Guy wrote the little note to Pauline and to his father he wrote a long
letter explaining that it was impossible to give up what he was doing to
be a schoolmaster.
It was peerless weather when they set out in Godbold's wagonette on the
nine miles to Ladingford. Guy was thrilled to be travelling like this
with Mrs. Grey, Margaret and Pauline. The girls were in flowered muslin
dresses, seeming more airy than he had ever thought them: and the
luggage piled up beside Godbold had the same exquisite lightness, so
that it appeared less like luggage than a store of birds' feathers. The
thought of nearly having missed this summery pilgrimage made Guy catch
his breath.
They arrived at Ladingford toward tea-time and found the barge lying by
an old stone bridge about a mile away from the village. Apart from the
spire of Ladingford church nothing conspicuously broke the horizon of
that flat green country stretching for miles to a shadowy range of
hills. Whichever way they looked, these meads extended with here and
there willows and elms; close at hand was the quiet by-road that crossed
the bridge and meandered over the low lands, as still and traffickless
as the young Thames itself.
The Naiad was painted peacock blue; owing to the turreted poops the
owner had superimposed and the balustrade with rail of gilt gadroons, it
almost had the look of a dismasted Elizabethan ship.
"Anything more you'll want?" Godbold enquired.
"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. Godbold," said Mrs. Grey. "Charming ...
charming ... such a pleasant drive. Good afternoon, Mr. Godbold."
The carrier turned his horse; and when the sound of the wagonette had
died away, there was silence except where the stream lapped against the
barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.
Guy and Pauline had resolved that they would give Margaret no chance of
calling them selfish during this fortnight; and since they were together
all the time, it was much easier now not to wish to escape from
everybody. The first week went by in such a perfection of delight as Guy
had scarcely thought was possible. Indeed it remained ultimately
unimaginable, this dream life on the Naiad. A pleasant woman in a
sunbonnet came to cook breakfast and dinner; and Pauline and Margaret
went to Ladingford and bought sunbonnets, a pink one for Pauline and for
Margaret one of watchet blue. In the fresh mornings Guy and the sisters
wandered idly over the meads; but in the afternoon Margaret generally
read a book in the shade while Guy and Pauline went for walks, walks
that ended always in sitting by the river's edge and telling each other
the tale of their love. The nights with a clear moon waxing to the full
were entrancing. There was a small piano on the barge, the notes of
which had been brought by damp almost to the timbre of an exhausted
spinet. It served however for Mrs. Grey to accompany Pauline while she
played on a violin simple tunes. Guy used to lie back on deck and count
the stars above Pauline's pavans and galliards: then from the silence
that followed he would see her coming, shadowy, light as the dewfall, to
sit close beside him, to sit, her hand in his, for an hour while the
moon climbed the sky and the fern-owls croaked in their hunting. And as
the romantic climax of the day, it was wonderful to fall asleep with the
knowledge that Pauline slept nearer to him than she had ever slept
before.
"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced
at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be
interesting for him."
Guy was thrilled by the notion of visiting Ladingford Manor, which had
been one of the great fortresses of romance held against the devastating
commercial morality of the Victorian prime with its science and
sciolism, and which possessed already some of the fabulous appeal of the
mediaeval songs and tapestries John Lambert had created there. An
invitation came presently to walk over any afternoon. Margaret said at
first she would not go; but Guy who was in a condition of excited
reverence declared she must come; and so the three of them set out
across a path in the meads that Guy populated with romantic figures of
the mid-Victorian days. On this stile Swinburne may have sat; here
Burne-Jones may have looked back at the sky; and surely it were
reasonable to suppose that Rossetti might have tied up his shoe on this
big stone by this brook, even as Guy was tying up his shoe now. Soon
they saw a group of elms and the smoke of clustered chimneys; there
golden-grey in front of them stood Ladingford Manor.
"There's the sort of stillness of fame about it," Guy whispered.
He wondered if Mrs. Lambert would now resemble at all the famous
pictures of her he had seen. And would she talk familiarly of the famous
people she had known? They came to the gate, entering the garden along a
flagged path on either side of which runnels flowed between borders of
trim box. Mrs. Lambert was sitting in a yew parlour under a blue silk
umbrella that was almost a pavilion, and she received them with many
comments upon the energy of walking so far on this hot afternoon.
"You would like some beer, I'm sure. There is a bell in that mulberry
tree. If you toll the bell, Charlotte will bring you beer."
Guy tolled the bell, and Charlotte arrived with a pewter tray and pewter
mugs of beer. Margaret would not be thirsty, but Pauline was afraid of
hurting Mrs. Lambert's feelings, and she pretended to drink, lancing
blue eyes at Guy over the rim of her mug.
"It's home-brewed beer," said Mrs. Lambert placidly, and then she leaned
back and sighed at the dome of her blue silk umbrella. She was still
very beautiful, and Guy had a sensation that he was sitting at the feet
of Helen or Lady Flora the lovely Roman. She was old now, but she wore
about her like an aureole the dignity of all those inspirations of
famous dead painters.
