Guy was very indignant when he heard from Pauline the sequel of her
sisters' vigilance. That they should afterwards have tried to atone with
gentleness for what they had made her suffer did not avail with him.
Monica and Margaret now impressed him with their unworldly beauty in a
strange way, for they became sinister figures like the Lady Geraldine in
Christabel, sly, malignant sylphs set in ambush to haunt the romantic
path of his love. He was intensely aware that he ought not to resent
their interference, but that he ought, in fact, to acknowledge the
justice of it, and by a stoical endeavor prove himself entitled to the
cares of this long engagement. Actually Guy was enduring a violent
jealousy, and illogically he began to declare how the others were
jealous of him and Pauline. The consciousness that he could not carry
her off into immediate marriage galled him, and he suffered all the
pangs of an unmerited servitude. He and Pauline became the prisoners of
tyrants who were urging them to accept the yoke of convention; the more
he suffered the more he knew in his heart that he was culpable, and the
more culpable he recognized himself the more he chafed against the
burden of waiting. All the resolutions that with the announcement of
their betrothal had seemed to sail before a prospering breeze now turned
and beat up against adverse influences, and were every moment in danger
of being irreparably wrecked.
Naturally coincident with all the stress of a situation, that owing to
the temperament of the Greys was never relieved by discussion, was a
complete failure to advance on the private road of his poetical
ambition. All that he had written was seeming vain and bad; all that he
was now trying to write deteriorated with every word painfully inscribed
upon the cheerless empty page. He had conceived a set of eclogues that
were to mark his contempt for the feverish incompetence of the modern
school, whose ears had been corrupted by Wagner's filthy din; and all he
could manage to achieve were seeming the banal inspirations of
Mendelssohn. Guy was like an alchemist perpetually on the verge of
discovering the stone that will transmute base metals to gold as he
tried to find the secret by which such an one as Beethoven could purify
with art the most violent emotions of humanity, yet always preserve
their intrinsic value. He craved the secret which even the most obscure
Elizabethans seemed to have possessed, that unearthly power of harmony
which could fuse all baseness in a glittering song. Passion had never
lost itself in arid decoration when they sang; nor yet had it ever
betrayed itself with that impudently direct appeal these modern lyrists
made, these shameless Rousseaus of verse. Yet he was as bad as any of
them, for he was either like them when he tried to write his heart, or
he expired in the mere sound of words like the degenerate ruck of the
Caroline heirs to a great tradition. He was almost on the point of
proclaiming his final failure, and if at that moment he could have
received from his father the offer to come and teach small boys at Fox
Hall, he would have gone.
And yet would he have gone? Could he abandon the delight of being with
Pauline? The nearer he came to confessing his failure the more he longed
for her company. He was surely now in the midway of the thorny path of
love, and whether he progressed or retreated he could not escape the
spines. Well had he said to himself that night in May: "_La belle Dame
sans mercy hath thee in thrall._"
All the fire and fever of his present life on the outskirts of a haunted
country was for his imagination alone. However timidly his pen
approached those dreams, they vanished; and whenever his pen betrayed
him Guy turned despairingly again to Pauline herself. These days without
her were every day more unendurable. Once he had been content to talk
about her to Mrs. Grey and her sisters, to listen to their praise of
her; now every word they spoke wounded his pride. This madness of love
could only feed itself in the very dungeons of his mind; and unless she
were with him it did so horribly gorge itself that, if he had not
swiftly seen her again, the madness would have broken the bars of its
prison and ridden him like a hag.
It was when Guy had worked himself to this pitch of desire for the
remedy of her sweet presence that Pauline was denied to him. He knew he
must blame himself because, even after the warning of that afternoon in
the Abbey, whenever they were together he would carry her away into the
country, whence they would not return sometimes until night had fallen.
Worse than that, by his now continuous withdrawal from the life of the
Rectory he must have disquieted her family. He saw that they were
becoming anxious about Pauline, but for that very reason he could not
bring himself to mitigate a solitary doubt of theirs. Even to talk about
her in the lightest way was now become an outrage upon the seclusion of
their joint life. Such a conversation as that with Margaret about the
silver photograph-frame was now unimaginable. What right had any one to
know even what picture of Pauline burned upon his wall in the
night-time? At first Pauline herself, when the memory of the shock her
mother's words had been to her died out, tried to justify the attitude
of guardianship. She would explain to Guy how, ever since she could
remember, her mother and sisters had treated her with this vigilance.
They had, as she said, always so much adored her that it was natural
for them to be unable at once to relinquish entirely to some one else
the complete possession of her. Yet Guy must not be jealous, because she
told them none of her secrets now; indeed, she was distressed at the
thought of how far outside her confidence they reproachfully esteemed
themselves. Her love for him had severely shaken the perfect unity of
their immemorial life together, and he must be generous and understand
how gradual would have to be their renunciation of her to him. Guy,
however, would not allow Pauline to have regrets like this. The most
trivial consideration of her family aroused his jealousy; and when Mrs.
