Complete Story. Meriel Stanley, Poacher.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIV, Issue XIX, 12 May 1900, Page 869

Complete Story. Meriel Stanley, Poacher.

(By

Grant Allen.)

(Author of “For Maimie’s Sake,” etc.)

Meriel Stanley is a singular instance of the natural woman still surviving in our midst. And the. natural woman is at war with our civilisation. I never see poor Meriel without an inner ■shudder, when I think of the end to which fate and her own temperament must inevitably hurry her. That shapely brown neck, straight and firm as a column, is all too delicate for a rope. Yet a. rope it will be, or I am no true prophet. When 1 say that Meriel is a natural woman, I mean what I say, for good and for evil. See her leaning her elbows on the gate that leads from Sir Walter’s copse out on to the heatherclad moorland—a tall lithe figure, with keen brown face, eager wistful eyes, and wealth of black hair just peeping from beneath her pink-and-white sunbonnet —a bronzed woman of the. people, quivering with suppressed emotion to the tips of the fingers —and you can guess at once the salient, points of her character. Hers is the impassioned temperament, embodied' in a sound and vigorous frame; take her as a specimen of the natural woman, a savage still at heart, but a savage, of the best tytpe, capable of great love, great revenge, great, devotion, great self-sacrifice, great crimes, great repentances, but not of anything mean or small or commonplace. The savage has in him, in the germ, all that the best and worst among civilised men have developed separate y—except one thing: consistency. He can rise to splendid heights of generosity, and sink to vile depths of cruelty and shame; but all is momentary; what he cannot compass is sustained action or sustained feeling. He is a creature of moral impulses, for good or bad. The passing mood, the passing emotion sway him. And Meriel is. like that. She can love; she can hate; but she cannot be steadily or persistently anything.

In spite of her strange name, she is not a gipsy. At least, not consciously. Much gipsy blood lurks unknown in the wild region of Dorset where the Stanleys live; and Meriel has associated with gipsies and poachers from her childhood upward. She can even “patter Rommany” a little, though only as an outsider; but her people have lone been settled in this district, and if ever they were members of the Stanley clan have forgotten it long ago in all save their surname. As to her fantastic Christian name, Meriel. that came to her from an aunt, who inherited it in turn from five generations of female ancestors. Meriel was christened by that name, though the clergyman who baptised her tried hard to modernise and vulgarise it into Muriel; but her mother stood up stoutly against such new-fangled nonsense. “’Twas always Meriel with the Stanleys and the Tibbalds,” she said, with true pride of race, “ever since 1 heard tell of ’em; my maaid shall be Meriel, passon will it or passon nill it.” And Meriel she was from that day onward.

It may surprise you to learn that Meriel was ever christened at all; for when she was a bairn, the nearest church to Greydiown was at Upton Parva, seven long miles off across the moor as the crow flies; and the. people of Greydown in those days recked little in mcst ways of churches and parsons. “They were a barbarious folk up here, zur,” Me: iel’s father said to me one day, in a rare burst of loquaciousness, for he is a silent man: “I don’t suppose you’d ’a found a. more barbarious folk anywheeres in Bngland, go forty year back, than the Greydown people.” And he was quite right. The hill itself stands mainly in Dorset; but it lies at the upper end of three river valleys, and at. the junction of three shires; so for ages it was the refuge of all the gipsies, the horse-copers, the sheepstealers, the poachers, the miscellaneous riff-raff and outlaws of the neigh■bourhood. Nowadays, their descendants for the most part are honestly occupied in broom-making and basketweaving; but they do not hike readily to steady labour, preferring to be free and to lie their own masters—a natural taste which 1 will confess I share with them. Nevertheless, even in their worst days of Isarbarism, the Greydowners always christened their children in church, and were married