"Home-brewed beer," Mrs. Lambert repeated dreamily, and seemed to fall
asleep in the past; while in the bee-drowsed yew parlour Pauline,
Margaret and Guy sat watching her. The throat of Sidonia the sorceress
was hers; the heavy lids of Hipparchia were hers; the wrist of
Ermengarde or Queen Blanche was hers; and the pewter tray on the grass
at her feet held Circe's wine.
Then Mrs. Lambert woke up and asked if they would like to see the house.
"Toll the bell in the mulberry-tree, and Charlotte will come. You must
excuse my getting up."
They followed Charlotte round the rooms of Ladingford Manor. There on
the walls were the tapestries that had inspired John Lambert, and there
were the tapestries even more beautiful that he himself had woven. On
the tables were the books John Lambert had printed, which gave
positively the aspect of being treasures by the discretion of their
external appearance. In other rooms hung the original pictures of
hackneyed mezzotints; and how rare they looked now with their velvety
pigments of emerald and purple, of orange, cinnabar and scarlet glowing
in the tempered sunlight. Margaret, as she moved from room to room,
seemed with her weight of dusky hair and fastidious remoteness to belong
to the company of lovely women whose romances filled these splendid
scenes; but Pauline was life, irradiating with her joy each picture and
giving to it the complement of its own still beauty.
"Mrs. Lambert keeps very well, miss," said Charlotte as they came out
again from the house. "But of course she doesn't get about much now. Yet
we can't really complain, especially with this fine weather."
"Would you like some more beer?" Mrs. Lambert asked, when they joined
her again in the yew parlour.
They said they were no longer thirsty; and, having thanked her for the
pleasures of the visit, they left her in the past, returning by the
pale green path across the meadows to where the Naiad lay by the old
bridge.
"Oh, I did want some tea," sighed Margaret.
"I love Mrs. Lambert," cried Pauline, dancing through the meads. "Wasn't
it touching of her to offer Margaret beer? Oh, Guy, when we're married
and when you die and I receive young poets at Plashers Mead, shall I
offer their future sisters-in-law home-brewed beer? Oh, but I'm sure I
shall forget to offer them anything."
Was there any reason, thought Guy, why Plashers Mead should not become a
second Ladingford Manor? Friends long ago took that house together:
perhaps Michael Fane would after all see the necessity of a second
Ladingford Manor and share Plashers Mead with himself and Pauline. After
this visit it was impossible to contemplate the prospect of being a
schoolmaster: it was impossible to imagine Pauline as a schoolmaster's
wife. At all costs their love must be sustained on the pinnacle of
romance where now it stood. Margaret would sympathize with his desire to
set Pauline in beauty; she, dreading the idea of marrying an Indian
engineer, would understand how impossible it was to make Pauline the
wife of a schoolmaster. Such a declension must somehow be avoided. It
were better they should wait three years for marriage, five years,
fourteen years as Tennyson had waited, rather than that he should make
the monstrous surrender he had been so near to making. At least he would
put himself and his work to the test and in a year he would be able to
publish his first volume of poems. Perhaps his father would realize then
that he deserved to marry Pauline. After all they were together: there
were maddening restrictions of course, but they were together. This
visit to Ladingford Manor must be accepted as an omen to persevere in
his original intention; for he had been granted the vision of a
perfected beauty, which he knew, by reading the lives of the men who
made it, had only been achieved after desperate struggles and
disappointments. This enchanted time on the Naiad must be the
anticipated reward of a tremendous industry when he got back to
Wychford. He would no more break the rules and fret at the restrictions
made for him and Pauline. Every hour when they were together should
henceforth be doubled in the intensity of its capacity for being
enjoyed. One thing only he would demand, that in August they should be
formally and openly engaged. Otherwise when Autumn came and made it
impossible to go on the river, they would be kept to the Rectory; and
the few hours of her company he would have must at least be free. He
would talk to Margaret about it, so that she might use her influence to
procure this favour. Then he would write and tell his father. All would
be easy; Ladingford had inspired him. He beheld the visit in retrospect
more and more clearly as an exhortation to endure against whatever the
world should offer him to betray his ambition. Yet was Pauline the
world? No, certainly Pauline had no kinship with the world, and
therefore he was the more straightly bound to disregard the voice of
material prosperity. She had joked about herself as a Mrs. Lambert of
the future; but behind the lightness of her jest had stood confidence in
himself and in his fame. Should he imprison that spirit of mirth and
fire in the husk of a schoolmaster's wife?
