Part 4

'Oh, for goodness' sake,' said Ross with great exasperation, 'don't tell me that you think racing's wicked, surely _you_ don't believe that because people gamble that the thing itself is wrong; you'll be going into a Monkery yourself next,' he said, glaring at me angrily. 'What do you suppose the horses were made capable of such speed for, if they weren't to run? I suppose you think they ought to be kept in their stables and fed on barley sugar, and you father's daughter,' said Ross disgustedly. 'Oh, don't talk to me, Meg; people like Aunt Amelia and Eustace make me sick. They just stick up a little set of opinions and call it religion. They always say the things _they_ don't like are wicked; can you see Aunt Amelia ski-ing or hunting? Would she exchange that disgusting fydo for my bulldog? But because I like those things they both say that I'm "worldly" and she calls me her "poor misguided nephew." No, my dear girl, it won't wash, that sort of rot does all the harm. And then the parsons! with their everlasting "venture to think." When a chap in the pulpit gets up and says, "My brethren, I venture to think," I always want to heave a hymn book at him and say, "Oh, don't venture such a lot, get on with it." I never venture. I just think and say so, why can't he?'

'Yes,' I murmured, 'I'm sure you do, Ross!'

'Look at the stuff they preach, too. Always harping on the mild and simple tack! Who wants to be mild or simple? How can they think that will attract _men_?'

'Or women,' I said as he paused for breath.

'No, or women,' agreed my brother.

'But, Ross, it does say He was meek and gentle.'

'But not mild, that's the hymn, and they only put it in to rhyme with "child." I hate hymns, except "Onward Christian Soldiers," and "Fight the Good Fight," and decent ones like that. Why do parsons nearly always leave out the other side of Him? Think how strong He was, and strong people are always gentle. Look at daddy. Could you have a stronger man, mentally, morally, or physically, and yet he is most extraordinarily gentle sometimes; meek, too, about some things. I wish I was!'

'I were, Ross.'

'Oh, no! you weren't, _never_ Meg. I will not be reproved for grammar by a twin. Oh, yes, you were meek once, about some bluebells. You're rather a sweet kid sometimes; I mean you used to be,' my brother corrected hastily, lest I should be puffed up with pride.

'Now, if _I_ went into a Monkery,' he continued, being thoroughly wound up, 'it might be a good thing. It would be discipline for me. I should never be able to say prayers all day. I'd always be falling foul over the law of obedience, and if there were a dog fight outside I'd have to go and separate them. It would take me years to get to what Eustace is now and--oh these nuts have got bugs in them, pass me an apple.'

When I went to bed and thought over what Ross had said I remembered that once when we were children, he and I and Eustace were taken round the National Gallery by Aunt Constance, and Ross came up to me privately and said 'Meg, I can't stand all these saints and Madonnas, and the paintings of Him are beastly, why, they're only women with beards. They're not a bit like the picture of Him that's in my head,' said the little chap with a proud tilt to his chin.

'What's your picture of Him like, Ross?' I remember asking.

'On a horse, of course, with a sword and crown like it tells you in the Revelation.'

And then, for that masculine English horror of 'talking religion' was developed strongly in him even at that early age, he wouldn't say any more, only, 'Let's come and see if we can find some lions!'

When daddy came in to wish me 'good-night' he said that Uncle Jasper was still in a most frightful bate with Eustace about 'this idea that he has got into his head,' and that Eustace has agreed to wait a year or two before chucking up the army.

I can't understand my cousin. Last time I saw him his young man's fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of loving me. Now he desires a Monkery. But which is 'the idea'? that's the question that I felt would keep me awake all night. Has he really a vocation? If so, I suppose I was merely a kind of centipede that got, for a moment, into his sponge. Time alone will give the answer.

But, oh dear me, I didn't keep awake all night. I only wish I had. Instead, I had a most appalling nightmare. I dreamed that Ross was going into a nunnery. He would do it, in spite of all I said to him. I found myself in the passage in floods of tears, hammering on his door and sobbing, 'Oh, don't, don't. Think of the privations.'

