'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle,
When every little bird shall be a Cupid,
And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blows
And curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights,
The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks,
And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses;
Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures,
And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'
The shadows have put on their evening length. Even Minky, as he stands
with his little face pushed through the bars of his gate, barking at the
servants as they return from church--a mere civility on his part, an
asking them, as it were, how they enjoyed the sermon--boasts one that
would not disgrace a greyhound or a giraffe.
'Are you there, Prue?' softly asks a voice, coming out of the darkening
green world outside; coming with an atmosphere of freshness, of dew, of
hawthorn, into the little hall, and peering toward the fireside-settle,
which, both from the waning light and its own position, hints but dimly
that it has an occupant. 'Are you asleep?'
'I do not know,' replies a disconsolate small treble. 'I tried to go to
sleep, to get over some of the time. Oh dear, what a long Sunday it has
been! Is he gone?' struggling up into a sitting posture out of her
enveloping shawls.
'Yes.'
'And you did not sit under our tree?'
'No.'
'How laconic you are!' cries Prue fretfully; 'and I have not exchanged
words with a creature since luncheon. Do come here; turn your face to
the light. What have you and Mr. Talbot been talking of for the last
four hours? John Talbot, as those horrid children call him. I think it
is so impertinent of them; but I suppose their mother taught them.'
A slight contraction passes over the radiant, dewy face, so docilely
turned towards the western shining.
'Peggy!' cries the younger girl in an altered tone, forgetting her
invalidhood, and springing off the settle; 'how odd you look! You do not
mean to say--is it possible? You do not suppose that I do not see--that
you can hide anything from me!'
'There is nothing that I want to hide,' replies Peggy with dignity,
though the blood careers under the pure skin to cheek, and brow, and
lily throat; then, with a sudden change of tone to utmost tender
deprecation, 'Oh, Prue, you do not mind? You are not vexed? It will not
make any difference to you!'
Prue is silent.
'It will make no difference to you,' repeats Peggy, rather faltering at
the total dumbness in which her tidings are received. 'Of course you
will go on living with me just as you have always done.'
For all answer, Prue bursts into a passion of tears.
'Oh, do not say so!' she cries vehemently. 'You talk as if I never were
going to have a home of my own! Oh, it would be too cruel, too cruel!'
Her sobs arrest her utterance. She has collapsed upon the settle, and
sits there a disconsolate heap, with its hands over its face. Peggy
stands beside her; a sudden coldness slackening the pulsations of her
leaping heart.
'You will not care any longer about him and me,' pursues Prue
weepingly. 'You will have your own affairs to think of. Oh, I never
thought that I should have to give up _you_. It was the last thing that
ever would have entered my head. Whatever happened, I always counted
upon having _you_ to fall back upon!'
The dusk is deepening. Peggy still stands motionless and rigid.
'I know that I am not taking it well,' pursues Prue a minute later,
dropping the fingers wetted with her trickling tears, and wiping her
eyes; while her breath still comes unevenly, interrupted by sobs. 'I
know that I ought to pretend to be glad; but it is so sudden, such a
surprise--he is such a stranger!'
The cold hand at Peggy's heart seems to intensify its chill. Is there
not some truth in her sister's words? Is not he indeed a stranger? Has
not she been too hasty in snatching at the great boon of love that has
been suddenly held out to her--she, whose life has not hitherto been
furnished with over-much of love's sweetness?
'I know that you must think me very selfish,' continues the younger
girl, still with that running commentary of sobs. 'I _am_ selfish,
though he says that I am not--that he never knew any one who had such an
instinct of self-abnegation; but then he always sees the best side of
people. Yes, I _am_ selfish; but I will try to be glad by and by--only,'
with a redoublement of weeping, 'do not expect it of me to-night.'
And, with this not excessive measure of congratulation, poor Peggy has
to be content, on the night of her betrothal. She goes to bed with the
cold hand still at her heart; but in the morning it has gone. Who can
have a cold hand still at her heart when she wakes at early morning at
lilac-tide, to find a little round wren, with tiny tail set on perfectly
upright, singing to her from a swaying bough outside her casement, with
a voice big enough for an ostrich, and to know that a lover is only
waiting for the sun to be well above the meadows to lift the latch of
her garden-gate.
