THEY were only beginning to revert. Last summer they had stood, spires
of fretted snow tapering at the points to jade-coloured buds, at the
edge of the little copse where the garden path lost itself among young
larches, birches, hazels, and poplars, black and white. The sun set
behind the copse, spreading in the summer evenings a pale gold
background, and often when he went to look at his foxgloves and to
listen to the lonely song of the willow-wren, rippling, like a tiny rill
of water, from the heart of the wood, Aubrey Westmacott had felt that
there was something almost dangerous in such bliss as this. To breathe
this limpid air, to hear the willow-wren, to look at white foxgloves,
and to know himself free forever from the long oppression of London--if
he could have sung his wistful gratitude, his melancholy joy, the song
might have been like the bird’s.
This year the change in the foxgloves had come as a complete surprise;
he was still a novice at gardening. He had left his beloved garden for a
week; regretfully, for he could not bear to lose a day of it--he was
like a lover with a bride, long pined for, who each day grows dearer and
lovelier; but he had gone, because it seemed churlish to refuse the old
don friend at Cambridge--and when he returned, at evening, and had
walked down to the copse and had seen them standing there, so delicately
yet so decisively altered, the shock of the surprise had seemed all
delight. He had intended white foxgloves to rise, always, against the
copse; but then he had not known how lovely pink foxgloves could be. He
had never seen them of such a shade, each bell of palest rose brimmed
with shadows of mauve, and finely freaked within. Regiments of the white
flowers had remained steadfast, so that there could be no sense of loss,
and he had picked an armful of the pink ones and carried them back to
the house, feeling, as he looked at them against his shoulder, that he
would have liked to kiss them. He spent the remaining hours of dusk in
arranging them. He never allowed the parlourmaid to arrange the flowers.
That she saw him, tolerantly, if with a flavour of irony, as a very
eccentric gentleman, he was aware, just as he was aware, quite
cheerfully, that many of his kind neighbours found him a rather absurd
one. But one of the deepest joys this new life afforded him, after the
paternal bliss of seeing the darlings grow, was in disposing them about
the rooms, with a loving discrimination that Ridley’s skilled but cold
and conventional hands could never have accomplished.
This evening he put the foxgloves in the drawing-room, a tall jar on the
bureau, a taller jar on the piano, and a group in the vast white Chinese
bowl, wedged cunningly into place with stones among the stems. Here he
could look at them next morning as he worked at his history. He always
worked in the drawing-room, for there he had the morning sun, and, if
he could not see his massed and tiered herbaceous border, could look out
at the cherry tree and at the tiny squares of terraced lawns, dropping
from level to level, with their stone steps and low stone walls and
narrow jewelled bordering of flowers.
There was a very nice little study behind the dining-room--it was from
the dining-room that one saw the herbaceous border, and he could
meditate future rearrangements and harmonies while he ate his
breakfast--but the study looked out on the stable shrubberies. He liked,
too, to feel himself encompassed by his treasures, old and new, while he
wrote of mediæval customs; his mother’s incompetent but loveable
water-colours, sketches of her old home, the grey, ancient, gabled house
among just such Cotswold slopes and uplands as his western windows
looked out upon, though his mother’s old home, passed long since to
alien hands, lay on the other side of the county; and his father’s
seafaring trophies, from China and Japan and far Pacific islands, and
all the lately acquired delightful solidities of Jacobean oak, and his
maturest choice in printed linen. Here, on their background of mullioned
window or dark wainscoting--such a gem of a little Jacobean house it
was--the pink foxgloves greeted him next morning, set among feathery
heads and sharp green spears of meadow grass, glimmering and poised on
tiptoe, like groups of softly blushing nymphs, and he stood for a long
time looking at them, his hands clasped behind his back.
He was forty-six, a fragile little man, blanched and stooping from the
long years of imprisonment in the Government office, from which the
undreamed-of inheritance had released him only three years ago, with
faded gold hair hanging across his forehead and a gentle face of stifled
dreams, the mouth slightly puckering as if in intentness on some task.
The eyes, of a dim yet dense pastel blue that told darkly in his faded
face, were intent, too, but not acute; they dwelt; they did not
penetrate. He wore a small, short moustache, and a pair of gold
_pince-nez_ dangled at his coat button.
