CHAPTER XII

THE JARRING ELEMENT

"She was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them."--JANE AUSTEN.

The first idea suggested by Mrs. Cooper to the mind of the beholder was almost inevitably the above. How could any man ever have liked her well enough to marry her?

Mr. Chetwynd-Cooper was among those unfortunates who are sent into the world without a sense of humour. He thus fell a victim to the same error of judgment which poor well-meaning King George the Third had committed before him: that of mistaking a dull, pretentious prig for a really good woman. Perhaps no queen in history, of whatever moral character, ever made a greater fiasco as the bringer-up of a large family than did Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. But in this respect Mrs. Cooper vied with her, and for the same reason. Each was so secure in her own belief in herself as possessed of all the domestic virtues, that to her the possibility of making a mistake never presented itself.

Such women are beyond the reach of argument. Mrs. Cooper had decided, quite early in life--on what grounds is not known--that to be such a woman as she was, ought to be the goal of all female endeavour. Hence, nothing could shake the complacency of her own content. She never tired of the pose of the perfect wife and mother, the parochial guardian angel; and this, although her nursery had been the epitome of untidiness and mismanagement, and her husband was obliged to keep her accounts, and in other ways to step into the breach continually to supply her glaring deficiencies. Neither was she discomposed by the fact that all her own children had found her out at an early age. If her husband ever broke through his habitual reserve, and remonstrated with her, she met him with the patient smile of the saint who is misunderstood.

Very soon after marriage he had found out the iron hand beneath her velvet glove. He had discovered that his own influence was nil, that argument could not move her, that opposition merely stiffened her smiling obstinacy. He had sunk into that life which is the most terrible form of solitude: complete isolation from those nearest to him. The worst of it was that, though he had no effect upon his wife, she had a gradual and insidious effect upon him. Continual contact with a dwarfed intelligence was causing inevitable deterioration, of which he was not aware.

Had the dalesmen known his daily martyrdom, he might have gained them; but his pride and his loyalty pushed him back behind barred doors. And what nobody yet had ever divined, this new niece of his knew before she had been twenty-four hours under his roof.

It made him hate her. The first time her grave, tranquil eyes rested upon her aunt, he felt that she understood and despised her. Then that same limpid gaze--direct, keen, pure--travelled to him, the man who was the life-companion of such a woman. He could feel her thought probing him, wondering at him, pitying him. He had not at first thought her like his sister, the dead Melicent to whom he had been sincerely attached. But when he encountered that wonderful glance, he saw the likeness so strongly that he afterwards never forgot it--was never able to look at the younger Melicent without thinking of her more beautiful, radiant mother, who had followed the man she loved into the wilderness.

But the very likeness embittered him. He had always nursed a grudge against his wilful sister--a half-contemptuous grudge, as against one who had stepped outside the pale of conventions held so sacred by his own wife. Was her young daughter to come from the wilds to sit in judgment upon this exemplary pair, who found the straitest paths of domestic dulness wide enough for them to walk in? He almost wished that Melicent would do something that should justify him in his dislike of her.

He was brooding over it alone in his study, where he wrote with much care his cold, dry, unreal sermons, when his wife's head appeared round the door, with her usual coy smile.

"_Quite_ unsuccessful, my darling boy," she said. "She defies me openly; and yet I flatter myself I was _most_ diplomatic."

Like many essentially cold-hearted people, Mrs. Cooper was prodigal of endearing epithets. Her husband, on principle, never used any.

"A direct command would, I imagine, have met the case better than diplomacy," he said, in his cold, collected tones. "What did she say? Was she rude?"

"Well, not exactly. She said it would be a breach of confidence to show her letter, but that she would see that the young man wrote no more. She also said that she insists upon her right to correspond with her guardian without the letters being overlooked. Rather a _shocking_ way to talk to me, wasn't it? But we must be very forgiving at first, I see that, and make very big _allowances_ for the poor darling! The guardian himself seems to be quite young, and unmarried. Why did not poor Arnold appoint you guardian? As it is, she evidently thinks we have no authority."

He sat, with a mind oddly divided between dislike for the girl who defied him, and a sneaking satisfaction that Minna had been routed for once--by his sister's child!

"However," said his wife, secure as ever in her own infallibility, "we shall manage her all right in the end. The example of our girls will be _invaluable_. It is best to put the matter aside for the present, and let her settle down."

"Will she settle down, do you think?" asked the vicar.

There was a tolerant, complacent smile. "My darling boy, I have trained five, and why not a sixth?"

The vicar did not contradict her; he merely asked:

"Did she tell you what her letter contained?"

"She said she had not opened it yet, which I fear must have been a--a--_tarradidle_"--Mrs. Cooper went, through certain evolutions of lips and eyes, intended as a mute apology for her use of a word so shocking--"but she said she felt sure it was only to say that, if she is not happy here, the writer had a home waiting for her."

"Preposterous nonsense! She is a child, and the man probably a savage," said the vicar, with some bitterness. "Picture Maddie or Gwen receiving a note of the kind!"

But when Millie did open Bert's letter, the contents were of a wholly different nature from what she had expected.

It merely contained a brief announcement of the fact that he had enlisted in that regiment of scouts which later was known to fame as Lacy's Lions.

