Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (free ebook reader for iphone .txt) 📖

sort of thing, and possible interference with swimming-matches and athletics, and so on, would she as soon choose this man for her accomplice as any other she knew? Suppose she was to hear to-morrow that Dr. Vereker was engaged to Sylvia Peplow, would she be glad or sorry?

Rosalind certainly did ask no such questions. If she had, the answers to the first two would have been, we surmise, very clear and decisive. What nonsense! Fancy Prosy being in love with anybody, or anybody being in love with Prosy! And as for marrying, the great beauty of it all was that there was to be no marrying. Did he understand that? Oh dear, yes! Prosy understood quite well. But we wonder, is the image our mind forms of Sally's answer to the third question correct or incorrect? It presents her to us as answering rather petulantly: "Why _shouldn't_ Dr. Conrad marry Miss Peplow, if he likes, and _she_ likes? I dare say _she'd_ be ready enough, though!" and then pretending to look out of the window. And shortly afterwards: "I suppose Prosy has a right to his private affairs, as much as I have to mine." But with lips that tighten over her speech, without a smile. Note that this is all pure hypothesis.

But she had nothing to conceal that she knew of, had Sally. What a difference there was between her inner world and her mother's, who could not breathe a syllable of that world's history to any living soul!

Rosalind acknowledged to herself now how great the relief had been when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped her to bear her present loneliness. She could hear again, when she woke in the stillness of the night, the voice of the old man, a whisper struggling through his half-choked respiration, that said again and again: "Oh, Rosey darling! can it be true? Thank God! thank God!" And the fact that what she had then feared had never come to pass--the fact that, contrary to her expectations, he had been strangely able to look the wonder in the face, and never flinch from it, seeing nothing in it but a priceless boon--this fact seemed to give her now the fortitude to bear without help the burden of her knowledge--the knowledge of who he was, this man that was beside her in the stillness, this man whose steady breathing she could hear, whose heart-beats she could count. And her heart dwelt on the old soldier's last words, strangely, almost incredibly, resonant, a hard-won victory in his dying fight for speech, "Evil has turned to good. God be praised!" It had almost seemed as if the parting soul, on the verge of the strangest chance man has to face, lost all measure of the strangeness of any earthly thing, and was sensible of nothing but the wonderment of the great cause of all.

But one thing that she knew (and could not explain) was that this secret knowledge, burdensome in itself, relieved the oppression of one still more burdensome, and helped her to drive it from her thoughts. We speak of the collision of the record in her mind of what her daughter was, and whence, with the fact that Sally was winding herself more and more, daughterwise, round the heart of the man whose bond with her mother she, small and unconscious, had had so large a share in rending asunder twenty years ago. It was to her, in its victory over crude physical fact, even while it oppressed her, a bewildering triumph of spirit over matter, of soul over sense, this firm consolidating growth of an affection such as Nature means, but often fails to reach, between child and parent. And as it grew and grew, her child's actual paternity shrank and dwindled, until it might easily have been held a matter for laughter, but for the black cloud of Devildom that hung about it, and stamped her as the infant of a Nativity in the Venusberg, whose growing after-life had gone far to shroud the horror of its lurid caverns with a veil of oblivion.

We say all these things quite seriously of our Sally, in spite of her incorrigible slanginess and vulgarity. We can now go on to St. Sennans-on-Sea, where we shall find her in full blow, but very sticky with the salt water she passes really too much of her time in, even for a merpussy.


CHAPTER XXVII


ST. SENNANS-ON-SEA. MISS GWENDOLEN ARKWRIGHT. WOULD ANY OTHER CHILD HAVE BEEN SALLY? HOW MRS. IGGULDEN'S COUSIN SOLOMON SURRENDERED HIS COUCH

St. Sennans-on-Sea consists of two parts--the new and the old. The old part is a dear little old place, and the new part is beastly. So Sally says, and she must know, because this is her third visit.

The old part consists of Mrs. Iggulden's and the houses we have described on either side of her, and maybe two dozen more wooden or black-brick dwellings of the same sort; also of the beach and its interesting lines of breakwater that are so very jolly to jump off or to lie down and read novels under in the sea smell. Only not too near the drains, if you know it. If you don't know it, it doesn't matter so much, because the smell reminds you of the seaside, and seems right and fitting. You must take care how you jump, though, off these breakwaters, because where they are not washed inconceivably clean, and all their edges smoothed away beyond belief by the tides that come and go for ever, they are slippery with green sea-ribbons that cling close to them, and green sea-fringes that cling closer still, and brown sea-ramifications that are studded with pods that pop if you tread on them, but are not quite so slippery; only you may just as well be careful, even with them. And we should recommend you, before you jump, to be sure you are not hooked over a bolt, not merely because you may get caught, and fall over a secluded reading-public on the other side, but because the red rust comes off on you and soils your white petticoat.

