk. The Sweet Applers, according to Mrs. Nicholls, were "that clunch they might have been brought up in a wood." At Riff everything was cast in a superior and more modern mould. Riff had a postman on a bicycle with an enormous front wheel, and if he brought a letter in the morning you could if necessary post an answer to it the same day in the red slit in the churchyard wall. Now at Sweet Apple Tree the old man in a donkey-cart blowing on a little horn who brought the Sweet Apple letters, took away directly the donkey was rested those which the inhabitants had just composed. And even he did not call if "the water was out."
Before I was born, when the Miss Blinketts were young and crinolined and their father was Vicar of Riff, Sweet Apple Tree, as they have often told me, had no choir, and the old Rector held a service once or twice a year in his Bath chair. After he took to his bed there was no service at all for twenty years. No wonder the Sweet Apple folk were "clunch"! How different from Riff, with its trombone and fiddle inviting the attention of its Creator every Sunday, and Mr. Blinkett, whose watchword was "No popery," preaching in his black gown two sermons a week to the favoured people of Riff.
It was Mr. Jones, Mr. Blinkett"s successor, that lamentable person, meaning well, but according to the Miss Blinketts quite unable to perceive when a parish was worked on the right lines, it was young Mr.
Jones from Oxford, who did not marry either of the Miss Blinketts, but who did put a stop to the trombone and fiddle, and actually brought the choir out of the gallery, and took away the hour-gla.s.s from the south window below the pulpit, and preached in his surplice, and made himself very unpopular by forbidding the congregation to rise to its feet when the Manvers family came into church, almost as unpopular as by stopping the fiddle. You can see the old fiddle still in the cottage of Hesketh the carrier, next the village stocks. His father had played on it, and turned "chapel" when his services were no longer required. And it was young Mr. Jones who actually had the bad taste openly to deplore the saintly Blinkett"s action in demolishing all the upper part of the ancient carved and gilded screen because at eighty he could no longer make his voice heard through it.
It was, of course, Mr. Jones who started the mixed choir sitting in the chancel behind the remains of the screen.
In the last days of the mixed choir, when first Mr. Black came to Riff (after Mr. Jones was made a bishop), Annette sang in it, with a voice that seemed to me, and not to me only, like the voice of an angel.
With the exception of Annette and the under-housemaid from the Dower House, it was mainly composed of admirable domestic characters of portly age--the elite of Riff--supplemented by a small gleaning of deeply virtuous, non-fruit-stealing little boys. We are told nowadays that heredity is nothing. But when I remember how those starched and white-collared juvenile singers were nearly all the offspring of the tenors and ba.s.ses, and of Mrs. Nicholls and Mrs. c.o.c.ks who were trebles, I feel the last word still remains to be said about heredity.
Annette did not sing in it long--not more than a year, I think. It was soon after she left it that Mr. Black--so I am told--started a surpliced choir. And here am I talking about her leaving the choir when I have not yet told you of her arrival in Lowshire, or anything about Red Riff Farm where her two aunts lived, and where Aunt Maria wrote her famous novel, _The Silver Cross_, of which you have of course often heard, and which if you are of a serious turn of mind you have doubtless read and laid to heart.
CHAPTER X
"Nothing is so incapacitating as self-love."
Red Riff Farm stands near the lane, between the village and the high road, presenting its back to all comers with British sang-froid. To approach it you must go up the wide path between the barn and the dovecote on one side, and on the other the long, low _laiterie_ standing above its wall, just able to look at itself in the pool, where the ducks are breaking up its reflection. When you pa.s.s through the narrow iron gateway in the high wall which protects the garden on the north side, the old Jacobean house rises up above you, all built of dim rose-red and dim blue brick, looking benignly out across the meadows over its small enclosed garden which had once been the orchard, in which some of the ancient bent apple trees are still like old pensioners permitted to remain.
When Annette first pa.s.sed through that gateway, the beautiful dim old building with its latticed windows peered at her through a network of apple blossom. But now the apple trees have long since dropped their petals, and you can see the house clearly, with its wavering tiled string courses, and its three rounded gables, and the vine flung half across it.
The low, square oak door studded with nails stands wide open, showing a glimpse of a small panelled hall with a carved black staircase coming down into it.
We need not peer in through the window at the Shakespeare Calendar on Aunt Maria"s study table to see what time of year it is, for everything tells us: the ma.s.ses of white pinks crowding up to the threshold and laying their sweet heads against the stone edging of their domain, the yellow lichen in flower on the roof, the serried ranks of Sweet William full out. It is certainly early June. And the black-faced sheep moving sedately in the long meadows in front of the house confirm us in our opinion, for they have shed their becoming woollen overalls and are straddling about, hideous to behold, in their summer tights. Only the lambs, now large and sedate, keep their pretty February coats, though by some unaccountable fatality they have all, poor dears, lost their tails.
Lowshire is a sedate place. I have never seen those solemn Lowshire lambs jump about as they do in Hampshire. A Hampshire lamb among his contemporaries with the juice of the young gra.s.s in him! Hi! Friskings and caperings! That is a sight to make an old ram young. But the Lowshire lambs seem ever to see the shadow of the blue-coated butcher in the sunshine. They move in decorous bands as if they were going to church, hastening suddenly all together as if they were late.