The next moment I was on my own bed with Ross and father beside me.

'Am I dying?' I asked, seeing my family gathered round my couch.

'Dying!' said my brother, giving me a shake with one hand and a stick of chocolate with the other, 'it's we who are dying, with laughter.'

'I thought you were going into a nunnery,' I wailed, 'and----'

'And very nice too,' said Ross, 'if I had a nice little nun to cuddle.'

That woke me right up. I don't know how my brother can say such things! Father says that really some of the family jokes _can't_ go in my novel. But I can scratch them out after.

*CHAPTER X*

It's a whole month since I wrote a chapter of my book. I don't seem to have had much time lately, although I know we all have all the time there is, as the Bishop reminded the lady who complained that she had not had enough in which to say her prayers!

And now it is full spring and the woods are a pageant of flowers, and there is a glory of green over the garden. It is warm like summer and the nights are still, and that wondrous thing called 'Love' has come to me.

I wish that I could get its fragrance down and put into my book something of its perfection.

My father twinkles at me and says that although I have got in William I., and 'the strong love interest' has turned up, William II. and the fauna of the South Pole have still to be inserted.

I think it's difficult to write of love, but Nannie says,--

'Oh, no. Just tell about the time you saw him first, and what he said to you, and you to him.'

But that first time, in church, he only looked at me, and the second time, out in the woods, I ran away! But two days after that, Aunt Constance had a dinner party, and the Foxhills came, and with them--Michael. I saw that same glow of adoration on his face, and I was afraid to let him see my eyes lest he should catch an answering look in them.

After dinner I slipped away into the Great Hall alone.

He followed me and said,--

'The garden is very sweet to-night, won't you come out with me?'

It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the right to go since he had asked it.

Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in India--of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous simplicity of the life of this man whose face had 'fixed me.'

And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that once in a London church he had seen 'a girl's face like a cameo, cut in the grayness of the wall behind.'

'I loved you then,' he said, 'I loved you in the woods that day--I love you now.'

And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman--out in the warm darkness with a man she'd hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that 'I must go in now, but that I had been so interested in all he'd told me of his life in India, that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.' And as I turned to go out of the garden I added airily, 'Write? Oh, yes, perhaps I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When he came home again in three years' time on leave we might even meet again. Perhaps--perhaps----'

But there were primal instincts at work that night out in the scented garden, and this gentleman, in conventional evening dress, suddenly reverted to the caveman who had seen his woman and quite definitely meant to have her. So with a certain ruthlessness that I discovered afterwards was typical of the man, he refused to let me go, but stormed the fortress of my heart with most exceeding suddenness. He brushed aside all my objections and the words and sentences chosen with such care, knocked down my carefully erected barriers and swept me off my feet, and swamped and drowned and deluged me in love, and with 'What does all that matter? You belong to me,' he took me in his arms and kissed me with a kiss that thrilled while it subdued me.

It seemed as if I had been with him in some dim, past age and then had somehow lost him, and had been restless ever since, striving to find what I had lost, and yet had been unconscious of the thing I sought until I found it, in a moment, in his arms.

As father and I went home I spoke to him with subtlety and with guile.

'Daddy, how old was mother when you married her?'

'Eighteen. Why, darling?'

'Just my age now.'

'Oh, nonsense, Meg, I quite decline to have a grown up daughter, you're only eight!'

'Have you ever felt it was too young for her to marry.'

'Never,' said father with great vigour, 'it was just the right age.'

'Do you believe in love at first sight, daddy?'

'Why, yes, I think I do in some cases. I loved your mother the moment I saw her, and then there's your friend Dante, little 'un, and----'

'Then, father, may I marry Captain Ellsley, please?'

But my father was not consistent, neither was he humble. He behaved like a man who not only desired the office of a Bishop, but was actually a whole bench of them at that moment, and intended therefore to 'have his children in subjection with all gravity.' He said he'd never in all his life heard anything quite so preposterous, he'd hardly seen the hulking chap (we do not see ourselves as others see us. Michael is an inch and a half shorter than father), never even noticed if he ate with his knife or not, so was it likely that----'

'But, father, Dante----'

'Yes, but he didn't marry the girl, as you've often said, Meg.'

