Wives and Daughters: A Completion

Chapter LXI

The Winter Ledger and the Red-Tile Drains
The wheels of the Hollingford fly had scarcely ceased to grate upon the wet gravel of the sweep before Molly had slipped her hand from her stepmother’s arm and escaped up the crooked stairs to her own room. She did not bolt the door—she had learned long ago that a bolted door only gave Mrs. Gibson an excuse to knock with the salts—but she stood beside the narrow casement where the October rain was driving in grey, diagonal sheets across the shrubbery, pressing her palms together until the knuckles whitened. Down below, the iron gate clicked shut. The horse splashed through the yellow clay puddle at the turning of the lane, carrying Roger the short mile into town to meet the eleven-o’clock London coach at the George, and the square top of his portmanteau under its tarpaulin cover vanished behind the dripping laurels. Five months. He had said late March, or April at the farthest, if the Alexandria packet met no delay at Malta or the quarantine station.
She had nothing to show for the morning’s tumult except a faint red mark across her wrist where the rough horn button of his dreadnought coat had pressed against her skin when he took both her hands. Yet as she looked down at that slight indentation, already fading into the pale flesh, the confusion of the past two years seemed to lift. There had been no vow. Mrs. Gibson’s entrance with the umbrella and the sandwich-tin had cut the sentence clean in two. A town-bred girl, or one nourished on the three-volume novels that Miss Phoebe Browning borrowed from the circulating library, might have fretted over the want of an explicit declaration. Molly felt no such lack. Roger was not a man to say one thing in October and mean another in March.
When the surgery bell rang at half-past one, announcing Mr. Gibson’s return from the parish boundary, Molly washed her face in cold water, smoothed her hair, and went down to the dining-parlour.
Mrs. Gibson was already seated before the cold loin of mutton, holding a cambric handkerchief near enough to her eyes to indicate sensibility without endangering her lace cuffs.
“Come to the fire, Molly,” said she, dropping her voice into the minor key she reserved for damp weather and unannounced callers. “Though indeed why I should call it a fire I do not know. I told Betty half an hour ago that the small coal they send up from the canal wharf now gives out no more heat than wet slate, and leaves a white ash over every bit of mahogany in the room. It is very hard that in a country town one must pay double the price for half the comfort one had at the Towers. And look at the fringe of the hearth-rug—Perkins’s driver came right into the hall with his dirty oilskins while I was giving Roger the sandwiches, and left a ring of grease on the oilcloth that will take half a pound of fuller’s earth to fetch out.”
Mr. Gibson, who had laid down his riding-whip and was stripping off his mud-spattered gaiters in the passage, stepped into the room in his slippers.
“Mr. Gibson, you are terribly wet,” his wife continued, drawing her skirts back an inch. “Pray do not stand near the fender in those stockings; the steam takes all the stiffness out of the chimney-valance. You have missed a most trying morning—quite an agitation, I assure you. Poor dear Roger! So reluctant to tear himself away from the hearth where he has always found—I think I may say without vanity—a second mother’s sympathy.”
The surgeon cast a single, rapid, sidelong glance from his wife’s pensive profile to his daughter’s quiet face. Molly’s eyelids were slightly pink, and she was cutting the bread with an excess of geometric precision; yet there was a composure about the corners of her mouth that he had not seen there since the winter of Cynthia’s engagement.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Gibson, seating himself and drawing the carving-knife across the steel with two sharp, business-like strokes. “I met the fly by the toll-bar as he was going in to catch the stage. The near horse has a splint coming on the foreleg, as I told Perkins last week, and Roger was leaning out of the window in the rain trying to get a last look at the church spire—or the milestone, I couldn’t be sure which. Did he eat the sandwiches?”
“He took them in the most grateful spirit,” replied Mrs. Gibson with dignity. “Though whether a young man in his state of feeling knows beef from veal is more than I would undertake to pronounce. It was quite a scene, Mr. Gibson—just such a parting as I remember when Lord Hollingford’s younger brother went out to join the embassy at Vienna, though of course the diplomatic service has a refinement that one cannot expect when a young man is going out to Alexandria to pack up dead beetles and pickled lizards. Still, as I said to Molly the moment the door closed, if poor dear Cynthia’s transplantation to a wider sphere in London has left a void in Roger’s heart which only a quieter, more domestic tie can repair, I am the last person in the world to place an obstacle in the path of true attachment. From the very afternoon he brought that hornet’s nest into the old schoolroom—or was it a wasp’s?—I said to myself, ‘Wait.’”
“My dear,” said Mr. Gibson dryly, laying a slice of fat upon her plate, “your prophetic faculties are only equaled by your memory. As I recall that afternoon, you spent the better part of it behind the window-curtain in terror of being stung. Molly, my girl, give me the mustard. The wind is backing round to the north-west. We shall have the roads dry by Thursday, and if this weather holds, the Falmouth packet will clear the Bay before the November gales set in.”
He did not look at Molly as he spoke, nor did he ask a single question about what had passed in the drawing-room before the fly arrived. Only when he rose after dinner to go into the surgery and mix a draught for old Silas Tod’s asthma, he paused behind her chair and laid his lean fingers, smelling of camphor, for two seconds upon the parting of her hair.
“Have you any message for the Hall, Molly?” he asked. “I must ride over to see the Squire’s bailiff about his thumb before dusk, and since the quarantine is off the west wing, I dare say the Squire will expect a bulletin.”
“Only my love, papa,” said Molly, looking up at him with clear, grateful eyes. “And tell him I can come over on Friday to help young Mrs. Hamley with the winter flannel, if he would like to have me.”
“H’m. He’ll have you fast enough,” muttered her father, already halfway to the door. “And before I forget—when I stopped at the George just now to lance the ostler’s gumboil, he gave me a small deal box that Roger had taken out of his portmanteau in the inn parlour while they were strapping his trunks to the London coach. It’s on the lower shelf in the surgery, behind the pestle. He scrawled a line on the lid to say the damp in the Hall lumber-room would spot the plates before Lord Hollingford comes down in January, and asked if you would give it house-room by a dry wall. Don’t let Betty use the wrapping-paper for lighting the copper. Keep out of the wet laurels this afternoon; one case of catarrh in the house is quite sufficient for my ledger.”
Ten minutes later, when Mrs. Gibson had retired upstairs for her afternoon nap and the house was quiet save for the ticking of the tall clock in the hall, Molly slipped into the surgery. Between a jar of dried digitalis and a bundle of splints stood a square box of planed white deal, bound with tarred twine. Across the unvarnished lid, in Roger’s square, upright hand—written with the thick carpenter’s pencil he always carried in his waistcoat pocket—were the words: Care of R. Gibson, Esq. — To be kept from the damp. M.G. will know the place on the upper shelf.
She did not untie the twine. The knot had been drawn tight in the parlour of the George three hours ago, while the coach-horn was blowing in the yard. She simply lifted the box in both arms—it was heavy with the weight of his field-books and brass-bound lenses—carried it up to her bedroom, and set it inside her wardrobe against the warm flue of the dining-room chimney, laying her palm flat upon the rough pine grain where the pencil-lead had bitten into the wood.
By the middle of November, the scarlet fever had been thoroughly scoured, whitewashed, and fumigated out of Hamley Hall, and the old red-brick house beside the reed-choked mere settled into its winter routine. Yet it was not the stagnant, oppressive routine of the twelve months following Mrs. Hamley’s death and Osborne’s fatal decline. A gruff vitality had begun to stir among the outbuildings and the low-lying pastures toward the brook.