The second week passed: the time at Ladingford was over, and early in
the morning they must start for the journey of thirty miles down to
Oxford. The dapple-grey horse that would tow the barge was already
arrived and now stood munching the long grass in the shade of the
bridge: the swallows were high in the golden air of the afternoon: the
long-purples on the banks of the young river seemed to await
reproachfully the disturbance of their tranquillity. To-morrow came: the
dapple-grey horse was harnessed to the rope: and then slowly, slowly
the Naiad glided forward, leaving astern the grey bridge, the
long-purples on the bank and the swallows high in the silver air of the
morning. There was not yet any poignancy of parting; for the spire of
Ladingford church remained so long in sight that scarcely did they
notice the slow recession; and often, when they thought it was gone, the
winding river would show it to them again; and in the end, when really
it seemed to have vanished, by standing on the poop they could still
make out where now it pierced thinly the huge sky. Moreover the
contentment of that imperceptible evanescence and of their dreaming
progress down the young Thames was plenary, lulling all regrets for a
peace that seemed not yet truly to be lost. The hay in the meadows along
the banks was mostly carried, and the cattle were magically fused with
the July sunlight, curiously dematerialized like the creatures of a
mirage. If a human voice was audible, it was audible deep in the green
distance and belonged to the landscape as gently as the murmurous water
scalloping the bows. Sometimes indeed they would pass late mowers who
leaned upon their scythes and waved good fortune to the journey, but
mostly it was all an emptiness of air and grass.
"If only this young Thames flowed on for ever," said Guy.
He and Pauline were leaning over the rail of the barge, and Guy felt a
sudden impulse to snatch at the bank rich in that moment with yellow
loosestrife, and by his action arrest for ever the progress of the
barge, so that for ever they would stay like the lovers on a Grecian
urn.
"And really," Guy went on, as already the banks of yellow loosestrife
were become banks of long-purples, "there is no reason why for us in a
way this river should not flow on for ever. Dear, everything had seemed
so perishable before I found you. Pauline, you don't think I ought to
surrender my intention, do you? I mean, you don't think I ought to go
away from Plashers Mead?"
Guy went on to tell her about the decision he had taken on the day the
visit to Ladingford was arranged.
"But it would have been dreadful to miss this time," Pauline declared.
"Oh, I felt it would be impossible," he agreed. "But even if our
marriage is postponed for another year, you do think I ought to stick it
out here, don't you? And really, you know, few lovers can have such
wonderful hours as the hours we do have."
Easily she reassured him with her confidence in the rightness of his
decision: easily she assuaged the ache of any lingering doubt with the
proclamation of that inevitable triumph in the end.
"But we must be engaged openly," said Guy. "You know, I shall be
twenty-three next month. Do you think we can be engaged properly in
August?"
"Mother promised in Spring," said Pauline. "Why don't you talk to her
about it? Why don't you talk to her about it now? She loves you to talk
to her."
He looked round to where Mrs. Grey was sitting in a deck-chair;
evidently by the rhythmic motion of her fingers she was restating to
herself a tune which had formerly pleased her, as the barge glided on
past a scene that changed perceptibly only in details of flowers and
trees, while the great sky and the green hollow land and the blue
distances rested immutable. Guy came and sat beside her.
"I've never enjoyed a fortnight so much in my life," he said.
She smiled at him, but did not speak, for whatever quartet she was
restating had to be finished first. Soon the last noiseless bars played
themselves and she turned round to his conversation.
"Mrs. Grey, do you think that Pauline and I can be engaged openly next
month? It won't mean, if we are, that I shall be worrying to see her
more often. In fact I'm sure I shall worry less. But I want to tell my
father, so that when he comes here he'll be able to see Pauline. He's a
conventional sort of man, and I don't think he'd grasp an engagement
such as ours is at present. Besides, I want to talk to the Rector,
because I feel that now he regards the whole thing as a childish game.
So can it be formal next month?"
Mrs. Grey sat back, so silent that Guy wondered if she had listened to a
word he had been saying. He paused for a moment, and then as she did not
reply, he went on:
"I also want to say how sorry I am that I asked Pauline to come into
Plashers Mead to say good-night to me last month. I didn't realize,
until she told me you were angry about it, what a foolish thing I'd
done. I don't want you to think that, if we are formally engaged, I
shall be doing stupid things like that all the time. Really, Mrs. Grey,
I would always be very thoughtful."
"Oh, yes," she answered in her nervous way. "Oh, yes. I understood it to
have been a kind of carelessness. But I had to speak to Pauline about
it, because she is so very impulsive. It's the sort of thing I might
have done myself when I was a girl. At least of course I shouldn't
because the Rector ... yes ... charming ... charming ... yes.... I
really think you might be engaged next month. It's your birthday next
month, isn't it?"
"Thank you more than I can thank you," said Guy.
Mrs. Grey waved to Pauline, who drew close.
"Pauline darling, I've thought of such a nice birthday present for Guy
... yes ... charming, charming birthday present ... yes ... for you two
to be engaged."
Pauline threw her arms round her mother's neck; and Guy in his happiness
noticed at that moment how Margaret was sitting by herself on the poop
in the stern. He was wrenched by a sudden compunction, and asked Pauline
if he should not go and tell Margaret.
"Charming of Guy ... yes ... charming," Mrs. Grey enthusiastically
exclaimed. "Now I call that really charming, and Pauline stays with me."
Guy went up the companion and asked Margaret if she were particularly
anxious to be alone. She seemed to pull herself from a day-dream, as she
turned to assure him she did not at all particularly want to be alone.