Before the dew is off the grass they have met. It is presumable that
familiarity with her new position will come in time to Peggy; but for
the present she cannot get over the extraordinariness of being--instead
of anxiously watching for some one else's tardy lover--going to meet her
own. And when they have met and greeted, the incredulity, instead of
lessening, deepens. Is it conceivable that it can be _her_ whom any one
is so extravagantly glad to see? All through the day--all through
several after-days--the misty feeling lingers that there must be some
mistake; that it must be some one else; that it cannot be the workaday
Peggy, whom she has always known, who is being thus unbelievably set on
high and done obeisance to.
'Have you told Prue?' asks Talbot, when he has enough got over the
ecstasy of that new morning meeting, to speak connectedly.
'Yes.'
'And what did she say?'
Margaret hesitates a moment.
'She--she was very much upset.'
'Upset!' repeats Talbot, his tone evidencing the revulsion of feeling of
one who had imagined that all Creation must be rejoicing with him. 'What
was there in it to upset her?'
'She said it was such a surprise; she was not at all prepared for it. In
that,' blushing, 'she was like me.'
He is silent. It is a mere speck in his heaven; but he would have liked
Prue to have been glad too.
'She said that you are such a stranger,' continues Peggy, looking
half-shyly up at him, with a sort of light veil of trouble over her
limpid eyes. 'When I come to think of it, so you are; if it were not,'
laughing a little, 'that I am always hearing the children call you by
it, I should not even know what your Christian name was.'
'A stranger!' repeats Talbot, in a rather dashed voice.
'Never mind; you will not be a stranger long,' returns Peggy, laughing.
'She will soon grow used to you; and so' (again with that flitting
blush)--'and so shall I. You must tell me all about yourself,' she goes
on, a few moments later, when, in order to escape from the aggressive
din that Jacob is making with the mowing-machine, as if to assert his
exclusive right to that engine, they have passed beyond the garden
bounds into the green sea of the adjoining park. 'You must begin at the
very beginning; you must tell me _all_.'
Is it his fancy that she lays a slight but perceptible emphasis on that
concluding word, which insists on the entirety of his confession?
Whether it be so, or that the stress exists only in his own imagination,
he winces. They have sat down under a horse-chestnut tree, whose
hundreds of blossom-pyramids point like altar tapers to the fleckless
sky; at their feet the bracken, so tardy to come, so in haste to go, is
beginning to spring and straighten its creases. Far as the eye can
reach, the park's green dips and rises are flushed with the rose and
cream of flowering thorn-bushes.
'Will you?' with a soft persistency.
'Of course I will,' replies Talbot; 'only,' with a laugh that does not
ring quite naturally, 'you do not know what you are bringing upon
yourself. Well, where am I to begin? At the very beginning?'
'At the very beginning,' repeats she, with a sigh of satisfaction,
settling herself more comfortably with her back against the tree-trunk
to listen. 'Tell me where you were born, and,' laughing, 'what sort of a
baby you were.'
And so he begins at the very beginning; and for a while goes on glibly
enough.
There are worse occupations for a summer's morning than to sit on juicy
May grass, with the woman you love beside you; and to read in the
variations of her rapt blue eyes her divine compassion for you. For the
you, the innocent distant you of six, who had the whooping-cough so
badly; her elate pride in the scarcely less distant you of sixteen,
carrying home your school-prizes to your mother; her tearful sympathy
with the nearer you--the you who still ache at the memory of the loss
you sustained when full manhood had given you your utmost capacity for
feeling it. Up to the date of his sister's death he goes on swimmingly;
but with that date there coincides, or almost coincides, another. It was
during the physical collapse that followed that crushing blow that
Betty, with her basket of red roses, had first come tripping into his
life. He stops abruptly.
'Well?' she says expectantly, looking towards him, and wiping the
sympathetic tears from her soft eyes.
'Well!' he repeats, with an uneasy laugh. 'Have not I dosed you with
myself enough for one morning? I--I think that is about all.'
'But that was more than five--nearly six years ago,' objects she.
'Nearly six years ago,' he echoes, in a tone of almost astonishment; 'so
it was. But--but, as I need not tell you, the importance of time is not
measured by its length; there are moments that bring an empire, and
there are years that bring nothing, or less than nothing.'