Three days before his departure, Roger had spent a long morning closeted in the study with his father, Mr. Gibson, and the lawyer from Warwick. During the two years Roger had been away in the interior of Africa—living upon camp rations charged to the expedition fund—four hundred pounds of his Trinity fellowship dividends had accumulated untouched at his Cambridge banker’s. Out of this he had drawn a hundred and forty for his new sea-outfit and instruments; and the remaining two hundred and sixty, together with forty pounds paid him by the Annals of Natural History for his papers on the osteology of the Cape ruminants, had been laid quietly upon the Squire’s battered leather desk. He had offered the three hundred pounds not as a gift, which the old man’s fierce pride would have flung into the turf-fire, nor even as an unbusinesslike loan from a son to a father, which would have galled him scarcely less, but as a formal, five-per-cent mortgage note for the resumption of the stalled land-drainage works, secured upon the felling-rights of the Home Copse and witnessed in Mr. Gibson’s crabbed hand.
“It’s plain arithmetic, father,” Roger had argued, tracing the pencil-lines on the twenty-year-old surveyor’s map where the Westmorland lender had broken off when Osborne’s debts came to light. “If I leave the three hundred in the bank at Warwick, it draws three per cent, which is nine pounds a year. If we pay off the brick-kiln score and lay the four-inch main tile through the forty acres of the Rush-meadow and the Lower Leasow, with two-inch lateral pipes down the furrows, the hay-rent goes up twelve shillings an acre within two seasons. That’s four-and-twenty pounds a year—fifteen to pay my five per cent, and nine pounds clear in your pocket toward the principal, besides getting little Roger’s land out of snipe-bog.”
So all through November, whenever the mist lifted from the water-meadows, the Squire was to be seen on his stout cob at eight o’clock in the morning, splashed to the saddle-girths with red Cheshire marl, shouting directions to six ditchers who stood knee-deep in the trenches. Thousands of red clay pipes, baked at the kiln five miles off, lay stacked in neat, rust-coloured pyramids along the hedgerows, waiting to be bedded into the stiff subsoil.
When Molly walked over from Hollingford on Friday mornings, carrying a basket of household patterns or a packet of French grocers’ bills that perplexed the village postmistress, she always looked first toward the low meadows. If she heard the ring of a spade striking a stone, or caught the Squire’s stentorian voice rating young Hodge for laying a collar-joint two inches out of the level, she knew the indoor weather would be passable.
The indoor weather still needed some delicacy of management, and by no means ran smooth from week to week. In the mornings, while the Squire was out in the mud, Aimée—looking very small, pale, and foreign in her heavy crape dress with its broad white muslin cuffs—sat with Molly in the warm, wainscoted parlour that had once been Mrs. Hamley’s morning-room. Between them on the turkey carpet sprawled little Roger, a sturdy, dark-eyed child of two and a half, who possessed his mother’s quick, brown fingers and his grandfather’s squareness of brow.
The Squire still entered this room as if he were treading upon thin ice over a marl-pit. He could not get it out of his head that a Frenchwoman and a Romanist must necessarily live upon frogs, wafers, and sentiment, and only the week before he had come to an open pitched battle with her at the nursery door. The child had been fretful with an eye-tooth, and the Squire had marched upstairs carrying a silver porringer of hot spiced port-wine posset—the sovereign Hamley specific upon which both Osborne and Roger had been reared—only to find his way barred by a pale, immovable little woman who positively refused to let a drop of alcohol pass the boy’s lips, declaring with quiet French obstinacy that she would wrap his feet in warm bran-poultices and give him nothing stronger than barley-water. The Squire had stumped down to the gun-room in a towering passion, muttering that the heir of Hamley would be bred up with the constitution of a turnip; yet when Mr. Gibson rode over the next afternoon and pronounced the bran-poultice the only sensible thing in the parish, the old man had been left without a leg to stand on.
It was the estate ledger that made the first narrow truce between them, though even that was yielded inch by inch. One wet Tuesday toward the end of the month, when the rain had driven the ditchers under the cart-shed and left the Squire kicking his heels before the parlour fire in an agony of muddled arithmetic over the brick-kiln accounts, Aimée laid down her hemming. Glancing over his shoulder at the blotted column of shillings and pence as she rose to fetch a reel of cotton, she asked in her quiet, clipped English if she might set down the carry-over on a slip of waste paper.
Her father, it appeared, had kept the books for a silk-dyer at Lyons before he retired to his little vineyard. Without touching the Squire’s own volume, she took a scrap of blue sugar-paper, separated the haulage charges from the kiln-tallies, deducted the rebates on cracked pipe, and laid the slip silently beside his elbow in neat, slanted continental figures.
The old man stared at the blue scrap through his horn-rimmed spectacles, checked the addition twice on his thick fingers, and gave a short, suspicious grunt.
“H’m,” said he, pushing his spectacles up on his forehead and looking hard at the fire rather than at his daughter-in-law. “They teach you to cast up sums in those foreign convents, then? Seven and four is eleven—carry one—ay, Darby’s charged me twice for the team from the cross-roads. Well, well, leave the slip by the inkstand. I’ll have the bailiff go over it on Saturday.”
He did not thank her at the time, and went out into the hall five minutes later to rate the stable-boy for leaving a bucket in the passage. Yet when Molly came again ten days afterward, in the first week of December, she found the blue sugar-paper pinned inside the cover of the great calf-bound day-book, and the Squire sitting at the round table with his elbow crooked toward Aimée’s work-basket.
“Look here, Molly,” he muttered in an undertone, while Aimée was upstairs tying the boy’s pinafore for his midday walk. “I don’t say I like her foreign ways—she’s as stubborn as a mule when she gets a notion into her head about that boy’s barley-water, and it goes against my stomach to see those little red-and-gilt pictures stuck inside her prayer-book on the chimney-piece—but she knows ninepence from a shilling. Poor Osborne never could keep two sixpences from rubbing holes in his pocket; took after his mother’s side in that, all poetry and fine words. Last night I left the butcher’s book on the desk, and this morning I find a mark in red ink against three pounds of suet that never came into the larder. And she tells the housekeeper that coal is gold dug out of the dark! Sits here with one log on the dogs and her shawl pinned tight, until I have to come in and kick the brands together myself for very shame.”
“She is trying to save for little Roger, sir,” said Molly gently.
“Save! The boy won’t want for bread while there’s an acre of timber standing at Hamley,” said the Squire testily, though his mouth softened under its grey bristles. “Still, I like a woman who doesn’t scatter meal with both hands. When our Roger comes home in the spring, he won’t know the Rush-meadow. We’ve got the water running clear out of the four-inch main outfall already—six gallons a minute into the brook, as sweet as a nut—and the rush-tufts are rotting out of the headland.”
At the name of Roger, a sudden shyness fell between the old man and the girl, as it always did. The Squire coughed, stooped down to build a perilous tower of wooden blocks for his grandson, and added in a lower, gruffer key:
“He’s a good lad, Molly. A true lad. He didn’t say much to me that last morning—we Hamleys aren’t great hands at speeches when the heart’s full—but he told me if anything went amiss while he was off the coast, I was to lean on you and Gibson. ‘Molly knows my mind, father,’ says he, standing by the stable-pump with his watch in his hand. ‘Molly knows my mind.’ So you keep your roses up through the frost, my lass, and don’t let your stepmother dose you with slops.”
