Arminell, a social romance/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
IN THE OWL'S NEST.
ARMINELL INGLETT made the best of her way to the old quarry. She was impatient to be alone, to enjoy the beautiful weather, the spring sights and sounds, to recover the elasticity of spirit of which she had been robbed by the Sunday-school.
But would she recover that elasticity after her conversation with the young tutor? What he had said was true. He was a village lad of humble antecedents who had been taken up by her father because he was intelligent and pleasing, and commended by the schoolmaster, and delicate. Lord and Lady Lamerton were ever ready to do a kindness to a tenant or inhabitant of Orleigh. When any of the latter were sick, they received jellies and soups and the best port wine from the park; and a deserving child in school received recognition, and a steady youth was sure of a helping hand into a good situation.
More than ordinary favour had been shown to this young man, son of Stephen Saltren, captain of the manganese mine. He had been lifted out of the station in which he had been born, and was promoted to be the instructor of Giles. Arminell had always thought her father's conduct towards him extraordinarily kind, and now her eyes were open to see that it had been a cruel kindness, filling the young man's heart with a bitterness that contended with his gratitude.
It would have been more judicious perhaps had Lord Lamerton sent young Jingles elsewhere.
Jingles, it must be explained, was not the tutor's Christian name. He had been baptized out of compliment to his lordship, Giles Inglett, and Giles Inglett Saltren was his complete name. But in the national school his double Christian name had been condensed, not without a flavour of spite, into Jingles, and at Orleigh he would never be known by any other.
The old lime-quarry lay a mile from the park. It was a picturesque spot, and would have been perfectly beautiful but for the heaps of rubbish thrown out of it which took years to decay, and which till decayed were unsightly. The process had, however, begun. Indeed, as the quarry had been worked for a century prior to its abandonment, a good deal of the "ramp," as such rubbish heaps are locally called, was covered with grass and pines.
Lord Lamerton had done his best to disguise the nakedness by plantations of Scotch-larch and spruce, which took readily to the loose soil, the creeping roots grasped the nodes of stone and crushed them as in a vice, then sucked out of them the nutriment desired; the wild strawberry rioted over the banks, and the blackberry brambles dropped their trailers over the slopes, laden in autumn with luscious fruit, and later, when flowers are scarce, with frost-touched leaves, carmine, primrose, amber and purple.
At the back of the quarry was an old wood, sloping to the south and breaking off sharply at the precipice where the lime rock had been cut away; this was a wood of oaks with an undergrowth of bracken and male fern, and huge hollies. Here and there large venerable Scotch pines rose above the rounded surface of the oak tops, in some places singly, elsewhere in dark clumps.
The rock of the hill was slaty. The strata ran down and made a dip and came to the surface again, and in the lap lay the lime-stone. When the quarry-men had deserted the old workings, water came in and partly filled it, to the depth of forty feet, with crystalline bottle-green water. Lord Lamerton had put in trout, and the fish grew there to a great size, but were too wary to be caught. The side of the quarry to the south shelved rapidly into the water, and the fisherman standing on the slope with his rode was visible to the trout. They were too cautious to approach, and too well fed with the midges that hovered over the water to care to bite.
The north face of the quarry—that is the face that looked to the sun—was quite precipitous; it rose to the same height above the water that it descended beneath it. Over the edge hung bushes of may that wreathed the gray rocks in spring with snow as of the past winter, and in winter with scarlet berries, reminiscences of the fire of lost summer. Where the may-bushes did not monopolise the top, there the heath and heather hung their wiry branches and grew to brakes, and the whortleberry—the vaccinium—formed a fringe of glossy leafage in June and July rich with purple berries, and in autumn dotted with fantastic scarlet, where a capricious leaf had caught a touch of frost that had spared its fellows.
Down a rocky cranny fell a dribbling stream, the drainage of the wood above; in summer it was but a distillation, sufficient to moisten the beds of moss and fern that rankly grew on the hedges beneath it, and in winter never attaining sufficient volume to dislodge the vegetation it nourished.
To the ledges thus moistened choice ferns had retreated as to cities of refuge from the rapacity of collectors, who rive away these delicate creatures regardless what damage is done them, indifferent whether they kill in the process, considering only the packing of them off in hampers for sale or barter, and in many places exterminating the rarest and most graceful ferns; but here, with a gulf of deep water between themselves and their pursuers, the parsley and maiden-hair ferns throve and tossed their fronds in security and insolence.
It was marvellous to see how plants luxuriated in this old abandoned quarry, how they seized on it, as squatters on no-man's land, and multiplied and grew wanton and revelled there; how the hart's tongue grew there to enormous size, and remained, unbrowned by frost, throughout the winter; how the crane's bill bloomed to Christmas, and scented the air around, and the strawberry fruited out of season and reason.
By what fatality did the butterflies come there in such numbers? Was it that they delighted in dancing over the placid mirror admiring themselves therein? After a few gyrations they inevitably dipped their wings and were lost; perhaps they mistook their gay reflections for inviting flowers, or perhaps, like Narcissus, they fell in love with their own likenesses, and, stooping to kiss, were caught.
