Part 13

Her mother was on the lawn when she got back, and Pauline blinked her eyes a good deal to throw the blame of tears upon the sun.

"Ah, you're back. Let's take a little walk round the garden," said Mrs. Grey in the nervous manner that told of something on her mind.

They went into the larger wall-garden and walked along the wide herbaceous borders through a blaze of snapdragons that here all day had been swallowing the sunshine.

"Where did you go with Guy?" her mother asked.

"We went down the river, and they're cutting the grass in the big meadow, and then afterwards...."

"Oh, Pauline, afterwards you went into Guy's house with him?"

Pauline nodded. "I know. I was just going to tell you."

"Pauline, how could you do such a thing?"

"I only went to say good night. I wasn't there five minutes."

Why should an action so simple be vexing her mother?

"Are you angry with me for going?"

"You must never do such a thing again," said Mrs. Grey, more crossly than Pauline had ever heard her. "Monica saw you go in as she was walking down Shipcot hill, and she has just this moment come and told me."

"But why shouldn't I go in and say good night?" Pauline asked. "There were people in the churchyard. I thought it was better to say good night in the house."

Her mother was tremendously pink with vexation, and Pauline looked at her in surprise. It was really unaccountable that such a trifling incident as going into Guy's house could have made her as angry as this. She must have offended her in some other way.

"Mother, what have I done to annoy you?"

"I can't think what made you do anything so stupid as that. I can't think. I can't think. So many people may have seen you go in."

"Well, Mother darling, surely by this time," said Pauline, "everybody must know we are really engaged."

Her mother stood in an access of irritation.

"And don't you understand how that makes it all the worse? Please never do such an inconsiderate thing again. You can imagine how much it upset Monica, when she ran back to tell me."

"Why didn't she come in and fetch me?" asked Pauline. "That would have been much easier. I think she thoroughly enjoyed making a great fuss about nothing. Everybody has been criticizing me lately. I know you all disapprove of anybody's being in love."

"Pauline, when you are to blame, you shouldn't say such unkind things about Monica."

"I have to say what I think sometimes," Pauline replied, rebelliously.

"And as for Guy," Mrs. Grey went on, "I am astonished at his thoughtlessness. I can't understand how he could dream of letting you come into his house. I can't understand it."

"Yes, but why shouldn't I go in?" Pauline persisted. "Darling Mother, you go on being angry with me, but you don't tell me why I shouldn't go in."

"Can't you understand what the Wychford people might think?"

Pauline shook her head.

"Well, I sha'n't say any more about it," Mrs. Grey decided. "But you must promise me never, never to do such a foolish thing again."

"I'll promise you never to go to Guy's house," said Pauline. "But I can't promise never to do foolish things when such perfectly ordinary things are called foolish."

Mrs. Grey looked helplessly round her, but as neither of her two elder daughters was present she had nothing to say; and Pauline, who thought that all the fuss was due to nothing but Monica's unwarranted interference, had nothing to say, either; so they walked along the herbaceous borders, each with a demeanor of reproach for the other's failure to understand. The snapdragons lolled upon the sun with gold-bloomed anthers, and drank more and still more color until they were drenched beyond the deepest dyes of crimson, extinguishing the paler hues of rose and chrome which yet at moth-time would show like lamps when the others had dulled in the discouragement of twilight.

"You mustn't think anything more about it," said her mother, after a long pause. "I'm sure it was only heedlessness. I don't think you can say I'm too strict with you and Guy. Really, you know, you ought to have had a very happy June. You've been together nearly all the time."

"Darling," said Pauline, utterly penitent for the least look that could have wounded her mother's feelings, "you're sweet to us. And Guy loves you nearly as much as I do."

The gong sounded upon the luteous air of the evening; and Pauline, with her arm closely tucked into her mother's arm, walked with her across the lawn towards the house.

"It's no good looking crossly at me," she said, when like a beautiful ghost Monica came into the dining-room. "I've explained everything to Mother."

