Cripps, the Carrier: A Woodland Tale

But against each sacred rite and hallowed custom of the place, against each good old-fashioned smoothness, and fine-fed sequacity, a rapid stir was now arising, and a strong desire to give a shove. There were some few people who really thought that the little world in which they lay was one they ought to move in; that perfect life was not to be had without some attempt at breathing; and that a fire (though beautifully laid) gives little warmth till kindled.

However, these were young fellows mostly, clever in their way, but not quite sound; and the heads of houses, generally speaking, abode on the house-top, and did not come down. Still they kept their sagacious eyes on the movement gathering down below, and made up their minds to crush it as soon as they could be quite certain of being too late. But these things ride not upon the cart of Cripps – though Cripps is a theologian, when you beat his charges down.

After the Easter vacation was over, with too few fattening festivals, the most popular tutor in Brasenose (being the only one who ever tried to teach) came back to his rooms and his college work with a very fine appetite for doing good; – according, at least, to his own ideas of good, and duty, and usefulness; all of which were fundamentally wrong in the opinion of the other tutors. But Hardenow, while he avoided carefully all disputes with his colleagues, strictly kept to his own course, and doing more work than the other five (all put together) attempted, was permitted to have his own way, because of the trouble there might be in stopping him.

The college met for the idle term, on Saturday morning, as usual. On Saturday afternoon Hardenow led off his old "squad" with two new recruits, for their fifteen miles of hard walking. Athletics and training were as yet unknown (except with the "eight" for Henley), and this Tractarian movement may have earned its name, ere the birth of No. 90, from the tract of road traversed, in a toe-and-heel track, by the fine young fellows who were up to it. At any rate that was what the country people said, and these are more often right than wrong, and the same opinion still abides with them.

Hardenow only took this long tramp for the sake of collecting his forces. Saturday was not their proper day for this very admirable coat-tail chase. Neither did they swallow hill and plain in this manner on a Sunday. Lectures were needful to fetch them up to the proper pitch for striding so. Wherefore on the morrow Mr. Hardenow was free for a cruise on his own account, after morning sermon at St. Mary's; and not having heard of his old friend Russel for several weeks, he resolved to go and hunt him up in his own home.

It was not a possible thing for this very active and spare-bodied man to lounge upon his road. Whatever it was that he undertook, he carried on the action with such a swing and emphasis, that he seemed to be doing nothing else. He wore a short spencer, and a long-tailed coat, "typical" – to use the pet word of that age – both of his curt brevity and his ankle-reaching gravity. His jacket stuck into him, and his coat struck away with the power of an adverse wind, while the boys turned back and stared at him; but he was so accustomed to that sort of thing that he never thought of looking round. He might have been tail-piped for seven leagues without troubling his head about it.

This was a man of great power of mind, and led up to a lofty standard; pure, unselfish, good, and grand (so far as any grandeur can be in the human compound), watchful over himself at almost every corner of his ways, kind of heart, and fond of children; loving all simplicity, quick to catch and glance the meaning of minds very different from his own; subtle also, and deep to reason, but never much inclined to argue. He had a shy and very peculiar manner of turning his eyes away from even an undergraduate, when his words did not command assent; as sometimes happened with freshmen full of conceit from some great public school.

The manner of his mind was never to assert itself, or enter into controversy. He felt that no arguments would stir himself when he had solidly cast his thoughts; and he had of all courtesies the rarest (at any rate with Englishmen), the courtesy of hoping that another could reason as well as himself.

In this honest and strenuous nature there was one deficiency. The Rev. Thomas Hardenow, copious of mind and active, clear of memory, and keen at every knot of scholarship, patient and candid too, and not at all intolerant, yet never could reach the highest rank, through want of native humour. His view of things was nearly always anxious and earnest. His standing-point was so fixed and stable, that every subject might be said to revolve on its own axis during its revolution round him; and the side that never presented itself was the ludicrous or lightsome one.

