Chapter Twenty Seven
An Act of Common Humanity
”… And now thy pardon, friend,
For thou hast ever answered courteously,
And wholly bold thou art, and meek withal
As any of Arthur’s best
… I marvel what thou art.”
“Damsel,” he said, “ye be not all to blame,
… Ye said your say;
Mine answer was my deed. Good sooth! I hold
He scarce is knight, yea but half man …
… He, who lets
His heart be stirred with any foolish heat
At any gentle damsel’s waywardness.”
Gareth and Lynette.
Her eyes gleamed up into his face. But for a moment or two she did not speak. The inclination was so desperately strong upon her to burst into tears that she felt if she attempted to answer him, if she even moved her gaze or allowed a muscle of her face to quiver, it would have been all over with her self-control. He, on his side, stood watching her closely; he did not like the strained, unnatural expression, and thought for a moment that when it relaxed it would be into something worse – he thought she was going to faint, and half stretched out his arms as if to catch her. Mary saw the action, and it restored her self-possession.
“I won’t be a fool,” she murmured to herself, “wasting all this precious time with my nonsense,” though in reality barely three minutes had passed since the sound of the wheels had first reached her.
Then she gave herself a sort of little admonitory shake, and, turning again to Mr Cheviott, spoke in a more natural, but yet evidently excited tone.
“I will explain it all,” she said, and so she did. Her father’s symptoms of increasing weakness and the note to Dr Brandreth, then the sudden seizure and the difficulty of obtaining a messenger, ending with her own failure at the Edge and Mrs Wills’s suggestion.
“And now,” she said, “if only you can tell me where I am, or if your man knows Farmer Bartlemoor’s, it will be all right, and I shall be so very grateful to you.”
But to her surprise Mr Cheviott did not at once reply, nor did he turn to “Andrew” for information. Instead of this, he took out his watch, and, examining it by the light of the lamp, murmured something to himself.
“Five miles – twenty minutes,” he said, “yes, that would be far the quickest.”
Then he turned to Mary.
“Miss Western,” he said, gravely, “you are getting as wet as you possibly can. I must drive you to some shelter. Shall I take you back to the Edge, or home?”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Mary. “Don’t mind me. I entreat you not to mind me. If you have time to drive anywhere, if I dare ask you such an unheard-of thing, drive me to the nearest point to Dr Brandreth’s. I feel as if I could not go to the Bartlemoors, they don’t know me, and my head is growing so confused I am not sure that I should know what to say when I got there.”
He had half expected this – it hardly seemed possible to oppose her – and the risk to herself, if greater in one way seemed less in another.
“Well, then,” he said, “will you do exactly as I tell you?”
“Yes,” she replied, meekly, “exactly.”
“Your cloak is waterproof, I see,” he continued, “is your dress dry underneath it?”
“Quite,” she answered, “and my boots are thick, and it has not been raining long.”
Mr Cheviott turned to the carriage, from which he extracted a large, soft, woolly rug.
“Loosen your cloak for a moment,” he said, “and put this thing on under it, then your cloak again. Now can you climb up to the front beside me? I am driving.” Mary managed it, almost without assistance, and Mr Cheviott followed her. But, just as the groom was about to leave the horse’s head, a sudden giddiness came over her, and she swayed forward for a second. Mr Cheviott caught her with his left arm, and called to the man to stay where he was for a moment.
“Miss Western,” he said, in a low voice, “you are perfectly exhausted. It is not right of me to let you go farther.”
She placed both hands on his arm.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she pleaded. “Anything rather than losing more time by taking me home first. It was only for a moment – I am better now.”
“Andrew,” called out Mr Cheviott, “where is my flask?”
“In the left-hand inside pocket, sir,” was the reply, “the pocket of your light top-coat, sir – not of the ulster.” In a moment the flask was forthcoming, a small quantity poured into the silver cup and held to Mary’s lips.
“No, thank you,” she said, calmly. “I never take wine.”
