Part 14

They followed Charlotte round the rooms of Ladingford Manor. There on the walls were the tapestries that had inspired John Lambert, and there were the tapestries even more beautiful that himself had woven. On the tables were the books John Lambert had printed, which gave positively the aspect of being treasures by the discretion of their external appearance. In other rooms hung the original pictures of hackneyed mezzotints; and how rare they looked now with their velvety pigments of emerald and purple, of orange, cinnabar and scarlet glowing in the tempered sunlight! Margaret, as she moved from room to room, seemed with her weight of dusky hair and fastidious remoteness to belong to the company of lovely women whose romances filled these splendid scenes; but Pauline was life, irradiating with her joy each picture and giving to it the complement of its own still beauty.

"Mrs. Lambert keeps very well, miss," said Charlotte, as they came out again from the house. "But, of course, she doesn't get about much now. Yet we can't really complain, especially with this fine weather."

"Would you like some more beer?" Mrs. Lambert asked, when they joined her again in the yew parlor.

They said they were no longer thirsty; and, having thanked her for the pleasures of the visit, they left her in the past, returning by the pale-green path across the meadows to where the _Naiad_ lay by the old bridge.

"Oh, I did want some tea," sighed Margaret.

"I love Mrs. Lambert," cried Pauline, dancing through the meads. "Wasn't it touching of her to offer Margaret beer? Oh, Guy, when we're married and when you die and I receive young poets at Plashers Mead, shall I offer their future sisters-in-law home-brewed beer? Oh, but I'm sure I shall forget to offer them anything."

Was there any reason, thought Guy, why Plashers Mead should not become a second Ladingford Manor? Friends long ago took that house together; perhaps Michael Fane would, after all, see the necessity of a second Ladingford Manor and share Plashers Mead with himself and Pauline. After this visit it was impossible to contemplate the prospect of being a schoolmaster; it was impossible to imagine Pauline as a schoolmaster's wife. At all costs their love must be sustained on the pinnacle of romance where now it stood. Margaret would sympathize with his desire to set Pauline in beauty; she, dreading the idea of marrying an Indian engineer, would understand how impossible it was to make Pauline the wife of a schoolmaster. Such a declaration must somehow be avoided. It were better they should wait three years for marriage, five years, fourteen years as Tennyson had waited, rather than that he should make the monstrous surrender he had been so near to making. At least he would put himself and his work to the test, and in a year he would be able to publish his first volume of poems. Perhaps his father would realize then that he deserved to marry Pauline. After all, they were together; there were maddening restrictions, of course, but they were together. This visit to Ladingford Manor must be accepted as an omen to persevere in his original intention; for he had been granted the vision of a perfected beauty, which he knew, by reading the lives of the men who made it, had only been achieved after desperate struggles and disappointments. This enchanted time on the _Naiad_ must be the anticipated reward of a tremendous industry when he got back to Wychford. He would no more break the rules and fret at the restrictions made for him and Pauline. Every hour when they were together should henceforth be doubled in the intensity of its capacity for being enjoyed. One thing only he would demand, that in August they should be formally and openly engaged. Otherwise when Autumn came and made it impossible to go on the river, they would be kept to the Rectory; and the few hours of her company he would have must at least be free. He would talk to Margaret about it, so that she might use her influence to procure this favor. Then he would write and tell his father. All would be easy; Ladingford had inspired him. He beheld the visit in retrospect more and more clearly as an exhortation to endure against whatever the world should offer him to betray his ambition. Yet was Pauline the world? No, certainly Pauline had no kinship with the world, and therefore he was the more straitly bound to disregard the voice of material prosperity. She had joked about herself as a Mrs. Lambert of the future; but behind the lightness of her jest had stood confidence in himself and in his fame. Should he imprison that spirit of mirth and fire in the husk of a schoolmaster's wife?

The second week passed; the time at Ladingford was over, and early in the morning they must start for the journey of thirty miles down to Oxford. The dapple-gray horse that would tow the barge was already arrived, and now stood munching the long grass in the shade of the bridge; the swallows were high in the golden air of the afternoon; the long-purples on the banks of the young river seemed to await reproachfully the disturbance of their tranquillity. To-morrow came; the dapple-gray horse was harnessed to the rope; and then slowly, slowly the _Naiad_ glided forward, leaving astern the gray bridge, the long-purples on the bank, and the swallows high in the silver air of the morning. There was not yet any poignancy of parting; for the spire of Ladingford church remained so long in sight that scarcely did they notice the slow recession; and often, when they thought it was gone, the winding river would show it to them again; and in the end, when really it seemed to have vanished, by standing on the poop they could still make out where now it pierced thinly the huge sky. Moreover, the contentment of that imperceptible evanescence and of their dreaming progress down the young Thames was plenary, lulling all regrets for a peace that seemed not yet truly to be lost. The hay in the meadows along the banks was mostly carried, and the cattle were magically fused with the July sunlight, curiously dematerialized like the creatures of a mirage. If a human voice was audible, it was audible deep in the green distance and belonged to the landscape as gently as the murmurous water scalloping the bows. Sometimes, indeed, they would pass late mowers who leaned upon their scythes and waved good fortune to the journey, but mostly it was all an emptiness of air and grass.

