Phemie Keller

For two days Mrs. Stondon kept her room. She said she had a headache, that she had caught cold, that she was too ill to see any one excepting her husband, and yet she would not allow Captain Stondon to send for a doctor. She was afraid a doctor might guess her malady to be more mental than physical, and so she refused to do anything except lie on a sofa in her dressing-room, while her maid bathed her forehead with eau-de-cologne and water, and brought her up morning and night a cup of tea.

On the evening of the second day Phemie went down stairs, lest her husband’s anxiety, her husband’s tenderness, should kill her.

She had thought over the matter during those two days till she was almost mad. She had loved a man not her husband—a man who loved another woman. She had loved unsought, unwooed. She had planted without hope of gathering. She had loved unasked, but, thank God, unknown.

Well, she could bury her own dead without the help of man; she could destroy this curse which had come to her in the guise of a blessing; she could hate Basil as she hated herself; she could leave him and Miss Derno to settle their love affairs to their own liking. She could keep her secret, her shameful, disgraceful secret, to herself, and mortal should not wring it from her. It was known but to herself and her God, and He would have pity.

Thinking all these good thoughts, having formed all these good resolutions, Phemie left her room and rejoined the family circle, and answered all inquiries about her health with a disagreeable politeness which she had laid down for the rule of her future life.

Ill enough she looked to have satisfied any doubt that might have been entertained about her sudden indisposition. She was pale, she was weak, she was weary; she spoke as though it was a trouble to her to talk, and though both Miss Derno and Basil Stondon saw she was trying her best to keep up before her husband, they took private occasion of advising him to send for a doctor whether she liked it or not.

“You seemed so well at dinner on Tuesday night,” said Miss Derno.

“But we had a long walk over Wildmoor, you remember,” remarked Basil, “and Mrs. Stondon complained then of being tired. Do you not recollect her sitting down to rest as we came back?”

Miss Derno did remember perfectly, and she remembered something else which she had scarcely noticed at the time, namely, how concerned Basil seemed about Mrs. Stondon’s weariness.

The coming of light is often felt before its actual advent. Miss Derno had not arrived at putting two and two together yet, but she had begun to perceive that somehow there was a two and two, and Basil’s anxiety about Mrs. Stondon’s indisposition set her wondering. It was not ordinary anxiety, it was not ordinary interest. To have heard Captain Stondon, any one might have thought his wife sick to death with some mortal malady, but to see Mr. Basil was more astonishing still.

Nothing would serve him but to mount his horse and ride off for a doctor. He would trust no messenger, he would listen to no remonstrances. After he once saw Phemie’s face, he never rested till he got leave from Captain Stondon to fetch medical advice, and through the twilight he galloped away to seek it.

“How very much Basil takes your illness to heart!” remarked Miss Derno as he left the room; and Phemie, from among the sofa pillows answered, “He is very kind.”

Very kind! he was indeed too kind; and Phemie, noticing it, felt that her own love might not be the only battle she should have to fight—felt dimly that she had not loved without return, that heart had answered but to heart, and spirit to spirit.

Poor Phemie!—poor soul!—what could a doctor do for her? He could order her back to her own room, and send her draughts, and prescribe quietness and arrowroot; no fatigue, and beef tea; no excitement, and after a few days a couple of glasses of Madeira; but the fever that was on Phemie he could not conquer; the heat and the cold, the alterations and the changes, he could neither see nor control.

She knew when he said she was better that he was mistaken. She felt that from day to day the struggle must continue—the fight go on. She confessed to her own heart, when she came down stairs for good, and began to walk and drive and ride once more, that the old disease was still unsubdued, that she was no stronger than ever she had been, but weaker by far.

Day by day the battle grew worse; the more she absented herself from Basil the more eagerly he welcomed her when she did come. Though she did not now like Miss Derno, still she entreated her to stay rather than go back to the old life—the sweet life that had been so full of pleasure and of peril. She asked Miss Hurlford, Mrs. Hurlford; she filled the house with company; she seemed never happy save in a crowd; she grew restless, impatient, irritable; she answered Basil shortly, and, as Miss Derno thought, sometimes not over civilly.

“I have it!” exclaimed that clever lady to herself one day; “Basil has been simpleton enough to fall in love with Mrs. Stondon’s bright eyes, and she thinks it necessary to assume the grand matron with him. Heaven help the woman! If she knew as much of him as I do, she would not attach much importance to it.”

