Paths of Judgement

MRS. CUTHBERT MERRICK, erect in her shining dogcart, watched the stout pony's indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance. The road was steep and the day hot.

Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness.

Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy of her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the hill-top was a grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and trees of an orderly dulness, that didn't even make Constable effects, to look at, below there, about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes resolutely from the unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and a minute's quick trot brought her to her destination.

Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the south-western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant summer woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the house, though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with contented serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the beech-woods, the rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon the other to the splendid line of the horizon.

So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the half-clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers about it. The independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs. Merrick thought, as she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house, too large for a cottage, too classic, with its pillared door-way and balanced proportions, for its diminutiveness. It made one think of a tiny Greek temple incongruously placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it symbolized an attitude that had always bewildered and irritated her. The garden, too, irritated her and made her envious. Even at this late summer season its beauty was abundant. Her well-trained gardener at Trensome Hall, with the two boys under him, produced no such effects with all his wide opportunities. Her garden was like an official report; this was like a poem. Mrs. Merrick did not use the simile; she merely felt, as before, irritating comparisons.

Flowers grew in long lines from the house to the garden wall, eddying into broad pools of colour. In the delicate green shadow of the limes were Canterbury-bells, frail bubbles, purple and white, making in the shade a soft radiance, as though they held light within them. Beds of white pansies, thickly growing, looked like cream poured upon the ground; near them nasturtiums, a disordered host, dashed waves of colour against the wall.

As Mrs. Merrick sat looking, with some visible sourness, at the garden, a girl, carrying a spade and a watering-pot came round the corner of the house. She was dressed in a white cotton dress and wore, over smooth but loosened hair, a flapping white hat. She gave one an impression of at once flower-like freshness and most human untidiness. The black ribbon at her neck was half untied, her hat was battered; her dress was askew and dabbled with water. Unabashed by these infelicities, she set down her burdens, drew off her heavy gloves, and advanced through the purple and white and flame; smiling indifferently.

Mrs. Merrick's smile as she put out her hand was obviously decorative. She presented an amusing contrast to the graceful disarray that greeted her. Her thin dry face was flushed above a rigid collar; a sharply tonged fringe and a netted miracle of twists and convolutions seemed appendages of the sailor hat-tilted forward and fastened to her head by a broad elastic band, a spotted veil and two accurate pins. She could but sit erect; her meagre body in its tightly buttoned bodice, was box-like. Her figure was her chief vanity; its "neatness" her aim, and the word with her signified a careful, unrelaxing compression.

"Gardening, Felicia?" she asked, glancing down at her niece's earth-dogged shoes.

Felicia Merrick's father and her own husband were brothers.

"Yes; digging all morning; weeding and watering most of the afternoon." Felicia was thinking that to-day her aunt looked more funnily than ever like a collection of parcels strapped together for postal delivery. She was mentally tying a stamped label to her hat; the circle of the curl between the eyebrows was already a post-mark.

"Doesn't Thomas do the digging? It must, I know, be hard to manage with one boy, but surely he could do the digging."

"He does, unless I want to."

"People can see you from the road-not that any one passes by here often."

"Not often," Felicia assented.

"I want to know if you can come down to us to-morrow for a week," said Mrs. Merrick, allowing the antagonistic moment to pass, and after a slight hesitation Felicia answered, "Yes, thanks."

Mrs. Merrick had often suspected that Felicia's gratitude on these occasions was not up to the mark of the opportunities they gave her, and now, emphasizing the present opportunity, she went on, "You can't fail to enjoy yourself. Lady Angela Bagley is with us. You have heard of her. I met her in London this Spring; we took a great fancy to each other. She is a wonderful woman-really wonderful. Such intellect, such soul, such world polish, and with it such saintliness. Everybody feels that about her; it helps one to know that there are such people in the world," said Mrs. Merrick, sighing as she flicked the pony-"people who have everything the world can give, and who care nothing for it." Felicia wondered from which of her recent guests her aunt had picked up these phrases which came oddly from her anxious materialism.

"I have often seen her picture in the ladies' papers," she replied; "it will be nice to see her." She dimly remembered a narrow face, a mist of hair, a long, yearning throat, and she at once decided that she would not like Lady Angela and her soul.

