Rural simplicity

Y DEAREST CLARA,—I am going to write you a long letter. There is just a little news to tell you, and I want to talk about something I could not possibly discuss with any one else. You are only a very few years older than I am, and yet you know so much more about things. I feel sure that if you advise me at all, you will advise me well. You have read so many more novels and stories than I have, that you understand human nature much better. And you are so sympathetic too. I have often thought it very sad that at the age of twenty-five you should have decided that you can never love again; but I know that you do take the warmest and deepest interest in the love-stories of others, and there is no one to whom I could more readily tell all the secrete of my heart. You must not imagine that I have any love-story or any secrets of that kind to tell you now. On the contrary, I have just realized that you are quite right about my cousin Tom, and that I can never, never love him at all. Every word that you said about him was true: mere good looks, good nature, and a partiality for athletics are not enough; I can see now how right you were when you told me that "one wants the wonderful insight and sympathy that can understand the delicacies and simplicities of a young girl's soul,"—I think that is the most beautiful sentence in your last dear letter. And it is so true! It is just a little difficult for me, because Tom is living at the Rectory until he goes up to Cambridge in October, and although he spends a good deal of his time in the study with papa, working for his examination, he does get a good many opportunities of seeing me. He really behaves just as if I had encouraged him; and he seems almost to expect me to fall in love with him. I like him well enough, but it would be absurd to think about loving him. I did that only before I had the benefit of your wise advice, my dear Clara.

And now I must tell you a little news. Do you remember how you used to rave about The Long Dream? Of course you do, because in your last letter you speak of the book again, and say what a consolation it has been to you in your great trouble. You give me, too, a sketch of what you imagine the author, Mr. Merle, must be like. What will you say when I tell you that for the last fortnight Mr. Merle has been living at Carleston, and that I have seen him constantly? It's true. Oh!

You were not quite right in your imaginary description of him. You said that you thought the author of The Long Dream would be "tall and dark, with flashing eyes and a complexion like cream with the faintest suspicion of coffee in it." He really has rather a roundish face, a fresh colour, and fair hair, which is generally rather untidy. I think his eyes are gray; but I have not been near enough to see properly. You were quite right in thinking that he would be tall, however. What made you guess that? In dress he is just like any other man.

Mr. Merle's father and mine were at college together, it turns out; so naturally we have seen a good deal of him. He has dined here twice and been to tennis several times. He plays better than Tom. He has got rooms at an old farmhouse, and will perhaps stay for another month, he says. Papa is delighted with him, and so is Aunt Mary; Tom does not like him so much, and says that he is conceited. This is utterly untrue; he is really quite unaffected and very good-tempered. He does not mind talking about his books; I told him last night that I loved The Long Dream, and it seemed to please him. Was I wrong? Tom behaves very badly, I am sorry to say, and cannot even keep his temper when Mr. Merle beats him at tennis. I think a boy of eighteen ought to know better, and I told him so. Then he got angry, and said a perfectly outrageous thing, a thing for which there is not the slightest foundation, which no amount of intimacy could have justified him in saying. I would not speak to him all the rest of that day; and I have now told him that if he dares even to hint at such a thing again I will never speak to him any more at all. I cannot think what has come over poor Tom lately; he used to be all right, and now he is horrible. He seems to have completely changed during the last fortnight. He said the other day that Mr. Merle was an atheist. I told him that even if it were true, such a charge would come very badly from him, because, as you know, on fine mornings, Tom is rather given to shirking church; and I pointed out to him that Mr. Merle had been to church twice on each of the Sundays that he has been here—he sits just opposite to our pew—and that he must have listened to papa's sermons, because he talked to papa about them afterwards. Tom had no reason whatever to offer for saying so; except that he had been told that most authors were atheists. I asked him how about St. Paul? Which of course he couldn't answer.

I do wish that Tom could manage to behave a little more as Charles Leader, Mrs. Leader's eldest son, did. I saw a good deal of him some time ago, and he asked me to marry him, you know, shortly after Tom's arrival here. He had simply misunderstood my manner to him; but when I told him his mistake, he never reproached me at all; he has left the village and never troubled me since. I wish Tom would go away too. It is so indelicate of him to keep on caring for me when I have stopped caring for him.

