Zoe Part 1

Zoe.

by Evelyn Whitaker.

CHAPTER I.

The Christening--An Outlandish Name--The Organist's Mistake--Farm-work--Tom and Bill--The Baby--Baby and All

'Hath this child been already baptised, or no?'

'No, she ain't; leastwise we don't know as how she 've been or no, so we thought as we 'd best have her done.'

The clergyman who was taking Mr Clifford's duty at Downside for that Sunday, thought that this might be the usual undecided way of answering among the natives, and proceeded with the service. There were two other babies also brought that afternoon, one of which was crying l.u.s.tily, so that it was not easy to hear what the sponsors answered; and, moreover, the officiating clergyman was a young man, and the prospect of holding that screaming, red-faced, little object made him too nervous and anxious to get done with it to stop and make further inquiries.

The woman who returned this undecided answer was an elderly woman, with a kind, sunburnt, honest face, very much heated just now, and embarra.s.sed too; for the baby in her arms prevented her getting at her pocket handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her brow and pulling her bonnet on to its proper position on her head. The man beside her was also greatly embarra.s.sed, and kept shuffling his large hob-nailed shoes together, and turning his hat round and round in his fingers.

I think that really that hat was the chief cause of his discomfort, for he was so accustomed to have it on his head that he could not feel quite himself without it; and, indeed, his wife could hardly recognise him, as she had been accustomed to see him wearing it indoors and out during the twenty years of their married life; pushed back for meals or smoking, but always on his head, except in bed, and even there, report says, on cold winter nights, he had recourse to it to keep off the draught from that cracked pane in the window. His face, like his wife's, was weatherbeaten, and of the same broad, flat type as hers, with small, surprised, dazzled-looking, pale blue eyes, and a tangle of grizzled light hair under his chin. He was noticeable for the green smock-frock he wore, a garment which is so rapidly disappearing before the march of civilisation, and giving place to the ill-cut, ill-made coat of shoddy cloth, which is fondly thought to resemble the squire's.

The christening party was completed by a hobbledehoy lad of about sixteen, who tried to cover his invincible shyness by a grin, and to keep his foolish eyes from the row of farm boys in the aisle, whose critical glances he felt in every pore. He was so like both father and mother, that there was no mistaking his parentage; but when Mrs Gray took off the shepherd's-plaid shawl in which the baby was wrapped, such a little dark head and swarthy face were exposed to view as might have made intelligent spectators (if there were any in Downside church that afternoon, which I doubt) reflect on the laws of heredity and reversion to original types.

'Name this child!'

The clergyman had got successfully through his business with the roaring George Augustus and the whimpering Alberta Florence, and had now the little, quiet, brown-faced baby in his arms. Even a young and unmarried man was fain to confess that it was an unusually pretty little face that lay against his surplice, with a pointed chin, and more eyebrows and lashes than most young babies possess, and with dark eyes that looked up at him with a certain intelligence, recognisable even to an unprejudiced observer.

'Name this child!'

Mrs Gray had taken advantage of this opportunity to mop her forehead with her blue and white pocket handkerchief, and wrestle with her bonnet's unconquerable tendency to slip off behind, and the clergyman pa.s.sed the question on to her husband, who fixed his eye on a bluebottle buzzing in one of the windows, and jerked out what sounded like 'Joe.'

'I thought it was a girl,' whispered the clergyman. 'Joe, did you say?'

'No, it ain't that 'zactly. Here, 'Liza, can't you tell the gentleman?

You knows best what it be.'

The next attempt sounded like 'Sue,' and the clergyman suggested Susan as the name, but that would not do.

'Zola' seemed to him, though not a reader of French novels, unsuitable, and 'Zero,' too, he could not quite appreciate.

'I can't make it out, an outlandish sorter name!' said Gray, with a terrible inclination to put on his hat in the excitement of the moment, only checked by a timely nudge from his wife's elbow; 'here, ain't you got it wrote down somewheres? Can't you show it up?'

