'Where, sir.'
'Anywhere you jolly well like so long as it's far enough. I'm going to
take my only daughter for a last walk in the woods. Of course, if you
thought it worth while to be at the park gates at ten-thirty to say
good-night I might----'
'If you could make it twenty to eleven I could bear it better,' said
Michael, 'it would be ten minutes less----'
'Ten-thirty is _the_ very latest, Michael. An hour is as much as I can
stand of her myself,' said father firmly, shoving him out into the hall.
'Oh, daddy,' I giggled, as we wandered out into the summer night, 'I
haven't laughed so much for years. _Who_ is Porky, and why and when did
you bet him ten bob?'
'He was my fag at Eton, Meg, and I bet him ten bob he'd never be a
Bishop.'
'Have you paid him yet?'
'I've given him six and tenpence on account, little 'un. Why, he's only
a colonial.'
'Oh, daddy! you really are a poppet; you're much too nice to be a
parson; whatever made you want to go into the Church?'
'I didn't want to, Meg. He made me.'
'What, that man, the Bishop of Ligeria?'
'No, _The Man_, the Bishop of my soul, darling.'
'Oh, father!'
'Didn't you know that I was once going into the army, Meg? It seemed to
me then, as now, the only conceivable thing to do, as the Fotheringhams
have always been soldiers. But I found that HE had other views about
it, and I had to chuck it up at the last minute. My father was so
furious with me that he chucked me out.'
'Oh, daddy!'
'And I have felt lately that there is something else I am required to
do, and I don't want to do it. Sometimes I think that this pleasant
Devonshire life is not the one to which I am to be allowed to 'settle
down.'
'And yet you like Him, father?'
'And yet I "like Him," Meg, but, oh, I really don't think I can let you
be married in the morning. I shall have to get Porky to say the bit of
the service that really matters, for I shall be tempted to leave it
out.'
And although father laughed as he said it, yet, from the struggle in his
face, I seemed to understand suddenly that my marriage was for him only
another 'bit of harness' which had been 'hewn' away. But why?'
Then Michael met me at the gate at half-past ten.
'There's a little cottage high up on a Cornish cliff, Meg.'
'How interesting,' I said.
'It's rather a sweet place for a day or two.'
'Oh, really?'
'And after that a bit of sea, which will be smooth'--(but _will_
it?)--'and a long journey, till we come to a little village where two
men will be sitting on a wall waiting for me, _and then_ the mountains
for my honeymoon, my Paradiso!'
You see, I am to have a quite unusual wedding tour. There is to be no
dallying with love beside a rippling and sequestered waterfall, alone
with Michael, who, at intervals, would strain me to his heart. _No_,
there will always be those two young men with us who are going to strain
my muscles all the time. I am going up a 'chimney' for my honeymoon. I
have had an ice-axe for a wedding present and a most amazing pair of
boots If I love and honour Michael, and obey him and the other two young
men, I may _even_ go up the wrong side of a mountain some day! 'It all
depends!'
Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by
the gate, but Michael's _then_ unveiled my eyes. I understood all in a
moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The
mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men--his bride. The cottage
and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?--less than the rust that
never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook's tour (personally
conducted) to his bride--his two young men--his mountains--his
honeymoon--his Paradiso.
But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before
their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook's
tour!
'All is over, Captain Ellsley.'
'No, it has not yet begun, Meg.'
'Oh, Michael! Oh, _please_, Michael.'
'And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of
your own accord, just once, my darling?'
And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this
hour to-morrow I shall have more 'experience,' I shall be linked up with
all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny
Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and
Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn't he content to love his
Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the
poorer. He might not have written his _Inferno_ or said:--
'My wife
Of savage temper, more than aught beside
Hath to this evil brought me.'
What?
Oh, yes, I know he didn't actually say it of himself, but his own
domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I will _not_ be reproved for
ignorance of Dante by--the General Public.