Eustace and Hilda (21 page)

“Nothing else, Minney, thank you very much. Nothing else.”

T
HE SUCCEEDING
days passed slowly for Eustace. He was aware of an emptiness in his life and he did not know how to fill it. Nothing beckoned from outside; social adventures he had none; since his illness any extra exertion, even the questionable pleasure of the dancing class, had been ruled out. But rather to his surprise and Hilda's there had been several drives in the landau lately, drives which had taken the best part of the day and almost transformed Mr. Craddock from an Olympian deity into a familiar friend. No longer did he insist on their joining him in the street by Boa Vista; he had mysteriously discovered that the rough, rutted track to Cambo was practicable after all, and now they had the satisfaction of seeing the carriage standing outside their door. In their excursions they had even gone as far as Spentlove-le-Dale, where the almshouses were, an expedition that needed two horses and had been undertaken by Mr. Craddock only once before that year. On the way they passed a waterfall, foaming over a rock in a coppice with an effect of irresistible power and energy which delighted Eustace, and which in old days would have taken a high place among his mental mascots. But now his imagination seemed to have lost its symbolising faculty, and nothing that he saw took root and flowered in his mind. A kind of melancholy settled over it, an apathy of the spirit, a clear transparent dusk like twilight, in which everything seemed the same colour and had the same importance. It was as though the black band and the black tie had imparted their sombre hue to the very air around him.

To-day they were bound for Frontisham, an unambitious goal, but it meant they would skirt the edge of the little moor where the heather and the bog-cotton and the sundew grew—a perilous place, almost a marsh, dotted with pools of dark or reddish water in which one might easily be engulfed. Eustace liked to imagine himself springing from tuft to tuft with the lightness of an ibex. And at the end of the journey was a sight he always looked forward to: the west window of Frontisham Church.

Mr. Cherrington was wearing a new suit, an oatmeal-coloured tweed, and a pair of brown boots; he looked gay and dashing.

“Now you must pinch me,” he said to Eustace, who obeyed with docility but without enthusiasm. “Harder than that,” he ordered, with the playfulness in his voice that Eustace loved and dreaded, for it might so quickly turn to irritation. “You'll have to eat some more pudding.”

“Doesn't it hurt?” asked Eustace anxiously, his fingers embedded in his father's sleeve.

“Can't feel it,” said Mr. Cherrington; “it's just like the peck of a little bird. There, that's better. Now jump in and make yourself comfortable.”

Eustace looked round at the little group standing between the freshly painted white gate with ‘Cambo' staring from it and the waiting landau. There was Hilda in her navy-blue dress and black stockings, a rusty sheen on both; Minney with Barbara in her arms; his aunt heavily veiled and hatted, her purplish skirt slightly stained with chalk dust where it swept the ground. Something in her bearing, for he could not see her face, implied dissent. Eustace hesitated.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Mr. Cherrington jocularly, “ladies first. Perhaps you'd like to ride on the box, Eustace.”

Eustace glanced at Hilda.

“Mr. Craddock always lets her drive down Frontisham Hill.”

“And you don't want to?”

“Not specially.”

“Very well, then, do as you please.”

Seated between his father and his aunt, with Minney, and Barbara obviously waiting to do something unexpected, facing him, Eustace pondered. “Do as you please.” The sentence sounded strangely in his mind: it made him feel unfamiliar to himself and filled his spirit with languor. His thoughts and impressions, which at this early stage of the drive usually followed a fixed course, began to lose their sequence. When, in obedience to time-honoured custom, they drove into the deep rut opposite Cliff House, a calculated mishap which made Hilda and even Miss Cherrington rock with laughter, the jolt and the lurch took Eustace completely by surprise: he even wondered what they were laughing at. Almost for the first time the imposing façade of The Priory, a superior boarding-house with grey-painted dormer window projecting from a steep slate roof crowned with a
chaveux-de-frise
, failed to impress him, and the knowledge that there were people rich enough to enjoy for months on end the luxuries of its unimaginable interior failed to comfort him with its promise of material security.