In the schoolroom, the knowledge that Melicent had stood firm communicated an electrical excitement to the atmosphere. The idea of possible revolt opened prospects of which nobody had as yet dared to think. Unconsciously to themselves, her cousins already regarded her as a strike-leader--a Moses who should lead them out of the house of bondage.

And yet no creature could have been less anxious for revolt than this girl. Her one desire was to fall upon knowledge and devour it. She was ready to become the slave of anyone who would teach her.

But one day in the schoolroom was enough to quench hope from that quarter. The education bestowed on her by her father had been partial; but what she knew, she knew thoroughly. Her Latin and arithmetic and Euclid were all good; her knowledge of geography and English history made Tommy feel quite faint. Of French and German she was wholly ignorant, and could not pick out the notes on the piano.

But in all respects she knew enough to know that Tommy knew nothing. All the morning the governess was experiencing the annoyance which Mr. Cooper had known, feeling the clear eyes upon her full of judgment.

The leading point in the education of Mr. Cooper's girls was that they should have no judgment. They were always to be content to accept what they were told. When they came in contact with actual life, their only standard would be that such and such a thing was according to, or differed from, what they were used to.

"I am a great believer in the power of habit," the vicar was wont to say. Poor soul! Habit had moulded him with a vengeance; he might be excused for thinking highly of its powers over the human intelligence.

Melicent was a problem to her cousins. They were fascinated by her, as the weak must always be by the strong; but they resented her aloofness. And they were simply bewildered by her tastes.

Tommy was--_sub rosâ_, of course--reading aloud to them a thrilling serial from the _Daily Looking-glass_. It was called "Phyllis and the Duke," and was a story of the pure love of that gallant nobleman, the Duke of Mendip, for his sister's governess, the lovely Phyllis de Forester; of the machinations of his envious cousin, Captain the Honourable Percy Blagdon; and of how Phyllis turned out to be the unacknowledged daughter of an Earl, and the true owner of the Honourable Percy's estates. They had reached a thrilling chapter, in which the trembling young governess went to interview a clairvoyante, in a mystic kind of house in St. John's Wood, to ascertain what had become of her chivalrous lover. Tommy was uneasy when the story took this turn. She did not like the sound of a mysterious house in St. John's Wood, and began to reflect, with resentment, that nowadays you could not trust even the _feuilleton_ of a halfpenny journal to be wholly inoffensive. But the writer was perfectly equal to the occasion, and knew his public to a nicety--or might we say, to a nastiness? The clairvoyante turned out to be Phyllis's deeply injured mamma, a young lady who would on no account have gone without the indispensable marriage ceremony; and the gentleman who exploited her, and "ran" the mysterious house, was her own brother, Phyllis's uncle, who long had sought his beloved niece in vain.

"I can't think why you don't like it," sighed Gwen, whose eyes were kindled, her cheeks aglow.

"It is so unreal and so silly," said her cousin calmly. "People don't go on like that. I like a story that makes you forget that it's not true."

"Such as what?" they asked her.

After reflection--"Such as 'Silas Marner,'" she said.

They had never heard of "Silas Marner."

The glorious autumn weather continued, and two or three days after Millie's arrival they took her for a long walk, out of the Dale, along Radlem Rigg, to look at the curious old prehistoric relic locally known as Tod's Trush.

The loveliness of her surroundings was again borne in upon Millie. The same up-soaring of spirit which she had experienced when her uncle drove her from the station once more exhilarated her. She could not analyse what it was that she found so different here from the land of her birth. She came from a country of clear air and vast spaces, of solitude and immeasurable distance. These dales were small in comparison with the endless rippling veldt she knew. But here there confronted her an element which she was quick to feel, though as yet too young to define--the element of mystery.

Strange it is that a few atmospheric effects should have power to lift the soul into new realms, into the brooding heart of a tender, tinted secret, which haunts the uplands and the valleys of Cleveshire, making a promised land of every peak that emerges, suggestive, from its golden, shimmering veil. The primal truth which underlay the power of the Veiled Isis was here; but in the North the magic is stronger, because to its mystery it adds the crowning note of austerity.

There is a loneliness which is the result, not of distance, but of inaccessibility. The dwellers in two valleys, perhaps five miles apart, divided by a high mountain, a dangerous pass, are separated far more thoroughly than those who dwell with fifty miles of plain between them, which the train will traverse in an hour. These dales give the impression of something remote, inviolable--something stern and shy, yet with a heart of glowing colour, of infinite tenderness, for those who can understand.

The Trush itself, when they reached it, was an old barrow, or tumulus, the earth covering of which had been entirely removed centuries ago. It was a square kist of stones, the top of which had fallen in. The coffin, or coffins, which it must once have contained, had vanished so long ago that a persistent local tradition maintained that there had never been any; but that the little house had been the abode of a being of supernatural origin, called Tod, concerning whom antiquarians cudgelled their brains in vain. Two upright slabs still stood like the jambs of a tiny doorway, with a lintel across; the whole surrounded by a circular wreath of large stones, which probably defined the original size of the mound.

To Melicent, who had never seen anything of the kind before, the vacant and lonely sepulchre was fraught with great pathos. Her thoughts took wing, and wandered to the times when human hands had erected this monument, and wondered whether it then stood in such unbroken solitude as it did now.

They had brought cakes with them, and a bottle of milk, and they all sat down among the heather and harebells, and refreshed themselves, while Tommy read a fresh instalment of "Phyllis and the Duke."