Me, too, with mastering charm
From husks of dead days freeing,
The sun draws up to be warm
And to bloom in this sweet hour.
The stem of all my being
Waited to bear this flower.
--LAURENCE BINYON.
It would be hardly possible to describe the unholy, the unmeasured
rejoicing to which Magdalen's engagement gave rise in her family. It is,
perhaps, enough to say that the twenty years of her cheerful, selfless
devotion to the domestic hearth had never won from her father and her
two aunts anything like the admiring approval which her engagement at
once elicited. The neighbourhood was interested. Lord Lossiemouth was a
brilliant match for anyone (if you left out the man himself). The
announcement read impressively in the _Morning Post_. The neighbours
remembered that there had been a youthful attachment, an early
engagement broken off owing to lack of means. And now it seemed the
moment he was rich he had come flying back to cast his faithful heart
once more at her feet. It was a real romance. Magdalen was considered an
extraordinarily fortunate woman by the whole countryside, but Lord
Lossiemouth was placed on a pedestal. What touching constancy. What
beautiful fidelity. What a contrast to "most men." "Not one man in a
hundred would have acted in that chivalrous manner," was the feminine
verdict of Hampshire.
A wave of cheap sentiment overflowed the Bellairs family, in which
Colonel Bellairs floated complacently like a piece of loose seaweed, and
in which even Aunt Mary underwent a dignified undulation.
Bessie alone was unmoved.
"You said, 'Yes' too soon," she remarked to Magdalen in private. "I
should never have thought you would be so lacking in true dignity. He
goes away for fifteen years and I should not wonder a bit if he had
thought of someone else in the interim for all you know to the
contrary--men are like that--and then he just lounges in and says 'Marry
me,' and you agree in a second. You might at any rate have made him wait
for his answer till after tea. In my opinion you have made yourself
cheap by such precipitate action. He thinks he has only got to ask, and
he can have."
Magdalen did not answer.
"I don't understand you," continued the pained monitor. "I have always
had a certain respect for you, Magdalen, and when he came back I
supposed you would give in to him in time if he pressed you without
intermission, and was constant for a considerable period--say a couple
of years; but I never thought it possible you would collapse like this.
I fear you have not taken his character sufficiently into consideration.
If I were in your place I should be afraid that Everard would not allow
my nature free scope, or take an interest in my mental development, and
that the sacrifices which make domestic life tolerable might have to be
all on my side. He is absolutely unworthy of you, and his nose is quite
thick. I daresay you have not remarked it, but I did at once. And in my
opinion he ought for his own good to have been made to _realise_ it.
Even Aunt Mary, though she says she entirely approves of the marriage,
admits that you have shown too much eagerness."
Fortunately for Magdalen the interest of the neighbours, and even of her
own family, was speedily diverted to another channel by the return of
Wentworth and Michael to Barford. The enthusiastic welcome which Michael
received from all classes, and from distant families who had never
evinced much cordiality to his elder brother, astonished Wentworth,
touched him to the quick.
"I had no idea we had so many friends," he said repeatedly.
Michael smiled vaguely and took everything for granted. Wentworth was so
anxious to shield him from fatigue and excitement that at first he was
only too thankful that Michael took everything so quietly. But after a
few days he became uneasy at his brother's inertness of mind and body. A
great doctor, however, explained Michael's state very much as the
Italian doctor had done. He was in an exhausted condition. What was
essential to him was rest. He must not be made to see anyone or do
anything he did not like.
"Your brother will regain his health entirely," the great man had said,
"if he is left in peace, and nothing happens to overexcite him. He is
worn to a shadow by that accursed prison. Many men in his condition
can't rest. Then they die. He can. He has the temperament that
acquiesces. He will cure himself if he is left alone. Let him lie in
the sun, and give nature a chance."
In spite of his anxiety Wentworth saw that Michael's bodily strength was
slowly returning. Every afternoon he left him half asleep in the sun,
and rode over to see Fay. Since she had accepted him it had become a
necessity to him to see her every day.
Wentworth had long been bent to the dust under the pain of Michael's
imprisonment. Fay had been bent with anguish to the dust by the weight
of her own silence which had kept him there.
And now in the twinkling of an eye they both stood erect, freed. Life
was transfigured for both at the same instant.
This marvellous moment found them both just when they were deciding
mildly to love each other. It took them and flung them together in a
common overwhelming joy. It almost seemed as if the shock might make a
man of Wentworth.
Did he half know (he was certainly always tacitly guarding himself
against the assumption of such an idea in the minds of others) that he
had so far been left out, not only from the whirl of life--he had
deliberately withdrawn from that--but from the weft of life itself. The
great loom had not swept him in. It had not appeared to need him. Some
of us seem to hang on the fringe of life, of thought, of love, of
everything. We are not for good or ill interwoven into the stuff, part
of the pattern.
