'The garden is very sweet to-night, won't you come out with me?'
It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the
right to go since he had asked it.
Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in
India--of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of
it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to
climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year
after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous
simplicity of the life of this man whose face had 'fixed me.'
And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that
once in a London church he had seen 'a girl's face like a cameo, cut in
the grayness of the wall behind.'
'I loved you then,' he said, 'I loved you in the woods that day--I love
you now.'
And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman--out in the warm
darkness with a man she'd hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget
that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected
my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little
barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that 'I must go in now, but
that I had been so interested in all he'd told me of his life in India,
that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.' And as I
turned to go out of the garden I added airily, 'Write? Oh, yes, perhaps
I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When
he came home again in three years' time on leave we might even meet
again. Perhaps--perhaps----'
But there were primal instincts at work that night out in the scented
garden, and this gentleman, in conventional evening dress, suddenly
reverted to the caveman who had seen his woman and quite definitely
meant to have her. So with a certain ruthlessness that I discovered
afterwards was typical of the man, he refused to let me go, but stormed
the fortress of my heart with most exceeding suddenness. He brushed
aside all my objections and the words and sentences chosen with such
care, knocked down my carefully erected barriers and swept me off my
feet, and swamped and drowned and deluged me in love, and with 'What
does all that matter? You belong to me,' he took me in his arms and
kissed me with a kiss that thrilled while it subdued me.
It seemed as if I had been with him in some dim, past age and then had
somehow lost him, and had been restless ever since, striving to find
what I had lost, and yet had been unconscious of the thing I sought
until I found it, in a moment, in his arms.
As father and I went home I spoke to him with subtlety and with guile.
'Daddy, how old was mother when you married her?'
'Eighteen. Why, darling?'
'Just my age now.'
'Oh, nonsense, Meg, I quite decline to have a grown up daughter, you're
only eight!'
'Have you ever felt it was too young for her to marry.'
'Never,' said father with great vigour, 'it was just the right age.'
'Do you believe in love at first sight, daddy?'
'Why, yes, I think I do in some cases. I loved your mother the moment I
saw her, and then there's your friend Dante, little 'un, and----'
'Then, father, may I marry Captain Ellsley, please?'
But my father was not consistent, neither was he humble. He behaved
like a man who not only desired the office of a Bishop, but was actually
a whole bench of them at that moment, and intended therefore to 'have
his children in subjection with all gravity.' He said he'd never in all
his life heard anything quite so preposterous, he'd hardly seen the
hulking chap (we do not see ourselves as others see us. Michael is an
inch and a half shorter than father), never even noticed if he ate with
his knife or not, so was it likely that----'
'But, father, Dante----'
'Yes, but he didn't marry the girl, as you've often said, Meg.'
Thus did I fall into my own pit, and in the net which I had spread for
another were my own feet taken. The Bench of Bishops preferred not to
discuss the subject further, so I went upstairs to bed in utter
desolation, because I couldn't give up Michael even though father was so
displeased with me.
But when he came upstairs ages afterwards he scratched on my door and
said,--
'Are you Meg?'
'Oh, daddy, of course I am.'
He came in then. 'How many?' he asked.
'Four.'
'Oh, darling! never in all the years do I remember any tragedy that took
more than three, even when you were so worried about "Adam-and-Eve's"
family!'
He was sweet to me then, and took away my four little wet handkerchiefs
and gave me his big dry one, and gathered me in his arms and said,--
'We can't have two rows in one family, Meg. Tell me about it, darling.'
So I told him.
'Oh, Meg,' he said when I had done, 'so love, that very perfect thing,
has really come to you, my little girl, but, oh, why do you choose a man
who will want to take you away to India, my darling?'
And then father made one of those strange remarks that he does sometimes
which I can't understand.
'My harness piece by piece He has hewn from me.'
'What _do_ you mean, daddy.'
'Perhaps I'll tell you some day, little 'un,' and he sighed and kissed
me and said he would at any rate see Michael in the morning. So I felt
more cheered. As he got up to go I thought how wonderful it is to love,
so I said,--
'Daddy, what is it that makes me now understand all the lovers of the
world? Jacob and Rachel, Elizabeth and Robert, even Dante----'
'Why, experience, darling,' father said, and came back and kissed me
again, smiling with faint amusement.
When he'd gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and
saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time
were still waiting in the garden--waiting for Michael. In the bright
moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen
before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow
tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing
them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken's curl
papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a
little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down
the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.
'How people can expect me to make scent,' she said, 'with no flowers.
Ah, this is better,' and she looked round the garden with great
satisfaction. 'I remember now, this one's always nice.' Then she began
to gather flowers and somehow I didn't mind a bit, though usually I
should very much object if some unauthorised person came into the garden
unbidden. She pulled bits of lilac and a great deal of honeysuckle,
some bluebells, and an armful of wallflowers, lilies of the valley, and
such a lot of primroses, and threw them into a still, which I never
remember noticing in the garden before. Then she damped them with
dewdrops and threw in more flowers--daffodils and gorse-blooms (the
thorns didn't prick her fingers, though her hands were very white and
soft.) Then more primroses and a few late violets, honeysuckle, and
bluebells. She added just a wisp of wood smoke, too, from a bonfire and
some damp earth and a shower of rain, and stirred the mixture with a
sunbeam. She laughed softly and her voice sounded like a faint breeze
rippling over the tree tops. Then she walked, or perhaps she floated,
round the garden, and on every bush and tree she scattered little
showers and sprays of scent, so that I could smell not just one thing
like lilac or bluebell, but a delicious harmony of flowers, wet earth,
and rain. She looked up at me as she went out of the garden and
laughed.
'It will last till he comes in the morning.'
And I smiled back because I loved that dear Dame Nature. When Nannie
came to wake me she said,--
'How sweet the garden smells. Hasn't the laburnum and clematis come out
in the night? I suppose it's the rain, Meg.'
But I knew better!
Then Michael came, prepared, I think, to interview a Bench of Bishops,
but found--my father--who remarked later in the day,--
'Well, he doesn't eat with his knife, Meg, and he--um--seems to know his
own mind, too. I don't think that "gentle knight" would have desired to
go into a Monastery if his ladye had refused him the first time he asked
her.'
Now how on earth did father guess that?
And I smiled to myself as I wondered if 'you belong to me' could
conceivably be considered by a Bench of Bishops as the speech of a
gentle knight 'asking' his ladye.
When I told Ross that I was going to marry Captain Ellsley in the
summer, he said coldly,--
'Never heard of the chap.'
'But,' I said, 'you must have heard of him, he's----'
'You don't mean _the_ Ellsley; that man that climbs in the Himalayas?'
'Yes, I do, Ross.'
'My hat,' he exclaimed, 'why he might have married anybody,' and then he
stared at me as if he had suddenly seen me in quite a new light and put
an arm round me and called me 'Jonathan' and said,--
'Oh, Meg, I'll have to change into the Indian Army so that I can murder
him if he isn't good to you!'