JULY

Guy had been conscious ever since the rose-gold evening of the

ragged-robins of new elements having entered into his and Pauline's love

for each other. All this month, however, June creeping upon them with

verdurous and muffled steps had plotted to foil the least attempt on

Guy's part to face the situation. Now the casual indiscretion of

yesterday brought him sharply against it, and, as in the melancholy of

the long Summer evening he contemplated the prospect, it appeared

disquieting enough. In nine months he had done nothing; no quibbling

could circumvent that deadly fact. For nine months he had lived in a

house of his own, had accepted paternal help, had betrothed himself; and

with every passing month he had done less to justify any single one of

the steps. What were the remedies? The house might be sublet; at any

rate, his father's bounty came to an end this quarter; engaging himself

formally to Pauline, he could throttle the Muse and become a

schoolmaster, and in two years perhaps they could be married. It would

be a wrench to abandon poetry and the hope of fame, indeed it would

stagger the very foundations of his pride; but rather than lose Pauline

he would be content to remain the obscurest creature on earth.

Literature might blazon his name; but her love blazoned his soul. Poetry

was only the flame of life made visible, and if he were to sacrifice

Pauline what gasping and ignoble rushlight of his own would he offer to

the world?

Yet could he bear to leave Pauline herself? The truth was he should

have gone in March, when she was in a way still remote and when like a

star she would have shone as brightly upon him absent or present. Now

that star was burning in his heart with passionate fires and fevers and

with quenchless ardors. It would be like death to leave her now; were

she absent from him her very name would be as a draught of liquid fire.

More implacable, too, than his own torment of love might be hers. If he

had gone in March, she would have been gently sad, but in those first

months she still had other interests; now if he parted from her she

would merely all the time be growing older and they would have between

them and their separation the intolerable wastage of their youth.

Pauline had surrendered to love all the simple joys which had hitherto

occupied her daily life; and if she were divided from him, he feared for

the fire that might consume her. It was he who had kindled it upon that

rosaureate evening of mid-May, and it was he who was charged with her

ultimate happiness. The accident of yesterday had reminded him sharply

how far this was so, and a sense of the tremendous responsibility

created by his love for her lay upon Guy. He must never again give her

family an occasion to remonstrate with her; he had been the one to

blame, and he wished Mrs. Grey had spoken to him without saying anything

to Pauline. How sad this long evening was, with reluctant day even now

at half past nine o'clock still luminous in the west.

Next morning there was a letter for Guy from his father.

FOX HALL, GALTON, HANTS,

_June 24th_.

MY DEAR GUY,--I inclose the balance of the sum I gave you, and I

hope it will have been enough to pay all the debts at which you

hinted in your last letter. I do not think it would be fair to you

to hamper you with any more money. In fact, I trust you have

already made up your mind not to ask for any.

You'll be sorry to hear that Wilkinson has fallen ill and must go

abroad at once. This makes it imperative for me to know at once if

you are coming to help me next September. If you are, I'm afraid I

must ask you to come here immediately and take Wilkinson's place

this term. I'm sorry to drag you away from your country estate,

but I cannot go to the bother of getting a temporary master and

then begin again with you in September. It unsettles the boys too

much. So if you want to come in September, you must come now. You

will only miss a month of your house and I hope that during the

seven weeks of the summer holidays you will be able to transfer

yourself comfortably and abandon it for ever.

Take a day to think over my proposal and telegraph your answer

to-morrow.

Your affectionate father,

JOHN HAZLEWOOD.

It seemed fateful, the arrival of this letter on top of the doubts of

last night. A day was not long in which to make up his mind. And yet,

after all, a moment was enough. He ought to go; he ought to telegraph

immediately before he could vacillate; he must not see Pauline first; he

ought to accept this offer. Farewell, fame!

Guy opened the front door and walked into Birdwood come with a note from

the Rectory.

"Miss Pauline took me away from my work to give you this most particular

and important and wait for the answer," said the gardener.

Guy asked him to step inside and see Miss Peasey while he went up-stairs

to write the reply.

"Miss Peasey doesn't think much of your variety, Birdwood. She says the

garden is entirely blue."

