Phemie Keller

He had been toiling under the noontide heat up the narrow defile which led from Grassenfel to Tordale. He had grown weary of the way, of the rough path, of the rugged scenery. He had looked to his right hand and to his left, and behold on the one side stormy Skillanscar met his view, whilst on the other the peaks of Helbeck rose towering to the summer sky.

He had looked straightforward, and there were mountains still—mountains that seemed to hem him in, and make him a prisoner in their rocky fastnesses.

Toiling onward, he had been thinking how long was the road; how great the distance; when all at once the path bore sharply round the base of a projecting rock, and brought him suddenly within view of Tordale Church.

With the everlasting hills overshadowing it, with the murmuring waterfall singing ever and always beside it; the sweet melody to which so few came to listen—with the larches and the pines waving their branches gently over the grassy mounds in the graveyard, with the August sun pouring his beams down the mountains on the dancing rivulet, on the smooth velvety turf, Tordale Church stood on a little mound commanding a view of the valley, that broke like a revelation of beauty on the traveller.

He had walked far to see this piece of God’s handiwork; he had toiled wearily up the defile, over the rocks, between the mountains, to find this gem which was set so securely among the hills, that the eye of stranger rarely rested on it. He had walked far, and he felt that he was not so young as formerly; yet when the glorious view opened before him Captain Henry Gower Stondon forgot the distance, thought no longer of fatigue, but, pausing, drank in the loveliness he beheld.

It was high noon among the Cumberland hills—high noon on a Sunday in August—and the mighty Sabbath hush pervaded all Nature, whether animate or inanimate.

Far away down the valley, where the rivulet trickled on slowly to join the Derwent, where the grass was greenest, and the sun least scorching, cows lay lazily chewing the cud—sheep browsed the sweet herbage leisurely. There was a solemn stillness amongst the mountains; the sunbeams rested in great patches where they had first fallen; the wind, as it came and went, and went and came, stole through the tree-tops noiselessly; no bird burst from the ivy or the broom, breaking with sudden flight the stillness of that noontide hour; the wild bee was so deep in the foxglove’s bell, that it had no time to tell of the treasures lying there. Even the grasshoppers seemed to have forgotten their song; and but for the church and the graves, the stranger who now looked on Tordale for the first time, might almost have fancied that he had reached an uninhabited Eden, never before trodden by the foot of man.

Very slowly he ascended the steps leading to the graveyard—primitive steps they were, too, Captain Stondon noticed, cut out of the clay,—with a piece of the stem of a fir-tree, split in two, placed as a guard on each,—awkward and dangerous steps for unaccustomed feet to essay; but it was only well accustomed and willing feet that, as a rule, mounted them, for Tordale was far from any town, quite out of the way of tourists, and the men and the women who paced along the mountain sides, and up the valley to the church beside the waterfall, came not for any fashion’s sake, not to listen to strange words and strange doctrines, but for love of the old story that will be ever fresh to each succeeding generation, as it was to the shepherds who first heard the glad tidings of great joy.

“It all comes to this at last,” thought the stranger, as he sat him down in the church porch, and looked at the green mounds, at the few mossy headstones, at the one solitary attempt at a monument; “it all comes to this. Let us start where we will, let us go where we may, let us wander over the world where we like, we must end here at last; we must come to the inexorable six feet by three, to the lonesome house prepared for us before we were born. One might have thought that death would have passed over such a valley as this; that sickness could never enter here; that there were scarcely any people to die in such a nook, and yet—and yet it is just as full as its fellows; the graves are beginning to jostle one another, and new headstones are fighting for precedence with old. It is the same wherever I go; the road always ends in a churchyard, the inhabitants are always to be found here.”

And with a not unpleasing feeling of melancholy, the man who thought this, let his eyes wander out, out, over the landscape on which the sleepers around could never look more.