Thus did I fall into my own pit, and in the net which I had spread for another were my own feet taken. The Bench of Bishops preferred not to discuss the subject further, so I went upstairs to bed in utter desolation, because I couldn't give up Michael even though father was so displeased with me.

But when he came upstairs ages afterwards he scratched on my door and said,--

'Are you Meg?'

'Oh, daddy, of course I am.'

He came in then. 'How many?' he asked.

'Four.'

'Oh, darling! never in all the years do I remember any tragedy that took more than three, even when you were so worried about "Adam-and-Eve's" family!'

He was sweet to me then, and took away my four little wet handkerchiefs and gave me his big dry one, and gathered me in his arms and said,--

'We can't have two rows in one family, Meg. Tell me about it, darling.'

So I told him.

'Oh, Meg,' he said when I had done, 'so love, that very perfect thing, has really come to you, my little girl, but, oh, why do you choose a man who will want to take you away to India, my darling?'

And then father made one of those strange remarks that he does sometimes which I can't understand.

'My harness piece by piece He has hewn from me.'

'What _do_ you mean, daddy.'

'Perhaps I'll tell you some day, little 'un,' and he sighed and kissed me and said he would at any rate see Michael in the morning. So I felt more cheered. As he got up to go I thought how wonderful it is to love, so I said,--

'Daddy, what is it that makes me now understand all the lovers of the world? Jacob and Rachel, Elizabeth and Robert, even Dante----'

'Why, experience, darling,' father said, and came back and kissed me again, smiling with faint amusement.

When he'd gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time were still waiting in the garden--waiting for Michael. In the bright moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken's curl papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.

'How people can expect me to make scent,' she said, 'with no flowers. Ah, this is better,' and she looked round the garden with great satisfaction. 'I remember now, this one's always nice.' Then she began to gather flowers and somehow I didn't mind a bit, though usually I should very much object if some unauthorised person came into the garden unbidden. She pulled bits of lilac and a great deal of honeysuckle, some bluebells, and an armful of wallflowers, lilies of the valley, and such a lot of primroses, and threw them into a still, which I never remember noticing in the garden before. Then she damped them with dewdrops and threw in more flowers--daffodils and gorse-blooms (the thorns didn't prick her fingers, though her hands were very white and soft.) Then more primroses and a few late violets, honeysuckle, and bluebells. She added just a wisp of wood smoke, too, from a bonfire and some damp earth and a shower of rain, and stirred the mixture with a sunbeam. She laughed softly and her voice sounded like a faint breeze rippling over the tree tops. Then she walked, or perhaps she floated, round the garden, and on every bush and tree she scattered little showers and sprays of scent, so that I could smell not just one thing like lilac or bluebell, but a delicious harmony of flowers, wet earth, and rain. She looked up at me as she went out of the garden and laughed.

'It will last till he comes in the morning.'

And I smiled back because I loved that dear Dame Nature. When Nannie came to wake me she said,--

'How sweet the garden smells. Hasn't the laburnum and clematis come out in the night? I suppose it's the rain, Meg.'

But I knew better!

Then Michael came, prepared, I think, to interview a Bench of Bishops, but found--my father--who remarked later in the day,--

'Well, he doesn't eat with his knife, Meg, and he--um--seems to know his own mind, too. I don't think that "gentle knight" would have desired to go into a Monastery if his ladye had refused him the first time he asked her.'

Now how on earth did father guess that?

And I smiled to myself as I wondered if 'you belong to me' could conceivably be considered by a Bench of Bishops as the speech of a gentle knight 'asking' his ladye.

When I told Ross that I was going to marry Captain Ellsley in the summer, he said coldly,--

'Never heard of the chap.'

'But,' I said, 'you must have heard of him, he's----'

'You don't mean _the_ Ellsley; that man that climbs in the Himalayas?'