"If only this young Thames flowed on for ever!" said Guy.

He and Pauline were leaning over the rail of the barge, and Guy felt a sudden impulse to snatch at the bank rich in that moment with yellow loosestrife, and by his action arrest for ever the progress of the barge, so that for ever they would stay like the lovers on a Grecian urn.

"And really," Guy went on, as already the banks of yellow loosestrife were become banks of long-purples, "there is no reason why for us in a way this river should not flow on for ever. Dear, everything had seemed so perishable before I found you. Pauline, you don't think I ought to surrender my intention, do you? I mean, you don't think I ought to go away from Plashers Mead?"

Guy went on to tell her about the decision he had taken on the day the visit to Ladingford was arranged.

"But it would have been dreadful to miss this time," Pauline declared.

"Oh, I felt it would be impossible," he agreed. "But even if our marriage is postponed for another year, you do think I ought to stick it out here, don't you? And really, you know, few lovers can have such wonderful hours as the hours we do have."

Easily she reassured him with her confidence in the rightness of his decision; easily she assuaged the ache of any lingering doubt with the proclamation of that inevitable triumph in the end.

"But we must be engaged openly," said Guy. "You know I shall be twenty-three next month. Do you think we can be engaged properly in August?"

"Mother promised in Spring," said Pauline. "Why don't you talk to her about it? Why don't you talk to her about it now? She loves you to talk to her."

He looked round to where Mrs. Grey was sitting in a deck-chair; evidently by the rhythmic motion of her fingers she was restating to herself a tune which had formerly pleased her, as the barge glided on past a scene that changed perceptibly only in details of flowers and trees, while the great sky and the green hollow land and the blue distances rested immutable. Guy came and sat beside her.

"I've never enjoyed a fortnight so much in my life," he said.

She smiled at him but did not speak, for whatever quartet she was restating had to be finished first. Soon the last noiseless bars played themselves and she turned round to his conversation.

"Mrs. Grey, do you think that Pauline and I can be engaged openly next month? It won't mean, if we are, that I shall be worrying to see her more often. In fact, I'm sure I shall worry less. But I want to tell my father, so that when he comes here he'll be able to see Pauline. He's a conventional sort of man, and I don't think he'd grasp an engagement such as ours is at present. Besides, I want to talk to the Rector, because I feel that now he regards the whole thing as a childish game. So can it be formal next month?"

Mrs. Grey sat back, so silent that Guy wondered if she had listened to a word he had been saying. He paused for a moment, and then, as she did not reply, he went on:

"I also want to say how sorry I am that I asked Pauline to come into Plashers Mead to say good night to me last month. I didn't realize, until she told me you were angry about it, what a foolish thing I'd done. I don't want you to think that, if we are formally engaged, I shall be doing stupid things like that all the time. Really, Mrs. Grey, I would always be very thoughtful."

"Oh yes," she answered in her nervous way. "Oh yes. I understood it to have been a kind of carelessness. But I had to speak to Pauline about it, because she is so very impulsive. It's the sort of thing I might have done myself when I was a girl. At least, of course, I shouldn't, because the Rector.... Yes ... charming ... charming ... yes ... I really think you might be engaged next month. It's your birthday next month, isn't it?"

"Thank you more than I can thank you," said Guy.

Mrs. Grey waved to Pauline, who drew close.

"Pauline darling, I've thought of such a nice birthday present for Guy ... yes ... charming, charming birthday present ... yes ... for you two to be engaged."

Pauline threw her arms round her mother's neck; and Guy in his happiness noticed at that moment how Margaret was sitting by herself on the poop in the stern. He was wrenched by a sudden compunction, and asked Pauline if he should not go and tell Margaret.

"Charming of Guy ... yes ... charming," Mrs. Grey enthusiastically exclaimed. "Now I call that really charming, and Pauline stays with me."

Guy went up the companion and asked Margaret if she were particularly anxious to be alone. She seemed to pull herself from a day-dream as she turned to assure him she did not at all particularly want to be alone. Guy announced his good news, and Margaret offered him her slim hand with a kind of pathetic grace that moved him very much.