Delicate as he had always been, and ineffectual, as he had always so
dejectedly been aware of being, he, too, with all his relatives, had
thought it very fortunate when, on leaving the university, he had
secured the tiny post in the Civil Service. There, he knew, he would
stay; he was not of the type that rises, and he had never during the
long years that followed rebelled consciously against his fate. He was,
he often told himself reproachfully, so very fortunate compared with men
far abler and more deserving than himself. He found that he could not
write, as he had hoped to do, after the conscientious hours at the
office. He read a great deal, and crept away to the country for every
week-end, sitting by meadow or river, like a dusty mouse let loose from
its trap and softly panting in the sunlight. He was often ill, and the
doctors always recommended a country life, but it was not on hygienic
grounds that he pined for limpid spaces and starry solitudes. There was
a soft passion in his blood, inherited from the mother whom he so much
resembled, for the sights and sounds and occupations of rurality. He
adored flowers. He often dreamed of them at night, and in waking hours
the thought of a garden of his own haunted him. Sometimes he went to
stay with friends in their gardens; but this was an ambiguous joy; it
was like seeing the pink and white babies playing about their nurses and
perambulators in the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, and having no
claim to kiss any of them. He loved children, too.
And now he found himself transplanted to this wonderful fairy tale by
Uncle Percy’s legacy. He still, often, could hardly realize it. There
was a haze of dizzy delight over all the memory of the last three years;
the search for a house, the securing of Meadows, the furnishing and
ordering of his household--he who had lived in rooms in Kensington for
twenty-four years, ruled over by a flawlessly honest but relentless
landlady! To think that he could have other fish for breakfast than
finnan haddock, and other vegetables in winter than cabbage! This was a
minor but an emphatic pleasure.
But above all, around all, the garden! He had planned and planted it
all, studying books, brooding over catalogues, making lists, writing
labels ever so neatly. The vegetables were given over to the gardener;
but his flowers, except for deep trenching--and oh, how deep, how rich,
he saw to it that it was! he tended single-handed. His seed-boxes, his
cold-frames, his tools and baskets, how he adored them all, and how
happy he was in any small personal economies, so that extravagance in
manure and bone-meal and leaf-mould should be well justified. The
history of mediæval customs was also a long-cherished ideal, but it
remained of secondary interest; his heart, always, was in the garden,
meditating mulchings, waterings, or hoeings. Every dream had come true,
had more than realized itself. Was it any wonder that he should feel
himself going softly in his amazed gratitude, should sometimes, as when
he listened to the willow-wren at evening, feel that such happiness was
dangerous.
It had not seemed to flaw the happiness, it had seemed but to add a
sweeter undertone to it, melancholy yet blissful, that into the new
Paradise there should have stolen a new longing, and that, as of old, he
should find himself haunted by an unattainable loveliness. He thought of
this as he looked at the pink foxgloves, for they made him think of the
face of Leila Pickering. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said to himself, as he
turned to the mediæval history, for he had the habit, caught from his
long loneliness, of speaking much to himself and with a quaint
repetition of words that stole into his social speech, “it is she they
are like; she they are like. Lovely, lovely, like her.”
Later in the morning, privileged as she was to interrupt even the
history, it was Mrs. Pomfrey who informed him that the strange, delicate
beauty was transitory, an unfixed type, and that, next year, or in a
very few years, the palely rosy nymphs would be purple.
“They’ll revert. You can get pink ones, you know, from the seedsmen;
rosy carmine they call it; but not at all this colour. I’ve never seen a
colour quite like this. Your soil must do it. I’ve always thought the
soil of Meadows had magic in it.”
Mrs. Pomfrey was the late rector’s widow, and lived in a thicket of
roses half a mile away in the village. She was tall, black-robed,
majestic, and melancholy, with a deep voice and black eyes and a high,
hooked nose and large false teeth that shifted slightly and slightly
clashed together when she spoke. She had survived all emotions except
the grief of having to grow her roses on a clayless soil, and to this
grief she often returned. A girlhood friend of Aubrey Westmacott’s
mother, she had been his link with Windbury. His week-ends with her
there had been the very comets of his dark London sky, and for years he
had seen Meadows inadequately tenanted, with an eye of brooding love.