As he strode up the hill, with the back of his leg-line concave at the calf, instead of convex (whenever his fluttering skirt allowed a glimpse of what he never thought about), it was brought home suddenly to his ranging mind that he might be within view of Beckley. At a bend of the rising road he turned, and endwise down a plait of hills, and between soft pillowy folds of trees, the simple old church of Beckley stood, for his thoughts to make the most of it. And, to guide them, the chime of the gentle bells, foretelling of the service at three o'clock, came on the tremulous conveyance of the wind, murmuring the burden he knew so well – "old men and ancient dames, married folk and children, bachelors and maidens, all come to church!"

Hardenow thought of the months he had spent, some few years back, in that quiet place; of the long, laborious, lonesome days, the solid hours divided well, the space allotted for each hard drill; then (when the pages grew dim and dark, and the bat flitted over the lattice, or the white owl sailed to the rickyard), the glory of sallying into the air, inhaling grander volumes than ever from mortal breath proceeded, and plunging into leaves that speak of one great Author only. And well he remembered in all that toil the pure delight of the Sunday; the precious balm of kicking out both legs, and turning on the pillow until eight o'clock; the leisurely breakfast with the Saturday papers, instead of Aristotle; the instructive and amusing walk to church, where everybody admired him, and he set the fashion for at least ten years; the dread of the parson that a man who was known as the best of his year at Oxford should pick out the fallacies of his old logic; and then the culminating triumph of Sabbatic jubilee – the dinner, the dinner, wherewith the whole week had been privily gestating; up to that crowning moment when Cripps, in a coat of no mean broadcloth, entered with a dish of Crippsic size, with the "trimmings" coming after him in a tray, and lifting the cover with a pant and flourish, said, "Well, sir, now, what do 'ee plaize to think of that?"

Nor in this pleasant retrospect of kindness and simplicity was the element of rustic grace and beauty wholly absent – the slight young figure that flitted in and out, with quick desire to please him; the soft pretty smile with which his improvements of Beckley dialect were received; and the sweet gray eyes that filled with tears so, the day before his college met. Hardenow had feared, humble-minded as he was, that the young girl might be falling into liking him too well; and he knew that there might be on his own part too much reciprocity. Therefore (much as he loved Cripps, and fully as he allowed for all that was to be said upon every side), he had felt himself bound to take no more than a distant view of Beckley.

Even now, after three years and a half, there was some resolve in him to that effect, or the residue of a resolution. He turned from the gentle invitation of the distant bells, and went on with his face set towards the house of his old friend, Overshute. When he came to the lodge (which was like a great beehive stuck at the end of a row of trees), it caused him a little surprise to find the gate wide open, and nobody there. But he thought that, as it was Sunday, perhaps the lodge-people were gone for a holiday; and so he trudged onward, and met no one to throw any light upon anything.

In this way he came to the door at last, with the fine old porch of Purbeck stone heavily overhanging it, and the long wings of the house stretched out, with empty windows either way. Hardenow rang and knocked, and then set to and knocked and rang again; and then sat down on a stone balustrade; and then jumped up with just vigour renewed, and pushed and pulled, and in every way worked to the utmost degree of capacity everything that had ever been gifted with any power of conducting sound.

Nobody answered. The sound of his energy went into places far away, and echoed there, and then from stony corners came back to him. He traced the whole range of the windows and caught no sign of any life inside them. At last, he pushed the great door, and lo! there was nothing to resist his thrust, except its sullen weight.

When Hardenow stood in the old-fashioned hall, which was not at all "baronial," he found himself getting into such a fright that he had a great mind to go away again. If there had only been anybody with him – however inferior in "mental power" – he might have been able to refresh himself by demonstrating something, and then have marched on to the practical proof. But now he was all by himself, in strange and unaccountable loneliness. The sense of his condition perhaps induced him to set to and shout. The silence was so oppressive, that the sound of his own voice almost alarmed him by its audacity. So, after shouting "Russel!" thrice, he stopped, and listened, and heard nothing except that cold and shuddering ring, as of hardware in frosty weather, which stone and plaster and timber give when deserted by their lords – mankind.

