Phemie Keller

Five years after Mrs. Montague Stondon’s little party in Chapel Street, the 3·55 express was tearing along the Eastern Counties line to Disley under the glare of the afternoon sun.

“It was the hottest day that summer,” so every passenger said, and so every passenger had abundant reason for thinking. The dust was intolerable—the heat unendurable; if you kept the windows down you were choked, blinded, and generally driven distracted with dust, grit, smoke, and small gravel; if you pulled the windows up, you had dust still, and were roasted, baked and boiled into the bargain.

When passengers got in, at the few stations where the train paused for such refreshment as could be afforded to it by water for its boiler, and oil for its wheels, each man and each woman seemed to bring a fire with him or her into the carriage. If they had been furnaces, instead of flesh and blood, they could not have added more to the discomfort of their neighbours than was the case.

The soda-water and sherry, the lemonade, the ginger-beer, which suffering humanity demanded at Cambridge as an alleviation of its miseries, might have been poured from a boiling kettle, and then the bell rang, and the passengers took their seats, and the train steamed out of the station, and plunged into the open country once again, routing up the gravel, and scattering stones and dust as it rushed along.

To heat and to dust there were, however, two travellers who seemed indifferent. Those two were Captain Stondon and his wife. After five years of moving from place to place, of seeing foreign countries, of living in hotels, in hired palaces, in Swiss châlets and French châteaux, they were returning by the 3·55 express to take up their head-quarters at Marshlands, and reside there for good.

With his back to the engine, with his hat off, with the warm breeze tossing his hair about and filling it full of dust, with his feet on the opposite seat, with the ‘Times’ lying beside him, Captain Stondon slept the sleep of the just, happily oblivious of the heat, and unconscious that Phemie was sitting in a direct draught.

She had taken off her bonnet, and drawn the blue silk curtain so as to shelter her eyes from the full glare of the sun, and while the train strained and throbbed along the rails, she looked out over the country through which they were passing.

Should you know her? Scarcely. The hair is the same that the summer sun shone down on in Tordale, but it is not the young hair that first entangled Captain Stondon’s fancy. There is no part of us that ages like the hair. Look at a child’s hair—a boy’s—a man’s. Watch the wind stirring each of them, and you will see what I mean. Every year as it passes by, lays its hands on our heads, and takes something of freshness and of beauty from them. What is it? you ask. I do not know. But as we see that the leaves in August are not the same as they were in April, so we can perceive that the hair of a lad of nineteen is different from what it will be at four-and-twenty. It is young, like himself, at nineteen, and each year that comes and goes will make it, like himself, older.

Well, then, that glory of auburn hair had lost something of its beauty, or rather, perhaps, its beauty was different, just as Phemie’s own loveliness was different.

She had been a girl then; she was a woman now—a woman in danger of becoming cold and worldly through mere prosperity and absence of trouble—a woman who disbelieved in broken hearts, in passionate love—who looked down from immeasurable heights of superiority on what she called boy and girl affection, and who thought of the dreams of her earlier life, when by chance they recurred to her memory, as she might of a foolish fairy tale, or of any other ridiculous fancy of her childish days.

A change had come over her! and Phemie acknowledged to herself that she was changed, as she looked out at the English scenery, which seemed so strange and unfamiliar to her eyes.

Through Middlesex, and Hertford, and Essex the train dashed on: the line passed first over the roofs of houses—over streets—over roads, and then the engine, settling into express-pace, sped away northward, beside the Lea, within sight of the prettily-wooded heights of Clapton, across the market-gardens at Tottenham, and so on, past Edmonton, and Waltham, and Broxbourne, and Elsenham to Audley End, through the grounds of which it dashed remorselessly, as though there was no park there people wanted to look at—no house they wished to see.

Then into the flat lands of Cambridgeshire, where each field seemed more level than the last, where willows grew in abundance, where the line ran beside swamps and osier beds, where there was nothing tall except the poplar trees, nothing to break the monotony of the scenery except church and cathedral towers.

After Cambridgeshire, Norfolk—great stretches of country, bare and bleak, that the fancy could roam out over as a man can take a walk: a country like Ireland, where you can dig peat and burn it, where you can walk miles without hedge or ditch or fence, where three hours from London you can imagine yourself at the world’s end, from whence the express steamed rapidly on to the rich abbey-lands surrounding Wymondham.

And as she looked, she thought—thought of the five years that had come and gone—come and gone since she travelled from Wymondham to London before. Shall I tell you of her life, my reader, during those five years, before we go on to reach the end?