“Very well, then, do as you please.”

But wasn't the important thing to do what pleased other people? Shouldn't self-sacrifice be the rule of life? Why had his father asked him to get into the carriage before any of them? Was it just a slip of the tongue? He had tried to make it seem so, but Eustace didn't think it was. Since Miss Fothergill's death there had been several occasions, it seemed to Eustace now, when his wishes had been consulted in a quite unprecedented way, and especially by his father. That he had always been waited on and spoilt and protected from harm, he knew very well, but this was something different: it involved the element of deference. Minney showed it and even Miss Cherrington, though it sat uneasily on her. There was a change in their bearing towards him. In countless small ways they considered his wishes. Something of the kind had happened after his illness, he had been told not to tire himself, not to get excited, not to strain his eyes and so on: but he had always been told. There had been an increase of affection and an increase of authority. But now the voice of authority faltered; he was often asked, often given his choice, and sometimes he caught them looking at him in a speculative fashion, almost with detachment, as though he had been taken out of their hands and they were no longer responsible for him. What did it mean? Did it mean they loved him less? ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.' Eustace was well acquainted with this text. Might it not follow that when the Lord ceased to chasten He also ceased to love?

“Do as you please.”

For a moment Eustace contemplated an existence spent in pleasing himself. How would he set about it? He had been told by precept, and had learned from experience, that the things he did to please himself usually ended in making other people grieved and angry, and were therefore wrong. Was he to spend his life in continuous wrong-doing, and in making other people cross? There would be no pleasure in that. Indeed what pleasure was there, except in living up to people's good opinion of him?

But Hilda's attitude towards him had not altered. Her eye was still jealously watchful for any slip he might make. She still recognised his right to self-sacrifice. She had climbed on to the box without looking round the moment he surrendered his claim to it. True, she knew he was afraid to hold the reins going down Frontisham Hill, disliked seeing the horses' hindquarters contracted and crinkling as the weight of the landau bore down on them, was alarmed by the grating of the brake and the smell of burning; but still there was glory in it, and that glory Hilda had unhesitatingly claimed for herself. She had taken the risk, and left to him.... What exactly had she left to him? The satisfaction of doing what she wanted. This was what Eustace understood; this was what was right.

He looked round in a daze. They were trotting slowly up Pretoria Street. On the left was Mafeking Villa, as dingy as ever, the ‘Apartments' notice still askew in the window, the front garden—a circular flower-bed planted with sea-shells, set in a square of granite chips—discreetly depressing; while a little way ahead, on the right, rose the shining white structure of the livery stable with its flag-pole and shrubs in tubs, as fascinating as the pier-head which, in extravagance of wanton ornament, it somewhat resembled. Here Brown Bess would certainly want to turn in, as she always did, for it was her home; and Mr. Craddock would say, “Don't be in a hurry,” “All in good time,” “You haven't earned your dinner yet”— playful gibes which Eustace looked forward to and enjoyed hearing, callous as they were. But to-day he was in no mood to be disheartened by the one prospect or elated by the other. He remembered that when they reached the end of the street and turned into the dusty high road they would have to pass Laburnum Lodge.

He had not seen the house since her death, and he did not want to see it now. But how could he help seeing it? If he shut his eyes he would only see it more clearly in his mind. Mr. Craddock drove inexorably on. Nothing could make him stop, nothing but a steam-roller or one of those motor-cars he hated so. For asking him to stop in mid-career without a good reason there might be a penalty, as there was in a train; several pounds added to the fare. No one had ever tried it, not even his father; who could tell what the consequences would be?

Do as you please
.

“Daddy,” said Eustace, “do you think we could go another way, not past Laburnum Lodge?”

The words were spoken. Minney's eyes opened in astonishment; Aunt Sarah's eyes were suddenly visible behind her veil; and Mr. Craddock and Hilda, simultaneously turning inwards, craned their necks and gazed at him speechless. Eustace did not look at his father.

