Minsden -- A Novel

 Minsden — Volume the First

Chapter I

Minsden was a parish of two thousand acres of sour clay and four hundred sheep-walk upon the chalk, five miles from the navigation at Melsham, and had never been considered an agreeable place by anyone who had an estate anywhere else.

It had a Great House which had belonged to the Calthorpes since the Dutch William; a parsonage with seven bedchambers and sixteen acres of glebe; a road which was impassable for six weeks after Christmas; and a reputation for long lives. Old Sir Julian Calthorpe had held the baronetcy for fifty-four years without having ever been known to perform an action that was remembered six months after it was done; and when he died in the hard November of 1814, his son, Sir Thomas, came down from town with four carriages, two French servants, and a settled conviction that the county had been waiting for him.

The county had not been waiting for him. It had gone on very tolerably with the bailiff, who was a quiet man named Sibley and lived at the Moat House.

Sibley had been thirty years looking after the timber, the leases, and the cottages; and his daughter Catherine, who was one-and-twenty in the year Sir Julian died, had grown up in the belief that the world was composed of people who required six months’ notice to quit, and that her father was the person who gave it to them. She was not handsome, though she had that sort of skin which looks well in a straw bonnet; she was not lively; she had never been three weeks together away from Minsden; and she had, at one-and-twenty, what very few young women of her condition are allowed to keep — the habit of silence when she had nothing to say.

In the spring of 1815, when the country was full of soldiers and timber was selling at four shillings a foot for the dockyards, Robert Raines had come to Melsham to buy the oak in the Lower Holt.

He was four-and-twenty, the second son of a clergyman in the North, with eighty pounds a year from his mother, a pair of shoulders that looked as if they could carry a baulk of elm, and an engagement with the Navy Board to supply three thousand loads of crooked timber before Michaelmas. He had dined at the Moat House twice a week for two months; had walked with Catherine to the wharf on Sundays; and had asked her, on the fourth of June, by the third lock, whether she would go to Newcastle with him when the contract was done.

She had said she would.

She had said it with her hands in her apron pockets, looking at the water, without any hesitation at all; and she had gone home to tell her father that she had settled it.

Chapter II

Mr. Sibley had heard her with the patience of a man who has measured timber for thirty years and knows that no two trees fall the same way; and then he had said:

‘You must ask Mr. Pargeter.’

Mr. Pargeter had been vicar of Minsden since the American War, had baptized Catherine, had buried her mother, and had given her two volumes of Secker’s Sermons when she was confirmed. He was sixty-eight; he had an independent fortune of four hundred a year; and he was one of those men who have spent a blameless life in the persuasion that prudence is the chief part of virtue, and who are never so dangerous as when they are acting from their best feelings.

He came down to the Moat House on the Monday morning, with his stick in his hand, and he took Catherine into the walnut walk.

‘My dear Catherine,’ he said, ‘I have known you from a child in the cradle, and I have never known you do a foolish thing. You will not begin now.’

‘I do not think it is foolish, sir,’ said Catherine.

‘He has eighty pounds a year.’

‘He has the contract.’

‘A contract with the Board of Admiralty is paper, my dear. The peace will be signed before harvest — you may take my word for it, Boney is at his last shift — and when the peace is signed the King will want no more oak, and Mr. Raines will be a young man with eighty pounds a year and a wife and no home to put her in. And what is to become of you in Newcastle, among strangers, with your father three hundred miles away and his health failing?’

‘He is not failing, sir.’

‘He is sixty-four, Catherine. He will not be bailiff for ever. When Sir Thomas comes down to live, there will be changes. A young man of fashion does not keep an old agent who cannot ride sixteen miles in a morning. And who is to look after him when you are in the North?’

He had said all this with so much tenderness, and with so sincere a sorrow for the pain he was giving her, that every word had the weight of a duty. He did not talk to her of rank, or of money, or of the figure she might make; he talked of her father, of her home, of the certainty of misery and the duty of waiting; and Catherine, who could have stood against an angry man for an hour without crying, had sat down upon the bench by the sundial and had given way.

She had not given way because she was frightened. She had given way because she had believed him.

