Amberley hung upon a cliff of land above the water meadows. Rising high
behind it, fold on fold, were the Sussex Downs, without lines, without
rigidity, as soft as drifting snow.
The village had been the seat of a tremendous castle,--little of these
famous ruins were left,--but the old, yellow stone walls still girdled
Amberley in the shape of a broken crown.
There was only one street, a sleepy, winding, white down road, which ran
between mossy barns and deep-thatched cottages under the Amberley Wall.
The castle was older than Amberley House, yet Amberley House was a
respectable three hundred years, and had been all that time the home of
countless Vernys. It had not retreated into relentless privacy, as most
old English homes have done; it stood, with its wide porch, stoutly upon
the moss-grown cobbles.
But it was better than its promises. If it had no park, there lay behind
its frontage not a park, but a garden--a garden that fitted in with
nature, only to excel it.
Lady Verny loved two things, her garden and her son; but she had been
able to do most with her garden. There were terraces that swung from
point to point above the long, blue valley; there was a lawn hemmed in
by black yew hedges, over which the downs piled themselves, bare and
high, with only the clouds beyond them. There was a sunken rose-garden,
with rough-tiled pathways leading to a lake with swans. Three hundred
years had helped Lady Verny with the lawn, but the herbaceous borders
had been her own affair. Julian, crossing the lawn toward her, was the
same strange mixture of her hand and time; and she had always known that
when she had done all she could for Julian and the garden, she would
have to give both up. With all their difficulties, their beauties, and
their sullen patches, they would pass into the hands of some young and
untried person unchosen by herself.
The person had been chosen now. Marian was already at Amberley for a
week-end, and knowing that Julian was expected, she had left Lady Verny
sitting by the tea-table under the yew hedge and gone up toward the
downs.
Julian would like this; he would not wish his bride to meet him
half-way. He would delight in Marian's aloofness; her deliberate and
delicate coldness would seem to him like the bloom upon a grape. But the
coldness of a future daughter-in-law is not the quality which most
endears her to a mother.
"Julian," Lady Verny said to herself as he approached her, "will make a
very trying lover. If he is absorbed in Marian, he will interfere with
her; and if he is absorbed in anything else, he will ignore her. He
needs a great deal of judicious teasing. Marian takes herself too
seriously to see the fun of Julian; she only sees the fun of sex. She
was quite right to go up to the downs. It'll amuse him to pursue her
now, but it'll bore him later; and in the end he'll find out that she
doesn't keep him off because she's got so much to give, but because
she's so afraid of giving anything."
"Where's Marian?" asked Julian before he kissed her.
"She went up toward the downs," said Lady Verny. "She left no directions
behind her. She's a will-o'-the-wisp, my dear."
Julian laughed.
"She knew I'd follow her," he said; "but I'll have my tea first,
please."
"She has always been followed, I imagine," said Lady Verny, giving him
his tea, "and she has always known it."
Julian looked pleased; this was the kind of wife he wanted, a woman used
to admiration, and who never made the fatal mistake of seeking it. He
had not much knowledge of women, but he had very strong opinions about
them, unshaken by any personal reckoning. One opinion was that nothing
too much can be done for a good woman. She must be protected, cared for,
and served under every ordeal in life. She must be like a precious
jewel; bars, safes, banks, must be constructed to insure her
inaccessibility from all the dangers of the open world.
She must be seen--the East receded from him at this point--and admired;
but she must be immaculate. That is to say, she must at no time in her
career personally handle an experience. She must be a wife and mother
(unmarried women, though often presumably virtuous, were only the shabby
bankrupts of their sex), but, once married and a mother, she must be
kept as far as possible from all the implications of these tremendous
facts.
Bad women were unsexed. That is to say, no law applied to them; they
were as outcast as a man who cheats at cards. The simile was not exact,
as the women were occasionally themselves the cheated; but it was near
enough for Julian. There were of course considerably more female
outcasts than card-sharpers; but this was fortunate, for inadvertently
they protected good women, in a manner in which card-sharpers have not
been known to protect good men. But Julian thought men needed no
protection, only women who were safe, needed it.
Julian was kinder to women than his opinions promised, because, being
strong, he was on the whole gentle toward those who were weak; but his
kindness was a personal idiosyncrasy, not a principle.