“Well,” said Mr. Cherrington at last, “if you want to go another way I suppose there's no objection. You don't mind turning round, Craddock, do you?”

Brown Bess had pulled up of her own accord, exactly opposite the livery stables.

“If Master Eustace wants me to, I'm sure I will,” said Craddock. “Especially him being such a favourite with the late lamented lady.”

There was a pause. Brown Bess began to draw across the street towards the open doors of the livery stable, from beyond which came confused sounds of swishing and stamping and munching, doubtless inviting to her ears.

“Oh, I know what Eustace feels,” broke in Hilda, “but he really will have to get used to seeing the house, won't he? It'll make us so late for tea, going all this way back through the town.”

“I think we ought to respect Eustace's wishes,” said Miss Cherrington decisively. “He is the best judge of what he owes to the memory of Miss Fothergill.”

“Yes, we don't want to spoil his outing for a little thing like that, do we?” said his father, with a sidelong glance at Eustace, who sat silent, puzzled by his aunt's words and vaguely troubled by their impersonal tone. “Eustace has to plough his own furrow like the rest of us, haven't you, Eustace?”

Eustace wriggled uncomfortably but didn't answer, absorbed in a vision of himself alone in an enormous field, holding the handles of a plough to which were attached two straining, sweating horses who kept looking round at him as much as to say, ‘When do you want to start?'

“Don't you think Eustace might order us another pot of tea, Sarah? I think we might have another. And another plate of cakes too. A growing lad like him can't have too many cakes. They'll put some roses in his cheeks.”

Miss Cherrington raised her eyebrows slightly.

“I don't want any more tea,” said Hilda.

Barbara was understood to say she would like another cake.

“Well, perhaps Eustace would be kind enough to ring the bell,” said Miss Cherrington in an even voice, looking past him as she spoke. “It's just by your elbow, Eustace.”

They were sitting in the garden of the Swan Hotel at Frontisham and they were all, except Barbara, a little conscious of their surroundings, for on previous expeditions they had had tea at the baker's, in a stuffy back room smelling of pastry and new bread.

Here they were under the shadow of the church. Vast and spectacular, shutting out the sky, it rose sheer on its mound above them. From where Eustace sat the spire was almost invisible, hidden behind some trees. He regretted this, but the west window was in full view, touched here and there with fire by the declining sun; and it was the west window that really mattered.

“Tucked away in this little-known corner of Norfolk,” the guide-book said, “is a treasure of the mediæval mason's art that lovers of architecture come miles to see: the west window of Frontisham Parish Church. Inferior in mere size to the west window of York Minster and to the east window of Carlisle Cathedral, the window at Frontisham easily surpasses them in beauty, vigour, and originality. It is unquestionably the finest example of flamboyant tracery in the kingdom; confronted with this masterpiece, criticism is silent.”

Eustace knew the passage by heart; he found it extremely moving and often said it over to himself. He did not share the guide-book's poor opinion of mere size: magnitude in any form appealed to him, and he wished that this kind of superiority, too, could have been claimed for Frontisham. But the book, which could not err, called the window the finest in the kingdom. That meant it was the best, the greatest, the grandest, the
ne plus ultra
of windows: the supreme window of the world. Eustace gazed at it in awe. It had entered for the architectural prize, and won; now it looked out upon the centuries, victorious, unchallenged, incomparable, a standard of absolute perfection to which all the homage due to merit naturally belonged.

It was not the window itself which fascinated him so much as the idea of its pre-eminence, just as it was not the guide-book's actual words (many of which he did not properly understand) that intoxicated him, so much as the tremendous, unqualified sense of eulogy they conveyed. He tried again, again not quite successfully, to see how the window differed from other church windows. But he could not see it through his own eyes, because he had so often visualised it through the eyes of the guide-book, nor could he describe it in his own words, because the author's eloquence came between him and his impressions. Feeling meant more to him than seeing, and the phrases of the panegyric, running like a tune in his mind, quickly started a train of feeling that impeded independent judgement.