She had believed that it was a selfish thing to leave her father; she had believed that Mr. Pargeter was wiser than she was; and she had believed that to hold to her own wish against the judgment of the only two persons who cared for her in the world was a piece of willful obstinacy which could bring no blessing with it.

She had written to Robert Raines that evening, in five lines. She had not asked him to come to the Moat House. She had said that she found she could not leave Minsden, that she was sensible of his goodness to her, and that she hoped he would be prosperous and happy.

He had not answered it. He had left Melsham on the Wednesday by the night mail, and the oak in the Lower Holt had been taken by a man from Devizes who gave five hundred pounds less for it and went bankrupt before Christmas.

Chapter III

Eight years in a small parish do not pass quickly, but they pass completely.

Nothing had happened at Minsden, except that Mr. Sibley had grown a little more deaf and had given up his horse for a gig; that Sir Thomas Calthorpe had come down to the Park with his sister, Miss Calthorpe, who was thirty and had never found anybody in the county quite good enough for her; and that Catherine had reached nine-and-twenty without having had another offer, or having wished for one.

She had not fallen into a decline; she had not taken to writing verses; she had not made herself miserable. She had made the puddings, and kept the accounts, and walked with her father along the hedges in the autumn to see where the ditching was wanted. But she had acquired, in those eight years, a habit of looking at a fact until she saw what it was, and then leaving it alone; which is the most uncomfortable habit a woman can have, for it prevents her from being amused by things that amuse other people, and gives her nothing to say when the company is agreeable.

In the October of 1823, the Great House was full for the shooting.

Sir Thomas had brought down his cousin, Captain Calthorpe of the Guards, who had been at Waterloo and had the Waterloo medal, and who looked as if he thought the Waterloo medal was a sufficient reason for having nothing else about him; and there was a Mr. Morland, who was in Parliament and spoke for twenty minutes upon the Corn Laws without using any word of less than three syllables; and there was Miss Calthorpe’s particular friend, Mrs. Venables, who had a husband in the West Indies and six trunks of pelisses and hats from London.

And on the third of November, Sir Thomas’s sister sent down a note to the Moat House to desire that Miss Sibley would come up to the Park in the evening, as they were to have a little music and wanted somebody to play the country-dances.

‘You had better go, Catherine,’ said her father, looking over his spectacles from the account-book. ‘Sir Thomas was very civil about the wheat-rick yesterday. It does not do to seem particular.’

Catherine went. She put on her white muslin, which had been washed three times and was three inches shorter in the skirt than Mrs. Venables’s, and walked across the park in the dusk with her thin shoes in her pocket.

Chapter IV

The drawing-room at Minsden Park was sixty feet long, with five windows looking towards the chalk hills, and had been newly furnished by Sir Thomas with yellow damask and mirrors that reached to the cornices.

When Catherine came in, Miss Calthorpe was sitting on a sofa by the fire, explaining to Mrs. Venables why it was impossible to live in the country; Sir Thomas was standing on the hearth-rug, with his back to the grate, admiring his own boots; and Captain Calthorpe was trying to teach a black spaniel to sit upon a footstool and not succeeding.

‘Ah, Miss Sibley,’ said Miss Calthorpe, with that very sweet smile which means that one has remembered a name just in time. ‘You are always so good. We were quite in despair. Mrs. Venables does not play reels, and these gentlemen have been walking twenty miles after the partridges and will not be amused without a dance.’

Catherine sat down at the instrument, which was a broad pianoforte by Broadwood, very much out of tune in the middle octaves, and began the first set of dances she could find in the book.

They danced for three-quarters of an hour. Captain Calthorpe danced with his cousin; Sir Thomas danced with Mrs. Venables; and Mr. Morland sat by the window and read a blue pamphlet about the navigation of the Severn.

At nine o'clock the door opened, and the servant announced Mr. Raines.

Sir Thomas went forward with a great deal of hand-shaking.

‘My dear Raines! We had almost given you up. The road from Melsham is abominable, I know. You got my letter about the timber for the new cottages? Let me make you known to my sister. Miss Calthorpe — Mr. Raines, of the North. A great engineer, I assure you — has built two bridges in Durham and is to do the new basin at Bristol.’

