VISITORS--MAT CRABTREE, OF HAYBRIDGE, REMEMBERS A BERKSHIRE MISS GRAY.

Susie Crabtree, who liked to have a finger in every pie, contrived to look in on these evening classes at Kershaw. She came by herself just for a few minutes, to see what was going on. She won her way out to dinner at a neighbouring country house, where she would leave Lambert Crabtree to play cards till the small hours, and sleep till his horse should arrive in time to take him back for a meeting of the bank partners. Such irregularities in his habits were not unusual in the Newton banker, who was supposed to have picked them up in his jovial bachelor days. Mrs. Crabtree had earned a reputation for true womanly wisdom in not coming down too hard on practices which she could not pluck up in a day, if they were ever to be thoroughly eradicated. That pretty little fine lady, who had an agreeable word for everybody, and was not above claiming a neighbour’s help, and taking a tribute of homage from him--whoever he might be, knew what she was about. Yes, indeed, she knew a great deal better than your puritanically plain, tremendously sensible, and overpoweringly good madam, who would drive a man to distraction by the height of her virtue, and her rigorous out-and-out obedience to its demands.

Mrs. Crabtree threw off her fur cloak as she entered the young colliers’ class-room, and beamed on the Calibans within, in what was to them the splendour of her lace gown, with the square bodice cut low in front to show the dazzle of her ivory-white neck, and the sleeves only coming to the elbows, leaving the round arms free except for the coils of bracelets. She wore strings of soft gleaming pearls in her hair and round her throat, and had pearls and rubies to match and relieve each other at her wrists and in the rings on her fingers.

The lads sat more open-eyed and open-mouthed than Nancy Jones, as the vision flashed upon them. Some of them smiled sillily, as when a dog licks his lips and wags his tail at a treasure utterly beyond his reach. One or two--among them the heavy lad who knew the machinery of his body, gloomed sulkily, and after the first broad stare looked another way. They would have said, if they could--‘We won’t stand being mocked. We are beginning to know whose sweat pays for all these grand rags, oyster spawn, bits of red glass, and all; who has to be content with bare bread, or to be grudged beefsteaks and pots of porter when we are dizzy with the darkness and faint with the foul air of the pits, and our arms fall to our sides with the weariness of hewing, while you strut and sail in your bravery, for which you never worked a hand’s turn. But why bring it here to sicken and madden us with the sight, when some of your kind were doing a poor bit of good, and almost tempting us to believe you cared for raising us to your level, and making us men and not simply beasts of burden, drudges, and slaves?’

There were fierce rising democrats and demagogues among the young bears of the Kershaw pits, as among the young bears elsewhere throughout the country.

Lecturers and lectured were nowhere during the few minutes the spectacle lasted and the play was played. If anyone had thought of the business of the evening Susie would not have suffered the thought to pass into action. She had her own part to perform, and she was convinced of its merit and popularity. She glanced round at the maps and diagrams, gave them the customary sweet praise--a little fainter than usual--and perpetrated a few smart jokes, which shone with a lustre not the less damaging that it was borrowed, at the expense of the solid motive of the meeting. She spoke to one or two of the lads without further abashing them by waiting for an answer. She pitied them with an expressive little shrug for having to come out in the evening in the dry pursuit of knowledge after the fatigue of the day. She asked if they would not like games better, but when told by her sister that there were the materials for such games as draughts, backgammon, dominoes, in the adjoining room on other evenings in the week, paid no attention to the information. Susie contented herself with wondering why the committee (there was no committee) did not get up concerts instead of playing at keeping school? The latter suggestion was in the face of Mrs. Crabtree’s knowledge that Jane Prior was not musical and that Miss Gray could not be expected to play and sing through a programme--even if she had the assistance provided by the performance of ‘that divine sonata of Beethoven’s you know, dear,’ or ‘that enchanting morsel of Schubert’s,’ which the critic would volunteer to supply. On the other hand, such of the boys as had musical capacities were being trained into a choir elsewhere, while to supplement the training here would be to relinquish in a great measure the purpose of the gathering, with Mr. Haynes’s plans on behalf of this portion of his parishioners. But Susie cared for none of these things.