“Oh! they’ll revert to purple, then,” he said, somewhat distressed; and
he repeated “purple, purple,” several times, as if to familiarize
himself with the sound and very sight of it, while Mrs. Pomfrey answered
him, “Give 'em time and they’ll all revert. You must dig 'em up and sow
again from year to year if you want to keep 'em pure.”
“Not that I don’t care very much for the purple ones,” said Aubrey;
“they are most beautiful flowers, most beautiful; but it’s wild in
woods, that I like best to see them. It will be a business to replant;
dear me! It took me a day of hard work to establish my white ones in
that haphazard-looking little colony down there.”
“Gardening is all hard work,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, “and all
disappointment, for the most part, too. It’s only the things you didn’t
expect to succeed that ever do, and any effect you particularly count on
is pretty sure to fail you.” She tempered her grimness by a slight,
bleak smile, however, for she and Aubrey Westmacott understood each
other and had the gardener’s soul, for which no work is too hard and no
disappointments too many.
“It will be very wonderful to have the intervals of pink to look forward
to, though,” Aubrey found the atonement. “They are singularly lovely,
aren’t they? Will you think me very silly, now, I wonder, or sillier
than you always think me?”
“I don’t think you silly, my dear Aubrey,” Mrs. Pomfrey interposed,
“only guileless; you are very guileless; I’ve thought that ever since
you were taken in by that dreadful cook of yours, who had red hair, and
got drunk and rubbed the whitebait through a sieve.”
“Well,” Aubrey continued, smiling his gentle, tentative smile, “my
foxgloves, at all events, can’t take me in, and since they are so very
unusual and so lovely I thought I’d ask a few people in to-day to see
them. The Carews, you know, and Barton, and Mrs. and Miss Pickering. And
you--if you can come. I’ll put it off till to-morrow, if that will
secure you, only the foxgloves may not be quite so lovely by then.”
“I will come with pleasure, my dear Aubrey,” said Mrs. Pomfrey, “and
though nobody will appreciate your foxgloves as you do, we shall all
enjoy your tea.”
“Miss Pickering cares very much for flowers, you know, very much. We’ve
talked a great deal about flowers,” said Aubrey, swinging his eyeglass
and nodding as he looked at his old friend.
“Does she? She doesn’t know much about 'em though.”
“No; all those years in India, and in towns. She has lived so much in
towns. Such an inappropriate life it seems for such an exquisite
creature.”
“Does it?” said Mrs. Pomfrey. She added after a moment, as if with
concession, “She is a very pretty girl.”
Aubrey Westmacott was not acute. “Isn’t she?” he said eagerly. “A
beautiful and noble and lovely head, isn’t it? like a flower; she is
altogether like a flower, with her slenderness and height. Do you know,”
he went on, swinging his glasses more quickly, while he kept his
ingenuous eyes on his friend, “can you guess the flower she makes me
think of? In that pale pink dress, that pink dress she wore the other
day at the rectory garden party, and with that white hat lined with
pink. Can you guess?” His eyes overflowed with their suggestion.
Mrs. Pomfrey moved hers from his face to the foxgloves. “Like those, I
suppose you mean.”
“_Isn’t_ she?” he repeated. “Now, isn’t it quite remarkable? You see it,
too.”
“Yes; I see it,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. She studied the flowers and again,
after a deliberating pause, went on, “Do you think Mrs. Pickering is
like purple foxgloves?”
Aubrey’s eyeglass tumbled from his hand. He was astonished, almost
indignant. “Mrs. Pickering?”
“She looks like her daughter,” said Mrs. Pomfrey; “as much like her,
that is, as a purple foxglove looks like a pink one.”
“I can imagine nothing more unlike a flower than Mrs. Pickering,” said
Aubrey, with gathered repudiation.
“No; certainly; she’s not at all like a flower. She’s more like a
sparrow--something sharp and commonplace and civic. I only intended an
analogy, for she must have been a very pretty girl.”
“Nothing could be less sharp or commonplace or civic than Miss
Pickering.” Aubrey was now deeply flushed.