"I'm very glad you have," Monica answered, austerely; and because she would not fall in with her own forgiving mood, Pauline took the gentle revenge of not expostulating with her that evening when there was an opportunity. Nor would she let Margaret refer to the subject. Her sisters were very adorable, but they knew nothing about love, and it would only make them more anxious to lay down laws if she showed that she was aware of their disapproval. She would be particularly charming to them both this evening, but her revenge must be never to mention the incident to either.

The principal result of her mother's rebuke had been to drive away Pauline's anger with Guy and the jealousy of his friend. All she thought now was of the time when next they would meet and when she would be able to laugh with him over the absurdity of other people pretending to know anything about the ways of love or of lovers like themselves. She decided also that, as a penance for having been angry with Guy, she would take care to inquire the very first thing about the mystery of the inscription on the window. Oh, but how she hoped that his friend had not come to stay at Plashers Mead, for that would surely spoil this Summer of theirs.

The next afternoon, when Pauline went into the paddock, Guy was awaiting for her on the mill-stream, her place in the canoe all ready as usual.

"Have you found your friend?" she asked, faithful to her resolution.

"Not a sign of him," said Guy. "What on earth he came for, I can't think. Miss Peasey never saw him, and of course she never heard him. He must have been bicycling. However, don't let's waste time in talking about Michael Fane."

Pauline smiled at him with all her heart. How wonderful Guy was to reward her so richly for the little effort it had cost to inquire about his friend!

"I've been prospecting this morning," he announced, as they shot along in the direction of the bridge. "They haven't started to make hay on the other side, so I'm going to paddle you furiously up-stream until we find some secret and magical meadow where we can hide and forget about yesterday's fiasco."

They glided underneath the bridge and left it quivering in the empty sunlight behind them; they swept silently over the mill-pond while Pauline held her breath. Then the banks closed in upon their canoe and Guy fought his way against the swifter running of the water, on and on, on and on between the long grasses of the uncut meadows, on and on, on and on past the waterfall where the Abbey stream joined the main stream and gave it a wider and easier course.

"Phew! it's hot," Guy exclaimed. "Sprinkle me with water."

She splashed him, laughing; and he seized her hand to kiss her dabbled fingers.

"Laugh, my sweet, sweet heart," he said. "It was your laugh I heard before I ever heard your voice, that night when I stood and looked at you and Margaret as if you were two silver people who had fallen down from the moon."

Again she sprinkled him, laughing, and again he seized her hand and kissed her dabbled fingers.

"They're as cool as coral," he said. "Why are you wrinkling your nose at me? Pauline, your eyes have vanished away!"

He plucked speedwell flowers and threw them into her lap.

"When I haven't got you with me," he said, "I have to pretend that the speedwells are your eyes, and that the dog-roses are your cheeks."

"And what is my nose?" she asked, clapping her hands because she was sure he would not be able to think of any likeness.

"Your nose is incomparable," he told her, and then he bent to his paddle and made the canoe fly along so that the water fluted to right and left of the bows. Ultimately they came to an island where all the afternoon they sat under a willow that was pluming with scanty shade a thousand forget-me-nots.

Problems faded out upon the languid air, for Pauline was too well content with Guy's company to spoil the June peace. At last, however, she disengaged herself from his caressing arm and turned to him a serious and puzzled face. And when she was asking her question she knew how all the afternoon it had been fretting the back of her mind.

"Why was Mother angry with me yesterday because I came into Plashers Mead to say good night to you?"

"Was she angry?" asked Guy.

"Well, Monica saw us and got home before me and told her, and she was worried at what people would think. What would they think?"

Guy looked at her; then he shook his fist at the sky.

"Oh, God, why must people try...."

She touched his arm.

"Guy, don't swear. At least not.... You'll call me superstitious and foolish," she murmured, dismayfully, "but really it hurts me to hear you say that."