by parson; not that they attached much religions importance to the rite in either case; but they liked the importance of it; that was the regular authorised way of doing things, and they would wish the settled folk down yonder at Upton to know that the Greydowners were every bit as good Christians any day as they were. Because you are a broomsquire, that is no valid reason why you shouldn’t behave like other civilised gentlefolk. “Then you really were christened Meriel?” 1 said to her once, interrogatively. And she answered, half laughing, “Yes; I was christened all right, zur; but 1 don’t suppose it took.’’ And I think she was right; for a verier pagan than Meriel Stanley it would be hard to light upon. As a girl, she grew up on this high wild moorland, running about shoeless and stockingless among the gorse and heather, and trapping leverets,and browning her shapely legs with paddling in the ponds after newts ami tadpoles. To this day, she can tickle trout against any man in Dorsetshire. Her father’s cottage lay among tall bracken in a valley or bottom just below the gibbet—that gibbet on which the murderers of the wayfaring woman were hung in chains a. hundred years ago, and which long remained a terror and a warning to evil doers, the sole symbol of civilisation, repressive civilisation, in these lonely u-’ands. You can tell the cottage from others about by the climbing red roses and by the great stacks of dry heather piled outside the door, and waiting to be made up into farmhouse hro-ms, such as are used for rough work in yards and stables. Before Meriel was ten years old, she knew as much about jays and weasels, and hawks and foxes ns Sir Walter’s gamekeeper. She could show you the mottled brown eggs of the night-jar, lying loose on the bare ground without nest or shelter; she could find the wren’s callow young and the baby stoats in the copse; she had observed at what age the soft little hedgehogs begin to get their prickles hardened, and where the woodcock probed with their long, straight bills after grubs and worms in the soft spongy moss of the peatlogged hollows. At eighteen, she was tall and beautiful, with wild, unkempt hair—hair long and black,and straight and wiry, without a suspicion of curl in it, recalling perhaps the remote Indian blood of her gipsy ancestors, once Jats of the Punjaub. A handsomer girl of her wayward peasant type I have, seldom seen. Let me try to describe her.

Meriel’s head is shapely ai d wejl poised on the shoulders— a trait which you will find almost always accompanies the impassioned character. Her neck is erect, and she carries herself proudly. The pose reminds me at times of the portraits of Dante. And indeed, though it may sound odd to compare this wild English moorland girl with the proud, sardonic Tuscan poet, I can recognise in essence a certain community of type between the two. Her eyes are dark and shy, but with sudden flashes in them. The eyebrows and eyelids are black and abundant. Her long, straight hair flows down on her shoulders when loosed—as it often is—or else is gathered up into a great careless bunch at the back of the head, with fo’ds covering the ears, which recall Charlotte Bronte. For, bar (inessentials, Meriel is just a. Charlotte Bronte undeveloped. Her features are somewhat large, but soft in outline; her chin strong; her mouth has sensuous thick lips, redeemed by the exquisite curve, like a Rossetti portrait. The hands are long and slender; the fingers have a curious tremulous movement; the whole emotion of the woman comes out in them at times, as it conies out in her heaving bosom, her flashing eve. her close-set lies, her strange, wistful expression. She impre ses m - always as vaguely longing f->r sone thing above her—something she has never known and never will know—something from which her class and her lack of education forever divide her.

You must know Meriel pretty well indeed before you begin to suspect how much there is in her. Like most people of intensely passionate natures,

she is not given to speech; her thoughts and feelings lie too deep for words; and even if her pride did not prevent her from saying at all times what she feels, her mere lack of vocabulary would suffice to keep her from voluble self-revelation. Nor is she by any means demonstrative. It is an error to suppose that emotional natures are necessarily given to expressing their emotion either in words or gestures. The exact opposite would be truer. Emotion hides itself. Meriel’s manners are quiet and reserved; she is not fitful or restless; you cannot often see how profoundly she is thinking or feeling; only at rare moments does some accident reveal the real depth of her nature. Once 1 caught her at sunset by the two-step stile that leads from the moor into ti.e Lammas Fields. She did not hear me coming. I crept up behind her, admiring her lithe form, silhoutted agaL.st the red sky, as she leaned on the stile and gazed at the crimson and orange clouds before her. When 1 drew qu.tr near, she turned round with a short sigh. To my surprise, I saw she had tears in her eyes. “That’s a beautiful sky, Meriel,” I said. She clasped her hands and answered, “Oh. beautiful! beautiful! The sky that makes one cryj. zur. doa-n’t it?” Then, as if she had let herse.f go too much, she turned and Hed, lil e the wayward, forest-haunting thing she is. For a month after, whenever she saw me, she seemed to slink on one side, as if ashamed of having let