Knowing pretty well all the chief rooms of the house, Hardenow resolved to go and see if they were locked; and grasping his black holly-stick for self-defence, he made for the dining-room. The door was wide open; the cloth on the table, with knives and forks and glasses placed, as if for a small dinner-party; but the only guest visible was a long-legged spider, with a sound and healthy appetite, who had come down to dine from the oak beams overhead, and was sitting in his web between a claret bottle and a cruet-stand, ready to receive with a cordial clasp any eligible visitor.

Hardenow tasted the water in a jug, and found it quite stale and nasty; then he opened a napkin, and the bread inside it was dry and hard as biscuit. Then he saw with still further surprise that the windows were open to their utmost extent, and the basket of plate was on the sideboard.

"My old friend Russel, my dear old fellow!" he cried with his hand on his heart where lurked disease as yet unsuspected, "what strange misfortune has befallen you? No wonder my letter was left unanswered. Perhaps the dear fellow is now being buried, and every one gone to his funeral. But no; if it were so, these things would not be thus. The funeral feast is a grand institution. Everything would be fresh and lively, and five leaves put into the dinner-table." With this true reflection, he left the room to seek the solution elsewhere.

He failed, however, to find it in any of the downstair sitting-rooms. Then he went even into the kitchen, thinking the liberty allowable under such conditions. The grate was cold and the table bare; on the one lay a drift of soot, on the other a level deposit of dust, with a few grimy implements to distribute it.

Hardenow made up his mind for the worst. He was not addicted to fiction (as haply was indicated by his good degree), but he could not help recalling certain eastern and even classic tales; and if he had come upon all the household sitting in native marble, or from the waistband downward turned into fish, or logs, or dragons, he might have been partly surprised, but must have been wholly thankful for the explanation. Failing however to discover this, and being resolved to go through with the matter, the tutor of Brasenose mounted the black oak staircase of this enchanted house. At the head of the stairs was a wide, low passage, leading right and left from a balustraded gallery. The young man chose first the passage to the right, and tightening his grip of the stick, strode on.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE FIRE-BELL

The doors of the rooms on either side were not only open but fastened back; the sashes of the windows were all thrown up; and the rain, which had followed when the east wind fell, had entered and made puddles on the sills inside. Such a draught of air rushed down the passage that Hardenow's lengthy skirts flickered out, in the orthodox fashion, behind him.

At the end of this passage he came to a small alcove, fenced off with a loose white curtain, shaking and jerking itself in the wind. He put this aside with his stick; and two doorways, leading into separate rooms, but with no doors in them, faced him. Something told him that both these rooms held human life, or human death.

First he looked in at the one on the left. He expected to see lonely death; perhaps corruption; or he knew not what. His nerves were strung or unstrung (whichever is the medical way of putting it) to such a degree that he wholly forgot, or entirely put by, everything, except his own absorbing sense of his duty, as a man in holy orders. This duty had never been practised yet in any serious way, because he had never been able to afford it. It costs so much more money than it brings in. However, in the midst of more lucrative work, he had felt that he was sacred to it – rich or poor – and he often had a special hankering after it. This leaning towards the cure of souls had a good chance now of being gratified.

In the room on the left hand he saw a little bed, laid at the foot of a fat four-poster, which with carved mouths grinned at it; and on this little bed of white (without curtain, or trimming, or tester), lay a lady, or a lady's body, cast down recklessly, in sleep or death, with the face entirely covered by a silvery cloud of hair. From the manner in which one arm was bent, Hardenow thought that the lady lived. There was nothing else to show it. Being a young man, a gentleman also, he hung back and trembled back from entering that room.

Without any power to "revolve things well," as he always directed his pupils to do, Hardenow stepped to the other doorway, and silently settled his gaze inside. His eyes were so worried that he could not trust them, until he had time to consider what they told.

They told him a tale even stranger than that which had grown upon him for an hour now, and passed from a void alarm into a terror; they showed him the loveliest girl – according to their rendering – that ever they had rested on till now; a maiden sitting in a low chair reading, silently sometimes, and sometimes in a whisper, according to some signal, perhaps, of which he saw no sign. There was no other person in the room, so far as he could see; and he strained his eyes with extreme anxiety to make out that.