"What, all those dellyphiniums the Rector raised with his own hand and

she don't like blue!"

Birdwood shook his head to express another defeat at the hands of

incomprehensible woman. A moment later, as Guy went up to his room with

Pauline's note, he heard him bellow in the kitchen:

"What's this I hear, mum, about the garden being too blue?"

Then Guy closed the door of the library and shut out everything but the

sound of the stream.

MY DARLING,--I've got such exciting news. Mr. Delamere who's a

friend of ours has asked us to stay in his barge--I mean he's lent

us the barge for us to stay in. It's called the Naiad and it's on

the Thames at Ladingford and when we've finished with it we're

going to have it towed down to Oxford and come back from there by

train. Mother asked if you would like to come and stay with us for

a fortnight. Think of it, a fortnight! Margaret is coming and

Monica is going to stay with Father, who can't leave the garden.

Oh, Guy, I'm wild with happiness! We're to start on the first of

July about. Do send me a little note by Birdwood. Of course I know

there's no need. But I would love to have a little note especially

as we sha'n't see each other till after lunch.

Your own adoring

PAULINE.

Guy wrote the little note to Pauline, and to his father he wrote a long

letter explaining that it was impossible to give up what he was doing to

be a schoolmaster.

It was peerless weather when they set out in Godbold's wagonette on the

nine miles to Ladingford. Guy was thrilled to be traveling like this

with Mrs. Grey, Margaret, and Pauline. The girls were in flowered muslin

dresses, seeming more airy than he had ever thought them; and the

luggage piled up beside Godbold had the same exquisite lightness, so

that it appeared less like luggage than a store of birds' feathers. The

thought of nearly having missed this summery pilgrimage made Guy catch

his breath.

They arrived at Ladington towards tea-time and found the barge lying by

an old stone bridge about a mile away from the village. Apart from the

spire of Ladingford church nothing conspicuously broke the horizon of

that flat, green country stretching for miles to a shadowy range of

hills. Whichever way they looked, these meads extended, with here and

there willows and elms; close at hand was the quiet by-road that crossed

the bridge and meandered over the low lands, as still and traffickless

as the young Thames itself.

The _Naiad_ was painted peacock-blue; owing to the turreted poops the

owner had superimposed and the balustrade with rail of gilt gadroons, it

almost had the look of a dismasted Elizabethan ship.

"Anything more you'll want?" Godbold inquired.

"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. Godbold," said Mrs. Grey. "Charming ...

charming ... such a pleasant drive. Good afternoon, Mr. Godbold."

The carrier turned his horse; and when the sound of the wagonette had

died away there was silence except where the stream lapped against the

barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.

Guy and Pauline had resolved that they would give Margaret no chance of

calling them selfish during this fortnight; and since they were together

all the time, it was much easier now not to wish to escape from

everybody. The first week went by in such a perfection of delight as Guy

had scarcely thought was possible. Indeed, it remained ultimately

unimaginable, this dream-life on the _Naiad_. A pleasant woman in a

sunbonnet came to cook breakfast and dinner; and Pauline and Margaret

went to Ladingford and bought sunbonnets, a pink one for Pauline and for

Margaret one of watchet blue. In the fresh mornings Guy and the sisters

wandered idly over the meads; but in the afternoon Margaret generally

read a book in the shade while Guy and Pauline went for walks, walks

that ended always in sitting by the river's edge and telling each other

the tale of their love. The nights with a clear moon waxing to the full

were entrancing. There was a small piano on the barge, the notes of

which had been brought by damp almost to the timbre of an exhausted

spinet. It served, however, for Mrs. Grey to accompany Pauline while

she played on a violin simple tunes. Guy used to lie back on the deck

and count the stars above Pauline's pavans and galliards; then from the

silence that followed he would see her coming, shadowy, light as the

dewfall, to sit close beside him, to sit, her hand in his, for an hour

while the moon climbed the sky and the fern-owls croaked in their

hunting. And as the romantic climax of the day, it was wonderful to fall

asleep with the knowledge that Pauline slept nearer to him than she had

ever slept before.

