Part 5

'Anywhere you jolly well like so long as it's far enough. I'm going to take my only daughter for a last walk in the woods. Of course, if you thought it worth while to be at the park gates at ten-thirty to say good-night I might----'

'If you could make it twenty to eleven I could bear it better,' said Michael, 'it would be ten minutes less----'

'Ten-thirty is _the_ very latest, Michael. An hour is as much as I can stand of her myself,' said father firmly, shoving him out into the hall.

'Oh, daddy,' I giggled, as we wandered out into the summer night, 'I haven't laughed so much for years. _Who_ is Porky, and why and when did you bet him ten bob?'

'He was my fag at Eton, Meg, and I bet him ten bob he'd never be a Bishop.'

'Have you paid him yet?'

'I've given him six and tenpence on account, little 'un. Why, he's only a colonial.'

'Oh, daddy! you really are a poppet; you're much too nice to be a parson; whatever made you want to go into the Church?'

'I didn't want to, Meg. He made me.'

'What, that man, the Bishop of Ligeria?'

'No, _The Man_, the Bishop of my soul, darling.'

'Oh, father!'

'Didn't you know that I was once going into the army, Meg? It seemed to me then, as now, the only conceivable thing to do, as the Fotheringhams have always been soldiers. But I found that HE had other views about it, and I had to chuck it up at the last minute. My father was so furious with me that he chucked me out.'

'Oh, daddy!'

'And I have felt lately that there is something else I am required to do, and I don't want to do it. Sometimes I think that this pleasant Devonshire life is not the one to which I am to be allowed to 'settle down.'

'And yet you like Him, father?'

'And yet I "like Him," Meg, but, oh, I really don't think I can let you be married in the morning. I shall have to get Porky to say the bit of the service that really matters, for I shall be tempted to leave it out.'

And although father laughed as he said it, yet, from the struggle in his face, I seemed to understand suddenly that my marriage was for him only another 'bit of harness' which had been 'hewn' away. But why?'

Then Michael met me at the gate at half-past ten.

'There's a little cottage high up on a Cornish cliff, Meg.'

'How interesting,' I said.

'It's rather a sweet place for a day or two.'

'Oh, really?'

'And after that a bit of sea, which will be smooth'--(but _will_ it?)--'and a long journey, till we come to a little village where two men will be sitting on a wall waiting for me, _and then_ the mountains for my honeymoon, my Paradiso!'

You see, I am to have a quite unusual wedding tour. There is to be no dallying with love beside a rippling and sequestered waterfall, alone with Michael, who, at intervals, would strain me to his heart. _No_, there will always be those two young men with us who are going to strain my muscles all the time. I am going up a 'chimney' for my honeymoon. I have had an ice-axe for a wedding present and a most amazing pair of boots If I love and honour Michael, and obey him and the other two young men, I may _even_ go up the wrong side of a mountain some day! 'It all depends!'

Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by the gate, but Michael's _then_ unveiled my eyes. I understood all in a moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men--his bride. The cottage and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?--less than the rust that never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook's tour (personally conducted) to his bride--his two young men--his mountains--his honeymoon--his Paradiso.

But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook's tour!

'All is over, Captain Ellsley.'

'No, it has not yet begun, Meg.'

'Oh, Michael! Oh, _please_, Michael.'

'And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of your own accord, just once, my darling?'

And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this hour to-morrow I shall have more 'experience,' I shall be linked up with all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn't he content to love his Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the poorer. He might not have written his _Inferno_ or said:--

'My wife Of savage temper, more than aught beside Hath to this evil brought me.'

What?

Oh, yes, I know he didn't actually say it of himself, but his own domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I will _not_ be reproved for ignorance of Dante by--the General Public.

FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER

'But when I became mature, I put away childish things.'