herself be discovered in the act of admiring* nature. A girl of so deeply emotional a temperament could hardly grow up without loving much ami loving often. The full wealth of her soul could only expend itself on those she loved profoundly. Even as a child. I rememl>er. she used to creep out of the cottage on summer nights. and go to a spot in the copse where the badger nested; there, the badger cubs would steal out. undeterred by the presence of that other wiki creature, and play clumsily with their mother in the sober twilight: and Meriel adopted one and loved it. as other children would love a. dog or a pigeon. The choice was significant. The sympathetic heart could waste its affection on the veriest bear: perfhaps it was well, for what sort of men could poor Meriel hoj>e to captivate among the chair-menders and basket-makers of her wild moorland home? It is not the man that the woman really loves—especially such impassioned women as this—it is the ideal she makes of him. And a passionate character like Mend's will erect a golden image of some gamekeeper or some groom, and bow down to it in secret as devotedly and earnestly as a lady will bow down to *her dissolute dragoon or her worthless, drunken, cross-country rider. Idealism works this miracle: it is as easy to idealise a lalnnirer or a navvy as an insipid curate or a sneering stockbroker.

When Meriel was sixteen, her passion was for the footman at the great house in the valley—the footman with blue livery and padded calves, who spent half the year at the town house in Mayfair, and half at Greydown. Not 'that she ever told her love: it is not the way of girls like Meriel to wear their hearts upon their sleeves. 1 doubt if anybody save myself, who am a novelist by trade, and therefore observant of these little signs of emotion, ever so much as guessed it. But day after day, when Alfred was about, Meriel would hover near the gate of the great, house, waiting and watching, amply repaid if the hero of her young love came out on his way to the village on some errand, and gave her a passing nod and a “ Good-day, young woman.” She gloated over his livery. T feel sure: gloated over it with the admiration which an eairl's daughter feels for a hero’s uniform. But Alfred went away some months later “to better himself,” at Brighton: and after mourning him for six weeks, Meriel fell a victim to the charms of the young policeman who arrested Teri Vaughan for causing incendiary heath fires at Highdown Firs. This, of course, was sheer treason to her class: family honour intervened: Se.pterius Stanley, her father, was the friend and associate of gipsies and poachers, and tramps and horse-stealers: he could hardly let his daughter consort uncensured with a mere policeman. And the young policeman himself was not likely to care for so disreputable a connection. In the essence of things, it is true, Meriel was as far above him as a poetess is above an ordinary young city man: but. the essence of things, I fear, counts for little or nothing in matrimonial matters. Meriel had to give up her stalwart policeman, and console herself later on with Ted Vang-han himself, when that noble young savage came gaily out of prison.

But every man ami every woman has one great love in a lifetime: ami after many lesser trial trips, Meriel Stanley found hers at. last in .Toe Arundel, the poaeher. You may laugh: but I can tell you an affection like Meriel Stanley’s is no laughing matter: the fact that she could idealise a great hulking rowdy and bully like .Toe is in Itself a strong proof of the woman’s deep poetic nature. Outwardly tranquil of demeanour, a dreamer, and brooder, Meriel has yet a profound admiration such as the natural woman always feels for the man of courage and the man of action. Do you remember Homer’s Andromache? She is the true type of the impassioned woman of these lower grades and lower races—the woman who ca.ll love and endure much, to whom crime and bloodshed are but natural attributes of the hero she worships. Hector had attacked the town where Andromache lived, had sacked and burned it, and slain her father and mother, and had carried her off as his wife after The primitive mode of “ marriage by capture.” And did Andromache hate him for those deeds of violence with all her soul? Not a bit of it: she accepted such little episodes as part of the established order of things, and clung to her Hector, and loved and cherished him, and worshipped him with a worship passing that, of the willing chooser. “ But, Hector,” she says to him in that immortal pasage which has stirred the hearts of a thousand generations, “but. Hector, thou to me art father aim! mother, and thou to me beloved husband.” Meriel Stanley is a survival of barbarism cast in the same mould. She could have worshipped the man who stole her from her home ami slew her patrents, if only he had qualities she could respect and idealise. Now, Joe Arundel, the poacher, was the whispered terror of his own neighbourhood. From childhood up Meriel had heard all her own set admire and describe with glowing praise the brave acts of this bold and sullen desperado. Joe had Iteen three separate times in prison a proud distinction. He was even gravely suspected of having murdered the gamekeeper whos corpse was found wrapped up in faded leaves at the bottom of the chestnut copse by Deadman's Hollow. Joe did not admit the impeachment, but neither did he reject it. He tossed his head and look ed arrogant whenever the subject was alluded to in his presence. Too proud to deny, he was too cautious to boast. Meriel would stand by and admire him silently. It was not Meriel’s way to be demonstrative either of affection or admiration. Only by the quick twitch in her bloodless fingers, by the

