CHAPTER I

Remains of our good yeomanry blood will be found in Kent, developing

stiff, solid, unobtrusive men, and very personable women. The distinction

survives there between Kentish women and women of Kent, as a true

South-eastern dame will let you know, if it is her fortune to belong to

that favoured portion of the county where the great battle was fought, in

which the gentler sex performed manful work, but on what luckless heads

we hear not; and when garrulous tradition is discreet, the severe

historic Muse declines to hazard a guess. Saxon, one would presume, since

it is thought something to have broken them.

My plain story is of two Kentish damsels, and runs from a home of flowers

into regions where flowers are few and sickly, on to where the flowers

which breathe sweet breath have been proved in mortal fire.

Mrs. Fleming, of Queen Anne's Farm, was the wife of a yeoman-farmer of

the county. Both were of sound Kentish extraction, albeit varieties of

the breed. The farm had its name from a tradition, common to many other

farmhouses within a circuit of the metropolis, that the ante-Hanoverian

lady had used the place in her day as a nursery-hospital for the royal

little ones. It was a square three-storied building of red brick, much

beaten and stained by the weather, with an ivied side, up which the ivy

grew stoutly, topping the roof in triumphant lumps. The house could

hardly be termed picturesque. Its aspect had struck many eyes as being

very much that of a red-coat sentinel grenadier, battered with service,

and standing firmly enough, though not at ease. Surrounding it was a high

wall, built partly of flint and partly of brick, and ringed all over with

grey lichen and brown spots of bearded moss, that bore witness to the

touch of many winds and rains. Tufts of pale grass, and gilliflowers, and

travelling stone-crop, hung from the wall, and driblets of ivy ran

broadening to the outer ground. The royal Arms were said to have

surmounted the great iron gateway; but they had vanished, either with the

family, or at the indications of an approaching rust. Rust defiled its

bars; but, when you looked through them, the splendour of an unrivalled

garden gave vivid signs of youth, and of the taste of an orderly,

laborious, and cunning hand.

The garden was under Mrs. Fleming's charge. The joy of her love for it

was written on its lustrous beds, as poets write. She had the poetic

passion for flowers. Perhaps her taste may now seem questionable. She

cherished the old-fashioned delight in tulips; the house was reached on a

gravel-path between rows of tulips, rich with one natural blush, or

freaked by art. She liked a bulk of colour; and when the dahlia dawned

upon our gardens, she gave her heart to dahlias. By good desert, the

fervent woman gained a prize at a flower-show for one of her dahlias, and

`Dahlia' was the name uttered at the christening of her eldest daughter,

at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could last. There

was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming's second daughter received the name

of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space, as it was known

that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective reading of her

Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country people are not

inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for anything. They find it

as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst of larger

congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs. Fleming's

proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity was openly

pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance which her labour

lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced confession of there

being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was then projected in

the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a sober appreciation

of the fairness of the face.

Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden

was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had been

heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully fed. The

encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was indicative of a

moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply her table with

plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how provided,

sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated to have

fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in the

abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said, `Good

bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my

children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced by

foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in

cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers economies

consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman. Practically

it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her. Though

payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by

Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for

mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate remembrance and

regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be only

always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory. Wrexby,

therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to stoutness,

and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets, novelists,

to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish

village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace

of the young girls,--fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast,

like fire and smoke, to look upon. In stature, in bearing, and in

expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of

eulogy, strikingly above their class. They carried erect shoulders, like

creatures not ashamed of showing a merely animal pride, which is never

quite apart from the pride of developed beauty. They were as upright as

Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to

the well. Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her

Rachel. They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from the

chief book of their reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No master

of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother's

receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their

systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter

speaking. The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to

be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by

degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly

grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in

story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the

princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves;

nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;

and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret

Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the

contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be

seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London. Naturally,

the girls dreamed of London. To educate themselves, they copied out whole

pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,' which was next to the family

Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer's small library. The deeds

of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were

assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers',

farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's sons, the thought of what manner of

youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation. Rhoda,

at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister's habit

of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the

guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.

In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model. There came

once to Squire Blancove's unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair

lady. They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow,

Mrs. Lovell by name. They looked at her all through the service, and the

lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any

distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and

often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her

eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself,

as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot

silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture

she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.

Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen,

and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would

allow to her. William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom the

wheels of the world went too fast:--a big man, appearing to be difficult

to kill, though deeply smitten. His cheeks bloomed in spite of lines and

stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that never gave

out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from what they saw.

Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a mighty

grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature kind,

it was her comfort to die and not to know it. This grievance was rooted

in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant. The sight of the

plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged to

his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting prospect.

"Plump 'em up, and make 'em dainty," he advanced in contravention of his

wife's talk of bread and beef.