Mrs. Crabtree’s last idea was to recall the fact that the Cowpath Races--the rowdiest races far and near--the existence of which every master with a scrap even of utilitarian conscience, regretted for his men, would be held in the course of a fortnight. She mentioned these races, and supposed, with an arch nod, the lads would all be there.

No, none of them was to get up on her account, Susie said, as she moved to go--a prohibition which had the effect of causing all the youths, including the incensed authority on the circulation of the blood, to stumble to their feet. Well, if they would do it, she would take just one of them. She fixed on the worst lad there, who was also an imposing-looking, swarthy young giant, to see her out and open the carriage door for her.

The selected escort blushed up and grinned in triumph, while his companions glared at him enviously.

‘She is not to come here again,’ Jane, who was much disturbed, vowed to her coadjutor. ‘Do you see how she has unsettled the class? It is horrid to say it of one’s sister--I suppose she cannot help it--but Susie’s manner to all men--great and small, old and young, has always something of flirtation in it. I hate it,’ muttered honest Jane, ‘it makes me feel so ashamed.’

If Jane had followed Mrs. Crabtree to the door she would have seen her encounter Mr. Haynes, and work upon the exemplary, but slightly grumpy, elderly clergyman with her blandishments. She dropped her bewildered collier escort with a gracious nod, and appealed to Mr. Haynes for his convoy. She kept him standing bareheaded, with his pepper-and-salt hair blowing in the cold spring wind, for five minutes, though she had prefaced her conversation with the dutiful announcement that she could not keep her husband waiting, and it was that wifely consideration which opened another husband’s heart. She wreathed her charming face in smiles. She paid her companion pretty humble compliments on his good offices in general, and this class-room for the pit boys in particular. As her father’s daughter, she begged to offer Mr. Haynes the small return of her heartfelt thanks.

And Mr. Haynes was deeply touched by Mrs. Crabtree’s condescension and sympathy in paying this flying visit, and doing so much mischief within its flight. He had barely thanked Jane Prior and Bennet Gray for their punctual appearance two nights a-week, and for all their labour and pains. He had made them feel, for their good, no doubt, that the help they gave was no more than their duty. He had groaned audibly, and shown himself sternly disinclined to let Jane off from her task, when the cold in her head, which still disfigured her even when it was going off, was at its worst, and Mrs. Prior positively forbade her daughter to expose herself to the evening air. He had not concealed the fact that single women by no means ranked with married women in his estimation. Neither had he hidden his impression that the former made too much of their trifling ailments. Before the culprits claimed indulgence on such pleas the maidens ought to be matrons accountable to husbands for the complainants’ health and well-being. Then the case was entirely altered. For if a clergywoman, for instance, was out of health or was doing too much for her own peace of mind, it interfered seriously with the comfort of her lord and master, besides harrowing his conjugal feelings.

Mrs. Crabtree was not the only visitor at the Kershaw class-room, though visitors as a rule were prohibited.

Mr. Haynes vindicated his right to break through the rules which he himself had laid down, by bringing in with him one evening, just as the work was over, a big man in the prime of life, whom Miss Gray guessed, by what she had heard, and by the first words said, to be Mr. Crabtree, of Haybridge, Lambert Crabtree’s elder brother.

Mat Crabtree was a curious commentary on the assertion that all our vices are only virtues which have run riot and grown corrupted. The hereditary traits which he shared in common with Lambert, were marked, and it would have been difficult not to recognise the two men as brothers, but while Bennet Gray detested the one with only a civil veil thrown over the detestation, she felt as if without any prompting, she could like the other. He was all that Lambert pretended to be, and was all that he might have been if rank tares had not grown up and choked the wheat of his better nature.

Mat Crabtree was the elder born--the squire; while the banker who had succeeded to the more profitable inheritance, and made the most of it, and was, to all appearance, the richer man, could only be squirish in his tendencies, and ape the country gentlemen whose bearing and surroundings were the objects of his ambition. It was quite lately that he had tacked Ladslove to his name in reference to the transaction by which he had secured the small farm to the bank, and managed afterwards to change it into a private possession.

