Beyond the City

Chapter 3

How deeply are our destinies influenced by the most

trifling causes! Had the unknown builder who erected and

owned these new villas contented himself by simply

building each within its own grounds, it is probable that

these three small groups of people would have remained

hardly conscious of each other's existence, and that

there would have been no opportunity for that action and

reaction which is here set forth. But there was a common

link to bind them together. To single himself out from

all other Norwood builders the landlord had devised and

laid out a common lawn tennis ground, which stretched

behind the houses with taut-stretched net, green

close-cropped sward, and widespread whitewashed lines.

Hither in search of that hard exercise which is as

necessary as air or food to the English temperament, came

young Hay Denver when released from the toil of the City;

hither, too, came Dr. Walker and his two fair daughters,

Clara and Ida, and hither also, champions of the lawn,

came the short-skirted, muscular widow and her athletic

nephew. Ere the summer was gone they knew each other in

this quiet nook as they might not have done after years

of a stiffer and more formal acquaintance.

And especially to the Admiral and the Doctor were

this closer intimacy and companionship of value. Each

had a void in his life, as every man must have who with

unexhausted strength steps out of the great race, but

each by his society might help to fill up that of his

neighbor. It is true that they had not much in

common, but that is sometimes an aid rather than a bar to

friendship. Each had been an enthusiast in his

profession, and had retained all his interest in it. The

Doctor still read from cover to cover his Lancet and

his Medical Journal, attended all professional

gatherings, worked himself into an alternate state of

exaltation and depression over the results of the

election of officers, and reserved for himself a den of

his own, in which before rows of little round bottles

full of glycerine, Canadian balsam, and staining agents,

he still cut sections with a microtome, and peeped

through his long, brass, old-fashioned microscope at the

arcana of nature. With his typical face, clean shaven on

lip and chin, with a firm mouth, a strong jaw, a steady

eye, and two little white fluffs of whiskers, he could

never be taken for anything but what he was, a high-class

British medical consultant of the age of fifty, or

perhaps just a year or two older.

The Doctor, in his hey-day, had been cool over great

things, but now, in his retirement, he was fussy over

trifles. The man who had operated without the quiver of

a finger, when not only his patient's life but his own

reputation and future were at stake, was now shaken to

the soul by a mislaid book or a careless maid. He

remarked it himself, and knew the reason. "When Mary

was alive," he would say, "she stood between me and the

little troubles. I could brace myself for the big ones.

My girls are as good as girls can be, but who can know a

man as his wife knows him?" Then his memory would

conjure up a tuft of brown hair and a single white, thin

hand over a coverlet, and he would feel, as we have all

felt, that if we do not live and know each other after

death, then indeed we are tricked and betrayed by all the

highest hopes and subtlest intuitions of our nature.

The Doctor had his compensations to make up for his

loss. The great scales of Fate had been held on a level

for him; for where in all great London could one find two

sweeter girls, more loving, more intelligent, and more

sympathetic than Clara and Ida Walker? So bright were

they, so quick, so interested in all which interested

him, that if it were possible for a man to be compensated

for the loss of a good wife then Balthazar Walker might

claim to be so.

Clara was tall and thin and supple, with a graceful,

womanly figure. There was something stately and

distinguished in her carriage, "queenly" her friends

called her, while her critics described her as reserved

and distant.

Such as it was, however, it was part and parcel of

herself, for she was, and had always from her

childhood been, different from any one around her. There

was nothing gregarious in her nature. She thought with

her own mind, saw with her own eyes, acted from her own

impulse. Her face was pale, striking rather than pretty,

but with two great dark eyes, so earnestly questioning,

so quick in their transitions from joy to pathos, so

swift in their comment upon every word and deed around

her, that those eyes alone were to many more attractive

than all the beauty of her younger sister. Hers was a

strong, quiet soul, and it was her firm hand which had

taken over the duties of her mother, had ordered the

house, restrained the servants, comforted her father, and

upheld her weaker sister, from the day of that great

misfortune.