Mid-December brought the first hard black frost, binding the ruts along the London road into iron ridges and covering the mere with a sheet of grey ice through which the dry reeds rattled like spears. With the frost came the early winter parcels, and among them a long, crossed sheet of satin-wove paper from Hanover Square, franked by one of Mr. Walter Henderson’s parliamentary dining acquaintances.
Mrs. Gibson read the letter aloud at the breakfast-table, pausing after every third sentence to sigh over the distance that separated a mother from her child, or to point out the remarkable similarity between Cynthia’s social triumphs and her own girlhood days at the Towers.
“‘We dined on Wednesday with Sir John and Lady Cumnor,’” read Mrs. Gibson, holding the pink sheet at an elegant angle toward the tea-urn, “‘and Lady Harriet was remarkably civil, though she still wears that dreadful puce turban which makes her look like a dragoon. Walter is already retained as junior counsel for two of the new canal and tramway petitions when the committees sit after the recess, which is very tiresome for me, as it leaves him nothing to talk of in the brougham except gradients and parliamentary deposits. However, he has promised that we shall go to Paris for three weeks at Easter if the sessions are short, and I have already ordered a silver-grey poplin from Madame Duchêne.’ Dear, sweet girl! So thoughtful of her husband’s career, and yet retaining all her natural playfulness! Listen to the postscript, Molly; this is meant particularly for you.”
Mrs. Gibson cleared her throat and adjusted her cap-ribbons.
“‘Tell dearest Molly that we met Lord Hollingford at the Royal Institution last Friday, where Walter took me to hear a most fatiguing lecture on glaciers or granite—I forget which, only the room was shockingly ventilated and everyone had boots that creaked. Lord H. told us that the Admiralty have had the November Malta bag, and that Mr. Roger Hamley’s packet touched at Valletta on the eighteenth of last month after a quick run from Falmouth, and went on toward Alexandria the next tide. I am very glad to hear it, for I confess I always felt a little guilty when it rained in October, thinking of him pitching about in the Bay of Biscay to go after those three detained Kosseir boxes. Walter says a man who chooses to go poking after pickled fish on the Red Sea when he might be living like a Christian in chambers has nobody to thank but himself. Give my love to Mr. Gibson, and tell him I have not had a headache since November, so I have thrown away the bottle of valerian he put in my dressing-case.’”
“Sensible girl,” remarked Mr. Gibson, cracking the top of his egg. “Valerian is four shillings an ounce, and it was entirely thrown away upon her constitution. Tell her next time you write, my dear, that she might have sent back the phial. Glass doesn’t grow on the hedges in this parish.”
“Mr. Gibson, how can you be so mercenary when the dear child is describing her domestic felicity?” cried his wife. “Though indeed, as she says about the Red Sea, there is a great deal of truth in Mr. Henderson’s view. The bar is a so much more tangible profession than natural history! One sees where it leads—silk gowns, and a seat on the bench, and dining with the Chancellor. Even if Roger discovers fifty new sorts of earwigs in Africa, one cannot very well bring them into a drawing-room. However, we must not be ambitious for everybody. Quiet tastes suit quiet people, and I am sure when Lord Hollingford comes down to the Towers after Twelfth Night to unpack those dreadful crates that came home from the first voyage, Molly will be quite in her element pasting dead leaves into brown paper books.”
Molly looked up quickly from her plate. “Is Lord Hollingford coming down in January, mamma? Have you heard?”
“Why, child, didn’t your father tell you?” said Mrs. Gibson, glad to have a piece of real intelligence left in her quiver. “Mr. Gibson met Mr. Preston’s successor—young Mr. Sheepshanks, a much more gentlemanly person in every respect—at the library yesterday, and he said the omnibus is ordered to meet the down-coach on the tenth. Lord Hollingford is bringing one of the museum gentlemen from London, and he told Mr. Gibson a month ago that he should claim your promise to come over and help decipher Roger’s shorthand tickets. Though why a young man who went to Rugby and Trinity should write a hand like a spider dipped in ink, when his poor brother Osborne wrote like copperplate, is one of those mysteries of education I never pretend to fathom.”
“Roger’s hand is remarkably legible, my dear,” said Mr. Gibson, rising and buttoning his coat to the chin, “provided one understands the Latin declensions and knows the difference between a stamen and a pistil—two branches of polite learning which were not, I believe, included in the curriculum at Ashcombe. Molly, if you are walking toward the almshouses this morning, leave this ointment with Betty Gosling. And if you look at the barometer in the hall as you pass, you’ll see the mercury is falling. We shall have rain before night, and the Squire will see how his new outfall stands a flood.”
When the front door had shut behind him, Molly gathered up Cynthia’s pink letter from the tablecloth where her stepmother had dropped it. Standing by the window that looked out onto the grey garden, she folded the scented sheet back into its creases and laid it inside the table-drawer.

Chapter LXII

The Herbarium at the Towers
On the twelfth of January, the Towers omnibus—driven by an under-coachman who evidently considered a country surgeon’s threshold beneath the dignity of Lord Cumnor’s bays—drew up at the Gibsons’ gate to fetch Molly and her small hair-trunk. At Molly’s feet on the floor-cloth, wrapped in an old breadth of green baize to preserve the corners from the iron boot-rail, sat the square deal box from the George.
Lord Hollingford had written a line to Mr. Gibson the evening before: Dr. Burnett of the Linnean Society is with us until Friday, and wants to get the Abyssinian field-bundles that came home via Massowah out of the soldered sea-tins and mounted for the cedar cabinets before the damp gets at them. Tell Miss Molly that if she has the fourth field-ledger—which Hamley tells me in his Portsmouth postscript he left at the inn for your dry wall—she must bring it along, as the numbers on the granite lichens correspond to nothing else in our possession.
Mrs. Gibson had stood in the hall while the trunk was carried out, divided between maternal pride in the Earl’s liveries and a gentle grievance that she had not been asked to superintend the pasting herself.
“Though indeed, as I told your father at breakfast,” she said, tucking a spare Shetland shawl around Molly’s elbows with unnecessary vigour, “the smell of corrosive sublimate and camphor in that north gallery always gave me the megrims when I was a girl. You will be sure to remember my affectionate duty to Lady Cumnor, Molly, and if Lady Agnes asks after my neuralgia, you may tell her that nothing supports me through this trying season like the consciousness of having done my part by everybody. And pray, child, do not let this Dr. Burnett persuade you to spoil your cuffs with gum-tragacanth. A girl who has her own prospects settling so comfortably—for I am sure anyone with half an eye can see what Lord Hollingford means by singling you out to handle Roger’s private books—ought not to go down to dinner with ink on her middle finger.”
“I am only going as a clerk, mamma,” said Molly, stepping quickly into the omnibus before the speech could draw the notice of the butcher’s boy across the street. “And papa is riding over on Thursday before dinner to fetch me home.”
Yet when she reached the Towers, she found that her clerkship was the one station in the house where nobody treated her with ceremony or tried to manage her feelings. Lady Cumnor was laid up in the south wing with her winter sciatica, and Lady Harriet had gone into Cheshire for a week’s hunting; so that after a brief, formidable audience in her ladyship’s dressing-room—where Molly had to account for the Squire’s drain-tiles, the health of the parish, and the exact yardage of young Mrs. Hamley’s crape—she was suffered to go straight up to the long muniment room above the library.
