Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in
which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A
sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way
through a darkened narrow passage, with the up-and-down steps of which
he was not familiar. At the turn of the passage he came upon a picture.
To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet
rested upon it.
The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to
the June sunlight, framing its scrap of landscape, with the windlass of
the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and brimming with water
crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with
leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The
whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman
manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child’s figure and
the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls
and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty
to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every
hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a
girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered
foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her
step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders
to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like
a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache,
and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip
strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.
‘Carry--so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger,
she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and
skimmed into the back garden.
‘Oh, you silly!’ cried one of the girls; ‘it’s only Paul.’
She came back, and as she passed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to
it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of
burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in,
patting her lips with her apron, her roguish head still decorated with
the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry,
but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress’s bonnet Her hair
was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was
fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright
sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.
‘Paul?’ she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level
right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her apron.
‘Is Paul a cousin, too?’
‘Of course he is,’ said the girl who had called her back; ‘he’s our
first cousin, Paul is.’
‘Is he,’ she asked, with demure face and dancing eye--’ is he--in a
kissing relationship?’
‘Try him, my wench,’ said Paul’s uncle.
She bunched her red lips for a kiss, like a child, and advanced her
head. Paul’s face was like a peony for colour, but he pouted his lips
also, and bent to meet hers. When they had almost met, she drew her
head back with a demure shake and a look of doubt The kitchen rang
with laughter at Paul’s hangdog discomfiture. The innocent, wicked,
tantalizing eye mocked him, and he was awhirl with shame; but he found
in the midst of it a desperate courage, and, throwing one arm around her
neck, he kissed her full on the lips with a loud rustic smack.
‘Well,’ she said, with a face of horrified rebuke, all but the eyes,
which fairly danced with mirth and mischief, ‘if that’s Castle Barfield
manners, I’d better go home again.’
‘Quite right, Paul,’ said Paul’s uncle. ‘Stand none o’ their nonsense,
lad.’
‘Oh, but, uncle,’ said she, ‘you _would_ think him milder to look at
him--now, wouldn’t ee?’
Paul knew the speech of the local gentry, he knew his father’s Ayrshire
accent, and his own yokel drawl; but this new cousin spoke an English
altogether strange to his ears, and it sounded fairylike. He stared in
foolish worship.
‘You’d better know who you be,’ said Paul’s uncle, ‘and shake hands.
This is your grand-uncle’s grand-niece, Paul. May Gold her name is. May,
my darlin’, this is Paul Armstrong.’
She held out her hand, and Paul took it shyly in his own. He had very
rarely touched a hand which was not roughened more or less by labour.
The warm, soft pressure tightened on his own hard palm for an instant
only, but he tingled from head to foot as if he had touched something
electric.
‘Oh!’-she said, ‘this is Uncle Armstrong’s little boy? She was by two
years his senior, and for a girl she was tall; but he was more than on a
level with her so far as mere height went, and the phrase cut him at the
heart. She took the strawberry-pottle from her head with both hands, as
if it had been a crown, and laid it on the kitchen dresser. ‘I’ve heard
my father talk of his father five hundred times. My father thinks no
end of Uncle Armstrong. He says that for a man of learning he never met
anybody one half so sensible.’
Paul fell head over heels in love with the pretty cousin from
Devonshire. That is to say, he fell in love with his own dreams about
her, and they were sweet enough for any lad to fall in love with. She
sang and she played, she brimmed over with accomplishment, which was
all rustic enough, no doubt, but angel-fine to Paul, and exotic, and
not like anything within his knowledge. She played and she sang that
afternoon, and never again had Paul’s ears drunk in such tones of
heaven.
He went home in an ecstasy of delight and anguish. How beautiful she
was! what a grace enveloped her! Her very name was a ravishment--a name
of spring and flowers and pure bright skies. May! He dared to whisper
it, and he tingled from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May!
May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then
her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with
hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame!
His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back
to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself
again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his
waistcoat Paul was a poet, and should have had a soul above buttons; but
before the phantom of that missing button his soul grovelled, until it
sprang up once more to hover round her foot, her hand, her eyes, her
voice, her name of May! May! May! and, with shudders of frostiest
self-reproach and richest pleasure, round the memory of that kiss!