Ida Walker was a hand's breadth smaller than Clara,

but was a little fuller in the face and plumper in the

figure. She had light yellow hair, mischievous blue eyes

with the light of humor ever twinkling in their depths,

and a large, perfectly formed mouth, with that slight

upward curve of the corners which goes with a keen

appreciation of fun, suggesting even in repose that a

latent smile is ever lurking at the edges of the lips.

She was modern to the soles of her dainty little

high-heeled shoes, frankly fond of dress and of pleasure,

devoted to tennis and to comic opera, delighted with a

dance, which came her way only too seldom, longing

ever for some new excitement, and yet behind all this

lighter side of her character a thoroughly good,

healthy-minded English girl, the life and soul of the

house, and the idol of her sister and her father. Such

was the family at number two. A peep into the remaining

villa and our introductions are complete.

Admiral Hay Denver did not belong to the florid,

white-haired, hearty school of sea-dogs which is more

common in works of fiction than in the Navy List. On the

contrary, he was the representative of a much more common

type which is the antithesis of the conventional sailor.

He was a thin, hard-featured man, with an ascetic,

acquiline cast of face, grizzled and hollow-cheeked,

clean-shaven with the exception of the tiniest curved

promontory of ash-colored whisker. An observer,

accustomed to classify men, might have put him down as a

canon of the church with a taste for lay costume and a

country life, or as the master of a large public school,

who joined his scholars in their outdoor sports. His

lips were firm, his chin prominent, he had a hard, dry

eye, and his manner was precise and formal. Forty years

of stern discipline had made him reserved and silent.

Yet, when at his ease with an equal, he could readily

assume a less quarter-deck style, and he had a fund of

little, dry stories of the world and its ways which were

of interest from one who had seen so many phases of

life. Dry and spare, as lean as a jockey and as tough as

whipcord, he might be seen any day swinging his

silver-headed Malacca cane, and pacing along the suburban

roads with the same measured gait with which he had been

wont to tread the poop of his flagship. He wore a good

service stripe upon his cheek, for on one side it was

pitted and scarred where a spurt of gravel knocked up by

a round-shot had struck him thirty years before, when he

served in the Lancaster gun-battery. Yet he was hale and

sound, and though he was fifteen years senior to his

friend the Doctor, he might have passed as the younger

man.

Mrs. Hay Denver's life had been a very broken one,

and her record upon land represented a greater amount of

endurance and self-sacrifice than his upon the sea. They

had been together for four months after their marriage,

and then had come a hiatus of four years, during which he

was flitting about between St. Helena and the Oil Rivers

in a gunboat. Then came a blessed year of peace and

domesticity, to be followed by nine years, with only a

three months' break, five upon the Pacific station, and

four on the East Indian. After that was a respite in the

shape of five years in the Channel squadron, with

periodical runs home, and then again he was off to the

Mediterranean for three years and to Halifax for

four. Now, at last, however, this old married couple,

who were still almost strangers to one another, had come

together in Norwood, where, if their short day had been

chequered and broken, the evening at least promised to be

sweet and mellow. In person Mrs. Hay Denver was tall and

stout, with a bright, round, ruddy-cheeked face still

pretty, with a gracious, matronly comeliness. Her whole

life was a round of devotion and of love, which was

divided between her husband and her only son, Harold.

