CHAPTER XVII

HOUSE OF A HUNDRED DREAMS

The shadows inside the roofless old abbey were warm and friendly. The sunlight gleamed against the tombs with a cheer which always falls over very old grief spots.

"This quietude--this sense of all rightness--makes you feel that nothing really matters, doesn't it?" I asked, looking around with a sort of awed delight as we paused to read one or two inscriptions--voluminous in length and medieval in spelling.

The man at my side was less awed.

"Shall we go on to the gardens, then?" he asked. "You'll not think so little of temporal pleasures there, perhaps."

I looked up at him.

"But why?"

"Well, because these gardens are usually filled with suggestions of living joys--for one thing. There are millions of forget-me-nots, which always give a cheering aspect to the landscape--and there are frequently the flowers mentioned in Shakespeare's plays."

With a sigh of regret we left the sanctuary. Then, turning a corner of the old stone wall we came full upon a side of the house which was receiving shamelessly the biggest sun-kiss I had ever seen. But then, it was the biggest house I had ever seen. It was the gladdest sun--and it was the warmest blending. Between house and sun--as if they were the love children of this union--lay thousands of brilliant flowers.

When I could get my breath I made a quick suggestion that we go closer.

"I want to know which is rosemary--and which is rue!" I told him. But he stopped a moment and detained me.

We halted beside a fallen stone, at a point slightly separated from the walls of the house--a sort of half-way ground, where the shadow of the Greek cross on an isolated pinnacle seemed still to claim the ground for religion, against the encroachments of the work-a-day world. Maitland Tait's sudden smile was a mixture of amusement and tenderness.

"I've recently heard a story about this spot--this identical stone--which will interest you," he said. "A monk comes here at night--one of those old fellows buried in there."

I smiled.

"It's quite true!" he insisted. "People have seen him."

"I know it," I avowed seriously. "I was not smiling out of unbelief, but out of sheer joy at beholding with mine own eyes the 'Norman stone!'

"'He mutters his prayers on the midnight air, And his mass of the days that are gone.'"

Maitland Tait looked at me in surprise.

"Do you know all the legends of the place?" he asked.

I shook my head sorrowfully.

"I wish I did," I replied. "For so many years this has been my House of a Hundred Dreams!"

We both fell into a moment's dreamy thoughtfulness, which I was first to cast aside.

"Come and tell me about the plants, if you can!" I begged. "Which _is_ rosemary, and which is rue?"

We walked down a flight of worn steps, and came upon prim gravel pathways.

"This is rosemary," he said, "and here, by the sun-dial, is rue."

Then, even when I realized that this was the place where Lady Frances Webb had spent her wearisome days, to keep from hearing the clock chime in the hall, I could not be sad. The sun-dial was another grief spot, it was true, but it was an ancient grief spot--and it was located in a golden sea of sunshine, under a sky that was the reflection of forget-me-nots.

"She could gather the rue while the sun-dial told, all silently, of the day's wearing on," I said.

He looked at me uncertainly.

"Did she say that in her letters?" he asked.

"Yes. She had sent her lover away, you see, and--there was nothing else in life."

"And she longed for the days to pass silently?"

"She stayed out here as much as she could--to keep from hearing the clock in the hall," I told him. "The chime shamed the unholy prayer on her lips, she said--and the sound of the ticking reminded her of her heart's wearying beats."

"Of _their_ hearts' wearying beats, you mean," he exclaimed, and a quick look of pain which darted into his face showed me that he comprehended. Then, for the first time, I began to grasp what a lover he would make! Before this time I had been absorbed with thoughts of him as a beloved.

Suddenly my hat began to feel intolerably heavy, and my gloves intolerably hot. I tampered fumblingly with the pearl clasp at my left wrist, and drew that glove off first. Maitland Tait was watching me. He saw my hand--my bare ringless hand. He stared at it as if it might have been a ghost, although it looked fairly pink and healthy in the warm glow of the noonday sun. Even the little pallid circle on the third finger was quite gone.