"I think you deserve it," she said, "for you've both been so sweet to me all this fortnight. I expect you think I don't notice, but I do ... always."

"Margaret," said Guy, "if this Summer Pauline and I have seemed to run away from people...."

"Oh, but you have!" Margaret interrupted. "I don't think I should find excuses, if I were you, for perhaps it's natural."

"I've fancied very often," he said, "that you've thought we were behaving selfishly."

"I think all lovers are selfish," she answered. "Only in your case you began in such an idyllic way that I thought you were going to be a wonderful exception. Guy, I do most dreadfully want you not to spoil in any way the perfectly beautiful thing that Pauline and you in love is. You won't, will you?"

"Have I yet?" asked Guy in a rather dismayed voice.

"Do you want me to be frank? Yes, of course you do, and anyway I must be frank," said Margaret. "Well, sometimes you have-- I don't mean in wanting always to be alone or in asking her in to Plashers Mead to say good night. No, I don't mean in those ways so much. Of course they make me feel a little sad, but smaller things than that make me more uneasy."

"You mean," said Guy, as she paused, "my staying on here and apparently doing nothing? But, Margaret, really I can't leave Pauline to be a schoolmaster, and surely you of all people can understand that?"

"Oh no, I wasn't thinking of that," said Margaret. "I think, in fact, you're right to stay here and keep at what you're trying to do. If it was ever worth doing, it must be doubly worth doing now. Oh no, the only criticism I shall make is of something so small that you'll wonder how I can think it even worth mentioning. Guy, you know the photograph of Pauline which Mother used to have and which she gave to you?"

Guy nodded.

"Well, I happened to see it on the table by your bunk, and I wonder why you've taken it out of its simple little wooden frame and put it in a silver one?"

Guy was taken aback, and when he asked himself why he had done this he could not find a reason. Now that Margaret had spoken of it, the consciousness of the exchange flooded him with shame as for an unforgivable piece of vandalism. Why, indeed, had he bought that silver frame and put the old wooden frame away, and where was the old wooden frame? In one of the drawers in his desk he thought; resolving this very night to restore it to the photograph and fling the usurper into the river.

"I can't think why I did," he stammered to Margaret.

"You've no idea how much this has worried me," she said. "I never had any doubts about your appreciation of Pauline."

"And now you have," said Guy, biting his lip with mortification.

The landscape fading from the stern of the barge oppressed him with the sadness of irreparable acts that are committed heedlessly, but after which nothing is ever quite the same. He wished he could tear to pieces that silver frame.

"No, I won't have any doubts," said Margaret, offering him her hand again and smiling. "You've taken my criticism so sweetly that the change can't symbolize so much as I feared."

It was very well to be forgiven like this, Guy thought, but the memory of his blunder was still hot upon his cheek and he felt a deep humiliation at the treachery of his taste. He had meant, when he came here to talk to Margaret, to ask her about herself and Richard, to display a captivating sympathy and restore to their pristine affection her relations with him, which latterly had seemed to diverge somewhat from one another. Now haunted by that silver frame, which with every moment of thought appeared more and more insistently the vile stationer's gewgaw that it was, Guy did not dare to approach Margaret in the security of an old intimacy.

It was she, however, with her grace who healed the wound.

"You're not hurt with me for speaking about that little thing?" she asked. "You see, you are in a way my brother."

"Margaret, you are a dear!"

And then recurred to him, as if from Ladingford Manor, the lines of Christina Rossetti, which he half whispered to her:

"For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands."

They had the sharper emotion for Guy because he had neither brothers nor sisters of his own; and that this lovely girl beside him on this dreaming barge should be his sister gave to the landscape one more incommunicable beauty.

And so all day they glided down the young Thames; and when Guy had sat long enough with Margaret in the stern, he sat with Pauline at the prow; and about twilight they reached Oxford, whence they came to Shipcot by train and drove through five miles of moonlight back to Wychford.

AUGUST

Pauline and Guy with their formal engagement in sight were careful to give no excuse for a postponement by abusing their privileges. The river was now much overgrown with weeds, and in the last week of July rough weather set in which kept them in the Rectory a good deal on the occasions when they met. Guy, too, was harder at work than he had been all the Summer. The fact of being presently engaged in the eyes of the world was sufficiently exciting for Pauline to console her for the shorter time spent with Guy. Moreover, she was so grateful to her family for not opposing the publication of the engagement that she tried particularly to impress them with the sameness of herself, notwithstanding her being in love with Guy. It happened, therefore, that the old manner of existence at the Rectory reasserted itself for a while; the music in the evenings, the mornings in the garden, everything, indeed, that could make the family suppose that she was set securely in the heart of their united life.