A bright wood fire was roaring up the wide stone chimney, and three trestle-tables had been set end to end along the mullioned windows to catch the pale January light. At the farthest table sat Dr. Burnett, a small, bald, snuff-coloured gentleman in silver spectacles, surrounded by herbarium presses and sheets of heavy cartridge-paper. Near the hearth stood Lord Hollingford, his sleeves turned back an inch at the wrists, plying a pair of iron shears to strip the soldered zinc lining from an oblong packing-case that still bore the chalk-marks of the Massowah and Suez customs-houses.
“Ah, Miss Molly!” said Lord Hollingford, laying down his shears and coming forward with the quiet, cordial gravity that always put her at ease. “You have brought the key to our puzzle, I see. Set the box here by the fender, Roberts, and bring a knife for the twine. Hamley wrote me from Portsmouth that he had packed the high-plateau notebook at the bottom of this deal case because the lock on his leather portmanteau was sprung. Have you opened it yet?”
“No, my lord,” said Molly, her colour rising a very little as the footman laid the white pine box upon the trestle. “The knot was tied so fast, and—and the lid said it was only to be kept from the damp.”
“Hamley’s knots are meant to weather Ushant,” said Lord Hollingford, smiling slightly as he took the clasp-knife himself and severed the tarred hemp with a firm, clean cut. “There. Let us see how our traveller keeps his gear.”
He lifted the lid. On top lay a folded square of oiled silk, smelling faintly of sea-salt and pine-rosin, and beneath it were two brass-mounted pocket lenses, a small geological hammer with its ash haft worn smooth by the palm, a bundle of quills, and three stout, calf-bound field-ledgers stained at the corners with red African dust.
Lord Hollingford lifted out the upper volumes and handed them across to Dr. Burnett, who fell upon them at once with a little dry cluck of satisfaction.
“Here is the fourth book at the bottom,” said Lord Hollingford, reaching down into the box. “Flora of the Semien Escarpment and Takazzé Gorge—August to September. That is yours, Miss Molly. If you will take the table by the middle window and call out the numbers from the margin as Burnett lifts the unmounted sheets from the zinc case, I will write the labels for the cabinet folders. We have three hundred sheets to get poisoned and mounted before tomorrow night.”
For two hours the long room was silent save for the crackle of the ash logs, the scratch of Lord Hollingford’s quill, and the crisp rustle of the grey drying-sheets as Dr. Burnett turned them with his bone folder. Molly sat with the square calf-bound book open before her. Every page was ruled in Roger’s upright hand—no spider’s scrawl, as Mrs. Gibson had called it, but clear, patient columns recording date, approximate altitude by the boiling-point thermometer, the dip of the strata, and the native names of the thorny scrub.
Here and there, in the outer margin, a brief personal note broke through the Latin diagnoses: Sept. 4. Mule slipped at the ford of the Takazzé; lost the third tin press and two bundles of rush. Saved the thirty-eight upper-gorge Carex packets in my pocket, though the gum is washed off the outer tickets. Water brackish. Or again: Sept. 11. Heavy sleet on the high pass; very cold, like the wind off the mere at home in November.
She was two-thirds through the volume when the pages parted stiffly at a thicker fold. Tucked deep into the gutter of the binding, where the thread held it fast from slipping out, was a single double-sheet of coarse grey blotting-paper, smaller than the standard herbarium mounts, and sealed at the corner with a drop of common red wafer-wax. Across the front, written not in the black gall-ink of the museum lists, but in the familiar grey lead of his pocket-pencil, stood the initials M.G., and beneath them the date: Oct. 28—The George Inn, Hollingford.
Dr. Burnett was at the farther end of the room, stooping with his magnifying glass over a tray of crustose lichens, and Lord Hollingford had stepped into the library corridor to speak to the steward about the estate timber.
With fingers that trembled despite her effort to keep them still, Molly slipped her nail beneath the dried wafer. Inside the grey fold, fastened to a square of stiffer white paper by three narrow strips of court-plaster, lay a single stunted sprig of mountain heath, its woody stem twisted by the wind, yet bearing a cluster of tiny bell-shaped blossoms of a faint, dusty rose-colour against the dark needle-like leaves.
Beneath the stem, Roger had written four lines in his smallest, neatest hand:
Erica arborea (dwarf high-pass habit, two feet high). Gathered Aug. 19, at 9,400 feet, on the basalt crag above the Lamalmon pass, near the headwaters of the Takazzé. The wind there never stops blowing, and the soil is no deeper than a sixpence; yet the root holds fast in the cleft of the stone and flowers after the frost. Kept from the general press for M.G.
Molly sat looking down at the pale pink bells until the tiny lines of grey lead grew indistinct. He had taken this out of his own pocket-case at the George while the horses were being put to in the October rain.
A step sounded on the oak boards outside the door. With a quick, guilty start—dreading a dry demand from Dr. Burnett to see if the specimen were a duplicate—she slipped the grey fold inside the bosom of her merino gown, her heart beating fast against the stiff paper.
“Where were we, Miss Molly?” asked Lord Hollingford, seating himself and wiping his pen upon his sleeve. “Ah, Number 184—the composite from the basalt gorge. Does he give the height?”
Molly dropped her eyes to the page, where the columns seemed to run together in the pale light. “Nine thousand four—no, I beg your pardon, my lord, I was looking at the wrong line,” she faltered, her face flaming to the roots of her hair as she turned back a leaf by mistake. “Seven thousand one hundred feet, on the western slope.”
Dr. Burnett looked up sharply over his silver spectacles. “Seven thousand one hundred, Miss Gibson? Pray look again. The Senecio on Sheet 184 is marked from the snow-line above the pass; it cannot be under eight thousand.”
“Wait—yes, I had my finger on the date column,” said Molly, horrified at her own blunder and bending her head low over the book to hide her hot cheeks. “Eight thousand two hundred feet. He says the seed-down was blowing across the snow-patches like thistle-fluff in an English lane.”
Dr. Burnett gave a short, dry grunt and went back to his lens, while Lord Hollingford glanced once at Molly’s bent head and dipped his quill into the standish without a word.
Yet an hour before dusk, when they reached the broken bundles from the fourth of September—where the mule had slipped in the ford and thirty-eight packets of high-altitude Carex and Cyperus had their outer numbers washed clean off by the river—it was Dr. Burnett himself who came to a dead halt.
“This is a wretched business, Hollingford,” said the little savant testily, pushing his spectacles up on his bald crown and staring at the heap of stained grey wrappers. “Here are thirty-eight distinct sedges from the upper gorge without a single leg-ticket left on them, and the fourth ledger merely says See hypsometric slip for Sept. 3–5. Without the altitudes and gathering order, they are so much hay for the Society’s transactions.”
Molly, who had been quietly turning to the back fly-leaves of her volume while the two gentlemen lamented over the tray, looked up with a shy hesitation.
“If you please, Dr. Burnett,” she said, “I think both the sequence and the camps are here, though they are not in the botanical column. Mr. Hamley tore these inner seed-wrappers straight from the back of his old Cambridge mathematical exercise-book as he climbed—I used to see him use the same ruled quarto paper at the Hall when he was drying the Cheshire mosses—and look, the printed page-numbers in the corner run backward from 140 to 103 in the exact order he gathered them going up the pass.”
She stepped to the middle table and laid her open ledger beside the stained packets.