"Grace----" he said.

"Yes?"

"Does this mean that you're--you're----"

A discreet cough--a still distant, but distinctly warning cough--interrupted for a moment. Collins was coming toward us, from the ruins of the old abbey. Maitland Tait looked up and saw him coming, but he did not stop. On the other hand, the sight of his servant seemed to goad him into a hasty precipitation.

"Grace, will you marry me?" he asked.

"Of _course_!" I managed to say, but not too energetically, for the muscles of my throat were giving me trouble again.

"Soon?" he asked hungrily.

I felt very reckless and--American.

"Before the shadows pass round this dial again, if you _insist_," I smiled.

But his eyes were very grave.

"Without knowing anything more about me than you know now?"

"Why, I know everything about you," I replied, in some astonishment. "I know that you are the biggest, and the best-looking, and the dearest----"

"You know nothing about me," he interrupted softly, "except what I have told you. I am a working man! I have always had the mass hatred for class, and--and my grandfather was a coal-digger in Wales."

I was silent.

"Yet, you are willing to marry me?" he asked.

"Of course! Coal is--very warming," I answered.

* * * * *

Collins descended the flight of stone steps and came slowly along the gravel walk. When he had come to the respectful distance he stopped. No English servant ever approaches very close--as if there were a quarantine around the sacred person of the served.

"My Lord," he said, but stammeringly, as a man halts over a newly-acquired language--"My Lord, Mrs. Carr wishes to know if you will have lunch served in the oak room, or in the----"

"In the oak room," the man standing beside me answered readily enough. "And have the old wing opened and lighted, Collins. We want to see the pictures in there."

The servant breathed the inevitable "Thank you," and turned away.

I seemed suddenly to feel that the golden sea of sunlight was sweeping me away--up into the blue, which was the reflection of forget-me-nots. And there loomed big on my horizon a house that was a home!

"My _Lord_?" I demanded, as soon as I could speak.

Maitland Tait nodded reassuringly.

"My father died two weeks ago," he said. "And I _had_ to come into the title."

"And this place is _yours_!" I sang out, feeling that all the years of my life I had been destiny's love-child. "This old abbey is yours! The park is yours! The garden is yours! The sun-dial is yours!"

"And the girl is mine!" he said, with a grave smile. "I am careless of all the other."

His gravity sobered my wild spirits.

"And your father was--Lord Erskine?" I finally asked.

"He _was_--Lord Erskine," he answered. "He married out of his station--far, far above his station, _I_ think----"

His big beautiful mouth set grimly, but he said nothing more, and I knew that this was as heavily as he would ever tread upon the ashes of the dead. Gradually, bit by bit, I learned the history of the muddy pool of mistake and fault, out of which the tender blossom of his boyhood had been dragged. His father had never seen him, but a certain stiff-necked family pride had caused him to provide material bounty for his child. The combination of a good education and rugged plebeian industry had made him what he was.

"But why didn't you tell me--that day when you first came to see me and we talked about this place--why didn't you tell me that it was _your_ ancestral home?"

He looked at me in surprise.

"Why, because I had made up my mind to marry you!" he said. "You told me that this old place was a sort of dreamland of yours--and I didn't want to complicate matters. I wanted your love for me to be a reality."

"Well, it--it is!" I confessed.

After a long while--that is, the sun-dial said it was a long while--spent this way a sudden thought of my waiting hosts at Bannerley came over me. I sprang up from the step of the pedestal where we had been sitting.

"I _must_ get some word to Mrs. Montgomery!" I said. "They will be thinking that my rash American ways have got me into some dreadful scrape, I'm afraid."

But the serene man at my side was still serene. His face looked as if nothing on earth could ever cause him a pang again. He caught my hand and drew me gently, but rather steadfastly back to my place.

"Mrs. Montgomery knows everything--except that we are going to be married--when did you say, to-morrow?" he smiled. "I've been staying with them, and they told me about you, and I told them about you--and we had rather a satisfactory adjustment of neighborly relations."