'Yes, I do, Ross.'

'My hat,' he exclaimed, 'why he might have married anybody,' and then he stared at me as if he had suddenly seen me in quite a new light and put an arm round me and called me 'Jonathan' and said,--

'Oh, Meg, I'll have to change into the Indian Army so that I can murder him if he isn't good to you!'

Funny old 'David.'

*CHAPTER XI*

Here's more than half the summer slipped away. The house has buzzed and overflowed with the boys whom Ross brings home.

Every day for eight whole weeks I have been out, riding or walking in the Hickley woods, sometimes with father, many times alone with Michael.

I love this man I'm going to marry very deeply, but I wouldn't let him know it. He dislikes 'the truest form of kindness' even more than all my other male things do!

Sometimes after a day of delight together he says as he goes home,--

'I've hardly seen you, darling.'

'Why, I've let you stay _all_ day,' I say reproachfully.

'Yes, but I haven't really had you; you've eluded me. You drive me mad, Meg, with your little air of cool aloofness.'

But what would he? Is a woman to be done out of her wooing because a man chose once to be a caveman and talked of things belonging to him, before he'd even got them? So naturally I tilt my chin a little when he talks like that, and hold out my hand to say good-night, and watch out of the tail of my eye to see how he is liking it! But sometimes it's----'

'No, I won't stand _any_ more of it to-night.' and then follows that mastering kiss which makes me really his for just that moment, and sends my thoughts and feelings whirling so that I try the harder to elude him afterwards!

One day this week I felt unusually romantic, so I read the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

'Oh, beautiful, Elizabeth,' I said, 'but simple, when you come to think of it. I'm sure that I could write one just as good, and I love my man every bit as much as you did Robert.'

So here is my Maiden Effort and probably my Swan Song:--

'At night I think of you, beloved. Dream that I see your face, Fancy I feel you kiss me As I rest in your embrace. But at the rose glow of morning You fade like a summer mist, And I wake, and long For a dream that has gone, For a face that I fancied I kissed.'

Of course it is not strictly accurate, for I never have the luck to dream of Michael, 'but a _Poet_,' I observed as I wrote the last lines down, 'is not expected to be verbally truthful in a _Poem_.'

'What, still slinging ink, little 'un?' said father, coming into my room at this point, 'why, you've got a blob on your neck!'

And then he picked up this chapter in that impertinent way he has and read it, with his eyes all curled up at the corners.

'Might one criticise the poem, Meg?' he asked diffidently.

'Oh, do,' I replied, conscious that it was beyond all criticism.

'Your "poem,"' he said, getting the word out with difficulty, 'has defective rhymes, darling. "Long" does not rhyme with "gone," nor is the--um--"poem" a sonnet.'

'But I never said it was, daddy.'

'No, Meg?'

'Oh, father,' I said, shaking his arm, 'it would look deliriously beautiful printed on good paper with wide margins and rough edges?'

Nannie said, 'You give it to Master Michael, dearie. He'll like it, and as to rhymes, why the stuff your father reads never has any.'

So I presented it to Michael, and I had no illusions then as to whether I were kissed or not.

Later, at tea, father had just observed that, like the Ephesians, we were 'in danger to be called in question for this day's uproar,' when a telegram was brought to him.

'The tone of this household will have to buck up a bit,' he remarked as he read it.

'It will after to-morrow,' grinned Charlie Foxhill, 'when Meg's gone, sir.'

(For oh, to-morrow is my wedding day, just fancy.)

'It's got to buck up before that,' father replied; 'this wire is from the new Bishop of Ligeria, he's coming here this afternoon and wants to stop the night. He'll have to stay on for the wedding, of course.'

'Oh, daddy,' I exclaimed in great disgust, 'we can't have this Ligerian fossil here to-morrow, it'll spoil everything, besides, there isn't a bed.'

'He'll have to sleep in his suit-case then, and his chaplain in the lid, Meg; there's no time to put him off, and _do_ try to behave like 'a clergyman's daughter' while he's here, little 'un! Why, good gracious!'

