When Guy left the Rectory that October afternoon, he felt as if he had
put back upon its shelf a book the inside of which, thus briefly glanced
at, held for him, whenever he should be privileged to open it again, a
new, indeed an almost magical, representation of life. On his fancy the
Greys had impressed themselves with a kind of abundant naturalness; but
however deeply he tried to think he was already plunged into the heart
of their life, he realized that it was only in such a way as he might
have dipped into the heart of a book. The intimacy revealed was not
revealed by any inclusion of himself within the charm; and he was a
little sad to think how completely he must have seemed outside the
picture. Hence his first aspiration with regard to the family was
somehow to become no longer a spectator, but actually a happy player in
their representation of existence. Ordinarily, so far as experience had
hitherto carried him, it had been easy enough to find himself on terms
of intimacy with any group of human beings whose company was
sufficiently attractive. For him, perhaps, it had even been particularly
easy, so that he had never known the mortification of a repulse. No
doubt now by contriving to be himself and relying upon the interest that
was sure to be roused by his isolation and poetic ambitions, he would
very soon be accorded the freedom of the Rectory. Yet such a prospect,
however pleasant to contemplate, did not satisfy him, and he was already
troubled by a faint jealousy of the many unknown friends of the Greys,
to whom in the past the privilege of that freedom must have been
frequently accorded. Guy wanted more than that; in the excess of his
appreciation he wanted them to marvel at a time when they had not been
aware of his existence; in fact, he was anxious to make himself
necessary to their own sense of their own completeness. As he entered
his solitary hall he was depressed by the extravagance of such a desire,
saying to himself that he might as well sigh to become an integral
figure of a pastoral by Giorgione, or of any work of art the life of
which seems but momentarily stilled for the pleasure of whomsoever is
observing it.
Guy was for a while almost impatient even of his own room, for he felt
it was lacking in any atmosphere except the false charm of novelty. He
had been here three weeks now, he and deaf Miss Peasey; and were the two
of them swept away to-morrow Plashers Mead would adapt itself to
new-comers. There was nothing wrong with the house; such breeding would
survive any occupation it might be called upon to tolerate. On the other
hand, were chance to sweep the Greys from Wychford, so essentially did
the Rectory seem their creation that already it was unimaginable to Guy
apart from them. And as yet he had only dipped into the volume. Who
could say what exquisite and intimate paragraphs did not await a more
leisurely perusal? Really, thought Guy, he might almost suppose himself
in love with the family, so much did the vision of them in that shadowy
drawing-room haunt his memory. Indeed, they were become a picture that
positively ached in his mind with longing for the moment of its
repetition. For some days he spent all his time in the orchard, throwing
sticks for his new bobtail; denying himself with an absurd
self-consciousness the pleasure of walking so far along the mill-stream
even as the bank opposite to the Rectory paddock; denying himself a
fortuitous meeting with any of the family in Wychford High Street; and
on Sunday denying himself the pleasure of seeing them in church,
because he felt it might appear an excuse to be noticed. The vision of
the Rectory obsessed him, but so elusively that when in verse he tried
to state the emotion merely for his own satisfaction, he failed, and he
took refuge from his disappointment by nearly always being late for
meals. Often he would see Miss Peasey walking about the orchard with
desolate tinkle of a Swiss sheep-bell, the only instrument of summons
that the house possessed. Miss Peasey herself looked not unlike a
battered old bellwether as she wandered searching for him in the wind;
and Guy used to watch her from behind a tree-trunk, laughing to himself
until Bob the dog trotted from one to another, describing anxious
circles round their separation.
"Your dinner's been waiting ten minutes, Mr. Hazlewood!"
"Doesn't matter," Guy would shout.
"Mutton to-day," Miss Peasey would say, and, "a little variety," she
always added.
Miss Peasey's religion was variety, and her tragedy was an invention
that never kept pace with aspiration. For three weeks Guy had been given
on Sunday roast beef which lasted till Wednesday; while on Thursday he
was given roast mutton, which as a depressing cold bone always went out
from the dining-room on Saturday night. Every morning he was asked what
he would like for dinner, to which he always replied that he left it to
her. Once, indeed, in a fertile moment he had suggested a curry, and
Miss Peasey, brightening wonderfully, had chirped:
"Ah yes, a little variety."
