HOUSE OF A HUNDRED DREAMS
The shadows inside the roofless old abbey were warm and friendly. The
sunlight gleamed against the tombs with a cheer which always falls
over very old grief spots.
"This quietude--this sense of all rightness--makes you feel that nothing
really matters, doesn't it?" I asked, looking around with a sort of
awed delight as we paused to read one or two inscriptions--voluminous
in length and medieval in spelling.
The man at my side was less awed.
"Shall we go on to the gardens, then?" he asked. "You'll not think so
little of temporal pleasures there, perhaps."
I looked up at him.
"But why?"
"Well, because these gardens are usually filled with suggestions of
living joys--for one thing. There are millions of forget-me-nots,
which always give a cheering aspect to the landscape--and there are
frequently the flowers mentioned in Shakespeare's plays."
With a sigh of regret we left the sanctuary. Then, turning a corner of
the old stone wall we came full upon a side of the house which was
receiving shamelessly the biggest sun-kiss I had ever seen. But then,
it was the biggest house I had ever seen. It was the gladdest sun--and
it was the warmest blending. Between house and sun--as if they were
the love children of this union--lay thousands of brilliant flowers.
When I could get my breath I made a quick suggestion that we go
closer.
"I want to know which is rosemary--and which is rue!" I told him. But
he stopped a moment and detained me.
We halted beside a fallen stone, at a point slightly separated from
the walls of the house--a sort of half-way ground, where the shadow of
the Greek cross on an isolated pinnacle seemed still to claim the
ground for religion, against the encroachments of the work-a-day
world. Maitland Tait's sudden smile was a mixture of amusement and
tenderness.
"I've recently heard a story about this spot--this identical
stone--which will interest you," he said. "A monk comes here at
night--one of those old fellows buried in there."
I smiled.
"It's quite true!" he insisted. "People have seen him."
"I know it," I avowed seriously. "I was not smiling out of unbelief,
but out of sheer joy at beholding with mine own eyes the 'Norman
stone!'
"'He mutters his prayers on the midnight air,
And his mass of the days that are gone.'"
Maitland Tait looked at me in surprise.
"Do you know all the legends of the place?" he asked.
I shook my head sorrowfully.
"I wish I did," I replied. "For so many years this has been my House
of a Hundred Dreams!"
We both fell into a moment's dreamy thoughtfulness, which I was first
to cast aside.
"Come and tell me about the plants, if you can!" I begged. "Which _is_
rosemary, and which is rue?"
We walked down a flight of worn steps, and came upon prim gravel
pathways.
"This is rosemary," he said, "and here, by the sun-dial, is rue."
Then, even when I realized that this was the place where Lady Frances
Webb had spent her wearisome days, to keep from hearing the clock
chime in the hall, I could not be sad. The sun-dial was another grief
spot, it was true, but it was an ancient grief spot--and it was
located in a golden sea of sunshine, under a sky that was the
reflection of forget-me-nots.
"She could gather the rue while the sun-dial told, all silently, of
the day's wearing on," I said.
He looked at me uncertainly.
"Did she say that in her letters?" he asked.
"Yes. She had sent her lover away, you see, and--there was nothing
else in life."
"And she longed for the days to pass silently?"
"She stayed out here as much as she could--to keep from hearing the
clock in the hall," I told him. "The chime shamed the unholy prayer on
her lips, she said--and the sound of the ticking reminded her of her
heart's wearying beats."
"Of _their_ hearts' wearying beats, you mean," he exclaimed, and a
quick look of pain which darted into his face showed me that he
comprehended. Then, for the first time, I began to grasp what a lover
he would make! Before this time I had been absorbed with thoughts of
him as a beloved.
Suddenly my hat began to feel intolerably heavy, and my gloves
intolerably hot. I tampered fumblingly with the pearl clasp at my left
wrist, and drew that glove off first. Maitland Tait was watching me.
He saw my hand--my bare ringless hand. He stared at it as if it might
have been a ghost, although it looked fairly pink and healthy in the
warm glow of the noonday sun. Even the little pallid circle on the
third finger was quite gone.
"Grace----" he said.
