Jeannie was standing on the first tee of the Wroxton golf links, doing
what is technically known as addressing her ball. In other words, her
driver was moving spasmodically backward and forward behind it, and she
was thinking about her right foot. Some six yards behind her stood two
impassive caddies, and Jack was standing opposite her ball and to the
right of her.
“Don’t press,” he said, “and go back slowly. Let your left heel come off
the ground quite naturally as the club goes back. Oh, keep your head
still! Your spine is a pivot round which the arms work. And keep your
eye on the ball.”
Jeannie’s club trailed very slowly back to about the level of her right
shoulder, when suddenly an idea struck her, and she paused.
“Jack, how can I see my club head on the back swing out of my left eye
if I am to look at the ball?” she asked.
“If you are going to argue, stand at ease,” said Jack. “You will
certainly miss the ball if you pause on the top of your swing. Let’s
talk it out, and take your stroke afterward.”
Jeannie was looking fixedly at the ball.
“Don’t talk when I’m playing,” she said, and with a long breath raised
her club a little higher. Then she hit furiously, and a frenzied ball
hid itself in long grass some ten yards in front of the tee.
“I told you so,” she exclaimed.
“Have it again,” said Jack.
“No, certainly not,” said Jeannie. “Oh, yes; I think I will. I will
start now. That was trial.”
“About the club head,” explained Jack, “it’s like this. You can see it,
but you don’t look at it. You look at the ball, and at nothing else
whatever. But do remember that you have to hit a part of the ball which
you don’t see at all.”
Jeannie’s caddie had teed her ball again.
“Then what’s the use of looking at it?” she asked.
“In about five years, if you stick to it, you will understand,” he
said.
Jeannie shifted uneasily on her feet. Then another idea struck her.
“Then tell me that in five years’ time,” she said. “But for practical
purposes, what am I to do this minute?”
There were already another couple waiting to start, one of which was
Colonel Raymond. Jeannie saw him, and nothing in the world would have
induced her to let him pass. Jack guessed as much.
“Hit this ball as hard as ever you can,” he said.
Jeannie shortened the intended swing, and threw her club at the ball.
Oddly enough, it rose clear of the grass, towered, and fell a full
hundred yards off, and getting a forward kick was like a bolted rabbit.
“I told you so,” she said again.
From behind came Cousin Robert’s voice.
“By gad!” he exclaimed loudly. But Jeannie did not turn round, and said
negligently to Jack:
“Topped!”
Now, the ball was anything but topped, and Jack, struggling with inward
laughter, sent a careless hooked drive down wind and far. Then, as is
natural at golf, the great silences of the game which isolates the
player from the whole world closed round them and they went forward.
Thereafter came distress and difficulties. A bunker welcomed Jeannie’s
second, and the bunker retained her third. A sky-sweeping iron shot was
recorded as her fourth, and the fifth leaped across the green as if a
wasp had stung it. Jack, meantime, had laid his second nearly dead, and
four was sufficient.
“That sha’n’t count,” said Jeannie; “we’ll begin now. The handicap is as
follows: We both play on till we reach the green, do you see, and then
the scoring begins. We are like as we lie on the green, Jack, and after
that you give me a stroke a hole. And I’ll play you for half a crown,”
she added, with a burst of reckless speculation.
It was an afternoon of spring, a day of that exquisite temper seldom
felt except in our much-maligned climate. April had laid aside its
outbreaks of petulant rain, and wore the face of a laughing child. The
great grave downs over which they played were scoured by a westerly
wind, which swelled the buds and smoothed out the creases in the little
buttons of green which were bursting from the hawthorn. From the height
an admirable expanse of big, wholesome country was visible on every
side: to the west the houses of Wroxton stood red and glimmering in a
hollow in the hills, and climbed the slopes of the circle. In the middle
rose the gray Cathedral piercing the blue veil of pure air in which the
lower houses were enveloped, and the tower was gilded with the sunshine.
North and east lay a delectable land, where broad fields alternated with
woods, round which hovered, like a green mist, the first outbreak of
bursting leaves, and down the centre of the valley, unseen but traceable
from a livelier flush of green, ran the river. To the south there were
only downs, rising and falling in strong undulations like the muscles of
strong arms interlaced. Overhead skylarks carolled unseen in the blue,
or dropped, when their song was done, among the grass, breathless and
drunken with music; the earth had renewed its lease of life, and the
everlasting fountains of youth were unsealed again. Never since the
seasons had begun their courses was winter farther away, and never
since Adam had walked with Eve in the garden had love touched two lives
more closely than it touched Jeannie and Jack as they went over the
breezy downs, club in hand.
