"But love is the great amulet which makes the World a Garden."
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Colonel Rutherford and Joan had had breakfast early that morning, for
Uncle John was going to London to attend some big meeting, at which,
much to his own secret gratification, he had been asked to speak. He
rehearsed the greater part of what he was going to say to Joan during
breakfast, and on their way down to the station. He had long ago
forgiven, or forgotten, which was more probable still, Joan's exile from
his good graces. After Aunt Janet's funeral, when Joan had spoken to
him rather nervously, suggesting her return to London, he had stared at
her with unfeigned astonishment.
"Back to London," he had said, "whatever for?"
"To get some more work to do," Joan suggested.
His shaggy eyebrows drew together in a frown. "Preposterous notion," he
answered. "I never did agree with it. So long as a girl has a home, what
does she want to work for? Besides, now your aunt is not here, who is
going to look after the house and things?"
The question seemed unanswerable, and since he had apparently forgiven
the past, why should she remind him? She realized, too, that he needed
her. She wrote asking Fanny to send on her things, and settled down to
try and fill her mind and heart, as much as possible, with the daily
round of small duties which are involved in the keeping of a house.
This morning on her way back from the station, having seen Uncle John
into his train for London, she let fat Sally walk a lot of the way. The
country seemed to be asleep; for miles all round she could see across
field after field, not a creature moving, not a soul in sight, only a
little dust round a bend of the road showed where a motor-car had just
passed. It occurred to her that her life had been just like that; the
quiet, seeming, non-existence of the country; a flashing past of life
which left its cloud of dust behind, and then the quiet closing round
her again.
"The daily round, the common task,
Shall furnish all we need to ask."
She hummed it under her breath.
"Room to deny ourselves--"
Perhaps that was the lesson that she had needed to learn, for in the old
days her watchword had been:
"Room to fulfil myself."
If it was not for Uncle John now she would have liked to have gone back
to London and thrown herself into some sort of work. Women would be
needed before long, the papers said, to do the work of the men who must
be sent to the firing-line. But Uncle John was surely the work to her
hand; she would do it with what heart she had, even though the long
hours of sewing or knitting gave her too much time to think.
Sally having been handed over to the stable-boy, Joan betook herself
into the dining-room. Thursday was the day on which the flowers were
done; Mary had already spread the table with newspaper, and collected
the vases from all over the house. They had been cleaned and fresh water
put in them; she was allowed to do as little work as possible, but the
empty flower-basket and the scissors stood waiting at her hand. The
gardener would really have preferred to have done the flower-cutting
himself, but Aunt Janet had always insisted upon doing it, and Joan
carried on the custom. There were only a few late roses left, but she
gathered an armful of big white daisies.
As she came back from the hall Joan saw Dick waiting for her. The maid
had let him in and gone to find "Miss Joan." Strangely enough the first
thought that came into her mind was not a memory of the last time that
they had met or a wonder as to why he was here; she could see that he
was in khaki, and to her it meant only one thing. He was going to the
front, he had come to say good-bye to her before he went. All the colour
left her face, she stared at him, the basket swinging on her arm, the
daisies clutched against her black dress.
"Joan," Dick said quickly; he came towards her. "Joan, didn't the maid
find you, didn't they tell you I was here? What's the matter, dear; why
are you frightened?"
He took the flowers and the basket from her and laid them down on the
hall table. Mary coming back at the moment, saw them standing hand in
hand, and ran to the kitchen to tell the others that Miss Joan's young
man had come at last.
"Isn't there somewhere you can take me where we can talk?" Dick was
saying. "I have such an awful lot to say to you."
"You have come to say good-bye," Joan answered. She looked up at him,
her lips quivered a little. "You are going out there."
Then he knew why she had been afraid, and behind his pity he was glad.
"Joan," he whispered again, and quite simply she drew closer to him and
laid her cheek against his coat, "does it really matter to you, dear?"
His arms were round her, yet they did not hold her as tightly as she
clung to him. "Must you go?" she said breathlessly. "There are such
hundreds of others; must you go?"
Dick could not find any words to put the great beating of his heart
into, so he just held her close and laid his lips, against her hair.
"Take me into that little room where I first saw you," he said
presently. "I have remembered it often, Joan; I have always wanted to
come back to it, and have you explain things to me there."