'They cannot have brought _nothing_,' replies she, her luminous eyes, in
whose pupils he can see himself mirrored in little, still interrogating
his; 'they must have brought _something_, good or bad; they must have
brought something.'
'You know that there has been no change of Ministry since then,' he goes
on, speaking rather fast, and wincing under the steadiness of her look.
'I have been ----'s secretary ever since--a mere machine, a scribbling
machine; and you know that machines have no history.'
She is silent, and her eyes leave his face, as if it were useless any
longer to explore it. She presses him no further. It would be both
ungenerous and bootless to urge him to a confession which he would never
make, and in the effort to evade which he would writhe, as he is doing
now. Her breast heaves in a long slow sigh. There is nothing for it. She
must submit to the fact of the existence for ever, for as long as her
own and his being last, of that five years' abyss between them; an abyss
which, though she may skirt it round, or lightly overskim it, will none
the less ever, _ever_ be there.
There is one subject that, in their moments of closest confidence, must
ever be tabooed to them; one tract of time across which, indeed, they
may stretch their hands, but which their feet can never together tread;
one five years out of the life of him who should be wholly hers, locked
away from her to all eternity. Her hand has fallen absently to fondling
Minky's poor little gray head, no bigger than a rabbit's. Minky, who has
followed them to their love-retreat, and has now come simperingly to
offer them his little cut-and-dried remarks upon the fine day.
Talbot's eye jealously follows that long hand in its stroking movement.
He would like to take it, and lay its palm across his hot lips. Why
should not he? It is his. But that five years' gulf prevents him. A
little milky blossom with its tiny stain of red, wind-loosened, has
floated down from the horse-chestnut tree, and now rests upon her hair.
He would like to brush it off with a kiss. Why should not he? Whose but
his is now all that blonde hair? But again the gulf stretches between
them.
The sun, steadily soaring zenithwards, sends a warm dart through their
tree, which, thick-roofed as it is, is not proof against the vigour of
his May strength. The deer gather for shade under the young-leaved oaks.
The whole earth simmers in the vivifying heat, and yet they both lightly
shiver. Upon Talbot there lies a horrible fancy, as of Betty sitting
between them. It seems to him as though, if he stretched out his arm to
enfold his new love, it would instead enwrap his old one. Is there no
spell by which he can exorcise this persistent vision? Will it always be
between them? He is still putting this bitter question to himself, when
Peggy speaks:
'Well,' she says, stifling the end of a sigh, and without any trace of
resentment in her tone, 'I am very much obliged to you for having told
me all that you have. I know that you are not fond of talking of
yourself, and if--if'--the carnation mounting even to her
forehead--'there is anything in your life that you had rather not tell
me, why we--we will let it alone; we--we will not think of it any more.'
Perhaps her words may contain the spell he has been praying for; since,
in a moment, the Betty phantom has vanished, and his new sweetheart
lies, live and real, in his arms.
'At all events,' she whispers, 'I can contradict Prue, next time that
she says you are such a perfect stranger.'
She smiles as she speaks. How lovely her smile is, when he sees it as
close as he is doing now! It is not perhaps quite so radiant as the one
with which she met him at the gate--but her eyes! He lets himself
drown--drown in those heavenly blue lakes. Why should he ever come to
the surface again?
'There they are, Franky!' cries a piercing little voice, cutting the
summer air from a few hundred yards' distance, 'under that
horse-chestnut tree; how close together they are sitting!'
Another minute has brought the owner of the voice, and of another voice
more lisping and less shrill, up to their eagerly sought, if not quite
so eagerly seeking, friends.
'You are not sitting so close together as you were,' chirps Franky
innocently. 'Mammy used----'
'What do you want? What have you come for?' asks Talbot, in a voice a
good deal rougher than his little _proteges_ are apt to hear from him,
and breaking into the middle of a sentence, whose close he can only
horrifiedly conjecture, before more than its two initial words have had
time to leave its small speaker's lips.
At the extreme and unusual want of welcome in his tone, both children
stand for a moment silenced. Then Lily, with an offended hoist of her
shoulders, turns pointedly to Margaret.
'Nanny says that my tongue is white,' cries she; 'she is always telling
me so. I came to ask you; I thought that you would not mind telling me,'
with an insinuating air, 'if it really is.'