Grey said she thought it would be better if the old rule of seeing
Pauline only twice a week came into force again, Guy was determined that
Pauline should resent the step as bitterly as he resented it. All the
time he was with her he would be lamenting the briefness of their
permitted intercourse, and since the weather was now so wet that even
they could not reasonably claim beneath such streaming skies the right
to abscond into deserted country, November shed a gloom upon their love.
On the days when Guy did come to the Rectory, no one attempted to rob
them of their privacy; they were always granted the nursery to
themselves, and even sometimes they had tea there together, if visitors
came, so that the privilege of their few hours should not be infringed.
Nevertheless, the old sense of time and the world at their service was
lost. The dull November dusk came swiftly on; and out in the passage the
cuckoo with maddening reiteration proclaimed each fleeting fifteen
minutes. Often Guy was asked to dinner, but the old pleasure was mostly
gone, for in the evening he and Pauline were not expected to retire by
themselves; and there was always an implied reproach for his influence
when she refused to play her violin. Then there came a dreadful day,
because some cousins had arrived to stay at the Rectory; for these two
girls, like every one else, had been accustomed to adore Pauline, and
so were determined to take an extreme interest in her engagement.
"We seem to have a ghastly lure for them," Guy groaned in exasperation,
when Pauline had managed at last to secure the nursery for themselves.
"Guy, they're only staying a week."
"Well," he protested, "and for me to stay with you a week takes months
of these miserable little hours we have. Oh, Pauline, I must see more of
you!"
Then back came the adoring cousins, and Guy felt that no torture he
could imagine was bad enough for them. Their cordiality to him was so
great that he had to be superficially pleasant; and, as smile after
smile was wrung from him, by the end of the afternoon he felt sick with
the agony his politeness had cost.
"Hurry and dress! hurry! hurry!" he begged Pauline in a whisper when the
gong sounded. "Let us at least have five minutes alone before dinner
comes and I must go."
Pauline was scarcely five minutes in coming down again, but Guy counted
each tick of the clock with desperate heartsickness.
"Oh, my darling, my darling," he said, when she was held in the so
dearly longed for, the so terribly brief embrace. "I cannot bear the
torment of to-day."
She tried to soothe him; but Guy had reached the depths and this relief
after such effort was almost too late.
"Pauline, listen," he said, quickly. "You must come and say good night
to me in the garden. Do you hear? You must! You must! I sha'n't sleep
unless you do. You must!"
"Guy," she murmured, "I couldn't."
"You must! Promise ... you must. Come down and say good night to me on
the lawn. I shall wait there all night. I shall wait...."
The cuckoo burst out to cry seven o'clock.
"You must come. You must come. Promise."
"Perhaps," she whispered, faintly. Then she said she could not.
Guy went to the door.
"Remember, I have not kissed you good night," he proclaimed, solemnly.
"And now I'm going. I shall wait from eleven o'clock, and stay all night
until you have kissed me."
"Oh, but Guy...."
"To-night," he said. "You promise?"
"Guy, if I dare, if I dare."
There were footsteps in the passage. He fled across the room, kissed her
momentarily and hurried out, saying good-by to the cousins, as he passed
them, with a kind of exultant affection.
Outside, the November night hung humid and oppressive; Guy, looking up,
felt rain falling softly yet with gathering intensity, and he lingered a
few moments in the drive, held by the whispering blackness. Behind him
the lamplight of the Rectory windows seemed for the moment sad and
unattainable and gave him the fancy he was drifting away from a friendly
shore. Then suddenly he marched away along the drive, content; for the
thought of "to-night," which latterly had often brought such a
presentiment of loneliness, now sounded upon his imagination like the
rapture of a nightingale.
Plashers Mead had never appeared so desirable as now, when it was the
prelude to such an enterprise as this of consecrating with a last
embrace the rain and gloom of November. If he had any hesitation about
the lightness or even, setting probity aside, about the prudence of such
an action, he justified himself with romantic reasons; and if he was
driven by conscience to an ultimate defense, he justified himself with
the exceptional circumstances that gave him a sanction to accept from
Pauline this sacrifice of her traditions. Impulses to consider what he
was doing were easily dismissed; indeed, before he reached his house
there was not one left. Inside, the warmth and comfort of Plashers Mead
were additional incentives to prosecute his resolve; every gleaming
book, the breathing of the dog upon the mat before the fire, the gentle
purr of the lamp, all seemed to demand that voluptuous renunciation
which would later urge him forth again into the night. That it would
probably be raining was not to prove an obstacle; Pauline would be more
sure to come if she thought he were standing outside in the rain. It was
a second Eve of St. Agnes; and Guy went across to his shelf and took
down Keats. He had come to the knights and ladies praying in their dumb
oratories, when there was a knock at the front door, and his mind leaped
to the thought that Pauline might have sent a note by Birdwood to
prevent his coming to-night. The knock sounded again, and as Miss Peasey
was evidently too deeply immersed in _The Pilgrim's Progress_, her
vespertine lectionary, to pay heed to visitors at this hour of nine
o'clock, he must go down and open the door himself.