Guy announced his good news, and Margaret offered him her slim hand with
a kind of pathetic grace that moved him very much.
"I think you deserve it," she said. "For you've both been so sweet to me
all this fortnight. I expect you think I don't notice, but I do ...
always."
"Margaret," said Guy. "If this summer Pauline and I have seemed to run
away from people...."
"Oh, but you have," Margaret interrupted. "I don't think I should find
excuses, if I were you, for perhaps it's natural."
"I've fancied very often," he said, "that you've thought we were
behaving selfishly."
"I think all lovers are selfish," she answered. "Only in your case you
began in such an idyllic way that I thought you were going to be a
wonderful exception. Guy, I do most dreadfully want you not to spoil in
any way the perfectly beautiful thing that Pauline and you in love is.
You won't, will you?"
"Have I yet?" asked Guy in rather a dismayed voice.
"Do you want me to be frank? Yes, of course you do, and anyway I must be
frank," said Margaret. "Well, sometimes you have--I don't mean in
wanting always to be alone or in asking her in to Plashers Mead to say
good-night. No, I don't mean in those ways so much. Of course they make
me feel a little sad, but smaller things than that make me more uneasy."
"You mean," said Guy as she paused, "my staying on here and apparently
doing nothing? But, Margaret, really I can't leave Pauline to be a
schoolmaster, and surely you of all people can understand that?"
"Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of that," said Margaret. "I think in fact
you're right to stay here and keep at what you're trying to do. If it
was ever worth doing, it must be doubly worth doing now. Oh, no, the
only criticism I shall make is of something so small that you'll wonder
how I can think it even worth mentioning. Guy, you know the photograph
of Pauline which Mother used to have and which she gave you?"
Guy nodded.
"Well, I happened to see it on the table by your bunk, and I wonder why
you've taken it out of its simple little wooden frame and put it in a
silver one?"
Guy was taken aback, and when he asked himself why he had done this, he
could not find a reason. Now that Margaret had spoken of it, the
consciousness of the exchange flooded him with shame as for an
unforgivable piece of vandalism. Why indeed had he bought that silver
frame and put the old wooden frame away, and where was the old wooden
frame? In one of the drawers in his desk, he thought; resolving this
very night to restore it to the photograph and fling the usurper into
the river.
"I can't think why I did," he stammered to Margaret.
"You've no idea how much this has worried me," she said. "I never had
any doubts about your appreciation of Pauline."
"And now you have," said Guy, biting his lip with mortification.
The landscape fading from the stern of the barge oppressed him with the
sadness of irreparable acts that are committed heedlessly, but after
which nothing is ever quite the same. He wished he could tear to pieces
that silver frame.
"No, I won't have any doubts," said Margaret, offering him her hand
again and smiling. "You've taken my criticism so sweetly that the change
can't symbolize so much as I feared."
It was very well to be forgiven like this, Guy thought, but the memory
of his blunder was still hot upon his cheek and he felt a deep
humiliation at the treachery of his taste. He had meant, when he came
here to talk to Margaret, to ask her about herself and Richard, to
display a captivating sympathy and restore to their pristine affection
her relations with him, which latterly had seemed to diverge somewhat
from one another. Now haunted by that silver frame, which with every
moment of thought appeared more and more insistently the vile
stationer's gewgaw that it was, Guy did not dare to approach Margaret in
the security of an old intimacy.
It was she, however, with her grace who healed the wound.
"You're not hurt with me for speaking about that little thing?" she
asked. "You see, you are in a way my brother."
"Margaret, you are a dear!"
And then recurred to him as if from Ladingford Manor the lines of
Christina Rossetti, which he half whispered to her:
_For there is no friend like a sister_
_In calm or stormy weather;_
_To cheer one if one goes astray,_
_To lift one if one totters down,_
_To strengthen whilst one stands._
They had the sharper emotion for Guy because he had neither brothers nor
sisters of his own; and that this lovely girl beside him on this
dreaming barge should be his sister gave to the landscape one more
incommunicable beauty.
And so all day they glided down the young Thames; and when Guy had sat
long enough with Margaret in the stern, he sat with Pauline at the prow;
and about twilight they reached Oxford, whence they came to Shipcot by
train and drove through five miles of moonlight back to Wychford.
_August_
Pauline and Guy with their formal engagement in sight were careful to
give no excuse for a postponement by abusing their privileges. The river
was now much overgrown with weeds, and in the last week of July rough
weather set in which kept them in the Rectory a good deal on the
occasions when they met. Guy too was harder at work than he had been all
the Summer. The fact of being presently engaged in the eyes of the world
was sufficiently exciting for Pauline to console her for the shorter
time spent with Guy. Moreover she was so grateful to her family for not
opposing the publication of the engagement that she tried particularly
to impress them with the sameness of herself, notwithstanding her being
in love with Guy. It happened therefore that the old manner of existence
at the Rectory reasserted itself for a while; the music in the evenings,
the mornings in the garden, everything indeed that could make the family
suppose that she was set securely in the heart of their united life.