What did the thought signify to him; what did death mean to this man who had faced it so often that it had no terrors left? What was the meaning of the reflection that passed through his mind as he sat in the church porch, looking down upon Tordale Valley? Simply this, that though he knew in an abstract kind of way he must die, yet that the wandering life he had led, had made the idea of when, and how, and where he should meet his fate so very vague and shadowy, that he never brought the subject really home to himself, never realised that six feet by three would some day suffice him as surely as it now sufficed others who had wandered, perhaps, as far as he. After looking on all manner of cemeteries; after seeing his comrades lying down to rest in India; after visiting the sepulchres in the East; after criticising Père-la-Chaise; after passing the London pest-grounds; after treading over pavements beneath which generations slumbered peacefully; after entering country churchyards where, after life’s fitful fever—after its mad delirium, after its success, its disappointments, its joys, its sorrows, its wild hopes, its unutterable agony—men and women slept that sleep, of the mysteries whereof we know so little, but which we may humbly hope is dreamless—he had come to think of death as a thing outside himself, as a fact which concerned others more than it did him.

The rude forefathers of this hamlet knew where their mortal remains would be laid. It was a hundred to one against their bodies being carried out of the valley—even so far as Grassenfel.

Most probably, as they came Sunday after Sunday to service, their eyes rested on the spot where, when they had held the plough for the last time, when they had turned their last furrow, scattered their last seed—reaped their last harvest—sold their last crops—they would be carried, as their fathers before them had been carried, and laid down far away in the earth, beyond the cold of the winter snows, beyond the heat of the summer sun, out of the sight of the young spring flowers—where the moaning of the autumn winds and the rustle of the autumn leaves might never disturb their repose.

“How close all this must bring death,” thought the traveller. “What a certainty they must feel about it—what a strange feeling such people must have on the subject.” And Captain Henry Gower Stondon grew so interested in the idea that he leaned his chin on his hand preparatory to thinking out the matter with greater comfort.

“It must bring it very near. I do not know that I should like it;” and then he went on to reflect further that it must be unpleasant also to have the whole of life bounded by those hills, by those frowning mountains; to have to play out the whole drama of existence in that green sequestered valley; to have the horizon of external experience brought so near that an hour’s walk at any time would enable a man to lay his hand upon it; to have his internal hopes, wishes, fears, joys, bound up in a few acres of land, in a score or so of acquaintances; to have Grassenfel for his longest excursion; to see those eternal peaks for ever lifting their heads to the sky; to come Sunday after Sunday through the valley, up the steps, across the threshold, and so into the little church, in the porch of which he was then sitting; to be christened there; to be married there; to be buried in some nook of the graveyard that sloped so sunnily towards the south! Captain Stondon, who had been a wanderer on the face of the earth from his youth up, decided that he should not like such a lot at all; and that such a lot—the sole birthright of millions—was a curious one to sit in the shade and strive to realise.

From the porch he could get a side view into the church; he could see some of the people about whom he was speculating—a fine stalwart race of men and women—a generation of handsome giants, with faces hard and steady and impassive, and enduring as the mountains under whose shadow they dwelt. A people who had something of the Scotch blood in them, who were not a fickle and light-minded generation, but rather occasionally be a trifle obstinate and stiffnecked.

Their very psalms were not as the spiritual songs of the dwellers in cities, of the inhabitants of the plains. There was a fierceness about the old Cameronian hymn they were singing which seemed in keeping with the loneliness, the desolation, the unutterable grandeur and solitude of the spot wherein this isolated band praised the Lord.

There was no organ—a violin and a flute sufficed to guide the choir; and with all their hearts, and with all their souls, the congregation aided the vocalists. The singing might be a little loud, perhaps, but it was not discordant; and suddenly, at the third verse, as though she had been holding back till the others got so thoroughly into the air as to overlook her, some girl lifted up her young, clear voice; and while Captain Stondon almost involuntarily rose to listen, mourned out,—

“What a voice!—good Heavens, what a voice!” thought the officer; and he drew more to the inner door to see if he could discover the singer.

