NO ONE can walk down any pretty lane, that is hung perhaps with garlands of old-man’s-beard, without discovering himself after a mile or two in some village or other where fear, that hidden, creeping thing, has sucked out the heart’s blood of more than one simple and timid human creature.
Very few villages indeed have escaped Mr. Tarr, whose enterprise and courage even on rainy days would carry him, with or without Miss Ogle and the others, into the most secluded valley, where he would be sure to start many a meek being into looking for impossible wonders, or else trying to prepare themselves for some dread appearance.
Miss Martha Pink, whose brother, with his large wondering face bent over Mr. Roddy’s rent books, showed that he wished to do his duty, though his beliefs were elsewhere—Miss Pink, with her tiny nose and her lamp that always burned after sunset in the parlour though she never sat there, was exactly the very appearance for fear to annoy.
Martha Pink, being more timid than wise, had lived her life until Mr. Tarr came with but two thoughts in it, her brother’s dinner and her parlour lamp, that showed by its light that she needed a lover.
Mockery understood Miss Pink, for even before Mr. Tarr’s visit the extreme restlessness and excitement of the rude children had foretold by their dreadful shouting in the lanes that something was expected.
And now Miss Pink feared the worst. Besides fear, that dread horror, there was also in Mockery the love longing, a matter that when kept silent or buried deep always breaks out in midnight wakefulness, sighs, and aching tears, and which also—for waters must find their level—bubbles up sometimes under pillows and in hidden cupboards.
Perhaps it was partly because of the portrait of the Dean, her relative, the picture that she carried with her to Mockery, that Mr. Pattimore, aged then about fifty-five, married his wife Nellie—or Dorcas, as he re-named her after the honeymoon.
He had taken a holiday in Norfolk, at a rectory where, besides the picture of the Dean, and his old friend the rector and his wife, there was something else too. This was neither the windmill nor the goose green, but a young girl of twenty, the daughter of his friend.
It was on a day when the August sun, heavy with love, covered the green lands with its glory, that Mr. Pattimore pulled her, who was to be his wife, out from the laurel bush.
She had been about the house, as the young lady must needs be because it was her home, but the portrait of the Dean had been there too, and that—a clear vision of the fine gaiters that his calling might lead him to—had taken all Mr. Pattimore’s indoor attention. But this August day, Mr. Pattimore in strolling by noticed something white in the laurel bush beside the drive.
Mr. Pattimore, who knew no more about birds than he did about women—for all his thoughts were with the Apostles—supposed that an owl might be resting there or a white rook, and so he moved the leaves a little aside and peeped in.
He saw no night bird, but a young girl in a white frock pleasantly seated amongst the boughs, and fully as tempting, with her red lips and firm roundness—for Mr. Pattimore’s eyes strayed—as any maid since the world cooled. Her hair, not dark but brown enough for darkness, was pleasantly tumbled, so that Mr. Pattimore couldn’t help wishing that his fingers were in it, and her blush when she saw his eyes looking at her made the good gentleman glad to remember that he wasn’t settled in a Church that forbade marriage.
As soon as Mr. Pattimore heard that the portrait of the Dean, towards which his high hopes lay as soon as he saw it, could go to Mockery as a wedding present with the young lady, he decided to marry her, and so he did.
But Mr. Pattimore had no idea what the laurel bush had done to his chosen. Nellie used to take her book there, and the laurel, a maiden too, would tell her, as soon as she was safely settled, to think about pretty men.
She may have had a fairy story in her mind, when she thought of her lover as a frog who hopped around her looking up with its large eyes asking a question, until it finally hopped into her lap. And after thinking of the man like that, she would think about the baby, and pull leaves from the laurel and pretend to make its clothes. ‘My baby‚’ she would whisper to herself every time now that she climbed into the bush, until Mr. Pattimore with the frog’s manners pulled her out, his hands a little more wantonly inclined than a clergyman’s should be.
The Dean—not the portrait this time, but the carnal man—wrote to Nellie, as soon as she was safely at Mockery and the picture hung up and the honeymoon over, and Mr. Pattimore read the letter as proudly as if he had written it himself.
The Dean said, ‘Remember St. Paul.’
‘He must have meant me,’ said Mr. Pattimore, ‘when he said that.’
Mr. Pattimore began to take cold baths.
But that wasn’t the worst.
He now saw all women, his young wife included, as wholesale temptations to wanton naughtiness…. Two nights after the return from the honeymoon, Mr. Pattimore stared for a full half-hour about bedtime at the picture, and fled to the attic.
Mrs. Pattimore lay that night, in the pretty bedroom upon which so much money had been spent, alone and in tears.
Her husband appeared the next day in a black garment that reached to his toes. He talked only at breakfast about the proposed sewing meeting, and Mrs. Pattimore could think only about the frog.
When he asked her to pass the toast, he said: ‘The toast, please, Dorcas.’
And Mrs. Pattimore, her eyes still dim with her night’s crying, exclaimed, ‘But I’m Nellie, you know—darling Nellie.’
‘You’re Dorcas now,’ replied her husband sternly.
Mrs. Pattimore had been a little proud of the Dean too—he was her second cousin on her mother’s side—in bygone times, but now she could never look up at the picture without feeling what a great harm the Dean had done to her when he mentioned St. Paul in the wedding letter. ‘Cousin Ashbourne might have talked to him at the wedding instead of writing when that was over,’ she used to say sadly; ‘he wouldn’t have listened to him then.’