In a week or two Paul had grown devoutly religious, and had no idea of
the real why. The Church Vale cousins were ardent churchgoers, for the
girls were at the time of life for ardour, and both the Vicar and his
Curate were unmarried. Paul, whose proper place of Sabbath boredom was
Ebenezer, was welcome as a proselyte, and had a seat in the family
pew, and the rapture of walking homeward sometimes by the side of the
feminine magnet.
So the dweller at the tent door sees himself at church, a pious varier
from chapel. The July sunbeams are falling through stained glass; the
roof-beams of the nondescript old building are half visible in shadow.
The windows are open, and a warm, spiced wind flutters through in
pleasantly successful disputation with odours of dry-rot and chilly
earth and stone. The sheep are bleating amongst the mounded graves, and
the curate is bleating at the lectern. A yearning peace is in Paul’s
heart, and the pretty distant cousin is near at hand, with a smell of
dry lavender in her dress. The first twining of feeling and belief is
here, the earliest of many of those juggleries of Nature which make a
fool of reason. Oh, sweet hour! oh, happy world! oh, holy place, where
she is! Oh, harmless, innocent calf-love! A jolly old throstle is
singing away in the elm which overhangs the parson’s gate. There is a
disembodied skylark voice somewhere high up in the mare’s-tail clouds
which veil the earth from too much heat and brightness; and the young
heart is unhardened and unspotted from the world.
And oh! oho! the elysium of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul,
and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their
Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate,
gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are
no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry
sunshine; there is no such nectar any more as foamed in the shining
pail.
On the way from Church Vale to Beacon Hargate there is a brook, which
now runs ink and smells of evil, and in those days flowed so clear that
you could count the parcel-coloured pebbles at the bottom, through water
which was sometimes pellucid as diamond, and sometimes of a cairngorm
colour. The arched pathway over it, with its weather-stained, square-cut
timber guards at either side, was called June Bridge, and above and
below the bridge, in curved hollows of the banks where the bed of the
brook was earthy, water-lilies floated, sliding with the stream, and
tugging back on their oozy anchorage. Paul found his goddess leaning on
this bridge, watching the lilies, and began to hum whilst he was yet out
of hearing,
‘May, on June bridge, in July weather,’ and to make a song in his head.
‘Can ee swim, Paul?’ asked his goddess.
‘Oh yes,’ said Paul, ‘I can swim right enough. Want them lilies?’ She
nodded, smiling. ‘I’ll get ‘em for you.’
He climbed the bridge, and dropped into the meadow.
‘I’ll wait for ee,’ said May, and sauntered on out of sight.
Paul stripped and dived, came up with a shake of the head, and swam
down-stream. He reached the water-lilies in a dozen strokes, laid a hand
on the stalk of one in passing, and tugged at it. The stem proved to be
tougher than he had guessed, and he dropped his feet to find bottom. He
was out of his depth, but he set both hands low and twisted at the stem.
This took him under water, but he came up smiling triumph, threw his
prize into the meadow, and paddled round the group on an outlook for the
finest blooms. One in the very middle of the floating bed was fresh and
flawless, and he swam for it. A number of cold weedy things were round
his legs at once, and before he knew it he was thickly meshed. The slimy
touch sent an unpleasant thrill through him, but he had no sense of fear
as yet He wrenched off the bloom he had aimed for, and again he went
under water. Then he found he could not rise, and a sudden spasm of
terror shook him. He struggled madly, and the pulses in his head beat
like bells. Just when the case seemed desperate, and he felt as if he
must take breath or die, something gave way. He surged upward, and got
one great gulp of air. His senses came back to him, and the terror died
away. He threw himself upon his back and paddled, and, keeping his face
above water thus, he tried artrully and slowly to extricate his legs
from the net which held them. A minute went by, and he was bound as fast
as ever. Instinct told him that another struggle meant ruin, and yet
instinct bade him struggle. He set his teeth and paddled softly. How
long could he last like this? he asked himself; and at that instant he
seemed to find an answer. The attitude in which he floated was becoming
rapidly more and more upright. There was a sinking weight upon his feet.