"Yes, it will be nice for you. She takes an interest in everybody. Of course your father must come, too. There are some interesting men whom he will like meeting. Mr. Daunt, the young M.P., is a cousin of Lady Angela-the comet of the season, my dear;-most wonderful speech in the House-you probably heard of it; Imperialism-national prestige;-and a friend of his, Mr. Wynne, a most captivating person. He writes essays, he paints, he plays the violin; people are quite mad about him in London. You mustn't fall in love with him, Felicia, for, charming as he is, he has no money."

Felicia, her arms leaning on the wall, picked at a flake of loosened stone with only a dim smile of acknowledgment for this jest.

"And old Mr. Jones, the scholar, from Oxford; your father, I feel sure, will be eager to meet him. How is your father, Felicia? Plunged in books, I suppose. Is he writing?"

"Yes. He is well."

"He will get ideas, I think, from Mr. Jones. I spoke of his book to Mr. Jones; he had never heard of it. I gave it to him; he looked through it last night. Of course, as he said, it is quite out of date by now."

Felicia picked off another flake, and said nothing.

"So," Mrs. Merrick went on more briskly-her niece had the faculty of disconcerting her even in the midst of apparent triumphs-"So it will be nice for him to talk things over with Mr. Jones. Here is Austin now. I thought that he would see or hear me."

Mr. Austin Merrick came down the garden path at a sauntering pace, his hands in his pockets, breathing in the sunlit air as though the afternoon's balmy radiance, rather than sight or sound of his sister-in-law, had lured him from his studies.

He was a tall man, with a stout, easy, indolent body and a handsome head. His eyes were of a vague but excitable blue; his thick grey hair haloed a clean-shaven face, delicate in feature, the nose finely aquiline, the lips full, slightly pursed, as if in a judicial weighing of his own impressions; his cheeks were rosy and a trifle pendulous. Loosely fitting clothes, a fluttering green neck-tie, a Panama hat, placed at the back of his head with a certain recklessness, carried out the impression of ease and of indifference.

"Ah! Kate," he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large, white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick irritably wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose.

"You and Felicia are coming to me for a week," she said, again flicking her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. "I mustn't let you get rusty up here."

If Miss Merrick had a faculty for disconcerting her aunt, her aunt had an equal faculty for "drawing" her father. His eye did not turn from the landscape, but it became more fixed and more pleasant as he said, "Ah, my dear Kate, rust, you know, is a matter of environment, and without my good little whetstone here I don't fancy that the combined efforts of our not highly intelligent country people could save me from it-when I go among them. A mental fog, a stagnant dulness, you know, affect one in spite of one's resolve to keep one's steel bright. Up here we have our own little space of dry, bracing air-we keep one another sharpened, don't we, Felicia? Rather uncomfortably sharpened, we sometimes find, when we come down from our tiny Parnassus."

Smiling, speaking in his most leisurely tones, Mr. Merrick laid his arm around his daughter's shoulders. She did not emphasize the effectiveness of the caress by returning it, or even by looking up, though her slight smile seemed to claim for his speech a jocular intention, while disavowing its magnificent complacency.

Mrs. Merrick's sudden flush made evident her nose's amelioration. "It is well to have the gift of idealization, Austin-it makes life far more comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?" The irony of her tone was not easy.

"One moment, Kate." Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter's shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. "Do you see that quite delightful effect-that group of trees melting against the sky-" It was to Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom Mrs. Merrick had never heard. "He could do it; it's like one of his smiling bits." His eye still dwelt upon it as he said, "I am rather busy just now, Kate. I have a great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a rather obscure phase of that most obscure thing-German idealism; what caves they creep into, poor fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun, the unpleasant sun;-I can't leave just now."

"But a holiday would do you good." Mrs. Merrick was forced to some urgency. Much as she wished this exasperating brother-in-law of hers to feel that she dispensed favours, she seldom met him in one of these sourly suave contests without being made to feel that she was receiving one. Indeed, her odd sceptical, scoffing brother-in-law, his solitude, his disdain, and his pagan-looking house as a background, was a figure she could not afford to miss from her parties-parties often so painfully scraped together-painfully commonplace when scraped. This year her party was surprisingly significant, but even in its midst Austin would count well as her appendage-would certainly redeem her from her husband's heavy conformity, that simply counted for nothing. He impressed her, and she imagined that he must impress other people.

