Complete works of willia.., p.267
Complete Works of William Morris, page 267
The church itself was one of those architectural oddities of which there are so many in England — the chancel high walled, rich in carving, a very lantern of traceried windows, with a low roof covered with lead; the nave barnlike with low aisle walls, and a high roof patched in all sorts of ways and ruinous enough; this latter again nearly swallowed up the low, square tower, in which there was scarcely a stone awry, and the tangled carving of whose Norman door was sharp and clear still. Inside, there were remnants of painted screen work struggling among ricketty deal pews, the rich farmers’ (in default of squire’s) pews cushioned and red-curtained; this in the nave; then the now bare magnificence of the chancel beyond, so startling, so little cared for; the rich chantry by the side of it whose alabaster images had been scored all over with initials of Bumpkin’s sweethearts through generations of slumbrous sermons; and in the chancel itself, the wasted and broken remains of the necessities of the old worship — half the altar stones built into the pavement, figures in stained glass without heads or turned upside down, painted tiles in the pavement, a brass or two, a half dozen of hatchments on the walls; and amidst it all, blocking up a window bay, the tomb of a member of the rector’s family — (it was a family living) — who some fifty years ago had been a professed dilettante and a travelled man, and had enlightened his native place with an Italian work of art in memory of his wife, and himself when he should come to die. This was a marvel for miles around. There was Death and his dart in it, and the rector on his knees, and his wife of her own accord opening Death’s door in the towering marble rockwork, amidst which an angel held a scroll of Fiat Voluntas Tua and the date — simpering meantime on a stained glass bishop in the opposite window, who, for all return, grinned queerly upon him from his aureoled head held in his hand.
The church was wretchedly kept enough amidst all these signs of former wealth, and was rather the place for an antiquary than for a seeker after the picturesque, and the village, again, full of architectural and historical interest as it was, would not have been called pretty or charming by people; and certainly I should not have called it cheerful, though there was nothing squalid about it. The general absence of gardens towards the street, the brown walls and brown road meeting, the brown-faced, heavily-walking men, the brown-faced anxious-looking women, the silence of the world (as it were) among the many noises of this summer afternoon, the landscape beyond so rich and so limited — no big hill, no wide fiver to lead one’s thoughts or hopes along. Was it a place to crush passion or to soothe it, or rather to nurse and foster it with brooding, with a sense of isolation and imprisonment?
CHAPTER II. THE RECTORY
I have told of the inside of the church; I will now do as much for the rectory. There was little modern or gay in it. Inside its high wall you came into a court with a drive round it, and a grass plot in the middle, the stable on one side and the kitchen garden on the other. There were roses enough, trained on the wall right up to the topmost windows — old-fashioned these were, but not the mediaeval ones of the poorer houses: A stone porch led into a big white-panelled hall, with unclerical matters enough for decoration — reminiscences not only of the hunting-field: but of travelled members of the family, the punctual one being a stuffed tiger in the corner, carefully dusted, but bald and shining in many places now. Its death was the handiwork of the late rector, once a sepoy captain, who laid aside his sword to be inducted into the family living. To him, also, were to be referred one or two Indian cabinets and a carved ivory junk in the low-ceilinged square drawing-room, and a carpet growing threadbare in the long dining-room, once a pleasant room enough, but dealt with unluckily by him of the monument, so that it is now drab and bare, with horsehair chairs and a stiff-legged sideboard with a sarcophagus cellaret underneath it, and with four vulgar portraits on the walls.
There stood the present rector now, leaning against the fireplace, though there was nothing in the grate but pink and white strips of paper, and a little, hardbitten, apple-cheeked old man, visibly a doctor, stood opposite to him with his hat in his hand, ready to go.
‘Well,’ said this latter, ‘he’ll do now. He’s beginning to eat like a trump.’
The rector grunted acquiescence, or pleasure — anything you will — and the doctor looked at him rather hard for a time, and then said:
‘How different he is to you — in looks, I mean; not much like his mother either.’