Lambert Crabtree’s bulk and floridness, which were coarse and would soon be gross, unwieldy, and rubicund, in Mat Crabtree would never be anything more than the becoming, slight portliness and rosiness, for his constitution and years, of a temperate man who would keep himself in training up to old age by the hard exercise which he loved. Where Lambert was bragging and bullying in his bluffness, Mat was only frank and cordial. Mat, too, was fond of field sports, but his fondness for hunting and shooting, like his fondness for farming, had been qualified and dignified by the reputation for scholarship which he had brought with him from the university, and still retained, not without reason, after more than twenty years’ retirement at Haybridge. Mat was also given to rallying his neighbours--above all, Jane Prior. He had known her from her childhood, and especially from the time of his brother’s marriage. She had continued a standing wonder to him, which he had contemplated with a mixture of admiration and amusement. But Mat’s rallying attitude was by no means the sole attitude of his mind towards any human being; it was that of a man of good sense and good feeling who respects his neighbour as he respects himself. The raillery was seldom ill-timed, and, though it provoked Jane, and was apt to cause her to treat the offender with lofty disdain, the provocation was rather due to the lack of humour in the woman, which in itself tickled Mat Crabtree, than to any real ground of complaint on her part. For he was with most people the well-liked man who could, almost without trying it, influence his fellows, which Lambert sought to be, only partially succeeding in the attempt.

There was one thing in which Lambert Crabtree had the advantage over Mat, if it could be called an advantage. The younger brother, at the age of forty-three, put in claims to a jaunty perennial form of youthfulness, which the elder at forty-five had long left behind him. Lambert was a gay, scarcely sobered down Benedict, after eight years’ experience of the character. Mat only two years older, hale and active in his prime, was reckoned by himself and by others who took him at his own reckoning as a confirmed rustic student and bachelor, fairly buried among his fields and books.

The marriage of Lambert Crabtree to Susie Prior had forged a strong link between Mat Crabtree and the Priors in spite of various obstacles. In the first place, Lambert was by no means a popular son and brother-in-law. In the second, the brothers did not see much of each other, and, notwithstanding the caricatured likeness between them, had grown to differ more widely than they agreed. In the third, Haybridge was farther from Redcot than Newton was, and there had not been the apology of actual relationship for compelling intercourse between the families, which Susie and her children supplied.

Still, by dint of natural affinity, Mat Crabtree had been in the habit till lately of coming more frequently and familiarly to the Priors than his brother had ever done, save during the short period of his courtship. But since Bennet Gray’s stay at Redcot, Mr. Crabtree of Haybridge had been so keenly alive to the barrier erected by Lambert Crabtree’s behaviour with regard to the minerals on Ladslove, that he had refrained from intruding under John Prior’s roof. As time wore on, however, and Lambert continued foiled, Mat became glad of an excuse to overleap the barrier. He had been on his way with an errand to Redcot, when, having occasion to call at Kershaw Rectory in passing, he was told by Mr. Haynes that Miss Prior and the young lady who was governess to the little Woods were at that moment in the collier lads’ class-room.

‘Why, what are they doing there?’ the visitor asked. ‘Let us have a look,’ was the next idea. ‘It will save me the trouble of going on to Redcot if Miss Prior will take my message.’

Then the two gentlemen presented themselves in time to see the ladies preparing to start. Had Mr. Haynes and his companion come earlier, no doubt Jane would have limited her recognition of their presence to a grave salutation, and would have gone on steadily, though it might be a little stiffly, with what she was saying, calling on Miss Gray to follow suit. And Bennet might have complied after a struggle, for she held herself as under orders; but though she ought to have been the more hardened of the two to the ordeal, she was glad to be spared it.

‘It is bad enough to go off the lines to the boys,’ she thought, doing her thinking, as will be readily observed, in a scandalously slangy manner, ‘but it would have been terrible to have had my “Outlines of Animal Physiology” gauged by a stranger who may be an inspector of schools, though I believe he is Mr. Crabtree, of Haybridge, a university man and a scholar, which is not much better.’