Which only shows how greatly deceived even the wisest women may be. Could Basil have married Phemie, he might not have cared for her; had she been eligible, he might have found his love damped by considerations of ways and means—of the butcher, baker, and grocer; but as it was—as Phemie was perfectly unattainable—Basil lost his senses about her. God help any woman who being loved by such a one loves him back! There are times in a woman’s life when it is better to fall into the hands of the wicked rather than of the foolish. I think Phemie would have known what to do with a villain, but she did not know what to do with Basil, who was not sinner enough to think of bringing misery to her, who was not man enough to leave her, who had not sense enough to see what the end might be, but who, torturing himself by Phemie’s change of manner, by Phemie’s pale face and fretful answers, stayed on, tormenting her with his presence, with anxious inquiries about her health, about her spirits, about her varying moods.

“I am ill,” she said one day, when he had persistently followed her about till she could keep her temper no longer. “I am ill—cannot you see that for yourself? I want to be alone—I want rest—I want quietness——”

“And yet you fill your house with visitors. That is a strange way of compassing the desired end,” he answered.

“If Captain Stondon be satisfied, I suppose it cannot signify to you what I do,” she retorted.

“Anything signifies to me that affects your health or happiness,” he replied, a little tenderly.

“I am surely the best judge of what does affect my health and happiness,” answered Phemie.

“You say you want rest,” he began.

“So I do,” she interrupted; “rest from being asked perpetually how I am.”

“You say you are ill, as any one, indeed, may see for himself. Why do you not have some advice?”

“I have had advice, but found it did me no good.”

“Why not go to town with Captain Stondon, and consult some first-rate physician? We are thinking of running up to London for a few days next week.”

“I know you are,” answered Phemie.

“Well, will you consider the matter, and come with us?”

She stood silent for a minute or two, and then answered,

“Any physician who knew exactly what was the matter with me would order rest and change. I may think about that while you are away, but I will not go to London.”

“Perhaps, however,” urged Basil, “you do not know what is the matter with you?”

“Perhaps not,” answered Phemie, shortly; “but I believe I do.”

This was the way he followed her about; before strangers he kept at a distance; even when Miss Derno chanced to be present he had learned to be prudent; but for all that he pursued Phemie like her shadow; he was always pleading and praying that she would take care of her health; he was always telling her how, for his sake, for Captain Stondon’s sake, for the sake of all her friends, she should give up so much company, and live quietly, and keep early hours, “as we used to do,” finished Basil, who longed with a terrible longing for the days to come back again—that could never come back more.

“We cannot live to-day as we lived yesterday,” was Phemie’s answer. “What was pleasant in the past might kill one in the present.”

“Would that quiet home-life which we enjoyed so thoroughly until just lately kill you if it could come again?” he asked.

“It would,” replied Mrs. Stondon. “I could not bear it now. It was all very well while it lasted, but I could not go back to it for all that.”

And then knowing that leaving those days against the monotony of which she was inveighing, had been to her like leaving heaven for earth, Phemie went off to her own room and cried—cried till her head was aching and her heart weary.

“If he would but leave me alone,” she thought. But when he did leave her alone, as he sometimes did—for Basil occasionally grew angry at her answers and left her in a rage—matters were no better.

Phemie would watch him talking to other women, smiling his smiles for them, speaking his tenderest, looking his handsomest, until she grew sick with jealousy, until she went almost mad to think how she must always keep him at a distance—how it ought to be her greatest happiness to see him angry with her, indifferent to her, fond of some one else.

She could not help speculating as to whether he cared for her. The one battle of her own love she might have fought, but the many battles of her own love and his doubtful love, of his tender care, of her own overpowering jealousy, of her own despairing remorse, made Phemie little better than a rudderless boat on a turbulent sea.

“O’er billows of temptation” the poor child tossed day by day in safety; but she felt the struggle was an unequal one; that the day must come when Basil would know her coldness, her indifference was all put on—unless he went away, or she went away—unless they were separated altogether.

While he and Captain Stondon were in London, she had nothing to contend against save her own sad loneliness and her constant desire to hear his voice, to see his face, to feel his presence in the house.

It was so easy to be good away from him that Phemie took her resolution.

She would leave Marshlands; she would flee to the mountains, and stay there till she grew strong again, till she had conquered herself, till he, perhaps, had got something to do, or decided on marrying Miss Derno. She would leave—and Mrs. Stondon straightway ventured on the first decided step she had ever taken in her life; and, without consulting Captain Stondon on the subject, started for Carlisle, accompanied by her maid and a man servant, in whose care she sent back Miss Jennings to Marshlands.

