Strolling out one evening, about the end of August, to cool after the
heated atmosphere of the workshop, Morgan was dreaming a beautiful
vain dream. He had gone half way down the shorter St. Margaret's road,
and in the distance rose the square church-tower. For the last two or
three minutes he had been conscious of people a few yards ahead of
him, and, as their slow stroll was yet slower than his, he had been
getting nearer and nearer to them. Now his eye rested half vacantly on
their backs, and the perception forced itself upon him that the three
backs were those of ladies; and the next thing that dawned upon him
was that there was something familiar as well as pleasing about the
carriage, the curves, and the movements of those backs, still some
twenty paces ahead of him. But he was still dreaming of Margaret, and
these perceptions from the outer world were not strong enough to
destroy the images in possession of his mind. He was quite close on
them before he became aware that he had stumbled on Mrs. Medhurst,
Margaret, and Diana.
Though conscious of them, he had, in his abstraction, almost walked on
them in the narrow road, making them turn instinctively. He knew he
was trembling visibly as he stood face to face with Margaret, her
figure flashing on him for a moment like a divine vision; then he saw
nothing and felt a fire burning at his temples.
"Morgan," said Mrs. Medhurst's sweet voice, and the cloud of things
passed away, and he became aware her arm was supporting him.
"So we know your hiding-place now," sang out Diana. "Why wouldn't you
let my old sweetheart tell me? I'm sure I'd have got it out of him all
the same had he been in London."
"Morgan doesn't even offer to shake hands with us," said Margaret in
soft suggestion.
Now that the encounter had been made, he pulled himself together to
face it. He felt shame-faced and altogether unstrung, and he knew that
the instinct that had made him insist on isolation had been fully
justified. He was over-conscious, too, of the stains on his hands as
he held it out. And yet beneath all his discomfort there was a full
tide of immeasurable happiness. He could not speak yet. His throat
swelled--the emotion was too overpowering. Here again was Margaret,
the real Margaret, by his side, talking to him!
His eyes took her in greedily. Under the large straw hat, with its
poppies and corn, her face showed exquisite, a face that might float
tantalisingly across a painter's vision, and vanish after but allowing
him the merest glimpse. Though she was clad in a simple dark blue
serge dress, the grace of her figure seemed to him a revelation, and a
ravishing sprig of cornflower peeped from her waistband. There was a
repose, too, and a gentleness in her bearing that made him think, by
contrast, of his Cleo, and of the uncouthness of Alice and Mary when
they attempted to be stately.
Perhaps the very thought seemed to call out to him in warning, for,
suppressing a sigh, he tore his eyes away from her.
"Why couldn't you let us know?" persisted Diana, who had been
evidently much put out by the failure of her artful letters to seduce
Archibald into giving away the secret of Morgan's whereabouts.
Mrs. Medhurst and Margaret both looked at Morgan and smiled, as if to
convey to him that _they_ understood his motives, and to indicate that
Diana was not in the secret. Diana's quick eyes, however, noted the
movement, though she said nothing just then.
"I had reasons," said Morgan, vaguely, feeling he must make some sort
of an answer to so definite a question.
"We are staying at St. Margaret's," explained Mrs. Medhurst, "and we
have been taking a stroll along the cliff-path. It began to get too
dangerous, so we climbed a fence and cut across somebody's ploughed
field, and then through a common, till at last we got on to this road.
And now we're wending our steps homeward. You, Morgan, I suppose, are
wandering after the labours of the day?"
He felt they were talking to him in as simple and natural a manner as
if they had but parted the day before, under normal circumstances; and
he was grateful for this delicacy that abstained from embarrassing him
and made the meeting an easy one for him.
"The beauty of the evening tempted me," he said, growing more at his
ease.
"And shall not our beauty tempt you as well," suggested Mrs. Medhurst
laughingly, "to come and see our humble cottage. It is a quaint
place. Mr. Medhurst bought it and we furnished it ourselves."