Wentworth felt young for the first time in his life, happy for the first
time in his life, really energetic for the first time. A certain languid
fatigue which had been with him from boyhood, which had always lain
mournfully on its back waving its legs in the air like a reversed
Battle, had now been jolted right side upper-most, and was using those
legs, not as proofs of the emptiness of the world, but as a means of
locomotion.
He had at first been enormously raised in his own self-esteem by his
engagement to a young and beautiful woman. He was permanently relieved
from the necessity of accounting to his friends for the fact that he was
still unmarried, reminding them that it was his own fault. Perhaps at
the bottom of his heart a fear lurked, implanted by the brutal Grenfell,
that he was going to be an old maid. That fear was now dispelled. It was
mercifully hidden from Wentworth that Grenfell and the Bishop and most
of his so-called friends would still so regard him even if he were
married.
But gradually and insensibly the many petty reasons for satisfaction
which his engagement to Fay had given him, and even the delight in being
loved, were overshadowed by a greater presence.
At first they had never been silent together. Wentworth liked to hear
his own voice, and prosed stolidly on for hours with exquisite enjoyment
and an eye to Fay's education at the same time, about his plans, his
aspirations, his past life (not that he had had one), the hollowness of
society (not that he knew anything about it), a man's need of solitude,
and the solace of a woman's devotion, its softening effect on a life
devoted hitherto, perhaps, too entirely to intellectual pursuits.
Fay did not listen to him very closely. She felt that his mind soared
beyond her ken. But she was greatly impressed, and repeated little bits
of what he had said to Magdalen afterwards. And she looked at him with
rapt adoration.
"Wentworth says that consideration in little things is what makes the
happiness of married life," she would announce pontifically.
"How true!"
"And he says social life ought to be simplified."
"Indeed! Does he happen to mention how it is to be done?"
"He says it ought to be regulated, and that everyone ought to be at
liberty to lead their own life, and not to be expected to attend cricket
matches and garden parties, if you are so constituted that you don't
find pleasure in them. I used to think I liked garden parties, Magdalen,
but I see I don't now. I care more for the big things of life now. Does
Everard ever talk to you like that when you and he are alone?"
"Never. Never."
"And Andrea never did, either. Wentworth is simply wonderful. You should
hear him speak about fame being shallow, and how the quiet mind looking
at things truly is everything, and peace not being to be found in the
market place, but in a walk by a stream, and how in his eyes a woman's
love outweighs the idle glitter of a social success. Oh! Magdalen, I'm
beginning to feel I'm not worthy of Wentworth. I've always liked being
admired, so different from him. I did not know there were men so
high-minded as he. He makes me feel very petty beside him. And he is so
humble. He says I must not idealise him, that he does not _wish_ it, for
though he may not be worse or better than I think he is only too
conscious of his many deficiencies. But I can't help it. Who could?"
And Fay let fall a tear.
"We needs must love the highest when we see it."
But the highest some of us can see is the nearest molehill.
What Michael and the Duke had failed to do for Fay Wentworth was
accomplishing.
"You are made for each other," said Magdalen, with conviction. "Every
day shows me that you and Wentworth bring out the best in each other.
Perhaps, gradually, you will keep nothing back from each other, tell
each other everything."
"He tells me everything now," said Fay. "He trusts me entirely."
"And you?" said Magdalen. "Do you tell him everything?"
* * * * *
Wentworth, too, had reached the conviction that he and Fay were made for
each other. He might have starved out the deeper love, the truth and
tenderness of a sincerer nature, if it had been drawn towards him. He
had often imagined himself as being the recipient of the lavished
devotion of a woman beautiful, humble, exquisite and noble, whose truth
was truth itself, and had vaguely wondered why she had not come into his
life. But perhaps if he had met such a woman, and if she had loved him
as he pined to be loved, he would have become suspicious of her, and
would have left her after many vacillations. He did not instinctively
recognise humility and nobility when he met them, because they bore but
slight resemblance to the stiff lay figures which represented those
qualities in his mind. To meet them in reality would have been to him
bewilderment, disappointment, disillusion.
Fay was not only what he seemed to want, what he had feebly longed for.
She was more than this. Her nature was the complement of his. A lack of
shrewdness, of mental grasp, a certain silliness were absolutely
essential to the maintenance of a lifelong devotion to him. Wentworth
had found the right woman to give him what he wanted. Fay had found the
right man.
Love, which had been knocking urgently at their doors for so many futile
years, heard at last a movement as of someone stirring within, and a
hand upon the disused latch.