Mr Cheviott felt almost inclined to laugh.
“It is not wine, as it happens,” he replied. “It is brandy and water. But, if it were wine, it wouldn’t matter. You promised to do as you were told.”
“Brandy,” repeated Mary, “I cannot take that. It will go to my head.”
“It will not,” said Mr Cheviott. “Now, Miss Western, don’t be silly. Drink it.”
She did so.
“Was there ever such a girl before?” said Mr Cheviott, speaking audibly enough though as if to himself. “Such a mixture of strength and childishness, common sense and uncommon fancifulness! Oh, Miss Western?” Mary, in turn, could hardly help laughing.
“Now,” he went on, “if you feel giddy you very likely will when we start – don’t say it’s the brandy. I cannot keep my arm round you,” Mary started up indignantly, she had forgotten that all this time, through the episode of the flask and all, the arm had been there, – “I cannot keep my arm round you,” he continued, coolly, though perfectly aware of the start, “because I am going to drive. I cannot trust my man to drive this mare, and I cannot let you sit behind with him. So promise me, if you feel giddy, to take hold of my arm for yourself. It will not interfere with my driving, and a very light hold will keep you firm.”
“Very well,” said Mary, meekly enough to outward hearing, though, in her heart, a vow was registered that, short of feeling herself falling bodily out of the carriage, nothing should induce her to resort to such assistance.
“I shall drive slowly, at first,” said Mr Cheviott, “as the mare is already a little excited. But it will not really lose any time to speak of. I was driving foolishly fast when I met you, but then I had only my own neck to think of.”
“And Andrew’s,” suggested Mary.
“And Andrew’s,” he repeated. “But Andrew is experienced in the art of taking care of his neck. I never saw any one with a greater knack of keeping out of damage than he has.”
Was he talking for talking’s sake, or with the intention of setting her at her ease by showing her how completely so he was himself? Mary felt a little puzzled. Thoroughly at ease he certainly was, and, more than this, he seemed to her to be in remarkably good spirits, yet his next observation showed her how far from indifferent he was feeling to the anxiety that she was suffering.
“I fancy we shall just catch Brandreth,” he said, “and you will find no time has been lost. This is his whist club night, and it was to be at old Admiral Maxton’s. They break up at nine, I know – the Admiral is so very old – so the doctor will be just about getting home.”
“Are you going to take me all the way to Withenden?” said Mary, half timidly.
“Certainly,” replied Mr Cheviott, decidedly. “Now, Andrew, let her go. All right.”
But just at first it seemed to Mary more like “all wrong.” With a plunge and a dash that nearly took her breath away, the impatient animal darted forward. How Andrew managed to scramble into his seat was a mystery to Mary. It was all she could do to keep hers; the same giddy feeling came over her, her head reeled, and, with a vague remembrance of Mr Cheviott’s injunction, she caught hold of his arm to steady herself. He was prepared for the movement, and by no means discomposed by it. In a minute or two the mare settled down into a steady pace, and Mary’s head grew steady.
She quietly withdrew her hand.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, somewhat stiffly.
“Not at all,” replied Mr Cheviott, “it’s what I told you to do. But don’t be frightened of Madge – it’s only a little show-off; we quite understand each other.”
“Thank you,” said Mary, imagining a patronising shade in his tone. “I was not the least frightened; I am not nervous.”
“No, you are not, but you are human, Miss Western, and what you have gone through to-night has been enough to try any one’s nerves,” said Mr Cheviott, gravely.
Mary did not reply, though she felt herself ungracious for not doing so. In a minute he went on again.
“I have been thinking,” he said, “of what you told me about your father. Of course I am no doctor, but I believe I can give you a little comfort. This sort of seizure is not so alarming when it comes on, as in his case, gradually; it is not like a man in too good health – a great full-blooded fellow like Squire Cleave, for instance – do you know him? – being struck down suddenly. Your father, as a rule, is so equable, is he not? and lives so quietly and regularly. I fancy he will get over it, and be much the same as usual again. Of course it is serious, but I have a friend at this moment who had an attack of this kind ten years ago, and is now fairly well and able to enjoy life; of course he is obliged to be careful.”