To be a kind mistress, a faithful steward, to occupy herself in good works, to keep herself from vanity and idleness were, I think, all the admonitions Mr. Aggland gave his niece when he parted from her among the Cumberland mountains—excellent in their way, doubtless, but useless for the sufficient reason that Mrs. Stondon had no household to order, no wealth to squander, no opportunity of assisting others, no temptation to be over-proud either of her beauty or her position.

He might as well have told a man without a stomach to be careful of what he ate; but then Mr. Aggland had expected things to be different, and so, for that matter, had Phemie herself.

She thought that after the Scottish tour, after a few months on the Continent, she and her husband would return to Marshlands, and enter on that home-life which is, I suppose, at some time or other, the temporal heaven of most women’s imaginations.

She pictured to herself (in a vague, girlish way, of course,) the great rooms filled with company, the manner in which she would manage her establishment, the visits she would pay to the poor, the hours she would devote to study, and behold, as the dream hero and the dream future had faded out of her past life, so, when she was married, the dream of usefulness and the dream of a settled home faded more swiftly still, out of her present.

Captain Stondon did not much like England. Moreover, he desired that before his wife entered into English society she should combine every possible accomplishment, every grace of manner, every known knowledge of les convenances to her other charms.

As a matter of course, Phemie was ignorant of the world, ignorant of its usages, ignorant of what was expected from her as the mistress of Marshlands; and equally, perhaps, as a matter of course, Captain Stondon desired that she should become acquainted with the importance of her own position; with the world, with its usages, before he introduced her to society; and he was confirmed in this desire by Phemie’s discomfiture at Montague Stondon’s.

The girl was mountain bred, and had never been out to a party in her life.

Every man has his own idea of wisdom, and Captain Stondon’s idea of the correct thing under the circumstances was to take his wife abroad, and keep her there.

In which idea he chanced to be wrong. Phemie would have learned more of the conventionalities of society in a week at home than she could possibly acquire during a twelvemonths’ residence on the Continent.

She was young enough to be moulded when he married her; she was old enough to be a little “eccentric” when she returned to England for good.

Those who have been bred and brought up in society, think, and think wrongly, that it is a difficult matter for a willing pupil to acquire its accent.

It lays such store by trifles, that it forgets what trifles its usages really are, how soon they are learnt. It forgets that habit is second nature, and that if habits can be formed early, they become second nature itself.

Captain Stondon forgot this, at any rate, and took Phemie abroad in consequence.

He had found a gem among the Cumberland hills, and he wanted to have it ground and polished before he presented it to English society.

He did not wish a speck to appear on its surface, a flaw to be even hinted at. The more valuable he perceived it to be, the more anxious he became that the world should not see it till no defect could be perceived, till no exception could be taken to the jewel he had discovered for himself, and discovering, had wed.

Captain Stondon, like most men who marry below their own station, desired that his wife should be educated late rather than never; but unlike the majority of his sex, his desires in this respect were fulfilled, not disappointed.

With the whole force and strength of her nature, Phemie devoted herself to learning. She had opportunities, and she embraced them; she had every advantage of masters that money could procure, and money never was better spent, than on so industrious and clever a pupil.

How she practised, how she studied, how she observed, no one ever knew fully except by the result.

Was it easy? It was like going to school after marriage; but nevertheless, with all her heart and with all her soul, Phemie tried to improve herself.

Was it happiness? Well, not exactly. But, then, Phemie looked beyond the drudgery to the reward; beyond the singing lessons to the time when she could show off her accomplishments in society. As the painter works for months in solitude, as the danseuse practises her most difficult steps for hours and days together, as the writer toils to finish his work, as the poet polishes and polishes his most musical lines, all for one end, one purpose—fame; so Phemie read, and studied, and laboured, that she might some day or other acquire social distinction.

Then she tired of it. Then suddenly, like a racer that has strained every nerve, and racked every muscle to reach the winning post—strained and racked beyond his strength—falls exhausted at last, a reaction set in. She wearied of travel, she wearied of hotels, she wearied of change of scene, wearied with an eternal longing, with a terrible heart-sickness for home.

It was nature asserting itself. It was the old time, the better time calling for her to come back ere she went too far ever to return; it was a passion, it was a fever; and through the long nights Phemie would lie awake and cry not the less bitterly, because silently, for home—for home!

When the southern sun was glaring down upon the earth, she thought of the mountain breezes, of the shady nooks among the hills, of the cool tarns, of the trickling streams. As a man in the first stage of fever dreams deliriously of gushing fountains, of flowing waters, so Phemie, with that home sickness on her, dreamt from morning till night about Tordale, about her own little room—her own no longer; about the heather, and the moss, and the ferns; about the clouds floating above Helbeck; about the mists enveloping Skillanscar.