"When you and Margaret marry," Monica announced, one afternoon when the
three sisters were in their nursery, "I really think I shall become a
nun."
"But we can't all leave Father and Mother," Pauline exclaimed shocked at
the deserted prospect.
"Now isn't that like people in love?" said Monica.
"Ah, but anyway I shall only be living at Plashers Mead," Pauline went
on. "So they won't be left entirely alone."
"And as I probably shan't ever make up my mind to be married," Margaret
added, "and as I've yet to meet the Mother Superior whom Monica could
stand for more than a week it seems probable that everything at the
Rectory will go on pretty much the same."
"Margaret, you will marry. I can't think why you talk like that. If you
don't intend to marry Richard, you ought to tell him so now, and not
keep him any longer in uncertainty."
Pauline realized that Margaret did not like this direct attack, but it
was so rarely that Margaret made it possible even to allude to Richard
that she had to take the opportunity.
"I don't think I've interfered much with you and Guy," said Margaret.
"Is it necessary that you should settle my affairs?"
"Oh, don't speak so unkindly to me, Margaret. I'm not trying to
interfere. And anyway you do criticize Guy and me. Both you and Monica
criticize us."
"Only when you tell us we don't understand about love."
"Well, you don't."
"All of us don't want to be in love quite so obviously as you," said
Margaret. "And Monica agrees with me."
Monica nodded.
"Well, it's my character," said Pauline. "I always knew that when I did
fall in love, I should fall dreadfully deep in love. I don't want to be
thinking all the while about my personal dignity. I adore Guy. Why
shouldn't I show it? Margaret loves Richard, but simply because she's so
self-conscious she can't bear to show it. You call me morbid, Margaret,
but I call you much more morbid than me."
Yet, though she resented them at the time, Margaret and Monica's
continual demands for Pauline to be vigilant over her impulsiveness had
an effect; and during all the month before they were engaged she tried
when she was with Guy to acquire a little of the attitude her sisters
desired. Circumstances by keeping them for a good deal of the time at
the Rectory made this easy; and Guy exalted by the notion of the formal
troth never made it difficult.
Pauline tried to recapture more of the old interests of life at
Wychford, and she was particularly attentive to Miss Verney, going often
to see her in the little house at the top of the hill and sitting with
her in the oblong garden whenever the August sun showed itself.
"I'm sure I'm sorry it's going to be a protracted engagement," said Miss
Verney. "They are apt to place a great strain upon people. I'm sure when
I read in The Times all about people's wills, though I always feel a
trifle vulgar and inquisitive when I do so, I often say to myself 'Well,
really, it seems a pity that some people should have so much more money
than is quite necessary.' Only yesterday evening I read of a gentleman
called Somethingheim who left L507,106 14s. and some odd pence, and
really, I thought to myself, how much nicer it would have looked without
the seven thousand one hundred and six pounds fourteen shillings and odd
pence. And really I had quite a fanciful time imagining that I received
a letter presenting it to me on account of some services my father
rendered at Sebastopol, which at the time were overlooked. Seven
thousand pounds I thought I would present to you and Mr. Guy Hazlewood,
if you would allow me; a hundred pounds to the church; six pounds I had
the idea of devoting to the garden; and the fourteen shillings and
sevenpence, I remember now it was sevenpence, I thought would make such
a pleasant surprize for my servant Mabel, who is really a most
good-hearted girl, tactful with the cats and not too fond of young men."
"How sweet of you, Miss Verney, to think of such a nice present," said
Pauline, who as she watched the old maid's grave air of patronage began
almost to believe that the money had been given to her.
"No, indeed, don't thank me at all, for I cannot imagine anything that
would give me such true pleasure. Let me see. Seven thousand pounds at
four per cent, which I think is as much as you could expect to get
safely. That's seventy times four--L280 a year."
"And Guy has some money--L150 or L115 or it may be only L50."
"Let us call it a hundred pounds," said Miss Verney. "For it would be
more prudent not to exaggerate. L380 a year. And I've no doubt the
Rector on his side would be able to manage twenty pounds. L400 a year.
Surely a very nice little sum on which to marry. Oh, certainly quite a
pleasant little sum."
"Only the gentleman hasn't given you the seven thousand pounds," said
Pauline.
"No, exactly, he has not. That's just where it is," Miss Verney agreed.
"But even if he hasn't," said Pauline, springing up and kissing her,
"that doesn't prevent your being my dear Miss Verney; and so, thank you
seven times for every pound you were going to give me."
