He hastened down towards the stables, and she went on as directed. It
seemed as if he must have put in the horse himself, so quickly did he
reappear with the phaeton on the open road. Margery silently took her
seat, and the Baron seemed cut to the quick with self-reproach as he
noticed the listless indifference with which she acted. There was no
doubt that in her heart she had preferred obeying the apparently
important mandate that morning to becoming Jim’s wife; but there was no
less doubt that had the Baron left her alone she would quietly have gone
to the altar.
He drove along furiously, in a cloud of dust. There was much to
contemplate in that peaceful Sunday morning—the windless trees and
fields, the shaking sunlight, the pause in human stir. Yet neither of
them heeded, and thus they drew near to the dairy. His first expressed
intention had been to go indoors with her, but this he abandoned as
impolitic in the highest degree.
‘You may be soon enough,’ he said, springing down, and helping her to
follow. ‘Tell the truth: say you were sent for to receive a wedding
present—that it was a mistake on my part—a mistake on yours; and I think
they’ll forgive . . . And, Margery, my last request to you is this: that
if I send for you again, you do not come. Promise solemnly, my dear
girl, that any such request shall be unheeded.’
Her lips moved, but the promise was not articulated. ‘O, sir, I cannot
promise it!’ she said at last.
‘But you must; your salvation may depend on it!’ he insisted almost
sternly. ‘You don’t know what I am.’
‘Then, sir, I promise,’ she replied. ‘Now leave me to myself, please,
and I’ll go indoors and manage matters.’
He turned the horse and drove away, but only for a little distance. Out
of sight he pulled rein suddenly. ‘Only to go back and propose it to
her, and she’d come!’ he murmured.
He stood up in the phaeton, and by this means he could see over the
hedge. Margery still sat listlessly in the same place; there was not a
lovelier flower in the field. ‘No,’ he said; ‘no, no—never!’ He
reseated himself, and the wheels sped lightly back over the soft dust to
Mount Lodge.
Meanwhile Margery had not moved. If the Baron could dissimulate on the
side of severity she could dissimulate on the side of calm. He did not
know what had been veiled by the quiet promise to manage matters indoors.
Rising at length she first turned away from the house; and, by-and-by,
having apparently forgotten till then that she carried it in her hand,
she opened the case, and looked at the locket. This seemed to give her
courage. She turned, set her face towards the dairy in good earnest, and
though her heart faltered when the gates came in sight, she kept on and
drew near the door.
On the threshold she stood listening. The house was silent. Decorations
were visible in the passage, and also the carefully swept and sanded path
to the gate, which she was to have trodden as a bride; but the sparrows
hopped over it as if it were abandoned; and all appeared to have been
checked at its climacteric, like a clock stopped on the strike. Till
this moment of confronting the suspended animation of the scene she had
not realized the full shock of the convulsion which her disappearance
must have caused. It is quite certain—apart from her own repeated
assurances to that effect in later years—that in hastening off that
morning to her sudden engagement, Margery had not counted the cost of
such an enterprise; while a dim notion that she might get back again in
time for the ceremony, if the message meant nothing serious, should also
be mentioned in her favour. But, upon the whole, she had obeyed the call
with an unreasoning obedience worthy of a disciple in primitive times. A
conviction that the Baron’s life might depend upon her presence—for she
had by this time divined the tragical event she had interrupted on the
foggy morning—took from her all will to judge and consider calmly. The
simple affairs of her and hers seemed nothing beside the possibility of
harm to him.
A well-known step moved on the sanded floor within, and she went forward.
That she saw her father’s face before her, just within the door, can
hardly be said: it was rather Reproach and Rage in a human mask.
‘What! ye have dared to come back alive, hussy, to look upon the dupery
you have practised on honest people! You’ve mortified us all; I don’t
want to see ’ee; I don’t want to hear ’ee; I don’t want to know
anything!’ He walked up and down the room, unable to command himself.
‘Nothing but being dead could have excused ’ee for not meeting and
marrying that man this morning; and yet you have the brazen impudence to
stand there as well as ever! What be you here for?’
‘I’ve come back to marry Jim, if he wants me to,’ she said faintly. ‘And
if not—perhaps so much the better. I was sent for this morning early. I
thought—.’ She halted. To say that she had thought a man’s death might
happen by his own hand if she did not go to him, would never do. ‘I was
obliged to go,’ she said. ‘I had given my word.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us then, so that the wedding could be put off,
without making fools o’ us?’