“Oh, of course not, my dear Aubrey; she is very unusual looking,” Mrs.
Pomfrey again conceded. “And she is tall and her mother is short. Old
Colonel Pickering, too, was tall, I remember. I saw him once or twice
when they were living at Cheltenham the year before he died! a bleached,
dull, oppressed old man, a much better type than the wife; she ruled
him, I heard, with a rod of iron. One may be sure that she doesn’t rule
Miss Leila. She is a young lady with a will of her own, unless I am much
mistaken in her.”
"A will of her own; yes, yes"--Aubrey eagerly, pathetically to Mrs.
Pomfrey’s ear, gathered up the ambiguous fragments--“and great firmness
of will; great decision of character; and the serenity, you know, the
sweet dignity that go with it, that so often go with it. You have
noticed her serenity, her dignity. And she is very silent--a great
contrast to her mother. I often wonder what brought them here. It’s very
fortunate for all of us; but Mrs. Pickering is, as you say, so civic,
yes, so commonplace, that I don’t understand what she can find in this
quiet place to please her. She certainly doesn’t care about her garden.
Those beds about The Cottage are very distressing; they distress Miss
Pickering.”
“It’s quite clear to me why they came,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. “They can’t
afford London, and, I suppose, know nobody there if they could; and
there is more chance of a pretty girl like Miss Leila marrying well here
than there is in Cheltenham. She doesn’t hunt, it’s true; but the
hunting makes a difference, and there is a good deal going on in one
way and another. Mrs. Pickering hoped to capture Arthur Barton; she made
that very evident. But he has never looked at another woman since his
wife died, and never will, I imagine; at all events, he didn’t look at
Miss Leila.”
Aubrey’s eyes, dwelling on her, expressed reprobation and almost horror.
“She tried to marry her daughter to Barton! That lovely child and
Barton! What a terrible woman!”
“Miss Pickering must be a good twenty-five, my dear Aubrey, and I was
married at eighteen. No; I don’t like Mrs. Pickering, but I can see
nothing reprehensible in her determination to settle her daughter well
in life.”
“But Barton! He is fifty! He must be fifty! He must be older than I am;
yes, very considerably older than I am.”
“Well?” said Mrs. Pomfrey, and there was a mingled reluctance and
grimness in her smile, “and do you think of yourself as unmarriageable?”
He ran his hand several times over his head and through his hair. He was
still flushed, but suddenly he became pale, swallowing quickly several
times.
“Do you know--you have said something--you have made me think
something--put something before me. Yes; I must tell you, I must tell
you,” he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and fixing his eyes
on the wall above Mrs. Pomfrey’s head. “I love her; I love Miss
Pickering. You may think it absurd. I know I’m a dull old bachelor;
everything of that sort; but there it is. Ever since I saw her, a year
ago, when they first came. I never dreamed of anything else. A dull old
bachelor, nothing to offer, and twice her age. But I can’t help
wondering--it’s only a wonder--whether there might just be a chance for
me--if you don’t think my age, and all that, makes it impossible. What I
mean,” Aubrey finished, with a sort of quiet desperation, “is--could she
love me? It would have to be love with a girl like Miss Pickering. Am I
a man that a girl like that could love?”
Tears now were in his eyes as he brought them back to Mrs. Pomfrey’s,
and seated upon the sofa, the pink foxgloves in the Chinese bowl beside
her, she looked back at him very gravely. She was so grave that for some
moments she was silent. Then, before speaking, she took out her
spectacles and polished them and put them on. She saw him quite well
without them. It was as if in emphasis of the gravity of the moment.
And, in the first place, she did not answer his question.
“How much have you seen, my dear Aubrey, of this young lady?” she
enquired.
He said, faltering, that he had seen a good deal of Miss Pickering
during this spring and summer. Mrs. Pickering had been very kind, had
asked him there quite often for tennis; and Miss Pickering had been far
more kind, for she had played with him and he was a wretched player,
though he was so fond of the game. “And we’ve had one or two little
walks. She came with me to the woods this spring and helped me to dig
anemone roots. Oh! I don’t pretend it’s anything at all; it’s only, I
know, her kindness; I never thought it anything else. But--if you really
don’t think me absurd for dreaming of it--?” He faltered to a long
gazing question.