“And see here on the inside fold of each wrapper,” she went on, her finger moving with swift, clear certainty. “Where the river wetted the paper and made the pencil-lead run, he has pricked a row of tiny holes with his entomological pin right along the blue ruled line to mark the last digit of his boiling-point thermometer. Look at his table on the fly-leaf: on the plateau, water always boiled between a hundred and ninety and two hundred degrees. On the third of September, at the six-thousand-two-hundred-foot ford, it boiled at two hundred degrees—and here on pages 140 to 128 he has pricked a single hole above the blue line for the two hundred. On the fourth, on the seven-thousand-eight-hundred-foot basalt shelf, it boiled at a hundred and ninety-seven—and here on pages 127 to 115 are seven pin-pricks below the line. And on the morning of the fifth, at the nine-thousand-four-hundred-foot pass, it boiled at a hundred and ninety-four—and all the rest have four pin-pricks below the line. The Cambridge page-numbers give the sequence, and the pin-holes give the altitude.”
Dr. Burnett snatched up the nearest wrapper, held it against the grey January sky to count the seven tiny punctures below the ruled line, and compared the numbered corner with the fly-leaf table. For a full minute he said nothing at all, only turning over three more packets with his blunt thumb.
“Upon my word, Miss Gibson,” said he at last, taking off his spectacles and making her a small, stiff, old-fashioned bow across the trestle, “if the clerks at Montagu House had half your head for a lacuna, we should not have three basements full of unindexed lumber. Hollingford, give me the red ink; we can save every sheet of the Takazzé series before the dressing-bell rings. And Miss Gibson—when the lithographers send down the forty proof-plates of the Abyssinian cryptogams in June, the Linnean Council has voted five-and-twenty guineas for an analytical index and synoptical table. If you will undertake the commission, I will have the portfolio and the blank tabular sheets sent straight to your hand.”
“I should like to do it very much, Dr. Burnett,” said Molly, her eyes brightening with genuine pleasure as she took up her pencil again. “Papa has an old mahogany drawing-board in the surgery attic that will hold the folio sheets flat, and I know all Mr. Hamley’s abbreviations for the spore-cases.”
On Thursday afternoon, the frost having given way to a soft, grey thaw that smelled of wet bark and ploughed land, Mr. Gibson rode over from Hollingford upon his bay mare, leaving word at the stables that the gig was to follow at seven to carry Molly and her trunk home after dinner.
Finding that the herbarium mounting was finished, Lord Hollingford carried the surgeon off for a turn through the park plantations before dark. They walked for half a mile in silence along the gravelled ride where the laurels had been cut back, two men who understood one another all the better because neither was given to wasting breath on prefaces.
“Burnett tells me,” said Lord Hollingford at last, stopping with his stick planted in the wet gravel to look at a felled larch, “that this Abyssinian series—thanks in no small part to your daughter’s sharp head yesterday afternoon over the water-damaged sedges—will put Hamley in the very front rank of the younger men. As to his prospects, Gibson, the figures stand thus: the council at the newly opened King’s College in the Strand have formally offered him the readership in comparative anatomy for the October session, at a hundred and fifty pounds a year for two afternoon lectures a week. Beyond that, the Principal Trustees at the British Museum have given me a conditional undertaking for the new assistant-keepership in the zoological department at Montagu House, at two hundred and fifty pounds, provided he lands the three detained Kosseir cases in sound order at Falmouth in March and lays the types before the board. While he remains a bachelor at Trinity, his fellowship brings him another two hundred; if he marries, of course, he vacates the fellowship under the college statutes after his customary year of grace, and begins upon the four hundred from his two London posts.”
Mr. Gibson tapped his boot with his riding-whip, looking straight down the ride toward the lodge gates.
“Four hundred is a very respectable figure to begin upon, my lord,” said he dryly. “I began at Hollingford upon a hundred and eighty and a pony that had the stringhalt. The Squire will be glad to hear it. He has been haunted for two years by a notion that natural history is only a polite name for catching butterflies in a hat—especially since two roods of his new two-inch lateral pipe in the Three-Cornered Piece choked up with ochre-silt on Tuesday because old Darby laid the collars through the bog-iron vein without turf-sod packing.”
“So the Squire told my bailiff yesterday,” said Lord Hollingford with a quiet smile. “He was up to his knees in the ditch swearing that no tile baked since King George’s time was worth a rush, and then spent three hours helping the men relay every yard of it himself.”
He stopped again, prodded a tuft of wet moss with the ferrule of his stick, and cleared his throat twice, looking remarkably uncomfortable.
“In fact, Gibson,” he began, and then broke off to take off his spectacles and wipe the mist from the glasses with his handkerchief. “You know I am the worst hand in the world at—at this sort of thing. Had no practice at it. What I mean to say is, Hamley sat with me in the library for ten minutes the night before he left. He had a scruple—and I must say I respected him for it, after the way things were entangled in your house last year—against speaking out before he knew whether the Museum post would come to anything, and with five months of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean packets still between him and a certainty. So he held his tongue. Only he asked me, if the Trustees gave a favourable answer while he was away, to let you see how the figures stood before the spring.”
Lord Hollingford jammed his spectacles back upon his nose, reddening slightly under his grey whiskers, and looked away toward the beech-woods. He had not once named Molly.
Mr. Gibson walked on a dozen paces, his chin sunk in his neckcloth, switching at the dead bracken beside the ditch. When he spoke, his voice had its sharpest Scottish burr.
“I won’t pretend to you, Lord Hollingford, that I am in any great hurry to part with the only creature in my house who doesn’t talk to me as if I were a deaf parishioner or a walking cheque-book. When a man gets past fifty, and comes home at nine o’clock at night wet to the skin from a farm-labourer’s loft, it is something to find a pair of grey eyes by the fender that don’t ask him why he didn’t put on his dress-coat first.”
He paused, gave a short, harsh cough, and struck a pebble clean across the ride with the butt of his whip.
“But I am not an old fool, either,” he went on. “A father who tries to keep a girl tethered to his surgery pestle because she makes his tea comfortably deserves to die in the workhouse. If he comes home safe in March and has a mind to speak for himself—well, there isn’t another man between here and Edinburgh whose pulse I’d trust as I trust Roger Hamley’s. He has no shifting sand in him.”
“Thank God that’s out,” said Lord Hollingford, letting out a long breath of genuine relief and reverting instantly to his natural voice. “I would rather face a committee of the House of Lords than meddle in another man’s parlour. Come back to the library, Gibson, and look at the fossil ganoids he sent from the blue lias; the scales are as sharp as if they had been split yesterday.”
February in Hollingford was always the deadest month of the twelve. The Christmas beef and blankets had been distributed and ceased to furnish conversation; the frost had turned to a succession of raw, weeping fogs that kept the Miss Brownings prisoners to their parlour fire; and nothing moved along the high road except the lime-carts from the hills and Mr. Gibson’s mud-splashed gig.
To Mrs. Gibson, however, this season of general stagnation proved uncommonly fertile. Having extracted from her husband—not without three days of plaintive siege—the bare fact that Lord Hollingford had spoken handsomely of Roger’s London prospects, she proceeded to construct an entire winter conservatory of domestic romance out of the slightest materials.
She bought four blue hyacinth glasses at the ironmonger’s and set them in a row along the drawing-room sill—because, as she informed Miss Phoebe Browning when that lady called in her clogs on the first dry Tuesday, “a house where a gentleman of scientific attainments is expected in the spring ought to show a little sympathy with the vegetable kingdom.”