*CHAPTER XII*

At other times when I have settled down to write, the words have seemed to hurry from my brain so fast that my pen has had to race along to catch the thoughts before they passed into oblivion. But now--though the desire to write consumes me like a fire, the words come haltingly. I am afraid lest I should mar the beauty of _this_ thing I know about. For I have found in marriage the loveliest experience of all.

For on my wedding day, when all the flowers and jewels and lace were laid aside, and all the good-byes said; the last kiss given to my father, and the farewells waved to all the loving village folk who were gathered at the gates to watch me go, I felt a little lonely, and wondered, as I drove away, if anywhere could ever be again so sweet as that old home.

When the little journey to the coast was made, and the sun set in a glow of splendour in the sea, the quiet night came down and the stars hung softly like jewelled lamps about a purple sky. Out in the windless, magical sea-scented night my husband caught and kissed me suddenly,--

'You can't send me away to-night, you little fluttering thing.'

But there was something in the quality of his kiss that frightened me, something almost ruthless in the finality of the words, so that I fled away upstairs in wild rebellion, because the summer's dalliance was over. I might elude the man no more. I must say like all the other women,--

'Meet, if thou require it Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands.'

Oh, if it only might be 'to-morrow, not to-night,' and when to-morrow came? why then again--to-morrow. Thus Mother Eve passed on to me that fear which caught her once when she, perhaps, was walking in the garden.

I went over to my window and leaned out. The sleeping world lay at my feet. I looked across the cliffs to where the quiet beauty of the sky met the wide splendour of the sea, and the great moon flooded the water, luring me to adventure out upon that rippling, shining pathway, which seemed to lead to God.

And as I looked I realised that all the natural world responded always to the natural laws, and, because of that obedience, there was that restfulness and harmony that had always soothed and quietened me, and the old 'washed' feeling came and swept away rebellion. So--when that time came that Michael shut the door, and there was no one in the room but him and me--he found 'duty' waiting, and that primeval fear that Eve passed down the ages to her daughter.

I suppose some of my thoughts were painted in my face, for I saw all that was dogged and ruthless in the man rise up--directed against himself, not me. I watched him beat down and back that ache and longing that was in his eyes when he came in, till there was nothing left but a vast, comprehending tenderness and the strength to wait, until such time as that frightened look had passed from his ladye's eyes.

And in the quiet shelter of his arms I listened to the very perfect things he chose to say. That by reason of the 'worship' he had sworn to give me, there could be no 'demands,' only a lovely gift most urgently desired if I could give a thing, so priceless, willingly.

And then at something wistful in his face, my love rose up and cast out fear--that craven thing. And there was a little kiss upon my husband's lips, so small and light, he hardly knew it there till it had gone--that little first one that I ever gave him 'of my own accord.' He took my hands and with the worship deepening in his eyes he asked,--

'Is my beloved mine?'

There flashed into my mind those words which, I suppose, express most fully the completeness and the glory and perfection of our human love, and which convey, so perfectly, the utter rest and peace and sweet contentment which both should find in marriage, when they love.

So I leaned against my husband and he stooped to hear the whispered words,--

'I am my beloved's, and his desire is towards me.'

So I gave. And in the old surrender of the woman to the man's exultant mastery, I, too, found love's consummation--and lo!--there was bread and wine--a chalice and a sacrament.

I have been married, really, such a very little while, yet in these fifteen months in India I have learned that sometimes women do not give ungrudgingly--that people speak and write of marriage as if its sweet abandonment were a thing of which to be ashamed. But if it were, would Christ have used it as a type of that other union--mystic and wonderful--between His Church and Him?

And so it seems to me that first should come the 'marriage of the minds.' If he 'demands' and she gives grudgingly or of necessity, or with regret, as if for something spoiled--they too are 'wasteful' and have 'cheapened Paradise.' They have not discerned the Sacrament, but have

'Spoiled the bread, and spilled the wine Which, spent with due respective thrift Had made brutes men, and men divine.'