For there was the Bishop of Ligeria, and a livid kind of chaplain who looked like a limp curl-paper, alighting at the front door from a motor-car.

Daddy rushed out into the hall and I after him. I wished I had had time to change into something black, as father seemed so anxious to make a good impression on the Bishop, but I managed to part my hair in the middle by the hall glass and I turned the collar of my blouse up instead of down.

And then one of those terrible delusions came over me, for I thought father seized the Bishop by the hand and shook it violently, exclaiming,--

'Hallo, Porky, what priceless luck.'

'What about that ten bob, old bean?' said Porky.

Then father turned and saw _me_ with my hair parted down the middle, and the _chaplain_, partially paralysed with horror.

'My daughter, me lud,' he said, and led the Bishop and his attendant into the drawing-room for a belated tea.

I got away as soon as I could. I felt I must have quiet to think things out. Is this another delusion, or did father really call a Bishop 'Porky'? Nannie said once that putting the feet in hot water draws the blood from the head and eases mental strain, so I decided to have a bath before dinner.

I ran into daddy in the corridor.

'Meg, you've torn the lace on your dressing-gown; I told you so yesterday. Why isn't it mended?'

'Cotton,' I wailed, 'is threepence a reel.'

'Bad as that, Meg?'

'Worse, my honoured parent, worse.'

'Wild oats, Meg?'

'Sacks.'

'Debts?'

I nodded.

'Tell me the uttermost, my erring child.'

'Fourpence to Nannie, and five and threepence to Ross.'

I escaped into the bathroom and slammed the door. I sang a hymn as I bathed; it was that one the children love so, 'Days and Moments Quickly Flying.' I thought it might help to restore the tone of the household.

Daddy shoved five and sevenpence under the door with a note to say that a lady in the house was very ill and would I either sing something else, or go in the next street, as that hymn made her nervous, so I chanted (being always anxious to oblige)--

'Beer, beer, glorious beer, Drink till you're made of it, Don't be afraid of it, Glorious, glorious beer.'

Another note was pushed under the door then to say that the lady was dead now, and the Bishop thought it would be well for me to sign the pledge (enclosed).

The Bishop took me into dinner. I behaved just like a clergyman's daughter.

'Sorry,' said Michael, suddenly dropping his fish fork, 'but I can't, after all.'

'Can't what?'

'Marry the girl, sir.'

'De'ah me,' said the Bishop, 'this is most distressing, very.'

'What would your ludship advise,' said father, looking at me hopelessly, 'you see, I can't keep her here either, for the sake of the parish.'

'There is a home for Decayed Gentlewomen at Putney,' the Bishop began; 'I should be very happy if my vote and influence would be of any help, but I doubt'--he continued surveying me solemnly--'whether they would take her. She is so ah--er--um--so _exceedingly_ decayed.'

After dinner the Bishop nodded in the direction of his chaplain and whispered to me,--

'It sings. Most painful. Very.'

So of course I asked it to. Aunt Constance accompanied its impassioned wail.

'If I should die To-night, My friends would look upon my face With tears, And kissing me, lay snow-white flowers against My hair. Keep not your kisses for my cold, Dead face, But let me feel them Now.' (Unknown author).

Father looked round the congregation with a cold eye. He has views about guests.

'Thank you very much, Mr Williams. Won't you sing something else?'

And Mr Williams went upstairs to get another.

'Oh,' sobbed Charlie Foxhill, laying his head down on Ross's shoulder, 'keep not your kisses for my cold----'

'No one,' my brother giggled, 'can look upon _your_ face _without_ tears, old thing, but you shall have snow-white flowers all right; here, can you feel them now?' and he shoved a camellia and several wet carnations down Charlie's collar, and the Bishop mopped his eyes and remarked in his best Oxford drawl,--

'Such a good chap, really, if he only wouldn't. Top-hole, very.'

At nine-thirty father said to Michael, 'You can go away now.'

'Where, sir.'