"Do come, Morgan," put in Margaret persuasively, as if some instinct
told her he was going to hesitate.
He knew that battling against the temptation would be hopeless. He
seemed to be walking with angels in the last flood of the evening
sunlight, and something of the divine calm of evening came over his
spirit. He was borne along, gently, gently, till all the sense of the
day's toil behind him fell away. The cool air breathed on him, and
fluttered the blades of grass on the common, and shook the purple
wild-flowers that grew along the wayside. It was laden with the odour
of the sheaves that were spread over the fields amid the brown
stubble, and seemed to waft to him something of the elemental poetry
of the great mother Earth, of the informing spirit of religions of
antiquity, of the human joy in the harvest festival, of the symbolic
cornucopia, of the grateful offerings of first-fruits.
With a rare understanding of his emotions, they referred no more to
him or his work, but plunged at once into their holiday adventures, so
that he also was carried away from himself. Diana was learning to
swim, and was as full of the subject as she had once or twice,
according to her own account, been of sea-water. Margaret's
enthusiasms were all for boating, and she took the others out whenever
the sea was smooth enough to soothe her mother's fears. The cottage,
too, was such fun that they never grew tired of it. And then there was
a field near at hand where they had a tennis-court marked out, and
where Diana and Margaret kept the ball going between them.
It did not take them long to reach St. Margaret's, and they entered
their cottage just as the sun was on the point of sinking. Morgan, now
abandoned to his adventure, was delighted with the curiously-built
place, with its tiny hall, on one side of which was the little
drawing-room, and on the other the dining-room. The walls were boarded
and the ceilings were low, rough and whitewashed. Sketches and prints
were hung in profusion, nooks were draped, and wicker and quaint
chairs and knick-knacks were arranged in a charming disorder, whilst
books were scattered everywhere. A piano loomed huge in the crowded
little drawing-room. And all this had been achieved, whispered Mrs.
Medhurst confidentially in his ear, by the outlay of an incredibly few
pounds.
Morgan had an enchanted couple of hours, handling the books, listening
to Margaret's playing, and admiring Diana's skill with the mandoline,
which her many-sided caprice had taken up of late. He joined them in
their evening meal for, according to their rural regime, they dined at
two and supped about nine. The dining-room opened direct into a third
inner room, which mysterious place Morgan judged to be a kitchen; for
the cottage was built long and low.
When eventually he rose to go, they bade him good-night with the same
implication of normality. It almost seemed they were taking it for
granted he would come again on the morrow. But he knew their omission
to give him a definite invitation was dictated by their feeling for
him; that they did not wish to seem to intrude on the life he had
chosen, but were leaving it to him to decide.
He strode off through the gathering darkness on the hour's walk that
would take him back to Dover. The colour had not quite died out of the
west, and, as he watched the violets and the cold blues and the pearl
greys fading with the strange, lingering light on the distant horizon,
his feeling of the evening just passed brought back to him the echo of
some lines in the poem, from which Helen had once quoted to him:
"It lies in heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void..."
He had the sensation of being in the middle spaces now, floating down
towards earth again from some rare ethereal region, to which his
spirit had mounted.
Perhaps, too, of Margaret might it be true, as of the Blessed Damozel:
"... she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands
And wept."
He recalled now what his father had written in his first letter about
her shutting herself up in her studio and her pretence of being at
work on a mass of wax. The hint of her suffering had been almost
intolerable to him then; and he knew that, in spite of all her gaiety
to-night, the wound had not healed. He pictured the four of them
sitting in the shaded lamp-light of the little drawing-room, and, as
the echo of the music she had played surged again in his ears, he
seemed to feel behind it a strange, ineffable sadness, as one might be
conscious of the dark depths of a moon-lit stream. Her every movement
rose before him again, giving him the sense of pain suppressed for his
sake.
He had abandoned himself to the charm of the evening--it had been so
wonderful to him! But now his vision seemed to have grown keener, to
be piercing deeper. His memory of each moment was marvellously clear.