So Miss Gray listened with pleasure to the clatter of the heavy boots of the pupils as they dismissed themselves.

In the meantime Mat Crabtree was shaking hands with Jane Prior, and telling her pleasantly, ‘I am glad to see you so well employed, Jane, giving what you have received.’ At that moment a twinkle came into his clear blue eyes--nearer the sky in colour than the steel tint of Jane’s eyes allowed hers to be. ‘What is it you are imparting to the young colliers?’ he inquired. ‘You are not boldly cutting to the bone at once, and introducing their inquiring spirits into the very heart of mysteries? It is not Hegel?’

‘No,’ said Jane, ‘but I’ll not tell you. I know you think I am as incapable of comprehending the simplest system of philosophy as the most ignorant lad among them.’

‘I never said so, and the gratuitous remark is the more unkind, since I was just going to ask you why you sent back the last parcel of books without naming any more you wanted, so that I did not know whether it ought to be Berkeley, or Spinoza, or Spencer.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jane, a little mollified; ‘I’ll write when I wish more; but, in the meantime, I am trying to master a little political economy. Of course, I went through Adam Smith and Bentham before, and now I am busy with Ricardo and Mill.’

‘I wish you joy; indeed I do. Why should you doubt me? You like close reasoning, and if it is sometimes in a circle, and proves nothing save to the man’s own satisfaction, I suppose it must be so, since man does not live by reasoning alone. Are you going to take Carlyle and Ruskin by way of antidote?’

‘Not just now,’ said Jane, treating the speech literally, and answering with reserve; ‘I have a purpose in view. I am not reading for mere amusement.’

‘I should think not, though you are capable of it,’ declared Mat Crabtree, with a marvelling diverted laugh. ‘But I say, Jane, will you save your father and mother from being bothered with my company so late? Besides, I ought to be at home looking over some accounts--my domestic against your political economy. I was coming over to tell you that Susie and the children are to spend Thursday at Haybridge. You know they were prevented from driving over at Christmas because Molly had a cold, and there was a suspicious case of illness at the offices which might have turned out measles. But all that is set to rights, and there are a few crocuses in the garden and lambs in the meadow by this time. Will the whole of you, or any of you, do me the favour of joining us, and making the day less tiresome for Susie? I think I can promise you that my housekeeper’s resources will be equal to the occasion--at least, that you will not be starved though you may have to put up with a little roughness in a bachelor’s quarters.’

‘You do not need to offer a pledge for the hospitality of Haybridge,’ said Jane, as to a man who was wasting idly modest professions. ‘You are very kind, but I cannot speak for my father and mother, or even for myself, in accepting your invitation till I see them.’

Mat Crabtree was ready to grant this. ‘But you will mention the matter and send me word. To tell the truth,’ he admitted, ‘I do not depend upon Mr. and Mrs. Prior. It is not worth their while, especially at this season. But I thought you might come and meet your sister and bring over the little Woods to have a game with their cousins. By the way,’ in an undertone, ‘is not that their governess, the young lady who has come to stay with you at Redcot since I saw you last? Will you introduce me? I shall be delighted if you will bring her also.’

‘You can tell her so yourself,’ said Jane, turning round and moving a couple of yards towards Bennet.

‘Mr. Crabtree, of Haybridge, wishes to be introduced to you, Miss Gray.’

Bennet Gray smiled and bowed, and stood unconscious and untroubled, waiting for something to be said by Mr. Crabtree, as the next step in making her acquaintance.

‘I’m glad to meet you. Miss Gray,’ said Mat Crabtree naturally and cordially; then he lifted his eyebrows with a slight involuntary motion, and looked a little--just a little--confused. He was short-sighted, and could not always trust the evidence of his eyes, but on the other hand he was observant and quick in recalling faces, which he seldom forgot.

Mat Crabtree had a habit which was also his brother’s, and which Lambert traded upon--of speaking out what came into his mind. As Mat blinked for a second and looked again at Bennet, he said, with some abruptness, ‘Have I not had the pleasure of seeing you before, Miss Gray--once, indeed, more than once, though we were not introduced, down in Berkshire?’