Catherine’s fingers did not stop. She went on playing The Triumph, through the third part and the repeat, with the regular, mechanical stroke of a person who has learnt to count four to a bar and does not think about the tune.

She had eight years to put between that evening and the third lock at Melsham; and she put them there, in eight seconds, while her hands moved on the keys.

He was broader than he had been; his face was browned by the weather; he wore a dark coat with plain buttons, and he looked like a man who was in the habit of telling four hundred workmen what to do at six in the morning and seeing that they did it. He bowed to Miss Calthorpe; he shook hands with Sir Thomas; he declined tea; and then, as the dance ended and the room became quiet, his eye went across the yellow damask to the corner where the pianoforte stood.

He saw her.

He did not start. He did not change colour. He stood for two seconds looking at her with a cool, steady, indifferent curiosity, as one looks at an old gate-post that one remembers having seen when one was a boy; and then he turned to Sir Thomas and began to speak of the stone-quarries at Box, which he had visited on his way from Bath.

Catherine took her hands off the keys, turned the leaf of her music-book, and began The Maid of the Mill.

Chapter V

The next morning was wet, with that small, steady rain which promises to last the day and generally keeps its word.

Catherine was in the store-room at nine, weighing sugar for the damson cheese, when Mr. Pargeter came in at the side door, with his umbrella dripping into the passage.

‘Well, Catherine,’ he said, taking off his gaiters by the kitchen fire. ‘I hear you were at the Park last night. A very brilliant party, I understand. Sir Thomas is doing things with a great deal of spirit.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Catherine.

‘And young Raines is there, I find. He has made his way, it seems. A very remarkable young man — very energetic. Sir Thomas tells me he is to have the whole management of the new dock at Bristol, two thousand a year at the least, and a share in the iron-works at Merthyr.’

He paused, and looked at her over his handkerchief as he wiped his spectacles.

‘You remember him, Catherine?’

‘Yes, sir. He was here in the year fifteen.’

‘To be sure, to be sure. A long time ago. You were a girl then. It was a very fortunate thing, my dear, that you had those who could advise you with prudence. A young man with his fortune to seek is a very different thing from a man established in the world. He might have been ruined half a dozen times in these eight years; three out of four of these contractors go to the wall. It must be a great satisfaction to you to reflect that you acted with so much propriety.’

Catherine put the scoop into the sugar-cask.

‘I did what you told me to do, Mr. Pargeter.’

‘And you see the wisdom of it, my dear. We must always look to the end. Self-denial is never thrown away. You have preserved your father’s comfort, you have remained in your natural station, and you have avoided all the hazards of a speculative life.’

He went away to the study to see Mr. Sibley about the poor-rates; and Catherine sat down upon the salt-box with the wooden scoop in her hand.

She did not feel any regret. She was clear-headed enough to know that regret is a waste of time over a thing that cannot be mended. But she perceived, with a sudden, cold distinctness which made her throat ache, that Mr. Pargeter had not understood the matter eight years ago, and did not understand it now; that he was praising her for having escaped a danger which had never existed, and congratulating her upon an act of prudence which had been simply an act of obedience to his own mistake; and that he was perfectly happy with himself, and would continue happy with himself to the day of his death.

Minsden — Volume the Second

Chapter I

For three weeks Mr. Raines was in and out of the parish every day.

Sir Thomas was building a new timber bridge over the Minsden brook to connect the Park with the high road to Melsham, and Raines had undertaken to give him the plan and to see the piles driven before he went to Bristol for the winter.

He dined at the Moat House once with Sir Thomas, to look at the parish map; he spoke to Mr. Sibley about the timber with the greatest civility; he bowed to Catherine when he met her in the lane; and he did not, in twenty-one days, say three words to her that might not have been cried from the top of the church tower without giving any person in Wiltshire the smallest reason to listen.

Miss Calthorpe, in the meantime, had discovered that an engineer of six-and-thirty with two thousand a year and a reputation from the newspapers was a very different thing from a young man from the North who bought oak.