You must not think that when I said Mr. Merle's face was roundish, that I meant it in a disparaging way at all. He is very good-looking; he has that appearance of nobility and strength which I so much admire in a man. He makes every one like him, except Tom. I wish I could give you a better idea of his personal appearance, but there really is no one we know who could be compared with him for a moment. He likes music; I sang two or three songs for him in the drawing-room the last time he dined here. He has a strange way of looking at one sometimes, as if he were thirsty. It is very interesting to talk to him; he has just come from London, you see, and has heaps of things to tell us. One hears so little in this benighted village. We are going to have tea at his rooms in the farmhouse this afternoon, which will be splendid. Tom says he shall not go. I shall meet him again in the evening at Mrs. Leader's. Please write soon to me, dearest Clara, and tell me what to do. Ever your most loving friend,

P.S.—His other names are Cecil Vanstoun. He only puts the initials, you know, on the title-page of his book. I forgot to say that I think I like him very much—very much indeed. I have begun to keep a diary; you suggested it some time ago.

,—No, I am not going to give you a humorous and epigrammatic account of the aborigines of Carleston, and the way they treat the unusual apparition of a live Londoner. That kind of thing has been done too often and too badly. Besides, I may possibly be an author, but I am certainly a man of business. I couldn't send you, free, in a letter that which might be printed and purchased. It would offend your natural delicacy; at any rate it ought to; I might as well send you a couple of guineas at once as amusement to that amount. And lastly, what is the use of a friend if we may not be very dull with him? We keep our brilliant side for the comparative stranger, or sell it to the positive editor; we use it to make an impression or a livelihood; we don't waste it on friends.

Well, as you know, I came down here from London about a fortnight ago, sick of the season, overworked, eagerly desiring to be alone, and dumb, and idle, and to drink new milk. I am already somewhat refreshed. I have drunk the new milk; I have stretched myself on the grass in the sun, and smoked many pipes, and become an object of derision to my landlady by reason of my laziness; I do not think she ever had a lodger who did less and enjoyed it more; and if I have not been absolutely dumb, I can at least guarantee that I have said nothing which would be worth repetition. I like this village; there's an indefinable air of goodness and rural simplicity about it. My rooms are not exactly artistic, of course, but everything is spotlessly clean. Why is bad Berlin wool-work on the sofa always accompanied by minatory texts on the walls? It is a pity that you restrict yourself to answering academical questions and I restrict myself to asking the other kind. The rooms do very well; I have imported a good piano, which is rather luxurious of me, I suppose.

But I have not been alone. When I decided, rather in a hurry, to take these rooms and come to Carleston for a couple of months or so, I neglected to inquire who was the village parson. He is the Rev. Hubert Marshe, and was at Trinity with my father. They were friends, and consequently I have been up to the Rectory a good deal. He is a man of some culture, has a touch of bibliomania, is gentle in everything but his orthodoxy, and is really loved by every one in the village. His wife died six years ago, and an unmarried sister, Mary Marshe, keeps house for him. She is rather a prim old lady, and insists on all the small points, but she has as sweet a disposition as her brother. A nephew of his is stopping in the house, and is supposed to be reading for the little-go with the Rector. He seems to occupy most of his time with adoring the Rector's only child Millicent, a girl of seventeen. He himself is not a bad fellow altogether, but rather a cub. Cambridge will improve him.