But in the evening the taste of hot tin that represented Miss Peasey's
curry made him for ever afterwards leave the variety to her own fancy,
thereby preserving henceforth that immutable alternation of roast beef
and roast mutton which was the horizon of her housekeeping.
These solitary meals were lightened by the thought of the Rectory.
Neither beef nor mutton seemed of much importance when his mind's eye
could hold that shadowy drawing-room. There was Monica with her
pale-gold hair in the stormy sunlight, cold and shy, but of such a
marble purity of line that but to sit beside her was to admire a statue
whose coldness made her the more admirable. There was Margaret, carved
slimly out of ivory, very tall, with weight of dusky hair, and slow,
fastidious voice that spoke dreamily of the things Guy loved best. There
was Pauline sitting away from the others in the window-seat, away in her
shyness and wildness. Was not the magic of her almost more difficult to
recapture than any? A brier rose she was whose petals seemed to fall at
the touch of definition, a brier rose that was waving out of reach, even
of thought. Guy wished he could visualize the Rector in his own
drawing-room; but instead he had to set him in Plashers Mead, of which
no doubt he had thought the owner a young ass; and Guy blushed to
remember the nervous idiocy which had let him take the Rector solemnly
into the kitchen to look at dish-covers in a row, and deaf Miss Peasey
sitting by as much fire as the table would yield to her chair. But if
the Rector were missing from the picture, at any rate he could picture
Mrs. Grey, shy like her daughters and with a delicious vagueness all her
own. She was most like Pauline, and indeed in Pauline Guy could see her
mother, as the young moon holds in her lap the wraith of the old
moon....
"Why, you haven't eaten anything," remonstrated Miss Peasey, breaking in
upon his vision. "And I've made you a rice pudding for a little
variety."
The shadowy drawing-room faded with the old chintz curtains and fragile,
almost immaterial silver; the china bowls of Lowestoft; the dull, white
paneling and faintly aromatic sweetness. Instead remained a rice pudding
that smelled and looked as solid as a pie.
However, that very afternoon Guy was greatly encouraged to get an
invitation to dinner at the Rectory from the hands of the gardener.
Birdwood was one of those servants who seem to have accepted with the
obligations of service the extreme responsibilities of paternity; and
Guy hastened to take advantage of the chance to establish himself on
good terms with one who might prove a most powerful ally.
"Not much of a garden, I'm afraid," he said, deprecatingly, to Birdwood,
as they stood in colloquy outside. The gardener shook his head.
"It wouldn't do for the Rector to see them cabbages and winter greens.
'I won't have the nasty things in my garden,' he says to me, and he'll
rush at them regular ferocious with a fork. 'I won't have them,' he
says. 'I can't abear the sight of them,' he says. Well, of course I
knows better than go for to contradict him when he gets a downer on any
plant, don't matter whether it's cabbage or calceolaria. But last time,
when he'd done with his massacring of them, I popped round to Mrs. Grey,
and I says, winking at her very hard, but of course not meaning any
disrespectfulness, winking at her very hard, I says, 'Please, mum, I
want one of these new allotments from the glebe.' 'Good Heavings,
Birdwood,' she says, 'whatever on earth can you want with for an
allotment?' With that I winks very hard again and says in a low voice
right into her ear as you might say, 'To keep the wolf from the door,
mum, with a few winter greens.' That's the way we grow our vegetables
for the Rectory, out of an allotment, though we have got five acres of
garden. Now you see what comes of being a connosher. You take my advice,
Mr. Hazlenut, and clear all them cabbages out of sight before the Rector
comes round here again."
"I will certainly," Guy promised. "But you know it's a bit difficult for
me to spend much money on flowers."
"_We_ don't spend money over at the Rectory," said Birdwood, smiling in
a superior way.
"No?"
