CHAPTER I

To the eyes of a man viewing it from behind,the nut-brown hair was a wonder and a mystery.Under the black beaver hat,surmounted by its tuft of black feathers,the long locks,braided and twisted and coiled like the rushes of a basket,composed a rare,if somewhat barbaric,example of ingenious art.One could understand such weavings and coilings being wrought to last intact for a year,or even a calendar month;but that they should be all demolished regularly at bedtime,after a single day of permanence,seemed a reckless waste of successful fabrication.

And she had done it all herself,poor thing.She had no maid,and it was almost the only accomplishment she could boast of.Hence the unstinted pains.

She was a young invalid lady--not so very much of an invalid--sitting in a wheeled chair,which had been pulled up in the front part of a green enclosure,close to a bandstand,where a concert was going on,during a warm June afternoon.It had place in one of the minor parks or private gardens that are to be found in the suburbs of London,and was the effort of a local association to raise money for some charity.There are worlds within worlds in the great city,and though nobody outside the immediate district had ever heard of the charity,or the band,or the garden,the enclosure was filled with an interested audience sufficiently informed on all these.

As the strains proceeded many of the listeners observed the chaired lady,whose back hair,by reason of her prominent position,so challenged inspection.Her face was not easily discernible,but the aforesaid cunning tress-weavings,the white ear and poll,and the curve of a cheek which was neither flaccid nor sallow,were signals that led to the expectation of good beauty in front.Such expectations are not infrequently disappointed as soon as the disclosure comes;and in the present case,when the lady,by a turn of the head,at length revealed herself,she was not so handsome as the people behind her had supposed,and even hoped--they did not know why.

For one thing (alas!the commonness of this complaint),she was less young than they had fancied her to be.Yet attractive her face unquestionably was,and not at all sickly.The revelation of its details came each time she turned to talk to a boy of twelve or thirteen who stood beside her,and the shape of whose hat and jacket implied that he belonged to a well-known public school.The immediate bystanders could hear that he called her 'Mother.'

When the end of the recital was reached,and the audience withdrew,many chose to find their way out by passing at her elbow.Almost all turned their heads to take a full and near look at the interesting woman,who remained stationary in the chair till the way should be clear enough for her to be wheeled out without obstruction.As if she expected their glances,and did not mind gratifying their curiosity,she met the eyes of several of her observers by lifting her own,showing these to be soft,brown,and affectionate orbs,a little plaintive in their regard.

She was conducted out of the gardens,and passed along the pavement till she disappeared from view,the schoolboy walking beside her.To inquiries made by some persons who watched her away,the answer came that she was the second wife of the incumbent of a neighbouring parish,and that she was lame.She was generally believed to be a woman with a story--an innocent one,but a story of some sort or other.

In conversing with her on their way home the boy who walked at her elbow said that he hoped his father had not missed them.

'He have been so comfortable these last few hours that I am sure he cannot have missed us,'she replied.

'HAS,dear mother--not HAVE!'exclaimed the public-school boy,with an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh.'Surely you know that by this time!'

His mother hastily adopted the correction,and did not resent his making it,or retaliate,as she might well have done,by bidding him to wipe that crumby mouth of his,whose condition had been caused by surreptitious attempts to eat a piece of cake without taking it out of the pocket wherein it lay concealed.After this the pretty woman and the boy went onward in silence.

That question of grammar bore upon her history,and she fell into reverie,of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance.It might have been assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping her life as she had shaped it,to bring out such a result as this.

In a remote nook in North Wessex,forty miles from London,near the thriving county-town of Aldbrickham,there stood a pretty village with its church and parsonage,which she knew well enough,but her son had never seen.It was her native village,Gaymead,and the first event bearing upon her present situation had occurred at that place when she was only a girl of nineteen.

How well she remembered it,that first act in her little tragi-comedy,the death of her reverend husband's first wife.It happened on a spring evening,and she who now and for many years had filled that first wife's place was then parlour-maid in the parson's house.

When everything had been done that could be done,and the death was announced,she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents,who were living in the same village,to tell them the sad news.As she opened the white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose westward,shutting out the pale light of the evening sky,she discerned,without much surprise,the figure of a man standing in the hedge,though she roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form,'Oh,Sam,how you frightened me!'

He was a young gardener of her acquaintance.She told him the particulars of the late event,and they stood silent,these two young people,in that elevated,calmly philosophic mind which is engendered when a tragedy has happened close at hand,and has not happened to the philosophers themselves.But it had its bearing upon their relations.

'And will you stay on now at the Vicarage,just the same?'asked he.