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AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA

By William J. Locke

London

William Heinemann

1895

TO ONE WHOSE WORK IT IS AS MUCH AS MINE

I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK.

AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA.




CHAPTER I.

It was a severe room, scrupulously neat. Along one side ran a bookcase,
with beaded glass doors, containing, as one might see by peering through
the spaces, the collected, unread literature of two stern generations.
A few old prints, placed in bad lights, hung on the walls. In the centre
of the room was a leather-covered library table, with writing materials
arranged in painful precision. A couch was lined along one wall, in the
draught of the door. On either side of the fireplace were ranged two
stiff leather armchairs.

In one of these chairs sat an old man, in the other a faded woman just
verging upon middle age. The old man was looking at a picture which he
supported on his knees-a narrow, oblong strip of canvas nailed on to
a rough wooden frame. The woman eyed him with some interest, as if
awaiting a decision.

They were father and daughter, and bore a strange family resemblance
to each other. Both faces were pale, their foreheads high and narrow,
marked by faint horizontal lines, their eyes gray and cold, their upper
lips long and thin, setting tightly, without mobility, upon the lower.
The only essential point of difference was that the father's chin was
weakly pointed, the daughter's squarer and harder. Both faces gave one
the impression of negativeness, joylessness, seeming to lack the power
of strong emotive expression. One can see such, minus the refinement
of gentle birth and social amenities, in the pews of obscure dissenting
chapels, testifying that they have been led thither not by strong
convictions, but by the force of mild circumstance.

Indeed, as is the case with hundreds of our upper middle-class families,
the Davenants had descended from a fierce old Puritan stock, and though
the reality of their Puritanism had gradually lost itself in the current
of more respectable orthodoxy, its shadow hung over them still. The
vigorous enthusiasm that spurred the Puritan on to lofty action
was gone; the vague dread of sin that kept him in moral and mental
inactivity alone remained. Perhaps it is this survival amongst us of
the negative element of Puritanism that produces in England the curious
anomaly of education without enlightenment. It has dulled our perception
of life as an art, whose “great incidents,” as Fielding finely says,
“are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the several
members of a fine statue or a noble poem.” It has caused us to live in
a perpetual twilight in which the possibilities of existence loom
fantastic and indistinct. The Davenants were gentlefolk, holding a good
position in the small country town of Durdleham; they visited among
the county families, and, on ordinary, conventional grounds, considered
themselves to belong to the cultured classes. They were the curious yet
familiar product of the old-fashioned, high-church Toryism impregnated
with the Puritan taint.

The light was fading through the French window behind the old man's
chair. He laid down the canvas on his lap and looked in a puzzled way at
the fire. Then he raised it nearer to his eyes for further examination.

“This is really very dreadful,” he said at last, looking at his
daughter.

“Something will have to be done soon,” replied the latter.

“It is so horribly vulgar, Grace,” said the old man; “look at that boy's
nose--and that drunken man--his face is a nightmare of evil. I really
must begin to talk seriously to Clytie.”

Mrs. Blather smiled somewhat pityingly. Since the earliest days of her
long widowhood she had undertaken the charge of her father's house and
the care of her two younger sisters, Janet and Clytie. Her familiarity,
therefore, with the seamy side of Clytie's nature had been of long
duration.

“You might as well talk to that fender, papa,” she said. “Clytie has
got it into her head that she is going to be an artist, and no amount of
talking will get it out.”

“It's all through her visiting those friends of hers, the Farquharsons.
They are not nice people for her to know. I shall not let her go there
again.”

“If she goes on like this there is no knowing what will happen.”

“Where did the child get these repulsive and ungirlish notions from?”
 the old man asked querulously.

The conception of the picture was not that of a young girl, and though
the execution was crude and untrained, there was a bold cruelty of touch
that saved it from being amateurish. The canvas was divided into two
panels. On the one was painted a tiny bully of a boy with his arm
rounded across his throat, about to strike a weakly, poverty-stricken
little girl. They were children of the poorest classes, the boy
realistically, offensively dirty--the _petit morveux_ in its absolute
sense. Behind them