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MOTH AND RUST




  BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

    RED POTTAGE.
    DIANA TEMPEST.
    SIR CHARLES DANVERS.
    A DEVOTEE.
    THE DANVERS' JEWELS.




  MOTH AND RUST

  TOGETHER WITH GEOFFREY'S
  WIFE AND THE PITFALL


  BY MARY CHOLMONDELEY,
  AUTHOR OF "RED POTTAGE."


  "Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array."
                                   --CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.


  LONDON
  JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
  1902




  TO

  ESSEX.

  Not chance of birth or place has made us friends.




  PREFACE


    My best thanks are due to the Editor of
    _The Graphic_ for his kind permission to
    republish "Geoffrey's Wife," which appeared
    originally in _The Graphic_.

                            MARY CHOLMONDELEY.




CONTENTS


                      PAGE
  MOTH AND RUST          1
  GEOFFREY'S WIFE      241
  THE PITFALL          267


       *       *       *       *       *




MOTH AND RUST




CHAPTER I

    "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and
    rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."


The Vicar gave out the text, and proceeded to expound it. The little
congregation settled down peacefully to listen. Except four of their
number, the "quality" in the carved Easthope pew, none of them had much
treasure on earth. Their treasure for the greater part consisted of a
pig, that was certainly being "laid up" to meet the rent at Christmas.
But there would hardly be time for moth and rust to get into it before
its secluded life should migrate into flitches and pork pies. Not that
the poorest of Mr Long's parishioners had any fear of such an event, for
they never associated his sermons with anything to do with themselves,
except on one occasion when the good man had preached earnestly against
drunkenness, and a respectable widow had ceased to attend divine service
in consequence, because, as she observed, she was not going to be spoken
against like that by any one, be they who they may, after all the years
she had been "on the teetotal."

Perhaps the two farmers who had driven over resplendent wives in
dog-carts had treasure on earth. They certainly had money in the bank at
Mudbury, for they were to be seen striding in in gaiters on market-day
to draw it out. But then it was well known that thieves did not break
through into banks and steal. Banks sometimes broke of themselves, but
not often.

On the whole, the congregation was at its ease. It felt that the text
was well chosen, and that it applied exclusively to the four occupants
of "the Squire's" pew.

The hard-worked Vicar certainly had no treasure on earth, if you
excepted his principal possessions, namely, his pale wife and little
flock of rosy children, and these, of course, were only encumbrances.
Had they not proved to be so? For his cousin had promised him the family
living, and would certainly have kept that promise when it became
vacant, if the wife he had married in the interval had not held such
strong views as to a celibate clergy.

The Vicar was a conscientious man, and the conscientious are seldom
concise.

    "He held with all his tedious might,
      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

    "On peut choisir ses amities, 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. I saw her out cub-hunting last autumn, and
asked who she was."

"Her brother is disreputable. He was mixed up with that case of drugging
some horse or other. I forget about it, but I know it was disgraceful.
He is quite an impossible person, but I suppose we shall have to know
him now. The place will be overrun with her relations, whom I have
avoided for years. Things like that always happen to me."

This was a favourite expression of Mrs Trefusis'. She invariably spoke
as if a curse had hung over her since her birth.

"What does it matter who one knows?" said Anne.

Mrs Trefusis did not answer. The knots in her face moved a little. She
knew what country life and country society were better than Anne. She
had all her life lived in the upper of the two sets which may be found
in every country neighbourhood. She did what she considered to be her
duty by the secondary set, but she belonged by birth and by inclination
to the upper class. It was at first with bewildered surprise, and later
on with cold anger, that she observed that her only son, bone of her
bone, very son of herself and her kind dead husband, showed a natural
tendency to gravitate towards the second-rate among their neighbours.

Why did he do it? Why did he bring strange, loud-voiced, vulgar men to
Easthope, the kind of men whom Mr Trefusis would not have tolerated? She
might have known that her husband would die of pneumonia just when her
son needed him most. She had not expected it, but she ought to have
expected it. Did not everything in her lot go crooked, while the lives
of all those around her went straight? What was the matter with her son,
that he was more at ease with these undesirable companions than with the
sons of his father's old friends? Why would he never accompany her on
her annual pilgrimage to London?

George was one of those lethargic, vain men who say they hate London.
Catch them going to London! Perhaps if efforts were made to catch them
there, they might repair thither. But in London they are nobodies;
consequently to London they do not go. And the same man who eschews
London will generally be found to gravitate in the country to a society
in which he is the chief personage. It had been so with George. Fred
Black, the disreputable horse-breaker, and his companions, had
sedulously paid court to him. George, who had a deep-rooted love of
horse-flesh, was often at Fred's training stables. There he met Janet,
and fell in love with her, as did most of Fred's associates. But unlike
them, George had withdrawn. He knew he should "do" for himself with "the
county" if he married Janet. And he could not face his mother. So he
sulked like a fish under the bank, half suspicious that he is being
angled for. So ignorant of his fellow-creatures was George that there
actually had been a moment when he suspected Janet of trying to "land
him," and he did not think any the worse of her.

Then, after months of sullen indecision, he suddenly rushed upon his
fate. That was a week ago.

Anne left her chair as Mrs Trefusis did not answer, and knelt down by
the old woman.

"Dear Mrs Trefusis," she said, "the girl is a nice girl, innocent and
good, and without a vestige of conceit."

"She has nothing to be conceited about that I can see."

"Oh! yes. She might be conceited about marrying George. It is an amazing
match for her. And she might be conceited about her beauty. I should be
if I had that face."

"My dear, you are twenty times as good-looking, because you look what
you are--a lady. She looks what she is--a----" Something in Anne's
steady eyes disconcerted Mrs Trefusis, and she did not finish the
sentence. She twitched her hands restlessly, and then went on: "And she
can't come into a room. She sticks in the door. And she always calls you
'Lady Varney.' She hasn't called a girl a 'gurl' yet, but I know she
will. I had thought my son's wife might make up to me a little for all
I've gone through--might be a comfort to me--and then I am asked to put
up with a vulgarian."

Anne went on in a level voice: "Janet is not in the least vulgar,
because she is unpretentious. Middle-class she may be, and is: so was my
grandmother; but vulgar she is not. And she is absolutely