The Black Patch

"Of course he's a wretch, dear; but oh!"--with an ecstatic expression--"what a nice wretch!"

"I see; you marry the adjective."

"The man, Beatrice, the man. Give me a real man and I ask for nothing better. But the genuine male is so difficult to find nowadays."

"Really! Then you have been more successful than the majority."

"How sarcastic, how unfriendly! I did look for sympathy."

Beatrice embraced her companion affectionately. "You have it, Dinah. I give all sympathy and all good wishes to yourself and Jerry. May you be very happy as Mr. and Mrs. Snow!"

"Oh, we shall, we shall! Jerry would make an undertaker happy!"

"Undertakers generally are--when business is good."

"Oh! you are quite too up-to-date in your talk, Beatrice Hedge."

"That is strange, seeing how I live in a dull country garden like a snail, or a cabbage."

"Like a wild rose, dear. At least Vivian would say so."

"Mr. Paslow says more than he means," responded Beatrice, blushing redder than the flower mentioned, "and I dare say Jerry does also."

"No, dear. Jerry hasn't sufficient imagination."

"He ought to have, being a journalist."

"Those are the very people who never imagine anything. They find their facts on every hedge."

"Is that an unworthy pun on my name?"

"Certainly not, Miss Hedge," said the other with dignity; "Jerry shan't find anything on you, or in you, save a friend, else I shall be horribly jealous. As to Vivian, he would murder his future brother-in-law if he caught him admiring you; and I don't want to begin my married life with a corpse."

"Naturally. You wisely prefer the marriage service to the burial ditto, my clever Dinah."

"I'm not clever, and I really don't know how to answer your sharp speeches, seeing that I am a plain country girl."

"Not plain--oh! not plain. Jerry doesn't think so, I'm sure."

"It's very sweet and flattering of Jerry, but he's mercifully colour-blind and short-sighted. I am plain, with a pug nose, drab hair, freckles, and teeny-weeny eyes. You are the reverse, Beatrice, being all that is lovely--quite a gem."

"Don't tell my father that I am any sort of jewel," remarked Beatrice dryly, "else he will want to sell me at an impossible price."

Dinah laughed, but did not reply. Her somewhat flighty brain could not concentrate itself sufficiently to grasp the subtle conversation of Miss Hedge, so she threw herself back on the mossy stone seat and stared between half-closed eyelids at the garden. This was necessary, for the July sunshine blazed down on a mass of colour such as is rarely seen in sober-hued England. The garden might have been that of Eden, as delineated by Martin or Doré, from the tropical exuberance of flower and leaf. But the buildings scattered about this pleasance were scarcely of the primitive type which Adam and his spouse would have inhabited: rather were they expressions of a late and luxurious civilisation.

And again, they could scarcely be called buildings in the accepted sense of the word, as they had been constructed to run on iron rails, at the tail of a locomotive. To be plain, seven railway carriages, with their wheels removed, did duty for dwellings, and very odd they looked amidst surroundings alien to their original purpose. A Brixton villa would scarcely have seemed more out of place in the Desert of Sahara.

Placed in an irregular circle, like Druidical stones, the white-painted woodwork of these derelicts was streaked fantastically with creepers, which, spreading even over the arched roofs, seemed to bind them to the soil. Titania and her fastidious elves might have danced on the smooth central sward, in the middle of which appeared a chipped sundial, upheld by three stone ladies, unclothed, battered, and unashamed. At the back of these ingeniously contrived huts bloomed flowers in profusion: tall and gaudy hollyhocks, vividly scarlet geraniums, lilies of holy whiteness, and thousands--as it truly seemed--of many-hued poppies. The wide beds, whence these blossoms sprang, stretched back to a girdle of lofty trees, and were aglow with the brilliant flowers of the nasturtium. The trees which shut in this sylvan paradise from the crooked lane rose from a tangled jungle of coarse grasses, nettles, darnels, and oozy weedy plants, whose succulence betrayed the presence of a small pond gorgeous with water-lilies. Paths led through the miniature forest, winding in and out and round about, so as to make the most of the small space; and the whole was bounded by a high brick wall, mellow and crumbling, but secure for all that, seeing it was topped with iron spikes and bits of broken bottles. One heavy wooden gate, at present bolted and barred, admitted the outside world from the lane into this Garden of Alcinous.