“Wait, my dear Miss Phoebe!” said Mrs. Gibson, shaking her head with a mysterious, matronly smile while she poured out the weak Pekoe. “My lips are sealed, of course—Mr. Gibson is so very peculiar with his medical etiquette, just as if an attachment were a compound fracture that mustn’t be talked of out of doors—but a mother’s penetration is not easily hoodwinked. For you know, Miss Phoebe, Molly has not Cynthia’s sparkle—it would be absurd in us to pretend it. She never could enter a room without looking as if she wished she were behind the door. Naturally, a young man of family needed a little gentle guiding to see her solid, unpretending value! When I think of the anxieties I have gone through since last autumn—first poor dear Cynthia, persecuted with attentions from a quarter where she could only offer a sister’s regard, and then my own sweet perseverance in turning Roger’s thoughts toward the quiet domestic virtues he had overlooked at his very elbow!”
“Indeed, Mrs. Gibson,” said Miss Phoebe, fluttering her mittens in great excitement, “Sally and I were saying only last night over our bézique that we hadn’t seen Molly look so blooming since she was in short frocks! And to think of Mr. Roger having a place at the Museum in London! Why, Sally says it is under Government, like the Post Office, and that they get free admission to look at the giraffes on public holidays!”
“It is not precisely the diplomatic service,” admitted Mrs. Gibson, sighing gently as she smoothed her silk apron. “Savants, I believe they call them; very respectable men, no doubt, though Lady Cumnor always said their linen was terribly frayed at the wristbands, and they have a trick of bringing quartz pebbles in their tail-pockets that ruins the damask chairs. Still, I have told Mr. Gibson that when the time comes, I shall insist upon going up to town for a fortnight myself to choose the drawing-room chintz. If one must have cases of stuffed humming-birds on the console-tables, one requires a lively rosebud pattern on the walls to carry it off.”
At this juncture the door opened, and Molly came in from her walk to Hamley Hall, her cheeks glowing from the sharp east wind that had sprung up since noon, and a small basket of cabbage-lettuce plants from the Squire’s cold-frame upon her arm for the surgery garden.
“Well, love!” said Mrs. Gibson, beaming upon her with an air of benevolent proprietorship that always set Molly’s teeth slightly on edge. “We were just speaking of spring arrangements. Have you left the patterns with young Mrs. Hamley?”
“Yes, mamma,” said Molly, untying her bonnet-strings. “And the Squire walked with me as far as the lodge. They have got the ochre-silt cleared out of the two-inch pipe in the Three-Cornered Piece at last, though the Squire says old Darby will never hear the end of it. And the bailiff from the Towers says the water is off the Lower Leasow three weeks earlier than it has been since the year of the great snow. They are going to put the plough into the headland on Monday.”
Mr. Gibson, coming in from the surgery with a newly washed phial in his hand, caught the last words.
“Ploughing the Lower Leasow in February, is he?” said the surgeon, holding the glass against the light to see that it was clear. “Then the twelve-shilling hay-rent on the forty acres will pay Roger’s five per cent and clear nine pounds off the brick-kiln score before Michaelmas. Did he have any word from town, Molly?”
“Not today, papa,” said she, setting her basket down upon the side-table. “Only the shipping list in Tuesday’s Standard. The Ariadne packet, homeward bound from Alexandria and Malta, passed Gibraltar on the eighteenth of this month, though the paper says the nor’-westers are blowing hard across the Bay, and all Levant vessels with hides or botanical bales have to ride out a ten days’ quarantine at St. Just Pool in Falmouth harbour before the health-boat clears them.”
She did not look toward the blue hyacinth glasses on the sill, where two of the bulbs had begun to rot in the cold water from Betty having set them too near the draught of the sash; nor did she need Mrs. Gibson’s sigh of confidential intelligence to remind her how many leagues of rough water and quarantine cable still lay between the Rock and the Cornish shore.

Chapter LXIII

March Winds and the High Road
The third week of March came in with a high, roaring sou’-wester that stripped the last dead oak-leaves from the Hamley plantations and drove the white clouds in tattered squadrons across the sky. Down in the Lower Leasow, where the four-inch main tiles had done their winter’s work, the newly turned furrows lay brown and crumbly in the sun, drying so fast that the rooks could scarce keep pace with the plough-tail.
On Wednesday morning, the twentieth of the month, as Mr. Gibson was buttoning his gaiters in the hall, the Squire’s stable-lad rode into the sweep on the old grey pony, carrying a twisted note directed in the Squire’s biggest, splashiest hand.
Dear Gibson, it ran, The boy is out of quarantine and ashore. The health-boat cleared the Ariadne at St. Just Pool on Monday night after ten days riding at anchor, and all three Kosseir boxes are whole. He is gone straight up to town by the mail to lay the types before the Museum Trustees at a Wednesday sitting Lord Hollingford got up for him, and will be down by the five-o’clock coach at the George on Friday afternoon. Tell my little lass to keep her bonnet-strings tied against the wind. Aimée is killing the speckled pullets, and the boy has got his back tooth through since Sunday without a drop of port-wine.—Yours to command, R. HAMLEY.
Mr. Gibson read the note twice, folded it into a neat spills-shape between his fingers, and walked back into the breakfast-parlour, where Mrs. Gibson was measuring out the green tea with her usual mournful exactitude.
“Well, Molly,” said he, laying the paper beside her toast-rack, “you may tell Betty to air the best spare blankets at the Hall next time you go over. The Ariadne is out of quarantine, and Roger will be at the George on Friday by five.”
Molly did not utter a sound. Her hand closed once upon the edge of the tablecloth, and the blood rushed up from her throat to her temples in a sudden, scorching wave, then receded, leaving her paler than before. She bent her head over the Squire’s crabbed lines, reading them three times before the words would stay in their places.
Mrs. Gibson, however, was equal to the occasion. She laid down the caddy-spoon with a little cry of chastened triumph.
“Friday at five! Well, I am sure, Mr. Gibson, it is a great mercy you mentioned it before I went into the larder, though why the Squire should write to you instead of to me, when he knows how naturally a young man looks to the mistress of the house on these occasions, is only another proof of how rustic people get when they live entirely among drain-pipes. Friday! Let me see—that gives us full eight-and-forty hours. Molly, love, we must have the amber curtains down in the drawing-room this very morning; the winter soot has got into the bullion fringe, and I would not have Roger come straight from Lord Hollingford’s London circle into a room that smells of small coal for the world. And I shall tell Betty to make a batch of those little lemon cheesecakes he used to eat by the half-dozen when he was so low in his mind about poor dear Cynthia.”
“If you mean to feed him on lemon cheesecakes after five months of Mediterranean biscuit and ten days of quarantine beef, my dear,” said Mr. Gibson, taking up his hat, “you had better wait till Saturday. A man who has been jolted down from London on the roof of the Defiance generally prefers a chop. Molly, have you got that roll of tracing-cloth the Squire wanted for the ditch-map?”
“Yes, papa. I promised young Mrs. Hamley I would bring it over on Friday morning, before the wind gets too high.”
“Why, child!” cried Mrs. Gibson in sharp dismay. “You can never think of walking three miles through the lanes on the very morning he is expected! Your hair will be blown into rats’ tails, and the east wind always makes the tip of your nose red for three hours afterward. When Mr. Kirkpatrick came down from circuit to propose to me at the Towers, I remained upon the sofa the whole morning with a volume of Felicia Hemans and a little eau-de-Cologne on my wrists, so that I might receive him with a proper composure.”