At this he shrieked for help, but he paddled softly and without hurry
all the same. He listened as well as he could for the beating in his
ears. The fields seemed deserted, but he called again. He closed his
eyes and listened, paddling softly, with set teeth. He was nearly
upright in the water now, and the weight still dragged But there was
yet an inch or two to spare, and he was resolved to make the most of his
chances. He called for help again, and a voice answered him petulantly
from the bank.
‘You silly toad!’ said the pretty cousin. ‘What do you want to frighten
me like that for?’ ‘I’m drowndin’!’ Paul answered.
‘Not you!’ said the pretty cousin. She made a movement of disdain, and
turned away; but Paul yelled at her with a fear so vivid that she turned
again with a white face, and fell upon her knees. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she cried,
‘are ee really drownin’?’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Paul doggedly. ‘These blasted weeds is pullin’ me
down. Be quick! Tie that there lace thing to your parasawl, and shy it
to me. Look slippy, or it’ll be all up with me. Hold your end tight.
Now, shy! Pull now! Gently--gently.’
He reached the bank, and gripped it with both hands. There was no need
to say that he had had a fright. His wide eyes and the colour of his
face said that.
‘Can ee get out now?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Paul; ‘I’m anchored.’
‘I’ll pull ee out,’ said she, rising to her feet; and Paul thrust one
hand towards her. She took him by the wrist, stuck both heels in the
crisp turf, and pulled. Paul set an elbow on the brink, and strained
upwards with all his might Something sucked out of the stream-bed, and
the waters went muddy. ‘You’re coming!’ cried May, and gave a haul which
was meant to be victorious; but Paul still hung like a log.
‘There’s about a ton of it,’ said Paul. ‘It’s tied like ropes.’
‘Gimme t’other hand,’ returned young Devon. ‘I’ll pull ee out if I dies
for’t.’
Paul surrendered the other hand, and she pulled. There was another
suck at the bottom of the stream, and Paul came up by a foot. She went
backwards for a new vantage-ground, and pulled again, and Paul came to
bank, clothed from the waist downward in water-lily leaf and weed, and
lay face downwards helpless on the turf at her feet.
‘Now,’ she said tartly, ‘you’re not goin’ to faint, I hope!’ Paul said
nothing. ‘Like a girl,’ she added, with disdain.
‘Not me,’ answered Paul, with his nose in the turf. ‘What have I got to
feint for?’
He asked the question with feeble scorn, and fainted.
May Gold stooped to a basket which lay near her, and, taking from it a
pair of garden scissors, knelt beside Paul, and began to snip his bonds.
He woke to find her thus engaged, and a virginal sweet sense of shame
filled him. Her fingers touched his skin at times, and he tingled with a
soft fire.
‘Nobody’d think it from they grimy paws,’ said May Gold to herself; ‘but
he’ve got a skin as fair as a maid’s.’
Paul heard the words, and shuddered exquisitely as she laid her soft
warm hand on his shoulder, leaning over him, and slicing away at the
withes in a business-like fashion.
‘I’ll finish that,’ he said tremulously.
‘La,’ she cried, ‘the child’s awake all the time! There’s the scissors;
I’ll go and wait in the lane.’
Paul lay still for a moment listening to the rustle of her dress; and
when it had gone out of hearing he rolled over, and with a shaking hand
began to free himself of the remnant of his bonds. He had not, so far,
had time to think of the imminent peril from which he had escaped. He
had been near death. Death! What a grip at the heartstrings! He had
had his second of terror in the fact, but the fact was nothing like the
looking back on it There was no urgent fear now to compel him to the
restraint of cowardice, and at this instant he was coward from scalp to
sole--from heart to skin coward. The peril escaped was a thousand times
more horrible than the peril endured, and he quailed now that the danger
was over.