She was twenty-nine; she was tired of Minsden; and she had that particular sort of determination which believes that whatever it wishes for very much is a thing which ought to happen. She walked down to the brook every morning with her sketch-book; she asked Raines questions about the arches, which he answered in twelve words; she told Mrs. Venables that he was the only man of real genius she had ever met; and she said to Catherine, on the second Sunday in November, as they came out of the church porch:

‘Do not you think Mr. Raines has a remarkably fine character, Miss Sibley? So firm — so decisive. A woman could always rely upon a mind like that. There is nothing weak, nothing wavering about him. I cannot endure a man who is to be turned about by other people.’

Catherine looked at the gravel path.

‘I believe he is very steady in what he undertakes,’ she said.

‘Steady! He is like an iron bar. My brother says that when he was at the works at Sunderland, the men struck for wages and threatened to throw him into the river; and he walked down among them with his hands in his pockets and told them that if they did not pick up their picks in ten minutes he would have the military from Newcastle; and they went back to work. That is what I call strength of character. I have no patience with people who have no will of their own.’

‘It is very convenient,’ said Catherine, ‘when the will happens to be right.’

Miss Calthorpe stared at her for a moment, decided that she was a heavy young woman who understood nothing but butter, and walked on to join her brother.

Chapter II

The twenty-fourth of November was the day fixed for driving the third pile, which was the main support of the centre arch.

There had been three days’ frost, followed by a sudden thaw and a heavy south-west wind; the brook, which was commonly four feet deep and twenty feet wide, had risen until it covered the alder-meadows on both sides; and the current was running against the old timber camp-sheeting with a dull, heavy roar that could be heard at the vicarage.

Sir Thomas had brought down the whole party from the Park to see the engine work — Miss Calthorpe in her beaver bonnet and pelisse of green velvet, Mrs. Venables with her muff, and Captain Calthorpe with his cigar.

Raines was upon the timber staging over the water, with his coat off, watching the monkey fall upon the head of the oak pile.

‘It will not do, Sir Thomas,’ he said, coming to the bank where the baronet stood with his hands under his coat-tails. ‘The bottom is silt. We have gone sixteen feet and found no holding. We must put in two more bays to the north, and carry the road twenty yards higher up, where the chalk comes down to the water.’

‘Nonsense, my dear Raines!’ said Sir Thomas. ‘The bridge has been planned for this exact spot. It lines with the avenue from the South Lodge. If you move it twenty yards higher up, it will cut through the plantation and spoil the whole view from the library windows.’

‘The view from the library windows will not hold up forty tons of gravel,’ said Raines.

Miss Calthorpe came forward on the plank.

‘Oh, Mr. Raines! You are not going to give it up? I had set my heart upon seeing the centre arch finished before we went to town. Surely a little perseverance — a little determination — will conquer the water. You are not a man to be beaten by a brook!’

She looked at him with that bright, daring confidence which is so charming in a pretty woman when she knows nothing whatever of the subject, and which has caused more mischief in the world than six battles.

Raines looked at her.

He was a sensible man, but he was six-and-thirty, and he had been praised for his firmness in three counties; and there is no man so easily caught by the parade of resolution as the man who has made a reputation by it.

‘The timber will bear the strain for to-day, ma'am,’ he said, ‘if that is what you wish to see. But it will not stand the winter.’

‘Then let us see it to-day!’ cried Miss Calthorpe. ‘I will be the first person to walk across the centre plank.’

Chapter III

Catherine was standing on the gravel bank ten yards behind them, with her father’s cloak over her arm.

She saw the water boiling through the piles; she saw that the main stay was shaking with every blow of the ram; and she saw, what nobody else saw, that the bank on which the staging rested was beginning to slide away in great cakes of greasy clay under the wash of the current.

‘Miss Calthorpe,’ she said, in a voice that was neither loud nor hurried, ‘you had better not go upon the plank.’

Miss Calthorpe did not turn her head.

‘Thank you, Miss Sibley. I am not in the least nervous. Mr. Raines is there to take care of me.’

She stepped out upon the single nine-inch deal which ran from the bank to the middle pile.

What happened afterwards took less than twenty seconds.