"_We_ don't spend a penny. _We_ has every mortal plant and seed and
cutting given to us. And not only that, but we gives in our turn. Look
here, Mr. Hazlenut, I'm going to hand you out a bit of advice. The first
time as you go round our garden with the Rector, when you turn into the
second wall-garden, and see a border on your right, you catch hold of
his arm and say, 'Why, good Heavings, if that isn't a new berberis.'"
"Yes, but I don't know what an old berberis looks like," said Guy,
hopelessly, "let alone a new one."
"Never mind what the old ones look like. It's the new I'm telling you
of. Don't you understand that everyone who comes down, from Kew even,
says, 'That's a nice healthy little lot of _Berberis Knightii_ as you've
got a hold of.' 'Ha,' says the Rector. 'I thought as you'd go for to say
that. But it ain't Knightii,' he chuckles, 'and what's more, it ain't
got a name yet, only a number, being a new importation from China,' he
says. You go and call out what I told you, and he'll be so pleased, why,
I wouldn't say he won't shovel half of the garden into your hands
straight off."
"Do the young ladies take an interest in flowers?" Guy asked.
"Of course they try," said Birdwood, condescendingly. "But neither them
nor their mother don't seem to learn nothing. They think more of a good
clump of dellyphiniums than half a dozen meconopises as some one's gone
mad to discover, with a lot of murderous Lammers from Tibbet ready to
knife him the moment his back's turned."
"Really?"
"Oh, I was like that myself once. I can remember the time when I was as
fond of a good dahlia as anything. Now I goes sniffing the ground to see
if there's any _Mentha requieni_ left over from the frost."
"Sniffing the ground?"
"That's right. It's so small that if it wasn't for the smell any one
wouldn't see it. That's _worth_ growing, that is. Only, if you'll
understand me, it takes any one who's used to looking at peonies and
such like a few years to find out the object of a plant that isn't any
bigger than a pimple on an elephant."
Guy was reluctant to let Birdwood go without bringing him to talk more
directly of the family and less of the flowers. At the same time he felt
it would be wiser not to rouse in the gardener any suspicion of how much
he was interested in the Rectory; he was inclined to think he might
resent it, and he wanted him as a friend.
"Who is working in your garden?" asked Birdwood, as he turned to go.
"Well, nobody just at present," said Guy, apologetically.
"All right," Birdwood announced. "I'll get hold of some one for you in
less than half a pig's whisper."
"But not all the time," Guy explained, quickly. He was worried by the
prospect of a gardener's wages coming out of his small income.
"Once a week he'll come in," said Birdwood.
Guy nodded.
"What's his name?"
"Graves he's called, but, being deaf and dumb, his name's not of much
account."
"Deaf and dumb?" repeated Guy. "But how shall I explain what I want
done?"
"I'll show you," said Birdwood. "I'll come round and put you in the way
of managing him. Work? I reckon that boy would work any other mortal in
Wychford to the bone. Work? Well, he can't hear nothing, and he can't
say nothing, so what else can he do? And he does it. Good afternoon, Mr.
Hazlenut."
And Birdwood retired, whistling very shrilly as he went down the path to
the gate.
Two nights later Guy, with lighted lantern in his hand, set out to the
Rectory. He did not venture to go by the orchard and the fields and so,
crossing the narrow bridge over the stream, enter by way of the garden.
Such an approach seemed too familiar for the present stage of his
friendship, and he took the more formal route through an alley of
medieval cottages that branched off Wychford High Street. Mysterious
lattices blinked at him, and presently he felt the wind coming fresh in
his face as he skirted the churchyard. The road continued past the back
of a long row of almshouses, and when he saw the pillared gate of the
Rectory drive, over which high trees were moaning darkly, Guy wondered
if he were going to a large dinner-party. No word had been said of any
one else's coming, but with Mrs. Grey's vagueness that portended
nothing. He hoped that he would be the only guest, and, swinging his
lantern with a pleased expectancy, he passed down the drive. Suddenly a
figure materialized from the illumination he was casting and hailed him
with a questioning "hullo?"
"Hullo," Guy responded.
"Oh, beg your pardon," exclaimed the other. "I thought it was Willsher."
"My name's Hazlewood," said Guy, a little stiffly.
"Mine's Brydone. We may as well hop in together."