Cumberland was rarely out of her mind; but when Cumberland faded away for a moment, it was only that Marshlands might take its place.

She had seen Marshlands, and whenever Tordale seemed too remote a spot to travel back to, whenever she wanted some nearer resting-place for her fancy to alight on, she folded her wings there, and wandered up and down under the elms and the fir-trees, through the gardens and the park, till she grew weary of imagining, and longed to start for England on the instant.

She did not like to say all that was in her heart about the matter. Captain Stondon had so evidently little intention of returning home that Phemie held her peace till she could refrain no longer.

Then, as is always the case with such natures, the stream burst its bounds all at once.

“Take me home, Henry, take me home, or I shall die,” was her entreaty; and without a word of inquiry or remonstrance, Captain Stondon agreed that they should retrace their steps to England.

But they got no further than Paris. There the son Captain Stondon had been hoping for was born—dead. There the doctor said that if Phemie herself were to live, she must turn her face southward again; and with the old fever not cured, only subdued, Mrs. Stondon agreed to spend another winter abroad.

“Life was not worth having on the terms,” she told her physician; but then, as that individual remarked, only in politer terms than I can possibly translate—

“Her life was not quite her own to throw away for a mere whim. Her husband—” And that was enough for Phemie. She was very grateful to Captain Stondon; she would not have pained him for the world; she was very fond of him; she thought she loved him; she did more, she was sure she loved him, and so was everybody who saw them together. Her life was his, and for him she turned her back on England, and within sight of the promised land journeyed once again to the country, that was as a house of bondage unto her.

We have all felt home sickness sometime or other; we have all hungered for the sea, or the hills, or the sun, or the bracing mountain breezes, with that mental hunger which is worse than any physical suffering; we have all wanted something in the course of our lives which we could not get; we have stretched out our hands unavailingly; we have sobbed through the darkness; we have pined, we have sickened; but the passion has ended at last, and we have sat down finally contented with our lot.

That was what Phemie did at any rate. She could not have continued fretting, and lived; but she ceased fretting and grew strong, and when, after all those years, she and her husband returned to England, there was no tumult in her breast about anything.

She had forgotten her dreams; she had almost forgotten her past; she had a kind and devoted husband; she had never repented her marriage; she had done well; she had made a very good and a very happy thing of life, and she was travelling down to Marshlands to take her proper place in society, with no breath of sorrow dimming the bright cold mirror of her existence.

Her sympathies had fallen to sleep with five years’ want of exercise; her feelings had grown dull for very lack of sorrow; her intellect was expanded, her heart narrowed. Scenery itself was not to her now what it had once been; she looked on it as something which God had created for the benefit and amusement of the rich; she did not understand people being tempted; she did not comprehend people going wrong; a very shocking thing had happened in her husband’s family—a thing which society never mentioned before him, and Phemie, of course, had been scandalised by it; but at the same time she could not comprehend how Montague Stondon could first forge another man’s name, and then deliberately cut his own throat.

She had not liked Montague Stondon. He had placed her at a disadvantage; but it was shocking to think of a man committing suicide, and she felt very sorry for his wife and only son.

At the same time she was unable to understand why Captain Stondon took the matter so much to heart. He was not to blame. He had advanced money over and over again, till he grew weary of doing so, and if Mr. Montague Stondon liked to go and forge, how was her husband to know by intuition that he had done so?

Was he to blame for declining to send 1000l. to the barrister by return of post? He would have done it had his relative told him the scrape he had got into, but he had not told him, and Captain Stondon refused to make the advance, and Montague Stondon cut his throat, and Captain Stondon paid the money after all.

Phemie thought about Mr. Stondon’s brown eyes and elaborate whiskers and expensive dinner, as the train swept through the flat lands surrounding Cambridge.

“How foolish they were to live beyond their means!” thought this wise young woman, and she would have said and thought the same about any other sin or shortcoming. That her fellow-creatures were but fallible; that flesh and blood is prone to error; that to most the right is difficult, the wrong easy; that the way to hell is broad, that the path to heaven is narrow;—these were things Phemie had yet to learn; these were the realities she was travelling home to meet; these were the lessons she had still to con out of books she had never yet opened. Intellect, study, knowledge of all abstract sciences, of what value are they if we remain ignorant of the living volumes around us—if we have no comprehension of the struggles and temptations, of the sins and the sorrows, of the agony and the remorse, of the men and the women we meet day after day?