“Roger isn’t coming on circuit, my dear,” said Mr. Gibson from the doorway, “and he won’t be at the George till five in the afternoon. Let the girl stretch her legs in the morning if she likes; it will save her listening to the carpet-beating. Only mind you are back by three, Molly, or your mother will have the parish constable out dragging the mere.”
All through Thursday, the house in Hollingford was given over to what Mr. Gibson privately termed the rites of purification. The blue hyacinth glasses—two of which had obstinately rotted at the neck while the other two put forth nothing beyond a crooked green nose—were banished to the back staircase, and their places supplied by two pots of forced early primulas procured at vast expense from the nursery-gardens. Mrs. Gibson moved from room to room in a clean Holland apron, shifting the fire-screens six inches to the left and then four inches to the right, and delivering a continuous, soft-voiced monologue upon the sacrifices required of a mother who had two daughters to establish in successive years.
By ten o’clock on Friday morning, when the last curtain-ring had been hooked up and Mrs. Gibson had retired to her chamber to try which cap-ribbon best harmonized with an expression of maternal benediction, Molly tied on her close straw bonnet, pinned her grey plaid shawl tight across her chest, and slipped out by the side gate with the roll of tracing-cloth under her arm.
It was a blustery March noon. The ruts had dried to a pale ash-colour, the celandines were starring the sheltered banks under the hazel-stools, and every gust that swept down from the low hills brought the sharp, clean smell of ploughed earth and wet gorse.
At Hamley Hall, she found all in a bustle of preparation. The great oak log was blazing in the hall chimney for the first time since Christmas; the housekeeper was polishing the silver tankards in the pantry; and Aimée, who had laid aside her heavy crape for a neat grey merino with white linen collar and cuffs, was kneeling before the study fender, trying to teach little Roger to say “Mon oncle” in plain Cheshire English.
“The Squire is gone down to the five-acre piece to tell the men they may knock off at four with a quart of ale apiece,” said Aimée, rising and kissing Molly on both cheeks with an unusual little flush of excitement in her pale face. “And the gig is to go into town at half-past four to meet the coach. You will stay and eat your dinner with us, Molly? The Squire said you must see the new calf before you go back.”
“I dare not stay past one,” said Molly, untying her strings for ten minutes by the fire while the child climbed upon her knee to search her pocket for ginger-lozenges. “Mamma has settled everything for the afternoon, and I promised papa to be home well before three. Tell the Squire I left the tracing-cloth on his desk, under the brass horse-shoe.”
She ate a slice of Aimée’s home-baked bread and honey, kissed the sturdy little boy—who had got hold of his uncle’s old riding-crop and was whipping the hearth-rug with great energy—and set off homeward at half-past one by the short cut through the park.
The path ran for half a mile along the margin of the mere, where the young alder-buds were showing purple against the sky, and the water lay in dark, wind-rippled sheets of steel-blue between the beds of rustling winter reed. Just where the lane turned inward from the water toward the white hunting-gate stood the old crooked ash-tree, its grey bark shelving down into the grassy bank.
Molly slackened her pace for an instant as she came abreast of the trunk. The wind was singing loud in the upper boughs, and the dry reeds by the water’s edge kept up such a sharp, continuous hissing that she did not hear the latch of the hunting-gate click behind the holly-bush fifty yards ahead, nor the quick, heavy crunch of a man’s boot upon the gravel.
Only when a shadow fell across the March grass at her feet did she look round.
Roger was standing three paces off, with his hand on the gate-post. He had not waited for the five-o’clock coach. He had come down by the fast Birmingham mail that dropped passengers at the cross-roads three miles off, and had walked across the fields with his oak stick in his hand and his rough travelling-coat buttoned over his chest. The Red Sea sun had burned his square, plain face to a deep brick-red bronze, and he looked slightly older and heavier in the shoulder.
“Molly!” he said, taking off his hat and dropping his stick into the grass.
“Roger!” she gasped, both hands flying out before she knew what she was doing. “We—papa said the five-o’clock coach! The gig isn’t even harnessed!”
“Hang the gig,” said Roger. He took two strides across the turf and caught both her cold hands in his own.
“Hollingford got three of the Trustees together at Montagu House on Wednesday afternoon to pass the Kosseir cases and sign my warrant on the spot,” he said, looking straight down into her face. “Do you think I was going to kick my heels at the Golden Cross till noon when the business was done and the high road was open? I touched at the Hall ten minutes ago. My father was out in the marl-pit, and Aimée told me you had just gone down the mere path. So I came after you.”
Molly tried to draw her breath, though the wind seemed to have blown all the air out of the sky. “Did you—did they keep you ten days in quarantine at Falmouth? And are the tins safe?”
“Every solder of them,” said Roger, not releasing her hands. “Though I thought I should go mad kicking my heels on the poop in St. Just Pool while the health-officer smoked his pipe ashore. And Burnett told me on Wednesday how you saved the thirty-eight Takazzé sedges when he was ready to fling them on the dust-heap. He says you have a better head for a broken cipher than anyone at the Society. Did Hollingford give you the fourth ledger in January?”
Her eyes dropped to the horn buttons on his coat—the very buttons that had left their mark upon her wrist in October.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I called out the wrong altitude on the next page because I had just found the blotting-paper.”
A sudden, boyish laugh broke through his gravity, lighting up the whole sunburnt breadth of his face; and then his mouth grew very grave and tender.
“When I slipped that sheet into the binding at the George, Molly,” he said, his voice growing husky, “I didn’t know whether I should ever have the right to ask you if you had kept it. I had been such a blind, blundering fool for two years—coming to you with all my trouble while I never saw what was before my eyes. Even in October, I knew I had no business to bind you until I had a roof to offer. Look up at me, my darling. Can you forgive me for having taken so long to know my own heart?”
Molly raised her clear, grey eyes, wet now, but shining without a shadow of reserve.
“It has always held, Roger,” she said simply. “Even when you didn’t know it was there.”
He did not answer in words. He put his arm round her grey plaid shawl and drew her close against his breast, bending his head to kiss her mouth once, and then again on the wet eyelash, while the March gale roared through the boughs above them and sent the little steel-blue waves lapping against the reeds at their feet.
When at last she drew her head back, the wind had blown her bonnet back by its untied strings upon her shoulders, and her dark hair was tumbled across her forehead—precisely in the rats’ tails Mrs. Gibson had prophesied.
“Oh, Roger!” she said, between a laugh and a sob, putting up her hands to smooth the braids. “You haven’t been home to see the Squire yet! He has been out in the Lower Leasow since eight o’clock, and he has got the water running six gallons a minute out of the west outfall, all to show you!”
“I am going back to him this instant,” said Roger, stooping to pick up his oak stick from the grass and tucking her hand through his arm. “Only you are coming with me to the gate to tell him why I took the mere path first; and then we are walking straight into Hollingford together before the five-o’clock coach gets to the George. And you may tell me along the lane whether you mean to earn those five-and-twenty guineas Burnett has voted you for indexing the cryptogam plates, or whether I am to have a finger in the pie.”
“Dr. Burnett engaged me for the index, Roger,” said Molly, with a sudden flash of her father’s own dryness as she stepped out beside him along the gravel, “and you have quite enough to do with your own lizards at Montagu House without meddling in my columns.”