At Carlisle her uncle met her; and after years—after long years of travel and success and happiness—Phemie returned to the dear old valley, to the sweet beauty of the familiar landscape, a delicate, unhappy woman.

“Why did your husband not accompany you?” asked Mr. Aggland, who was uneasy lest something had happened.

“I thought I told you in my letter,” she answered, listlessly. “He was in London and I at Marshlands. The notion took hold of me that I should like to sleep in my old bed, to look at the waterfall, to walk over the heather once again; and when the fit came on I could not rest, I could not wait. I felt I must get away from those trees, from those fields, from those trim gardens, or die. And I am so ill, uncle, I am so ill.”

“Ought you not to have gone to London for advice?” said Mr. Aggland.

“No, I ought to have come here,” she answered; “I want the mountain air and the mountain scenery and rest and quiet—rest and quiet.” And she closed her eyes as she spoke, and leaned back in the carriage which her uncle had provided.

Mr. Aggland looked at her; he did not understand the cause of this sudden freak, and he was just the man to dislike whatever he could not understand.

“Phemie,” he said, “I suppose I need not ask you whether there is anything amiss at home? Captain Stondon would not, I am certain, be unkind——”

“Unkind!” she burst out, “unkind! He is far too good and kind. You do not know, I never could tell you, how good he is, how tender, how devoted. It is not that, uncle; it is only that I am ill; bear with me as he has done. Let me be at peace for a while, let me go as I like, come as I like, and if I am cross and irritable and out of spirits, think I shall be different soon.” And she put out her hand and stroked his face with an imploring gentleness which made Mr. Aggland feel sorrowful.

This was not the Phemie of the Hill Farm—this was not the Phemie of Marshlands—this was a beseeching, dependent, exhausted Phemie, who might, for aught he could tell to the contrary, have come home from the midst of all her wealth and luxury to the old place to die.

He thought of her mother, he thought of those terrible illnesses abroad, when she had fought for her life, fought so hard to keep it! What if this passion for the hills and the mountains was but a morbid sickness to see earth’s best-remembered places ere passing away from earth for ever?

He took the poor hand—now so thin—and felt her pulse. He prided himself on being half a doctor, and said,

“Irritable and weak; you will require wine, Phemie; I must send down and ask Mr. Conbyr to let me have some old port out of his cellar.” But Phemie answered—

“I want no wine except the wine of the mountain air—the bouquet of the wild thyme and the heather. Have not I come, uncle,” she said, “from a place where everything money can buy has been able to do nothing for me? It is not eating or drinking that can make me well, but the sight of the dear old hills—of the sky as we see it reflected in Strammer Tarn (I have never seen such a sky since)—of Scotland from the top of Skillanscar—if I ever get strong enough to climb it or Helbeck. I have grown weary of the Lowlands,” she added, with a sigh, “and I have come to the Highlands for you to make me well.” And the soft hand stroked his cheek once more, and Mr. Aggland could have wept because of her words and manner.

“She must be going as her mother went,” he thought; “I will send Johnny over for Mr. Fagg in the morning. He may not be very first-rate, but he will be able to tell me that.”

Now “that,” in Mr. Aggland’s vocabulary, meant, were Phemie’s lungs sound—was she in a consumption? And he sat pondering on what could be the matter with her, if it were not consumption, while his niece lay back in the carriage, watching for the old familiar faces of the hills—watching, with her uncle’s hand clasped tight in hers, with a terrible sorrow tearing at her heart, with a sickening remorse oppressing her conscience.

“There they are! there are the dear old mountains!” she exclaimed at last; and then she burst into a passion of tears, which frightened her uncle, who could not understand what was the matter with her.

“You will make yourself worse, Phemie,” he remonstrated; but it was all the same to Phemie.

Whether tears made her worse or better, she could not help remembering what she had been when she left those hills—what she was now.

“If he but knew,” thought Phemie, “it would break his heart too!” And I fancy Phemie was right, and that had Mr. Aggland suspected what was really the matter with his niece, he would sooner have seen her in her grave than coming back burdened with such a secret to the place where she had dwelt in innocence and purity for so long.

And yet never a sweeter, gentler creature trod those lonely hills, those mountain fastnesses, than Phemie Stondon, who revisited each well-remembered haunt—each tarn and stream, and crag, sorrowing.