Mrs. Pomfrey now rose. She stood looking away from him, then moved
towards the door. “My dear Aubrey,” she said, “I think of you what
anybody who knows you must think--that the woman who wins your love is
one of the most fortunate of women. Whether you are the kind of man that
a girl like Miss Pickering could love, I cannot say. I’ve really seen
very little of her. All that I know of her is that she is very pretty
and has nice quiet manners. If she marries you, she is, as I say, the
most fortunate of women.”
Mrs. Pomfrey stepped out into the little square, flagged hall. He
accompanied her to the garden gate, following her speechless, while,
lifting up her skirts, displaying large, flat-heeled shoes, she stepped
down from terrace to terrace. She paused at the last.
“Your Alpine phlox is doing very nicely. You’ll find that by next year
it will have spread to a foot across,” she said. He had put in the
Alpine phlox the autumn before under her supervision. She added at the
gate, “By that time there may be a Mrs. Westmacott at Meadows.”
Pale, almost tearful, he pressed her hand over the gate. “I can’t say
how I thank you,” he murmured.
After a little while he was able to compose his thoughts and write his
notes. Thompson took them round, and before lunch he had his answers.
They could all come, except Mr. Barton, the dapper, fussy, kindly,
pepper-and-salt little squire, who lived in the beautiful big house just
over the nearest hill; he had gone up to London for the day.
Aubrey very much enjoyed giving little tea-parties at Meadows. In London
he had not enjoyed them at all. He had given them when duty required
it, and he had sometimes been very extravagant and had taken a couple of
young girl cousins, up for the season, to a restaurant and a play. But
he had never enjoyed these occasions. He was shy and a poor talker, and
in London the demands upon one’s personality were too heavy to make his
entertaining a success. The demands upon one’s personality in the
country were so small and so easily satisfied; a garden talked for one
and entertained for one. All his neighbours, except Mrs. Pickering,
whose formal beds did not count, had gardens and were profoundly
interested in them. The mild, middle-aged Carews were authorities, and
to-day he remembered, with all the pressure of his new preoccupations,
that he must question them about that matter of mulching.
At four-thirty he saw two parasols approaching along his box hedges--one
was black and one was rose-colour; his heart stood still when he saw it.
She would be wearing, then, the dress that made her look more than ever
like a pink foxglove. He went down the terraces to greet mother and
daughter at the gate.
Mrs. Pickering was short and stout and blonde, her slightly rapacious
features--small aquiline nose, small smiling mouth, and small projecting
chin--embedded and muffled, as it were, in powdery expanses of cheek and
throat. She had an unsmiling, steel-blue eye, appraising, determined,
deliberate, under its level bar of dark eyebrow. She did not please
Aubrey. Her voice in especial, metallic yet glossy, as if with a careful
veneer, disturbed him. A gossiping lady of the neighbourhood had
informed him that Mrs. Pickering’s origins were quite lacking in
distinction and that in her handsome girlhood she had stalked the
stupid Colonel--of a quite good family--and had brought him down,
resistless, at the first shot. These stories, for which he had not liked
his informant the more, seemed to hover in Mrs. Pickering’s glance and
smile, and her voice to preserve the flavour of many strategies and
triumphs. But Aubrey did not look for long at Mrs. Pickering. She
rustled in, dressed in her fashionable black and white, a long chain of
steel and brilliants crossing her buttressed bosom, a crest of plumes,
black and white, waving upon her head.
Miss Pickering followed her mother. Tall, very tall, and poised with a
lovely grace, she was, but for the arresting darkness of brows and
lashes, fair; with the infantile fairness, the wild-rose tints, that to
the ingenuous male will always seem to vouch for a spiritual
exquisiteness to match. And she, too, had small, aquiline features, and
her hair was as golden as the heart of a wild rose. She did not smile,
like her mother; she was a serene young lady, and silent, as loveliness
should be.
“This sweet place!” said Mrs. Pickering. “How charmingly you are
improving it, Mr. Westmacott; it looks prettier every time I see it.”