This son it was who kept them in the neighborhood of

London, for the Admiral was as fond of ships and of salt

water as ever, and was as happy in the sheets of a

two-ton yacht as on the bridge of his sixteen-knot

monitor. Had he been untied, the Devonshire or Hampshire

coast would certainly have been his choice. There was

Harold, however, and Harold's interests were their chief

care. Harold was four-and-twenty now. Three years

before he had been taken in hand by an acquaintance of

his father's, the head of a considerable firm of

stock-brokers, and fairly launched upon 'Change. His

three hundred guinea entrance fee paid, his three

sureties of five hundred pounds each found, his name

approved by the Committee, and all other formalities

complied with, he found himself whirling round, an

insignificant unit, in the vortex of the money market

of the world. There, under the guidance of his father's

friend, he was instructed in the mysteries of bulling and

of bearing, in the strange usages of 'Change in the

intricacies of carrying over and of transferring. He

learned to know where to place his clients' money, which

of the jobbers would make a price in New Zealands, and

which would touch nothing but American rails, which might

be trusted and which shunned. All this, and much more,

he mastered, and to such purpose that he soon began to

prosper, to retain the clients who had been recommened to

him, and to attract fresh ones. But the work was never

congenial. He had inherited from his father his love of

the air of heaven, his affection for a manly and natural

existence. To act as middleman between the pursuer of

wealth, and the wealth which he pursued, or to stand as

a human barometer, registering the rise and fall of the

great mammon pressure in the markets, was not the work

for which Providence had placed those broad shoulders and

strong limbs upon his well knit frame. His dark open

face, too, with his straight Grecian nose, well opened

brown eyes, and round black-curled head, were all those

of a man who was fashioned for active physical work.

Meanwhile he was popular with his fellow brokers,

respected by his clients, and beloved at home, but his

spirit was restless within him and his mind chafed

unceasingly against his surroundings.

"Do you know, Willy," said Mrs. Hay Denver one

evening as she stood behind her husband's chair, with her

hand upon his shoulder, "I think sometimes that Harold is

not quite happy."

"He looks happy, the young rascal," answered the

Admiral, pointing with his cigar. It was after dinner,

and through the open French window of the dining-room a

clear view was to be had of the tennis court and the

players. A set had just been finished, and young Charles

Westmacott was hitting up the balls as high as he could

send them in the middle of the ground. Doctor Walker and

Mrs. Westmacott were pacing up and down the lawn, the

lady waving her racket as she emphasized her remarks, and

the Doctor listening with slanting head and little nods

of agreement. Against the rails at the near end Harold

was leaning in his flannels talking to the two sisters,

who stood listening to him with their long dark shadows

streaming down the lawn behind them. The girls were

dressed alike in dark skirts, with light pink tennis

blouses and pink bands on their straw hats, so that as

they stood with the soft red of the setting sun tinging

their faces, Clara, demure and quiet, Ida, mischievous

and daring, it was a group which might have pleased

the eye of a more exacting critic than the old sailor.

"Yes, he looks happy, mother," he repeated, with a

chuckle. "It is not so long ago since it was you and I

who were standing like that, and I don't remember that we

were very unhappy either. It was croquet in our time,

and the ladies had not reefed in their skirts quite so

taut. What year would it be? Just before the commission

of the Penelope."

Mrs. Hay Denver ran her fingers through his grizzled

hair. "It was when you came back in the Antelope, just

before you got your step."

"Ah, the old Antelope! What a clipper she was!

She could sail two points nearer the wind than anything

of her tonnage in the service. You remember her, mother.

You saw her come into Plymouth Bay. Wasn't she a

beauty?"

"She was indeed, dear. But when I say that I think

that Harold is not happy I mean in his daily life. Has

it never struck you how thoughtful, he is at times, and

how absent-minded?"

"In love perhaps, the young dog. He seems to have

found snug moorings now at any rate."

"I think that it is very likely that you are right,

Willy," answered the mother seriously. "But with which

of them?"

"I cannot tell."

"Well, they are very charming girls, both of

them. But as long as he hangs in the wind between

the two it cannot be serious. After all, the boy is

four-and-twenty, and he made five hundred pounds last

year. He is better able to marry than I was when I was

lieutenant."

"I think that we can see which it is now," remarked

the observant mother. Charles Westmacott had ceased to

knock the tennis balls about, and was chatting with Clara

Walker, while Ida and Harold Denver were still talking by

the railing with little outbursts of laughter. Presently

a fresh set was formed, and Doctor Walker, the odd man

out, came through the wicket gate and strolled up the

garden walk.