How vivid still was the picture of Mrs. Medhurst bending down into the
light, when he had noticed how the gold was fading out of the still
beautiful hair. In the haunting memory of her sweet face he seemed to
see now an under-expression of anxious pity and love.
Perhaps now that the pressure was relaxed, Margaret had stolen up to
her room and was sobbing passionately to a silent world.
They seemed to beat through him, these sobs! And then Mrs. Medhurst's
face again seemed to be with him, and the knowledge that his father
had loved her in the olden days seemed to bring her closer to his
heart. He stood still and threw out his arms in the darkness, with the
vain yearning fancy that perhaps she might be there, that perhaps she
might take him to her.
"Morgan," sang out a voice by his side.
His arms dropped and his heart beat painfully, and, though in a moment
he had perceived it was Diana had overtaken him in the gloom, he could
not recover himself.
"Why, you're crying!" she exclaimed, as her hand stole into his. "And
so is she. That makes a pair of you. I'm sure I don't know what it's
all about, but it's enough to vex a saint. Something mysterious has
happened and nobody will tell me a word about it. And I dare not ask
Margaret. I tried it once, and it just started her off crying--I
thought she'd never stop!"
He did not answer her. He but held her little hand tighter, aware that
the contact made his own seem coarser. They moved on together.
Suddenly he checked himself. "You must not come any further," he
began. "I must see you back."
"Tell me first what has happened," she persisted; "Why have you become
a workman?"
"I cannot and must not tell you. Besides, you could never understand."
"I understand a good deal more than you grown-up people think I do.
Why can't you leave off being a workman? And why don't you come and
marry Margaret? She's awfully in love with you, and so are you with
her--you know you are!"
"Yes Diana, I know I am," fell from his lips, and immediately he
regretted the words.
"Then come back now and tell her," said Diana, tugging at him as if to
make him turn.
"But look at my hands," he said, half in jest, half in earnest. "See
how rough and stained they are! I shall always be a workman, and I
shall always be very poor."
"Margaret doesn't care anything about that," she protested. "She's not
that sort of girl. Do come back, please, Morgan. Mamma's reading
downstairs. I'll steal up to Marjy and tell her you're waiting for
her. If you stand under the window, I'm sure you'll hear her crying.
Come along, Morgan, you can take ever such a nice walk together,
and----"
"And,"--he echoed stupidly.
"Oh, I was going to say I'll be glad to get the pair of you off my
hands."
"I'm afraid that pleasure will have to be postponed indefinitely," he
observed. "And now, Diana," he added, as sternly as he could, "you
must be going back home without me--that is, I'll see you safe to
where the houses begin."
"Morgan, you're a brute!" she answered with equal sternness. "But I
mean to get to the bottom of this mystery all the same. I'll make a
bet with you. How long do you give me to find out?"
"Ten years," said Morgan. He had now turned back with her.
"Ten years!" she echoed mockingly. "Why there'll be any number of
olive-branches by then. Yours, of course, I mean."
"Diana! You are a very wicked girl."
"Well, I'm fourteen. That's quite old enough to be wicked, isn't it?
Good-night, Morgan." And she suddenly sped ahead, and before he could
recover from his astonishment she had become a shadow amid the
darkness.
He strode after her, though he had not the least anxiety for her, as
they were not yet a mile distant from the cottage. From the speed with
which she kept ahead of him, it was clear she was determined to elude
him; seeing which he contented himself with keeping within range of
her.
When, eventually, he turned towards Dover again, it was with a
feeling of half-sorrow that he should have happened to take that walk.
Strong and firm as he was, he was not strong enough to endure such
ordeals. He had winced most whilst Diana had been speaking to him. And
then the figure of Cleo came up again. Cleo, to whom he was married!
In the depression that now came upon him, a friendship with Margaret,
even years hence, seemed an impossibility to him. She might remain
with him as an ideal figure, but the real living Margaret was too
dazzling for him to look upon.