The Rev. Thomas Hardenow knew (as clearly as his keen perception ever had brought any knowledge home) that he was not discharging the functions now – unless they were too catholic – of the sacerdotal office, in watching a young woman through a doorway, without either leave or notice. But though he must have been aware of this, it scarcely seemed now to occur to him; or whether it did, or did not, he went on in the same manner gazing.

The girl could not see him; it was not fair play. The width of great windows, for instance, kept up such a rattling of blinds, and such flapping of cords, and even the floor was so strewn with herbs (for the sake of their aroma), that anybody might quite come close to anybody who had cast away fear (in the vast despair of prostration), without any sense of approach until perhaps hand was laid upon shoulder. Hardenow took no more advantage of these things than about half a minute. In that half-minute, however, his outward faculties (being all alive with fear) rendered to his inward and endiathetic organs a picture, a schema, or a plasm – the proper word may be left to him – such as would remain inside, at least while the mind abode there.

The sound of low, laborious breath pervaded the sick room now and then, between the creaking noises and the sighing of the wind. In spite of all draughts, the air was heavy with the scent of herbs strewn broadcast, to prevent infection – tansy, wormwood, rue, and sage, burnt lavender and rosemary. The use of acids in malignant fevers was at that time much in vogue, and saucers of vinegar and verjuice, steeped lemon-peel, and such like, as well as dozens of medicine bottles, stood upon little tables. Still Hardenow could not see the patient; only by following the glance of the reader could he discover the direction. It was the girl herself, however, on whom his wondering eyes were bent. At first he seemed to know her face, and then he was sure that he must have been wrong. The sense of doing good, and the wonderful influence of pity, had changed the face of a pretty girl into that of a beautiful woman. Hardenow banished his first idea, and wondered what strange young lady this could be.

Although she was reading aloud, and doing it not so very badly, it was plain enough that she expected no one to listen to her. The sound of her voice, perhaps, was soothing to some one who understood no words; as people (in some of the many unknown conditions of brain) have been soothed and recovered by a thread of waterfall broken with a walking-stick. At any rate, she read on, and her reading fell like decent poetry.

Hardenow scarcely knew what he ought to do. He did not like to go forward; and it was a mean thing to go backward, rendering no help, when help seemed wanted so extremely. He peeped back into the other room; and there was the lady with the fine white hair, sleeping as soundly as a weary top driven into dreaming by extreme activity of blows.

Nothing less than a fine idea could have delivered Hardenow from this bad situation. It was suddenly borne in upon his mind that the house had a rare old fire-bell, a relic of nobler ages, hanging from a bar in a little open cot, scarcely big enough for a hen-roost; and Russel had shown him one day, with a laugh, the corner in which the rope hung. There certainly could be but very little chance of doing harm by ringing it; what could be worse than the present state of things? Some good Samaritan might come. No Levite was left to be driven away.

For Hardenow understood the situation now. The meaning of a very short paragraph in the Oxford paper of Saturday, which he had glanced at and cast by, came distinctly home to him. The careful editor had omitted name of person and of place, but had made his report quite clear to those who held a key to the reference. "How very dull-witted now I must be!" cried the poor young fellow in his lonely trouble. "I ought to have known it. But we never know the clearest things until too late." It was not only for the sake of acquitting himself of an awkward matter, but also in the hope of doing good to the few left desolate, that Hardenow moved forth his legs, from the windy white curtain away again.

He went down the passage at a very great pace, as nearly akin to a run as the practice of long steady walks permitted; and then at the head of the staircase he turned, and remembered a quiet little corner. Here, in an out-of-the-way recess, the rope of the alarm-bell hung; and he saw it, even in that niche, moving to and fro with the universal draught. Hardenow seized it, and rang such a peal as the old bell had never given tongue to before. The bell was a large one, sound and clear; and the call must have startled the neighbourhood for a mile, if it could be startled.