"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced

at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be

interesting for him."

Guy was thrilled by the notion of visiting Ladingford Manor, which had

been one of the great fortresses of romance held against the devastating

commercial morality of the Victorian prime with its science and

sciolism, and which possessed already some of the fabulous appeal of the

medieval songs and tapestries John Lambert had created there. An

invitation came presently to walk over any afternoon. Margaret said at

first she would not go; but Guy, who was in a condition of excited

reverence, declared she must come; and so the three of them set out

across a path in the meads that Guy populated with romantic figures of

the mid-Victorian days. On this stile Swinburne may have sat; here

Burne-Jones may have looked back at the sky; and surely it were

reasonable to suppose that Rossetti might have tied up his shoe on this

big stone by this brook, even as Guy was tying up his shoe now. Soon

they saw a group of elms and the smoke of clustered chimneys; there

golden-gray in front of them stood Ladingford Manor.

"There's the sort of stillness of fame about it," Guy whispered.

He wondered if Mrs. Lambert would now resemble at all the famous

pictures of her he had seen. And would she talk familiarly of the

famous people she had known? They came to the gate, entering the garden

along a flagged path on either side of which runnels flowed between

borders of trim box. Mrs. Lambert was sitting in a yew parlor under a

blue-silk umbrella that was almost a pavilion, and she received them

with many comments upon the energy of walking so far on this hot

afternoon.

"You would like some beer, I'm sure. There is a bell in that

mulberry-tree. If you toll the bell Charlotte will bring you beer."

Guy tolled the bell, and Charlotte arrived with a pewter tray and pewter

mugs of beer. Margaret would not be thirsty, but Pauline was afraid of

hurting Mrs. Lambert's feelings, and she pretended to drink, lancing

blue eyes at Guy over the rim of her mug.

"It's home-brewed beer," said Mrs. Lambert, placidly, and then she

leaned back and sighed at the dome of her blue-silk umbrella. She was

still very beautiful, and Guy had a sensation that he was sitting at the

feet of Helen or Lady Flora the lovely Roman. She was old now, but she

wore about her like an aureole the dignity of all those inspirations of

famous dead painters.

"Home-brewed beer," Mrs. Lambert repeated, dreamily, and seemed to fall

asleep in the past; while in the bee-drowsed yew parlor Pauline,

Margaret, and Guy sat watching her. The throat of Sidonia the sorceress

was hers; the heavy lids of Hipparchia were hers; the wrist of

Ermengarde or Queen Blanche was hers; and the pewter tray on the grass

at her feet held Circe's wine.

Then Mrs. Lambert woke up and asked if they would like to see the house.

"Toll the bell in the mulberry-tree, and Charlotte will come. You must

excuse my getting up."

They followed Charlotte round the rooms of Ladingford Manor. There on

the walls were the tapestries that had inspired John Lambert, and there

were the tapestries even more beautiful that himself had woven. On the

tables were the books John Lambert had printed, which gave positively

the aspect of being treasures by the discretion of their external

appearance. In other rooms hung the original pictures of hackneyed

mezzotints; and how rare they looked now with their velvety pigments of

emerald and purple, of orange, cinnabar and scarlet glowing in the

tempered sunlight! Margaret, as she moved from room to room, seemed with

her weight of dusky hair and fastidious remoteness to belong to the

company of lovely women whose romances filled these splendid scenes; but

Pauline was life, irradiating with her joy each picture and giving to it

the complement of its own still beauty.

"Mrs. Lambert keeps very well, miss," said Charlotte, as they came out

again from the house. "But, of course, she doesn't get about much now.

Yet we can't really complain, especially with this fine weather."

"Would you like some more beer?" Mrs. Lambert asked, when they joined

her again in the yew parlor.

They said they were no longer thirsty; and, having thanked her for the

pleasures of the visit, they left her in the past, returning by the

pale-green path across the meadows to where the _Naiad_ lay by the old

bridge.

"Oh, I did want some tea," sighed Margaret.