'And is not mine white too?' inquires Franky eagerly, and in a minute
both red tongues are protruded for inspection; and Talbot bursts,
against his will, into a vexed laugh.
It is not always, indeed, to have their tongues looked at; but during
the ensuing days of his courtship Talbot finds that he must hold himself
in continual readiness against onslaughts in unexpected directions from
Miss and Master Harborough, who, finding the little Red House more
amusing than the empty Manor, and being troubled with no doubts as to
their acceptableness, arrive from every point of the compass at each
likeliest and unlikeliest hour of the summer day. The only thing for
which he has to be thankful is that their arrival is generally heralded
by their eager treble voices; so that he has just time to step down out
of his seventh heaven before they are upon him. Perhaps if it were not
for this, and for one or two other slight abatements from its complete
felicity, the tuliped garden, with its lilac breath, its come pansies,
and its coming pinks, would be too like that one when the first he and
she felt the heavenly surprise of their new kisses.
For the children's intrusions are not quite the only cloud in Talbot's
Whitsun sky. It is oftener than once or twice that the phantom of the
past has seated itself between them. It is oftener than once or twice
that he has found Peggy looking at him in a pained astonishment, at his
having suddenly broken off in the middle of some fond phrase. She cannot
know, and he can never tell her, that it is because there has suddenly
flashed upon him the recollection, vivid as reality, of some occasion on
which he had showered the same words of fire upon her who has had
precedence over Peggy in his heart. He would fain cut all such words out
of his vocabulary; employ in this new worship nothing that had been
desecrated by having been offered on the altars of the old. But it is
impossible. He had poured out all his heart's best before the first
love. How then can he have anything fresh for the second? The thought
cuts him like a knife; but none the less, all the more rather--since it
is our knife-thoughts that cling most pertinaciously to us--does it come
back and back again. In return for all the wealth of her fresh
firstfruits, he has nothing to give her but what is stale, threadbare,
sullied. This is a reflection that would sit easily upon most men. If it
were not so, there would be but few unembittered love-makings. But upon
Talbot's palate it is wormwood. And lest there should be any chance of
his escaping from his past, there is always some innocent reminiscence,
allusion, or appeal on the part of Lily or Franky to bring it back to
him.
Prue, too! On the blue of his heaven, Prue forms another little cloud.
Prue makes no pretence of pleasure in the prospect of his brotherhood;
and to Prue he is sacrificed oftener than he thinks just. It is, thanks
to Prue, that he has so often been sent back prematurely to his
pot-house; that he has had prematurely to break off his trance of wonder
at the eyes, the only blackness under which springs from some slight and
fugitive fatigue; at the cheek, which his doubting finger may rub as
hard as it chooses without any other result than that of intensifying
its damask; at the hair, from which he has been allowed once to withdraw
the pins in order to convince himself by ocular demonstration that
though it may come _down_, it can never come _off_.
'I think you had better go now. She has been alone all day,' is a
formula whose recurrence he has now learnt to dread.
He shrugs his shoulders.
'I have been alone for thirty-two years.'
'I think if you would not mind going now----'
'I should mind extremely.'
She laughs softly, the happy low laugh of the consciously well-beloved,
rich in the prospect of a whole lifetime of love ahead.
'Whether you mind it or not, I am afraid you _must_ go. She had been
crying this morning.'
'More shame for her. What has she to cry about? Now if _I_ were to
cry--Peggy, you like her much better than you do me' (taking her half
angrily in his arms). 'Pah!' with a change of tone, perceiving, for the
first time, a gardenia pinned upon the breast of her gown; 'why do you
wear that horrid thing?'
'Franky gave it me. He begged it from the gardener at the Manor for me.'
'Throw it away!' cries Talbot, with more energy than the occasion seems
to warrant. 'I detest the smell. It is like a fungus.'
'It will hurt his feelings if I do.'
'It will hurt mine if you do not,' returns Talbot with emphasis; and
suiting the action to the word, he snatches the blossom almost violently
from her breast, and tosses it away.
She looks at him, her eyes tinged with a faint surprise.
'What a thing it is to have rival admirers!' she says, laughing; and
then she sends him reluctantly away.
