The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
walking with you and came back late by train yesterday. You know I
always taught him to observe the Sabbath. But I'd forgive him
_anything_ if he'd only come back and give me _one_ kiss ... my boy...."
But John was well on his way to Reading, and the London express, and all
his mother's tardy plaints were fruitless to recall him. Moreover, he
was not perceptive. To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed much as
usual; and he was certainly not conscious that she had parted with him
in anger. He was fond of her in a way, but he had been used from
childhood to her being always in a huff about something or other.
Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial calmness, straightened
her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet strings, and walked a little of the way
back with her towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively
behind. For the rest of that day he enjoyed unrebuked freedom to do as
he liked. He ate his fill and even smoked a pipe in the parlour. His
wife having regained her composure held aloof from him in silent, stony
grief.
Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of Aldermaston driving
thither in a chaise and got a lift, nearly as far as her home, a
substantial farmstead on the Mortimer road, close to both church and
school. This enabled her to begin her duties punctually. She taught her
girls and boys from nine to twelve and two to four. She thought of John
with gentle melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at
night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of her betrothed's
departure, especially his mother's wild display of grief. But the next
morning as she walked from the farmstead to the school she actually
hummed a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the dewy
hedge and arranged them round her light straw hat. At the same time she
had a twinge of remorse at her forgetfulness--poor John was doubtless
now at sea watching England fade from the exile's view; and she forced
herself to assume before her scholars an aspect of restrained grief.
Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather went by in her
surroundings of perfect beauty, she confessed to herself she had seldom
felt so happy, in spite of her sweetheart's absence.
*CHAPTER III*
*SIBYL AT SILCHESTER*
They had ridden over from opposite directions--he from Farleigh Wallop
on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet
Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern
Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of
early Christian Britain was then--and now--only marked by two-thirds of
an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees.
There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few
houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient
hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear,
apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous
past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest--waving fields
of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent
farmstead--unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster
school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and
its churchyard.
On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the
untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves.
This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an
explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman.
He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her
appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode
behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted
away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.
Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a
Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the
riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too
obvious to the male eye.
Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or
twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure,
good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young
woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently
moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a
gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns
of the younger generation were distant cousins.
_Roger_ (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and
scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five
years ago--a little filled out perhaps.... And _this_ is how we meet.
How _utterly_ different from what I had been looking forward to! I
remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh _how_ you cried, and how for
the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say
_I_ didn't write--when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a
nigger to get a position to afford to marry--and _now_ I hear from Maud
you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come
as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper
that some one posted to me at Aden--I suppose it was _you_! And this is
what women call _fidelity_!"
_Sibyl_ (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks
Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss
my case--not mere romantic school girls--they would say I had acted with
ordinary common sense, and _very_ unselfishly. I am, as you know,
twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several
years--I should never again get such a chance ... and I really _do_ like
Lord Silchester, you don't know _how_ kind he can be--and you can't
_really_ care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and
never even _wrote_ to me...."
_Roger_: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the _World_
... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides,
I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office
... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with
scorn: "_Missionary_ meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing
fit to wear when I landed...."
_Sibyl_: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so
madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a
sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ...
or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you
as a shock, so I _did_ post that _World_ to you and got Gerry to address
it--and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But _do_ let's be
calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I _must_
get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming--she helped to bring
it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "_Damn_ her!") "She's got
twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I _am_ sorry ... in
a way ... but you'll find _heaps_ of girls, _much_ nicer than I am,
ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes
glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed
cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.)
"And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now
I know more about things--I was so young when you went away--I don't
approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their--I mean aren't their ...
children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something
unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which
she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the
audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)
_Roger_: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all
right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only
second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You
thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer,
and so you threw me over...."
_Sibyl_: "Well! I _did_ think I might, and _not_ selfishly. There's
papa--more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's
mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara
and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into
professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of
self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what
would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be
able to marry for _ever_ so long...."
(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")
_Sibyl_: "Yes, but what could we do on that? Poor papa could afford to
give me nothing more than my trousseau.... Even on seven hundred a
year, _if_ you get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households, and
I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African climate long, and I
should have to come home. I _don't_ like roughing it, I should
_dislike_ hot countries; and I _hate_ black people.... No, Roger ...
dear ... be sensible... If you want to carve out a great career in
Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with a wife for several
years to come; and then ... I'll--I'll find some really _nice_ girl to
marry you, somebody with a little money. And Silchester might help you
enormously. They'll probably take him into the new Government--aren't
you glad that _horrid_ old Gladstone's _gone_?--He'll be at the Colonial
Office or somewhere like that and I know he'd do anything I asked him,
once we were married. If you still want to go back to Africa he shall
get you made a Consul or a Governor or whatever it is you want...." But
Roger was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded, even though
all the time an undercurrent of thought was glancing at the advantages
that might accrue from Sibyl's _mariage de convenance_. He'd be
_hanged_ if he'd take anything from Lord Silchester.... He was entitled
to some such appointment, anyway, after all he had done. But there, he
had lost all interest in life and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be
to blame. All his interest in an African career had been bound up with
Sibyl's sharing it. With her at his side he felt equal to anything. He
would conquer all Equatorial Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south,
find Emin Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria, and in
no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham----
"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion and be old before my
time, riding after you through the jungle, or living stupidly like a
grass widow at home...."
Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she noted him with
an approving eye. His anger and extravagance brought out a certain
boyishness and, made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him,
still additionally attractive physically.... He certainly was
good-looking and in the prime of manhood ... she sighed ... the
remembrance of Lord Silchester's pale, somewhat flabby face, his
slightly pedantic manner, his carefulness about his health.... He
rode--yes--they had already had decorous rides together, but she
imagined before the ride his cob had had some of the freshness taken out
of him by the groom....
Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints, to convey the
idea that Lord Silchester being nearly sixty--at any rate close on
fifty-six--and not of robust health, might not live for ever; though
really she wouldn't mind if _she_ died first, men were so perfectly
hateful, and so was your family--if you were a woman. You were expected
to do all you could for your family, and abused into the bargain by