"I don't think you anything but the most lovely and perfect thing on earth," he vowed, passionately. "And it drives me mad that people should try to spoil your naturalness ... but still ... it was thoughtless of me."

"But why, why?" she asked. "That's the word Mother used about you. Only why, why? Why shouldn't I go and say good night?"

"Dear, there was no harm in that. But, you see, village people might say horrible things.... I was dreadfully to blame. Yes, of course I was."

She flushed like a carnation at dawn; and when Guy put his arm around her she drew away.

"Oh, Guy," she said, brokenly, "I can't bear to think of being alone to-night. I shall be asking questions all the night long; I know I shall. It's like that horrid mill-pool."

"Mill-pool?" he echoed, looking at her in perplexity.

She sighed and stared sadly down at the forget-me-nots.

"You wouldn't understand; you'd think I was hysterical and stupid."

Silently they left the island, and silently for some time they floated down the stream; then Pauline tossed her head bravely.

"Love's rather cruel in a way."

Guy looked aghast.

"Pauline, you don't regret falling in love with me?"

"No, of course not, of course not. Oh, I love you more than I can say."

When Guy's arms were round her again Pauline thought that love could be as cruel as he chose; she did not care for his cruelty.

JULY

Guy had been conscious ever since the rose-gold evening of the ragged-robins of new elements having entered into his and Pauline's love for each other. All this month, however, June creeping upon them with verdurous and muffled steps had plotted to foil the least attempt on Guy's part to face the situation. Now the casual indiscretion of yesterday brought him sharply against it, and, as in the melancholy of the long Summer evening he contemplated the prospect, it appeared disquieting enough. In nine months he had done nothing; no quibbling could circumvent that deadly fact. For nine months he had lived in a house of his own, had accepted paternal help, had betrothed himself; and with every passing month he had done less to justify any single one of the steps. What were the remedies? The house might be sublet; at any rate, his father's bounty came to an end this quarter; engaging himself formally to Pauline, he could throttle the Muse and become a schoolmaster, and in two years perhaps they could be married. It would be a wrench to abandon poetry and the hope of fame, indeed it would stagger the very foundations of his pride; but rather than lose Pauline he would be content to remain the obscurest creature on earth. Literature might blazon his name; but her love blazoned his soul. Poetry was only the flame of life made visible, and if he were to sacrifice Pauline what gasping and ignoble rushlight of his own would he offer to the world?

Yet could he bear to leave Pauline herself? The truth was he should have gone in March, when she was in a way still remote and when like a star she would have shone as brightly upon him absent or present. Now that star was burning in his heart with passionate fires and fevers and with quenchless ardors. It would be like death to leave her now; were she absent from him her very name would be as a draught of liquid fire. More implacable, too, than his own torment of love might be hers. If he had gone in March, she would have been gently sad, but in those first months she still had other interests; now if he parted from her she would merely all the time be growing older and they would have between them and their separation the intolerable wastage of their youth. Pauline had surrendered to love all the simple joys which had hitherto occupied her daily life; and if she were divided from him, he feared for the fire that might consume her. It was he who had kindled it upon that rosaureate evening of mid-May, and it was he who was charged with her ultimate happiness. The accident of yesterday had reminded him sharply how far this was so, and a sense of the tremendous responsibility created by his love for her lay upon Guy. He must never again give her family an occasion to remonstrate with her; he had been the one to blame, and he wished Mrs. Grey had spoken to him without saying anything to Pauline. How sad this long evening was, with reluctant day even now at half past nine o'clock still luminous in the west.

Next morning there was a letter for Guy from his father.

FOX HALL, GALTON, HANTS, _June 24th_.

MY DEAR GUY,--I inclose the balance of the sum I gave you, and I hope it will have been enough to pay all the debts at which you hinted in your last letter. I do not think it would be fair to you to hamper you with any more money. In fact, I trust you have already made up your mind not to ask for any.