I looked at him in awe. I could not quite shake off the idea that he had a miraculous lamp hidden about somewhere in his pockets. Things seemed to _happen_ when he wished them to happen.

"Did you chance to know that I would take a bad train and be delayed here this morning at sunrise?" I asked, trying to look dignified and unawed. "Did you know that I should be compelled to waste precious morning hours pacing up and down a railway station platform?"

"Why, of course," he answered imperturbably. "Mrs. Montgomery sent me over to meet you."

I sprang up again, more energetically this time.

"Then why didn't you meet me?" I asked, with the horror of shocking English propriety overwhelming me. "Come! We must go to Bannerley at once."

He rose and followed me toward the main garden path. Then he pointed the way to the house door.

"I've had Collins telephone that your train was very, very late," he explained. "She'll not be surprised--nor too inquisitive. She even suggested this morning that if you shouldn't get in until evening--the drive to Bannerley is very fine by moonlight."

* * * * *

In the late afternoon the chilly dusk sent little forerunners ahead, which caused the old wing of the house to be lighted from within, instead of opened to the cool dying sunset. A cheery fire was kindled in the room which had once been the library of Lady Frances Webb.

The dampness and air of disuse disappeared, and it seemed as if personalities came forth from the shadowy corners and sat beside the fire with Maitland Tait and me.

"This was her own desk, they tell me," he said, as he was showing the ancient treasures to me, yet still looking at them himself with half-awed, almost unbelieving eyes. "This was where all her famous books were written."

I crossed the room to where the little locked secretary stood. Its polished surface was sending back the firelight's glow and seemed to proclaim that its own mahogany was imprisoned sunshine.

"And she wrote those letters here," I said in a hushed voice. "Do you suppose she has some of his letters locked away somewhere?"

He nodded, fitting the key to its lock very carefully.

"All of them! All the letters written her by--Uncle James."

"And we are going to look over them together--you and I are going to read these love-letters--before we burn them?" I asked, quick joy making my voice tremulous.

For a moment there was silence in the old room, then he turned away from the secretary, and came very close.

"Why burn them--now?" he asked, his own strong voice of a sudden more tremulous than mine. "Why burn them, now, darling? Why not--hand-- them--down?"

Then--in that instant--I knew what life was going to mean to me. And I felt as if I had the great joy of the world--hugged close--in a circle of radiance--like the _Madonna della Sedia_!

"I can be good--a very good woman--if I have your face before me," I told him.

After a while he smiled, then took my hand and drew me to a shadowy corner of the room.

"You haven't seen this yet," he said.

There was a crimson velvet curtain hanging before a picture, and he drew aside the folds.

"This is--Uncle James,"

The candlelight shone against the canvas, and glittered in dancing little waves over the name-plate on the frame.

"_Portrait of the Artist, by Himself._"

"Was it a comfort to her, I wonder?" my lover said, his thoughts only half with the past.

"A torturing comfort--the kind a woman like her demands," I answered. "She had to go to it every hour in every day--and look at it--to make her heart ache, because it was only a picture. She was a human being--as well as a novelist, so that such as this could only add to her anguish. She wanted a _living_ face----"

"She wanted--this?"

He set the candlestick down and put both arms round me.

"She wanted--_this_?" he breathed.

His face was close above mine-waiting for the first kiss. A moment later it came--descending gently, like some blessed holy thing. And it was that.

"You are like him," I whispered. "Your face can make me good."

His arms tightened, and a smile escaped.

"And yours? What will you be like to me?" he asked.

I looked up, remembering.

"Like--just an American woman--a tormenting side-issue in your busy life?"

But he shook his head gravely.

"No--not that."

A casement was open near by, and he drew me toward the shaft of radiance which fell into the shadowed room.

Across the courtyard, white now with moonlight, were the ruins of the abbey. There shone a softened luster through the space of the absent window, and above, resplendent in her niche, stood the Virgin. Her head was bowed above the burden in her arms.

"Like that--_like that_!" he whispered.

THE END