If it were a scheme of the most deep-laid coquetry, instead of the
result of a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice, she could not have hit
upon a better method of inflaming his passion. All through the long
light evening, whose yellow at this sweetest season is so late in
changing to night's blue, he prowls about outside her garden-fence,
peering between her lilac-clusters and laburnum-droops for a glint of
her white gown; shaking his fist at Prue's selfish little head, and
counting, through the fevered night, the strokes of the leisurely church
clock as they carry him nearer and nearer to the dewy morning hour, when
he may again hold his red rose of Lancaster in his hungry arms.
And meanwhile his short holiday is racing away. Scarcely has it seemed
to have begun when the end is already at hand. The date of the
reassembling of Parliament, of his chief's return to Downing Street, and
his own consequent reappearance there, looms nearer and nearer.
To return to Downing Street without her! He has been without her all his
life, and until the last six months has never looked upon himself as
particularly an object of commiseration on that score; but _now_ his
whole soul swells with a disgusted self-pity at the idea of his lonely
return to his Bury Street lodgings.
He has extracted from Peggy without much difficulty a promise that his
last evening shall be indeed and wholly his; that for once it shall be
Prue, not he, that goes to the wall; that he shall neither be dismissed
to his public-house, nor left to disconsolate moonings about the
inhospitable roads and fields, until it is time to betake himself to his
truckle-bed; that, on the contrary, he may for once have his fill of her
fair company, that should by rights be always his; may sit, and saunter,
and sweetly stray with her; and at length, when the stars ride high, may
leisurely bid 'God bless her!' at the garden gate, and dismiss her to
dream of him.
But lovers propose, and freakish chance disposes.
Talbot has returned to his inn to dress for dinner, and has jumped into
his dress-clothes, in miserly grudging of the moments stolen from his
final hours. He had left Peggy with eager injunctions to be equally
quick, so that a few more moments may be squeezed out before Sarah, with
her clamorous dinner-bell, breaks, with life's loud prose, into the
whispered poetry of their _tete-a-tete_. And apparently she has been
obedient to his behest, for she is--though he would have thought it
impossible--beforehand with him, and stands awaiting him, with arms
resting on the top of the gate.
But how is this? She has made no change in her dress, but is still in
her morning cotton.
As he draws near to her she stretches out her hand to him deprecatingly.
'I hope you will not be very angry!'
A slight chill of apprehension passes over him.
'But I am sure that I shall,' he answers, with a hasty instinct to ward
off the impending blow. 'What is it? What do you mean? Not,' with an
accent of incredulous indignation, 'Prue again?'
'It is not her fault,' replies Peggy apologetically, and yet defensively
too; 'nobody _enjoys_ being ill. But you know how finely strung she is;
something must have upset her.'
'Something is always upsetting her!' returns Talbot brutally.
'I am afraid she must have taken a chill,' pursues Peggy, wrinkling up
her forehead into anxious lines. 'I am sure I do not know how, but I
think she must; she has had to go to bed.'
The young man's brow clears. If Prue's illness involves only her absence
from the dinner-table, he will not very violently quarrel with it after
all.
'Very wise of her,' he says in a lighter voice; 'the best place for her!
Poor Prue!'
'But----,' begins Peggy, whose brow has not smoothed itself in sympathy
with her lover.
'But what?' inquires he sharply, his apprehensions returning. 'You are
not going to tell me that on my last evening I am to be sacrificed to a
_malade imaginaire_!'
'She is not a _malade imaginaire_,' answers Margaret half indignantly;
'her cheeks are as hot as fire, and her pulse has run up to ninety.'
'I believe she runs it up on purpose. Are you barring the gate for fear
I should force my way in?'
'Oh, no, no!' cries she, hastily dropping her arms from their
resting-place on the top rail, and flinging her portals hospitably wide.
'Come in! come in! how could you dream of such a thing? Do you suppose
that I am going to send you away without your dinner? But after
dinner----'
'After dinner?'
'When she is ill, she likes me to sit beside her, bathing her forehead
and her hands. I have always done it, ever since she was a baby. When
you are ill, I will bathe your forehead and your hands. Oh!' clasping
her fingers soft and fast upon his arm, and looking up with brimful eyes
into his angry face, 'do not look so cross at me! Do not you think that
it is hard enough for me without that?'