"Are we disturbing you?"
It was the voice of Brydone, and with Willsher in his wake he came into
the hall.
"Charlie and I have made several shots to find you in, but, of course,
we know you're a busy man nowadays."
"Go on up-stairs, will you?" said Guy, making a tremendous effort to
appear hospitable. "I'll dig out the whisky."
He went along and shouted in Miss Peasey's ear what was wanted. She
looked up as if it were Apollyon himself come to affront her holy
abstraction.
"I think there's some left from that bottle we got in August.... I shall
lay it on the mat," she told him.
Guy nodded encouragingly and went up-stairs to join his guests.
"Well, I suppose you'll be soon having a missus in charge here," said
Brydone, heartily.
Willsher hummed "Bachelor Boys" as a contributory echo of the question.
"Oh no; we're not getting married at once, you know," Guy explained.
"Well, you're quite right," Brydone declared, heartily. "After all,
being close at hand like this, you're not much likely to draw a blank in
the lottery."
"Marriage is a lottery, isn't it?" said Guy, with polite sarcasm.
"Rather," sighed Willsher. "Terrific!"
"I suppose I shall have to be looking round preparatory to getting
married in two or three years' time," Brydone added. "Well, you see,
after Christmas I shall be thinking about my finals, and then I'm going
to come in as the old man's partner. Country people like it best if a
doctor's married. No doubt about that, is there, Charlie?"
The solicitor's son agreed it was indubitable.
"Of course, if I had the cash to hang on in Harley Street for ten years
as a specialist, it would be another matter. But I can't, so there it
is."
Even this fellow had his dreams, Guy thought; even he would make
acquaintance with thwarted ambitions.
"Been doing anything with a rod lately?" asked Willsher, whose pastime,
when he could not be standing in action on the river's bank, was always
to steer a conversation in the direction of anglers' gossip.
"No, not lately," said Guy, "though I knocked down a lot of apples with
one last month."
"Ha-ha, that's good!" Brydone ejaculated. "That's very good, Hazlewood.
That's good, isn't it, Charlie?"
"Awfully good," agreed the angler.
Their appreciation seemed perfectly genuine, and Guy was touched by the
readiness of them to be entertained by his lame wit.
"I mustn't forget to tell the old man that," Brydone chuckled. "He's
always digging at me over the fish. Done anything with a rod lately? I
knocked down a lot of apples last month. Your governor will like that,
Charlie!"
Guy heard the clink of a tray deposited cautiously on the floor of the
passage outside. He allowed Miss Peasey time to retreat before he opened
the door, because it was one of the clauses in her charter that she was
never, as a lady housekeeper, to be asked to bring a tray into a room
when any one but Guy was present. He hoped that after they had drunk his
visitors would depart; but, alas! the unintended charm of his
conversation seemed likely to prolong their stay.
"Rabelais," Brydone read slowly, as he saw the volumes on the shelves.
"That's a bit thick, isn't it?"
"In quantity or quality, do you mean?" asked Guy.
"I've heard that's the thickest book ever written," said Brydone.
"Do you read old French easily?" asked Guy.
"Oh, it's in old French, is it?" said Brydone, in a disappointed voice.
"That would biff me."
A silence fell upon the room, a silence that seemed to symbolize the
"biffing" of the doctor's son by old French. Willsher took the
opportunity to steer the conversation back to fish, and ten o'clock
struck in the middle of an argument between him and his friend over the
merits of two artificial flies. Guy must be on the Rectory lawn by
eleven o'clock, and he began to be anxious, so animated was the
discussion, about the departure of these well-meaning intruders. He did
not want to plunge straight from their company into the glorious
darkness that would hold Pauline; and he eyed the volume of Keats lying
face downward on the table, hoping he would be allowed to come back to
the knights and ladies praying in their dumb oratories, while he thought
with a thrill of the moment when he should be able to read:
And they are gone; ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
"If you can't get a chub any other way, you can sometimes get him with a
bit of bacon," Willsher was saying. "And I know a fellow who caught one
of those whoppers under Marston's Mill with a cherry. Fact, I assure
you."
"I know a man at Oldbridge who caught a four-pounder with a bumblebee."