I went to dine last night with a Mrs. Leader, a widow who has a big house here but who formerly lived in Cornwall. I had met her at the Rectory. By the way, whenever the Rector's nephew, Tom, gets very angry with the Rector's daughter, Millicent—which happens sometimes, because he is as unreasonable as most adorers—he always talks to her about this Mrs. Leader's elder son, who is now away from home. He does this simply to annoy her—a fact which I had in my mind when I said he was rather a cub. However, that's none of my business. It was rather a pleasant dinner. Mrs. Leader has that shade of gentle Puritanism in her which one still finds occasionally in the inhabitants of English villages. It is the old Puritanism with charity added. She is hard on herself and indulgent to the rest of the world. There are some good people still alive, my dear Jack, but one does not as a rule meet them in London. For real goodness and simplicity one must come to the country. I had a long talk with Mrs. Leader about her elder son Charles, whom she worships, and, curiously enough, I had another talk with Miss Marshe on the same subject later in the evening. She implied in that vague and delicate way which comes to girls by instinct that Charles Leader had asked her to marry him, and that she had refused him. She did not say either of these things directly, but she talked as if I knew them, until I actually did know them, and altogether—well, I am going to stop these uninteresting details, and come to the main point. I had not meant to tell you, but I find that I must. You may have guessed it already—you are rather clever at such things. I take back all that I have ever said about women, I had never met the perfect woman before, but I have met her now. I love Millicent Marshe, and I am going to ask her to marry me.

At least, I am not sure whether I shall ask her to marry me or not. I am not yet sure whether she cares for her cousin Tom. I rather gathered from a hint that her aunt let fall that a marriage between these two was not unlikely. If she really cares for Tom, of course I shall not annoy her by my interference. You must not misunderstand me when I say that she is perfect. I do not mean that her attainments—her intellectual attainments—are better than those of all other women. I have not entirely lost my critical faculty. I can see, for instance, that her playing is slipshod, and her singing only shows the average drawing-room quality. Very likely she was not well taught. What I meant rather was that she was quite unspoiled. I feel sure that she has never given one sentimental thought to a man in her life. There are girls in town who have a hideous practice of writing morbid confidences to each other about men they have met. She would never do that. She is quite incapable, too, of fickleness. She will love once, and love always. But at present she has never thought of love and marriage. She is the perfect, virginal type—fresh and untainted as a fragrant wild-flower in one of the hedge-rows here; and yet a strange, unconscious, delicate instinct keeps her from all mistakes—she would never let a man believe that she cared for him, if she did not. This Charles Leader who, I have told you, asked her to marry him must have been an idiot to have thought that he had a chance. She would never lead a man on unless she meant to marry him. She has lived all her days in this country village, far away from the vulgar flirtations and sickly sentimentalities of London. She is a white soul, framed in a lovely body. I could write pages about her beauty. Jack, but I fear you would only laugh at me. She has dark hair, and brown, faithful eyes, and a young rosebud of a mouth that—what am I doing—I who have hated sentimentality all my days! Yes, you may laugh at me as much as you like, I don't mind. I suppose it will all be over soon, for I am afraid that it is for Tom not for me that she cares. I have studied character all my life, and I do not think I can be mistaken.

Briefly, my plan is this. I shall observe as closely as possible during the next few days. If she seems to favour Tom, I shall go away and trouble her no more. If she seems to favour me, I shall propose to her. I feel absolutely sure that she would never mislead either Tom or myself. You will tell me that I am wanting in pluck, but I do not think so. It would be foolhardiness to propose to her if she obviously cared for Tom; and it would also be, probably, very offensive to her. I do not allow myself to hope much, and yet at times hopes will force their way in, and I picture happiness.

That is my plan of campaign. Cambridge is quite desolate just now I suppose. Why do you stop? I had a good deal to tell you about a book that I am planning, but I've taken up all my space with my account of Millicent Marshe. You may be as amused as you please, but it's terribly serious with me, and I have no notion how it will all end. Ever yours, .

September 3rd,—Oh! Oh! Oh! I wish I could understand myself. I wish I knew what I was doing. I wrote a long letter to Clara about Mr. Merle this morning. I went to his rooms with the others this afternoon. I met him at dinner this evening at Mrs. Leader's. I am immensely interested in him, but I am not quite sure that I love him; what is much worse is that I am by no means sure that he loves me. Tom walked back with me from the Leaders to the Vicarage, and I thought that he did not seem to care for me as much as he once did. Of course, that was just what I wanted, for I can never marry Tom; but it pained me to see that he could be so fickle and forget so easily. So I made a sort of appeal to his better nature, to see if he really had forgotten; and now I am afraid that he will think I was encouraging him. I do not believe Charles Leader has ever forgotten me. I only wish that he would, except that it would rather lessen my high opinion of him. I do so hate fickleness. I like simplicity and constancy.

