§ 1
For three or four days I could get no word with Mary. I could not now
come and go as I had been able to do in the days when we were still "the
children." I could not work, I could not rest, I prowled as near as I
could to Burnmore House hoping for some glimpse of her, waiting for the
moment when I could decently present myself again at the house.
When at last I called, Justin had gone and things had some flavor of the
ancient time. Lady Ladislaw received me with an airy intimacy, all the
careful responsibility of her luncheon party manner thrown aside. "And
how goes Cambridge?" she sang, sailing through the great saloon towards
me, and I thought that for the occasion Cambridge instead of Oxford
would serve sufficiently well. "You'll find them all at tennis," said
Lady Ladislaw, and waved me on to the gardens. There I found all four of
them and had to wait until their set was finished.
"Mary," I said at the first chance, "are we never to talk again?"
"It's all different," she said.
"I am dying to talk to you--as we used to talk."
"And I--Stevenage. But---- You see?"
"Next time I come," I said, "I shall bring you a letter. There is so
much----"
"No," she said. "Can't you get up in the morning? Very early--five or
six. No one is up until ever so late."
"I'd stay up all night."
"Serve!" said Maxton, who was playing the two of us and had stopped I
think to tighten a shoe.
Things conspired against any more intimacy for a time. But we got our
moment on the way to tea. She glanced back at Philip, who was loosening
the net, and then forward to estimate the distance of Maxton and Guy.
"They're all three going," she said, "after Tuesday. Then--before six."
"Wednesday?"
"Yes."
"Suppose after all," she threw out, "I can't come."
"Fortunes of war."
"If I can't come one morning I may come another," she spoke hastily, and
I perceived that Guy and Maxton had turned and were waiting for us.
"You know the old Ice House?"
"Towards the gardens?"
"Yes. On the further side. Don't come by the road, come across by the
end of the mere. Lie in the bracken until you see me coming.... I've not
played tennis a dozen times this year. Not half a dozen."
This last was for the boys.
"You've played twenty times at least since you've been here," said Guy,
with the simple bluntness of a brother. "I'm certain."
§ 2
To this day a dewy morning in late August brings back the thought of
Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the
misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on
either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and
of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored
boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. And I feel
the same hungry freshness again at the thought of those stolen meetings.
Presently came the sunrise, blinding, warming, dew-dispelling arrows of
gold smiting through the tree stems, a flood of light foaming over the
bracken and gilding the under sides of the branches. Everything is
different and distinctive in those opening hours; everything has a
different value from what it has by day. All the little things upon the
ground, fallen branches, tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity
and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows
in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the
light and merged with the sky. And at last, a cool grey outline against
the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes Mary,
flitting, adventurous, friendly, wonderful.
"Oh Stevenage!" she cries, "to see you again!"
We each hold out both our hands and clasp and hesitate and rather shyly
kiss.
"Come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. It's still not six. And
there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the
wet. Oh! it's so good to be out of things again--clean out of
things--with you. Look! there is a stag watching us."
"You're glad to be with me?" I ask, jealous of the very sunrise.
"I am always glad," she says, "to be with you. Why don't we always get
up at dawn, Stevenage, every day of our lives?"
We go rustling through the grass to the prostrate timber she has chosen.
(I can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that
lifted her skirt.) I help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from
which her feet can swing....
Such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this
morning. But then comes our conversation, and that I find vague and
irregularly obliterated. But I think I must have urged her to say she
loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to
put my heart's wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three
years for me--until I could prove it was not madness for her to marry
me. "I have been thinking of it all night and every night since I have
been here," I said. "Somehow I will do something. In some way--I will
get hold of things. Believe me!--with all my strength."
I was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon
me.
"Stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear Boy; I have never wanted to kiss
you so much in all my life. Dear, come close to me."
She bent her fresh young face down to mine, her fingers were in my hair.
"My Knight," she whispered close to me. "My beautiful young Knight."