In summer butterflies were always to be found hovering over or floating on the surface, but they hovered or floated only for a while, presently a ring was formed in the glassy surface, a ring that widened and multiplied itself—the butterfly was gone, and a trout the better for it.
About six feet of soil, in some places more, in others less, appeared in sections above the quarry-edge, that is to say, above the rock. It was quite possible to trace the primitive surface of the pre-historic earth, much indented; but these indentations had been filled in by accumulations of humus, so that the upper turf was almost of a level.
Where rock ended and soil began, the jackdaws had worked for themselves caves and galleries in which they lived a communal life, and multiplied prodigiously. A pair of hawks bred there as well, spared by express order of Lord Lamerton, but viewed with bitter animosity by the keepers; also a colony of white owls, all on tolerable terms, keeping their distances, avoiding social intercourse, very much like the classes among mankind. These owls also would have perished, nailed to the stable doors or the keeper's wall, had not his lordship extended protection to them likewise. The kingfishers in the Ore were becoming fewer, the keepers waged war on them also, because they interfered with the fish. Lord Lamerton did not know this, or he would have held his protecting hand over their amethystine heads.
The cliff was ribbed horizontally, the harder bands of stratification standing forth as shelves on which lodged the crumbling of the more friable beds, and the leaves that sailed down from the autumn trees above. On these ledges a few bushes and a stunted Scotch pine grew. The latter grappled with the rock, holding to it with its red-brown roots like the legs of a gigantic spider.
At the west end, on a level with the topmost shelf of rock, just beneath where the earth buried the surface of rock, was a cave artificially constructed, at the time when the lime was worked, as a refuge for the miners when blasting.
Formerly a path had existed leading to this cave, but now the path was gone—scarce a trace survived. The owls, calculating on the inaccessibility of the grot to man, had taken possession of it, and bred there.
"I am glad I came here," said Arminell. "In this lovely, lonely spot one can worship God better than in a stuffy church, pervaded with the smell of yellow-soap, of clean linen, and the bergamot of oiled heads, and the peppermint the clerk sucks. Here one has the air full of the incense of the woods, the pines exuding resin in the sun, the oak-leaves exhaling their aroma, and the ferns, fragrant with the sea-like stimulating odour. I am weary of that hum-drum which constitutes to mamma the law and aim of life. We may be all—as Jingles says—steeped in syrup, but it is the syrup of hum-drum that crystallizes about us, after having extracted from us and dismissed all individual flavour, like the candied fruit in a box, where currants, greengage, apricot, pear—all taste alike. We are so saturated with the same syrup that we all lead the same saccharine existences, have the same sweet thoughts, utter the same sugary words, and have not an individualizing smack and aroma among us. Mamma is the very incarnation of routine. She talks to her guests on what she thinks will interest them, got up for the occasion out of magazines and reviews. These magazines save her and the like of her a world of trouble. The aristocrats of the moon, according to Jingles, sent their heads forth in pursuit of knowledge; we have other peculiar heads sent to us stuffed with the forced meat of knowledge, and wrapped in the covers of magazines. So much for my mother. As for my father, he neither takes in nor gives vent to ideas. He presents prizes at schools, opens institutes, attends committees, sits on boards, presides at banquets; occasionally votes, but never speaks in the House; his whole circle of interests is made up of highways, asylums and county bridges. In olden times, witches drew circles and set about them skulls and daggers, toads and braziers, and within these circles wrought necromancy. My father's circle is that of hum-drum, set round with county and parochial institutions, with the sanitary arrangements carefully considered, and without the magic circle he works—nothing."
She was standing at the west end of the quarry, looking along the edge of the precipice, on her left.
"I wonder," she mused, "whether it would be feasible to reach the owls."
Filled with this new ambition, she thought no more of the shortcomings of her father and step-mother.
"It would be possible, by keeping a cool head," she said.
"I should like to see what an owl's nest is like, and in that cave I can pay my Sunday devotions."
The shelf was not broad enough to allow of any one walking on it unsupported, even with a cool head.
In places, indeed, it broadened, and there lay a cushion of grass, but immediately it narrowed to a mere indication. The distance was not great, from whence Arminell stood, to the cave, some twenty-five feet, and a slip would entail a fall into the water beneath.
As the girl stood considering the possibilities and the difficulties, she noticed that streamers of ivy hung over the edge from the surface of the soil. She could not reach these, however, from where she stood. Were she to lay hold of them, she might be able to sustain herself whilst stepping along the ledge, just as if she were supported by a pendent rope.
"I believe it is contrivable," she said; "I see where the ivy springs at the root of an elder tree. I can find or cut a crooked stick, and thus draw the strands to me. How angry and indignant mamma would be, were she to see what I am about."
She speedily discovered a suitable stick, and with its assistance drew the pendent branches towards her. Then, laying hold of them, she essayed an advance on the shelf. The ivy-ropes were tough, and tenacious in their rooting into the ground. She dragged at them, jerked them, and they did not yield. She grasped them in her left hand, and cautiously stepped forward.