And, by the way, I'm sure it's time I got in all those other bits I know about. Those poor birds of the South Pole, still waiting on the ice for me to bring them fame! And then that other king, but oh! he was so dull. He missed the best of everything in life: for William II., 1087, never married; and so of course he never knew what we shall know in four more weeks, that 'A child's kiss, set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad.'

And when the labour and the travail are all done, and my baby rests in my arms, I shall have more 'experience.' I shall be linked up with all the other mothers of the world. Oh, dare I say it? Humbly I do. I shall be linked up, faintly and far off, even with Mary.

*PART II*

*FOUR YEARS LATER*

*CHAPTER I*

'I start life on my own account and don't like it.'

Grammar is not my strong point, and I never could quote correctly, but my geography is hopeless. I always remember, however, when I am at sea that the earth revolves around the sun, and on its axis, too, for I can feel the double motion in every fibre of my being.

Now that I am once more on dry land and the universe has ceased to rock I have gone back to my childish and comfortable belief that the world is a nice, firm, square thing fixed on four legs like a dining-room table.

I really am a shocking sailor, though 'the Gidger'[#]--my small daughter--loves the sea. The stewardess was an angel of light to me, yet she insisted on my turning out for all the boat drills. I felt I would so much rather lie in my berth than bother about my place in a boat if we were torpedoed, that it would be so much less exertion to go down comfortably in the big ship than toss about in a small boat on the chance of being saved. One great advantage of _mal de mer_ is that all other sensations are obliterated. I was not conscious of the least fear when the ship next to ours went down, and the fact that our own escaped a like fate by a miracle left me cold. Even my loneliness and misery at my first parting from Michael since our marriage were all forgotten--swallowed up in one great desire to lie down flat and perhaps take a little iced champagne, 'for my stomach's sake,' like poor darling Timothy.

[#] _Re_ the nick-name Gidger, the first 'G' is pronounced as in Gideon and the second 'g' as in German.

Over four whole years of life I've 'drawn a veil,' and, oh, so much has happened since I finished the last chapter.

I've got to know my husband, that's one thing. A woman never really knows a man when first she marries him. That old woman in our village used to say 'the longer you live with a man, the less you like him,' and she ought to know, she was 'thrice widowed.'

So I have discovered that mine is a very quaint person, with primitive, old-world ideas, that make him ruthless with himself and other people about 'work' and 'duty'; and because he never had a sister (and a mother only for an hour), he's rather apt to think any woman who powders her nose is of necessity a painted Jezebel! Shall I ever forget his face on the steamer going out to India, when one of those dear, delicious, natural, American women produced a small mirror and a powder puff in the social hall and said to her friend,--

'Say, Sadie, why didn't you tell me I'd got a nose like a headlight?'

And his expression! when I told him that _of course_ I had the same things in my pocket. Why, good gracious, is there any woman who doesn't powder her nose, though I do agree with him that some of them put it on thicker than they need.

Then, too, he can, and will, only talk upon subjects he understands. Imagine the devastating dullness of a life lived on those lines. But now. he says 'two in a family can't talk, there aren't enough words to go round.' So my black beast (as I call him), has been content to adore and bully me by turns, and fill his life with deeds, and leave the words for other people and his wife. Consequently, I am not perfectly positive yet how much less I like him.

One day, after the war had raged two years in France, he came and told me that he was ordered to the Front, and I could see the soldier and the lover struggling in his face.

'Oh, Meg, I'm going, so I shan't miss it after all, but how _can_ I leave you?'

