ANDY leaned over the gate while the throb of the motor grew
fainter—ceased—and the dew fell quietly upon the grassy edge of the
lane. Already lights shone from the upper windows of the village, little
stars of home twinkling out in brief, pathetic bravery an answer to the
eternal repose of Charles’ Wain above the chimney stacks.
A sense of home wrapped Andy close as he stood there watching. During
the last months he had gained a new capacity for love—that exquisite,
human love of places which can never be explained to those who do not
know it.
“Crunch! crunch!” sounded a faint footstep on the distant gravel of the
churchyard path—then silence as the schoolmaster crossed the field—and
a smell of tobacco in the night air close at hand.
“Good evening. Very pleasant out,” said Andy.
Mr. Kirke stopped.
“Something to have a harvest festival _about_ this year,” he said. “When
you see the crops all black in the fields——” he paused. “Fine
congregation to-night. And the way the hymns went——” He paused and
puffed again at his pipe. “Mr. Thorpe tells me there was no less than
nineteen and tenpence in the collection bags. Last year it was only
eleven shillings odd.”
The two men’s voices were softened and mellowed by the night air—they
felt friendly towards one another. The schoolmaster refilled his pipe as
he too leaned against the gate, but in a decorous attitude which
expressed his sense of being rather honoured.
“My aunt thinks I must be frightfully lonely here,” said Andy,
unconsciously trying to bring the talk round to the subject of which his
mind was full. “She thinks”—he laughed a little—“that I ought to get a
wife.”
Mr. Willie Kirke settled his shoulders more intimately against the
gate—for that is a subject in which bachelors of all ages feel an
interest at times—it is somehow pleasantly tickling to think what the
poor women have missed through their abstinence.
“Well,” said Mr. Kirke, striking a match that flamed on his narrow face
and bottle shoulders as he lighted his pipe, “I don’t know if you lose
more’n you gain or gain more’n you lose by remaining unmarried. There
was only one girl I ever——” Puff. Puff.
“What did she——?” said Andy, through a sympathetic pause.
“Oh, married a butcher! But I never asked her.”
“Should you——” Now was Andy’s chance.
“Should you think if a man were silly enough to propose that he’d better
do it by letter or in person?”
He laughed a little scornfully, and put it in a detached manner—so.
Mr. Kirke kicked the gate thoughtfully with the air of a man who
meditates on a series of gallantries so long that it takes some time to
sort them out.
“Far as my experience goes—mind you, I don’t pose as one of your
ladies’ men—but so far as my experience goes, I should say, ‘Kiss first
and talk afterwards.’”
Andy moved a shade farther back into the shadow.
“But supposing you _had_ to write?”
Mr. Kirke took his pipe from his mouth and gazed before him into the
soft dark. This was what he liked. He had always been so clever and
ingenious that since that hour in his boyhood when he had found he could
mend the family clock he had continued to feel himself in a position to
give a valuable opinion about everything.
“If I had to write, I should make it short and sweet. Very short and
very sweet.”
“But supposing a man had an awful lot to say?” pursued Andy, trying
still to sound detached and careless, and throwing a horse chestnut at a
shrub to give the impression verisimilitude.
“He could say it after they were married,” replied Mr. Kirke with a
chuckle. “Plenty of time then, and to spare.”
“She—she might not have him,” said poor Andy, the inmost fear of his
heart forcing its way to his lips.
“Trust her!” chuckled Mr. Kirke again. For he held the profound
conviction of most bachelors over forty that no woman can resist a man
if he really does his best. “Well—good-night. I must be getting home.”
But Andy asked him to come in for a few minutes, and they went together
into the brightly-lighted dining-room, where it did really seem
incredible that any one should have asked advice on affairs of the heart
from Mr. Kirke.
Andy assumed a demeanour more nearly resembling that of the senior
curate than he had shown for weeks, and he was very much the Vicar of
Gaythorpe as he rang the bell and ordered light refreshments. But Mr.
Kirke was impervious to the change of atmosphere, and remarked when Mrs.
Jebb closed the door behind her—the little maid was already in
bed—“Been rather a fascinating woman in her day, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Andy started and his eyes began to twinkle, he forgot to be imposing as
he caught hold of an idea.
“A very nice woman,” he said warmly. Then he remembered that Mr. Kirke
was his friend, and felt bound to add, “She can’t cook—but that’s——”
He waved it off with the matchbox.
“Doesn’t look a cook,” said Mr. Kirke, still in his character of the
appraising dog. “But fine eyes. Fine eyes.”