Nellie Pattimore, changed now to a Dorcas, was as meek as a dove and just as loving. She would sit up in her bed in all her night finery and pout a little because he wasn’t there; and though there didn’t seem to be the least hope of a baby coming, she couldn’t help imagining there might be, and was beginning to sew some tiny garments. She began with a christening gown, and as soon as she was sure that she couldn’t have a baby she tried to pretend that she was making the gown for some other mother’s little one; though she could hardly bear to think, for she so longed herself, that there were other mothers in the world.
As each spring-time came—and Dorcas had only been married five years when Mr. Tarr and Miss Ogle invaded the village—she would comfort herself with the flowers, calling them all, when no one heard, ‘her pretty babies,’ because when she knelt down upon a soft mossy bank to smell a cowslip she felt sure that the scent of a real baby’s neck would be just like that.
Mrs. Pattimore lived at Mockery harmlessly enough with her longing that hid itself in her feelings for the flowers and in the bedroom wardrobe where she kept her sewing. She would listen meekly enough when Mr. Pattimore, with eyes fixed upon the hard, stupid lines of the Dean’s—‘dear Cousin Ashbourne’—face, would speak more to the picture than to her, and tell him how Caddy—that lazy Caddy!—corrupted all the youth of Mockery with his nasty conversations that he always addressed to the ducks—as Mr. Pattimore did his to the Dean.
‘He sets all their hearts and minds‚’ said Mr. Pattimore one April day at lunch, ‘agape for all naughtiness.’
Mrs. Pattimore blushed and looked down; she felt—and so many women have felt the same—that if all his outcry against wantonness could only be changed by the grand trump of love, what a lover he would become—and then the baby!
A few moments after lunch Mrs. Pattimore peeped into the dining-room, dressed to go out, just to see what he was doing.
Mr. Pattimore, with his hands clasped and his face a sad one, in which pride and hatred of sin were coupled, still stared at the Dean.
Mrs. Pattimore, with thoughts as hasty as a young girl’s who means to be naughty, hurried out of the house to ask a question of Mr. Caddy. She found Miss Pink, with her large scarf of grey wool that certainly any of Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford ladies would have taken, as we have done, for a shawl, standing beside the churchyard gate waiting for Mr. Pink, who had for some reason or other entered the edifice of one hundred and eighty-two sittings.
‘Have you seen Mr. Caddy?’ inquired Mrs. Pattimore of Miss Pink. ‘I want to ask him something.’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Miss Pink, speaking out of the folds of her shawl; ‘he’s leaning over his cottage gate and talking to the ducks as usual.’
And so he was; but when Dorcas came near to him, wishing to learn the right path to naughtiness that she hoped would help her to her husband’s love, instead of going on telling the ducks and Mary Gulliver, who now modestly withdrew, about the leg of a bedstead, that astonished the late wedding guests taking their last cups by coming through the ceiling, he said to Mrs. Pattimore, ‘Mockery be a fine place for summer roses to grow in.’
‘But it isn’t time for the roses yet, Mr. Caddy,’ said the lady, her blush becoming an ordinary look of disappointment.
‘They little small flowers be so pretty,’ remarked Mr. Caddy, looking into the meadows. ‘They do always hear what God be a-saying when it do rain.’
‘But, Mr. Caddy’—Mrs. Pattimore looked after the departing form of Mary; she meant to make her plunge—‘a pretty girl likes to——’
‘To gather a flower for poor mother’s grave.’ Mr. Caddy looked sadly at the churchyard.
A loud clamour came near—the Mockery children; they were chasing a black cat up the lane with shouts and stones. They were led by Esther, who called out to Mr. Caddy that the cat was soon to have kittens, and ran on shouting.
Mrs. Pattimore looked around Mockery. She wished to comment upon something that would set Mr. Caddy off talking to the ducks again.
In the middle of a wide field she saw Mrs. Topple going from one part of the field to another, stooping down and looking.
‘Poor ’oman‚’ said Mr. Caddy, seeing her too; ‘she do spend all her time in looking for good-luck clover.’
The tall, drooping figure of Mr. Pink came out of the little shop; he walked carefully down the stone path and then down the lane in the direction of his house.
‘’E do try to get Mrs. Moggs to go to the beautiful sea,’ explained Mr. Caddy when Mr. Pink had departed; ‘but she do only ring they bells and smile at ’e.’
Miss Pink now came near, hurrying from the churchyard as if frightened; she had missed Mr. Pink, who had left the church by another path. Miss Pink begged Mrs. Pattimore to take her home.
‘My brother only thinks of saving Mrs. Moggs’ soul now,’ she said. ‘And something’s been seen in the sea.’
‘They children do tell of a Nellie-bird,’ said Mr. Caddy.
Mrs. Pattimore turned sadly away with Miss Pink; she had learned nothing from Mr. Caddy.
But when she was gone, though not quite out of hearing, Mr. Caddy said, turning to the duck-pond:
‘’Tis a pretty petticoat that do do it, so Mary do say, and a pair of white stockings.’
Mrs. Pattimore hardly listened to Miss Pink, who was telling her that she believed the beast of the Book of Revelation and the Nellie-bird the children told of were one and the same.