"My dear child, it would be, as I believe I remarked, a pleasure. I have
the greatest dread of long engagements. My own, you know, lasted five
years; and at the end of the time a misunderstanding arose with my
father, who being a sailor had a hasty temper. This very
misunderstanding arose over money. I'm sure the person who invented
money was a great curse to the world, and deserved to be pecked at by
that uncomfortable eagle much more than that poor fellow Prometheus of
whom I was reading in a mythology book that was given to me as a prize
for spelling and which I came across last night in an old trunk. My
father declared that William ... his name, I believe I've never told you
his name, his name was William Bankes spelt with an E. Now, my own being
Daisy after the ship which my father commanded at the moment when my
poor mother ... when in fact I was born, my own name being Daisy, I was
always a little doubtful as to whether people would laugh at the
conjunction with Bankes, but being spelt with an E, I daresay it
wouldn't have been uncomfortably remarked upon. My father said that
William had deceived him about some money. Well, whatever it was,
William broke off our engagement; and though all his presents were
returned to him and all his letters, the miniature fell out of my hand
when I was wrapping it up. I think I must have been a little upset at
the moment, for I am not usually careless with any kind of ornament. And
when I picked it up, it was so cracked that I could scarcely bring
myself to return it, feeling in a way ashamed of my carelessness and
also wishing to keep something of William's by me. I have often blamed
myself for doing this, and no doubt if the incident had occurred now
when I am older, I should have acted more properly. However, at the time
I was only twenty-four: so possibly there was a little excuse for what I
did."
Miss Verney stopped and stared out of her window: all about the room the
cats were purring in the sunbeams: Pauline had a dozen plans racing
through her mind for finding William and bringing him back like Peter in
Mrs. Gaskell's book. She was just half-way up the hill with fluttering
heart, longing to see Miss Verney's joy at the return of her William ...
when tea tinkled in and the dream vanished.
When Pauline told Guy about Miss Verney's seven thousand pounds he was
rather annoyed and said he was sorry that he and she were already an
object of charity in Wychford.
"Oh, Guy," she protested, "you mustn't take poor Miss Verney too
seriously; but it was so sweet of her to want to set us up with an
income."
"Besides I _have_ got a hundred and fifty," said Guy.
"Oh, Guy dear, don't look so cross. Please don't be cross and dreadfully
in earnest about anything so stupid as money."
"I feel everybody will be pitying you for becoming engaged to a
penniless pretender like me," he sighed.
"Don't be so stupid, Guy. If they pity anybody, they'll pity you for
having a wife so utterly vague about practical things as I am. But I
won't be, Guy, when we're married."
"Oh, my own, I wish we were married now. God! I wish, I wish we were!"
He had clasped her to him, and she drew away. Guy begged her pardon for
swearing: but really she had drawn away because his eyes were so bright
and wild that she was momentarily afraid of him.
August kept wet and stormy; but on the nineteenth, the day before Guy's
birthday and the vigil of their betrothal, the sun came out with the
fierceness of late Summer. Pauline went with Margaret and Monica for a
walk in the cornfields, because she and Guy, although it was one of
their trysting days, had each resolved to keep it strictly empty of the
other's company, so that after a kind of fast they should meet on the
great day itself with a deeper welcome. Pauline made a wreath of poppies
for Margaret and for Monica a wreath of cornflowers; but her sisters
could find no flower that became Pauline on this vigil, nor did she
mind, for to-morrow was beckoning to her across the wheat and she gladly
went ungarlanded.
"I wonder why I feel as if this were our last walk together," said
Margaret.
"Oh, Margaret, how can you say a horrid thing like that," Pauline
exclaimed; and to-morrow drooped before her in the dusty path.
"No, darling, it's not horrid. But, oh, you don't know how much I mind
that in a way the Rectory as it always has been will no longer be the
Rectory."
Pauline vowed she would go home, not caring on whose wheat she trampled,
if Margaret talked any more like that.
"I can't think why you want to make me sad," she protested. "What
difference after all will this announcement of our engagement bring? I
shall wear a ring, that's all!"
"But everybody will know you belong to Guy," said Margaret, "instead of
to all of us."
"Oh, my dears, my dears," Pauline vowed. "I shall always belong to you
as well. Don't make me feel unhappy."
"You don't really feel unhappy," said Monica in her wise way. "Because
every morning I can hear you singing to yourself long before you ought
to be awake."
Then her sisters kissed her, and through the golden cornfields they
walked silently home.
When Pauline was in bed that night her mother lingered after Margaret
and Monica had left her room.
"Are you glad, darling, you are going to give Guy such a charming
birthday present to-morrow?" she asked.
"It's your present," said Pauline. "Because I couldn't possibly give
myself unless you wanted me to. You know that, don't you, Mother? You do
know that, don't you?"
"I want you to be my happy Pauline," her mother whispered. "And I think
that with Guy you will be my happy Pauline."
"Oh, Mother, I shall, I shall. I love him so. Mother, what about Father?
He simply won't say anything to me. To-day I helped him with
transplanting, and I've been helping a lot lately ... with the daffodil
bulbs when we came back from Ladingford, and all sorts of things. But he
simply won't say a word."
"Francis is always like that," her mother replied. "Even when he first
was in love with me. Really, he never proposed ... we somehow got
married. I think the best thing will be for you and Guy to go up to his
room after lunch to-morrow, before he goes out in the garden; then you
can show him your ring."
"Oh, Mother, tell me what ring it is that Guy has found for me."
"It's charming ... charming ... charming," said her mother
enthusiastically.