Then Mrs. Jebb returned in the toilet which she had worn at the harvest
festival service, with more odd bits of white lace and black ribbon
floating than seemed possible for one mortal costume to contain, and she
glanced at the schoolmaster as she put down the tray.
“Splendid congregation, Mrs. Jebb,” said Mr. Kirke, gallantly assisting
with a corner of the cloth.
“Thank you. Oh, excellent. And the decorations so lovely,” said Mrs.
Jebb, all aflutter.
Then she retired, and Mr. Kirke remarked—
“Quite a lady. You can see _she_ hasn’t been bringing in trays all her
life.”
Andy beamed at his guest, for he was at that stage of sentiment when an
ordinary man or woman can no more help match-making than they can help
breathing—though men carefully hide the craving. And after all, it is
the most generous part of love—that desire to pass on happiness.
“Mrs. Jebb is so—so”—he sought for an adjective which should
truthfully recommend the lady—“so chatty.”
“Now,” said Mr. Kirke, with the air of a connoiseur, “I can understand
that woman fascinating a man who liked the airy-fairy type. It’s a
matter of taste. For my part I like an armful. Always have. Always
shall.”
So Andy saw that his first attempt at match-making had failed, and a few
minutes later he allowed his guest to depart without protest. Then Mrs.
Jebb went up to bed, after extinguishing the lamps in the hall and
dining-room according to custom, and Andy sat down in his familiar seat
by the study table.
He removed the sheet of blotting-paper which covered his little heap of
manuscript and shook down the ink in his pen—after that he looked
across the garden, though all was black darkness there and clouds had
covered the stars; for it had already become a habit for him to sit at
that table and look forth so. And Andy’s mother would have yearned and
wondered if he had had one—to see the change in her boy. Boy still,
beneath it all, as the best men are until their dying day—but putting
on the mask of manhood. For loneliness and responsibility form such a
forcing-house for qualities hitherto dormant that developments take
place which seem almost incredible in the time.
The lamplight caught Andy’s face, which no stress could ever make
anything but round and jolly-looking. He would always have, even in the
deepest adversity, the appearance of a happy person who has been wounded
by some incomprehensible mistake; but he looked now strong enough to
suffer without bitterness—and that is, after all, the final test of
strength.
As he glanced out into the soft dark of the garden with no one watching
him to put his face on guard, his eyes gradually grew luminous. It was
clear enough that he watched a dream. All the hot vigour of a young
man’s love flowed in a molten tide into his imagination, where it blazed
up and made a crimson, leaping glorious flame that enabled Andy to see
quite clearly the City of Married Love as it looks to the eyes of a
pilgrim. The high towers—the secret streets—the tender mist that
glorifies the Enchanted Muddle—he seemed close to the gate as he sat
there staring at the dim form of the trees against a starless sky.
Then the reading-lamp began to smell because Mrs. Jebb had forgotten the
oil that morning, and of course Andy lost sight of his dream when it
became necessary to extinguish the lamp and light a couple of candles.
But even that interruption did not cool the fire within him; it only
blew across the leaping flames and caused the embers underneath to burn
more fierce and even—a still, red heart of fire.
Andy shook out his pen again, and wrote on a blank sheet—
“Elizabeth——”
As he wrote it, he seemed to reach out towards her with his very soul.
He felt that she must know, though she lay asleep with her cheek upon
the white pillow and her hair spread round her.
A deep tenderness came over Andy as he pictured her so—it seemed to
flow through all his being—how could he write a letter asking her to
marry him? A man must be a poet without self-consciousness, a lover
without fear, and a potential husband without priggishness to do that
properly—and where do you find that man?
Anyway, not in poor Andy, who sat clutching the mop of curls above his
brow that had been brilliantined so nice and flat for the harvest
festival, and who could get no further than—
“I do not know if you will be surprised to hear that I love you.”
He read it over. It sounded lame—awful! He must think of something more
suitable.
But in about a week’s time the letter would have to be sent. He had not
liked to mention it to Dick Stamford—a sort of fierce delicacy
restrained him—but of course Dick would be obliged to say something
when the end of his period of probation arrived.
It was now the end of the third week in September, and October had been
the time named; but what part of October, Andy did not know. In any
case, it must be soon.
He tore up the paper and started afresh—
“My dear Miss Elizabeth,
“It has long been my desire to tell you how deeply——”
No! He tore up that too, and flung it into the waste-paper basket. Then
he began to wonder with a sort of smarting uneasiness what Dick Stamford
would put in his letter.