The staging gave a long, cracking groan; the lower pile slipped six inches in the silt; the deal tilted; and Miss Calthorpe, with a short, sharp scream, fell sideways into eight feet of yellow water, between the timbers.

Captain Calthorpe dropped his cigar and began to take off his coat, which had three capes and was very tight in the sleeves; Sir Thomas ran up and down the bank calling for the workmen; and Mrs. Venables sat down upon a baulk of timber and went into hysterics with great regularity.

Raines did not hesitate. He went into the water from the head of the pile, caught Miss Calthorpe by her pelisse as she came up against the camp-sheeting, and brought her to the bank within forty yards of where she had fallen.

She was not drowned; she had swallowed two mouthfuls of muddy water and had ruined her green velvet; but when she was laid upon the grass she was insensible from the cold and the terror, and lay like a dead sheep.

Raines stood over her, dripping from head to foot, his teeth chattering with the chill of the November water, looking about him for somebody who had any sense.

‘Take her to the Moat House,’ said Catherine.

She was beside him with her father’s cloak already shaken out.

‘The Great House is three-quarters of a mile, and the wind is against you. My father’s is two hundred yards. Put the cloak round her, carry her between two of the men on the gate, and do not let her sit up until she has had some brandy.’

She did not look at him; she did not ask him if he was wet; she turned to Sir Thomas, who was trembling like a leaf, and told him to send the groom to Melsham for the apothecary; and then she went down the lane at a pace which made her skirts fly, to have the bed warmed and the fire lighted in the best parlour.

Chapter IV

By five o'clock in the afternoon the Moat House was quiet again.

Miss Calthorpe had been put into Catherine’s own bed, with hot bricks to her feet and three blankets; the apothecary had bled her twelve ounces, according to the practice of that country, and had declared that she had escaped an inflammation of the lungs by a miracle; and Sir Thomas had gone back to the Park to dress for dinner, having thanked Catherine four times with tears in his eyes and having promised to give five pounds to the Minsden poor at Christmas.

Raines remained in the kitchen.

Mr. Sibley had lent him an old coat of grey frieze, three sizes too large for him, and a pair of woollen stockings; and he sat by the hearth, with his boots drying in the chimney-corner, drinking hot ale with a toast in it.

Catherine came in from the dairy with a basin of broth.

‘She is asleep, sir,’ she said to her father, who was nodding in the arm-chair. ‘The apothecary says she may be moved in the carriage to-morrow if the day is fine.’

Raines looked up at her from the settle.

‘You were right, Miss Sibley,’ he said.

‘About the bed?’

‘About the plank. You told her not to go upon it.’

‘It was not very hard to see that the bank was giving way,’ said Catherine, setting down the basin. ‘The water had been under the roots of the willow since Tuesday.’

‘I saw it myself,’ said Raines, looking into his ale-mug. ‘I saw it at ten o'clock.’

Catherine said nothing.

‘I saw it,’ he repeated, ‘and I let her go because she dared me to it. I have been forty years in the world, Miss Sibley, and I have had the management of six hundred men at a time, and I let a foolish girl in a velvet pelisse talk me into doing what I knew was dangerous, because I would not have it said that I was afraid of thirty yards of water.’

He set down the mug upon the table with a hard, dry knock.

‘That is what I have been thinking of for the last two hours. If she had been drowned between those piles, I should have been the man who drowned her; and all the excuse I should have had to give to the coroner was that I was too proud to be contradicted by a woman.’

Catherine took up her knitting from the window-seat.

‘It was very fortunate that you were able to get her out,’ she said.

‘It was fortunate for her,’ said Raines. ‘It was not particularly fortunate for my opinion of myself.’

He sat silent for a long time, watching the firelight on the pewter dishes on the dresser; and Catherine went on with her stocking, counting her loops by the click of the needles, until the clock in the passage struck six.

Chapter V

Miss Calthorpe was taken to the Park the next day in the coach, wrapped in four shawls, and Minsden had an event which lasted it until the frost.

