The White Riband.
by Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse.
Prologue
That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy"s drawing-rooms; for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young female--less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even an improper motive--one of those over-powering pa.s.sions one reads about rather surrept.i.tiously in the delightful works of that dear, naughty, departed Lord Byron--would have been somehow more ...
more ... satisfactory. One could only whisper such a sentiment, but it stirred in many a feminine breast when Loveday"s story set the ripples of reprobation circling some twenty miles, till the incomparably bigger pebble of the Prince of Wales" nuptials made correspondingly greater waves, even though they took a month or so to spread all its fascinating details so far from the Metropolis. What, after all, as a topic of conversation, was Loveday"s ill-gotten gaud compared with the thrill of the new Alexandra jacket with its pegtop sleeves? One should hold a right proportion in all things.
Thus the duchy"s drawing-rooms. In the back parlours of the little country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own respectable--and respectful--way, held its courts of justice, Loveday"s story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws of G.o.d and the British Const.i.tution.
In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday descended lower still--she became a "f.a.ggot." Thus from one born to wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever terms, fit the due warning on to her tale.
And this moral, for all who ran, but more particularly for those who danced, to read, was as follows:--
It all came of wanting things above your station.
"How simply does your s.e.x dispose of the problems of life, ma"am,"
replied Mr. Constantine to Miss Flora Le Pett.i.t, the heiress of Ignores Manor, when she supplied him with this moral as an epitaph oh the affair. Miss Le Pett.i.t smiled on him amiably, but arched her already springing brows as well, for though everyone knew Mr. Constantine was reputed clever, there were the gravest doubts about his orthodoxy.
"Problems of life, Mr. Constantine?" she demanded. "Surely over-fine words to apply to the crazy acts of a village girl deranged in her intellects." She would have added: "And a nameless one at that," if she had not remembered (what, in truth, she was never in danger of forgetting) that she was a lady talking to a gentleman.
"A village girl is as capable of pa.s.sion as you or I," replied he, and had he not remembered (what he was somewhat apt to forget) that he was a gentleman talking to a lady, he would have added: "And a great deal more so than you." Miss Le Pett.i.t, who considered that he _had_ forgotten it, gave the little movement known as "bridling," which reared her ringletted head a trifle higher on her white shoulders, then decided to front the obnoxious word bravely as a woman of the world. She had met with it chiefly in books where it was used solely to denote anger.
There had been, for instance, the tale of "Henry: or, the Fatal Effect of Pa.s.sion." ... Henry had slain a school-fellow in his rage, and had been duly hanged; yet something told Miss Le Pett.i.t that was not how Mr. Constantine was using the word.... She rose to it splendidly.
"Pa.s.sion ... and pray where do you find such a thing in this story of the vanity of a child of fifteen?"
"In the usual place, ma"am," said Mr. Constantine (now entirely forgetting that which Miss Le Pett.i.t ever remembered)--"in her soul.
Did you think it merely a thing of the body? The body may be the objective of pa.s.sion, but the quality itself is what is meant by the word. It is generated in the soul and may pour itself into strange vessels."
"Or even shower its ardours upon a piece of white riband?" cried Miss Le Pett.i.t, with a t.i.tter.
"Shall we say upon Beauty itself?" corrected Mr. Constantine more gravely than he had yet spoken. Then, with a smile, he elaborated: "For as pa.s.sion is in the soul, so is beauty in the heart, and hearts have differing vision. That was Loveday"s desire. Translate this paltry thing into terms of other ambitions--and where is any one of us then?
Unless, indeed, we are so bloodless, so without imagination, that we cannot but be content with our lot just as it is."
Miss Le Pett.i.t, who had never seen reason for anything but contentment, and looked upon it as a Christian virtue, demurred with:--
"The whole affair is so ridiculously out of proportion."
Mr. Constantine glanced, with admiration in his gallant though elderly eye, over Miss Le Pett.i.t"s figure as she lay back in the gilt chair; glanced from her high, polished forehead, round which the smooth chestnut hair showed as gleaming, from her parted red lips and bare, sloping shoulders to her tiny waist and the outward spring beneath it of the clouded tulle that lapped in a dozen baby waves over the globe of her swelling crinoline.
"When I was a young man," he said, "the ladies went about in little robes, such as you would not wear nowadays as a shift. We thought them pretty then, and thought none the worse of them because they made the women look more or less as G.o.d saw fit to make "em. Yet now we think you equally lovely as you float about the world like monstrous beautiful bubbles, so that a man must adore at a distance and only guess at Paradise in a gust of wind.... Yet to the next generation, believe me or not as you like, your garb will seem too preposterous to be true, and a generation later Time will pay you the unkindest cut of all--you will be picturesque, and your grand-daughters will revive you--for fancy dress.
Proportion, ma"am, is nothing in the world but fashion."
"Now we are talking about something I know more about than you, Mr.
Constantine," cried Miss Le Pett.i.t archly, "and I, for one, do not believe that the present style of dress can ever go completely out; it is too becoming. We shall have novelties, of course, but the idea will remain the same. And, talking of novelties, if you don"t scorn such things, I will tell you a great secret. I am the first person to procure one of the new jackets--like the Princess of Wales wears, you know.
You must have heard about them. Alexandra jackets they"re called. Isn"t that pretty? And they"re just as pretty as she is. The sleeve...."
And thus the great description flowed on, with a bevy of entranced girls, who had caught the raised tone, fluttering round in excitement like a crowd of b.u.t.terflies round a blossom of extra sweetness.
From which it will be seen that a month had already pa.s.sed since Loveday had been the excitement of society, and that this conversation between the eccentric Mr. Constantine and the charming Miss Le Pett.i.t was almost the last flickering of interest in her fate. The life of one moon had been enough to see the waxing and waning of what Mr. Constantine had surprisingly called her pa.s.sion.