What a load was lifted from Mary’s heart! To be allowed to hope– what a relief! The tears rushed to her eyes, they were in her voice as she replied:
“Oh, how good you are! Thank you, thank you for telling me that,” and in his turn Mr Cheviott made no reply.
“Freedom from anxiety, from daily worry – he has had too much of that – would be greatly in his favour, would it not?” Mary added, after a little pause.
“Undoubtedly, I should say,” said Mr Cheviott, recalling as he spoke the careworn expression of the Rector’s face as he had last seen him. “Peculiarly so in his case, I should say. He is a very sensitive man, is he not?”
“Very,” said Mary, “but not in the sense of being irritable. He is very sweet-tempered. Poor father,” she went on, with a sudden burst of confidence which amazed herself, “he has had far too much anxiety; but if only he gets well, I think and believe that that can be, is going to be, cured.”
“What can she mean?” thought Mr Cheviott, one or two possible solutions of her words darting through his mind. But what she did not tell he of course could not ask, only just then a sudden and unnecessary touch of the whip made Madge start again.
They were close to Withenden by now. Dr Brandreth’s house stood a little out of the town on the side by which they were entering it. Mr Cheviott drew up.
“Suppose we wait here,” he said. “Andrew can be thoroughly trusted to deliver exactly any message you give him, and it might be – perhaps you would not care about clambering up and down again from that high seat?”
Mary’s cheeks grew hot, dark as it was. She did not know whether to be angry or grateful, whether indignantly to declare her indifference to Withenden gossip or to choose, as her conductor evidently wished to suggest, “discretion as the better part of valour.” A moment’s reflection decided her that, considering all he had done and was doing, she had no right to reject the suggestion.
“Thank you,” she said, and, turning to the groom, gave a distinct message, short and to the point. “My letter will be at Dr Brandreth’s before now,” she added to Mr Cheviott, “and that will explain a little. It was asking him to come early to-morrow.”
“That message is all you have to give,” said Andrew’s master as the man was hastening off. “You need not say who brought it, or anything.”
“But, Mr Cheviott,” said Mary, half timidly, half indignantly, “I would not mind all Withenden knowing I had brought it. And – and your driving me here was really an act of pure humanity; no one could say I had done anything in the least not – not nice.”
Her voice quivered a little.
“Certainly not. But don’t you think sometimes – we must take the world as we find it, you know – sometimes it is just as well to give ‘no one’ the power to say good, bad, or indifferent about what we do?” said Mr Cheviott, very gently.
“Perhaps,” said Mary, more humbly than was usual with her. Then she added, “It was not nice of me to say that – about your kindness being an act of pure humanity. I didn’t mean – I only meant – I don’t know what I meant, but I am very, very much obliged to you.”
“But you have no reason to be. It was, as you said, just an act of common humanity,” said Mr Cheviott, with slight bitterness.
”‘Pure,’ I said, not ‘common’,” corrected Mary.
“Well, it’s all the same. How can I think you will consider it even an act of friendliness? You won’t have us for your friends. And even if I were ten times the unmitigated ruffian you believe me to be,” he added, with a slight laugh, “would it not be an immense pleasure to me to return in the slightest degree your goodness to Alys? You do believe I care for her, I think? I am grateful, most grateful, to you and to the dark night, and to the chance that made me choose that way home, for making it possible for me to be of the least service to you.”
“Mr Cheviott,” said Mary, impulsively, “whatever you are, you have behaved most generously to me. It was very good of you to come to papa – after – after all I said.”
“Thank you,” he said in a low voice.
“I wish,” she added, as if speaking to herself, “I wish I could understand you. I hate to do any one injustice.”
“And what if you found that you had done such to me?” he asked, eagerly.