Mrs. Venables told the story at Melsham with nineteen additions, in all of which Captain Calthorpe was described as having been on the point of plunging into the flood when Mr. Raines anticipated him; Sir Thomas wrote a letter to the county paper about the heroism of his guest; and Mr. Pargeter preached a sermon on the Sunday from the ninety-third Psalm, upon the voice of many waters, in which he introduced so many compliments to the family at the Park that Miss Calthorpe was obliged to hold her handkerchief to her face through the whole of the application.

Raines went to Bristol on the Tuesday.

He did not call at the Moat House before he went; he sent a boy with a note of three lines to Mr. Sibley, returning the grey frieze coat and thanking him for the hospitality of his house; and Catherine put the note into the drawer with the parish receipts, and did not take it out again.

In January, Miss Calthorpe went to Bath with her brother.

It was understood in Minsden that she was to be married in the spring. Mrs. Venables had mentioned it to the curate’s sister: it was to be Mr. Raines; he had taken a house in the Paragon at Bath, and had bought a chariot with yellow wheels, and had given her a sapphire ring which had cost eighty guineas.

Mr. Pargeter came down to the Moat House to talk about it.

‘A very brilliant connection for young Raines,’ he said, rubbing his hands over the fire. ‘Very brilliant indeed. Sir Thomas’s sister! A family that came in with the Conqueror. It shows what energy and industry may do in this country, Catherine. I am sure we must all rejoice at his good fortune.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Catherine.

‘Though between ourselves, my dear,’ added the vicar, dropping his voice, ‘it is a great escape for you. A man of that determined character — so headstrong, so little used to consult the feelings of others — would have made a very difficult husband for a quiet girl. Miss Calthorpe has the spirit to manage him. You would have been crushed, Catherine; you would have been completely crushed.’

Catherine looked at him.

She did not say that Miss Calthorpe’s spirit had spent forty seconds in eight feet of water and had spent the next six weeks in fainting whenever a door banged; she did not say that the only person who had been managed was Raines, who had been managed into risking another person's life by a taunt; and she did not say that she had known both of these things for two months.

She said that the snow was coming down very fast, and asked Mr. Pargeter whether he would have his ginger-wine warm.

Minsden — Volume the Third

Chapter I

The marriage was not in the spring.

In March, the Bristol papers announced that the works at the new dock had been suspended in consequence of a dispute between the company and the contractor; in April, it was known that Mr. Raines had thrown up the contract and had demanded an arbitration; and in May, Miss Calthorpe’s engagement was not mentioned at the Park.

Captain Calthorpe, who had come down for the trout-fishing, was heard to say at the Calthorpe Arms that Raines was an obstinate North-country dog who would have his own way or none; that he had quarrelled with the committee because they wanted to use the stone from the Clifton quarries, which belonged to one of the directors, instead of the stone from Box; and that a man who would throw away two thousand a year for the sake of sixpence a foot on ashlar was a fool who would never get on in the world.

‘He said the Clifton stone would perish in four frosts,’ said the Captain, flicking his boot with his whip. ‘And the director said it had stood for thirty years in the Custom House. And Raines told him to his face that the Custom House was a disgrace to the city, and walked out of the room. That is your man of genius! Sir Thomas is exceedingly glad the thing went no further. A woman of my sister’s family cannot be married to a man who makes himself impossible in good company.’

Catherine heard this from her father, who had it from the innkeeper.

‘What do you think of it, Catherine?’ asked Mr. Sibley.

‘I think the stone from Clifton does perish in the frost, father,’ she said. ‘The coping of the dairy at the Park was made of it in Sir Julian’s time, and you had to replace it with Pennant before it had been down five years.’

‘Ay,’ said the old man, taking his pipe from his mouth. ‘So I did. I had forgotten that. It cost twenty-four pounds, and Sir Julian made a great noise about it.’

‘Then I suppose Mr. Raines remembered it,’ said Catherine.

Chapter II

In the July of that year, Mr. Pargeter died.

He died as he had lived, with great composure, in his seventy-seventh year, having eaten a moderate dinner of boiled mutton and turnips and read the evening prayers to his servant; and he left five pounds to the clerk, forty pounds to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and his two volumes of Secker’s Sermons to Catherine Sibley.

When the will was read, it was found that he had left a letter for her, sealed with his crest in black wax.