At the very first words of the question, Bennet gave a startled glance back at the questioner, and the tell-tale blood flew in vivid crimson over her face; then, as she turned away her eyes, the blood ebbed, and she grew very pale in marked contrast to her usually bright colour. ‘The pleasure was not mutual,’ she said, with some hesitation; ‘I never saw you before, either in Berkshire or anywhere else.’

‘No?’ he exclaimed, in the next thing to blunt incredulity. ‘But you have been in Berkshire? You are the Berkshire Miss Gray? Your face and figure are not so common--pardon me--as to mislead anybody. I almost think I could stake my life that you are the young lady who was pointed out to me in the cricket field at Barleigh, whom I afterwards saw at church sitting opposite me during the service; though I never spoke to her,’ he protested smiling. He was thrown off his guard by the puzzle of the situation. He was rendered blind to the embarrassment he was causing by the excitement of a man who is not accustomed to be found wrong on one point, who is spurred on to vindicate to himself the correctness of his powers of observation.

‘If Miss Gray’s is not a common face, Gray is a common name,’ interposed Jane, drawn out of herself by noticing the vexation increasing to distress on her friend’s part, occasioned by Mat Crabtree’s odd insistance. Jane did not in the least understand it. As a rule she was careless of such contretemps in society. But when her attention was arrested, as in the present case, her _esprit de corps_ and her friendship were alike up in arms. What earthly right had one person to dispute another’s identity? What conceivable excuse could a man urge for questioning and contradicting a woman on a point which she must know best? It was too unreasonable and absurd. She had thought Mat Crabtree had sense and taste, that he was not like his brother except in externals. She was disappointed in him. She would not have Miss Gray put out--though it was hard to say why she should be put out by such utter nonsense.

‘Yes,’ Bennet was saying in rather a low tone, exhibiting to the full the awkwardness which a person naturally straightforward is apt to betray when he or she is driven into a corner, and is about to be guilty of an equivocation. She had failed to reply to the appeal as to whether she had not been in Berkshire, and the rest of her reply was thoroughly ambiguous. ‘There may be many Miss Grays even in Berkshire.’

‘Well, I cannot make it out,’ asserted Mr. Crabtree, in reference to a matter which he had no business to make out, which, if he had not been an honourable, unsuspicious gentleman in the middle of his husbandry and philosophy, he might have dropped as if it had been a serpent or a live coal, on the first hint. ‘Then you were not the niece to Josh Gray, of Chancery Lane?’

‘I had no uncle Josh Gray,’ said Bennet, as stiffly and laconically as if her tongue was frozen.

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ declared the incorrigible inquisitor. ‘It would have been a very good thing for you if you had. That Miss Gray, Josh Gray’s niece, must have come into----’

He was stopped by Bennet Gray’s calling as if in an extremity of apprehension--‘Oh, Mr. Haynes, _will_ you kindly shut the door? The draught is dreadful.’

‘I hope _you_ have not caught cold next, Miss Gray,’ said Mr. Haynes with a shade of irritability in his voice as he turned from a book kept to show the average attendance of the class, which he had been carefully examining. He hated to hear people cough, especially when they were his curates or teachers or Bible women. It was a sign of impending trouble, and it always sounded like a reproach to himself. Mrs. Crabtree might have coughed as much as she chose; she was accountable to none save her husband. But the rector’s subordinates were answerable to him, while he, in his turn, was answerable for them. ‘Young ladies are so careless about draughts, and wraps, and ordinary precautions against illness,’ he said aloud, quite plaintively.

‘You should not condemn us wholesale, Mr. Haynes,’ Jane felt bound to remonstrate, holding up a fur cape of her own, and a shawl of Miss Gray’s. ‘You see these, and you hear Miss Gray is guarding herself against a draught. We must go home presently, when Mr. Crabtree has finished his investigation into Miss Gray’s pedigree and history,’ Jane said ironically, dealing what ought to have been a withering rebuke to the offender, and by no means intending to deal another blow at her friend.

