She never once looked back in any sense, when she had passed out of
the gates of the Manor. She had known that it was laid upon her to go
through this ordeal of standing before the mother whom he loved, to be
approved by her. She had faced the ordeal without shrinking, because she
loved him. She was as sure of him and his love for her as she had been
certain of the deceit of the wretch with whom she had gone through
the empty ceremony of marriage in order that her mother might die
happy--though the result was that she died of her misery.
She knew that if Mrs. Wingfield were pleased with her, Jack would be
delighted and ask her to marry him the next time they met, if he did
not force a meeting with her for the purpose; but if his mother did not
approve of her, and called her heartless because her dress was white
instead of black, and flippant because she had appeared several days at
a sporting meeting within a couple of months of her husband’s death,
he would be greatly downcast, but he would ask her to marry him all the
same.
But she had set forth to face the ordeal by visit as firmly as she would
have gone to meet the ordeal by fire or the ordeal by water, had she
lived in the days of such tests of faith. She knew that, whatever should
happen her faith in him would not be shaken and his faith in her would
remain unmoved. But she had made up her mind to find favour in the sight
of his mother, and she now felt that she had succeeded in doing so.
If she had failed, she would have been miserable, but she would have
promised to marry him all the same.
The sense of exultation which was hers was due to her knowledge of the
fact that she had found favour in the eyes of the mother of the man
whom she loved, not to her feeling that she would, as the wife of Jack
Wingfield, occupy a splendid position in the county--such a position
as her poor mother had never dreamt of her filling. Beyond a doubt, she
found it quite delightful to think of owning that beautiful park through
which she had been allowed as a great privilege to stray while the house
was empty. Every part of the grounds was a delight to her--the deep
glen with its well-wooded sides sloping down to the little stream that
twinkled among its ferns and mosses and primroses--the irregular meadow
where stood the tawny haystacks like islands in the midst of a sea of
brilliant green--the spacious avenues of elm and oak that made her feel
when walking in their shadow, that she was going through the nave of
a cathedral--she loved everything about the place, and it would be the
greatest joy to her to live all her life there--with love; without love
she would as soon spend the rest of her life in one of the cottages on
her father’s farm.
She felt exultant only in the thought that he was to be her companion
when she went to that place. She had all her life been looking forward
to a life of love; and it had been puzzling to her when she found that
year after year went by without bringing her any closer to love. She was
not conscious of being fastidious in her association with men; but the
fact remained the same: she never had the smallest feeling of love for
any of the men who had told her that they loved her--and she never had a
lack of such men about her.
For the months of her engagement to that man, Marcus Blaydon, her
thought was that this was the punishment that was laid upon her for
the hardness of her heart--this prospect of living with a man who could
never be anything to her but an object of dislike. He never awoke in her
a slumbering passion--not even the passion of hate. She merely disliked
him as she disliked a foggy day; and yet she was condemned to spend the
remainder of her life with him with love shut out. Was that to be her
punishment for having rejected the many offers of love which had been
laid at her feet by men whom she liked well but could not love?
And then with the suddenness with which a great blessing or a great
calamity is sent by Heaven (according to the Teachers) there had been
sent to her the two best things in the world--Freedom and Love. She knew
that if this man had been one of her father’s shepherds and had asked
her to love him she would have given herself to him. Her sense of being
on the way to fill a splendid position socially was overwhelmed by
the feeling that she was beloved by a man whom she loved as she never
thought it would be given to her to love any man. That was her dominant
thought--nay, her only thought--while she walked through the lanes to
her home.
And it never occurred to her that she was reckoning among her
possessions a great gift which had not yet been offered to her. It
never occurred to her that she might be mistaken in taking his love for
granted. Even if weeks and months were to pass without his coming to
her, she would still not entertain so unworthy a thought as that he
was not coming to her. But she was not subjected to the ordeal of his
absence. He came to her on Monday morning, the first thing. It was
surely ridiculous for him to set out on this mission before the workers
in the fields had left their beds; but so he did. He went forth and
wandered for miles across the Downs. He went within sight of the sea,
by a curious impulse, and he sat on the turf in the early sunlight,
listening to the great bass of the breaking waves beneath him and to the
exquisite fluttering flutings, of a lark in the sky above him. Then he
turned and found the road that led down to the snuggest of villages--he
owned every house, though he did not know it--and up again to a region
of ploughed fields--enormous spaces of purple-brown surrounded by great
irregular hedges of yellow gorse.