The rector didn’t answer, and the doctor said again, after a pause:
‘He’s a clever lad, your son. I hope he mayn’t turn out too clever, and give us the slip.’
‘Which do you mean?’ said the other, in a tone as if he repented his rudeness in not answering before, yet didn’t wish the talk to last.
‘Why, Arthur, of course; weren’t we talking of him? No, John is all right, though he’s clever enough too — but sharp, and full of sense. O, he’ll do! He’ll die a rich man, I should say.’
The rector smiled faintly, but said nothing, and the little doctor smiled too, as the pleasantest way of showing that he knew he was to go, and bustled out of the room, leaving the usual doctor’s injunctions behind him.
When he had shut the hall door upon him, the rector turned, sauntered slowly into the drawing-room and thence through an open glass door and out onto the old-fashioned flower garden with its terrace and mulberry tree, and straight-cut flower borders, and the great row of full-foliaged elms that cut it off from the fields without. He stopped presently in the yellow light of the sinking sun, amid the sweet scent of the June flowers, and stared hard at the beauty before him, muttering: ‘She was right that day; it was a dull place to bury oneself in.’
A pang compounded of the memory of hopes and fears, pleasures and pains of many past years shot through him as he spoke; one of those sparks of feeling which sometimes touch dull, or dulled, natures for a moment. If they could only catch at them and grasp in them the thread that would lead them out of the wretched maze! For the scent of the summer evening had somehow mingled with thoughts that the talk about his sons had begun in him, and for that moment he remembered what he might have been, rather than what he was. Old aspirations, old enthusiasms, the kindling of what he thought true love — and the slaking of it — it was too bitter to let him muse long. He turned back again into the house, feeling that less of a prison than the sweet summer garden that led into the fields, that led into other fields that led he didn’t care where. He flung himself down into a chair and took a stupid book of travels in his hand and didn’t read it.
Sooth to say, he did not look like a man likely to have pleasant thoughts. He was a handsome man, too; liker to a captain of dragons than a parson, one would have said; tall and well-knit, with black hair, black eyebrows over fierce-looking grey eyes, a straight, well-made nose, a well-fashioned mouth and large chin and jaw; all the features cast in a find mould — yet all spoilt; his brow knit in an ugly half-scowl, his eyes with little expression in them but suppressed rage, his nose swelled and reddened, his mouth and chin grown coarse and lumpy — an unlovely face. People in general are not very quick to read character in a face, but the simplest people had found out that Parson Risley was of no use to them, in spite of his good looks. It must be said, too, that he had always (in any case where it was possible) acted with a reckless cruelty which in rougher times would perhaps have developed and won for him the reputation of an Ezzelin; and though he had tempered this from time to time by giving great gifts, yet this man of just forty, with what seemed an easy life to lead, dealing with no very important matters, without ambition, as it seemed, without serious opposition, without fear of having his position lessened, without anything much to grasp at, managed to make himself both feared and hated in the limited society in which he moved.
Yes! even as the beautiful church was a grave and a ruin, the comely well-conditioned village a dull prison, the fair sweet-scented countryside a sort of dull enchanted valley to be escaped from, so was this handsome house and handsome man, its owner, the scene and actor of a tragedy without meaning and without ending, a curse without a name, a lurking misery that could not be met and grappled with, because its very existence had slain sight, and memory, and hope — that of pain itself, that quickens those whom God will not have die while they seem to live.
CHAPTER III. MRS RISLEY’S SECRET
Parson Risley had taken the living of Ormslade as a young man, newly married; his wife bore him two sons at Ormslade and died a year after the birth of the second, little regretted by him. She had been a pale, thin, querulous, flaxen-haired woman with blue eyes, whom he had never treated with even a show of respect. For this, as for everything else, she didn’t seem to care greatly; yet when she was sickening for her last Illness (she died in childbirth of her third child, who died with her) it is certain that she had in her mind a great longing to live till one of her sons grew up, that she might tell him a grievance of hers, and perhaps entrust a hatred to him; a hatred to his father.