‘I am afraid I have been very rude,’ said Mat Crabtree, laughing as at an excellent joke, with the coolness of innocence not impudence. ‘But the likeness is amazing, if there is no foundation for it,’ he returned to the charge. He was incapable of taking advantage of Miss Gray’s age, sex, and social standing, as Lambert would have done without scruple. He, Mat Crabtree, was not influenced by the accident, that he happened to be Crabtree of Haybridge who was conferring an honour in speaking in a friendly fashion to a stranger--a young woman, the governess to John Prior’s grandchildren. The speaker did not consider himself a man who might take liberties and commit _bêtises_ in such circumstances with impunity. But he was tempted to over-estimate the privileges of his forty-five years when he had to do with Jane Prior and her friends and contemporaries--young women--state it in a general way, young enough to be his daughters.

‘I think there must be some degree of relationship,’ Mat Crabtree hammered on at his speculation, with the amazing amount of obtuseness which clever, kindly people sometimes display. ‘Pray, are you a Londoner, Miss Gray? Can you tell me where your family hailed from originally? Were they north or south country Grays? Like most old fogies, I am a dabbler in genealogies.’

Bennet Gray stood at bay.

‘Then I daresay you will hardly be able to believe me, Mr. Crabtree,’ she said a little haughtily, but with the ring of truth in her voice, ‘when I own that I cannot tell you much. My father was an attorney in London--though he had not a brother called Josh,’ she allowed herself to digress, with a faint smile, a falter of her tongue, and a rising blush; ‘so I am a Londoner born, but both my father and mother died young, and I was brought up by my mother’s relations, who were not Grays, but Shrubsoles.’

‘Now, that is a Berkshire name,’ cried Mat Crabtree, with the utmost alertness, ‘I am not sure that there are not Shrubsoles at Coldblow, near Barleigh.’

‘You are wrong there, Mr. Crabtree.’ She was goaded into the impulsive contradiction. Then she stopped short. How should she know that he was wrong? She had not so much as admitted that she had ever been in Berkshire or at Barleigh. It was all a miserable tissue of prevarication and self-contradiction. What could this Mr. Crabtree think of her? He was making himself, without any evil intention, probably, a thousand times more detestable than his brother. He would work her a world more harm; while she had been thinking that she would like him, and they might become friends. How did it strike Jane and Mr. Haynes? Bennet dared not look up at them, or seek to know. Was exposure to come in this way--the worst way possible--and quite prematurely, when everything had been going on so favourably?

There was no more of the discussion. It was broken off, without any solution of the riddle, by Jane’s leading the way out to the phaeton. Mat Crabtree would not be hindered from wrapping up the girls and handing them to their seats, by the trifling objection that he was in bad odour with both of the women. He said his good-byes cheerfully, and with what sounded a positively malicious heaping up of insult on injury. He called after them, ‘I hope to see you both at Haybridge on Thursday, when we shall have plenty of time to follow the ramifications of the Grays, and to settle the connection between Miss Gray, here, and the other--the Berkshire Miss Gray. Depend upon it, there is something in it.’

‘I never knew Mr. Crabtree so provoking and tiresome before,’ Jane apologised and complained in one discontented breath, as the couple drove off. ‘What could possess him that he should torment you about Berkshire and this other Miss Gray whom he seems to have got on his brain? Did you ever happen to be in Berkshire?’

‘Yes,’ Miss Gray was forced to answer faintly; then she added more steadily, ‘but certainly I did not see Mr. Crabtree there.’

‘Then, what does it all mean?’ inquired Jane in her bewilderment.

‘I don’t know,’ answered a weary, heart-sick voice. ‘I have got such a headache, will you excuse me, Miss Prior?’

Rather than have passed through the ordeal to which she had been subjected, Bennet Gray would have preferred a thousand times to have encountered, in her capacity of teacher, every school inspector in England, and to have been detected by each putting all the towns of her native land into wrong counties, and making the blood which was coursing in her veins stand as still as water in a stagnant pool.