"Yes?"
"Does this mean that you're--you're----"
A discreet cough--a still distant, but distinctly warning
cough--interrupted for a moment. Collins was coming toward us, from
the ruins of the old abbey. Maitland Tait looked up and saw him
coming, but he did not stop. On the other hand, the sight of his
servant seemed to goad him into a hasty precipitation.
"Grace, will you marry me?" he asked.
"Of _course_!" I managed to say, but not too energetically, for the
muscles of my throat were giving me trouble again.
"Soon?" he asked hungrily.
I felt very reckless and--American.
"Before the shadows pass round this dial again, if you _insist_," I
smiled.
But his eyes were very grave.
"Without knowing anything more about me than you know now?"
"Why, I know everything about you," I replied, in some astonishment.
"I know that you are the biggest, and the best-looking, and the
dearest----"
"You know nothing about me," he interrupted softly, "except what I
have told you. I am a working man! I have always had the mass hatred
for class, and--and my grandfather was a coal-digger in Wales."
I was silent.
"Yet, you are willing to marry me?" he asked.
"Of course! Coal is--very warming," I answered.
* * * * *
Collins descended the flight of stone steps and came slowly along the
gravel walk. When he had come to the respectful distance he stopped.
No English servant ever approaches very close--as if there were a
quarantine around the sacred person of the served.
"My Lord," he said, but stammeringly, as a man halts over a
newly-acquired language--"My Lord, Mrs. Carr wishes to know if you
will have lunch served in the oak room, or in the----"
"In the oak room," the man standing beside me answered readily enough.
"And have the old wing opened and lighted, Collins. We want to see the
pictures in there."
The servant breathed the inevitable "Thank you," and turned away.
I seemed suddenly to feel that the golden sea of sunlight was sweeping
me away--up into the blue, which was the reflection of forget-me-nots.
And there loomed big on my horizon a house that was a home!
"My _Lord_?" I demanded, as soon as I could speak.
Maitland Tait nodded reassuringly.
"My father died two weeks ago," he said. "And I _had_ to come into the
title."
"And this place is _yours_!" I sang out, feeling that all the years of
my life I had been destiny's love-child. "This old abbey is yours! The
park is yours! The garden is yours! The sun-dial is yours!"
"And the girl is mine!" he said, with a grave smile. "I am careless of
all the other."
His gravity sobered my wild spirits.
"And your father was--Lord Erskine?" I finally asked.
"He _was_--Lord Erskine," he answered. "He married out of his
station--far, far above his station, _I_ think----"
His big beautiful mouth set grimly, but he said nothing more, and I
knew that this was as heavily as he would ever tread upon the ashes of
the dead. Gradually, bit by bit, I learned the history of the muddy
pool of mistake and fault, out of which the tender blossom of his
boyhood had been dragged. His father had never seen him, but a
certain stiff-necked family pride had caused him to provide material
bounty for his child. The combination of a good education and rugged
plebeian industry had made him what he was.
"But why didn't you tell me--that day when you first came to see me
and we talked about this place--why didn't you tell me that it was
_your_ ancestral home?"
He looked at me in surprise.
"Why, because I had made up my mind to marry you!" he said. "You told
me that this old place was a sort of dreamland of yours--and I didn't
want to complicate matters. I wanted your love for me to be a
reality."
"Well, it--it is!" I confessed.
After a long while--that is, the sun-dial said it was a long
while--spent this way a sudden thought of my waiting hosts at
Bannerley came over me. I sprang up from the step of the pedestal
where we had been sitting.
"I _must_ get some word to Mrs. Montgomery!" I said. "They will be
thinking that my rash American ways have got me into some dreadful
scrape, I'm afraid."
But the serene man at my side was still serene. His face looked as if
nothing on earth could ever cause him a pang again. He caught my hand
and drew me gently, but rather steadfastly back to my place.
"Mrs. Montgomery knows everything--except that we are going to be
married--when did you say, to-morrow?" he smiled. "I've been staying
with them, and they told me about you, and I told them about you--and
we had rather a satisfactory adjustment of neighborly relations."