knitted brow, by the eyes steadily fixed on her chosen hero, could one tell how immense was her admiration for the man who had defied the whole banded power of the law and the county and exposed himself to the risk of a rope for his last portion. Her fists would cleneh themselves till the nails dug into the palms and almost drew blood, while Joe talked in dark hints of some little brush with Sir Walter’s keepers, or vaguely alluded with picturesque mistiness of thought and language to some fight with the police over a brace or two of pheasants. For, brought upas she had been, passionate rebelliousness was almost a necessary feature of Meriel Stanley’s character. She hates law and order with the natural hatred of a hunted creature. What have they ever done for her and hers save harry them into prison or hound them to the workhouse? The gentry in her eyes are so many oppressors of her wild free kind. They would drive all the world from the heath and the copse into service or the factories. Meriel wants none such. For her the open moor and the wide air of heaven.

Joe for his part did not readily discover that Meriel was in love with him. Joe is not by nature an intuitive creature. He can read the tracks of bird and beast in the snow far more easily than he can read the marks of human feeling or human passion. And Meriel is not the sort of girl to fling herself at any man. She falls in love, it is true, easily and rapidly. Her passions have the barbaric quickness and certainty. Almost at sight she says,

“1 love that man,” or “I do not.” But she says it to herself alone. Torture would not draw from her the overt confession. In that, once more, she is thoroughly savage. Your savage woman loves desperately, but in silence. She is coy and wayward. She flies like a squirrel from him who pursues and then turns and smiles, not because she wishes to escape, but because some deep instinct of her race teaches her that to fly is the proper part of woman. But I could see from an early point in this growing passion how Meriel was letting her love for Joe swallow up her entire nature. She would sit on the logs by her father’s house when Joe came round, with- her strong, small chin poised on her open hand, and listen while Joe talked to Septerius Stanley, as rapt as if Joe’s few jerky inarticulate sentences were the purest flower of human eloquence. Did ever man talk like Joe? Did ever man look like him? Six feet two, though a trifle hulking and shambling in gait, 1 must admit, with a scar on the left cneek won In open tight with those oppressors of the human race, tip- police; and with courage enough to go on to the bitter end. till fate landed him at last in that lofty position in death he was bound to occupy. Meriel looked and sighed. He was a king among poachers. Night after night she would creep out by the copses where Joe might be found, and as he skulked past her with his blear-eyed ferret would suggest to him casually in a careless voice where the best pheasants were likely to Im- found, or point out which path the keeper had last taken on his evening round through the chestnut plantation. She knew as much of woodland lore as Joe himself, I fancy, and Joe accepted her hints with ungraceful country awkwardness. Still he thought her “a knowing one,” and told her so sometimes. Meriel’s brown cheek flushed red through the russet at words of praise from her hero’s lips. Anybody but a fool, or Joe, would have known she was in love. But Joe, though a sharp hand at a trap or a net, is not remarkable for the quickness of his instincts. At last one evening as they stood together by the copse (the merry small rabbits gambolling all round them, and the corncrake battling), Meriel told him some point she had observed about the hare’s “forms” in the heath: a new wrinkle even to the experienced poacher. Joe gazed at. her and smiled—sm led from ear to ear with expansive appreciation. “Meriel maaid,” he said slowly, with open mouth and hanging lip, - ’ee do know a thing or tw-o, 'ee do! There ha n’t dree maaids on Greydown hill knows as much as thee, "maaid. If thee an’ me was to come together, us 'ould do a good trade in the poachin’, ’ouldn’t us?”