And after a lengthened rummage in a voluminous pocket, and the production of several articles irrelevant to the occasion--a thimble, a bit of ginger, and part of a tract--Mrs Gray brought to light a piece of paper, on which was written the name 'Zoe.'

'Zoe, I baptise thee'----

A sudden crash on the organ-pedals followed these words. Mr Robins, the organist, had, perhaps, been asleep and let his foot slip on to the pedals, or, perhaps, he had thought there was no wind in the instrument and that he could put his foot down with impunity. He was plainly very much ashamed of himself for what had happened, and it was only right that he should be, for, of course, it made all the school children giggle, and a good many of their elders too, who should have known better.

The boy who blew the organ declared that he turned quite red and bent his head over the keys as if he were examining something on them, and he was evidently nervous and upset, for he made ever so many mistakes in the concluding parts of the service, and, to the great surprise and to the satisfaction of the blower, cut the voluntary at the end unusually short, ending it in an abrupt and discordant way, which, I am sorry to say, the blower described as 'a 'owl,' though any shock that the boy's musical taste sustained was compensated for by the feeling that he would be at home at least ten minutes earlier than usual to tea.

Now it so happened that Mr Robins was in the vestry when the christening party came in to give the particulars about the babies to be entered in the register. He had come to fetch a music-book, which, however, it appeared after all had been left at home; but the clergyman was glad of his help in making out the story of the little Zoe who had just been baptised.

I have spoken before of intelligent observers noticing and drawing arguments from the entire want of likeness between Zoe and her parents; but all the observers on this occasion whether intelligent or not, with the exception of the officiating clergyman, were quite aware that Zoe was not the Grays' baby, but was a foundling child picked up one night by Gray in his garden.

Of her antecedents nothing was known, and, of course, any sensible people would have sent her to the workhouse--every one agreed on this point and told the Grays so; and yet, I think, half the women who were so positive and severe on Mrs Gray's folly would have done just the same.

We do not half of us know how kind-hearted we are till we are tried, or perhaps it is our foolishness that we do not realise.

Gray was only a labourer with twelve s.h.i.+llings a week and a couple of pounds more at harvest; and, of course, in bad weather there was no work and no wages, which is the rule among the agricultural labourers about Downside, as in many other parts, so did not present itself as a grievance to Gray's mind, though, to be sure, in winter or wet seasons it was a hard matter to get along. But it was neighbours' fare, and none of them felt hardly used, for Farmer Benson, what with bad seasons and cattle plague, was not much better off than they were, and the men knew it.

But out of these wages it was hardly to be expected of the most provident of people that anything could be laid by for old age or a rainy day; indeed, there seemed so many rainy days in the present that it was not easy to give much thought to those in the future. Of course too the local provident club had come to utter and hopeless grief. Is there any country place where this has not been the case? Gray had paid into it regularly for years and had gone every Whitmonday to its dinner, his one voluntary holiday during the year, on which occasion he took too much beer as a sort of solemn duty connected with his members.h.i.+p. When it collapsed he was too old to join another club, and so was left stranded. He bore it very philosophically; indeed, I think it was only on Whitmonday that he felt it at all, as it seemed strange and unnatural to go to bed quite sober on that day, as he did on all other days of the year.

On all other occasions he was a thoroughly sober man, perhaps, however, more from necessity than choice, as the beer supplied by Farmer Benson in the hayfield was of a quality on which, as the men said, you got 'no forrarder' if you drank a hogshead, and Gray had no money to spare from the necessaries of life to spend on luxury, even the luxury of getting drunk.