It was written in his neat, clerical hand, dated three weeks before his death, and it was this:

‘My dear Catherine,—

I have desired that this may be put into your hand when I am no longer here to give you that counsel which you have always received with so much dutiful submission.

I look back upon the long period during which I have been permitted to watch over you with sincere thankfulness; and upon no part of it with more satisfaction than upon that occasion when, by the blessing of Providence, I was enabled to guide your inexperience away from a connection which must have separated you from your excellent father and exposed you to the trials of a worldly and unsettled life.

You have been a good daughter, my dear child; you have preserved your peace of mind; and you will find, as you advance in years, that the recollection of duty performed is the only possession which does not lose its value in the grave.

I remain, your affectionate friend and pastor,

THOMAS PARGETER.’

Catherine read it twice through, standing by the window of the empty study, while the appraisers were valuing the chairs and tables in the parlour.

She did not cry. She felt a great respect for the hand that had written it, and a great pity for the old man who had gone out of the world so entirely sure that he had done good; and then she folded the sheet, and put it into her pocket, and walked home across the glebe.

She knew now, what she had suspected for eighteen months, that the letter was the record of an error.

It had not been an error of malice; it had been an error of good intentions, backed by the authority of seventy years and an unblemished character; and it had cost her eight years of her life, and the only man she had ever cared to look at, and it had left her at nine-and-twenty with an old father andSecker’s Sermons.

She did not call it an injury. She was too honest to give it a fine name. She called it a mistake; and she saw that the person who had made the mistake had gone where no argument could reach him, leaving her with the consequence to keep for the rest of her days.

Chapter III

The new vicar came in August. He was a young man from Oxford with a great deal of voice and a sister who played the harp; and the parish was so busy in finding out what they were like that nobody had any time to think about the bridge.

The bridge stood as Raines had left it in November — the two stone piers finished, the centre opening filled with rough timbering, and the gravel road running down to the water’s edge and stopping there.

On the twenty-second of August, Catherine was coming back from Melsham in her father’s gig, having been to the bank for the harvest-wages, when she saw a horse and gig standing by the Lower Holt.

A man was sitting upon the gate with a memorandum-book upon his knee, writing with a pencil.

He looked up as the gig came along the turf, and she saw that it was Robert Raines.

He had no coat on; his sleeves were rolled up as they had been on the staging; and he looked older, thinner, and considerably less prosperous than he had looked in the drawing-room at Minsden Park.

He got down from the gate, took his horse by the bridle, and walked into the middle of the road to let her pass.

Catherine pulled up the pony.

‘Good morning, Mr. Raines,’ she said.

‘Good morning, Miss Sibley.’

He stood for a moment looking at the pony’s ears, and then he said:

‘I am taking the timber from the Holt after all. Your father told me in June that Sir Thomas wanted to be rid of it.’

‘Yes,’ said Catherine. ‘The new cottages are to be built with brick.’

‘It is good oak,’ he said, looking towards the woods. ‘It has been standing sixty years. It is better oak than they have in the dockyards now by three shillings a foot.’

‘My father always said so,’ said Catherine.

There was a silence of perhaps half a minute, during which the pony cropped the nettles by the ditch.

‘I was sorry to hear of Mr. Pargeter’s death,’ said Raines.

‘He died very easily,’ said Catherine. ‘He was seventy-seven.’

‘He was a very good man, I believe,’ said Raines.

‘He was a very good man,’ said Catherine, in her quiet, level voice, ‘and he was very often mistaken.’

Chapter IV

Raines looked up at her quickly.

It was the first time in eight years that she had said a word to him which had any meaning in it that could not have been read by the parish constable; and she sat in the gig with the reins in her gloved hands, looking straight between the pony’s ears, as steady as a church.

‘You thought so?’ he asked.

‘I knew it,’ said Catherine. ‘I knew it when I was one-and-twenty, and I knew it when I was twenty-eight.’

‘Then why did you write that letter to me at Melsham?’

The question came out like a shot from a pistol. It was the question he had been keeping inside him for eight years, through the Newcastle contracts, and the bridges, and the Bristol docks; and it had come out at last, on a Tuesday morning in a dusty lane, without any preparation at all.