"I love Mrs. Lambert," cried Pauline, dancing through the meads. "Wasn't

it touching of her to offer Margaret beer? Oh, Guy, when we're married

and when you die and I receive young poets at Plashers Mead, shall I

offer their future sisters-in-law home-brewed beer? Oh, but I'm sure I

shall forget to offer them anything."

Was there any reason, thought Guy, why Plashers Mead should not become a

second Ladingford Manor? Friends long ago took that house together;

perhaps Michael Fane would, after all, see the necessity of a second

Ladingford Manor and share Plashers Mead with himself and Pauline. After

this visit it was impossible to contemplate the prospect of being a

schoolmaster; it was impossible to imagine Pauline as a schoolmaster's

wife. At all costs their love must be sustained on the pinnacle of

romance where now it stood. Margaret would sympathize with his desire to

set Pauline in beauty; she, dreading the idea of marrying an Indian

engineer, would understand how impossible it was to make Pauline the

wife of a schoolmaster. Such a declaration must somehow be avoided. It

were better they should wait three years for marriage, five years,

fourteen years as Tennyson had waited, rather than that he should make

the monstrous surrender he had been so near to making. At least he would

put himself and his work to the test, and in a year he would be able to

publish his first volume of poems. Perhaps his father would realize then

that he deserved to marry Pauline. After all, they were together; there

were maddening restrictions, of course, but they were together. This

visit to Ladingford Manor must be accepted as an omen to persevere in

his original intention; for he had been granted the vision of a

perfected beauty, which he knew, by reading the lives of the men who

made it, had only been achieved after desperate struggles and

disappointments. This enchanted time on the _Naiad_ must be the

anticipated reward of a tremendous industry when he got back to

Wychford. He would no more break the rules and fret at the restrictions

made for him and Pauline. Every hour when they were together should

henceforth be doubled in the intensity of its capacity for being

enjoyed. One thing only he would demand, that in August they should be

formally and openly engaged. Otherwise when Autumn came and made it

impossible to go on the river, they would be kept to the Rectory; and

the few hours of her company he would have must at least be free. He

would talk to Margaret about it, so that she might use her influence to

procure this favor. Then he would write and tell his father. All would

be easy; Ladingford had inspired him. He beheld the visit in retrospect

more and more clearly as an exhortation to endure against whatever the

world should offer him to betray his ambition. Yet was Pauline the

world? No, certainly Pauline had no kinship with the world, and

therefore he was the more straitly bound to disregard the voice of

material prosperity. She had joked about herself as a Mrs. Lambert of

the future; but behind the lightness of her jest had stood confidence in

himself and in his fame. Should he imprison that spirit of mirth and

fire in the husk of a schoolmaster's wife?

The second week passed; the time at Ladingford was over, and early in

the morning they must start for the journey of thirty miles down to

Oxford. The dapple-gray horse that would tow the barge was already

arrived, and now stood munching the long grass in the shade of the

bridge; the swallows were high in the golden air of the afternoon; the

long-purples on the banks of the young river seemed to await

reproachfully the disturbance of their tranquillity. To-morrow came; the

dapple-gray horse was harnessed to the rope; and then slowly, slowly the

_Naiad_ glided forward, leaving astern the gray bridge, the long-purples

on the bank, and the swallows high in the silver air of the morning.

There was not yet any poignancy of parting; for the spire of Ladingford

church remained so long in sight that scarcely did they notice the slow

recession; and often, when they thought it was gone, the winding river

would show it to them again; and in the end, when really it seemed to

have vanished, by standing on the poop they could still make out where

now it pierced thinly the huge sky. Moreover, the contentment of that

imperceptible evanescence and of their dreaming progress down the young

Thames was plenary, lulling all regrets for a peace that seemed not yet

truly to be lost. The hay in the meadows along the banks was mostly

carried, and the cattle were magically fused with the July sunlight,

curiously dematerialized like the creatures of a mirage. If a human

voice was audible, it was audible deep in the green distance and

belonged to the landscape as gently as the murmurous water scalloping

the bows. Sometimes, indeed, they would pass late mowers who leaned upon

their scythes and waved good fortune to the journey, but mostly it was

all an emptiness of air and grass.

"If only this young Thames flowed on for ever!" said Guy.