At a quarter to four that afternoon, Mrs. Gibson was seated in the exact centre of the newly hung drawing-room sofa, arrayed in her lavender silk gown with the Honiton lace lappets, a mother-of-pearl paper-knife poised negligently between her fingers, and the second volume of Childe Harold open on the little table beside her.
“I do wish Molly would come down and let me look at her collar,” she murmured plaintively to Mr. Gibson, who had come in ten minutes early from his country round and was standing on the hearth-rug with his hands under his coat-tails, eyeing the forced primulas with profound distrust. “She must have slipped up the back stairs while I was speaking to Betty about the muffins, for it is nearly four, and the fly from the George cannot be here before twenty minutes past five. When a young man arrives from foreign parts with his mind full of tender expectations, everything depends upon the first coup d’œil.”
At that moment the iron gate at the bottom of the garden clanged open—not with the respectful click of Perkins’s fly-man, but with a swing that made the latch ring against the stone pier.
Mr. Gibson stepped to the window and looked out over the wire blind.
Coming up the gravel walk between the wet laurels were two figures. One was Molly, her grey shawl pinned slightly awry, her boots splashed to the ankles with the red marl of the Hamley headland, and her eyes shining like two stars in a frosty sky. The other was a broad-shouldered, bronzed young man in a rough frieze coat, who carried no umbrella, had a mud-spattered oak stick in his left hand, and was holding Molly’s arm drawn tight through his right.
“My dear,” said Mr. Gibson, turning back toward the sofa with an inscrutable face, “if your coup d’œil requires twenty minutes’ notice, I am afraid you are going to be disappointed. Unless my spectacles deceive me, there are four muddy boots coming up the hall steps at this instant, and if Lord Hollingford’s letter is to be believed, two of them belong to the new Assistant-Keeper of the British Museum.”
Before Mrs. Gibson could do more than let fall the paper-knife upon the rug, the parlour door was flung open without Betty’s intervention, and Roger stood on the threshold, with Molly’s hand still fast in his.
To do Mrs. Gibson justice, the habits of a lifetime did not desert her in the breach. Within three seconds she had glided across the carpet, presented both cheeks to Roger’s sunburnt salute, and pressed her lace handkerchief once to her eyelids with a murmur of maternal sensibility that completely drowned his first attempt at an apology for the morning coach.
“Not a word, my dear Roger! Not a single word!” she exclaimed, laying her fingers upon his rough sleeve. “What are hours and coaches to a heart that has been counting the weeks since October? As I was saying to Mr. Gibson not five minutes ago—looking at that very window where you stood in the rain—‘Wait,’ I said; ‘do not talk to me of the five-o’clock stage! A young man whose affections have been so long, though silently, fostered under this roof will find wings to bring him here before the clock strikes!’ Though indeed, Molly love, how you came to meet him in the lane with your hair in that state, and without even putting on your best merino, is more than I can comprehend.”
“I didn’t give her time to change her frock, Mrs. Gibson,” said Roger, laughing with the easy, good-humoured directness that not even Clare’s rhetoric could disconcert, while he looked across her shoulder straight at the surgeon on the hearth-rug. “I caught her by the mere as I came over from the cross-roads, and we went back to tell my father in the five-acre field before we came on here. Mr. Gibson—Lord Hollingford told me he had shown you my figures in January. With the Trinity dividend lapsing after my year of grace, it will be a plain four hundred a year when the King’s College term opens. Have I your leave to take her up to town when my work at Montagu House begins in June?”
Mr. Gibson took his hands from under his coat-tails, came forward two steps, and gripped Roger’s outstretched hand with a pressure that made the young man’s brown knuckles turn white.
“You may take her when the banns are out, Roger,” said the surgeon, his voice dropping into its driest, shortest key to hide the sudden twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Only mind you don’t starve her on dried lichens. And now, if you have walked six miles since noon, you had better go into the study and wash the Cheshire clay off your hands before Betty brings up the mutton; for my wife has bought two pots of forced primulas in your honour, and if you touch them with those fingers, we shall never hear the last of it till Michaelmas.”
They were married in the first week of June, when the wild dog-roses were breaking into pink and white foam along all the Hollingford lanes, and the Squire’s newly drained pastures in the Rush-meadow stood knee-deep in dark-green rye-grass.
It was a very quiet wedding, much to the secret grief of Mrs. Gibson, who had cherished visions of four grey horses from the George and a breakfast laid out by the confectioner from Warwick. Nor was she wholly reconciled to the practical arrangement by which the young couple were to spend their first three months in three airy furnished rooms in Great Russell Street, opposite the Museum gates, while the narrow brick house Roger had taken on a modest lease in Gower Street was having its parlour paint dried and its bookshelves fitted.
“Bloomsbury is so very far from Hanover Square, love,” she sighed, as she superintended the cording of Molly’s boxes on the morning of the wedding. “And though Cynthia says Mr. Henderson’s brougham shall call for you whenever they have an open evening, I cannot think how you are to manage upon four hundred a year without a page in buttons to answer the door when the scientific people leave their cards. And why you must needs encumber the chaise-boot with that flat mahogany drawing-board from your father’s attic, and a deal portfolio of Dr. Burnett’s copperplates, as if you were going up to town to set up as an engraver’s clerk instead of a bride, is beyond my poor comprehension. However, I have put two pairs of my own worked cambric pillow-slips at the bottom of the trunk, so that if you should happen to have the jaundice or a cold in the head before your furniture is in, you may at least look fit to be seen by the Bloomsbury apothecary.”
She consoled herself more thoroughly that afternoon by writing eight crossed pages to Cynthia at Paris, explaining how entirely it was owing to her own delicate tact that the disparity between a country surgeon’s daughter and an ancient landed family had been smoothed over without the least awkwardness on either side.
When the travelling-chaise had rolled away down the white summer road toward the London coach—carrying Molly, with her mother’s old pocket Bible in her dressing-case, and her mahogany drawing-board, her brass dividers, and her ruled tabular sheets for the Linnean Transactions corded safely under the seat beside Dr. Burnett’s proof-plates, into the wider world of books and work—the Squire and Mr. Gibson walked back together from the church porch to the surgery gate, where the surgeon’s bay mare stood saddled at the post.
Between them toddled little Roger, holding fast by a finger of each grandfather, and kicking up the white June dust with his stout square shoes.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Gibson,” said the Squire, stopping by the horse-block and clearing his throat with a tremendous noise as he looked down the empty lane where the dust-cloud was settling upon the hedges. “The house will be main quiet without her. Aimée’s a good little soul—though she still crosses herself when the thunder cracks and won’t hear of a drop of port in the boy’s gruel—but Molly had a way of sitting by a man’s chair without clacking that made the pipe taste sweeter. You’ll be coming over on Tuesdays for a game of cribbage, eh? We two old fellows mustn’t sit moping by our own fenders while the young ones are carrying all before them.”
Mr. Gibson untied the mare’s rein, looked for a second into the quiet garden where the shadow of the surgery gable fell across the turf, and then swung himself into the saddle with his habitual sharp jerk.
“Ay, Squire, I’ll come on Tuesdays,” said he, gathering up the leather and settling his black medical bag against the pommel. “Provided you don’t expect me to listen to any more bragging about that four-inch tile in the Lower Leasow. Mind the wheel, little man. Good day to you, Hamley—I have a case of measles down by the mill, and measles don’t wait for wedding-cake.”
He touched his hat with his whip, turned the mare’s head toward the parish boundary, and trotted briskly off down the sunlit lane toward the mill.

THE END

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