Mr. Merle is very brilliant. He has had a piano sent down here from London, and I sang Love's Rapturous Sorrow to him this afternoon at his rooms; I thought that he might have thanked me rather more warmly. When I had finished. Aunt Mary asked him if he played, and he said that he did a little. I was rather surprised at this, because it had never occurred to me that any men, except professionals, played the piano at all. He consented to play at once and asked me what I should like. I suggested the Pathétique Sonata, because I can never make the Rondo go right, and I wanted to see if he could. "You're right," he said, as he sat down at the piano. "The school-girls have got at that terribly, but they will never make me stop liking it. Didn't you find that in the days when you were at school?" He did not wait for me to reply, but began at once. He played it all through without notes magnificently. He would not play any more, and he would not sing, although he confessed that he sang "a little." I wish that I had known all this before I sang those drawing-room songs to him. He must have hated them and probably he hates me in consequence. I think that if he had possessed perfect taste he would not have played quite so well—he would have seen that it was a sort of reproach to me. Besides, I thought that he had got the piano simply for my pleasure, and now it appears that he got it entirely for his own. Still I do not think that he meant to be selfish. Men as a rule have very little tact. Yet, I don't know—I fancy that I should not have liked him so well if he had been less brilliant. I cannot help thinking about the power he holds. His book is read everywhere and quoted everywhere. It is admired by the very best critics, and yet I am almost sure that he was pleased when I told him that I loved it. I like to feel that he can do things which are beyond other men, but I do wish he would be a little—how shall I write it?—a little more decided. He leaves me uncertain.

Charles Leader never did that. Whenever I go to Mrs. Leader's I always find a certain train of thoughts—tender and sorrowful—start up in my brain about Charlie, as I called him then. Charlie was always quite decided. But so mistaken! Tom never left me in doubt, either. He's mistaken, too.

September 4th,—I have just had a long letter from my dear Clara, answering the letter which I sent the day before yesterday. I have no notion how she arrived at the conclusion, but this is it:—

"Unconsciously perhaps, you are very much in love with Cecil Vanstoun Merle."

What magic there is in those words! I think I have read them over a hundred times, and it makes me tremble to write them down. I cannot imagine how she guessed it. She must have great insight in these things, or she would never have discovered my feelings from my letter. I had hardly guessed them myself. Well, this is my own diary, and no one but myself will ever read it; so I will write down my confession. I love Cecil Vanstoun Merle. I love him more than any one or anything in the whole world. I could never, never, never love any one else. And he has not yet shown me plainly that he loves me. Consequently, I have no right to love him.

I won't love him.

I can't help loving him.

I should like just to sit down and cry for ever and ever. I am very unhappy. And yet I am not sure that I shall not in the end be very happy indeed, if I only follow the plan which dear Clara has made out for me—the Plan of Campaign, she calls it. She is so wise, and she has had experience. This is what she says:—

"You know, my dear Millicent, that I myself have loved and lost. I was then in the first bloom of my girlhood, young, guileless, tender-hearted, beautiful, some said. I never attempted to conceal my passion, and that was why I lost him. Men only care to win what is difficult to win. Especially is this the case with men of the bold and intensely masculine physique that you describe in Cecil Merle. An obstacle is an allurement to such men. I am convinced that if you show Cecil Merle that you care for him, he will at once lose any love that he may have for you. If on the other hand you show a marked preference for your cousin Tom, and if he cares in the least degree for you now, he will care a thousandfold more then, and you may count on a proposal from him before he leaves Carleston. Besides, this is the only truly maidenly course to pursue; my own conduct was unwise. I was blinded by love and I have paid the debt in a life-long sorrow."

I almost think that she is right. There may, perhaps, be a little difficulty with Tom. A very little encouragement always encourages Tom so very much. He may not see the true motives for my conduct; and even if he saw them he might be selfish. Of course, if he really loved me, it would be a pleasure to him to add to my happiness; and he would be adding to my happiness if he helped me to win Mr. Merle—I mean if he helped to give Mr. Merle an opportunity of winning me. Perhaps that is the way that I ought to look at it. Besides, as Clara points out, if Tom presumes too far, I can always tell him that he is insulting me. Yes, I must for a few days try Clara's plan, and pretend to be fond of Tom. I can always alter the plan if I find that it does not succeed. I must see what effect it has on Mr. Merle.