"Really, I do believe I have roused somebody at last!" exclaimed the ringer, as he looked through a window commanding the road to the house, and saw a man on horse-back coming. "But, surely, unless he sprang out of the ground, he must have been coming before I began."

In this strange loneliness, almost any visitor would be welcome; and Hardenow ran towards the top of the stairs to see who it was, and to meet him. But here, as he turned the corner of the balustraded gallery, a scared and hurrying young woman, almost ran into his arms.

"Oh, what is it?" she cried, drawing back, and blushing to a deeper colour than well-extracted blood can show; "there is no funeral yet! He is not dead! Who is ringing the bell so? It has startled even him, and will either kill or save him! Kill him, it will kill him, I am almost sure!"

"Esther – Miss Cripps – what a fool I am! I never thought of that – I did not know – how could I tell? I am all in the dark! Is it Russel Overshute?"

"Yes, Mr. Hardenow. Everybody knows it. Every one has taken good care to run away. Even the doctors will come no more! They say it is hopeless; and they might only infect their other patients. I fear that his mother must die too! She has taken the fever in a milder form; but walk she will, while walk she can. And at her time of life it is such a chance. But I cannot stop one moment!"

"And at your time of life is it nothing, Esther? You seem to think of everybody but yourself. Is this fair to your own hearth and home?"

While he was speaking he looked at her eyes; and her eyes were filling with deep tears – a dangerous process to contemplate.

"Oh, no, there is no fear of that," she answered misunderstanding him; "I shall take good care not to go home until I am quite sure that there is no risk."

"That is not what I mean. I mean supposing you yourself should catch it."

"If I do, they will let me stay here, I am sure. But I have no fear of it. The hand that led me here will lead me back again. But you ought not to be here. I am quite forgetting you."

Hardenow looked at her with admiration warmer than he could put into words. She had been thinking of him throughout. She thought of every one except herself. Even in the moment of first surprise she had drawn away so that she stood to leeward; and while they were speaking she took good care that the current of wind passed from him to her. Also in one hand she carried a little chafing-dish producing lively fumigation.

"Now, if you please, I must go back to him. Nothing would move him; he lay for hours, as a log lies on a stone. I could not have knowledge whether he was living, only for his breathing sometimes like a moan. The sound of the bell seemed to call him to life, for he thought it was his own funeral. His mother is with him; worn out as she is, the lady awoke at his rambling. She sent me to find out the meaning. Now, sir, please to go back round the corner; the shivering wind comes down the passage."

Hardenow was not such a coward as to obey her orders. He even wanted to shake hands with her, as in her girlhood he used to do, when he had frightened this little pupil with too much emendation. But Esther curtsied at a distance, and started away – until her retreat was cut off very suddenly.

"Why, ho girl! Ho girl; and young man in the corner! What is the meaning of all this? I have come to see things righted; my name is Worth Oglander. I find this here old house silent as a grave, and you two looking like a brace of robbers! Young woman! – young woman! – why, bless me now, if it isn't our own Etty Cripps! I did believe, and I would believe, but for knowing of your family, Etty, and your brother Cripps the Carrier, that here you are for the purpose of setting this old mansion afire!"

Esther, having been hard set to sustain what had happened already (as well as unblest with a wink of sleep since Friday night), was now unable to assert her dignity. She simply leaned against the wall, and gently blew into the embers of her disinfecting stuff. She knew that the Squire might kill himself, after all his weeks of confinement, by coming over here, in this rash manner, and working himself up so. But it was not her place to say a word; even if she could say it.

"Mr. Oglander," said Hardenow, coming forward and offering his hand, while Esther looked at them from beneath a cloud of smoke, "I know your name better than you know mine. You happened to be on the continent when I was staying in your village. My name is Thomas Hardenow. I am a priest of the Anglican Church, and have no intention of setting anything on fire."

"Lor' bless me! Lord bless me! Are you the young fellow that turned half the heads of Beckley, and made the Oxford examiners all tumble back, like dead herrings with their jaws down? Cripps was in the schools, and he told me all about it. And you were a friend of poor Overshute. I am proud to make your acquaintance, sir."