It was all very foolish, of course—the whole plan from that beginning
of it in the Stamfords’ billiard-room was ridiculous to the last
degree—but so, looked at in one way, are the chasings of the first
white butterflies above a violet bank, and they are no less a part of
springtime.
Andy got up and walked about the room; then he sat down again and began
afresh, desperately—
“My dear Girl,
“I don’t know what to call you in a letter, because you are
everything to me, and I can’t tell whether I am anything to you.
But—”
he paused, pen uplifted—that was surely a ring at the doorbell. As he
waited, for he had been too much engrossed fully to take it in, another
peal echoed through the sleeping house and made the matter certain.
Hastily flinging his papers into a drawer, he went to the door,
wondering, with a sudden anxious tug at the heart as he ran along, who
was ill among the Gaythorpe folk, or what baby might suddenly need
christening? Brother Gulielmus felt like that when men came with horn
lanterns to wake him at dead of night and pilot him to some deathbed
where the Devil wanted a lot of fighting if the soul were to soar away
from his clutches. The little old house was gone, but it stood on the
same spot, and everything was shaping Andy into the same sort of man.
He clattered the chain down and flung open the door. A dim figure stood
in the shadow of the porch without speaking. Andy peered forth,
concerned for one of his flock.
“What is it?”
No reply.
“Is there some one ill in the village?”
Still no reply.
Andy pushed back the door and came near to the man.
“You—Stamford!”
“Yes. I was—er—passing. I thought I’d drop in,” said Dick.
“Come in,” said Andy briefly, leading the way with a lighted candle in
his hand. He expected to hear his guest stumble, for it seemed
improbable that any one would call on a friend in the country at one
o’clock in the morning if he were quite sober. But there was no sign of
drink about Dick as he stood near the mantelpiece, fidgeting with the
ornaments. He only looked very uncomfortable.
“Sit down,” said Andy, trying to treat it as an ordinary call. “Been a
lovely day, hasn’t it?”
But Stamford did not sit down, and his rather heavy, florid face was
deep crimson in the candlelight.
“I had to come,” he blurted out.
“I know. Used to late hours ever since you left school. Sometimes feel
you can’t go quietly to bed. Here _I_ am,” said Andy, carelessly
indicating the two candles and the writing-table.
Stamford let a small china dog fall with a crash, picked up the bits,
apologised, and walked to the bookshelf and back again.
“Look here. I don’t know how to begin.”
“Well, sit down to it, man,” said Andy, dragging the big arm-chair
forward. “Have a pipe? Can’t offer you a cigar.”
Stamford disregarded the invitation, and backed up against the
fireplace.
“I’m engaged to Elizabeth Atterton.”
Andy’s glance flashed out, keen as a rapier.
“Is that a joke?”
“No.”
Andy tried to speak, but no words would come from his dry throat. The
room became misty for a second, then it cleared, and Stamford was
saying, with no air of the triumphant lover—
“I dined with the Attertons, and after dinner old Atterton told me I’d
been a good boy, and I might try my luck. And the old girl sent for me
to her room, where she was nursing that blessed back of hers, and she
cried, and said she hoped Elizabeth would have me. So when they told me
to go down into the morning-room where Elizabeth was—what could I do?
After that—what could I do? I couldn’t say I must wait until I’d
thought it over, when they’d been thinking it over for a year. And I
couldn’t say anything about you—now, could I?”
Andy shook his head.
“I suppose not,” he said with some difficulty.
“I’m beastly sorry. I never felt in such a hole in my life. I’d have
given anything—_anything_, to be out of it and safe at home. I never
meant to steal a march on you, Deane.”
“I know that,” said Andy heavily.
Then Stamford sat down.
“I was in a d——d hole,” he repeated. “I never meant to behave like a
skunk. I was going to suggest that we should both write to her on the
first of October, and let the devil take the hindmost. You believe that,
Deane?”
“Yes,” said Andy.
Then they both stared at the empty grate, and at last Stamford got up.
“After all,” he said, “if she’d wanted you she wouldn’t have taken me,
would she?” He paused, and continued, arguing with himself as well as
Andy: “Those Atterton girls have had heaps of chances. Neither of them
would marry just for the sake of getting married. If Elizabeth hadn’t
been willing, she would have said so.”
“Yes,” said Andy again. Then he pricked his numbed senses into a little
semblance of life. “Oh yes, of course.”
“Don’t think I’m not appreciating the way in which you stuck to your
part of the bargain,” continued Stamford, going uneasily towards the
door. “You behaved awfully well.”
Then through the mist caused by pain in Andy’s mind loomed the image of
Lady Jones. What had Lady Jones to do with it? Oh, he knew.