"I have a really interesting group," she said, and she recited the list, adding, "Mr. Jones particularly wants to meet you. He found your book so suggestive-" Mrs. Merrick, in pinching circumstances, was careless of consistency; she had no appearances to keep up before Felicia.

"Jones? Ah, yes," Mr. Merrick repeated with benignity.

"A clever man, you know."

"Not bad," Mr. Merrick owned, indulgent in discriminating gravity. "That little book of his on Comte wasn't half bad; you remember it, Felicia?"

Mrs. Merrick had not heard of the book on Comte; it was an added discomfiture. "You will come, then?" She gathered up her reins.

"May we leave it open, Kate? I can, I know, give you a day or two, but may I leave the time and number open? Felicia shall go to you to-morrow, and I will join you as soon as may be." His face had regained its full serenity, and Mrs. Merrick was forced to accept the galling concession.

When she had driven off, Felicia picked up her spade and resumed her digging. Her father stood in the path watching her.

"Could one of Spenser's heroines be imagined digging?" he mused. "The day, the flowers-you among them-bring Spenser to my mind."

"I could imagine Britomart gardening if she had nothing bigger on hand to do," said Felicia. "But I am not a Britomart type."

"And yet you are not unbelligerent, Felicia;-an indolent, unroused Britomart. But I don't see you in armour. Charming, that white dress drenched with sunlight."

"And with water. I saw Aunt Kate disapproving; no wonder. I suppose we must go to her? Aren't you sometimes rather tired of Aunt Kate and her parties?"

"My dear child, selfishness is the besetting danger of a congenial isolation such as ours. We must think of her and of your uncle. And then"-Mr. Merrick paused as his daughter made no reply-"it is well that you should have these distractions."

"How refuse, when we have only German idealism as an excuse?" Felicia remarked.

"A very good one were we self-centred enough to urge it. But you may find these people interesting, Felicia; I really wonder that Kate managed to get people as interesting to come to her. Young Daunt is a very clever fellow. He speaks well and keeps a position of quite extraordinary independence."

"What is he?-a Liberal?"

"Really, my dear Felicia-your ignorance of politics!" Her father laughed, half approving the indifference to the world's loud drums such ignorance betokened. "Daunt, like all ambitious young men nowadays, is on the winning side; he is a Conservative; an under-secretary in the Admiralty."

"Personally ambitious, do you mean?"

"When does one see any ambition other than personal, my dear?" Mr. Merrick asked mournfully, taking off his hat and rubbing his thick but delicate hand through his hair. "Devotion to an idea, self-immolation if need be, is no longer to be found in British public life."

Felicia was stooping low to pick weeds, and her father seemed to be addressing himself to the landscape in general, as much as to her vague attention. "He is clever, as a man poor and determined on worldly success, and bound to succeed, is clever. It's a cloddish cleverness, after all. This Wynne, now, is of an appealingly contrasted type. I've read a little volume of his somewhere; slight but sensitive, subtle, ironic; bound by no outworn faiths and making use of none for his own advancement; an observer merely, not a scrambler."

Her head among her irises, Felicia observed, "Scrambling must be nice, I should think."

She continued her weeding, when her father with an indulgent laugh had walked off to the house, and she smiled a little to herself as she worked; it was, for the youth of the face, a mature smile; a smile that recognized and accepted irony and yet kept a cheerful kindness. Her father made her wince when he faced the world. Alas! Aunt Kate, the world!

The most inappropriate Britomart simile lingered and saddened her as her thought rested on it. It was true, though, that all her life long she had burnished weapons, sharpened her sword and kept her heart high. Now, it was as if with that sad smile and a shrug for the miscalculation of past energy, she leaned on the useless sword and watched the triviality of life go by. How find deep meanings in such muddy shallows? Of what avail was the striving urgency of growth? Where were great objects for armed faiths? She stood ready, waiting for lions; and only jackasses strayed by. But though she could laugh at herself, and see the Britomart attitude as sadly funny, her hand had not slackened-she still held her sword. If a lion did come, so much the better for her-and for life.