Part 28 (2/2)

”And though our well-brought-up girls shrink from the frank speech, they do not appear to shrink from the ideas of the old Greeks. They don't mind playing the part of cows so long as one doesn't mention it.”

About eighteen months ago, the village had been full of talk and excitement in consequence of the birth of an heir to the house of Engleton, Lady Engleton's mission in life being frankly regarded as unfulfilled during the previous three or four years, when she had disappointed the hopes of the family. Hadria listened scornfully. In her eyes, the crowning indignity of the whole affair was Lady Engleton's own smiling acceptance of the position, and her complacent eagerness to produce the tardy inheritor of the property and honours. This expression of sentiment had, by some means, reached the Vicarage and created much consternation.

Mrs. Walker a.s.serted that it was right and Christian of the lady to desire that which gave every one so much pleasure. ”A climax of feminine abjectness!” Hadria had exclaimed in Henriette's presence.

Miss Temperley, after endeavouring to goad her sister-in-law into the expression of jubilant congratulations, was met by the pa.s.sionate declaration that she felt more disposed to weep than to rejoice, and more disposed to curse than to weep.

Obviously, Miss Temperley had reason to be uneasy about her part in bringing about her brother's marriage.

These sudden overflows of exasperated feeling had become less frequent as time went on, but the neighbours looked askance at Mrs. Temperley.

Though a powder-magazine may not always blow up, one pa.s.ses it with a grave consciousness of vast stores of inflammable material lying somewhere within, and who knows what spark might set the thing spouting to the skies?

When the occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and downs of no character, but with all the trouble of a mountain district in its complexities of slope and hollow. Hadria suffered from a gnawing home-sickness; a longing for the rougher, bleaker scenery of the North.

The tired spirit translated the homely English country, so deeply reposeful in its spirit, into an image of dull unrest. If only those broken, stupid lines could have been smoothed out into the grandeur of a plain, Hadria thought that it would have comforted her, as if a song had moved across it with the long-stretching winds. As it was, to look from her window only meant to find repeated the trivialities of life, more picturesque indeed, but still trivialities. It was the estimable and domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves: Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood--Mother earth submissive to the dictators.h.i.+p of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her body and her soul abandoned supine to his caprice. The sight had an exasperating effect upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. It was, perhaps, the same in kind as the far stronger sensation of disgust that she felt when she first saw Lady Engleton with her new-born child, full of pride and exultation. It was as much as she could do to shake hands with the happy mother.

When Valeria expressed dismay at so strange a feeling Hadria had refused to be treated as a solitary sinner. There were plenty of fellow-culprits, she said, only they did not dare to speak out. Let Valeria study girls and judge for herself.

Hadria was challenged to name a girl.

Well, Algitha for one. Hadria also suspected Marion Jordan, well-drilled though she was by her dragoon of a mother.

Valeria would not hear of it. Marion Jordan! the gentlest, timidest, most typical of young English girls! Impossible!

”I am almost sure of it, nevertheless,” said Hadria. ”Oh, believe me, it is common enough! Few grasp it intellectually perhaps, but thousands feel the insult; of that I am morally certain.”

”What leads you to think so in Marion's case?”

”Some look, or tone, or word; something slight, but to my mind conclusive. Fellow-sinners detect one another, you know.”

”Well, I don't understand what the world is coming to!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel. ”Where are the natural instincts?”

”Sprouting up for the first time perhaps,” Hadria suggested.

”They seem to be disappearing, if what you say has the slightest foundation.”

”Oh, you are speaking of only _one_ kind of instinct. The others have all been suppressed. Perhaps women are not altogether animals after all.

The thought is startling, I know. Try to face it.”

”I never supposed they were,” cried Valeria, a little annoyed.

”But you never made allowance for the suppressed instincts,” said Hadria.

”I don't believe they _can_ be suppressed.”

”I believe they can be not merely suppressed, but killed past hope of recovery. And I also believe that there may be, that there _must_ be, ideas and emotions fermenting in people's brains, quite different from those that they are supposed and ordered to cherish, and that these heresies go on working in secret for years before they become even suspected, and then suddenly the population exchange confessions.”

”After that the Deluge!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel. ”You describe the features of a great revolution.”

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