Guy rather resented the implication of this birdlike intrusion in
company with the doctor's son, a lanky youth whom he had often noticed
slouching about Wychford in a cap ostensibly alive with artificial
flies. Apparently Willsher must also be expected, against whom Guy had
already conceived a violent prejudice dating from the time he called at
his father's office to sign the agreement for the tenancy of Plashers
Mead. It was of ill augury that the Greys should apparently be supposing
that he would make a trio with Brydone and Willsher.
"Brought a lantern, eh?" said Brydone.
"Yes, this is a lantern," Guy answered, coldly.
"You'll never see me with a lantern," Brydone declared.
Guy would have liked to retort that he hoped he would never even see
Brydone without one. But he contented himself by saying, with all that
Balliol could bring to his aid of crushing indifference:
"Oh, really?"
Somebody behind them was running down the drive and shouting, "Hoo-oo,"
in what Guy considered a very objectionable voice. It probably was
Willsher.
"Hullo, Charlie," said Brydone.
"Hullo, Percy," said Willsher, for it was he.
"Know this gentleman? Mr. Hazlewood?"
"Only officially. Pleased to meet you," said the new-comer.
"Not at all," answered Guy. He felt furious to think that the Greys
would suppose he had arranged to arrive with these two fellows.
"Done any fishing yet?" asked Brydone.
"No, not yet," said Guy.
"Well, your bit of river has been spoilt. Old Burrows let every one go
there. But when you want some good fishing, Willsher and I rent about a
mile of stream further up and we'll always be glad to give you a day.
Eh, Charlie?"
Charlie replied with much cordiality that Percy had taken the very words
of invitation out of his mouth; and Guy, unable any longer to be frigid,
said that he had some books at which they might possibly care to come
and look one afternoon. Mr. Brydone and Mr. Willsher both declared they
would be delighted, and the latter added in the friendliest way that he
knew an old woman in Wychford who was very anxious to sell a Milton
warranted to be a hundred years old at least. Was that anything in Mr.
Hazlewood's way? Guy explained that a Milton of so recent a date was not
likely to be much in his way, and Mr. Brydone remarked that no doubt if
it had been a Stilton it would have been another matter. His friend
laughed very heartily indeed at this joke, and in an atmosphere of
almost hilarious good-fellowship, that was to Guy still a little
mortifying, they rang the Rectory bell.
None of the family had reached the drawing-room when they were shown in,
and Guy was afraid they were rather early.
"Always like this," said Brydone. "Absolutely no notion of time.
Shouldn't be surprised if we had to wait another quarter of an hour.
Known them for years, and they've always been like this. Eh, Charlie?"
The solicitor's son shook his head gravely. He seemed to feel that as a
man of business he should display a slight disapproval of such a casual
family.
"Ever since I was a kid I can remember it," he said.
Guy tried to tell himself that all this talk of intimacy was merely due
to the accidental associations of country life over many years. But it
was with something very like apprehension that he waited for the Greys
to come down. It would be dreadful to find that Brydone and Willsher had
a status in the Rectory. When, however, their hosts appeared, Guy
realized with a tremendous relief that Brydone and Willsher obviously
existed outside his picture of the Rectory. To be sure, they were
Charlie and Percy to Monica, Margaret, and Pauline; but galling as this
was, Guy told himself that after a lifelong acquaintance nothing else
could be expected.
It pleased Guy really that the dinner was not a great success, for he
was able to fancy that the Greys were encumbered by the presence of
Brydone and Willsher. Monica was silent; Margaret was deliberately
talking about things that could not possibly interest either of the
young men; and Pauline was trying to save the situation by wild
enthusiasms which were continually being repressed by her sisters. Mrs.
Grey alternated between helping to check Pauline and behaving in exactly
the same way herself. As for the Rector, he sat silent with a twinkle in
his eye. Guy wished regretfully, when the time came to depart, that he
could have stayed another few minutes to mark his superiority to the
other guests; but alas, he was still far from that position, and no
doubt he would never attain to it.
"Oh, have you brought a lantern?" asked Pauline, excitedly, in the hall.
"Oh, I wish I could walk back with you. I love lantern-light."