She drew a little away and looked up at him. "What you thought of me the
other night"--she spoke of it is yesterday, the months in between had
slipped awry--"wasn't true, Dick. I----"
He drew her to him quickly again, and this time he kissed her lips.
"Let's forget it," he said softly. "I have only got to-day and
to-morrow, I don't want to remember what a self-satisfied prig I was."
"Is it to be as soon as that?" she asked. "And I shall only have had you
for so short a time."
"It is a short time," Dick assented. "But I am going to make the best
of it; you wait till you have heard my plans."
He laughed at her because she pointed out that the flowers could not be
left to die, but he helped her to arrange them in the tall, clean vases.
They won back to a brief, almost childish, happiness over the work, but
when the last vase had been finished and carried back to its proper
place, he caught hold of her hands again.
"Now," he said, "let's talk real hard, honest sense; but first, where's
my room?"
She led him silently to the little room behind the drawing-room. She had
taken it over again since her return; the pictures she liked best were
on the walls, her books lay about on the table. The same armchair stood
by the window; he could almost see her as he had seen her that first
morning, her great brown eyes, wakened to newfound fear, staring into
the garden.
"You shall sit here," he said, leading her to the chair. It rather
worried him to see the dumb misery in her eyes. "And I shall sit down on
the floor at your feet. I can hold your hands and I can see your face,
and your whole adorable self is near to me, that's what my heart has
been hungering for. Now--will you marry me the day after to-morrow,
before I go?"
"Dick," she said quickly; she was speaking out of the pain in her heart,
"why do you ask me? Why have you come back? Haven't you been fighting
against it all this time because you knew that I--because some part of
you doesn't want to marry me?"
His eyes never wavered from hers, but he lifted the hands he held to his
lips and kissed them. "When I saw you again in that theatre in
Sevenoaks," he said, "it is perfectly true, one side of me argued with
the other. When I came to your rooms and found that other man there,
green jealousy just made me blind, and pride--which was distinctly
jarred, Joan"--he tried to wake an answering smile in her eyes--"kept
me away all this time."
"Then why have you come back?" she repeated.
"Because I love you," he answered. "It is a very hackneyed word, dear,
but it means a lot."
"But it doesn't always stay--love," she said. "Supposing if afterwards
those thoughts came back to worry you. What would it mean to me if I saw
them in your eyes?"
"There isn't any reason why they should. Listen, dear"--he let go her
hands and sat up very straight. "Let's go over it carefully and
sensibly, and lay this bugbear of pain once and for all. Before you knew
me or I knew you, you loved somebody else. Perhaps you only thought you
loved him; anyway, I hope so; I am jealous enough of him as it is. Dear,
I don't ask you to explain why you gave yourself to this man, whether it
was impulse, or ignorance, or curiosity. So many things go to make up
our lives; it is only to ourselves that we are really accountable. After
to-day we won't dig over the past again. At the time it did not prevent
me falling in love with you; for two years I thought about you
sometimes, dreamed of you often. I made love to a good many other women
in between; don't think that I show up radiantly white in comparison to
you; but I loved just you all the time. I saw you in London once, the
day after I landed, and I made up my mind then to find out where you
lived, and to try and persuade you to marry me."
He waited a minute or two; his eyes had gone out to the garden; he could
see the tall daisies of which Joan had carried an armful waving against
the dark wall behind them. Then he looked back at her very frankly.
"It is no use trying to pretend," he said, "that I was not shocked when
I first saw you dancing. You see, we men have got into a habit of
dividing women into two classes, and you had suddenly, so it seemed to
me, got into the wrong one. Dear little girl, I don't want to hurt
you"--he put his hand on her knee and drew a little closer, so that she
could feel him leaning against her. "I am just telling you all the
stupid thoughts that were in me, so that you can at last understand that
I love you. It only took me half a night to realize the mistake I had
made, and then I set about--you may have noticed it--to make you love
me. When I came up to London I had made up my mind that you did love me;
I was walking as it were on air. It was a very nasty shock that
afternoon in your room, Joan; I went away from it feeling as if the end
of the world had come."
"Oh, I know, I know," she said quickly. "And I had meant it to hurt you.