"Oh, I won't ask, but I'm longing to see it. Mother, what do you think
it will be? Oh, but you know, so I mustn't ask you to guess. Oh, I do
hope Margaret and Monica will like it."
"It's charming ... charming ... and now go to sleep."
Her mother kissed her good-night and when she was gone, Pauline took
from under her pillow the crystal ring.
"However nice the new one is," she said, "I shall always love you best,
you secret ring."
Then she got out of bed and took from her desk the manuscript book bound
with a Siennese end-paper of shepherds and shepherdesses and rosy
bowers, that was to be her birthday present to him.
"What poetry will he write in you about me, you funny empty book?" she
asked, and inscribed it:
_For Guy with all of his Pauline's love._
The book was left open for the roaming letters to dry themselves without
a smudge, because there was never any blotting-paper in this desk that
was littered with childish things. Then Pauline went to the window; but
a gusty wind of late Summer was rustling the leaves and she could not
stay dreaming on the night as in May she had dreamed. There was
something faintly disquieting about this hollow wind which was like an
envoy threatening the trees with the furious winter to come, and Pauline
shivered.
"Summer will soon be gone," she whispered, "but nowadays it doesn't
matter, because all days will be happy."
On this thought she fell asleep, and woke to a sunny morning, though the
sky was a turbid blue across which swollen clouds were steadily moving.
She lay watchful, wondering if this quiet time of six o'clock would hold
the best of Guy's birthday and if by eight o'clock the sky would not be
quite grey. It was a pity she and Guy had not arranged to meet early, so
that before the day was spoiled they should have possessed themselves of
its prime. Pauline could no longer stay in bed with this sunlight, the
lucid shadows of which caught from the wistaria leaves were flickering
all about the room. She must go to the window and salute his birthday.
Suddenly she recalled something Guy had once said of how he pictured her
always moving round her room in the morning like a small white cloud.
Blushful at the intimacy of the thought she looked at herself in the
glass.
"You're his. You're his," she whispered to her image. "Are you a white
goose as Margaret said you were? Or are you the least bit like a cloud?"
Guy came and knelt by her in church that morning, and she took his
action as the sign he offered to the world of holding her now openly. In
the great church they were kneeling; rose-fired both of them by the
crimson gowns of the high saints along the clerestory; and then Guy
slipped upon her finger the new ring he had bought for their engagement,
a pink topaz set in the old fashion, which burned there like the heart
of the rosy fire in which they knelt suffused.
Breakfast was to be in the garden, as all Rectory birthdays were except
Monica's which fell in January; and since the day had ripened to a kind
of sweet sultriness as of a pear that has hung too long upon a wall, it
was grateful to sit in the shade of the weeping-willow by the side of
the lily-pond. To each floating cup, tawny or damasked white or deepest
cramoisy, the Rector called their attention. Nymphaeas they were to
him, fountain divinities that one after the other he flattered with
courteous praise. When Guy had been given all his presents, Pauline saw
her father put a hand in his coat and pull out a small book.
"Father has remembered Guy's birthday," she cried clapping her hands.
"Now I do call that wonderful. Francis, you're wonderful. You're really
wonderful."
"Pauline, Pauline, don't get too excited," her mother begged. "And
please don't call your father Francis in the garden."
"Propertius," Guy murmured, shyly opening the book; but when he was
going to say something about that Roman lover to the Rector, the Rector
had vanished.
After breakfast Pauline and Guy walked in the inner wall-garden that was
now brilliant with ten thousand deep-throated gladioli.
"Pauline," said Guy, "this morning I learnt Milton's sonnet on his
twenty-third birthday, and I feel rather worried. Listen,
_How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,_
_Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!_
_My hasting days fly on with full career,_
_But my late Spring no bud or blossom shew'th._
Well, now, if Milton felt like that," he sighed, "what about me?
Pauline, tell me again that you believe in me."
"Of course I believe in you," she vowed.
"And I am right to stay here?" he asked eagerly.
"Oh, Guy, of course, of course."
"You see, I shall be writing to my father to-night to tell him of our
engagement, and I don't want to feel you have the least doubt of me. You
haven't, have you? Never? Never? There must never have been the
slightest doubt, or I shall doubt."
"Dearest Guy," she said, "if you changed anything for me, our love
wouldn't be the best thing for you, and I only want my love to be my
love, if it is the love you want, Guy. I'm not clever; you know. I'm
really stupid, but I can love. Oh, I can love you more than anyone, I
think. I know, I know I can. Guy, I do adore you. But if I felt you were
thinking you ought to go away on account of me, I would have to give you
up."
"You couldn't give me up," he proclaimed, holding her straight before
him with looks that were hungry for one word or one gesture that could
help him to tell her what he wanted to say.
"Does my love worry you?" she whispered, faint with all the
responsibility she felt for the future of this lover of hers.
"Pauline, my love for you is my life."