The details of the play would not be interesting even to golfers, to
others tedious; but it may be remarked that Jack drove long balls, which
started low and rose inexplicably toward the end of their flight, and
that a clean ball rising suddenly against a blue sky is invariably felt
to be a stimulating object.
“It must be so nice,” remarked Jeannie, “if it doesn’t hurt to be a golf
ball. You lie there seeing nothing except blades of grass close round
you, and then suddenly the ground races away from you, and you rise,
rise, like that one did, over a bank and a road, and drop on the smooth
short grass of the green.”
“The hole must be unpleasant,” said Jack. “You go trotting over the
green, and then suddenly tumble into a horrible, small, dark prison,
with iron at the bottom.”
“Yes, and somebody says ‘Good shot!’ but they take you out again. Oh,
Jack, may I take off my hat?”
All mankind may be divided into those who like hats and those who do
not. Some people habitually wear a hat unless there is a real reason,
like a church or royalty, for taking it off, but to others a hat is to
be always discarded if possible. Both Jeannie and the other were
habitually hatless folk, a characteristic which goes hand-in-hand with a
love for wind and large open places, and is borne out, to endless
issues, in the normal attitude of the mind toward problems of life.
She gave it to her caddie to carry for her, and shook her head to free
it of its prison-house shades.
“That is better,” she said. “Now my drives will go ten yards farther.”
Colonel Raymond, meantime, playing behind them, was lavish of advice to
his opponent.
“Cultivate a style,” he said. “Hew out a style for yourself, and the
rest will follow. Ah!”--and he watched his own ball, which he had topped
heavily with his mashie, skip and bump over the outlying banks of a
bunker and roll up gently to the hole.
“A useful stroke that,” said this incomparable man. “I picked it up from
poor young Tom Morris. Time and again have I seen him skim his ball over
the rough stuff and lay it dead. A fine, useful shot.”
Useful the shot undoubtedly was, and certainly there was no showiness
about it, a quality which Colonel Raymond detested.
“You’ve got to get into the hole,” was his maxim. “Well, get there,” and
he missed his putt.
Colonel Raymond, on his return to Wroxton after the recovery of Maria,
had been at first a little disconcerted to find that the engagement of
Cousin Jeannie was common property. Mrs. Raymond, no doubt, would have
mentioned it in her letters to him, but the Colonel had begged her not
to write at all.
“The other children will be with me,” he had said, “and a letter may so
easily carry infection. Why, there was a man in India who got the
cholera simply through a letter. So don’t write, Constance. Send me a
telegram every day or two to say how Maria is, and don’t fret yourself.
Worry and fright, as Cousin Jeannie said, are to be avoided.”
But almost before the first shock of the news had conveyed itself to the
Colonel, he saw his ingenious way out of it.
“Didn’t I say they were engaged all along?” he roared to his old
cronies. “I remember nearly letting it out one evening here. It was
intended, as I said, not to be known at once, and I kept my counsel. But
I remember letting it slip once at Miss Clifford’s. Ask her if it is not
so. I knew all along, all along. Is that your lead, partner? A devilish
poor one.”
As soon as the year’s mourning for Jeannie’s father was over the
marriage was to take place--that is to say, they would not be married
till June. Never had a courtship run more smoothly, and never did the
course of true love behave less proverbially.
Canon Collingwood took the engagement as he took most things in life,
with placid enjoyment, but the event had moved Mrs. Collingwood beyond
the run of worldly matters. Like the rest of Wroxton, every time she had
been brought in contact with Jeannie she had been moved to something
warmer than mere liking, even when she disagreed with her, at the charm
and simplicity of the girl. There were some people, like herself, who
did many unselfish things from a sense of duty; Jeannie, on the other
hand, seemed to do them from inclination, and her sense of duty was as
invisible as the string which binds together a pearl necklace. All that
could be seen were the series of beautiful shining acts; what made the
series was left to conjecture. Mrs. Collingwood’s necklace of shining
acts was differently constructed. There were hard, black knots in it,
and the string showed between each pearl, and it looked remarkably
strong. There was no fear whatever of its breaking.