All his thoughts and half his feelings had hurried for weeks past
towards prayer. In his extremity he had not prayed or thought of
praying. A cool, self-centred, self-preserving something in his mind had
taught him to command all his own forces for one purpose. Would he have
been damned if he had lost the power to pray before that cunning mentor
of the flesh deserted him?
He dressed lingeringly and feebly, and when he had done so he went back
to the tangle of water-weeds he had left on the river-bank. There were
a dozen of the lovely waxlike blooms amongst them, uninjured. He snipped
them away with the scissors, and, climbing the stile with heavy feet,
surrendered them to May.
‘Oh,’ she said shrilly, ‘take ‘em away! I couldn’t bear to look at ‘em!’
‘Take ‘em,’ said Paul. ‘They jolly nigh cost me my life.’
Before he answered (or before she caught the meaning of his answer) she
had flung them into the roadway; but at the instant when she understood
him she made a dart at them, gathered them all together in her hands,
and sped to the brookside. There she lay at length upon the turf, and
washed the blooms in the flowing water. Then she gathered long tough
grasses, and looped them together until she had made a cord, with which
she bound the waxen posy. Paul followed and sat near, languidly propped
on one hand to watch her.
‘Paul Armstrong,’ said May, and he knew at once by this manner of
address that she was going to be severe with him, ‘I’d no idea you was
so wicked.’
‘Oh,’ Paul answered defensively, ‘I ain’t wicked--not over and above.’
‘You’re a very wicked boy indeed,’ she said. ‘You was in danger of your
life--there’s no mistake about that, though at first I didn’t believe
you.’
‘There’s nothing wicked in that,’ said Paul
‘Ah 1’ she cried, her little white teeth gripping one end of the grassy
cord whilst she wound the other about the stems of the water-lilies,
‘I can see you know what I mean. Using bad language in the very face of
death and danger! I wonder you wasn’t drowned for a judgment.’
‘Oh, come,’ Paul answered. ‘I didn’t use bad language.’
‘Oh, yes, you did, though,’ she retorted. ‘And I’m not going to be
friends with a boy as talks like that.’
‘Not friends!’ said Paul. ‘Why, May?’ He spoke in an accent of
incredulous reproach.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m properly shocked, I tell ee. I’m never going to be
friends again.’
‘If I thought that was goin’ to be true,’ said Paul, ‘do you know what
I’d do?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, ‘and I don’t want to.’
‘I’d hull myself into that brook this minute and never come out again.’
‘You’d do what? she asked.
To ‘hull’ is to hurl in the dialect Paul spoke in youth. The word was
strange to her.
‘I’d throw myself into that brook this minute, and never come out
again.’
‘Oh, you wicked boy!’ she cried, but her eyes sparkled with triumph. She
quenched the sparkle. ‘It _is_ true; and after that piece of wickedness,
it’s truer than ever.’
Paul rose to his feet; his face was white, and his eyes stared as they
had done when she had just rescued him.
‘Good-bye, May,’ he said.
‘Good-bye,’ she answered coolly.
‘You’re never goin’ to be friends any more, May?’
‘No,’ she said, but rose to her feet with a shriek, for Paul had taken
two swift paces, and had plunged back into the brook, clothes and all.
‘Paul!’ she shrilled after him. ‘Paul! Don’t ee drown. Don’t ee now.
Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t ee!’
Paul stood shoulder-deep in the stream, and she besought him from the
bank with clasped hands and frightened eyes.
‘Goin’ to be friends,’ said Paul grimly.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she cried. ‘Come out, do, there’s a dear!’
Paul reached the bank in a stroke, and climbed back into the meadow.
The instant he gained his feet she rushed at him and boxed his ears
furiously. Paul laughed with pleasure. He had had his head punched by
every fighting peer within a mile of home, and the soft little hands
fell like a sort of fairy snowflakes.
‘Oh, you wicked, wicked, wicked boy!’ she raged, stamping her foot at
him. ‘You can go in again as soon as ee want to. _I_ won’t be so fullish
as to call ee out.’
‘D’ye mean it?’ asked Paul, suddenly grim again.
‘No,’ she said, fawning on him with her hands, but doing it at a
distance for fear of his wet clothes. ‘But, Paul, child, you’ll catch
your death. Run home.’