Almost the entire population of the Weald knew of this Eden--that is, by hearsay--for no one entered the jealous gate, unless he or she came to do business with the eccentric character who had created the domain. Jarvis Alpenny was a miser, hence the presence of disused rail carriages, which saved him the trouble and cost of building a house. In The Camp--so the place was called--he had dwelt for fifty years, and he was as much a recluse as a man well could be, who made his income by usury. It seemed odd, and was odd, that a money-lender should not only dwell in, but carry on his peculiarly urban profession in, so rural a locality as the Weald of Sussex. Nevertheless, Alpenny did as large a business as though he had occupied some grimy office in the heart of London. Indeed, he really made more money, as the very seclusion of the place attracted many needy people who wished to borrow money secretly. As the local railway station was but three miles distant, these secretive clients came very easily to this rustic Temple of Mammon. Any one could stay in Brighton without arousing the curiosity of friends; and it was surely natural to make excursions into the bowels of the land! Jarvis Alpenny showed a considerable knowledge of human nature in thus isolating his habitation; for the more difficult people find it to obtain what they want, the more do they value that which they obtain.

Alpenny called Beatrice his daughter. He would have spoken more correctly had he called her his stepdaughter, for that she was. And apart from the difference in the name, no one would have believed that the wizen, yellow-faced, sharp-featured miser was the father of so beautiful a girl. She dwelt in The Camp like an imprisoned princess, and no dragon could have guarded her more fiercely than did Durban, the sole servant and factotum of the settlement, as it might truly be called. Alpenny himself might have passed for the wicked magician who held the aforesaid princess spell-bound in his enchanted domain. But as the Fairy Prince always discovers Beauty, however closely confined, so had Beatrice Hedge been discovered by Vivian Paslow. He was a poor country gentleman who dwelt in a two-miles distant grange; and his only sister, confessing to the biblical name of Dinah, was the decidedly plain girl who had just whispered to Beatrice how she had become engaged, on the previous day, to Gerald Snow. That Gerald was the son of a somewhat needy vicar, and possessed an objectionable mother, made no difference to Dinah, who was very much in love and very voluble on the subject.

"Of course," resumed Miss Paslow, after a pause in the conversation, "I and Jerry will be horribly poor. Vivian has no money and I have less. Mr. Snow the vicar has only a fifth-rate living, and Mrs. Snow is a screw like your father."

"Dinah!" Beatrice winced and coloured at these plain words.

"Well, Mr. Alpenny is a screw, and only your stepfather after all. As to Mrs. Snow--oh, my gracious"--with expressive pantomime--"I'm glad Jerry and I won't have to depend upon her for food. Whenever the poor famished darling comes to Convent Grange, I simply rush to make him a glass of egg and milk in case he tumbles off his chair."

"That may be emotion, caused by the sight of you Dinah."

"How nasty, how untrue! No! I did the tumbling when he proposed yesterday. He proposed so beautifully that I think he must have been reading up. I was in the parlour and Jerry came in. He looked at me like that, and I looked at him in this way, and afterwards----" Here Dinah, who was at the silly boring stage of love, told the wonderful story for the fifth time, ending with the original remark that for quite three hours after Jerry left her, Jerry's kisses were warm on her maiden lips.

"Why didn't you bring Mr. Snow in, Dinah?" asked Beatrice, who had listened most patiently to these rhapsodies.

"Oh, my dear!" fanning a red and freckled face with a flimsy handkerchief, "he's much better in the lane, minding the horses. You see he will make me blush with his looks and smiles and hand-squeezings, when he thinks that no one is looking--which they usually are," finished Miss Paslow ungrammatically.

"And you came over to tell me. That is sweet of you."

"Well, I did and I didn't, dear, to be perfectly candid. You see, Jerry and I were going for a ride this morning, just to see if we entirely understood how serious marriage is; but Vivian is such a prig----"

"He isn't!" contradicted Beatrice indignantly.

"Oh yes, he is," insisted Dinah obstinately; "he doesn't think it quite the thing that I and Jerry should be too much alone--as though we could make love in company! He wouldn't like it himself, though he did insist on my coming here with him, and rode in the middle, so as to part Jerry and me. So poor, dear, darling Jerry is holding the horses in the lane, while Vivian is doing business with your father in there," and Miss Paslow pointed a gloved finger at a distant railway carriage, which was so bolted and barred and locked and clamped that it looked like a small dungeon.

A grave expression appeared on the face of Beatrice. "Do you know what kind of business Mr. Paslow is seeing my father about?"

"Oh, my dear, as though your father--which he isn't--ever did any sort of business save lend money to people who haven't got any, as I'm sure we Paslows haven't. We've got birth and blood and a genuine Grange with a ghost, and Vivian has good looks even if I haven't, in spite of Jerry's nonsense; but there isn't a sixpence between us. How Mrs. Lilly manages to feed us, I really don't know, unless she steals the food. Our ancestors had the Paslow money and spent it, the mean pigs!--just as though our days weren't more expensive than their days, with their feathers and lace and port wine."