Weeks before the time for the wedding the new dresses of the Miss
Cliffords were ready. They were purple, real purple, fit for empresses,
and their bonnets were purple, too. They had also both of them left
cards at Bolton Street, with P. P. C. written in the corner. This was
not meant to imply that they were going away, or to express a hint that
Jeannie was; but Miss Phœbe remembered that cards had been left on a
curate of her father’s just before his marriage and his promotion to a
parsonage, and P. P. C. was connected in her mind with congratulations.
The Miss Cliffords had had some discussion of the etiquette of high life
prescribed on such occasions, and this had been fixed upon as a safe and
elegant thing to do.
“It does not matter so much for you, Clara,” Phœbe had said, “because
you saw Miss Avesham. I could not go and call in person and sit in the
drawing-room and say pretty things, for I should feel so hot and
awkward. It would be better simply to leave cards at the door. I hear in
London that it is a very general custom to do so without even asking if
people are in.”
“That seems so cold,” said Clara.
“It is better to be cold than to seem as if one were putting one’s self
forward. As for P. P. C., I am sure that is right. I remember writing P.
P. C. on the cards we left on Mr. Hopkinson as well as anything.”
“It would be a pity if it meant something different,” said Clara. “You
see, Phœbe, neither of us can recollect what it stands for.”
“It is French, I am sure,” said Phœbe. “Let us see. What could it be? C.
I think must be _congratulations_. To convey now. _Pour prendre!_ Of
course that is it. I remember _pour prendre_ perfectly now. _Pour
prendre congratulations._ I hope you are satisfied now, Clara.”
“Yes, Phœbe. I feel sure you must be right,” said her sister. “But shall
we not send a little present together? Miss Avesham has been very good
to me.”
Phœbe tossed her head. This was a covert allusion to that terrible
affair of the picture.
“A diamond necklace, perhaps,” she said scornfully; “or would you prefer
a pearl and diamond tiara?”
This cutting irony on the part of Phœbe closed the discussion for the
time being; but Clara bore the thing in mind, and eventually decided on
a silver bootjack and an ode of congratulation in the Wroxton Chronicle.
Phœbe had not negatived this proposition when she had advanced it
before, but of late she had been very sharp with her sister, and for
weeks past she had not looked well; habitually she had a high colour,
but of late she had become sallow and gray in skin. More than once
Clara had asked whether she would not see a doctor, but Phœbe had always
met the suggestion with a disdainful refusal. She had played hardly at
all on her mandolin lately, and when the household work was over she
would sit in a chair in her corner, with her hands on her lap, doing
nothing. If Clara came in when she was sitting like this, she would jump
up and pretend to occupy herself with something, for she did not wish
her sister to see her tears. But when alone she would seldom do
anything, and day by day a curious gnawing pain below her right
collar-bone grew worse and worse. The pain, whatever it was, was not
continuous. If she slept well at night it was usually bad the next day,
or had been bad the day before; but if her night had been disturbed by
it, in these early days, she usually passed a comfortable day. A little
lump had appeared there below the skin, and Phœbe, before her bed-room
glass, looked at it with some anxiety, and called it a rheumatic
swelling. As such she rubbed it with embrocation, which did not seem to
make it any better.
Both Clara and Phœbe were accustomed, even when alone, to dress for
dinner. In the winter, when the evenings were cold, this usually only
meant the donning of Sunday clothes; but when the milder days of spring
succeeded, they faced each other in low dresses. By the beginning of
April Clara had already worn her low dress more than once, but Phœbe
never. It was still chilly, she said, and if Clara did not take care she
would catch cold.
Phœbe had a horror of doctors. To call in a doctor implied that you
thought that you were ill. Turkey rhubarb, quinine, and embrocation,
according to her, were a trinity of greater potency than the whole
college of surgeons, and she was not naturally nervous. She even doubted
whether the epidemic of typhoid which had visited Wroxton in the autumn
might not have been made too much of, and a plentiful exhibition of the
staple drugs, she thought, should have been tried first. For this
swelling underneath her collar-bone she tried all these in succession,
but smarting, deafness, and general upset seemed only to have added to
her discomfort. The pain, which at first had been only a dull ache,
grew intenser. At times it stabbed and pierced her, and now, after a day
of pain, a sleepless, tossing night succeeded.