Nobody was with her when she died except the hired nurses and the little village doctor. Of this latter she asked many questions as to ‘when he thought children grew old enough to understand matters of love’ and the like questions which he parried as well as he could, and in his turn asked leading questions, to see if she would not tell him the story, whatever it was. But she didn’t open herself to him and died and left all unsaid.
After all, it was no great thing that she had to tell; only how she had found three letters in an old pocket-book of her husband’s, hidden away among clothes. Here they all are, in order that we may make an end of the rector’s history at once, before we begin that of his sons, with whom our tale will chiefly have to do. They all dated from before his marriage; the first is in his own hand:
Hasted Hall
My love, my darling —
I could not do it yesterday, though I came up to London for nothing but to tell you. And yet l was going to do it, the last half hour we were together, though you were so happy and bright. Didn’t you notice how confused and stupid I was? But then, when you took me to see your newly-furnished bedroom, and were so pretty over talking about all the things, and showed me your dear clothes in the drawers, and I saw your little slippers lying about, and all the dear things that touch your body that I love so, your little slippers lying about, and all the dear things that touch your body that I love so, , as I thought I should never lie with you in the new pretty bed, and I came away with the kisses that I feel now, and leaving that lie behind me — for you know the kind of thing I have to say. Don’t curse me; then my heart failed me as I thought I should never lie with you in the pretty new bed, and I came away with the kisses that I feel now, and leaving that lie behind me — for you know the kind of thing I have to say. Don’t curse me; live, and think of me, as I shall think of you.
I am to be married next Thursday. Who knows, we may meet again — my wife may die before we are either of us very old — you know, dear, that life won’t be very pleasant to me so don’t he too angry. At all events, be sure that I don’t love her. Ugh! I haven’t told you a word about it, and now, when all is over, why should I? yet I must say this much, that I should have been clean ruined if I had not. Just a hint to my father a month ago about what might have happened to me made him quite mad, and you don’t know how I ran into debt — there, you forgive me, don’t you? as you have forgiven me so many times.
Ah, my God, if I were only back with you to forgive and be forgiven over and over again! How can I do it, how can I do it? To lie, and pretend to love this ugly stupid woman — hardhearted, too she is — when I have had the cleverest and most beautiful woman in the world in my arms! Why was I born among rich people loving all sorts of comfort? One thing more — I shall go to my rectory as soon as I am married — my wife is rich — I can easily afford to send you £250 a year, so you will be richer now than you have been. I must try to think how you can write to me, for I must hear of you — for indeed and indeed I shall always love you, my precious, my darling, my own! O, if you could only kiss your poor James.
The second letter was this, in a large well-formed woman’s hand:
There is your letter back again. Take it, and the curse with it you pretend to dread. Yet if I curse you, I don’t curse God; I bless him rather for showing me what you are while I could yet escape from you — yes, even at the cost of all the pollution I have suffered from you, and the loss of the house (a dull loveless one, certainly) I left for you. Curse you and your money — the money for which you have sold me and yourself. I will have none of it. Who cares whether I die or not? And as for you — I know you now; my eyes are opened; all sorts of little things come back to me now, and I see what they mean. I stifled all doubts in me — all disgusts I hid to myself — I should soon have got to be as base as you. Ah, why am I writing to him and telling him of my feelings as if we were still — lovers? but note this: may your life grow duller and duller in the dull place you are going to bury yourself in — may you have no escape in the whole world from dullness — I say I know you; may all your grossnesses and falsenesses increase on you till everything hates you, till your face that I have kissed, and hung over, changes as your base soul works on it. My curse, my curse, upon you — ah, why are words so weak? — I will not die, do you hear? I will live and curse you.