"Pauline! Pauline! Do think what you're saying," Mrs. Grey protested.
"I like lantern-light, too," Margaret proclaimed.
"When you come to see us again," said Pauline, "will you bring your
dog?"
"Oh, I say, shall I?" asked Guy, flushing with pleasure.
"Such a lamb, Margaret," said Pauline, kissing her sister impulsively
and being straightly reproved for doing so.
The good-nights were all said, and Guy walked up the drive with Brydone
and Willsher.
"Queer family, aren't they?" commented the doctor's son.
"Extraordinarily charming," said Guy.
"I've known them all my life," said Willsher, a little querulously. "And
yet I never seem to know them any better."
Guy was so much elated by this admission that he repeated more warmly
his invitation to come and see him and his books, and parted from the
two friends very pleasantly.
Two or three days later Guy thought he might fairly make his dinner
call, and with much forethought did not take Bob with him, so that soon
there might be an excuse to come again to effect that introduction. Mrs.
Grey and Monica were out; and Guy was invited to have tea in the nursery
with Margaret and Pauline. He was conscious that an honor had been paid
to him, partly by intuition, partly because neither of the girls said a
conventional word about not going into the drawing-room. He felt, as he
sat in that room fragrant with the memories of what must have been an
idyllic childhood, the thrill that, as a child, he used to feel when he
read, "_The Queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey._" This was
such another parlor infinitely secluded from the world; and he thought
he had never experienced a more breathless minute of anticipation than
when he followed the girls along the corridor to their nursery. The
matting worn silky with age seemed so eternally unprofaned, and on the
wall outside the door the cuckoo calling five o'clock was like a
confident bird in some paradise where neither time nor humanity was of
much importance. Janet, the elderly parlor-maid, came stumping in behind
them with the nursery tea-things; and, as Guy sat by the small hob-grate
and saw the moist autumnal sun etherealize with wan gold the tattered
volumes of childhood, the very plum cake on the tea-table was endowed
with the romantic perfection of a cake in a picture-book. When the sun
dipped behind the elms Guy half expected that Margaret and Pauline would
vanish too, so exactly seemed they the figures that, were this room a
mirage, he would expect to find within as guardians of the rare
seclusion. Guy never could say what was talked about that afternoon; for
when he found himself outside once again in the air of earth, he was
bemused with the whole experience, as if suddenly released from
enchantment. Out of a multitude of impressions, which had seemed at the
time most delicately strange and potent, only a few incidents quite
commonplace haunted his memory tangibly enough to be seized and
cherished. Tea-cups floating on laughter against that wall-paper of
berries, birds, and daisies; a pair of sugar-tongs clicking to the
pressure of long, white fingers (so much could he recapture of
Margaret); crumpets in a rosy mist (so much was Pauline); a copper
kettle singing; the lisp of the wind; a disarray of tambour-frames and
music, these were all that kept him company on his way back to Plashers
Mead through the colorless twilight.
Chance favored Guy next day by throwing him into the arms of the Rector,
who asked if he were fond enough of flowers to look round the garden at
a dull season of the year. Guy was so much elated that, if love of
flowers meant more frequent opportunities of going to the Rectory, he
would have given up poetry to become a professional gardener. Of course
there was nothing to see, according to the Rector--a few nerines of
his own crossing in the greenhouse; a _Buddleia auriculata_
honeycomb-scented in the angle of two walls; the double Michaelmas
daisy, an ugly brute already condemned to extermination; a white
red-hot-poker, evidently a favorite of the Rector's by the way he gazed
upon it and said so casually _Kniphofia multiflora_, as if it were not
indeed a treasure blooming in Oxfordshire's dreary Autumn.
"Tulips to go in next week," said the Rector, rolling the prospect upon
his tongue with meditative enjoyment. "A friend of mine has just sent me
some nice fellows from Bokhara and Turkestan. I ought to get them in
this week, but Birdwood must finish with these roses. And I've got a lot
of clusiana too that ought to be in. I am going to try her in
competition with shrubbery roots and see if _they'll_ make her behave
herself."
"Could I come in and help?" offered Guy.