She was still firmly determined not to see a doctor; but when one
afternoon, Clara being out, she had met Jeannie in the street, and had
been persuaded to go to Bolton Street to have tea with her, Jeannie
saying it would be a kindness, since she was alone, she confessed, in
answer to a question of hers, that she was not well.
“I have pain,” she said, “oh, such pain! And it is all I can do to
prevent Clara seeing it. I cannot sleep for it. Oh, Miss Avesham, do
tell me that it is nothing.”
Jeannie had felt anxious when she saw her that day, but she tried to be
consoling.
“Very likely it is nothing,” she said. “But one cannot tell. Do see a
doctor at once. The thing worries you and makes you ill. If there is
anything wrong, it ought to be attended to; but if you are assured it is
nothing, that will be a relief, will it not?”
“But Clara will know,” objected Phœbe. “If it is anything wrong she
would fret so.”
“Oh, you are absurd,” said Jeannie, frankly. “Supposing nothing is
wrong, you need never tell her. But supposing you ought to see a doctor,
how she would blame herself for not having insisted. Where is the pain?”
Miss Phœbe, with much diffidence, alluded distantly to her collar-bone.
“I think it is probably rheumatic,” she added.
Jeannie rang the bell, and went to the table to write a note.
“Now, Miss Phœbe,” she said, “you are going to see the doctor here and
now. Don’t say you won’t, for it is no use. I am writing to Dr.
Maitland; he will be at home by now, and I am sure he will come here at
once. You see, in this way your sister will not know.”
The poor lady leaned back in her chair, almost with relief.
“It is very kind of you,” she said. “And indeed I think Clara must see
if it went on any longer.”
Jeannie gave the note to the butler, and when he had left the room:
“I am sure it is wise, Miss Phœbe,” she said. “Why, if I or Arthur have
an ache in our little finger we fill the house with surgeons. There is
never anything the matter, and they tell us so. Now Dr. Maitland will be
here in ten minutes or less. You shall go to my room, and he will look
at you there.”
“It is very kind of you,” said Phœbe; “and you will not tell Clara?”
“Never without your consent,” said Jeannie. “Come, let us go upstairs.”
Dr. Maitland was in, and in ten minutes he was at Bolton Street. He was
shown into the drawing-room, and Jeannie came down stairs to him.
“She looks as if it were only one thing,” she said. “But don’t tell her.
When you have seen her, come and tell me. She is upstairs.”
After he had gone Jeannie went to the window and looked out. The full
abundance of spring was in the air; the false death of winter was over,
and all living things rejoiced in this renewal of the world. The grass
of the lawn was starred with young crocuses, gnarled trees put out their
sheaves of tender living leaves; all was as it had been twelve months
ago. But in the lives of men no such renewal and repetition is admitted.
The year passes, and they are a year nearer to the grim apparition of
decay and death. It seemed to her a long time before the footstep of the
doctor again sounded on the stairs. She faced round again into the room
to meet him.
“I have not told her,” he said, “as you desired. But there is no
doubt--cancer.”
“Would any operation give her a chance?”
“A chance certainly, but a more than doubtful one. It is of five months’
growth at least.”
“If she had come earlier this chance would have been better?” asked
Jeannie.
“Undoubtedly.”
“Shall I tell her?” she asked.
“She had better be told. The operation would be dangerous. If it is
left, the end is certain, and probably--though one can never tell--not
far distant. It is a case where she must decide whether to have the
operation or not.”
“Do you recommend it?”
“Scarcely. If I was in the same condition I would not have it done.”
Jeannie stood silent a moment.
“Oh, poor thing, poor thing!” she said. “And I suppose I must tell her.”
She put her hands before her eyes for a space, and then gave herself a
little shake.
“What a coward one is!” she said. “Thank you very much, Dr. Maitland. I
will let you know about it.”
“I will tell her if you wish, Miss Avesham,” said he.
“No; I know her better than you,” said Jeannie. “Good-bye. I shall go
upstairs at once to her.”
Dr. Maitland shook hands with her; he felt an intense admiration for
her.
“It is only yourself who will accuse you of being a coward,” he said.