He and Pauline were leaning over the rail of the barge, and Guy felt a

sudden impulse to snatch at the bank rich in that moment with yellow

loosestrife, and by his action arrest for ever the progress of the

barge, so that for ever they would stay like the lovers on a Grecian

urn.

"And really," Guy went on, as already the banks of yellow loosestrife

were become banks of long-purples, "there is no reason why for us in a

way this river should not flow on for ever. Dear, everything had seemed

so perishable before I found you. Pauline, you don't think I ought to

surrender my intention, do you? I mean, you don't think I ought to go

away from Plashers Mead?"

Guy went on to tell her about the decision he had taken on the day the

visit to Ladingford was arranged.

"But it would have been dreadful to miss this time," Pauline declared.

"Oh, I felt it would be impossible," he agreed. "But even if our

marriage is postponed for another year, you do think I ought to stick it

out here, don't you? And really, you know, few lovers can have such

wonderful hours as the hours we do have."

Easily she reassured him with her confidence in the rightness of his

decision; easily she assuaged the ache of any lingering doubt with the

proclamation of that inevitable triumph in the end.

"But we must be engaged openly," said Guy. "You know I shall be

twenty-three next month. Do you think we can be engaged properly in

August?"

"Mother promised in Spring," said Pauline. "Why don't you talk to her

about it? Why don't you talk to her about it now? She loves you to talk

to her."

He looked round to where Mrs. Grey was sitting in a deck-chair;

evidently by the rhythmic motion of her fingers she was restating to

herself a tune which had formerly pleased her, as the barge glided on

past a scene that changed perceptibly only in details of flowers and

trees, while the great sky and the green hollow land and the blue

distances rested immutable. Guy came and sat beside her.

"I've never enjoyed a fortnight so much in my life," he said.

She smiled at him but did not speak, for whatever quartet she was

restating had to be finished first. Soon the last noiseless bars played

themselves and she turned round to his conversation.

"Mrs. Grey, do you think that Pauline and I can be engaged openly next

month? It won't mean, if we are, that I shall be worrying to see her

more often. In fact, I'm sure I shall worry less. But I want to tell my

father, so that when he comes here he'll be able to see Pauline. He's a

conventional sort of man, and I don't think he'd grasp an engagement

such as ours is at present. Besides, I want to talk to the Rector,

because I feel that now he regards the whole thing as a childish game.

So can it be formal next month?"

Mrs. Grey sat back, so silent that Guy wondered if she had listened to a

word he had been saying. He paused for a moment, and then, as she did

not reply, he went on:

"I also want to say how sorry I am that I asked Pauline to come into

Plashers Mead to say good night to me last month. I didn't realize,

until she told me you were angry about it, what a foolish thing I'd

done. I don't want you to think that, if we are formally engaged, I

shall be doing stupid things like that all the time. Really, Mrs. Grey,

I would always be very thoughtful."

"Oh yes," she answered in her nervous way. "Oh yes. I understood it to

have been a kind of carelessness. But I had to speak to Pauline about

it, because she is so very impulsive. It's the sort of thing I might

have done myself when I was a girl. At least, of course, I shouldn't,

because the Rector.... Yes ... charming ... charming ... yes ... I

really think you might be engaged next month. It's your birthday next

month, isn't it?"

"Thank you more than I can thank you," said Guy.

Mrs. Grey waved to Pauline, who drew close.

"Pauline darling, I've thought of such a nice birthday present for Guy

... yes ... charming, charming birthday present ... yes ... for you two

to be engaged."

Pauline threw her arms round her mother's neck; and Guy in his happiness

noticed at that moment how Margaret was sitting by herself on the poop

in the stern. He was wrenched by a sudden compunction, and asked Pauline

if he should not go and tell Margaret.

"Charming of Guy ... yes ... charming," Mrs. Grey enthusiastically

exclaimed. "Now I call that really charming, and Pauline stays with me."

Guy went up the companion and asked Margaret if she were particularly

anxious to be alone. She seemed to pull herself from a day-dream as she

turned to assure him she did not at all particularly want to be alone.