"Well, now that would certainly be most kind," said the Rector; and his
thin, handsome face lit up with the excitement of infecting Guy with his
own passion. "But aren't you busy?"
"Oh no. I usually work at night."
So Guy came to plant tulips, and from planting tulips to being asked to
lunch was not far, and from finishing off a few left over to being asked
to tea was not far, either. Moreover, when the tulips were all planted
there were gladioli to be sorted and put away. Incidentally, too, the
punt had to be calked and the boat-house had to be strengthened, so that
in the end it was half-way into November before Guy realized he had been
coming to the Rectory almost every day. The more he came, however, the
more he was fascinated by the family. They still eluded him, and he was
always aware, particularly between Margaret and Pauline, of a life in
which as yet he hardly shared. At the same time, so familiar now were
the inner places of the house and most of all the nursery, he felt as if
happily there would come a day when to none of the sisters would he seem
more noticeable than one of their tumble-down arm-chairs.
Once or twice he stayed to dinner, and the long dining-room with the
sea-gray wall-paper and curtains of the strawberry-thief design was
always entered with a particular contentment of spirit. The table was
very large, for somebody always forgot to take out the extra leaf put in
for a dinner sometime last summer, or perhaps two summers ago. The
result was that the Rector was far away in the shadows at one end; Mrs.
Grey equally remote at the other; while Guy would in turn be near to
Margaret or Pauline or even Monica in the middle. Old-fashioned glasses
with spirals of green and white blown in their stems; silver that was
nearly diaphanous with use and age; candlesticks solid as the Ionic
columns they counterfeited, or tapering and fluted with branches that
carried the candle-flames like flowers, everything seemed as if it had
been created for this room alone. From the wall a lacquered clock as
round and big and benign as the setting sun wavered in the coppery
shadows of the fire, and with scarcely the sound of a tick showed forth
time. Guy had never appreciated the sacredness of eating in good company
until he dined casually like this at the Rectory. He never knew what he
ate and always accepted what was put before him like manna; yet he was
always conscious of having enjoyed the meal, and next morning he used to
face, unabashed, Miss Peasey's tale of ruined tapioca which had waited
for him too long.
The seal of perfection was generally set on these unexpected dinners by
chamber-music afterwards, when under the arched roof of the big
music-room for an hour or more of trios and quartets Guy contemplated
that family. The Greys could not have revealed the design of their life
with anything but chamber-music, and setting aside any expression of
inward things, thought Guy, how would it be possible to imagine them
more externally decorative than seated so at this formal industry of
art? He liked best perhaps the trios, when he and Mrs. Grey, each in a
Caroline chair with tall wicker back, remained outside, and yet withal
as much in the picture as two donors painted by an old Florentine.
Monica in a white dress sat straight and stiff, with pale-gold hair that
seemed the very color of the refined, the almost rarefied accompaniment
upon which her fingers quivered and rippled. Something of her own
coldness and remoteness and crystalline severity she brought to her
instrument, as if upon a windless day a fountain played forth its
pattern. Margaret's amber dress deepened from the shade of Monica's
hair, and Margaret's eyes glowed deep and solemn as the solemn depths of
the violoncello over which she hung with a thought of motherhood in the
way she cherished it. Was it she, wondered Guy, who was the ultimate
lure of this house, or was it Pauline? Of her, as she swayed to the
violin, nothing could be said but that from a rose-bloomed radiance
issued a sound of music. And how clearly in the united effect of the
three sisters was written the beauty of their lives. Guy could almost
see every hour of their girlhood passing in orderly pattern as the
divine Houris dance along a Grecian frieze. There was neither passion
nor sentiment in the music; there was neither sorrow nor regret. It was
heartless in its limpid beauty; it was remote as a cloud against the
sunrise; cold as water was it, and incommunicable as a dream; yet in
solitude when Guy reconjured the sound afterwards, it returned to his
memory like fire.
A great occasion for Guy was the afternoon when first the Greys came to
tea with him at Plashers Mead. Himself went into Wychford and bought
the cakes, so many that Miss Peasey held up her hands with that
ridiculously conventional gesture of surprise she used, exclaiming:
"Oh, dear, this _is_ a variety!"