Other things besides the war have happened in those four years. Daddy did not settle down in Devonshire, but his passion for men's souls has driven him to one of the terrible places of the earth, where he lives among natives, for whom he has always had a kind of abhorrence. He and Porky wage war against the devil over an immense tract of country, for daddy is on the Bench now, and his diocese is next to that of the Bishop of Ligeria. They meet once a year, daddy and his old fag, both consumed with a burning desire that men's bodies should be clean and their souls washed white, both so muscular and so militant that they are utterly unable to comprehend 'the church passive,' or to see why a man can't shoot and ride and crack a joke as well as pray. But then, as Ross used to say, 'Father is a man first and a parson afterwards.' I have sometimes wondered, since I have learned to see things 'farther than my nose,' whether the sentiment expressed so elegantly by my brother did not contain an element of truth, _i.e._ 'that the chaps in the pews are more likely to listen to what the chap in the pulpit is jawing about if they know he's a good shot and rides as straight as they do.'

But the thrill of the years was Cousin Emily, who, without a word to any one, let her house in Hampstead and turned up one day at daddy's bungalow and announced that she had come to keep house for him and to instil kindness to animals among the natives. My father (with that mediaeval humour that made people in the Middle Ages put up gargoyles on their churches) says 'Emily's parrot, Meg, has done more for the cause than any missionary ever born will do. The natives simply love the collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity!'

At one of the annual meetings Porky asked Emily if he could borrow the godly bird for _his_ diocese, but there was that in his eyes which made her know he wanted her as well. So daddy married them, and they are now like the parrot, 'continually given to all good works together!

The paralytic chaplain's health has given out. The strain of one of the annual meetings (or else the climate) was too much for him, so he has been sent home, and has a curacy in England and a wife now, who can lay those 'snow-white flowers' against his hair! And talking of England reminds me that while Michael wrestled with his packing in a kind of sulphurous haze, I pulled strings. If you pull them hard enough in India you can generally make the puppets work, so somehow I got a passage and embarked for England three days after Michael sailed for France.

Captain Everard, a great friend of my brother, sailed in the same boat. He was so kind when I felt sick and kept my small daughter amused.

When I got to Tilbury I was limper than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'damp rag hung over the back of a chair.' I don't know what I should have done without the dear little stewardess to pack for me, and Captain Everard to help me and the Gidger through the customs, and all the other nightmare horrors of a landing in England in war time. I suppose I said I was 'British' when the Aliens Officer asked me my nationality, but I felt like a disembowelled spirit. (No, I don't mean disembodied!) Captain Everard could not come to London with me, but got me a corner seat in a carriage with only three men in it, nice chaps in the Pioneers, one of whom Captain Everard knew slightly.

*CHAPTER II*

At last after an interminable and arctic journey, during which I passed through every phase of land and sea sickness and might have died of cold but for a timely dose of brandy from the Pioneers, the train glided into the gloom of St Pancras station. Suddenly everything turned rose colour. Such a delicious surprise! Waiting under one of the shaded lamps was that wounded warrior--Ross. He looked so dear and big and beautiful in his kilt. I flung myself and the Gidger, regardless of life and limb, and the restraining hands of three Pioneers, out of the carriage and into his arms almost before the train had stopped. Did you ever know anything so delightful? He had coaxed the shipping company for information about the boat and got leave from the hospital to meet me. He enveloped us both in a huge hug with his one good arm. Oh, I was pleased to see him after five years, my dear adorable twin brother. I told him about the Pioneers, and he said,--

'Really, Meg, I think drinking spirits in a railway carriage with strange soldiers is about the limit of anything even you've ever done!'

But he thanked them very nicely. He has such charming manners when he chooses (he ought to have, I brought him up), he told them I was such a bad traveller, and that he was much obliged to them for looking after me. The Pioneers said it was a great relief to their minds that some one had met me; so if it was to theirs you can imagine what it was to mine.

The Gidger loved 'Uncle Woss' at once, and was deeply interested in his M.C. ribbon and bandaged arm, and the admiration seemed mutual, for Ross said,--

'Oh, what a Poppet, Meg.'

Whereupon the Gidger, ever athirst for information, asked,--

'What's a Poppet, Uncle Woss?'

My brother replied that a Poppet was a little girl in a white fur coat, and immediately buttoned her up in one, while he called a soldier, who was standing near, to 'bring the other coat,' and, as he helped me on with it, he said, 'You remember Brown, don't you, Meg?'