“Of course I would own myself in the wrong, if I saw that I had been,” she replied, proudly, and Mr Cheviott could feel that her head was thrown back with the gesture peculiar to her at times.
“And then?”
“You would – you would forgive me, I suppose,” she said, lightly, but with a slight nervousness in her voice. Mr Cheviott was silent. Mary seemed impelled to go on speaking. “On the whole,” she said, “I think I shall register your kindness to-night as an act of great generosity. Will that do better?”
“As you please,” Mr Cheviott replied, dryly, but, it seemed to Mary, sadly too. And she was right.
“How can she ever see that she did me injustice?” he was saying to himself. “I can never explain things – it is madness to imagine I can ever be cleared.”
Andrew’s report was most satisfactory. Dr Brandreth had just come in and would start at once. The order for his dog-cart had been sent out while the man stood at the door.
“Then,” said Mr Cheviott, “the faster we get back to Hathercourt the better. You would like to be there before Brandreth arrives?”
“Very much,” said Mary.
“Will not your mother have been very uneasy about you?” he added.
“I hope not. I think not,” said Mary, anxiously. “She may have been too absorbed about papa to think of me. And she knows the difficulty. Very likely she thought I was waiting at the Edge till Wills came back again. But, Mr Cheviott, you are not meaning to take me home all the way?”
“What else, what less could I possibly do?” he replied, bluntly.
“Will not your sister be dreadfully uneasy at your being so late?” she asked.
“No, she does not expect me to-night at all – at least, I left it uncertain,” Mr Cheviott replied. “I have been hunting over near Farkingham to-day. It is nearly the last meet of the season, and Alys begged me not to miss it. Then I dined at Cleavelands, half intending to sleep there. But I found there was going to be a dance after dinner, and – somehow I don’t care for that sort of thing, especially without Alys. So I came away.”
No one certainly could have to-night accused Mr Cheviott of stiffness or uncommunicativeness.
“How is Alys?” asked Mary.
“Better, on the whole, better, but it is slow work,” said Mr Cheviott, with a little sigh. A sigh partly of brotherly anxiety, partly of regret for the additional complications this accident of his sister’s had brought into his own and others’ lives. “It may be years before she is thoroughly well again,” he added, and Mary, feeling that there was little she could say in the way of comfort, was silent.
“Can your horse take you all the way home again tonight?” she said, presently.
“I think so. If not, I dare say I can put up for the night at Beverley’s farm,” he said, carelessly, adding, with a slight change of tone, “our old quarters.”
The allusion, somehow, made Mary feel nervous again. In her eagerness to change the subject she flung herself off Scylla into Charybdis – in homelier terms, “out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
“Do you know what came into my head when I first saw you driving so fast up that lane?” she said with a slight laugh.
“No,” he replied. “You did not know who it was. I think you first fancied I was Dr Brandreth, did you not?”
“I thought it just possible. But that is not what I meant. I could not help having a foolish wild sort of fancy that perhaps you were Sir Ingram de Romary – you know the story?”
“The fellow that pitched himself over the Chaldron Falls,” said Mr Cheviott. “Yes, I remember. Your fancies about me are the reverse of complimentary, do you know, Miss Western? The last time you had any such, if I remember right, you took me for the ghost of that other still more disreputable Romary, the fellow that forced an unfortunate ‘heathen Chinee’ girl to marry him, and then abused her so that she threw herself out of the window of the haunted room.”
“Mr Cheviott!” said Mary, reproachfully, her cheeks glowing at the remembrance of that day.
And Mr Cheviott was merciful enough to say no more.
They drove back to Hathercourt very fast. So fast that when they drew up at the Rectory gates there was as yet no sound of Dr Brandreth’s wheels in the distance.
“Will you let me get down here, please?” said Mary. “I don’t want to make them think it is the doctor, as they would only feel disappointed.”
Mr Cheviott got down and helped Mary out of the carriage.