Only, because I love him so much, I shall always call him Cecil in future in these secret pages of my diary. I know that if I let him see that I loved him he would hate me. And if he hated me, I should die. Clara is quite right about his boldness, and I feel sure that with him an obstacle would prove an allurement. If it makes him declare his—ah, I can't write it! He is coming to dinner to-morrow night, and I will write again then.

September 5th.—I have just come up from the drawing-room. I talked to Tom most of dinner-time, and I played the accompaniments to Tom's songs. I told him that I should have The Devout Lover ringing in my head all night. Afterwards I talked to Cecil—chiefly about Tom's prospects at Cambridge. I watched most anxiously to see what effect this had on Cecil. I could not discover that it had any effect at all; he does not let one see very easily what his feelings are. He ought to, I think. Tom, however, was very much elated; I thought he would never let go of my hand when he said good-night. This is unfortunate, but I must go on with the plan a little longer, until I see things more clearly.

When one sees the two men together, one cannot help noticing Cecil's distinct superiority. He is really god-like, far beyond all other men. Charles Leader appealed to me to some extent; my friendship for him was invested with a certain sentiment. I was a simple country girl, and I was misled at the time by my feelings. When Tom came, he appealed to me far more, but although I have always tried to be kind to him, I can see now that I never loved him. Cecil, on the other hand, does not exactly appeal to me; he masters me, absorbs me. To see him is joy unspeakable; to think of him is the rapture that almost tortures. How utterly I love him!

Something within me seems to tell me that Clara was right. Cecil is so brilliant, so bold, so intensely masculine, that the thought of a rival would add to the ardour of his love; I feel that I know his nature perfectly; he is made to conquer, and he would care nothing for a victory which involved no fighting. Yes, for one day more I will carry on the plan, and then I will let him say what he will be dying to say. I hope it will be in the conservatory. It seems so nice to think of it happening in a dim light, among the flowers, and ferns, and things.

September 7th,—It does cut me to the heart to be so cruel to Cecil, and it hurts me ever so much more to be so kind to Tom. But this at any rate will be the last day of it. I have given the plan every chance now, and I do not mean to conceal my real feelings so completely for the future.

Mr. Merle came for tennis this afternoon. I made papa take him off to see our collection of early prayer-books. When he came back I had managed to get rid of Aunt Mary and was seated in the summer-house alone with Tom. I was distinctly cold in my manner to Cecil, and tried to make him feel de trop, I thought he would be very furious; but he was not. He was very polite, and seemed to be very careful what he was saying. He left early. I must get ready for dinner, and have no time to write any more now, but I shall add a word or two perhaps when I come up to bed.

10.30. It is all over! Let me set down as calmly as my despair will allow me how everything happened.

After dinner Tom suggested that I should go out with him into the garden, as it was cool and pleasant there. I thought this would be a good opportunity to begin to let him down easily; so I went with him. But I could not let him down, because he hardly spoke; he seemed strange in his manner, I thought. We wandered into the conservatory, where it was almost dark; and then quite suddenly he put his arm round my waist, and—kissed me. I die with shame! How can men be such brutes—such gross, coarse, unmannerly brutes! I told him that I hated him; he wanted to excuse himself, but I would not listen, and hurried back into the drawing-room.

Papa was standing on the hearth-rug with an open letter in his hand, which he had been reading to Aunt Mary. She looked at me rather curiously. The letter was from Cecil—no, Mr. Merle; for I must call him Cecil no longer—and apologized for not coming to say good-bye. He has been suddenly called away, and is going abroad, probably for two years.

Oh, my heart is broken, and I would that my life might end to-night.

.—On the 4th inst., at St. Margaret's, Carleston, by the Rev. Patrick Downs, Charles, eldest son of the late Charles Leader of Tredennick, Cornwall, to Millicent, only daughter of the late Rev. Hubert Marshe, formerly Rector of Carleston.