If you don't mind jumping off these breakwaters--and it really is rather a lark--you may tramp along the sea front quite near up to where the fishing-luggers lie, each with a capstan all to itself, under the little extra old town the red-tanned fishing-nets live in, in houses that are like sailless windmill-tops whose plank walls have almost merged their outlines in innumerable coats of tar, laid by long generations back of the forefathers of the men in oil-cloth head-and-shoulder hats who repair their nets for ever in the Channel wind, unless you want a boat to-day, in which case they will scull you about, while you absolutely ache sympathetically with their efforts, of which they themselves remain serenely unaware, till you've been out long enough. Then they beach you cleverly on the top of a wave, and their family circle seizes you, boat and all, and runs you up the shingle before the following wave can catch you and splash you, which it wants to do.

There is an aroma of the Norman Conquest and of Domesday Book about the old town. Research will soon find out, if she looks sharp, that there is nothing Norman in the place except the old arch in the amorphous church-tower, and a castle at a distance on the flats. But the flavour of the past is stronger in the scattered memories of bygone sea-battles not a century ago, and the names of streets that do not antedate the Georges, than in these mere scraps that are always open to the reproach of mediaevalism, and are separated from us by a great gulf. And it doesn't much matter to us whether the memories are of victory or defeat, or the names those of sweeps or heroes. All's one to us--we glow; perhaps rashly, for, you see, we really know very little about them. And he who has read no history to speak of, if he glows about the past on the strength of his imperfect data, may easily break his molasses-jug.

So, whether our blood is stirred by Nelson and Trafalgar, whereof we have read, or by the Duke of York and Walcheren, whereof we haven't--or mighty little--we feel in touch with both these heroes, for they are modern. Both have columns, anyhow; and we can dwell upon their triumph or defeat almost as if it wasn't history at all, but something that really happened, without running any risk of being accused of archaism or of deciphering musty tomes. And we can enjoy our expedition all the same to the ruined keep in the level pastures, where the long-horned black cattle stand and think and flap their tails still, just as they did in the days when the basement dungeons, now choked up, held real prisoners with real broken hearts.

But there is modern life, too, at St. Sennans--institutions that keep abreast of the century. Half the previous century ago, when we went there first, the Circulating Library consisted, so far as we can recollect it, of a net containing bright leather balls, a collection of wooden spades and wheelbarrows, a glass jar with powder-puffs, another with tooth-brushes, a rocking-horse--rashly stocked in the first heated impulse of an over-confident founder--a few other trifles, and, most important of all, a book-case that supplied the title-role to the performance. That book-case contained (we are confident) _editiones principes_ of Mrs. Ratcliff, Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer Lytton, Currer Bell ... well, even Fanny Burney, if you come to that. There certainly was a copy of "Frankenstein," and fifty years ago our flesh was so compliant as to creep during its perusal. It wouldn't now.

But even fifty years ago there was never a volume that had not been defaced out of all knowledge by crooked marks of the most inquisitive interrogation, and straight marks of the most indignant astonishment, by the reading-public in the shadows of the breakwaters. It really read, that public did; and, what's more, it often tore out the interesting bits to take away. I remember great exasperation when a sudden veil was drawn over the future of two lovers just as the young gentleman had flung himself into the arms of the young lady. An unhallowed fiend had cut off the sequel with scissors and boned it!

That was done, or much of it, when the books were new, and the railway-station was miles away; when the church wasn't new, but old, which was better. It has been made new since, and has chairs in it, and memorial windows by Stick and Co. In those days its Sunday-folk were fisherfolk mostly, and a few local magnates or parvates--squirophants, they might be called--and a percentage of the visitors.

Was St. Sennan glad or sorry, we wonder, when the last two sorts subscribed and restored him? If we had been he, one of us would have had to have the temper of a saint to keep cool about it. Anyhow, it's done now, and can't be undone.

But the bathing-machines are not restored, at any rate. Those indescribables yonder, half rabbit-hutch, half dry-dock--a long row for ladies and a short one for gentlemen, three hundred yards apart--couldn't trust 'em any nearer, bless you!--these superannuated God-knows-whats, struggling against disintegration from automatic plunges down a rugged beach, and creaking journeys back you are asked to hold on through--it's no use going