‘Because I was afraid you wouldn’t let me go, and I had made up my mind
to go.’
‘To go where?’
She was silent; till she said, ‘I will tell Jim all, and why it was; and
if he’s any friend of mine he’ll excuse me.’
‘Not Jim—he’s no such fool. Jim had put all ready for you, Jim had
called at your house, a-dressed up in his new wedding clothes, and
a-smiling like the sun; Jim had told the parson, had got the ringers in
tow, and the clerk awaiting; and then—you was _gone_! Then Jim turned as
pale as rendlewood, and busted out, “If she don’t marry me to-day,” ’a
said, “she don’t marry me at all! No; let her look elsewhere for a
husband. For tew years I’ve put up with her haughty tricks and her
takings,” ’a said. “I’ve droudged and I’ve traipsed, I’ve bought and
I’ve sold, all wi’ an eye to her; I’ve suffered horseflesh,” he says—yes,
them was his noble words—“but I’ll suffer it no longer. She shall go!”
“Jim,” says I, “you be a man. If she’s alive, I commend ’ee; if she’s
dead, pity my old age.” “She isn’t dead,” says he; “for I’ve just heard
she was seen walking off across the fields this morning, looking all of a
scornful triumph.” He turned round and went, and the rest o’ the
neighbours went; and here be I left to the reproach o’t.’
‘He was too hasty,’ murmured Margery. ‘For now he’s said this I can’t
marry him to-morrow, as I might ha’ done; and perhaps so much the
better.’
‘You can be so calm about it, can ye? Be my arrangements nothing, then,
that you should break ’em up, and say off hand what wasn’t done to-day
might ha’ been done to-morrow, and such flick-flack? Out o’ my sight! I
won’t hear any more. I won’t speak to ’ee any more.’
‘I’ll go away, and then you’ll be sorry!’
‘Very well, go. Sorry—not I.’
He turned and stamped his way into the cheese-room. Margery went
upstairs. She too was excited now, and instead of fortifying herself in
her bedroom till her father’s rage had blown over, as she had often done
on lesser occasions, she packed up a bundle of articles, crept down
again, and went out of the house. She had a place of refuge in these
cases of necessity, and her father knew it, and was less alarmed at
seeing her depart than he might otherwise have been. This place was
Rook’s Gate, the house of her grandmother, who always took Margery’s part
when that young woman was particularly in the wrong.
The devious way she pursued, to avoid the vicinity of Mount Lodge, was
tedious, and she was already weary. But the cottage was a restful place
to arrive at, for she was her own mistress there—her grandmother never
coming down stairs—and Edy, the woman who lived with and attended her,
being a cipher except in muscle and voice. The approach was by a
straight open road, bordered by thin lank trees, all sloping away from
the south-west wind-quarter, and the scene bore a strange resemblance to
certain bits of Dutch landscape which have been imprinted on the world’s
eye by Hobbema and his school.
Having explained to her granny that the wedding was put off; and that she
had come to stay, one of Margery’s first acts was carefully to pack up
the locket and case, her wedding present from the Baron. The conditions
of the gift were unfulfilled, and she wished it to go back instantly.
Perhaps, in the intricacies of her bosom, there lurked a greater
satisfaction with the reason for returning the present than she would
have felt just then with a reason for keeping it.
To send the article was difficult. In the evening she wrapped herself
up, searched and found a gauze veil that had been used by her grandmother
in past years for hiving swarms of bees, buried her face in it, and
sallied forth with a palpitating heart till she drew near the tabernacle
of her demi-god the Baron. She ventured only to the back-door, where she
handed in the parcel addressed to him, and quickly came away.
Now it seems that during the day the Baron had been unable to learn the
result of his attempt to return Margery in time for the event he had
interrupted. Wishing, for obvious reasons, to avoid direct inquiry by
messenger, and being too unwell to go far himself, he could learn no
particulars. He was sitting in thought after a lonely dinner when the
parcel intimating failure as brought in. The footman, whose curiosity
had been excited by the mode of its arrival, peeped through the keyhole
after closing the door, to learn what the packet meant. Directly the
Baron had opened it he thrust out his feet vehemently from his chair, and
began cursing his ruinous conduct in bringing about such a disaster, for
the return of the locket denoted not only no wedding that day, but none
to-morrow, or at any time.
‘I have done that innocent woman a great wrong!’ he murmured. ‘Deprived
her of, perhaps, her only opportunity of becoming mistress of a happy
home!’