Lady Verny looked at him a little helplessly. There was something she
wanted very much to say to him, but she suffered from the disability of
being his mother. There is an unwritten law that mothers should not
touch upon vital matters with their sons. Lady Verny believed that
Julian was a victim of passion. She did not think he had understood
Marian's nature, and she knew that when passion burns itself out, one of
two things is left, comradeship or resentment. She had lived with
resentment for twenty years, and she knew that it was not an easy thing
to live with, and that it would have been worth while had she known more
about it earlier, to have found out if there was comradeship under the
passion before the flames of it had burned her boats.
"I wonder," she said consideringly, gazing into the bottom of her
tea-cup, "if your lovely Marian has a sense of humor?"
"Humor?" said Julian, taking two savory sandwiches and wrapping them in
bread and butter. "What does she want with humor at her age? It's one of
the things people fall back on when they've come croppers. Besides, I
don't believe in comradeship between the sexes. Infernally dull policy;
sort of thing that appeals to a bookworm. What I like is a little
friendly scrapping. Honor's easy! I never have cared much for brains in
a woman."
He smiled at the woman he knew best in the world, who had brains, and
had given him the fruit of them all her life, with kindly tolerance.
Probably she was jealous; but she wouldn't be tiresome if she was, and
he would make things as easy for her as possible.
Lady Verny saw that Julian thought that she was jealous. She looked away
from him to the terrace where he had fallen as a baby and struck his
head against the stone cornice of the sun-dial.
She could never look at the sun-dial without seeing the whole scene
happen again--and the dreadful pause that followed it when the small,
limp figure lay without moving. Julian was the only child she had ever
had. She shivered in the hot summer air and gave up the subject of human
love. There is generally too much to be said about it to make it a good
subject of conversation except for lovers, who only want each other.
She pointed to the newspaper that lay between them; that also was
serious.
"My dear," she said quietly, "this appears to be a very bad business?"
"Yes," Julian acknowledged. "This time there'll be no ducking; there's
nothing to duck under."
"And I dare say," said his mother, without moving the strong, quiet
hands that lay on her lap, "you have been thinking what you are going to
do in it?"
"Oh, yes, I've decided," said Julian. "I shall be off in ten days.
You'll guess where, but no one else must know."
"It was a big risk before, Julian," she said tentatively.
"This time it'll be a bigger one," he answered, meeting her eyes with a
flash of his pleased blue ones. "That's all. It'll need a jolly lot of
thinking out."
"And you've--and Marian has agreed to it?" Lady Verny asked anxiously.
"I haven't told her yet," said Julian, easily. "It didn't occur to me to
mention it to her first any more than to you. I knew you'd both
understand. Obviously it was the one thing I could do. She'll see that,
of course."
"I'm different," said Lady Verny, with a twist of her ironic mouth. "I'm
your mother. A mother takes what is given; a wife expects all there is
to give."
Julian looked a little uncomfortable. Burton, who was a man, and might
therefore be assumed to know better than a woman what a woman felt, had
come to the same conclusion.
Julian was prepared to give everything he had to Marian--Amberley and
all his money and himself. There was something in the marriage service
that put it very well, but didn't, as far as he remembered, say anything
to include plans.
"I hope she likes Amberley?" he ventured.
Lady Verny filled his cup a second time, and answered tranquilly:
"Marian thinks it a charming little place to run down to for week-ends."
Then she added very gently: "This is going to be very hard for Marian,
Julian. You'll remember that, won't you, when you tell her?"
"Damnably hard," said Julian under his breath. "Of course I'll remember.
I wish to Heaven she'd marry me first. By Jove, I'll _make_ her!"
Lady Verny's lips closed tightly. She wasn't going to tell Julian
anything, because she did not believe in telling things to people who
will in the course of time find them out for themselves. She knew that
Marian would not marry him at a moment's notice. She knew that he was
asking Marian already to stand a very serious burden, and she did not
think Marian's was the type of love that cares for very serious and
unexpected burdens. She gazed at the bushes of blue anchusa; the
gardener had planted pink monthly roses a little too thickly among them.
She could alter that; she did not think there was anything else she
could alter.
Julian strode toward the downs full of seriousness, eagerness, and
pride, and in her heart Lady Verny prayed not that God's will might be
done, which seemed to her mind superfluous, but that it might as far as
possible be made to square with Julian's. She was a wise and even a just
woman, but she thought that Providence might be persuaded to stretch a
point or two for Julian.