“Would you mind my waiting here an instant?” he said with some hesitation. “Dr Brandreth cannot be here for five or ten minutes yet, and I should be so glad to hear how your father is, and if I can be of any more use.”
“I will run back and tell you – in a moment,” said Mary.
There was no need for her to ring or knock at the hall door. It was on the latch as she had left it, and in a moment, at the sound of her opening it, Alexa, George, and Josey appeared.
“Oh! Mary, we have been so frightened about you,” they began.
“But first tell me how papa is,” she interrupted.
“Better, a little better. He opened his eyes and smiled at mamma, and now he seems to be sleeping, really sleeping, not in that dreadful sort of way,” said Alexa.
Mary gave a sigh of thankfulness.
“Run in and tell mamma Dr Brandreth will be here in five minutes. Has she been very frightened about me?”
“No, dear, we wouldn’t let her,” said Alexa, re-assuringly. “We told her you might have to wait at the Edge till Wills came back, it was raining so.”
“That was very good and sensible of you,” said Mary, at which commendation poor Alexa’s white face grew rosy with pleasure.
“But aren’t you coming in to mamma, Mary?” she said, seeing that her sister, after disentangling herself from a mysterious fluffy shawl in which she was wrapped, was turning away to the door.
“Immediately,” said Mary. “I am only running back to the gate with this rug, to return it to the – the person that lent it me, and who drove me to Withenden.”
“All the way? How very good-natured! What a way you have been! And what a lovely rug. Is that Mrs Wills’s? Surely not,” they all said at once. But Mary wisely paid no heed, she ran to the gate and back again almost before she was missed.
“This is your rug, Mr Cheviott,” she said, breathlessly, “and thank you for it so much, and thank you for everything. And papa is already a very little better, they think.”
“I am so glad,” he said, cordially. “But, Miss Western, how exceedingly foolish of you to have taken off the rug and run out again into the cold without it!”
Mary laughed.
“I am very hardy,” she said, as she ran off again. “Good-night, and thank you again.”
But Mr Cheviott stopped her for an instant.
“Is there nothing I can do to help you?” he asked.
“Nothing – nothing more, I should say,” she replied.
“And – Miss Western, you are not going to sit up all night,” he went on – “promise me you will not; you are not fit for it, and that is not the way to prepare yourself for, perhaps, weeks of nursing.”
“I am truly quite rested and fresh,” she said. “It is very kind of you to think of it. I shall not do anything foolish. Good-night again.”
He did not and had not attempted to shake hands, nor had Mary offered to do so.
“He refused my hand the last time I offered it,” she said to herself. “But on the whole, perhaps, what wonder?”
Dr Brandreth, approaching Hathercourt some ten minutes later, was surprised to meet a dog-cart driving off in an opposite direction. But it passed too quickly for even his quick eyes to identify it.
“Whose trap can that be?” he said to his boy.
“Dunno, sir. Not so very onlike the Romary dogcart neither,” was the reply.
“Impossible!” said the doctor. And in his own mind he wondered why Mary Western had not prosecuted the acquaintanceship with the Cheviotts, so strangely begun.
“It would be a good thing for those girls to make some friends for themselves,” he thought to himself. “Nice as they are, I don’t altogether understand them; they don’t give themselves airs – the very reverse, yet for all that I suspect they are too proud for their own advantage. And if poor Western is really breaking up, goodness only knows what is to become of them!”
Early, very early the next morning, Mr Cheviott’s groom made his appearance at the Rectory to make inquiry, with his master’s compliments, for Mr Western. At the door he was met by “the young lady herself,” coming out for the refreshment of a breath of the sweet spring air, all the sweeter for the last night’s heavy rains.
“And she told me to tell you, sir, with Mrs Western’s compliments, as how the Rector was better than might have been expected, and as how the doctor gives good hopes.”
So “Sir Ingram de Romary” drove home again, and sympathising Alys heard with eager interest of her friend’s new troubles, and longed more than ever to see Mary Western again.