I wanted to shake you out of what I thought was only a dream. I had not
the courage to tell you, and yet, that is not quite true. I was afraid
if I told you, and if you saw that I loved you at the same time, you
would not let it make any difference. I did not want you to spoil your
life, Dick."
"You dear girl!" he answered. "On Monday," he went on slowly, "I got my
orders for France. They are what I had been wanting and hoping for ever
since the War started, and yet, till they came, funnily enough, I never
realized what they meant. It seems strange to talk of death, or even to
think of it, when one is young and so horribly full of life as I am--yet
somehow this brings it near to me. It is not a question of facing it
with the courage of which the papers write such a lot; the truth is,
that one looks at it just for a moment, and then ordinary things push it
aside. Next to death, Joan, there is only one big thing in the world,
and that is Love. I had to see you again before I went; I had to find
out if you loved me. I wanted to hold you, so that the feel of you
should go with me in my dreams; to kiss you, so that the touch of your
lips should stay on mine, even if death did put a cold hand across them.
He is not going to"--he laughed suddenly and stood up, drawing her into
his arms--"your face shall go before me, dear, and in the end I shall
come home to you."
"What can I say?" Joan whispered, "You know I love you. Take me then,
Dick, and do as you wish with me."
They talked over the problem of his people and her people after they had
won back to a certain degree of sense, and Dick told Joan of how Mabel
had wished him luck just as he started out.
"You are going to be great friends," he said, "and Mother will come
round too, she always does."
"I am less afraid of your Mother than I am of Mabel," Joan confessed. "I
don't believe Mabel will ever like me."
Dick stayed to lunch and waited on afterwards to see Colonel Rutherford.
He had extracted a promise from Joan to marry him on Saturday by special
licence. He would have to go up to town to see about it himself the next
day; he wanted to leave everything arranged and settled for her first.
He and Joan walked down to the woods after lunch, and Joan tried to tell
him of her first year in London, and of some of the motives that had
driven her. He listened in silence; he was conscious more of jealousy
than anything else; he was glad when she passed on to talk of her later
struggles in London; of Shamrock House, of Rose Brent and Fanny.
"And that man I met at your place," he asked. "You did not even think
you loved him, did you, Joan?"
"No," she answered quickly, "never, Dick, and he had never been to my
room before. He just pretended he had been to annoy you because I
suppose he saw it would hurt me."
Colonel Rutherford arrived for tea very tired, but jubilant at the
success of the meeting, which had brought in a hundred recruits. He did
not remember anything about Dick, but was delighted to see him because
he was in uniform. The news of the other's early departure to the front
filled Colonel Rutherford with envy.
"What wouldn't I give to be your age, young man," he grunted.
Joan slipped away and left them after tea, and it was then that Dick
broached the subject of their marriage.
"I have loved her for two years," he said simply, "and I have persuaded
her to marry me before I leave on Saturday. There is no reason why I
should not marry, and if I die she will get my small amount of money,
and a pension."
Colonel Rutherford went rather an uncomfortable shade of red. "You said
just now," he said, "that you were the doctor here two years ago. Did
you know my niece in those days?"
"I only saw her once," Dick admitted. "I was called in professionally,
but I loved her from the moment I saw her, sir."
"God bless my soul!" murmured Colonel Rutherford. A faint fragrance from
his own romance seemed to come to him from out the past. "Then you know
all about what I was considering it would be my painful duty to tell
you."
"Yes," Dick answered, "I know."
The other man came suddenly to him and held out his hand. "I don't know
you," he said, "but I like you. We were very hard on Joan two years ago;
I have often thought of it since; I should like to see a little
happiness come into her life and I believe you will be able to give it
her. I am glad."
"Thank you," Dick said. They shook hands quite gravely as men will.
"Then I may marry her on Saturday?"
"Why, certainly, boy," the other answered; "And she shall live with me
till you come back."
"You are very lucky, Joan," he said to his niece after Dick had gone
away. "He is an extremely nice chap, that. I hope you realize how lucky
you are."
Joan did not answer him in so many words. She just kissed him good-night
and ran out of the room. To-night of all nights she needed Aunt Janet;
she threw a shawl round her shoulders presently and stole out. The
cemetery lay just across the road, she could slip into it without
attracting any attention. This time she brought no gift of flowers, only
she knelt by the grave, and whispered her happiness in the prayer she
prayed.
"God keep him always, and bring him back to me."