REAL jollity is as antiseptic as sunshine, and when Andy sat in a
leather chair opposite Mr. Thorpe, with Mrs. Thorpe presiding over an
immense batch of the first mince-pies which had been brought out for his
refreshment, he unconsciously felt the bitterness of his grief being
sweetened and purified. It had been a lonely and disappointing time
lately, and he had watched the autumn leaves hanging thick on the trees
ready to fall at the first gale, with a leaden dulness of heart that was
sapping his vitality.
When he trudged back and forth to the little church past the
resting-place of Brother Gulielmus he thought often that so he would
lie, his little day’s work done, and he had an intense consciousness of
the futility of life, though he worked hard and tried to fight against
it.
To-night, he had come down to the Thorpes’, because Mrs. Thorpe asked
him, with a heavy sense of all places being alike; and now, though they
had discussed nothing but the crops and the weather, his bitterness was
already changing into that good grief which never yet harmed a man, in a
wholesome atmosphere of mince-pies and blazing autumn logs—or rather,
in the atmosphere of sane and strong acceptance of life as it is which
emanated from the Thorpes present, and the generations of Thorpes who
had gone before. They—those older Thorpes—and the Will Ford who was
afterwards Gulielmus had doubtless sat through long evenings after
harvest-time in exactly the same atmosphere as surrounded Andy at
present—and a sturdy sense of a man’s right to work and gain strength
by working—and of a man’s right to suffer and grow fine by
suffering—took hold of Andy’s soul to the exclusion of that weak dream
of universal ease which had been, unconsciously, the outcome of a modern
education.
For when Mrs. Thorpe said—
“Have another mince-pie—_do_,” she really voiced, quite without it, the
brave and kind thoughts of those who had been strong enough to take life
gladly, and urged Andy to follow their example.
And when Mr. Thorpe said—
“We shall pull our damsons to-morrow. We waited until they’d had a touch
of frost on them to take the tartness off. Have you pulled yours yet?”
he really spoke of all those things, deep hidden, which make a man ready
to do his day’s work here and trust in God for the reward.
And as they sat round the fire, their tongues speaking of the unchanging
springtime and harvest, and their souls of the unchanging day’s work and
faith in the end, they belonged—those three—to no time or place. They
were so absolutely unconsciously above and beyond all that, and any man
who has ever thought from the far misty dawn of history until now, might
have slipped into the fourth empty chair, and talked with them and
understood.
At last Mrs. Thorpe began to speak of Elizabeth’s wedding, and wondered
what the bridesmaids would wear, and brought out a silver cream-jug
which she and Mr. Thorpe were presenting to the young couple.
“I hear the Squire is going to the Little House,” said Mr. Thorpe, for
so the Dower Lodge was called in the village. “But he fails a bit, week
by week, though he isn’t an old man. He’ll be glad to see his son
settled in and managing everything.”
“That’s why they are hurrying the marriage on so. Only five days from
now,” added Mrs. Thorpe. “I have heard people say, ‘Short a-doing—long
a-rueing!’ but it can’t be so in this case, I think. They do seem to
have everything the heart can want.”
“Nice-looking girl,” said Mr. Thorpe, taking the masculine view. “Very.”
“The Stamfords have gold plate, if they like to use it, and no young man
ever made a worse husband for having sown his wild oats first,” said
Mrs. Thorpe, following with the feminine outlook. “Shall you assist at
the ceremony, Mr. Deane?”
“No,” said Andy. Then he added more quietly, “I don’t expect to. They
will have Mr. Banks, of course, and probably other old friends.”
“Well, anyway, it’s poor fun marrying a pretty girl to somebody else,”
concluded Mr. Thorpe, knocking out his pipe.
Soon after that Andy went home, and he was met in the hall by Mrs. Jebb,
who informed him that Mrs. Simpson—with whom she was now on terms of
armed neutrality—had been to ask him about fetching her sideboard home.
It appeared that an empty removal van would be passing her house early
the following morning, and the men had promised to bring the sideboard
from the Vicarage, if agreeable to Mr. Deane.
Andy glanced at his watch and saw it was already past eleven.
“I will go round myself and tell her that it is all right,” he said.
“Such a shame for you to turn out again after your hard day,” said Mrs.
Jebb sentimentally. “Mrs. Simpson has made more trouble about that
hideous sideboard——”
But Andy was already half-way down the steps, so Mrs. Jebb resumed her
candle and went up to bed, leaning awhile from her casement to watch the
Hunter’s moon shining splendid over the massed tree-tops, and to dream
vaguely of pale-grey satin and orange blossoms. Then she drew down her
blind and perused a novel called _An Autumn Rose_, which had a heroine
whose virgin heart had remained untouched until she was well over forty.
Andy ran along with his hands in his pockets, for the night was sharp
with a touch of frost, and as he turned out of his own gate he paused
for a moment to glance, like Mrs. Jebb, at the extraordinary brilliance
of the moonlight.
The little village lay asleep; all the windows with drawn blinds on one
side of the houses were glittering and shining in the moonlight like
golden windows in some enchanted dream. The sky stretched above them,
calm and wide and clear, with little waves of gold around the moon.
There was scarcely a breath of wind stirring, and Andy stood in the
shadow of the tree, quite still, so that he gave no sign of life to the
white empty road. Any one passing would have fancied himself quite
alone. Any one coming across the field-path from Gaythorpe Manor and
standing on the step of the fence might have looked over the still
landscape and fancied himself the only waking soul in all that quiet
world.
Elizabeth, standing on that step of the fence and looking at the windows
of Andy’s house, which were pale golden in the moonshine, evidently
thought she was quite alone; and her face appeared stronger and more
reposeful than any one who had seen her laughing in the daytime would
have thought possible. The clear, bright light seemed to have drawn away
the girlish softness of her features, and her tender colouring, and to
have left her as she would be if the joys and passions of life had all
gone from her.