Guy led them solemnly round the house and furnished the empty rooms with
such vivid descriptions that their emptiness was scarcely any longer
perceptible. In his own room he waited anxiously for judgment. Margaret
was, of course, the first to declare an opinion. She did not like his
curtains nor his green canvas, and she was by no means willing to accept
his excuse that they were relics of undergraduate taste.
"If you don't like them now, why do you have them? Why not plain white
for the walls and no curtains at all, until you can get ones you really
do like?"
Pauline was afraid his feelings would be hurt and declared with such
transparent dishonesty how greatly she loved everything in the room that
Guy, grateful though he was to her intended sweetness, was more
discouraged than ever. Monica objected to his having Our Lady on the
mantelshelf, and would not admit her as Saint Rose of Lima; but Guy was
enough in awe of Monica not to justify the identification with Saint
Rose by his desire for a poetic apostrophe. As for Mrs. Grey, she
behaved as she always did when Monica and Margaret were being
critical--that is, by firing off "charmings!" in a sort of benevolent
musketry; but if Guy was not convinced by her "charmings!" he could not
resist her when she said:
"I think Guy's room is charming ... charming!"
He felt his room could be an absolute failure if from the ashes of its
reputation he were alluded to actually for the first time as "Guy." Gone
then was Mr. Hazlewood; fled were those odious "misses." He turned to
Pauline and said, momentously, boldly:
"I say, Pauline, you haven't seen my new kitten."
She blushed, and Guy stood breathless with the attainment of the first
peak. Then triumphantly he turned to Mrs. Grey:
"Monica and Margaret are very severe, aren't they?"
How easy it was, after all, and he wished he had addressed them directly
by their christian names instead of taking refuge in a timid reference.
Now all that was wanting for his pleasure was that Monica, Margaret, or
Pauline should call him Guy. He wondered which would be the first. And
vaguely he asked himself which he wanted to be the first.
Pauline was talking to Margaret in the bay window.
"Do you remember," she was saying, "when Richard came to look at
Plashers Mead and we pretended he was going to take it?"
Margaret frowned at her for answer; but for Guy the afternoon so lately
perfected was spoiled again; and when they were gone, all the evening he
glowered at phantom Richards who, whether Adonises or Calibans, were all
equally obnoxious and more than obnoxious, positively minatory. Next day
he felt he had no heart to make an excuse to visit the Rectory; and he
was drearily eating some of the cakes of the tea-party when Mr. Brydone
and Mr. Willsher paid him their first call. Guy did not think they would
appreciate the empty rooms, however eloquently he narrated their future
glories; so he led his visitors forthwith to the cakes, listening to the
talk of trout and jack. After a while he asked with an elaborate
indifference if either of them had lately been round to the Rectory.
"Too clever for me," said Brydone, shaking his head. "Besides, Pauline
kicked up a fuss a fortnight ago because we asked if we could have the
otter-meet in their paddock."
"They were never sporting, those Rectory kids," said Willsher, gloomily.
"Never," his friend agreed, shaking his head. "Do you remember when
Margaret egged on young Richard Ford to punch your head because your
old terrier chivied the Greys' cat round the churchyard?"
"I punched _his_ head, I remember," said Willsher in wrathful
reminiscence.
"Does Richard Ford live here?" Guy asked.
"His father's the Vicar of Little Fairfield, the next parish, you know.
Richard's gone to India. He's an engineer, awfully nice chap and head
over heels in love with the fair Margaret. I believe there's a sort of
engagement."
In that moment by the lightening of his heart Guy knew that he was in
love with Pauline.
Outside the November night hung humid and oppressive.
"I thought we should get it soon," said Willsher, and as the two friends
vanished in the mazy garden Guy, looking up, felt rain falling softly
yet with gathering intensity. He stood for a while in his doorway, held
by the whispering blackness. Then suddenly in a rapture of realization
he slammed the door and, singing at the top of his voice, marched about
the hall. Once upon a time "to-morrow" had been wont to drowse him; now
the word sounded upon his imagination like a golden trumpet.