He was in one way better off than his neighbours from a worldly point of view, in that he had not a large family as most of them were blessed with; for children are a blessing, a gift and heritage that cometh of the Lord, even when they cl.u.s.ter round a cold hearth and a scanty board. But Gray had only two sons, the elder of whom, Tom, we have seen at Zoe's christening, and who had been at work four years, having managed at twelve to scramble into the fifth standard, and at once left school triumphantly, and now can neither read nor write, having clean forgotten everything drummed into his head, but earns three s.h.i.+llings and sixpence a week going along with Farmer Benson's horses, from five o'clock in the morning till six in the evening, the long wet furrows and heavy ploughed land having made havoc of his legs, as such work does with most plough-boys.

The younger boy, Bill, is six years younger and still at school, and having been a delicate child, or as his mother puts it, 'enjoying bad health,' is not promising for farm-work, and, being fond of his book and a favourite at school, his mother cherishes hopes of his becoming a school-teacher in days to come.

But such is the perversity of human nature, that though many a Downside mother with a family of little steps envied Mrs Gray her compact family and the small amount of was.h.i.+ng attached to it, that ungrateful woman yearned after an occupant for the old wooden cradle, and treasured up the bits of baby things that had belonged to Tom and Bill, and nursed up any young thing that came to hand and wanted care, bringing up a motherless blind kitten with a.s.siduous care and patience, as if the supply of that commodity was not always largely in excess of the demand, and lavis.h.i.+ng more care on a sick lamb or a superfluous young pig than most of the neighbours' babies received.

So when one evening in May, Gray came in holding a bundle in his arms and poked it into her lap as she sat darning the holes in Tom's stockings (she was not good at needlework, but she managed, as she said, to 'goblify' the holes), he knew pretty well that it was into no unwilling arms that he gave the baby.

'And a mercy it was as the darning-needle didn't run right into the little angel,' Mrs Gray always said in recounting the story.

He had been down to the village to fetch some tobacco, for the Grays'

cottage was right away from the village, up a lane leading on to the hillside, and there were no other cottages near. Tom was in bed, though it was not eight yet--but he was generally ready for bed when he had had his tea; and Bill was up on the hill, a favourite resort of his, and especially when it was growing dark and the great indigo sky spread over him, with the glory of the stars coming out.

'He never were like other lads,' his mother used to say with a mixture of pride and irritation; 'always mooning about by himself on them old hills.'

The cottage door stood open as it always did, and Mrs Gray sat there, plainly to be seen from the lane, with Tom's gray stocking and her eyes and the tallow candle as near together as possible. She did not hear a sound, though she was listening for Bill's return, and, even though Tom's snores penetrated the numerous crevices in the floor above, they were hardly enough to drown other sounds.

So there was no knowing when the bundle was laid just inside the cottage gate, not quite in the middle of the brick path, but on one side against the box edging, where a clump of daffodils nodded their graceful heads over the dark velvet polyanthus in the border. Gray nearly stepped upon the bundle, having large feet, and the way of walking which covers a good deal of ground to right and left, a way which plough-driving teaches.

Mrs Gray heard an exclamation.

And then Gray came in, and, as I have said, did his best to impale the bundle, baby and all, on the top of his wife's darning-needle.

CHAPTER II.

Mr Robins--Village Choirs--Edith--An Elopement--A Father's Sorrow--An Unhappy Pair--The Wanderer's Return--Father!--A Daughter's Entreater--No Favourable Answer--A Sleepless Pillow

The organist of Downside, Mr Robins, lived in a little house close to the church.

Mr Clifford the vicar was accounted very lucky by the neighbouring clergy for having such a man, and not being exposed to all the vagaries of a young schoolmaster, or, perhaps, still worse, schoolmistress, with all the latest musical fancies of the training colleges. Neither had he to grapple with the tyranny of the leading ba.s.s nor the conceit and touchiness that seems inseparable from the tenor voice, since Mr Robins kept a firm and sensible hand on the reins, and drove that generally unmanageable team, a village choir, with the greatest discretion.

But when Mr Clifford was complimented by his friends on the possession of such a treasure, he accepted their remarks a little doubtfully, being sometimes inclined to think that he would almost rather have had a less excellent choir and have had some slight voice in the matter himself.