The parish register tells of Wylies since the thirteenth century. Nothing of great importance, perhaps, but the name is there, and the possessors of it appear to have done their duty faithfully in the state of life in which they were placed. Baptism, marriage, death—what could human ambition require beyond that? And now the old race is extinct. A lonely widow, childless, almost kinless, lives in Wyl’s Hall; and the last possessor of the name, kindly honest Admiral Wylie, lies in his great solitude among the nameless northern dead, far away in the deserted Norse churchyard upon the mountainside.
Brenda Gilholme found a place for herself in the great human mill where we are all so many “hands” serving our little looms, feeding our insignificant crushers with honest raw material which goes away from us and never comes again. Even to her analytical, deep-searching mind it was clear that Mrs. Wylie had need of someone to bear her company in her widowhood, and so she stayed unquestioningly at Wyl’s Hall now that Mrs. Wylie had returned there.
Here she lived just like an ordinary little country maiden who knew nothing of Greek verbs and was profoundly ignorant respecting political economy. She knew all about the tides, and sympathized with old Godbold, the marsh-man, when the northeast winds blew against the ebbing tide, and laughed at all his five creaking windmills. She learnt the names of all the six stalwart coastguardsmen stationed at Mizzen Heath, and was deeply versed in the smuggling lore of this famous smuggling country, where the most honest and law-abiding man can scarcely look at the long deserted coast, the intersected marshland, and the silent sandy roads, without thinking of contraband wares. These coastguardsmen, with their civil tongues and ready ways, occupied an important position in the domestic economy of Wyl’s Hall. Their little turf refuge was at the foot of the kitchen garden, and there a pleasant-spoken man was to be found by night and day.
Women are weak where sailors are concerned. Mrs. Wylie set an evil example with the London newspaper, and the portly cook followed with surreptitious cold pudding when her dishes were washed on a warm evening. There was always something requiring a man’s hand at Wyl’s Hall, and the coastguards had a certain leisure, during which the most somnolent could scarcely sleep. No man slumbers quite peacefully about five o’clock in the evening, however actively employed he may have been during the previous night; and, indeed, at all times of day or night there was usually one of the six Mizzen Heath guardians awake and off duty.
Into this little world, shut off by shallow seas in front, closed in by vast moors behind, Brenda had quietly made her way like some new and gracious flower when the flowers of earth were still frozen in. In it she had found a place, among its denizens a welcome. And this was life. This the end and aim of all existence. To do a little good, to leave a pleasant memory in a few hearts. Ah, my brothers, the marble slabs in every church tell of men’s virtues and men’s deeds; lauding them and praising them beyond their value! “And of Mary, his wife, who died at the age of seventy-six.” A short record, a simple statement. We do not hear of her virtues and her deeds, and only a few of us vaguely surmise that she may have had a hand in the shaping of that wonderful vessel, her lord and master, whose good name will go down to posterity—an example to men unborn. Could the life of “Mary, his wife,” be dissected, I think it would prove to be a cleaner record.
And so Brenda, in her way, was doing her share of unrecorded good, working out her small existence in a daily round of trivial self-sacrifices, self-suppressions, self-abnegations, as the majority of women are doing round us now. In a manner she was happy, for youth itself is a happiness, because it is a deceptive glamour of anticipation—anticipation which, thank God! we can never learn to recognise as destined to certain disappointment. At times she vaguely questioned the benefit accruing from the possession of an exceptional education, but fortunately she was unaware that she was endowed with an exceptional intellect. She did not suspect that she could have scanned the wide expanse of sea and land spread out around the coastguards’ refuge without finding a human mind worthy so much as to hold mere passing intercourse with hers.
She never looked upon this existence as permanent. It could not last. Something would come, some change for good or evil, and the powers—the infinite womanly powers of love and self-sacrifice—would have a larger scope. Meanwhile she did her duty by Mrs. Wylie with unfailing energy and inexhaustible cheerfulness. Between these two women, as between the elder and Theo Trist, there had been no definite exchange of sentiments. Both would have said that their tacit devotion to each other was nothing else than a practical worldly arrangement of mutual advantage and equal benefit.
Mrs. Wylie was almost her old self again. At times the former cheerfulness of demeanour would lighten up the old house. There