The third, with the date of the next post, was in the same hand:
Oh no, no, no, I didn’t mean it — and have you forgiven me? Indeed I will live, and wait, and hope, and try to keep young and-handsome for you. O, what a letter I could write! If you only knew how full my heart is of love for you; yes, I shall be happy with my love, whatever happens. I could tell you many things, only the same and horror of my last miserable words keeps returning. What did I do the night I sent the letter off? — last night it was. Let me tell you that, for I know you will be pleased to hear about me, and that you are forgiving me as you read this.
I wandered about the street after post time till it got dark, and then went right into town; it was such a fine bright evening, and I felt so strange, not at all like I expected to feel; I can’t tell you how, but not mad at all. So it got dark, and still I walked about, all through the City at first, and then I turned westward and got into the Strand, and people spoke to me as if I was — well, I shall never be that, never! I will live and be good till I can be with you again, my darling — and then I began to love you so again, and I cried, and put my veil down, and I stopped at the turning off to Waterloo Bridge and went half way down the street toward the bridge — and then there were so many people about; and I turned back and went straight to the Olympic; and I took a ticket for the stalls, quite sensibly, and went in and sat in one of the stalls close by the door, just where we sat last week, my darling — and Robson was acting in Medea still, though it was half over. Wasn’t it strange of me? And shall I tell you how I felt when the people laughed? Well, I thought quite distinctly: ‘Now I needn’t trouble to kill myself after all, because I must have died, and this is hell’ — you have forgiven me, dear, haven’t you? that’s why I tell you all this — well, Medea came to an end, and then there was a farce, and people laughed more and more till at last we all got up, and I got my bonnet and walked straight home and it was raining when I came to Waterloo Bridge, for I went that way home. There were few people about, but I walked straight home, and ran sometimes. I don’t know why, but I had a feeling on me of being too late.
Well, I got home, and I daresay you can guess — poor child! Who must be so unhappy yourself — as to how I felt when I let myself in. Anything one calls home is the worst place to be in when one is unhappy, isn’t it, dear? Yet I must have gone to sleep, for soon it was broad daylight when I looked round again; broad daylight outside, I mean, for the red curtains in the little back room that you don’t like were drawn, and made the front room dark and dismal — and l found myself wet, very stiff and tired, and footsore; and I crept upstairs to our — to my bedroom; then I began to take off my clothes — dear, I can’t tell you any more what I did, but it was all very dreadful; but don’t grieve too much, for I am better now; because the sun rose a rose after a bit, long before Martha was astir, and then I crept downstairs in those slippers, dear, and got the pen and ink, and began to write this; and I felt quite happy at once, but tired and ill.
Your letter was very kind, I know — so kind, my darling, that I know you have forgiven me — and you mustn’t think me light-headed for writing all this. I am quite sensible: and to show you that I will talk about money matters — of course I would take your money, dear, if only to be obliged to you, and to live by you still; but it would be so very awkward for you to send it. And you must remember my telling you of Mr Dixon, my godfather? and how, in spite of all, he wanted me to come and live with him; I shall do so soon now. He is one of the best of old men, who knows and cares so little about the ways of society that I think he looks upon marriage as quite as shocking as anything else. Think of me, dear, among the books and papers in his museum of a house on Stoke Newington Common though I don’t suppose you were ever near there. O darling, darling, think of me, and be as happy with your wife as you can be. Get children, and love them. Who knows what may happen? as you said in your letter. — O, my dear, it is almost the bitterest of all that I didn’t keep your dear, dear letter. Yet, even if you don’t write to me again, I shall know you have forgiven me. — Yet your kisses, those kisses you spoke of are on my lips still —
Goodbye, goodbye —
Your Eleanor
These three letters, put in one envelope and addressed in Mrs Risley’s weak formal hand, were found under her pillow when she died. Her husband took them, glanced at them, and made a motion toward the fire, but didn’t throw them in. One may hope from this that at least a little pain shot across him as he put them away in his bureau. But I think there was something of fear, too, and it must be said that he had never answered no. 3 — that no. 2 had not astonished him exactly, but made him both uneasy and resentful; and that he rather looked at himself as an injured man, on that score, thenceforward.