"When you and Margaret marry," Monica announced, one afternoon when the three sisters were in their nursery, "I really think I shall become a nun."

"But we can't all leave Father and Mother!" Pauline exclaimed, shocked at the deserted prospect.

"Now isn't that like people in love?" said Monica.

"Ah, but, anyway, I shall only be living at Plashers Mead," Pauline went on. "So they won't be left entirely alone."

"And as I probably sha'n't ever make up my mind to be married," Margaret added, "and as I've yet to meet the Mother Superior whom Monica could stand for more than a week, it seems probable that everything at the Rectory will go on pretty much the same."

"Margaret, you will marry. I can't think why you talk like that. If you don't intend to marry Richard, you ought to tell him so now, and not keep him any longer in uncertainty."

Pauline realized that Margaret did not like this direct attack, but it was so rarely that Margaret made it possible even to allude to Richard that she had to take the opportunity.

"I don't think I've interfered much with you and Guy," said Margaret. "Is it necessary that you should settle my affairs?"

"Oh, don't speak so unkindly to me, Margaret. I'm not trying to interfere. And, anyway, you do criticize Guy and me. Both you and Monica criticize us."

"Only when you tell us we don't understand about love."

"Well, you don't."

"All of us don't want to be in love quite so obviously as you," said Margaret. "And Monica agrees with me."

Monica nodded.

"Well, it's my character," said Pauline. "I always knew that when I did fall in love I should fall dreadfully deep in love. I don't want to be thinking all the while about my personal dignity. I adore Guy. Why shouldn't I show it? Margaret loves Richard, but simply because she's so self-conscious she can't bear to show it. You call me morbid, Margaret, but I call you much more morbid than I."

Yet, though she resented them at the time, Margaret's and Monica's continual demands for Pauline to be vigilant over her impulsiveness had an effect; and during all the month before they were engaged she tried when she was with Guy to acquire a little of the attitude her sisters desired. Circumstances, by keeping them for a good deal of the time at the Rectory, made this easy; and Guy, exalted by the notion of the formal troth, never made it difficult.

Pauline tried to recapture more of the old interests of life at Wychford, and she was particularly attentive to Miss Verney, going often to see her in the little house at the top of the hill and sitting with her in the oblong garden whenever the August sun showed itself.

"I'm sure I'm sorry it's going to be a protracted engagement," said Miss Verney. "They are apt to place a great strain upon people. I'm sure when I read in _The Times_ all about people's wills, though I always feel a trifle vulgar and inquisitive when I do so, I often say to myself, 'Well, really, it seems a pity that some people should have so much more money than is quite necessary.' Only yesterday evening I read of a gentleman called Somethingheim who left five hundred and seven thousand one hundred and six pounds fourteen shillings and some odd pence, and really, I thought to myself how much nicer it would have looked without the seven thousand one hundred and six pounds fourteen shillings and odd pence. And really I had quite a fanciful time imagining that I received a letter presenting it to me on account of some services my father rendered at Sebastopol, which at the time were overlooked. Seven thousand pounds I thought I would present to you and Mr. Guy Hazlewood, if you would allow me; a hundred pounds to the church; six pounds I had the idea of devoting to the garden; and the fourteen shillings and sevenpence--I remember now it was sevenpence--I thought would make such a pleasant surprise for my servant Mabel, who is really a most good-hearted girl, tactful with the cats, and not too fond of young men."

"How sweet of you, Miss Verney, to think of such a nice present," said Pauline, who as she watched the old maid's grave air of patronage began almost to believe that the money had been given to her.

"No, indeed, don't thank me at all, for I cannot imagine anything that would give me such true pleasure. Let me see. Seven thousand pounds at four per cent., which I think is as much as you could expect to get safely. That's seventy times four--two hundred and eighty pounds a year."

"And Guy has some money--one hundred and fifty pounds, or one hundred and fifteen pounds, or it may be only fifty pounds."

"Let us call it a hundred pounds," said Miss Verney. "For it would be more prudent not to exaggerate. Three hundred and eighty pounds a year. And I've no doubt the Rector on his side would be able to manage twenty pounds. Four hundred pounds a year. Surely a very nice little sum on which to marry. Oh, certainly quite a pleasant little sum."

"Only the gentleman hasn't given you the seven thousand pounds," said Pauline.

"No, exactly, he has not. That's just where it is," Miss Verney agreed.

"But even if he hasn't," said Pauline, springing up and kissing her, "that doesn't prevent your being my dear Miss Verney; and so, thank you seven times for every pound you were going to give me."