Catherine turned her head and looked him full in the face.

‘Because I was one-and-twenty, Mr. Raines; and because he had known me from my cradle, and my father was old, and I was told that it was my duty to stay; and because I was not wise enough then to know that a duty which is only prudence is very often no duty at all.’

He stood holding the bridle, with his mouth set hard.

‘You let him persuade you.’

‘I did,’ said Catherine. ‘I let him persuade me that it was a right thing to break a promise because the man I had made it to had his way to make in the world. I was wrong. I have known I was wrong for a great while. But I did it because I thought it was right, and not because I was afraid of the North.’

‘And afterwards?’ he said.

‘Afterwards is eight years ago,’ said Catherine. ‘The pony will not stand, Mr. Raines.’

He did not move his hand from the bit.

‘I was an obstinate fool, Catherine,’ he said, speaking low and fast. ‘I thought you had given me up because you were afraid of the poverty; and I went away to Newcastle determined to show you that I could make two thousand a year without any help from Minsden. And when I had made it, I came back here with my head full of pride, and let that silly woman at the Park make a puppet of me, because she flattered me and told me I was a man of iron.’

‘You were very near drowning her,’ said Catherine.

‘I was very near drowning myself,’ he said. ‘And when you stood on that bank and told her the truth, while I was playing the fool on the plank to please her vanity, I knew which of us had the real strength. I have known it ever since.’

‘The stone at Bristol wasPennant, I hope?’ said Catherine.

A slow, grim smile came over his brown face.

‘It was Box ashlar,’ he said. ‘Every yard of it. And it cost me four hundred pounds out of my own pocket to prove it to them; and the dock will stand when the Clifton Custom House is in the river.’

‘Then you had better let go the pony,’ said Catherine, ‘or my father’s dinner will be cold.’

Chapter V

He let go the bit; but he did not go back to the gate.

He walked beside the gig all the way to the Moat House, with his horse following behind him; and when they came to the garden gate, Mr. Sibley was sitting on the bench under the walnut-tree, with his spectacles on his nose and the Minsden poor-book on his knees.

The old man looked up over his glasses, and saw them coming through the wicket together; and he looked at Catherine’s face, and then at Raines’s grey coat; and he did not say a word about the timber, or the harvest-wages, or the clock having struck one.

He took off his spectacles, wiped them on his coat-tail, and said:

‘You have been a long time on the road, Catherine.’

‘Yes, father,’ said Catherine. ‘Mr. Raines has been telling me about the oak in the Lower Holt.’

‘Ay,’ said Mr. Sibley. ‘It is good oak. I always told Sir Julian it would fetch its value if we waited long enough.’

They were married in October, at the church with the old tower, by the new vicar from Oxford, who read the service with a great deal of emphasis and made a very eloquent discourse afterwards upon the duties of the married state, which neither of them listened to.

Sir Thomas gave them a silver tea-pot, which had the Calthorpe crest upon it and was very handsome and rather thin; Miss Calthorpe, who was in London for the winter, sent Catherine a card of congratulations with a French motto in gold leaf; and Mrs. Venables told everybody at Bath that it was a very suitable match, for Miss Sibley was a quiet, domestic sort of person who would not expect to live in a great style, and Mr. Raines was a man who had completely ruined his prospects by his violent temper.

They went to live at Chepstow, where Raines had the building of the new iron bridge over the Wye; and Catherine kept his accounts, and saw that the stone was sound, and lived forty years without ever finding it necessary to consult any person upon what she ought to think.

When she was sixty, her eldest grandson, who was a clever lad at Cambridge and had a great turn for argument, asked her one day whether she did not think that one should always be guided by the advice of those who were older and wiser than oneself.

‘You must ask them their reasons, Robert,’ she said, looking over her spectacles as she mended his father’s socks. ‘And when they have given them to you, you must look at the reasons, and not at the people.’

‘And if they are very good people, grandmamma?’

‘The best people in the world, my dear,’ said Catherine, ‘are very often like your grandfather’s old pile in the Minsden brook: they stand very upright, and look very solid, and have no holding in the bottom whatever.’