With her long dress trailing among the heather, she walked slowly over the moors day after day, thinking thoughts such as had never passed through her mind before. She would sit beside the trickling waterfall, where the ferns and the grass bent down the stream just as they used to do, and with her hand leaning upon some mossy stone, would weep tears that, had she shed them before marriage instead of after, might have made her life more useful and more happy.

She had a kind word and a sweet smile for every one; she was vain and fanciful no more; she was subdued, and quiet and humble to such a degree, that the farmers and the farmers’ wives looked after her in amazement, and marvelled among themselves whether that could be the Phemie Keller, the saucy, flighty, conceited Phemie who had gone away to be made a grand lady of all at once.

“She does not think as much of her silks and satins now as she used to do of her old muslin gowns,” said one.

“And is she not homely like and kind?” added another.

“She took the baby in her arms the other day,” remarked a farmer’s wife, “and the tears came into her eyes when she told me she had never a living one of her own.”

“And oh! my bairn, my bairn!” mourned Peggy M‘Nab, “what hae ye dune wi’ the heartsome life that was in ye? and whaur hae ye gotten that mournfu’ luik that it gars me greet till see? Yer mither had the same when she came back hame amang us; but——”

“But I have no reason for looking like what she did, is that what you mean, Peggy?” asked Mrs. Stondon. “Perhaps it is only because I am ill that I am mournful, as you call it.”

“But ye’re no that ill,” remarked Peggy.

“I may feel as ill,” answered Phemie, who was only too glad in those days to make her health appear as bad as possible. She laid all sins, all shortcomings, to sickness; and she was ill enough to make Mr. Aggland seriously uneasy, to urge him to grave discourse with Mr. Fagg—now a married man and the father of three children.

“I cannot tell what is the matter with her,” said that gentleman, frankly, “unless it be, as she declares—exhaustion. You see,” went on Mr. Fagg, “Mrs. Stondon is one of those women who keep up for a long time and then drop all at once. She would scarcely feel she was overtaxing her strength till the stock was completely gone. You must have known yourself many a man who never felt fatigue while walking, and yet who gave way in a moment when the distance was accomplished. His spirit kept him up, and then, when the motive for exertion was over, the reaction came on. Now that is what it seems to me is the matter with Mrs. Stondon—reaction, and perhaps her longing for the hills. Her passion for this solitude is probably nothing more nor less than nature’s voice telling us what will cure her. One thing I know,” finished Mr. Fagg, “that I can do nothing for her, and I do not believe any man in England could.”

Mr. Fagg was right; the fever that was on Phemie was beyond the power of man to cure, and it was beyond the power of nature either. Beside the waterfall among the heather, pacing the valley with Davie—now old and sedate—following the mistress he loved so well, Phemie came to understand all she had pledged away in the church among the mountains.

She knew now why she had wept that night when the wind blew and the rain beat against the windows, when, through the wind and the rain, Captain Stondon came up from the vicarage to hear her decision.

She had forgotten that night until lately—forgotten her tears, her doubts, her hesitation; but, as at the day of judgment the scroll of our lives will be unfolded before us, so even in this world there are times when part of the history is remembered by us, when the thoughts and the resolutions of the long ago, appear before us like unwelcome ghosts.

Her life had been her own then, but it was too late now—too late—too late!

And among the broom and the ferns, and the thyme and the heather, Phemie would take out her husband’s letters—the long loving letters he sent her each day from London, and read them till she forgot her own misery in thinking of the misery knowledge of her fault would bring to him.

Could there have been anything worse for such a woman than solitude? when she never knew peace day or night for thinking of Basil, and for reproaching herself for thinking of him.

She was sitting one afternoon by Strammer Tarn, on the very spot where she had been wont to twine wreaths and garlands for her hair in the old days departed—sitting looking at the dark waters, at the frowning rocks, at the expanse of moor and mountain.

It was the glory of the summer time, it was the noon of the year, and she had walked slowly over from the Hill Farm, drinking in the full beauty of the season, the perfection of the scenery, with a strange sad thirst. There was not a thing during the progress of that walk she overlooked—the moss growing upon the stones, the heather budding into flower, the wild thyme blooming upon sunny spots, the trailing brambles, the chirp of the grasshopper, the humming of the bees, the great grey boulders lying on the grass, the springing of the turf beneath her feet, the little pools of water in which Davie slaked his thirst, the very insects that winged their way past her—all these things Phemie noticed and remembered afterwards.