Guy announced his good news, and Margaret offered him her slim hand with

a kind of pathetic grace that moved him very much.

"I think you deserve it," she said, "for you've both been so sweet to me

all this fortnight. I expect you think I don't notice, but I do ...

always."

"Margaret," said Guy, "if this Summer Pauline and I have seemed to run

away from people...."

"Oh, but you have!" Margaret interrupted. "I don't think I should find

excuses, if I were you, for perhaps it's natural."

"I've fancied very often," he said, "that you've thought we were

behaving selfishly."

"I think all lovers are selfish," she answered. "Only in your case you

began in such an idyllic way that I thought you were going to be a

wonderful exception. Guy, I do most dreadfully want you not to spoil in

any way the perfectly beautiful thing that Pauline and you in love is.

You won't, will you?"

"Have I yet?" asked Guy in a rather dismayed voice.

"Do you want me to be frank? Yes, of course you do, and anyway I must be

frank," said Margaret. "Well, sometimes you have-- I don't mean in

wanting always to be alone or in asking her in to Plashers Mead to say

good night. No, I don't mean in those ways so much. Of course they make

me feel a little sad, but smaller things than that make me more uneasy."

"You mean," said Guy, as she paused, "my staying on here and apparently

doing nothing? But, Margaret, really I can't leave Pauline to be a

schoolmaster, and surely you of all people can understand that?"

"Oh no, I wasn't thinking of that," said Margaret. "I think, in fact,

you're right to stay here and keep at what you're trying to do. If it

was ever worth doing, it must be doubly worth doing now. Oh no, the only

criticism I shall make is of something so small that you'll wonder how I

can think it even worth mentioning. Guy, you know the photograph of

Pauline which Mother used to have and which she gave to you?"

Guy nodded.

"Well, I happened to see it on the table by your bunk, and I wonder why

you've taken it out of its simple little wooden frame and put it in a

silver one?"

Guy was taken aback, and when he asked himself why he had done this he

could not find a reason. Now that Margaret had spoken of it, the

consciousness of the exchange flooded him with shame as for an

unforgivable piece of vandalism. Why, indeed, had he bought that silver

frame and put the old wooden frame away, and where was the old wooden

frame? In one of the drawers in his desk he thought; resolving this very

night to restore it to the photograph and fling the usurper into the

river.

"I can't think why I did," he stammered to Margaret.

"You've no idea how much this has worried me," she said. "I never had

any doubts about your appreciation of Pauline."

"And now you have," said Guy, biting his lip with mortification.

The landscape fading from the stern of the barge oppressed him with the

sadness of irreparable acts that are committed heedlessly, but after

which nothing is ever quite the same. He wished he could tear to pieces

that silver frame.

"No, I won't have any doubts," said Margaret, offering him her hand

again and smiling. "You've taken my criticism so sweetly that the change

can't symbolize so much as I feared."

It was very well to be forgiven like this, Guy thought, but the memory

of his blunder was still hot upon his cheek and he felt a deep

humiliation at the treachery of his taste. He had meant, when he came

here to talk to Margaret, to ask her about herself and Richard, to

display a captivating sympathy and restore to their pristine affection

her relations with him, which latterly had seemed to diverge somewhat

from one another. Now haunted by that silver frame, which with every

moment of thought appeared more and more insistently the vile

stationer's gewgaw that it was, Guy did not dare to approach Margaret in

the security of an old intimacy.

It was she, however, with her grace who healed the wound.

"You're not hurt with me for speaking about that little thing?" she

asked. "You see, you are in a way my brother."

"Margaret, you are a dear!"

And then recurred to him, as if from Ladingford Manor, the lines of

Christina Rossetti, which he half whispered to her:

"For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands."

They had the sharper emotion for Guy because he had neither brothers nor

sisters of his own; and that this lovely girl beside him on this

dreaming barge should be his sister gave to the landscape one more

incommunicable beauty.

And so all day they glided down the young Thames; and when Guy had sat

long enough with Margaret in the stern, he sat with Pauline at the prow;

and about twilight they reached Oxford, whence they came to Shipcot by

train and drove through five miles of moonlight back to Wychford.