A chord or two from the violin, and the hymn proceeded,—

He had entered the church by this time, and found her. She was but three seats from the porch. He could have stretched out his arm and touched her; but the sexton, honest old man, just as though he divined the stranger’s wishes, opened the door of the pew she alone occupied, and signed to Captain Stondon to enter, which signal Captain Stondon, nothing loth, obeyed accordingly, and with his face bent over his hat, hearkened to the last verse,—

Then the officer, who, though he might be as polite as most people, was not above feeling human curiosity, turned and looked at the girl, who owned a voice which seemed to him more like the warbling of a bird than anything he had ever heard before in his life,—turned and looked at Phemie Keller, at a girl dressed in a pink muslin gown, which had evidently been bought and made for some middle-aged woman, which had been as evidently worn shabby by the older individual, and cut down and altered for its present wearer—a divinity in a washed-out, large-patterned curiously befrilled dress, a Hebe in a cottage bonnet trimmed with brown and white checked ribbons—a beauty who wore thread gloves, and had on a rusty-black silk cape that might have belonged to Noah’s grandmother.

But her face! Such perfection of colour—such delicacy of feature! Where had this rustic stolen her beauty? Eyes of the deepest, softest, darkest blue; eyes that looked black when you looked at them in the shade; dark brows and lashes; and hair—without half a dozen paints to my hand to mix together, and blend, and powder with gold dust, I could never hope to show what Phemie’s hair was like; and I could not then, because, as she moved, the shade changed also. Now it was sunny, now brown, now red, now brown and sunny, now red and brown; and then red, and gold, and brown, would all mix and shimmer together in the varying light.

Hair to have made one of the old Venetian painters go mad, first with rapture and then with anger, because brush and palette could never hope to reproduce its colouring—hair that might well (to recall the quaint conceit of other days) tangle a lover in its meshes;—hair such as Captain Stondon had never seen before, though he had mixed much with society, and been favoured with locks, not a few, in the days when he was young, in the days that were gone and fled.

In the matter of beauty, the officer had, his whole life long, been possessed of a truly catholic taste. Before loveliness he had always, figuratively speaking, bared his head, and bowed down and worshipped. Dark locks and shining curls, sorrowful eyes, dimpled cheeks, laughing girls, thoughtful women, tall and stately, short and fairylike, Captain Stondon had admired them all. Given a woman, and pretty, and he would kneel at any shrine. He would pay compliments, he would flatter, he would lay all good gifts at the feet of his divinity save love, and that in the years departed he had given once to one woman, and could offer no more, as he firmly believed, to any living being.

That one woman had won his heart, worn it, played with it, exhibited it, and then, weary of the toy, had flung it under foot, and trampled it in her wicked selfishness, in her unfeeling triumph.

She sold herself for money, for the pomps and vanities of a world which courted her exceedingly, and went and stayed at her house, and followed her to the grave, and then strove, not without success, to console her husband for her loss. She had deserted the poor man for the rich; but though she had used the former despitefully, though she had made him work hard for her sake, though she had left his early manhood and middle age lonely, he had been true to the love of his youth, and loved no woman since.

He had admired, he had followed in the train of many a queen of beauty, he had whispered soft nothings, he had flirted, perhaps, but he had not loved, he had not married. Matchmakers had given him up in despair; manœuvring mammas valued Captain Stondon’s opinion of their daughters, simply because it was the opinion of a connoisseur, not because it was that of a person who might be expected to take any shares in the matrimonial market. He knew what was what, in a word, and he consequently knew that the young girl with the divine voice would grow up into a most beautiful woman.

“Well dressed,” thought the officer, critically examining her, while the clergyman adjusted his spectacles, and opened his sermon-case, and coughed, and looked for his pocket-handkerchief,—“well dressed, well instructed, with a clever chaperone, what a sensation she would make in a West End drawing-room! What a pity that she should have been born to wear her grandmother’s old gowns in a place like this, for——”

“For the wages of sin is death,” was the text that terminated both his scrutiny and his soliloquy; and if Captain Stondon had thought for a moment that the young lady might be conscious at once of her own beauty and of his admiration, he was immediately undeceived by her handing him her open Bible, his attention being called to the passage in question by the finger of Miss Keller’s well-worn glove.