"I caught a six-pounder at Oxford with a mouse's head myself," Guy
declared.
The friends looked at him in the admiration and envy with which anglers
welcome a pleasant, companionable sort of lie. It was a bad move, for it
seemed as if by that lie he had drawn closer the bonds of sympathy
between himself and his guests. They visibly warmed to his company, for
Brydone at once invited himself to another "tot" and was obviously
settling down to a competitive talk about big fish; while Willsher's
first shyness turned to familiarity, so completely indeed that he asked
if Guy would mind his moving the furniture in order to try to explain to
that fathead Brydone the exact promontory of the Greenrush where he had
caught thirty trout in an hour when the mayfly was up two years ago.
Half past ten struck from the church tower, and Guy became desperate.
There was nothing he hated so much as asking people to go, which was one
reason why he always discouraged them at the beginning; but it really
seemed as if he must bring himself to the point of asking Brydone and
Willsher to leave him to his work. He decided to allow them until a
quarter to eleven. The minutes dragged along, and when the quarter
sounded Guy said he was sorry, but that he was very much afraid he would
have to work now.
"Right oh," said Brydone. "We'll tootle off." But it took ten minutes to
get them out of the house, and when at last they disappeared into the
mazy garden Guy was in a fume of anxiety about his tryst. He could not
now go round by Rectory Lane, as he had intended at first. No doubt
Brydone and Willsher would stay talking half an hour on the bridge, for
the rain had stopped and they had given the impression of having the
night before them. In fact, Brydone had once definitely announced that
the night was still young. Yet in a way the fact of their nearness and
of his having to avoid them added a zest to the adventure.
How dark it was and how heavily the trees dripped in the orchard! Guy
pulled the canoe from the shed and dragged it squeaking over the wet
grass; not even he in the exaltation of the moment was going to swim the
Hellespont.
When he was in the canoe and driving it with silent strokes along the
straight black stream; when the lantern was put out and the darkness was
at first so thick that like the water it seemed to resist the sweep of
his paddle, Guy could no longer imagine that Pauline would venture out.
He became oppressed by the impenetrable and humid air, and he began to
long for rain to fall as if it would reassure him that nature in such an
annihilation of form was still alive. Now he had swung past the
overhanging willows of the churchyard; his eyes, grown accustomed to the
darkness, discovered against a vague sky the vague bulk of the church,
and in a minute or two he could be sure that he was come to the Rectory
paddock. He was wet to the knees, and his feet, sagging in the grass,
seemed to make a most prodigious noise with their gurgling.
Guy was too early when he crept over the lawn, for there were still
lights in all the upper windows, and he withdrew to the plantation,
where he waited in rapt patience while the branches dripped and
pattered, dripped and pattered ceaselessly. One by one the lights had
faded out, but still he must not signal to Pauline. How should he, after
all, make known to her his presence on that dark lawn? Scarcely would
she perceive from her window his shadowy form. He must not even whisper;
he must not strike a match. Suddenly a light crossed his vision, and he
started violently before he realized that it was only a glow-worm
moving with laborious progress along the damp edge of the lawn. Black
indeed was the hour when a glow-worm belated on this drear night of the
year's decline could so alarm him. For a while he watched the creeping
phosphorescence and wondered at it in kindly fellowship, thinking how
like it was to a human lover, so small and solitary in this gigantic
gloom. Then he began to pick it up and, as it moved across his hand and
gave it with the wan fire a ghostly semblance, he resolved to signal
with this lamp to Pauline.
Midnight crashed its tale from the belfry, and nowhere in the long house
was there any light. There was nothing now in the world but himself and
this glow-worm wandering across his hand. He moved nearer to the house
and stood beneath Pauline's window; surely she was leaning out; surely
that was her shadow tremulous on the inspissate air. Guy waved, and the
pale light moving to and fro seemed to exact an answer, for something
fell at his feet, and by the glow-worm's melancholy radiance he read
"_now_" on a piece of paper. Gratefully he set the insect down to vanish
upon its own amorous path into the murk. Not a tree quivered, not a
raindrop slipped from a blade of grass, but Guy held out his arms to
clasp his long-awaited Pauline. The "now" prolonged its duration into
hours, it seemed; and then when she did come she was in his arms before
he knew by her step or by the rustle of her dress that she was coming.
She was in his arms as though like a moth she had floated upon a flower.
Their good night was kissed in a moment, and she was gone like a moth
that cannot stay upon the flower it visits.
Guy waited until he thought he saw her leaning from her window once
more. Then he drew close to the wall of the house and strained his eyes
to catch the farewell of her hand. As he looked up the rain began to
fall again; and in an ecstasy he glided back to Plashers Mead, adoring
the drench of his clothes and the soft sighing of the rain.