What shall we learn from Greek or from Roman, if the lines which have been traced by the hand of our God on the hearts of his creatures remain to us but as the writing on the wall? What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? we are asked in the book which cannot speak foolishly—“if,” as John Bunyan says, “the things of this world lie too close to his heart; if the earth with its things has bound up his roots; if he is an earth-bound soul wrapped up in thick clay?” And, in like manner, it is surely not too much to affirm that all knowledge and all power, all accomplishments, all grace, all wealth, are useless, are merely as sounding brass and as tinkling cymbals, unless there is joined to them a comprehension of the infirmities, temptations, sufferings of humanity.

To all, prosperity is a trial and a snare; but it is a worse trial and a worse snare to the young than to the old; for which reason prosperity had not improved Mrs. Stondon. She had lived a purely selfish existence. “Fortune had placed a bandage over her eyes.” Driving in a carriage through the pleasantest roads of this world, she took no thought of those who were limping along its roughest paths, its flintiest ways, foot-sore and weary. Fate had been so good to her, it had appointed her lot beside such cool streams, that she grew hard, and the Phemie who went out of England was not the Phemie who came back to it five years later.

And yet she was not changed quite past recognition. The old sweetness, the old truthfulness, the old frankness, the old steadiness of principle underlay the superstructure of selfishness and coldness which a too happy life had reared.

Beneath the world’s burning suns, the flowers of her spring-time had withered away; but the roots of the plants that had borne those flowers were still deep in her heart ready to bring forth leaves and buds and flowers again, and finally fruit if God saw fit; and full though her existence might be of wealth and prosperity, still there was a vacant chamber which had never been unlocked by mortal hand, and which all the pomps and vanities, all the social successes, all the praises, all the popularity, all the flattery, and all the favour of this world would have been impotent to fill.

Sometimes when the twilight was stealing over the landscape—sometimes when the fleecy clouds chased each other across the sky—when she sat looking up at the great mountains, or from among myrtle bowers gazed out over the sea—sometimes when she remained very still and very quiet—when the rush of many feet was silent, when the sound of merriment died away, when she was alone with herself, alone with her lonely life, with her empty heart—I think she must have felt that there was a want in her existence—that she had somehow missed the mark—that God never intended the Phemie Keller who had danced across the hills to Strammer Tarn, who had nursed the children at the farm, who had cried if a person only looked crossly at her, who had been loved and cared for, who had been in such trouble at leaving the old home faces behind her, to develop into Phemie Stondon, who, without a pulse throbbing faster at the anticipation, was travelling home to Marshlands to perform the duties of her station, or to neglect them, as matters should turn out.

Nevertheless, she was glad to get back to England. The idea of a settled abode was pleasant to her; she wanted to see her uncle, and Helen, and Duncan; she thought, with society, that she and Captain Stondon had stayed away from their duties long enough; she quite believed that court gentlemen ought to reside for some portion of the year, at all events, on their properties; and further, she was tired of the Continent, tired of the heat, tired of the sun, tired of foreign languages, of strange tongues, of residences which were not homes.

There was another reason why Phemie desired to settle in England: she was tired of having Captain Stondon constantly at her elbow; but this, of course, was not the way she put it to herself.

He had those duties to perform I have made mention of before, and he ought to return to fulfil them. A man of property had scarcely a right to spend year after year in climbing mountains, in looking at old ruins, in making foreign friends, in spending money abroad. Phemie quite thought he ought to take up his abode at Marshlands, and was very glad when he said that he agreed with her.

Montague Stondon’s death had been a shock to him. It reminded him of purposes unaccomplished in his own life, of negligence, unfaithfulness, of good resolutions forgotten, of good intentions unfulfilled. He would return and do better for the future; and accordingly he returned, and, unmindful of heat and dust, slept on till the train reached Disley.

It was evening then, and while the carriage which met them at Disley rolled along the level sandy roads, Phemie looked eagerly and longingly for the woods surrounding Marshlands. She strained her eyes for them as she had not strained them to catch a first sight of famous cities far away, and yet when she beheld the firs and the elms reflected against the sky, when she saw the trees lifting their heads to heaven, when she caught the sunset glory bathing the whole scene in a flood of crimson light, an indefinable feeling of sadness came over her, and her heart grew heavy to remember that the landscape and the woods were the same as they had been when she looked upon them soon after her marriage, but that she was changed—that she was going back another Phemie from the Phemie her husband had married, to her husband’s house.