‘I’m not a child,’ said Paul. ‘I’m within two years as old as you are,
May. I say, May------’
‘Oh, do run home!’ she coaxed him. ‘Do ee, now, Paul, for my sake.’
‘I’m off,’ said Paul. ‘Ask me anything like that, and I’ll walk into
fire _or_ water.’
‘Why, Paul,’ said the little Vanity, turning her face down, and looking
up at him past her beautiful lashes and arched brows, ‘whatever makes
you talk like that?’
‘Because it’s the simple truth,’ said Paul ‘You try me, May.’
‘But why is it the simple truth?’ she asked.
‘Because----’ said Paul fiercely, and then stopped dead.
‘Oh, that’s no answer,’ she said, with a little sway of her hips. She
kept her eye upon him, but turned her head slightly aside. She might
have practised glance and posture all her life and made them no more
telling. But Paul’s teeth were beginning to chatter, and she was
alarmed. ‘Don’t stop to tell me now,’ she said, and seeing that he was
about to protest, she added swiftly: ‘Come and tell me to-night, Paul,
won’t ee, now? And run home now, Paul, do, there’s a dear. Run, and then
you won’t catch cold--to please me, Paul.’
So Paul ran, and ran himself into a glow, and felt as if the fire of
comfort in his heart would have warmed the Polar regions. Until time and
experience taught him better, he always wanted a big word for even the
least of themes.
‘Man,’ said old Armstrong once (but that was years later), ‘ye’d borrow
the lungs of Gargantua to sing the epic of a house-fly.’
‘Yes, dad,’ said Paul; ‘that’s a capital imitation of my style,’ and
they both chuckled affectionately.
But now his mind was a mere firework of interjections--squibs, bombs,
and rockets of ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Now!’ and ‘She’ll listen! and
‘She’ll despise me!’ He was within a month of sixteen, and he was in
receipt of sixpence a week as pocket-money, but the second fact was to
be no more durable than the first. He could neither stay at sixteen nor
at the sixpence. Time would take care of the one event, and Paul of the
other. An immediate marriage, perhaps even an early marriage, was out of
question. It might be necessary to wait for years. There was a fortune
to be made, of course, and though it might come by some rare chance
to-morrow, it might, on the other hand, take time.
‘We’ve got to be practical,’ said Paul.
Whether Paul were a greater ass than most imaginative boys of his years
may be a question, but he was as serious about this matter as if he had
been eight-and-twenty, and when he reached home he had been rejected and
had died of it, and accepted and married many times over. He got into
his working clothes after a thorough rub down, and, except for a touch
of languor, was none the worse for his morning’s adventure. Armstrong
was out on business for the day, and in the drowsy afternoon Paul laid
an old press blanket on the office floor, took a ream of printing-paper
for a pillow, and slept like a top. This made an end of languor, and
when the hour of freedom struck, he ran down the weedy garden and raced
upstairs to his attic-chamber, and there attired himself in his best.
These were days when the cheapest of cheap dandies wore paper cuffs
and collars, then newly discovered, and Paul made himself trim in this
inexpensive fashion. He had spent half an hour at his ablutions before
leaving the office, and walked towards his rendezvous all neat and
shining.
May met him at the door with a finger on her lips and a pretty air of
mystery.
‘I’ve had to fib about ee. Uncle Dan saw you run past all wet this
morning, and he asked. I had to tell him something. I said you fell in
trying to reach them watter-lilies. I didn’t want your own uncle to know
your wickedness.’
There was not time for more, for Uncle Dan himself appeared at this
moment.
‘None the worse for your duckin’, eh, Paul?’
‘Not a bit.’
‘We’re goin’ to have a bit of music, lad. Come in and sit down, if
you’ve a mind to it.’