As she stood there, quite still, in the full moonlight, with a white
cloak round her and a white scarf over her head, against the luminous
darkness of the sky, she was more like some noble abbess come to life
again than a young lady who intended to be married in five days.
And it was no chance resemblance, but a strange, momentary impression of
a mental state upon the outward appearance—for Elizabeth would have
become an abbess if, with her position and her character and her large
private means, she had lived a few centuries earlier. She did so
fundamentally belong to that type of woman who says to herself, “If I
can’t be happy, I will be good,” which is quite illogical, of course,
because that type of woman is always good to start with.
And as she paused, motionless, with her hand at her breast holding the
close-drawn scarf, it was clear that the mahogany sideboard, in the
guise of a harbinger of fate, had been at it again.
Andy ran forward out of the shadow and said breathlessly, in a voice
which he scarcely knew to be his own—
“You were looking at my windows!”
Elizabeth gave a great start, and her face was very white in the
moonlight.
“Yes,” she said, half whispering.
“What did you come for?” said Andy, pressing nearer to her.
They stood under a sycamore tree in the lane, but they could not see
each other because a cloud sailed across the moon: it was very dark and
still. Then the cloud passed—a little wind stirred—and immediately a
thousand dusky stars of shadow quivered on the white radiance of the
moonlit road.
“Why did you come?” repeated Andy a second time.
There was enough light now for them to see into each other’s eyes, and
what they saw there changed, for a moment, that white road with the
stars of shadow quivering on it, to the floor of heaven. They forgot,
for that one moment, that there was anything in earth or heaven but the
love they saw in each other’s eyes.
“Why did you come, dear?” whispered Andy with his arms about her.
“To see your home. To say good-bye,” said Elizabeth. “Oh, Andy, I
thought you didn’t care for me. I thought you had changed your mind at
the last minute. Why did you keep away until it was too late?”
“I promised Stamford,” said Andy. “We both wanted you, and he had to
wait until his year was out. I tried to play fair. I didn’t want to make
him lose heart when he had done his best to keep straight.”
“How good of you. Dear Andy, how good of you,” said Elizabeth, smoothing
the shoulder, of his rough coat with that comforting touch which women
keep for their lovers and their children.
“No; it was not good,” said poor Andy, choking a little, “because I
never expected to lose you. I thought you loved me.”
Then Elizabeth threw her arms round his neck and sobbed out—
“I do love you. Oh, I do love you!”
So they stood, clasped together, until Andy loosed his arms from about
her for a moment; but he took her into them again with a low cry that
came from the very depths of his being—
“I can’t let you go!”
Still, in a little while, it became clear to these two foolish—or
wise—young people that they must let each other go. Perhaps it was
because they stood on the floor of heaven and so saw things beyond the
stars, that even their own earthly happiness began to look a small thing
beside the destruction of Dick Stamford’s soul.
“What am I to do?” said Elizabeth. “Poor Mrs. Stamford——”
She broke off, and the memory of that Magnificat in the Attertons’
morning-room swept with desolating conviction across their hearts.
“Why did you accept Stamford when you loved me?” said Andy. “Even if you
supposed I didn’t care, you need not have done that.”
“I thought,” said Elizabeth—and here it all came out—“I thought if I
could not be happy myself I could make a great many other people happy.
I could do some good with my life. I should never have taken Dick
Stamford if I had not felt I could do some good with my life in that
way. And I knew I could never be happy without you.”
Oh, it was all foolishness, of course; but shadowy generations of good
women stood behind Elizabeth as she said that, and the ladder of useless
self-sacrifice on which they stood reached very high up: even as far,
perhaps, as the dreams of those who know that their first duty is to
themselves.
Anyway, there was something rather wonderful about the look of Andy and
Elizabeth when they came forth from the shadow of the tree and walked
together across the field. Their young faces were a little stern, and
the radiance about them seemed in some strange way to be more a white
fire of the spirit triumphing over the flesh than any ordinary
moonlight.
They walked quietly, and scarcely spoke, but the things which usually
seem unreal were near realities, and those things which usually seem
real did not matter. Even though they saw the City of Wedded Love, the
Enchanted Muddle, in ruins before them, a light streamed from somewhere
farther on that made the ruins glorious—a huge altar to the God of
Love.
At last they came suddenly, from behind a clump of trees, upon the
garden of Gaythorpe Manor. And things began to be real—or
unreal—again, according as you may take it.
“How did you get away?” said Andy in a low voice.
“I went to my room with a headache, but when I looked out and saw the
moonlight I thought a turn alone would do me good. They’d given me the
great guest-chamber where Anne Boleyn once slept; and it has little
stone steps leading from a terrace into the garden. So it was easy
enough.” Her lip quivered. “I don’t know how women would get on without
headaches, Andy.”
Andy smiled tenderly, for all his unhappiness, at the queer mixture
which is a woman: and when a man has learned to do that, he understands
a great deal.
“Poor little girl,” he said.
But that somehow touched a chord of human and dear things that nearly
broke their hearts, and without knowing how, they found themselves
clinging together, their faces wet with tears.
“Good-bye,” said Andy, trying to go.
“Good-bye,” said Elizabeth, clinging to him.
Then it was Elizabeth who tried to go, and Andy who held her fast.
They came so, nearer and nearer to the little stone staircase, and when
Elizabeth put her foot on the first step, Andy felt as if his life were
going from him. Silently she went and silently he watched her go, with
beads of sweat standing on his forehead that the night wind changed to
drops of ice.
At the top she turned and said—
“Good-bye.”
He tried to answer, but no sound would come from his dry throat—then
the door closed, and he went back across the moonlit field.