“It will take years before it looks as I mean it to look,” said Aubrey,
leading them up the terraces. “That’s the joy of gardening, isn’t it? It
gives one something to plan for one’s whole future.” He smiled with a
slight appealingness at Miss Pickering. “I am afraid I make myself
rather foolish sometimes; I talk so much about my garden.”
“I don’t wonder that you do,” said Mrs. Pickering; “it’s quite a little
Paradise.”
In the drawing-room it was Mrs. Pickering who continued to talk. She
renewed her laments over the water-colours. "To think that these
beautiful old places should get into the hands of common middle-class
people!"--Aubrey had again to assure her that the people who had bought
his mother’s old home were very nice indeed.--And Mrs. Pickering said
that she doted upon his room, “So old-world, so peaceful!” and
expatiated on the view of the terraced lawns and further meadows from
the window. She made no comment on his foxgloves, and it seemed like a
presage of happiness when Miss Pickering, from her chair, remarked,
looking up at them, “How lovely your pink foxgloves are!”
“You think so? You like them? Yes, yes, are they not lovely?” He was
delighted with her commendation.
“It’s such a pretty idea, putting them with the grasses,” said Miss
Pickering. “I do like lots of flowers in a room.”
He did not have an opportunity of speaking with her alone till after
tea. Then, when they had all gone into the garden--how it happened he
did not know, for he would not have dared arrange it--he found himself
walking down the path towards the copse with Miss Pickering, while
behind them, quite far already behind them, Mrs. Pickering paused and
exclaimed over the herbaceous border, Mr. Carew beside her. Mrs. Carew
and Mrs. Pomfrey had sat down under the trees near the house.
“Would you like to see the pink foxgloves growing?” he asked her. “They
are very beautiful growing--more beautiful, I think you’ll feel, than in
the house.”
“I’d love to see them,” said Miss Pickering.
They crossed the slip of meadow among the tall grasses and, “There,”
said Aubrey, pointing, with a faint smile, “there they are!”
“_How_ sweet!” said Miss Pickering, with her serene emphasis. They stood
to look.
“Do you know,” said Aubrey, wondering at himself, but he felt upborne,
“that I find they look like you--the pink ones.”
“Really?” She smiled now, turning her calm, blue eyes upon him. “That’s
very flattering.”
“No, no; not flattering; not at all flattering,” said Aubrey. “Not at
all, not at all,” he repeated under his breath. He could say no more
just then. They walked on, his heart in a flutter.
“Have you ever heard a willow-wren, Miss Pickering?” he asked suddenly.
“A willow-wren? I don’t think so. I don’t know much about birds.”
“It is usually singing in the wood at this hour. Would you care to come
and see if we can hear it?”
“I’d love to. I wish you’d teach me all about birds,” said Miss
Pickering.
His heart was thumping now. They entered the copse. It seemed to him, as
they passed them, that the foxgloves were tall angels set about Paradise
and welcoming him there. It was very still among the trees. Miss
Pickering walked lightly beside him. She, too, looked like an angel.
They reached a clearing, where an old fallen log lay, and here they sat
down. “We shall hear it, I think,” said Aubrey, “if we sit here
quietly.”
Presently, in the stillness, the little bird began to sing its song, the
descending chromatic chain of liquid notes, melancholy and happy; the
song of his very soul, Aubrey felt, and that the bird said for him all
that he could not say as, with head bent, he sat listening, the beloved
presence beside him. She was part of the song; and in it, as they
listened together, their very hearts were mingling. They knew each
other, he felt sure, very well.
“How sweet!” she murmured, and he nodded, not able to look at her.
There was a silence, and then the bird sang again. He raises his eyes to
hers now, and they turned to him and smiled. Her hand lay on the rough
bark of the log, and his was near it. Was it her hand that responded to
the unconscious appeal of his, or had he dared? He held it. That was the
bewildering, the transcending fact.
“Oh, Miss Pickering! Miss Leila--Leila,” he stammered. “May I tell you?
May I ask you? Can you care for me?”
Her eyes still smiled, if very gravely. “Do you really love me?” she
murmured.
“Oh, Leila!” he repeated. The willow-wren still sang, but all the little
chains of sound seemed to be woven into a mist about him, trembling,
shining. He held her hand to his lips. He wished to kneel before her.