“It was only by an—an accident, that I did not break my promise and
propose to her,” he said at last.
But when the words were out, he wondered why he had said them.
For a moment the two young men stood silent, while a great thought,
unspoken, almost uncomprehended, vibrated between them.
“You never know——” was all Stamford could find to say. Then he
struggled and brought forth a final word. “We all seem in the same box,
somehow, if you only knew. Well, good-night.”
But they shook hands in the dark porch with an extraordinary vista
opening out before both of them, blinding them for a moment to their own
misery and triumph. They saw—those two ordinary young men on a
doorstep—the road on which all creation moves towards the light. They
knew that they were brothers.
Stamford kicked the mat. He wanted to go, and yet he could not get away.
“Then I may take it there’s no ill-feeling?” he said mechanically.
“No,” said Andy, and after a pause he held out his hand. “Good-night.”
He had had enough.
“Oh, good-night.”
Stamford escaped down the drive with a sense of immense relief. It had
been horribly unpleasant, but it was over. Now for the next best thing.
Andy, meantime, stood in the shadow of the porch; he felt a queer
reluctance to go back into the study—the same meaningless dislike that
a child has for a place where it has been badly hurt, instinctive, based
on the shadowy, primitive beginnings.
He closed the front door softly behind him, and followed the path round
the house towards the church by force of habit. The night air blew cool
upon his hot forehead, and the queer thud of his heart calmed down to
its normal beat. But as his physical sensations ceased to trouble him,
his realisation of what had happened grew clearer.
He fought off the moment when he must not only know, but realise, that
Elizabeth could never be his wife, but it came nearer, with the slow,
inevitable tread of such moments. He tried to pretend that he was
listening to the wind, then to the clock striking two, then to a
startled bird among the bushes—the inevitable moment marched on.
At last it was upon him.
But only the darkness, and the tomb of Brother Gulielmus where he sat,
knew how he got through it.
About half-past three he went into the house, and found all dark and
silent, the candles guttered out in their sockets. So he felt his way
upstairs and closed his door.
But he could not sleep, because he saw Stamford every time he closed his
eyes, and then Elizabeth as she looked the first time he met her at Mrs.
Simpson’s sale; and all the time one sentence of Stamford’s rang in his
ears with hideous reiteration: “After all—if she’d wanted you she
wouldn’t have taken me. After all....” And so on, over and over again.
The birds awoke to the tune of it—the little maid creaked
downstairs—Mrs. Jebb came more lightly after—Sam tramped across the
gravel beneath the window—all to the same dull, aching tune.
At last Andy got up, bathed, shaved, and came down to face a life
without Elizabeth.
Mrs. Jebb, herself, brought in the bacon and placed it on the table like
a funeral meat.
“Won’t you have a boiled egg as well?” she asked in a low tone, such as
is used in suggesting black gloves.
“No, thank you,” said Andy, opening the paper.
“Or a poached one on toast?” she urged.
Andy glanced at her.
“I want nothing more, thank you,” he said, curbing his impatience.
“Mr. Deane,” said Mrs. Jebb, “there’s news in the village. I thought I
would tell you myself. Miss Elizabeth Atterton is engaged to Mr. Richard
Stamford.”
“Oh, how did you hear that?” said Andy, turning his paper.
“Mr. Stamford’s groom told Sam Petch, and he chanced to mention it at
the back door,” said Mrs. Jebb.
“News soon flies round Gaythorpe,” said Andy. “Will you tell Sam I shall
want the pony-cart at half-past nine.”
So Mrs. Jebb had to go, but she ordered a chicken for dinner, and
apple-pudding, because those were Andy’s favourite dishes, and she knew
that many a heart had been caught on the rebound. Of what use were the
novels she interminably read, if not to teach her such things as that?
She watched the little maid peeling the apples with a pensive eye,
putting to herself the following conundrum:
“Did he send that letter I saw a copy of in the waste-paper basket—or
did he only _mean_ to propose?”
And her invariable comment on giving it up, was: “Anyway, it’s all right
now.” But even to her own mind she did not use those words, because
those strange unspoken conversations can also take place between a woman
and herself.
All the same she dined on a drumstick of chicken and forced the little
maid to do the same, so that there would be more left for Andy, though
she knew he would never notice it if they finished the fowl altogether.
The maid cocked her eye disdainfully at Mrs. Jebb as they sat at meat,
and said to herself: “She needn’t bother to eat drumsticks—_she’ll_
never get him!”
Which shows once more how unexpectedly much, and how wonderfully little,
everybody knows about everybody else.