Paul half welcomed and half resented the putting off of the decisive
moment He was in a dreadful nervous flutter, his hopes alternately
flying like a flag in a high wind, and drooping in a sick abandonment of
everything. And May was more ravishing than ever. She had stuck the
stem of a rose in one little ear like a pen, and the full flower itself
nestled drooping at her cheek. There was never anything in the world
more demure than her face and her manner, but the frolic eye betrayed
her mood now and then, and Paul was half beside himself at every furtive
smile she shot at him. A local tenor, the pride of the church choir, was
there, and May and he sang duets together, amongst them ‘Come where my
love lies dreaming.’ Paul’s heart obeyed the call with a virgin coyness,
and his thoughts stole into some dim-seen shadowed sanctuary, some place
of silence where the feet fell soft, and a pale curtain gleamed, and
where behind the curtain lay something so sacred that he dared not draw
the veil, even in fancy. ‘Her beauty beaming,’ sang the local tenor.
‘Her beauty beaming,’ May’s voice carolled. Heaven, how it beamed! The
boy’s emotion choked him. If shame had not lent him self-control, he
would have broken into tears before them all.
The musical hour wore away, and the local tenor had a supper engagement,
and must go. May slid from the room, and soon after her voice was heard
calling ‘Paul.’
Paul answered.
‘Come here a minute,’ she said. ‘I want to speak to ee.’
Paul stumbled out, blind and stupid. She was standing at the open door
with some gauzy white stuff loosely folded over her hair and drawn over
her bosom. The July moon was at the full, and low in the heavens.
‘Look at that,’ she said, and Paul looked.
The four poplars clove the intense dark blue, but not so loftily as
in his first remembrance of them. The street was quiet Not a sound
disturbed the humming spicy silence of the summer night Paul turned from
that sweet intoxication to her face. She smiled at him, and his heart
seemed to swoon. He did not know till later, but she suffered from some
very slight tenderness of the eyes which made them shrink from too much
light, and he had never seen her in her full beauty until this moment,
when they seemed so large and deep that he could scarcely bear to look
at them. She had a hat in her hand, and she held it out to him, still
smiling, but so dreamily, so unlike herself, that he could but look and
tremble and wonder. He took the hat mechanically, and saw that it was
his own. He thought himself dismissed, and his heart changed from a soft
ethereal fire to cold lead.
‘Auntie!’ she called--‘Aunt Deb ‘Me and Paul’s goin’ to take a bit of a
walk. I’ve got to give him a lecture.’
Some affectionate assenting answer came, and May floated into the
moonlight, across the street, and into a shady alley which lay between
two high-hedged gardens; then into moonlight again, across another road,
through a clinking turnstile, and into a broad field, where Paul had
played many a game of cricket before and after working hours. From
here the open country gleamed, mystic and strange; every hill and dale
familiar, and all unlike themselves, as a friend’s ghost might be unlike
the living friend.
Her first words jarred his dream to pieces.
‘You’re a funny boy, Paul. After all that fullishness of yours this
morning I met your brother Dick. He gave me something. I’ve got it here
this minute. I want to know if it belongs to you--really. Dick says it’s
all your very own, but I don’t more’n half believe him. I say you must
have copied it out of some book. Now, di’n’t ee?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Paul huskily. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a piece of poetry,’ she said. ‘Can you make poetry?’
‘I try sometimes,’ said Paul.
It cost an effort to answer. He wanted her to know, and he shrank from
her knowing.
‘Did you make this?’
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell it.’
She spoke the lines prettily, and put away her rustic accent, all but
the music:
‘“Down in the West dwells my lady Clare:
Blow, O balmy wind, from the West!
Bathe me in odours of her hair,
Bring me her thoughts ere she fell to rest!
‘“Beam, O moon, through her casement bars;
Bathe in thy glory her glorious hair:
Keep guard over her, sentinel stars;
Watch her and keep her, all things fair!”’
‘You didn’t make that up out of your own head, did ee, Paul?
‘Yes,’ said Paul.
Here was his divinity reciting the lines with which she herself had
inspired him.
‘Now, couldn’t ee make a piece of poetry about me?’ she asked.
Paul’s heart gave one great thump at his breast and stopped.
‘That was about you,’ he said.
‘Why, you silly boy,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the name wrong. But oh,
Paul, ain’t ee beginning very young? Askin’ for maids’ thoughts afore
they go to sleep! Mine, too! You’ll be a regular gallows young reprobate
afore you’re much older. That I’m sure of.’