She remembered when she sat by Strammer Tarn—how Davie lay stretched at her feet—how with her face resting on her hand she had been looking for ever and ever so long into the dark deep waters, when suddenly Davie sprang up, and with all his short bristly hair standing on end, growled at one who came brushing his way through the heather towards her.

It was Basil! She had barely time to rise from her seat, and with breath coming quick and short, and colour deepening and fading, make sure it was he, ere he was beside her—ere he held her hands in his—ere he was pouring out almost unintelligible words of joy.

Why had she run away and left him to come home to a desert? Did she think he could exist away from her? Did she think he knew peace, or rest, or comfort where she was not? Ah, Heaven! did he not see in the woman’s face all she thought, all she had suffered? Had he not noticed the red and the white, the blush and the pallor? All alone there, could he not tell her the tale of his love at last—tell her, sure that his love was returned—that she had fled less from him than from herself?

He had not come there to tell her his story, he had only come craving to see her—to speak to her—to be near her once again. But—well—well—love, holy or unholy, finds a vent for itself sometime: and it was among the lonely mountains, under the summer sky, that Basil yielded to the temptation and spoke of his.

And Phemie. Ah! reader, be pitiful, be merciful, if you have ever known what it is to have the man you love best on earth tell you that you are all the world to him—be lenient to this poor sinner whose dream-hero had come to her beside the tarn—too late—too late!

She could not help it: she had never felt before what it is to love—to be beloved: her heart gave a great leap of triumph, and then it stood still with agony.

She went mad with happiness, and then the misery of her position made her sane.

She tore herself out of his arms and fell to the ground and wept; she lay with her face buried in the turf, sobbing till her heart was fit to break. In the stillness of that mountain solitude, the voice of lamentation seemed to rise through the air and float away and away, while the bee hummed, and the rocks frowned, and the flowers sprang, unmindful of passion, unsympathetic with woe.

Her beauty, her accomplishments, her wealth—everything of which she had been proud, of which she had been ambitious—had brought her to this.

Then she rose up and bade him go: with his kisses on her lips, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, she reminded him of her position and of his.

She told him how, so long as the sun rose and set, she could never be anything to him; she told him she honoured her husband beyond all men on earth, and that sooner than hurt him or disgrace him, she would die a hundred times over.

She felt strong now, stronger than she had ever been; she spoke of all her husband had done for her—of how he had taken her from poverty and given her wealth—of how he had fulfilled his part of the compact—of how he had loved and trusted her always.

“And he has been kind and good to you, and this is how you repay him!” she went on. “God give me strength to despise you as I ought.”

He stood silent till she had done—till, having panted out her last reproach, she ceased to speak—then he said,

“Oh! if I had but met you then—if I had come here instead of him——”

“You would have left me here,” she retorted.

“I would not! I could never have seen you and not loved you.”

At which Phemie laughed scornfully.

“You see me a lady now,” she said; “but I was only a poor country girl then. You would have been much too fine a gentleman to have looked at such as I was, or if you had looked, it would not have been with honest eyes like his. I did not know the world in those days, but I have seen enough of it since; and what I have seen has taught me that there is not one man in ten thousand—not one man in a million—who would have married me as he did.”

“I would,” said Basil.

“You would not,” answered Phemie, and she turned away; but Basil stopped her.

“Phemie,” he began—it was the first time he had called her by her name, and it sounded strangely sweet in her ears—“Phemie, can we never be anything to one another? I will wait years—I will wait till my hair is grey—only say you love me.”

“Basil Stondon,” said Phemie, facing round, “I know what you mean—I know what you would say; but put that out of your mind once and for ever. I will never step across a grave to happiness. I have made my bed, I will lie in it. If I am ever a widow, if I should have the misfortune to outlive my husband, I will outlive him single. When I pledged my troth to him among these hills, I did so for better or worse—the worse has come to me, but that cannot alter our position. We can never be anything to one another—for I chose my life before I ever saw you. Never.”

Never! He was a poorer creature even than Phemie thought him, for as he walked up and down Tordale valley that night, recalling to his memory her every word, her every gesture, he vowed to himself that she should be something to him—that he would be something to her.

He was in for the race and he must strive for the winning-post. He had loved this woman, and he could love no other woman in the future like Phemie, his kinsman’s wife.