I looked at him in awe. I could not quite shake off the idea that he
had a miraculous lamp hidden about somewhere in his pockets. Things
seemed to _happen_ when he wished them to happen.
"Did you chance to know that I would take a bad train and be delayed
here this morning at sunrise?" I asked, trying to look dignified and
unawed. "Did you know that I should be compelled to waste precious
morning hours pacing up and down a railway station platform?"
"Why, of course," he answered imperturbably. "Mrs. Montgomery sent me
over to meet you."
I sprang up again, more energetically this time.
"Then why didn't you meet me?" I asked, with the horror of shocking
English propriety overwhelming me. "Come! We must go to Bannerley at
once."
He rose and followed me toward the main garden path. Then he pointed
the way to the house door.
"I've had Collins telephone that your train was very, very late," he
explained. "She'll not be surprised--nor too inquisitive. She even
suggested this morning that if you shouldn't get in until evening--the
drive to Bannerley is very fine by moonlight."
* * * * *
In the late afternoon the chilly dusk sent little forerunners ahead,
which caused the old wing of the house to be lighted from within,
instead of opened to the cool dying sunset. A cheery fire was kindled
in the room which had once been the library of Lady Frances Webb.
The dampness and air of disuse disappeared, and it seemed as if
personalities came forth from the shadowy corners and sat beside the
fire with Maitland Tait and me.
"This was her own desk, they tell me," he said, as he was showing the
ancient treasures to me, yet still looking at them himself with
half-awed, almost unbelieving eyes. "This was where all her famous
books were written."
I crossed the room to where the little locked secretary stood. Its
polished surface was sending back the firelight's glow and seemed to
proclaim that its own mahogany was imprisoned sunshine.
"And she wrote those letters here," I said in a hushed voice. "Do you
suppose she has some of his letters locked away somewhere?"
He nodded, fitting the key to its lock very carefully.
[Illustration: He drew me to a corner of the room]
"All of them! All the letters written her by--Uncle James."
"And we are going to look over them together--you and I are going to
read these love-letters--before we burn them?" I asked, quick joy
making my voice tremulous.
For a moment there was silence in the old room, then he turned away
from the secretary, and came very close.
"Why burn them--now?" he asked, his own strong voice of a sudden more
tremulous than mine. "Why burn them, now, darling? Why not--hand--
them--down?"
Then--in that instant--I knew what life was going to mean to me. And I
felt as if I had the great joy of the world--hugged close--in a circle
of radiance--like the _Madonna della Sedia_!
"I can be good--a very good woman--if I have your face before me," I
told him.
After a while he smiled, then took my hand and drew me to a shadowy
corner of the room.
"You haven't seen this yet," he said.
There was a crimson velvet curtain hanging before a picture, and he
drew aside the folds.
"This is--Uncle James,"
The candlelight shone against the canvas, and glittered in dancing
little waves over the name-plate on the frame.
"_Portrait of the Artist, by Himself._"
"Was it a comfort to her, I wonder?" my lover said, his thoughts only
half with the past.
"A torturing comfort--the kind a woman like her demands," I answered.
"She had to go to it every hour in every day--and look at it--to make
her heart ache, because it was only a picture. She was a human
being--as well as a novelist, so that such as this could only add to
her anguish. She wanted a _living_ face----"
"She wanted--this?"
He set the candlestick down and put both arms round me.
"She wanted--_this_?" he breathed.
His face was close above mine-waiting for the first kiss. A moment
later it came--descending gently, like some blessed holy thing. And
it was that.
"You are like him," I whispered. "Your face can make me good."
His arms tightened, and a smile escaped.
"And yours? What will you be like to me?" he asked.
I looked up, remembering.
"Like--just an American woman--a tormenting side-issue in your busy
life?"
But he shook his head gravely.
"No--not that."
A casement was open near by, and he drew me toward the shaft of
radiance which fell into the shadowed room.
Across the courtyard, white now with moonlight, were the ruins of the
abbey. There shone a softened luster through the space of the absent
window, and above, resplendent in her niche, stood the Virgin. Her
head was bowed above the burden in her arms.
"Like that--_like that_!" he whispered.
THE END