There was a trembling wish deep down in his heart that she had left
this unsaid, but how could he be so disloyal as to let it float to the
surface? He drowned it deep, but it was there. She had misunderstood.
She read him coarsely, not as the May of his dreams had read him.
‘Now, you write something about me, will ee, Paul?--something in my
own name. Will ee?’ Paul made no answer for the moment, for the request
fairly carried him off his balance. ‘Will ee, now?’ she asked, bringing
her face in front of his.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he half sighed, half panted.
‘Here’s a stile,’ she said, springing forward with a happy gurgle of a
laugh. The laugh to Paul’s ear was as musical as the sad chuckle of
the nightingale, and as far from sorrow as its one rival is from mirth.
There was _camaraderie_ in it, sympathy, a touch even of something
confidential. ‘Now, well sit down here together, and you shall make it
up.’
She perched on the stile as light as a perching bird, and drew her lithe
figure on one side to make room for Paul. The stile was narrow, and
there was barely room for two. Paul hesitated shyly, but she patted the
seat in a pretty assumption of impatience, and he obeyed.
‘Paul,’ she said, sliding an arm behind him, and taking hold of the
side-post. ‘What was it ee wanted to tell this morning?’
‘This morning?’ said Paul stupidly. It is one thing to resolve to be
courageous in battle. It may be another thing when the fight begins.
‘Now, I’m sure you haven’t forgot already,’ she said. ‘Here! You catch
hold of the post on my side. Then we shall be comfortable.’ She swayed
forward to make easier for him the movement she advised, and her whole
figure from ankle to shoulder touched him lightly. He obeyed, and she
swung back again, nestling into the curve of his arm. ‘That’s nice,
isn’t it? Now, what was ee going to tell?’ Paul had not a word to say
for himself. If he had ever had the audacity to picture anything in his
own mind like this present truth, he would have thought it certain to
be deliriously happy; but as a matter of fact he was miserable, and felt
himself at the clumsiest disadvantage. ‘You said,’ she murmured, half
reproachfully, you’d go through fire _or_ water for me, Paul.’
‘So I would,’ said Paul.
‘Why? she asked, nestling a little nearer. ‘Why, Paul?’
‘I would,’ said he, rather sulkily than otherwise.
‘Why?’ She swayed forward again, and looked into his face. Her breath
fanned his cheek. Her eyes were wide open and looked into his almost
mournfully. ‘Why?’ Her glance hypnotized him. ‘Why?’
‘I love you,’ he said, in a whisper.
‘Do ee? she cooed. ‘Oh, you silly Paul! What for?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There never was anybody as lovely as you are.’
The words seemed to slide from him, apart from his will.
‘Oh, you silly Paul Am I lovely?’
‘Lovely? sighed Paul, and tangled his eyes in hers more and more.
‘You’ll make up that piece of poetry about me, won’t ee, Paul?’
‘Yes.’
The word was just audible, a breath, no more.
‘You dear!’ she said; and, leaning nearer and yet nearer to him, she
laid her lips on his. They rested there for one thrilling instant, and
then she drew back an inch or two only. ‘Make it up about that,’ she
said, looking point blank into his eyes. Paul drooped his head and the
lips met again, and fastened. A delicate fire burned him, and he curled
his arm about her waist, and drew her to him. She yielded for one
instant, and then slipped away with a panting laugh. ‘Oh, Paul?’ she
said; ‘you really are too dreadful for anything! Fancy! A mere child
like you. I should like to know what Mr. Filmer’d say if ever he knew
I’d let ee do that.’
By one of those curious intuitions to which the mind is open at times
of profound excitement, Paul knew what her answer would be, but he
asked the question. At first his voice made no sound; but he cleared his
throat and spoke dryly, and in a tone of commonplace:
‘Who is Mr. Filmer?’
‘Mr. Filmer’s the gentleman I’m going to be married to,’ said May.
‘He’s a very jealous temper, and I shouldn’t like him to know I’d been
flirting, even with a child like you.’
It was all over.