You'll be sorry to hear that Wilkinson has fallen ill and must go abroad at once. This makes it imperative for me to know at once if you are coming to help me next September. If you are, I'm afraid I must ask you to come here immediately and take Wilkinson's place this term. I'm sorry to drag you away from your country estate, but I cannot go to the bother of getting a temporary master and then begin again with you in September. It unsettles the boys too much. So if you want to come in September, you must come now. You will only miss a month of your house and I hope that during the seven weeks of the summer holidays you will be able to transfer yourself comfortably and abandon it for ever.

Take a day to think over my proposal and telegraph your answer to-morrow.

Your affectionate father, JOHN HAZLEWOOD.

It seemed fateful, the arrival of this letter on top of the doubts of last night. A day was not long in which to make up his mind. And yet, after all, a moment was enough. He ought to go; he ought to telegraph immediately before he could vacillate; he must not see Pauline first; he ought to accept this offer. Farewell, fame!

Guy opened the front door and walked into Birdwood come with a note from the Rectory.

"Miss Pauline took me away from my work to give you this most particular and important and wait for the answer," said the gardener.

Guy asked him to step inside and see Miss Peasey while he went up-stairs to write the reply.

"Miss Peasey doesn't think much of your variety, Birdwood. She says the garden is entirely blue."

"What, all those dellyphiniums the Rector raised with his own hand and she don't like blue!"

Birdwood shook his head to express another defeat at the hands of incomprehensible woman. A moment later, as Guy went up to his room with Pauline's note, he heard him bellow in the kitchen:

"What's this I hear, mum, about the garden being too blue?"

Then Guy closed the door of the library and shut out everything but the sound of the stream.

MY DARLING,--I've got such exciting news. Mr. Delamere who's a friend of ours has asked us to stay in his barge--I mean he's lent us the barge for us to stay in. It's called the Naiad and it's on the Thames at Ladingford and when we've finished with it we're going to have it towed down to Oxford and come back from there by train. Mother asked if you would like to come and stay with us for a fortnight. Think of it, a fortnight! Margaret is coming and Monica is going to stay with Father, who can't leave the garden. Oh, Guy, I'm wild with happiness! We're to start on the first of July about. Do send me a little note by Birdwood. Of course I know there's no need. But I would love to have a little note especially as we sha'n't see each other till after lunch.

Your own adoring PAULINE.

Guy wrote the little note to Pauline, and to his father he wrote a long letter explaining that it was impossible to give up what he was doing to be a schoolmaster.

It was peerless weather when they set out in Godbold's wagonette on the nine miles to Ladingford. Guy was thrilled to be traveling like this with Mrs. Grey, Margaret, and Pauline. The girls were in flowered muslin dresses, seeming more airy than he had ever thought them; and the luggage piled up beside Godbold had the same exquisite lightness, so that it appeared less like luggage than a store of birds' feathers. The thought of nearly having missed this summery pilgrimage made Guy catch his breath.

They arrived at Ladington towards tea-time and found the barge lying by an old stone bridge about a mile away from the village. Apart from the spire of Ladingford church nothing conspicuously broke the horizon of that flat, green country stretching for miles to a shadowy range of hills. Whichever way they looked, these meads extended, with here and there willows and elms; close at hand was the quiet by-road that crossed the bridge and meandered over the low lands, as still and traffickless as the young Thames itself.

The _Naiad_ was painted peacock-blue; owing to the turreted poops the owner had superimposed and the balustrade with rail of gilt gadroons, it almost had the look of a dismasted Elizabethan ship.

"Anything more you'll want?" Godbold inquired.

"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. Godbold," said Mrs. Grey. "Charming ... charming ... such a pleasant drive. Good afternoon, Mr. Godbold."

The carrier turned his horse; and when the sound of the wagonette had died away there was silence except where the stream lapped against the barge and where very far off some rooks were cawing.