"Good evening, Mrs. Hay Denver," said he, raising his

broad straw hat. "May I come in?"

"Good evening, Doctor! Pray do!"

"Try one of these," said the Admiral, holding out his

cigar-case. "They are not bad. I got them on the

Mosquito Coast. I was thinking of signaling to you, but

you seemed so very happy out there."

"Mrs. Westmacott is a very clever woman," said the

Doctor, lighting the cigar. "By the way, you spoke about

the Mosquito Coast just now. Did you see much of the

Hyla when you were out there?"

"No such name on the list," answered the seaman,

with decision. "There's the Hydra, a harbor defense

turret-ship, but she never leaves the home waters."

The Doctor laughed. "We live in two separate

worlds," said he. "The Hyla is the little green tree

frog, and Beale has founded some of his views on

protoplasm upon the appearancer, of its nerve cells. It

is a subject in which I take an interest."

"There were vermin of all sorts in the woods. When

I have been on river service I have heard it at night

like the engine-room when you are on the measured mile.

You can't sleep for the piping, and croaking, and

chirping. Great Scott! what a woman that is! She was

across the lawn in three jumps. She would have made a

captain of the foretop in the old days."

"She is a very remarkable woman.

"A very cranky one."

"A very sensible one in some things," remarked Mrs.

Hay Denver.

"Look at that now!" cried the Admiral, with a lunge

of his forefinger at the Doctor. "You mark my words,

Walker, if we don't look out that woman will raise a

mutiny with her preaching. Here's my wife disaffected

already, and your girls will be no better. We must

combine, man, or there's an end of all discipline."

"No doubt she is a little excessive in her views."

said the Doctor, "but in the main I think as she does."

"Bravo, Doctor!" cried the lady.

"What, turned traitor to your s*x! We'll

court-martial you as a deserter."

"She is quite right. The professions are not

sufficiently open to women. They are still far too much

circumscribed in their employments. They are a feeble

folk, the women who have to work for their bread--poor,

unorganized, timid, taking as a favor what they might

demand as a right. That is why their case is not more

constantly before the public, for if their cry for

redress was as great as their grievance it would fill the

world to the exclusion of all others. It is all very

well for us to be courteous to the rich, the refined,

those to whom life is already made easy. It is a mere

form, a trick of manner. If we are truly courteous, we

shall stoop to lift up struggling womanhood when she

really needs our help--when it is life and death to her

whether she has it or not. And then to cant about it

being unwomanly to work in the higher professions. It is

womanly enough to starve, but unwomanly to use the brains

which God has given them. Is it not a monstrous

contention?"

The Admiral chuckled. "You are like one of these

phonographs, Walker," said he; "you have had all this

talked into you, and now you are reeling it off again.

It's rank mutiny, every word of it, for man has his

duties and woman has hers, but they are as separate

as their natures are. I suppose that we shall have a

woman hoisting her pennant on the flagship presently, and

taking command of the Channel Squadron."

"Well, you have a woman on the throne taking command

of the whole nation," remarked his wife; "and everybody

is agreed that she does it better than any of the men."

The Admiral was somewhat staggered by this

home-thrust. "That's quite another thing," said he.

"You should come to their next meeting. I am to take

the chair. I have just promised Mrs. Westmacott that I

will do so. But it has turned chilly, and it is time

that the girls were indoors. Good night! I shall look

out for you after breakfast for our constitutional,

Admiral."

The old sailor looked after his friend with a twinkle

in his eyes.

"How old is he, mother?"

"About fifty, I think."

"And Mrs. Westmacott?"

"I heard that she was forty-three."

The Admiral rubbed his hands, and shook with

amusement. "We'll find one of these days that three and

two make one," said he. I'll bet you a new bonnet on it,

mother.