At first she had a ledge of four inches in width to rest her feet on, but the rock, though narrow, was solid, and by leaning her weight well on the ivy, and advancing on the tips of her feet, she succeeded, not without a flutter of heart, in passing to a broad patch of turf, where she was comparatively safe, and where, still clinging to the ivy, she drew a long breath.
The water, looked down on from above, immediately beneath her was blue; only in the shadows, where it did not reflect the light, was it bottle-green.
There was not a ripple on it. She had not dislodged a stone. She turned her eyes up the bank. She had no fear of the ropes failing her; they would not be sawn through, because they swung over friable earth, not jagged rock.
"Allons, avançons," said Arminell, with a laugh. She was excited, pleased with herself—she had broken out of the circle of humdrum.
The ledge was wide, where she stood, and she held to the rope to keep her from giddiness, rather than to sustain her weight.
After a few further steps, she paused. The shelf failed altogether for three feet, but beyond the gap was a terrace matted with cistus and ablaze with flower. Arminell's first impulse was to abandon her enterprize as hazardous beyond reason, but her second was to dare the further danger, and make a spring to the firm ground.
"This is the difference between me and my lady," said Arminell. "She—and my lord likewise—will not risk a leap—moral, social, or religious."
Then with a rush of impetuosity and impatience, she swung herself across the gap, and landed safely on the bed of cistus.
"Would Giles ever be permitted the unconventional?" asked Arminell. "What a petit-maître he will turn out."
The Hon. Giles Inglett, her half-brother, aged ten, was, as already said, the only son of Lord Lamerton and heir-apparent to the barony.
From the cistus patch she crept, still clinging to the ivy, along the ledge that now bore indications of the path once formed on it, and presently, with a sense of defiance of danger, allowed herself to look down into the still water.
"After all, if I did go down, it would not be very dreadful—it is a reversed heaven. I would spoil my gown, but what of that? I have my allowance, and can spoil as many gowns as I choose within my margin. I wonder—would a fall from my social terrace be as easy as one from this—and lead to such trifling and reparable consequences?"
Then she reached the platform of the cave, let go the ivy-streamers, and entered the grotto.
The entrance was just high enough for Arminell to pass in without stooping. The depth of the cave was not great, ten feet. The sun shone in, making the nook cheerful and warm. Again Arminell looked down at the pond.
"How different the water seems according to the position from which we look at it. Seen from one point it blazes with reflected light, and laughs with brilliance; seen from another it is infinitely sombre, light-absorbing, not light-reflecting. It is so perhaps with the world, and poor Jingles contemplates it from an unhappy point."
She seated herself on the floor at the mouth of the cave, and leaned her back against the side, dangling one foot over the edge of the precipice.
"The best of churches, the most inspiring shrine for holy thoughts—O how lucky, I have in my pocket Gaboriau's 'Gilded Clique!'"
She wore a pretty pink dress with dark crimson velvet trimmings, but the brightest point of colour about Arminell was the blood-coloured cover of the English version of the French romance of rascality and crime.
Arminell had lost her mother at an age at which she could not remember her. The girl had been badly brought up, by governesses unequal to the task of forming the mind and directing the conscience of a self-willed intelligent girl.
She had changed her governesses often, and not invariably for the better. One indulged and flattered her, and set her cap at Lord Lamerton. She had to be dismissed. Then came a methodical creature, eminently conscientious, so completely a piece of animated clockwork, so incapable of acting or even thinking out of a set routine, that she drove Arminell into sullen revolt. After her departure, a young lady from Girton arrived, who walked with long strides, wore a pince-nez, was primed with slang, and held her nose on high to keep her pince-nez in place. She was dismissed because she whistled, but not before her influence, the most mischievous of all, had left its abiding impress on the character of the pupil.
This governess laughed at conventionalities, such as are the safeguards of social life, and sneered at the pruderies of feminine modesty. Her tone was sarcastic and sceptical.
Then came a lady of good manners, but of an infinitely feeble mind, who wore a large fringe to conceal a forehead as retreating as that of the Neanderthal man. Arminell found her a person of infinite promise and no achievement. She undertook to teach Greek, algebra, and comparative anatomy, but could not spell "rhododendron."
When Lord Lamerton had married again, the new wife shrank from exercising authority over the wayward girl, and sought to draw her to her by kindness. But Arminell speedily gauged the abilities of her step-mother, and became not actively hostile, but indifferent to her. Lady Lamerton was not a person to provoke hostility.
Thus the girl had grown up with mind unformed, judgment undisciplined, feelings impetuous and under no constraint, and with very confused notions of right and wrong. She possessed by nature a strong will, and this had been toughened by resistance where it should have been yielded to, and non-resistance where it ought to have been firmly opposed.
She had taken a class that Sunday in the school, as well as on the preceding Sunday, only at Lady Lamerton's urgent request, because the school-mistress was absent on a holiday.
And now Arminell, who had come to the Owl's Nest to pay her devotions to heaven, performed them by reading Gaboriau's "Gilded Clique."