But quickly they glided away from passion to discuss projects of simple
happiness; and walking together a long while under the trees beyond the
wall-garden, they were surprized to hear the gong sound for lunch before
they had finished the decoration of Plashers Mead as it should be for
their wedding-tide. Back in the sunlight, they were dazzled by the
savage colour of the gladioli in the hot August noon and found them
rather gaudy after the fronded half-light where nothing had disturbed
the outspread vision of a future triumphantly attainable.
After lunch her mother called Pauline aside and told her that now was
the moment to impress the Rector with the fact of her engagement. The
tradition was that her father went up to his library for half-an-hour
every day in order to rest after lunch before he sallied out into the
garden or the parish. As usual his rest was consisting of standing on a
chair and dragging down old numbers of The Botanical Magazine or heavy
volumes of The Garden in order to search out a fact in connection with
some plant. When Pauline and Guy presented themselves the Rector gave
them a cordial invitation to enter, and Pauline fancied that he was
being quite exceptionally kindly in his tone toward Guy.
"Well, and what can I do for you two?" he asked, as he lit his long clay
pipe and sat upright in his old leather armchair to regard them.
"Father," said Pauline coming straight to the heart of her subject.
"Have you seen my engagement ring?"
She offered him the pink topaz to admire, and he bowed his head,
conveying that faint mockery with which he treated anything that was not
a flower.
"Very fine. Very fine, my dear."
"Well, aren't you going to congratulate me?" Pauline asked.
"On what?"
"Oh, Father, you are naughty. On Guy of course."
"Bless my heart," said the Rector. "And on what am I to congratulate
him?"
"On me of course," said Pauline.
"Now, I wonder if I can honestly do that," said the Rector very
seriously.
"Father, you do realize, don't you, because you are being so naughty,
but you do realize that from to-day we are really engaged?"
"Only from to-day?" the Rector asked, a twinkle in his eye.
"Well, of course," Pauline explained. "We've been in love for very
nearly a year."
"And when have you decided to get married?"
Pauline looked at Guy.
"We thought in about two years, Sir," said Guy. "That is, of course, as
soon as I've published my first book. Perhaps in a year really."
"Just when you find it convenient in fact," said the Rector still
twinkling.
"Well, Father," Pauline interrupted, "have we got your permission?
Because that's what we've come up to ask."
"You surprize me," said the Rector, starting back with an exaggerated
look of astonishment such as one might use with children.
"Father, if you won't be serious about it, I shall be very much hurt."
"I am very serious indeed about it," said the Rector. "And supposing I
said I wouldn't hear of any such thing as an engagement between you two
young creatures, what would you say then?"
"Oh, I should never forgive you," Pauline declared. "Besides we're not
young. Guy is twenty-three."
"Now I thought he was at least fifty," said the Rector.
"Father, we shall have to go away if you won't be serious. Mother told
us to explain to you and I think it's really unkind of you to laugh at
us."
The Rector rose and knocked his pipe out.
"I must finish off the perennials. Well, well, Pauline, my dear, you're
twenty-one...."
Pauline would have liked to let him go on thinking she was of age, but
she could not on this solemn occasion, and so she told him that she was
still only twenty.
"Ah, that makes a difference," said the Rector pretending to look very
fierce. And when Pauline's face fell, he added with a chuckle, "of one
year. Well, well, I fancy you've both arranged everything. What is there
left for me to say? You mustn't forget to show Guy those Nerines. God
bless you, pretty babies, be happy."
Then the Rector walked quickly away, and left them together in his dusty
library where the botanical folios and quartos displaying tropic blooms
sprawled open about the floor, where along the mantelpiece the rhizomes
of Oncocyclus irises were being dried; and where seeds were strewn
plenteously on his desk, rattling among the papers whenever the wind
blew.
"Guy, we are really engaged."
"Pauline, Pauline!"
In the dusty room among the ghosts of dead seasons and the mouldering
store amassed by the suns of other years, they stood locked, heart to
heart.
Before Guy went home that night, when they were lingering in the hall,
he told Pauline that the next thing to be done was to write to his own
father.
"Guy, do you think he'll like me?"
"Why, how could he help it? But he may grumble at the idea of my being
engaged."
"When do you think he'll write?"
"I expect he'll come down here to see me. In the Spring he wrote and
said he would."
"Guy, I'm sure he's going to make it difficult for you."
Guy shook his head.
"I know how to manage him," he proclaimed confidently.
Then he opened the door; along the drive the wind moaned, getting up for
a gusty Bartlemy-tide.
Pauline stood in the lighted doorway letting the light shine upon him
until he was lost in the shadows of the tall trees, sending, as he
vanished, one more kiss down the wind to her.
"Are you happy to-night?" asked her mother, bending over Pauline when
she was in bed.
"Oh, Mother darling, I'm so happy that I can't tell you how happy I am."
In the candlelight her new ring sparkled; and when her mother was gone
she put beside it the crystal ring, and it seemed to sparkle still more.
Pauline was in such a mood of tenderness to everything that she petted
even her pillow with a kind of affection and she had the contentment of
knowing she was going to meet sleep as if it were a great benignant
figure that was bending to hear her tale of happy love.