Meriel s heart beat high: Meriel’s cheek flushed crimson. He had recognised her at last, then: this prince of men had spoken! She drew away a step or two. with her quick squirrel glance. “Doau’t ’ee talk like that,

Joe,” she said, and gave a little toss of the proud, black head—yet her voice was tender. “I bain’t one for the men. They’m all deceivers.” It dawned across Joe as she withdrew her face, that Meriel really liked him. Joe was a lady’s man in his way: but his way was not Meriel’s. He slipped his arm round her waist. Meriel tried to evade him: though ’twas a formal evasion. The proud heart was won long ago. Tears stood in Meriel’s eyes. Joe Arundel had chosen her! After that they met nightly on the moor among the tall green gorse, or else in the copse where Joe killed the keeper. That thrill of romance and terror suited Meriel’s fancy well: she felt about the copse as some Homeric maiden of Ilion might have felt about the spot where her lover had slain in open fight a mighty man among the Myrmidons. Educated and cultivated, she would have wandered by herself and read Shelley and Rossetti: as it was, she stole off to meet Joe in the copse which had been the scene of his greatest and most successful encounter with the despotic forces. By and bye, she began to talk to him tentatively of marriage. Joe didn’t think much of that—Joe was not by nature a marrying man: he took it they might get along well enough by themselves without the passon and the passon’s fees. But there, Meriel’s will was iron. All the Stanleys from all time had been duly married in church, and she wouldn’t go back upon the tradition of the family. “Passon to Upton Parva won't want to marry we,” Joe objected grinning. “Then us can go to Exeter,” Meriel answered with grave earnestness: “but married I will be, and to none but thee, Joe Ar’ndel.” After that, Joe felt that there was nought for it but to give way. He gave way with a bad grace, and entered a church for the first time since his christening. “It pleases ’er, an’ it don’t hurt me,” was the explanation he gave to his poaching pals of h's unsportsmanlike conduct. At the same time he made it clearly understood that he did not mean to let his new state seriously interfere with his manner of living.

Once married, Mer’el went on loving her worthless husband with the unvarying and incredible devotion of an impassioned nature. Nothing he could do to her seemed to alter her affection. Her man might come home drunk and beat her: that was only natural: men are built that way: and was it not to be expected that a splendid creature like Joe—six feet two in his shoeless feet, and broad shouldered to match—tshould knock about a weak woman who loved and admired him? Meriel was no shrew.

Souls capable of deep feeling are seldom seolds. She endured it all—and worse-—because it was Joe’s pleasure. Her first baby came. Mer’el positively idolised it: her baby: Joe’s baby. I doubt if any child in the squire's nursery was ever so much made of as the poacher’s brown boy, with his father’s eyes, and black hair like his mother’s. Not that she talked of her little one much. Meriel never talked much about anything that moved her inmost soul. She had learned how to do wiithout sympathy. But one day as I passed her cottage in the glen, she was seated on a log outside the porch where red roses clambered; holding out a foxglove spike to please her baby. “That’s a fine boy, Meriel,” I said, looking at him. Tears came into her eyes once more. “Yes, he’s a t’dy little man, zur,” she answered, holding him up to be admired. “They do tell me he favours Joe.” And she said it as she might have said “He resembles the prince, his father.” The fierce suppressed earnestness of her tone fairly touched me. “I never saw a prettier baby in my life,” I replied. She looked up at me, a shy glance, with gratitude in her eyes: but she answered nothing. Her thoughts were too deep for such words as she knew. Only a poet could have uttered what was passing within her.

I said at the beginning, I could never see Meriel without an inner shudder at the fate which is in store for her. What fate? you ask. Well, it seems to me inevitable. I have a sort of premonition of the very way it will come. Some day, Joe will get into a quarrel with some other man about a woman—the other man’s wife, and Meriel’s rival. The two will fight; and the other man, being quicker though less powerful than Joe, will get him down and hold him. Then Meriel will rush in to her faithless husband’s aid, and stab his assailant. She would never stab her rival—she is too proud for that: but she would stab the man who for her rival’s sake dared attack her hero. The rest follows of course. And those who read the report of the trial in the papers will only know that a poacher’s wife, a very bad lot, the daughter and associate of criminals, was sentenced to death for murdering a man with whom her good-for-noth-ing- husband had been quarrelling. But I know all: and in some dim way, I can feel for poor Meriel.