Yet Miss Le Pett.i.t, eager, nay, even anxious, as she had been to lead the gentleman away from the topic, reverted to it as though by a curious fascination, when he had taken his leave. To tell the truth, her conscience had some slight cause to make her uneasy on this very subject of the violent Loveday. The thing was ridiculous, of course ...
she, Miss Le Pett.i.t, could not conceivably have been even remotely to blame for such a fantastical happening, and yet that slight p.r.i.c.king remained....
"An odd word to have used," she commented, in recounting the conversation she had had with Mr. Constantine to her eager friends, "a very odd word, indeed, for by it, apparently, he did not mean an access of anger such as the word signifies in all the books I have read...."
"You mean in the books that you are _supposed_ to have read, Flora," interrupted one of the young ladies, a flighty girl, whose tongue often outran her discretion. "I have come across it meaning something quite different in books like--well, you know the sort of books I mean."
"I do not think, though, that even _that_ was how Mr. Constantine used the word," replied Flora, with more of discernment than she commonly showed, "though I will not pretend to you, Ellen, that I do not recognise the sense in which you refer to it. To be candid, I don"t think I know what he did mean, but he seemed to me to be paying a vast deal of attention to the matter, which surprised me in a person of his standing."
"I have heard he is a man of much sensibility, though he is so satirical," murmured the romantic Emilia, bending over her netting so that her ebon curls shaded her suddenly flushing cheek.
"Perhaps he knows more about the fair Loveday than we have guessed,"
cried the careless Ellen; "perhaps he knows _too_ much, and cannot keep away from the subject for his guilty conscience, as they say murderers are drawn back to the spot where they have buried the body of their victim!"
But this was too gross a departure from delicacy of thought and phrase, and Miss Le Pett.i.t, the p.r.i.c.k stirring, perchance, signified as much by the cold manner in which she brought back the conversation to the more correct and really more enthralling subject of the Alexandra jacket.
It was generally agreed that Miss Belben, of Bugletown, could not go far wrong with the sleeves if Flora would be so infinitely good as to lend her jacket for a copy, and this favour she accorded graciously to her dear friend, Emilia.
Mr. Constantine walked down the windy hill with his mind already clear both of Loveday and the elegant company in which he had been taking tea.
He was, above all things, a philosopher, and that means that, though his imagination was easily touched, his heart remained unstirred, He had serious thoughts of ordering a new cabriolet, and on arriving at the market place, he turned into the coachbuilder"s to renew the discussion as to whether red or canary yellow were the more fashionable hue for the wheels.
CHAPTER I: IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT OF TIME, AND DOWN SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE
Chapter I
IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT OF TIME, AND DOWN SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE
It was on a balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le Pett.i.t. Loveday had gone to fetch the milk. For Loveday"s aunt, Senath Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant, soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare. Mercifully, for Loveday, though she appeared sullen, had ever more sensibility than was good for one in her position, and each time Aunt Senath was forced to sell the cow, Loveday behaved as though she had as good a right to sit and cry herself silly as any young lady with whom nothing was more urgent than to spoil fine cambric with salt water.
This, then, was a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her ap.r.o.n over the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was hurt rather than angered by the unkind action, for there was a reason, connected with Primrose, why she had felt a tender curiosity as to what the two girls were guarding so closely. Yet she was aware of bitterness also--for it was ever so when she appeared. Maids ceased their gossip, boys laughed and pointed after her. She was "different."
Not in being a love-child, there were plenty of them in the village, but their parents generally married later, and even if they did not, then the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women about whom other people talk so much.... She would live by the harbour plying a trade which allowed her to have a love-child or so without it being an occasion for undue remark, or, if she did not descend to those depths where no one expects anything better and censure consequently ceases through ineffectiveness, then at least everyone knew the author of her fall to be an honest, loutish Englishman, no worse than most of his neighbours.
Loveday was without either of these two rights to existence. Her mother had been a respectable girl till her fall, and, as far as anyone was aware, since, for she had died of the fruit of her guilty connection, and though her portion was doubtless h.e.l.l-fire, there is nothing to show that one cannot keep respectable even under such disquieting circ.u.mstances. The elder Loveday had clung obstinately to her self-respect under circ.u.mstances which her neighbours had tried to render nearly as trying on earth. She had died, as she had lived, impenitent and only crying for the foreigner who had seduced her, while he was then lying, had she but known it, in the lap of his first mistress, the sea, who, perhaps from jealousy at his straying, had taken him forcibly into her embrace on the same night that Loveday the younger was born.
Old Madgy, the midwife, who was also more than suspected of being somewhat of a witch, declared that the expectant mother _did_ know it--that she had been made aware, through a supernatural happening, of the loss of her lover, and that that was why the babe saw the light in such undue haste, and the mother took her departure almost as swiftly to that place where alone she could ever hope to rejoin him. For, as evening drew on, Madgy, having called to see how Loveday did, though nothing was thought of yet for a clear week, found her in the dairy (the Stricks had not yet fallen on that poverty which came to their roof under Aunt Senath"s shrewish management) standing as one wisht beside the great red earthen pan of scalded cream.
"And "ee can b"lieve me or no as it like "ee, my dears," old Madgy would say to many a breathless circle in a farm kitchen during the intervals of her duties overstairs, "but there was the cream in the pan a-heavin"
up an" down in gurt waves, like a rough sea, and her staring at "en like one stricken, as she was poor sawl, sure enough. Eh, it was sent for a sign to her, and a true sign, for that avenen" her man was drowned on his way to her, with his fine cargo of oil and onions and all. And there was the cream heavin" in waves for a sign of the rough seas that took him, though wi" us the skies was fair and the water in the bay as smooth as silk."