But he did not complain. If it came to an argument, the farmer sidled

into a secure corner of prophecy, and bade his wife to see what would

come of having dainty children. He could not deny that bread and beef

made blood, and were cheaper than the port-wine which doctors were in the

habit of ordering for this and that delicate person in the neighbourhood;

so he was compelled to have recourse to secret discontent. The attention,

the time, and the trifles of money shed upon the flower garden, were

hardships easier to bear. He liked flowers, and he liked to hear the

praise of his wife's horticultural skill. The garden was a distinguishing

thing to the farm, and when on a Sunday he walked home from church among

full June roses, he felt the odour of them to be so like his imagined

sensations of prosperity, that the deception was worth its cost. Yet the

garden in its bloom revived a cruel blow. His wife had once wounded his

vanity. The massed vanity of a silent man, when it does take a wound,

desires a giant's vengeance; but as one can scarcely seek to enjoy that

monstrous gratification when one's wife is the offender, the farmer

escaped from his dilemma by going apart into a turnip-field, and

swearing, with his fist outstretched, never to forget it. His wife had

asked him, seeing that the garden flourished and the farm decayed, to

yield the labour of the farm to the garden; in fact, to turn nurseryman

under his wife's direction. The woman could not see that her garden

drained the farm already, distracted the farm, and most evidently

impoverished him. She could not understand, that in permitting her, while

he sweated fruitlessly, to give herself up to the occupation of a lady,

he had followed the promptings of his native kindness, and certainly not

of his native wisdom. That she should deem herself `best man' of the two,

and suggest his stamping his name to such an opinion before the world,

was an outrage.

Mrs. Fleming was failing in health. On that plea, with the solemnity

suited to the autumn of her allotted days, she persuaded her husband to

advertise for an assistant, who would pay a small sum of money to learn

sound farming, and hear arguments in favour of the Corn Laws. To please

her, he threw seven shillings away upon an advertisement, and laughed

when the advertisement was answered, remarking that he doubted much

whether good would come of dealings with strangers. A young man, calling

himself Robert Armstrong, underwent a presentation to the family. He paid

the stipulated sum, and was soon enrolled as one of them. He was of a

guardsman's height and a cricketer's suppleness, a drinker of water, and

apparently the victim of a dislike of his species; for he spoke of the

great night-lighted city with a horror that did not seem to be an

estimable point in him, as judged by a pair of damsels for whom the

mysterious metropolis flew with fiery fringes through dark space, in

their dreams.

In other respects, the stranger was well thought of, as being handsome

and sedate. He talked fondly of one friend that he had, an officer in the

army, which was considered pardonably vain. He did not reach to the ideal

of his sex which had been formed by the sisters; but Mrs. Fleming,

trusting to her divination of his sex's character, whispered a mother's

word about him to her husband a little while before her death.

It was her prayer to heaven that she might save a doctor's bill. She

died, without lingering illness, in her own beloved month of June; the

roses of her tending at the open window, and a soft breath floating up to

her from the garden. On the foregoing May-day, she had sat on the green

that fronted the iron gateway, when Dahlia and Rhoda dressed the children

of the village in garlands, and crowned the fairest little one queen of

May: a sight that revived in Mrs. Fleming's recollection the time of her

own eldest and fairest taking homage, shy in her white smock and light

thick curls. The gathering was large, and the day was of the old nature

of May, before tyrannous Eastwinds had captured it and spoiled its

consecration. The mill-stream of the neighbouring mill ran blue among the

broad green pastures; the air smelt of cream-bowls and wheaten loaves;

the firs on the beacon-ridge, far southward, over Fenhurst and Helm

villages, were transported nearer to see the show, and stood like friends

anxious to renew acquaintance. Dahlia and Rhoda taught the children to

perceive how they resembled bent old beggar-men. The two stone-pines in

the miller's grounds were likened by them to Adam and Eve turning away

from the blaze of Paradise; and the saying of one receptive child, that

they had nothing but hair on, made the illustration undying both to

Dahlia and Rhoda.

The magic of the weather brought numerous butterflies afield, and one

fiddler, to whose tuning the little women danced; others closer upon

womanhood would have danced likewise, if the sisters had taken partners;

but Dahlia was restrained by the sudden consciousness that she was under

the immediate observation of two manifestly London gentlemen, and she

declined to be led forth by Robert Armstrong. The intruders were youths

of good countenance, known to be the son and the nephew of Squire

Blancove of Wrexby Hall. They remained for some time watching the scene,

and destroyed Dahlia's single-mindedness. Like many days of gaiety, the

Gods consenting, this one had its human shadow. There appeared on the

borders of the festivity a young woman, the daughter of a Wrexby

cottager, who had left her home and but lately returned to it, with a

spotted name. No one addressed her, and she stood humbly apart. Dahlia,

seeing that every one moved away from her, whispering with satisfied

noddings, wished to draw her in among the groups. She mentioned the name

of Mary Burt to her father, supposing that so kind a man would not fail

to sanction her going up to the neglected young woman. To her surprise,

her father became violently enraged, and uttered a stern prohibition,

speaking a word that stained her cheeks. Rhoda was by her side, and she

wilfully, without asking leave, went straight over to Mary, and stood

with her under the shadow of the Adam and Eve, until the farmer sent a

messenger to say that he was about to enter the house. Her punishment for

the act of sinfulness was a week of severe silence; and the farmer would

have kept her to it longer, but for her mother's ominously growing

weakness. The sisters were strangely overclouded by this incident. They

could not fathom the meaning of their father's unkindness, coarseness,

and indignation. Why, and why? they asked one another, blankly. The

Scriptures were harsh in one part, but was the teaching to continue so

after the Atonement? By degrees they came to reflect, and not in a mild

spirit, that the kindest of men can be cruel, and will forget their

Christianity toward offending and repentant women.