This was Paradise.
“It’s so very sudden,” said Leila Pickering. “I never dreamed you cared
till just now.”
“Ever since I saw you first--ever since I saw your eyes. It has been
like the fragrance of my flowers at evening, like the moon rising on my
flowers. I did not dare to hope--you so young, so lovely;--life before
you.”
“I think we can be very happy together,” said Leila Pickering. “I knew
you were a dear from the first moment I saw you, too.”
The willow-wren stopped singing now and flew away. In the distance,
then, he heard the liquid, dropping notes, and they sounded very sad.
His arm was around Leila Pickering, and she leaned her head on his
shoulder, so that in an ecstasy of wonder he felt the warm brightness of
her hair against his cheek. He had never heard her talk so much. She
told him that she had had such a dull, horrid life, so poor, knowing
such tiresome, second-rate people. And she did not get on at all well
with her mother.
“Nobody has ever really understood me--till you came,” she said, sitting
upright now beside him, the lovely colour in her cheeks delicately
heightened, her eyes shining while she talked. She confided in him. She
loved him. They were betrothed--this was the blissful, culminating
thought that seemed to go in waves of music through him as he gazed at
her. He had ceased to hear the willow-wren’s melancholy little song. And
then he heard her say:
“I don’t want to live in the country, you know. You won’t mind? Of
course I love it; but we can pay week-end visits, always;--you must know
such heaps of nice people; friends. And we’ll travel too--I long to see
the world. India doesn’t count. Only think, I’ve never been to Paris
except once--on a horrid, cheap trip, for a week. We never could afford
to do anything really amusing or buy any really nice things. My life has
been so frightfully dull, and I do want to stretch my wings and see lots
of people and entertain and go to plays, you know. I adore London. I’m
sure I shall be a good hostess.”
It was as if a sword had transfixed him. He seemed to hear a great bell
booming--a great London bell--Big Ben; he had always heard Big Ben from
his office in Whitehall, and there had been a jangle of bells in
Kensington, too, and a roar, a ceaseless roar. And he seemed to hear the
words “Dangerous, dangerous.” He had been too happy.
He kept his mild, kind eyes of a pastel blue upon her, and he told
himself, while he wrestled, transfixed, that she must not guess; but, as
if pressed from his anguish, he heard himself murmuring helplessly,
though the gentle, fixed smile held his lips, “You don’t care for my
little place, then? You wouldn’t care to go on living at Meadows? It’s a
nice little place, Meadows--a nice little place; we could make it very
pretty, and we could have people here, as many as you wanted.”
Had a note of pleading, almost desperate, crept in unawares? He saw her
calm eyes harden slightly, fixed on him. And he saw, then, tears rise in
them.
“Oh! it’s so dull, so dull, down here!” she breathed. “It’s a darling
little place, Meadows--of course, of course I love it. I wish we could
afford to keep it, just to run down to for a quiet week-end now and
then; but you couldn’t, could you? And it’s far too small for
entertaining, isn’t it? And no one really smart cares to come and stay
with one if one has no shooting, nothing to offer. One can really _live_
in London--I’ve always felt that. You do care more for me than you do
for Meadows?” she finished with a smile, half appealing and half
challenging.
And looking into the blue eyes, blurred and enlarged, like a child’s,
with their tears, he saw himself as mean and petty and selfish. He loved
her, and was it only as another flower to place among his flowers,
another treasure to place among his treasures, a possession of his own,
without end or purpose for itself? He loved her, and, unimaginably, she
loved him and would marry him. Love must know pain and sacrifice--"pain
and sacrifice"--he seemed to hear himself repeating. This was a young
life, with its rights to life, and it must stretch its wings.
He smiled at her and raised her hand again to his lips, saying, “Of
course I care more for you than for Meadows, dear Leila. Of course we
will live where you choose.”
And very radiant now, rising and smiling down upon him, Leila Pickering
said, “You _are_ a dear. I’m sure it’s best for us both; we’d get so
pokey here. I know we couldn’t afford Mayfair--I wouldn’t dream of that;
but I think a house in one of those little new streets near Cadogan
Square would be just right for us; don’t you?”
[Illustration: decorative bar]