It was a shock; it tried the officer’s gravity for the moment; but his companion so evidently regarded him as a very common-place stranger, to whom she was nevertheless bound to offer the customary civility of the neighbourhood, that it would have been difficult for him to help feeling his vanity touched also.

Nevertheless, he took the book, and he looked at the text, and he listened to the sermon, not a bad one by the way, with the attention expected from him; and, when the service was over, he walked out into the graveyard, where, taking possession of a quiet corner, he watched the congregation returning, some down the valley, some under the shadow of the mountains, some up the hill paths, to their respective homes.

If there were one figure the officer’s eyes followed longest, it was that of the girl beside whom he sat in church. She had waited for a man whom Captain Stondon recognised as the violinist of the choir, and he now looked after the pair as they climbed the side of Helbeck, and wended their way—whither?

Listening to the low murmur of the waterfall—looking idly now down the valley, now up to the summit of the distant hills—Captain Stondon stood with his arms resting on the churchyard wall, cogitating whether he should return to Grassenfel, or inquire for some place near at hand in which to rest and refresh himself, when he was roused from his reverie by the clergyman, who, passing through the graveyard, saw the stranger, and spoke to him.

The place was so lonely—so few tourists penetrated to Tordale—that it seemed natural to the clergyman to accost the middle-aged individual who had listened with much apparent attention to his sermon.

Where people are few acquaintanceship is easy. Perhaps also the clergyman saw something in the bearing of the stranger which had been overlooked by Miss Keller; in any case, he paused to speak, and then the two men walked down the steps side by side, and, turning from the direct path, strolled towards the waterfall together.

It was a picturesque spot: over the rock came the mountain stream, dropping with a dull, monotonous splash into the basin it had worn for itself below, whence over moss-grown stones it trickled off into the valley beyond. A few trees overshadowed the pool beside which Captain Stondon and his companion stood for a moment in silence looking at the Fall; ivy and lichens covered the face of the rocks, ferns and foxgloves grew between the stones, and the water bathed the green banks, and touched the familiar flowers, and mosses, and blades of grass caressingly, ere it left them behind for ever.

There were broom and gorse, and patches of heather on the hill-side; underfoot, the turf was smooth as velvet; above their heads was the clear blue sky; around was loneliness and nature; and, as if reluctant to break the spell, the two men held their peace, until Captain Stondon, stepping from stone to stone in order to reach the basin, declared he must have a draught of the water, it looked so cool, and pure, and sparkling.

“While you drink you should wish,” remarked the clergyman, with a smile; “and if it be, as I suppose, your first draught, your desire will surely be gratified.”

“Wish!” repeated the other, seating himself on a fragment of rock. “It is an important moment. What shall I wish?”

“You must not tell me, or wishing will be useless,” was the reply.

“What have I to wish for?” persisted the officer; “what is there left that I could wish to come to pass, unless for the years of my youth to be given back to me? and I could scarcely wish for that. Mine has been a happy lot as lots go; still, I do not know that I should like to travel the road over again.”

“Can you wish nothing for your wife?”

“I have none. I have neither wife nor child, sister nor brother, nephew nor niece,” and as he said this a change came over his face, and, stooping towards the pool, he took a long, deep draught, as he did so silently wishing this wish, or rather praying this prayer, “O God, when Thy good time comes, leave me not to die alone!”

Then he stepped back on to the green turf, and the pair fell into conversation about the place and its scenery, about the parish and its inhabitants, about the church, and how long it had been built, about Cumberland generally, and finally about the world that, full of temptation and struggle and pleasure and disappointment, lay outside those mountains, far away from the green valley of Tordale.