'Why, Sam! of course I do,' and I shook hands. 'However do you always manage it?'

'Oh, got a knee this time,' said Ross, and stared at Brown, who looked extremely sheepish. 'Where's your maid?' he added.

'Haven't brought her, couldn't get a passage.'

'Oh, what rotten luck; how have you managed?'

'Captain Everard did a lot for me.'

'But not your hair, surely, Meg? (Get a porter, Brown, and fish the baggage out.)'

So while Brown 'fished,' I revelled in my warm coat, and tried to see how it set on me at the back and said, 'Why, Ross, it's sable.'

'Well, you don't think I'd give you a rabbit one, do you?' said my brother.

Being uneconomically inclined myself, I felt I ought to add, 'But what extravagance!'

He scoffed, and said he'd have me know his godmother had left all her money to him, and not to me, that a fur coat was cheaper than pneumonia, anyway, besides being less trouble to one's relatives, and for those two reasons _only_ he had bought it. 'I've got a car waiting outside,' he said, 'so that while remarks on finance, coming from you, are deeply interesting, my child, they are also apt to be expensive, as it's up to thirty bob by now, the train's so late.'

As we drove out of the station Ross said, 'Michael wired to the Savoyard for your rooms, and my hospital is quite close,' and then he added in an airy manner, 'Oh, by the way, I knew you'd want a nursemaid for the Gidger, so I engaged one for you. She's pretty and seems nice, so I didn't bother about references.'

I didn't want to appear ungrateful, so I only murmured that I could see about those later on, and I drew a little closer to him and squeezed his arm for joy at seeing him again, while the Gidger gazed, entranced, out of the window at the traffic.

'Ross,' I said, 'how on earth does Sam always manage it?'

'I dunno,' said Ross, staring through the glass at Sam's impassive back. 'It's extraordinary. When I got this bullet in my arm he came up a moment after, said he'd bust his knee. Sometimes I think he must have some arrangement with the d----'

'With a person that we need not name.'

'Just so,' said Ross, and giggled as he used to do when I reproved him.

But, all the same, it is a funny thing that Sam always has managed to get with Ross, from the time he turned up as the school boot-boy, to the day he appeared in my brother's dug-out with a can and said, 'Hot water, sir,' in just the same old way.

When I arrived at the hotel the 'pretty nursemaid' turned out to be my darling Nannie.

'When you feel you can stop kissing them both, Meg would like your references.'

'References given _and_ required,' laughed Nannie.

'Then the deal's off. Meg's past won't bear looking into.'

Ross had just crammed my rooms with flowers and the air was full of scent. He said Michael told him 'heaps of lilies.' Did he remember that the scent of those is love? I do think, however, he might have ordered the removal of the earwigs.

I was so tired that I came upstairs directly after dinner. The Gidger was already fast asleep.

'Pretty lamb,' said Nannie, just as she always used to do.

So like the gardener's cat in Punch, I felt that we could

'Sit among the greenhouse flowers And sleep for hours and hours and hours.'

Just before I sailed I got a mail from daddy. He was about to start upon a journey to some scattered mission stations 'to confirm the churches,' and after that he said 'perhaps I shall come home.' Oh, won't it be too topping if he does. He was very excited, too, over the two new missionaries who had come out to the only healthy station. He writes:--

'They're really quite nice, Meg, the Reverend Mister has a heart of gold. She's solid gold right through, only you know, little 'un, those very gold people do have funny clothes and shoes sometimes. I'm afraid she's rather inclined to think that curly hair is "wicked." I don't know what she'd say to yours, Meg, but then the children of the clergy always go quickest to the dogs; you've said that heaps of times, so of course it must be right.'

He finished up:--

'Good-bye, darling, don't forget that whatever the next few months may bring you, "underneath are the Everlasting Arms."'