Lowshire is a sedate place. The farm lads still in their teens move as slowly as the creeping rivers, much slower than the barges. The boys early leave off scurrying in shouting bands down the lanes in the dusk.
The little girls peep demurely over the garden gates, and walk slowly indoors, if spoken to.
We have ascertained that it is early June, and we need no watch to tell us what o"clock it is. It is milking-time, the hour when good little boys "whom mother can trust" are to be seen hurrying in an important manner with milk-cans. Half-past four it must be, for the red cows, sweet-breathed and soft-paced, have pa.s.sed up the lane half an hour ago, looking gently to right and left with l.u.s.trous, nunlike eyes, now and then putting out a large red tongue to lick at the hedgerow. Sometimes, as to-day, the bull precedes them, hustling along, surly, _affaire_, making a low, continuous grunting which is not anger, for he is kind as bulls go, so much as "orkardness," the desire of the egotist to make his discontentment public, and his disillusionment with his pasture and all his gentle-tempered wives.
Annette came down the carved staircase, and stood a moment in the doorway in a pale lilac gown (the same that you will remember the Miss Blinketts saw half an hour later).
Her ear caught the sound of a manly voice mingled with Aunt Maria"s dignified tones, and the somewhat agitated accompaniment of the clink of tea-things. Aunt Harriet was evidently more acutely undecided than usual which cup to fill first, and was rattling them in the way that always irritated Aunt Maria, though she made heroic efforts to dissimulate it.
Annette came to the conclusion that she should probably be late for choir practice if she went into the drawing-room. So she walked noiselessly across the hall and slipped through the garden. A dogcart was standing horseless in the courtyard, and the delighted female laughter which proceeded from the servants" hall showed that a male element in the shape of a groom had been added to the little band of women-servants.
What a fortunate occurrence that there should be a caller!--for on this particular afternoon Aunt Maria had reached a difficult place in her new book, the hero having thrown over his lady-love because she, foolish modernist that she was, toying with her life"s happiness, would not promise to leave off smoking. The depressed auth.o.r.ess needed a change of thought. And it would be pleasant for the whole household if Aunt Harriet"s mind could be diverted from the fact that her new air-cushion leaked; not the old black one, that would not have mattered so much, but the new round red society one which she used when there were visitors in the house. Aunt Harriet"s mind had brooded all day over the air-cushion as mournfully as a hart"s tongue over a well.
Annette hoped it was a cheerful caller. Perhaps it was Canon Wetherby from Riebenbridge, an amiable widower, and almost as great an admirer of Aunt Maria"s works as of his own stock of anecdotes.
In the meanwhile if she, Annette, missed her own lawful tea at home, to which of the little colony of neighbours in the village should she go for a cup, on her way to the church, where choir practice was held?
To the Dower House? Old Lady Louisa Manvers had ceased to come downstairs at all, and her daughter Janey, a few years older than herself, poor downtrodden Janey, would be only too glad to see her. But then her imbecile brother Harry, with his endless copy-book remarks, would be certain to be having tea with her, and Lady Louisa"s trained nurse, whom Annette particularly disliked. No, she would not go to the Dower House this afternoon. She might go to tea with the Miss Blinketts, who were always kind to her, and whose cottage lay between her and the church.
The two Miss Blinketts were about the same age as the Miss Nevills, and regarded them with deep admiration, not unmixed with awe, coupled with an evident hope that a pleasant intercourse might presently be established between The Hermitage and Red Riff Farm. They were indeed quite excited at the advent among them of one so gifted as the author of _Crooks and Coronets_, who they perceived from her books took a very high view of the responsibility created by genius.
Annette liked the Miss Blinketts, and her knowledge of Aunt Maria"s character had led her to hope that this enthusiastic deference might prove acceptable to a wearied auth.o.r.ess in her hours of relaxation. But she soon found that the Miss Nevills with all the prestige of London and a literary _milieu_ resting upon them were indignant at the idea that they could care to a.s.sociate with "a couple of provincial old maids."
Their almost ferocious att.i.tude towards the amiable Miss Blinketts had been a great shock to Annette, who neither at that nor at any later time learned to make the social distinctions which occupied so much of her two aunts" time. The Miss Nevills" acceptance of a certain offering of ferns peeping through the meshes of a string bag brought by the Miss Blinketts, had been so frigid, so patrician, that it had made Annette more friendly than she would naturally have been. She had welcomed the ferns with enthusiasm, and before she had realized it, had become the object of a sentimental love and argus-eyed interest on the part of the inmates of The Hermitage which threatened to have its embarra.s.sing moments.
No, now she came to think of it, she would not go to tea with the Miss Blinketts this afternoon.
Of course, she might go to the Vicarage. Miss Black, the Vicar"s sister who kept house for him, had often asked her to do so before choir practice. But Annette had vaguely felt of late that Miss Black, who had been very cordial to her on her arrival and was still extremely polite, did not regard her with as much favour as at first: in fact, that as Mr.
Black formed a high and ever higher opinion of her, that of his sister was steadily lowered to keep the balance even.
Annette knew what was the matter with Mr. Black, though that gentleman had not yet discovered what it was that was affecting his usually placid temper and causing him on his parochial rounds so frequently to take the short cut past Red Riff Farm.