It might have been fancied that, with his heart so full of the great
intention, he would be walking like one in a dream, taking no thought
of the things about him; but so far from his being like this, he looked
upon everything that he came across with an affection such as he had
never known before. He felt that these things of Nature were closer to
him than they had ever been--in fact, for some of them he felt as would
an explorer in a strange land who suddenly comes upon a number of people
and recognizes in each a relation of his own. He had never been in such
close touch with Nature before, and every step that he took was one of
rejoicing.
He dallied so much in strange ways that it was actually as far on in the
day as seven o’clock before he found himself in that narrow steep
lane close to a narrower and steeper one, which led up to Athalsdean
Farm--this was where his motor had broken down, and she had come upon
him searching (by the aid of his chauffeur’s eyes) for the cause of the
mischief. He had not yet reached the exact spot, when he saw her turning
from the farm lane to the one through which he was walking; but she was
not coming toward him; her turn took her in the opposite direction.
He shouted to her, and she glanced round, and then stood still. She was
at that instant under an ash that was not yet fully clothed with leaves;
the sunlight shone upon her bare head. Bare? Well, scarcely bare with
that splendour of wreathed tresses crowning her; but she wore no hat,
and carried no sunshade. Her dress was a print, made very short, so that
her serviceable shoes and her ankles were fully exposed. Such leaves as
were upon the boughs cast dark shadows upon her dress, but her head was
altogether in the sunshine.
She waited for him, rosy and eager--she could not control her
eagerness--she could not trust herself to speak a word of greeting in
reply to his.
“I have been in search of you,” he said.
“For long?”
“For long? All my life, Priscilla. I want you, Priscilla--I never wanted
anything so much. I need you. I cannot do without you.”
He had not released the hand that she gave him, but he did not hold it
so tightly but that she could have taken it from him if she had been so
minded; but it so happened that she was not so minded. She allowed him
to keep it, and he drew her to him. He put his other hand on her waist,
and then slipped it up to the back of her head. That was how he kissed
her, with his hand at the back of her head; and that was how she
allowed him to kiss her at 7.5 a.m. on that fresh June morning, when the
hedgerows were giving in scent to the sun the dews that had lain upon
them, keeping them fresh through the night.
“You do not say a word,” he complained, when he had kissed her and
kissed her--on the cheeks, the chin, the eyes, and the mouth--when he
had held her so close to him that she felt deliciously dishevelled, and
for some seconds found it difficult to breathe. “Not a word!”
She gasped, and kept him away with one hand. He was holding the other so
tightly by now that she had no chance of recovering it.
She laughed.
“A word? What word?” she gasped.
“Any word--the word that is in your heart.” There was no use talking
loud. His arm was about her again.
“There is no word in my heart--you have squeezed it out,” she managed to
say.
“You would not let me lay a finger on you if you did not love me--I know
that,” said he.
“You know that, and yet you ask me to say something to you. Talking is a
sinful waste of time.”
“So it is, my darling girl. You have said it: out of the fulness of the
heart the mouth----”
“Kisses--that is what it does; it doesn’t speak--it cannot.”
“Since when has that knowledge come to you, Priscilla.”
“I confess that it is newly acquired. You make an excellent coach for a
backward girl, my master.”
“You are not backward; it is only that your education has been
neglected.”
“And you look on yourself as a successful crammer? Haven’t you seen the
advertisements, ‘particular attention paid to neglected children’? You
are paying me particular attention. Don’t you think that my education is
pretty nearly complete, Jack?”
“Oh, you have a lot to learn yet; but you are coming on. You have
learned that my name is Jack--that’s a distinct advance. Oh, my dear
girl, the delight of teaching you all--all--all!”
“I had no idea that you were so ardent an educationist. Ah, I knew you
would come to me! But what I have been asking myself for several days
is, Were there no girls in your own station in life----”
She could not finish her question for laughter; the phrase which her
father was very fond of using sounded very funny coming from her lips,
which were--as she had found out--exactly on a level with his own.
“Station of life? Station of life? Your lips are the waiting room--a
first-class waiting room in the station of life,” said he.
That was how he received her suggestion that he was ready to make what
his relations would undoubtedly call a _mesalliance_ in asking her to
be his wife; though, as a matter of fact, he had not yet asked her to
be his wife. Perhaps she should have regarded his movements during the
previous five minutes merely in the light of a friendly attention to
enable him to see if she was amicably disposed toward him.