Guy and Pauline had resolved that they would give Margaret no chance of calling them selfish during this fortnight; and since they were together all the time, it was much easier now not to wish to escape from everybody. The first week went by in such a perfection of delight as Guy had scarcely thought was possible. Indeed, it remained ultimately unimaginable, this dream-life on the _Naiad_. A pleasant woman in a sunbonnet came to cook breakfast and dinner; and Pauline and Margaret went to Ladingford and bought sunbonnets, a pink one for Pauline and for Margaret one of watchet blue. In the fresh mornings Guy and the sisters wandered idly over the meads; but in the afternoon Margaret generally read a book in the shade while Guy and Pauline went for walks, walks that ended always in sitting by the river's edge and telling each other the tale of their love. The nights with a clear moon waxing to the full were entrancing. There was a small piano on the barge, the notes of which had been brought by damp almost to the timbre of an exhausted spinet. It served, however, for Mrs. Grey to accompany Pauline while she played on a violin simple tunes. Guy used to lie back on the deck and count the stars above Pauline's pavans and galliards; then from the silence that followed he would see her coming, shadowy, light as the dewfall, to sit close beside him, to sit, her hand in his, for an hour while the moon climbed the sky and the fern-owls croaked in their hunting. And as the romantic climax of the day, it was wonderful to fall asleep with the knowledge that Pauline slept nearer to him than she had ever slept before.

"Guy ought to go and see the Lamberts at the Manor," Mrs. Grey announced at the end of the second week. "I've written to Mrs. Lambert. It will be interesting for him."

Guy was thrilled by the notion of visiting Ladingford Manor, which had been one of the great fortresses of romance held against the devastating commercial morality of the Victorian prime with its science and sciolism, and which possessed already some of the fabulous appeal of the medieval songs and tapestries John Lambert had created there. An invitation came presently to walk over any afternoon. Margaret said at first she would not go; but Guy, who was in a condition of excited reverence, declared she must come; and so the three of them set out across a path in the meads that Guy populated with romantic figures of the mid-Victorian days. On this stile Swinburne may have sat; here Burne-Jones may have looked back at the sky; and surely it were reasonable to suppose that Rossetti might have tied up his shoe on this big stone by this brook, even as Guy was tying up his shoe now. Soon they saw a group of elms and the smoke of clustered chimneys; there golden-gray in front of them stood Ladingford Manor.

"There's the sort of stillness of fame about it," Guy whispered.

He wondered if Mrs. Lambert would now resemble at all the famous pictures of her he had seen. And would she talk familiarly of the famous people she had known? They came to the gate, entering the garden along a flagged path on either side of which runnels flowed between borders of trim box. Mrs. Lambert was sitting in a yew parlor under a blue-silk umbrella that was almost a pavilion, and she received them with many comments upon the energy of walking so far on this hot afternoon.

"You would like some beer, I'm sure. There is a bell in that mulberry-tree. If you toll the bell Charlotte will bring you beer."

Guy tolled the bell, and Charlotte arrived with a pewter tray and pewter mugs of beer. Margaret would not be thirsty, but Pauline was afraid of hurting Mrs. Lambert's feelings, and she pretended to drink, lancing blue eyes at Guy over the rim of her mug.

"It's home-brewed beer," said Mrs. Lambert, placidly, and then she leaned back and sighed at the dome of her blue-silk umbrella. She was still very beautiful, and Guy had a sensation that he was sitting at the feet of Helen or Lady Flora the lovely Roman. She was old now, but she wore about her like an aureole the dignity of all those inspirations of famous dead painters.

"Home-brewed beer," Mrs. Lambert repeated, dreamily, and seemed to fall asleep in the past; while in the bee-drowsed yew parlor Pauline, Margaret, and Guy sat watching her. The throat of Sidonia the sorceress was hers; the heavy lids of Hipparchia were hers; the wrist of Ermengarde or Queen Blanche was hers; and the pewter tray on the grass at her feet held Circe's wine.

Then Mrs. Lambert woke up and asked if they would like to see the house.

"Toll the bell in the mulberry-tree, and Charlotte will come. You must excuse my getting up."