Moth and Rust; Together with Geoffrey's Wife and The Pitfall. Mary Cholmondeley

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       The mirror to the mind of God."

      There was no doubt he was tedious, and it was to be hoped that the portion of the Divine mind not reflected in the clerical mirror would compensate somewhat for His more gloomy attributes as shown therein.

      Mrs. Trefusis, "Squire's" mother, an old woman with a thin, knotted face like worn-out elastic, sat erect throughout the service. She had the tight-lipped, bitter look of one who has coldly appropriated as her due all the good things of life, who has fiercely rebelled against every untoward event, and who now in old age offers a passive, impotent resistance to anything that suggests a change. She had had an easy, comfortable existence, but her life had gone hard with her, and her face showed it.

      Near her were the two guests who were staying at Easthope. The villagers looked at the two girls with deep interest. They had made up their minds that "the old lady had got 'em in to see if Squire could fancy one of 'em."

      Lady Anne Varney, who sat next to Mrs. Trefusis, was a graceful, small-headed woman of seven-and-twenty, delicately featured, pale, exquisitely dressed, with the indefinable air of a finished woman of the world, and with the reserved, disciplined manner of a woman accustomed to conceal her feelings from a world in which she has lived too much, in which she has been knocked about too much, and which has not gone too well with her. If Anne attended to the sermon—and she appeared to do so—she was the only person in the Easthope pew who did.

      No; the other girl, Janet Black, was listening too now and then, catching disjointed sentences with no sense in them, as one hears a few shouted words in a high wind.

      Ah me! Janet was beautiful. Even Mrs. Trefusis was obliged to own it, though she did so grudgingly, and added bitterly that the girl had no breeding. It was true. Janet had none. But beauty rested upon her as it rests on a dove's neck, varying with every movement, every turn of the head. She was quite motionless now, her rather large, ill-gloved hands in her lap. Janet was a still woman. She had no nervous movements. She did not twine her muff-chain round her fingers as Anne did. Anne looked at her now and then, and wondered whether she—Anne—would have been more successful in life if she had entered the arena armed with such beauty as Janet's.

      There was a portrait of Janet in the Academy several years later, which has made her beauty known to the world. We have all seen that celebrated picture of the calm Madonna face, with the mark of suffering so plainly stamped upon the white brow and in the unfathomable eyes. But the young girl sitting in the Easthope pew hardly resembled, except in feature, the portrait that, later on, took the artistic world by storm. Janet was perhaps even more beautiful in this her first youth than her picture proved her afterwards to be; but the beauty was expressionless, opaque. The soul had not yet illumined the fair face. She looked what she was—a little dull, without a grain of imagination. Was it the dulness of want of ability, or only the dulness of an uneducated mind, of powers unused, still dormant?

      Without her transcendent beauty she would have appeared uninteresting and commonplace.

      "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth."

      The Vicar had a habit of repeating his text several times in the course of his sermon. Janet heard it the third time, and it forced the entrance of her mind.

      Her treasure was certainly on earth. It consisted of the heavy, sleek-haired young man with the sunburnt complexion and the reddish moustache at the end of the pew—in short, "the Squire."

      After a short and ardent courtship she had accepted him, and then she herself had been accepted, not without groans, by his family. The groans had not been audible, but she was vaguely aware that she was not received with enthusiasm by the family of her hero, her wonderful fairy prince who had ridden into her life on a golden chestnut. George Trefusis was heavily built, but in Janet's eyes he was slender. His taciturn dulness was in her eyes a most dignified and becoming reserve. His inveterate unsociability proved to her—not that it needed proving—his mental superiority. She could not be surprised at the coldness of her reception as his betrothed, for she acutely felt her own great unworthiness of being the consort of this resplendent personage, who could have married any one. Why had he honoured her among all women?

      The answer was sufficiently obvious to every one except herself. The fairy prince had fallen heavily in love with her beauty; so heavily that, after a secret but stubborn resistance, he had been vanquished by it. Marry her he must and would, whatever his mother might say. And she had said a good deal. She had not kept silence.

      And now Janet was staying for the first time at Easthope, which was one day to be her home—the old Tudor house standing among its terraced gardens, which had belonged to a Trefusis since a Trefusis built it in Henry the Seventh's time.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      "On peut choisir ses amitiés, mais on subit l'amour."

      —Princess Karadja.

      After luncheon George offered to take Janet round the gardens. Janet looked timidly at Mrs. Trefusis. She did not know whether she ought to accept or not. There might be etiquettes connected with afternoon walks of which she was not aware. For even since her arrival at Easthope yesterday it had been borne in upon her that there were many things of which she was not aware.

      "Pray let my son show you the gardens," said Mrs. Trefusis, with impatient formality. "The roses are in great beauty just now."

      Janet went to put on her hat, and Mrs. Trefusis lay down on the sofa in the drawing-room with a little groan. Anne sat down by her. The eyes of both women followed Janet's tall, magnificent figure as she joined George on the terrace.

      "She dresses like a shop-girl," said Mrs. Trefusis. "And what a hat! Exactly what one sees on the top of omnibuses."

      Anne did not defend the hat. It was beyond defence. She supposed, with a tinge of compassion, what was indeed the case, that Janet had made a special pilgrimage to Mudbury to acquire it, in order the better to meet the eyes of her future mother-in-law.

      All Anne said was, "Very respectable people go on the top of omnibuses nowadays."

      "I am not saying anything against her respectability," said poor Mrs. Trefusis. "Heaven knows if there had been anything against it I should have said so before now. It would have been my duty."

      Anne smiled faintly. "A painful duty."

      "I'm not so sure," said Mrs. Trefusis grimly. She never posed before Anne, nor, for that matter, did any one else. "But from all I can make out this girl is a model of middle-class respectability. Yet she comes of a bad stock. One can't tell how she will turn out. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh."

      "There are worse things than middle-class respectability. George might have presented you with an actress with a past. Lord Lossiemouth married his daughter's maid last week."

      "I don't know what I've done," said Mrs. Trefusis, "that my only son should marry a pretty horse-breaker."

      "I thought it was her brother who was a horse-breaker."

      "So he is, and so is she. It was riding to hounds that my poor boy first met her."

      "She rides magnificently. СКАЧАТЬ