“Let that be the last word of frivolity between us,” she said. “I want
to be serious. Be sure, my dear Jack, that this is the most serious
moment that has come into our lives.”
“I know it--I know it, my beloved,” said he. “I know that meeting you
was the most important thing in my life. And I know that marrying you
will be the wisest. You are the first person in the world who gave me
credit for having any backbone. You are the first person in the world to
give me a sort of respect for myself. My mother is the dearest soul on
earth; but she has never thought it necessary to help me on to anything.
She was quite content that I should live and inherit the property, and
follow her to the grave and then go there myself, doing as little as
possible in the interim. It’s wonderful how little a country gentleman
can do if he only puts his heart into the business of idling. I think it
quite likely that I might have made a record in this way. But you came
into my life, and--and you have become my life. That’s why I want you to
stay with me--to stand by me, and you’ve promised to do it?”
“Have I?” she said. “Yes, I suppose I have; at any rate, whether I have
or not you may be sure that I’ll do it. And don’t you doubt, Jack, that
we’ll do something in the world before we are parted. A man without a
woman beside him represents an imperfect scheme of life. Life--that
does not mean a man, nor does it mean a woman; it means the man and the
woman. So it was in the beginning, so it is to-day. Life--the man and
the woman, each living for the other. That’s life, isn’t it?”
“It is; and we’ll do some living, you and I, Priscilla, if others have
failed.”
“The failures are those who forget--the woman who forgets that she is a
woman and seeks to do the man’s work--the man who forgets that he is a
man and treats the woman as if she were the same as himself. Oh, here
we are talking of the philosophy of life when we should be living. But
that’s the way of philosophy: it keeps a man learning the best way to
live, and by the time he has learnt it it is time for him to die.”
“Hang up philosophy and give us life, say I. Dear girl, you have made me
happy and--hungry. I left my bed at four this morning, and now it’s past
seven.”
“You will come with me and have breakfast. I wonder if any man up to
this day ever asked a girl to marry him before breakfast.”
“I wonder. But a chap feels so much fresher in the early morning, I
think it should be tried more frequently.”
“It was a bold experiment, Jack. But it might only succeed when carried
out in connection with the dairy industry.”
“That is how you come to be up so early. Shall I have a chance of seeing
your dad if I go with you? I suppose a dad has always to be reckoned
with.”
“No one has to be reckoned with except myself in this matter. I am
myself, and I know myself, and will obey myself and none other this
time--this time.”
She spoke with some vehemence, and her last sentence was uttered with a
touch of bitterness. He knew what she meant. Providence had come to her
rescue once, but a second interposition on her behalf was too much to
expect. He could appreciate her feeling.
“You will not have to meet my father until you please,” she said. “Just
now he is miles away--at Galsworthy. We shall be alone.”
“I’ll not shudder at the prospect,” said he. “We can’t have everything
in this world, can we?”
They went together up the lane to the farm with as much decorum as was
consistent with the possibility of being discovered by some watcher in
the fields, and they had breakfast face to face at an old Tudor table
in one of the panelled rooms of the farmhouse, and beneath the old
oak beams--a lovely room that had undergone no change in even the most
trifling detail for three hundred years. The bowls of wallflowers on the
table and on the lattice shelf were of blue delft, and the plate-rack on
the wall held some dishes of the same colour.
“You suppose all this is old?” he said, looking around.
“Oh, no; but it wasn’t bought in my lifetime,” she replied. “I can show
you in an account book exactly what was paid for everything. The date of
the last entry in the book is the ‘Eve of the Feast of the Purification,
1604.’”
“Three hundred years ago. But that’s nothing in the history of your
family. Have you a ledger that goes back to the Heptarchy?”
“I’m afraid that that one is mislaid. But the eggs are fresh; if we
don’t boil them now they will be three hours old at nine.”
“You might have some relic of the Heptarchy, Priscilla.”
“Alas! nothing remains from that date except our name.”
“And yet you are content to submerge it in the mushroom-growth
Wingfield? Have you no reverence for the past?”
“Just now I confess that I am thinking more of the future. Oh, the
future, Jack, my boy--the future!”
She laid a hand upon his shoulder and stood in front of him in the
attitude of a true comrade.
“My pal!” he cried, taking the note from her. “My pal, was there ever a
time when we didn’t know each other?”